Sweden is desperately trying to destroy itself.

[BeBMan]

Everything in Sweden is going downhill. In this report listing "happiest countries" it is only no. 10!

No 1 and 2 are occupied by Norway and Denmark, which is obviously wrong because everyone knows from the gut that they're just faking their happiness.

[kentonio]

I've likely traveled much more than you and we don't have the kind of relationship where I like to share personal info with you.

Seems wildly unlikely given the complete and total **** you talk about other countries.

[Kidlicious]

Everything in Sweden is going downhill. In this report listing "happiest countries" it is only no. 10!

No 1 and 2 are occupied by Norway and Denmark, which is obviously wrong because everyone knows from the gut that they're just faking their happiness.

If you believe everything your govt tells you and they tell you that you are happy then you will believe you are happy.

[Kidlicious]

If you don't have the data to prove your claim, your claim is unfounded. You admit you don't have it.

Cover ups are evidence.

[Kidlicious]

Yoou sound like a right wing conspiracy theorist from Breitbart

This isn't a theory. It's a scandal.

[BeBMan]

If you believe everything your govt tells you and they tell you that you are happy then you will believe you are happy.

1. That article doesn't refer to a government report. Maybe you should have read it instead pulling more stuff out of your ass

2. You are the Trump (hint: he's leading your gov now) bootlicker here, so save your advice for someone who cares.

[kentonio]

1. That article doesn't refer to a government report. Maybe you should have read it instead pulling more stuff out of your ass

No, he's saying that the people believe they are happy because the government there tell them they have to be, because obviously that always works.

[BeBMan]

Damn, that's pretty much genius stuff. Tell ppl how they should feel and they'll do it

[rah]

Just like Kid making up whatever he wants with the hope that people with just believe him instead of actually thinking.

[Dinner]

You're not just asking for more data, you're making/defending specific claims while simultaneously acknowledging that the data to support those claims isn't available.

There are a whole lot of politicians making these allegations, there are a whole lot of senior police and union officials making these claims, there are a whole lot of reporters reporting these claims based upon undisclosed sources presumably because they are afraid for their jobs if the publicly disclose the political interference.

I'd call that a great bases for questioning the claims that the numbers have not been doctored for political reasons. That is a whole lot of reasonable doubt about the official numbers.

[Kidlicious]

1. That article doesn't refer to a government report. Maybe you should have read it instead pulling more stuff out of your ass

That's like saying that you heard it said that North Koreans are happy, but it came from a citizen, not the govt. If they were to say anything consider ed unacceptable they would be blacklisted.

2. You are the Trump (hint: he's leading your gov now) bootlicker here, so save your advice for someone who cares.

Trump is an American, not a socialist.

[Broken_Erika]

Trump is an American, not a socialist.

Well Gosh-Golly-Jee-Williker-Zimminy-Jippity-Doo! You don't say.

[BeBMan]

That's like saying that you heard it said that North Koreans are happy, but it came from a citizen, not the govt. If they were to say anything consider ed unacceptable they would be blacklisted.


Trump is an American, not a socialist.

"OMG, don't believe the government. Well, unless it's the government I approve of, then believe everything"

[Dry]

I was intrigued by this topic and tried to sort out the numbers and stats.
It remains a difficult task, because as mentionned by Aeson:

As you said about rape, Sweden has expanded the classification of what is rape over time, so how much of the increase in reported rapes is because more qualifies as rape, and how much increase (or decrease) in same-type rape is unclear.

This is confirmed even by official swedish sources see http://www.government.se/articles/20...ime-in-sweden/, the section about rape is the second one.
But it's wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_Sweden that sumarizes it best:

Unlike the majority of countries in Europe, crime data in Sweden are collected when the offence in question is first reported, at which point the classification may be unclear. In Sweden, once an act has been registered as rape, it retains this classification in the published crime statistics, even if later investigations indicate that no crime can be proven or if the offence must be given an alternative judicial classification.

and

The Swedish police registers one offence for each person raped, and if one and the same person has been raped on a number of occasions, one offence is counted for each occasion that can be specified.

Now, OTOH, to compare apples with apples, there are the EU surveys: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statist...ice_statistics where they clearly sate (in paragraph "Data sources and availability"):

Countries were asked to adhere to standard definitions when assembling the figures and to provide details of any divergences.

You can get the detailed tables, by crime, by country here: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statist...YB2016_II.xlsx
If you go to the rate table (Table09), you will get the trends in the Rape Offences recorded by the police. The problem I had with this table is that it shows the rough numbers and the trend, but not the relative number (rape per 100,000 inh).
So if you look at Sweden, you see the index for 2014 is 128, while for UK England and Wales it is 223. Based on these figures, you might think England has become a hell hole for rape, but in reality the numbers in those tables say nothing about relative numbers (rape per 100,000 inh).

However, I found this page http://www.nationmaster.com/country-...rime/Rape-rate and cross checked the numbers of the official EU tables for a few countries. When I put the EU numbers in a per-100K inhabitant formula, I got for Sweden 62.2, Belgium 29.3 and France 15.3. These numbers are close enogh to those on that nationmaster page, so I guess we can trust them.
It remains thus that even when "Countries are asked to adhere to standard definitions", the rape rate in Sweden remains the highest in Europe.

It also remains unclear if the EU figures are about rape reports or proven rape (after police enquiry, police "believing the victim"). The page makes you think it is about proven rape, but the table makes you doubt, maybe it's about rape reports. We can safely exclude it is about rape conviction, as both in the text of the page and inside the excel sheets, it clearly says "police recorded".

So the impression I got from all the web research I did, is that it is again politcal agenda stuff. All the numbers I found are not about convicted rapes, but about police reported rapes.
If you have a leftist mindset and a political agenda, you want to keep those numbers high, because it "proves" there is a rape culture. If you are more right wing, also with a political agenda, you will use thise high numbers to "prove" the left policy "doesn't work", "see the numbers". If you care more about people than political agenda, whether you're right or left wing, you want to clarify what is really going on and you want to compare apples with apples and oranges with oranges.

And as usual, I have a tendency to think that the scientists who conducted the survey had one intention, but the political (and media) world used it to demonstrate something else.
Everything I found about this topic makes me think the EU enquiry was about rape reports, not about proven rape: are women afraid to report rape or not. If indeed this was the point of the survey, then an increase of your numbers is an improvement. 28% increase in Sweden, good, 123% in UK excellent. Victims are reporting.
But those numbers have been used by politics and media to demonstrate actual rape. Maybe influenced by extreme feminist idea that every reported rape is an actual rape.

So my very feeling here: There is very clear political manipulation of stats and fuzzyness of definitions for some left wing agenda. The numbers are also very clearly used by people with a rightist agenda, and they come with radically different conclusions. And both are of course wrong about what these numbers are.
It would be the job of journalists to put the survey back in context and read all the numbers and definitions and spot those little details that shine the light on what was actualy surveyed. But which journalist does that today. Political agenda and emotional news/titles get you more hits than facts.

But that's just my 2 eurocent impression...

[rah]

Yes Politics can definitely impact the methodology. I once managed a survey on sexual harassment in the federal work place (sponsored by the organization that was being funded to stop it. Of course it was in their best interest to find harassment running rampant so they would continue to be funded. So they ended up with a definition that included, every having over heard a dirty joke or having someone give you a lewd look (a real broad definition of what counted as lewd.) Of course using those definitions over 85% of women where deemed to have been sexually harassed. That's the number that was reported to congress and thet organization was given millions of dollars to fight harassment in the federal workplace. So the methodology should always be rigorously reviewed.

and an even more interesting aspect was that the survey was anonymous but we had a hidden code that allowed us to determine the sex of the respondents and many men answered that they were women and almost all of them responded 0 harassment even by those broad definitions. Trying to make it look like there were no issues and required no further activity. We're assuming it was managers filling out surveys intended for their staff but we can't be 100% sure. We eliminated them fro the results but it's just another example of what can go wrong.