SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Sweden's government has a message for you Swedes:
The security environment in Europe and in Sweden's vicinity has deteriorated and the all-volunteer recruitment hasn't provided the Armed Forces with enough trained personnel. The re-activating of the conscription is needed for military readiness. Trained personnel are fundamental for building military capability. In 2016 the Armed Forces lacked 1,000 active squad leaders, soldiers and sailors as well as 7,000 reservists.
Recruitment to the Armed Forces will be both voluntary and conscription. Individual motivation, interest and will should to be considered as much as possible. The Armed Forces is planning for 4,000 recruits annually in basic military training in 2018 and 2019. The modern conscription is gender neutral and will include both women and men.
What's that about the security environment? Oh, it's about Russia:
Sweden is reinstating the military draft — for men and women — because of dwindling volunteers and growing concerns over a more assertive Russia in the Baltic and Ukraine. [...] Marinette Nyh Radebo told the BBC the "security change in our neighborhood" prompted the move by Sweden, which is not a NATO member. "The Russian illegal annexation of Crimea (in 2014), the conflict in Ukraine and the increased military activity in our neighborhood are some of the reasons," she said.
[...] Swedish Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist said he was inspired to make the draft gender-neutral by neighboring Norway, which in 2013 introduced a law applying military conscription to both sexes. That made Norway the first NATO member to draft both men and women, joining a tiny group of countries around the world, including Israel. Turkey and Germany are the only major NATO countries that still use a draft. Conscription also exists in Austria, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, Greece and Norway, according to Deutsche Welle. France ended the draft in 2001. Italy and the Netherlands put the draft on hold.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 04 2017, @07:15PM (17 children)
> Sweden is the perfect example of the end result of "tolerance."
Yeah. Sweden really is the future that liberals want. [buzzfeed.com]
Fucking horrid.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday March 04 2017, @07:44PM (16 children)
I wasn't talking about the tranny, I was talking about the no-go zones and the fires and rapes perpetrated by Islamic savages and other lesser-developed peoples. But then again rallying your people behind a big scary foreign bogeyman is an ages-old tactic to distract your people from domestic problems and divert their anger away from their moron chickenshit bureaucrats.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 04 2017, @07:51PM (4 children)
Who cares what you were talking about?
You are a damn fool whose only value is to be mocked for your idiocy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 04 2017, @07:55PM (1 child)
Yeah, shock culture is so 2000s
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday March 04 2017, @11:53PM
I post for my own amusement, not any of yours. And unfortunately I am very easily amused.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 04 2017, @08:20PM (1 child)
You are a damn fool whose only value is to be mocked for your idiocy.
Ethanol-fueled has value? When did that happen?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday March 04 2017, @10:59PM
Well it's true for some value of value.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Saturday March 04 2017, @08:04PM (7 children)
Strong warm-blooded Americans know that rapes, shootings and murders should be kept between us good Christians. We don't need to import dark-skinned people to fill our prisons or create scary neighborhoods. We can do it with our own people, with no need to go find crazies from other religions than our good "turn the other cheek, then drone his family" Christianity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 04 2017, @08:17PM (5 children)
Are you trying to suggest that, because a given culture already has a number of rapists in it, importing more is reasonable?
(Score: 3, Touché) by bob_super on Saturday March 04 2017, @08:27PM (4 children)
I was more going for pot vs kettle, but your idea does make a whole lot of sense from a market demand standpoint... Our rapists are pretty darn expensive, we should import cheaper ones to save a buck while maintaining the same fear levels.
(man, I shouldn't be working on a Saturday)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 04 2017, @09:03PM (1 child)
Do yu get paid for commenting on SN? How does one get into such employment?
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Saturday March 04 2017, @09:13PM
Not quite: https://xkcd.com/303/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Sunday March 05 2017, @10:52AM (1 child)
Coming from someone who has a healthy fear of ANYONE religious (well, maybe not most of the Buddhists, dunno why), I kinda gotta agree with the AC's concept to a certain extent.
I've always believed that we're a certain amount like a piece of soft clay. It rolls around, bumps up against other clay, whatever. All the while, it picks up dust and chunks of other clay, and that just becomes a part of it. Each zealot picks up some of us, while leaving too much of themselves behind. That's probably a flawed metaphor still, but it's 4:30 am here and I'm pretty drunk so it's the best I have to work with.
To try to relate that back to the original concept, we're dealing with a group of people who are fleeing some pretty terrible things in their home country. They're not fleeing the religion of their home country, but the death and destruction that's happening there. Their religion is, to put it mildly, shit. Don't get me wrong, Christianity is shit too, and I'd like to see it gone, but the point of saying this is that the immigrants are not necessarily nonbelivers. No small amount of them are largely still devout believers, and that gives me no small degree of "the creeps". But as I suggested in another response to you, integration is hella important. You had a valid counterpoint in the military draft argument. But we're "doing good things" by taking in these refugees, but how do you get from A to B on the integration path? I feel like there's a whole lot of focus on the general idea, but no one really cares about the fine details of the second part. It's somehow become a black-and-white all-or-nothing package deal, and as it stands, someone loses either way.
Depending on what you read, there's some pretty terrible things going on to the citizens of countries in Europe due to the policies there. Are those lies, or is there a real problem? I don't honestly know, though a coworker of mine who regularly visits Europe with her native Czech husband won't go to anywhere there anymore except for his country, and they're the reason she cites, with little elaboration. I'm the kind of person who's inclined to believe the worst in people. I do genuinely want to look at it all like good things are happening and everything is going to be okay though, and yet the personal anecdote leaves me worried. Can you suggest something profound that would change my mind?
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Sunday March 05 2017, @10:22PM
Not an easy one...
The problems are many, but let's go over the obvious ones:
- Western Europe already has problems of high low-skilled unemployment. It's structural, based on cost differentials with the East, Africa, and Asia. Manufacturers closing shop to build elsewhere or because they can't compete make the news... Mining and old industrial areas show visible decay...
- Western Europe already has problems of discrimination over previous generations of "visible minorities", usually Arabs from North Africa and Blacks from Central Africa. When mass immigration happened (end of the colonial area), a lot of minorities got parked in giant under-maintained zones which are not the best address to put on a resume.
- Western Europe already has problems of shitty politicians who blame Brussels, Eastern Europeans and immigrants for their own incapacity to deal with issues, paving the way for the Extreme Right to take hold among the worried masses.
- Western Europe is mostly a Christian area, where other religious groups have been (usually) tolerated as long as they worship discreetly and don't point out the inherent discrimination of some laws and holidays.
- Western European cops are not US cops. The density of law enforcement, and punishment scales, are much lower. The people who degrade, intimidate, harass have more elbow room and can be more visible. When some of those, of European descent, decide to take their boredom out on visible minorities, it causes those to gang up even more than normal (because it is normal that rejected unemployed discriminated reservation-bound minorities form groups).
So, for the last 30 years at least, there have been structural issues at play in Europe (as in the US), with unpleasant areas, but enough subsidies to keep people quiet and misbehavior to cheaper-than-prevention levels.
And then comes the Bush Depression, which slashed public services.
And then comes the flow of millions of "don't look like me, don't pray like me, don't speak the language, don't know the customs" people, coming from countries labelled as Full Of Dangerous Murderous Monsters.
And those who come now are not the rich well-educated cream of the crop, who were able to run away from the conflicts years ago. They need a whole range of jobs to get on their feet, but mostly low-end ones where their handicaps can be offset by their desire to recover.
To top it off, a small handful of people associated with them by origin or religion only, are trying to burn the place down just because some asshole told them it was the right thing to do, and stupid media made their predecessors famous.
So we have countries which are not in a good state to receive a big influx, welcoming people who will not have an easy time, surrounded by people who need someone to blame for their own shitty conditions, provided with excuses by media who amplify the 1 or 3 ppm who do cause issues.
Throw in media who also highlights the lack of infrastructure causing some to land in the street and/or cause visible trouble, and you end up with a much bleaker picture than the realities on the ground. There are problems, but they tend to be concentrated and most people will not casually encounter them, or be able to side-step them the way bums and shitty neighborhoods have always been ignored.
A wall of text and we're nowhere near solutions, which will fill many giant reports, most of which will swiftly be pushed aside by politicians.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 04 2017, @09:23PM
I pointed that out but was told that many of the American blacks became Muslims in prison after all.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Saturday March 04 2017, @08:06PM (2 children)
Sweden is the country that spent 3 months looking for a non existent Russian submarine...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05 2017, @05:31AM
Sweden is a hot mess of Muslims, immigrants, terrorists, Muslim terrorists, immigrant terrorists, Muslim immigrants and Muslim immigrant terrorists. But it's not half as bad as Iceland. Need more vetting! [grapevine.is]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05 2017, @05:10PM
Just because they couldn't find it doesn't mean it didn't exist. Just because they thought it was Russian doesn't mean it was.