![image.png](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmNesCADCyYrW2WCJy8jykBYrnnwWnueaqg56WuVTyTDQR/image.png)


For the love of God, please stop using this pandemic to push your preferred political ideology.

Don't get me wrong. There's a political aspect to how governments are responding to the crisis, and it's perfectly fine to comment on that. "Trump screwed up" and "This wouldn't happen if the U.S. had a better healthcare system" and "Jesus Christ, is the U.K. really going to avoid taking any preventive measures at all?" are totally valid criticisms.

What's NOT fine is using this as an excuse to make shallow and misleading arguments based in dubious logic that amount to little more than "capitalism bad" or "socialism bad." For example, I've seen a bunch of posts from leftists pointing out that stores in the U.S. and Europe have empty shelves, which apparently proves that capitalism doesn't work and all the Western criticism of the Soviet Union's food shortages was just hypocrisy. Newsflash: Any country hit by a major crisis is going to have empty shelves. The difference is that the Soviet Union had empty shelves even when there wasn't any crisis going on. And I'm sure our stores will restock their shelves a lot faster than the stores in Soviet Russia did.

On the other side of the spectrum, I've seen conservatives and libertarians talk about how elderly people in Italy are being left to die, as an example of the horrors of socialized medicine. Newsflash: That's what happens when there are too many sick people and not enough doctors or nurses or beds or ventilators for all of them. They implement triage, focusing on the patients who have the best chance of recovery and ignoring those who are unlikely to survive even with treatment. It sounds harsh, but it's absolutely necessary to save a greater number of lives in the long run. Here's how it would work under a capitalist system: A few upper middle class and wealthy people would be able to pay for treatment, even if they had lows odds of survival, and then everyone else would be subjected to triage, the same as in Italy. Congratulations, you went from "prioritizing the young and healthy over the old and/or infirm" to "prioritizing the young and healthy over the old and/or infirm, unless those old/infirm people happen to have money." Is that really an improvement?

Stop acting like this crisis just so conveniently happens to prove your existing worldview right. It doesn't.