User talk:OldKingColeSlaw

Hello!--OldKingColeSlaw (talk) 23:04, 5 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Welcome!

Hello, OldKingColeSlaw, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! Beeblebrox (talk) 23:05, 5 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Politics and WP Sweden

Hello there, you're dead right about the political wrangling that pervades many Sweden-related topics here. It's the same on the Swedish Wikipedia, only less contested sometimes. People who are politically interested but not high-profile pro politicians in Sweden have a strong tendency to marshal history, statistics and economics to win a debate, and often this is done selectively of course. So one gets these tugs-of-war involving recent history, foreign policy, economics, social orders which are really about politics, and which are pretty low on citing any reliable sources - or which only cite the ones that support your views. This spills over a lot to the internet in Sweden (blogs, Facebook users, wikipedia etc).

Plus, there is a strong identification with the US here: people in Sweden generally feel much more affiliated with America than with Europe, it's been like that for generations. It used to be the in-joke that this was the 51st US state. So "this is how it's done in the USA", "this is what they like over there", "how Americans think" has a force of argument in itself with many people - which explains why people who discuss Swedish economics and society like to invoke America or say "Sweden is just being normalized to an ordinary (US style) free country from being as bad as East Germany" (they want to be liked by US Americans; nobody would admit to longing to be appreciated or picked up by Germans or Spaniards). Actually Sweden has changed a great deal since the 1970s, changed continuously in an increasingly market liberal direction, and the view that it was "a socialist, rigidly egalitarian country" even in the 1980s/90s is just crap.Strausszek (talk) 11:58, 9 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]