Stupid Swedish People.

They had an election recently in Sweden and the issue of torture was hardly discussed. How can they be so backwards to not have a frank dialogue about such an important topic where there are such compelling arguments on both sides? Instead they had a curious obsession with economic policy, as if that actually had any impact on the daily lives of its citizens.

You probably don't know this but Swedes are the butt of the equivalent of "Pollock" jokes. I think it's mainly the Swiss that do that, but calling them stupid might step on more nerves than you think. :-)

The Swedes arguably have their shit together more than any other nation on the planet.

after winning the election by a small margin. Sounds familiar doesn't it.

of the Democratic Party in the U.S. So, no, it doesn't sound familiar.

Silly!

In fact, they have the highest number of atheists/agnostics of any country in the world (http://www.adherents.com/largecom/com_atheist.html).

More bad news for Sweden - they moved into the #3 spot in the World Economic Forum's 2006 global competitiveness rankings behind Finland (2) and Switzerland (1).
The USA? Oh, we were #1 last year....we fell to 6th this year (http://www.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/09/26/wef.competition.reut/index.html).

I'm half Norwegian and half Finn. Both my parents were first gen Muricans and both told Swedish jokes, all in jest, of course.

My Norwegian father would say "Ten thousand Swedes marched through the weeds to lick one sick Norwegian". My Finnish mother would chime back, "A smart Norwegian is the same thing as a dumb Suomalainen."

During the Norwegian Olympics, the Norwegians were selling Scandinavian maps with water where the Swedish peninsula is supposed to be.

I have no idea where the Danes or Icelanders are in this pecking order.

All in good fun.

Torture may be an important discussion point, but economic policy usually does affect the daily lives of the citizens of a country. And for such a small country, economic issues will determine their social policy.

:hi:

won, thus ending a Social Democrat era that provided Swedes an enviable cradle-to-grave welfare system, low unemployment, socialized health care, and state-funded higher education. I don't even pretend to know much about their future or their past, but I did gather that it was taxes that brought the current party down, the same war cry the Repugs are beginning to screech again. I've had Swedish friends and visited their country and believe me, they have a lot to be proud of. We should be so fortunate. Besides, they aren't involved in our torture scandal are they?

in the sense that the conservatives won partly because they toned down the talk about taxes, they even went as far as to say that the tax deductions they would propose would only be targeted at low income workers and fully financed to be proposed.

The election was won and lost on jobs. The conservatives where better at formulating the problem around young people are having a hard time finding a job, a lot of people is caught in the trap that our social security system has become and to many in government programmes not enough proper jobs. To be fair the conservatives exaggerated a bit but it worked.

The ruling party went to election with the message that everything is fine (which it largely is) but that the Swedes could expect more of the same - in short they were content...

Add the arrogance of the party leader Goran Persson, which is the real reason I voted conservatively for the first time ever and the election was lost (and believe me a lot of social democrats did the same). The party has been sliding to the right for a decade and now looks more like a centrist liberal party than a proper social democratic party. This has been disastrous for the political life in Sweden. The conservatives have not had to act like an opposition party because the government have fulfilled their every wet privatization and liberalisation dream.

This way we get a crippled conservative government that has triangulated the shit out of themselves and will now act more as social liberals than conservatives and a pressure on the opposition party of the Social democrats to move back to the left - and kick the disgusting Persson into retirement.

One reason it has come to this is that the candidate who was the first choice among everyone to succeed the PM, Mrs. Anna Lind was tragically killed a couple of years back. There simple weren´t any natural successors and the PM decided to stay on.