9 ms·

Goodbye Sweden

87 points by joegreen 11y ago

bebna 11y ago
Looks like a case of "never meet your heroes".
etiam 11y ago
Hyperbole. Some of the concerns are quite real but please don't mistake this for an accurate or balanced statement.
- vesinisa 11y ago
  Totally agree. This is essentially a political rant about the politics of Sweden and as such pretty exaggarating. I don't quite understand why it's trending on HN.
  - topynate 11y ago
    (meta) Anything that gets more comments than votes is known to be penalised by the HN ranking algo. Any highly political post like this tends to get more comments than votes, so most of the time it sinks. But, this article is about Sweden, which is outside of most readers' personal experience, so while people still upvote it from agreement with its politics, they don't jump in and start debating it quite so much. Eventually enough people will flag it or start commenting that it'll drop anyway (a mistake in the algorithm if you ask me, as it makes flags 'super-downvotes') but in the mean time...
- PopeOfNope 11y ago
  Stating statistical fact is now considered hyperbole?
leonk 11y ago
Nationalism, xenophobia, and even fascism seems to be on the rise in Sweden - as it is in the rest of Europe. (I'm basing this solely on media coverage and personal observation.) Posts like this show a poor attempt, with entirely subjective observations, to justify some of these attitudes. What's particularly scary is how the poster tries to disguise his views with a belief in socialist politics.
- superplussed 11y ago
  "The once homogenous population has been forever altered by a rapid and massive addition of people from vastly different cultures and value-systems. 26,8% of the population is now foreign-born or with at least one foreign-born parent, and the national census bureau estimates that some 150 000 per year will arrive to the country of just 9,8 million residents. There simply is no possible way to absorb and assimilate such volumes of people, period. Then you are merely creating ethnic enclaves, which due to incompatible language, culture and job skills become ghettos, which in turns brews crime, misery and extremism. Once the inflow has exceeded the capacity for absorbtion, further immigration only makes the problem worse. " I don't know the author, but this sounds like it belongs in a Pegida handbook.
  - sfjailbird 11y ago
    People here in Scandinavia are very worried because their cozy little village of a region is being infused with massively different cultures. Can't really blame them, and to be sure crime and social costs are higher as a result of immigration. That said, there is every reason to believe that these effects will diminish over time as immigrants start to integrate, even some beneficial effects are already showing. The problem is that 'integration' takes generations, and a very large influx jeopardizes this process. So the adverse effects remain very visible and most people are too short-sighted to take the long view. At the same time Europeans are so hypersensitive about 'racism' that the topic can't even be discussed in polite company (which leaves it to actual racists to even talk about the issues).
    - jerf 11y ago
      What a shocking expression of cultural imperialism and contempt. "Yes, your culture is being disrupted by massive immigration that I freely admit you can't assimilate very well, and is causing significant problems. But it's OK, go ahead and suffer through the negative effects that are frontloaded into your lifetime, because I'm sure that in a few generations, after you're dead, it will all work out." Are you really surprised that with a pitch like that that Europeans aren't falling over themselves to shape up? Especially if they lack your great and frankly historically baseless belief that their culture and their children are guaranteed to have a place in it?
Numberwang 11y ago
I blame aftonbladet.se for 80% of the crap going on in Sweden at the moment. They really have made a huge difference to the worse of the mental health of the nation.
- Profan 11y ago
  80% seems a bit on the heavy side, but I'll agree that them and Expressen are just cannons of useless vitriol.
mahouse 11y ago
Sweden is the best example of what happens when you have a completely liberal society. And, of course, it's bleeding to lots of places. And if you call them out, you are called racist.
- Trufa 11y ago
  Completely liberal?? Drinking is extremely expensive and regulated, drugs are strictly forbidden. It's full of subsidies and welfare in many aspects of life and society, not sure what you're talking about. It's very liberal in some senses, but calling it a completely liberal society is silly.
  - toyg 11y ago
    He's talking right-wing American English, where "liberal" strongly overlaps with "communist/socialist". Americans are fond of reverting long-standing European political conventions "just because". Historical Liberalism was all about free trade and low taxes? Let's use the term for the party that supports higher taxes and regulations. Red is for socialists, blue for conservatives? Let's swap them! How fun! (Not that it matters anyway, the entire European discourse is a million miles to the left of anything being discussed in the Land of the Free. The world is so weird.)
    - ajmurmann 11y ago
      The use of the word "liberal" in the US drove me nuts the first few months I lived in the US. I used to be identify myself as a "Liberal" in Germany and constantly felt misrepresented when people were talking about "liberals" in the US. Weird enough the term that comes closest to what I understand as European liberalism is libertarianism. So we had to throw in a syllable to make up for the word that's being used everywhere else having been hijacked. I wonder if some of this is fallout from the insane two party system.
  - kagamine 11y ago
    I think user mahouse has confused liberal with European socialism (as opposed to Soviet socialism) and is blaming socialist policies for the death of Sweden. There is some truth in that Scandinavia has gone too far in favor of the world's poor at the expense of it's own citizens (by truth, read: popular opinion). But let us not forget what Scandinavia was like (and still is) without the mass immigration of 'those brown people', it was an Aryan wet dream with everything for us and none for you. In many ways the modern Scandinavia is a hugely successful human accomplishment. While some people have less (of material things) many have had their lives improved enormously. For every "svarte neger" that hits the headlines as a rapist, 10000+ or more no longer have to live in poverty, in a war zone, under an oppressive regime. Shed a tear for the leftists who saw a way to make the world a better place one life at a time, made that happen with their country's wealth even at the expense (in limited financial terms) of some, and have created a positive liberal society striving to reach a worthwhile ideal. The old Sweden is dead, long live Sweden! What the blogger fails to address (and I haven't read more than that one post) is how any of this affects him, why this means he has to go back to the US and why any of us should give a shit about his tabloid fueled opinion.
allendoerfer 11y ago
The EU asylum system [0] is currently debated and fairness will be improved. It is not an easy task, considering the UK threatening to leave, but Sweden and Italy are treated unfairly by their partners here. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Regulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Regulation
- nazgob 11y ago
  This is an issue for Italy but not for Sweden. Sweden is not a border state.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rehtona 11y ago
I think some personality types are just prone to the attitude that everything's turning to shit. The same people that feel that the world is less safe today while statistics show the opposite. That doesn't mean he doesn't have some good points. Personally I'm particularly worried about the schooling system. The strain of immigration may be real, I don't know if it will be a net positive or negative in the end. To be safe I would prefer a more modest immigration policy. I think Sweden is following a larger trend in the west of a more polarizing society with higher income inequality and the slashing of the social safety net. I think globalization and new technology is to blame for this, not naive politicians.
cupofjoakim 11y ago
Swede here – I don't agree with this post. He does bring up some very good point about the real estate situation though. I do, however, think that it's wrong to say that Stefan Löfven is a 'corrupt yokel'. He's been in a very hard situation politically, where he's been forced to rule as a minority. The opposition is doing everything they can to make sure that he looks incompetent as a leader, as it's basically ensuring their next election victory. He's only been in office since september, so it's not actually that weird that not too much has been done. The whole post is filled with overstatements like this – and I'm kind of amused about the idea of escaping sweden because it left some of it's socialist ideals in the 60's to go to a country who despises socialism.
- mkohlmyr 11y ago
  They don't really have to try very hard. He comes across as deeply incompetent most chances he gets imho, he's been especially embarrassing in international circumstances. He should have gone the way of Juholt, if not for timing and a lack of decent alternatives. I left Sweden 5 years ago and I more or less agree with the post. It seems to have some undertones i don't entirely appreciate but on the whole it should serve as a necessary reality check if taken with a pinch of salt. It brings up many points that are worth discussing at length but which are essentially verboten in Swedish society. Even if it does overstate or sensationalize somewhat. I doubt he is leaving specifically because it has abandoned some socialist ideals. For me it has more to do with not wanting to be part of the mass delusion, not wanting to constantly fit your opinions to an ever narrowing hallway of acceptable ideas and speech (not because they couldn't but because they shouldn't have to). At least when you don't live there you don't have to see and live it day in and day out. If anything I have grown more fond of Sweden and the ideals it represents since moving, because I am not forced to come to terms with its realities on a daily basis.
  - tjogin 11y ago
    Another Swede, I agree with a lot of the points, especially how the current government can't help but make themselves look foolish. But, free health care, free education, almost no religious zealots what so ever, zero religious impact on lawmaking, a relatively inclusive society, etc, makes Sweden one of the better places to live in the world, imho. Obviously, I'm biased. I too find it rather weird that someone who yearns for more socialism would move from Sweden to the US. :)
ExpiredLink 11y ago
Where is he emigrating to?
- GordonS 11y ago
  USA (it does say in the post :)
  - ExpiredLink 11y ago
    I overlooked it because of the "lying scumbag" remark.
- rehtona 11y ago
  A country without any problems or immigrants: the USA!
  - happyscrappy 11y ago
    Yeah, wait until he finds out there are 12 million undocumented immigrants.
eivarv 11y ago
The same old xenophobe right-wing populist rhetoric we hear in Norway as well (though Sweden has admittedly met with larger issues than us). "Yes, there was a heavy blanket of socialism and collectivist values covering everything, but there was a core of pragmatism beneath the redness." Redness? Come on.
scdoshi 11y ago
the xenophobia in this rant basically amounts to "sweden for swedes", but it's more striking when you read this on the About page: Please note that I enforce a zero-tolerance policy towards racism, violence and extremist comments. Judging other people by the color of their skin is manifestly absurd. So please don’t submit such comments here Edit: removed some sarcasm
- veeti 11y ago
  Where is he "judging people by the color of their skin"? Exactly what is xenophobic in this post?
  - rmxt 11y ago
    Did you miss these lines? "Jihadist Trojan horses are flowing through the porous border along with the tens of thousands ID-less refugees. But what makes me the most pessimistic about Sweden’s future is how the social fabric itself has been undermined." If the "social fabric" of a country amounts to it's prior ethnic homogeneity, then decrying it's unraveling amounts to being scared of people coming from the outside. People which, in the case of Sweden, also tend to have a darker skin tone than the average citizen 50 years ago. This, in conjunction with the suggestion that Muslim immigrants tend to be "Jihadist Trojan horses" makes it a very thinly veiled Islamophobic piece.
    - draugadrotten 11y ago
      > "Jihadist Trojan horses are flowing through the porous border along with the tens of thousands ID-less refugees. It is true that 9 out of 10 that applies for Asylum in Sweden have no ID. Source: http://www.svd.se/nio-av-tio-saknar-id-handling http://www.svd.se/nio-av-tio-saknar-id-handling
      - rmxt 11y ago
        Nope, that's a willful misreading: "Statistik från årsredovisningen som släpps i dag visar att endast tio procent initialt har godkända id-handlingar som godkänds av verket." Only 10% had ID which were approved on the first go around. It's not clear what portion of the 90% had "no ID" and what portion merely had insufficient ID on their first attempt. Your reading would make it seem like ALL of these immigrants are shady characters out of a cartoon, trying to fake their way into the country.
Pandabob 11y ago
Funny how, as a Finn, the more international vibe of Sweden is one of the main reasons why I'm planning on immigrating there after graduation.
Paul_S 11y ago
I don't agree with the author on almost anything but I wholeheartedly agree that voting with your feet is the only type of voting that brings immediate results. Voting with your feet > voting with your wallet > voting though a ballot box every 5 years (you should still do that though as it costs you nothing!)
antocv 11y ago
Sweden will not miss you.
vasilipupkin 11y ago
"crumbling rail system"? Going to Sweden on vacation. Please tell me it's BS :)
- Trufa 11y ago
  Seriously, Sweden is an amazing country, so beautiful. People are so welcoming there, it's incredibly safe and easy to go around. Everybody speaks English and is willing to help. Some swedes that were mingling with some of this horrible immigrants the blogger was talking about where kind enough, to invite me to their place to sleep. Don't guide yourself by anything on this article, I'm surprised it got so far. Go to Sweden and enjoy that amazing country.
- dagw 11y ago
  Crumbling is not the same as crumbled. There is an increasing problem with maintenance that has been neglected over the years and they have been plagued by some embarrassing and high profiled delays over the past year or two. They've also been a bit slow with replacing some trains, but on the whole it still works well enough. Better than the Italians, not as good as the Japanese basically.
- beerbajay 11y ago
  It's infinity times better than the US rail system. It's "crumbling" because the system has been split up into smaller companies with some parts having been contracted out to private companies all of which now fight over whose responsibility it is to fix certain parts of the infrastructure.
brisance 11y ago
As a Singaporean, I laugh at these low immigration numbers. 150K per year out of 9.8 million residents, that's a drop in the ocean. According to the government, the total population of Singapore is 5.26M. Out of this, 3.27M are citizens, with 540K Permanent Residents and 1.46M non-residents. In other words, about 2M or 38% of the population were not born in Singapore.[1] Note that this is a conservative estimate since an immigrant can become a Singapore Citizen after 2 years as a Permanent Resident. And yes, obviously there is great concern because a lot of foreigners do not assimilate well either.[2] [1] http://population.sg/resources/population-composition/ http://population.sg/resources/population-composition/ [2] http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/rapid-growth-singapores-immigrant-population-brings-policy-challenges/ http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/rapid-growth-singapor...
- errtnsd 11y ago
  OP mentioned 26.8% for Sweden. That is not low compared to Singapore.
  - dagw 11y ago
    That's 26.8% that either weren't born in the country _or have at least one foreign-born parent_. That's a pretty significant difference. I was born in Sweden and can trace my direct Swedish ancestry back at least 400 years and I still fall into that 26.8%.
    - _delirium 11y ago
      Fwiw, some foreign-born numbers: 15% of the Swedish population is foreign-born. Of those, about 1/3 were born in another EU country, who are immigrants but not really what the current controversy is about (the largest single foreign-born group in Sweden are from Finland, constituting about 1.5% of the population). The remaining 10%, born outside the EU, are what "immigration politics" is mainly talking about. (The comparable figure for Denmark is a bit lower; around 5-6% of the population are born outside the EU.)
- GordonS 11y ago
Dewie3 11y ago
I couldn't manage to find one single positive article in this report[1]. So it's good for they that they got the opportunity to move (apparently they moved back for family reasons). [1] Really? Not even an article about a particularly delicious meal of köttbullar?
cyphunk 11y ago
you had me at "Jihadist Trojan horses are flowing through the porous border" what a pile of crap
holgersindbaek 11y ago
Dane here... we look at Sweden and sigh. The once prosperous and sensible country seems to have lost it. It's all about being "good" for other peoples money and it seems like there's a sort of self-hatred amongst ethnic Swedes. If you want to see the pinnacle of multiculturalism, feast your eyes on Sweden. I'll give it 10-20 years and then I think we will have a thorough breakdown in Swedish.
- fyrus 11y ago
  Swede here. You nailed it.
  - cpach 11y ago
    LOL. Did you sign up here just to say that?
mattlutze 11y ago
Now, to be clear, it is my opinion that modest immigration is healthy for society and beneficial for trade, cultural development and so forth. Protectionism as a concept is counter-productive, while free trade and the ability for skilled labor to go where they’re in demand is beneficial for everyone. Having said that, what Sweden is doing is something completely different. The once homogenous population has been forever altered by a rapid and massive addition of people from vastly different cultures and value-systems. tl;dr: Protectionism is bad. Sweden should be protectionist and homogenous. ... if the rest of the article is like this I'm not sure of the value of it.
mhomde 11y ago
Everyone has their own view and cling to their reality with confirmation bias and cherry picking. The optimists say we'll work out any problems, this is a transition period, the complainers are exaggerating and "everything's fine where I live" The pessimists will say things are only getting worse and that the optimists are ignoring real problems. I live in Stockholm and try very hard to have a nuanced view. Unfortunately, more and more, I see the pessimists view. It isn't as bad as the worst pessimists are saying, but it's also far from as good as the optimists are claiming. Sweden is a 2/3 parts tenderizing frog that's ignoring that the temperature is rising and 1/3 that's boiling. If we see past the actual issues, which are complex and multifaceted, there's a number of trends in Sweden that's deeply disturbing 1) The level of discourse is only getting worse and more polarized. Populism, emotions and who can make most noise wins over any rational nuanced debate. 2) The quality of politicians are becoming more corrupt and separated from their voters, while resorting to pandering to whatever gives them votes, money and power. It's frightening to see the lack of competence in any party right now. 3) A naive sense of security and refusal of many Swedes to believe things are getting worse and that we are facing real problems. We don't seem to value what we always had and can't conceive we'll ever lose it. Even though education, pensions and care is going down the drain and crime rates rapidly rising. Someone will twist or focus on some minor facet to state that's not the case at all. Everyone will like and tweet that article clinging to the feeling that we're still great. 4) Inability to treat root causes rather than symptoms. 5) A toxic media climate dominated by "feel good" articles and vicious attacks on any dissidents. 6) Exaggerating and focusing on the wrong topics. We can have a turbulent feminist debate in all the newspapers about manspreading in the subway, while ignoring issues like cultural violence against women, because it isn't "political correct" to even discuss that topic. Sweden's problems are not only Sweden's... but symptomatic of the problems we're facing in general in Europe and the world: Inability to deal with rampant complexity and globalization, a financial system predicated on unsustainable expansion, booming population and third-world poverty meeting first world abundance. We just want to feel like good people in a world where it's more and more everyone for themselves... Just saying all this makes me depressed, think I'll go back to believing we're awesome.
stefantalpalaru 11y ago
Somehow I don't think that Sweden will miss a white supremacist. I do worry about the US, though. This nutjob will most likely be armed over there.
karmazeroed 11y ago
There are valid points in this post, eg http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-diverse-cities-are-often-the-most-segregated/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-diverse-cities-... I thought he could almost be talking about London. Diversity is not integration. Lack of integration creates polarisation. A single example: different nationalities have different levels of education, therefore different incomes, therefore different social status, and different accommodation budgets, therefore geographic limitations, and common solutions. In my area, watching east africans try to steal phones off tables in coffee shops is so run of the mill it's boring. Same nationalities, same activities - community effects. Some places in London try to resolve such a situation by mixing up affordable housing with higher-income housing. The situation is then exacerbated, as the higher income people then have to live with what is in their culture unpleasant behaviour. Of course, everything just gets dismissed as racism, when it's in fact about culture, not race, and not applicable to all cultures. The dismissal resolves nothing. If we were talking about moving into the amazon, people would be outraged at the displacement of the locals, but somehow western cultures don't matter, or some sort of penance has to be paid for sins of some previous generations. Until the liberals learn to have a discussion instead of flippant dismissals and name calling, nothing will be resolved, and europe's moving to the right shows that their is something that needs to be resolved.
- ajmurmann 11y ago
  I have to agree. I am very concerned by both what's happening in Europe and by concerns being dismissed as racism or xenophobia. I am glad there are others who have a level headed view of this. It's really hard to talk about this topic, because so much of the associated vocabulary has been taken over by actual racists in the past and sets off all kinds of alarm bells.
spanishcow 11y ago
I didn't knew that ycombinator allowed such xenophobic views on their site. This is an example of some guy that thinks that only the pure swedish people is to be trusted. I'm horrified at what Hacker News can become...
- cyphunk 11y ago
  While I agree the article is trash I also think having it posted on HN provides value as the comments and reaction show clearly how unwelcome xenophobia is.
  - PopeOfNope 11y ago
    All it's shown me is how politically biased the readership here is.
norswap 11y ago
This reads exactly like Atlas Shrugged, complete with politicians bankrupting the system, unwarranted charity, non-objective scholars and a collapsing railroad system. I don't know of the situation in Sweden, but I kept wondering if the post was satire. It seemed too one-sided to be totally honest. And then things like "most of the west had a housing crash" don't increase your confidence in the writing.
megalodon 11y ago
Surreptitiously racist and full of prejudice. Thank you for leaving our country.
cpach 11y ago
This article is not relevant for HN. Flagged.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  As evidenced by the 100 comments by interested HNers?
  - cpach 11y ago
    As per the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Did this article really gratify your intellectual curiosity?
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      First criterion, front and center on that page: "Anything that good hackers would find interesting"
      - cpach 11y ago
        Being a HN user for over seven years, I’m very aware of that criterion. IMO most political discussions is a detriment to this site. But obviously there hasn’t been enough user flags to kill this submission. Too bad! Edit: BTW, you didn’t answer my question :-/
        JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        Doesn't matter what I like; if we flagged every article somebody didn't like, there'd be no HN.

Goodbye Sweden

87 points by joegreen 11y ago

bebna 11y ago

Looks like a case of "never meet your heroes".

etiam 11y ago

Hyperbole. Some of the concerns are quite real but please don't mistake this for an accurate or balanced statement.

vesinisa 11y ago
Totally agree. This is essentially a political rant about the politics of Sweden and as such pretty exaggarating. I don't quite understand why it's trending on HN.
- topynate 11y ago
  (meta) Anything that gets more comments than votes is known to be penalised by the HN ranking algo. Any highly political post like this tends to get more comments than votes, so most of the time it sinks. But, this article is about Sweden, which is outside of most readers' personal experience, so while people still upvote it from agreement with its politics, they don't jump in and start debating it quite so much. Eventually enough people will flag it or start commenting that it'll drop anyway (a mistake in the algorithm if you ask me, as it makes flags 'super-downvotes') but in the mean time...
PopeOfNope 11y ago
Stating statistical fact is now considered hyperbole?

leonk 11y ago

Nationalism, xenophobia, and even fascism seems to be on the rise in Sweden - as it is in the rest of Europe. (I'm basing this solely on media coverage and personal observation.) Posts like this show a poor attempt, with entirely subjective observations, to justify some of these attitudes. What's particularly scary is how the poster tries to disguise his views with a belief in socialist politics.

superplussed 11y ago
"The once homogenous population has been forever altered by a rapid and massive addition of people from vastly different cultures and value-systems. 26,8% of the population is now foreign-born or with at least one foreign-born parent, and the national census bureau estimates that some 150 000 per year will arrive to the country of just 9,8 million residents. There simply is no possible way to absorb and assimilate such volumes of people, period. Then you are merely creating ethnic enclaves, which due to incompatible language, culture and job skills become ghettos, which in turns brews crime, misery and extremism. Once the inflow has exceeded the capacity for absorbtion, further immigration only makes the problem worse. " I don't know the author, but this sounds like it belongs in a Pegida handbook.
- sfjailbird 11y ago
  People here in Scandinavia are very worried because their cozy little village of a region is being infused with massively different cultures. Can't really blame them, and to be sure crime and social costs are higher as a result of immigration. That said, there is every reason to believe that these effects will diminish over time as immigrants start to integrate, even some beneficial effects are already showing. The problem is that 'integration' takes generations, and a very large influx jeopardizes this process. So the adverse effects remain very visible and most people are too short-sighted to take the long view. At the same time Europeans are so hypersensitive about 'racism' that the topic can't even be discussed in polite company (which leaves it to actual racists to even talk about the issues).
  - jerf 11y ago
    What a shocking expression of cultural imperialism and contempt. "Yes, your culture is being disrupted by massive immigration that I freely admit you can't assimilate very well, and is causing significant problems. But it's OK, go ahead and suffer through the negative effects that are frontloaded into your lifetime, because I'm sure that in a few generations, after you're dead, it will all work out." Are you really surprised that with a pitch like that that Europeans aren't falling over themselves to shape up? Especially if they lack your great and frankly historically baseless belief that their culture and their children are guaranteed to have a place in it?

Numberwang 11y ago

I blame aftonbladet.se for 80% of the crap going on in Sweden at the moment. They really have made a huge difference to the worse of the mental health of the nation.

Profan 11y ago
80% seems a bit on the heavy side, but I'll agree that them and Expressen are just cannons of useless vitriol.

mahouse 11y ago

Sweden is the best example of what happens when you have a completely liberal society. And, of course, it's bleeding to lots of places. And if you call them out, you are called racist.

Trufa 11y ago
Completely liberal?? Drinking is extremely expensive and regulated, drugs are strictly forbidden. It's full of subsidies and welfare in many aspects of life and society, not sure what you're talking about. It's very liberal in some senses, but calling it a completely liberal society is silly.
- toyg 11y ago
  He's talking right-wing American English, where "liberal" strongly overlaps with "communist/socialist". Americans are fond of reverting long-standing European political conventions "just because". Historical Liberalism was all about free trade and low taxes? Let's use the term for the party that supports higher taxes and regulations. Red is for socialists, blue for conservatives? Let's swap them! How fun! (Not that it matters anyway, the entire European discourse is a million miles to the left of anything being discussed in the Land of the Free. The world is so weird.)
  - ajmurmann 11y ago
    The use of the word "liberal" in the US drove me nuts the first few months I lived in the US. I used to be identify myself as a "Liberal" in Germany and constantly felt misrepresented when people were talking about "liberals" in the US. Weird enough the term that comes closest to what I understand as European liberalism is libertarianism. So we had to throw in a syllable to make up for the word that's being used everywhere else having been hijacked. I wonder if some of this is fallout from the insane two party system.
- kagamine 11y ago
  I think user mahouse has confused liberal with European socialism (as opposed to Soviet socialism) and is blaming socialist policies for the death of Sweden. There is some truth in that Scandinavia has gone too far in favor of the world's poor at the expense of it's own citizens (by truth, read: popular opinion). But let us not forget what Scandinavia was like (and still is) without the mass immigration of 'those brown people', it was an Aryan wet dream with everything for us and none for you. In many ways the modern Scandinavia is a hugely successful human accomplishment. While some people have less (of material things) many have had their lives improved enormously. For every "svarte neger" that hits the headlines as a rapist, 10000+ or more no longer have to live in poverty, in a war zone, under an oppressive regime. Shed a tear for the leftists who saw a way to make the world a better place one life at a time, made that happen with their country's wealth even at the expense (in limited financial terms) of some, and have created a positive liberal society striving to reach a worthwhile ideal. The old Sweden is dead, long live Sweden! What the blogger fails to address (and I haven't read more than that one post) is how any of this affects him, why this means he has to go back to the US and why any of us should give a shit about his tabloid fueled opinion.

allendoerfer 11y ago

The EU asylum system [0] is currently debated and fairness will be improved. It is not an easy task, considering the UK threatening to leave, but Sweden and Italy are treated unfairly by their partners here. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Regulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Regulation

nazgob 11y ago
This is an issue for Italy but not for Sweden. Sweden is not a border state.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

rehtona 11y ago

I think some personality types are just prone to the attitude that everything's turning to shit. The same people that feel that the world is less safe today while statistics show the opposite. That doesn't mean he doesn't have some good points. Personally I'm particularly worried about the schooling system. The strain of immigration may be real, I don't know if it will be a net positive or negative in the end. To be safe I would prefer a more modest immigration policy. I think Sweden is following a larger trend in the west of a more polarizing society with higher income inequality and the slashing of the social safety net. I think globalization and new technology is to blame for this, not naive politicians.

cupofjoakim 11y ago

Swede here – I don't agree with this post. He does bring up some very good point about the real estate situation though. I do, however, think that it's wrong to say that Stefan Löfven is a 'corrupt yokel'. He's been in a very hard situation politically, where he's been forced to rule as a minority. The opposition is doing everything they can to make sure that he looks incompetent as a leader, as it's basically ensuring their next election victory. He's only been in office since september, so it's not actually that weird that not too much has been done. The whole post is filled with overstatements like this – and I'm kind of amused about the idea of escaping sweden because it left some of it's socialist ideals in the 60's to go to a country who despises socialism.

mkohlmyr 11y ago
They don't really have to try very hard. He comes across as deeply incompetent most chances he gets imho, he's been especially embarrassing in international circumstances. He should have gone the way of Juholt, if not for timing and a lack of decent alternatives. I left Sweden 5 years ago and I more or less agree with the post. It seems to have some undertones i don't entirely appreciate but on the whole it should serve as a necessary reality check if taken with a pinch of salt. It brings up many points that are worth discussing at length but which are essentially verboten in Swedish society. Even if it does overstate or sensationalize somewhat. I doubt he is leaving specifically because it has abandoned some socialist ideals. For me it has more to do with not wanting to be part of the mass delusion, not wanting to constantly fit your opinions to an ever narrowing hallway of acceptable ideas and speech (not because they couldn't but because they shouldn't have to). At least when you don't live there you don't have to see and live it day in and day out. If anything I have grown more fond of Sweden and the ideals it represents since moving, because I am not forced to come to terms with its realities on a daily basis.
- tjogin 11y ago
  Another Swede, I agree with a lot of the points, especially how the current government can't help but make themselves look foolish. But, free health care, free education, almost no religious zealots what so ever, zero religious impact on lawmaking, a relatively inclusive society, etc, makes Sweden one of the better places to live in the world, imho. Obviously, I'm biased. I too find it rather weird that someone who yearns for more socialism would move from Sweden to the US. :)

ExpiredLink 11y ago

Where is he emigrating to?

GordonS 11y ago
USA (it does say in the post :)
- ExpiredLink 11y ago
  I overlooked it because of the "lying scumbag" remark.
rehtona 11y ago
A country without any problems or immigrants: the USA!
- happyscrappy 11y ago
  Yeah, wait until he finds out there are 12 million undocumented immigrants.

eivarv 11y ago

The same old xenophobe right-wing populist rhetoric we hear in Norway as well (though Sweden has admittedly met with larger issues than us). "Yes, there was a heavy blanket of socialism and collectivist values covering everything, but there was a core of pragmatism beneath the redness." Redness? Come on.

scdoshi 11y ago

the xenophobia in this rant basically amounts to "sweden for swedes", but it's more striking when you read this on the About page: Please note that I enforce a zero-tolerance policy towards racism, violence and extremist comments. Judging other people by the color of their skin is manifestly absurd. So please don’t submit such comments here Edit: removed some sarcasm

veeti 11y ago
Where is he "judging people by the color of their skin"? Exactly what is xenophobic in this post?
- rmxt 11y ago
  Did you miss these lines? "Jihadist Trojan horses are flowing through the porous border along with the tens of thousands ID-less refugees. But what makes me the most pessimistic about Sweden’s future is how the social fabric itself has been undermined." If the "social fabric" of a country amounts to it's prior ethnic homogeneity, then decrying it's unraveling amounts to being scared of people coming from the outside. People which, in the case of Sweden, also tend to have a darker skin tone than the average citizen 50 years ago. This, in conjunction with the suggestion that Muslim immigrants tend to be "Jihadist Trojan horses" makes it a very thinly veiled Islamophobic piece.
  - draugadrotten 11y ago
    > "Jihadist Trojan horses are flowing through the porous border along with the tens of thousands ID-less refugees. It is true that 9 out of 10 that applies for Asylum in Sweden have no ID. Source: http://www.svd.se/nio-av-tio-saknar-id-handling http://www.svd.se/nio-av-tio-saknar-id-handling
    - rmxt 11y ago
      Nope, that's a willful misreading: "Statistik från årsredovisningen som släpps i dag visar att endast tio procent initialt har godkända id-handlingar som godkänds av verket." Only 10% had ID which were approved on the first go around. It's not clear what portion of the 90% had "no ID" and what portion merely had insufficient ID on their first attempt. Your reading would make it seem like ALL of these immigrants are shady characters out of a cartoon, trying to fake their way into the country.

Pandabob 11y ago

Funny how, as a Finn, the more international vibe of Sweden is one of the main reasons why I'm planning on immigrating there after graduation.

Paul_S 11y ago

I don't agree with the author on almost anything but I wholeheartedly agree that voting with your feet is the only type of voting that brings immediate results. Voting with your feet > voting with your wallet > voting though a ballot box every 5 years (you should still do that though as it costs you nothing!)

antocv 11y ago

Sweden will not miss you.

vasilipupkin 11y ago

"crumbling rail system"? Going to Sweden on vacation. Please tell me it's BS :)

Trufa 11y ago
Seriously, Sweden is an amazing country, so beautiful. People are so welcoming there, it's incredibly safe and easy to go around. Everybody speaks English and is willing to help. Some swedes that were mingling with some of this horrible immigrants the blogger was talking about where kind enough, to invite me to their place to sleep. Don't guide yourself by anything on this article, I'm surprised it got so far. Go to Sweden and enjoy that amazing country.
dagw 11y ago
Crumbling is not the same as crumbled. There is an increasing problem with maintenance that has been neglected over the years and they have been plagued by some embarrassing and high profiled delays over the past year or two. They've also been a bit slow with replacing some trains, but on the whole it still works well enough. Better than the Italians, not as good as the Japanese basically.
beerbajay 11y ago
It's infinity times better than the US rail system. It's "crumbling" because the system has been split up into smaller companies with some parts having been contracted out to private companies all of which now fight over whose responsibility it is to fix certain parts of the infrastructure.

brisance 11y ago

As a Singaporean, I laugh at these low immigration numbers. 150K per year out of 9.8 million residents, that's a drop in the ocean. According to the government, the total population of Singapore is 5.26M. Out of this, 3.27M are citizens, with 540K Permanent Residents and 1.46M non-residents. In other words, about 2M or 38% of the population were not born in Singapore.[1] Note that this is a conservative estimate since an immigrant can become a Singapore Citizen after 2 years as a Permanent Resident. And yes, obviously there is great concern because a lot of foreigners do not assimilate well either.[2] [1] http://population.sg/resources/population-composition/ http://population.sg/resources/population-composition/ [2] http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/rapid-growth-singapores-immigrant-population-brings-policy-challenges/ http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/rapid-growth-singapor...

errtnsd 11y ago
OP mentioned 26.8% for Sweden. That is not low compared to Singapore.
- dagw 11y ago
  That's 26.8% that either weren't born in the country _or have at least one foreign-born parent_. That's a pretty significant difference. I was born in Sweden and can trace my direct Swedish ancestry back at least 400 years and I still fall into that 26.8%.
  - _delirium 11y ago
    Fwiw, some foreign-born numbers: 15% of the Swedish population is foreign-born. Of those, about 1/3 were born in another EU country, who are immigrants but not really what the current controversy is about (the largest single foreign-born group in Sweden are from Finland, constituting about 1.5% of the population). The remaining 10%, born outside the EU, are what "immigration politics" is mainly talking about. (The comparable figure for Denmark is a bit lower; around 5-6% of the population are born outside the EU.)
GordonS 11y ago

Dewie3 11y ago

I couldn't manage to find one single positive article in this report[1]. So it's good for they that they got the opportunity to move (apparently they moved back for family reasons). [1] Really? Not even an article about a particularly delicious meal of köttbullar?

cyphunk 11y ago

you had me at "Jihadist Trojan horses are flowing through the porous border" what a pile of crap

holgersindbaek 11y ago

Dane here... we look at Sweden and sigh. The once prosperous and sensible country seems to have lost it. It's all about being "good" for other peoples money and it seems like there's a sort of self-hatred amongst ethnic Swedes. If you want to see the pinnacle of multiculturalism, feast your eyes on Sweden. I'll give it 10-20 years and then I think we will have a thorough breakdown in Swedish.

fyrus 11y ago
Swede here. You nailed it.
- cpach 11y ago
  LOL. Did you sign up here just to say that?

mattlutze 11y ago

Now, to be clear, it is my opinion that modest immigration is healthy for society and beneficial for trade, cultural development and so forth. Protectionism as a concept is counter-productive, while free trade and the ability for skilled labor to go where they’re in demand is beneficial for everyone. Having said that, what Sweden is doing is something completely different. The once homogenous population has been forever altered by a rapid and massive addition of people from vastly different cultures and value-systems. tl;dr: Protectionism is bad. Sweden should be protectionist and homogenous. ... if the rest of the article is like this I'm not sure of the value of it.

mhomde 11y ago

Everyone has their own view and cling to their reality with confirmation bias and cherry picking. The optimists say we'll work out any problems, this is a transition period, the complainers are exaggerating and "everything's fine where I live" The pessimists will say things are only getting worse and that the optimists are ignoring real problems. I live in Stockholm and try very hard to have a nuanced view. Unfortunately, more and more, I see the pessimists view. It isn't as bad as the worst pessimists are saying, but it's also far from as good as the optimists are claiming. Sweden is a 2/3 parts tenderizing frog that's ignoring that the temperature is rising and 1/3 that's boiling. If we see past the actual issues, which are complex and multifaceted, there's a number of trends in Sweden that's deeply disturbing 1) The level of discourse is only getting worse and more polarized. Populism, emotions and who can make most noise wins over any rational nuanced debate. 2) The quality of politicians are becoming more corrupt and separated from their voters, while resorting to pandering to whatever gives them votes, money and power. It's frightening to see the lack of competence in any party right now. 3) A naive sense of security and refusal of many Swedes to believe things are getting worse and that we are facing real problems. We don't seem to value what we always had and can't conceive we'll ever lose it. Even though education, pensions and care is going down the drain and crime rates rapidly rising. Someone will twist or focus on some minor facet to state that's not the case at all. Everyone will like and tweet that article clinging to the feeling that we're still great. 4) Inability to treat root causes rather than symptoms. 5) A toxic media climate dominated by "feel good" articles and vicious attacks on any dissidents. 6) Exaggerating and focusing on the wrong topics. We can have a turbulent feminist debate in all the newspapers about manspreading in the subway, while ignoring issues like cultural violence against women, because it isn't "political correct" to even discuss that topic. Sweden's problems are not only Sweden's... but symptomatic of the problems we're facing in general in Europe and the world: Inability to deal with rampant complexity and globalization, a financial system predicated on unsustainable expansion, booming population and third-world poverty meeting first world abundance. We just want to feel like good people in a world where it's more and more everyone for themselves... Just saying all this makes me depressed, think I'll go back to believing we're awesome.

stefantalpalaru 11y ago

Somehow I don't think that Sweden will miss a white supremacist. I do worry about the US, though. This nutjob will most likely be armed over there.

karmazeroed 11y ago

There are valid points in this post, eg http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-diverse-cities-are-often-the-most-segregated/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-diverse-cities-... I thought he could almost be talking about London. Diversity is not integration. Lack of integration creates polarisation. A single example: different nationalities have different levels of education, therefore different incomes, therefore different social status, and different accommodation budgets, therefore geographic limitations, and common solutions. In my area, watching east africans try to steal phones off tables in coffee shops is so run of the mill it's boring. Same nationalities, same activities - community effects. Some places in London try to resolve such a situation by mixing up affordable housing with higher-income housing. The situation is then exacerbated, as the higher income people then have to live with what is in their culture unpleasant behaviour. Of course, everything just gets dismissed as racism, when it's in fact about culture, not race, and not applicable to all cultures. The dismissal resolves nothing. If we were talking about moving into the amazon, people would be outraged at the displacement of the locals, but somehow western cultures don't matter, or some sort of penance has to be paid for sins of some previous generations. Until the liberals learn to have a discussion instead of flippant dismissals and name calling, nothing will be resolved, and europe's moving to the right shows that their is something that needs to be resolved.

ajmurmann 11y ago
I have to agree. I am very concerned by both what's happening in Europe and by concerns being dismissed as racism or xenophobia. I am glad there are others who have a level headed view of this. It's really hard to talk about this topic, because so much of the associated vocabulary has been taken over by actual racists in the past and sets off all kinds of alarm bells.

spanishcow 11y ago

I didn't knew that ycombinator allowed such xenophobic views on their site. This is an example of some guy that thinks that only the pure swedish people is to be trusted. I'm horrified at what Hacker News can become...

cyphunk 11y ago
While I agree the article is trash I also think having it posted on HN provides value as the comments and reaction show clearly how unwelcome xenophobia is.
- PopeOfNope 11y ago
  All it's shown me is how politically biased the readership here is.

norswap 11y ago

This reads exactly like Atlas Shrugged, complete with politicians bankrupting the system, unwarranted charity, non-objective scholars and a collapsing railroad system. I don't know of the situation in Sweden, but I kept wondering if the post was satire. It seemed too one-sided to be totally honest. And then things like "most of the west had a housing crash" don't increase your confidence in the writing.

megalodon 11y ago

Surreptitiously racist and full of prejudice. Thank you for leaving our country.

cpach 11y ago

This article is not relevant for HN. Flagged.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
As evidenced by the 100 comments by interested HNers?
- cpach 11y ago
  As per the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Did this article really gratify your intellectual curiosity?
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    First criterion, front and center on that page: "Anything that good hackers would find interesting"
    - cpach 11y ago
      Being a HN user for over seven years, I’m very aware of that criterion. IMO most political discussions is a detriment to this site. But obviously there hasn’t been enough user flags to kill this submission. Too bad! Edit: BTW, you didn’t answer my question :-/
      - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        Doesn't matter what I like; if we flagged every article somebody didn't like, there'd be no HN.