Author Archives: Stefan Geens

Rubadubbing the wrong way

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NYCulture vulture Felix Salmon reviews Dramaten‘s New York production of Ibsen’s Ghosts at BAM, directed by Ingmar Bergman. He can’t get over the fact that they’ve decided to offer simultaneous translation from Swedish á la UN instead of surtitles á la Opera.

The idea of dubbing any performance, as opposed to sur/subtitling it, is not just plain irritating, but wasteful, and unimaginative in its use of modern technology.

Irritating, for the same reason that dubbed movies are irritating. Actors’ voices are an integral part of the performance. Dubbing replaces part of the performance, while sur/subtitling complements it. And — not that Felix is in any danger of learning Swedish — it insulates the viewer from new languagesThe French, Germans and Spaniards — all notorious film dubbers — speak far worse English than the Dutch, Flemish and Swedes..

Astonishingly, I’ve actually met people here in Europe who prefer dubbed films. There is less information to process; it’s easier, they say. I wonder if Bergman — who not only likes to control every aspect of a production, but who is known to condescend — assumed Americans couldn’t handle surtitles. Too many notes, so to speakImagine applying the same logic to Opera: simultaneous translation of La Bohème into English, helpfully read out to you through a headset..

Wasteful, because the performance, whether on screen or live, is a fixed text. Having translators would make sense if the words were improvised, but having them grope for the same mot juste every performance seems silly. From Felix’s description, it seems they didn’t even have a fixed text to read from.

An unimaginative use of modern technology, and not just because the deaf have no recourse, as they do with sub- and surtitles, to text versions of the spoken wordI love Swedish DVDs of Swedish movies because they all have Swedish subtitles; perfect for learning..

I have no idea how much it would cost to buy or rent a surtitling system as with the opera. It can’t be that much — it’s glorified trainstation timetable technology. But perhaps the systems are just not portable enough for limited runs. In which case, how about setting up a little Wi-Fi network in the theatre and renting out Palms/Pocket PCs with a push technology app on it? You’d have the entire script right in front of you, with a little dot, much like with karaoke machines, running alongside it. You could even have the original Norwegian script, if you’re a devout Ibsenist, or the director’s written commentary to follow. This last feature, instead of having you walk out half-way, might have you come back for seconds.

EU: A bigger picture

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How do get from where we are now to the ideal global society?

But first, what is the ideal global society? For me, it’s a world government, perhaps a more muscular UN. It’s the principle of subsidiarity enacted along the US federal model, with countries democratically choosing almost all policies themselves, such as taxes and legal systems, but with the International Court of Justice as ultimate arbiter, enforcing such non-negotiable rights as freedom of speech, gender equality, freedom of religion… all the stuff we already take for granted in the west.

It’s completely free trade, free movement of labor and capital. It’s an aid and development program that is closer in size to 5% of global GDP than the current 1%. It’s a UN standing army, with a good track record of extinguishing hot spots, so that individual countries no longer feel the need to keep their own army. And it’s as many currency areas as are needed.

Now, how to get from here to there? Perhaps we should think of the EU and the US as good cop, bad cop. The idea would be that the EU holds the carrot, a shining example of democratic multilateralism at work, while the US holds the stick, engaging in the thankless task of dragging the stragglers kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

The problem with this analogy, in addition to it being belabored, is that the bad cop is being very cavalier with the (international) law, bending it in order to save it, supposedly, while the good cop is selfishly keeping the carrot all to itself.

Or, at least, that is the impression the EU is in danger of giving. First off, anybody who has taken international trade theory knows that retaliatory tariffs hurt both sides. Even unilateral free trade regimes benefit both sides for slightly counterintuitive reasons that are most convincing with a little effort. Yet Europe is still in a mercantilist mood, where trade with the outsiders is a zero-sum game. This looks bad.

Second, CAP.

Third, it is nitpicking which countries to let in. It’s great that Poland is in. But Turkey should be next, and Israel, and why not Lebanon, and Palestine (now there is an incentive) and those countries ringing the Mediterranean? Giscard d’Estaing argues they are not Christian enough. That is such a silly argument it deserves no retort, but I couldn’t help myself. If Europe wanted to be a real good cop, it should allow in contiguous countries based purely on standards of democracy and human rights. Anything else is beneath contempt.

And yet, EU architects are queasy. Such an EU would be too big to govern effectively, they sayThe only reason I can think of why they might think a big EU is “too big to govern” is that they mean, “too big to govern by the current big countries in the EU.” That, however, is not a very democratic impulse.. Such an EU would have a diluted sense of identity, it would no longer be Europa Universalis. No it would not. But their concerns do raise the question of what the EU should be: the embryo of a future ideal global society? Or a fortress, defending our Christian heritage from the barbarians at the gate?

Obviously I much prefer the first option. The EU as an embryonic global society is also the reason why I don’t think political unions should dictate currency areas: as the EU grows, it would be economic suicide to get every new member to join EMU. Using the slippery slope argument here is a no-brainer: If a single currency is not enough for a growing EU, when do you add another, and on what basis? Obviously not out of political considerations; the answer, of course, is optimal currency areas. I, for one, think the eurozone has already expanded beyond its ideal size.

Others prefer the second option — Fortress Europe — and in many ways it is a lot simpler and more reassuring. One continent, one history, one nation, one currency… I unfortunately have a deep mistrust of nationalism, including the common European garden variety. Other might not. Well, then, if they must have a European club, at least make sure it is not at the expense of the rest of the world. At the very least, scrap CAP, trade barriers, and barriers to labor mobility for those outside the EU.

Sweden in EMU: Better late than early

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I would like to break out a comment posted in response to my arguments against Sweden joining the EMU from a few weeks back. Gustav Holmberg writes, among other things, “As a no-sayer, I think you must come up with a constructive alternative to the European Union.” I’m not sure if that burden is mine; I am quite content with the present setup for Sweden — in the EU and outside the EMU. However, implicit in Gustav’s criticism is that if Sweden does not eventually join EMU, the EU will become an unworkable proposition for Sweden, outcast that it will beMeanwhile, Anders does some great line-by-line refuting of pro-EMU arguments on his blog, here and here [Swedish]..

So, against my better judgment, here is a constructive alternative to the EU: Basically, it’s an EU where you can be an EMU outsider and an EU insider. Is that too much to ask? Why would that not be feasible, given that monetary policy is officially divorced from the political sphere anyway? For the near to medium-term future, this is what the EU will be in any case; the slew of new countries joining will be doing so only on a political level, not on a monetary level. And both the UK and Denmark have opted out of EMU for now.

It is possible that the UK and Denmark eventually join, as do the newcomers, and that the EU’s mandarins remain adamant that all members join EMU. What should Sweden do then? It should join, then, and it should do so for the wrong reason, which is that it will otherwise be politically marginalized (go ahead, you may call this bullying). Luckily, PM Persson has stated that Swedes will get to keep voting to join EMU until they get it right, so there will be plenty of opportunities in the future to give in and adopt the euro.

But why wait? Why not just vote to join now, and reap the prestige of being an early adopter? I have two reasons why not, although the first one alone should suffice: First, because I think the euro is an economic experiment that will fray at the edges over time. I think that in the next 10 years, the euro will be tested in ways that make clear it is not a good idea for Sweden and other non-core members to be part of EMU. Better, therefore, not to rush into something that is practically impossible to undo. Better to watch and wait; if the eurozone is not the optimal currency area for Sweden, then this will become obvious over time. If I am wrong, Sweden can join with the likes of PolandI am willing to wager 50 euro that Sweden and the UK outside EMU will grow faster than the eurozone average over the next 10 years, mainly because I think Germany is experiencing an economic malaise and has no action plan, and ECB policy will need to take this into account..

The second reason involves where the EU is going at the moment. Both sides have made this referendum a vote of confidence in the political project that is the European Union, even though it should not be. But because it is, a yes vote would be seen as a great boost to the EU as a political project.

But what kind of political project is it? Well, Gustav mentions that the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy is a problem. To me, however, it’s a deal breaker. CAP eats up 45% of the entire EU budget — 45 billion euro, or the cost of a Gulf War every other year. In other words, almost half of all EU monies is spent on something that actively contributes to third world poverty and delays modernization in Europe proper, in order to buy the political support of narrow rural interest groups. 35% is spent on structural and cohesion funds, compensating, if you will, for the negative effects of CAP. That leaves 20% of the funds doing something useful. Whatever the intentions may be, this is a catastrophic waste of money.

Voting yes would amount to an applause for this state of affairs. That is exactly the wrong message for Sweden to send. Sweden can and should use its considerable moral authority to tell the French (mainly) that this is not okay; that if they expect Sweden’s full commitment to the EU, the EU should stop spending 45% of its money on patronage activities, clear bribes to get rural interests on board. This is not the kind of legitimacy the EU as a project should be seeking, nor should Sweden be rewarding this kind of behavior.

Mo' Moses

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I took some pictures on a family jaunt to St. Catherine’s Monastery in the summer of 2002. The trip itself was blogged here. I have just recently gotten myself a film scanner, so I made some hi-res scans of the more architecturally expository pictures, as well as some landscape shots. It’s not really meant as art; I took these more out of an impulse to document.


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This picture and the next give a great overview of the interior of the monastery. (Warning: Full size is huge, ~2MB)


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See if you can spot the parents.


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The path leading up the broad valley to the left leads, eventually, to Mount Sinai. There is also a shortcut directly up the gully behind the monastery.


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The shortcut to Mount Sinai is through the gully on the left. The path is hard to see.


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This is the postcard shot.


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A detail of the fortified wall, seen from the interior (bottom left corner of the monastery in the above shots).


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The church is on the left, the mosque is in the middle. it might seem odd to find a mosque in an Orthodox Christian monastery, but it’s one of the reasons the monastery has survived 1,500 years of Muslim rule. Attacking a mosque was not something Muslim rulers condoned. Also, there was a letter from Mohammed putting the monastery under his protection, but the letter may not, it is now conceded, have been as authentic as advertised at the time.

This last trick may no longer work for warding off religiously inspired acts of destruction, but perhaps architects should consider putting a church, synagogue and mosque atop all future skyscrapers.


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Again, a detail of the fortified wall. Same bit, but from a different angle.


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The back end of the church.


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Sunlights hits the valleys around Mount Sinai soon after sunrise, as seen from the summit.


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A closeup of one of the gulleys. It may not be Ansel Adams, but at least I do have a gibbous moon in the image. (I wish black and white images were not restricted to 256 levels of gray on computer screens, especially now that scanners do 16-bit scans.)


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I’m kind of wishing this image was in color, but the landscape silhouette is purer this way.

Summer of the mind

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There is something Platonic about summer in Sweden. On one level, it is an abstraction, a collection of ideal things about summer, much as I remember summers from childhood, even though they could never have been like this. But it’s a fact that the light here is yellower, the sky brighter blue; it’s like looking at an old color photograph of summer, lens flare and all. And just as with a photograph, there are no flies (yet), and no humidity, and the sun in the late afternoon seems fixed in the sky — it will hover there for as long as you care to look.

Summer in Sweden is also a summer of the mind. It’s brilliant daylight outside at 5 am, and by then you feel as guilty as sleeping till noon in New York. People go to work early, but then spend most of the day rooted in parks and on terrace cafés — human sunflowers. After work, behind the Kungliga Biblioteket in Södermalm, they’ll play a mysterious game that involves setting up a miniature wooden set from The Lord of the Rings, then taking turns destroying it by throwing wooden sticks at is, playing Sauron. It goes on for hours. I sometimes go to watch, pretending to read my first Swedish-language novel, a Henning Mankell detective thriller. My main fear: At the end of the novel the detective will tell me whodunnit, and I just won’t get it. Is there a word for butler in Swedish?

Great reads

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Here are some great reads I’ve come across over the past week:

An article by Dan Bilefsky in the Wall Street Journal details how Antwerp’s Hassidic Jews are being displaced by Jain Indians as the city’s predominant diamond traders. This came as a complete surprise to me — I’ve obviously been out of the country too long — but I suspect most Belgians are not aware of this shift either; the Hassidic diamond cutters remain an iconic presence in the institutional memory of the city.

It makes sense that an industry so dependent on trust would be dominated by people bound by strict moral codes. With uncut diamonds so easily pilfered by employees, western-style companies don’t stand a chance in this market. The Jain, however, are more than just incorruptible: they’ve managed to coopt the forces of globalization, cutting their diamonds much more cheaply in India, while Antwerp’s Jews are still debating whether they should open shop on the Sabbath.

A few weeks ago, the New York Review of Book had a landmark appraisal of the animal rights movement at age 30 by Peter Singer, the renowned philosopher who popularized the movement. This article continues the NYRB tradition of camouflaging suasive essays as impartial book reviews, but it makes for fascinating reading. Unlike much that is written by and about animal rights advocates, Singer avoids emotional appeals, restricting himself to the philosophical arguments, knowing full well they have the best chance of leaving an impact.

Singer charts the movement’s success in curbing animal testing, but points to the relative lack of animal welfare concerns on US factory farms, especially when contrasted with conditions in Europe. As if to prove his point, one of Sweden’s largest supermarkets is presently phasing out the selling of factory-farmed eggs. Their advertising prop: A narrow human-sized cage [Swedish] at Slussen, a busy commuting point in Stockholm, inviting you and 6 friends to climb in and experience factory farming from the chicken’s perspective.

In 1992, Norman Rush wrote Mating, one of my favorite novels. He’s just come out with Mortals, set in Botswana a few years after Mating, and it promises to be as good a read, perhaps even better.

Until I get my hands on itUpdate (2003/06/03): Found it at Hedengrens! I snatched the (only?/last?) copy. I’m reading it now., I’ll have to content myself with this excerpt. But what an appetite whetter it is! Novelists can only appeal to experiences held in common by the readership; what Rush excels at is finding emotional states to articulate which otherwise seem so peculiar and private that we internalize them. Here is an example:

But I’m fine, he thought, trying not to relive a moment from the walk home that had made him feel fragile. Near the school was a rundown property whose occupants kept a goat. The goat had run up purposively to the fence as Ray came by and for an instant Ray had thought something monstrous was happening, because the goat’s tongue seemed to be a foot long. He’d been frightened until he’d realized that it was only a goat eating a kneesock. Iris could be asleep. He would look for her, softly.

That second of near-panic because the brain has formed a preliminary conclusion from visual data that jars strongly with everything you know as normal — it’s a state I’ve felt before. I vividly remember one such episode: I was 11, we lived on 66th and 3rd in New York in one of those twenty-something story white-brick buildings built in the 60s, and our penthouse had a terrace that ran all around the exterior of the apartment. One night, while I was studying at my desk facing my window, I looked up and noticed the reflection of my dad standing behind me, looking over my shoulder. I turned around, but he was not there. The second it took to figure out he was standing outside on the terrace, looking in, was terrifying. I thought I had seen a ghost.

John Updike somewhat sniffily reviews the novel in The New Yorker, with a faux neutrality betrayed by a tone of regret, words that are slightly sharpAccusing Rush of logomania is rich coming from a man who wrote the famously prolix Rabbit books., and this question left rudely unanswered:

Are C.I.A. novels literature? I haven’t read many, but Rush seems to have the lingo down pretty well, and the little subterfugal tricks.

One wishes he would just come out and say that he did not like the novel.

The piece on Slavoj Zizek by Rebecca Mead in the New Yorker is a much more interesting critique, but only if I am right in my suspicions that it is sublimely ironical, in the sense that it purports to be a friendly portrait of the man when instead it aims to lay bare the banality of much that he espouses.

And I don’t just mean all that uncritical fawning over Lacan, “the French Freud“, famously defrocked Thomas Nagel’s hilarious essay on Sokal’s exploit: “It is not always easy to tell how much is due to invincible stupidity and how much to the desire to cow the audience with fraudulent displays of theoretical sophistication. Lacan and Baudrillard come across as complete charlatans, Irigaray as an idiot, Kristeva and Deleuze as a mixture of the two. But these are delicate judgments.”as a French Fraud by Sokal in his 1996 hoax in Social Text. To me, the sign that a reading between the lines is in order is a retelling by Mead, a New Yorker, of Zizek’s elevator riff in a fashion completely devoid of sarcasm:

[Zizek] has also noted that the “close door” button in an elevator does nothing to hasten the door closing but merely gives the presser a false sense of effective activity. Like many of Zizek’s observations, this is the kind of insight that forever changes one’s experience, in this case of elevator riding …

With apologies to Zizek, noticing that the “close door” button does not work is something every New Yorker living above the 5th floor figured out by the time they were seven. In fact, you can spot out-of-towners in an instant if they reach for the “close door” button. Slovenia obviously has few high-rise buildings. And when Mead comments that “he may appear to be a serious leftist intellectual, but is it not the case that he is in fact a comedian?”, I think what we are seeing is a backhanded compliment: philosophers of the absurd are just comedians who take themselves way too seriously.

Iraq Reloaded

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Is it still too early to assess the justifiability of the Iraq war? Can we at least draw some provisional conclusions? There’s been a respectful waiting period among Bush’s loyal opposition in Congress, chastened perhaps by the overwhelming popular support for this war in the US. But — amid the continued failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — the right questions are beginning to be asked, not just by mainstream politicians, but by the mainstream media.

It would have been better if these institutions had raised these issues before the war, rather than after. For, while questions were being asked by some, they were not being asked by those who hold the most influence over public opinion in the US. Politicians, part herder and part herd, saw the cost of asking them rise too high once the snowballing war effort had reached a critical mass of popular support. The media, meanwhile, was stared down by an administration that was able to put its case in the starkest possible termsThere is media, and then there is Fox News, which started with the premise that the war is justified, and the truth be damned. That’s a text-book definition of propaganda.: “Iraq is dangerous to you. We can tell. Don’t you trust us?” Most Americans answered “yes, we trust you,” because the implications of not being able to trust the government on this matter were unpalatable to them. I certainly was willing to give Colin Powell the benefit of the doubt when he convincingly brought the administration’s case to the Security Council.

The pact became: The US government has incontrovertible but classified proof of ongoing biological and chemical weapons programsLet’s just not mention the forgeries that sustained the claims of a nuclear weapons program. and will furnish us retroactively with the evidence, as soon as it is able to secure the ground for inspectors. For the record, then, the pertinent questions now are: Was this case for war with Iraq overstated? If so, by whom — the CIA? Or the White House? Through incompetence, or by designYou can expect a parallel debate in the UK.?

And a bonus question we will have fun with in the blogosphere — those bloggers who claimed all the credit and influence for goading a country to war, will they also clamor for a share of the blame if there is blame due? Yes Andrew Sullivan, I am thinking of you. You were among the first and most vociferous in favor of bringing war to Iraq, and now you are setting the stage for claiming you were duped. On May 16, 2003, you wrote:

How to explain the lack of WMDs in Iraq? Were we lied to? Is our intelligence flawed? Were the weapons destroyed? […] [T]he bottom line of Lacey’s argument is that our intelligence caused Bush and Blair to commit extraordinary errors in front of the entire world. Where is the accountability for that?

But surely there is a special accountability for those who did the persuading, as opposed to those who were merely persuaded? From the very beginning, you pounced on each and every hint that the State Department might be wavering in its commitment to war. You pushed every story that maximized Iraq’s danger to others, and ridiculed those stories that minimized the danger. Media outlets that did question the justness of this war, like the BBC, you demonized. That is not a sophist being duped. That is an ideologue being biased.

Several commentators have pointed out that we can already conclude there was an overstated case for war. There simply were no nuclear, biological or chemical weapons (NBCs) primed for use in battle, nor large-scale ongoing NBC weapons programs, as promised by the US — these would have been impossible to miss. The question becomes: by how much was the case overstated? To answer that definitively, we will need several more months. But day after day it becomes more plausible that Saddam Hussein never restarted prohibited weapons production after the inspectors left in 1998, and that the NBCs he possessed from previous forays in the 80s degraded rapidly, as apparently these weapons do.

So far, the questions asked (by the New York Times, Andrew Sullivan, Democrat politicians and others) have hinted that the mistakes occurred at the intelligence gathering stage. But an extremely interesting piece by the well-sourced Josh Marshall in his Talking Points Memo now lays the blame at the door of the White House. Nut graf:

The story, again and again over the last eighteen months, has been of the intelligence bureaucracy generating estimates of Iraq’s capacities that are pretty much in line with what we’re now finding. Again and again, though, the political leaders sent them back to come up with better answers.

Combine this with the stunning (to me) ABC News report a month ago of a Bush administration source “leaking” that accusations involving Iraq and WMDs were a mere pretext for war, and you can make the case that the decision to go to war was not made reluctantly, from a critical appraisal of available intelligence, but out of ideological conviction that necessitated some shoehorning of reality.

What do I now think happened? Wolfowitz and his neocon pals had a window of opportunity after 9/11 to sell their pre-existing action plan to the White House. Their idea: to rid the world of threats to US interests through unilateral, pre-emptive wars, starting with Iraq. There were competing strategiesPowell favored multilateral action; others favored containment coupled to policies to alleviate the root causes of international terrorism, but the neocons won out through a concerted campaign that played to a president who by his own admittance doesn’t have the first clue about international affairs, and hence who is unable to appreciate such subtleties as just war theory“The principles of the justice of war are commonly held to be: having just cause, being declared by a proper authority, possessing right intention, having a reasonable chance of success, and the end being proportional to the means used.”.

Whereas most objections to the US-led war have revolved around there being a lack of right intention on the part of the US (the war is about oil, about lashing back, about Jewish world domination, about imperialism), we have here a better criticism of the war, one that does not require a global conspiracy; the US may even have had the right intent in wanting to get rid of Saddam HusseinThomas Aquinas on right intention: “True religion looks upon as peaceful those wars that are waged not for motives of aggrandizement, or cruelty, but with the object of securing peace, of punishing evil-doers, and of uplifting the good.”, but lacked a sufficiently just cause. Whether through wishful thinking or deliberate intent, a just cause was fabricated through exaggeration and paranoid induction from relatively inane intelligence information.

Because the question of evidence was always going to be a hurdle to cross after the flush of victory, I tend towards an explanation of this process that involves disastrous delegation: A president out of his depth buys the neocon agenda, makes his wishes known, and yes-men scramble to provide rationales. These in turn get re-appropriated by the President, who now utters them as truths. This process has happened at least once, when Bush accused Iraq of being in the final stages of manufacturing nuclear weapons, citing documents the White House now acknowledges were forgeries.

If this is what happened, and Iraq is found empty of NBCs, many people in the intelligence community and at the State Department will have to ask themselves whether they are willing to fall on their swords to protect the President from charges of gross incompetence. Don’t count on it.

The (Euro)Vision thing

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21:07 CET: I thought I might blog the EuroVision song contest (ESC) in semi-real time. It’s starting just now in Riga, Latvia, and it is already descending into pre-scripted multilingual hell. A sure sign of the interest Swedes are showing the festival is how the other Swedish TV channels have capitulated for the night. Populist Channel 5, whose demographic is a natural match for ESC, is showing Waterworld.

21:15 CET: The Icelandic and Austrians have just performed, and I have to say that the Swedish entry is beginning to look very promising all of a sudden.

21:39 CET: Stockholm is now at its best. Three weeks ago, the trees were still bare, but today the parks and gardens were bursting with green. Perhaps the timing with the ESC was on purpose, but Stockholm had a festival of outdoor music today, with most public places given over to performances of some kind, some so close together you could listen to two at once. There were marching bands, choirs, folk singers, jazz bands, rock groups; even the Hare Krishnas went for a chant around the block.

21:46 CET: The weather for it was perfect, and Stockholmers were out in force. There were perhaps even more performers than audience members, which led to an interesting (to me) question: What is the root cause of this Swedish love for performing? Foreigners at the very least are aware of ABBA, that summit of the Swedish pop pyramid, but there is so much more lurking beneath them. There is an exhibitionist streak in Sweden: They invented the first reality television show, for example. Survivor is the US adaptation of Robinson. Caroline from Vesalius College helped to produce the very first Robinson, while Anna’s Magnus is in Malaysia as we speak keeping score for Robinson 2003.

Then there is the obsession with Swedish Big Brother. But the most popular show here is undoubtedly Fame Factory, where aspiring singer songwriters and boy/girl band wannabees compete on TV for household ubiquity (in Sweden)The German group just actually sang “Let’s get happy and let’s be gay” with absolutely no notion of any double entendre.. In the US, you will know this concept as American Idol. But it’s been going strong here for years.

21:50 CET: Tatu is playing. The Russian lesbian duo has been blogged here before. They are the Russian entry for the ESC (I thought only amateurs were allowed, but what do I know?). A popular paper here today blared “Shlager favoriter vill visa brösten” (ESC favorites want to bare their breasts [at the festival]) and apparently the Swedish TV had a crisis meeting in order to decide what to do in case they did. The world is safe — They’ve just finished and they did not.

22:04 CET: Time to articulate a pet peeve: All pretence of these perfomances being live has been dropped. There are no bands, the singers mouth the words; the only thing plausibly authentic is the choreography. Then why does everyone insist on holding a microphone? Are they a performer’s security blanket? Or are we meant to engage in the willing suspension of disbeliefPerhaps I am wrong — the Norwegian has just belted out some fantastic false notes.?

22:26 CET: Back to ferreting out the roots of Sweden’s penchant for the performance: I think there is a clue in the ease with which the US adopts Swedish pop-cultural ideas (and vice versa). Both societies have a devout religious tradition, one in which the church plays/played a central social role. Seeing the older generation perform in Stockholm today, unselfconsciously, it seemed to me that the church performance would be a natural breeding ground for Sweden’s tradition of talent. In the US, of course, many singers graduate from church performances.

That’s my theory. Eurof, what’s yours?

22:34 CET: The Belgians are coming! The Belgians are coming! And their song so far is excellent, but why is it sung in Sami (Lap)? Or is it Native American? Ooh, and bagpipes too. And an accordion. So multinational. Actually, I suspect the only way the Flemish and the French managed to agree on a group was to have the lyrics be completely unintelligible. But clearly this is much too good to be here. I fully expect them to be completely unappreciatedUPDATE: It’s Celtic, apparently, but sung by real Belgians..

22:46 CET: Sweden’s Fame (of Fame Factory) just did their act, and I have to say, they can more than hold their among tonight’s competition, though as I write this they are sounding awfully similar to the Slovenian act, which is going last. Perhaps that would be a better way to hold future ESCs: Just like those car races where all the cars are the same and the only difference is the driving talent, perhaps everybody could all sing the same song. They all sound similar enough, really.

22:53 CET: I just tried to vote for the Belgians from Sweden, and I was told I should try again later. Favorites besides Belgium: UK, Sweden, Romania, Slovenia, Ireland. Worst: Austria and Germany. By a mile. But also Turkey; what were they thinking, ululating in English? Didn’t work for me.

23:00 CET: Successfully voted for the Belgians. It’s the first time I’ve voted for anything, I think. Certainly not ever in a Belgian general election. The only time I lived there during an election I was in Luxembourg absailing for the weekend.

21:13 CET: Oh, no, it seems like they no longer announce “nul points!” This was my favorite part — the squirming and the public humiliation of the losers. To answer your question Eurof, there has definitely been favoritism, but since the voting is by the public, it is interesting to see changing attitudes over time: For example, the Turks just gave the Greeks 4 points, which they are SO undeserving of.

23:20 CET: Wow, Belgium is in the running. I don’t know if I can handle this. And our natural allies have yet to vote. And the Bosnians want to vote twice. I love how this is a little microcosm for Europe. Much more effective than the euro for building a civilizational identity. And much more inclusive, with 26 countries being allowed to playHere are all the songs for you to listen to and make up your own mind, in case you missed the show..

23:31 CET: Belgium is fading, and still has to vote. But the big embarrassment is the Latvians not managing to get a single point yet, together with the British. They weren’t that bad, were they? Or is this payback for euroscepticism?

23:41 CET: If Belgium doesn’t win, it would be truly wonderful for Turkey to win. They need to be in the EU as soon as possible, and if the ESC is one thing, it is a popularity contest that eurocrats would do well to listen to. Russia’s Tatu should not win: too much chance of an organized fan base calling in and skewing the results.

23:42 CET: Belgium in the lead again. But they have yet to vote. Typical scenario for the Belgians: losing by giving the Turks the lead when they vote. Watch for it.

23:53 CET: Belgium voting. They’ve built up enough of a lead to widthstand giving 12 points to the Turks and still be ahead. It will depend an small differences in scores from the Estonians, Slovenians, Romania and Sweden. Belgium just gave 12 points to Turkey. How galant of us!

23:59 CET: And nul points to the Belgians from the Swedes. My vote was clearly wasted. It’s all up to the Slovenians now. The Belgians have a 5 point lead. I really would not be used to us winning…

00:05 CET: And Turkey wins!! Belgium second. Russia third. The Slovenians gave the Belgians only 3 points. Definitely the best possible political result. Though I still think the Belgian song was the best. I might even consider listening to it again on a normal day. I obviously missed something with the Turkish song.

In the final analysis, Belgium may well have lost the contest as a direct result of the general elections held there last weekend. The main shocker was the gains made by the anti-immigrant Flemish nationalist party, which got nearly 20% of the overall vote (and much, much higher tallies in Antwerp). Giving Turkey 12 points was a way for Belgians to atone for this political embarrassment, and a way to show solidarity with our many Turkish immigrants. It may have cost us the win by a few points.

State of the (Swedish) blog

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The Swedish blogging community is still in its infancy, yes, but a made-for-blog event is looming: The September 14 referendum on joining EMU. Can the Swedish blog rise to the occasion, and in doing so carve out a space for itself in the Swedish mediasphere?

It depends. Certainly, nothing is expected of them/usI have no idea if I qualify. I think globally but cannot help but blog locally, right?
 
Two excellent geek blogs that transcend the genre: Tesugen.com and mymarkup.net [Swedish, mainly about blogging].. If we keep to our geek blogs and personal journals, there is nothing to be ashamed of. But it would be a pity to forgo an opportunity to shape the debate in ways only blogs can.

Blogs can shine in part because of what they are not. They are not academic treatises, they are not fact-checked or edited, they are not immutable; instead, they are snapshots of the process of opinions forming. They are places where we can try on ideas for size, invite feedback, and move on. It takes courage to be an exhibitionist with one’s ideas and beliefs, but Pardon my massive breach of trust in foisting this tortured cliché on you…the unexamined life is not worth blogging. Also, it helps to have visitors who are as opinionated as you are. And to have a thick skin.

There is an element of the Hegelian thesis, antithesis, synthesis in the ideal blog. But stress any one element too much and the effort fails. In the Gulf War, for example, I think blogging failed through a surfeit of opinion at the expense of dialogue. Both sides hovered at their respective ideological watering holes, mutually offended by each other’s existence (and secretly loving it). Perhaps both sides were prisoner to a Darwinian conception of their purpose: In their quest for the survival of the fittest idea, ideological front lines were shored up to such an extent there was no more movement possible. It was an intellectual WWI.

In Sweden, if blogs err, they err in their eagerness to build consensus without first clearly defining differences. Afraid of offending anybody, they do not engage in dialogue either. Regarding EMU, it might be considered polite for the two sides to argue past each other, but it certainly does not do the democratic process any favors. Blogs can and should be in people’s faces and stepping on toes, brash and candid, making noise, homing in on sloppy thinking and keeping both sides honest.

So when it comes to making up your mind for the referendum, blog it.When you post, don’t forget to ping valblog.nu/EMU, which will hopefully become a clearing house for Swedish EMU blog posts. Let your post be a thesis of your views on the matter now. Hope for an antithesis to pop up from among your comments or on readers’ own blogs, and let a future post keep something from both. Rinse & repeat until September 14.

In defense of Swedish exceptionalism

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A comment by Charles Kenny on a post of mine last year has stuck with me:

One possible measure for innovation per capita (many flaws) is patent applications filed by residents per year. In the US its 141,342 as compared to 8,599 for Sweden. Works out at 1/2,000 people in the US, compared to 1/1,000 in Sweden. Suggests you’re right… [That Sweden is more innovative than the US.] Again, if you look at Science and Technical Journal Articles published in 2000 — 166,829 for US, compared to 8,219 for Sweden — or royalty and license fee receipts (36.5bn compared to 1.4bn) Sweden comes out ahead on per capita terms. Yay ray socialists.

I have to quote Charles Kenny as my sole authority here because I have looked for but not found this information myself on the public web. But he is a World Banker, so either he has special access to internal databases, or he made it all up, in which case this blog will have to go through soul searching not unlike that at the New York Times, and I’ll have to hold a meeting with myself and ask myself some hard questions (“Why did you promote Charles Kenny from sometime comment-leaver on your personal blog to editor on MemeFirst, despite his atrocious dress sense? Didn’t alarm bells go off when he started “blogging” from Kabul, but never produced the receipts?”).

Since that post, I’ve entertained a number of theories as to why Sweden is so innovative, but I came across a new one recently, again in the interview of Joe Stiglitz by the Wall Street Journal:

WSJ: Is the European approach [which focuses more on the role of government in the economy and the existence of a welfare state] a viable alternative?

MR. STIGLITZ: Countries like Sweden never bought into the American style. It hasn’t abandoned its welfare system [where medical care and social security are considered the responsibility of the government] and yet it’s still very strong. The New Economy has penetrated Sweden to a great degree, but the country has weathered the downturn much better than the U.S. It promoted the New Economy in a more stable way, having a strong welfare state that allowed people to take a risk [on investing in technology start-ups and other New Economy companies and offering a huge safety net if things faltered].

It’s a really interesting notion, and it might go a long way to explaining why the received wisdom that lower taxes lead to higher GDP growth is not backed up by statistics.

Here are my own two homespun explanations for Sweden’s exceptional innovation record. They might be completely bogus, so I will rely on sophistry to make them appeal:

Progressive regulations: Sweden is the world’s avant-garde for stringent regulations concerning pollution abatement, public health, natural resource management, safety codes, and the like. These are costly, and you might expect these costs to dampen growth. But Swedish businesses, forced to develop technologies to cope with these regulations, soon find themselves selling their innovations to Europe and the US, who tend to adopt similar regulations with a lag. First mover advantage by government decree, if you like.

Mercy taxing: In Sweden’s notorious high tax environment, so-so business ideas don’t survive. The companies that do make it have to be very efficient at what they do. The miracle happens when these companies then leave the nest that is Sweden and expand into low-tax countries, like the US. Look at Ikea. Look at H&M. Imagine the profits they reap in the US if they manage to be profitable back home. This is my “If it doesn’t kill you it will make you stronger” theory of economic development.

<irony>To conclude, Sweden should increase welfare spending, ban fossil fuels and raise taxes.</irony>