[hargv]

Summing up the article: Sweden took in a lot of immigrants and refugees which resulted in a backlash. This gave a voice to an anti-immigration political party.

The other Scandinavian countries had a different experience, not surprisingly since they are very different in culture and policy.

All in all what the author describes is just unapologetical selfishness vs intentional virtue signalling. Most people are able to internalise the facts that

a) taking in refugees will cause problems and those problems will need to be dealt with

And

b) taking in refugees will save lives and it's important to do so as much as possible

But of course some people just want to be as radically left or right as possible and yell about it. The worst of us do not define the rest of us, but it seems to be simply irresistible to write article after article about the worst of us.

[hdjjhhvvhga]

Sweden was pretty peculiar in this regard because not only they decided to take a large influx of immigrants but also made it difficult to discuss the issue in public without being called a racist.

[hargv]

It's again one of those things where people tend to be overly extreme- I've had a few rational discussions with people but generally most people who have wanted a discussion have been of the "if you're worried you're racist" or "so you want our women to be raped by foreigners" style of discussion, which makes it real fucking tiring to try.

I've engaged in several conversations where someone starts out with statistics of crime and so on but wildly misrepresent those statistics, and when called out on and engaged in a discussion about the actual numbers in the studies they cite, the conversation has more than once ended on "So you want to let any trash into our school :) Allright if you ever have kids you'll understand :)))))" or something like that.

On the other side it tends to end with "If you talk about it you give a voice to racists so better to just not talk about it publicly?"

The reality either way is that if immigration is a problem, then we have a problem to solve. It's not going away, with how the world is looking right now, likely it will get worse. The impression I've been given growing up about why Scandinavia has succeeded has been that when there have been issues we dig our heels in and deal with them, find a way through. When the work put in goes down and the talking done goes up, nothing gets dealt with and the kind of people who get their power and following from "hate clicks" or "hate votes" flourish. The Internet is an unfortunate issue here as well- the media cycle is too fast to give justice to any sort of societal effort- before a decision can even be made about anything in politics there will be endless articles of how every conceivable outcome of the decision has already been failing before it has happened.

Covid is a good example, we have somehow already failed completely to contain it and succeded completely where others failed depending on who you ask and the verdicts started coming out just weeks into the pandemic from every corner of the world.

Honestly the theory I've been slowly growing over the last few years is that this is how society finally dies- media and everyone engaging in social media profiting increasingly on reporting failure until things simply cannot be allowed to succeed any more and our society just starts eating itself alive.