I have a complaint about the media. First they make a bunch of films with the same stupid plot hole. I refer, of course, to the 1938 Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes, its 1979 and 2013 remakes, and several other movies inspired by it, such as Bunny Lake is Missing and Flightplan.
Then if that were not enough they try to run the same ridiculous “We can act like something whose existence is thunderingly obvious never existed at all and no one will notice” plotline past the public in the newspapers. I refer, of course, to the article by Oliver Moody that appeared in the Times on 6th February 2023. The headline is “Swedish police demand tools to fight ‘unprecedented’ gang crime” and the subheading is “Nation with peaceful reputation averaged one shooting or bombing a day last month”
Swedish police chiefs have warned that crime is hitting “extremely serious and unprecedented” levels after 19 shootings in Stockholm and the surrounding towns since Christmas.
Gun violence between gangs competing over the increasingly lucrative drugs trade has been rising since the turn of the millennium, culminating in a record 63 fatal shootings last year. The country also has the European Union’s highest numbers of drug offences, burglaries and thefts per head, according to the bloc’s statistics agency.
While the firearms murders were already the dominant issue at the general election last September, the concerns have worsened as several gang conflicts in the Stockholm region escalated over the past six weeks.
At least four teenagers and young men have been shot dead in the latest spate of violence. There was on average of one shooting or bombing a day in the area over the four weeks from December 25.
In the most recent incident an adult and two children were targeted at their flat in Arboga, 75 miles west of the capital. Their front door was peppered with bullets twice in the space of a week, although no one was hurt.
Ten police leaders including Anders Thornberg, head of the national police authority, said their agencies were under “historically high” strain. “Day and night our staff are working to deal with fatal shootings, bombings and other serious violent crimes,” they wrote in Dagens Nyheter newspaper.
“But despite this hard and determined work 24 hours a day, and despite the fact that police and prosecutors have never before deprived so many people of their liberty, the detention centres and prisons are full to bursting — more needs to be done.”
The senior police officers said crimes were harder to solve because victims and witnesses have become more reluctant to testify.
Gangs are believed to be hiring children as young as 13 or 14 to intimidate their rivals with gunshots or explosives. Thornberg and his colleagues said the investigations were getting “ever harder to deal with” because of the number of officials involved in youth cases.
The most recommended comment was by J Sture and said, “This article appears to be missing a crucial element. Are we to suppose that this rise in gang warfare and drugs is all to with the native Swedish population? Just asking…”. At the time of writing there are 137 comments to Oliver’s Moody’s article. By my reckoning around 120 of them mock the author for not mentioning that the gangs driving the unprecedented increase in Sweden’s crime rate are made up of Muslim immigrants or their immediate descendants.
Burying the lede can work as a strategy if no one even suspects there ever was a lede there in the first place. When people know damn well what is not being said, it has the opposite effect. This helps nobody and harms everybody, including Sweden’s Muslims. A problem that cannot be named cannot be solved.
I refer you, yet again, to the 13th Analect. Confucius is long dead, but his wisdom continues to be ignored.
Language is a powerful tool; the unnamed cannot be discussed, let alone with clarity. That’s why the left does all it can to change language and word meanings; what you can’t talk about clearly, you also can’t think about clearly. They’re creating thought-vacuums, intentionally, so as to wriggle their way through the defenses of your mind.
Human language is a reflection of the people using it to think. If you don’t actually think, then your language is muddled and incoherent; if you do, it’s usually concise and well-formed.
The interesting thing is, how few on the right recognize this fact. It’s like they’re fish swimming in a sea of meaning, never recognizing it for water. The left grasps the nature of things, and so it seeks to change the water through which they navigate.
Read the 13th, and a lot of the problems in modern society become clear. We very badly need a rectification of names across the whole of the West.
Perhaps Ms Thunberg has a solution? A school strike perhaps, to stop the children getting involved? The Swedish voters changed the government recently, perhaps recognising implicitly that something needed to change. How about methodological individualism, treating everyone as an individual, responsible for their actions, especially at the age of 13.
But telling the truth is a revolutionary act, is it not?
We don’t so much live in a post-truth world as a post-reality world.
If suicidal collective insanity like Net Zero can even be contemplated, let alone become the orthodoxy, I am unsurprised a massive uptick in violence in Sweden fails to mention areas being partially overrun by murderous gangs of Somalis etc.
Likewise, article after article have ascribed a spate of athletes who “died suddenly” to climate change, eating eggs, and all manner of other things, but with one possible cause never being mentioned.
A complaint with the media?
I’d give you my list, but you’d need a bigger server.
It is indeed not just Sweden, it is indeed many Western nations – one is not allowed to discuss the challenges to the West that were once outside, but are now inside Western nations (such as a rival world view that has been around since the 7th century – but now has been declared, by the Western establishment, as friendly – with any dissent about this position being PUNISHED by the Western establishment), or from inside – such the Covid injections – or the general power of the vast corporations which are created by the Cantillon Effect (fiat money and Credit Bubble finance) and government regulations – which concentrate economic power, and link it to political power (the merging of the state and certain vast corporations – an emerging Corporate State).
As Ronald Reagan said “liberty is never more than one generation away from being destroyed” – this is because once Freedom of Speech goes, all other basic liberties soon follow, and the young do not even remember a time when there was liberty, or have a clear understanding of what liberty is.
I remember a Danish comedian being lectured on a Swedish television station about his “Islamophobia” and also his “exaggeration” of the activities of NON Islamic (yes NON Islamic – many of the gangs are NOT Islamic) gangs in Sweden – his reply was to point out that not only had there been bomb explosions in Stockholm the previous night (which he had heard from his hotel room), but that there had been no mention of these events on Swedish television that morning.
It’s almost amusing, from an American point of view. We’re so often lectured and hectored by our European “betters” about how violent and unjust American society is because of our high incarceration rates and endemic violence that’s really restricted only to certain minority demographics in certain specific locales…
How’s it feel to learn what that’s like, at first hand? It’s very easy to have liberal and generous policies about crime and punishment when you’ve got a mostly homogenous mono-ethnic society that you’ve exported all your troublemakers from, over the last many generations. Not so easy when you’ve refilled the reservoirs with the essentially undomesticated variety of human being, is it?
Every time I look at what Sweden and other European countries have turned themselves into in the name of socially liberal policies, I have to laugh. Without the outlet all of you had with the rest of the world, mostly the Americas, you’d have had a much more devisive history. But, you got rid of all the troublemakers and malcontents, sloughed them off on us here in the New World, and here we are. There’s a reason the US has a much higher incarceration rate than the nations “contributing” their problem children; it’s because those sorts of malcontents that boarded boats rather than live with the rest of you weren’t all that good at living with other people, period. No idea at all why any of y’all thought it would be a good idea to go out and recruit a fresh batch of troublemakers. Was it boredom, darlings?
Ah, well. Y’all will learn. Like everyone else, the hard way. Which seems to be the only really lasting educator.
Kirk – to be fair some European leftists do, in private, understand this.
For example, the Danish government, Social Democrats, has a (on the quiet) strict immigration policy – they understand that mass migration into Denmark would make the place a Hellhole, and they do NOT want that.
Old (1950s and 1960s) Sweden lecturing Americans on how peaceful society can be was like people from Minnesota (in the 1950s and 1960s) lecturing people in the South about how peaceful society can be – and Minneapolis was peaceful back in the 1950s and 1960s, just as Stockholm and Malmo were peaceful back in the 1950s and 1960s – none of these places are peaceful now. Demographic change – demographic change that the elites said they wanted. Well they got what they wanted – and now their children and grand children are at risk.
As for the Welfare State – publications such as the Economist magazine are exactly WRONG, mass migration will not save the Welfare State, it will make the Welfare State collapse more quickly.
I do not believe the state can hand out all these benefits and services for ever – but if a country wants to keep a Welfare State as long as possible, the mass inward migration of vast numbers of low skill, and often violently criminal, people is what it should prevent.
If one looks at the flood of illegal immigration gushing over the southern border of the United States right now – they are NOT all violent criminals (although many are), but few will be real taxpayers – they will get to the Federal Income Tax threshold. But they will claim Food Stamps, free education for their children, “Emergency” health care, and on and on. There will be fake “studies” claiming that they pay their way – but everyone knows that such “studies” are as straight as the Corporate types of the Wall Street Journal claiming that the Arizona (which most WSJ types could not find on a map) Gubernatorial election was not rigged in 2022. When everyone knows it happened, watched it happen, having the Corporate elite come out denying it, is irritating – very irritating indeed. Ditto Corporate types pointing at the influx over the Southern border and saying (in best Economist magazine absurdity) “rejoice, this is an economic benefit!” (indeed to them the problem is that immigration is “restricted” – the influx should be LARGER). Oddly such people do not rejoice if you hire a bus and deliver the illegals outside their home in their nice part of the country.
A society that has no government benefits and services can PERHAPS have something like “free migration” (as long as the existing population is allowed to use force if force is used against them – without being persecuted as “racists” for defending themselves) – a Welfare State can not have free migration or anything even vaguely like it.
By the way – there is a weird government advertising campaign on British television.
“Everyone is entitled to government help with the cost of living” – it really does say “everyone” (not “someone who has paid into the system for X number of years” or something like that) and then it lists all the different benefits and services the government wants to give to “everyone” (we are not going bankrupt fast enough – economic collapse NOW!).
If I was poor in some African or Asian country – I would come to the United Kingdom as fast as I could, after all such a policy (of giving help to “everyone”) can not last long, so I would want to get as much as I could before the Collapse.
Did a minister make these advertisements? No – most likely ministers have never even seen them (they work long hours – going through endless reports which are written to confuse them and browbeat them), such is the way government now works – the elected politicians do not have much influence (they have some influence over some things – but not over the basic policy of spend-spend-spend).
There is nothing new about any of this, except that it seems to be getting worse as civilization keeps more and more stupid people alive and breeding even more stupid people.