[HN Gopher] A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's...
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A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image
Author : RapperWhoMadeIt
Score : 187 points
Date : 2025-03-27 13:01 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| robinhoodexe wrote:
| The director also made Kim Jong Il's Comedy Club[1], an
| absolutely insane documentary on North Korea.
|
| [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1546653/
| yvely wrote:
| And also by Mads Brugger and about North Korea. Civilian self-
| chosen undercover operation. Fascinating watch.
| https://m.imdb.com/title/tt13243898/
| Oarch wrote:
| For all its excellent marketing, of course Denmark has issues
| much like any other country.
|
| It's still a great country, just take the marketing with a hint
| of salt - a self certain smugness / hubris can easily make you
| blind to real problems.
| nolito wrote:
| It's mostly marketing. Danes, and other Scandinavians, love the
| idea that they are more honest then others. It's not correct in
| Denmark. I find Denmark to be a quite corrupt country
|
| Tax-evasion in small scale called "sort arbejde" is quite
| common.
|
| Former primeminister and current foreign miniater Lars Lokke
| Rasmussen is a interessant figure. He's famous for not even
| being able to pay for his own underware.
| bjornsing wrote:
| Great documentary! The story that chocked me most was the social
| democrat local politician that helped criminals launder money and
| evade taxes in his spare time... How low can you sink?
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| Everyone that tells him/herself a story, can use that story to
| justify crime. Defender of the underdogs. Saviour of the home-
| country from the foreign hordes. In every story, there is
| idealisation and demonisation, a giving up of complexity and
| the moral horror justifications of fairy tales.
| bjornsing wrote:
| Perhaps. But it takes a lot of story telling to be able to
| spend your days voting for higher taxes on law-abiding
| citizens, and your nights helping the worst in society evade
| those taxes...
| reptilian wrote:
| Same filmmaker exposed US, UK, Apartheid collaboration and
| involvement in the spread of HIV in Africa, and the assassination
| of the SecGen of the UN, Dags Hammerskjold
| piva00 wrote:
| Minor nitpick, it is "Dag Hammarskjold"
| pvg wrote:
| Reptilians just like dags
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wmrOdqIfZk
| HideousKojima wrote:
| For Hammarskjold, the various documents that have been released
| or otherwise leaked suggest he could have been killed by the
| US, France, the USSR, or mercenaries hired by African mining
| interests. Or some combination of the above. As far as I can
| tell there is no definitive proof of who exactly was behind it,
| only that a lot of powerful people wanted him gone.
|
| Does the filmmaker have access to some sort of exclusive
| information that the rest of the world doesn't? Or, like most
| of these sorts of filmmakers, is he drawing conclusions beyond
| what can be conclusively reached with the availabile evidence?
| reptilian wrote:
| Watch the documentary. Union miniere, Belgian government,
| SAIMR paramilitaries, CIA and MI6 all were deeply involved.
| reptilian wrote:
| You'll have to watch "Cold Case Hammersjold
| HideousKojima wrote:
| "Though the filmmakers present Mr. Jones as a self-assured
| whistle-blower, their notes from several interviews they
| conducted with him before the final taping reflect that he
| repeatedly denied that his group was involved in an AIDS
| project."
|
| "As the interviews progressed, the filmmakers posed
| additional questions that introduced details of possible
| militia activities. Mr. Jones's responses evolved and, by
| the time he sat for the final interview, he professed
| firsthand knowledge of people and events that he had
| previously seemed to first learn about from the
| filmmakers."
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/27/world/africa/hammarskjol
| d...
|
| Yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb and say a documentary
| that claims western powers were intentionally spreading
| AIDS in South Africa (under the guise of a vaccination
| program) and does so on the basis of some extremely
| questionable witnesses _might_ be stretching the evidence
| about some other things.
| tokai wrote:
| >a documentary that claims western powers were
| intentionally spreading AIDS in South Africa
|
| It does not. Its a supposed South African plot to poor
| infect South Africans and neighboring countries.
| kratom_sandwich wrote:
| I saw the documentary and highly recommend it, but one thing
| that irks me is that apparently there are no reports or
| investigations on this other than the movie itself? Seemed odd
| to me for such a larger-than-life-conspiracy ...
| cess11 wrote:
| Well, you hardly ever hear about the hundreds of thousands of
| cubans and their MiG:s or the covert support from Sweden when
| there's talk about the fall of south african apartheid
| either. It usually stops at reminiscing about some non-
| violent forms of protest and more lacklustre quotes from
| Mandela, considered a terrorist by the US until 2008.
|
| It's a sensitive topic in the Occident, many powerful people
| would prefer their friends never face scrutiny or justice due
| to involvement with those crimes.
| jacobgorm wrote:
| Hammerskjold died in a plane crash, so did the lead partner and
| her husband, also a partner, at the Horten law-firm that was
| the center of the "black swan" scandal, very recently:
|
| https://euroweeklynews.com/2025/03/19/denmark-bound-plane-cr...
| arghwhat wrote:
| Black Swan was a big deal, but this article massively overstates
| the average Dane's faith in the system. The welfare state is
| certainly not reverred as a religion, and the current state of it
| is always a hot discussion topic with pulls in either direction.
|
| Unlike what this article suggests, tax fraud is also relatively
| common (one would have to be rather daft to assume that a country
| with such absurdly high taxation did _not_ have tax evasion as a
| key pastime - although probably not as aggressively as in places
| like the US), and while heavily frowned upon certainly not seen
| as the highest form of crime as this article suggests. Well,
| maybe if you ask the tax agency and the political parties pushing
| for ever more welfare, both of which push heavily for a cashless
| society where all financial transactions are fully trackable by
| them, but I think most would place tax evasion quite far down on
| the list of significant crimes.
|
| I would instead say that the average Dane is _carefree_ about
| these issues, not because they are trusting or believe their
| system is worth religious following, but because the issues
| experienced there feels quite minor compared to what seems to
| happen elsewhere in the world. When your concept of a significant
| natural disaster is a flooded basement, you tend to not worry
| that much about what happens locally.
| MaxHoppersGhost wrote:
| > one would have to be rather daft to assume that a country
| with such absurdly high taxation did not have tax evasion as a
| key pastime - although probably not as aggressively as in
| places like the US
|
| The US has lower taxes so by your logic we would have less
| evasion. Unless you're making a judgement on Americans.
| scandox wrote:
| I think the common perception is that Americans are more
| ideologically committed to tax avoidance whereas Europeans
| are more viscerally tempted by tax evasion?
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Not being an American I've always had similar impressions.
| That taxes in USA are hated way more than anywhere else.
| arghwhat wrote:
| I am making a judgement on the US corporate culture and
| population within it, yes. It has far more loopholes that
| remain open and actively used than Denmark does.
|
| Denmark does its very best to make it either a pain in the
| arse or impossible to use company property in any way that
| could be seen as having private value. Did you _drive home_
| in your company car? Then get ready to be privately taxed of
| its full market value and for the company to get a bill for
| the VAT. Did you _take a private phone call_ on a company
| phone? Then you have to pay the "free phone" tax and the
| company VAT of the phone. Did you buy furniture for your home
| office, but without having the home office locked to
| physically separate it from your regular home, or did you put
| a comfortable chair in there so it its private value becomes
| ambiguous? Not a valid company purchase.
|
| Weird US tricks like getting paid in stock and taking loans
| with that stock as collateral, with the resulting liability
| cancelling out remaining tax also don't work there. The
| common stuff would be, say, restaurant owners inexplicably
| having really low private food expenditure, or really low
| revenue on paper for how popular the place is.
|
| I suspect the reason is that the US government has pressure
| from lobbyists to maintain the status quo, while the DK
| government has pressure to claw in taxes to cover their sky
| high spending ambitions.
| murderfs wrote:
| > Weird US tricks like getting paid in stock and taking
| loans with that stock as collateral, with the resulting
| liability cancelling out remaining tax also don't work
| there.
|
| That's not how the U.S. trick works, it's taking loans with
| the stock as collateral in order to defer realizing the
| capital gains while still being able to spend the money.
| It's no different from just taking out an unsecured loan,
| it's just that banks are more willing to give you a larger
| balance/less usurious rates if it's secured by something.
| dtquad wrote:
| This isn't true and sounds like something written by terminally
| online reddit libertarians.
|
| The Black Swan documentary is primarily about sleazy private
| sector actors in Denmark. The only remotely state affiliated
| individuals in the documentary is a business man who was a
| former small city council member and a bankruptcy lawyer who
| has previously contracted for Danish government organizations.
| The system worked fine and the Danish equivalent of the FBI,
| the NSK, already had ongoing cases of investigations into a lot
| of the uncovered material.
|
| The only "common" tax fraud in Denmark is when a house needs
| some minor fixing before being put on sale. Many Danish people
| will pay their friend's friend to do it for them "under the
| table" and not as formally contracted and taxed work. This is
| becoming increasingly harder.
|
| However this is far from the massive systemic corruption in
| many other countries.
| DanielHB wrote:
| Sweden (and I assume Denmark) has a lot of tax-dodging[1]
| (just like any other country). The tax code is complex (but
| not nearly US-complex) and gives plenty of ways to avoid
| paying tax[2].
|
| But at least the tax agency seems quite keen on investigating
| abuses. I remember Klarna has to pay a huge fine for trying
| because of trying to abuse tax loopholes a few years ago.
|
| [1] I define tax dodging as using legal tax loopholes in
| order to pay less tax. A lot of those tax rules are not even
| complicated, they were just set up with a specific type of
| person in mind to let them pay less tax.
|
| [2] The most popular ones that middle class Swedes use are
| delaying paying property capital gains, 30% tax deduction on
| loan interest payments, special rules for private pension and
| using ISK investment accounts (which allow you to avoid
| capital gains). None of them are illegal, just heavily favor
| some demographics. It is not that hard for a upper middle
| class Swede to avoid the maximum 56% income tax rate and the
| 30% capital gains tax.
| arghwhat wrote:
| Or when a restaurant owner inexplexably has really low
| private food expenditure, or has really low revenue on paper
| despite being relatively popular, or small companies having a
| _lot_ of company dinners, or labor workers having a _lot_ of
| company places to go in their company porsche SUV, or...
|
| The reason regular salaried employees do this less, limited
| to the kind of sort arbejde ("under the table" labor) you
| describe is because it has become obscenely difficult to do
| anything meaningful with sorte penge (untaxed money) - _not_
| because people don 't want to do more or didn't previously do
| it.
| absolutelastone wrote:
| Seems to me salaried workers would be a category that is
| more conscientious by self-selection. They are comfortable
| working within the rules of a system and less willing to
| take risks such as by violating those rules.
| arghwhat wrote:
| Yeah, but that there is such a distinction is a little
| sad. The use of companies for tax avoidance can also lead
| to some prejudice against small companies in general,
| which is unfair to those playing nice.
| matwood wrote:
| > one would have to be rather daft to assume that a country
| with such absurdly high taxation did not have tax evasion as a
| key pastime - although probably not as aggressively as in
| places like the US
|
| I think there is a distinction between avoidance (typically
| considered legal) and evasion (fraud and illegal). Everyone
| should practice avoidance, using the system as designed. IME,
| evasion is much higher in countries with say a VAT than the US.
| Paying cash for transactions, even rather large ones, is common
| in order to avoid 10-20%+ VAT.
| rambambram wrote:
| Money that is not required to be paid cannot be called a tax.
| Taxes are not voluntary. Things like tax avoidance don't even
| exist, by definition of the word.
| jsutter909 wrote:
| What would you call going out of your way to buy cigarettes
| in a lower tax jurisdiction? The word avoidance seems
| pretty fitting here. Taxes are as voluntary as the activity
| being taxed
| milesrout wrote:
| Presumanly is tax evasion if you buy them elsewhere then
| import them into your country without paying the required
| import duties.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| How about vacationing in a country that has a lower VAT
| because hotels and everything are cheaper?
| milesrout wrote:
| VAT is a consumption tax. If you consume goods in a place
| with lower consumption taxes then the tax is doing
| exactly what it is meant to do.
|
| If you buy consumer goods in a low-VAT place but
| transport them to a high-VAT place and consume them, then
| that is clearly illegitimate for the same reason that it
| is legitimate for VAT to be applied to imports and
| refunded to exporters.
| arghwhat wrote:
| Within EU, you have free movement of goods, and the VAT
| is generally paid in the country of sale, not in the
| country of of the consumer. There are a few exceptions to
| this, and other regions might have other trade
| agreements.
|
| Within the EU definition, VAT taxes the company making
| the sale for the increase in value of a product through
| the processes the companies and distributors applied to
| it, and is not a taxation of the receipt of said value.
|
| There is nothing illegitimate about then consuming the
| product in a different country. It just doesn't happen to
| send money to your own country's treasury.
| rambambram wrote:
| I would call that an economic decision, or an
| opportunistic one. How can you avoid something that's not
| even there?
| jltsiren wrote:
| There is a third category: tax avoidance by abusing loopholes
| in the system. While legal, it's not about using the system
| as designed. I find it morally equivalent to illegal tax
| evasion. Behavior like that erodes trust in the system and
| makes the society worse.
| milesrout wrote:
| There are three categories: tax minimisation (structuring
| legitimately to minimise tax), tax avoidance (structuring
| legitimately but artificially to avoid taxes) and tax evasion
| (lying to evade tax).
|
| Tax minimisation is fine. Tax avoidance is, in sensible
| countries, not illegal but ineffective: tax avoidance
| arrangements are _void_ for tax purposes. Tax evasion is a
| serious crime.
|
| Avoidance is not using the system as it was designed. It is
| using the system as it was not intended, creating totally
| artificial structures just for tax reasons. In a sensible
| society the taxman can just say "clearly artificial so I will
| ignore this" and if you disagree, well, see you in court.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I wonder if this will impact Denmark's spot at the top of the
| corruption perceptions index. Last years rankings still has them
| at first, but it's hard to say when the data was collected.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
| guappa wrote:
| No it won't. They ignore all evidence of corruption so far,
| they can keep going. The whole point is they think other
| countries are more corrupt than them, because they're just
| better.
|
| edit: if you downvote me and haven't lived in a scandinavian
| country for over a decade... perhaps trust me instead of
| trusting your preconceptions?
| frantathefranta wrote:
| I'm fully aware that Sweden and Denmark are different countries
| (I lived in Denmark for 3 years), but this reminded me of the
| reel of Swedes playing every time I visit IKEA, where they talk
| about how corruption is absolutely unthinkable in Swedish
| society.
|
| And there's also this tidbit from the article:
|
| > Other Scandinavian nations also reeled upon watching The Black
| Swan. After the series premiered in Sweden, a criminologist at
| Lund University warned: "There's a lot of evidence that it's
| probably even worse here."
| belter wrote:
| "Sweden's sudden awakening to corruption - From small
| arrangements between friends to large-scale bribery and
| embezzlement, Swedes are discovering the extent of a phenomenon
| they had underestimated" -
| https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/05/08/s...
| guappa wrote:
| I think they really aren't, not at large. At the core they
| need to feel superior, and that includes believing that they
| are genetically honest, unlike those people with darker skin
| and brown eyes.
| cess11 wrote:
| Since the late eighties Sweden has privatised, as the euphemism
| goes, heavily. In particular schools and medical and elder care
| have become cesspools of corruption and mob activity. It's
| gotten worse in construction as well.
|
| Today some active politicians simultaneously perform as senior
| advisers and the like for so called public affairs, i.e.
| lobbying, firms. That is, in the open. The leader of one of the
| largest parties in parliament and kind of part of the current
| government had a mob leader as guest at his wedding a while
| back.
|
| There's an agreement among the largest parties to blame the
| fallout on immigrant minorities. They still disagree about
| whether to also put blame on sexual and gender minorities, as
| well as indigenous minorities. I expect them to start agreeing
| more during the next election.
| scottyah wrote:
| Interesting. It really seems like wherever the power goes,
| the corruption follows. The good news with privatization is
| that it doesn't attract the corrupt looters to government and
| you can trust them as a culture to be a watchdog for
| corruption.
|
| When the government as a body is in control of everything,
| all the corrupt looters go there, but you can't have the
| private industry keep them in check unless you count on the
| pipeline of years in industry gaining financial freedom ->
| public service as a regulator.
| guappa wrote:
| Yeah swedish people think like that. Living in sweden and
| having some experience I can tell you that there's no
| corruption because the police don't care to investigate it,
| even with proof they won't bring people to justice. Most that
| happens to corrupt people is that they quit job and go to work
| somewhere else.
| wubrr wrote:
| Same in Canada for the most part.
| benregenspan wrote:
| It's funny that reel is at IKEA, given IKEA's sketchily
| engineered tax structure, and that it's also the same company
| that paid off Romanian secret police under Ceausescu.
| Gud wrote:
| What's sketchy about their tax structure? Just curious what
| you think. I think they are pretty open about it?
|
| The original purpose of IKEA was to foster self reliance,
| essentially making everyone a bit handier. IKEA brings decent
| quality furniture to people who otherwise wouldn't afford it.
| I think it's a noble goal, hence why I ask.
|
| As I understand it, and I could be wrong, IKEA is owned by a
| non-profit organization called INGKA, set up in such a way to
| generate revenue not to a few rich people but:
|
| "INGKA Foundation's purpose is to further, without pursuing
| any profits, a better everyday life for the many people in
| need. We achieve this purpose by funding the IKEA Foundation,
| which is committed to helping children and families living in
| poverty afford a better everyday life while protecting the
| planet."
|
| https://www.ingkafoundation.org/our-charitable-purpose/
|
| https://www.inter.ikea.com/en/this-is-inter-ikea-
| group/about...
|
| https://www.inter.ikea.com/en/-/media/InterIKEA/IGI/Financia.
| ..
|
| Regarding them paying of Romanian secret police, I'm very
| interested to hear about it. I know they used east german
| prisoners for a time as cheap labor.
| decimalenough wrote:
| The Economist did a famous analysis of IKEA's tax
| structure:
|
| https://www.economist.com/business/2006/05/11/flat-pack-
| acco...
|
| TL;DR: The only beneficiaries of INGKA's charity are the
| owner and his family.
| Gud wrote:
| Sorry, that TL;DR is completely false.
|
| 1) the "owner" is long dead.
|
| 2) the foundation is set up in such a way to perpetuate
| itself and its goal (to better mankind), forever. Not to
| generate wealth for Ingvar Kamprads offspring. He hardly
| left them penniless. His family does not control his
| foundations. They have a minority vote.
|
| 3) if the world's billionaires set up their organisations
| in similar ways, the world would be a much better place.
|
| You can read more here:
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/everything-earn-ikea-
| founder-...
|
| Ingvar Kamprad is known to have lived a simple lifestyle,
| despite being one of the wealthiest men while he was
| still alive. While travelling he stayed at cheap hotels
| and drove an old Volvo. Does this strike you as a man
| motivated by greed?
|
| From your article: "That control is so tight that not
| even Mr Kamprad's heirs can loosen it after his death.
| The foundation's objects require it to "obtain and
| manage" shares in the Ingka Holding group. Other clauses
| of its articles require the foundation to manage its
| shareholding in a way to ensure "the continuity and
| growth" of the IKEA group. The shares can be sold only to
| another foundation with the same objects and executive
| committee, and the foundation can be dissolved only
| through insolvency."
| decimalenough wrote:
| Quoting TFA: _What emerges is an outfit that ingeniously
| exploits the quirks of different jurisdictions to create
| a charity, dedicated to a somewhat banal cause, that is
| not only the world 's richest foundation, but is at the
| moment also one of its least generous. The overall set-up
| of IKEA minimises tax and disclosure, handsomely rewards
| the founding Kamprad family and makes IKEA immune to a
| takeover._
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| And yet every other Swede in Stockholm knows someone renting
| out their first-hand rental apartment illegally.
|
| Or taking one class a year as a "student" to qualify for
| student housing with rent control, etc.
| munificent wrote:
| Here's an interesting question: If most people in a society
| believe corruption is at level X when it's actually at X+N, is
| it better to expose the reality or not?
|
| Being a member of a society that you believe has low corruption
| disincentivizes you from being corrupt yourself because people
| generally want to follow the surrounding norms. So it's
| probably good for people to believe that corruption is better
| than it is.
|
| But exposing corruption is also necessary to root it out and
| actually punish the people involved.
|
| How does one make the trade-off for when disclosure is net
| helpful for reducing overall corruption? Does it depend on X
| and N?
| kratom_sandwich wrote:
| Crtl-F "who turns 53 in June" to skip a rather lengthy
| description of the series (or scroll to the large red "B")
|
| > Nothing I learned from Smajic solved the central mystery of The
| Black Swan: why did she choose to capsize her life by
| participating at all?
|
| I recall that Herve Falciani only leaked his trove of tax data
| when a police investigation was closing in on him. Maybe
| something similar here: a looming indictment?
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| She was a police informant, and surely any looming indictment
| would happen in the ~5 years since this started.
| itissid wrote:
| Its just people. People are the same everywhere, and are
| fundamentally unpredictable systems. How large groups behave does
| depends to a certain extent on context: by compared to others and
| your socio-economic situation. How they publicly expressed their
| values are entirely different from their behavior. This is to the
| dread of incumbent governments and pollsters.
|
| If you starve a wealthy man for 2 weeks he will be ready to
| cannibalize. If you create a metric upon which you place a lot of
| economic-value, soooner or later it will get gamed and corrupted.
| If you remove checks and balances humans being unpredictable will
| turn on each other.
|
| One can choose to ignore this fact, but at the cost of endless
| grief to oneself and those around.
| hoseyor wrote:
| I disagree that people are unpredictable systems. The ruling
| class very much knows that people are not only predictable, but
| even programmable. It's just the aspirational middle and some
| lower classes that have internalized the idea that there is no
| way to predict and that every human is the same and all
| different groups and people are equal in characteristics and
| qualities. For example, liars will lie, predictably, even if
| expressed as a function of probability.
| Aurornis wrote:
| More accurately, I think it's just confusion about the Law of
| Large Numbers.
|
| People confuse population-scale average behaviors with
| guarantees about individuals.
|
| In any country you can find outliers that don't match the
| country's norms.
|
| The hard part is that the devious ones can leverage their
| country's (or culture, or state, or relgious affiliation, etc.)
| norms to disguise their bad behavior. It's easier to scam
| someone if you pretend to blend in with groups known for being
| trustworthy.
| toast0 wrote:
| You are saying humans are unpredictable, but then you make
| predictions.
|
| I think you are saying that people's behavior changes based on
| stimulus. That doesn't mean they're unpredictable, just that
| the prediction shouldn't be unchanged behavior regardless of
| stimulus.
| d4mi3n wrote:
| I read it as the GP saying there's often confusion about
| assuming behavior about individuals as opposed to making
| predictions based on trends of large groups of individuals.
|
| For some population, you can safely state that some portion
| of them will contract appendicitis. You cannot make that same
| assertion about an individual person. This likewise carries
| to specific behaviors (theft, charity, becoming a pet owner,
| etc).
| toast0 wrote:
| The same is true of say washing machine motors. You can
| predict that ~ 10% of them will fail in a certain amount of
| time (and even go into how they fail), but that doesn't
| tell you much about a specific motor. Or sports events, if
| you say there's a 25% chance of team A winning a single
| match; the results of the match don't support or refute
| your prediction... you'd have to run many matches to see if
| your prediction was empirically correct.
| fumufumufumu wrote:
| Culture has a large influence.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-12785802.amp
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| > People are the same everywhere
|
| This is not true in general. Environment does not only
| influence behavior, it selects for it.
|
| As evidenced by our ability to breed behavior traits in
| domesticated animals - I.e. ragdoll cats, retrievers, rat
| terriers, etc. have distinct behavioral traits that have been
| intentionally selected for.
| cenamus wrote:
| Those dog breeds differ by like a factor of 10 in size, way
| more than humans basically in any aspect.
|
| But yeah, depending on how strong the selective force is...
| Ashkenazy Jews have an average IQ of what, around 130 points?
| But on the other side also suffer a lot more genetic
| disorders.
|
| Interesting are also the altitude tolerance of Sherpa, body
| morphology of the Kenian runners and the dive endurance of a
| particular South east asian tribe (if I remember correctly),
| some organ is able to store a lot more blood than usually
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| If you have a really well working economic system you can bribe
| everyone to be nice and you declare yourselves saints and
| history ended. Still makes those that upend these economic
| systems the evil ones. Even if paradise burns away the candle
| earth on both ends.
|
| but i digress, and its hard to communicate that its better to
| end good times with ability to move, then to be caught in
| paradise, when the resource window falls shut. you want to be
| able to wiggle and act in the dark times, keep it together ,
| have tech thats maintainable but not existence ending , while
| wild hordes fight for the last glimmering bits of the golden
| era.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| > _People are the same everywhere_
|
| That is absolutely not true. People aren't the same even in
| adjacent neighborhoods sometimes. Some create great
| environments, some create hells on earth.
|
| Source: I lived in 3 different countries + an isolated island.
|
| But you don't even need my biased opinion on the matter. We
| have cultures that throw gay people off the roofs, and cultures
| that celebrate them.
| hnhg wrote:
| Some of those cultures that apparently celebrate gay people
| were also chemically castrating them not that long ago, and
| also have a lot of locals who still hate gay people and
| cannot wait to get back to the old ways.
|
| The rise of the far right in Europe and USA might challenge
| your idea of fixed regional cultures quite soon.
| tomp wrote:
| The main drive of who you call "far right" is precisely to
| import _less_ people that want to throw gays off roofs.
| hnhg wrote:
| Some of them, maybe. Some others are just not tolerant of
| LGBT lifestyles and equality at all.
|
| Also, I don't think someone who wants limited immigration
| is necessarily far right.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| *)limiting _ILLEGAL_ immigration, emphasis on the word
| illegal.
|
| Nobody in Europe has a problem with _LEGAL_ immigration,
| but the left wing parties and MSM keeps ignoring this and
| sweeping illegal immigration along the legal immigration
| banner to drive the narrative that Europeans are racists
| who hate all immigrants in order to justify (social)
| media censorship and restrictions on free speech to fight
| the "right wing extremist nazi" boogie man, which
| ironically, actually fuels the swing towards the
| extremist right wing, because the regular public
| discourse and communication channels for criticizing
| illegal immigration in public are censored/disabled.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| They always say that, until you talk about legalizing
| more immigration, then you find out that no, they don't
| want any more immigration period.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> until you talk about legalizing more immigration_
|
| Maybe because people have been duped so much in the last
| 10+ years to know that the loaded statement of "more
| immigration" from the government only means legalizing
| more ILLEGAL immigration, driving them to hate all forms
| of immigration because the governments have proven
| themselves useless at enforcing border controls and
| depurations of those who brake the law.
|
| That's the result that you get when you maliciously sweep
| ILLEGAL immigration under the same political banner used
| for legal immigration, as the liberal European
| governments have done, so you end up hurting the image of
| legal immigration as well but this is the fault of
| politicians, not the people whoa have suffered form
| illegal immigration and have next to no channels of
| changing this other than voting far right.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Ummm... At least in the US, they are absolutely not
| worried about law breaking at all. Look who they just
| elected president? "Law and order" is basically dead
| here.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Do you want the Orange Man to bring back all those
| prisoners he sent to EL Salvador? Would you like them in
| your neighborhood?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I just find it fascinating how some people are perfectly
| fine with rich criminals, but want to get rid of the poor
| criminals. It makes me wonder what their real motivations
| are.
| mantas wrote:
| Crimes by random thugs is affecting day-to-day life much
| more than corrupt politicians stuffing their pockets with
| public money.
|
| Getting stabbed on the street vs somebody giving a
| government contract to a buddy? If I must choose, I'd
| rather take the later tbh.
| guappa wrote:
| Is it? A thug might occasionally steal your wallet. Rich
| criminals make sure you will not get cure for whatever
| illness you will surely get as you get older.
| mantas wrote:
| A thug may kill you and it won't matter much what illness
| you'll get at old age.
| guappa wrote:
| A lightning might kill you as well while you're still in
| the crib. But not all these events have the same
| probability.
|
| Why do you worry more about the very unlikely events and
| not at all about the almost sure events?
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/articl
| e30...
|
| When you use a list of tattoo elements to identify
| "Venezuelan gang members" and that list is also matched
| by the cheap options on the wall of any random tattoo
| shop, you tend to get a lot of false positives.
|
| Mr. Mota can absolutely stay in my neighborhood.
| tomp wrote:
| I don't think that anyone minds immigration of highly
| educated people from advanced civilized countries that
| have aligned values and respect local cultures.
|
| But illegal _and_ legal immigrants from other countries
| mainly consume taxpayer resources and spread crime and
| violence.
| guappa wrote:
| Of course they do mind, ask any dark skinned person with
| a university degree about their experiences.
| decimalenough wrote:
| A lot of people in Europe absolutely have a problem with
| legal immigration, with asylum seekers particularly
| maligned.
|
| Specifically, the rise of far-right parties in
| Scandinavia, Germany and France is very much a reaction
| to legal immigration from Arab and African countries. The
| argument is not "they're stealing our jobs", but "they're
| abusing our welfare benefits, driving up crime and raping
| our women".
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| 1) Not all asylum seekers are legal immigrants. Legal
| means you have obtained an entry visa before crossing the
| border.
|
| 2) Even huge amounts of legal asylum seekers can end up
| straining the already thin welfare state, so it's only
| normal that taxpayers paying for the welfare state, ask
| their politicians _" where are you goanna house all these
| newly arrived asylum seekers when even citizens and
| taxpayers are struggling with housing?"_ or _" how do you
| know all those unvetted people you're letting in aren't
| criminals or if they're compatible with our culture and
| values so that we and our children can feel safe in
| public?"_
|
| So when politicians provide no answers to those
| questions, how are you surprised voters aren't taking
| this well and choosing the extreme right?
| decimalenough wrote:
| I'm not sure who you're asking, but I'm not surprised at
| all.
| only-one1701 wrote:
| Would love to know your thoughts on what differentiates
| people. Perhaps race?
| ANewFormation wrote:
| Similar experience/perspective as the gp. People in
| different places are, in many if not most cases, just
| fundamentally different in countless ways.
|
| I think both genetics (personality, among endless other
| characteristics is significantly to majority heritable and
| going to have different distributions in different areas)
| and environment/culture play significant roles.
|
| But an interesting thing is that by the time people are
| adults, perhaps even before, the environmental factors have
| irreversibly changed them so marginalising cultural factors
| as "just" environmental doesn't really paint a fair
| picture.
|
| For a person who's happy to travel/live just about anywhere
| this makes having children doubly fun, because you
| basically get to decide the 'cultural mold' for your
| children, which is really neat!
| vladms wrote:
| I would call it culture. How you are educated, what you see
| around since day 0 on. It is very hard to escape it and
| unless you travel and live in another country you will not
| even be aware of such things (and even then you need a
| certain level of introspection).
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Seeing how the concept of race is a social construct with
| absolutely zero science behind it then no.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| This is commonly stated but seems more driven by ideology
| than science. People's racial identity is near to
| perfectly correlated with their genetic identity as can
| be ascertained with a very limited number of genetic
| markers.
|
| And essentially all of species related biology would be a
| 'social construct' by such logic. The difference between
| entire _species_ is often poorly defined. Different
| species can even interbreed and produce fertile offspring
| such as a liger. Or take the Australian Dingo which is
| literally just a wild dog, but it 's not classified as
| one for quite arbitrary reasons.
| intrasight wrote:
| We all differ in nature and nurture - in subtle and major
| ways.
|
| We're knowledgeable people here, so we know there's no such
| thing as race other than as a human artifact. As human
| artifact, it can certainly affect how we think and
| therefore how we behave.
| K0balt wrote:
| People are motivated by genetics and memetics. Genetics
| makes us get hungry when we don't eat, gives us sexual
| urges, things like that that we share with even the simpler
| forms of life. How we are affected and influenced by those
| stimuli is largely a matter of genetics.
|
| How we react to those stimuli is governed by culture, or
| memetics. Like genes, memetic frameworks are also passed on
| generationally, but with a much higher mutation rate.
|
| Genetics is hardware, which defines possible behaviors.
| Memetics is operating system and applications, defining
| actual behaviors.
| jjani wrote:
| Culture is everything. Culture being the people you're
| surrounded with on a daily basis, not the culture of an
| arbitrary geography. The people you interact with in your
| home, at school, at work, at the church/sports club. What
| is the distribution of their actions, values, practices?
|
| It is the major decider from the way one talks, one walks,
| one acts, one decides, everything.
|
| Can it be overruled by nature? Yes, very rarely. There's
| always a very small percentage of people (often thought of
| as neurodivergent, or witches, or simply free-spirited or
| eccentric, all case by case) who's neurogenetics cause them
| to partiaLly diverge. But these are the exceptions.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > We have cultures that throw gay people off the roofs, and
| cultures that celebrate them.
|
| And you could take single individuals from either culture and
| drop them in the other culture, and most of them would
| happily act and think just like the new culture, and swear
| blind that they'd always thought that way.
|
| It would be an interesting experiment to see how many
| individuals you could replace one-by-one before the culture
| changed. Or perhaps, like a Ship of Theseus, you could
| replace all the people, but have the culture endure.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| And so if you went to Saudi Arabia you'd pretend to be down
| with executing people for apostasy?
|
| Obviously it's an extreme example but many of the norms of
| a Western mindset would be no less offensive to billions of
| people in this world.
|
| What bias of moderation exists is that you probably
| wouldn't migrate to Saudi Arabia unless you were already
| mostly ok with their values.
|
| And if e.g. economic opportunity drove you there you'd
| probably keep your opinions to yourself, but it's unlikely
| your values would fundamentally change.
|
| I will only add - I speak from experience here.
| neaden wrote:
| If you grew up in Saudi Arabia raised by a typical family
| then yeah sure, you probably would be fine with it.
| Culture of course shapes people and I think it's silly to
| pretend you could freely swap adults but that doesn't
| mean that people are fundamentally different.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| That's not what he asked you. You answered some other
| question.
| janderson215 wrote:
| The question that was asked was not to confirm what GP
| said, it was combative to try to position GP as a bad
| person. Basically the equivalent of saying "so you're
| saying you would be okay killing Jews if you lived in
| Nazi Germany."
|
| GP answered to clarify their position and answered the
| only question that should have been asked, the equivalent
| of, "if during my childhood I was indoctrinated by the
| Hitler Youth program, yes I probably would have done this
| horrible thing and so would you."
| bsoles wrote:
| > What bias of moderation exists is that you probably
| wouldn't migrate to Saudi Arabia unless you were already
| mostly ok with their values... you'd probably keep your
| opinions to yourself, but it's unlikely your values would
| fundamentally change.
|
| Then, how do you explain, for example some people who
| migrates to France from a majority Muslim country and
| decides all French people are infidels and deserve death?
| Similarly, I know a lot of people who would curse
| America, yet still chooses to live in America. They were
| never mostly OK with the values on their current
| countries...
| jajko wrote:
| Hahaha. Take a look at western Europe. Vast majority of the
| immigrants from neither Africa or Middle east didn't adopt
| any of the core values of their host country even after
| decade+. More often than not, even second generation has
| very different values. What happens is isolated or
| connected silos of original values surviving a lot of
| generations.
|
| Just ask Germans or French or Belgian folks, or go there.
| The idea was exactly what you write, and it failed
| miserably with no solution in sight.
|
| Just to explain - we have friends among those communities.
| We like them a lot, but the difference is there even after
| couple of generations. Its not talked about much, but if
| you look for it, it shows up. Nobody will talk about this
| with strangers of course, thats just polite facade.
| jjani wrote:
| They were arguably never placed in fact never placed in
| the culture. There are 24 hours in a day. In what culture
| does one spend most of those hours?
|
| Imagine if those same people would have been adopted as
| newborns, by a rural family on a farm in Belgium, France
| or Germany.
|
| This isn't inherent to Europe, nor to any particular
| background. I live in Korea. Most Western immigrants here
| spend most of their time not inside the culture. They
| both work and relax outside of the dominant culture. If
| they have children here, and raise them similarly, those
| children will also have different values. But if they put
| their child in environments where everyone else is from
| the dominant culture, for >8 hours per day ever since
| kindergarten, then that's the values they'll take on.
|
| It all does come down to culture. For what it's worth,
| I'm originally from Europe, and very familiar with the
| phenomenon you're talking about.
|
| Someone else here rightly mentioned the internet as
| changing this somewhat, which has some truth in it - it
| does affect the probability distribution. But by and
| large, it still holds.
| lukan wrote:
| "Vast majority of the immigrants from neither Africa or
| Middle east didn't adopt any of the core values of their
| host country even after decade"
|
| Depends. I think in their home countries, Muslim youth
| does not hang around drunk in the park, that is more of a
| european thing, erm. cultural value. So they clearly
| adopted.
|
| Ok, so that was satirical. But they are the ones
| bothering me. I am not bothered by women wearing a Hijab
| and I don't see that hurting our values.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The Hijab is the least problem. The polls among European
| Muslims that show their attitudes towards secularism and
| various human rights that we take for granted (such as
| "abandoning your religion") are the problem. As are the
| consequences, such as parallel societies and the visible
| tip of the iceberg = actual terrorists and the whole
| infrastructure for recruiting them and sending them to
| jihadist hotspots.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| > and most of them would happily act and think just like
| the new culture, and swear blind that they'd always thought
| that way.
|
| If that was true you wouldn't have minority communities
| isolated within larger ones, they would just naturally mix
| - but the ones that do are the outliers.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| Absolutely not. You can move me to any place on earth, I
| will not be okay with throwing gay people off the roofs for
| being gay.
|
| The fact that you think like that is kind of insane to me.
| kaveh_h wrote:
| Distribution of Culture is way different now that internet
| enables virtual cultures to exist which have less physical
| barrier.
| Gormo wrote:
| Individuals are drastically different from each other.
| Populations of humans, however, regress to the mean fairly
| readily, and even small groups (at least if they aren't
| grouped according to precise selection criteria) will tend to
| reflect very similar emergent patterns.
| bsoles wrote:
| > If you starve a wealthy man for 2 weeks he will be ready to
| cannibalize... People are the same everywhere.
|
| > That is absolutely not true. People aren't the same even in
| adjacent neighborhoods sometimes. Some create great
| environments, some create hells on earth.
|
| Sure. People are not the same in their current behaviors.
| People are the same in how they acquire their behaviors or
| change their behaviors based on the conditions of their
| environments. And sometimes these changes are very quick.
|
| To give a very simple example, many people in my native
| country who would throw burning cigarette butts on the
| ground, stop doing so immediately when they, say, immigrate
| to the US. They didn't really change all of a sudden; what
| remains the same is the people's opportunistic ability to
| adapt to the conditions of their environment, regardless of
| what is moral, just, etc.
| alternatex wrote:
| Your example is a popular trope in the Balkans about how
| Balkan people behave when they go to work in Germany vs how
| they behave when they come back home in the Balkans.
|
| Incentives are everything in a civilized society and anyone
| who cannot wrap their mind around this is most likely
| privileged.
| nilslindemann wrote:
| What you say seems to be an exaggerated view of the world
| ("It's just people"). You confuse a few people with sociopathic
| trails with the average normal human with a heart and a
| conscience.
|
| The examples you give come from environments which are likely
| to attract sociopaths. You yourself are with a higher
| probability a narcissist than the average human [1].
|
| [1]
| https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/items/96cff233-cefd-45...
| mtgentry wrote:
| One nice thing about being on the spectrum is that you can spot
| morally sketchy situations more clearly--or at least more clearly
| than most normies. I once walked out of a pitch meeting where we
| were trying to land a client that completely clashed with a
| solid, well-paying client we already had. I couldn't believe no
| one else saw the huge conflict of interest. No one batted an
| eyelash.
| albert_e wrote:
| > One out of every two Danes has seen the documentary.
|
| Why not simpler English -- "half of the country has watched it"
|
| Also pendatic aside -- i think "every two danes" is a stretch --
| i am sure we can find many instances of "two danes" where both
| has watched it. Or neither. Some are being born as we speak
| (write).
| dfawcus wrote:
| > Why not simpler English -- "half of the country has watched
| it"
|
| I guess as it was aimed at a British audience, and that is not
| an uncommon way for us to form such sentences.
|
| If you hadn't mentioned it, I'd not even have noticed it,
| simply parsing it as "half".
| danso wrote:
| If this were social media, at least 10 people including me
| would be replying with the Major Hellstrom Sees Three Fingers
| meme.
| daedrdev wrote:
| One out of every two X is an extremely common and perfectly
| reasonable phrase in english, meaning your complaint about
| finding 2 Danes who haven't watched it is nonsensical as we
| know they mean on average.
| thwarted wrote:
| Why say "four out of five dentists" instead of "80% of
| dentists"?
| dfawcus wrote:
| Because that is just what we do.
|
| Expressing things as percentages was a late arrival; when
| until the mid 70s folks had to be able to cope with, and
| mentally manipulate vulgar fractions.
| absolutelastone wrote:
| "four out of five" has the same number of syllables as
| "80%". "Three out of four" has even fewer syllables than
| 75%, for that matter. So I can see why those stuck around.
| Meanwhile "one out of two" is wordier than just "half". Are
| you saying British people still use it in such an
| inefficient case anyway?
| dfawcus wrote:
| The media does when writing such things up, stylistic
| choices.
|
| It is also likely to be "one in two" rather than "one out
| of two", in speech "half", "three quarters", "seven
| eighths" etc is more likely.
| mrweasel wrote:
| That seems a bit overblown. I doubt that most wasn't aware that
| things like this is going on. Perhaps the scale and the number of
| people involved is a little more than most would have expected.
| The worst bit, for me and most of the people I debated the
| documentary with is how people can be so unapologetic about doing
| irreparable environmental damage. There's currently a another
| case where a company have blatantly mismanaged handling of
| polluted soil, in the name of profit. The fact that these people
| don't give a shit, and the people working of them just hit a wall
| if they're trying to alert local government is the most choking,
| not that there's corruption.
|
| Also this type of corruption isn't seen by Danes in our day to
| day life, so they don't really register on our corruption
| perception. I still struggle to view it as corruption and not
| just straight up criminal activity or deliberate environmental
| damage.
| danso wrote:
| Besides the description of the scandal for non-Danish audiences,
| this was also an interesting reflection on the deception inherent
| in the production of any kind of documentary work, even when it's
| portrayed as straight CCTV footage.
|
| > _All documentaries are artificial: their footage has been
| carefully threshed and sieved with an eye to telling a story or
| pushing an argument. The Black Swan, though, relies on the
| unblinking, real-time gaze of hidden CCTV cameras, so we lull
| ourselves into thinking that we're seeing the full picture, the
| full truth. No such thing. Instead, we get evasion upon evasion:
| Smajic's charade for her clients, Malm cheating the taxman, TV2
| withholding their work from the police, Brugger keeping details
| from his audience. Smajic's final bluff merely confirms what
| Brugger seems to have believed throughout his career: everywhere,
| there are conspiracies and lies that he must expose, even if he
| has to participate in the dissembling himself._
|
| > _...Smajic believes she's a victim of journalistic deceit. The
| Black Swan was meant to be about her life, she said, with the
| hidden camera footage being used only sparingly to corroborate
| her stories. She'd been offered no security during the filming,
| she said. When TV2 screened the first three episodes for her
| approval, they were really just raw, unedited clips, she
| maintained, and in any case, she'd been strongly medicated after
| a surgery and couldn't assess them with a clear mind. ("Amira
| watched the edited episodes, they just needed finalising," TV2's
| Norgaard told me. "During the four hours she spent with the
| editorial team that day, she appeared unaffected and seemed
| coherent, as we also documented in the series.") Smajic hadn't
| been running any other office at the time, she said to me, and in
| any case, "they hadn't bought the rights to every single moment
| in my life"._
| raincom wrote:
| In the third world, corruption is very open from the clerk in a
| local revenue office to the top ministers/secretaries. There is a
| price for every service.
|
| In the West, it is hard to see low-level corruption (bribes for
| services) in offices. However, corruption takes form in the shape
| of collusion; and this collusion is pretty much legal. Revolving
| door, consultants, lobbyists, conflicts of interests, setting up
| NGOs to grab money from the govt, offering sinecure jobs like
| advisors, directors, etc for friends and family--these are some
| strategies to do unethical yet legal stuff in the West.
| huijzer wrote:
| I was just listening to a talk by Stephen Kotkin were he
| mentioned corruption. He said corruption is not binary.
| Instead, it's a continuum. The question is how much of the
| money a public servant spends will actually end up in the
| desired outcome. In China, he said, maybe 20% will end up in
| the pockets of the public servant while the other 80% is spent
| on the road. In Nigeria, he said, everything will go to the
| servant and there will be no road.
|
| Source: https://youtu.be/ZD8BhZEJcjI at around 1:00:00.
| raincom wrote:
| This continuum hides one thing: overbidding in terms of
| project cost and underdelivery in terms of quality. At least
| in US, quality is maintained, while costing 300% more (look
| at any subway, rail projects). In the third world, projects
| are overbid, also underdeliver in terms of quality. No
| quality control at all.
| intrasight wrote:
| > it's a continuum
|
| Corruption is multidimensional. There's the size. There's the
| nature of the parties involved. There's the question of
| whether it's legal or illegal - which itself as a continuum
| as my lawyer girlfriend always reminds me
| dumbfounder wrote:
| No conflict, no interest.
| gooosle wrote:
| In Canada you can just steal public funds if you're in the
| government with complete immunity. Set up a government program
| to support X (ex - greeness, gender education in congo,
| studying a random worm somewhere in asia, etc), then just
| transfer the funds directly to your own companies, and the
| companies of your friends and family [1]. We had like 5 major
| corruption scandals in the last 2 years - basically zero
| repercussions for those involved.
|
| If you pick the right reason/name for X - anyone who crticises
| you can also automatically be labelled racist, dumb, fascist or
| whatever as well.
|
| [1]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Tech...
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| I cannae creids there would be something rotten in the state of
| Denmark
| croes wrote:
| Will that change Denmark's position in the Corruption Perception
| Index?
|
| https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2024
|
| I always thought the lower the more realistic
| nolito wrote:
| I d'ont. Im portuguese living in Denmark for many years. The
| difference is just perception.
|
| The portuguese say: "this shitty country is so corrupt". I
| never encountered any corruption in Portugal.
|
| The danes say: "See we are the best and justest country in the
| World without corruption". Facts say otherwise. Just google
| Lars Lokke Rasmussen and take a look at his actions
| guappa wrote:
| Italian living in sweden. It's 100% identical. They don't
| even bother to hide it, because there can't be corruption
| here by definition. So to us it's so obvious.
| Isamu wrote:
| >All of Scandinavia, he believes, has persuaded itself that crime
| exists only in violent, poor abscesses on the edges of their
| societies. "The Danes totally subscribe to this idea that Denmark
| has no corruption, and to the idea of Denmark as the end of the
| road," Brugger said, referring to the political scientist Francis
| Fukuyama's notion that "getting to Denmark" is the goal of every
| modern democracy.
|
| First, this is an assertion about "All of Scandinavia", and there
| is some contradiction about crime exists but is small, and
| Denmark has "no corruption". But this is basic over-
| generalization, between low and none, and a expose that provides
| anecdotes but doesn't challenge statistics.
|
| Still people will claim (rhetorically) "none" when the real
| answer is not zero. And is that really incorrect? To be correct
| is to quantify and provide your reasoning. That's something that
| public discourse is yet to embrace.
| JMiao wrote:
| How can we view in the usa?
| eitland wrote:
| Haven't seen this film, but here are some observations I think we
| should keep in mind in general when it comes to journalism.
|
| There is a famous saying, that in one version goes like this:
|
| _I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will
| vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this --
| who will count the votes, and how. [1]_
|
| Mutatis mutandis, something very similar can be said about
| filmmaking: it is of less importance exactly what someone says
| and of great importance who cuts and edit it.
|
| Light or lack of light, missing context - this can be the exact
| questions asked that triggered the answer[2] or what the person
| said to qualify their statements [3]. There is music, sound
| effects, camera perspectives and so on and so on.
|
| One can also lead the viewer towards a conclusion without
| spelling it out [4].
|
| There is a reason militaries advice soldier that in case of
| capture we should say as little as absolutely possible outside of
| what one is legally required to say: name, rank, service number,
| and date of birth. Anything and everything can and probably will
| be abused.
|
| This is true not only for opponents in a war but as probably
| everyone knows also with police in most of the world, and HN is
| keenly aware of this.
|
| I'd argue that we should be equally aware when it comes to
| journalism: as much as I respect many journalists, they are not a
| homogeneous group of perfectly ethical people striving for
| perfect objectivity. They have personal agendas: fame, income,
| people and cases they sympathize with and people and cases
| theywant to hurt.
|
| We should be aware of this when reading, watching or listening -
| but of course even more when answering questions.
|
| Any competent defense attorney can tell
|
| [1]: Supposedly said by Stalin in reference to a vote in the
| Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but
| exactly who said is is less important than the general idea.
|
| [2]: can be as simple as this classic: asking the person
| "hypothetically, if you wanted to ... how would you have done
| it?"
|
| [3]: Simple example: "Q: Have you cheated on your taxes? A: yes,
| <here the director cuts>, back in 1956 when I was 18 ..."
|
| [4]: This is an actual example: Our public broadcaster in Norway
| mentioning that they had tried to investigate the economic
| transactions of some people, saying they couldn't do it and it
| was very confusing and ending that segment with a merry go round.
|
| What they didn't mention was that Norwegian police had already
| investigated the same people over three years, several months
| secretly and had not only been unable to prove the crimes
| suggested, but gone as far as stating they found it proven that
| the accused were innocent.
| edm0nd wrote:
| Did you really make it as a rapper? Do you have a Spotify or
| Soundcloud or wat?
| wtcactus wrote:
| Did it really shatter their self image, or it just made every
| Dane realize that the tabu their society created against speaking
| badly on the absurdity high taxation they face is actually felt
| by everyone that is a net contributor of their system?
|
| The middle class citizen in most of Europe is now paying more
| than 50% of their earnings to the state. I don't believe a single
| one actually believes this is anything fair and many surely think
| it's oppressive and a form of slavery.
|
| There are only 3 kinds of people that defend these outrageously
| high taxes:
|
| - the ones that are a net negative to the system
|
| - populist politicians
|
| - people that are indoctrinated to virtue signal about the theme,
| but that don't actually believe in it (the ones in the video)
|
| We are really living in the Dictatorship of the Majority.
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