this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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Corruption perception index
Denmark being at the top of these lists is always so fucking funny to me. We just hide the corruption in a few layers of abstraction and whoops look at that, we're rated extremely well on all the charts!
Yeah. I laughed seeing Sweden up there. It’s as if our right wing Nazi collaborator government hasn’t been privatising and selling our welfare.
They’re currently vowing to double the amount of surveillance cameras. Oh, and what powers the police force? Palantir. Nevermind the fact that chat control originated with a Swedish politician.
I guess the scale works if corrupt and morally bankrupt is the top of the scale.
Nazi collaborator? what???
The only reason we have a right wing government is because they are actively working with the Nazi party.
But is that due to corruption or just the state wanting more power for itself? Those problems aren't necessarily the same.
Privatising public welfare to sell off to your grubby little friends is corruption. Taking bribes from Peter Thiel is corruption. One of the leading Christ Democrats has a secret donor financing her private security.
If all it takes to buy a politician is to send a threatening letter or DM, and then financing their private security on the down-low, then our politicians are easy to buy.
Sometimes Swedish corruption is even simpler. Politicians get such a high salary -- motivated by that making them less bribeable -- that they realize "when I'm out of politics, I'm fucked". What are they going to do, go back to a quarter of their salary? Then a lobby org. hands them a piece of legislation, and they know what it means. It is not a threat, they know they have just been saved, they have a way out from politics.
Johannes Klenell describes this type of corruption (among other things) in his latest book, summarized in parts in the interview here: https://poddtoppen.se/podcast/935202361/scocconomics/i-bananrepubliken-med-johannes-klenell
I don't think we agree on what corruption is. I hear this a lot from Danes in the context of "The farmers and bankers have whole political parties in their pockets" and "all our MPs are career politicians" and "you can't get a nice job unless you know someone".
While these statements aren't fully true, they're definitely real issues. But I would suggest these are not corruption. You could consider them problematic, sure, but corruption is about using your public authority to steal and misappropriate resources to enrich yourself. Stuff like bribes, embezzlement, etc. Which happens far less in Denmark than most other places I'd say.
The main exception is the royal house, which is super duper corrupt.
The first paragraph quotes are complaints about influence peddling, kickbacks, regulatory capture, cronyism, and nepotism, all of which are absolutely forms of corruption. I'm sure others forms probably apply as well.
I'm not sure what first paragraph quotes you are referring to, first paragraph of the report? Or of some comment here on Lemmy? Sorry if I'm missing something.
The quotes in the first paragraph of your comment that you were passing off as mildly unpleasant but not corruption. They definitely are corruption.
Ah, of course, thanks.
But are they? If the farmers band together to form a political party which gets voted into parliament doesn't seem like definite corruption to me. If the farmers had judges and officials in their pockets that would be corruption.
If the majority of MPs have educated themselves within law, economics and social science to pursue a career of representing their communities, and they are then elected due in part to their experience ane expertise on state and governance matters, that's not definite corruption to me. It's not clear to me that someone like that cannot earnestly represent their electorate.
If someone is looking to make a hire, and they have many qualified candidates, them choosing to hire someone recommend by their peers in the field doesn't seem like definite corruption. If they were to hire their family members or friends based despite lower qualifications, that would be nepotism.
The problem is all those ifs, and they're giant ifs. Always assuming the best case scenario is the best possible way to get completely fucked over. Obviously those strawman statements are not proof alone of corruption, but to entirely ignore them as potential warning signs is beyond foolish. And to say they don't describe corruption is demonstrably false.
I agree, but here we are talking about reality, not assumptions. In this particular context, the majority of cases are as I describe. It's completely justified to keep these things under intense scrutiny (Denmark is relatively transparent and has a functioning critical press across interests and political spectra), but if you assume the worst you start seeing corruption where there might be none.
I'm not sure I see that, but I could well be wrong. Would you care to demonstrate?
Oh yeah, no problem! Sorry I don't have a webcam or anything, so it'll have to be a textual demonstration.
Web searches the phrase "forms of political corruption"
Clicks most relevant link, probably Wikipedia
Reads the webpage, processes the words thereon
Notices how people in politics committing fraud, graft, influence peddling, bribery & kickbacks, regulatory & state capture, nepotism, patronage, and cronyism (see, I knew more applied) would very reasonably cause their constituents to have complaints like "private minority interests have major political parties in their pockets" and "lots of our politicians have been in their positions of power for an unreasonable amount of time" and "you can't get a good job or government contract or research grant or get a pothole filled unless you 'know somebody'"
Demonstration complete, now it's your turn! Let me know if you need to "see" any of that again, I can always s l o w i t d o w n for ya ;)
Thanks. Sounds like you're saying the issues I mentioned could be signs of corruption, but are not corruption in themselves? Which is true for sure, but they don't necessarily imply corruption.
And in this particular case, they get scrutinized and very little actual corruption is found.
Not signs of, examples of. Like you say, not every case of these issues is corruption, but plenty (worldwide) are. And yeah, I'm not arguing about the actual statistics in Denmark, I've no idea and you've presented no actual data. Which is fine, I probably wouldn't read it anyway, my Danish is more than rusty. You're welcome.
Could you give me a few examples?
Okay so definitely some institution bias there.
Looking over the short blurbs in their methodology reads like a list of "freedom index think tanks" that are the exact people that claim it's not corruption it's lobbying. Especially when they land on conclusions like Israel is basically as corrupt as South Korea because we just mark the west bank and Gaza as no data...
Yes that is the point of the propaganda being pointed out in the meme. To get the perception incongruent with reality. Good job!