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A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

robinhoodexe 2y ago
The director also made Kim Jong Il’s Comedy Club[1], an absolutely insane documentary on North Korea. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1546653/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1546653/
- yvely 2y ago
  And also by Mads Brügger and about North Korea. Civilian self-chosen undercover operation. Fascinating watch. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt13243898/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt13243898/
Oarch 2y ago
For all its excellent marketing, of course Denmark has issues much like any other country. It's still a great country, just take the marketing with a hint of salt - a self certain smugness / hubris can easily make you blind to real problems.
- nolito 2y ago
  It's mostly marketing. Danes, and other Scandinavians, love the idea that they are more honest then others. It's not correct in Denmark. I find Denmark to be a quite corrupt country Tax-evasion in small scale called "sort arbejde" is quite common. Former primeminister and current foreign miniater Lars Løkke Rasmussen is a interessant figure. He's famous for not even being able to pay for his own underware.
bjornsing 2y ago
Great documentary! The story that chocked me most was the social democrat local politician that helped criminals launder money and evade taxes in his spare time… How low can you sink?
- InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  Everyone that tells him/herself a story, can use that story to justify crime. Defender of the underdogs. Saviour of the home-country from the foreign hordes. In every story, there is idealisation and demonisation, a giving up of complexity and the moral horror justifications of fairy tales.
  - bjornsing 2y ago
    Perhaps. But it takes a lot of story telling to be able to spend your days voting for higher taxes on law-abiding citizens, and your nights helping the worst in society evade those taxes…
reptilian 2y ago
Same filmmaker exposed US, UK, Apartheid collaboration and involvement in the spread of HIV in Africa, and the assassination of the SecGen of the UN, Dags Hammerskjold
- piva00 2y ago
  Minor nitpick, it is "Dag Hammarskjöld"
  - pvg 2y ago
    Reptilians just like dags https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wmrOdqIfZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wmrOdqIfZk
- HideousKojima 2y ago
  For Hammarskjold, the various documents that have been released or otherwise leaked suggest he could have been killed by the US, France, the USSR, or mercenaries hired by African mining interests. Or some combination of the above. As far as I can tell there is no definitive proof of who exactly was behind it, only that a lot of powerful people wanted him gone. Does the filmmaker have access to some sort of exclusive information that the rest of the world doesn't? Or, like most of these sorts of filmmakers, is he drawing conclusions beyond what can be conclusively reached with the availabile evidence?
  - reptilian 2y ago
    Watch the documentary. Union miniere, Belgian government, SAIMR paramilitaries, CIA and MI6 all were deeply involved.
  - reptilian 2y ago
    You'll have to watch "Cold Case Hammersjold
    - HideousKojima 2y ago
      "Though the filmmakers present Mr. Jones as a self-assured whistle-blower, their notes from several interviews they conducted with him before the final taping reflect that he repeatedly denied that his group was involved in an AIDS project." "As the interviews progressed, the filmmakers posed additional questions that introduced details of possible militia activities. Mr. Jones’s responses evolved and, by the time he sat for the final interview, he professed firsthand knowledge of people and events that he had previously seemed to first learn about from the filmmakers." https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/27/world/africa/hammarskjold-south-africa-aids.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/27/world/africa/hammarskjold... Yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb and say a documentary that claims western powers were intentionally spreading AIDS in South Africa (under the guise of a vaccination program) and does so on the basis of some extremely questionable witnesses might be stretching the evidence about some other things.
arghwhat 2y ago
Black Swan was a big deal, but this article massively overstates the average Dane's faith in the system. The welfare state is certainly not reverred as a religion, and the current state of it is always a hot discussion topic with pulls in either direction. Unlike what this article suggests, tax fraud is also relatively common (one would have to be rather daft to assume that a country with such absurdly high taxation did not have tax evasion as a key pastime - although probably not as aggressively as in places like the US), and while heavily frowned upon certainly not seen as the highest form of crime as this article suggests. Well, maybe if you ask the tax agency and the political parties pushing for ever more welfare, both of which push heavily for a cashless society where all financial transactions are fully trackable by them, but I think most would place tax evasion quite far down on the list of significant crimes. I would instead say that the average Dane is carefree about these issues, not because they are trusting or believe their system is worth religious following, but because the issues experienced there feels quite minor compared to what seems to happen elsewhere in the world. When your concept of a significant natural disaster is a flooded basement, you tend to not worry that much about what happens locally.
- MaxHoppersGhost 2y ago
  > one would have to be rather daft to assume that a country with such absurdly high taxation did not have tax evasion as a key pastime - although probably not as aggressively as in places like the US The US has lower taxes so by your logic we would have less evasion. Unless you’re making a judgement on Americans.
  - scandox 2y ago
    I think the common perception is that Americans are more ideologically committed to tax avoidance whereas Europeans are more viscerally tempted by tax evasion?
    - StefanBatory 2y ago
      Not being an American I've always had similar impressions. That taxes in USA are hated way more than anywhere else.
boomboomsubban 2y ago
I wonder if this will impact Denmark's spot at the top of the corruption perceptions index. Last years rankings still has them at first, but it's hard to say when the data was collected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
- guappa 2y ago
  No it won't. They ignore all evidence of corruption so far, they can keep going. The whole point is they think other countries are more corrupt than them, because they're just better. edit: if you downvote me and haven't lived in a scandinavian country for over a decade… perhaps trust me instead of trusting your preconceptions?
- deleted 2y ago
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frantathefranta 2y ago
I'm fully aware that Sweden and Denmark are different countries (I lived in Denmark for 3 years), but this reminded me of the reel of Swedes playing every time I visit IKEA, where they talk about how corruption is absolutely unthinkable in Swedish society. And there's also this tidbit from the article: > Other Scandinavian nations also reeled upon watching The Black Swan. After the series premiered in Sweden, a criminologist at Lund University warned: “There’s a lot of evidence that it’s probably even worse here.”
- belter 2y ago
  "Sweden's sudden awakening to corruption - From small arrangements between friends to large-scale bribery and embezzlement, Swedes are discovering the extent of a phenomenon they had underestimated" - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/05/08/sweden-s-sudden-awakening-to-corruption_6670747_4.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/05/08/s...
  - guappa 2y ago
    I think they really aren't, not at large. At the core they need to feel superior, and that includes believing that they are genetically honest, unlike those people with darker skin and brown eyes.
- cess11 2y ago
  Since the late eighties Sweden has privatised, as the euphemism goes, heavily. In particular schools and medical and elder care have become cesspools of corruption and mob activity. It's gotten worse in construction as well. Today some active politicians simultaneously perform as senior advisers and the like for so called public affairs, i.e. lobbying, firms. That is, in the open. The leader of one of the largest parties in parliament and kind of part of the current government had a mob leader as guest at his wedding a while back. There's an agreement among the largest parties to blame the fallout on immigrant minorities. They still disagree about whether to also put blame on sexual and gender minorities, as well as indigenous minorities. I expect them to start agreeing more during the next election.
kratom_sandwich 2y ago
Crtl-F "who turns 53 in June" to skip a rather lengthy description of the series (or scroll to the large red "B") > Nothing I learned from Smajic solved the central mystery of The Black Swan: why did she choose to capsize her life by participating at all? I recall that Herve Falciani only leaked his trove of tax data when a police investigation was closing in on him. Maybe something similar here: a looming indictment?
- boomboomsubban 2y ago
  She was a police informant, and surely any looming indictment would happen in the ~5 years since this started.
deleted 2y ago
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itissid 2y ago
Its just people. People are the same everywhere, and are fundamentally unpredictable systems. How large groups behave does depends to a certain extent on context: by compared to others and your socio-economic situation. How they publicly expressed their values are entirely different from their behavior. This is to the dread of incumbent governments and pollsters. If you starve a wealthy man for 2 weeks he will be ready to cannibalize. If you create a metric upon which you place a lot of economic-value, soooner or later it will get gamed and corrupted. If you remove checks and balances humans being unpredictable will turn on each other. One can choose to ignore this fact, but at the cost of endless grief to oneself and those around.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hoseyor 2y ago
  I disagree that people are unpredictable systems. The ruling class very much knows that people are not only predictable, but even programmable. It’s just the aspirational middle and some lower classes that have internalized the idea that there is no way to predict and that every human is the same and all different groups and people are equal in characteristics and qualities. For example, liars will lie, predictably, even if expressed as a function of probability.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  More accurately, I think it's just confusion about the Law of Large Numbers. People confuse population-scale average behaviors with guarantees about individuals. In any country you can find outliers that don't match the country's norms. The hard part is that the devious ones can leverage their country's (or culture, or state, or relgious affiliation, etc.) norms to disguise their bad behavior. It's easier to scam someone if you pretend to blend in with groups known for being trustworthy.
- toast0 2y ago
  You are saying humans are unpredictable, but then you make predictions. I think you are saying that people's behavior changes based on stimulus. That doesn't mean they're unpredictable, just that the prediction shouldn't be unchanged behavior regardless of stimulus.
saranshsharma 2y ago
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mtgentry 2y ago
One nice thing about being on the spectrum is that you can spot morally sketchy situations more clearly—or at least more clearly than most normies. I once walked out of a pitch meeting where we were trying to land a client that completely clashed with a solid, well-paying client we already had. I couldn’t believe no one else saw the huge conflict of interest. No one batted an eyelash.
albert_e 2y ago
> One out of every two Danes has seen the documentary. Why not simpler English -- "half of the country has watched it" Also pendatic aside -- i think "every two danes" is a stretch -- i am sure we can find many instances of "two danes" where both has watched it. Or neither. Some are being born as we speak (write).
- dfawcus 2y ago
  > Why not simpler English -- "half of the country has watched it" I guess as it was aimed at a British audience, and that is not an uncommon way for us to form such sentences. If you hadn't mentioned it, I'd not even have noticed it, simply parsing it as "half".
  - danso 2y ago
    If this were social media, at least 10 people including me would be replying with the Major Hellstrom Sees Three Fingers meme.
- daedrdev 2y ago
  One out of every two X is an extremely common and perfectly reasonable phrase in english, meaning your complaint about finding 2 Danes who haven't watched it is nonsensical as we know they mean on average.
  - albert_e 2y ago
    I know this format is common usage but don't see it commonly used to represent this fraction-- 50% or half -- where this construct seems needlessly long or formal. The second part was just playful aside -- not serious. Ofcourse that didn't come through. I know there is a common sensical read that all readers will apply to it and it will not be misinterpreted. I thought this being HN people will find it amusing to treat it as a logical statement and parse.
- thwarted 2y ago
  Why say "four out of five dentists" instead of "80% of dentists"?
mrweasel 2y ago
That seems a bit overblown. I doubt that most wasn't aware that things like this is going on. Perhaps the scale and the number of people involved is a little more than most would have expected. The worst bit, for me and most of the people I debated the documentary with is how people can be so unapologetic about doing irreparable environmental damage. There's currently a another case where a company have blatantly mismanaged handling of polluted soil, in the name of profit. The fact that these people don't give a shit, and the people working of them just hit a wall if they're trying to alert local government is the most choking, not that there's corruption. Also this type of corruption isn't seen by Danes in our day to day life, so they don't really register on our corruption perception. I still struggle to view it as corruption and not just straight up criminal activity or deliberate environmental damage.
danso 2y ago
Besides the description of the scandal for non-Danish audiences, this was also an interesting reflection on the deception inherent in the production of any kind of documentary work, even when it's portrayed as straight CCTV footage. > All documentaries are artificial: their footage has been carefully threshed and sieved with an eye to telling a story or pushing an argument. The Black Swan, though, relies on the unblinking, real-time gaze of hidden CCTV cameras, so we lull ourselves into thinking that we’re seeing the full picture, the full truth. No such thing. Instead, we get evasion upon evasion: Smajic’s charade for her clients, Malm cheating the taxman, TV2 withholding their work from the police, Brügger keeping details from his audience. Smajic’s final bluff merely confirms what Brügger seems to have believed throughout his career: everywhere, there are conspiracies and lies that he must expose, even if he has to participate in the dissembling himself. > ...Smajic believes she’s a victim of journalistic deceit. The Black Swan was meant to be about her life, she said, with the hidden camera footage being used only sparingly to corroborate her stories. She’d been offered no security during the filming, she said. When TV2 screened the first three episodes for her approval, they were really just raw, unedited clips, she maintained, and in any case, she’d been strongly medicated after a surgery and couldn’t assess them with a clear mind. (“Amira watched the edited episodes, they just needed finalising,” TV2’s Nørgaard told me. “During the four hours she spent with the editorial team that day, she appeared unaffected and seemed coherent, as we also documented in the series.”) Smajic hadn’t been running any other office at the time, she said to me, and in any case, “they hadn’t bought the rights to every single moment in my life”.
raincom 2y ago
In the third world, corruption is very open from the clerk in a local revenue office to the top ministers/secretaries. There is a price for every service. In the West, it is hard to see low-level corruption (bribes for services) in offices. However, corruption takes form in the shape of collusion; and this collusion is pretty much legal. Revolving door, consultants, lobbyists, conflicts of interests, setting up NGOs to grab money from the govt, offering sinecure jobs like advisors, directors, etc for friends and family--these are some strategies to do unethical yet legal stuff in the West.
- huijzer 2y ago
  I was just listening to a talk by Stephen Kotkin were he mentioned corruption. He said corruption is not binary. Instead, it's a continuum. The question is how much of the money a public servant spends will actually end up in the desired outcome. In China, he said, maybe 20% will end up in the pockets of the public servant while the other 80% is spent on the road. In Nigeria, he said, everything will go to the servant and there will be no road. Source: https://youtu.be/ZD8BhZEJcjI https://youtu.be/ZD8BhZEJcjI at around 1:00:00.
  - raincom 2y ago
    This continuum hides one thing: overbidding in terms of project cost and underdelivery in terms of quality. At least in US, quality is maintained, while costing 300% more (look at any subway, rail projects). In the third world, projects are overbid, also underdeliver in terms of quality. No quality control at all.
  - intrasight 2y ago
    > it's a continuum Corruption is multidimensional. There's the size. There's the nature of the parties involved. There's the question of whether it's legal or illegal - which itself as a continuum as my lawyer girlfriend always reminds me
- dumbfounder 2y ago
  No conflict, no interest.
B1FF_PSUVM 2y ago
I cannae creids there would be something rotten in the state of Denmark
croes 2y ago
Will that change Denmark‘s position in the Corruption Perception Index? https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2024 https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2024 I always thought the lower the more realistic
- nolito 2y ago
  I d'ont. Im portuguese living in Denmark for many years. The difference is just perception. The portuguese say: "this shitty country is so corrupt". I never encountered any corruption in Portugal. The danes say: "See we are the best and justest country in the World without corruption". Facts say otherwise. Just google Lars Løkke Rasmussen and take a look at his actions
  - guappa 2y ago
    Italian living in sweden. It's 100% identical. They don't even bother to hide it, because there can't be corruption here by definition. So to us it's so obvious.
  - croes 2y ago
    It became obvious to me in the banking crisis 2008 as everybody in Germany talked about corruption in Greece and ignored the German companies involved that bribed Greece politicians. It doesn’t help either that the corruption perceptions index is often shortened in German to Korruptionsindex = corruption index which makes it sound objective instead instead of subjective
curtisszmania 2y ago
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Isamu 2y ago
>All of Scandinavia, he believes, has persuaded itself that crime exists only in violent, poor abscesses on the edges of their societies. “The Danes totally subscribe to this idea that Denmark has no corruption, and to the idea of Denmark as the end of the road,” Brügger said, referring to the political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s notion that “getting to Denmark” is the goal of every modern democracy. First, this is an assertion about “All of Scandinavia”, and there is some contradiction about crime exists but is small, and Denmark has “no corruption”. But this is basic over-generalization, between low and none, and a exposé that provides anecdotes but doesn’t challenge statistics. Still people will claim (rhetorically) “none” when the real answer is not zero. And is that really incorrect? To be correct is to quantify and provide your reasoning. That’s something that public discourse is yet to embrace.
JMiao 2y ago
How can we view in the usa?
- everybodyknows 2y ago
  Kanopy has two of Brügger's docus.
eitland 2y ago
Haven't seen this film, but here are some observations I think we should keep in mind in general when it comes to journalism. There is a famous saying, that in one version goes like this: I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how. [1] Mutatis mutandis, something very similar can be said about filmmaking: it is of less importance exactly what someone says and of great importance who cuts and edit it. Light or lack of light, missing context - this can be the exact questions asked that triggered the answer[2] or what the person said to qualify their statements [3]. There is music, sound effects, camera perspectives and so on and so on. One can also lead the viewer towards a conclusion without spelling it out [4]. There is a reason militaries advice soldier that in case of capture we should say as little as absolutely possible outside of what one is legally required to say: name, rank, service number, and date of birth. Anything and everything can and probably will be abused. This is true not only for opponents in a war but as probably everyone knows also with police in most of the world, and HN is keenly aware of this. I'd argue that we should be equally aware when it comes to journalism: as much as I respect many journalists, they are not a homogeneous group of perfectly ethical people striving for perfect objectivity. They have personal agendas: fame, income, people and cases they sympathize with and people and cases theywant to hurt. We should be aware of this when reading, watching or listening - but of course even more when answering questions. Any competent defense attorney can tell [1]: Supposedly said by Stalin in reference to a vote in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but exactly who said is is less important than the general idea. [2]: can be as simple as this classic: asking the person "hypothetically, if you wanted to ... how would you have done it?" [3]: Simple example: "Q: Have you cheated on your taxes? A: yes, <here the director cuts>, back in 1956 when I was 18 ..." [4]: This is an actual example: Our public broadcaster in Norway mentioning that they had tried to investigate the economic transactions of some people, saying they couldn't do it and it was very confusing and ending that segment with a merry go round. What they didn't mention was that Norwegian police had already investigated the same people over three years, several months secretly and had not only been unable to prove the crimes suggested, but gone as far as stating they found it proven that the accused were innocent.
edm0nd 2y ago
Did you really make it as a rapper? Do you have a Spotify or Soundcloud or wat?
wtcactus 2y ago
Did it really shatter their self image, or it just made every Dane realize that the tabu their society created against speaking badly on the absurdity high taxation they face is actually felt by everyone that is a net contributor of their system? The middle class citizen in most of Europe is now paying more than 50% of their earnings to the state. I don’t believe a single one actually believes this is anything fair and many surely think it’s oppressive and a form of slavery. There are only 3 kinds of people that defend these outrageously high taxes: - the ones that are a net negative to the system - populist politicians - people that are indoctrinated to virtue signal about the theme, but that don’t actually believe in it (the ones in the video) We are really living in the Dictatorship of the Majority.
subpixel 2y ago
Why can’t I find this series anywhere? Even for, you know, download?
boruto 2y ago
I did not except the biker gang bandidos in Denmark is led by one Abrar raja. I don't know, as an Indian it just feels weird to hear a Pakistani name in that setting.
- crossroadsguy 2y ago
  And I, also as an Indian, am thinking how could they beat us to that. Why not an Indian ;-)

The director also made Kim Jong Il’s Comedy Club[1], an absolutely insane documentary on North Korea. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1546653/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1546653/

yvely 2y ago
And also by Mads Brügger and about North Korea. Civilian self-chosen undercover operation. Fascinating watch. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt13243898/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt13243898/

Oarch 2y ago

For all its excellent marketing, of course Denmark has issues much like any other country. It's still a great country, just take the marketing with a hint of salt - a self certain smugness / hubris can easily make you blind to real problems.

nolito 2y ago
It's mostly marketing. Danes, and other Scandinavians, love the idea that they are more honest then others. It's not correct in Denmark. I find Denmark to be a quite corrupt country Tax-evasion in small scale called "sort arbejde" is quite common. Former primeminister and current foreign miniater Lars Løkke Rasmussen is a interessant figure. He's famous for not even being able to pay for his own underware.

bjornsing 2y ago

Great documentary! The story that chocked me most was the social democrat local politician that helped criminals launder money and evade taxes in his spare time… How low can you sink?

InDubioProRubio 2y ago
Everyone that tells him/herself a story, can use that story to justify crime. Defender of the underdogs. Saviour of the home-country from the foreign hordes. In every story, there is idealisation and demonisation, a giving up of complexity and the moral horror justifications of fairy tales.
- bjornsing 2y ago
  Perhaps. But it takes a lot of story telling to be able to spend your days voting for higher taxes on law-abiding citizens, and your nights helping the worst in society evade those taxes…

reptilian 2y ago

Same filmmaker exposed US, UK, Apartheid collaboration and involvement in the spread of HIV in Africa, and the assassination of the SecGen of the UN, Dags Hammerskjold

piva00 2y ago
Minor nitpick, it is "Dag Hammarskjöld"
- pvg 2y ago
  Reptilians just like dags https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wmrOdqIfZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wmrOdqIfZk
HideousKojima 2y ago
For Hammarskjold, the various documents that have been released or otherwise leaked suggest he could have been killed by the US, France, the USSR, or mercenaries hired by African mining interests. Or some combination of the above. As far as I can tell there is no definitive proof of who exactly was behind it, only that a lot of powerful people wanted him gone. Does the filmmaker have access to some sort of exclusive information that the rest of the world doesn't? Or, like most of these sorts of filmmakers, is he drawing conclusions beyond what can be conclusively reached with the availabile evidence?
- reptilian 2y ago
  Watch the documentary. Union miniere, Belgian government, SAIMR paramilitaries, CIA and MI6 all were deeply involved.
- reptilian 2y ago
  You'll have to watch "Cold Case Hammersjold
  - HideousKojima 2y ago
    "Though the filmmakers present Mr. Jones as a self-assured whistle-blower, their notes from several interviews they conducted with him before the final taping reflect that he repeatedly denied that his group was involved in an AIDS project." "As the interviews progressed, the filmmakers posed additional questions that introduced details of possible militia activities. Mr. Jones’s responses evolved and, by the time he sat for the final interview, he professed firsthand knowledge of people and events that he had previously seemed to first learn about from the filmmakers." https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/27/world/africa/hammarskjold-south-africa-aids.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/27/world/africa/hammarskjold... Yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb and say a documentary that claims western powers were intentionally spreading AIDS in South Africa (under the guise of a vaccination program) and does so on the basis of some extremely questionable witnesses might be stretching the evidence about some other things.

arghwhat 2y ago

Black Swan was a big deal, but this article massively overstates the average Dane's faith in the system. The welfare state is certainly not reverred as a religion, and the current state of it is always a hot discussion topic with pulls in either direction. Unlike what this article suggests, tax fraud is also relatively common (one would have to be rather daft to assume that a country with such absurdly high taxation did not have tax evasion as a key pastime - although probably not as aggressively as in places like the US), and while heavily frowned upon certainly not seen as the highest form of crime as this article suggests. Well, maybe if you ask the tax agency and the political parties pushing for ever more welfare, both of which push heavily for a cashless society where all financial transactions are fully trackable by them, but I think most would place tax evasion quite far down on the list of significant crimes. I would instead say that the average Dane is carefree about these issues, not because they are trusting or believe their system is worth religious following, but because the issues experienced there feels quite minor compared to what seems to happen elsewhere in the world. When your concept of a significant natural disaster is a flooded basement, you tend to not worry that much about what happens locally.

MaxHoppersGhost 2y ago
> one would have to be rather daft to assume that a country with such absurdly high taxation did not have tax evasion as a key pastime - although probably not as aggressively as in places like the US The US has lower taxes so by your logic we would have less evasion. Unless you’re making a judgement on Americans.
- scandox 2y ago
  I think the common perception is that Americans are more ideologically committed to tax avoidance whereas Europeans are more viscerally tempted by tax evasion?
  - StefanBatory 2y ago
    Not being an American I've always had similar impressions. That taxes in USA are hated way more than anywhere else.

boomboomsubban 2y ago

I wonder if this will impact Denmark's spot at the top of the corruption perceptions index. Last years rankings still has them at first, but it's hard to say when the data was collected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

guappa 2y ago
No it won't. They ignore all evidence of corruption so far, they can keep going. The whole point is they think other countries are more corrupt than them, because they're just better. edit: if you downvote me and haven't lived in a scandinavian country for over a decade… perhaps trust me instead of trusting your preconceptions?
deleted 2y ago
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frantathefranta 2y ago

I'm fully aware that Sweden and Denmark are different countries (I lived in Denmark for 3 years), but this reminded me of the reel of Swedes playing every time I visit IKEA, where they talk about how corruption is absolutely unthinkable in Swedish society. And there's also this tidbit from the article: > Other Scandinavian nations also reeled upon watching The Black Swan. After the series premiered in Sweden, a criminologist at Lund University warned: “There’s a lot of evidence that it’s probably even worse here.”

belter 2y ago
"Sweden's sudden awakening to corruption - From small arrangements between friends to large-scale bribery and embezzlement, Swedes are discovering the extent of a phenomenon they had underestimated" - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/05/08/sweden-s-sudden-awakening-to-corruption_6670747_4.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/05/08/s...
- guappa 2y ago
  I think they really aren't, not at large. At the core they need to feel superior, and that includes believing that they are genetically honest, unlike those people with darker skin and brown eyes.
cess11 2y ago
Since the late eighties Sweden has privatised, as the euphemism goes, heavily. In particular schools and medical and elder care have become cesspools of corruption and mob activity. It's gotten worse in construction as well. Today some active politicians simultaneously perform as senior advisers and the like for so called public affairs, i.e. lobbying, firms. That is, in the open. The leader of one of the largest parties in parliament and kind of part of the current government had a mob leader as guest at his wedding a while back. There's an agreement among the largest parties to blame the fallout on immigrant minorities. They still disagree about whether to also put blame on sexual and gender minorities, as well as indigenous minorities. I expect them to start agreeing more during the next election.

kratom_sandwich 2y ago

Crtl-F "who turns 53 in June" to skip a rather lengthy description of the series (or scroll to the large red "B") > Nothing I learned from Smajic solved the central mystery of The Black Swan: why did she choose to capsize her life by participating at all? I recall that Herve Falciani only leaked his trove of tax data when a police investigation was closing in on him. Maybe something similar here: a looming indictment?

boomboomsubban 2y ago
She was a police informant, and surely any looming indictment would happen in the ~5 years since this started.

deleted 2y ago

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itissid 2y ago

Its just people. People are the same everywhere, and are fundamentally unpredictable systems. How large groups behave does depends to a certain extent on context: by compared to others and your socio-economic situation. How they publicly expressed their values are entirely different from their behavior. This is to the dread of incumbent governments and pollsters. If you starve a wealthy man for 2 weeks he will be ready to cannibalize. If you create a metric upon which you place a lot of economic-value, soooner or later it will get gamed and corrupted. If you remove checks and balances humans being unpredictable will turn on each other. One can choose to ignore this fact, but at the cost of endless grief to oneself and those around.

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hoseyor 2y ago
I disagree that people are unpredictable systems. The ruling class very much knows that people are not only predictable, but even programmable. It’s just the aspirational middle and some lower classes that have internalized the idea that there is no way to predict and that every human is the same and all different groups and people are equal in characteristics and qualities. For example, liars will lie, predictably, even if expressed as a function of probability.
Aurornis 2y ago
More accurately, I think it's just confusion about the Law of Large Numbers. People confuse population-scale average behaviors with guarantees about individuals. In any country you can find outliers that don't match the country's norms. The hard part is that the devious ones can leverage their country's (or culture, or state, or relgious affiliation, etc.) norms to disguise their bad behavior. It's easier to scam someone if you pretend to blend in with groups known for being trustworthy.
toast0 2y ago
You are saying humans are unpredictable, but then you make predictions. I think you are saying that people's behavior changes based on stimulus. That doesn't mean they're unpredictable, just that the prediction shouldn't be unchanged behavior regardless of stimulus.

saranshsharma 2y ago

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mtgentry 2y ago

One nice thing about being on the spectrum is that you can spot morally sketchy situations more clearly—or at least more clearly than most normies. I once walked out of a pitch meeting where we were trying to land a client that completely clashed with a solid, well-paying client we already had. I couldn’t believe no one else saw the huge conflict of interest. No one batted an eyelash.

albert_e 2y ago

> One out of every two Danes has seen the documentary. Why not simpler English -- "half of the country has watched it" Also pendatic aside -- i think "every two danes" is a stretch -- i am sure we can find many instances of "two danes" where both has watched it. Or neither. Some are being born as we speak (write).

dfawcus 2y ago
> Why not simpler English -- "half of the country has watched it" I guess as it was aimed at a British audience, and that is not an uncommon way for us to form such sentences. If you hadn't mentioned it, I'd not even have noticed it, simply parsing it as "half".
- danso 2y ago
  If this were social media, at least 10 people including me would be replying with the Major Hellstrom Sees Three Fingers meme.
daedrdev 2y ago
One out of every two X is an extremely common and perfectly reasonable phrase in english, meaning your complaint about finding 2 Danes who haven't watched it is nonsensical as we know they mean on average.
- albert_e 2y ago
  I know this format is common usage but don't see it commonly used to represent this fraction-- 50% or half -- where this construct seems needlessly long or formal. The second part was just playful aside -- not serious. Ofcourse that didn't come through. I know there is a common sensical read that all readers will apply to it and it will not be misinterpreted. I thought this being HN people will find it amusing to treat it as a logical statement and parse.
thwarted 2y ago
Why say "four out of five dentists" instead of "80% of dentists"?

mrweasel 2y ago

That seems a bit overblown. I doubt that most wasn't aware that things like this is going on. Perhaps the scale and the number of people involved is a little more than most would have expected. The worst bit, for me and most of the people I debated the documentary with is how people can be so unapologetic about doing irreparable environmental damage. There's currently a another case where a company have blatantly mismanaged handling of polluted soil, in the name of profit. The fact that these people don't give a shit, and the people working of them just hit a wall if they're trying to alert local government is the most choking, not that there's corruption. Also this type of corruption isn't seen by Danes in our day to day life, so they don't really register on our corruption perception. I still struggle to view it as corruption and not just straight up criminal activity or deliberate environmental damage.

danso 2y ago

Besides the description of the scandal for non-Danish audiences, this was also an interesting reflection on the deception inherent in the production of any kind of documentary work, even when it's portrayed as straight CCTV footage. > All documentaries are artificial: their footage has been carefully threshed and sieved with an eye to telling a story or pushing an argument. The Black Swan, though, relies on the unblinking, real-time gaze of hidden CCTV cameras, so we lull ourselves into thinking that we’re seeing the full picture, the full truth. No such thing. Instead, we get evasion upon evasion: Smajic’s charade for her clients, Malm cheating the taxman, TV2 withholding their work from the police, Brügger keeping details from his audience. Smajic’s final bluff merely confirms what Brügger seems to have believed throughout his career: everywhere, there are conspiracies and lies that he must expose, even if he has to participate in the dissembling himself. > ...Smajic believes she’s a victim of journalistic deceit. The Black Swan was meant to be about her life, she said, with the hidden camera footage being used only sparingly to corroborate her stories. She’d been offered no security during the filming, she said. When TV2 screened the first three episodes for her approval, they were really just raw, unedited clips, she maintained, and in any case, she’d been strongly medicated after a surgery and couldn’t assess them with a clear mind. (“Amira watched the edited episodes, they just needed finalising,” TV2’s Nørgaard told me. “During the four hours she spent with the editorial team that day, she appeared unaffected and seemed coherent, as we also documented in the series.”) Smajic hadn’t been running any other office at the time, she said to me, and in any case, “they hadn’t bought the rights to every single moment in my life”.

raincom 2y ago

In the third world, corruption is very open from the clerk in a local revenue office to the top ministers/secretaries. There is a price for every service. In the West, it is hard to see low-level corruption (bribes for services) in offices. However, corruption takes form in the shape of collusion; and this collusion is pretty much legal. Revolving door, consultants, lobbyists, conflicts of interests, setting up NGOs to grab money from the govt, offering sinecure jobs like advisors, directors, etc for friends and family--these are some strategies to do unethical yet legal stuff in the West.

huijzer 2y ago
I was just listening to a talk by Stephen Kotkin were he mentioned corruption. He said corruption is not binary. Instead, it's a continuum. The question is how much of the money a public servant spends will actually end up in the desired outcome. In China, he said, maybe 20% will end up in the pockets of the public servant while the other 80% is spent on the road. In Nigeria, he said, everything will go to the servant and there will be no road. Source: https://youtu.be/ZD8BhZEJcjI https://youtu.be/ZD8BhZEJcjI at around 1:00:00.
- raincom 2y ago
  This continuum hides one thing: overbidding in terms of project cost and underdelivery in terms of quality. At least in US, quality is maintained, while costing 300% more (look at any subway, rail projects). In the third world, projects are overbid, also underdeliver in terms of quality. No quality control at all.
- intrasight 2y ago
  > it's a continuum Corruption is multidimensional. There's the size. There's the nature of the parties involved. There's the question of whether it's legal or illegal - which itself as a continuum as my lawyer girlfriend always reminds me
dumbfounder 2y ago
No conflict, no interest.

B1FF_PSUVM 2y ago

I cannae creids there would be something rotten in the state of Denmark

croes 2y ago

Will that change Denmark‘s position in the Corruption Perception Index? https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2024 https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2024 I always thought the lower the more realistic

nolito 2y ago
I d'ont. Im portuguese living in Denmark for many years. The difference is just perception. The portuguese say: "this shitty country is so corrupt". I never encountered any corruption in Portugal. The danes say: "See we are the best and justest country in the World without corruption". Facts say otherwise. Just google Lars Løkke Rasmussen and take a look at his actions
- guappa 2y ago
  Italian living in sweden. It's 100% identical. They don't even bother to hide it, because there can't be corruption here by definition. So to us it's so obvious.
- croes 2y ago
  It became obvious to me in the banking crisis 2008 as everybody in Germany talked about corruption in Greece and ignored the German companies involved that bribed Greece politicians. It doesn’t help either that the corruption perceptions index is often shortened in German to Korruptionsindex = corruption index which makes it sound objective instead instead of subjective

curtisszmania 2y ago

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Isamu 2y ago

>All of Scandinavia, he believes, has persuaded itself that crime exists only in violent, poor abscesses on the edges of their societies. “The Danes totally subscribe to this idea that Denmark has no corruption, and to the idea of Denmark as the end of the road,” Brügger said, referring to the political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s notion that “getting to Denmark” is the goal of every modern democracy. First, this is an assertion about “All of Scandinavia”, and there is some contradiction about crime exists but is small, and Denmark has “no corruption”. But this is basic over-generalization, between low and none, and a exposé that provides anecdotes but doesn’t challenge statistics. Still people will claim (rhetorically) “none” when the real answer is not zero. And is that really incorrect? To be correct is to quantify and provide your reasoning. That’s something that public discourse is yet to embrace.

JMiao 2y ago

How can we view in the usa?

everybodyknows 2y ago
Kanopy has two of Brügger's docus.

eitland 2y ago

Haven't seen this film, but here are some observations I think we should keep in mind in general when it comes to journalism. There is a famous saying, that in one version goes like this: I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how. [1] Mutatis mutandis, something very similar can be said about filmmaking: it is of less importance exactly what someone says and of great importance who cuts and edit it. Light or lack of light, missing context - this can be the exact questions asked that triggered the answer[2] or what the person said to qualify their statements [3]. There is music, sound effects, camera perspectives and so on and so on. One can also lead the viewer towards a conclusion without spelling it out [4]. There is a reason militaries advice soldier that in case of capture we should say as little as absolutely possible outside of what one is legally required to say: name, rank, service number, and date of birth. Anything and everything can and probably will be abused. This is true not only for opponents in a war but as probably everyone knows also with police in most of the world, and HN is keenly aware of this. I'd argue that we should be equally aware when it comes to journalism: as much as I respect many journalists, they are not a homogeneous group of perfectly ethical people striving for perfect objectivity. They have personal agendas: fame, income, people and cases they sympathize with and people and cases theywant to hurt. We should be aware of this when reading, watching or listening - but of course even more when answering questions. Any competent defense attorney can tell [1]: Supposedly said by Stalin in reference to a vote in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but exactly who said is is less important than the general idea. [2]: can be as simple as this classic: asking the person "hypothetically, if you wanted to ... how would you have done it?" [3]: Simple example: "Q: Have you cheated on your taxes? A: yes, <here the director cuts>, back in 1956 when I was 18 ..." [4]: This is an actual example: Our public broadcaster in Norway mentioning that they had tried to investigate the economic transactions of some people, saying they couldn't do it and it was very confusing and ending that segment with a merry go round. What they didn't mention was that Norwegian police had already investigated the same people over three years, several months secretly and had not only been unable to prove the crimes suggested, but gone as far as stating they found it proven that the accused were innocent.

edm0nd 2y ago

Did you really make it as a rapper? Do you have a Spotify or Soundcloud or wat?

wtcactus 2y ago

Did it really shatter their self image, or it just made every Dane realize that the tabu their society created against speaking badly on the absurdity high taxation they face is actually felt by everyone that is a net contributor of their system? The middle class citizen in most of Europe is now paying more than 50% of their earnings to the state. I don’t believe a single one actually believes this is anything fair and many surely think it’s oppressive and a form of slavery. There are only 3 kinds of people that defend these outrageously high taxes: - the ones that are a net negative to the system - populist politicians - people that are indoctrinated to virtue signal about the theme, but that don’t actually believe in it (the ones in the video) We are really living in the Dictatorship of the Majority.

subpixel 2y ago

Why can’t I find this series anywhere? Even for, you know, download?

boruto 2y ago

I did not except the biker gang bandidos in Denmark is led by one Abrar raja. I don't know, as an Indian it just feels weird to hear a Pakistani name in that setting.

crossroadsguy 2y ago
And I, also as an Indian, am thinking how could they beat us to that. Why not an Indian ;-)