14/08/2014

WTFIWWY… Hammer-time F!




So… We are moving in to election times here in Sweden and this equals the erecting of what is called a “Valstuga”, a small shed that each local branchy of a political party put up on a busy square or similar place, usually they all end up in the same place and in essence create a political shantytown. =P so these small sheds anyway work as storage for marketing material and basic shelter from the Swedish summers. Now this is not anything uncommon... it happens each election but so far this year we have had 2 stories in national media about incidents connected to these valstugor.

The first one happened about a week ago as two carpenters working on erecting these sheds where attacked by a man who complained about the noise and then proceeded hit them with a hammer, he fortunately failed to cause any serious damage and retreated back towards his apartment but thanks to several witnesses police could apprehend the man without much of a incident. According to some the man did raise the hammer towards the police but either finally came to his senses or was incapable of getting to the police. It would fortunately turn out that the man had no political motives with his attack... He was just under the influence… deeply under… .. . Now i agree that people hammering away can be a very annoying sound… But the answer is never to pick up a hammer and try to beat the sound out of people… It does not work. It is also pretty stupid to do this in broad daylight as other people tend to notice your impromptu xylophone performance.
The second story is perhaps at the same time both less and more severe, but it does involve a valstuga and someone taking offense. 
It would seem that during the night one or more people felt that they had to redecorate the valstuga of up and coming political party F! (Read as fi, short for feminist initiative) using the Mythbuster school of re-decorating. After breaking down a wall they simply gutted the small shed and left a fairly neat pile of tinder outside. Much to my surprise they did not lit it on fire… This otherwise seems to be the primary form of entertainment for hooligans. Now again as I said before there are good and bad ways to express frustration, tearing down valstugor is not one of them... All that says is that you are immature and have the mental capacity of pack of instant-noodles. Especially as these places are usually manned during daytime by people who want nothing more than to argue over the finer points of how and why this or that party should in fact be named guildmaster and be given all the guildbank privileges. Then again I am sure the F! Will not complain about this in the long run as this give them a lot of free publicity and a free box of sympathy point, and traditional marketing is expensive these days. 
Now why I bring these two stories up is because we are still fairly early in the game for the not-so-Iron throne and I hope this is not an indication of days to come. I like living in a place where political violence for the most part consist of the very edge cases of conservative or communist parties having their Friday night love sessions and the rest posting angry rants on the internet. But this year we have two parties that are stirring the pot... so who knows.

So all I can say is.. People if you feel that you need to express your dislike with this or that party… either do it on election day (honestly the most efficient... but also the least individually visible way) or at least keep it civil and try to not cause bodily or financial harm to people…  But I guess that is hoping for too much.

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