Author Archives: Stefan Geens

US/UK press review: Lindh

Posted on by
3

The New York Times obit of Anna Lindh is a straightforward affair, with nothing much we didn’t already know; more surprising perhaps is a gracious op-ed piece from the Wall Street Journal. An excerpt (link is valid for a week):

Of course, she also believed in detente with North Korea and attacked post-Sept. 11 America as a “Lone Ranger” in world affairs, positions that we didn’t admire. But we always appreciated the spirit of openness that she and her country brought to the European debate. Her murder strikes a blow to democracy as well as the Swedish way of political life.

Though the viewpoints of Anna Lindh and the WSJ editorial board could not be more divergent on many issues, there is no denying that she charmed many Americans, not least Colin Powell, with her straighforward demeanor and conscientious nature.

In the UK, The Guardian’s obit is a much better read than the NYT, but that is perhaps because this literary form is taken so much more seriously by the English (and, yes, they had 5 more hours to prepare till press time). We’ll have to wait until next week for the Economist‘s take.

At 5pm CEST today, there will be a “march” at Sergels Torg in memory of Lindh. Prime Minister Persson will talk. I think I am going to take a look.

September 11 in Stockholm

Posted on by
2

Stockholmers went to work with a leaden step this morning. From my 46 bus, as it drove along Södermalm’s northern shore, you could see the city’s gorgeous skyline, and in the middle of it stood the NK tower and its rotating logo, as if it were a beacon marking the deed. People stared. Then, at Slussen junction, the bus stopped next to huge posters of a smiling Anna Lindh hawking yes votes. Today, these pictures felt eerily like tributes.

Anna Lindh isn’t doing as well as originally reported. She’d be out of danger if only the bleeding from her liver would stop. It’s on everybody’s mind here.

And today is September 11. Two years ago, in a few hours, I saw a plane smash into the World Trade Center, and then I saw the towers collapse. I certainly hope it is the most awful thing I will see in my life, and while I remember it every day, September 11s will never be the same.

Who could hate a Swedish foreign minister so much? Especially Lindh? I think the answer is simple: People who hate the open society; people who have been on the blunt end of a Swedish foreign policy that promotes democracy, accountability, and human rights. Without any evidence, let me venture that if it was a hit job, the police should be looking at the Russian mafia for its child prostitution rings, and at Milosevic afficionados.

"Gud, han har knivhuggit mig i magen"

Posted on by
2

I heard of the knife attack that seriously wounded Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh in Stockholm’s NK department store this afternoon as I was writing for this blog that the most newsworthy event here today was an op-ed piece [Swedish] by Economics Nobel Prize winner Joe Stiglitz in Dagens Nyheter. That certainly isn’t true anymore.

As the manhunt continues for a bloodstained assailant in a military outfit, Lindh is being operated on, but she is apparently not in critical condition. It doesn’t seem fitting to drone on about EMU minutiae just now, so read the Stiglitz piece at your convenience and I will perhaps post something on it tomorrow.

Update – 19:24 CEST: Parallels with the murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, who was gunned down in central Stockholm in 1986, are obvious. That tragedy came to signify a loss of innocence for Swedish society, on par with Kennedy in the US, and later Pim Fortuyn for the Dutch, and the lesson from all these events is that there is always bound to be one nutcase for whom the lure of notoriety through harm proves irresistible.

While no doubt Prime Minister Persson has protection, I doubt Lindh did, and I suspect she preferred not to have any. Eventually, you just have to settle for acceptable risks. Certainly she has had much exposure of late, campaigning heavily for Swedish entry to EMU, but I have this feeling the substantive reason for the attack may not have to do with the upcoming referendum. Much like the assumption was that Fortuyn was murdered for his right-wing views during an election campaign — when in fact the murderer was an animal rights activist — I wonder if the attack on Lindh, though precipitated by her recent visibility, is not the result of a grudge unrelated to economics. I only think this because the EMU campaign, while spirited, has hardly been acrimonious.

Update – 19:57 CEST: Swedish TV is having its own case of CNN-itis, where there hasn’t been any news for hours yet coverage remains non-stop.

Remainders

Posted on by
2

IKEA’s product naming conventions exposed. Next time I need to send an anonymous letter, forget cutting words from newspapers; I’m going straight for the IKEA catalogue. Worthy of Henning Mankell, don’t you think? Kurt Wallander would eventually solve this following puzzle, but only after far too many victims have died:

I first noticed Asne Seierstad, a (yes, blond young) Norwegian who reported from Baghdad during the war, for the unexpectedly vicious bouts of envy she elicited among some Swedish friends. Unperturbed, Asne’s just written a book about a season she spent with an Afghan family, and it’s gotten this rave review.

Blogs á clef

Posted on by
1

In 1995, a SAIS student magazine called Sighs became Sighs.com, the news clearing house for that year’s graduating class. Over the years, the site collected contributed emails and party pictures and travel writing and wedding announcements and then baby pictures. Obscurity was its friend — if you didn’t know the site existed, you would never find it. It was linked to from the SAIS main site, but you had to dig deep.

Then Google happened. Overnight, Sighs.com was a click away from every employer’s resumé check. For many SAIS alums, the site held their only web mention, and for some, that meant cross-dressing pictures. In other cases, weddings had soured, or banter had lost its context, so it became imperative to shield this little extended family album from strangers. Sigh.com’s archives now hide behind a passwordOh hell, the password to the archives only exists to keep out bots, really, so you might as well know it. User ID is “paul” and password is “wolfowitz”, in honor of our dean at the time. If you are offended by nudity or explicit sexual acts, then this site is perfectly safe to visit.. In any case, its heyday is probably over, with class spirit now supplanted by individual lasting friendships.

Bloggers too have had to deal with the privacy needs of friends that appear in supporting roles, or at least many have made a stab at pretending to. I myself have protected unusual names to spare them an unflattering Google hit, while other bloggers, such as James Lileks or Francis Strand, employ nicknames for their cast.

In doing so, bloggers have stumbled upon (or deliberately employ) a nugget that racier 19th century writers knew well: Masking identities makes for addictive reading, especially if there is a suspicion that public figures are involved.

I have a conceit that the private lives of celebrities hold no sway over me, and I am greatly aided in this pursuit by being completely incapable of recognizing the famous in New York, let alone Stockholm, despite plenty of supposed exposureThe only celebrity I have ever spotted unaided was Jim Jarmusch, on the corner of 7th and Ave A, at 2 am in the morning on my way back from 7B, and only because we were in danger of colliding.. And yet, and yet, I confess to having browsed Aftonbladet twice now in unsuccessful bids to find out what party Francis might have been to.

Anyway, I am off to Belgium for the weekend, for a family reunion of sorts, and also to attend the wedding feast of F. and her beloved N. F. and I go back a long way, of course.

Extreme physics

Posted on by
2

I’m a sucker for popular literature on mathematics and evolutionary biology, and were it not for RyanAir’s grossly unfair 15kg luggage allowance I would now be finishing this book on the Riemann Hypothesis instead of leaving it in my parents’ library in Dublin. Or maybe not. I felt it wasn’t well written, and now Amazon reviewers are finding all kinds of faults with it, so perhaps I will start again with Prime Obsession, which incidentally would be a good brand name if anyone ever decides to market perfume to geeks.

Extreme physics is another topic I lap upThis link to a New York Times article should be permanent, courtesy of a pact with Userland and the NYT. It’s an officially sanctioned back door, of sorts, the result of a NYT keenly aware that bloggers’ links are great publicity, yet wanting to charge for its archives.. The New York Times updates us on the latest in string theory in today’s science section, and it makes for some mind-blowing paragraphs:

“In the long run,” he said, “the universe doesn’t want to be four-dimensional. It wants to be 10 dimensions.”

So sooner or later, the loops will unravel like a tangle of rubber bands, passing through a succession of configurations that take less and less energy to maintain, until finally the other dimensions expand and the cosmological constant is gone.

The decay of the cosmological constant will be fatal, astronomers agree. At that moment a bubble of 10-dimensional space will sweep out at the speed of light, rearranging physics and the prospects of atoms and planets, not to mention biological creatures.

So all of you hoping for everlasting fame or immortality, don’t waste your energy. Literally.

Yep, if I won the lottery, I’d go straight back to university, paying brilliant but hungry PhD candidates to stay patiently by my side as I stumble through mathematical foothills, up to physics base camp, then making the ascent into the rarified air of quantum physics, hoping for a glimpse of the Theory of Everything at the summit. So far, nobody’s made it all the way up, or at least come back alive.

Unfortunately, because I have a modicum of numeracy, I will never play the lottery. Catch-22.

Please vote yes, some of you

Posted on by
Reply

Argh. I can’t take this. The no side is going to win in Sweden’s euro referendum, and for the first time in my life I am going to hold a majority opinion. This is making me feel queasy, so in the interests of a closer race, I’d like to examine those cases where voters should, rationally, vote yes to the euro, purely out of economic self-interest.

1. You own stock in or work for a Swedish company that gets the the bulk of its revenues from euroland. Such a business would be able to eliminate all costs associated with managing exchange rate volatilty, and this should add a percentage point or two to the bottom line. Some of Sweden’s largest companies, including its multinationals, fall into this category. If you were the CEO of such a company it would be your duty to shareholders to lobby for joining EMU, regardless of its greater good. And indeed, this is what many captains of Swedish industry are doing, on TV and in the papers.

The same goes for smaller businesses and freelancers. If you make the bulk of your money in euros, it’s in your best interest to vote yes.

However, there aren’t that many of you. Exports constitute around 45% of Sweden’s GDP, which is quite a high number, but of that only about 40% is to euroland countries. Only about 18% of Sweden’s GDP is directly attributable to trade with EMU countries.

There is little doubt that some companies will benefit if Sweden adopts the euro. The costs, however, would be borne by the country as a whole, in the form of interest rates that are not optimal for Sweden’s economy, because they would be optimal for Germany and France, mainly.

2. You are an immigrant from an EMU country and you send remittances home. You’d save on the costs of converting your money, and you would not be subject to the vagaries of a floating exchange rate regime. Conveniently, you get to vote. If you are a Swede but spend most of your money abroad, the same argument applies.

3. Your wages are paid in euros. If you’re posted here from an EMU country, either for your business, or as a diplomat, or as a correspondent, chances are you’re getting paid into your bank account back home. The euro in Sweden would make things a lot easier for you. Since you get to vote, make sure it’s yes.

4. Your prestige as a European leader rests on your country adopting EMU. If I were Göran Persson, I would vote yes early and often.

Summer dulldrums

Posted on by
1

Is August a bad month for blogging? Even James Lileks felt compelled to apologise today (“nothing I’ve written here in the last gasp of August has satisfied me…”) and I certainly did, sort of, a few posts back. Andrew Sullivan may have been on to something when he shuttered up completely for the month. Could it be that blogs are inherently derivative, in the sense that they feed on news, and on a slow news month they simply lose their verve?

Or perhaps there are more people on vacation in August, so there are simply fewer participants thrumming on the great sounding board that is blogging. This makes more sense, as August has hardly turned out to be slow in the news department.

Still, blogaholics find ready enablers in the millions of internet dens that now dot holiday destinations. I certainly was able to get my fix in western Ireland, and Ben Hammersley is getting his in Kabul. But over the past few days, as I read his blog, I have noticed an aspect of his writing that I recognized in my own over the past month or so: it’s the tone of the travelog, of the visitor, of the person skimming the surface of a place, and by necessity this is not as enlightening as the writings of an expat (site currently down) living in the place, or that of a well-travelled native. I think this is because the best writing about places is about the author’s connections to those places. It takes time to make those connections — at the very least, it takes longer than a holiday.

So perhaps summer blogging is a little like the summer fling: fun while it lasts, but of no lasting importance.

With republicans like these…

Posted on by
9

Who needs democrats? Seriously, I just met up with my friend Ben N. from SAIS, who is passing by Dublin, and we had a few in a local pub. He is one of the two smart republicans I know (the other being Kim) but found him to be radically moderate all of a sudden about a great many things. He is against the Iraq war, outright, and has been from the start. He’s against the recall vote in California (direct democracy being bad), nodded at my lamenting the rise of dynastic democracy of the USAfter the Bushes, watch for Hillary in 2008, though she might have to run against Jeb., and had we ventured into the US budget, we would probably have found ourselves in full agreement.

Where were the days of our stubborn idealism? I remember one pitched battle in the kitchen of our flat on Via Irnerio, in Bologna, about whether European or American democracy was superior, which degenerated into call and response along the lines of “is so, is not, is so…” Now we’d probably be at pains to point out the good parts of our respective democratic heritages. I certainly do about the US. On occasion.

I think I know where Ben’s mellowing has come from. He was accompanied by his lovely democrat wife, whom I hadn’t met before, and it is clear that in this bipartisan marriage, Ben has been doing some political migrating. I’m glad he has, because it gives me the necessary empirical evidence to push a hunch I’ve had to the level of hypothesis. His marriage is the third involving overtly political friends of mine that has manifested a lurch towards the political leanings of the woman in the relationship.

For example, Eurof, who used to fall asleep clutching a dog-eared copy of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, or who in a moment of drunken sincerity proclaimed his sexual attraction to Margaret Thatcher — this very same Eurof now entertains conspiracy theories about why Greece is no longer a superpower. He believes French foreign policy is enlightened, for God’s sake, and this coming from a Brit. Clearly, he is in love with a GreekEurof is on holiday in Greece at the moment, where they invented the internet 2000 years ago along with everything else, but lost it, so he will not be able to comment here just this minute..


Kim and Matthew, Oregon Gothic, 1998

Meanwhile, Matthew’s trajectory has been the opposite. He hailed from a solid middle class North London Labourite family, and his main stab at rebellion involved making bad postmodern student movies at Oxford. In Bologna, he dabbled in anarcho-revolutionary publishing, and was certainly not above such typical propaganda activities as spreading misinformation about revolutionary rivals. All this came to a screeching halt when he met Kim. Kim owned lots of guns. Now Matthew owns guns. Now Matthew wants to kick ass in Iraq. Enough said.

How to test my hypothesis, so that it can aspire to scientific rigor? Hoping for divorces and observing any shifts would clearly be unethical. Perhaps in the future we should do a better job of chronicling our stated political leanings, so that we can be held to account when we venture off the Shining Path and down the wedding aisle. Oh, that’s what blogs are for.