A police officer has been shoot dead in Gothenburg and this is how Mattias Irving, spokesperson for the Religious Social Democrats of Sweden, likes to spin it on Twitter (my translation):
“In the last ten years, about 450 people have died at work in Sweden. Wish we took everyone’s deaths as seriously. No one has more than one life to give. Every loss is a tragedy that could have been prevented.”
Lord Tennyson’s Queen Mary, Scene 5.5:
”She knew me, and acknowledged me her heir,
Pray’d me to pay her debts, and keep the Faith:
Then claspt the cross, and pass’d away in peace.
I left her lying still and beautiful,
More beautiful than in life. Why would you vex yourself,
Poor sister? Sir, I swear I have no heart
To be your Queen. To reign is restless fence,
Tierce, quart, and trickery. Peace is with the dead.
Her life was winter, for her spring was nipt:
And she loved much: pray God she be forgiven.”
The case for legalisation is made in The Lancet.
He never left, but now he’s back as Sweden’s prime minister.
The Spanish government has today ruled out reintroducing Covid restrictions as the infection rate among young people spirals out of control.
On a visit to Europe to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the first world war, Donald Trump insisted to his then chief of staff, John Kelly, that Hitler did a lot of good things.
Reuters quotes Ursula von der Leyen: “This legislation uses the protection of children as an excuse to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation.”
More here.
Stefan Löfven, who resigned and then came back two weeks later, today presented his “new” government to the King. It’s the same government as before, bar one Minister for Rural Affairs. Zzz…
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After his ingratiating films about such men as Fidel Castro and Vladimir Putin, Stone is back with an eight-hour series about Nursultan Nazarbayev. It’s sad to see such a great film maker go downhill.
It’s hot. Very hot.
In his new book, White Skin, Black Fuel, Swedish author Andreas Malm warns of “fossil fascism”. The irony is that his cure against this evil is, well, fascism. Anyone who disagrees with his policies should be forced into silence. In this book it’s about the coal and oil industry, but I wonder if the international audience knows this man’s history of support for the most extreme, violent, and undemocratic organisations. He has long been an advocate for violence against political opponents, big and small. He’s an excellent writer, though.
Secularist often want to emphasise that Swedes are non-believers. It’s not true. Belief in a personal god has decreased dramatically, to about 15%, but more people believe in a diffuse supernatural power. And according to a study from 2019, about 20% are atheists (Erika Willander, Sveriges religiösa landskap, Stockholm: The Swedish Agency for Support for Faith Communities, 2019).
The government in Kabul is losing control over more and more of the country, which is falling into the Taliban’s hands. It’s a matter of time before the utterly totalitarian Islamists rule as they did pre-2001. As always, women and gay people will suffer the most.
The Biden administration has renewed genocide allegations against China for repression of Uyghur Muslims and other minorities in its northwest Xinjiang region, Religion News Service reports.
The five men could be punished by death or imprisonment for life, Nigerian newspaper Vanguard reports.
According to PRRI’s new survey, The 2020 Census of American Religion, 70% of Americans identify as Christian, 23% are religiously unaffiliated, and 5% identify with non-Christian religions.
Americans without religious identity are no longer increasing in numbers. White evangelicals are now fewer than before.
Jewish Americans make up 1% of the population and they are primarily concentrated in the areas around New York.
This is important, not least because so many students use Wikipedia as their main source of information.
“[T]he viewpoint on Christianity given is the liberal one that would be found in mainline denominations and liberal Catholicism as opposed to the actual Bible-believing fundamentalist type viewpoint,” Larry Sanger says.
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Much of western Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands is under water. I’m watch Deutsche Welle’s videos from the disaster area, and it’s unbelievable.
It’s easy to understand why flooding is a common theme in prophesies of doom.
“These results are consistent with the idea that domestication enhanced the cooperative-communicative abilities of dogs as selection for attraction to humans altered social maturation.”
Study published in Current Biology.
“When comparing riots, it is too simplistic to simply condemn them because they are violent,” Professor Jonathan Havercroft writes. “Rioters’ intentions matter.”
I disagree. Destroying people’s property is never justified.
Luke Prokop makes history. Great, but also sad that it’s taken this long.
From Florence Gaub and Julia Lisiecka’s study, published by the EU Institute for Security Studies in April 2017:
Continuing the trend, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, the driver of the lorry in the Nice attack, had been sentenced only four months prior to the atrocity to a six month suspended prison sentence for assaulting a motorist with an improvised weapon. The Berlin Christmas market attacker, Anis Amri, also had a criminal past: before arriving in Germany, he was wanted by Tunisian authorities for the theft of a truck and sentenced in absentia to five years in prison, and was also jailed in Italy for arson. More recently, the perpetrator of the attack in Westminster, Khalid Masood, was also known to the UK police due to a colourful criminal history including grievous bodily harm, possession of a knife and various public order offences.
Study in full here.
The Independent writes that Japanese architect Hajime Narukawa claims to have tackled the problem of how to draw an oblate spheroid Earth on a flat plane.
Personally, think the question is quite silly, but at least Joshua Kane is trying to answer it in an article published by Religion News Service.
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The Church of England said it plans to apologise for medieval anti-Semitic laws enacted in 1222 that eventually led to the expulsion of the country’s Jews in 1290, Ynetnews reports.
The article is a bit too apologetic, but I agree with the criticism of “fundamentalism” as it’s often used today.
Read it at Research Gate.
The battle isn’t lost. 🇭🇺👍♥️
This wasn’t what Ben & Jerry’s board expected when they gave in to the anti-Israel activists. Instead of claiming victimhood, the Israelis show resilient spirit. 👍
The study, published in the Journal of Internal Medicine, the frequency of misattributed paternity was estimated at 1.7%.
It doesn’t take much to offend the ultra-Orthodox, but it’s fascinating how religious extremists love to hurl insults while being so hyper-sensitive themselves.
A swastika was found carved into an elevator in the US State Department, near the office of the special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, Jerusalem Post reports.
“People I’ve followed both on Facebook and Twitter are generally much meaner on Twitter, where they’re in the political arena, than on Facebook, where their friends and family are a big part of the audience.”
This according to a new study published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.
| Political Party | Position | Support |
|---|---|---|
| Social Democrats | Left | 23.8% |
| Sweden Democrats | Far Right | 21.6% |
| Moderate Party | Right | 21% |
| Left Party | Far Left | 13.3% |
| Centre Party | Centre | 8.9% |
| Christian Democrats | Right | 4.5% |
| Green Party | Left | 3.8% |
| Liberal Party | Centre | 2.2% |
Sweden’s electoral threshold is 4%, so the Greens and Liberals would lose their seats in the Riksdag if these figures were the result in next year’s general election.
Chief executives are being warned to think twice before they tweet, a piece of advice everybody should listen to. There’s a risk others will actually read what you tweet. 🐦
In this video, the historian Aviad Kleinberg says most secular Jews aren’t detached from Judaism because it’s possible to combine atheism and Jewishness in a way that it isn’t in other regions. A point often difficult to explain to non-Jews.
And get beaten up by the Jews. 👍✡
Emily Jensen thinks Brittany Chapman Nash’s new book, Let’s Talk about Polygamy, could help. It would be good, because the awful consequences need to be addressed.
Source: Daily Mail.
In an Arab News article, Ishtiaq Ahmad points out that the Taliban’s latest propaganda video on social media shows inhumane executions of rival commandos after they had surrendered.
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