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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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To be fair, this guy is Swedish. The sense I get from my Swedish friends is that nobody is allowed to complain about anything that's part of The Rules in Sweden (except maybe bad fika), and if you do, you are ipso facto some kind of bitter, deformed outcast, a defiler of the Jantelagen. The big old Swedish companies are also culturally fairly old-fashioned in the sense of focusing on their business, I'm sure there are many places you can hide from this stuff, and if you think that it's only a problem when you personally see it that's basically luck of the draw in your coworkers.