Early thoughts on the attacks in Norway

Condolences to the bereaved.

Gratitude to the police (can they get proper funding now please? But not for the Orwellian stuff unconstitutionally making everyone criminals by default) and emergency services (again: can they get proper funding now please? Those copters wouldn't exist without private voluntary donations and the University Hospital Ullevål branch that received the badly wounded has buildings held together by duct tape) and everyone helping each other.

I find the attacks themselves sad and surreal yet entirely unsurprising.

Despite having no special knowledge I find it all far too unsurprising, uncomfortably so since everyone else seems to be surprised. Are they only pretending? Feigning surprise? Were my depressing expectations just a "lucky" fluke? It might not matter but if they're all honestly surprised it unnerves me far more than any attack no matter who did it. It's the widespread existence of at least one massive political blind spot. To me that's far more scary than violence (and I do find the human capabilities for violence --both physical and psychological-- frightening!). Not that I don't have my own blind spots, I'm all too keenly aware of some of them and there is sure to be more.

The reasons for finding it surreal are so bountiful I'm not sure where I would start but if in fact the perpetrator(s) self-identified as (an) anti-islamic and anti-multicultural nationalistic conservative(s) it certainly adds to it. So many who will be maligned by this or that part of his alleged ideological pedigrees (a slightly strange mix depending on the definitions) wanted nothing more than to avoid exactly this kind of outcome (intra-societal and/or local inter-cultural violence) and some have been raising a stink about it for decades, an outcome deemed unavoidable if the political course stayed on the same general bearing as the last twenty years. Yeah I'm one of those who wanted to avoid it, maybe we ran out of time or maybe more will start to understand the challenges we all face.

It's a toss-up.

...

There was sluggish rolling thunder, the occasional lightning, and oscillating levels of rain early this morning in Oslo. It's over now as I've spent time whittling down this entry to size; maybe I'll go fight some windmills later in another blog post, maybe I'll refrain (I'm not even sure I can bear watching the meandering political labyrinth of denial and self-delusion that is likely next). I've been awake since the bomb woke me yesterday afternoon (and I have to stay up for at least four more hours), it woke me but I didn't realize and only two hours later did I happen to check the news (all this despite me living fairly close to the blast and my normal sleep quality being below dismal, in addition I had only slept for about four hours... go figure). This morning before the weather started I was looking out over most of the surrounding hills and a good portion of the city, I've been thinking a lot because the future I wanted to avoid seems to be here.

Not getting any broken windows is about the only silver lining I see.

Well there's the prime minister's noble and enlightened words --pure perfection--, but does he truly understand the meaning of what he said, and does the rest? If he and they do then an awful lot of changes for the better needs being made to make our society able to try to live up to those words.

It's started raining again, and stopped again.

Wondering if it's even worthwhile writing this in Norwegian later on, primary language or not.