Topic: WE'RE STUFFED!!!

[Michael]

Exactly - I have been fascinated to observe how they exercise their new economic power in other countries. Julie and I have had extensive debates about this.

One one hand they are not interested in changing the 'way of life' of other countries as the USA has done, but on the other hand they are obsessed with 'Soft Power'. But their Soft Power is not like that of the USA. India by contrast has unfathomable depths of Soft Power resources (eg Bollywood and their colourful culture) but seem to not get the point they should employ it strategically.

On the one hand China's economic influence in other nations (being watched closely in the Pacific) shows no signs of being interested in influencing anything except pure business. And their pure business has no environmental or social conscience. But on the other hand they shamelessly fund ruling parties in those countries, mainly by building new political or military buildings for them. But they don't seem to care which party they support - it's all about economic leverage in the end.

The big issue is the 'string of pearls' where they are surrounding India with highly funded infrastructure. If you look carefully however, it is not so much India they are trying to surround, although they do often speak of destroying India's power, it is securing economic resource supply lines that they are concentrating on.

What is causing the West to be caught off-guard, is that they are not exercising their economic power in the way the West would expect. So the Western powers are a bit confused about what is going on, and don't know quite know how to respond. This has huge security implications for USA's over-blown military budget.

[Builder]

Some Westerners say that Chinese are 'value-free', i.e. interested only in making money. There are over 800,000 Chinese working in various African countries and Chinese soldiers have been witnessed in Zimbabwe quelling protests. As you said, in return for resources they supply friendly regimes with nearly everything, including their own military power.

Some Republicans have claimed that AFRICOM was established for countering Chinese influence in Africa. Yet the issue of US assistance being 'value-ladden' in contrast of Chinese 'nearly unconditional' help is a huge problem for Americans. They just can't bypass their own Cold War time legislation tying assistance to export of democracy.

Somebody is getting, is or has been stuffed, indeed.

[Jahn]

Read the reports of your very own SÄPO. You could also read annual reports of Baltic security services. It is all there - in black and white. Primary sources.

In Estonia, for example, these extreme right movements really began to flourish only after tightening contacts with Swedish neonazis.

I do not deny that there exist Swedish nazist, but they are rare.
Ok, one of them got elected with 102 votes (2,7%) in a municipality of 5000 inhabitants.

As we say over here, the Nazi ideas are dead. It belong to the past. After all we have a long tradition of peace and democracy in this country that is rooted in the mass conciouseness.

[Jahn]

Swedish connection

Yes there was,
but we talk about criminal individuals, not political parties.

[Jahn]

The delicate situation is that all votes are not registered yet and there can be significant changes popping up in the middle of this week. The winner so far is the prime minister party and his alliance.

Unfortunately, there have been some mistreat with the votes here and there so at least one county is under consideration of re-election.

The Reinfeldt government has been only some hundred votes from majority and question marks are still at hand how this shall develop.

If there gonna be a minority government some strategies has been suggested to not let the Swedish democrats getting any significant role. As it appears now, the Red Green coalition will not be invited to the government, the Green party is the closest party to get invited, if so.

So I am afraid that it will take another week before the election is settled  in Sweden.

[Michael]

Talking of Nazis, I heard two things about them recently.

The first is a curiosity. A local film critic (who is quite good actually ) reviewing The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo sequel - something about playing with fire - said at first she was disappointed with TGWTDT because it left so much out of the book. One of things she said it left out was Stieg Larsson's account of the Nazis in Sweden. I have no idea what that means, as I haven't read the book.

She saw the film again on TV and really liked it, so long as she treated it as different to the book. She also liked the sequel about fire.

The second was most interesting. This man (who writes articles for the New Republican occasionally, which really put me on guard, but he did come across very sensible and reasonable - not a raving neo-liberal or anything like that) spoke of how during WWII, the Nazis in Germany, under the direct support of Hitler, set up a project with the Muslim Brotherhood, from Egypt.

Now you would need to know who the Muslim Brotherhood are. If you don't, then enough to know that the entire Islamist extremism had its first manifestations from the Muslim Brotherhood. They wrote the main philosophy of the movement which has become recently controversial as one of the main thinkers, who I believe is still in prison, wrote a recant of many of the founding principles. I expect things have move too far now for his recant to have much influence, and especially as the Taliban and the Saudi wahabis now do the major generation of Islamist influence.

But the thing this man pointed out, was that the Nazi-Islam project was successful in reworking basic Nazi fascist principles into an Islamic paradigm. Those early founders of the Muslim Brotherhood returned to Egypt infused with new ideas. What is amazing is that it was reworked so well, that we don't now see any connection, but if you think carefully you can see that modern Islamist thought is really just European fascism dressed up in Arab clothes.

[Builder]

As we say over here, the Nazi ideas are dead. It belong to the past. After all we have a long tradition of peace and democracy in this country that is rooted in the mass conciouseness.

What you say, is words, what is happening in Sweden, is re-animating of this thinking. Extreme right in parliament and neonazi on local council talk of different feelings and thoughts among population. Why else would they vote for these extreme rightists (first neonazi elected since 1940s, i.e. apparently you have had nazis in charge before) and not vote for that traditional ruling party of Sweden called social democrats?

Peace and democracy in ethnically and culturally homogenous country is a common phenomenon. Now, however, when Europe is increasingly multiethnic and multicultural, you see all that democractic paradise and tolerance evaporating.

As I said, Sweden has a largest neonazi movement among Nordic countries according to SÄPO (http://www.thelocal.se/20508/20090707/). They might be rare in comparison to other views, but the size has its effect and considering Swedish historical flirt with eugenics and other stuff, I would not be too surprised to see neonazis getting more and more support.

You say, you have the mass consciousness of people turned democractic. Human psyche can never be fixated on anything permanently (except in cases of some illnesses). I doubt the irreversibility of democractic Sweden and I think it is being reversed right under our eyes, right now. If Sweden were a paradise as you say, why would Jews leave Malmö?
http://www.thelocal.se/24632/20100127/

Malmö's mayor seems to live according to some irrelevant hyper-democratic principles (opposing both Zionism and anti-Semitism, with the emphasis apparently on the former), while things go sour right under his nose:
http://www.thelocal.se/25228/20100226/

On top of that irony, Mona Sahlin, who tried to discipline that hyper-democractic mayor: http://www.thelocal.se/25210/20100225/ ...lost the elections.

[Builder]

What psychology can teach us about our response to climate change

Calls to 'save the planet' or 'do it for our grandchildren' do not engage people, says psychology professor

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/sep/23/climate-change-psychology-response-scepticism

Tonight at the Royal Society's lecture hall in central London, Prof David Uzzell will present this year's joint British Academy/British Psychological Society annual lecture. The title of the talk is one that should interest anyone keenly involved in the climate debate: "Psychology and Climate Change: collective solutions to a global problem".

Uzzell is based at the University of Surrey's Department of Psychology and was appointed as the UK's first Professor of Environmental Psychology in 2000. I spoke to him ahead of his lecture and asked him to summarise its themes:

Psychology has a lot to offer the climate change debate. To date, the emphasis from psychologists has largely focused on behaviour-change strategies. This makes sense: if you are interested in changing people's personal behaviour, a psychologist is probably the person you need to speak to. But my concern over the last few years is just how effective this is. It is effective up to a point, but is it really going to bring in the returns that we need to address the very serious problems of climate change?
My line is that we can try to change behaviour, but it might be more effective to change the conditions that encourage our behaviours. There is a debate being had within psychology that we should aim for environmentally significant behaviour as opposed to environmentally convenient behaviour. Not focusing on turning lights off etc, but instead concentrating on things such as buying energy-efficient appliances.
But I would take this further: psychologists now need to work with other disciplines, such as engineering, sociology etc. We need to have a much better understanding of the conditions which lead to unsustainable behaviour. It's no good the government saying to us that for journeys less than a mile you should walk or use public transport because when you are trying to juggle demands, such as your job and children within limited time, you are probably going to take your car. We need to change the conditions rather than attack individual behaviours.
There's been a lot of finger-wagging and people resent that. They also notice the contradictions. One of the things that came out of a Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs survey in 2007 was that we would do more if the government did more. We see double standards. People also need feedback on how they're doing. People need to know explicitly what the benefits are of what they are being asked to do. People are not interested in concepts such as "saving the planet" or "doing it for their grandchildren". People want impacts that are concrete, immediate and personal to them. They need to see how it's benefiting them. If they are being asked to make - what they see in their terms, at least - as a sacrifice, they need to see what the benefit is to them.

Much of this might seem like basic common sense, but Uzzell says he will also talk about why people choose to "distance" themselves from climate change:

Work over the past 15 years or so has shown that people think the environment is worse the further away it is from them. We've seen the same results in Britain, Slovakia, Australia, and Ireland. We've done it with children, with urban people, rural people. We consistently get the same results. The problem - both cause and effect - is always somewhere else.
We've also found that people think the problems will be worse in the future. And when we ask what the causes of the environmental problems are we get interesting results. If you ask people to rank causes, you find the highest scores for 'inaction by government' or the 'actions of industries'. You also see the 'industrialisation of developing countries', the 'poverty of developing countries', and 'overpopulation' as ranking highly. Overall, what you see is a tendency to distance the causes from themselves.
Rejecting climate change as a problem is, in a way, a coping strategy. Another aspect is that recent events, such as the UEA emails affair, the failure of COP15 at Copenhagen etc, give people a convenient reason to discount climate change as a threat. It gives them a permission to deny.
We shouldn't be surprised that people see climate change as remote and impersonal to them. We shouldn't be talking about how our lives will become somehow poorer through climate change, but instead be talking about it could help us to become healthier, happier and enable us to live in a better environment.
Ultimately, we have to present alternatives and opportunities. If there is no other genuine option than to drive your car, then people will continue to drive. We know as psychologists that people are resistant to change so we must address this.

It's fascinating to see some of the "psychological phenomenon" that the authors highlight to help explain why so many people chose to reject climate change as a risk. I'll list their headings here, but do try and read the paper for the full explanations:

* Psychological nonequivalence of mathematically equivalent information
* Influence of affective processing of information
* Discounting the importance of future events
* The differential impact of losses and gains
* Construction of mental models for representing problems
* Reliance on confirmatory evidence

In conclusion, the authors also present four examples of "food for thought" to any climate scientist wishing to disseminate their findings to the wider community:

1) Sampling issues: clarity about the source and representativeness of samples of evidence that your audience and you are using to form inferences and draw conclusions.
2) Framing issues: methods for presenting science should engage cognitive and emotional processing, in a balanced manner, and try to make distant future outcomes concrete.
3) Comprehending the problem and solution: communicators should take into account the "mental model" held by members of their audience and tailor presentations accordingly.
4) Consensus building: the process and public perception of reaching a consensus about the science needs to be effective, transparent, and objective.

Food for thought, indeed.

[Jahn]

This bullshit about Sweden is actually quite annoying. We are not the best society in the world but I can assure that the Nazi movement is completely dead political here. The Nazis that still operates are criminals. And only a guy that has his living based on fear in the society, as believing in terrorism as a real threat, would believe 100% what our security police is telling. They are making moneyon the same fear.

If you would like to do something to reduce pre-mature mortality in the western society, fighting terrorism is a peanut. Fight obesity instead. Do not scare people of a threat that is close to invisible an uncalcuable in mortality statistics. No one has died because of terrorism in Sweden since 1975. And none has died in the US the last 20 years because of "real tefforism".

The original Nazi movement in Germany was a Death cult. And such cults will always attract people.

What is naive in politics today is the "surprise" that the Swedish Democrats got in to the parliament. There is a 4% barrier and they got 3.5% in last election (2006) and 5.3 in this. Big surprise for the established parties.

[Jahn]

As I said, Sweden has a largest neonazi movement among Nordic countries according to SÄPO (http://www.thelocal.se/20508/20090707/). They might be rare in comparison to other views, but the size has its effect and considering Swedish historical flirt with eugenics and other stuff, I would not be too surprised to see neonazis getting more and more support.

I know Juhani that you think Sweden is shit but that do not give you the right to spread stinking lies or far out speculations.

when Europe is increasingly multiethnic and multicultural, you see all that democractic paradise and tolerance evaporating.

In the same sentence please also mention that Sweden have the largest proportion of immigrants of all the Nordic countries. And what about Your country? How many people from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia have you in your neighborhood? Figures very welcome. Old Sweden is taking the big shit from the  US aggressions by giving immirants from  countries at war a decent place to live. A fact that you have not mentioned at all, how is that in scientific objecitivity mr prof?

 And we (I say we but I do not agree) have tried to try to care for refugees from many different infected parts of the world and that has obviously a price = Immigration alien parties get into the parliament. People are tired of the segregation and the increase of criminality that this unintegration has resulted in.

But you make it to a problem of a new direction into fascism and less democracy. As we say here - you are out bi-cycling. You are not giving the whole picture so you can continue to spread your lies and far out speculaations that feed your role -to bring fear into society instead of truth.

You do not share this immigrant problem in the Baltic, do You? On the other hand you got your own problem, recession. And being angry on the Swedish banks for the hype that you (and probaly them) created.

[Builder]

I rest my case.

Now SÄPO is generating lies.

Warrior clinging to an image of his country that is 30-40 years old and refusing to see it for what it is in the 21st century.
You haven't got a shot for freedom if you stay attached like this.

Remember, one of the fundamental truths is that warrior has no country, no nationality, no...?

[Jahn]

I rest my case.

Now SÄPO is generating lies.

Warrior clinging to an image of his country that is 30-40 years old and refusing to see it for what it is in the 21st century.
You haven't got a shot for freedom if you stay attached like this.

Remember, one of the fundamental truths is that warrior has no country, no nationality, no...?

I am not clinging, I only try to describe what is around.

You feed on lies regarding tefforism, your whole position is about to keep that threat alive. The big problem in society is not tefforism, it is obesity.
Obesity kill people, tefforism does not. Become real, face reality and not SF.

Now - dear E, please answer, which you so often refuse to do, How many immigrants do you have in your country from, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan? In percent of your very, very tiny population?

Sweden got about half a million refugees from these, and similar countries. That is about five percent of the population here and then we have another 5 percent that is older regarding the time for coming to this country. So about 10 percent of the inhabitants in Sweden is refugees or immigrants the two last decades, any comment professor?
Could this rather large proportion of refugees have any impact of how people vote when they see and experience that these people does not (have the capability to) integrate and become full members of the society? That we as social engineers, and well educated also regard this new segregation as a social problem that the Swedish society has failed to address.

[Jahn]

Now SÄPO is generating lies.

Well, when do you know they tell the truth? It is all secrets - you know!

After all you are an expert in the field. PRAVDA!

[Builder]

I am not clinging, I only try to describe what is around.

You feed on lies regarding tefforism, your whole position is about to keep the feed. The big problem in society is not tefforism, it is obesity.
Obesity kill people, tefforism does not.

Now - dear E, please answer, which you so often refus to do, how many immigrants do you have in your country from, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. In percent of you very, very little population??

We got about half a million refugees from these countries. That is about five percent of the population and then we have another 5 percent that is older regarding the time for coming to this country. So about 10 percent of the inhabitants in Sweden is refugees or immigrants the two last decades, any comment professor?

Don't you see at all how attached you are to the 'old Svedala' - the country without corruption, etc.

The country without corruption. Is that true some may ask?
The country with the greatest proportion of immigrants from Iran and Iraq. is that true some may ask?
The country of equity.Is that true some may ask?
The country of Peace and all the best qualities that you can name. Is that necessary some may ask? (to name all of the good qualities that this little country have).

Pretty ridiculous assertions, I would say. A country without corruption? Do you want examples from Sweden?
Greatest proportion of your immigrants are from Iran and Iraq? It seems to have been your choice to take them in and now rightist parties want it to stop and possibly some of them back home.
Equity? Capitalist country of equity? Rightist governments are generally against equity. They are in charge.
Peace and the best qualities? You are no more peaceful than, say, France. So what?

But you have already totally killed any possibility of discussion by dismissing your own security service. You do not expect seriously that I would discuss any of this any further?

I just did pointing out some things that are quite prominent now. The rest is up to you.

[Jahn]

Don't you see at all how attached you are to the 'old Swedala' - the country without corruption, etc.
Pretty ridiculous assertions, I would say. A country without corruption? Do you want examples from Sweden?
Greatest proportion of your immigrants are from Iran and Iraq? It seems to have been your choice to take them in and now rightist parties want it to stop and possibly some of the back home.
Equity? Capitalist country of equity? Rightist governmenst are generally against equity. They are in charge.
Peace and the best qualities? You are no more peaceful than, say, France. So what?

But you have already totally killed any possibility of discussion by dismissing your own security service. You do not expect seriously that I would discuss any of this any further?

I just did pointing out some things that are quite prominent now. The rest is up to you.

Sorry,

but I did not hear the immigration figures from your country.