Totally agree. This is essentially a political rant about the politics of Sweden and as such pretty exaggarating. I don't quite understand why it's trending on HN.
(meta) Anything that gets more comments than votes is known to be penalised by the HN ranking algo. Any highly political post like this tends to get more comments than votes, so most of the time it sinks. But, this article is about Sweden, which is outside of most readers' personal experience, so while people still upvote it from agreement with its politics, they don't jump in and start debating it quite so much.
Eventually enough people will flag it or start commenting that it'll drop anyway (a mistake in the algorithm if you ask me, as it makes flags 'super-downvotes') but in the mean time...
Nationalism, xenophobia, and even fascism seems to be on the rise in Sweden - as it is in the rest of Europe. (I'm basing this solely on media coverage and personal observation.)
Posts like this show a poor attempt, with entirely subjective observations, to justify some of these attitudes. What's particularly scary is how the poster tries to disguise his views with a belief in socialist politics.
"The once homogenous population has been forever altered by a rapid and massive addition of people from vastly different cultures and value-systems. 26,8% of the population is now foreign-born or with at least one foreign-born parent, and the national census bureau estimates that some 150 000 per year will arrive to the country of just 9,8 million residents.
There simply is no possible way to absorb and assimilate such volumes of people, period. Then you are merely creating ethnic enclaves, which due to incompatible language, culture and job skills become ghettos, which in turns brews crime, misery and extremism. Once the inflow has exceeded the capacity for absorbtion, further immigration only makes the problem worse. "
I don't know the author, but this sounds like it belongs in a Pegida handbook.
People here in Scandinavia are very worried because their cozy little village of a region is being infused with massively different cultures.
Can't really blame them, and to be sure crime and social costs are higher as a result of immigration. That said, there is every reason to believe that these effects will diminish over time as immigrants start to integrate, even some beneficial effects are already showing.
The problem is that 'integration' takes generations, and a very large influx jeopardizes this process. So the adverse effects remain very visible and most people are too short-sighted to take the long view. At the same time Europeans are so hypersensitive about 'racism' that the topic can't even be discussed in polite company (which leaves it to actual racists to even talk about the issues).
What a shocking expression of cultural imperialism and contempt. "Yes, your culture is being disrupted by massive immigration that I freely admit you can't assimilate very well, and is causing significant problems. But it's OK, go ahead and suffer through the negative effects that are frontloaded into your lifetime, because I'm sure that in a few generations, after you're dead, it will all work out."
Are you really surprised that with a pitch like that that Europeans aren't falling over themselves to shape up? Especially if they lack your great and frankly historically baseless belief that their culture and their children are guaranteed to have a place in it?
Here in Denmark, in my opinion much of the worry is not based on first-hand experience with actual immigrants who have moved to your town and are not integrating well, but rather with a more generalized worry that the culture in some sense is threatened. That's harder to solve with practical measures like integration assistance, because it's not based on specific daily problems but more general ideological worldviews.
If anything it seems anti-correlated with presence of real live immigrants. The largest group of immigrants to Denmark go to Copenhagen. But Copenhagen isn't where you find the strongest anti-immigrant sentiment, as you'd expect if anti-immigrant sentiment were caused by contact with immigrants. Such sentiment isn't absent, but Copenhageners are comparatively okay with immigration and the majority take moderate views, focused on practical issues like programs to improve integration. The strongest worries and the more "militant" style of anti-immigrant politics comes from rural and small-town areas which do not really see large-scale immigration.
I believe this is also the case in a number of other European countries, for example in Austria and Switzerland, where immigrants go mainly to the cities, but anti-immigrant sentiment is concentrated in the rural areas and small towns. Some of this probably has nothing to do with immigration per se but is a result of preexisting cultural splits between cosmopolitan, liberally oriented cities, and more conservative countrysides (a 19th-century sort of romantic nationalism is very strong in rural Scandinavia).
Are you sure that an European equivalent of white-flight hasn't happened? People who are less likely to like living with immigrants are likely to move to suburbs or not move to the cities in the first place.
Enclaves are caused by "tipping" in a Schelling check-board model. It would be interesting to check the data to this type of model.
The only flight we see in Denmark are people fleeing the quiet rural areas and moving to the big university cities, primarily Copenhagen and to a lesser degree Århus.
That is absolutely correct. But Switzerland has a different kind of immigration - its mostly highly skilled workers, working in IT or as doctors, and some lower skilled labour in the hospitality industry. The total amount is very high though (20%+), which makes people uncomfortable - and understandably so.
The situation in Sweden is a bit different though. Many of them are people that have no chance of finding a job in the Swedish market, which leads to crime, ghettos and separated societies. Its essentially mis-managed on a political level. This will only lead to resentment, the rise of right-wing parties and social problems. I don't think this is a desirable outcome for either the immigrants nor for Sweden as a society.
> At the end of 2012 there were 1.87 million foreigners in Switzerland, the equivalent of nearly 23.3% of a total population that has passed the 8-million mark. In addition, more than 270,000 cross-border workers hold a job in Switzerland.
I bet that most of the permanent residents and virtually all of the seasonal workers are in the low-skill category.
No need to guess. Quote [0]: "The admission of people from non-EU/EFTA countries is regulated by the Foreign Nationals Act, and is limited to skilled workers who are urgently required and are likely to integrate successfully in the long term."
And the previously non-regulated EU residents are from a more similar cultural background, so there is a qualitative difference from the situation in Sweden.
I think 'belongs to Pegida handbook' in itself doesn't say much. It would be ideological (as opposed to evidence-based) political correctness to avoid stating the obvious: it is almost impossible to absorb huge volumes of immigrants, especially when a country has been largely homogeneous and insular for hundreds, if not thousands of years. It does behoove new immigrants to learn the language of their adopted countries. This does not have to be at the expense of their native cultures, insofar as it doesn't run contrary to humanistic principles (e.g. mistreatment of women and FGM are both 'cultural' and 'religious' for sure, but they still have to be repudiated.)
Many points are exaggerated, but the immigration issue in Sweden is very real. It has gone completely off track. The thing is, you are not allowed to talk about it. People have lost their jobs doubting the official policy of unlimited immigration, which simply should not happen in a free country. Sweden currently spends half their health care budget on immigration costs.
Of course the right wing will gain popularity, and while I'm not sympathetic, its very understandable.
I don't know enough to claim you're wrong. But the claim is rather extraordinary and sounds very much like common right-wing propaganda from other countries. So a good study would help.
I think it was in reference to a 2011 official statistic, but I have been unable to find the direct source, and the sources are all in Swedish. Sorry, should have hunted down the precise numbers before blurting them out!
The thing is, you are not allowed to talk about it.
Really? Then how come I get the impression that politicians and newspapers are full of talk about the topic?
Sweden currently spends half their health care budget on immigration costs.
On the national level [1]:
47 billion SEK spent on migration and foreign aid.
63 billion SEK spent on health care.
Note: most of the health care in Sweden is financed on the regional level; a rough approximation of total amount spent on spent on health care based on [2] would be about 260 billion SEK.
That makes sense - though 47 billion SEK is still a lot, don't you think?
The other thing I was referring to was that the Swedish newspaper Expressen exposed the identities of Disqus users, and at least one of them lost heir job as a consequence:
47 billion is a lot of money. In my opinion it's money well spent, but everyone is allowed to have their own opinion of course.
The aid part of that is 29 billion. If we did what we're expected to (what every country is expected to, even if few live up to it), that part should probably be 40 billion - the UN(?) has a goal that every country should spend 1% of GDP on foreign aid.
About the Disqus thing, I'd say that it's ok to expose "public persons" who claim one thing in public and do something different when they think nobody knows its them. This includes politicians, judges, police, other public authorities. Doing this to "normal" people isn't generally justified, IMHO. On the other hand, we have huge problems with bullying online that we need to do something about - and exposing bullies may be a useful part of that.
> the poster tries to disguise his views with a belief in socialist politics
I thought he was stating the opposite, he comes across as very right wing, hates Obama (that bizarre ending), blames the leftist govt of the 60s onward for depleting abundant resources and blames liberals for overspending.
Yeah, this sounds like the average European xenophobic tirade against a leftist government. Except they just got back in power after 8 years of right-wing government, but who cares about the past, right? It's all the socialists' fault!
Sweden is not a paradise, we know that, but it's not kicking out the "blackies" that you will solve the long-term problem of keeping a social-democratic country running. Full-on fascism and full-on "freemarketism" are easier to run, of course, but they come with greater drawbacks.
And this reaction is exactly what makes any valid debate in pretty much most of Western Europe impossible.
Any time anyone dares to complain about the influence of ultra-reactionary immigrants on the quality and safety of public life, they are immediately branded "nationalist", "xenophobic" or "fascist".
Many of us, like myself, are from immigrant backgrounds. There is a world of difference between how our predecessors treated the country they immigrated to and what the recent waves of reactionary Islamists are doing.
People who aggressively and violently oppose the liberal values of our nations are not immigrants, they are invaders. And people of all races and political believes are getting tired of this shit.
Stop blaming the victims. We are not the aggressors, we are not the homophobic, antisemitic, anti-women criminal trash that terrorises public life.
We were once safe and progressive nations, and wanting to take that back does not make us fascist.
"People who aggressively and violently oppose the liberal values of our nations are not immigrants, they are invaders"
You guys should've done more to keep the Sweden Democrats out of the country then, I guess. ;)
Also, wanting life to be better doesn't make you fascist. But deciding that the only thing between you and a mythical past of glory is a tiny fraction of the population that needs to "defeated" is certainly goose-stepping in that direction. See Robert Paxton's 2004 book for more.
As a German living in the US I actually had the most interesting experience visiting Japan. I always thought of myself as "liberal" when I lived in Europe. However, moving to the US I found myself often times very annoyed by people not obeying common everyday conventions. A dumb example would be people jaywalking right in front of your car, being fully aware that you have to stop because of their jaywalking. When I visited Japan I realized that I actually appreciate fascism to a certain degree, which is a shocking thing to realize. Having a strong shared set of conventions and shared values that help enforce these conventions make everyday life so much more pleasant. When I use light rail in SF, I am constantly strategizing where to position myself relative to other passengers, so that I can get on the train early in order to get a seat. In Japan there are markings on the floor where you have to stand and no one would dare to skip the line. These are small examples of things that make everyday life just so much more pleasant. I don't give a damn what color your skin is or what country you are from, but I agree with you, you better stick to the rules that everyone else adheres to.
Please, go on a tour around Norway, then visit Trondheim (still in Norway)
Usually you can leave whatever you want anywhere in Norway (for e.g. we did leave our motorcycles with keys in the ignition, i personally left my midrange helmet on a bench overnight, oops)
In Trondheim? Everything is nailed to the ground, there are metal bars and comical locks everywhere - the difference? Trondheim ended with a huge group of gypsies a few years back. Also, look at the hotpots of crime in Norway
Mainly because when we visited it wad the only gypsy town, there are other student towns in Norway. And it wasn't unsafe in a student way - it was plagued by horrible levels of theft - hence the ubiquitous fortifications and locks - something that one can hardly blame pn students (at that scale)
Ive seen gypsies try to steal with my own bloody eyes, i guess that makes me a racist then...
There is a difference in bellowing "let's hurt anyone we don't like" and "we probably should address the real world"
Suppression of discussion serves no one.
In Poland we accepted some chechens, romans, etc.
A lot of them refuse to learn even the basics of reading or writing, they are completely dysfunctional on most basic of the levels, they periodically have a decent housing provided for freez which then they utterly ruin, because they now all it takes is to protest they "inhumam treatment" to have it all cleaned out and repaired, for free. They refuse to be a part of local society, the police, social services, etc all alarm about tgeurt utter lack of will to integrate, or even be functional. And every time someone tries to talk about it, a slew of "politically correct" media kills any meaningful discussion
My city is one of most racist, and i am deeply ashamed when there is an attack, be it verbal or physical, on an innocent human.
Nationalism is on the rise indeed, the nationalist party has been growing exponentially the last elections, now at ~13%. The reason why it's rising is probably not because swedes particularly like the ideology, but because it is the only party that does not believe that the current situation is feasible (They want to drastically limit immigration so it's equal to that of our neighbors)
I have not seen any rise in fascism. Xenophobia, maybe. By the definition of the word it is the irrational fear of the foreign. The fear is often very rational as immigrants are over-represented in crime, unemployment etc. However people work with generalizations so it is not unlikely that some of the fears might be irrational.
So I'm xenophobic for worrying about parts of Malmö where the post office and global carrier services such as DHL no longer operate because they can't guarantee their workers safety and where even the police can't go without the equivalent of a SWAT team? That just doesn't belong in Sweden, no matter how you try to justify it.
I live in Malmö; the "problem area" you're talking about is a couple of blocks by Seved, where one company (Postnord) won't deliver _large_ packages due to the possibility of theft. That's not "the police can't go there". That's not "DHL can't guarantee worker safety". I've walked these streets hundreds of times; they're no different than thousands of other streets in thousands of other cities. They're not especially dangerous. They are in fact probably safer than large parts of other cities.
I blame aftonbladet.se for 80% of the crap going on in Sweden at the moment. They really have made a huge difference to the worse of the mental health of the nation.
Sweden is the best example of what happens when you have a completely liberal society. And, of course, it's bleeding to lots of places. And if you call them out, you are called racist.
He's talking right-wing American English, where "liberal" strongly overlaps with "communist/socialist".
Americans are fond of reverting long-standing European political conventions "just because". Historical Liberalism was all about free trade and low taxes? Let's use the term for the party that supports higher taxes and regulations. Red is for socialists, blue for conservatives? Let's swap them! How fun!
(Not that it matters anyway, the entire European discourse is a million miles to the left of anything being discussed in the Land of the Free. The world is so weird.)
The use of the word "liberal" in the US drove me nuts the first few months I lived in the US. I used to be identify myself as a "Liberal" in Germany and constantly felt misrepresented when people were talking about "liberals" in the US. Weird enough the term that comes closest to what I understand as European liberalism is libertarianism. So we had to throw in a syllable to make up for the word that's being used everywhere else having been hijacked. I wonder if some of this is fallout from the insane two party system.
I think user mahouse has confused liberal with European socialism (as opposed to Soviet socialism) and is blaming socialist policies for the death of Sweden. There is some truth in that Scandinavia has gone too far in favor of the world's poor at the expense of it's own citizens (by truth, read: popular opinion).
But let us not forget what Scandinavia was like (and still is) without the mass immigration of 'those brown people', it was an Aryan wet dream with everything for us and none for you. In many ways the modern Scandinavia is a hugely successful human accomplishment. While some people have less (of material things) many have had their lives improved enormously. For every "svarte neger" that hits the headlines as a rapist, 10000+ or more no longer have to live in poverty, in a war zone, under an oppressive regime. Shed a tear for the leftists who saw a way to make the world a better place one life at a time, made that happen with their country's wealth even at the expense (in limited financial terms) of some, and have created a positive liberal society striving to reach a worthwhile ideal. The old Sweden is dead, long live Sweden!
What the blogger fails to address (and I haven't read more than that one post) is how any of this affects him, why this means he has to go back to the US and why any of us should give a shit about his tabloid fueled opinion.
Agreed. Instead of letting only smart/educated immigrants in, they let EVERYONE in. This is a horrible idea.
If you want to help the poor outside of your country, you should help them elevate themselves, not lower your own country to the global average.
The political correctness trumps everything in Sweden. You can't discuss the violence of Islam without being called a racist (even if Islam is not a race).
this is what switzerland is doing, and it seem one of very few countries, who got the immigration right from the start, in long term.
it's a tricky situation... there is more people trying to come here in europe than there is sustainable place (economically wise) to be absorbed into. we have quite a bit of an economical crisis going on here, which doesn't help. so basically masses march in, we have no job for them, meaning they don't contribute to our society, just consume.
on the other side, they often come from horrible places, have to endure the travel with real chances of dying. that should tell you a bit how desperate they are.
In ideal world, we should focus our resources on improving state of their home countries, so they don't have to run away in first place.
In real world... since many screwed countries are results of US (CIA, military) meddling with their internals and failing spectacularly (or succeeding greatly, depending on what the real objectives were), I say forward a large portion of them there. After first 100.000, let's talk :)
The EU asylum system [0] is currently debated and fairness will be improved. It is not an easy task, considering the UK threatening to leave, but Sweden and Italy are treated unfairly by their partners here.
I think some personality types are just prone to the attitude that everything's turning to shit. The same people that feel that the world is less safe today while statistics show the opposite. That doesn't mean he doesn't have some good points. Personally I'm particularly worried about the schooling system. The strain of immigration may be real, I don't know if it will be a net positive or negative in the end. To be safe I would prefer a more modest immigration policy.
I think Sweden is following a larger trend in the west of a more polarizing society with higher income inequality and the slashing of the social safety net. I think globalization and new technology is to blame for this, not naive politicians.
Swede here – I don't agree with this post. He does bring up some very good point about the real estate situation though.
I do, however, think that it's wrong to say that Stefan Löfven is a 'corrupt yokel'. He's been in a very hard situation politically, where he's been forced to rule as a minority. The opposition is doing everything they can to make sure that he looks incompetent as a leader, as it's basically ensuring their next election victory. He's only been in office since september, so it's not actually that weird that not too much has been done.
The whole post is filled with overstatements like this – and I'm kind of amused about the idea of escaping sweden because it left some of it's socialist ideals in the 60's to go to a country who despises socialism.
They don't really have to try very hard. He comes across as deeply incompetent most chances he gets imho, he's been especially embarrassing in international circumstances. He should have gone the way of Juholt, if not for timing and a lack of decent alternatives.
I left Sweden 5 years ago and I more or less agree with the post. It seems to have some undertones i don't entirely appreciate but on the whole it should serve as a necessary reality check if taken with a pinch of salt. It brings up many points that are worth discussing at length but which are essentially verboten in Swedish society. Even if it does overstate or sensationalize somewhat.
I doubt he is leaving specifically because it has abandoned some socialist ideals. For me it has more to do with not wanting to be part of the mass delusion, not wanting to constantly fit your opinions to an ever narrowing hallway of acceptable ideas and speech (not because they couldn't but because they shouldn't have to). At least when you don't live there you don't have to see and live it day in and day out. If anything I have grown more fond of Sweden and the ideals it represents since moving, because I am not forced to come to terms with its realities on a daily basis.
Another Swede, I agree with a lot of the points, especially how the current government can't help but make themselves look foolish.
But, free health care, free education, almost no religious zealots what so ever, zero religious impact on lawmaking, a relatively inclusive society, etc, makes Sweden one of the better places to live in the world, imho. Obviously, I'm biased.
I too find it rather weird that someone who yearns for more socialism would move from Sweden to the US. :)
That's a very easy reasoning to following, it also gathers a lot of popularity, specially if I'm out of a job o with one I don't like.
Explaining why this is not true, or rather why it is much more complex than that, takes a lot of time, effort and understanding of non trivial economic concepts.
I would say the later is the hard way, this kind of reasoning applies to so many things that said by politicians all around the world to gather votes.
I would also like to clarify that I absolutely don't believe that that kind of reasoning is only used by the right wing politicians, that would be extremely naive.
If foreigners come to country / need jobs / get jobs only were true. Would you say your little sunshine story applies to other areas of swedish immigration as well? No it doesn't, and that's what people are starting to realise. But once you do and call for actions from the governmment, you're being called a racist from people that still live in a dream world and refuse to wake up. Dreams are easy, truth is hard.
If calling things "racist" is a dream, then so is the sunshine story of blaming everything on "the immigrants" and a "crumbling social fabric." Polarization and naivety are easy, subtlety and deeper understanding are hard.
> Polarization and naivety are easy, subtlety and deeper understanding are hard
Isn't precisely the problem that we can't have a rational discussion of this issue without people bringing out the X-word, the R-word, the I-word and others and calling for immediate stop of all criticism of the current situation?
I'd say that the problem seems to be that any attempt at rational discussion inevitably leads to talks of "us" vs. "them", culture war, conspiracy theories and propaganda akin to "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" (including "Eurabia", lying to kafirs, etc.), the negation of moderate muslims and integrated immigrants, stereotypes and generalizations, misrepresented statistics and basically fear mongering dealing with the supposed invading hordes of savages.
The average Joe not being able to tell "racist" from "xenophobe" seems kind of trivial in comparison.
"Jihadist Trojan horses are flowing through the porous border along with the tens of thousands ID-less refugees. But what makes me the most pessimistic about Sweden’s future is how the social fabric itself has been undermined."
If the "social fabric" of a country amounts to it's prior ethnic homogeneity, then decrying it's unraveling amounts to being scared of people coming from the outside. People which, in the case of Sweden, also tend to have a darker skin tone than the average citizen 50 years ago. This, in conjunction with the suggestion that Muslim immigrants tend to be "Jihadist Trojan horses" makes it a very thinly veiled Islamophobic piece.
"Statistik från årsredovisningen som släpps i dag visar att endast tio procent initialt har godkända id-handlingar som godkänds av verket."
Only 10% had ID which were approved on the first go around. It's not clear what portion of the 90% had "no ID" and what portion merely had insufficient ID on their first attempt. Your reading would make it seem like ALL of these immigrants are shady characters out of a cartoon, trying to fake their way into the country.
I wouldn't be surprised if many of them threw IDs away, so they can claim they are coming from war regions and seek asylum, instead of being just another part of economic migration (like many people from north Africa/middle east actively try).
I don't blame them, if I would be so desperate, this would be a logical step. The big moral question that opinions differ so much on is: should we in Europe try to help all of them at all costs, even if millions will come?
Personally, I wouldn't mind sharing my resources, if the person I share it with will respect rules I set and learn to speak the language I speak. If not, goodbye.
To be trite and cliche: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Your claims make a superficially plausible story, but if you are going to base your moral decisions on something, basing them on these unsubstantiated claims is circular reasoning.
Why do you personally get to set the rules? Vote for people that support the rules that you believe in, but thinking that you can play cultural imperialist, dictating how people should act and what language they should speak, is frankly egotistical.
Assuming you're not trolling; the whole bit about immigrants is textbook xenophobia, couched in code words. The author uses the word "immigrants", but they don't use it mean all non-Swedish people from any other country. "Immigrants" in this context means the poor, dirty and lazy people of whatever country it's popular to hate at the moment. They're probably brown-skinned or at least non-Aryan.
What is "sweden for swedes" to you? It sounds very much like the struggle of many other ethnic groups in the world. Kurdistan for Kurds, Israel for Jews, etc.
I don't agree with the author on almost anything but I wholeheartedly agree that voting with your feet is the only type of voting that brings immediate results.
Voting with your feet > voting with your wallet > voting though a ballot box every 5 years (you should still do that though as it costs you nothing!)
Seriously, Sweden is an amazing country, so beautiful. People are so welcoming there, it's incredibly safe and easy to go around.
Everybody speaks English and is willing to help.
Some swedes that were mingling with some of this horrible immigrants the blogger was talking about where kind enough, to invite me to their place to sleep.
Don't guide yourself by anything on this article, I'm surprised it got so far.
Crumbling is not the same as crumbled. There is an increasing problem with maintenance that has been neglected over the years and they have been plagued by some embarrassing and high profiled delays over the past year or two. They've also been a bit slow with replacing some trains, but on the whole it still works well enough.
Better than the Italians, not as good as the Japanese basically.
It's infinity times better than the US rail system.
It's "crumbling" because the system has been split up into smaller companies with some parts having been contracted out to private companies all of which now fight over whose responsibility it is to fix certain parts of the infrastructure.
As a Singaporean, I laugh at these low immigration numbers. 150K per year out of 9.8 million residents, that's a drop in the ocean.
According to the government, the total population of Singapore is 5.26M. Out of this, 3.27M are citizens, with 540K Permanent Residents and 1.46M non-residents. In other words, about 2M or 38% of the population were not born in Singapore.[1] Note that this is a conservative estimate since an immigrant can become a Singapore Citizen after 2 years as a Permanent Resident.
And yes, obviously there is great concern because a lot of foreigners do not assimilate well either.[2]
Fwiw, some foreign-born numbers: 15% of the Swedish population is foreign-born. Of those, about 1/3 were born in another EU country, who are immigrants but not really what the current controversy is about (the largest single foreign-born group in Sweden are from Finland, constituting about 1.5% of the population). The remaining 10%, born outside the EU, are what "immigration politics" is mainly talking about. (The comparable figure for Denmark is a bit lower; around 5-6% of the population are born outside the EU.)
Singapore is very different though, with a long history of immigration.
Additionally, my understanding of Singapore's immigration laws (I looked into migrating there myself a few years ago) is that it's difficult to do so for anything other than economic reasons - you have to prove you have a job offer or can contribute substantially to Singapore's economy.
You are right. As long as you can demonstrate an ability to generate income for yourself and thus by extension taxes for the government, you are welcome here.
Needless to say, this one-dimensional measure of a person's "worth" unfortunately attracts exactly the sort of pompous ass that everyone dislikes.
Edit: I re-read my post and realized it could be misconstrued to mean that you are not welcome. I apologize if this was your interpretation. I meant to say, using "economic indicators" as a basis for assessing whether an immigrant is "worthy" to join the tribe is misguided.
If you're a foreigner in Singapore and you are not:
a) a tourist,
b) a spouse of a Singaporean,
c) a student enrolled in a Singapore school,
d) gainfully employed by a Singapore-registered business
Chances are pretty good you are an illegal immigrant. So to answer your question, foreigners who are out of work are deported to their country of origin at the earliest opportunity.
But that's not the problem. The growing problem is that the immigrants do not assimilate well, form their own enclaves and are hiring their own countrymen at the expense of locals. Recently there was a report where the IT and HR departments of a Singapore firm, being run by predominantly foreigners, colluded to bring in their own countrymen and discriminated against Singaporean job applicants. They received kickbacks but got caught because the Singaporean owner, being IT savvy, had been monitoring the situation and thought something was amiss in the low number of Singaporean applicants.
So that we are talking about the same thing, from where is the immigration coming from? Is it primarily neighboring countries with similar language, culture, and religion, or is it like Sweden where commonality in culture is the exception rather than the norm?
As of 2014, about 55% are from other South-East Asian countries. But the government has a policy of maintaining a stable "ethnic mix" which means that there are now a lot of mainland Chinese. And while I'm also Chinese by ethnicity, you can ask other ethnic Chinese from Hong Kong, Taiwan or Malaysia what they think about the nouveau riche from China. :)
I couldn't manage to find one single positive article in this report[1]. So it's good for they that they got the opportunity to move (apparently they moved back for family reasons).
[1] Really? Not even an article about a particularly delicious meal of köttbullar?
Dane here... we look at Sweden and sigh. The once prosperous and sensible country seems to have lost it. It's all about being "good" for other peoples money and it seems like there's a sort of self-hatred amongst ethnic Swedes. If you want to see the pinnacle of multiculturalism, feast your eyes on Sweden. I'll give it 10-20 years and then I think we will have a thorough breakdown in Swedish.
Now, to be clear, it is my opinion that modest immigration is healthy for society and beneficial for trade, cultural development and so forth. Protectionism as a concept is counter-productive, while free trade and the ability for skilled labor to go where they’re in demand is beneficial for everyone.
Having said that, what Sweden is doing is something completely different. The once homogenous population has been forever altered by a rapid and massive addition of people from vastly different cultures and value-systems.
tl;dr: Protectionism is bad. Sweden should be protectionist and homogenous.
... if the rest of the article is like this I'm not sure of the value of it.
Everyone has their own view and cling to their reality with confirmation bias and cherry picking. The optimists say we'll work out any problems, this is a transition period, the complainers are exaggerating and "everything's fine where I live" The pessimists will say things are only getting worse and that the optimists are ignoring real problems.
I live in Stockholm and try very hard to have a nuanced view. Unfortunately, more and more, I see the pessimists view. It isn't as bad as the worst pessimists are saying, but it's also far from as good as the optimists are claiming. Sweden is a 2/3 parts tenderizing frog that's ignoring that the temperature is rising and 1/3 that's boiling.
If we see past the actual issues, which are complex and multifaceted, there's a number of trends in Sweden that's deeply disturbing
1) The level of discourse is only getting worse and more polarized. Populism, emotions and who can make most noise wins over any rational nuanced debate.
2) The quality of politicians are becoming more corrupt and separated from their voters, while resorting to pandering to whatever gives them votes, money and power. It's frightening to see the lack of competence in any party right now.
3) A naive sense of security and refusal of many Swedes to believe things are getting worse and that we are facing real problems. We don't seem to value what we always had and can't conceive we'll ever lose it. Even though education, pensions and care is going down the drain and crime rates rapidly rising.
Someone will twist or focus on some minor facet to state that's not the case at all. Everyone will like and tweet that article clinging to the feeling that we're still great.
4) Inability to treat root causes rather than symptoms.
5) A toxic media climate dominated by "feel good" articles and vicious attacks on any dissidents.
6) Exaggerating and focusing on the wrong topics. We can have a turbulent feminist debate in all the newspapers about manspreading in the subway, while ignoring issues like cultural violence against women, because it isn't "political correct" to even discuss that topic.
Sweden's problems are not only Sweden's... but symptomatic of the problems we're facing in general in Europe and the world: Inability to deal with rampant complexity and globalization, a financial system predicated on unsustainable expansion, booming population and third-world poverty meeting first world abundance.
We just want to feel like good people in a world where it's more and more everyone for themselves... Just saying all this makes me depressed, think I'll go back to believing we're awesome.
I thought he could almost be talking about London. Diversity is not integration. Lack of integration creates polarisation. A single example: different nationalities have different levels of education, therefore different incomes, therefore different social status, and different accommodation budgets, therefore geographic limitations, and common solutions. In my area, watching east africans try to steal phones off tables in coffee shops is so run of the mill it's boring. Same nationalities, same activities - community effects. Some places in London try to resolve such a situation by mixing up affordable housing with higher-income housing. The situation is then exacerbated, as the higher income people then have to live with what is in their culture unpleasant behaviour. Of course, everything just gets dismissed as racism, when it's in fact about culture, not race, and not applicable to all cultures. The dismissal resolves nothing. If we were talking about moving into the amazon, people would be outraged at the displacement of the locals, but somehow western cultures don't matter, or some sort of penance has to be paid for sins of some previous generations. Until the liberals learn to have a discussion instead of flippant dismissals and name calling, nothing will be resolved, and europe's moving to the right shows that their is something that needs to be resolved.
I have to agree. I am very concerned by both what's happening in Europe and by concerns being dismissed as racism or xenophobia. I am glad there are others who have a level headed view of this. It's really hard to talk about this topic, because so much of the associated vocabulary has been taken over by actual racists in the past and sets off all kinds of alarm bells.
I didn't knew that ycombinator allowed such xenophobic views on their site. This is an example of some guy that thinks that only the pure swedish people is to be trusted.
While I agree the article is trash I also think having it posted on HN provides value as the comments and reaction show clearly how unwelcome xenophobia is.
114 comments
[ 0.14 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadEventually enough people will flag it or start commenting that it'll drop anyway (a mistake in the algorithm if you ask me, as it makes flags 'super-downvotes') but in the mean time...
Posts like this show a poor attempt, with entirely subjective observations, to justify some of these attitudes. What's particularly scary is how the poster tries to disguise his views with a belief in socialist politics.
There simply is no possible way to absorb and assimilate such volumes of people, period. Then you are merely creating ethnic enclaves, which due to incompatible language, culture and job skills become ghettos, which in turns brews crime, misery and extremism. Once the inflow has exceeded the capacity for absorbtion, further immigration only makes the problem worse. "
I don't know the author, but this sounds like it belongs in a Pegida handbook.
Can't really blame them, and to be sure crime and social costs are higher as a result of immigration. That said, there is every reason to believe that these effects will diminish over time as immigrants start to integrate, even some beneficial effects are already showing.
The problem is that 'integration' takes generations, and a very large influx jeopardizes this process. So the adverse effects remain very visible and most people are too short-sighted to take the long view. At the same time Europeans are so hypersensitive about 'racism' that the topic can't even be discussed in polite company (which leaves it to actual racists to even talk about the issues).
Are you really surprised that with a pitch like that that Europeans aren't falling over themselves to shape up? Especially if they lack your great and frankly historically baseless belief that their culture and their children are guaranteed to have a place in it?
If anything it seems anti-correlated with presence of real live immigrants. The largest group of immigrants to Denmark go to Copenhagen. But Copenhagen isn't where you find the strongest anti-immigrant sentiment, as you'd expect if anti-immigrant sentiment were caused by contact with immigrants. Such sentiment isn't absent, but Copenhageners are comparatively okay with immigration and the majority take moderate views, focused on practical issues like programs to improve integration. The strongest worries and the more "militant" style of anti-immigrant politics comes from rural and small-town areas which do not really see large-scale immigration.
I believe this is also the case in a number of other European countries, for example in Austria and Switzerland, where immigrants go mainly to the cities, but anti-immigrant sentiment is concentrated in the rural areas and small towns. Some of this probably has nothing to do with immigration per se but is a result of preexisting cultural splits between cosmopolitan, liberally oriented cities, and more conservative countrysides (a 19th-century sort of romantic nationalism is very strong in rural Scandinavia).
Enclaves are caused by "tipping" in a Schelling check-board model. It would be interesting to check the data to this type of model.
The situation in Sweden is a bit different though. Many of them are people that have no chance of finding a job in the Swedish market, which leads to crime, ghettos and separated societies. Its essentially mis-managed on a political level. This will only lead to resentment, the rise of right-wing parties and social problems. I don't think this is a desirable outcome for either the immigrants nor for Sweden as a society.
> At the end of 2012 there were 1.87 million foreigners in Switzerland, the equivalent of nearly 23.3% of a total population that has passed the 8-million mark. In addition, more than 270,000 cross-border workers hold a job in Switzerland.
I bet that most of the permanent residents and virtually all of the seasonal workers are in the low-skill category.
And the previously non-regulated EU residents are from a more similar cultural background, so there is a qualitative difference from the situation in Sweden.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Switzerland
Indeed, it's alsmost the same that we hear from nationalists in Germany, France, etc.
Of course the right wing will gain popularity, and while I'm not sympathetic, its very understandable.
[citation needed]
For example: http://economics.handels.gu.se/digitalAssets/1455/1455743_fr... directly contradicts your claim.
I don't know enough to claim you're wrong. But the claim is rather extraordinary and sounds very much like common right-wing propaganda from other countries. So a good study would help.
Really? Then how come I get the impression that politicians and newspapers are full of talk about the topic?
Sweden currently spends half their health care budget on immigration costs.
On the national level [1]:
47 billion SEK spent on migration and foreign aid.
63 billion SEK spent on health care.
Note: most of the health care in Sweden is financed on the regional level; a rough approximation of total amount spent on spent on health care based on [2] would be about 260 billion SEK.
[1]: http://www.regeringen.se/artiklar/2015/04/statens-budget-201...
[2]: http://www.ekonomifakta.se/sv/Fakta/Offentlig-ekonomi/Offent...
The other thing I was referring to was that the Swedish newspaper Expressen exposed the identities of Disqus users, and at least one of them lost heir job as a consequence:
http://www.thelocal.se/20131212/millions-of-disqus-comments-...
I don't know what these people posted, and I suspect it wasn't that great a contribution, but this is unacceptable.
The aid part of that is 29 billion. If we did what we're expected to (what every country is expected to, even if few live up to it), that part should probably be 40 billion - the UN(?) has a goal that every country should spend 1% of GDP on foreign aid.
About the Disqus thing, I'd say that it's ok to expose "public persons" who claim one thing in public and do something different when they think nobody knows its them. This includes politicians, judges, police, other public authorities. Doing this to "normal" people isn't generally justified, IMHO. On the other hand, we have huge problems with bullying online that we need to do something about - and exposing bullies may be a useful part of that.
I thought he was stating the opposite, he comes across as very right wing, hates Obama (that bizarre ending), blames the leftist govt of the 60s onward for depleting abundant resources and blames liberals for overspending.
Sweden is not a paradise, we know that, but it's not kicking out the "blackies" that you will solve the long-term problem of keeping a social-democratic country running. Full-on fascism and full-on "freemarketism" are easier to run, of course, but they come with greater drawbacks.
Any time anyone dares to complain about the influence of ultra-reactionary immigrants on the quality and safety of public life, they are immediately branded "nationalist", "xenophobic" or "fascist".
Many of us, like myself, are from immigrant backgrounds. There is a world of difference between how our predecessors treated the country they immigrated to and what the recent waves of reactionary Islamists are doing.
People who aggressively and violently oppose the liberal values of our nations are not immigrants, they are invaders. And people of all races and political believes are getting tired of this shit.
Stop blaming the victims. We are not the aggressors, we are not the homophobic, antisemitic, anti-women criminal trash that terrorises public life.
We were once safe and progressive nations, and wanting to take that back does not make us fascist.
You guys should've done more to keep the Sweden Democrats out of the country then, I guess. ;)
Also, wanting life to be better doesn't make you fascist. But deciding that the only thing between you and a mythical past of glory is a tiny fraction of the population that needs to "defeated" is certainly goose-stepping in that direction. See Robert Paxton's 2004 book for more.
There are no races in the human species.
> Many of us, like myself, are from immigrant backgrounds.
So when do you plan to go back to your own country? What, you think that with the new designated enemy we forgot about you?
According to Wikipedia, It's a student town (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trondheim#Student_culture) with over 20% of the population being students. Why don't you blame them as easily as the gypsies?
There is a difference in bellowing "let's hurt anyone we don't like" and "we probably should address the real world"
Suppression of discussion serves no one. In Poland we accepted some chechens, romans, etc. A lot of them refuse to learn even the basics of reading or writing, they are completely dysfunctional on most basic of the levels, they periodically have a decent housing provided for freez which then they utterly ruin, because they now all it takes is to protest they "inhumam treatment" to have it all cleaned out and repaired, for free. They refuse to be a part of local society, the police, social services, etc all alarm about tgeurt utter lack of will to integrate, or even be functional. And every time someone tries to talk about it, a slew of "politically correct" media kills any meaningful discussion
My city is one of most racist, and i am deeply ashamed when there is an attack, be it verbal or physical, on an innocent human.
I have not seen any rise in fascism. Xenophobia, maybe. By the definition of the word it is the irrational fear of the foreign. The fear is often very rational as immigrants are over-represented in crime, unemployment etc. However people work with generalizations so it is not unlikely that some of the fears might be irrational.
(I'm from and live in Sweden)
I live in Malmö; the "problem area" you're talking about is a couple of blocks by Seved, where one company (Postnord) won't deliver _large_ packages due to the possibility of theft. That's not "the police can't go there". That's not "DHL can't guarantee worker safety". I've walked these streets hundreds of times; they're no different than thousands of other streets in thousands of other cities. They're not especially dangerous. They are in fact probably safer than large parts of other cities.
It's full of subsidies and welfare in many aspects of life and society, not sure what you're talking about.
It's very liberal in some senses, but calling it a completely liberal society is silly.
Americans are fond of reverting long-standing European political conventions "just because". Historical Liberalism was all about free trade and low taxes? Let's use the term for the party that supports higher taxes and regulations. Red is for socialists, blue for conservatives? Let's swap them! How fun!
(Not that it matters anyway, the entire European discourse is a million miles to the left of anything being discussed in the Land of the Free. The world is so weird.)
But let us not forget what Scandinavia was like (and still is) without the mass immigration of 'those brown people', it was an Aryan wet dream with everything for us and none for you. In many ways the modern Scandinavia is a hugely successful human accomplishment. While some people have less (of material things) many have had their lives improved enormously. For every "svarte neger" that hits the headlines as a rapist, 10000+ or more no longer have to live in poverty, in a war zone, under an oppressive regime. Shed a tear for the leftists who saw a way to make the world a better place one life at a time, made that happen with their country's wealth even at the expense (in limited financial terms) of some, and have created a positive liberal society striving to reach a worthwhile ideal. The old Sweden is dead, long live Sweden!
What the blogger fails to address (and I haven't read more than that one post) is how any of this affects him, why this means he has to go back to the US and why any of us should give a shit about his tabloid fueled opinion.
If you want to help the poor outside of your country, you should help them elevate themselves, not lower your own country to the global average.
The political correctness trumps everything in Sweden. You can't discuss the violence of Islam without being called a racist (even if Islam is not a race).
it's a tricky situation... there is more people trying to come here in europe than there is sustainable place (economically wise) to be absorbed into. we have quite a bit of an economical crisis going on here, which doesn't help. so basically masses march in, we have no job for them, meaning they don't contribute to our society, just consume.
on the other side, they often come from horrible places, have to endure the travel with real chances of dying. that should tell you a bit how desperate they are.
In ideal world, we should focus our resources on improving state of their home countries, so they don't have to run away in first place.
In real world... since many screwed countries are results of US (CIA, military) meddling with their internals and failing spectacularly (or succeeding greatly, depending on what the real objectives were), I say forward a large portion of them there. After first 100.000, let's talk :)
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Regulation
I think Sweden is following a larger trend in the west of a more polarizing society with higher income inequality and the slashing of the social safety net. I think globalization and new technology is to blame for this, not naive politicians.
I do, however, think that it's wrong to say that Stefan Löfven is a 'corrupt yokel'. He's been in a very hard situation politically, where he's been forced to rule as a minority. The opposition is doing everything they can to make sure that he looks incompetent as a leader, as it's basically ensuring their next election victory. He's only been in office since september, so it's not actually that weird that not too much has been done.
The whole post is filled with overstatements like this – and I'm kind of amused about the idea of escaping sweden because it left some of it's socialist ideals in the 60's to go to a country who despises socialism.
I left Sweden 5 years ago and I more or less agree with the post. It seems to have some undertones i don't entirely appreciate but on the whole it should serve as a necessary reality check if taken with a pinch of salt. It brings up many points that are worth discussing at length but which are essentially verboten in Swedish society. Even if it does overstate or sensationalize somewhat.
I doubt he is leaving specifically because it has abandoned some socialist ideals. For me it has more to do with not wanting to be part of the mass delusion, not wanting to constantly fit your opinions to an ever narrowing hallway of acceptable ideas and speech (not because they couldn't but because they shouldn't have to). At least when you don't live there you don't have to see and live it day in and day out. If anything I have grown more fond of Sweden and the ideals it represents since moving, because I am not forced to come to terms with its realities on a daily basis.
But, free health care, free education, almost no religious zealots what so ever, zero religious impact on lawmaking, a relatively inclusive society, etc, makes Sweden one of the better places to live in the world, imho. Obviously, I'm biased.
I too find it rather weird that someone who yearns for more socialism would move from Sweden to the US. :)
This is the easy way:
Foreigners come to country ->
Foreigners need jobs ->
Foreigners get jobs ->
Less jobs for nationals.
That's a very easy reasoning to following, it also gathers a lot of popularity, specially if I'm out of a job o with one I don't like.
Explaining why this is not true, or rather why it is much more complex than that, takes a lot of time, effort and understanding of non trivial economic concepts.
I would say the later is the hard way, this kind of reasoning applies to so many things that said by politicians all around the world to gather votes.
I would also like to clarify that I absolutely don't believe that that kind of reasoning is only used by the right wing politicians, that would be extremely naive.
Isn't precisely the problem that we can't have a rational discussion of this issue without people bringing out the X-word, the R-word, the I-word and others and calling for immediate stop of all criticism of the current situation?
The average Joe not being able to tell "racist" from "xenophobe" seems kind of trivial in comparison.
Please note that I enforce a zero-tolerance policy towards racism, violence and extremist comments.
Judging other people by the color of their skin is manifestly absurd. So please don’t submit such comments here
Edit: removed some sarcasm
"Jihadist Trojan horses are flowing through the porous border along with the tens of thousands ID-less refugees. But what makes me the most pessimistic about Sweden’s future is how the social fabric itself has been undermined."
If the "social fabric" of a country amounts to it's prior ethnic homogeneity, then decrying it's unraveling amounts to being scared of people coming from the outside. People which, in the case of Sweden, also tend to have a darker skin tone than the average citizen 50 years ago. This, in conjunction with the suggestion that Muslim immigrants tend to be "Jihadist Trojan horses" makes it a very thinly veiled Islamophobic piece.
It is true that 9 out of 10 that applies for Asylum in Sweden have no ID.
Source: http://www.svd.se/nio-av-tio-saknar-id-handling
"Statistik från årsredovisningen som släpps i dag visar att endast tio procent initialt har godkända id-handlingar som godkänds av verket."
Only 10% had ID which were approved on the first go around. It's not clear what portion of the 90% had "no ID" and what portion merely had insufficient ID on their first attempt. Your reading would make it seem like ALL of these immigrants are shady characters out of a cartoon, trying to fake their way into the country.
I don't blame them, if I would be so desperate, this would be a logical step. The big moral question that opinions differ so much on is: should we in Europe try to help all of them at all costs, even if millions will come?
Personally, I wouldn't mind sharing my resources, if the person I share it with will respect rules I set and learn to speak the language I speak. If not, goodbye.
Why do you personally get to set the rules? Vote for people that support the rules that you believe in, but thinking that you can play cultural imperialist, dictating how people should act and what language they should speak, is frankly egotistical.
Too many immigrants, they are taking our jobs/benefits, we're letting the jihadis in, and so forth?
Voting with your feet > voting with your wallet > voting though a ballot box every 5 years (you should still do that though as it costs you nothing!)
Everybody speaks English and is willing to help.
Some swedes that were mingling with some of this horrible immigrants the blogger was talking about where kind enough, to invite me to their place to sleep.
Don't guide yourself by anything on this article, I'm surprised it got so far.
Go to Sweden and enjoy that amazing country.
Better than the Italians, not as good as the Japanese basically.
It's "crumbling" because the system has been split up into smaller companies with some parts having been contracted out to private companies all of which now fight over whose responsibility it is to fix certain parts of the infrastructure.
According to the government, the total population of Singapore is 5.26M. Out of this, 3.27M are citizens, with 540K Permanent Residents and 1.46M non-residents. In other words, about 2M or 38% of the population were not born in Singapore.[1] Note that this is a conservative estimate since an immigrant can become a Singapore Citizen after 2 years as a Permanent Resident.
And yes, obviously there is great concern because a lot of foreigners do not assimilate well either.[2]
[1] http://population.sg/resources/population-composition/ [2] http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/rapid-growth-singapor...
I was born in Sweden and can trace my direct Swedish ancestry back at least 400 years and I still fall into that 26.8%.
Additionally, my understanding of Singapore's immigration laws (I looked into migrating there myself a few years ago) is that it's difficult to do so for anything other than economic reasons - you have to prove you have a job offer or can contribute substantially to Singapore's economy.
Needless to say, this one-dimensional measure of a person's "worth" unfortunately attracts exactly the sort of pompous ass that everyone dislikes.
Edit: I re-read my post and realized it could be misconstrued to mean that you are not welcome. I apologize if this was your interpretation. I meant to say, using "economic indicators" as a basis for assessing whether an immigrant is "worthy" to join the tribe is misguided.
How many of these are out of work and lives on public welfare?
a) a tourist, b) a spouse of a Singaporean, c) a student enrolled in a Singapore school, d) gainfully employed by a Singapore-registered business
Chances are pretty good you are an illegal immigrant. So to answer your question, foreigners who are out of work are deported to their country of origin at the earliest opportunity.
But that's not the problem. The growing problem is that the immigrants do not assimilate well, form their own enclaves and are hiring their own countrymen at the expense of locals. Recently there was a report where the IT and HR departments of a Singapore firm, being run by predominantly foreigners, colluded to bring in their own countrymen and discriminated against Singaporean job applicants. They received kickbacks but got caught because the Singaporean owner, being IT savvy, had been monitoring the situation and thought something was amiss in the low number of Singaporean applicants.
Source: http://www.nptd.gov.sg/portals/0/homepage/highlights/populat...
[1] Really? Not even an article about a particularly delicious meal of köttbullar?
what a pile of crap
Having said that, what Sweden is doing is something completely different. The once homogenous population has been forever altered by a rapid and massive addition of people from vastly different cultures and value-systems.
tl;dr: Protectionism is bad. Sweden should be protectionist and homogenous.
... if the rest of the article is like this I'm not sure of the value of it.
I live in Stockholm and try very hard to have a nuanced view. Unfortunately, more and more, I see the pessimists view. It isn't as bad as the worst pessimists are saying, but it's also far from as good as the optimists are claiming. Sweden is a 2/3 parts tenderizing frog that's ignoring that the temperature is rising and 1/3 that's boiling.
If we see past the actual issues, which are complex and multifaceted, there's a number of trends in Sweden that's deeply disturbing
1) The level of discourse is only getting worse and more polarized. Populism, emotions and who can make most noise wins over any rational nuanced debate.
2) The quality of politicians are becoming more corrupt and separated from their voters, while resorting to pandering to whatever gives them votes, money and power. It's frightening to see the lack of competence in any party right now.
3) A naive sense of security and refusal of many Swedes to believe things are getting worse and that we are facing real problems. We don't seem to value what we always had and can't conceive we'll ever lose it. Even though education, pensions and care is going down the drain and crime rates rapidly rising.
Someone will twist or focus on some minor facet to state that's not the case at all. Everyone will like and tweet that article clinging to the feeling that we're still great.
4) Inability to treat root causes rather than symptoms.
5) A toxic media climate dominated by "feel good" articles and vicious attacks on any dissidents.
6) Exaggerating and focusing on the wrong topics. We can have a turbulent feminist debate in all the newspapers about manspreading in the subway, while ignoring issues like cultural violence against women, because it isn't "political correct" to even discuss that topic.
Sweden's problems are not only Sweden's... but symptomatic of the problems we're facing in general in Europe and the world: Inability to deal with rampant complexity and globalization, a financial system predicated on unsustainable expansion, booming population and third-world poverty meeting first world abundance.
We just want to feel like good people in a world where it's more and more everyone for themselves... Just saying all this makes me depressed, think I'll go back to believing we're awesome.
I thought he could almost be talking about London. Diversity is not integration. Lack of integration creates polarisation. A single example: different nationalities have different levels of education, therefore different incomes, therefore different social status, and different accommodation budgets, therefore geographic limitations, and common solutions. In my area, watching east africans try to steal phones off tables in coffee shops is so run of the mill it's boring. Same nationalities, same activities - community effects. Some places in London try to resolve such a situation by mixing up affordable housing with higher-income housing. The situation is then exacerbated, as the higher income people then have to live with what is in their culture unpleasant behaviour. Of course, everything just gets dismissed as racism, when it's in fact about culture, not race, and not applicable to all cultures. The dismissal resolves nothing. If we were talking about moving into the amazon, people would be outraged at the displacement of the locals, but somehow western cultures don't matter, or some sort of penance has to be paid for sins of some previous generations. Until the liberals learn to have a discussion instead of flippant dismissals and name calling, nothing will be resolved, and europe's moving to the right shows that their is something that needs to be resolved.
I'm horrified at what Hacker News can become...