Sweden and India

Sweden is hold as the least religious country in the world. India is said to be the most religious. At least that's what an american christian-evangelical leader said in a documentary I saw. In a speech he attacked "Washington" with the words "we are a nation of indians lead by swedes!". Sweden is associated with the Jante law. In India this can happen: an angry mob of presumably ordinary indians visit an income tax office because they thought the tax bureaucrats had bothered their idol, an extremely rich Bollywood actor. Say what you want, that's NOT Jante.

Kanye West is in town

, DN (swedish) writes.

The Arlanda Express airport train has been 100% more expensive during its first ten years

, DN (swedish) writes. The executive comments.

The article also says they are planning for staffed information desks onboard the trains.

Streets with fewer and fewer record stores, but more and more people with ipods, in the piracy country of Sweden

The music country of Sweden is also the piracy one, as reflected by the success for the pirate party. Östersjön is the northern, colder, digital pirate bay.

The guy above is not only "hipper" than you think - he is actually a Sofo person. The material he's listening to is probably more illegal than you thought, at least before reading this post.

Until the spring of 2009, when a new tougher law came into place, more than a million swedes downloaded music illegally. Pro-filesharing voices in the debate said sort of like "we can't have a law that makes a million citizens criminals".

But the piracy country has also produced Spotify, the legal way of getting music through the web, so we are 360-savvy on this matter.

The police say they are about to destroy the Stockholm part of the Black Cobra criminal gang

, DN (swedish) writes.

Have in mind that some locals can "suffer" from "sunday angst", despite plenty of people not only work, they work with making consumption possible for

First of all this is a post that investigates the "sunday angst" phenomenon. What is it? A search on Google didn't gave so much.

Because most people don't work, but will start working the next day, does that create some special "air" of low energy combined with dark thoughts about the coming week? In other words, do people simply infect each other on sundays?

There's also something to say about "sunday angst" when it comes to travelling. Even if you probably don't expect Sweden or Sweden per se to be spectacular and guaranteed non-depressing, the sunday angst is mostly something you associate with your own REALITY at the place you live (that is, if you in some way can relate to anything named "sunday angst", maybe you can't).

But you can recognise the "sunday angst" even if you are travelling and don't have to work tomorrow. Just look at people and think about what day it is. You can try to deny it. But you are affected by people around you. You probably travelled to the working and energized Sweden, not to this. The sundays are not representable. Maybe nowhere? How international is the sunday angst?

Sundays in Stockholm's inner-city:

* People have a day off
* Not going to church
* Home alone, having a hangover (in 2006, 58% of Stockholm's apartments had only one person living there)
* But unlike southern Europe and the rest of Sweden, practically all stores with employees are OPEN during at least a couple of hours

Swedes often choose the "progressive", as the "Stockholm" political elite suggests, but here are exceptions

* 74%* of the swedes want to keep monarchy (february 2009), which means keeping the royal family royal. But practically ALL political celebrities say no to monarchy, at least when they have to put their own name under it. The three left-wing political parties have also expressed their no for the party as a whole.

The weekly Svensk Damtidning/Swedish Lady Magazine practically only write about royal people. And it's fair to suggest that they look forward to the 2010 royal wedding year with dollar marks in their eyes.

* 84%* of the swedes say no to 50-50 parental leave (november 2009), which would mean that both parents have to stay home with the kid exactly half (eight months) of the total parental leave time.

In november 2009 a number of social liberal politicans wrote the debate article "It's time for a shared parental leave time" (what they suggested was four months to the mother, four months to the father and four months to be used however they wanted).

Here's the

*: The two % numbers you have seen here should be cut down for inner-city stockholmers - no matter if the royal palace is located here or not. The ones' you see in the street have views more similar to the ones of the political elite.

So there's not many examples, but in these two issues you can talk about a similar divide like the one between the american rural people and the elite in "Washington".

But the elite in "Stockholm" haven't been close of doing anything serious in these issues, so there's not much debate about it.

In Sweden the big-city people are more "blue" (pro-small government) than rural people...

...and here is a map on how the majority of people living close to each Stockholm subway station placed their votes in the 2006 elections. (Red is "big government" and blue is "small government".)

The swedish softness on crime and the laidback european way of ignoring minor offences can be named by the expression ”freedom under responsibility”

Since long USA has had a more difficult and insecure society to handle. And they have handled it by NYC major Rudy Giuliani's zero tolerance model, for example, something that has never came up for debate in Sweden.

We also lack the energy and the kind of group-thinking "on steroids" that quickly made Singapore the cleanest.

So when it comes to ”decency”, un-extreme and pragmatic Europe walk in its own pace in the middle of the race.

The historically calm swedish society is the base for our softness on crime. You can definitely call it unswedish – ”in a negative way”, this time... - to wine too much when you are affected by a crime. ”Shit happens”. A high enough amount of people just think it's downright low-class to demand ”revenge”.

And now to the minor offences. In Iceland, which is like Sweden but more, it is TECHNICALLY LEGAL to bicycle at the sidewalks. You get the society-to-handle theory? They didn't expect any chaos in the streets of Reykjavik, so they went for the ”freedom under responsibility”.

Stockholm activities that are technically illegal but that the police will not care about (no guarantees, though):

Bicycling at the sidewalks (if it doesn't look very unsecure).

Drinking alcohol in the street or in the park.

Peeing outdoors.

Jaywalk (as everywhere).

Examples of Stockholm activities that are technically allowed:

Eating, drinking and talking on your cell phone on public transportation.

Watching a crime without doing your best to prevent it.

Smoking when walking (unlike in Tokyo).

Saying ”knulla”/”fuck” in television

Chinese-swedes possibly spied at by countryman

, SR International writes.