Can we talk about Sweden for a bit?

[Looket]

Halb said:

So does that mean pretty rigid 'austerity' measures, or just simply cutting back in some of the 'extravagances'?
Is this a paradigm shift in Sweden?

I would say it probably means cutting back. A lot.

I don't have a crystal ball but let me paint a picture.

Swedes have among the highest household indebtedness in Europe.
We have had a massive property bubble brewing for the past 20 years.
The economy isn't in tip-top shape to say the least.
Our public coffers are rapidly drying up.
We are massively export dependent.
We also now have a government that staunchly believes in the virtues of spend, spend, spend and zero growth.

I can see quite a few big red flags in there. The outcome will entirely depend on how hard we fall, but in my mind there's not much doubt that the welfare state as is will have no choice but to cease to exist. A paradigm shift is understating it.

[Looket]

Halb said:

So like the UK, 2007-2010 then?

In a way. There are similarities.

Crucially for Sweden though, there's little to no room for manoeuvring. Interest rates are already in negative territory. Public finances are stretched to their limits. Half a million immigrants are forecast to arrive in the next couple of years, the crushing majority of whom will never get a job. Housing is severely lacking and short of expropriating people's second homes the answer according to the relevant minister (who by the way is Mehmet Kaplan - a fine man who has compared IS warriors to Swedish volunteers during the Winter War) is to build ludicrously expensive temporary modular houses at a cost of roughly £50m per every 1000 newcomers. Either way, the point is that with a huge black hole in the books the money has to come from somewhere else and it certainly won't come from the immigrants themselves. Little over half ever get a job, and even then contribute about half as much as a native Swede. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the equation doesn't work.

It's not like there's a couple Trident programmes to scrap either - we barely have a defence to begin with. How we're going to meet the demands of virtually open borders with a sustained welfare state I don't know. The tax rises would have to be astronomical and would annihilate the economy in and of themselves. Throw an external shock or perhaps you know, a rate hike, into the picture and it's quite clear to me that we're fairly far up the proverbial faecal river without so much as a stick for a paddle.

The welfare state is simply unsustainable in its current form, whichever way you choose to look at it. Far too many people depending on too few to provide for them. Swedish socialism has hit a brick wall, and with it the left have lost their very raison d'etre. It's a coup if there ever was one.

IainT said:

Really? Is this just the main cities because hose prices outside of that are incredibly low!

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-12-10/swedish-housing-surges-to-unsafe-value-as-debt-soars

Last year apartment prices across the country increased by 13%, houses by 12%.

For more statistics if you're so inclined: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&amp...

I do like some of the translations.

[Looket]

This man knows what the deal is: http://swedenreport.org/2015/06/02/goodbye-sweden/

I'm glad to announce that I too am off in a couple of months. It took me less than two years to reach the point of fk this. I'll be living below the poverty line for a while as I try to get my business off the ground in the UK. But it'll be worth it.

Goodbye Sweden.

[Looket]

fk me, this brings a chill down my spine.

http://www.expressen.se/gt/forskolan-hagahuset-arr...


A nursery participating in Pride... with the children repeating slogans.

'Haga Nygata was painted in all of the colours of the rainbow on Thursday. With homemade flags, banners and songs 120 children from the Hagahuset nursery took part in the manifestation for love.
- We do it because we want to, said 3-year old Alice Gesaw.
- You must be allowed to love who you want to, added her friend Hugo Beaumont.'

Their teacher explains:
'We talk about the equal value of people every day - that sexuality or the colour of one's skin doesn't matter. We do this 365 days of the year.'

[Looket]

Bombings in Malmö since last year: http://www.sydsvenskan.se/malmo/bombkarta-har-har-...

Shootings in Gothenburg since 2013: https://olitrocks.cartodb.com/viz/dbd8170a-d915-11...

[Looket]

Oh dear, it seems the wacists are now the largest party in Sweden. Metro published a Yougov poll putting the Sweden Democrats at 25.2%, the Social Democrats at 23.4% and the Moderates (Tories) at 21%. Then promptly withdrew the article as the results are only due out tomorrow.

Whether it's true remains to be seen, but in any case I think it's fair to say that this summer's been hard on the multicultitards. Few too many bombs, grenades, rapes, shootings and stabbings to hide under the carpet.

[Looket]

Don't forget that one ad campaign in one entrance of one Stockholm tube station. You know, the one that cost £30k but ended up getting around £6m worth of exposure and caused a horde of lefty apes to run amok.

That probably helped a bit.

[Looket]

Oops.



I expect a media meltdown tomorrow.

[Looket]

LastLight said:

Christ alive! What the hell has happened to the Swedes. Last time I was there (admittedly, Stockholm not Malevolentmo) I felt so safe and relaxed and found the people to be friendly and helpful. Now it sounds worse than an episode of Top Gear in Alabama.

I would suggest that the Swedes are as non-violent and friendly as ever - unless you start talking politics, in which case toys may get thrown out of the pram.


EDIT: According to the Sentio poll released today, the Social Democrats are on 23.5%, the Sweden Democrats on 23.4% and the Moderates on 21.1%. No worries though, Sentio has already been declared a racist institute (plus, it's Norwegian... and what do they know?) and Yougov is a Donald Duck institute. All is well.

Edited by Looket on Thursday 20th August 12:23

[Looket]

strudel said:

That to me suggests frustration with the current system and/or they can't adequately justify why they feel the way they do. Are the Swedes a particularly moral nation? (I only know of Lagom)

Well, put it this way, I can't remember the last time the Socialdemocrats weren't the largest party in Sweden. Even during the 2006 election, which was considered a landslide for the conservative Alliance, they got 35% of the vote. That was considered complete and utter humiliation - gone were the days of lone majority rule. The Moderates may have overtaken them on a couple of occasions during the disastrous Juholt and Sahlin years, but the difference this time is that both the Moderates and Socialdemocrats have been overtaken by a third party from outside the establishment. Imagine UKIP overtaking the Tories and Labour.

It's historic in many ways, and in my opinion quite telling of the frustration with the current system. Even more so considering the Sweden Democrats got 12.9% of the vote in last year's election. They've doubled in size in less than a year! That's crazy momentum.

As for not being able to justify their own views, that's mostly true as well. If I were a betting man, I'd say it's mostly down to Sweden historically being a socialist country with a strong consensus culture and subsequently rigid opinion hegemony. Put simply, the left hasn't needed to ever really justify itself. The decline of the left in the last decade however has caused a lot of frustration in certain quarters which in turn has polarised the debate climate in absurdum. As a result, people jump straight to mud-slinging and agitating rather than attempting a sober debate - because there isn't a proper debate to be had. It's essentially trench warfare.

[Looket]

Digga said:

Naivety. It's like leaving your house unlocked. Yes, no doubt this will allow some of your nicer neighbours to pop by and leave you home made cakes and jam, or return the tools you've kindly loaned them, but on the downside there's sadly also going to be a potential risk of someone emptying all you valuables into a van, or worse still, dropping by and slitting your throat.

Funny you should say that, seeing as in the Sweden of old people did use to leave their houses, cars and bicycles unlocked. Although that was slightly before my time - I grew up in the nineties and early noughties - the worst crime I could think of in my youth was someone sitting on my moped without asking. That was in a Stockholm suburb. I can only imagine what it would've been like in a smaller city or in the country. Point is, it may boil down to blind naivety in this day and age but it's a trait deeply engrained in the Swedish 'folk soul'. Which I suppose sums the problem up quite nicely, albeit in slightly less eloquent terms than Iain.

It's nice to go to our place in Finland and have all the neighbours barge through the front door without so much as a knock like it's the most natural thing in the world.

[Looket]

Rude-boy said:

Would either of you guys be able to point me in the right direction of a half decent guide to the trips and traps for dirty foreigners like me buying in Finland?

We have been thinking about buying somewhere in Finland for a few years now but things have taken a more serious twist in the last couple of weeks and i can see that I am going to have to get up to speed swiftly.

Intention is to go there for a couple of weeks a year and rent out for as much as we can for the rest of the year (not to make money, or even really with concern to pay for the asset, just to try to make it cost neutral (other an opportunity cost of having capital tied up!)

As far as I'm aware there isn't a lot of red tape for foreigners to buy property. The guides at: http://www.expat-finland.com/housing/buying_proper... will get you up to speed. Your best bet would probably be to get in touch with an estate agent though.

In the mean time look at http://www.etuovi.com/?locale=en and http://www.tori.fi/ (use Google Translate) to look at property.

[Looket]

QuantumTokoloshi said:

The BBC this morning, take the view that the whole of Sweden is behind taking in an unlimited number of migrants and refugees. I wonder what the view here is?

Ah, that would be a reference to the national media propaganda campaign of the last week. It was sparked by the picture of the 3 year old boy. Apparently the Swedes overnight abandoned all their worries and opened their eyes to the evils of the world. 100 celebrities say so.

In the mean time the Sweden Democrats are continuing their meteoric rise and people are getting increasingly fked off at being told what to feel, think and say. In the words of the national press ombudsman, 'free speech was given to us by politicians, if not treated right they can take it away'.

[Looket]

It seems the 'Angry Dago' has gone a bit mad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KSJY0c8QWw

For all its cringe worthiness it's still well-worth watching. He has a way with words.

[Looket]

Finlandia said:

I saw that earlier
He's not really wrong though.

Indeed, his analysis is spot-on.

Extra points for posing seductively in the woods.

[Looket]

BrabusMog said:

Hjälp oss hjälpa on TV3 tonight...

I'm sure all of their 10 viewers will donate atleast £20 in total!

In other news the Sweden Democrats are now polling 26.5%. Who'd have thought making a circus out of dead children for political points could possibly backfire.

[Looket]

hidetheelephants said:

the hard right eat babies:

That would be funny if it wasn't true. Swedish feminism is, by and large, based on the work of a crazy bint whose name currently escapes me. In her seminal book, which you'll very likely find referenced in any feminist piece of literature worth its salt, she claims that 50% of Swedish women are beaten and abused in their homes and that there exist vast yet hidden death cults of satanistic men who sacrifice babies in the woods by eating them.

I'm not even making it up.

[Looket]

Finlandia said:

Gudrun is it? Ex commie turned radical feminist.

Eva Lundgren. Nutty ex-professor of Uppsala Uni.

Not only do these satanist pedophile networks eat babies, they eat them fresh. Ripped straight out of the womb. Mmmmmm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Lundgren

[Looket]

According to Rebecca Uvell, an actual proper journalist that still takes pride in doing her job, the National Board of Housing, Building and Planning published a largely unnoticed report in March regarding immigration, the housing shortage and the massively over-crowded asylum centres.

If you're not familiar with the Swedish rental market, all you need to know is that it's heavily controlled. Most parents register their children with various private and communal housing queues as soon as they're born in order for them to have any kind of chance of moving away from home in the distant future. To get an apartment in Stockholm you need decades worth of accumulated queue time - and even then you're lucky to get a box room in a distant sthole of a suburb. The private sector is, for all intents and purposes, non-existent. Contracts are either traded on the black market for ridiculous money (you're essentially... buying a rental) or swapped for brick and mortar. Want my £400/PCM Zone 1 apartment? Fine, I'll swap it for your £400.000 house.

Anyway, in their report they recommend that all available rentals be required by law to register with one single council-controlled housing queue. And that 'factors other than queue time' be the deciding factor in who gets first dibs on any given apartment. In other words, all rental apartments are to be allocated to immigrants. Due to legal reasons however they acknowledge that while forcing landlords to ultimately surrender their property rights may be difficult, they can be prosecuted for discrimination if they refuse to let their apartment to whomever the council send their way.

I wouldn't be surprised if all this actually came to be. Mehmet Kaplan, Minister of Housing for the Green Party is a known mentalist (clue is in his name and party affiliation).

All I can say is that I'm glad to be leaving this madhouse behind very shortly.


http://www.uvell.se/2015/09/12/socialisering-28327...

EDIT: This is Mehmet Kaplan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehmet_Kaplan

Edited by Looket on Tuesday 15th September 16:21

[Looket]

LastLight said:

Jesus, do the left know no bounds in their desire to make everyone adhere to their world view and life-template? Swedes - surely the least lucky indigenous population this side of The Christmas Islands...

False!

Swedes cannot, by definition, be an unlucky people as we don't exist! To be perfectly honest I'm not entirely sure of the reasoning behind it, but what I do know for sure is that we definitely don't have our own national identity or a rightful claim to existence.

See? It all becomes so much easier that way!

As an aside, the above post is part of a larger debate where the argument has been made that it's the Swedes' fault that integration isn't working. It's our fault, because we live in the affluent neighbourhoods with the nice houses and the glitzy apartments. It's our fault, because we send our children to the high-performing schools that churn out triple-A* students year after year. It's our fault, because we hog all the nice, cushy, well-paid jobs. It's our fault, because we are so inherently and utterly and vehemently racist.

So now it's time for us to move over. Literally.

Although I'm yet to see or hear anyone ask how that would be possible when we don't even exist.