By Matthew Yglesias

This Foreign Policy article on Steig Larsson and the decline of the Swedish utopia concludes with what seems to me to be a whopper of a factual error:

If you look at the statistics, Sweden is not a particularly violent country, nor a particularly lenient one to criminals. It is in about the middle of the European averages for both figures. There were 230 homicides in Sweden in 2009, compared with 143 in Washington, D.C., which has a population a bit more than half Sweden’s size. But compare these figures to what they were in the years when Sweden looked like a utopia. In 1990, there were 120 homicides in Sweden, and 472 in Washington. There is a convergence here that doesn’t flatter Sweden.

In fact, there are 9.3 million people in Sweden and only 600,000 in Sweden. In other words, Sweden has about fifteen times the population of Washington DC and less than half the murders. Stockholm is a bit larger than DC, and its murder rate of 3 per 100,000 in 2009 is way lower than DC’s murder rate of 24 per 100,000. And indeed you can see that the relatively low level of violent crime in Sweden is a necessary backdrop for the plot of Larsson’s books. In The Girl Who Played With Fire a triple-murder in Stockholm becomes a major news story that dominates nationwide media attention for several days.

By Matt Zeitlin

I run more game than the Bulls and Sonics

- Is this why Judd Gregg didn’t take the Commerce Secretary offer?

- Angry that Guantanamo isn’t closed? The administration hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory, but neither has Congress.

- The one word essay prompt at All Souls always seemed like a great thing if you wanted to test people’s ability to pull clever,  substance-free thoughts with lots of highfalutin references out of their asses. I do, however, wonder what Derek Parfit wrote for his.

- ESPN is trying really, really hard to get Americans interested in the World Cup, and not by overhyping the U.S. team.

- On that note, the MLS still kinda sucks.

- Leon Wieseltier on Sheikh Jarrah.

- Peter Beinart: dirty stinking commie.

- Quantum mechanics is not “responsible” for postmodernism. The difficulty of interpreting language or constructing grand narratives out of social phenomena has nothing to do with not being able to know with the same precision the momentum and position of a particle. If we had a pre-quantum mechanics understanding of the world, it would have no bearing on the validity, truth or usefulness of the claims and arguments of postmodernists.

I know some of you might not like Nelly, but he’s playing at Northwestern tomorrow and “Country Grammar,” for what it’s worth, holds up.

Have a fun weekend.

By Dara Lind

The furor over Facebook’s latest changes to its privacy settings has died down over the last week, and I’m a bit dismayed. Sure, as announced by Mark Zuckerberg on Monday (in a Washington Post op-ed clearly more aimed at the legislators who’d hauled him in to testify last week than at his site’s actual users) the settings have now been tweaked to give people “easier control over their information.” But Facebook’s gotten really good at this game by now — the company’s patron saint of customer service is apparently Lucy Van Pelt — and it’s odd that the people who were in an uproar a few weeks ago seem, for the most part, to have been pacified merely by the fact that some concessions are being made, rather than stopping to think about how long they might last.

This is silly. Zuckerberg has always been quite honest about the fact that Facebook will continue to move toward greater publicity with user data. When he’s forced to apologize, as he was in the Post this week, he doesn’t apologize for doing things with users’ information they never wanted to happen — he apologizes that “sometimes we move too fast.”

Zuckerberg seems to think that full publicity is the inevitable future. He said in January that “people have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.” The problem is that actual social science research shows this isn’t true. The Pew Research Center reported this week that (in the words of Web-sociology guru danah boyd) “young adults are more actively engaged in managing what they share online than older adults.” Surely Facebook, if it wanted, could figure out that its line about a youth-driven juggernaut toward publicity isn’t borne out by the data — it’s not like it doesn’t have the user data of hundreds of millions of users at its fingertips. So what gives?

I suspect that while Zuckerberg spins publicity as a social good, he actually believes it’s a moral one. It’s a theme that’s become pretty common among execs of data-collecting, data-publicizing companies: making it so that anything anyone does can be seen by anyone they know is a way of keeping them honest. Check out this quote he gave David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, in an interview:

“The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly…Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

Easy for Mark Zuckerberg to say. He’s a white, cisgendered, presumably straight male who went to Exeter and Harvard and has only ever been his own boss. It’s fair to say that he’s been on the short end of a power dynamic much less frequently than the overwhelming majority of his users. The notion that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” is the sentiment of someone who’s never had to code-switch, someone who’s never had to be in the closet for fear of getting kicked out of the house, someone who’s familiar with the world of white-collar “networking” in which bosses are expected to have semi-social bonds with their employees rather than the world of enforced hierarchy in which bosses are on the lookout for off-the-job indiscretions to punish or exploit. For many, many people, having more than one identity isn’t a sign of “lack of integrity” because it’s not even really a personal choice. It’s the only way to survive in a world that isn’t always perfectly willing to accept and respect them for who they are.

This is especially true of the young people who are Facebook’s core users, and who are, as boyd points out, the least likely to be aware of what Facebook is doing with their user data. And Facebook is making no efforts to educate them. It may have finally gotten the message that some people care about privacy, but it’s still assuming that those people are an educated elite. This week’s concessions are great for the people who know about them, but the people whose lives could be materially changed for the worse by having a single identity forced on them may not know.

I really want GLSEN, or another national organization that deals with queer youth issues, to start hounding Facebook loudly — not just for the most recent changes, or the ones before that, but for the insensitivity the company’s philosophy shows for anyone who has to manage their identity to get by. Zuckerberg isn’t the moral vanguard; he’s trying to force users vastly less privileged than he is to accept a set of social norms that need a whole lot of privilege to keep them afloat. And right now, right after Lucy has placed the football back on the ground and everyone’s stopped focusing on the battle that’s just ended, is the perfect time to point out that Facebook isn’t just going too fast but moving in a bad direction.

By Satyam Khanna

Yesterday, Yglesias outlined the rules-based system illustrated by the National Security Strategy. I think it’s worth diving into how exactly Obama has done this. Most interesting is how he has aligned the use of force doctrine with international institutions. Here’s Bush:

The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction— and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. … the United States cannot remain idle while dangers gather.

And Obama:

When force is necessary, we will continue to do so in a way that reflects our values and strengthens our legitimacy, and we will seek broad international support, working with such institutions as NATO and the U.N. Security Council. The United States must reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend our nation and our interests, yet we will also seek to adhere to standards that govern the use of force. Doing so strengthens those who act in line with international standards, while isolating and weakening those who do not.

Under the U.N., generally, the only means in which a country can use force is in self-defense. You can see that self-defense is quite limited, as it must be “necessary” and after an “armed attack.” The UN Security Council, on the other hand, is given power to basically do whatever it wants; it can fight “threats to the peace,” however broad that may be (i.e., it can launch preventive wars, if it has the votes).

Bush’s “gathering threats” doctrine basically told the U.N. Security Council, “I want your broad and unlimited power to conduct warfare, even if I am not entitled to it under international law.” Left unanswered was why every other country in the world couldn’t follow suit, launching attacks against whomever they wanted “even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.” International anarchy, really.

Obama’s NSS gives that power back to the U.N. Security Council. By preserving the right of self defense but adding the big caveat that the U.S. will “adhere to standards that govern the use of force,” U.S. is returning to the widely held view that countries can only use force in immediate self defense, and that anything more must be authorized by the procedures of international institutions.

This is a major, major victory for international stability, because, at least in theory, other rogue states can no longer look to the U.S.’s example to launch preventive war; they can only use unilateral force when it is absolutely, immediately necessary. The potential ripple effect of this NSS — a more stable, predictable system governing how and when nations can conduct warfare — is something to be proud of.

Update: As Matt notes, none of this is black and white. The use of drone attacks, for instance, raises some pretty serious questions about the right of self-defense in international law.