Two Bombings in One Night? That’s Normal Now in Sweden
commonsense.news
commonsense.news
One would think that people in Sweden would see a connection between the several weekly cases of shootings against apartments and detonations in buildings, and the accessibility of the information mentioned above. But no. There isn't even a debate. It's something I absolutely cannot understand.
Historically, transparency and openness has been crucial elements of Swedish culture and societal structure. However, it's a luxury which the country, in the light of today's situation, simply cannot afford to have to the extend it had historically. But no one seems to actually see this. It's drives me kinda nuts.
I can't recall the exact number, but it went something like "remove top 10 dangerous cities from violent crime statistics in the USA, it pretty much becomes like a standard European country".
[1]: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/mar/28/viral-imag...
One (imperfect) way to look at it is by looking at per capita homicides by county. Here's California: https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/app/california/2022/mea...
The counties with the highest murder rate in CA are Trinity, Kern, Lake, Del Norte, and San Joaquin. They're about twice as murderous as Alameda (Oakland).
A confounding factor is that smaller counties have a larger margin of error, but the overall trend is still clear. Another confounding factor is that this is by county and not city, but if cities were much worse than their surroundings they'd dominate the per capita metric.
- Central counties, large metropolitan areas: 10.3
- Medium metros: 7.3
- Small metros: 6.4
- Nonmetro: 6.4
- Fringe counties, large metros: 4.9
It turns out there are seven states with very dangerous metro areas (Missouri, Illinois, Maryland, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana) and eight states with dangerous metro areas (South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Indiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Nevada). The remaining states are much safer, with metro rates comparable to the nationwide nonmetro average.
Some of that matches with the conventional wisdom (e.g. Chicago is dangerous), but I think those nationwide statistics are quite deceptive. I think it's quite interesting that a California metro area is safer than a California nonmetro area, and both are nearly twice as safe as a Louisiana metro.
Take a look at these charts I generated: https://ibb.co/album/LztM7j . You can reproduce them with this saved CDC WONDER request: https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D140/D307F000
Example this ad campaign from a couple of years back.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/23/uk-ad-campai...
But fair enough - I couldn't remember my source, maybe I'll dig up the article I was referencing, it might very well be faulty.
This type of reality distortion field aggressively pushes people away and paints liberals in a bad light.
"The explosions were confirmed by police, who reported several buildings with broken windows at Willow Street and damage to a business’s window at Fulton Street; no injuries have been reported.
Explosions were also heard in District 9, which includes the Mission, according to one Twitter user. That report has yet to be confirmed by police."
"Police Captain Derrick Jackson of Northern Station confirmed there was “a small device that was set off in the area of 355 Fulton between Franklin and Gough.”
“There was damage to a business plate glass window, but no civilians were injured,” said Jackson in an email to the Hayes Valley Safe community group."
"A San Francisco police spokesperson told The Standard that on Saturday at approximately 3:50 p.m., police officers assigned to Tenderloin Station responded to Willow Street and Polk Street to a report of a possible explosion.
“When officers arrived on scene, they found that several building windows on Willow Street were broken and a parked vehicle was damaged,” the spokesperson said in an email."
I do wonder if it was a firework versus an IED, personally an IED would be more concerning.
The author missed this shot on this one. :)
Primary amount of gun crime is suicide in the usa. When you exclude these sideline issues, comparing gun suicides to bombings is silly. Sweden and the usa are quite similar for gun homicide. Moreover, they are for exactly the same reason.
>Among shooting suspects, 85 percent are first- or second-generation immigrants, according to the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, as immigrant neighborhoods have become hotbeds for gang crime.
Sweden is a noob when it comes to immigration. Canada is pro-tier. USA isn't doing so good despite lots of experience.
More importantly, Turkey accepted far greater numbers of immigrants from the arab spring and doesn't have the problems Sweden/germany and north america has. why is very important and culture is not the answer. Canada is bottom tier compared to Turkey when it comes to immigration. They had multiple crusades through their country.
>So how did Sweden’s famously liberal electorate usher in a party with roots on the extreme right? In a word: denial.
Totally disagree. Denial is what the left wing is experiencing. The right-wing has absolutely no denial. Sweden tried to do the right thing, give people in shitty war torn middle east a new life. It blew up in their face because they totally don't understand. Worse yet, the anti-immigration folks also don't understand. So the problem is about to exacerbate. If you think it's bad now...
>Many immigrants have integrated well into Swedish society, but too many have ended up in segregated suburbs, where unemployment is high and crime is rampant.
To illustrate from history the problem. The city of detroit had this problem. Mass migration of poor black people from the south resulted in exactly the same thing. Bill Clinton many decades later failed to fix the inner city ghettos.
To say in 1966 that many black people have integrated well into detroit society is about the equivalent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Detroit_riot
>Sweden is one of the most generous welfare states in the world: Although these neighborhoods are marked by high unemployment, there is no American-level material deprivation.
#theproblem
>Yet police are struggling to maintain control of some 60 immigrant-majority neighborhoods—officially labeled “vulnerable areas”—where gangs and clans compete with the state for local authority.
Funny how nobody uses the word ghetto anymore. The swedish people have intentionally pushed these immigrants into ghettos.
>In the meantime, those elites dismissed any criticism of large-scale immigration as “racism.”
For almost a decade now, everyone is a racist. This is a political ploy to silence political opponents. Every single death from a bomb or otherwise is on these people's karma.
The beauty of this absolutely idiotic political ploy the left-wing has been pushing is that it comes at a cost to themselves. Your political opponents love when you punch yourself in the face. They'll sit back and watch you keep punching yourself in the face. Greta came up a couple times in the article and she's a great example of political activists punching themselves in the face. Greta's political opponents gladly showcased her every opportunity they can because she was nonstop punching herself in the face.
I don't need a crystal ball to know Sweden will do absolutely nothing to resolve the problem. So in a few decades and an awful lot more deaths of mostly immigrants will we see the fix arrive.
Eh? Sweden has 1.2 intentional homicide per 100,000 people. The US has 6.3 [1].
France and the UK have 1.2, Germany has 0.8, Japan has 0.3.
The US has 5.8 homicides using firearms only [2].
Fun(?) fact: in the US, about 1,000 per year are killed by police [3], which amounts to about 0.3 per 100,000. An American is about as likely to be killed by police as a Japanese person is to be killed by a murderer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_brutality_in_the_United...
This is a direct result of the larger population of armed murders in the US. "An American is about as likely to be killed by police as a Japanese person is to be killed by a murderer" is only true when you include armed robbers and murderers in the data.
The point of the post is the other stuff moreso.
The generation born in the '50s and '60s is retiring now, and it's much larger than subsequent generations. Retirement age is 67. Their healthcare and pension is paid for by the working population, who hope the next generation will pass on the torch.
That's just not going to work if the elderly equal or outnumber the working-aged population. Liberal immigration is at least a plan to avert this demographical trainwreck of a disaster. Is it sustainable? Is it even a good plan? Dunno. But the other option isn't pretty either.
Why the war in Ukraine? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Cross
They already have the problem. Population decline is going to wreck Russia.
>The generation born in the '50s and '60s is retiring now, and it's much larger than subsequent generations. Retirement age is 67. Their healthcare and pension is paid for by the working population, who hope the next generation will pass on the torch.
Are you suggesting it is a good idea to replace the native population to support the Swedish welfare system? Additionally, the article states that many of these immigrant are themselves using the welfare system. Wouldn't it be better to bite the bullet and let the country reach its carrying capacity naturally even if it results in some pain? I don't think this can be explained from an economic perspective.
I think the aging population simply acted as an allowing factor that made the discussion viable politically. But I think ultimately it happened as part of liberal immigration ideology itself. From that standpoint, the immigration policy is still largely a success. If all life is equal and everyone deserves the human rights, then from that prospective, even if the policy has issues, those issues do not outweigh the total net gain of humanity. Even if it comes at a cost for some people.
>But the other option isn't pretty either.
Can you explain what the other option is and why you think it would be pretty?
"Replace" certainly seems like loaded language. I believe the intent is to bolster the younger cohorts to try to avoid too heavy a generational imbalance.
I'm not suggesting it's a good idea, I'm suggesting it's an idea.
> Can you explain what the other option is and why you think it would be pretty?
One other option is to go the route of Italy or Greece, run the welfare system at a massive imbalance, and make up for it with public debt.
The other options are all some form of breach of the social contract. Either increasing the burden on the working age demographic past what they'll accept, or the eventual bankruptcy of the pension and healthcare system. Pension levels would have to be lowered to the point where the elderly would have to come out of retirement and re-join the workforce to survive, despite a lifetime of making payments into the system and promises they'll be returned.
The thing is a social contract that can't actually exist doesn't matter. If we all agree to not work but still receive benefits we haven't made a meaningful social contract. Breaching that contract is probably the best thing to do. Also, its difficult to evaluate exactly what the contract is here: is it that we all agree to a welfare state (roughly speaking) or is it that in the event that it is possible to have a welfare state then we will have it? I think the latter is more reasonable.
>Pension levels would have to be lowered to the point where the elderly would have to come out of retirement and re-join the workforce to survive, despite a lifetime of making payments into the system and promises they'll be returned.
The way I see it the point you're making here is that since they put in, they deserve to take out, as their input was when the system was still working and the contract thus in place. And that's true to a degree, but people implicitly acknowledge of and take a risk when they contribute to these systems. Did anyone think that in the event of a massive famine (for an extreme example) that they will magically be paid back on their contribution? The decline of the working population is maybe not something they thought about, but it comes implicitly as part of a general acknowledgement that a given system only exists withing a certain interval of environments.
All this said, you didn't explicitly state that you believe this contract should be upheld at all costs, but that seems to be the only case where that point would be relevant in the first place.
The question everyone at working age will face is why they should put money into a system when what they're getting back is less than they put in. For old times sake?
People may forgive hardships when there is some external factor, but this is something that's been known for decades.
> All this said, you didn't explicitly state that you believe this contract should be upheld at all costs, but that seems to be the only case where that point would be relevant in the first place.
I don't know if there is a good solution to this. I'm not sure what the alternative is. Grab a pointy stick, put a colander on your head and go full mad max?
This is a weak version of "uphold the social contract at all costs" mentality. Rather than uphold it because of the people that enacted the contract, we will uphold it because the people put in charge of upholding it want to stay in charge. Its a much more reasonable idea and if this is really the case then it's an unfortunate situation. That said I don't think its likely that the Swedish elderly are either contributing much to taxes or capable of revolting. The younger generations would actually react positively to it. For example I already have no trust that I will see a meaningful return on my social security "investment." I'd rather see it shut down than wait for the off chance that anything is left in 30 years.
I think democracies move too slowly to make changes like this, however. I don't think there is really any plan at all. I think that is ultimately the issue here. And unfortunately if the article is to be believed the "solution" of voting in what the article has called an extremist party may become reality. I think that's the real issue here. We can debate social contracts all we want but if an extremist party is voted in it shows that Sweden's plan was flawed from the outset.
You think the younger generations will think their parents getting completely shafted is a positive thing? Especially given many will end up supporting them financially (outside of the pension system)? I'm struggling to see how that would play out.
A timely subject now, but I'll always remember Queen Elizabeth pitching austerity to the British public while sitting in front of a solid gold piano.
This sounds like an important point. What exactly are the factors behind the difference?
The Amish have also been in America longer than Italians as a prominent immigrant group.
They haven't "integrated" as a function of time in the sense that's being discussed here.
All such historical comparisons are just cherry picking, or finding historical comparisons that fit the author's biases.
One could also claim that Sweden will eventually end up splitting apart along religious lines, as happened in the Indian subcontinent with India and Pakistan.
You can basically apply that to any era and find the same. However, after time those immigrants contribute and make something. Irish/Italians made the east coast. Germans built the midwest. Jews built Hollywood. etc etc.
Every single big racial migration event has in time been a hugely beneficial thing.
The problem Sweden is learning. Their welfare system and large government is preventing the newcomers from starting.
Do you mind explaining what you are referring to? I'm a bit ignorant of this era of US history. I thought the east coast was the "original" US - that is, the thirteen colonies. Specifically New York was most definitely "made" by this point, even before the US was a thing. The New York stock exchange was founded in 1792, just 16 years after the country was founded. And trade was always big in New York. I don't know much about the rest of the east coast so I may be missing some larger historical context here but I was under the impression that NY was the most important sate by far on the east coast and continues to be so.
The author of the article is talking about 'integration' and such. I wonder how many people on HN, who are probably natural citizens, actually integrate with their society? I would guess that I'm not by many standards.
Now lets say we want to go to the extent of getting some antisocial hackers integrated into society and contributing toward progress. What does that mean? It's not just speaking the language.
Something the author clearly doesn't know is that Turkey took in far greater numbers than they ever did. Turkey also has far more experience with immigration. Turkey also has tremendously higher immigrant crime than USA and Sweden. Yet where's the bombing exactly?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime#/media/F...
So what gives? What is integration?
Well maslows heirarchy of needs is explanatory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs#...
Your most basic needs like food and water require you to have a job.
So do these immigrants have jobs? No they dont. The article says unemployment is high.
Is this because they are lazy? No certainly not. Now they go on welfare in order to live, which the author touts but that's not good. That's very bad. They need a job asap. This is the key spot that must be worked on and welfare is the opposite of what you want to do.
I bet you can see where this goes. Libertarianism and smaller government. Do ANYTHING to get them employed and the government can't be involved for or against. Deregulate whatever you have to. Make these problematic suburbs into free trade zones if you need to.
Is that true? AFAIK SD vote mostly concentrates around and in Malmö, an urban agglomeration.
"feel like they are losing and have been losing for a few decades now."
As the article mentions, one of the main topics of this election was "law and order", not "the countryside is losing".
And who loves law and order more than close minded people?
Another big topic of the elections was the energy crisis and the price of gas… who loves their cheap gas in Sweden? Those cadillacs and heated houses are not cheap to fuel. I wonder if HN even knows most Cadillacs in the world are in middle Sweden. Swedish Hillbilly culture just blows my mind
Very weird thing to say by the way, as if law and order are somehow bad and only bad people would love such things.
Certainly you know gay clubs used to be raided and gay people arrested and beaten up by the police not until that long ago. In Russia today it's the police making sure no one speaks their mind. The Uyghurs in China are persecuted by Chinese law and order. Blacks in the deep south a century ago? And goes on and on and on…
But yeah… historically if you have been a white straight cis man the law has maybe not have been that mean towards you since the end of feudalism. Other people though…
On the other hand, one could also rediscover the benefits of law and order by getting hit by a bullet in one of the by now notorious Swedish gang wars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_and_order
Hence why the people calling for "law and order" are often calling for and doing illegal things.
I’d rather not assume law doesn’t mean law and order doesn’t mean order because the eternal D vs. R divide transforms normal words into a bat to smack one’s opponent over the face with.
If you can't understand that after 3 comments what can I do? It's not hard to understand. It's different things. I never told you I want rape and riots, why are you distorting my words? I said people to whom "law and order" appeals to as policy are close minded people.
I'm personally much more afraid of any Raggare in the Swedish country-side than I've ever been of any immigrant in Stockholm. But I'm also an immigrant in Stockholm and you are not so you will never understand. Never. Just imagine knowing that 1 every 4 males around you basically voted to see people like you gone (if not worse) and you don't even know which one of the 4 it is.
The article is about how disenfranchised Swedish citizens are tired of being victimized by crime and violence and having their legitimate concerns for safety be invalidated and ignored by false accusations of racism... and you turn around and continue to ignore what they're telling you to instead insinuate some other imaginary real reason for their voting changes.
Maybe try actually listening to people and trying to help, instead of making up a cynical reason why they're bad people whose complaints can be ignored? If you read an article about a women's group concerned about sexual assault, would you be so quick to disregard their statements and try to find a hidden "real issue" to shift blame to?
Why are they so worried about gangs and bombings when those are for the most part urban problems?
Doesn't peak your interest? It sure peaks mine.