Yes. Fascinatingly enough it's not been as bad in neghbouring countries, leading to the term "we don't want Swedish conditions over here".
It probably is because Sweden has taken on much more immigrants, to the point where the percentage of Swedish residents born outside Sweden is 3x higher than in Norway and Denmark. This has probably overloaded the capacity of the social security system, and has lead to a greater extent of neighbourhoods where almost every older adult is a poor first-generation immigrant.
No, it is not related to an overloading of the social security system in that way. Yes, the system is overloaded by having a large new contingent of non-contributing individuals partaking of the payouts but this has not led to a decrease in those payouts, far from it. A family with 5 children can get enough money from the state - in 2016 the amount was 32.800 kr according to a calculation published by Riksdagen (the Swedish parliament) which comes down to a lower middle class income - for a reasonably comfortable life without ever having to seek employment.
The problem is cultural, not economical. The Swedish state has, following a decision pushed by Olof Palme on Sweden having to become 'a multicultural state like the United States of America where Swedish culture is no longer the single dominant one' followed a policy to not only allow but encourage migrants to not integrate or assimilate into Swedish culture but to keep and strengthen their own, paid for largely by the Swedish state through subsidies for ethnically segregated cultural organisations. This has led to the establishment of ethnically segregated areas in many of the larger cities with names like 'lilla Mogadishu' (little Mogadishu), 'lilla Kabul', 'lilla Bagdad' and more. It has led to objectively unexplainable situations where a regime-supporting Eritrean cultural festival is organised in Stockholm by "refugees" from the same regime which then attracts opponents to the regime from all over Europe who come there to make war on those same regime-supporting "refugees" [1]. It has led to parts of Göteborg - the second largest city in Sweden - being under the virtual control of the Ali Khan clan [2] with members erecting road blocks to keep out authorities, somewhat comparable to the way road blocks were erected in Portland OR but far more established than those temporary eruptions of anarchy.
Sweden is now a cauldron bubbling with different factions - Afghans, Somalians, Moroccans, Iraqi, Syrians, Turks, Lebanese, Ugandans, Eritreans and more - striving for dominance in different types of organised crime. The multicultural 'experiment' has failed spectacularly and disastrously as was foreseen by many but which was not to be spoken of in fear of being labelled a 'racist' or 'nazi'. This labelling still continues and the denial still prevails but the subject has become more approachable due to the fact that the results of this failure are clearly and undeniably visible for anyone to see. What remains is to find a solution for the problems caused by the near half century of mismanagement and misdirection which keeps those aspects of Swedish culture and society which made it successful and worthy of emulation but does away with the ideologically driven mistakes. Given that the political party most (but certainly not solely) responsible for these failures - Socialdemokraterna or "the social democrats" - is and has for a long time being the largest and most dominant party combined with the fact that political parties in general and this party in particular are not known for admitting to past mistakes it remains to be seen whether and if so to what extent this will happen.
>This has led to the establishment of ethnically segregated areas in many of the larger cities with names like 'lilla Mogadishu' (little Mogadishu), 'lilla Kabul', 'lilla Bagdad' and more.
>Sweden is now a cauldron bubbling with different factions - Afghans, Somalians, Moroccans, Iraqi, Syrians, Turks, Lebanese, Ugandans, Eritreans and more - striving for dominance in different types of organised crime.
>The multicultural 'experiment' has failed spectacularly and disastrously as was foreseen by many but which was not to be spoken of in fear of being labelled a 'racist' or 'nazi'.
> only the parties I didn't want to vote for could talk about it.
...and therein lies the rub. Assuming you did vote you gave your vote to just those parties which did all they could to promulgate the problem by castigating anyone who dared to speak about migration in anything but a positive way as 'racists' or 'nazis'.
The only reason we can talk about it now is that those parties - or rather that party, only Sverigedemokraterna (the "national-conservative" party, their program resembles that of the social democrats of the early 60's from before Olof Palme) has been steadfast in their position with Moderaterna (the "classically liberal" party) having been one of the instigators of the current problems through Fredrik Reinfeldt's (prime minister of Sweden from 2006 to 2014) deal with Miljöpartiet (the "green party" which has been far more active in promoting migration and related activism than they have been for their original environmental goals) to "open the borders" in 2014 to "punish the country for having voted Sverigedemokraterna into the parliament". That same prime minister claimed that "Ursvenskt är bara barbariet. Resten av utvecklingen har kommit utifrån" [1] ("purely Swedish is only barbarism, the rest of development has come from the outside") - with a prime minister who thinks such about the country he is supposed to lead it comes as no surprise that he made things worse rather than better.
I'm a migrant to Sweden myself, having moved there from the Netherlands in 2002. I was surprised by the fact that Sweden had a real-life national socialist party, something which would not be possible in the Netherlands. No, it was not Sverigedemokraterna but Nationalsocialistisk Front which later changed its name into Svenskarnas Parti before they gave the ghost a few years later. Now there is something called Nordiska Motståndsrörelse (Northern Resistance movement) which seems to fill the gap. What soon became clear is that those parties did exist but that they were the absolute fringe and never attracted more than a few hundred people, were not taken seriously by nearly everyone and were mostly dangerous for their own in-crowd due to incessant infighting. The only real function these parties had and have seems to be to function as a foil for the likes of EXPO (a self-proclaimed anti-nazi/anti-racist group which may have started out that way but for many decades is more aptly described as a left-wing propaganda organisation, their research wing proudly describes itself as "Swedens STASI") and the propaganda arms of several "progressive" parties to portray Sweden as having a large problem with "nazis" and "racists". This stood and stands in complete opposition to the facts which, at least until recently, showed Sweden as one of the most tolerant and open countries in the world. This tolerance and openness having been abused past the breaking point finally seems to permeate the masses which makes the scare tactics - "skrämselpropaganda" for another fine Swedish word to try to pronounce for all you linguaphobes out there - less effective and has started to make it possible to discuss problems related to migration and integration/assimilation without immediately (or at least "effectively", the accusations are still made but they don't tend to stick as well as they did before) being shot down as a 'racist' or 'nazi'.
Simple, import the 3rd world, become the 3rd world, what baffles me is that it really takes 10,20, 30 years of live experience for some people to start understanding (much too late) this very simple fact.
It's been happening a lot lately. Last decade or so we've began to have a real gang problem.
It wasn't helped by the fact that hand grenades were classed as illegal fireworks up until like 2017, and fairly risk free to smuggle into the country.
Hand grenades are clearly not the primary cause since they were legal for a long time before this became a problem. Its also not clear that they account for more recent bombings.
Whether or not you think they should be legal is completely beside that point of them being the primary cause, which you pivoted away from. Likely because its hard to support.
Norway and Sweden has been - and is - flush with weapons and have been for decades.
When I grew up at least two of my neighbors had complete G3s and lots of ammo stashed in their house. There were tens of thousands of these stored in homes everywhere as part of terrestrial defense forces (Heimevernet).
This wasn't a drought. It was totally unproblematic. Even if sometimes people got angry and sparks flew things didn't explode.
Because guns aren't explosive.
Something else has happened that has made the situation dangerous.
Since immigrants in Germany are not throwing grenades, it is an unnecessary generalozation. It is also an over simplification of the situation in Sweden. And premature, as nothing seems to be known for certain yet.
All of the bombings are gang related, and gang members in Sweden have a disproportionately foreign background.
There is nothing to gain here by pretending this isn't happening. People are literally dying. No one mentioned any races, and conflating "immigrant" with any particular race is misleading at best.
Not disputing the nbers, why would I? But painting it as problem purely caused by migration, and I highly doubt we talk about people from Germany, Denmark or Norway, has some xenophobic undertones, doesn't it?
Given the very loose definition of racism and xenophobia these days, you may be right, but in the same sense that you can call a woman sexist for not wanting to be followed by a man when walking alone at night. Calling her a sexist repeatedly does not make her behavior unfounded or unreasonable.
As far as I understand, it's a relatively global operation. Swedish gangs essentially franchise the business model from the Mexican cartels.
Swedish immigrants are susceptible to this because Sweden did a spectacularly poor job at integrating these people. The idea was to liberally accept immigrants to solve the demographic crisis and the pension system, but along the way most of the immigrants who moved to the country were let down and given fairly shitty life prospects.
Turns out these people aren't filled with grateful joy over having undignified dead end jobs and living in dinky apartments in segregated communities in derelict apartment buildings from the '70s. Quelle surprise.
These are not American-style (overseas) immigrants, with relative wealth and degrees. These are poor refugees who might never have wanted to live in the West anyway. Integrating them in an advanced European monoculture sounds like an impossible social engineering task, no?
I think there has been a somewhat conceited attitude among the Swedish political class to assume that Swedish values and ideals are an inevitable logical conclusion from enlightenment, and if someone doesn't share these values, it's because the poor souls haven't been informed of the correct way to think yet, and when encountering superior Swedish values, they willingly abandon their unenlightened opinions and assume the enlightened values of Sweden in their place.
Well as it turns out these values are a logical conclusion only if you've been indoctrinated in them since you were a toddler.
If Sweden isn't a monoculture then your argument suggests integration should be possible, yes?
That doesn't mean it would be easy to integrate refugees. Just look at how hard it was for Miami to integrate Cuban refugees. Anti-Castro extremists, for example, set off car bombs in the 1970s and 1980s. http://cuban-exile.com/doc_051-075/doc0073.html
Knowing this, yes, other European countries should have done more, to helped share the effort needed.
To make sure I understand the topic, I researched more about Sweden's multicultural history.
> Tornedalians were the targets of extensive so-called "racial biology" and swedification policies. In the early-to-mid 1900s Herman Lundborg and others from the State Institute for Racial Biology performed skull measurements on Tornedalians, with Lundborg performing the first measurements in 1913. At the same time speaking Finnish in schools was banned in parts of the country, including the Torne Valley. This ban was only revoked by the Riksdag in 1957.
How does that fit into your concept of "monoculture" in Sweden?
I think that's missing the point. Sweden has been an overbearing consensus culture with relatively limited room for debate or differences in opinions or values beyond the superficial.
Minorities like the Roma have been permitted to exist, but they've had zero place in the public sphere.
Yes, historically Sweden has been overbearing consensus culture, including using so-called "race science" to justify their positions, as with the Tornedalians.
But didn't official policy change long before they accepted many poor refugees from the non-West, which is the criteria shrimp_emoji used at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37336674 ?
That change, as I understand it, included creating the autonomous Sámi parliament back in the 1990s, and recognizing the Tornedalians and Sweden Finns, yes?
Plus, by the time of the Middle Eastern refugees, Sweden had accepted Western refugees, like Chileans back in the 1970s and Balkan refugees of the 1990s?
How then is Sweden a still meaningfully a monoculture even by, say, 2005?
I mean, I can understand how a government can be a monoculture, even if the country is not (eg, Afrikaans and South Africa), but I took shrimp_emoji to refer to the overall population, not the government.
Jews have had full civil rights in Sweden since before 1910, and took in a large amount of refugees from the Holocaust (famously, the entire Jewish population of Denmark). Sounds like the did a good job there.
Sweden has a chequered history when it comes to it relation to Jews. Before and during the first years of the second world war Sweden was mostly "neutral on the side of Nazi-Germany", it was only when the tides of war began to turn that Sweden became "neutral on the side of the allies". The stamped "J" (for "Jüde" or "Jew") in German passports for Jewish citizens was put there on the suggestion of Swiss and Swedish authorities which otherwise would have demanded visa for all Germans [1]. If you want to learn more about this history there is a book on the subject written by a (Jewish) stand-up comedian-turned-political-commentator named Aron Flam. The book is titled "This is a Swedish Tiger" [2] ("Det här är en svensk tiger", a pun on a Swedish wartime motto which relies on the double meaning of the term "en svensk tiger" in Swedish which means both "a swedish tiger" as well as "a swede keeps silent" and thus served the same purpose as "loose lips sink ships" for the allies and "feind hört mit" (the enemy is listening) for the Germans). In this book Flam describes how the Swedish state tried to profit from its "neutrality" by trading with Nazi Germany, allowing German troop transports to use the Swedish railroads while denying the Norwegian king to cross the border in order to flee those same troops, providing the German war machinery with vital components like ball bearings (a Swedish invention and speciality. the well-known SKF brand stands for "Svenska Kullagerfabriken", "Swedish Ball Bearing Factory"). The book is available in e-Book form in English, just search for "This is a Swedish Tiger" wherever you tend to search for books.
There are some differences. Sweden, for various reasons, seems to cluster immigrants into fewer places with more of them all together. And the clustering creates service shortages for police, social services, jobs, etc. This makes for more kids that should be in school to not be in school, and also higher unemployment than there would be if they were more spread out. That heavy clustering also creates fewer opportunities to integrate with the locals, so the immigrant communities are more insular. All of that makes it easier for extremists to recruit, intimidate, organize, etc.
Do you have any references that Sweden clusters more immigrants to fewer places than anyone else? Housing doesn't just pop out of thin air. We have 3 cities with over 200k in population. Otherwise top 10 is 100k+. Just last year we took in 100k. Do you expect us to just pop up houses uniformly? One here, one there? Of course clusters build with the magnitudes we take in.
But, that thing you're citing about a limited number of cities that could handle immigration is a good example of why it might be different for Sweden vs Germany.
It's hard to imagine that if a huge number of Swedes were dumped in close proximity in Somalia, that they would sit around collecting benefits, forming gangs to beat, rape, and rob the native people, and blame it all on the Somalis and their government for not giving them enough handouts and advantages to succeed.
There's some other cause (which can't be said aloud).
If a bunch of Swedes were dumped in Somalia, the locals would tell them to go fuck themselves and go back to their own country.
I don't think the problem here is what you're thinking but not saying. I think the problem is that suckers get took, to be crass. And to continue in that spirit, no self respecting nation of people would spread their buttcheeks and let the whole world have a go. It seems to me the Swedish have outlived their lifespan as a nation. I suppose it's the natural order of things, meek, defenseless tribes and nations don't last very long.
So if it's "racist" you are implying that you identified a certain "race" while the comment was mentioning immigrants, which could well be white but apparently you have other non-white immigrants in mind and therefore came yourself to a "racist" conclusion ?
And there I was, believing our immigrant were all rapists. At last that's what our far right wants us to believe... Isn't stabbing the UK-based immigrant problem?
Taking this comment thread into account, I'll just add submissions about gang violance in Sweden to the list of submissions I routinely flag. Along with discussions about the homeless and crime in SF. None of the comment under those submissions are worthy of what HN is supposed to be.
My brief experience of living in Germany says that they're doing a better job of integrating immigrants. In Sweden they're basically dumped in a suburb and ignored, until they start blowing things up that is.
For a little over a century, the left wing Swedish Social Democratic Party dominated Swedish politics. For decades, they and their voters have argued that enforcing migrant dispersal, as they do in Denmark, is racist and an abuse of human rights. They argue that migrants should be free to live anywhere they please. I can understand the sentiment at face value, but the deleterious social effects are undeniable. It is an example of compassion taken to an illogical extreme; ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
I think that it is a fair statement to say that wherever liberals have been in control with their pro-immigrant and ACAB ideology, the area (whether local, like San Fransisco, Gothenburg, or national, like France) has become a shithole within a few years.
They are not "dumped in a suburb" by the authorities but actively choose to move there. This is made possible by a law - EBO or "eget boende" (own accommodations) - which gives asylum seekers and their relatives the right to choose their own domicile. The current government wants to abolish this law [1] since it makes it harder to integrate/assimilate people who end up living in ethnically segregated areas.
> My point is that no one gives a shit about making them part of society.
Those who want to become part of society are carried on hands and portrayed proudly in the media as examples of the success story of Swedish migration policies - unless they dare to criticise those same policies of course. The problem is that people are not encouraged to integrate or assimilate into Swedish culture as that goes against the multicultural ideals written into the Swedish 'constitution' (Sweden is actually governed under a collection of law instead of a single constitution but these serve the same purpose). Encouraging newcomers to...
- learn Swedish as soon as possible...
- try celebrating midsommar (the midsummer festival) and jul (Christmas) in some way to show they are interested in the customs and culture of the country which took them in instead of segregating themselves into their own cultural traditions....
- make eye contact with 'strangers' - the person at the cash register, the conductor on the train, etc - instead of looking away as is common for women in many middle eastern cultures, telling men from those same cultures than a woman who looks them in the eyes is not 'interested' in them but simply follows western-European customs where it is considered proper and polite to look others (of both sexes) in the eyes.
- keep check on their children when they are out in the streets. Swedish children are raised by their parents, not by the neighbourhood. Sending your children out on the streets without supervision will and does lead to problems since Swedish adults will not tell of misbehaving children other than their own.
- etc.
...is frowned upon since it goes against the aforementioned multicultural ideals.
organized crime is not restricted to immigrants. For example: Hell's Angels were famously declared an illegal organisation in the Netherlands. Not sure they have a lot of turkish or maroccan immigrants.
Have a look at the wiki page on organized crime in the Netherlands, and check the family names of the most recent cases.
What do you want the news to say when it is not yet known who did it and what exactly exploded? Do you want them to lie? Or do you want them to push through the police cordon and do their own investigation faster and better than the police does?
the reason it uses that term is that "gang bombings" in international press paints a very different, AFIK incorrect, picture
The thing is Sweden has problems with people blowing up stuff with bombs since years, BUT it's also since years that this acts in most cases _only target property_, e.g. a police booth, but not people. I.e. no injured people is more the norm then it is a lucky confidence.
on the other hand unrelated people dying because of gang violence is kinda common in the many counties. So when youn read "gang bombings" it's much more likely to be associated with an act with the intention or willingness to kill people then an act with the intention to cause property damage
This isn't the IRA. There are no warning calls to the police to get people to evacuate. These are the same people who gun down their targets on crowded streets in broad daylight.
The fact that relatively few people have gotten killed is entirely due to luck and the relatively low yield of the explosions (usually hand-me-down hand grenades from the Balkans wars).
It is a problem though. We shouldn't become desensitized to daily headlines of explosions and assassinations in broad daylight because only a few hundred people are killed each year.
but when you report in one country with very different dynamics about another country you probably want to not put anything which needs additional context in the headlines because people way to often only read headlines
honestly preferable there shouldn't be a headline, but that just doesn't work, I mean how do you know if the topic might be of interest of there is no longer a headline telling you about the topic
Yeah maybe it's not the best term but it's quite accurate and I didn't spend more than 5 seconds thinking about it.
The point is, however, that this ("gang violence") isn't really happening in most of Europe (or other first world countries like Japan), and wasn't happening in Sweden 15 years ago.
Also, did you consider that the reason there's no casualties is that people are so afraid to go out or walk around these "gang areas" that there's just noone around? I wouldn't exactly call that a positive...
You are implying that gangs bombing buildings in the city center is 'okay'-ish because people weren't targeted intentionally?
Were the buildings evacuated before?
TBH mentioning gangs would paint a very accurate picture. Because it is gangs, they are fighting for drug control, blackmail, rape and kill.
And to go one step further: It would be even better to name the cultural background of these gangs and that it's a direct consequence of a misdirected immigraction politique
you are twisting what people write, putting words in their mouth and intentional side track the original argument which was about the formulation of the title to one which assumes it's about the content of the article
and no matter how much you insist that grate crime is all equality bad the situation a country is in when there are frequent assassination attempts by bomb and the situation Sweden is in is VERY different
so if you are not Swedich newspaper it's a good idea to add the necessary context when writing about it, which is impossible in the title, so you use a more generic title
Gang bombings is accurate because thats what they are. How would people learn gang bombings in Sweden usually target property not people if you dont run stories about them?
Why stop there? Why not just title it "Four Bombings in Europe?" You wouldn't want to give an unhealthy outlook toward Sweden when bombings happen elsewhere too.
But seriously and respectfully, my point being the title is not accurate to the article. "Residential bombing" is not a real description, it could be aerial bombings, it could be gas leaks, it could be terrorism, or something else.
Context is important. I'm not interested in random bombings. If a foreign nation is attacking Sweden, I want to know everything in real time. If it's an explosion due to a gas leak I'm probably not going to click in and read it, but maybe someone who is interested in public safety or that geographic area will. If it's gang violence, maybe someone with an interest in safety and law enforcement is interested.
"Residential bombing" doesn't tell me enough to make me want to understand it more, it _does_ sound like a gas leak, but I am interested in gang violence in Sweden because it's something I know very little about.
When I have a limited amount of time to read the news, I'm only going to prioritize articles that look like I'm going to get something out of it, I'm not going to read articles with vague headlines. To me that's click bait just like any other.
But shouldn't we then prefer the lest sensational variant, we are so swamped with bad news all the time that at least for external (i.e. country far away, likely not going to affect the country the news is for) things if I had the choice between two attention grabbing similar misleading titles I would always prefer the one which is less painting the picture of "the whole world goes to shit". Because AFIK this kind of misunderstanding produced here is less likely to have further negative ripple effects of people which only saw the headline incorrectly quoting it.
But also I'm living in a country where there is no issue with newspapers constantly downplaying police or citizen violence.
The article mentions "Just after 1am local time...All four blasts were at residential buildings". Which makes you wonder if it's just luck that nobody was hurt.
We have a similar explosives surge in the Netherlands, all gang related. It seems like blowing each others shit up is a bit of a trend in those circles.
Could there be any particular reason why this has become more popular? Is gang violence up in general? New release of the anarchy cookbook perhaps haha?
- More chance of getting away with it vs (attempted) assassination, since you usually don't cause bodily injury or death (so police divert less resources to the crime) and you are well away on your scooter when the explosion happens. Lately more have been getting caught however. Still the punishment then is less than with (attempted) murder.
- More kids willing to do it, because punishment is lower, and chance to get caught is lower.
- Besides the intimidating effect, it creates pressure on the victim by the neighbors and the government, because they now suspect the victim is a criminal and want it to stop. It can even lead to eviction.
All in all in pretty good way to pester your enemies without escalating to murder.
Interesting. A question: Can regular citizen protect their address in The Netherlands, or are addresses public and searchable online, as in Sweden?
That's somewhat of a pet peeve I have with the Swedish situation. Due to the country's transparency principles (which I in general consider a good thing), everyone's registered address and other personal details are easily searchable online for everybody through numerous different services. Including who you live with, and lots of other information. So basically, to use US lingo, the government is doxxing everyone by default.
There's no way to opt out of this, except if you are already subject to a documented threat (but then it's obviously already too late and you likely are forced to move), or if you belong to a small group of professions that might be considered particularly vulnerable.
In consequence, you can easily and anonymously look up where your enemies, or their relatives, live. I don't see how this is not contributing to the problem. Potentially even being one of its major drivers. However, there's basically zero public or political debate about changing this part. In fact, most people in Sweden are completely oblivious to the idea that it could be different. That as a citizen you might want to have the right to choose whether your address is available to the public or not. Even though that choice is the norm in most countries, afaik.
So I find that totally annoying. Making it harder to look up where someone lives, would likely, over time, reduce the number of attacks on buildings (which not only include bombs, but also shootings at buildings).
There are probably tens of thousands of households across Sweden who experience an elevated risk of being exposed to bombings or shootings, as gang-related individuals (or their family members) are living in their buildings. So this is a real crisis, I would say.
Broadly speaking, violence has been up in Europe post-lockdowns. Something about having a lot of people with few ties to a community, having no economic prospects and strained welfare systems. Then add the EU's self-destructive path in order to "stick it to Putin".
For Sweden in the particular, I believe they also have an idiot compassion problem in their judicial system beyond even most "progressive" justice systems. So for example, if you're under 15 you cannot go to juvenile jail in Sweden because it does not exist. End result, gangs were recruiting 15s and under. I'm not entirely sure if Sweden ever got around to changing that.
Not trying to belittle what happened but there have literally been weekly gang land hits in Sweden this whole year, so 4 explosions, or hits, in one day was a statistical inevitability.
It has gotten very, very bad. It reminds me of some large American cities in the 80s and 90s, except spread out across the country, in comparatively smaller cities.
Disclaimer, I'm a Swede born in the 80s. I've merely heard of what happened in the states through popular media, interviews with gang members and stuff like that. What we're seeing here now, resembles that very much. Isolated areas, people who live their whole short lives in a bubble of gangs, drawing down on sight.
Fueds always start over money, or hurt pride, but they can keep going for however long the involved members are active.
I remember the big biker wars of the 90s[1], with a total registered death toll of a dozen. Now that's a bad month in Sweden. However you approach this debate, it needs to happen.
What baffles me about this "gang-related" cases of violence is that it's presumably over drug money. And Sweden has rather low drug consumption level and is essentially cashless, so any transaction larger than shopping for groceries goes via a bank. And Swedish banks are very transparent and compliant and have very strict KYC/AML rules. I once had to explain to the bank why my friend transferred me an equivalent of $200 and every ATM deposit as well, even if it's $20. How the fuck are the drug money passed around in enough quantities to warrant "gang wars" here?
It's not always about money, it's also hurt pride and dumb principles.
That's why in Sweden you see these "gangs" that are essentially one family, one "clan" is what they often call them in media.
Just like the early italian mafia in the states I guess, one patriarch, their sons, their son's friends, their cousins, their nephews. They're all related somehow, and they enter into blood fueds over hurt pride that just snowball.
From what I could quickly google, there is this report from The Swedish Council for Information on Alcohol and Other Drugs [1] which says that at least for students the number is 50% lower than EU average (p. 28).
Don’t believe the lies from the Swedish anti-drug organizations. They are fueled by religious zeal, not science.
It is probably true that Sweden has a below average cannabis usage, compared to the rest of Europe, but recent studies from the Swedish customs(?) show much higher numbers.
Smoking pot in Sweden is incredibly taboo - so those who do keep their mouths shut about. Still plenty of people do it, we had the internet early on and could see through the propaganda.
I was fairly open about smoking(and growing) while I lived in Sweden so I got to know and discuss this issue quite well. It is one of the reasons I no longer live in Sweden - on paper it is free and democratic, but if you go against the group think there will be consequences.
Here in Chicago business is a secondary cause of murders. The biggest reason is honestly just fragile egos. If one of your opps posts something on social media about you or writes a song dissing you the street ethos many have bought into requires you to kill them. Honestly the biggest cause of violence is fragile egos.
>If one of your opps posts something on social media about you or writes a song dissing you the street ethos many have bought into requires you to kill them.
Relevant:
TIL that Chicago street gangs today identify themselves by song. By listening to what drill music (a Chicago form of gansta rap) is playing, youths can tell which gang's territory they are in, or even when gangs are working together.
<https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/5t7ig0/til_th...>
To put another way, I've heard it said that drill rap may be the first music genre that becomes extinct because its practitioners kill each other off.
And again the same question: I have a friend who had to physically go to the restaurant to get a confirmation that he in fact had paid about $250 for dinner for six people and they then swished him back. How will you explain hundreds of transactions a month when you don't even have an official source of income?
Yes, but I mean it should presumably be very hard to even spend the money for the sellers here, let alone to launder them, which will be needed if you're selling all the time.
Buying a gun is a very rare transaction happening 100% in the physical world and leaving no traces per se. Receiving/spending money here is digital in 99% of cases and is recorded forever.
It’s hard to know how to react because the article doesn’t give any historical rates of these residential explosions. Residential explosions could actually be down for all we know.
> In 2022, there were 90 explosions and 101 cases of attempted bombings or preparations for bombings in Sweden, according to police data. As of 15 August this year, 109 explosions had been recorded.
Gun violence and these explosions have been going up quite a bit last few years at least. Anecdotal (Sweden here) people in my closest circle feel a lot less safe, and less comfortable in public spaces, compared to a few years ago. Not to a huge extent, but noticeable.
Wait, is that question serious or you are really prentending you don't know what "changed" in Sweden, or in another European countries, over the past 10 or 20 years :-) ?!
if it's very new why was my swedish coworker from a few years ago going on and on about the government still but having gotten that problem under control even after years
through he was also speaking about self build pipe bombs instead of imported hand grenades
