You wrote, "Ideally, in a democracy, every adult citizen should have exactly the same level of influence," but that really doesn't make sense, and I don't think was ever the intention of the framers of any democracy. Ideally all our votes count the same, but there's nothing undemocratic about some people being better at persuasion than others. Your blog has a lot of interesting points. Don't you think it gives you more influence than an average person in Sweden?
Did I write that? Probably I did, I write so many things, but I can't find it in the post. My thoughts on democracy are a little flavored by the concept of liquid democracy, which I believed in earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
Elsewhere in this comments section I confessed to my strivings towards elite status, in the sense of being able to influence people more than the average person. Since I have a blog that a few people read while most people don't publish anything at all, I guess I have a little more influence than an average person. However, there is a reason why I write in English: I have very little influence in Sweden.
It was in a comment on this post - I was trying to reply to it, not at the top level. Sorry about that! I tagged it in a comment. It was in the context of being uncomfortable with the power of elites.
Yes! I have thought a bit of that (many years of Woke=many years of searching for solutions just because the issue is always on the agenda). I stopped when I started speculating whether Swedish women could be solidaric enough to share their men with oppressed sisters from Afghanistan. Since the monogamous ideal could be one important reason why Sweden is better than Afghanistan, it could become a... strange situation.
With the internet their potential mates don't have to be Swedish. And then there's the likelihood that many female immigrants simply won't want a man. Especially Gen Z.
Interesting to see some discussion on migration from within a previous supplier of migrants to other countries, notably the prairies of North American.
I'll write from an Australian perspective.
As many countries approach below replacement population growth, getting peeps to come to a country/economy in lieu of, say, robotic labour (which Japan seems to prefer) will become a bigger and bigger issue. While a supply of people from war-torn and bandit destroyed countries will always provide problems due to trauma, base survival instincts etc (also all migrants are economic migrants, it's just that some peeps migrate for catastrophic reasons (political & structural & natural disaster), these trump any strictly economic narrative, refugees are a special case for historic post WW2 reason when the franchise was expanded to include non-rich people. In ancients days you became enslaved and counted yourself lucky.
ALso, there are people affected by war or disaster who cannot migrate, so if your view is only informed by those who manage to move, well you have some type of survivor-ship bias going on. Refugee programs were developed in the cold war and generally one's idea/image of a refugees is some man in a bad suit being caught on barbed wire on the Berlin Wall and being shot there, trying to get to 'teh west' so "human's rights" only informs the recent three or four generations story-telling of the refugee in that context. (Was the man in a bad suit not an economic migrant?)
I live in Australia, some of my earliest settler ancestor were brothers from County Kerry in Ireland. There had been a Rockite Rebellion and the eldest brother was sent out as a convict in 1821. It's a minor not well-known event in Irish history, even as the rebels completely filled on ship, but suffice it to say that Protestants are bastards.
Anyways, that fellow did so well helping to disposes the locals to run sheep (mostly on Ngarigo Country on the Monaro) that two younger brothers and their families came out over the next 2 decades. A common enough story in Australia that it is known as serial migration.
Many Irish Catholic migrants went west over the Atlantic, of course. Are those classed as economic migrants because legally they were not allowed to buy land in Ireland, and because one does not own land one does not have a vote? Politics = economics in many ways.
In Australia we have had a large migration programme that went ballistic after WW2 and involved many DPs from WW2, and many programmes to both educate the locals and the incomers. In this blog post I find the air of innocence betrays a somewhat disingenuous position, however, taken at face value it betrays incompetence rather than malignant conspiracy.
Australia's population growth continues only because of migration. Since I was born in the 60s the population has doubled. We are stealing people evenly from around the world, and despite our various governments wanting the be seen as standing firm on "illegal queue jumpers" our economy needs people, and people want to be in that economy. Here "cultural" reasons does not matter at all in selection, if anything "economic" reasons are a leveller of backgrounds, so the slippage on "not real refugees because they are economic migrants" is doubly moot.
When the White Australia Policy was in force, the racism was implemented through various "cultural" tools such as a grammar test that could be given in any language, at the discretion of the migration officer. If they didn't like the look of you they select some obscure Greek grammar and failed you for "cultural" reasons.
One more aside. I work in a museum. When people behave badly in the museum, they are often in a group which somehow rubs out their individuals roles. I.E. a bunch of teenagers, a hen's party, a bunch of retirees who have come off a big cruise ship. The same people in a mix from each of those groups moderate and moralise each other, because they are more aware of the world-building they can and should do.
curiously this reminder of what my convict & "migrant" ancestors were doing to Ngarigo country and "the nature" as continental Europeans call it, came up on Facebook today... it was not just seals and whale boiled down for fat/tallow/blubber
I'm not opposed to economic immigration. It is a much better idea than refugee immigration: Since when do people like to live together because some of them, at some point, were the victims of something? By contrast, economic immigration policies can bring people together because they share interests and objectives.
First a formal request that might clash with the preferences of the rest of your readership: I'd love it if you used justified text alignment rather than left-aligned.
Content-wise a great piece as usual, and exactly my experience as well. Also loved the cliffhanger of the underlying forces.
Thanks for the analisys and sorry to hear how things turned out for Sweden.
The anecdotal evidence around me tells that the topic of immigration has been discussed with unacceptable levels of simplism. Immigration good vs immigration bad. Refugees welcome vs kill them all. Etc.
Where are talking about an optimization problem where proportions and cultural background are key factors for the outcome but people insist on their hooliganism. And of course, the word "racism" has been used a a smoke screen as the problem has nothing to do with genes and everything to do with memes, in the original meaning by Richard Dawkins.
We are now seeing the result of treating an optimization problem as a problem of binary inputs.
Question: now that Sweden is screwed up, how do you think the situation can be fixed?
>>And of course, the word "racism" has been used a a smoke screen as the problem has nothing to do with genes and everything to do with memes, in the original meaning by Richard Dawkins.
My impression is that Swedes as sick and tired of the word "racism". It has lost its glow here.
>>Question: now that Sweden is screwed up, how do you think the situation can be fixed?
A situation with criminal gangs and mafias, like the one in Sweden, can only arise in states governed by the rule of law and civil rights. So the best way to suffocate the gangs is to act through the loopholes where there are no civil rights.
In Sweden that loophole is called child protection. The autorities have the right to do more or less whatever they please with every person below the age of 21 in the name of child protection. No civil rights there. So the state can just build internment camps for every youngster below the age of 21 who is only vaguely suspect of being involved in a criminal gang, without changing any important law. It can also take away the children from any parent suspected of gang involvement and immediately place them in foster care. The law allows for that.
Good for the children? Certainly not. But the current system that takes away children on the vaguest suspicion of violence or insufficient toothbrushing is also very bad for most children involved. If that monstrous system started to oppress children and teenagers in a way that was good for society, at least it could help society very quickly. It could basically be made impossible for everyone below 21 and everyone who has children to be even rumored to have any gang connections. Then there wouldn't be many people left to form criminal gangs.
This naturally won't happen, because those in power don't realize that they have a monstrously oppressive system outside the civil rights system at their disposal. So I must admit that I don't know what to do. Just sobering up and understand how vulnerable every peaceful welfare state actually is could be a first step.
>>A situation with criminal gangs and mafias, like the one in Sweden, can only arise in states >>governed by the rule of law and civil rights. So the best way to suffocate the gangs is to act >>through the loopholes where there are no civil rights.
In some way what you are saying is that 11% of certain immigrants in the population is enough to require musculated non-democratic measures in practice, with all the risk that it encompasses. I wonder what the threshold for assimilation of the incumbent population (or requirement of strong handed measures to prevent so) is.
(I got the 11% from your post where you mention the initial population size and how the 1.2M of imported people)
Numbers aside, my perspective is a bit of a mirror image of yours. I see musculated non-democratic measures as the normal state of affairs. Not because I like it - I really don't - but because the vast majority of human societies have been, and are, that way.
I think that a society that is civilized and trustful enough to be able to uphold civil rights and the rule of law is something unusual and fragile. Ideally, the citizens of such societies should be busy upholding the advances that have been made. But humankind is a competitive animal as well as a cooperative animal, so when there is more to gain from breaking things down people with influence will do so. And then we will be back to that normal state of things when some heavy-handed repression here and there is needed to keep things under control.
>> I see musculated non-democratic measures as the normal state of affairs.
I don't.
I usually say that it is very easy to maintain peace and order under fear but much harder to do so under social consensus. Harder but not impossible.
I had the privilege of a semester in DK (20y ago) and usually referred to the Scandinavian countries as role models - visited Sweden 3 times IIRC. The student dorm where I lived kept d 90/10 local/foreigner ratio, a strict 50/50 gender balance and little space for going outside the rules (not zero but little), which made me learn a lot. Order can be kept under social consensus if those ideas as fostered, promoted and conserved and certain ratios are kept. At that point no heavy hand is necessary.
>> Ideally, the citizens of such societies should be busy upholding the advances that have been made.
Instead of bloody taking them for granted.
>> when there is more to gain from breaking things down people with influence will do so.
Do you see evil intensions? Or rather naiveté. Everybody loses when security breaks down. But now, there is a problem to be fixed. "It takes 3 generations to make a gentleman".
I live by the motto "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." But still I allow myself to see quite a bit of narcissism behind Woke. Every Woke person is not narcissistic. Some are stupid for real. But there is a significant element of narcissism to it too, both on the collective and the individual level.
I was born in Sweden, grew up there, and moved to the U.S. after high school in 2016. I remember my last few years there being confusing – many of my classmates and friends started shifting hard either in the direction of Woke values or became SD supporters. Negative sentiment around immigration became super prevalent, as did concern about increasing right-wing "extremism".
I never saw the consequences of immigration myself before I left, and never figured out why it was such a polarizing topic. I think your article summarizes it incredibly well and taught me some things I didn't know before:)
Ultimately, I agree with Kirk that the "elite" argument is overblown. I knew tons of people who supported immigration, rich and poor, city-dwellers and farmers. I think it was just seen as the "correct" belief to have given the trusting and empathetic nature of Swedish people.
Of course politicians and the media could have listened to the complaints that people raised, or tried to understand why the popularity of SD was growing instead of ignoring it, but I don't fault them for their behavior. It was consistent with the behavior and beliefs of the majority of the populace (at least that I knew). They did what we asked them to do.
Congratulations on having escaped Sweden in time! In hindsight the Woke years taught us about human nature, but there and then it wasn't too pleasant.
There were millions of Swedes of all levels of income and influence who held pro-immigration, Woke opinions, because they thought that was the nice thing to do. The shift toward more anti-immigration sentiments were not only a question of social status, but also of geography: It came to the periphery before it came to cities. And it came to the south much before it came to the north. Your comment made me think of this article from 2006,
where a professor accuses the people of southern Sweden of upholding a xenophobic culture. It sounded absurd for real: By then, criticizing the culture of immigrants in any way was taboo, but apparently it wasn't racist to claim that the people of southern Sweden had a racist culture. I sent her a e-mail and asked if she hadn't compared anti-immigration sentiment to levels of immigration of every region (by then southern Sweden had much more immigration). That was obviously meaningless: A short time later she complained to the press over all abusive messages she received.
“On the road towards a society where the state is always right and civil society and the individual are considered misguided, Woke was only a temporary fluke. The underlying forces were much stronger.”
Very scary. It’s beginning to look like the US is past peak Woke, which, on your conjecture that societies need an enemy, could explain the timing of the onset of the Russia-Ukraine war. From Woke to WW III…
I suspect that Russia is even more in need of an outer enemy than the West: In Russia, they don't even have Woke. So my guess is that Russia actually became a hard-core enemy because they are even more into such games.
"Sweden lost its ability to decide its level of hospitality itself." -- I notice this factor seems to be important in causing outbursts of anti-immigrant sentiment. I think one route of causation are the practical consequences you describe, but another route of causation is the emotional state of perceived loss of control.
Yes. The essence of charity is that it is on the terms of the giver. People give as much as they feel good about giving. When people are forced to give more or under different circumstances, it is not charity anymore. The balance of power has been reversed.
The "welfare state" is an interesting compromise between the two extremes. With a welfare state, the individual giver (taxpayer) doesn't get to individually decide how much they feel good giving, but the state (the taxpayers collectively) decide that. The reason that works is that taxes are carefully levied so that everybody's status-ranking *after tax* is the same as it is *before tax*, so people consent to being collectively taxed at a higher rate than they would consent to give to charity individually (which would risk lowing their relative status-ranking).
In regard to "perceived loss of control", the current wave of asylum-seekers entering the US has that feature. Due to the details of US immigration law, this is the only route of entry into the US where the immigration "system" doesn't put a firm limit on the number of people who can enter in a year, combined with the fact that the people entering don't have a living situation arranged when arriving. (The classical "wetback" "illegal immigrants" generally have lined up employment and living situations (at least in general) before they arrive.)
>>The "welfare state" is an interesting compromise between the two extremes. With a welfare state, the individual giver (taxpayer) doesn't get to individually decide how much they feel good giving, but the state (the taxpayers collectively) decide that. The reason that works is that taxes are carefully levied so that everybody's status-ranking *after tax* is the same as it is *before tax*, so people consent to being collectively taxed at a higher rate than they would consent to give to charity individually (which would risk lowing their relative status-ranking).
I never thought about that. Now that you say it, it sounds really smart.
Very interesting analysis. One thing that stood out a bit was the repeated references to some undefined "elite". It would benefit the argument if it was more clearly explained who this elite is.
From my danish perspective, it is very hard to identify one specific group as being elite, at least in terms of influence. We no longer have a single unified nobility that directs the country.
Are the politicians elite? They don't seem to be. They are definitely not rich (they are paid ok, but not even close to the level of industry leaders). They are clearly not some intellectual powerhouse. Politician is one of the last jobs left that are open to everyone, without any requirement on education level or other qualification whatsoever. At least in Denmark, less than half of the ministers in the parliament have a long higher education.
Is it the media? We have both right-wing media, left-wing media and everything in between, each with their own agendas, but recently they all seem more interested in getting clicks than furthering their specific ideologies. We definitely don't have one dominant media.
Is it the intellectuals? The professors and students at higher education establishments definitely do their best to debate and take part in public discussions, but they seem to be pretty much drowned out by social media these days. There is not much cachet in displaying your PhD compared to your follower count.
How about the actual rich then. They are definitely elite based on a lifestyle perspective, but in terms of influence...? They might be able to occasionally hobnob with politicians, but when it comes to actual policy they seem as frustrated with being ignored as everybody else.
To me, this use of "elite" seems like an artefact of the same basic need to find an internal enemy as you so eloquently describe in the article. Some days the "elite" will be the socialist intellectuals, other days it will be the conservative industrialists, all depending on what the current hot issues are and what enemy we need.
Everything to avoid facing the fact that it is all ourselves.
I agree that "elite" is a very fluffy word. And still, I think it signifies something that is both real and important.
My best definition of the word "elite" is "those with some influence". Ideally, in a democracy, every adult citizen should have exactly the same level of influence. As we all know, this is not how it works in practice. Most people have close to zero influence over everything outside their arms length. A minority of people collectively have some influence: They are the elite.
Some of them have influence because they have money. Some of them because they have political power. Some of them because people listen to them (for example journalists, influencers). Some of them because they are important professionals in their area.
None of them have total power. Most of them are in a more or less precarious position and can lose their elite position from one day to another. Still, here and now, they possess some scraps of influence that most people almost completely lack.
From this definition it is clear that the elite is not only my perpetual nemesis, but also the societal category that I'm striving for myself. I'm writing a blog with important words like "elite" in it. My purpose for doing that is, of course, that I want to influence people. I can't say that I'm successful in my strivings and I'm also not desperate to be. Still, I can't hide that "the elite" is a place where I would like to be myself.
By the way, great to speak with someone from Denmark. In my opinion, people in Denmark and Sweden speak far too little with each other.
Excellent article! But I have to push another idea, that apparently hadn't come to author's mind. Woke is not something that simply happens. Woke is part of quite old (as of now) and elaborate agenda - that of the neo-Marxists, so called Frankfurt school. It is quite explicit in its goals - eliminate Western/European/White people by using the minorities (ANY kind of), so they can build communism. Why Sweden? Sweden was heavily infiltrated with "foreign agents" (the new terminology) since the beginning of the Cold War. Anyone interested in espionage and intelligence knows about that.
> It is quite explicit in its goals - eliminate Western/European/White people by using the minorities (ANY kind of), so they can build communism.
This seems like quite a leap. How would importing predominantly islamic culture ever lead to communism? It seems to be one of the cultures most resistant to socialist ideas. If anything, importing more of this should make a culture more conservative and less likely to move towards communism.
Yes, you are right, it is not going to lead to communism. But marxists don't see it. All they want to use is minorities - religious, sexual, ethnic, anything - to destroy the core of the society/state. In the chaos that will inevitably happen, they would provide "strong hand" to restore order and peace. This is very well explained by Yuri Bezimenov (search in YouTube) as the KGB tactic as well. I still believe Frankfurt Marxists are not the same as Soviet ones, but I may be wrong (but then why Democrats in the US are in such a conflict with KGB guys in Moscow?). What they don't think about is that Islamic culture will be minority for a while and after that it will become predominant by the sheer fact of their birth rates. I guess they fall for their own trap thinking that they will reeducate them.
Do you even live in the USA? I am surrounded by Democrats and they are absolutely not Marxists. They are solid lovers of capitalism. Most of them haven't even read a word of Marx.
Most communists haven’t read Marx. Probably the problem is that you don’t know what Marxist means. Your friends either don’t as well or they are making logical fallacies. Do they believe that people are equal? (Not to the law, but in general) Do they believe that everyone is capable of doing anything, provided resources and time? Do they believe in affirmative action policies? Do they believe in “tax the rich” and subsidize poor? Well, then they are Marxists or at very least “useful idiots “ as Lenin call them.
>>Woke is part of quite old (as of now) and elaborate agenda - that of the neo-Marxists, so called Frankfurt school.
Woke certainly has ideological roots that are at least decades old. The question is why those ideas could suddenly engulf society as a whole. And why they did so at different times in different societies.
well, yeah, I guess that's the point of it, but it is important to be emphasized the fact that this is not "natural event", it is a consequence of conscious efforts. It could have happened in the US earlier, but until very recently it was a curse to be called socialist there and in the past there was a McCarty. In the same time, Sweden was the platzdarm of KGB infiltration.
Though in the US, among the well-educated, there have been Frankfurt-school people since the late 1960s at least but woke-like ideas have only leaked gradually into the mainstream until recently. Also, I haven't noticed woke people in the US to be particularly socialist; on the whole, they seem to be educated well above average and have somewhat above-average income, and not at all interesting in narrowing the distance between themselves and the working class.
First of all, "well educated" is a weird term. Being educated from Harvard in English major is the opposite of being "well educated", it's more like "well brainwashed". And yes, in the small group of people with enough money to do nothing all day there have been Frankfurt-school people. The difference is that they were not allowed to have any power in the US back then.
Second, you are presuming that if you have above average income you can't be socialist. That is simply not true. Also, woke people are talking about equality, it is by definition socialism. Another remark: you have observed that they don't want to narrow the distance between themselves and the working class, because said working class is white people, anti-socialist "crowd". They want to associate themselves with minorities (like Frankfurt school tactics suggest), so they can destroy that working class.
Interesting argument, but I never got the impression that the anti-lockdown consensus was enforced in Sweden anywhere near as heavily as the pro-lockdown consensus was in places like Canada, Israel or even Germany. Was there something ugly going on under the rug that I as a non-Swede would not see? Or did things deteriorate after mid-2020? (I happened to be in Sweden in Jan-Mar 2020 and was startled by the *lack* of visible culture war; people were discussing immigration quite openly and various theories on covid mortality were being shared without much moralistic fervor. The one exception was the rather fanatical insistence by the government that children must not skip school.)
My impression has indeed been that Swedes are more eager to solve problems communally than Americans (who wouldn't even check notes with others) or Germans (who often just want to hear the answer from the pulpit). But I've seen a lot less willingness to step on peoples' toes. Skimming DN after being surrounded by American and German media was a breath of fresh air.
>>Was there something ugly going on under the rug that I as a non-Swede would not see?
Most of all, massive amounts of top-down stupidity. Many people understood that the Public Health Agency had no clue about what they were doing. We thought everything they said was bullshit. There were no reliable statistics. For about two months, everything was a guessing game, where people were guessing whether society would break down or not (it didn't, the spring saved us). And those with school-age children had to guess whether breaking the law would be worth it or not.
>>Skimming DN after being surrounded by American and German media was a breath of fresh air.
I can clearly understand if that was the feeling in 2020. Dagens Nyheter was and is the most despicable publication I can imagine. But it was awful in a different way than higher-quality American and German mass media in full Woke mode.
Maybe this all felt less stupid to me as I came from the other side. To me it was obvious that the only way society could break down was by overdoing the NPI response. Part of me is surprised that it didn't happen in China, Israel and Canada (although I heard of a wave of youth violence in Israel conspicuously following that phase).
You probably haven't seen much of the American media ecosystem; the statistics and anecdotes that were pushed by the MSM there were much worse than anything I had heard in Europe (I assume you are aware of the Rebekah Jones saga, but if not, Blocked & Reported have a nice episode).
What have I missed about DN? I have missed Swedish "peak woke", so I don't know who had been defenestrated and blackballed before the relevant topics became mainstream, but at the current state it doesn't look toxic or brainwormed to me.
>>To me it was obvious that the only way society could break down was by overdoing the NPI response.
It probably takes a worse virus that kills more working-age people for society to break down from the virus and the panic is causes.
>>(I assume you are aware of the Rebekah Jones saga, but if not, Blocked & Reported have a nice episode)
No, I never heard of Rebekah Jones, she's not in my duckpond, obviously. When reading the Wikipedia page, I think it sounds like an extremely sophisticated level of conflict compared to Sweden. Here at the top we had adult men whining over someone saying that they lacked talent for what they were doing.
>>What have I missed about DN? I have missed Swedish "peak woke", so I don't know who had been defenestrated and blackballed before the relevant topics became mainstream, but at the current state it doesn't look toxic or brainwormed to me.
Most of all it is just low-quality. Mass media is not what it was anywhere: The internet has taken away most funding. But in a small linguistic area like Sweden, the effects of decreased funding have been much worse than in the Anglosphere, where there is still room for a few newspapers. In Sweden, there simply is not room for any high-quality newspaper anymore (if there ever was). But many people believe it is, because it was at least more so 30 years ago. That gives a small number of opinion-apes in Stockholm outsized power.
> No, I never heard of Rebekah Jones, she's not in my duckpond, obviously. When reading the Wikipedia page, I think it sounds like an extremely sophisticated level of conflict compared to Sweden. Here at the top we had adult men whining over someone saying that they lacked talent for what they were doing.
The conflict was surprisingly unsophisticated. The majority of journalists saw numbers they wanted to be true and a good-looking girl with a story they wanted to believe, and that's as far as their willingness to investigate went. The few who dug deeper did not dare tell what they saw. I recall Zeynep Tufekci (one of the best reporters on COVID-related matters, one of the very few who kept both the interests of human society and public health in perspective) giving an oblique warning -- something along the lines of "be careful with her data" -- deep down in a comment thread when someone brought up Jones's plots. That was the first time I heard that something might be off about this hero of the people. For a year or two the press was blindly repeating her claims. I don't think any comparable bullshit has held the high ground in Europe for near as long. In Germany, Alexander Kekulé was cheerily busting BS on public radio (MDR) the whole time.
> Most of all it is just low-quality. Mass media is not what it was anywhere: The internet has taken away most funding. But in a small linguistic area like Sweden, the effects of decreased funding have been much worse than in the Anglosphere, where there is still room for a few newspapers. In Sweden, there simply is not room for any high-quality newspaper anymore (if there ever was). But many people believe it is, because it was at least more so 30 years ago. That gives a small number of opinion-apes in Stockholm outsized power.
I've long learned to ignore opinion columns; it's been a while since anything of interest has appeared in a such (in any language I can read). Not like the rest is much better, and certainly not in Germany, but at least there are the occasional highlights (Spiegel's reporting on South Africa is perhaps the most surprising).
If I get the Rebekah Jones case right, it was a good-looking and possibly slightly crazy young woman who didn't like the way they made statistics where she worked. So she made her own statistics and became famous.
My first question when I read about her is: Why did anyone care? It seems like whistleblowers have a very different kind of status in America compared to in Sweden. Someone like Rebekah Jones would never have had any success in Sweden. Here we believe in official statistics because they are official. If someone made their own statistics like Rebekah Jones, people would know they were useless because they didn't come from the top.
>>I've long learned to ignore opinion columns; it's been a while since anything of interest has appeared in a such (in any language I can read).
The problem with Swedish mass media is that it is one, long, fat opinion column. Because that is what can be afforded. And since there is only one opinion and it still manages to give the semblance of a newspaper, people think they get the one and only factual truth.
I assume I don't agree with the opinion stuff of for example The Guardian either (I probably agree less than with Swedish mass media, because The Guardian is still Woke). But there seems to be some journalism going on there still, so I read an article once in a while there entirely out of free will.
> If I get the Rebekah Jones case right, it was a good-looking and possibly slightly crazy young woman who didn't like the way they made statistics where she worked. So she made her own statistics and became famous.
"Slightly" :)
The problem is that the numbers were pulled out of her ass, and no one cared to check. (Something similar happened with the Surgisphere "metastudy", which was behind a lot of the early anti-Ivermectin polemics before real data started to spread. On Ivermectin, at least they got the conclusion sort-of right.)
I'm feeling a bit lazy now to debate whose media are worse, so I'll just leave you a link to enjoy :)
Of course, the grass is always greener on the other side, and the lack of faux-French philosophy in particular is probably making Swedish journalism look smarter to me. Or it is the mystique of a language I have far from mastered. I am well aware that the NYT keeps doing good work in between all the pearl-clutching and name-calling (and does so fairly frequently since Baquet is gone); I have also seen good stuff come out of The Atlantic and New Yorker. (Not from WaPo, but I can live without them.) But the amount of poison that has been poured into society is much larger here than I've ever seen in Sweden.
You wrote, "Ideally, in a democracy, every adult citizen should have exactly the same level of influence," but that really doesn't make sense, and I don't think was ever the intention of the framers of any democracy. Ideally all our votes count the same, but there's nothing undemocratic about some people being better at persuasion than others. Your blog has a lot of interesting points. Don't you think it gives you more influence than an average person in Sweden?
Did I write that? Probably I did, I write so many things, but I can't find it in the post. My thoughts on democracy are a little flavored by the concept of liquid democracy, which I believed in earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
Elsewhere in this comments section I confessed to my strivings towards elite status, in the sense of being able to influence people more than the average person. Since I have a blog that a few people read while most people don't publish anything at all, I guess I have a little more influence than an average person. However, there is a reason why I write in English: I have very little influence in Sweden.
It was in a comment on this post - I was trying to reply to it, not at the top level. Sorry about that! I tagged it in a comment. It was in the context of being uncomfortable with the power of elites.
Sweden's immigration woes can be remedied by allowing female only immigration.
Yes! I have thought a bit of that (many years of Woke=many years of searching for solutions just because the issue is always on the agenda). I stopped when I started speculating whether Swedish women could be solidaric enough to share their men with oppressed sisters from Afghanistan. Since the monogamous ideal could be one important reason why Sweden is better than Afghanistan, it could become a... strange situation.
With the internet their potential mates don't have to be Swedish. And then there's the likelihood that many female immigrants simply won't want a man. Especially Gen Z.
Except all migration is economic, refugee movements are just less considered, more pre-empted.
Interesting to see some discussion on migration from within a previous supplier of migrants to other countries, notably the prairies of North American.
I'll write from an Australian perspective.
As many countries approach below replacement population growth, getting peeps to come to a country/economy in lieu of, say, robotic labour (which Japan seems to prefer) will become a bigger and bigger issue. While a supply of people from war-torn and bandit destroyed countries will always provide problems due to trauma, base survival instincts etc (also all migrants are economic migrants, it's just that some peeps migrate for catastrophic reasons (political & structural & natural disaster), these trump any strictly economic narrative, refugees are a special case for historic post WW2 reason when the franchise was expanded to include non-rich people. In ancients days you became enslaved and counted yourself lucky.
ALso, there are people affected by war or disaster who cannot migrate, so if your view is only informed by those who manage to move, well you have some type of survivor-ship bias going on. Refugee programs were developed in the cold war and generally one's idea/image of a refugees is some man in a bad suit being caught on barbed wire on the Berlin Wall and being shot there, trying to get to 'teh west' so "human's rights" only informs the recent three or four generations story-telling of the refugee in that context. (Was the man in a bad suit not an economic migrant?)
I live in Australia, some of my earliest settler ancestor were brothers from County Kerry in Ireland. There had been a Rockite Rebellion and the eldest brother was sent out as a convict in 1821. It's a minor not well-known event in Irish history, even as the rebels completely filled on ship, but suffice it to say that Protestants are bastards.
Anyways, that fellow did so well helping to disposes the locals to run sheep (mostly on Ngarigo Country on the Monaro) that two younger brothers and their families came out over the next 2 decades. A common enough story in Australia that it is known as serial migration.
Many Irish Catholic migrants went west over the Atlantic, of course. Are those classed as economic migrants because legally they were not allowed to buy land in Ireland, and because one does not own land one does not have a vote? Politics = economics in many ways.
In Australia we have had a large migration programme that went ballistic after WW2 and involved many DPs from WW2, and many programmes to both educate the locals and the incomers. In this blog post I find the air of innocence betrays a somewhat disingenuous position, however, taken at face value it betrays incompetence rather than malignant conspiracy.
Australia's population growth continues only because of migration. Since I was born in the 60s the population has doubled. We are stealing people evenly from around the world, and despite our various governments wanting the be seen as standing firm on "illegal queue jumpers" our economy needs people, and people want to be in that economy. Here "cultural" reasons does not matter at all in selection, if anything "economic" reasons are a leveller of backgrounds, so the slippage on "not real refugees because they are economic migrants" is doubly moot.
When the White Australia Policy was in force, the racism was implemented through various "cultural" tools such as a grammar test that could be given in any language, at the discretion of the migration officer. If they didn't like the look of you they select some obscure Greek grammar and failed you for "cultural" reasons.
One more aside. I work in a museum. When people behave badly in the museum, they are often in a group which somehow rubs out their individuals roles. I.E. a bunch of teenagers, a hen's party, a bunch of retirees who have come off a big cruise ship. The same people in a mix from each of those groups moderate and moralise each other, because they are more aware of the world-building they can and should do.
curiously this reminder of what my convict & "migrant" ancestors were doing to Ngarigo country and "the nature" as continental Europeans call it, came up on Facebook today... it was not just seals and whale boiled down for fat/tallow/blubber
https://www.facebook.com/meika.loofs.samorzewski/posts/pfbid0DYb7hiBypXTQEqVtKGxcDGRR2ff3u9T2C2wigsXf2iFPtxhoEZHdZarKDst6i2ghl
mostly sent to the Indian & Chinese markets
I'm not opposed to economic immigration. It is a much better idea than refugee immigration: Since when do people like to live together because some of them, at some point, were the victims of something? By contrast, economic immigration policies can bring people together because they share interests and objectives.
First a formal request that might clash with the preferences of the rest of your readership: I'd love it if you used justified text alignment rather than left-aligned.
Content-wise a great piece as usual, and exactly my experience as well. Also loved the cliffhanger of the underlying forces.
I never thought about text alignment anywhere in the blogosphere. I will keep my eyes open!
Thanks for the analisys and sorry to hear how things turned out for Sweden.
The anecdotal evidence around me tells that the topic of immigration has been discussed with unacceptable levels of simplism. Immigration good vs immigration bad. Refugees welcome vs kill them all. Etc.
Where are talking about an optimization problem where proportions and cultural background are key factors for the outcome but people insist on their hooliganism. And of course, the word "racism" has been used a a smoke screen as the problem has nothing to do with genes and everything to do with memes, in the original meaning by Richard Dawkins.
We are now seeing the result of treating an optimization problem as a problem of binary inputs.
Question: now that Sweden is screwed up, how do you think the situation can be fixed?
>>And of course, the word "racism" has been used a a smoke screen as the problem has nothing to do with genes and everything to do with memes, in the original meaning by Richard Dawkins.
My impression is that Swedes as sick and tired of the word "racism". It has lost its glow here.
>>Question: now that Sweden is screwed up, how do you think the situation can be fixed?
A situation with criminal gangs and mafias, like the one in Sweden, can only arise in states governed by the rule of law and civil rights. So the best way to suffocate the gangs is to act through the loopholes where there are no civil rights.
In Sweden that loophole is called child protection. The autorities have the right to do more or less whatever they please with every person below the age of 21 in the name of child protection. No civil rights there. So the state can just build internment camps for every youngster below the age of 21 who is only vaguely suspect of being involved in a criminal gang, without changing any important law. It can also take away the children from any parent suspected of gang involvement and immediately place them in foster care. The law allows for that.
Good for the children? Certainly not. But the current system that takes away children on the vaguest suspicion of violence or insufficient toothbrushing is also very bad for most children involved. If that monstrous system started to oppress children and teenagers in a way that was good for society, at least it could help society very quickly. It could basically be made impossible for everyone below 21 and everyone who has children to be even rumored to have any gang connections. Then there wouldn't be many people left to form criminal gangs.
This naturally won't happen, because those in power don't realize that they have a monstrously oppressive system outside the civil rights system at their disposal. So I must admit that I don't know what to do. Just sobering up and understand how vulnerable every peaceful welfare state actually is could be a first step.
>>A situation with criminal gangs and mafias, like the one in Sweden, can only arise in states >>governed by the rule of law and civil rights. So the best way to suffocate the gangs is to act >>through the loopholes where there are no civil rights.
In some way what you are saying is that 11% of certain immigrants in the population is enough to require musculated non-democratic measures in practice, with all the risk that it encompasses. I wonder what the threshold for assimilation of the incumbent population (or requirement of strong handed measures to prevent so) is.
(I got the 11% from your post where you mention the initial population size and how the 1.2M of imported people)
About 20 percent of the inhabitants of Sweden are foreign-born: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1143161/sweden-population-by-birthplace/
Almost 25 percent have two foreign-born parents. 32 percent have at least one foreign-born parent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden
Numbers aside, my perspective is a bit of a mirror image of yours. I see musculated non-democratic measures as the normal state of affairs. Not because I like it - I really don't - but because the vast majority of human societies have been, and are, that way.
I think that a society that is civilized and trustful enough to be able to uphold civil rights and the rule of law is something unusual and fragile. Ideally, the citizens of such societies should be busy upholding the advances that have been made. But humankind is a competitive animal as well as a cooperative animal, so when there is more to gain from breaking things down people with influence will do so. And then we will be back to that normal state of things when some heavy-handed repression here and there is needed to keep things under control.
>> I see musculated non-democratic measures as the normal state of affairs.
I don't.
I usually say that it is very easy to maintain peace and order under fear but much harder to do so under social consensus. Harder but not impossible.
I had the privilege of a semester in DK (20y ago) and usually referred to the Scandinavian countries as role models - visited Sweden 3 times IIRC. The student dorm where I lived kept d 90/10 local/foreigner ratio, a strict 50/50 gender balance and little space for going outside the rules (not zero but little), which made me learn a lot. Order can be kept under social consensus if those ideas as fostered, promoted and conserved and certain ratios are kept. At that point no heavy hand is necessary.
>> Ideally, the citizens of such societies should be busy upholding the advances that have been made.
Instead of bloody taking them for granted.
>> when there is more to gain from breaking things down people with influence will do so.
Do you see evil intensions? Or rather naiveté. Everybody loses when security breaks down. But now, there is a problem to be fixed. "It takes 3 generations to make a gentleman".
>>Do you see evil intensions? Or rather naiveté?
I live by the motto "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." But still I allow myself to see quite a bit of narcissism behind Woke. Every Woke person is not narcissistic. Some are stupid for real. But there is a significant element of narcissism to it too, both on the collective and the individual level.
Thank you so much for writing this.
I was born in Sweden, grew up there, and moved to the U.S. after high school in 2016. I remember my last few years there being confusing – many of my classmates and friends started shifting hard either in the direction of Woke values or became SD supporters. Negative sentiment around immigration became super prevalent, as did concern about increasing right-wing "extremism".
I never saw the consequences of immigration myself before I left, and never figured out why it was such a polarizing topic. I think your article summarizes it incredibly well and taught me some things I didn't know before:)
Ultimately, I agree with Kirk that the "elite" argument is overblown. I knew tons of people who supported immigration, rich and poor, city-dwellers and farmers. I think it was just seen as the "correct" belief to have given the trusting and empathetic nature of Swedish people.
Of course politicians and the media could have listened to the complaints that people raised, or tried to understand why the popularity of SD was growing instead of ignoring it, but I don't fault them for their behavior. It was consistent with the behavior and beliefs of the majority of the populace (at least that I knew). They did what we asked them to do.
Congratulations on having escaped Sweden in time! In hindsight the Woke years taught us about human nature, but there and then it wasn't too pleasant.
There were millions of Swedes of all levels of income and influence who held pro-immigration, Woke opinions, because they thought that was the nice thing to do. The shift toward more anti-immigration sentiments were not only a question of social status, but also of geography: It came to the periphery before it came to cities. And it came to the south much before it came to the north. Your comment made me think of this article from 2006,
https://www.svd.se/a/f0a1fc93-8aa6-3856-8eee-9bcb129a4042/flyktingpolitiskt-trendbrott
where a professor accuses the people of southern Sweden of upholding a xenophobic culture. It sounded absurd for real: By then, criticizing the culture of immigrants in any way was taboo, but apparently it wasn't racist to claim that the people of southern Sweden had a racist culture. I sent her a e-mail and asked if she hadn't compared anti-immigration sentiment to levels of immigration of every region (by then southern Sweden had much more immigration). That was obviously meaningless: A short time later she complained to the press over all abusive messages she received.
“On the road towards a society where the state is always right and civil society and the individual are considered misguided, Woke was only a temporary fluke. The underlying forces were much stronger.”
Very scary. It’s beginning to look like the US is past peak Woke, which, on your conjecture that societies need an enemy, could explain the timing of the onset of the Russia-Ukraine war. From Woke to WW III…
I suspect that Russia is even more in need of an outer enemy than the West: In Russia, they don't even have Woke. So my guess is that Russia actually became a hard-core enemy because they are even more into such games.
"Sweden lost its ability to decide its level of hospitality itself." -- I notice this factor seems to be important in causing outbursts of anti-immigrant sentiment. I think one route of causation are the practical consequences you describe, but another route of causation is the emotional state of perceived loss of control.
Yes. The essence of charity is that it is on the terms of the giver. People give as much as they feel good about giving. When people are forced to give more or under different circumstances, it is not charity anymore. The balance of power has been reversed.
The "welfare state" is an interesting compromise between the two extremes. With a welfare state, the individual giver (taxpayer) doesn't get to individually decide how much they feel good giving, but the state (the taxpayers collectively) decide that. The reason that works is that taxes are carefully levied so that everybody's status-ranking *after tax* is the same as it is *before tax*, so people consent to being collectively taxed at a higher rate than they would consent to give to charity individually (which would risk lowing their relative status-ranking).
In regard to "perceived loss of control", the current wave of asylum-seekers entering the US has that feature. Due to the details of US immigration law, this is the only route of entry into the US where the immigration "system" doesn't put a firm limit on the number of people who can enter in a year, combined with the fact that the people entering don't have a living situation arranged when arriving. (The classical "wetback" "illegal immigrants" generally have lined up employment and living situations (at least in general) before they arrive.)
>>The "welfare state" is an interesting compromise between the two extremes. With a welfare state, the individual giver (taxpayer) doesn't get to individually decide how much they feel good giving, but the state (the taxpayers collectively) decide that. The reason that works is that taxes are carefully levied so that everybody's status-ranking *after tax* is the same as it is *before tax*, so people consent to being collectively taxed at a higher rate than they would consent to give to charity individually (which would risk lowing their relative status-ranking).
I never thought about that. Now that you say it, it sounds really smart.
Very interesting analysis. One thing that stood out a bit was the repeated references to some undefined "elite". It would benefit the argument if it was more clearly explained who this elite is.
From my danish perspective, it is very hard to identify one specific group as being elite, at least in terms of influence. We no longer have a single unified nobility that directs the country.
Are the politicians elite? They don't seem to be. They are definitely not rich (they are paid ok, but not even close to the level of industry leaders). They are clearly not some intellectual powerhouse. Politician is one of the last jobs left that are open to everyone, without any requirement on education level or other qualification whatsoever. At least in Denmark, less than half of the ministers in the parliament have a long higher education.
Is it the media? We have both right-wing media, left-wing media and everything in between, each with their own agendas, but recently they all seem more interested in getting clicks than furthering their specific ideologies. We definitely don't have one dominant media.
Is it the intellectuals? The professors and students at higher education establishments definitely do their best to debate and take part in public discussions, but they seem to be pretty much drowned out by social media these days. There is not much cachet in displaying your PhD compared to your follower count.
How about the actual rich then. They are definitely elite based on a lifestyle perspective, but in terms of influence...? They might be able to occasionally hobnob with politicians, but when it comes to actual policy they seem as frustrated with being ignored as everybody else.
To me, this use of "elite" seems like an artefact of the same basic need to find an internal enemy as you so eloquently describe in the article. Some days the "elite" will be the socialist intellectuals, other days it will be the conservative industrialists, all depending on what the current hot issues are and what enemy we need.
Everything to avoid facing the fact that it is all ourselves.
As a quick rule of thumb, in Sweden, you can map 'self-proclaimed elite' into 'voted for Centerpartiet'. It's not a perfect rule, of course.
Very interesting questions.
I agree that "elite" is a very fluffy word. And still, I think it signifies something that is both real and important.
My best definition of the word "elite" is "those with some influence". Ideally, in a democracy, every adult citizen should have exactly the same level of influence. As we all know, this is not how it works in practice. Most people have close to zero influence over everything outside their arms length. A minority of people collectively have some influence: They are the elite.
Some of them have influence because they have money. Some of them because they have political power. Some of them because people listen to them (for example journalists, influencers). Some of them because they are important professionals in their area.
None of them have total power. Most of them are in a more or less precarious position and can lose their elite position from one day to another. Still, here and now, they possess some scraps of influence that most people almost completely lack.
From this definition it is clear that the elite is not only my perpetual nemesis, but also the societal category that I'm striving for myself. I'm writing a blog with important words like "elite" in it. My purpose for doing that is, of course, that I want to influence people. I can't say that I'm successful in my strivings and I'm also not desperate to be. Still, I can't hide that "the elite" is a place where I would like to be myself.
By the way, great to speak with someone from Denmark. In my opinion, people in Denmark and Sweden speak far too little with each other.
I was trying to reply to this comment earlier when I quoted you saying every adult citizen should have the same influence.
Excellent article! But I have to push another idea, that apparently hadn't come to author's mind. Woke is not something that simply happens. Woke is part of quite old (as of now) and elaborate agenda - that of the neo-Marxists, so called Frankfurt school. It is quite explicit in its goals - eliminate Western/European/White people by using the minorities (ANY kind of), so they can build communism. Why Sweden? Sweden was heavily infiltrated with "foreign agents" (the new terminology) since the beginning of the Cold War. Anyone interested in espionage and intelligence knows about that.
> It is quite explicit in its goals - eliminate Western/European/White people by using the minorities (ANY kind of), so they can build communism.
This seems like quite a leap. How would importing predominantly islamic culture ever lead to communism? It seems to be one of the cultures most resistant to socialist ideas. If anything, importing more of this should make a culture more conservative and less likely to move towards communism.
Yes, you are right, it is not going to lead to communism. But marxists don't see it. All they want to use is minorities - religious, sexual, ethnic, anything - to destroy the core of the society/state. In the chaos that will inevitably happen, they would provide "strong hand" to restore order and peace. This is very well explained by Yuri Bezimenov (search in YouTube) as the KGB tactic as well. I still believe Frankfurt Marxists are not the same as Soviet ones, but I may be wrong (but then why Democrats in the US are in such a conflict with KGB guys in Moscow?). What they don't think about is that Islamic culture will be minority for a while and after that it will become predominant by the sheer fact of their birth rates. I guess they fall for their own trap thinking that they will reeducate them.
"but then why Democrats in the US are in such a conflict with KGB guys in Moscow?"
Democrats are not Marxists, come on.
Yes, they are. Without a doubt.
Do you even live in the USA? I am surrounded by Democrats and they are absolutely not Marxists. They are solid lovers of capitalism. Most of them haven't even read a word of Marx.
Most communists haven’t read Marx. Probably the problem is that you don’t know what Marxist means. Your friends either don’t as well or they are making logical fallacies. Do they believe that people are equal? (Not to the law, but in general) Do they believe that everyone is capable of doing anything, provided resources and time? Do they believe in affirmative action policies? Do they believe in “tax the rich” and subsidize poor? Well, then they are Marxists or at very least “useful idiots “ as Lenin call them.
>>Woke is part of quite old (as of now) and elaborate agenda - that of the neo-Marxists, so called Frankfurt school.
Woke certainly has ideological roots that are at least decades old. The question is why those ideas could suddenly engulf society as a whole. And why they did so at different times in different societies.
well, yeah, I guess that's the point of it, but it is important to be emphasized the fact that this is not "natural event", it is a consequence of conscious efforts. It could have happened in the US earlier, but until very recently it was a curse to be called socialist there and in the past there was a McCarty. In the same time, Sweden was the platzdarm of KGB infiltration.
>> it is a consequence of conscious efforts
Though in the US, among the well-educated, there have been Frankfurt-school people since the late 1960s at least but woke-like ideas have only leaked gradually into the mainstream until recently. Also, I haven't noticed woke people in the US to be particularly socialist; on the whole, they seem to be educated well above average and have somewhat above-average income, and not at all interesting in narrowing the distance between themselves and the working class.
First of all, "well educated" is a weird term. Being educated from Harvard in English major is the opposite of being "well educated", it's more like "well brainwashed". And yes, in the small group of people with enough money to do nothing all day there have been Frankfurt-school people. The difference is that they were not allowed to have any power in the US back then.
Second, you are presuming that if you have above average income you can't be socialist. That is simply not true. Also, woke people are talking about equality, it is by definition socialism. Another remark: you have observed that they don't want to narrow the distance between themselves and the working class, because said working class is white people, anti-socialist "crowd". They want to associate themselves with minorities (like Frankfurt school tactics suggest), so they can destroy that working class.
Interesting argument, but I never got the impression that the anti-lockdown consensus was enforced in Sweden anywhere near as heavily as the pro-lockdown consensus was in places like Canada, Israel or even Germany. Was there something ugly going on under the rug that I as a non-Swede would not see? Or did things deteriorate after mid-2020? (I happened to be in Sweden in Jan-Mar 2020 and was startled by the *lack* of visible culture war; people were discussing immigration quite openly and various theories on covid mortality were being shared without much moralistic fervor. The one exception was the rather fanatical insistence by the government that children must not skip school.)
My impression has indeed been that Swedes are more eager to solve problems communally than Americans (who wouldn't even check notes with others) or Germans (who often just want to hear the answer from the pulpit). But I've seen a lot less willingness to step on peoples' toes. Skimming DN after being surrounded by American and German media was a breath of fresh air.
>>Was there something ugly going on under the rug that I as a non-Swede would not see?
Most of all, massive amounts of top-down stupidity. Many people understood that the Public Health Agency had no clue about what they were doing. We thought everything they said was bullshit. There were no reliable statistics. For about two months, everything was a guessing game, where people were guessing whether society would break down or not (it didn't, the spring saved us). And those with school-age children had to guess whether breaking the law would be worth it or not.
>>Skimming DN after being surrounded by American and German media was a breath of fresh air.
I can clearly understand if that was the feeling in 2020. Dagens Nyheter was and is the most despicable publication I can imagine. But it was awful in a different way than higher-quality American and German mass media in full Woke mode.
Maybe this all felt less stupid to me as I came from the other side. To me it was obvious that the only way society could break down was by overdoing the NPI response. Part of me is surprised that it didn't happen in China, Israel and Canada (although I heard of a wave of youth violence in Israel conspicuously following that phase).
You probably haven't seen much of the American media ecosystem; the statistics and anecdotes that were pushed by the MSM there were much worse than anything I had heard in Europe (I assume you are aware of the Rebekah Jones saga, but if not, Blocked & Reported have a nice episode).
What have I missed about DN? I have missed Swedish "peak woke", so I don't know who had been defenestrated and blackballed before the relevant topics became mainstream, but at the current state it doesn't look toxic or brainwormed to me.
>>To me it was obvious that the only way society could break down was by overdoing the NPI response.
It probably takes a worse virus that kills more working-age people for society to break down from the virus and the panic is causes.
>>(I assume you are aware of the Rebekah Jones saga, but if not, Blocked & Reported have a nice episode)
No, I never heard of Rebekah Jones, she's not in my duckpond, obviously. When reading the Wikipedia page, I think it sounds like an extremely sophisticated level of conflict compared to Sweden. Here at the top we had adult men whining over someone saying that they lacked talent for what they were doing.
>>What have I missed about DN? I have missed Swedish "peak woke", so I don't know who had been defenestrated and blackballed before the relevant topics became mainstream, but at the current state it doesn't look toxic or brainwormed to me.
Most of all it is just low-quality. Mass media is not what it was anywhere: The internet has taken away most funding. But in a small linguistic area like Sweden, the effects of decreased funding have been much worse than in the Anglosphere, where there is still room for a few newspapers. In Sweden, there simply is not room for any high-quality newspaper anymore (if there ever was). But many people believe it is, because it was at least more so 30 years ago. That gives a small number of opinion-apes in Stockholm outsized power.
> No, I never heard of Rebekah Jones, she's not in my duckpond, obviously. When reading the Wikipedia page, I think it sounds like an extremely sophisticated level of conflict compared to Sweden. Here at the top we had adult men whining over someone saying that they lacked talent for what they were doing.
The conflict was surprisingly unsophisticated. The majority of journalists saw numbers they wanted to be true and a good-looking girl with a story they wanted to believe, and that's as far as their willingness to investigate went. The few who dug deeper did not dare tell what they saw. I recall Zeynep Tufekci (one of the best reporters on COVID-related matters, one of the very few who kept both the interests of human society and public health in perspective) giving an oblique warning -- something along the lines of "be careful with her data" -- deep down in a comment thread when someone brought up Jones's plots. That was the first time I heard that something might be off about this hero of the people. For a year or two the press was blindly repeating her claims. I don't think any comparable bullshit has held the high ground in Europe for near as long. In Germany, Alexander Kekulé was cheerily busting BS on public radio (MDR) the whole time.
> Most of all it is just low-quality. Mass media is not what it was anywhere: The internet has taken away most funding. But in a small linguistic area like Sweden, the effects of decreased funding have been much worse than in the Anglosphere, where there is still room for a few newspapers. In Sweden, there simply is not room for any high-quality newspaper anymore (if there ever was). But many people believe it is, because it was at least more so 30 years ago. That gives a small number of opinion-apes in Stockholm outsized power.
I've long learned to ignore opinion columns; it's been a while since anything of interest has appeared in a such (in any language I can read). Not like the rest is much better, and certainly not in Germany, but at least there are the occasional highlights (Spiegel's reporting on South Africa is perhaps the most surprising).
If I get the Rebekah Jones case right, it was a good-looking and possibly slightly crazy young woman who didn't like the way they made statistics where she worked. So she made her own statistics and became famous.
My first question when I read about her is: Why did anyone care? It seems like whistleblowers have a very different kind of status in America compared to in Sweden. Someone like Rebekah Jones would never have had any success in Sweden. Here we believe in official statistics because they are official. If someone made their own statistics like Rebekah Jones, people would know they were useless because they didn't come from the top.
>>I've long learned to ignore opinion columns; it's been a while since anything of interest has appeared in a such (in any language I can read).
The problem with Swedish mass media is that it is one, long, fat opinion column. Because that is what can be afforded. And since there is only one opinion and it still manages to give the semblance of a newspaper, people think they get the one and only factual truth.
I assume I don't agree with the opinion stuff of for example The Guardian either (I probably agree less than with Swedish mass media, because The Guardian is still Woke). But there seems to be some journalism going on there still, so I read an article once in a while there entirely out of free will.
> If I get the Rebekah Jones case right, it was a good-looking and possibly slightly crazy young woman who didn't like the way they made statistics where she worked. So she made her own statistics and became famous.
"Slightly" :)
The problem is that the numbers were pulled out of her ass, and no one cared to check. (Something similar happened with the Surgisphere "metastudy", which was behind a lot of the early anti-Ivermectin polemics before real data started to spread. On Ivermectin, at least they got the conclusion sort-of right.)
I'm feeling a bit lazy now to debate whose media are worse, so I'll just leave you a link to enjoy :)
https://nitter.net/TheAgeofShoddy/status/1382388653322735618#m
Of course, the grass is always greener on the other side, and the lack of faux-French philosophy in particular is probably making Swedish journalism look smarter to me. Or it is the mystique of a language I have far from mastered. I am well aware that the NYT keeps doing good work in between all the pearl-clutching and name-calling (and does so fairly frequently since Baquet is gone); I have also seen good stuff come out of The Atlantic and New Yorker. (Not from WaPo, but I can live without them.) But the amount of poison that has been poured into society is much larger here than I've ever seen in Sweden.