What the Danish and European media misunderstand (and misrepresent) about America, and vice versa. And other stuff.
The Danish government is willfully misleading the citizens of Denmark about America. So are most of the privately owned Danish news media, but privately owned companies are entitled to be as biased as they want. Steffen Kretz is the U.S. correspondent for the taxpayer-funded, state-controlled media Danmarks Radio (DR). I’ve chronicled his bias, misperceptions, misrepresentations,…
There are fourteen independent nations in the world today that used to be Soviet states, and many more that were Soviet clients. If we focus on continental Europe, there are six countries that can be counted among the former and even more than can be counted among the latter. This map of 1990 Europe from…
A business article in today’s Berlingske Tidende examines what the spending bill passed by the U.S. Congress means for Denmark. The facts presented by the article are more or less accurate, but they’re served to the reader in a way that raises some interesting questions. When the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, made a surprise…
AUDIO NOTE: No audio today, just ran out of time. Maybe I’ll add an audio version of this post later in the week, after I’ve upgraded the default WordPress audio player to something better—i.e., pretty much anything. Notice what didn’t happen in America this week? Two things. Democracy didn’t die and a second civil war…
This morning—not much more than 24 hours before polling places open in America—Berlingske published a signed editorial entitled “Berlingske believes: The USA is in a death-spiral of mistrust.” There’s plenty of empirical data to support that premise. I touched on a lot of it yesterday and on Friday. Berlingske’s lede states things pretty plainly: The United…
AUDIO NOTE: It’s a long post, today, and therefore a long audio. To save myself some time I did most of it in one take. It’s therefore bubbling over with mispronunciations, self-corrections, improvised riffs, and random musings that aren’t found in the text below. So it’s messy but fun. All you lurkers who come around…
Joe Biden’s still out there telling Americans that Republicans are a threat to democracy. President Joe Biden warned in a speech on Wednesday that the country’s democracy was dangerously close to crumbling, painting the closing stretch of the midterm elections in stark terms. “In our bones,” the president declared at one point, “we know democracy is…
The Danish election was held yesterday. It looks at this point as though for all the drama and intrigue, for all the weirdness and confusion, for all the gains of some parties and all the losses of some others, nothing has actually changed: we’ll still have a red bloc (leftist) government with Mette Frederiksen as…
The rise of the new Moderates (Moderaterne) party in Danish politics is a phenomenon worthy of examination by the citizens of every western republic currently experiencing high polarization—which is probably everywhere. As a public service to all self-governing citizens of the western world, I’ve managed to wrangle an interview with the man behind the movement:…
The fault lines and tectonics responsible for the rattling of western civilization can be seen or described as a right-left conflict, a globalist-localist conflict, or a collectivist-individualist conflict. Each of those perspectives has its merits and its uses, and at one point or other I’ve used each of them, but none of them seems to…
Let’s start with a some textual analysis. Here’s the text: What we’re seeing now is the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy. It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the—I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism. Those words were spoken by Joe Biden at a fundraiser in…
My headline is my contention: the wild and hysterical extremism of the global left is the most destructive political force in the west. Let’s start with some definitions, in accordance with my old-fashioned notion that communication and understanding work best when people are talking about the same things. By “the global left” I mean the…
If there’s a single over-arching theme to the political thinking of western elites—you know, the GLOB—since the early 1990s, it’s wrongness. Try and think of a single major issue that our political and cultural establishment has gotten right since the Soviet Union collapsed. Something you can look back on and say, “Well, we can all…
Straight to the money quote: The storming of Congress made an indelible impression on me. The mob and the rabble flowed towards and into one of the iconic altars of democracy, storming the hallways, ravaging, robbing, and killing. Armed with everything from handguns to clubs. “The mob and the rabble” is my own interpretive translation,…
An opinion piece in Berlingske asks an interesting question: Should there be room for “well-coiffed hatred and cheeky fascism” at the Popular Assembly?Esben Vest Billingsøe (Opinion), Berlingske.dk, May 20 What I’m translating as the “Popular Assembly” could also be translated as the “People’s Meeting.” It’s an annual summer event (held in the 24th week of…
We begin this post with two quick items before getting into our headline event. First: last night’s Fredagsrock at Tivoli appears to have been a calm affair. Youngest attended with four friends: they were able to enter the park at about three in the afternoon, the crowd never got out of hand, and they enjoyed…
In a couple of consecutive posts back in the glory days of December 2021 (“Someone Is Blundering” and “No MAGA Country for Smart Men“), I cited excerpts from an Atlantic article by Anne Applebaum. She’s an old school liberal and the Atlantic has become a woke digest, but I thought the article painted a very…
