| Can you people please stop with this unhealthy attention. You need to understand that Swedish culture is really unhealthy right now and I ask all of you - I plead to you - as a Swede, to please stop giving Swedish policy attention so we can, on our own, solve our problems and get back to some kind of normalcy and humbleness. What has happened the past 30+ years and has become really problematic the past 10 years is that Sweden has this extremely unhealthy culture of believing in Swedish exceptionalism while at the same time craving attention from other nations, and promoting this belief socially. While the Swedish Corona strategy is not explicitly designed to be contrarian at the world stage (and therefor get a lot of attention), the way Swedish mono-culture works is that the people who implement policy (as well as many citizens) chauvinistically and subconsciously believe that Sweden is somehow superior to other nations and at the same time believe that Sweden (as an exceptional country) has something to teach inferior countries (i.e all other countries). So where we are right now is that we have this unhealthy feedback loop where Sweden initially did it's own thing, and as it turned out to be different that has been a signal to policy makers that Sweden is right. Because Sweden is exceptional, so if the policy is different from inferior countries (i.e all other countries), it must be right. I wish, probably more than anything else, that other countries would just stop giving Swedish policy makers this attention because then maybe, hopefully, our politicians can start to do what's right for our citizens instead of what gets attention and talking points at the world stage. This is far broader than Corona: Sweden gets way too much attention overall, because Swedish politicians and government communication employees have nailed "marketing" more than anything else. They crave this attention and they manufacture policy to get attention, at the expense of the people who live in the country. Often under the guise of marketing Sweden as a "moral super power", superior to other nations. So please, if you are for example a left leaning American, please don't use Sweden as a political piece. Don't give our politicians this attention. There are many other countries that deserve attention but they deserve attention because they do The Right Thing. Like Denmark. Not like Sweden that fucks things up but enjoy the attention it gets when doing so, citizens be damned. |