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A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

theguardian.com

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Re: A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

#91

Post by intrasight »

only-one1701 wrote: post #80
bufferoverflow wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Would love to know your thoughts on what differentiates people. Perhaps race?

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.

Re: A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

#92

Post by wtcactus »

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.

Re: A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

#93

Post by K0balt »

only-one1701 wrote: post #80
bufferoverflow wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Would love to know your thoughts on what differentiates people. Perhaps race?

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.

Re: A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

#94

Post by intrasight »

huijzer wrote: post #52
raincom wrote: post #50

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…

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 servan…

> 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

Re: A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

#95

Post by mr_toad »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #76
itissid wrote: post #26

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 rea…

> 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.

> 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.

Re: A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

#96

Post by ANewFormation »

jamiek88 wrote: post #90
only-one1701 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to know your thoughts on what differentiates people. Perhaps race?

Seeing how the concept of race is a social construct with absolutely zero science behind it then no.

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.

Re: A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

#97

Post by absolutelastone »

arghwhat wrote: post #55
dtquad wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 i…

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.

Re: A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

#98

Post by FirmwareBurner »

hnhg wrote: post #83
tomp wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main drive of who you call “far right” is precisely to import less people that want to throw gays off roofs.

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.

*)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.

Re: A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

#99

Post by ANewFormation »

mr_toad wrote: post #95
bufferoverflow wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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 cultu…

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.

Re: A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

#100

Post by amanaplanacanal »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #98
hnhg wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

*)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 extr…

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.
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