
Fake Sweden expert on Fox News – no connection to Swedish security - adamwi
http://www.dn.se/nyheter/varlden/fake-sweden-expert-on-fox-news-has-criminal-convictions-in-us-no-connection-to-swedish-security/
======
rodionos
Let's look at raw statistics for a second. The data comes from the Swedish
crime agency bra.se: [https://www.bra.se/bra/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-
statist...](https://www.bra.se/bra/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-
statistics/crime-statistics.html)

1) Total numbers of offenses. Rape statistics chart is displayed below:

[https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/013dc374/1/#fullscreen](https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/013dc374/1/#fullscreen)

2) Population pro-rated:

[https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/013dc374/3/#fullscreen](https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/013dc374/3/#fullscreen)

What happened in 2002-2004? As was discussed in media, the Swedish authorities
have encouraged reporting of sex offenses and changed the methodology of how
rape crime is reported and counted.

One of the unintended side effects is that it's difficult to compare the time
series, and this is one of the challenges that all statistical agencies are
facing. If you change the definition, be prepared for misunderstanding and
misreporting - both intentional and not.

By the way, the country where Julian Assange is alleged of a sex assault is
... Sweden.

~~~
rodionos
By the way, here are two rape definitions used by the FBI: 'legacy' and
'revised':
[https://www.ucrdatatool.gov/offenses.cfm](https://www.ucrdatatool.gov/offenses.cfm)

Made a difference to Brock Turner's case.

------
znfi
In what way is the term "defense and national security advisor" used in the
US? Does this necessitate being an advisor to the military or the ministry for
foreign affairs?

Because this article to me, as a swede, seems to contain very little
substance, and given that DN for no apparent reasons lists this guys whole
criminal records makes you wonder what the purpose really is here. For
comparison I'm not aware of ever having seen this detailed of a listing of
someone's criminal record. There is no mention of any inaccuracies in what
this person has said, only that the title chosen by Fox News is incorrect.

It's also somewhat ironic that they quote Nils Bildt as complaining of the way
media behave, when this whole article, and publication of his criminal record
in particular, in many ways seems like a way to "punish" him for criticizing
the politically correct image championed by the media over here.

Finally, it might be worth pointing out that the surname Bildt is in Sweden
strongly associated with the politician Carl Bildt, former prime minister of
Sweden and former minister for foreign affairs.

------
spiderfarmer
Things like this makes me worried about the future of the USA. How can a
country succeed in the future if they reject reality? I know Fox News is not
representative of all US media, but even the president admits that his
worldview is based on whatever the news editor cooks up that day.

~~~
themihai
All this makes me think a war is being cooked up though the stance on Europe
doesn't make any sense to me. I thought China is the "issue" now not EU which
still pays the price of the latest NATO war(s).

~~~
Bombthecat
Yup, my guess it will be 6-7 years until war.

------
willvarfar
I don't get why the Right is so keen to vilify Sweden.

I've lived abroad and travelled and feel I have a fair handle on all the
countries I've visited and I'm living abroad now.. In Sweden! Nordic countries
are by far the best functioning countries I've ever visited and should serve
as positive examples.

~~~
Pxtl
Because Scandinavia has countries that are aggressively left-wing and really
successful at it. These are the places that prove that liberal ideals work.
And they've accepted a tremendous number of refugees.

So ideologue right wingers are desperate to see them fail, as proof that
Muslims are intrinsically hateful and that Scandinavians are chumps for
falling for leftist ideals.

~~~
pavlov
That seems to be basically it.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Soviet-affiliated communist parties were
triumphant in large parts of Europe. In countries like Hungary and
Czhechoslovakia, they came to power through elections and rapidly seized
absolute government control. Many communists in Western European countries
were expecting France, West Germany and others to soon follow suit. After all,
the "scientific" theory of Marxism-Leninism explained this would happen, and
enough cherry-picked facts were available to support the inevitability of the
capitalist governments' collapse.

Today's right-wingers look a lot like those 1948 communists. Plenty of things
are going their way, but that is not good enough in itself -- the Bannon-style
ideological framework makes fatalist predictions that must be validated, by
adapting facts if necessary.

------
dep_b
It's a bit weird that a country safer than the US now gets portrayed as a
sodom and gomorra of rape and violence. The striking difference between Swedes
and immigrants in terms of violent crimes (four times as much, five times for
rape) is declared for a large part by the fact that Swedes on average are nice
and peaceful people.

Fox and Trump blowing everything out of proportion shouldn't stop a healthy
debate about what the benefits of the current wave of immigration for Sweden
and the Swedes really are.

~~~
willvarfar
Immigrants don't commit crimes. Poor people commit crimes. It happens that the
poorest people in Sweden right now are immigrants.

The rape stats are also way different from how they are portrayed in the
media. In Sweden, if you are in an abusive relationship, _every_ instance of
abuse is counted individually, and as Assange learned, the law is very strict.
As other countries tend to do far worse at reporting and prosecuting abuse,
and as other countries tend to count all occurrences of abuse together as one
crime, the numbers are not directly comparable to other countries.

Source: am living in Sweden in a "hotspot", am an immigrant but am rich and
white. I saw nazis demonstrating in the local town center yesterday, which
shocked me. Sweden is a very safe nice country, and the alt-Right in Sweden
(SD being big where I am) and abroad are misrepresenting it.

~~~
kpil
"Immigrants don't commit crimes"... Well, if you import a lot of very poor and
unskilled people, the result will be more crime.

Actually, I think it's more complicated that that. I can't find the data but I
remember a report that stated that Somali and Iraqi immigrants had 5 time
higher conviction rate, and that more than 25% had been convicted for a crime,
compared to ~5% of swedes.

I also remembered that immigrants from Sri Lanka -that have been a conflict
zone for a very long time - had more or less _half_ the conviction rate than
Swedes, which is an interesting fact.

[Swedish article about statistics in Norway, with very similar demographics
and culture, except way lower immigration: [https://www.svd.se/brottslighet-
bland-invandrare-borde-oroa-...](https://www.svd.se/brottslighet-bland-
invandrare-borde-oroa-alla-partier)]

~~~
bobdole1234
So, don't let them be poor.

~~~
kpil
I doubt that any other country gives more money in the form of subsidies or
social assistance programmes, both per capita (giver and receiver) and in
absolute numbers.

They also have free healthcare and enjoys free education up to university,
including financial aid for studies and a home equipment loan.

There are also very few signs of structured racism, when looking at various
ethnic groups with comparable education, etc, although it of course exists,
just like all other biases and generalisations in a society.

There have been a substantial asylum related immigration for long enough that
we can look at the second generation, and their level of education, crime,
etc, and draw the conclusion that whatever we are doing, it's not really
enough or possibly not even the correct things to do.

~~~
kpil
Personally, I think it's more related to that many immigrants have a hard time
to understand the highly individualist society when coming from clan
societies, the case that many of them have traditional and backwards values
that is frowned upon in the rest of the society although it's never ever done
in the open, the islamists and wahhabist propaganda that uses them for their
own purposes, and even how we put them in areas where the brutalist
architecture, disappointing, misguided, and dirt-cheap city planning amplifies
the social group dynamic effects that could perhaps been kept in check in a
more non-anonymous society (as explored by Philip Zimbardo.)

And class ( or socioeconomic background - there are related problems that are
ignored ). And education. And the fact that we have not done anything to
prevent this for the past 30 years.

------
kevinbowman
I'm interested in how this is being reported on in the USA - is there a
discussion about the complete fabrication of this story, or is the story
itself successfully doing the rounds? It seems amazing that manipulation of
the public on such a massive scale is even possible in somewhere like the USA,
if that's what is happening.

~~~
stanleydrew
I saw something about it on Twitter. But it's Fox News, so wasn't really that
unexpected.

They have been attempting to manipulate the public on a massive scale for a
long time, as long as the manipulation serves the preferred narrative.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Surely, NBC, CNN, etc try and do this also?

Note: Don't take this to mean I, in ANY way, support Fox News.

~~~
stanleydrew
I'm not suggesting they don't but we're not discussing a specific instance on
any of those networks, so that's not really at issue here. I think Fox News
showed that low-integrity narrative-fitting and selective editing are very
profitable. Other networks have probably followed to some extent.

------
spiderfarmer
When an immigrant politician in The Netherlands made up a "fact" about Dutch
doctors pulling the plug on immigrants patients sooner because of racism / a
language barrier, he was asked by all journalists why he would use an
unsubstantiated rumor in his campaign and how he thought that using something
like that was ethical. When I saw that I was proud to be a citizen of this
country, even though we have our own Trump wannabe with even tinier hands:
Geert Wilders.

------
hacker_9
Utterly embarrassing, but not unexpected. News in the US exists in a different
reality compared to other countries. If the BBC did this it would be such an
utter shock it would probably make the newspapers. But in the US? Business as
usual.

------
xname2
So many comments here imply that there is no immigration problem whatsoever in
Sweden. It's all Trump/right-win made-up. But it is not true:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/world/europe/sweden-
natio...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/world/europe/sweden-nation-of-
open-arms-debates-implications-of-immigration.html)

Sweden, Nation of Open Arms, Debates Implications of Immigration

"In 2014, the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats gained 12.9 percent of the vote
in parliamentary elections to become the country’s third-largest party, up
from only 2.9 percent eight years earlier."

------
Melchizedek
Nevertheless, what he said was completely correct.

"National security advisor" in an American context is apparently not just
someone who gives advise on national security, but a specific high ranking
post. Nils Bildt however is an independent analyst from Sweden who is based in
the US. If the Swedish government considers him an "expert" or not seems
irrelevant.

While the presentation of who he is was misleading, it doesn't seem like a
huge conspiracy and could simply be a mistake. The reaction to it looks like a
case of killing the messenger when you don't like the message.

------
byrnedo
Murders / 100k people in Sweden: 4. Chicago has 27.

~~~
danielvf
Comparing Sweden to Chicago seems a bit of a stretch. A number more directly
comparable would be the US Non-Black homicide rate, which was 2.54 per 100,000
in 2015.

I think that's lower than the Sweden figure in the sibling comment.

[Edit: I had said that this rate was also lower than England. I was wrong on
that one. ]

[https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-
the-u.s.-...](https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-
the-u.s.-2015/tables/expanded_homicide_data_table_3_murder_offenders_by_age_sex_and_race_2015.xls)

~~~
AdeptusAquinas
The actual rate for Sweden and the UK is 0.9, each. So even the 'non-black'
rate in the US is higher than both, put together.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intenti...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate)

~~~
rodionos
I recommend double checking reference tables in Wikipedia.

It is conveniently displayed first in search results, however for Sweden:

[https://www.bra.se/download/18.358de3051533ffea5ea7f2cf/1459...](https://www.bra.se/download/18.358de3051533ffea5ea7f2cf/1459417671952/Reported_offences_1950_2015.xls)

    
    
      > 305 Completed murder, manslaughter and assault resulting in death.
      > 9,851,017 Total population
    

= 3.1 per 100000 people

~~~
AdeptusAquinas
The differences are due to different definitions of intentional homicide
between countries, which is why I would argue a UN study with its own
definition is better for comparison than a Swedish and US source.

------
xorcist
The family name Bildt is an old noble one with registered heraldry and
absolutely not a surname you can take in Sweden. It's also the surname of the
prime minister at the time Nils emigrated. Perhaps that's a bit of background
to who puts on such a charade.

------
ptype
Ironically coming from DN, who under current editor Wolodarski has lost a huge
amount of credibility among Swedish intellectuals. What used to be the premier
journalistic publication of Sweden now runs a highly biased agenda, and has
been involved in a number of journalistic scandals (cover ups etc).

~~~
Steer
I find it interesting and telling that you don't present any sources for your
argument. Which paper in Sweden does the "Swedish intellectuals" read now? I
think it is still DN, but would be interested to hear your sourced argument
why this isn't true.

~~~
ptype
If you read my post again, you will see that I did not actually say that the
Swedish intellectuals (for the lack of a better term) are not reading DN, just
that DN has lost a lost of credibility. It is my observation that this is
becoming more and more of a wide spread view, based on discussions with
friends and colleagues. You are right - I'm busted! - I have not conducted a
market study of this. But then again, do you have any sources why they still
read DN as you claim?

------
cmrdporcupine
Unfortunately the news cycle has already moved on.

