Nuke 'em

The day may come when words will not suffice anymore. When this befalls, we shall hit them hard, and hit them fast.

Thou shalt not falter.

For now, I just hope they will not reply in kind...

Make love, not noise, pt. 2

Oh my God. How could I not see this? Painting "Make love, not noise" on those diggers was not at all some cute hippie girls' joyous expression of protest against noise pollution. How could this escape my otherwise so thorough scrutiny?

If you do a quick google-search on "make love not noise", you will of course find that one of the first hits leads you to a public proclamation of the Freiburg revolutionary forces! The graffiti, which I first thought was an almost heart-warming college-kid night action, was in fact a subversive call for a huge hippie street party!

Unlike the South Park hippie jam festival, however, this was not a spontaneously occurring, though eventually mushrooming beyond control, get-together of a handful of no-good dopeheads. This thing that was going down here last Tuesday was serious anarchist stuff, and — it was for real. They even had an action samba band (sounds real bad, eh?) with them.

But then, on second thought, I suppose it all was pretty boring. Like, you know, the usual bunch of misguided bums who want to make the world a better place (and start right now!). Probably looked kinda like this:

Freiburg, May 01, 2007

But still, sweet Jesus, how could I let this happen?

Yet the worst thing is, they have an almost better picture of the graffitied trackhoe on their page than I do. Damn hippies.

Make love, not noise

Just a block from where my office is, they are digging up the road with those two trackhoes that make you think a tank platoon is patrolling the neighborhood.

Here's how Freiburg citizens express their protest against the situation:

Not a real good picture, but you get the idea

Oh, and, uh... If you're by any chance my upstairs neighbor (for which you might qualify if you're a student girl from the States), this also goes for you: Please, make love, not noise.

Cancel history?

I'm still clueless. A couple of days ago, I saw a guy who had this patch sewn over the EASTPAK-label on his bag that said: "Cancel history, stop hatred".

Are you sure you want to cancel history?

As research has revealed, the patch is issued by a renowned snowboarding and skating equipment company. That's fine and it explains the "stop hatred"-part. But, what on earth does "cancel history" mean? I mean, cancel history? How the hell do I cancel history?

By way of introduction

I am a fairly reasonable man. I have a nice job. I have friends and a family who both value my judgment on things. I'm generally known as a thoughtful, rather cautious person, although I make my share of mistakes. I am mostly content with what I am, and in cases I'm not, I'm working on it.

Until quite recently, I have never thought of creating a blog. The present development of increasingly making one's private life a matter of public interest is not my cup of tea.

And although I acknowledge that there are numerous instances where blogs are put to some very practical use, I have at the same time to admit that I still consider blogging mainly a communication domain of lonesome, ailurophile Kansas City web developers, college sophomores spending their year abroad partying and young professionals posting annoying political rantings that nobody really cares about.

Now, you may think, these are somewhat stereotypical views I'm putting forward here. You are right, of course. People need stereotypes to cope with their surroundings. Without stereotypical, or rather prototypical, notions of the experienceable world, people might not be able to survive very long.

I tend to believe that prototypes can somehow be described as mental representations that prevent our minds from being flooded with huge amounts of completely new information each time perceptual data is being processed. If this is true, then prototypes are the basis of our surprisingly natural capability to deal with diversity. In short, prototypes are good for mental health.

(There is some dispute, to be sure, over whether prototype models or exemplar models are better suited to account for questions of cognitive categorization, but there is no need here to go into these, for present purposes at least, hairsplitting details.)

Prototypical members of a category are not necessarily defined by frequency of occurrence. A German Shepherd is a good example of a prototypical dog in most Western societies, though that does not imply that the German Shepherd is the kind of dog you run into on a daily basis. Similarly, the urban pigeon might not be reasonably be seen as a prototypical bird, however often you may find what a nuissance they can be if you live in an urban area.

In some places, however, things are different. This is where the present effort to go public with my concerns comes in.

I live in Freiburg, a pretty little town in Germany that you can think of as the capital of the Black Forest. Here, prototypicality and frequency of occurrence are more closely related than the theory predicts. This is particularly evident in the case of the local residents.

Usually, urban civilisations show a relatively high degree of diversification. There are countless population strata that are intricately interwoven, and actual specimens of what might come close to being prototypical members of the town's population are rarely encountered.

It's not only that, for example, mental representations of the typical New Yorker look pretty much different, depending on whether you are in Manhatten or in the Bronx. People may well have quite specific ideas of what the typical New Yorker might look like, or what the New Yorkers' attitudes towards their lives and hometown might be. But I still think German Shepherds are easier to find than typical New Yorkers. If you intend to find actual instances of prototype representations of New Yorkers, you will have to differentiate between typical Wall Street employees, typical New York cabbies, typical New York homeless and so on.

The situation is similar in German cities like Berlin and Hamburg and also in smaller towns like Bonn, for example. In the latter case, it is even almost impossible to define a bundle of features that taken together make up the prototypical local resident.

While this accounts for the relative diversity you would expect from urban areas, Freiburg clearly can be taken as a counterexample. The number of real-world occurrences of prototypical local residents far exceeds that of other citizen subgroups. In other words: there is a stronger than expected tendency for members of the category Freiburg resident to exhibit prototypicality.

Of course, this is only a very general statement and it would be hugely unfair to simply lump together all those people. Strictly speaking, as is the case with typical New York cabbies, New York bankers and so on, you will have to differentiate. In the present case we may, quite comfortably, define the category members' age as the criterium for further discriminating between subcategories of this particular population.

We can then roughly distinguish between three age groups, or subcategories:

1. Those younger than 18, who are mostly uninteresting for the present discussion since they aren't much different from people their age anywhere
2. Those aged between 18 and 35, who I will mainly be targetting here, and
3. Those older than 35.

First, let me say a word about those older than 35, since they are quickly dealt with. Prototypical features include an open display of fundamentalist-liberalism, an apparently comfortable lifestyle with a nice, though economic, car, a complete set of all-weather-equipment by Jack Wolfskin (which can be worn on nearly all occasions, even during Saturday shopping), membership in one of the numerous citizen action groups against capitalist intervention, and, if they have children of the appropriate age, these go to an integrated kindergarten. Real-world instances of this prototype are legion.

Central members of the second category I will call hippies. Hippies account for a good portion of the local population. Hippies preferably wear dreadlocks, they occur in drum-circles and play hacky sack in public parks while they should attend to their cultural studies seminars. If you don't have dreadlocks, or at least are a foreign student from Latin America, and won't play hacky sack, you're probably totally intolerant.

Take a look at this. See that? Hippies.

The serious danger of hippies occurring in large numbers is recognized by Eric Cartman in South Park episode 902, where Cartman delivers the town of South Park from a raging hippie plague using a hippie drill, further assisted by Slayer's Raining Blood.

The Hippie Core Drill Machine

I agree with Cartman who correctly states that it's all simple science: "Look: When hippies start to nest in a new area, it draws other hippies in. With the right weather conditions and topography, it can lead to a music festival." While Cartman is faced with the clear and present danger of half a million hippies gathering for a hippie jam festival and its immediate consequence, the consumption of all South Park, Freiburg with its mild weather conditions and proximity to the Black Forest has for many years proven to be an ideal and especially fecund hippie hotbed.

If you have ever been to Boulder, Colorado, you might get an idea of what the situation here looks like. About Boulder, the New York Times says that it "is a sort of Front Range Shangri-La that blends hardcore athleticism, latter-day hippie sensibilities and university-town liberalism." Freiburg , Germany, then, must be viewed as being strictly equivalent to Boulder, CO.

As of yet, (and since, after all, it was me who moved to their city, right?) I have not been looking for applying practical solutions, which I might, however, fully endorse if the time comes.

Taking measures

Until now, I have only been affected insofar as constant exposure to real-world occurrences of the hippie-prototype has slightly disturbing effects on my mental state in that it opens up a wide range of emotions from feeling mildly annoyed to deeply concerned each time I have a hippie-encounter. Which usually happens several times a day.

So, the idea for entering the blogosphere, even if not as a wholly committed member, eventually came about when I caught myself spamming a small circle of trusted people with my increasingly disillusioned observations on the social environment I find myself in. Which means that this blog is rather going to be of the ranting kind. Now you may feel welcome, even if I might not let you leave your comments on these postings.