Dreaming of Freedom

Last night at 6pm I arrived in Gustav Adolf Torg to see the welcome sight of a bunch a cyclists with ‘bilfri stad’ tied onto their bikes. Accompanied by a handful of policemen in two vans they set off to cycle round the city in a peaceful celebration of cycling. This was my very first actual critical mass and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the whole thing was just so calm and relaxed. There was a real sense of ’safety in numbers’ which as you can imagine makes cycling seem ultra safe. I spent a very enjoyable hour cycling round with everyone, chatting to people and noticing how generally the drivers were quite respectful of our group.

I was in two minds about the Critical Mass because here in Sweden they actually have real cycle lanes with traffic lights that run over a significant part of the towns. This is something cyclists in England can only dream about. But after much thought it does seem that cyclists are still marginalized. In the face of serious climate change, cycling as a viable alternative to driving really needs to be taken seriously by town planners and significant provision needs to be made for cyclists. A Critical Mass certainly seems a good way for the individual cyclist to come together with other and feel less isolated and more normalized.

K videoed the Critical Mass yesterday and has created a video of the event.

Critical Mass Gothenburg:
Last Friday of the month
Gustav Adolf Torg
6pm

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In Norwich this weekend? Nothing to do? Try a visit to the Norwich Art Centre where all Saturday they will be showing free and very interesting films about oil depletion.

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So I’m really in the website mood and I’ve finally updated my own website struggling with photoshop in the process and I like to think succeeding to some small degree. I’ve also refreshed my Gothenburg and Norwich pages and the whole bundle of pages and sites is starting to feel a little more ‘mine’.

The weather here in Gothenburg is starting to get cold and sandals and sunglasses have been pushed aside in my attempt to shut windows and snuggle into jumpers. I’ve been steadily working my way through the Linguaphone course material I borrowed from the library and I have to say it’s good solid stuff. No wonder it’s so expensive to buy. Horrary for libraries!!

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So the war in the Middle East continues and every day we get bizarrely skewed reporting from the media. We shouldn’t be surprised. Our economic system, like the American system is heavily dependent on a state of permanent war. Chomsky has some interesting thing to say about the Pentagon Keynesian system. Post World War Two the government made a decision about whether to follow a course of social or military spending and the reason for pursuing the later was ‘just for straight power reasons’ because ‘military spending doesn’t redistribute wealth, it’s not democratizing, it doesn’t create popular constituencies or encourage people to get involved in decision making’. He makes the point that to argue for military spending to be turned into social spending doesn’t make any sense. Instead we have to totally restructure society and ‘create both a culture and an institutional structure in which public funds can be used for social needs, for human needs’. This of course threatens the very basis of the society as we know it. It argues that we can’t escape the war economy without establishing a truly democratic system of organization.

It’s not an argument that you hear as much as you should and to some extent it’s harder to deal with because you can only create a new social structure if everyone wants to create it together. It is however worth the reminder that the system we live within was deliberately designed to make us a passive and powerless population. As Chomsky says ‘any state, has a primary enemy: it’s own population’ and it is the effort to ‘keep the population quiescent, and obedient and passive‘ that means that governments use arms races or the threat of terrorism or war to ‘create global tension and a mood of fear‘ which allows ‘people to abandon their rights’ to the government in order to survive.

If you want to read Chomsky’s concise criticisms and analysis of American political, social and economic policies for yourself - I’d recommend Understanding Power The Indispensable Chomsky which is a collection of Chomsky’s comments from teach-ins and public talks held between 1989 and 1999. It’s edited by Peter R Mitchell and John Schoeffel and I’ve taken some quotes from the section entitled ‘The Permanent War Economy’, pages 70-74.

If you’d rather be out on the streets protesting, you could of course join the protest in Manchester on the 20th of September.

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The weather was really quite lovely today so after a morning in front of the computer, I went out for a cycle and went scrumping apples. I had to do a fair bit of jumping up and even found myself climbing up a bit of a tree.

I’ve finally finished and got my Dad’s website up and running. I’ll probably make a million changes before long but for now you can check the new Gunns Gallery website.

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So autumn is creeping in with it’s chills and fallen leaves and it’s raining an awful lot here. Yesterday we crept out with raincoats and cycled up to Härlanda Tjärn which is a lake west of Göteborg. It was lovely cycling through the woods to get to the lake and I think I’ll have to head back there soon. There are lots of paths there to walk around the lake and woods so it’s very walker and cyclist friendly.

Apart from that I’ve been working on the Swedish which seems to be at the same level it was two weeks ago! I’ve also been out scrumping apples as you do at this time of year.

Sadly I’m not in England to enjoy the Heritage Open Days so I want lots of emails about all the free thing people have been to instead.

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K came home last night with an armful of new ideas that he spilled out onto the table and I picked through them like shiny pebbles to see which I could hoard as treasure. But it seems too valuable to hoard so I’m blogging about the thing that makes me most excited…

it’s a a new project called Ubiquity. Once you install it really makes things easier for you when you’re online. So I spent a happy hour last night playing with it and I found out what the weather was like in Norwich, viewed a map and embedded it in an email, emailed my brothers, found out what a load of new words meant and translated a load of paragraphs on Swedish pages to English. It was so amazingly easy and just a taste of what the internet is going to be like. It’s only in the experimental stages but I would recommend installing it if you’re up for trying something new.

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