Vad säger statistik om arbetslöshet? : En analys av den offentliga debattenom arbetslösheten i Sverige inför valet 2005

This essay examines the public debate concerning the unemployment of Sweden just before the general election 2005. Its main purpose is to analyse what lies behind the huge differences in statistics, as presented by the two leading factions in the debate. It concludes that these differences are foremost a problem of semantics, and that although the two factions have statistical proof of their claims, it is their use of terminology that is in fact their main weapon in the debate.The key word here is the swedish word for employment – sysselsättning – which the two facitons use in entirely different ways, creating a lot of possabilities for interpretation. This has caused a type of debate which is actually about the reinterpretation this word, and those who are to be included in the statistics as being “sysselsatt”, therefore, it is semantics that affects the number of unemployed people in the statistics.

Anton Nyström's Defense of Homosexuality

In 1919 Anton Nyström became the first person in Sweden to publish a comprehensive defense of homosexuality. He believed that its classification as a mental illness was erroneous and that Sweden's law against homosexual sex was both irrational and cruel. Nyström was a physician whose work in the medical area dealt primarily with dermatology, psychiatry and human sexuality; however he was also a prolific historian, who took a staunchly anti-Christian view in his analysis of how Christianity affected European culture, especially in the area of sexual morality. In fact, much of Nyström's medical texts dealing with human sexuality consisted of anti-Christian cultural and historical commentary. The object of this "C-uppsats" is to analyze Nyström's pamphlet, Om Homosexualitet och Hermafroditi: Belysning af Missförstådda Existenser and illustrate how its defensive structure was consistent with the pattern used by the author in his other books and articles on human sexuality. Specifically, that irrational and neurotic Christian beliefs caused both mental and physical suffering and were the source of deleterious forms of morality. Additionally, this paper will also show that the solution Nyström had for the problem of negative and erroneous attitudes towards homosexuality was to replace the sodomitic view of homosexuality with one based upon a more rational and naturalistic belief system, the basis of which could be found in the pre-Christian cultures of Europe, most especially in Greece. This new conception was to be constructed primarily out of historical example and cultural analyses. For Nyström, history writing was used both as a weapon to fight the source of negative attitudes towards homosexuality, as well as a tool that could be used to build a positive cultural model which would be beneficial for homosexuals.