Of course we can't say Communism and socialism are terrible ways of managing government--no true Communist or socialist society has ever existed, since they haven't been able to match utopian ideals. Really? This lousy argument continues to pop up with regular intervals, unsurprisingly on Facebook:

Socialism hasn't failed as there has never been an actual socialist society anywhere. The former Soviet Union, East Bloc countries, and contemporary Cuba, China, and North Korea, are not Socialist. These societies have incorporated certain elements of Socialism to some extent, as have Japan, and most advanced industrial nations, excepting the U.S. In Western Europe, this system (with some exceptions, and bearing in mind nothing is entirely ideal) worked quite well until fairly recently.

Oh yeah, so what do we call those societies? Fairy tale societies? Of course it doesn't matter that they call themselves socialists, reject the idea of private property, believe in complete government control, and worship Marxism. Since they haven't actually gotten rid of their government and united in brotherhood across the borders, they're not yet Communists. But we can all spot a capitalist or a Nazi when we see money at banks or swastikas on TV, right?

If we take this argument to its logical conclusion, we can't really say there are any ideological societies at all. America isn't a capitalist country, because the government owns some parts of the economy. Germany wasn't National Socialist during the war, because there were still a few Jews left in Berlin. Sweden isn't democratic because it's chosen media censorship over public polling a few times.

Dear readers, any time someone pulls this argument, fire back with the absurdity of applying it to other ideologies. At that point we can only look at history and conclude that societies that have called themselves socialist have all failed, and societies calling themselves capitalist have escaped mass poverty and generated wealth. White armchair academics are lucky, because they have the exclusive right of denying this, while enjoying freedoms and wealth billions of people in this world would be ready to kill for. Maybe one day, when someone points a gun to their head and takes their money away, they'll understand what makes the world go 'round.

People know that I am against sex education in school. To me it's simple: sexuality and sexual values should be taught to children by parents and their communal culture, not by public messengers of the government. The rest is up to individuals when they're experimenting in their teens. The biological aspect of sexuality should be taught in biology class based on scientific facts, but there shouldn't be any lessons concerning values, politics or lifestyle based upon those facts.

What happens when the government teaches our children about sexuality? They indoctrinate them with whatever ideological trend is popular at the moment. In Sweden it's been ultra-liberalism since the late 60's. It's a fact that gay and queer lobby groups are co-writing the biology books to suit their propaganda. Our teachers even hand out condoms from those lobby groups in class. And you say public education is not politically biased? When I went through sex education in school, I learned the following:

• "Here, have a condom!" (this indirectly suggests it's normal for 14-year-olds to have sex, as long as they're protected).
• "Can anyone here give suggestions on how to spice up sex life?" (this not only suggests the above, but really excludes a majority of the teens in the class room who haven't yet had any such experience).
• Homosexuality is just as morally acceptable as heterosexuality.
• Abortion is an important human right for women.

Read carefully: I'm not saying either of these suggestions are right or wrong. I'm saying it shouldn't be up to our education system to teach our children about them. Just as I teach my children certain values, certain lifestyle choices, certain moral behavior and certain cultural ideals, I have the right to be a dominant influence in how they perceive sexuality. I don't trust teachers or politicians to ensure that my future daughter avoids whoring like her friends and my future boy avoids ending up paying alimony to some dumb lay he screwed over when he was drunk.

Most young people, especially teenagers, are not capable of thinking for themselves or withstanding peer and teacher pressure. If an authority they trust say heterosexuality is oppressive or that whoring is good, they're gonna buy it. I remember gay lobby groups coming to college and trying to persuade us to convert to liberal sexuality. Most of my friends were brought up traditionally; they called the teacher a fag and ran him out. Some were immigrants and were taught to not even accept homosexuality.

Critics will say there are Christian families who profess extreme forms of chastity, or extremists who rally against homosexuals. So? Let them do it. Who are you, or the government, to say what they ought to teach their children? If the attitudes have no place in society as a whole, or if they're simply not in line with reality, chances are the children will grow up to dismiss them later on. Either way it's not any central power's job to babysit parents nor their children about this. The government's incapable of being unbiased on these issues, and regardless if what it teaches ought to be perceived as "good," it's brainwashing and has no place in public education.

Having tried out most conceivable forms of housing - living with family, living with grandmother, living alone, living in dorm, sharing apartment with friend etc., I've thought about how most young people prefer to live alone these days. In Sweden in particular people want big space, all by themselves. Pure lonewolfing. At some point you begin to wonder why.

Young people before their mid-20s, who are not yet in a serious long-term relationship, should not live alone. They grow accustomed to their own silly drama details without recognizing a larger social whole. That whole can be anything from a friend to a small collective. Everyone is busy blaming socialism for society's problems without recognizing that the reason civil responsibility is declining has to do with our housing patterns. We live lonely lives isolated from each other, demanding the world adapting to us instead of us trying to adapt and master the world.

If you can set aside the small problems that occur when sharing housing with someone, you'll find an immense richness in sharing every day moments, helping each other to mend broken things, partying together, leaving each other alone when that's needed. Collective housing strengthens community spirit, social responsibility, independent initiative and common solutions to common problems. These features are essential in any culture that wishes to escape the pacifying effects of welfare socialism.

While private space is one of the beauties of modern life, I seriously challenge all young people reading this to dare sharing housing with an interesting person, friend or "trusted stranger." Discover that sharing life with other people is more rewarding and fun than having a big, lonely apartment. The welfare State can only begin to lose its power over our lives, once we start building civil bonds and acting in the interest of a larger social whole. Sharing space with other people is a journey that enables you to develop such a lifestyle.

Martin recently bumped up this brilliant article about the job crisis in the humanities, in his post about prestige bubbles:

The follow-up letters I receive from those prospective Ph.D.'s are often quite angry and incoherent; they've been praised their whole lives, and no one has ever told them that they may not become what they want to be, that higher education is a business that does not necessarily have their best interests at heart. Sometimes they accuse me of being threatened by their obvious talent. I assume they go on to find someone who will tell them what they want to hear: "Yes, my child, you are the one we've been waiting for all our lives." It can be painful, but it is better that undergraduates considering graduate school in the humanities should know the truth now, instead of when they are 30 and unemployed, or worse, working as adjuncts at less than the minimum wage under the misguided belief that more teaching experience and more glowing recommendations will somehow open the door to a real position.

Unfortunately, during the three years that I searched for positions outside of academe, I found that humanities Ph.D.'s, without relevant experience or technical skills, generally compete at a moderate disadvantage against undergraduates, and at a serious disadvantage against people with professional degrees. If you take that path, you will be starting at the bottom in your 30s, a decade behind your age cohort, with no savings (and probably a lot of debt).

It's hard to tell young people that universities recognize that their idealism and energy — and lack of information — are an exploitable resource. For universities, the impact of graduate programs on the lives of those students is an acceptable externality, like dumping toxins into a river. If you cannot find a tenure-track position, your university will no longer court you; it will pretend you do not exist and will act as if your unemployability is entirely your fault. It will make you feel ashamed, and you will probably just disappear, convinced it's right rather than that the game was rigged from the beginning.

That's a pretty harsh thing to read for those who've already, or are still spending loans and savings on studying literature, philosophy or linguistics. There are no jobs, and the more people who go on dreaming about a future scholar position, the bigger this crisis will become. It's a disaster, not simply because society just ain't valuing the humanities as high as other fields of study, but really for the growth in unemployment and general disdain among young people.

The situation is even worse, as expected, in countries where government manages student loans, like Finland or Sweden. Here you can basically freeride directly from high school to the university and start pulling out student loans without any specific requirements, other than to actually complete the courses in time. This means a bunch of young people, confused about their lives in general, figure they like to read, or talk, or study some obscure course, and thus start living on loans.

This breeds tons of problems, and I've seen all of it. People who study because they want to party. People who study because they want to decide "later on" what to do. People who study because that's what today's culture expects you to do. People who study to pass time. And people who study, well, because they're confused and are not sure what else to do. This is easy when government pays the dues.

Now, imagine the American situation instead, even if these problems are also American to some extent. Your parents plan ahead for years that their kid is going to college one day. They save, they plan, they put away money, just so that an education will be open in the future. It's a big thing. Once that child goes out in the world to study and become someone, it damn well knows it's spending daddie's and moma's cash. You're actually studying because your parents made it possible for you. As a consequence, you're less likely to screw around, party too much and play games. It's real and you do your best to get somewhere in life.

Student loans are dangerous when they're made available to anyone at any consequence, and especially if the government pays the dues, because governments tend to be uniform, hence indiscriminate. It doesn't make any demands that you do something important with that money. And yet, debt piles up. What's worse, often highlighted by Charles Murray, society nowadays expects you to study at a university, while the truth is that only a smaller percentage of a population should need to. It's an elite institution, not a community center. We pile up debt and broken dreams on top of academic illusions. The humanities, bless its disciplines, doesn't offer us much in the way of jobs. So what does it offer? Dream jobs. We need to rethink our academic culture completely in the West.

At the pharmacy, buying overpriced medicine, I walk to the end of a looong queue. Only one person is serving customers. Suddenly she just walks away without saying anything to anyone. Being Sweden, no one complains or riots. Everyone remains quiet, except...

Old man: Government management...

Me: That's right.

Old man: Pardon me?

Me *turns around*: I agree.

Old man: *chuckles* They're probably on their lunch time or something.

Me: And we're standing in a neat, government managed queue.

Old man: If this was privately owned, we wouldn't be standing here in the first place.

Other people looked at us, no one said anything. They were thinking the same thing. What if we'd let competition do its job? How about lower prices on important medication, shorter queues and more personal expertise? When will Scandinavia treat its citizens, not as byproducts of a gigantic bureaucracy, but as private adults with individual needs and desires?

Despite my appearance on this medium, I’m generally reluctant to share my pseudo-political, philosophical views with anyone who rests outside of my discipline. Most people are trained to argue, not engage in meaningful discourse, which entails actual re-examination and potential reformation of one’s views. In short, emotivist appeals are often the most effective, and I find the most effective way of arguing with the average person is to present an emotivist perspective on reason (irony noted).

A socialist I know openly espouses employing fashionable issues to reach more people. Populism is intellectually unsound, and sadly the only way to effectively garner attention for your cause or idea. Socialism is sexy because people in their late teens and twenties work low-income jobs and only see piles of debts in the form of tuition; the feeling of unfairness and exploitation permeates them. The yearning for the adolescent urge to rebel is manifested only in a slightly more sophisticated manner politically. Socialism is ironically a selfish philosophy, and something I largely consider a four-year temper tantrum through university.

How is cultivating discourse then possible? What hope is there for humanity if not every man is not capable of philosophy? Does the solution lie in Platonism or in Nietzsche’s perspectivism? I hope to develop my voice on Corrupt by further exploring these questions, in my quest to make meaningful discourse possible en masse.

If you ask most women, they will vote for leftist policies every single time, because it is in their nature to avoid conflict and competition. They want peace by co-operation at all costs. If they can let a bureaucracy to do it for them, they'll go for it. Over the years I've observed how young women are rapidly taking over radical leftism and its off-shots: vegetarianism, socialism/anti-capitalism, humanism and multiculturalism.

Jack Donovan over at the Spearhead notes:

If women are generally more collectivist in nature, unless there is some check against collectivism, it seems likely that over time the state will become progressively more collectivist.

That's exactly what is going on in Scandinavia. The dominant political women in Sweden's government each promote their version of welfare collectivism: Mona Sahlin (Social Democrats) wants to make paying taxes "sexy," Nyamko Sabuni (Liberals) wants the government to enforce religious diversity, Maria Wetterstrand (Green Party) calls for cap & trade and tax regulations against climate change, Maud Olofsson (Center Party) proudly celebrates the Pride Festival, Birgitta Ohlsson (Liberals) wants to get rid of all borders and turn feminism into a State doctrine...wait, it already is.

The more women we promote to high political positions in society, the more welfare-ism, socialism and feminism will wreck our cultures. The common denominator in all of these ideologies is the principle of enforced collectivism. This in turn is based on the misguided perception that human individuals are motivated by reason alone. If we all just share our wealth, we'll all be rich. Only a fool could come up with such an idea, knowing that deep down inside individuals are mostly selfish, and governments always tend to be slow, corrupt and intellectually inert.

Leftism has spawned a culture of repressed resentment among women, which have led to them feeling mistreated, weak and powerless. This is what they now express through government policies and programs, combined with a passion to help any group they perceive as equally weak (animals/nature, immigrants, disabled people, children etc. etc.):

13. Many leftists have an intense identification with the problems of groups that have an image of being weak (women), defeated (American Indians), repellent (homosexuals), or otherwise inferior. The leftists themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They would never admit it to themselves that they have such feelings, but it is precisely because they do see these groups as inferior that they identify with their problems. (We do not suggest that women, Indians, etc., ARE inferior; we are only making a point about leftist psychology).

14. Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men.

Unabomber Manifesto

The Unabomber recognized that people who feel inferior to others will always beg for a system where everyone's needs are taken care of by others. This impulse, which takes abnormally submissive forms among many leftist-leaning women, has become a disease in Europe to the point where men are actively defending this same impulse. Political women are quick to label capitalism, elitism and self-advancement as "greed" and would like to control us all with government programs. They won't stop until we stop them. Thankfully, not all people buy this misguided intention for world socialism:

Friedman is simply stating the obvious: independence is not the same as selfishness, and even if it were, most people are by nature selfish, so we need to construct society with this in mind. We cannot assume, like most women in politics do, that we are rational, compassionate and good deep down inside and will act thereafter if we have a system that can manage it for us. History has a terrible track record for such societies. Rather, greed motivates the welfare fanatics, because all they want is to use your resources to better themselves. If that is not selfishness, what is?

I was taught by my father, through his actions, that a real man takes care of his own problems. I never questioned that philosophy for a moment and we never talk about it. It's a quiet agreement between all men: if you can do it yourself, do it. Don't stand there and whine like a pussy when something goes wrong. This behavior fosters the kind of men that healthy women are looking for, and it's the kind of quality material we need to build a successful society.

Female impulses, if given too much power, pacifies this process and hands it over to bureaucrats. Brilliance and civilization came to us through the genius of excellent men and women who fulfilled their destinies. Any force working against it is a virus and must be rooted out. To all men who are still not caved in by feminism: time to saddle up and take charge again. Refuse to be a part of any victim culture. If you're being discriminated against, you'll have to work harder. If you feel inferior, you have to work yourself stronger. Harden, toughen up and emulate the smartest of assholes around you. We're reclaiming lost domains--ever onward into countless battles!

This guy, as Brett Stevens points out on Facebook, is a fool:

Let's set aside his "unique" blend of leftist ideologies for a moment. He separates Communism as an ideology envisioned by Marx from its consequences seen in Soviet Russia. The argument? He's not promoting the "bad" or "failed" sort of Communism, e.g. the sort of Communism history has documented so far in every place where it's been applied, but a "true" Marxist sort that probably only exists in books.

If you watch this video and place this argument in its context, you realize how foolish it really is. It's absurd to define an ideology as pure on paper and refusing to acknowledge the consequences it brings in real life. If "true" socialism is so hard to achieve, or if it most times ends up becoming a paranoid genocidal system of tyranny, that pretty much speaks for itself. Put simply, this man is a fool.

Since every Communist country to date has failed to reach its utopian state, Communists and socialists everywhere are nowadays using their failure as an argument for their world view. It goes something like this: since we've never seen any "true" Communist country come to life, we can't blame any Communist society for having failed. That's gotta be the worst political argument made in history.

It's not really interesting whether what we've seen so far is "true" Communism or not. What's interesting is WHAT we've seen to come out of this ideology, no matter what we call it or how far it's gone. Genocide, economic chaos, slaughter of the aristocracy and a neurotic culture top the list. To defend or in any way excuse Communism or its little brother socialism by saying we've not seen any "real" socialism come to action is plain absurd. This goes for Communism, just as much as for National Socialism.

The idea that workers controlled the means of production in Nazi Germany is a bitter joke. It was actually a combination of aristocracy and capitalism.

The workers didn't control the means of production--so what? Sweden is a socialist democratic country, but our workers don't own any means of production. In which country has workers ever done so on a larger scale? This doesn't mean that socialism doesn't exist. It just means that it fails to live up to its ideals.

The employer, however, was subject to the frequent orders of the ruling Nazi elite.

That's Statism, but you might also call it socialism, because the government controls the employers. In America that would be called socialism indeed.

The Nazis abolished trade unions, collective bargaining and the right to strike.

...but...

An organization called the “Labor Front” replaced the old trade unions, but it was an instrument of the Nazi party and did not represent workers.

How many labor unions today actually represent their workers rather than the elite? If a single political party controls the workers, no matter if it's through a union or not, it's a worship of government. Socialism and Communism work the same way, they just have the ideal of one day replacing that government monopoly with anarchy. Today we know that's never happened. People who still insist that is not socialism, either try to pull a fast one, or have no clue whatsoever what they're talking about.

Social Democratic welfare States, I argue, are more suspect to a homogeneous political climate. The nature of any government bureaucracy is to reinforce its own importance and expansion. For instance, if you sit at the top of a health department and a new flu is out, even if it's not really harmful to the public as a whole, you'll want to take some--any measure against it to appear like you're being effective. That way you'll receive more funding from politicians.

With an ever-growing welfare apparatus, political parties will have to dedicate more and more of their energy toward maintaining and managing it, meaning a big part of their political agenda will revolve around tax rates and government policies. So even if you're a Conservative and don't trust governments too much, you'll inherit a system that needs to be managed anyway. The chance of reducing or even removing a department or institute that already exists is minimal, and voters will feel less safe if you suddenly announce that a health department or a job center must go, since they are essentially seen as platforms of safety.

Once a society becomes Social Democratic or any socialist democratic variant thereof, it will therefore effectively homogenize its political arena and limit it to a liberal-leftist battlefield where small government changes become hot topics during elections. If you look at America right now, you have one major party that wants to reform but keep an old health care system, while another big party in power wants to reform and change the current system. In Sweden the health care discussion exclusively revolves around what the tax rates should be, not about any change to the system itself.

In Social Democratic societies the political alternatives meet in the Center and orient themselves around leftism, because Conservatism transforms into welfare-friendly liberalism, which sometimes shares similar goals with Conservatism, but wants to implement them through a bureaucracy. We see a similar development in America where an increased influence from bureaucracies after the Iraq War and the government take-overs of companies in crisis has led to a more homogeneous political climate around foreign policy and the economy.

Welfare democracy, put simply, is a dead end and will eventually force the West to commit suicide.

When describing your political ambitions, the most common response you get from (leftist) people is this: "So you want lower taxes and a reduced welfare State? Man, that sounds a lot like selfishness to me." The key argument here is clearly that you're altruistic if you donate taxes to a general welfare system that benefits all, while you're selfish if you don't. But at a closer look, this is nonsense.

If you turn the argument around, you might as well say that it's selfish to assume you have a right to someone else's money, especially if you haven't contributed an equal (if any) amount yourself. This is the hidden fallacy in many socialist arguments: it sounds good to take from all and hand everything out equally, but the result always ends up being a large segment of lazy and selfish people who abuse the system to get by without doing their part.

Of course, an additional argument against the socialist idea is that it's not necessarily selfish to prefer to live as independent as possible. The grumpy Korean veteran in Gran Torino isn't selfish--he just prefers to maintain his own lifestyle without the intrusion of others. Still, he saves the life of at least one person, purely out of good heart. Can we assume all Conservatives would? No, but then again, we're not libertarians who assume people share equal intentions. We need leadership, we need government (to some extent), and we need culture and tradition. It's not perfect, but history tells us it beats all socialist and liberal forms of society any day.

Scenario: You are sharing a kitchen with 20 other people. This includes full cooking equipment. You notice a few people have bought their own dish soap, but realize most won't. It doesn't take two days before a huge mountain of old, unwashed dishes prides the sink. In short: there's no shared dish soap, so people simply take the easy way out and leave their things to rot.

Argument: You realize this won't work in the long-term, so you suggest the idea that all people put up an equal sum of money to buy a big bottle of dish soap to be shared collectively. That way, you argue, there will be a practical incentive for everyone to make their dishes, and you can worry about studies, girls and beer instead.

Can you figure out the pitfalls, including the logical fallacies, of this argument?

(Remember, I don't want comments claiming this is socialism/communism/crowdism. I want to read your perspectives on why this argument isn't water proof, period. Readers who contribute with intelligent remarks will gain status until next week's scenario. Don't let me down.)

The White Nationalist movement, for those of you who haven't yet noticed, is a club of desperate socialist goof balls pretending to be anti-leftist. Yet their entire view on State and society reeks of socialism. One of their hallmarks is that they can never get along, so they start up five new parties and websites every other month. Their latest deal is "antikap.nu," a Swedish website that claims it's anti-globalist, but not leftist.

Unsurprisingly, their analysis of the financial crisis in the West becomes a subtle way of blaming it all on Jews and America. Here's how I countered one of their readers:

Alex: Everyone cannot be anti-capitalists, some need to be liberal like you or else capitalism wouldn't exist and thus no anti-capitalists, no struggle, no heroic idealism. In other words we'd be weak couch potatoes without you!

The Social Democrats are for EU/UN/IMF etc., and thus not protectionists.

You exclude the fact that the Social Democrats outright owned large chunks of the private market via the government: http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4059

You seem to have forgotten that the Swedish crown increased in value in relationship to the dollar during the financial crisis? It is more intelligent now to talk about a recovery of the dollar than to talk about a falling crown, even if both claims naturally are correct in mathematical terms. But your way of expressing yourself is manipulative and evil since today's exchange course is completely normal, historically.

The Swedish crown increased in value in relationship to the dollar, not in regards to its historical value: http://www.riksbank.se/templates/Page.aspx?id=26813

"Our" (not mine, I'm a land owner) economy was built around Ericsson, Volvo and others going to Lehman Brothers once in a quarter to borrow money from those gamblers, and using this money as a sort of "pre-payment on the salary." After the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the pyramid selling scheme of certain other Jews, an important part of the business model of the Swedish companies fell.

The business model didn't work. Why you bring up Jews in all of this remains unclear.

If capitalism was superior to planned economy it's a bit strange that all capitalist nations suddenly become planned economies during world wars? Even USA and England reduced their capitalism and introduced "war economy," i.e. a form of planned economy. Kennedy claimed that the planned economy of Soviet Union most likely was superior to America's capitalism and wanted to take away the capitalist's authority to print people's money. Sure, Soviet Union collapsed when the Trotskyists regained power, but that could equally be explained by looking at their race materialism... That one economy would be "superior" to the other is a hard claim to make. Though one can claim that an honest, easily understandable and transparent economic system minimizes the risk for "bubbles" and "crashes."

Why would increased protectionism during war necessarily mean that a planned economy is superior to market economy? Here you lump Keynesian and Monetarist theory together, and that's intellectually dishonest. There's not just one brand of capitalism.
Race materialism, what?
Capitalism has dragged almost all of Eastern Europe, China, Russia (currently) and South Korea out of poverty and low GDP, I think that speaks for itself. The crisis you talk about is not due to capitalism itself, but that it's been poorly implemented and followed (see above).

Really, that sounds like hocus pocus.. Inflation is the product of an increase in the money supply by those who print money, banks and the stock market: When someone takes a loan the amount of the money in the world increases and the prices then go up, same thing when stocks "increase in value," then people get richer and pay more for their potatoes due to market economic high school math.

Inflation has gone up thanks to a government allowing banks to regulate the economy via interest rates. If you're not a Keynesian, you deem this is wrong, even if you believe in capitalism.

We who are neither liberals nor socialists, but Conservative nationalists, visit www.CORRUPT.org

There was a simple reason why I warned our readers about the swine flu hysteria back in April: I knew governments and health organizations would eventually freak out over this. I was right. Sweden is currently panicking over the 900+ cases of swine flu reported in the country. So far one person is said to have died from swine flu. Before you panic also, consider this:

• There is no epidemic in Sweden. 900 people have contracted the swine flu, but in comparison to tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, which aren't classified as epidemics in most Western countries, this is peanuts.
• We don't know if anyone has died from swine flu in Sweden--these people could have contracted the flu but also suffered from a weak immune system and coughed themselves to death.
• Cases of swine flu already began to decline in Mexico by May, shortly after it began to spread world wide.

Now, what is the Swedish government proposing we do? Of course, in the Holy name of Nanny Equality, we mass vaccinate everyone for millions of tax payers' money!

The Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKL) is set to recommend that the swine flu vaccine is issued free of charge for all.

"The advantage of having a free vaccine is that there will not be any groups who can claim that they can't afford it. More people will be vaccinated, which is important for society," he said.

These are the recommendations that have been made by the National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) to local health authorities and which were presented at a press conference on Thursday.

Instead of thinking rationally, taking into account that this is yet again not an epidemic and that we're currently in a deep recession with high unemployment, we literally waste millions on vaccinations. We don't even know if the vaccine will do more help than harm, since this it is likely to reduce the power of the natural immune system against the flu. There are even legitimate concerns about the health risks with the vaccine itself:

A warning that the new swine flu jab is linked to a deadly nerve disease has been sent by the Government to senior neurologists in a confidential letter.

The letter from the Health Protection Agency, the official body that oversees public health, has been leaked to The Mail on Sunday, leading to demands to know why the information has not been given to the public before the vaccination of millions of people, including children, begins.

It tells the neurologists that they must be alert for an increase in a brain disorder called Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), which could be triggered by the vaccine.

I'll highlight from the article what we learned from the American swine flu vaccination in 1976:

• More people died from the vaccination than from swine flu.
• 500 cases of GBS were detected.
• The vaccine may have increased the risk of contracting GBS by eight times.
• The vaccine was withdrawn after just ten weeks when the link with GBS became clear.
• The US Government was forced to pay out millions of dollars to those affected.

Why isn't the Swedish government informing the public about this? Because bureaucracies are brainless entities that exist to protect and justify their own existence. The health department in Sweden would feel impotent if it didn't act upon this issue, which has been portrayed in the media as armageddon. And now we're all going to pay for this party, whether we join it or not.

I won't join it. Simple risk evaluation tells me I am better off taking care of my health and hygiene more than usual, than getting a vaccine that carries a small but notable risk in damaging me permanently. In an ideal (Conservative) world, each person would pay for his or her own vaccine if they felt like it was important. In the Swedish world, you pay for any idiocy currently in the headlines, even if it means your very fall. Let this be a warning for those who still long for a socialist revolution.

Read more about why I reject the swine flu panic here: 1, 2