8 ms·

I'm not from Denmark, but not very far from it. Don't you get civil disorder every time a high profile, widely hated criminal gets off with a sentence that's mu

I'm not from Denmark, but not very far from it. Don't you get civil disorder every time a high profile, widely hated criminal gets off with a sentence that's much lighter than people get in the movies? Where I live, every time that happens, populist and right wing parties rise in the polls. At this time, they're maybe one incident involving a Syrian refugee away from winning the elections. It's inevitable, with so many thousands of them, there's bound to be one who crosses the line at some point. The US has a different kind of democratic tradition. Some will say they're more democratic, but I think it has a lot to do with the "winner takes all" principle vs. "proportional representation". Deep down inside, it's what a significant chunk of the population wants: "as long as there are still people whom I can't identify with out there breaking the rules, we're still not tough enough on crime". The largest group is the one that gets represented, and doesn't have to share power.

reycharles 11y ago
> Don't you get civil disorder every time a high profile, widely hated criminal gets off with a sentence that's much lighter than people get in the movies? I don't remember any such incident in Denmark.
- VLM 11y ago
  It might be a cultural thing to average levels of criminality from the top and bottom. Much like Americans believe some things to be binary or some things to be a spectrum, perhaps in Denmark criminality is binary, either you are and they throw the average sized book at all of them, or you aren't. As an anecdote this is the same Denmark that went insane over a retailer selling Marmite, costing many thousands of euro in fines and punishments. That would fit the pattern of once the binary switch flips from non-criminal to criminal, a medium sized book is thrown at all miscreants. Another possible anecdote is I know their neighbors, and probably the Danes also, punish drunken driving similar to how attempted murder is treated in the US. That would also fit the theory.
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    What do you mean by similar to how attempted murder is treated in the US and what US state are you talking about? Drunk driving means first getting your drivers card taken if you have too much alcohol in your blod but it requires a lot. And I am not sure what you mean punishment wise. Care to elaborate?
  - varjag 11y ago
    Drunken driving is essentially an attempted manslaughter, but Scandinavian treatment of it is fairly lenient. In most cases you get away with a huge fine or a short prison term.
    - ryanlol 11y ago
      That's not true in the slightest, drunken driving laws don't measure the drivers impairment but BAC. And in any case, attempt implies intent.
      - varjag 11y ago
        > That's not true in the slightest, drunken driving laws don't measure the drivers impairment but BAC. They measure the impairment and BAC is an instrument to that. Otherwise it would be of no interest. There used to be other impairment tests, like walking the line, before breath testers became commonplace. > And in any case, attempt implies intent. As manslaughter is an unintentional killing, I thought the metaphor was fairly obvious. You know drunk drivers are prone to committing manslaughter other variables being equal, you do it anyway: well that's an attempt. Rationale behind it is irrelevant, just like noone cares you needed those money badly when you killed that cashier.
  - ryanlol 11y ago
    > went insane > costing many thousands of euro Doesn't add up.
soft_dev_person 11y ago
In Denmark it is as far as I can tell still acceptable to publicly discuss and vent about the issues concerning both crime and immigration. In some neighbouring countries it has been mostly put down by left wing "moderators" under the seemingly well intended excuse of not wanting to cause stigma (stigmatizing the critics in the process), instead causing huge amounts of frustration and a sense of betrayal in large parts of the general public. This is what makes otherwise regular people turn to parties much further to the right than they would otherwise. I think Denmark will come out on top in this, other countries should take a cue from them. Note: I live in a neighbouring country. Edit: Moderated "general public" to "large parts of the general public"
- thallian 11y ago
  Yeah, it seems that immigrants are either the source of all evil or saints. Without any meaningful middleground it will only get more extreme. (I am not from a neighbouring country but not that far away)
  - hussong 11y ago
    I'd call that the 'Double Schrödinger's Immigrant': - takes away our jobs, while simultaneously leeching off of our taxpayers' money AND - helps us solve our demographic problem / labor shortage, while simultaneously moving back to his home country as soon as peace is restored there
    - cousin_it 11y ago
      Interestingly, the first possibility isn't self-contradictory. If you agree to work for a very low salary, you'll bid down the wages for everyone else and require public assistance to stay afloat. From what I've heard, it's happening with Walmart workers in the US.
- _delirium 11y ago
  Considering the rise of Dansk Folkeparti in Denmark (sort-of a "nicer/cleaner" version of Sweden Democrats), and the very low quality level of the current Danish political debate, I'm not sure the Danish approach is doing much to defuse right-wing populism through letting people air their grievances. They can, but they just they do that in addition to voting for populist-right parties, not instead of. In any case it seems to be a much broader phenomenon than the political discourse norms of any one country. Right-populist politics, in the various local flavors offered by DF/SD/Trump/Szydło, are gaining across many countries despite quite a few differences in those countries.
thallian 11y ago
In Switzerland it is used as a political instrument by the right wing parties. They call it 'Kuscheljustiz' ('cuddle justice') and the tabloids are happily using the term too. It got a new height with the 'Durchsetzungsinitiative', a popular initiative we get to vote on in a month. It wants to enforce the result of the popular initiative on the (automatic) deportation of foreign criminals which got accepted by 52.3 of voters (and 17.5 of cantons) in 2010. The party behind both says that the governement and parlamental chambers are stalling the implementation of the initiative and do not adhere to its meaning hence the second one (which says they have to do the original one word by word). The stuff happily ignores some principles of the law like proportionality, higher up international law and such. Yeah, the combination of the so called cuddle justice and foreigners has been proven to work very good to get votes here (works even better now with more refugees).
- gohrt 11y ago
  > They call it 'Kuscheljustiz' ('cuddle justice') That's funny! The 1996 immigration reform commission was the "Hug Commission", and "hug" in English means "cuddle"
- yogiparish 11y ago
  Also living in Switzerland, I've noticed a scary involuntary alliance of journalism with what you might call the US-style conservatives (which is right-wing to far right-wing here): Critical journalists who tend - by a variety of factors like age and education - to be on the more 'left' side of the political spectrum write a large amount of critical articles about those various conservative initiatives, like the one mentioned above. The attacked parties gain an incredible amount of publicity and they've taken the tabloids as their "publicity hostage". Combine this with the diffuse resentment of those readers/people not feeling represented by government, those conservatives easily win at elections and votes - even when some of those initiatives are in clear disarray of everything the country stood and stands for. I always think of Woody Allen's "Bananas": By tomorrow the official language will be Swedish (same as Switzerland ;) ) and people have to wear their underwear on their heads. But at least its against the establishment. The death of those sometimes outrageously stupid political ideas could be easily achieved by simply ignoring them and their pundits. This might force the political players to get back to actual problem-solving concepts and lead to healthier debates in the media. But then again, maybe that's the wrong approach.
ThomPete 11y ago
Given that I moved my entire family here, just got my green card and isn't planning to move any time soon I would agree that it's the best democracy in the world :) But this is not a discussion about democracy and actually not so much about the length of sentences (although that does matter) this was more a discussion about what constitutes a crime that you go to prison for and what constitutes stupidities that might be illegal but shouldn't treated as if you are on the verge of becoming either a mass murders, criminal mastermind or drug overlord. I have two kids, one which is american citizen the other now with a green card and I am hoping with time to apply for american citizenship (Denmark allow dual citizenship). My concern is that my kids grow up in a society with these kind of laws and I don't want them to be caught in some Kafkan universe which there are plenty of examples of here. With regards to Civil unrest in Denmark. Then no. There is of course debates and there are people who think the rules are too lax. And so the justice system needs to find a balance where it's primary function is to deter people from committing crimes to begin with and then make sure the victims of crimes feels the offence adequately punished. This is not an easy task and Denmark is not perfect but as much as I feel free in the US I am a thousand times more afraid of the US justice system than the Danish. It's the one thing I fear here and I am by all intents and purposes of the word a law abiding citizen.
jernfrost 11y ago
I think those kind of things are culturally dependent. I am from Norway and I noticed that Americans and Brits typically people from Anglo-Saxon cultures were most angry at the sentencing the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik got in Norway. Victims and their families were not revenge oriented towards Breivik the way Americans and Brits were who were not even at the receiving end of his crimes. I notice a clear difference between cultures in how this is perceived is in the view with respect to good, evil and punishment in general. I think in Scandinavia in general people don't really believe in good and evil, at least not in the American sense. We don't divide the world into good guys and bad guys. All the way back to Viking times Scandinavians have practices much milder punishment than the Anglo-Saxons. It might be a Germanic thing. The dutch also were much milder than the British historically. In fact the english seemed almost offended in the 1700s by how mild punishment was in the Netherlands. I think anglo-saxons have simply been conditioned more strongly to desire revenge and retribution.
- hangonhn 11y ago
  When I initially read your reply I was going to suggest perhaps the homogeneity of Scandinavia might be a contributing factor. There is less of "us vs them" whereas in the UK and the US, there are many different groups of people, most of them are conquered people. In those cases, it's quite easy to see why there's such a sharp contrast. However, upon greater reflection, China also has very harsh sentences and a strong desire for revenge and China is pretty homogeneous so my initial theory doesn't make sense. One thing I wonder about is whether Scandinavia is the norm or the exception. To someone like me, a Chinese-American, harsh sentencing and "good vs evil" is the social norm, even if it's incredibly naive. I am now really curious as to what lead to the difference.
  - wobbleblob 11y ago
    I think your premise is wrong. Scandinavia isn't as homogeneous as you think, and the UK and US aren't as diverse as you think. I can only assume China isn't as homogeneous as you think either. What it is, is that we are all conditioned to recognize a lot of diversity in what's familiar to us, while communities of strangers seem more or less the same to us. I remember how relatives from the US visited a central European capital, and were surprised how little diversity they saw. To them Hungarians, Germans, Slovenes, Poles, Russians, Turks, Roma, Bulgarians, Greeks etc seemed all pretty much the same. I remember how I first visited a couple of north American major cities and was surprised how little diversity i saw. To me they seemed all pretty much the same.

reycharles 11y ago

> Don't you get civil disorder every time a high profile, widely hated criminal gets off with a sentence that's much lighter than people get in the movies? I don't remember any such incident in Denmark.

VLM 11y ago
It might be a cultural thing to average levels of criminality from the top and bottom. Much like Americans believe some things to be binary or some things to be a spectrum, perhaps in Denmark criminality is binary, either you are and they throw the average sized book at all of them, or you aren't. As an anecdote this is the same Denmark that went insane over a retailer selling Marmite, costing many thousands of euro in fines and punishments. That would fit the pattern of once the binary switch flips from non-criminal to criminal, a medium sized book is thrown at all miscreants. Another possible anecdote is I know their neighbors, and probably the Danes also, punish drunken driving similar to how attempted murder is treated in the US. That would also fit the theory.
- ThomPete 11y ago
  What do you mean by similar to how attempted murder is treated in the US and what US state are you talking about? Drunk driving means first getting your drivers card taken if you have too much alcohol in your blod but it requires a lot. And I am not sure what you mean punishment wise. Care to elaborate?
- varjag 11y ago
  Drunken driving is essentially an attempted manslaughter, but Scandinavian treatment of it is fairly lenient. In most cases you get away with a huge fine or a short prison term.
  - ryanlol 11y ago
    That's not true in the slightest, drunken driving laws don't measure the drivers impairment but BAC. And in any case, attempt implies intent.
    - varjag 11y ago
      > That's not true in the slightest, drunken driving laws don't measure the drivers impairment but BAC. They measure the impairment and BAC is an instrument to that. Otherwise it would be of no interest. There used to be other impairment tests, like walking the line, before breath testers became commonplace. > And in any case, attempt implies intent. As manslaughter is an unintentional killing, I thought the metaphor was fairly obvious. You know drunk drivers are prone to committing manslaughter other variables being equal, you do it anyway: well that's an attempt. Rationale behind it is irrelevant, just like noone cares you needed those money badly when you killed that cashier.
- ryanlol 11y ago
  > went insane > costing many thousands of euro Doesn't add up.

soft_dev_person 11y ago

In Denmark it is as far as I can tell still acceptable to publicly discuss and vent about the issues concerning both crime and immigration. In some neighbouring countries it has been mostly put down by left wing "moderators" under the seemingly well intended excuse of not wanting to cause stigma (stigmatizing the critics in the process), instead causing huge amounts of frustration and a sense of betrayal in large parts of the general public. This is what makes otherwise regular people turn to parties much further to the right than they would otherwise. I think Denmark will come out on top in this, other countries should take a cue from them. Note: I live in a neighbouring country. Edit: Moderated "general public" to "large parts of the general public"

thallian 11y ago
Yeah, it seems that immigrants are either the source of all evil or saints. Without any meaningful middleground it will only get more extreme. (I am not from a neighbouring country but not that far away)
- hussong 11y ago
  I'd call that the 'Double Schrödinger's Immigrant': - takes away our jobs, while simultaneously leeching off of our taxpayers' money AND - helps us solve our demographic problem / labor shortage, while simultaneously moving back to his home country as soon as peace is restored there
  - cousin_it 11y ago
    Interestingly, the first possibility isn't self-contradictory. If you agree to work for a very low salary, you'll bid down the wages for everyone else and require public assistance to stay afloat. From what I've heard, it's happening with Walmart workers in the US.
_delirium 11y ago
Considering the rise of Dansk Folkeparti in Denmark (sort-of a "nicer/cleaner" version of Sweden Democrats), and the very low quality level of the current Danish political debate, I'm not sure the Danish approach is doing much to defuse right-wing populism through letting people air their grievances. They can, but they just they do that in addition to voting for populist-right parties, not instead of. In any case it seems to be a much broader phenomenon than the political discourse norms of any one country. Right-populist politics, in the various local flavors offered by DF/SD/Trump/Szydło, are gaining across many countries despite quite a few differences in those countries.

thallian 11y ago

In Switzerland it is used as a political instrument by the right wing parties. They call it 'Kuscheljustiz' ('cuddle justice') and the tabloids are happily using the term too. It got a new height with the 'Durchsetzungsinitiative', a popular initiative we get to vote on in a month. It wants to enforce the result of the popular initiative on the (automatic) deportation of foreign criminals which got accepted by 52.3 of voters (and 17.5 of cantons) in 2010. The party behind both says that the governement and parlamental chambers are stalling the implementation of the initiative and do not adhere to its meaning hence the second one (which says they have to do the original one word by word). The stuff happily ignores some principles of the law like proportionality, higher up international law and such. Yeah, the combination of the so called cuddle justice and foreigners has been proven to work very good to get votes here (works even better now with more refugees).

gohrt 11y ago
> They call it 'Kuscheljustiz' ('cuddle justice') That's funny! The 1996 immigration reform commission was the "Hug Commission", and "hug" in English means "cuddle"
yogiparish 11y ago
Also living in Switzerland, I've noticed a scary involuntary alliance of journalism with what you might call the US-style conservatives (which is right-wing to far right-wing here): Critical journalists who tend - by a variety of factors like age and education - to be on the more 'left' side of the political spectrum write a large amount of critical articles about those various conservative initiatives, like the one mentioned above. The attacked parties gain an incredible amount of publicity and they've taken the tabloids as their "publicity hostage". Combine this with the diffuse resentment of those readers/people not feeling represented by government, those conservatives easily win at elections and votes - even when some of those initiatives are in clear disarray of everything the country stood and stands for. I always think of Woody Allen's "Bananas": By tomorrow the official language will be Swedish (same as Switzerland ;) ) and people have to wear their underwear on their heads. But at least its against the establishment. The death of those sometimes outrageously stupid political ideas could be easily achieved by simply ignoring them and their pundits. This might force the political players to get back to actual problem-solving concepts and lead to healthier debates in the media. But then again, maybe that's the wrong approach.

ThomPete 11y ago

Given that I moved my entire family here, just got my green card and isn't planning to move any time soon I would agree that it's the best democracy in the world :) But this is not a discussion about democracy and actually not so much about the length of sentences (although that does matter) this was more a discussion about what constitutes a crime that you go to prison for and what constitutes stupidities that might be illegal but shouldn't treated as if you are on the verge of becoming either a mass murders, criminal mastermind or drug overlord. I have two kids, one which is american citizen the other now with a green card and I am hoping with time to apply for american citizenship (Denmark allow dual citizenship). My concern is that my kids grow up in a society with these kind of laws and I don't want them to be caught in some Kafkan universe which there are plenty of examples of here. With regards to Civil unrest in Denmark. Then no. There is of course debates and there are people who think the rules are too lax. And so the justice system needs to find a balance where it's primary function is to deter people from committing crimes to begin with and then make sure the victims of crimes feels the offence adequately punished. This is not an easy task and Denmark is not perfect but as much as I feel free in the US I am a thousand times more afraid of the US justice system than the Danish. It's the one thing I fear here and I am by all intents and purposes of the word a law abiding citizen.

jernfrost 11y ago

I think those kind of things are culturally dependent. I am from Norway and I noticed that Americans and Brits typically people from Anglo-Saxon cultures were most angry at the sentencing the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik got in Norway. Victims and their families were not revenge oriented towards Breivik the way Americans and Brits were who were not even at the receiving end of his crimes. I notice a clear difference between cultures in how this is perceived is in the view with respect to good, evil and punishment in general. I think in Scandinavia in general people don't really believe in good and evil, at least not in the American sense. We don't divide the world into good guys and bad guys. All the way back to Viking times Scandinavians have practices much milder punishment than the Anglo-Saxons. It might be a Germanic thing. The dutch also were much milder than the British historically. In fact the english seemed almost offended in the 1700s by how mild punishment was in the Netherlands. I think anglo-saxons have simply been conditioned more strongly to desire revenge and retribution.

hangonhn 11y ago
When I initially read your reply I was going to suggest perhaps the homogeneity of Scandinavia might be a contributing factor. There is less of "us vs them" whereas in the UK and the US, there are many different groups of people, most of them are conquered people. In those cases, it's quite easy to see why there's such a sharp contrast. However, upon greater reflection, China also has very harsh sentences and a strong desire for revenge and China is pretty homogeneous so my initial theory doesn't make sense. One thing I wonder about is whether Scandinavia is the norm or the exception. To someone like me, a Chinese-American, harsh sentencing and "good vs evil" is the social norm, even if it's incredibly naive. I am now really curious as to what lead to the difference.
- wobbleblob 11y ago
  I think your premise is wrong. Scandinavia isn't as homogeneous as you think, and the UK and US aren't as diverse as you think. I can only assume China isn't as homogeneous as you think either. What it is, is that we are all conditioned to recognize a lot of diversity in what's familiar to us, while communities of strangers seem more or less the same to us. I remember how relatives from the US visited a central European capital, and were surprised how little diversity they saw. To them Hungarians, Germans, Slovenes, Poles, Russians, Turks, Roma, Bulgarians, Greeks etc seemed all pretty much the same. I remember how I first visited a couple of north American major cities and was surprised how little diversity i saw. To me they seemed all pretty much the same.