The Big Bad Swedish Politics & News Thread

[Famous Mortimer]

FI are GreenLeft.

The Alternative is D66.

More in detail, the The Alternative is more or less openly bourgeois people. FI is bourgeois people who are in denial about/self hating for being bourgeois.

[Famous Mortimer]

I would have thought that the Socialist People's Party would line up pretty neatly with the Dutch Socialist Party and the Swedish Left Party. Are you saying that with the Workerites gone they are a more intersectional-y rump?

I would say FI are like GreenLeft because they both flirt with liberal economics and are very intersectional-y.

I would say the Red-Greens are roughly equivalent to the FI and GreenLeft, minus the economics part. I assume they must still be pretty hardcore because of all the Communists.

but yeah, Radicals are D66, that's pretty dead on.

I still say The Alternative is also basically D66, and therefore totally redundant and unnecessary.

[Famous Mortimer]

I was using intersectionalist as a nice way to say Social Justice Warriors. I would lump the Feminist Initiative, Red-Greens, and GreenLeft into that category partially because they are all so weak on integration, as you pointed out. Radical feminism...unless you're a minority, then whatever you want, it's "your culture".

How is the Danish SSP on integration, by the way? I thought they were more akin to the Dutch SP.

[Famous Mortimer]

Back to Sweden, I have a question. I'm sure all of you will say that a coalition with ANY far-right party, even just giving outside support, is impossible in Sweden right now.

Eventually it will happen though, it's going to be hard though because the Swedish Democrats are so much more extreme than the Danish People's Party or the Progress Party, with their neo-Nazi past.

Is there any chance that some of the more moderate, or at least less tainted, people within the SD break out and establish a new party that might be more suitable for a coalition?

[Famous Mortimer]

Back to Sweden, I have a question. I'm sure all of you will say that a coalition with ANY far-right party, even just giving outside support, is impossible in Sweden right now.

Eventually it will happen though, it's going to be hard though because the Swedish Democrats are so much more extreme than the Danish People's Party or the Progress Party, with their neo-Nazi past.

Is there any chance that some of the more moderate, or at least less tainted, people within the SD break out and establish a new party that might be more suitable for a coalition?

SD is not really to the right of DPP. It i much more a matter of differences in perception off such parties and the political culture in the two countries in general than ideology. Of course the toxic roots of SD reinforces this difference, but they are not the main reason for it.

Even with the far right being somewhat normalized in Denmark, I still don't think the Liberals would ever rely on support from a party with neo-Nazi origins the way they rely on the DPP now.

[Famous Mortimer]

Randomly jumping in here with two questions:

1.) Why is Stockholm a stronghold of the center-right?


2.) When I was visiting Vadstena, Odeshog, and Urnatur in May, I met two local green politicians. How strong is the Green Party in Sweden? Is it common for them to be in rural areas and small towns?

Also, we had a talk with the man who owns the treehouse hotel at Urnatur (he's one of the politicians we met) and told us he resented many Greens from the city because they believe that people should all live in cities, while he advocates that people live in the country. How strong is this divide in the Swedish Green Party?


Also, why the f*** do you people not export Kina Wafers??? They are now my favorite chocolate and they're not available in the U.S.

That is just wrong on so many levels.

1. Apart from recently with the SD, Swedish politics has a strong consensus on social issues and is divided mostly alongside economic lines. City people are rich. Imagine if New York was voting solely on economics and rural Kentucky was doing the same.

2. The Green party mostly has strength in cities and university areas but they exist elsewhere too. A former party leader made them biggest party in rural northern Kalix. The Green party generally does badly in rural areas for the reason you cited so I wouldn't call it a strong divide within the party.

The Kina wafers are under fire for racism, I believe, so that may not help.

I get what you're saying but New York isn't the best example since it's actually about 60% poor minorities and even among the Whites, a good chunk are either poor White ethnics living way out in the middle of nowhere in far west Brooklyn or hipsters making $10 an hour but getting by only because they don't have kids.

[Famous Mortimer]

Most of the former Soviet Bloc countries have a similar left-wing rural/right-wing cities divide. Same reason?

[Famous Mortimer]

Randomly jumping in here with two questions:

1.) Why is Stockholm a stronghold of the center-right?


2.) When I was visiting Vadstena, Odeshog, and Urnatur in May, I met two local green politicians. How strong is the Green Party in Sweden? Is it common for them to be in rural areas and small towns?

Also, we had a talk with the man who owns the treehouse hotel at Urnatur (he's one of the politicians we met) and told us he resented many Greens from the city because they believe that people should all live in cities, while he advocates that people live in the country. How strong is this divide in the Swedish Green Party?


Also, why the f*** do you people not export Kina Wafers??? They are now my favorite chocolate and they're not available in the U.S.

That is just wrong on so many levels.

1. Apart from recently with the SD, Swedish politics has a strong consensus on social issues and is divided mostly alongside economic lines. City people are rich. Imagine if New York was voting solely on economics and rural Kentucky was doing the same.

2. The Green party mostly has strength in cities and university areas but they exist elsewhere too. A former party leader made them biggest party in rural northern Kalix. The Green party generally does badly in rural areas for the reason you cited so I wouldn't call it a strong divide within the party.

The Kina wafers are under fire for racism, I believe, so that may not help.

I get what you're saying but New York isn't the best example since it's actually about 60% poor minorities and even among the Whites, a good chunk are either poor White ethnics living way out in the middle of nowhere in far west Brooklyn or hipsters making $10 an hour but getting by only because they don't have kids.

Yeah I guess one of the richest cities in the world with the same GDP per capita as Stockholm is a horribly analogy for Stockholm as a rich city.

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2012/1/18-global-metro-monitor/0118_global_metro_monitor.pdf

Your original point was that if New York voted based solely on economic self interest, they would vote conservative like Stockholm does. So yes, it was a bad analogy. New York already votes based on economic self interest. Most New Yorkers vote Democrat because most New Yorkers are poor.

[Famous Mortimer]

His portrait of the future Sweden as a Latin America style society with a functioning economy, but high inequality, violence and gated communities is obviously a dystopia seen from a Social Democratic view, so no wonder he is unpopular in SAP circles.

This is basically what New York City looks like.

[Famous Mortimer]

Of these, 21.5% have a foreign background, which means that Swedes with two Swedish-born parents makes up 7.7 million.

I think it's important to point out that the current 21,5% with foreign background also includes me, since my mother is Danish, and the rather large group of everyone else in Sweden with one Swedish-born parent, and a Nordic or otherwise western parent, and I hardly think we count as foreign even by the the most rigid Swedish Democratic viewpoint.

All these sorts of estimations always rely on ceteris paribus, which rarely come true. The current level of immigration will not continue for 10 or 15 years. The idea that the Swedish population could double in a mere decade is of course absurd.

His point wasn't that it would come through, but to demonstrate the extent of the current inflow and part of his point was, of course, that it is unrealistic for Sweden to keep taking so many.

Reinfeldt made that speech where he talked about the endlessness of the Swedish landscape and that there was room for everybody (I can't find the actual text, but he made the Swedish countryside sound as if it was the North American prairies). In reality most immigrants wants to live in cities and are not interested in a pioneer existence as subsistence farmers in rural Norrland. Sweden's potential as an immigrant country is related to how much your cities and larger towns can hold (without creating actual ghettos/slums or massive housing shortage for "the natives") and how many your labour market can absorb. And seen in that context Sweden is a fairly small country.

Refugees currently become immigrants (we seem unable to disconnect this mechanism - and Swedish pols are less willing to give temporary residence permits than neighboring countries, so they aren't even trying) and immigration is a numbers game. We Europeans should decide on a maximum. How large a population can we accomodate? How large a population are we willing to accept? And how much can we accept to change the ethnic balance? Those issues seems stil to be taboo in the Swedish debate - especially the last one, which is labeled as "racist".

So this simple calculation is interesting in a context in which many tend to trivialize the extent of the ongoing demographic changes and their consequences. There are people who are too alarmist, but the trivializing of both demographic and economic consequences is more widespread. It is as if most of the open borders crowd refuse to do or accept basic math and disregard prognoses.

In the 90s professor in demographics P.C. Mathiesen proposed that Denmark should have an Immigration Commission, where demographers, economists etc. could create prognoses of how immigration would affect Denmark in various areas, but the idea was blocked by Radikale, who claimed such numbers would be "abused". I think Danish debate would have been a lot more rational if based on the detailed studies Mathiesen wanted to conduct, and if Sweden wants to keep taking anywhere near as many refugees as you do now, you should establish an Immigration Commission to do some serious number crunching - also on the delicate matters like ethnicity. Of course that would be even harder to get accepted in Sweden.

Immigrants want to live in cities because that's where other immigrants are. Hypothetically, just hypothetically, they might be willing to live in the countryside if there were a large number of their countrymen along with them.

The problem, of course, is that you end up with a ghetto, just a rural one rather than an urban one, basically transporting villages from Syria or Africa up into Sweden.

[Famous Mortimer]

"Swedish Foreign Minister claims the country is 'facing collapse' because of the mass influx of refugees"

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3297317/Swedish-Foreign-Minister-claims-country-facing-collapse-mass-influx-refugees.html#ixzz3qGo3ZKs5

Of course, she's not calling for it to stop, just calling for more money from the EU, more equal distribution of refugees across the EU.