It probably is because Sweden has taken on much more immigrants, to the point where the percentage of Swedish residents born outside Sweden is 3x higher than in Norway and Denmark. This has probably overloaded the capacity of the social security system, and has lead to a greater extent of neighbourhoods where almost every older adult is a poor first-generation immigrant.
The problem is cultural, not economical. The Swedish state has, following a decision pushed by Olof Palme on Sweden having to become 'a multicultural state like the United States of America where Swedish culture is no longer the single dominant one' followed a policy to not only allow but encourage migrants to not integrate or assimilate into Swedish culture but to keep and strengthen their own, paid for largely by the Swedish state through subsidies for ethnically segregated cultural organisations. This has led to the establishment of ethnically segregated areas in many of the larger cities with names like 'lilla Mogadishu' (little Mogadishu), 'lilla Kabul', 'lilla Bagdad' and more. It has led to objectively unexplainable situations where a regime-supporting Eritrean cultural festival is organised in Stockholm by "refugees" from the same regime which then attracts opponents to the regime from all over Europe who come there to make war on those same regime-supporting "refugees" [1]. It has led to parts of Göteborg - the second largest city in Sweden - being under the virtual control of the Ali Khan clan [2] with members erecting road blocks to keep out authorities, somewhat comparable to the way road blocks were erected in Portland OR but far more established than those temporary eruptions of anarchy.
Sweden is now a cauldron bubbling with different factions - Afghans, Somalians, Moroccans, Iraqi, Syrians, Turks, Lebanese, Ugandans, Eritreans and more - striving for dominance in different types of organised crime. The multicultural 'experiment' has failed spectacularly and disastrously as was foreseen by many but which was not to be spoken of in fear of being labelled a 'racist' or 'nazi'. This labelling still continues and the denial still prevails but the subject has become more approachable due to the fact that the results of this failure are clearly and undeniably visible for anyone to see. What remains is to find a solution for the problems caused by the near half century of mismanagement and misdirection which keeps those aspects of Swedish culture and society which made it successful and worthy of emulation but does away with the ideologically driven mistakes. Given that the political party most (but certainly not solely) responsible for these failures - Socialdemokraterna or "the social democrats" - is and has for a long time being the largest and most dominant party combined with the fact that political parties in general and this party in particular are not known for admitting to past mistakes it remains to be seen whether and if so to what extent this will happen.
[1] https://www.tv4.se/artikel/3qmMWIhaUax7HuAl2mQxOF/kaos-vid-j... an [2] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Khan-klanen
Context for others: Sweden has no language, income, employment, or skills requirement <https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/...> for obtaining citizenship.
In completely unrelated news, Arabic is now the second most spoken language in Sweden <https://digitaledition.chicagotribune.com/tribune/article_po...>.
>Sweden is now a cauldron bubbling with different factions - Afghans, Somalians, Moroccans, Iraqi, Syrians, Turks, Lebanese, Ugandans, Eritreans and more - striving for dominance in different types of organised crime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe...
>The multicultural 'experiment' has failed spectacularly and disastrously as was foreseen by many but which was not to be spoken of in fear of being labelled a 'racist' or 'nazi'.
SWEDEN YES <https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sweden-yes>
For the longest time only the parties I didn't want to vote for could talk about it.
...and therein lies the rub. Assuming you did vote you gave your vote to just those parties which did all they could to promulgate the problem by castigating anyone who dared to speak about migration in anything but a positive way as 'racists' or 'nazis'.
The only reason we can talk about it now is that those parties - or rather that party, only Sverigedemokraterna (the "national-conservative" party, their program resembles that of the social democrats of the early 60's from before Olof Palme) has been steadfast in their position with Moderaterna (the "classically liberal" party) having been one of the instigators of the current problems through Fredrik Reinfeldt's (prime minister of Sweden from 2006 to 2014) deal with Miljöpartiet (the "green party" which has been far more active in promoting migration and related activism than they have been for their original environmental goals) to "open the borders" in 2014 to "punish the country for having voted Sverigedemokraterna into the parliament". That same prime minister claimed that "Ursvenskt är bara barbariet. Resten av utvecklingen har kommit utifrån" [1] ("purely Swedish is only barbarism, the rest of development has come from the outside") - with a prime minister who thinks such about the country he is supposed to lead it comes as no surprise that he made things worse rather than better.
I'm a migrant to Sweden myself, having moved there from the Netherlands in 2002. I was surprised by the fact that Sweden had a real-life national socialist party, something which would not be possible in the Netherlands. No, it was not Sverigedemokraterna but Nationalsocialistisk Front which later changed its name into Svenskarnas Parti before they gave the ghost a few years later. Now there is something called Nordiska Motståndsrörelse (Northern Resistance movement) which seems to fill the gap. What soon became clear is that those parties did exist but that they were the absolute fringe and never attracted more than a few hundred people, were not taken seriously by nearly everyone and were mostly dangerous for their own in-crowd due to incessant infighting. The only real function these parties had and have seems to be to function as a foil for the likes of EXPO (a self-proclaimed anti-nazi/anti-racist group which may have started out that way but for many decades is more aptly described as a left-wing propaganda organisation, their research wing proudly describes itself as "Swedens STASI") and the propaganda arms of several "progressive" parties to portray Sweden as having a large problem with "nazis" and "racists". This stood and stands in complete opposition to the facts which, at least until recently, showed Sweden as one of the most tolerant and open countries in the world. This tolerance and openness having been abused past the breaking point finally seems to permeate the masses which makes the scare tactics - "skrämselpropaganda" for another fine Swedish word to try to pronounce for all you linguaphobes out there - less effective and has started to make it possible to discuss problems related to migration and integration/assimilation without immediately (or at least "effectively", the accusations are still made but they don't tend to stick as well as they did before) being shot down as a 'racist' or 'nazi'.
[1] https://www.dn.se/nyheter/politik/reinfeldt-det-ursvenska-ar...
It wasn't helped by the fact that hand grenades were classed as illegal fireworks up until like 2017, and fairly risk free to smuggle into the country.
Whether or not you think they should be legal is completely beside that point of them being the primary cause, which you pivoted away from. Likely because its hard to support.
You may remove either component, and the calamity would not have transpired.
You have it backwards.
Norway and Sweden has been - and is - flush with weapons and have been for decades.
When I grew up at least two of my neighbors had complete G3s and lots of ammo stashed in their house. There were tens of thousands of these stored in homes everywhere as part of terrestrial defense forces (Heimevernet).
This wasn't a drought. It was totally unproblematic. Even if sometimes people got angry and sparks flew things didn't explode.
Because guns aren't explosive.
Something else has happened that has made the situation dangerous.
And it is a tiny bit racist, ypur comment I mean.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338563093_Migrants_...
All of the bombings are gang related, and gang members in Sweden have a disproportionately foreign background.
There is nothing to gain here by pretending this isn't happening. People are literally dying. No one mentioned any races, and conflating "immigrant" with any particular race is misleading at best.
https://www.gulf-insider.com/almost-all-gang-members-in-swed...
There is no use in splitting hairs on this one. The issue is clear.
Swedish immigrants are susceptible to this because Sweden did a spectacularly poor job at integrating these people. The idea was to liberally accept immigrants to solve the demographic crisis and the pension system, but along the way most of the immigrants who moved to the country were let down and given fairly shitty life prospects. Crappy jobs, small apartments, segregated communities in crumbling '70s apartment buildings.
I think there has been a somewhat conceited attitude among the Swedish political class to assume that Swedish values and ideals are an inevitable logical conclusion from enlightenment, and if someone doesn't share these values, it's because the poor souls haven't been informed of the correct way to think yet, and when encountering superior Swedish values, they willingly abandon their unenlightened opinions and assume the enlightened values of Sweden in their place.
Well as it turns out these values are a logical conclusion only if you've been indoctrinated in them since you were a toddler.
The Swedish population includes a large number of Finns, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden says even 50 years ago 10% of the population was born to foreign born mothers.
If Sweden isn't a monoculture then your argument suggests integration should be possible, yes?
That doesn't mean it would be easy to integrate refugees. Just look at how hard it was for Miami to integrate Cuban refugees. Anti-Castro extremists, for example, set off car bombs in the 1970s and 1980s. http://cuban-exile.com/doc_051-075/doc0073.html
Knowing this, yes, other European countries should have done more, to helped share the effort needed.
To make sure I understand the topic, I researched more about Sweden's multicultural history.
https://www.informationsverige.se/en/om-sverige/individens-r... says "There are five recognised historical national minorities in Sweden: Jews, Roma people, Sami people, Sweden Finns, and Tornedalians" and historically they were deliberately oppressed by monocultural policies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornedalians gives one example:
> Tornedalians were the targets of extensive so-called "racial biology" and swedification policies. In the early-to-mid 1900s Herman Lundborg and others from the State Institute for Racial Biology performed skull measurements on Tornedalians, with Lundborg performing the first measurements in 1913. At the same time speaking Finnish in schools was banned in parts of the country, including the Torne Valley. This ban was only revoked by the Riksdag in 1957.
How does that fit into your concept of "monoculture" in Sweden?
Minorities like the Roma have been permitted to exist, but they've had zero place in the public sphere.
Yes, historically Sweden has been overbearing consensus culture, including using so-called "race science" to justify their positions, as with the Tornedalians.
But didn't official policy change long before they accepted many poor refugees from the non-West, which is the criteria shrimp_emoji used at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37336674 ?
That change, as I understand it, included creating the autonomous Sámi parliament back in the 1990s, and recognizing the Tornedalians and Sweden Finns, yes?
Plus, by the time of the Middle Eastern refugees, Sweden had accepted Western refugees, like Chileans back in the 1970s and Balkan refugees of the 1990s?
How then is Sweden a still meaningfully a monoculture even by, say, 2005?
I mean, I can understand how a government can be a monoculture, even if the country is not (eg, Afrikaans and South Africa), but I took shrimp_emoji to refer to the overall population, not the government.
[1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-passen
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Det_h%C3%A4r_%C3%A4r_en_svensk...
But, that thing you're citing about a limited number of cities that could handle immigration is a good example of why it might be different for Sweden vs Germany.
There's some other cause (which can't be said aloud).
I don't think the problem here is what you're thinking but not saying. I think the problem is that suckers get took, to be crass. And to continue in that spirit, no self respecting nation of people would spread their buttcheeks and let the whole world have a go. It seems to me the Swedish have outlived their lifespan as a nation. I suppose it's the natural order of things, meek, defenseless tribes and nations don't last very long.
In bigger German train stations you regularly see machine-gun armed police.
in the Netherlands we are seeing an uptick of grenade-attacks, and they are generally related to criminal organisations.
Have a look at the wiki page on organized crime in the Netherlands, and check the family names of the most recent cases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organized_crime_in_the_Netherl...
They are not "dumped in a suburb" by the authorities but actively choose to move there. This is made possible by a law - EBO or "eget boende" (own accommodations) - which gives asylum seekers and their relatives the right to choose their own domicile. The current government wants to abolish this law [1] since it makes it harder to integrate/assimilate people who end up living in ethnically segregated areas.
[1] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/regeringen-vill-avveckla-...
My point is that no one gives a shit about making them part of society.
Those who want to become part of society are carried on hands and portrayed proudly in the media as examples of the success story of Swedish migration policies - unless they dare to criticise those same policies of course. The problem is that people are not encouraged to integrate or assimilate into Swedish culture as that goes against the multicultural ideals written into the Swedish 'constitution' (Sweden is actually governed under a collection of law instead of a single constitution but these serve the same purpose). Encouraging newcomers to...
- learn Swedish as soon as possible...
- try celebrating midsommar (the midsummer festival) and jul (Christmas) in some way to show they are interested in the customs and culture of the country which took them in instead of segregating themselves into their own cultural traditions....
- make eye contact with 'strangers' - the person at the cash register, the conductor on the train, etc - instead of looking away as is common for women in many middle eastern cultures, telling men from those same cultures than a woman who looks them in the eyes is not 'interested' in them but simply follows western-European customs where it is considered proper and polite to look others (of both sexes) in the eyes.
- keep check on their children when they are out in the streets. Swedish children are raised by their parents, not by the neighbourhood. Sending your children out on the streets without supervision will and does lead to problems since Swedish adults will not tell of misbehaving children other than their own.
- etc.
...is frowned upon since it goes against the aforementioned multicultural ideals.
What do you want the news to say when it is not yet known who did it and what exactly exploded? Do you want them to lie? Or do you want them to push through the police cordon and do their own investigation faster and better than the police does?
The thing is Sweden has problems with people blowing up stuff with bombs since years, BUT it's also since years that this acts in most cases _only target property_, e.g. a police booth, but not people. I.e. no injured people is more the norm then it is a lucky confidence.
on the other hand unrelated people dying because of gang violence is kinda common in the many counties. So when youn read "gang bombings" it's much more likely to be associated with an act with the intention or willingness to kill people then an act with the intention to cause property damage
The fact that relatively few people have gotten killed is entirely due to luck and the relatively low yield of the explosions (usually hand-me-down hand grenades from the Balkans wars).
I said that it's misleading if put in the title in international because people only read the title and put it into context with their expectation.
And in many counties the implicit reading would be "gang tires to kill people with bomb" which makes it look like Sweaden is falling apart
both of which just isn't the case
so I'm the title speaking about residental explosions and then in the body exploding properly what that means makes a lot of sense
That shit will never be normal.
but when you report in one country with very different dynamics about another country you probably want to not put anything which needs additional context in the headlines because people way to often only read headlines
honestly preferable there shouldn't be a headline, but that just doesn't work, I mean how do you know if the topic might be of interest of there is no longer a headline telling you about the topic
The point is, however, that this ("gang violence") isn't really happening in most of Europe (or other first world countries like Japan), and wasn't happening in Sweden 15 years ago.
Also, did you consider that the reason there's no casualties is that people are so afraid to go out or walk around these "gang areas" that there's just noone around? I wouldn't exactly call that a positive...
in many cases has been happening since a very very long time
just with very different dynamics then in the US
which in combination with people often only reading the headline makes it a bit trick for a US newspaper to choose a good title
e.g. when I read "gang violence escalates" in a German news paper I expect very different thing then when reading it in the US
but in both counties it something you might have read in the last 2-3 decades
and AFIK this bombings are not limited to some "gang areas"
they should have called it that _in_ the article
but due to the very unhealthy way ton of people consume articles (title only) title have to be written with a lot of care
Thats what happened with “residential explosion.”
headlines are "<censored cursing>"
But shouldn't we then prefer the lest sensational variant, we are so swamped with bad news all the time that at least for external (i.e. country far away, likely not going to affect the country the news is for) things if I had the choice between two attention grabbing similar misleading titles I would always prefer the one which is less painting the picture of "the whole world goes to shit". Because AFIK this kind of misunderstanding produced here is less likely to have further negative ripple effects of people which only saw the headline incorrectly quoting it.
But also I'm living in a country where there is no issue with newspapers constantly downplaying police or citizen violence.
So my preference might differ.
But seriously and respectfully, my point being the title is not accurate to the article. "Residential bombing" is not a real description, it could be aerial bombings, it could be gas leaks, it could be terrorism, or something else.
Context is important. I'm not interested in random bombings. If a foreign nation is attacking Sweden, I want to know everything in real time. If it's an explosion due to a gas leak I'm probably not going to click in and read it, but maybe someone who is interested in public safety or that geographic area will. If it's gang violence, maybe someone with an interest in safety and law enforcement is interested.
"Residential bombing" doesn't tell me enough to make me want to understand it more, it _does_ sound like a gas leak, but I am interested in gang violence in Sweden because it's something I know very little about.
When I have a limited amount of time to read the news, I'm only going to prioritize articles that look like I'm going to get something out of it, I'm not going to read articles with vague headlines. To me that's click bait just like any other.
Were the buildings evacuated before?
TBH mentioning gangs would paint a very accurate picture. Because it is gangs, they are fighting for drug control, blackmail, rape and kill.
And to go one step further: It would be even better to name the cultural background of these gangs and that it's a direct consequence of a misdirected immigraction politique
what I'm was saying is that from only reading the title in international press a lot of people would get a wrong picture
nothing in their says that what they did is okayish
just far less bad then idk. trying to kill as many people of a specific group as possible with a bomb
which is what I would think happened when I read gang bombings in US media
and no matter how much you insist that grate crime is all equality bad the situation a country is in when there are frequent assassination attempts by bomb and the situation Sweden is in is VERY different
so if you are not Swedich newspaper it's a good idea to add the necessary context when writing about it, which is impossible in the title, so you use a more generic title
And they do mention gangs! The exact word is used twice.
But fair enough. Provide alternative title. Make sure it is factually correct too.
> bombs are mainly used to intimidate targets, while shootings are used to kill enemies.