What the Danish and European media misunderstand (and misrepresent) about America, and vice versa. And other stuff.
We had guests over for lunch Saturday afternoon. Unlike many Danish households, we hadn’t planned our day around the evening’s European Cup match between Denmark and Finland, but we weren’t deliberately avoiding it, either. By the time 18:00 rolled around, our little gathering was winding down so we turned on the game. We didn’t watch…
Joe Biden is now in Europe—if the Brits will forgive our encompassing their scepter’d isle within our continent—and DR’s ace U.S. correspondent Steffen Kretz is ready to help us understand what it’s all about. Analysis: Is America back, as Joe Biden claims?Steffen Kretz, DR.dk, June 9 First, a joke. (Bear with me.) A couple has…
My spirits were lifted this morning by a local feature posted on TV2 last night: Total ban on loud music: harbor will seize SoundboksesTV2.dk, June 8 A “Soundboks,” if you’ve been fortunate enough not to have learned from experience, is an industrial-strength speaker that can generate massive sound from a relatively small cabinet. Designed by…
I couldn’t resist the metaphorical implications of Salvatore Garau’s invisible statue yesterday, but over the weekend a much more practical story had broken and I’d intended to write about it before Io Sono didn’t catch my eye. So here we are, a day late and a dollar short: Will stop “the race to the bottom”:…
The Italian artist Salvatore Garau sold a sculpture entitle Io Sono (“I Am”) for $18,000. That’s not so remarkable. The interesting thing about the sculpture, and even more interesting thing about the sale, is that the sculpture is invisible. “Invisible” is, like beauty and astigmatism, in the eye of the beholder. Or not in the…
More and more damning information is coming about Dr. Fauci, the Wuhan lab leak theory, and the mechanics of statecraft applied to the suppression of scientific inquiry, even from some piously leftwing outlets. The border crisis continues unabated. Mere weeks after Eastern European hackers shut down a major gas pipeline and caused gas shortages across…
Note: There was no AmerikanskeTilstande post yesterday due to an unforeseen opportunity to dine with Herself, unaccompanied by our spawn, at an actual restaurant, for the first time since 2019. The opportunity was seized. Science and math are magnificent fields worthy of our deepest respect, as well as our gratitude for all they’ve given us,…
An article published on Berlingske.dk this afternoon doesn’t have much “news value” at first glance, but I’m glad to see it because I so desperately want Denmark not to follow America down the road to hell. The headline is “American elite university drops Latin and Greek to fight racism,” and that’s a straightforward summary of…
The big story today is DR’s revelation that Denmark’s foreign intelligence service (the FE, analogous to America’s CIA) cooperated with America’s NSA to monitor the digital communications of Germany’s top leadership: German Chancellor Angela Merkel, her Foreign Minister, and the opposition leader, among other political leaders from northern European nations. The big DR story is…
Yesterday’s post was all about the narrative—specifically, the leftist-controlled American narrative that drives so much establishment media coverage and big tech censorship. (Note that not long after I posted that, Facebook lifted its ban on posts speculating about a possible lab origin of the virus. Thoughtcrime abolished! As I foretold you: it will eventually be…
Conventional wisdom tells us that control of “the narrative” is everything these days. And I mean everything. To control the narrative, we’re told, is to control the direction of our culture. Here in Denmark, there in America, and everywhere else besides: to frame the terms of debate is to win. Perception is reality. Maybe, maybe…
Note: AmerikanskeTilstande took a four day weekend without advance notice. We apologize to our readers and hope you’ll both forgive the omission. Turns out that when you shut things down, fewer things happen. That was the news from TV2 on Friday, in any case: “Violence in nightlife area fell drastically with midnight closings,” the headline…
If you believe in communism—that is, if you understand and adhere to its tenets—you’re a communist. If you believe in socialism, you’re a socialist. If you believe in capitalism, you’re a capitalist. If you believe in nudity, you’re a nudist. If you believe in race, you’re a racist. That is, if you first of all…
There’s a passage from G.K. Chesterton’s Heretics (1905) that I’ve cited a few times on this blog. It’s a typically playful Chestertonian spin on a bit of the Gospel, specifically John 20:29, but since most of us aren’t as fluent in scripture as Chesterton’s readers were back in the day, let’s refresh: Jesus saith unto…
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Denmark was covered widely in the Danish press. TV2 had a liveblog. So did Berlingske. So did Jyllands-Posten. So did B.T. Politiken doesn’t appear to have run a liveblog, but they squeezed a headline out of a commonplace: “Blinken: It’s a true pleasure to be in Denmark.”…
There were other things I wanted to write about today: several articles about U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Denmark, a fawning “portrait” of him on DR over the weekend, the murderous and hateful Islamic State twin sisters who want to return “home” to Denmark from their camp in Syria, Danish coverage of…
Note: Due to the long holiday weekend, AmerikanskeTilstande won’t be posting again until Monday, May 17. Let’s say you’ve been hosting a dinner party for nine. It’s time for dessert. You’re going to be serving pie. Mmm, delicious pie! And let’s say your nine guests are unusually particular about how much pie they can eat….
Not that long ago, a Danish newspaper editor had a theory. His theory was that Danes were so intimidated by the threat of Islamist violence that they were censoring themselves from speaking critically about Islamism. As he explained it himself, “widening fears and feelings of intimidation in dealing with issues related to Islam” were breeding…
Do you believe in redemption? Not as a motif in a superhero movie. Not as a hackneyed cliché in the blurb on the back of a paperback. Do you believe that an actual human being, flawed and bumbling, can redeem him- or herself through sincere repentance and good deeds? Could you yourself could forgive, sincerely…
