"We are implementing what we describe as a paradigm shift in Swedish migration policy.... This is not because we don’t like these people..."

"... or because we don’t understand that many of them might face a very difficult situation... but because of the fact that we will never be able to manage the enormous task of integration in the right way if you continue to have such a high influx of immigrants every year. It’s impossible.... What happened during the refugee crisis was that all these very nice words, all this open-heart policy, met a very tough reality.... This turned out to be much more difficult than many people had anticipated. I believe many Swedes knew this already from the beginning but... the questions regarding this were portrayed as being very small-minded."

 

Said Johan Forssell, 45, who has headed Sweden's migration department since September, quoted in "Why ‘open-hearted’ Sweden brought in a wholesale crackdown on asylum/After the 2015 refugee crisis, years of liberal migration policies met the tough reality of gangs, riots and failed integration" (London Times).

"The next big project is to require foreigners to take language and integration tests when applying for citizenship. Most European countries introduced similar requirements many years ago, but Sweden’s exceptionalism on this front was once a source of pride. 'I think it’s stupid. Most people in Sweden also think it’s stupid,' Forssell said. 'I have talked to many people coming here from other nations, applying for citizenship, and they find this very odd. How are you going to be a Swedish citizen if you don’t know anything about Sweden or you can’t speak Swedish?'"

"Socialcandy are slightly sticky gummies, in opaque pastel shades... and different shapes, most of which take the form of a word, acronym, or symbol of the Internet age."

"There’s a LOL, a yolo, a hashtag, a thumb’s-up sign that looks like the one on Facebook. There’s an O.M.G., a SELFIE, an @, and [another symbol that is is html code and would screw up this post].... Nordic countries, in general, are crazy for candy... But if any one particular country knows its candy, it’s Sweden....  In Sweden, every Saturday is effectively a national holiday, called lördagsgodis, which means 'Saturday candy.'... [I]t tasted of artificial strawberry flavor, as opposed to strawberries themselves, just as the yellow half of a two-color, pill-shaped banana-and-caramel 'bub'... tasted, quite pleasingly, of artificial banana. The flavor of a skull-shaped gummy, on the other hand, Pepto-Bismol-pink and coated in sour sugar crystals, was shockingly reminiscent of a real strawberry, specifically an alpine variety.... I stocked up on those, plus some gummies in the shape of vampire teeth, gummy Coke bottles; a scoopful of delicate little marshmallows that looked like pink-capped mushrooms; and a small selection of what we in America know as Swedish fish but in Sweden are called pastellfiskar, or pale fish...."

From "How to Eat Candy Like a Swedish Person" by Hannah Goldfield in The New Yorker.

"Sweden on Wednesday confirmed Magdalena Andersson as its first female leader.... Hours after assuming office, Andersson resigned from the post..."

"... when a member of the ruling coalition, the center-left Swedish Green party, quit the government in protest after lawmakers passed a budget bill backed by three right-wing parties. Andersson’s Social Democratic Party had put forward an alternative budget proposal that failed to pass. Andersson said she hopes to form a single-party ruling government. Andersson had briefly joined the ranks of around two dozen current female heads of state and government.... Around half of those women head European countries."

So says WaPo, in "Sweden elected its first female leader. She resigned hours later."

I had trouble understanding that. The article is much more concerned about generic female achievement than explaining what happened in Sweden. The top-rated comment supplies what I think is the actual news:

"Scientists behind a Nordic study have found that keeping primary schools open during the coronavirus pandemic may not have had much bearing on contagion rates."

"There was no measurable difference in the number of coronavirus cases among children in Sweden, where schools were left open, compared with neighboring Finland, where schools were shut, according to the findings."

Bloomberg reports.

"Bedeviled for over 34 years by the mysterious killing of Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister who was shot in the back by an unknown assailant on a quiet Stockholm street..."

"... Sweden’s judiciary finally made its case on Wednesday. At a news conference in Stockholm, the prosecutor Krister Petersson said that there was 'reasonable evidence'that the assailant was Stig Engstrom, a graphic designer at an insurance company, who killed himself in 2000, at the age of 66....It was hardly a surprise, however, as the Swedish case was widely considered solved in 2018 by a freelance journalist, Thomas Pettersson, whose reporting led to Mr. Engstrom.... There has been widespread criticism about the way the Swedish judiciary and the police have handled the case over the past decades. The mystery endured through six investigations and three commissions over the years, but Mr. Engstrom eluded suspicion though he had presented himself to the police as a witness to the killing.... At the time of the killing, investigators were focused on the suspected complicity of Kurdish militants, and Mr. Engstrom was not taken seriously, according to Mr. Pettersson.... 'He has the right timing, the right clothing; he has unique information, he lied, he had close access to guns of the right type,' Mr. Pettersson said. 'He was right-wing and Palme unfriendly,” he added. “He had a deep political interest and a deep anti-Palme sentiment.'"

The NYT reports.

"Allemansrätten ('every man’s right') is in the Swedish Constitution, guaranteeing the right to camp, swim, build campfires and gather wild produce..."

"... such as flowers, mushrooms, and berries. Similar rights, whether formalized by law or accepted as historic custom, exist in Central Europe and the Baltics. Now, covid-19 has underscored the value of roaming rights. In Sweden, 80 to 90 percent of the country’s land mass is open for responsible recreation.... In the United States, I calculate that a little more than a quarter of the country is theoretically roamable. That sounds like plenty of space, but the great bulk of these places — mainly federal and state public lands — are either crowded (such as our heavily trafficked national parks), inaccessible or in sparsely populated Western states and Alaska.... [A]s the need for social distancing continues, many will begin to feel stir-crazy in the same pedestrian-unfriendly sprawl, on the same dangerous country roads and around the same dull cul-de-sacs. A more evolved understanding of private property will help us feel healthier, freer, more equal and more connected to our communities and local environments. It’ll help us get out of the house in good times and bad. A crisis gives us an opportunity to rethink how we normally do things...."

From "America may be opening back up, but most of our land is still off-limits. Let’s change that" (WaPo).

Did Sweden make the right call, keeping open despite the pandemic?

The NYT analyzes the details.

Sweden has had 27% "excess deaths," while Britain has had 67% (the worst in Europe). But maybe Sweden shouldn't be compared to Britain. Italy, Spain, Belgium, and France have all also done worse than Swedent, but Sweden is worse than the other Scandinavian countries. Denmark has 6% excess deaths, Norway 5%, and Finland 0%. (What's the U.S. percentage? I don't think the article says.)

Swedish officials chose not to implement a nationwide lockdown, trusting that people would do their part to stay safe. Schools, restaurants, gyms and bars remained open, with social distancing rules enforced, while gatherings were restricted to 50 people....

“Once you get into a lockdown, it’s difficult to get out of it,” Sweden’s state epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, said. “How do you reopen? When?”

Instead of imposing strict lockdowns, public health officials said that Swedes could be relied on to go out less and follow sanitation guidelines. That proved to be true: As a whole, Swedes visited restaurants, retail shops and other recreation spots almost as little as residents of neighboring countries, according to Google mobility figures....

You can't really ask what if we had done that, because we're Americans, and we would have done things our way if the government had left us to make our own choices about going out and about and getting close to other people in the workplace and the schools. And we'd have been doing it within the physical conditions of our country:

Sweden’s low density overall and high share of single-person households — factors it shares with its Scandinavian neighbors — set it apart from other Western European countries. In Italy, the virus tore through multigenerational households, where it easily spread from young people to their older relatives.

And although Sweden is not a particularly young country in comparison with its Western European peers, it has a high life expectancy and low levels of chronic diseases, like diabetes and obesity, that make the virus more lethal.

So Sweden performed an experiment, and we can look at the results, and it's a challenge to analyze the results and not come up with the answer that you want — either we should have done that too or it would never have worked here. There's also the compromise position: We should have used the Swedish approach in the sparsely populated parts of the country and the mandatory lockdown in the dense places — New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, etc.

And what about that difference in "chronic diseases, like diabetes and obesity"? I see that 13% of the Swedish population is obese and 40% of Americans are obese — the worst in the world [ADDED: or the worst in the set of countries the NYT chose to compare in this article].

People who are obese know they are obese. They could be given the advice to do more self-isolation, but if it's 40% of us, what can we do? Can the workplaces and schools remain open with 40% of them advised to stay home? Actually, that's a way to do social distancing: You have only 60% occupancy of these spaces — distance created. Keep places open but expect the obese to stay home. It's pretty awkward to give that advice, though. So much easier to tell everyone to stay home. Except the part where the economy crashes and we're all plunged into a depression.

"'The virus is a wake-up call,' one of my doctor friends says, standing in a white bikini on a dock by the Oslo fjord."

"It is an early spring morning and we have just been for a dip in the sea, which is 4º C (about 40º F). Now we let wind and a bleak sun dry us off. 'We have messed up nature,' she goes on. 'We have exploited it in places we shouldn’t have been.' The ice-bathing club meets more often. We need the rush, the extracted inner heat that will keep us warm for the rest of the day. We strictly observe the recommendations of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health: no more than five in a group. Only meet outdoors. Stay one meter apart. 'We are all going to get it one way or another,' says Joanna, a cancer surgeon.... 'It is only a question of time. The strategy of the government is clear: Norway wants to curb the spread so that not too many get ill at the same time.'... A friend on my street is afraid of everything. Trampolines. Carbs. Falling stocks. Bank collapse. Losing control. But nothing scares him more than the Swedish model. Sweden is the only country in Europe to have imposed no rules of restriction. The schools are open, bars serve whatever you like, even fitness centers are functioning. With a population twice as big as Norway’s, the country’s death toll by end of April was more than ten times higher. Sweden has knowingly let a large part of the population get infected in order to achieve herd immunity before a vaccine is ready. 'What do you prefer? A country run by a government that listens to medical advice and takes the responsibility?' my anxious neighbor asks. 'Or the Swedish system of experts battling one another on thin ice?... What is solidarity?... It is for us who are privileged to observe the rules. What’s so bad about lounging on the sofa for a few weeks, anyway? Can’t we just be a bit careful? When did that ever hurt?'"

From "A Virus in the Neighborhood" by Åsne Seierstad (New York Review of Books).

"There are only different hellish ways to adapt to a pandemic and save both lives and livelihoods. I raise Sweden..."

"... not because I think it has found the magic balance — it is way too soon to tell — but because I think we should be debating all the different ways and costs of acquiring immunity. When I look across America, though, and see governors partly lifting lockdowns — because they feel their people just can’t take it anymore for economic or psychological reasons, even though their populations have little or no immunity — I worry we may end up developing more herd immunity but in a painful, deadly, costly, uncoordinated way that still leaves room for the coronavirus to strike hard again and overwhelm hospitals.... Herd immunity 'has historically been nature’s way of ending pandemics,' added Dr. David Katz, the public health physician.... 'We need to bend with her forces...' That means a designed strategy, based on risk profiles, of phasing back to work those least vulnerable, so we gradually cultivate the protection of herd immunity — 'while concentrating our health services and social services on protecting those most vulnerable' until we can sound the all-clear."

From "Is Sweden Doing It Right?/The Swedes aren’t battling the coronavirus with broad lockdowns" by Thomas Friedman (in the NYT).

"Taking a different approach to other nations contravenes jantelagen, the Scandinavian societal rule that forbids sticking your neck out or being noticeably ambitious."

"'If this succeeds, the first casualty will be jantelagen,' Annie said. 'We’ll be so pleased with ourselves.' Yet as the death toll rises, a significant number of people believe Sweden may have made a fatal error of judgment.... The state claims that the curve of infections has flattened. But as the weather warms up there are fears that the numbers will rise sharply if partygoers ignore the rules. For Plan B and other venues, their future livelihood may depend on their ability to enforce social distancing while still holding public events. 'I hope they don’t impose more rules,' said Ellen. 'Otherwise the summer could be ruined.'"

From "Sweden: the young dance at a distance amid growing fears about fatal coronavirus misstep/In a world on lockdown, the country has so far refused to introduce harsh public restrictions" (in The London Times).

Jantelagen — I'd never heard of that! It means the Law of Jante. Jante is the name of a fictionalized town in a novel by Aksel Sandemose called "A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks." Sandemose — who was was Dano-Norwegian — was satirizing the culture of Nordic countries. Sandemose identified 10 rules these people were following:

"Sweden's Relaxed Approach to the Coronavirus Could Already Be Backfiring"/"Why Sweden's Lax Coronavirus Approach Could Be Backfiring."

2 headlines for an article that went up yesterday at TIME. The first one is the main headline on the article. The second one is the form it takes as it appears at the top of the "most popular" list in the sidebar over there.

There's such a difference between calling the Swedish approach "relaxed" and calling it "lax." "Relaxed" sounds more like freedom and ease. "Lax" sounds like negligence.

But Sweden did experiment with a lax/relaxed approach — perhaps you think the U.S. could have done that — and we can look at the results:

As many public spaces throughout Europe empty out—with citizens only leaving home for essential groceries or medication—life in Sweden is carrying on, mostly as usual. Children walk to school while adults meet up for dinner at their local bar. Only the vulnerable have been advised to isolate and some are working from home. Yet in Sweden, where there are 9,141 confirmed cases and 793 people have died, experts worry weaker measures may be leading to a more severe outbreak in the country of just 10 million citizens.

Death comes for Max von Sydow.

The great Swedish actor was 90. From the NYT obituary:

Carl Adolf von Sydow was born on April 10, 1929, in Lund, in southern Sweden.... He was said to have adopted the name Max from the star performer in a flea circus he saw while serving in the Swedish Quartermaster Corps....

For all his connection to the land of his birth and of Bergman, Sweden became distant to Mr. von Sydow.... "I have nowhere really to call home... I feel I have lost my Swedish roots. It’s funny because I’ve been working in so many places that now I feel at home in many locations. But Sweden is the only place I feel less and less at home."

Did he really name himself after a flea?! From a 2012 interview (in The Guardian):

Is it true he named himself after a flea? "Ha ha ha!" booms Von Sydow, his laugh filling the room. "Yes! Ha ha ha! During my military service, I performed a sketch in which I played a flea called Max. So when critics kept misspelling my name, I decided to change it and thought, 'Ah! Max!'"

Ah, so it was not an actual flea "in a flea circus he saw," as the New York Times put it. He himself was in a show playing a character that happened to be a flea.

A flea circus is a show on a tiny stage that has real fleas performing (or tiny imitation fleas):

The first records of flea performances were from watchmakers who were demonstrating their metalworking skills. In 1578, Mark Scaliot produced a lock and chain that were attached to a flea. The first recorded flea circus dates back to the early 1820s, when an Italian impresario called Louis Bertolotto advertised an “extraordinary exhibition of industrious fleas” on Regent Street, London. Some flea circuses persisted in very small venues in the United States as late as the 1960s....

Here's Charlie Chaplin with his flea circus in one of my all-time favorite movies — "Limelight" (which I'll put up as a meditation on death alongside "The Seventh Seal," so please make that your double feature):

38 minutes of Swedes looking askance at Jordan Peterson.

Peterson holds forth in his usual way, quite cogent, earnest and unflappable, and not for one minute is he released from the stinkande öga.

"Truck Drives Into Crowd and Department Store in Stockholm."

The NYT reports.

The driver of a small truck steered his vehicle toward a crowd of people and then rammed it into a department store in the heart of Stockholm on Friday afternoon, killing at least two people, the police and local news outlets reported, in what was believed to be a terrorist attack.

And more news about the terrorism-by-vehicle in London last month. The woman we saw in video jumping or falling off the bridge and into the River Thames — Andreea Cristea — has died.



She was 31 years old and an architect, and her boyfriend said he was going to propose to her that day, his birthday.

"Bob Dylan will finally accept his Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm this weekend, the academy has announced."

BBC reports.

The academy said it would meet Dylan, 75, in private in the Swedish capital, where he is giving two concerts. He will not lecture in person but is expected to send a taped version. If he does not deliver a lecture by June, he will have to forfeit the prize money....

From the Nobel website:

In a few days Bob Dylan will visit Stockholm and give two concerts... Please note that no Nobel Lecture will be held. The Academy has reason to believe that a taped version will be sent at a later point.....

The Academy will then hand over Dylan’s Nobel diploma and the Nobel medal, and congratulate him on the Nobel Prize in Literature. The setting will be small and intimate, and no media will be present; only Bob Dylan and members of the Academy will attend, all according to Dylan’s wishes.

What do you think now of Dylan's approach to the Nobel people?

It's weird that he won't just forfeit the money. Having come this far, he should have kept aloof.

He's crafting some distinctive minimal approach. What an artist!

Either go or don't go, but don't half go. He should do much more or shun them altogether.

He's coming to Stockholm to do concerts, in his usual way, so doing nothing seems like it means something. It's like not taking a few minutes to see a relative when you're traveling through his city and you don't have a way to keep your presence secret. What Bob is doing is strictly in keeping with what he was doing before: Nothing. You know, too much of nothing can make a man feel ill at ease/One man’s temper might rise while another man’s temper might freeze. Especially in Stockholm.

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: Poll results:

"Sweden was ranked the best country in the world for women. That may come as a surprise to American conservatives..."

"... some of whom.... have argued in recent weeks that criminal hordes of Muslim immigrants have forced frightened Swedish women to barricade themselves at home. That Sweden had a temporary 'mansplaining' hotline last year — which women could call to report condescending instances of men explaining things to them that they already knew — may have helped matters. The United States was ranked 16th."

From "The Best Country in the World? Survey Says It’s Switzerland" in the NYT.

"The media is in a trance. They are concentrating on seeing 'Trump the idiot' or 'Trump the liar'..."

"... and no one sees the dancing bear."

AND: Here's Scott Adams discussing what's up with Donald Trump and the Sweden comments (and using some software I'm interested in getting and using something like this):



ADDED: There's a problem with the media, granted. I am looking at that. But there's also a problem with Trump that I see in "you look at what's happening last night in Sweden." I understand the explanation. He meant that if you looked at TV the previous night, you could have seen a segment on Tucker Carlson that was about Sweden. That eliminates the confusion caused by his slightly screwy language that had lots of people wondering about something that supposedly had just happened in Sweden. But it does show a problem with Trump that's worse than his somewhat word-salad-y approach to speaking. It shows how TV-oriented he is.

Trump did not instinctively, easily notice that he needed to say I saw a TV show about something last night. He comes across as having the delusion that when you look at the TV, you're looking through a window onto the world. I'm not saying he actually has that delusion, but he naturally falls into figurative speech and would say — un-self-consciously — I'm seeing X when he's only watching X on TV. And I am worried that he's not keeping reality securely separate from what is seen on TV. (Remember when Trump said that he "watched... thousands and thousands of people... cheering" in Jersey City as the WTC fell?)

Trump criticizes the media as fake and distorting, but then he seems to be the guy staring at the screen to see what's going on in the world. Notice how often he uses phrases like "you look at what's happening." I can't look at what's happening outside of my immediate surroundings. I have to watch TV, which I wish were more precise and fact-based. But I maintain my awareness that I'm getting these words and pictures through a filter. Does Trump not maintain his awareness? Is he just choosing the filter he likes and staring inanely through Tucker Carlson's window?!

BUT: What if Trump's TV is some freaky Twilight-Zone thing and he can see the future?

Just two days after President Trump provoked widespread consternation by seeming to imply, incorrectly, that immigrants had perpetrated a recent spate of violence in Sweden, riots broke out in a predominantly immigrant neighborhood in the northern suburbs of Sweden's capital, Stockholm....

"One of the three standard items in the Iron Age toiletry set... is the nail scraper..."

"... the other two are a tweezer (for epilating body hair, including facial hair) and an ear-spoon (for removing earwax). The nail-scraper remains in use up to the Viking period; Vikings believed that one should not cut one's nails, as nail clippings would add to the ship made of the fingernails of the dead which plays a role in Ragnarok."

From an answer to the question how did people cut their finger- and toenails before the invention of the nail clipper. Another commenter insists that the ship was made of the untrimmed nails of the dead. And that sounds right:

In Norse mythology, Naglfar or Naglfari (Old Norse "nail ship") is a boat made entirely from the fingernails and toenails of the dead. During the events of Ragnarök, Naglfar is foretold to sail to Vígríðr, ferrying hordes that will do battle with the gods... The boat itself has been connected by scholars with a larger pattern of ritual hair and nail disposal among Indo-Europeans, stemming from Proto-Indo-European custom....

In the Poetic Edda... the enthroned figure of High...  describes the composition of Naglfar as that of the untrimmed nails of the dead, and warns about burying the dead with untrimmed nails, stating that "the ship is made of dead people's nails, and it is worth taking care lest anyone die with untrimmed nails, since such a person contributes much material to the ship Naglfar which gods and men wish would take a long time to finish".

Sweden wants love.

"To gin up interest in the Scandinavian country, a Swedish tourism agency created the Swedish Number, 46-771-793-336, a single phone line that connects international callers to randomly selected Swedish volunteers to chat about whatever is on their minds...."

The Swedish Number’s website invites callers to “talk about anything you want.” After I dialed the number... an automated voice responded: “Calling Sweden. You will soon be connected to a random Swede, somewhere in Sweden.”"...

By letting everyday Swedes communicate directly with foreigners, tourism officials hope to present a more authentic picture of the country than one conjured up by a marketing agency, said Magnus Ling, the secretary general and chief executive of the Swedish Tourist Association.

Yes, he acknowledged, the chats could go off the rails. But he had little fear of lewd, meanspirited or even dangerous correspondence — he believed that people have good intentions, he said. And he believed the Swedish people would make good ambassadors for the country.

The linked article is in the NYT. The coverage leans cutesy, and there's zero acknowledgement that Sweden might have a tourism problem based on news reports that might lead women to believe that we are not safe walking alone there.

For example, from last month: "Police defend warning for solo women in northern Sweden." And: "Two 10-year-old schoolgirls molested and a woman's trousers ripped off: Inside the sleepy Swedish town rocked by EIGHT sex attacks in three weeks by migrant men."

"A mob of black-clad masked men went on a rampage in and around Stockholm's main train station last night beating up refugees and anyone who did not look like they were ethnically Swedish."

"Before the attack, the group of 200 people handed out xenophobic leaflets with the message 'Enough now.'"

'All over the country, reports are pouring in that the police can no longer cope with preventing and investigating the crimes which strike the Swedish people,' reads the leaflet. 'In some cases, for example, in the latest murder of a woman employed at a home for so called ‘unaccompanied minor refugees’ in Molndal, it goes as far as the National Police Commissioner choosing to show more sympathy for the perpetrator than the victim,' it continues. 'But we refuse to accept the repeated assaults and harrassment against Swedish women. We refuse to accept the destruction of our once to safe society. When our political leadership and police show more sympathy for murderers than for their victims, there are no longer any excuses to let it happen without protest...."

ADDED: BBC reports that Sweden now has 123 boys for every 100 girls in the 16 to 17-year-old age group. The strange, huge disparity is attributed to asylum applicants:

What is surprising is that if you look at the breakdown of the ages of applicants in Sweden, there's a huge bump in the figures at the age of 16 - often unaccompanied minors arriving without a parent or guardian. And 92% of unaccompanied minors aged 16 and 17 years old are male. So why is this?

"If you're underage, first of all, you get housing, you get more financial resources. You also have a lot of staff around you helping you with different issues," says Hanif Bali, a member of the opposition Moderate Party in the Swedish parliament - which is on the centre right of the political spectrum. "If you need food, clothing, everything, you can go to the municipality and demand this money... You have the right to family reunification. So you can bring all of your family to Sweden, if you are underage."

Given these huge incentives and the fact that age isn't checked, men are lying about their age, according to Bali:

"[A] very big amount of those who are tested do not have the correct age. Some friends of mine, who have taken care of these unaccompanied refugees, are saying, 'We took care of one kid, and we found out he was about 28 years old.'"