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You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / The Swedish Right Is A Joke

The Swedish Right Is A Joke

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Some blogger claims that her mother got screwed out of health care. The media starts sniffing around the story. If you were the Swedish right, how would you react? Wrong-o. Nobody published a vulnerable young blogger’s home address. Nobody tracked down where she works, showed up in person and yelled at the boss to fire her. Maybe the Swedish don’t realize that anyone who can afford to pour concrete countertops can obviously buy medical care retail. Instead, everyone more or less agreed that the system let her down.

The Swedish right needs to find some way to caricature people like that blogger as an alien ‘other’ who, unlike true Swedes from real Sweden, doesn’t deserve any sympathy at all. Otherwise the leftroots will swipe their cod roe and sliced egg on buttered rye flatbread and eat it every time.

I hope that nobody tells nyceve about this.

Reader Interactions

45Comments

  2. 2.

    LarsThorwald

    Too insidery baseball for me. I honestly have no idea what the hell this post is about. I really don’t.

  4. 4.

    New Yorker

    Speaking of the right and jokes, I found this via Sully:

    http://www.galileowaswrong.com/galileowaswrong/

    This HAS to be Peak Wingnut, right? I mean, the whole scientific revolution that took western civilization from the dark ages to the modern age pretty much began with Copernicus and Galileo. To try to re-establish the geocentric theory is basically to tell everyone that we need to return to the year 1400 AD as a civilization.

  7. 7.

    DougJ

    Otherwise the leftroots will swipe their cod roe and sliced egg on buttered rye flatbread and eat it every time.

    They swiped it a long time ago. The left-wing domination of Swedish politics goes too far, even for me.

    EDIT: Just to be clear, do you know how much those nuts tax alcohol? It’s insane.

  8. 8.

    slag

    Great. So this means I have to move to Sweden to find some sanity? Ahhh well….at least they offer good healthcare. Most of the time, anyway.

  12. 12.

    New Yorker

    @El Cid:

    Touche. The only thing I would say is that there never was a protracted battle between the church and the emerging scientific world over the nature of the earth’s interior. Thus, for me, the whole “Galileo is wrong” thing smacks as a political movement explicitly demanding utter submission to the infallible Catholic Church.

  13. 13.

    CT Voter

    Teh stupid got me, obviously, because I still don’t know what this is about, even with the clarification.

    I’m guessing Nyceve must have another diary at Kos explaining how crappy everything related to healthcare reform is?

    *******

    Yes, I got stupided. I should have clicked on the link.

    What’s wrong with those righties, anyway?

  15. 15.

    El Cid

    Also, our newest crazy right leader:

    As the [O’Donnell 2008] campaign entered the summer season, staff was instructed to compile a 10-page document examining how the distribution of tens of thousands of two-ounce suntan lotion packets could shake up the race, according to several members of O’Donnell’s 2008 team.
    __
    O’Donnell’s idea: To affix a clever slogan to packets that read: “Don’t Get Burned By Higher Taxes. Vote Christine O’Donnell 2008″ and distribute them at local parades […]
    __
    “It was an irresponsible idea,” said David Keegan, who served as O’Donnell’s financial officer. “And half the people in the street thought she was throwing condoms out of the truck.”

  19. 19.

    BTD

    @Guster:

    I know the reference. I don’t understand the post.

    I clicked the links and everything,

    You seem to understand it. How about a translation?

  22. 22.

    Tim F.

    The caustic tone illustrates how close I feel to the end of my tether. Honestly, America has plumbed depths of stupid that would turn the Time Cube guy’s hair white. I might be one Malkin toddler hunt away from going Galt Billmon completely. I should feel good for Sweden, and I do, but it rubs sand in the wound when some other place makes public policy discussions look easy. What the hell is wrong with us.

  27. 27.

    Peter J

    The left-wing domination of Swedish politics goes too far, even for me.

    The Social Democrats have, since the end of WW2, been in power for all but 13 years.

  28. 28.

    Linda Featheringill

    Otherwise the leftroots will swipe their cod roe and sliced egg on buttered rye flatbread and eat it every time.

    Oh, no! Not that!

    Of course, the Swedish Right is probably a bit left of Obama and definitely to the left of much of the Administration Staff.

  30. 30.

    Anoniminous

    This has nothing to do with her health care; her health care is 100% covered by the state. The mother was refused living benefits – her sick pension and/or early retirement – which is the equivalent of Social Security.

  31. 31.

    Anoniminous

    Link to original blog post … in Svenska. You’ll have to copy/paste to the Google language tools for a full ‘Swedlish’ translation but here are the last couple of paragraphs:

    Note: words in [ ] are my quick translation to make the meaning come across.

    “This is a farce. Everyone knows it. But nothing we can do about it. No matter what they find on it is tax money that pays for this. It’s all the same whether it is sickness, activity or income support. Can not let people be alone? Who has won anything in the way that a human degradation? The bourgeois politicians like to talk about incentives to work, but what incentive [can] my mother [have]? Should it be so hard to accept that some people can not contribute as much as everyone else? In addition, she has [worked] as an animal for over thirty years, gone to work every day. Could not it be enough? Has she not contributed enough? If no sick pay is for my mother, who is it then for?

    It’s fun to say healthy people, the only valid reason for absence is own funeral. That is what the Alliance also says. But they’re not kidding.

    This is Sweden in 2010, under the bourgeois regime. For me this is not the choice at any time. These are not abstract questions wallet or even pure ideological positions much. It’s about a [person] and her right to dignity.”

    BTW, the Alliance is a coalition of center-right and right parties based on neo-liberal political/economic/social ideas, e.g., they want Sweden to be more like the US.

  35. 35.

    El Cid

    @Linda Featheringill:
    Though it really had a fashion in the 19th century, there were still 20th century adherents. In the 19th century there was at least no consensus on the interior of the Earth, but by the 20th century there soon was.

    [Certain 20th century] writers have proposed that “ascended masters” of esoteric wisdom inhabit subterranean caverns or a hollow Earth. Antarctica, the North Pole, Tibet, Peru, and Mount Shasta in California, USA, have all had their advocates as the locations of entrances to a subterranean realm referred to as Agartha, with some even advancing the hypothesis that UFOs have their homeland in these places.
    __
    A book allegedly by a “Dr. Raymond Bernard” which appeared in 1964, The Hollow Earth, exemplifies this idea. The book rehashes Reed and Gardner’s ideas and ignores Symmes. Bernard also adds his own ideas: the Ring Nebula proves the existence of hollow worlds, as well as speculation on the fate of Atlantis and the origin of flying saucers. “Bernard” argued that the inhabitants of Atlantis took refuge in the Earth’s interior before the city was destroyed in great calamity.[5] It was Atlanteans who piloted the flying machines known in ancient India as vimanas and in the modern world as flying saucers.[5] After the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bernard claimed, the Atlanteans became concerned that radioactive air might flow into the world’s interior, and so some emerged in their flying saucers in an act of self-defense.[5] An article by Martin Gardner revealed that Dr.Walter Siegmeister used the pseudonym `Bernard’, but not until the publishing of Walter Kafton-Minkel’s Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 years of dragons, dwarves, the dead, lost races & UFOs from inside the Earth, in 1989, did the full story of Bernard/Siegmeister become well known.

    But then there has always been crazy nonsense like Worlds in Collision or Forbidden Archaeology or Chariots of the Gods.

  36. 36.

    Alex S.

    Sweden, and probably all other european countries aren’t big enough to separate the population by overarching categories like liberals and conservatives. By now, those two categories are correlated to geography, education, class and ethnicity.

  37. 37.

    Ruviana

    I thought it was from the recently uncovered fouth volume of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series….

  40. 40.

    John Bird

    Hey, cool, it’s like Tim F. read my comment on here on the Sumner piece and decided to provide evidence for it :)

    Seriously, though, thanks, I’m always looking for further evidence that the success story of these countries, especially in times of crisis and reform, is in part because the two sides of the aisle have reached a consensus – a consensus well to the left of both parties in the United States.

    So, as a result, questions of whether someone gets health care or not are practical ones of government conduct and policy and project planning, not moral ones of personal worth.

  41. 41.

    Delia

    @DougJ:

    Just to be clear, do you know how much those nuts tax alcohol? It’s insane.

    A long time ago I had an interesting conversation with a young Swedish woman who was living in Boston. She said she didn’t know where Sweden got its reputation for being liberated. Also, that every weekend Swedes packed the ferries to Denmark so they could go drinking.

    Personally, everything I know about the Swedish right wing comes from Stieg Larsson.

  42. 42.

    Platosearwax

    @DougJ:

    EDIT: Just to be clear, do you know how much those nuts tax alcohol? It’s insane.

    Not as much as they tax it here in Norway. Hell, we go to Sweden to buy alcohol because it is so cheap.

  44. 44.

    Jbird

    @Platosearwax:

    My favorite Norway story from my Air Force brat friend (now an Iraq war vet) is how he fished some drunk half-drowned German-speaking businessman out of a bog on the road back from Systembolaget.

    He, personally, loved the way mixed economies treated retail, and pointed out to me that people in those countries see their tax dollars at work every time they pop out a baby or go to the doctor, so they couldn’t care less about high vice taxes beyond the normal bitching and moaning in the five minutes after they leave the store. Don’t know whether he was just being ornery but I can see it.

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