The following video is from the “Warnings” series aired on CBN. In it Dale Hurd interviews an immigrant to Sweden (who is also an economic researcher) about the economic effects of the refugee crisis in Sweden, and the increasingly deluded response of the Swedish elites.
From the notes accompanying the video:
These are Interview excerpts with Swedish economic researcher Tino Sanandaji. Sanandaji has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and is a contributor to National Review. He is a research fellow at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm. His family is Kurdish and came to Sweden from Iran. This interview was conducted in November, 2014.
Hat tip: Gaia.
Sweden is killing their own country.
Doesn’t the average Swede understand this?
I ask the same thing of my own country.
Interesting. He seems to be talking about exactly what I’ve been trying to tell people about de facto religious followings. Unfortunately he doesn’t mention the source of these things as beliefs like Marxist zero-sum conflict theory and dielectical materialism.
The behaviors he’s describing among the political elite also have technical terms for them: moral credentialing and moral licensing.
Until we stop allowing people to define “religion” as only those beliefs related to a god or gods, people are going to continue to fail to question the rationality of their beliefs. They will continue to fall for the semantic argument and false dichotomy that as long as some belief isn’t related to a god or gods then it isn’t “religious” and therefore must be “scientific” and rational.
Unfortunately it seems that almost nobody is learning that they can have unscientific and irrational beliefs that are unrelated to gods or supernatural explanations.
Nimrod, I am delighted to see your comment
“Until we stop allowing people to define “religion” as only those beliefs related to a god or gods, ”
You’re thinking along the same line when I was when I unearthed the following definition “Religion: a pursuit or interest to which someone ascribes supreme importance” prior to publishing a warning how AGW was incrementally being exploited to restrict individual freedoms and sustain tyranny just as state religions of antiquity had been.
Once again: I think this provides yet another demonstration how Progs and Islamists employ similar war strategies. IMHO, it’s a very helpful connection to repeatedly make (“know thy enemy”) to help muster more defenders of Western traditions.
The main problem with real science is that it requires brutal intellectual honesty with oneself and others, otherwise it becomes scientism (“science” in quotation marks) and not science. The other problem is that people tend to imagine the implications of some policy or belief proposition in isolation rather than attempt to perform comprehensive cost-benefit analysis.
This is all difficult enough to do for someone who does know these things, but I’d be willing to bet that almost nobody who graduates with a science degree spent any time in school learning about any of this.
Yes, you translated my point about scientism exactly right.
Yes, the prospects are very bad for the new students. It’s grown so difficult even for the renown scientist. The pressure to conform and join the consensus is unlimited when scientism is tied at the hip to unrestrained governmental powers.
One thing I didn’t mention in that essay is that there is virtually nobody in SSM assailing the Sustainability crowd’s incessant use of the Precautionary Principle.
“This [insert latest fright] crisis is too great, the threat to the public too dire, for our government to be limited in its actions by anything so restricting as the US Constitution, or English common law, or Western traditions like freedom of speech.”
Or, in the words of Rahm Emanuel, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”
In fact, because Western governments are obviously so familiar with the Precautionary Principle, it’s more than fair that regulars at this site to ask why it is not invoked to fight Islam?
That’s a great point about using the Precautionary Principle against Islam.
The European countries have employed that principle with respect to “nationalism” so that even (1) mild pride in one’s culture and (2) an incipient concern that mass immigration is not healthy for one’s own people are seen as but the last step — just millimeters away — from full blown National Socialism. The insurance against this hideous sentiment was, of course, the European Union.
Better safe than sorry.
An excellent comment, Nimrod. I don’t care to exploit GoV to tout my blog as a normal rule but I thought your words were worthy of further dissemination.
Thanks. Here’s something else you might find interesting (not my site) http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140117153635.htm
I wish someone would do a study like that one, except where different beliefs were characterized based on measured brain activity. If so we’d most likely find that a number of popular “secular ideologies” are indistinguishable from religions at a cognitive level. That would require a level of interest in brutal intellectual honesty with oneself and others that I’m afraid just doesn’t exist within academia.
If that were done then people might be forced to evaluate the effects of their beliefs on an even playing field, without being able to use prejudice against tradition as an excuse to disregard beliefs out of hand.
The disdain for the past is sad and it takes place in the context of the progressives’ infatuation with “progress.”
What doesn’t agree with them is “not progress” by definition, and “not progress” is always on the museum shelf next to witchcraft, blood letting, crucifixion, Jesus, lynching, phlogiston, prejudice, heliocentrism, the Inquisition, colonialism, trial by ordeal, and a balanced budget.
This disdain cuts us off from our ancestors. One tiny island in the Aegean Sea, Samos, was the home of Pythagoras, Epicurus, and Aristarchus in the ancient world. All well known morons.
There was a shooting with 2 fatalities in Gothenburg last night ,no doubt the culprits will be “Swedish “.
Europe, beginning with Sweden and France, will provide the sad lesson for America. They are disarmed…except for the Muslims. Europe will be shocked to discover the Muslims have been smuggling in and stockpiling Kalashikovs and RPGs against the day the war goes hot. Many Euros will die in the following totally unnecessary civil war.
Unnecessary because the killer hornets were invited in by Quisling traitors. Some hornets plant their little killer bee eggs into bloated fat and stupid insects. The baby hornets grow up while eating away on the insides of the bloated fat and stupid host. By the time the just-hatched baby wasps are eating their way through the host, it’s just about dead anyway. Europe, you did this to yourself. Thank God for America’s second amendment. At least we will have a fighting chance.
I wonder if the BBC will show as much interest in the murder of a British woman by Islamists in Tunisia as they have to the “three British schoolgirls” tragedy.
To ask the question is to answer it.
There’s a great post about the contrast in the BBC’s lacklustre coverage of 1400 rapes of underage girls in Rotherham and its endless empathy for the 3 birds hot for jihad at:
http://john-moloney.blogspot.com/2015/03/liberal-monsters-ii.html
Sanandaji’s analysis is probably generally applicable in the West, the ‘anti-racist’ mania has infected the Left in my own country as well. Luckily, so far, the political elite seems sceptical in regard to the benefits of multiculturalism and mass immigration. Hopefully, Australian society is resistant to the sinister influences of Swedish-style ‘consensus’ politics and social controls.
Sweden is leading the way–in hare-brained and self-destructive social engineering experiments.
Sanandaji’s analysis is both wonderful and mundane. Any observant informed person knows, and knew, what he says is true. One needs to be Kurdish in Sweden to be allowed to say it without having your career destroyed or worse.
He certainly nailed it: the Swedish elite are aggressively secular, but as human beings they need a certain “something bigger than themselves” to believe in. So they found the quasi-religion of “anti-racism”. Nailing it even further Sanandaji notes that in practising this religion they imagine themselves as if they were in 1930’s Germany fighting the noble fight of the good and worthy.
Another telling insight of Sanandaji’s is: “I could understand their telling white lies [about the adverse impacts of their insane refugee admissions policy] for a short period if they had a plan to fix the problem, but they don’t have a plan.”
Telling, as in: even he has accepted that politicians and media should actually tell lies for some ‘good reason’? Most people in the West wouldn’t accept that at all.
Acceptance of this idea is widespread in academia. See the Jonathan Gruber videos. In the videos he is speaking to academic audiences where nothing he’s saying is the least bit controversial.
Yes this is the reality if life in Sweden and the issue of nothing more than welfare state. There are a number of reasons as to why the emergence of welfare state matches up with poor mental health, the community segregation, the flow of crime, the rise of game and gambling and the transformation of human charterer into passivity, isolation and many other mysterious changes that mark everyday life of ordinary people here in Sweden. The welfare epidemic is the story of our journey throughout six decades, struggling to convince the outside world of the power of an idea in action. We need to new way of thinking and rationalization of cause and effect. We need a new political alternative to put the entire system in a right track. A new way of thinking and seeing a system that generates psychosocial problems is the only way to save the system. We have a self-destructive social system that cannot be saved by reform. We need a political alternative.
For the past few decades things have changed dramatically and almost everything remained the same in sweden when our politicians try to turn fictions into facts, biases into scientific stories and tales into narratives events and displayed them in social media with further expansion through word-of-mouth. But the people on the ground, the residents of public housings, the isolated elderly, the tax payers, the misfits, the immigrants and the SMS debt-ridden people deserve enlightened leadership, an agenda of hope and a vision for future in Sweden.