Jacob Christensen

This is the best laugh I’ve had since – well, last week’s episode of Californication. Danish media report a remarkable statement by the Danish PM in an interview with the German newspaper Die Welt. Yes, Anders Fogh Rasmussen said, there will be a referendum on the EMU, or in the words of the original interview:

Wird es in Dänemark Referenden zum EU-Vertrag und, ein zweites Mal, zum Euro geben?

Zum EU-Vertrag nicht. Wir haben uns für die Unterzeichnung entschieden, und ich hoffe, dass er bis Ostern ratifiziert sein wird. Zur anderen Frage: Wir haben drei Opt-Outs – zur Frage der militärischen Zusammenarbeit, zur polizeilichen Zusammenarbeit und zum Euro. Wir überlegen gerade, wie wir damit umgehen sollen. Soll es zu allen drei Fragen ein Referendum am gleichen Tag geben? Oder sollen wir die drei Fragen getrennt behandeln? In unserem neuen Regierungsprogramm steht, dass wir die drei Opt-Outs abschaffen wollen. Es geht nur noch um das Wann und Wie. Um es klar zu sagen: Es wird ein Referendum über die Einführung des Euro geben.

The funny bit? The interview was published on 8 February.

Update: Berlingske Tidende wants a piece of the action as well.

Back in the early 1990s I was marginally involved in a tentative research project about “power and democracy” at the University of Copenhagen (my not too interesting contribution can be found in this book). One point I do remember about the entire affair is that Hans Jørgen Nielsen¹ – always the most wonderfully quirky of political scientists – at one meeting pointed out that people were always talking about “power and democracy”, but somebody really ought to go into the subject of “powerlessness and dictatorship” in the contemporary world.

I am pleased to tell Hans Jørgen that Lauri Karvonen has published a book on this subject.

Oh, and by the way: We have the concept “democratisation”, but how about “dictatorisation” as a parallel?

1. This HJN should not be confused with the HJN who wrote Fodboldenglen [↩]

Alex Harrowell brings us what must surely be the headline of the day, nay, of the week.

Oh, and I have Mads Brügger’s interview with Geert Wilders from last week waiting for me on the AppleTV.

As an update to this post, regarding this post (in case you forgot), Karl Palmås, alias 99/68, has done some analysis on the back-scratching linking patterns in the Swedish academic blogoshphere.

But the excercise actually uncovered that rarest of species: A Swedish female academic blogger.

In case you are interested, here are some of the female academics on my Google Reader:

• Laura McKenna
• Carly Schall (a former exchange student i Umeå, btw)
• Crooked Timber is home to a number of women: Eszter Hargittai, Ingrid Robeyns, Maria Farrell, Belle Waring
• Islamologi.se (recommended if you read any of the Scandinavian languages) has some female contributors…
• …and Ekonomistas has Eva Mörk on its roster
• On the other hand, Vänstra Stranden is on hiatus

Slimed? Apperently gubbslem – which would translate into something like geezer phlegm – is the popular Swedish expression for what is otherwise known as old-boys networks. In the physical world gubbslem is a kind of algae.

First we had the www – you know static html-based pages. FrontPage stuff.

Then came CMS (that’s data-bases plus graphic front-ends to you and me) which meant blogs and the like.

You realised that in order to keep up, you need rss. In short: If you haven’t got an rss-feed on your page, I’ll give it a miss because Google Reader is my main entrance to the internet these days.

Then came the social web, aka web2.0. MySpace, last.fm, Flickr, Facebook, you name it.

Obviously, once you have 17 accounts on social websites (where many of the same people appear as your contacts), certain problems with keeping up with the updates begin to appear. Consequently we now have the meta-social web in the form of FriendFeed and Profilactic, which is where you can now find me all mashed up.

Now, should I open an account on LinkedIn, now I’m at it?

This Saturday is not particularly funny if you are a Social Democrat.

In Sweden, DN started the day with ringing the death bell for the party in its reporting about the latest opinion poll which pointed to massive losses for the Social Democrats in the large cities.

Er, well, right…

Let us first note that the Social Democrats still hold a more than healthy lead over the four-party alliance government and that what really needs explaining still is the pathetic performance of the centre-right parties since September 2006. The “red corner” still holds a 13 ppt lead over the “blue corner”.

Second, it is not really surprising that there is a difference between the cities (always Conservative and Liberal territory) and the rest of the country (always Social Democratic territory) in Sweden. Of cause demographic changes with people moving to the larger cities may very well affect the playing field in the shorter and longer run and that Sweden outside of Stockholm’s tullar does not exist in the minds of DN’s editors is a known fact.

And then there is Denmark. The latest Gallup poll tells us that the Social Democrats are only supported by 20,9 per cent of the voters against 20,6 per cent for the Socialist Party. These two parties are the only ones recording major movements and it is obvious to me that the latest round of conflicts of immigration and integration policy is yet again doing severe damage to the Social Democrats. The question is if this is a short-term or a long-term crisis but the elections in 2005 and 2007 have shown us that the electorate on the Danish left wing is now as floating as the electorate on the right wing and that the Social Democratic hegemony is well and truly dead. From an academic perspective this is interesting because the Danish Social Democrats simply have to reinvent themselves from the bottom upwards.

Even following the austerity policies of the mid-1990s, the Swedish Social Democrats never faced such a challenge.

After upgrading to WordPress 2.5

Well, I think I succeeded but it took a bit of hacking in the K2 theme. I also had to update to the latest nightly version of K2 to pull off the stunt.

What? Me? Editing css? Yes, indeed.

Jeremy of scatterplot compares university policies:

Evaluations at Northwestern are online and include part that can henceforth be viewed by anyone with a Northwestern userid. (One’s salary is private at Northwestern but public at Wisconsin; one’s course evaluations are public at Northwestern but private at Wisconsin. Choose your poison.)

In this case I actually think you could make an argument for naming and shaming.