Democracy!

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The kiddywinkles got to go on a demo yesterday. They organised it themselves, took themselves out of lessons, invited the news crews and the mayor. Then the mayor’s secretary rang five minutes before it was due to go ahead to say that he was going to be half an hour late and could they delay it?

Wristwatch

I'm late, I'm late for a very important date.

They could not, so the chairman of the education committee came out in his stead.

As way of apology, the mayor offered to come to the school personally and speak to the student reps from each class. Not only did he get to sit in a meeting with about a dozen student representatives (and no other adults), but each time I saw him in the playground, he was surrounded by children asking him difficult questions.

So far, he has avoided being at the centre of this. He has not been able to make a lot of meetings (though he has been able to get to meetings in other schools). Clearly, the children believe the buck stops with him. I do not know much about the man but I noticed the little patronising head tilt while he was talking to them about not being able to just go ahead and close a DIFFERENT school. I think it is lovely that our children have the right and the ability to stand up for themselves like this. It affects them the most and they have the least power over it. Lovely to see them getting stuck in. Even without all the problems that the proposal has, I think that mayors SHOULD have to explain to children why their school is closing because the council has run out of money. This is not bloodless, here, this financial mismanagement.

A lot of them have a really good idea of what is wrong with the plans, one 12 year old child wrote

“Synes det træls at de har sagt at de har regnet alt med, men når man spørge dem om hvad de har tænkt sig med modtagerklassen er deres svar ” det har de ikke lige taget stilling til” det kan man jo ikke bruge til noget.”

I think it is annoying that they have said they have worked everything out but when someone asks what their plans for the Danish-for beginners class are, they answer “we haven’t considered it” That’s not very useful.”

To the local newspaper!

I mean, not to denigrate children…. But a CHILD can see that they are shitting the bed. I have no idea how it has escaped their (or the press’ for that matter), attention.

Driving Test

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Driving tests in Denmark are a bit different from those in the UK. I was expecting to be in another car but I got to drive my instructor’s car which was cool. There was a little test about “How do you check the brakes?” and I showed him and then I drove around. There were no tick sheets, like back home. He just took it all in.

I got stuck behind a truck and was not really up for overtaking (even though I could have), I just don’t overtake anything in my lessons (other than the occasional cyclist), so I did not want to learn how to do it during the test.

This oversight tipped him off to my hidden desire to drive slowly at all times, so he got me to drive ON THE MOTORWAY. Back home, you don’t get to try the motorway until you have passed your test. I fucked up getting into fifth gear and was so distracted by that that I did not get anywhere near the speed limit until I had been on the road for a couple of seconds. An eternity during a test.

Italiano: segnale di inizio autostrada English...

This sign means "Get into 5th gear, newbie"

So, not surprisingly, I did not pass. But the nice surprise came when he said afterwards

“You CAN actually drive. You just need to drive faster! See you again!”

 

I am okay with that, I was approaching it as a sort of mock exam anyway. It is a bit of pain that I need more lessons and to go through that again. But then again. I NEED more lessons, there is a lot I am not happy about (like reversing, parking and the motorway).

 

Interactions with Racists

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My country has a lot of racists. Some of them are online. You learn to stay clear of them and if you have to interact, you sort of just make fun of them.

Anyway, I sent a letter to the editor about the council’s racist policy and these are a couple of the comments.

The lady one is actually quite sweet and might not be more racist than your average person (for example “me”), though she has not thought through a lot of stuff like “Is it true that all children with immigrant backgrounds need to learn Danish?” but I have hope for her.

The chap one is in his late teens and has not thought through a lot of stuff, his knee is jerking so much he will strain his hamstrings. He heard “Arab” and immediately jumped to the reactionary position that They should be stopped from whatever it is They are doing.

Neither of them seem evil and I bet as soon as they get to know some children from these backgrounds, they will grow as human beings and question their prejudices.

 

Lady one: Social og sundhedshjælper
hallo er du racist? hvorfor må arabiske børn ikke gå skole blandt danske børn ? så det der diskrimination skal du hvist tale for dig selv syntes det er helt ok at børnene lære fra hinanden og hvordan en i h skal de arabiske børn lære dansk ´da det nu er den beste måde at lære det på er at gå sammen med dansk talende børn fy du skulle skamme dig

“hello are you racist? why must arabic children not go to school with danish children ? so that is discrimination you should know talk for yourself thought it is completely okay that the children learn from each other and how should the arabic children learn danish when the besst way to learn it is to go to school with danish speaking children you should be ashamed of yourself”

Me
Jeg ønsker bare at børn få ligemuligheder. Jeg siger ikke at danske børn skulle have deres egen skoler, men det er ikke okay at tvinge børn at gå til en eller anden skole pga deres bedstemor var fra Syrie. Og det er jo underlige at sige at “arabisk” børn kun kan lære hvis de sidder ved sidden af “danske” børn. Børn er børn.

I only want children to get equal opportunities. I didn’t say that Danish children should have their own schools but that it is not okay to force children to go to one school or another because their grandma was from Syria. And it is really strange to say that “Arabic” children can only learn if they sit next to “Danish” children. Children are children.

Chap one · Efterskole
Hvorfor skal muslimske børn være skyld i at skolerne skal laves om for danske ?
så kan de sku da sagtens gå på en skole for dem selv !

Why should muslim children be the reason that the schools have to be changed for the danish? They can blody go to their own schools.

Lady one· Social og sundhedshjælper

det er ikke deres skyld og der er aldrig blevet nævnt at det var bare at der burde være ens spille regler lige meget hvor i verden du kommer fra på vores skoler

they’re not the reason and no one said that they were but just that their should be one set of rules for everyone whereever in the world you come from in our schools.

Me
Hvad har Islam med dette emne at gøre?

What’s Islam got to do with it?

Chap one Efterskole
Fordi “arabere” er ment som muslimer, min tidligere kommentar virker måske lidt racistisk men er slet ikke racist, men land skik følg eller land fly !

Because “Arabs” is meant as muslims my previous comment might look a bit racist but it is not even racist but do as the Romans do or leave Rome.

Me (written in English, couldn’t be bothered with the Danish)

Gosh. Do you think the council man realises that everyone will think he means “Muslims” when he says “Arabs need to be spread out”??? I think it’s a bit harsh to say that the town council should leave the country if they don’t want to follow Danish rules (like the Folkeskole Act). I am sure if we explain the law to them in mandatory classes, they will learn to integrate with the rest of us.

 

I am so not worrying about the quality of my written Danish anymore. I can spell “sgu”, know when a sentence is over and have discovered what the shift button does on my keyboard.

Another silver lining to this cloud is that my understanding of Danish has levelled up because google translate cannot even touch this and I really have to look at what they are saying to suck the meaning out. (Or ask someone)

 

D minus 12

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Argh. Have I mentioned how much I hate moving yet?

Not that I have a lot to move but this is the first time I have had to transfer furniture. I have been trying to offload unwanted stuff on f-town’s answer to freecycle. This is harder than I first imagined it might be. Though, I should have known after having lots of experience of London’s answer to freecycle: freecycle.

What is getting me through this is how great my new place will be. The front room is bigger than my flat. There are exposed beams. There is lots of light. And of course, it’s the start of something new with my “wiking”. He has only moved a couple of times and so has no idea what is in store. He says it is going to be fine.

I have been bracing myself for some serious moving-house bs. Though, it might not come. I just rang the telecom company to give them some notice on my move and even though I am cancelling my contract of land line and broadband, they just said “Okay, you’re not our customer in 30 days time, thanks bye!” This is light years away from what I could expect from BT. Oh my god, I’m getting palm sweats just thinking about it. Also, did I mention? I did it in Danish without much of an eyelid batter. I just rang them up, spoke to them in their language and I got the thing I wanted. Huh, what? Crazy times.

As for all the banking, utility and “other” bidness; this seems to be operated centrally. I change my address with one central database and TADA, everyone knows. This is craziness to me. On one hand, I hate that a central database has so much on me and is exposed to the threat of identity theft or privacy invasion. On the other, I cannot express how pleased I am that everything is taken care of with one conversation (or indeed, one click)

I have so far transported three bags of books and I have another set ready to go for tomorrow after volunteering. If I can help it, I would like to transport all my “bits” before the main moving day, so all anyone has to carry is my massive huge hulking bits of furniture. Up a spiral staircase. Oh god. I am so glad that I will be in charge of “morale” and “refreshments”. I voted early on for “men” to be hired for this lifting but the bf seems to think his friends are strong enough and well trained in the art of furniture transportation. We will see.

And then after all that, I have a major clean up session to look forward to. I like my landlord and I hope that he only takes from my deposit that which I truly owe him. I hear they make up bollocks about doors and floors and they have a “new condition” clause in the contract, as in, I have to deliver a “new condition” flat. Not that I received a “new condition” flat but it was newly painted, I will give them that.

Here are some pictures of my new place.

In Pursuit of Happiness

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Bit of a soppy one. Sorry. I am sure I will revert to my usual “Danes drive like this. Everyone else drives like this” programming very soon.

Things are going great. My relationships have so often been disaster zones, replete with hazard warning stripy tape.

Dance!

Stay Back!

There was that guy I saw who was emotionally abusive and none of my friends liked him and I am not sure I even liked him but I stayed with him because I thought “One must have a boyfriend and this one is good about the sex phobia”. He shouted at me so much, I though it was normal. He made me nervous. He made me fat so I could not leave him! He did not like me, he hated everything about me. He only stayed with me because he thought “One must have a girlfriend and this one is good about me being an asshole.”

There was the guy who wrote me out of his life one bit at a time. I wouldn’t have minded (much) but it started while we were living together. A secret flirtation here. A kiss there. After we broke up, he forgot every good memory of our time together. Then he started working systematically on the things we had in common “I don’t like x anymore, it’s stupid” And before you know it, it’s like I never existed.

There were the people I fell in love with, despite having no future with them because I needed emotional intimacy and they were nice. There was the guy I let move in with me and he turned out to be a pathological liar. Oh shit.

What I really needed was a lovely extended time of being single. I learned to be brave, take risks and find out important truths. What I found out was that I am pretty kick-ass and that I do not need a chap. I found out how to play B on the guitar.

Now, I have a partner and it’s healthy, fun and exciting. No one wants to hear how happy I am, right? Not in exhaustive detail.

Not that it won’t be hard work. I appreciate the work I will have to put in to maintain this thing. I’m sort of looking forward to it. I loved being single and I could have rocked that life too but I am enjoying this one. This life that I have.

Least Corrupt Nation

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Have you seen that film Hot Fuzz? It came out over five years ago, what are you waiting for? Anyway, in that movie, Hot Fuzz, a dedicated policeman moves to a little town in England with the lowest murder rate. Puzzlingly, it has the highest “accident” rate. I think we can all see where this is going, right?

Denmark is one of the least politically corrupt nations on our planet. That may be true. There are a lot of shit holes on our planet and maybe Denmark is one of the best of a bad lot. Stranger things have happened.

The perception I am getting, though, is that Denmark is more corrupt than my country but they hide it a lot better. This is how it works:-

  1. Announce politically corrupt thingy (dodgy budget, fraudulent proposal or what have you)
  2. No one notices it is corrupt
  3. The free Press do not look into whether it is corrupt
  4. It passes.
  5. Calamity ensues.
  6. Someone notices it was wrong in step 1, the Press might report on it
  7. Someone stands up and says “Oops. Honest mistake. Human error!”
  8. No one loses their job
  9. No one learns anything
  10. There is no step 10.

The town council were invited to a school meeting last night and the BRASS BALLS on those chaps. Most of the meeting was making a case for our school over the other schools and so the politicians kept saying “Yes but we have to close some schools and all the schools are saying that!” Predictable and not politically corrupt.

Then when questioned about how their calculations about how expensive my school is to run and how much capacity we have are officially wrong this is what one of them said:-

Yes, those calculations are wrong. But the savings from our proposal STILL saves 29 million kroner. Those calculations are not wrong.

 

Then me and my friend at the back just busted out laughing. It was a old school hysterical laugh. More like the spasms you get from too much sobbing. No humour in it but a visceral reaction to a major lie. I couldn’t stop for ages and it HURT to laugh. And now, I have moved on from saying gently “Oh dear, they have made a mistake, I need to help them realise before it is too late”. They cannot POSSIBLY believe that. They are not THAT stupid.

I got angry. I had not planned on speaking. I have done my bit. Jesus. But I took the mike and out came some Danish to my surprise.

Du må ikke sige at dine beregninger er ikke forkert. Det er FORKERT. Det er ikke ok! Det er ULOVLIG. Hvordan siger man “fraud” på dansk? (People shouted it out and for a second I thought they were doing a supportive heckle like in American church “TELL IT SISTER!”) Oh tak “bedrag”. Det er BEDRAG hvis dine beregninger er forkert. Og det ER forkert. Man må ikke sige “Sadan er det bare” og pludselig det bli’r sandt. Det er ikke okay!

It’s not okay to say something is true when it is not. It is not okay to say that your calculations are correct. They are not correct. They are not correct and that is ILLEGAL. How do you say “fraud” in Danish? It’s FRAUD. You can’t just say “that’s the way it is” and it suddenly becomes true. It’s not okay!

I was making good eye contact with the member of the council who I have appealed to on the racism thing, only to be told that her party agrees that spreading children out is acceptable but “unfortunately” the law prevents it. The member of the council who straight up lied, apparently buried his head in his notes looking shifty and sad. For that man, it was a huge change in facial expression, again he was smiling and grinning all the way through and was told three times by parents “TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY”

Beaker!

Artist's Impression

What seems to be happening is they still think that Step 2 is continuing as usual. Step 3 certainly is. The Press have published the letters to the editor about the saving calculations being wrong and one journalist has done a couple of stories but no real digging. No real “holding to account”.

Point of interest, the way they defended themselves after my “indlæg” was not “Listen bitch, HERE are the calculations, read them and weep” but rather “We went over every line ourselves and they’re not wrong.”

They really expect us to trust them as usual and when it all goes wrong they can shrug and say “We didn’t know, sorry.”

And this is political corruption. The Press are not interested, even the local press which is majorly weird. The Human Rights Institute never got back to me (but they have their own problems, I understand they’re being investigated for dodgy book keeping). The politician I wrote to pretended like I was saying “Oh no, closing a school hurts my feelings!” and not “The town council are squandering money”.

Little local colour: they introduced a paid-parking scheme. It flopped (the machines didn’t work because they ordered the wrong ones), they withdrew the scheme and now those who recommended the U-turn want CREDIT for their part in the fiasco. It’s rather like crashing a large expensive boat on to some rocks, sinking it, killing half a dozen people and then wanting credit for abandoning ship.

What depresses me the most is that Step 2 is going on as usual. Only a couple of handfuls of people seem to understand what is happening to them, they say “I don’t understand the calculations” and they blindly trust that their politicians would not lie to them on purpose. It’s one of the least politically corrupt countries after all, you can trust the politicians. And when it all goes down, no one will get in trouble even though hundreds of millions of kroner will have been squandered and many children will have been exposed to chaotic schooling for a couple of years.

So, Denmark has a really low level of corruption but a really high level of situations where politicians apologise for getting something wrong “by accident”. I think we can all see where this is going, right?

But I tried. I really have tried.

Womens’ Rights in Denmark

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My country is cooing over Danish drama and one journalist noted that in Denmark, they must have much more equality because the two series they have seen have “strong roles for women”.

Denmark 2011

The accepted standard for “Is this series/film/book sexist?” is the Bechdel test.

  1. Are there two named female characters?
  2. Do they have a conversation?
  3. Is it about something else than some man?

There is plenty of tv and film that contains strong roles for women but many of these have very little in the way of showing that the writer understands that women have conversations about a variety of topics with one another.

‘Forbrydelsen’ and ‘Borgen’ usually pass this test. In Forbrydelsen I, the main female characters are a cop and a bereaved Mum and they talk about the murder a couple of times. There is also a political aide but I do not recall any conversations that did not revolve around the Mayoral candidate. And the cop talks to her mum about sorting her effing life out because it is naturally a mess because she works so hard.

In Borgen, the main female characters are a news anchor and the prime minister of Denmark. They do not converse as such. The prime minister talks work with her female ministers and the news anchor talks to her mum about sorting her effing life out.

Obviously, we are in a state when we have to snatch at such crumbs. LOOK! Denmark recognises the humanity of women! They have main characters who are well written! Even if the majority of the protagonists and supporting artists are men. Even if the majority of conversations are conducted with men. Still, progress is progress, right sisters?

So, even though the state of Danish writing reflects that women can do more in drama  than advance the character development of men, they have only graduated to showing the challenges of balancing working life. Like, it was progress for Asian actors to be shown on British tv but at first it was only to show them struggling with arranged marriages. I remember the day I saw an episode of Casualty and there was an Asian who just cut off their entire arm or something, and that was it. Yay!

Each and every strong female character in these Danish dramas is shown having one conflict. The conflict of being a woman with a traditionally masculine job. There are no current Danish dramas offering strong female roles about someone who works as a nurse, teacher or daycare worker so I have no idea if they would also find family life to balance.

The nice thing about Danish drama is that it shows that women can indeed be wonderful in “masculine” roles but only at the expense of their “feminine” side. They stop being able to nurture. Sara Lund does not care for her child or boyfriend. Nyborg’s husband is blue balled and her children are withering. Katrine’s bedsit is a goddamned disgrace.

Interestingly, this is similar to what I have been saying for a while about the Danish system. In Denmark, the women work. They have pretty generous shared parental leave but the child is expected to be placed in full-time daycare from between 6 months and a year. This is supposed to be a liberation. Now we can do what the men do! Give up our role as parents in order to maintain a paid position! Hurray!

Just because culturally men have been encouraged not to be present fathers to their offspring, instead preferring to snatch a few moments here and there around bedtime, it’s not really progress to also erase the concept of a mother in favour of fairness.

Not that I am saying that daycare is bad. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with a well run, clean and pleasant environment with low children to adult ratios for little people to hang out and play in. But there is no substitute for a close, intimate and authentic relationship between a child and its parents. The system we had before where women had to leave work to raise children was wrong but so is the system where they have to go back.

Why isn’t it the done thing for both parents to go part time? This is not liberation, it’s another tyranny.

Meanwhile, all the art around the women in Denmark nags at them “Are your children suffering? Is your man feeling ignored and inadequate?”

Besides, all the gushing over compelling central female roles misses the fact that they have to put up with a lot of guff. A lot of gender bullshit. There are the same snide comments and double standards that British women have to face. There is the same risk of sexual violence. There is the same cultural baggage of seeing women only for sex and nurturing. There is the same pathetic pinkwash on all the “girl” toys.

Seriously, Borgen is good tv but do we really have to put up with another couple of months of journalists banging on about how great Denmark is without actually bothering to find out for sure?

The Danish Political Parties

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Politics is a spectrum. You have two opposing views and people line up along the axis. You can arrange political parties along different axes like “capitalist/socialist”, “pro workers/pro investors” and so on.

One interesting axis for immigrants in Denmark is how pro-foreigner a party is. On one end of the continuum, you have people who believe that Denmark should be preserved with no new cultural (or indeed genetic), information coming in and at the other those that believe that Denmark is a multicultural society and should continue to develop as such.

I have noticed that you can measure where on the continuum any particular party is not by WHAT they say about foreigners but how carefully they word the exact same sentiment.

For example. If you were to ask the major political parties in Denmark “Do you think it is acceptable to stop children from foreign backgrounds going to certain schools to spread them out evenly across a borough?”

Danske Folkeparti, Venstre, Socialist Folkeparti and Social Democrats would all say they agreed but they would vary in how much care they took to mask their statement with political BS.

For those not into Danish politics. The first two are “blue” right wing parties, the first is an extreme right wing party. The last two are “red” left wing parties but fairly moderate.

I have not polled other parties on their opinions and I would find their answers most instructive. I suspect Enhedslisten and Konservatives would be “Against” and “Radical Venstre” would be “For” but that is just my gut.

What is the most disquieting about the whole thing is that the proposal to “spread children out” using discrimination during school admissions  or removing free school choice is illegal. It is illegal under Danish law and illegal under international law. These four parties see nothing wrong with breaking the law but they only differ on how thick you need to lay it on to persuade everyone it is acceptable.

If you come from a country with good human rights lawyers, you can forget about them defending you here. Four children under the age of 12 have been deported without their families for being “unable to integrate” (though I think the most recent two had exceptions made for them but not a law change). The human rights lawyers have not peeped a word. Heaven knows what they are working on but they must be very busy not to want to take on those cases pro bono. They are slam dunks in any other country but here in Denmark we must have a trial by media and if we are worthy of being saved, the ministry steps in at the last minute and gives a stay of execution.

This idea of spreading children out in schools springs from the same impulses as racial segregation. People that hold these views do not view certain groups as all the way human. They’re not “folks”, they’re not “real” people. They’re “tosproger” or “efterkommere” or “udlændinge”.

Not only do they need their decisions made for them for their own good but they also need to be kept away from each other. It is seen as a priori true that having large groups of “foreigners” together is a bad thing.

If you probe a bit deeper to find out why they think this way, they say that They cannot speak the language, They cannot integrate, They cannot adapt to the culture, They cannot get jobs. This is “best for everyone”.

A child whose grandparents came from Bolivia has completely different needs from a child who has arrived in the last month from Argentina. Sure, they might have the same religion, linguistic family history and similar sorts of values but an “efterkommer” has massively different needs from a school than an “indvandrer”. For a start, the first girl will be for all intents and purposes “Danish” and she will need no help with her Danish language skills.

Still, if people in these political parties could see foreigners as real people and not blank faced immigrant automatons, they would recognise how this sort of thinking is highly prejudiced and unnuanced.

Even if they said they only wanted to spread out children who were not born in Denmark, they would be catching children who were toddlers when they moved here (and are therefore very Danish already), in their net. If they said that they wanted to spread out only children who arrived in the last five years, then they will have to accept the consequence that they will be taught by teachers who are non-specialists at bringing newcomers up to speed in the Danish language.

The idea is a load of bollocks. If they took the time to look at why the unemployment rate is higher in Denmark amongst foreigners, they would surely have to look at why so many foreigners in work are over-employed. If they looked at why some “tosprog” teens cannot seem to speak the language properly, they should also look at why so many “etsprog” teens also speak shitty Danish.  If we are looking at gang culture, then we need to make sure that certain gangs are not given the green light for capturing our imaginations with their lovely motorcycles.

Fact is, the main Danish political parties do not see foreigners as fully human. Not the refugees, not the green card immigrants, not the Greenlanders, not the love immigrants. Even the “highly skilled” and “highly educated” luxury class of immigrant is a herd of cash cows. Something to be appeased with tax breaks and networking meetings with free biscuits. Their human needs to be accepted into a community are not taken seriously and besides, they are not expected to stay.

Foreigners are just “The Other” and all that differs is how gently the party puts it.

Going Postal

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Once, I had a cup of tea with an entirely disagreeable woman who insisted that post was not searched in Denmark to discover smuggling of goods without proper payment of duties from outside the EU. It had never happened to her, ipso facto it never happens at all. She boasted quite openly about all the smuggling she had benefitted from. What’s a care package between friends? I have only ever fallen foul of the Danish Post Office once. I bought a DVD from a company outside of the EU and as its value was above the limit, duty was owed. The tax (if I recall correctly), was a small amount, not something to break the bank but the Post Office required payment for opening my mail and the total charge was more than the DVD.

Postman Pat

Et tu, Jess?

Dodging taxes is a national sport here. This is one of the first things foreigners have to get to grips with: the Danes who are proud of the welfare state but undermine it at every turn. Some Danish magazine publishers have switched their operations to the outside of the EU (for example Norway). This allows them to avoid tax on the cover price and undercut their rivals.

To close the loophole, the government plan to instruct the Post Office to open mail from outside of the EU that looks like it could be a magazine. Even though the prices of magazines are below the usual threshold for paying import tax, they are to become an exception.

If your magazine is impounded, you have to pay a release fee which is many times more than the cover price of the issue. The Post Office assure us that they WILL be searching all suspicious packages, magazine shaped or otherwise.

And so, the naughty magazine publishers who took away Danish jobs and gave them to Norwegians to undercut the other Danish magazines will have to change their ways.

I expect every single one of my readers has seen the problem with this plan, so it is funny to think that the Government were surprised by the “unintended” consequences.

Of course, all magazines sent from outside the EU will be subject to this new exception. People who like to receive a little slice of home in the way of a subscription will either have to make their peace with a monthly visit to the Post Office and a massive “fee” or drop the luxury entirely. Norwegians, Americans, Asians, Australians and Africans will be cut off, periodically speaking.

Perhaps they will seek online alternatives. Indeed, owning a library card gives you access to hundreds of international newspapers and magazines. Many offer their issues online, free or by subscription. But that is not the point. There is comfort and excitement in receiving a magazine in the post, curling up with it, taking it slowly, storing it carefully in a box. This will be a terrible blow for a lot of people. For those who cannot travel back and forth to the old country for reasons of finance or time or health; there are very few workarounds. There is always the smuggling option but that requires co-conspirators and serious camouflage of the package’s status. Many Danish people like to keep up with their language skills or esoteric hobbies with non-EU subscriptions. They will have to rely on only what the EU can provide from now on. The Post Office are serious about this. If you are importing a 30 Danish kroner magazine from outside of the EU, you must accept the consequences.

And all because a bunch of Danes wanted to dick the state out of some taxes. Honestly.

p.p. Your Local Politician

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I wrote a letter to the local MP asking for help. I outlined that the council had ballsed up the financial plans (something which they have totally admitted to in a meeting but has yet to reach the front pages of the local newspapers), and that the leader of the committee had let it slip that he thought it acceptable that schools to choose children on the basis of their ethnicity (illegal).

This is the response I have had back from the member of parliament’s secretary:-

Thank you for your mail to the member of parliament and your interest in the school reforms in F-town. As a member of the parliament, he cannot influence local decisions made by the town council. However, he sometimes talk with the mayor and he has read your mail and will pass on your worries.

About ethnicity – discrimination will definitely not be the case. It has been a problem that some schools have a very high number of pupils with another ethnic background, whereas other schools have very few. There can be initiated some initiatives to ensure a more even distribution, but I do not know whether that is the case.

I hope I answered some of your questions and if you need further information, I will recommend that you contact a city counselor from the town council.

So, everyone with me so far? I write a letter to a member of parliament reporting suspected financial mismanagement and illegal discrimination by the town council. The response I get sidesteps the idea that I am expecting the Council to be answerable for mistakes and responds as if I have written asking for the plans to be stopped because I simply do not like them. Predictable but still annoying.

The second paragraph is the most beautiful exemplar of what is wrong with Denmark. This is a “red” politician and his secretarial representative is saying “Of course there will be no illegal ethnic discrimination, that would be illegal. But there might be some discrimination of people because of the ethnic group they belong to, that’s FINE.”

The last paragraph is exactly what you might expect from any politician in any modern democracy: “Not our problem, eff off.”

But at least they got back to me, right?

EVERYONE! Denmark is a terrible place! The town council of some small town has decided to do whatever it wants to the schools. They do not have to prove their claims of savings. Even if they admit formally that they have made massive mistakes in their calculations (embarrassing schoolboy errors, as it turns out), it does not make the front page and no one has to resign. If the council accidentally lets it slip that they intend to break the law and actively discriminate against children on the basis of their “ethnicity”; everyone in the whole goddamn establishment red and blue, lines up to tell you that it is not RACISM, silly. It’s not DISCRIMINATION to discriminate against someone! We are SPREADING them out! We are HELPING them meet more white people! Do you WANT white children not to have brown friends??? Hallo? Are you RACIST?

Everyone seems so afraid of upsetting the goddamn hygge around here.

A man rang me out of the blue (my name has been in the newspapers), and said

I think it’s awful that we are sending boys into Afghanistan to die so that they can install democracy there while this SHAM goes on here. I am willing TO DIE for democracy and this is NOT good enough.

And he (and the others like him), are what are good about Denmark.

Meanwhile there are hundreds of people in my town who are not getting involved. Either because they do not think it involves them (they might think differently when the evidence of financial mismanagement comes out or their kid needs to go to a decent school); or because it involves them but they cannot be bothered; or because it involves them but are too afraid to stand up to anyone in case of offence.

English: The three wise monkeys, "See no ...

Hygge must be preserved

Fuck “consensus”. Fuck it right in the ear. This is wrong. This must stop. And it won’t because the people who are what is good about Denmark are in a tiny minority compared to the sheeplike bystanders and the racist and/or incompetent people who are wrong with it.

F-town DESERVES the mess it is going to get in the schools and in the budget, but I am certain that the children do not.

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