The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1091
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 37 minutes
Words per Minute
162.59322
Hate Speech Sentences
113
Summary
The Lotus Eaters are back, and this week, we're talking about how Sweden has become a war zone, and whether the far-right AFD should be banned. We're also joined by Bo and Stelios, and we reminisce about the 5-year anniversary of the Brexit vote, and what might happen in the future.
Transcript
00:00:00.160
Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for the 31st of January 2025.
00:00:06.180
Where has that month gone? I can't believe how quickly it's already gone, to be honest.
00:00:11.360
When you get middle-aged, whole year, you can say that about whole years.
00:00:14.780
Especially January and February are the worst months of the whole year.
00:00:20.300
That's true. I'm not going to complain because it's been very cold and rainy in Britain.
00:00:26.160
And obviously I am joined by Stelios, the Stelios, and Bo, the Bohawk, the ballistic missile.
00:00:36.680
I haven't done that in ages, but I can't come up with any new ones.
00:00:43.520
That's not mine. It's truly cringe to come up with your own nicknames, right?
00:00:51.020
And today we're going to be discussing how Sweden is basically a war zone.
00:00:59.620
I'm going to say no, but I'm going to show all the debate.
00:01:03.000
And we're going to do good journalistic work saying the arguments for and against.
00:01:08.780
And Bo is going to reminisce about five years of the post-Brexit world.
00:01:17.600
And we're going to talk about it and what went down and what might happen in the future.
00:01:22.320
Because it does leave a lot to be desired the way it was done, doesn't it?
00:01:27.680
But I'm not going to get into the commentary now.
00:01:29.500
It's also worth mentioning as well, we do have an announcement that we have the gold Zoom call.
00:01:37.000
So that's the usual time of 3 o'clock, I believe, until about 3 p.m. our time until 4.30.
00:01:48.540
If you want to talk to us, if you have questions for us, I think I'm also going to ask you what would you like to see from Trump.
00:01:55.620
And I'm going to potentially turn that into a bit of a segment at some point.
00:02:00.960
Our sort of wish list for what needs to be done.
00:02:04.080
So we can sort of mark how well he's doing relative to that.
00:02:22.860
And I couldn't believe some of the things I was reading when I was researching this.
00:02:28.680
Which, considering I've been doing this for quite some time now, takes a lot.
00:02:36.400
And I think the best epitomisation of this is this headline here.
00:02:39.700
More than one explosion a day in Sweden as gang violence spirals out of control.
00:02:46.360
Sweden is facing an unprecedented wave of gang-related bombings with 32 explosions in 28 days,
00:02:53.320
prompting the government to consider lowering the criminal age to 14 as violence escalates
00:02:59.040
and criminals increasingly use financial extortion and digital recruitment to expand their operations.
00:03:04.200
So basically, loads of foreign criminal gangs have moved into Sweden.
00:03:09.240
No bonus marks for guessing their background because I think we all know.
00:03:20.760
So, it's also the fact that they're using young teenagers, basically, as part of it.
00:03:29.120
And they're hiring people from abroad in a sort of marketplace of online criminality.
00:03:34.960
And there are, like, sort of set rates if you want to kill someone.
00:03:39.120
Apparently, it varies depending on which city in Sweden you're in.
00:03:48.380
But they've sort of got a menu for crime because criminality has got so extensive.
00:03:54.500
And, of course, Sweden used to be one of the safest countries on planet Earth.
00:03:59.560
And so, this U-turn is not that the native Swedes have just decided, you know, what, you know, we're sick of peace and quiet.
00:04:09.960
And Stockholm alone has witnessed 21 explosions in the past month, which is insane to me that a major European city can experience that level of what amounts to, basically, gangland terrorism.
00:04:28.600
There was yesterday a post that listed the bombings that have taken place in January in Sweden.
00:04:35.520
And it literally reads like a band's tour schedule.
00:04:44.380
Yeah, it's 30 bombings and it's the 31st of January.
00:04:51.520
So, the Swedish Prime Minister has called the bombing crisis domestic terrorism, which I think is reasonable.
00:04:58.300
I think if someone's bombing, you know, every day, over, you know, twice a day sometimes, then I think that's fair to say.
00:05:06.940
And police have arrested 50 individuals in 25 different cases, including bomb makers, the perpetrators themselves planting the bombs, and the gang leaders operating from abroad, of course.
00:05:18.520
And apparently, the nature of these bombings has changed.
00:05:23.540
So, originally, it was about territorial disputes between various ethnic gangs.
00:05:29.200
And now, they're more being used as a retaliative measure to target businesses that refuse to be extorted.
00:05:37.960
And it seems to be that they're saying, you know, it's like extorting protection money, isn't it, really?
00:05:46.320
In Sweden, of all places, like you said, it used to be one of the most homogenous, peaceful places in the world.
00:05:58.240
It's a tragedy, isn't it, that this has been imposed upon the Swedish people, because they don't deserve this.
00:06:09.520
Hand grenade attacks have more than doubled in 2024, and they're already quite high.
00:06:16.640
What other country suffers from spates of grenade attacks?
00:06:21.880
Apparently, by mid-October, there had been 22 recorded grenade attacks, up from nine in 2023.
00:06:28.240
Which is nine too many, and certainly 22 too many.
00:06:33.300
And even in, you know, Britain, which is quite multicultural these days, we're not getting this level of things going, are we?
00:06:42.280
Of course, Sweden's a little bit further along than we are.
00:06:49.860
It's worth mentioning as well that Sweden's got a population of 10.5 million, officially at least.
00:06:55.840
And so, these numbers might not seem high to you if you're American, and you live in a very big country.
00:07:04.200
But in Europe, in a small European country, you know, this is a similar population to that of the City of London.
00:07:11.940
And so, it would be unprecedented if, say, the City of London had seen a bombing every day.
00:07:23.420
Because I'm not aware of any kind of vote of the Swedish to just open up the borders and just voluntarily put up with crime and mafias of the sort.
00:07:36.720
So, it's also worth mentioning, three out of four murderers in Sweden are committed by migrants.
00:07:42.000
So, there's a hint at the picture of who's doing what here.
00:07:47.880
And, I mean, I don't know whether that remaining one quarter is people who've been there for multiple generations.
00:07:54.480
I didn't necessarily look into the specifics of it.
00:08:01.400
Well, apparently, gun murders per capita in Stockholm are 30 times that of London.
00:08:06.860
And it goes on in London quite frequently, doesn't it, Beau?
00:08:09.960
Sorry, I'm asking you not because you're a gun criminal, but because you're familiar with the City of London compared to me.
00:08:16.640
I mean, Sweden, on the map geographically, is reasonably big.
00:08:20.700
But a lot of it is sort of, how to say it, not tundra exactly, but a lot of it isn't, it's not urbanised.
00:08:26.880
So, they've got a few cities, right, a few big cities.
00:08:32.280
So, basically, they've been flooded with unbelievably violent criminals.
00:08:40.280
Some of the worst criminals in Europe, by the looks of it, and by the sounds of it.
00:08:45.560
I wonder why Sweden, of all places, because it's like, I don't think these things happen as badly, anyway,
00:08:52.800
in Norway or Denmark or Finland or Estonia, but specifically Sweden.
00:09:01.300
Well, I have some data to reveal that, but sorry, Steli.
00:09:04.300
No, no, before you say this data, I want to say that if anyone told me about this about a month ago,
00:09:10.340
I would say, no, this doesn't happen in Sweden.
00:09:14.260
But maybe there are so many other stuff that we haven't yet heard about, Scandinavia and other countries.
00:09:23.940
Although, some of the other countries, like the Danes, are pretty good on mass migration
00:09:29.440
in that they don't have much of it and they collect comprehensive data.
00:09:33.120
I'm willing to make a guess and say that it has to do a lot with welfarism.
00:09:38.060
I think that the Swedes are very generous in what they offer to foreigners
00:09:41.660
and also the kinds of people that have migrated to Sweden.
00:09:48.980
A man who burned the Koran was shot dead in his flat in Sweden recently.
00:09:53.100
He was actually going through court because of what he did.
00:09:56.840
And I think he was originally, well, I imagine he's still considered one, an Iraqi.
00:10:03.480
So it's interesting that presumably a former Muslim is there burning a Koran
00:10:09.720
and he doesn't even get through his court trial for doing so, which is also ridiculous.
00:10:33.660
All of these things have happened in the past month.
00:10:37.400
So it's just going to show how extensive it is.
00:10:43.480
Isn't Sweden supposed to be socialist paradise?
00:10:47.340
Apparently socialists just really like grenade attacks for some reason and killing people.
00:10:54.840
So also the person may be linked to a foreign power, Reuters is saying, for some reason.
00:11:00.120
So let's have a look at some of the data, shall we?
00:11:01.640
Here is Peter Sweden, aptly named as he is Swedish.
00:11:04.340
62,000 people are now involved in criminal gangs in Sweden.
00:11:16.420
We have one of the highest sexual assault rates in the world.
00:11:20.140
And he's saying that socialist policies destroyed Sweden, basically.
00:11:27.720
It seems pretty fair that both the combination of open borders and welfare is just a recipe for disaster here.
00:11:35.880
You pay people to not work and also not assimilate.
00:11:41.680
And here I am, rather immodestly, showing one of my own tweets, but it illustrates an important point.
00:11:48.360
If you look at gun crime deaths as a per capita rate, Sweden is lodged between Albania and Bosnia.
00:11:57.240
And what is significant about Albania and Bosnia?
00:12:00.580
Well, they are the two Muslim-majority countries in Europe.
00:12:04.740
And so the fact that Sweden's in between them is a little bit prophetic.
00:12:07.780
It tells you something about the kind of people that might have migrated there.
00:12:10.840
And, in fact, we know that a lot of these people are from Islamic countries.
00:12:25.020
The blue line is those of a Swedish background, as the data labels it.
00:12:31.520
And the sort of pinkish-y color is difficult to tell because the screen glare here is the first-generation immigrant.
00:12:42.080
And as we can see, deadly violence and robbery relative to the natives, massively over-represented.
00:12:50.560
But also the second-generations lead the way by a pretty decent margin.
00:12:55.220
You know, crimes against life and health, the first-generation, and crimes against liberty and peace.
00:13:04.640
Sexual crimes, the first-generations are over-represented.
00:13:07.500
Which, these sorts of things mirror the nature of crime all across Europe, really.
00:13:12.320
We can see certain crimes where the first-generation are more likely to commit it than the second-generation.
00:13:20.440
But also some of the worst ones, like deadly violence, for example.
00:13:25.100
It's the second-generation of immigrant that's doing it.
00:13:29.000
And so the problem isn't simply just the people who were born abroad and moved here.
00:13:34.420
And even more so, in some cases, their children.
00:13:40.600
He was second-generation, and look what he did.
00:13:44.120
And so it's very obvious to me that the problem isn't so much just, oh, it's assimilation.
00:13:50.620
Because, no, actually, the more time people spend there, the worse they get.
00:13:57.600
And it's something that the native population shouldn't have to put up with.
00:14:12.740
So North African and African other are massively overrepresented.
00:14:21.980
So some of the more Muslim countries, Pakistanis perhaps.
00:14:26.660
And then we can see here, like, US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand
00:14:30.800
is basically on parity with those of Swedish background.
00:14:34.880
And Nordics, except Sweden, only slightly overrepresented, but not by the same degree
00:14:44.660
Countries outside of Europe are just massively overrepresented, except for maybe South Asia
00:14:49.960
and, you know, East Asia as well is actually underrepresented, which mirrors entirely what
00:15:01.040
What's interesting is that the Swedes themselves are not very criminal.
00:15:08.940
As we know from the era before they opened their borders.
00:15:14.140
It's not that the Swedes themselves have changed.
00:15:27.600
And it's something that's entirely preventable and was politically imposed upon them,
00:15:32.240
much the same as lots of other European countries.
00:15:34.520
If we go back to the addition and the conjunction between open borders and welfarism, you see
00:15:41.140
how this all is a respite for disaster because it says essentially let their borders be open
00:15:48.540
and let us just give too much money as social provisions and let us just increase spending
00:15:56.880
And this actually has a hidden layer of evil behind it because it literally lends to the narrative of
00:16:05.000
all this is an issue of insufficient money given to people who perpetrate such crime.
00:16:13.080
Because if you have a welfarist background, a very leftist, welfarist mindset,
00:16:17.900
and you think that all crime comes from lack of economic prospects,
00:16:22.000
then the only way to react to this is by saying, well, let us just flatten out economic inequalities.
00:16:31.000
Let us tax the Swedish more in order to give more money to these people so crime diminishes.
00:16:37.560
And of course, that will make the problem worse, won't it?
00:16:39.620
And we can look at things like Danish data and the Danes keep very good records of the nationality
00:16:49.700
And you can see that lots of countries like Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Tunisia, Jordan, Uganda, Iraq,
00:16:57.960
Morocco, Algeria, Ethiopia, Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Kenya, Ghana,
00:17:03.820
all overrepresented for some reason Myanmar is up there.
00:17:07.560
I didn't realise they'd get many people from there.
00:17:11.100
So basically it is Africa and the Islamic world that are massively overrepresented.
00:17:17.140
And then you start getting to European countries down here in the light blue.
00:17:21.880
And there's such a clear distinction between the two here, aren't there?
00:17:29.120
Yeah, you'd say that also for Europe, the Danish are a bit rambunctious.
00:17:35.040
It's funny, I've seen this stuff before and I'm always surprised, it's surprising to me
00:17:42.980
that Kuwait, because Kuwait's number one there, Kuwait's tiny.
00:17:46.620
But that's because of the per capita aspect of it, isn't it?
00:17:49.020
Like, you wouldn't, you could have one violent...
00:17:55.000
And then, of course, there's lots of data here from Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy and Sweden
00:18:15.120
Yes, so we've got the natives here in dark blue that contribute the most and take the least.
00:18:25.080
And then extra-EU, you can see that the amount that they actually contribute to the economy
00:18:30.400
doesn't outweigh the amount they take from it in later life.
00:18:35.320
So they're not net contributors at all, actually.
00:18:37.860
And you can see that very clearly here, that this part of the graph under the line
00:18:43.820
is much more significant than the part over it.
00:18:48.860
In fact, it's almost two to one, just from eyeballing it.
00:18:52.460
And it may well be that they take twice as much as they provide.
00:18:56.220
And so, yes, Sweden has imported foreign criminals
00:19:00.220
who basically tyrannise and terrorise the native population.
00:19:06.240
And they're paying for it in the same way that many other European countries are as well.
00:19:14.940
if you add DEI, inequality of opportunity, and all these things.
00:19:18.640
Again, it's going to lead towards a narrative that says,
00:19:24.700
Well, what would happen would be all of the peaks would lower
00:19:27.780
and everyone would be worse off, wouldn't they?
00:19:32.680
So I'm going to quickly fire through what is actually being done.
00:19:34.920
And I'm just going to say what's happening ever so quickly
00:19:37.980
and then summarise what needs to be done further.
00:19:41.880
So in September of 23, they introduced new rules for labour migrants.
00:19:47.060
Basically, work permits will only be made available to those labour migrants in Sweden
00:19:51.320
who earn a salary of at least 80% of the Swedish median salary.
00:19:55.240
That was to mitigate some of the financial damage that it's doing.
00:19:58.500
And then in October of 23, they made it harder for non-European migrants to claim benefits.
00:20:06.560
And then in August of 24, they were discussing paying Swedish passport holders that are foreign-born
00:20:13.200
the equivalent of 1,000 US dollars to leave Sweden,
00:20:17.360
basically paying a sort of Dane geld to get rid of the foreign gangs.
00:20:21.920
But of course, if you've got an illegal, they can just keep on coming back
00:20:27.860
Although, I still think it would be better than doing nothing,
00:20:32.580
even though I think the idea of paying foreign people that are extorting you money to leave is weak.
00:20:44.600
You just round up everyone involved, known to be involved,
00:20:48.380
and you put them in a maximum security prison for a long, long, long time.
00:20:57.160
Yeah, at the end, either before or at the end of their sentence, they're deported.
00:21:01.580
Just not allowed in the general population anymore.
00:21:06.380
It's not allowed among normal civilised humans.
00:21:15.920
Basically, they introduced a law which would force public sector workers
00:21:22.160
And, of course, this is the Guardian saying it's utterly inhumane
00:21:26.260
to report people illegally in your country if you're a public official,
00:21:33.600
Do they have any article now saying how inhumane the bombings are?
00:21:40.640
Oh, the humanity of those victims, that doesn't matter.
00:21:46.380
So here in October, they were having tougher rules.
00:21:50.560
They actually talked about introducing DNA testing
00:21:53.720
to see if someone was part of a family before reunifying them.
00:22:00.480
If you've come to the country, if anything, you should be removed.
00:22:02.920
If you want to join your family, you can all go back home.
00:22:07.780
You don't have a right to another person's country
00:22:12.320
That's never, ever been something that has existed until recently,
00:22:19.600
And they are actually getting a bit more serious
00:22:22.960
because they're pretty obvious now, aren't they?
00:22:27.340
which people leaving Sweden will exceed immigrants in 2024,
00:22:34.720
This was European Conservative reporting the same thing.
00:22:48.940
which made it look like there was net immigration.
00:23:19.240
it's just that they can get a better gig elsewhere,