Lars P. Syll

Take full responsibility for your life [embedded content] Never give in. Never give up. Advertisements

[embedded content] Filmer kan beröra oss på många olika sätt. De flesta är spännande eller roliga tidsfördriv. Men sen finns också de riktigt stora filmerna. De som tar tag i oss och tränger djupt under skinnet och skakar om oss. För alltid. Kjell-Åke Anderssons filmatisering av Göran Tunströms Juloratoriet — med gudabenådad musik av Stefan Nilsson — är en sådan film. Det är en av de sorgligaste filmer som kan ses. Men på samma gång kanske också den allra vackraste. Den om...

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The Conservative belief that there is some law of nature which prevents men from being employed, that it is “rash” to employ men, and that it is financially ‘sound’ to maintain a tenth of the population in idleness for an indefinite period, is crazily improbable – the sort of thing which no man could believe who had not had his head fuddled with nonsense for years and years … Our main task, therefore, will be to confirm the reader’s instinct that what seems sensible is...

Courage is a capability to confront fear, as when in front of the powerful and mighty, not to step back, but stand up for one’s rights not to be humiliated or abused. Courage is to do the right thing in spite of danger and fear. To keep on even if opportunities to turn back are given. Dignity, a better life, or justice and rule of law, are things worth fighting for. Not to step back, in spite of confronting the mighty and powerful, creates courageous acts that stay in our...

The speed of America’s moral descent under Donald Trump is breathtaking. In a matter of months we’ve gone from a nation that stood for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to a nation that tears children from their parents and puts them in cages. What’s almost equally remarkable about this plunge into barbarism is that it’s not a response to any actual problem. The mass influx of murderers and rapists that Trump talks about, the wave of crime committed by immigrants here...

“Mediation analysis” is this thing where you have a treatment and an outcome and you’re trying to model how the treatment works: how much does it directly affect the outcome, and how much is the effect “mediated” through intermediate variables … In the real world, it’s my impression that almost all the mediation analyses that people actually fit in the social and medical sciences are misguided: lots of examples where the assumptions aren’t clear and where, in any case,...

To save Europe we have to abandon the euro The euro crisis is far from over. The tough austerity measures imposed in the eurozone has made economy after economy contract. And it has not only made things worse in the periphery countries, but also in countries like France and Germany. Alarming facts that should be taken seriously. The problems – created to a large extent by the euro – may not only endanger our economies, but also our democracy itself. How...

The correlation between high executive pay and good performance is “negligible”, a new academic study has found, providing reformers with fresh evidence that a shake-up of Britain’s corporate remuneration systems is overdue. Although big company bosses enjoyed pay rises of more than 80 per cent in a decade, performance as measured by economic returns on invested capital was less than 1 per cent over the period, the paper by Lancaster University Management School says. “Our...

Facts and opinions, though they must be kept apart, are not antagonistic to each other; they belong to the same realm. But do facts, independent of opinion and interpretation, exist at all? Have not generations of historians and philosophers of history demonstrated the impossibility of ascertaining facts without interpretation, since they must first be picked out of a chaos of sheer happenings (and the principles of choice are surely not factual data) and then be fitted into a...