If people just keep flagging comments that they don't agree with, we will never be able to have a proper discussion about this. Holding a different/non-PC opinion should not be grounds for killing a post. Win with words, not with moderation.
EDIT: The post is also gone from the front page. Upsetting.
2. Even the current violent crime wave has very low casualties. As I said in other comment. The most violent city in Sweden is close to NY in number of murders.
3. This is political issue for the radical right. They want to push this Swedish cities as violent hellholes because immigrants agenda.
Bombing has become a regular occurrence in a first world European country that isn't fighting a war, or experiencing mass civil unrest, nor are there any major terrorist groups or separatist movements occurring.
How is that not "very interesting"? It is extremely unusual, the onset of this violence has been very sudden, and the accompanying wave of censorship and debate-suppression that has accompanied it is very much within the scope of what HN regularly discusses.
As for (3), you give yourself away. Your problem is not that it's not interesting but rather you fear the political right and their message about immigrants.
Here's a thought. If their message is merely an "agenda" that they're "pushing", and if they're wrong, the Swedish authorities could kill it dead by simply recording the origins and ethnicities of the people blowing up Sweden and showing that they're all long term Swedes. But they refuse to collect this data, for obvious reasons: it wouldn't show that.
For as long as the Swedish government and people keep engaging in a massive coverup, you will continue to see the Sweden Democrats grow stronger. Their criticisms aren't being answered or met with compromise: they're being ignored, smeared and suppressed.
1. The comparison to the 90s is frequently made in the media and by politicians from the government parties, but rarely put into context. From what I understand, the early 90s were actually the worst period so far in modern Sweden (I moved to Sweden in 2006 so this was before my time). The country underwent a massive economic crisis, similar to what happened in the US in 2008. It saw, for the first time, the establishment of well-organized criminal gangs (as you mention), first large waves of war refugees (with the social and societal frictions and tensions this brought), as well as a wave of intense neonazi violence. And all this had to be handled by utterly ill-prepared, understaffed police, which until then, had basically never really been tested on that scale.
On a side note: Police might be more skilled now, but is still massively understaffed (at least when it comes to those working outside the offices). This alone is quite a scandal in my opinion, considering the demographic and socioeconomic changes that the country voluntary went through during the past 30 years. You cannot take upon yourself the challenge of welcoming hundreds of thousands of people from war countries and totally different backgrounds, who often come with nothing more than a suitcase, place them all together in the suburbs in an otherwise extremely homogeneous, wealthy and famously "introvert" (for lack of better term) society (which makes it really hard for outsiders to connect and become a part of it), and then just hope that everything will be alright.
2. Regardless of the relative number of physical casualties, I'd argue that there is a lot being destroyed right now in Sweden in regards to trust (between people, into authorities) and perceived safety. This matters because one of the biggest advantages and success factors of Sweden has been people's high level of trust in each other (and into the state). If this erodes, it'll have many second order effects. Some of them will only become visible over time.
Your #1 is a good point, but it emphasizes the relative normality of things. This is symptom of change and some distress in society. However, the narrative is 'west is burning' collapse of society. Society changes. Immigrants change things. People with lower education and soci
al status are more likely to be criminals.
#2 The destruction of trust is trough propaganda narrative pushing moral panic, not by the actions themselves. There is clear ill will and bigotry that tries to make this problem into question of survival.
#2 How can you be so sure? What makes you so confident that you got it right that its not the incidents itself that destroy trust?
Imagine you live in the area in Linköping where this big bombing happened. You don't need to be exposed to any "propaganda narrative" to look at your neighbors and wonder if he/she is involved in something or has enemies.
That is eroding trust. Propaganda narratives might amplify this in some cases for some people. But it's important, in my eyes, to be honest with the order of things. The problems are there. That they are used by some bigots doesn't justify talking the problems smaller. This has been done for the past decade. Meanwhile, hundreds of mostly young men have been shot in gang violence.
Exactly, surpressing discussion that people don't like and just sweaping it under the carpet or flagging everything you disagree with will only make the issue worse than it already is over time.
A balanced evidence-based discussion from both sides paints the full picture.
Is it? Political threads are pretty routinely allowed and surface. This one is patently being killed because a lot of people really hate the implications.
Noticing differences and basic pattern recognition is deemed off limits in liberal polities. Only "humanity" allowed is the collectivist, communistic, mythical "unity".
They cannot for example explain why it is Sweden where grenades are sentient, but they are dormant Finland.
I’ve had many talks to people about this situation and in short I see this as young people not having been fostered by the society.
There are so many aspects to it, but there are no easy meme-solutions to this one:
It’s really interesting to read and hear about the success of the cease-fire/GVI method developed in the US and led by David Kennedy. This work have started in Sweden as well, but you need a 7-10 year horizon here:
Conceptually it’s a bit like parenting actually, which only makes sense.
For it to be effective it will require cooperation between several instances - police, social services, school and others that might touch/interface with these kids.
It needs to be worked agile (not Agile), if you nerds know what I mean!
Second - city planning. These areas will have to be bulldozed down and rebuilt IMO.
People need to be able to put pride and feel connected to where they live. Young men tend to really easily access “don’t give a shit”-mode. I know from experience...
A part of this generation is probably lost already and we need to keep a 20 year lookout.
Or we can just whine about wanting 16yo kids be sent to 10 year in prison and spread memes on facebook.
> These areas will have to be bulldozed down and rebuilt IMO
They did that in the 60s-70s with a part of Malmö, an area called Lugnet. That area was improved because of the gentrification that followed. The people who used to live in Lugnet (mostly working class) moved out to newly built areas further out from the city center (Rosengård for example). Those areas are problematic today.
Sure, but this is not what I’d like to see though.
The “newly built” areas that you refer to are probably not something to be proud of, right?
I’ve only been to Rosengard twice, and it felt just as awful as the old projects outside stockholm.
This is going to cost a lot of money/resources to fix and I’d rather we spend money fixing the bugs in our society than build prisons and lock people up for decades.
In the end the latter will not fix the underlying issues and instead work to segregate and compound issues further.
"Swedish police do not record or release the ethnicity of suspects or convicted criminals"
This why fewer and fewer people trust officialdom. Always redact, redact, redact! Whether it's CIA cables, air bags, or upticks in violence--the powers that be refuse to put the facts on the table and trust people to make the right decisions.
If a guy kills some people, and is convicted by a jury, I think the public has a right to know who he is, where he came from, why he did it, etc. without having that intermediated by armchair-sociologist bureaucrat.
How it is an oversimplification? What else is going on? This sounds like a small scale tribal war. In history, when ever there has been too many idle young men, violence has been a result.
How come organized criminals use bombs in Sweden but rarely anywhere else? IMO bombs are more like the M.O of terrorists. If a gang wanted to scare or take out a rival, there must be more efficient ways. A bomb not only draws unwanted attention from the public and authorities, you also run the risk of hurting the wrong people.
(Edit: Am a Swede, and live nearby the Linköping bomb site that hurt 25 this June..)
It is my understanding that explosives where popularized after an influx of hand grenades from Serbia. Until rather recently these have been categorized as dangerous materials rather then weapons so it didn't carry the same risks being caught with them as with handguns.
My uneducated guess as to why the violence is that is has become decentralized. We had a fairly long period with stable power structures in the Swedish underground, there where a few biker gangs that had a few rare and violent bouts bouts but they where infrequent.
Today we have a large number of loosely organized criminals that act independently, fighting over much smaller turfs.
In some sense this might very well be because the old criminal organizations, populated mostly by right leaning criminals, have failed to integrate potential recruits from different ethnic backgrounds.
The organised gangs use anti-tank mines to settle scores in sweden. Hand grenades and bangers are just handed down to users like the drugs. The serbian gangs obviously see a market for it.
I'm glad the Serbs don't seem to think it's worth selling them AK-47s and RPGs, yet.
The article draws comparisons to Mexico, where bombs are a part of gang warfare.
Guns are efficient killing machines but I'd argue they represent a greater chance of being caught when attempting to kill or injure a lot of people at once.
And this is terrorism, per the article, it's just seen as intra gang, not general public. That's also a +1 for a bomb, which can be hidden in plain sight and doesn't have to "work" to be good as a deterrent for rival gangs.
"This is a serious situation, but most people shouldn't be worried, because they are not going to be affected."
What a terrible statement. Most "situations" don't affect most people. The fact that your chances of dying from pancreatic cancer are pretty low doesn't mean you shouldn't be taking steps to reduce your sugar intake and whatnot.
You should worry proportionally to the actual risk. Most people don't worry day-to-day about pancreatic cancer (it's also unrelated to sugar intake afaik).
To all the share blue people who flagged this story the real adults are trying to have a conversation about how to fix this if it ever comes to our country stop ending conversations online by flagging stuff
The situation is terrible. From what I’ve understood from reading the news past year is that the police has lost control over Malmö (Sweden’s third largest city that got hit with the most immigrant applications) to organised criminals and the inhabitants who can afford it are moving away quickly.
The right-wing party Sverigedemokraterna is hence growing stronger while the current ruling socialist party Socialdemokraterna is losing voters inversely as a result.
Malmö is called the most dangerous city in the Nordic countries. In last few years it has had murder rate close to New York.
New York has had lowest murder rate in 50 years and it's considered safe city. According to a 2015 ranking of 50 cities by The Economist, New York was the 10th overall safest major city in the world, as well as the 28th safest in personal safety[1]. I suppose many New Yorkers can sympathize with people Malmö because they know what it's to live in constant fear when the police has lost the control.
Crime in large cities is not evenly distributed. You can leave your car unlocked in one neighborhood and you will regret stopping at the light with an open window in another. Malmo's population is only 300K according to Wiki. It's smaller than the smallest borough of the NYC. I imagine its residents do not enjoy nearly as much insulation from the crime areas as Newyorkers do.
I agree with that comment, although I'm not sure that the reasons behind the statement are the same.
My reasons/observations are that a) swedes tend not to think about "bad case", so if something does not go according to an optimistic plan - it sometimes comes as a great surprise for them; b) over the years police became more and more understaffed and undertrained, due to both population growth and too many police officers leaving the job.
Both these issues were never addressed until (partly) very recently (with Moderates and KD wanting to get more police officers), so yes - this is self-inflicted, in the sense that swedish police force is still in 90s or early 2000s, while criminals evolved well into 201X.
As the article states, many have grown up in Sweden, so the recent immigration waves that the alt right claims have ruined Sweden are probably not the sole cause. The question is why there has been such a sharp rise in bombings. Personally I'd look at what has changed on the drug markets recently instead of immigration policies.
So? Do you believe they entered the drug trade because of their names? Do you think there would be no drug trade if their grandparents weren't admitted to Sweden?
not OP, but I do believe that drug trade wouldn't take place to this extend without the immigrants.
I've lived in Finland decades ago and it was very different from where I came from - clean so to speak. Even in Helsinki Weed was hard to come by. No weird guys lurking on corners and all this scum one encounters in big cities in the wrong districts. There were no wrong districts.
Scandinavia is/was (?) a different culture also because it was not riddled with such untethered people.
I think it's really hard to separate things like immigration from other things that might have influenced the availability of drugs, say vast increases in international trade that make smuggling much easier, that happened over the same time.
"Dog whistle" is a whistle with a high pitch that only dogs can hear. It also means something that can be said, which isn't overtly racist, but which racists will recognize as reflecting a racist attitude.
In this case, the comment is accusing you of summoning a dog with your dog whistle, while meaning that your comment is subtly racist.
For what it's worth, I don't really agree. The bombers are largely second or third generation immigrants, and I read you as implying they weren't ethnic Swedes - which is true. I don't see how the truth can be racist.
It's not that the truth is racist, its the selective application of the truth that is racist.
For instance, the fact that the majority of the US prison population is African American has been used against African Americans for a very long time, while completely ignoring the selective prosecution that creates that situation.
What is an ethnic swede? Does it have to do with blood purity, skull proportions, or some other definitely racist concept? Or, does it have to do with cultural assimilation and broad acceptance into the ethnic subgroup?
me personally no, im based somewhere in europe...
if you want to know more, watch "sanity for sweden", "Renaissance Horizon" or any other youtube channels that talk the facts. better yet, go to bitchute instead since yt censor machine is very active when it comes to facts and not feelings.
EDIT: The post is also gone from the front page. Upsetting.