We had a major economic crisis in Sweden in the 90s and rebalanced our unsustainable social security system, which was previously thought inconceivable. It wasn't the end of the world. There is still fairly generous social security, pensions, our nation debt is down from 73% to 32% and taxes are down (probably unrealistic for the US...).
It can be done if a crisis gets bad enough, the insanity can stop.
Politicians usually do the right thing as soon as they've explored every other option. Not every country is Argentina.
I feel like there it is a bit of a mistake to assume that hazing and macho locker room culture necessarily overlap with "rape culture".
I've been part of the former and I saw no indication of that. Guys were borderline raped by their team mates but treated women with a lot of respect and care. It's not in the same mental world and I don't think the guys considered what they did to their team mates sexual, even if it literally was. I'd argue that it's really bad if the hazing goes overboard or just becomes a sustained severe harassment (and given how hard it is to police it might be better to outright ban it), but that doesn't mean that people are more disposed towards sexual assault towards women. I've not been part of one of these youth academies but I've known and played with people who have, and they've not been worse than anyone else.
What I think is going on is that celebrity makes people behave really badly, both the guys being celebs and the women seeking their favour/attention. It seems to me that the same thing happens with all kinds of stars: sports, music, acting. It's not about whether the people involved do (severe)hazing or not, it's that they're idolized stars, allowing them to do whatever and still be rewarded for it. It creates a really fucked up incentive structure for everyone involved. The younger you are and the more isolated from general society you are, the worse it gets, which points in the direction of these academies possibly making things worse.
I understand that there is a desire to put an = between hazing and "rape culture" but I think that is a mistake and obscures what's really going on. Solving hazing is probably desireable, but that won't solve the sexual assaults and pretending it will is counterproductive.
Ioper
3mo ago
And slavery was made illegal in Sweden in 1335 and serfdom never really existed either in practice or as a legal concept, even though there were major agricultural areas (Västgöta slätten, Östgöta slätten, Mälardalen).
The far more important thing to look at is societies like China and India and South Korea and Singapore and Japan, which mistreat their own women to such an extent that their societies fail to reproduce themselves.
This was and still is a very curious thing to me. I have three friends with east Asian wives, one from Korea, one from China and one from Japan. Their wives are all middle or upper middle class and they have all married either laterally or downwards (especially lookswise), but all seem exceptionally happy with their husbands, who are not really exceptional people.
As I've come to understand it this does not have to do with fetishization as much as with just how badly these women have been treated by their previous Asian boyfriends and the general expectations on them from their prospective in-law families and society in general. From the perspective of a decent Swedish guy, the standards for being a good partner seem astonishingly low – to the point where failure almost seems to require an active effort.
It just seems so unsustainable for them. It's not like we're perfect or giga-cucked over here but it's still a walk-over, at least in the mind of these particular women. They just want to be treated with respect by their partners, be able to work after having children and not be treated as pseudo servants/slaves by their in-laws. I've had a bit of hard time really believing this, could it really be that bad?
Perhaps.
Or perhaps my friends' wives have a overly negative view of their home societies and that's why they ended up with western husbands. Or maybe it's a combination.
Ioper
6mo ago
Pepe Escobar is quite possibly the least credible source on planet earth...
Sweden has a growing cost/efficiency problem with our healthcare system as well and the identified main cause is growing administrative bloat.
The interesting thing is that while documentation requirements have gone up (partially and possibly mainly due to privatisation) that isn't perceived as the main driving factor to the bloat.
The main driving factor is that the administrative department isnt doing administrative work related to the hospital care. They are engaged in more prestigious make work they create for themselves, like creating "strategic communication plans", leaving the health care professionals to deal with the actual administration despite massive administrative departments.
This is perceived as a black hole that can consume an endless amount of resources without ever helping the core business.
It's a bit funny that an industry so dedicated to pumping franchises for money insisting on deconstructing their properties for no apparent reason at all, especially when the deconstructions aren't even good or creative.
Why not just give the audience what it wants? Ie. Another adventure man, rom com, war hero, horror, whatever.
I'm not saying that deconstruction can't be a good idea but why does every franchise have to be deconstructed? Why does almost every movie have to be about deconstruction of narrative tropes or the movie making process?
Ioper
4mo ago
I don't believe this at all. We were never colonized in Sweden and the exact same thing happened.
Either something really strange is going on behind the scenes (like a pseudo government take over) or the board are complete clowns.
A trans person is someone whose mental traits break from this typical correlation, i.e., their mental traits fall in the opposite mode of the bimodal sexual distribution.
In my experience that isnt true at all. Trans men and trans women almost always exhibit (mostly) the mental traits associated with their birth sex.
What they do have is an intense discomfort with having both these mental traits and physical traits (or possibly just intense discomfort that happened to focus on this).
I read an interview with a Swedish expert who, while being negative about death penalties in general, was similarly confused about how long it took and all the reported thrashing, which goes against all experience with industrial accidents where people pass out and die very quickly without they themselves or their nearby colleages realising what's going on.
Something clearly went wrong here.
Right now, the bureaucratic class in education, government, and elsewhere exert a strongly negative influence on productivity, and they have absolutely no incentives to trim down red tape to put themselves out of jobs or reduce the amount of power they hold.
I think this is a misdiagnosis of whats going on. On an individual level where someones work is individually threatened by the removal of some administrative or bureaucratic requirement they might oppose it's removal but at the same time there's at least ten people in the same organization that is burdened by said requirement and dreams of it being removed. Also, even if the requirement is removed they're unlikely to be fired, they'll be reassigned and hiring will be reduced.
It is not the administrative state that is driving this, it's the regulatory state, mostly because they don't actually have to deal with the consequences of the regulations they create. It is good to pass regulation because you're then seen as "doing something" and the costs are too diffuse to be tracked back to you by the electorate. There is noone that can say no so the regulatory complexity grows and with it cost disease. It's kind of like a spaghetti code base that is never refactored because people with power have no incentive to do so and the code will never actually fail to execute, only work worse and require more compute.
That said, opinions of a department wholly concerned with dealing with some bureaucratic hurdle is suspect when asked about the value of said regulation. But again, these are usually small parts of the overall organisation that are concerned with something else of concrete value.
It is possible that llms will help but I could see it being a wash because it also enables bad behaviour which necessitates further regulation and enforcement.
Ioper
4mo ago
I'm sure Hamas lies and they obviously lied about the hospital explosion, and its a shame that media uncritically re-reports Hamas numbers but even the Jerusalem post puts palestinan deaths in Gaza at >13k.
If you have a credible argument for the real number being less than 6th of that then I would like to hear it.
Ioper
3mo ago
Another major thing is housing which is very hard to compensate for.
If you live in high cost of living area living alone is really expensive.
Even if both parents are working you're going to be much poorer after a break up.
Ioper
4mo ago
Many people won't even believe that male and female humans have different physical performance in sports for any reason but different socialization.
In my subjective experience here in Sweden this has almost entirely gone away. It used to be fairly prevalent in the late 90s/00s but then both statistics and young teenage boys comfortably beating elite professional women over and over again got media attention and the narrative went away.
Ioper
5mo ago
Alternatively, they intentionally made a video with an "unexpected" result in order to draw interest... Like how practically all these videos work and reality tv too for that matter.
People getting to dunk on smug people is like catnip, video producers know this.
It could be as you say anyway but I wouldn't take that video as an indication of anything, except what the producers wanted and possibly their social circles. It's the opposite of a scientific investigation.
Ioper
5mo ago
Or shtetl/non-shtetl Ashkenazi, Sakoku/Meiji restoration Japan, etc.
It doesn't matter how intelligent you are if all you're trying to do is figure out more elaborate ways to stare up your own asshole.
What the actual value of equipment and munitions sent is by no means clear, at least to me. Is it what it nominally cost to produce when it was produced? What it cost to produce inflation adjusted? What the deprecated value of it is? What the deprecated value of it is minus disposal costs? Is it what a replacement would cost?
If anything I think much of the aid has been financially overvalued to a ridiculous degree for optics reasons and now the accounting valuation may change as the optics or political viability of appropriating funds for sending aid change.
Newly produced munitions is hard to change how you valuate it though, it costs what it costs.
Ioper
9mo ago
they would be restrained by a group of 8-10 upperclassmen dressed in various “Purge-like” masks, who would then begin “dry-humping” the victim in a dark locker room.
I'm guessing this either an extremely rare occurrence or just a flat out fabrication.
Sounds like the kind of thing that happens once as a practical joke/scaring someone, which then gets mythologised.
A similar thing happened in my club and it was definitely not a common occurrence, it happened once and was then talked about for a decade.
Less spectacular stuff happens all the time though and I imagine just regular lockerroom stuff would be unpalatable to (some) people if it was written down.
Cut out either the strength training or the MMA, whatever you find less interesting.
If you can stick with 4x a week strength or 6x a week MMA then that is more than enough. Working out and building muscle is a marathon, not a sprint. You're going to injure yourself or lose interest because you'll get so exhausted if you stick with this (and actually do the workouts for real).
10 workouts a week for an almost complete beginner is insanity. See if you can stick with one program for at least 6 months and then re-evaluate.
An issue here is that what people are exposed to mostly actually is "fake" (or mild) because it's mostly those people who have the energy and resources to advocate for themselves (or promote in the case of grifters). This goes for a ton of things, like autism. How much are you exposed to the mildly autistic nerdy guys and how much to the non-verbal people who need to be supervised and/or restrained 24/7 to prevent them from eating their own shit and stabbing themselves with sharp objects? (Actual example from my time working as a home carer).
How many people eating gluten free have celiacs and how many are just pretentious assholes?
How much is one exposed to the whiny Redditor/TikTok long covider and how much to the person who is about as functional as someone in the last week of their life with terminal cancer? I don't think anyone whose seen the latter in real life can believe it's fake or even psychiatric but people don't see that, how could they realistically?
I mean, a captive bolt pistol with a large caliber seems like a fairly humane way to go. I don't think there's much left when half your brain gets smashed to mush.
But at that point why just not hang people or use a guillotine? Not sure why those are unacceptable.
Why would you trust that?
In my estimation the vast majority are largely amoral and just go with the flow. My wife is mostly amoral for example, she doesn't have moral opinions on almost anything. She isn't stupid or malevolent, she just doesn't care.
When I want to talk about some moral issue she just zones out because she gets bored. She wants to talk about what happened at her work or what she is planning for the garden or the baby room.
Very few people have moral opinions as anything more than accessories or as part of cheerleading for their team. People do get incredibly passionate about cheering/booing though.
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