COVID “trained seals” aren’t helpful : from the Left or the Right

when it comes to COVID, lets leave the “trained seals” to the circus... 

I have friends on the Right who seem to feel compelled to defend Trump’s response to Covid, regardless whether they have private doubts or not.

And I have friends on the left who seem to feel just as compelled to remain silent on the Swedish Social Democrats’ equally flawed response to the pandemic.

I was a social democrat, like Sweden’s current ruling party and Canada’s opposition NDP, from late 1969 to late 2004 : 35 years inside that particular whale.

The CCF proceeded the NDP from 1933 to 1961 and they had been very close students of the British Labor Party, from soup to nuts.

But by the late 1960s, the cult had moved on to the Swedish Social Democrats as the Alpha & Omega of NDP intellectual thought.

No surprise then that both the formal NDP structure and its left-leaning friends in the Canadian media have not complained anywhere near as hard about the Swedish Social Democrat response to Covid as they have when conservatives in America and the UK also propose to develop national herd immunity by letting the weak and elderly to go to the wall, for the common good.

As Orwell noted 80 years ago, conservatives and lefties criticizing each other, while defending every inane twist and turn from their own side, is nowhere as effective as when left and right critique their own sides.

On Covid, as on so many other issues, we need more Orwells and less trained seals from both Left and Right....