Video of the day -- exporting the plague
Now that the Chinese regime's serial incompetence has reduced its country to a writhing cesspit of disease, it has dropped restrictions on travel and is encouraging its subjects to visit other countries in large numbers. Given the staggeringly high rates of covid infection in China, the danger this poses to the rest of the world is obvious. Furthermore, the regime is retaliating against other countries which try to protect themselves by putting restrictions on entry from China. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the regime is actively trying to re-ignite the pandemic in the rest of the world, to minimize the embarrassing contrast between its own failure and other counties' successes in defeating covid. To craven and weak people, saving face is more important than doing the right thing.
posted by Infidel753 at 3:30 AM
9 Comments:
Is it just saving face though? If I may be (perhaps) somewhat uncharitable to the Politburo in Beijing is it possible this is making a virtue out of necessity and that the plague spreading outside of China is welcome as a form of biological warfare? I'm not saying they engineered this but if it can afflict their rivals and enemies then the PRC are thinking that's good. I mean they are amoral bastards at the best of times.
The world has ignored the dangerous policies of the communist regime in China for far too long. This is just the latest issue. The CCP does not care. They do not value human life. They value their own hold on power and saving face.
NickM: I'm sure that's true as well (and should really be considered an act of war). But it's characteristic of totalitarian regimes that, to justify their power, they have to claim a sort of infallibility. To admit error would be to admit imperfection, which would mean admitting that their claim to absolute power is questionable, and that others should have a say or even a role in decision-making -- and from there, the whole basis for the system crumbles. It's never stated so explicitly, but that's the mentality at work. They can't even acknowledge that they dropped zero-covid because of the protests, because that would imply that the protesters had a valid point and the policy was flawed. They have to pretend that it's due to some change in objective circumstances.
Darrell: I think for a long time many people treated the Chinese regime as a normal government because there was money to be made in doing so. A lot of companies have grown their profits by moving manufacturing to China where wages are low and workers have no rights, and those companies can bribe the governments of their home countries to avoid rocking the boat.
I recall that during the Tiananmen protests (which culminated in the massacre there) someone in the regime commented that China has a billion people, so the rulers could afford to sacrifice a million if necessary to retain control. That's the kind of mentality that evolves when the rulers are used to having absolute power, and there is no mechanism for the masses to vote them out.
I don't think for a moment that China nor any earthly regime could "invent" a viral weapon. Humans aren't all that smart. But if they could I would reference the first chapter of Stephen King's "The Stand". What would you do with research project gone bad and a deadly agent released into society. I've reread that chapter half a dozen times trying to figure out if I knew that my society was doomed would I release it in China?
It may be the case that humans cannot intentionally create a viral weapon. But as long as the practice of animal farming continues, meaning that animals exist crammed together in filthy conditions in close proximity with humans in many places, the emergence of new pandemic diseases is a certainty (as happened with covid in Wuhan). And as long as that's the case, amoral regimes like China's will seek to weaponize them.
For that matter, in The Stand, once the US government realized that the superflu was loose and would wipe out most of the population exposed to it, they did deliberately spread it to the Soviet bloc -- due to fear that the Iron Curtain would otherwise protect the Soviet-bloc countries long enough to enable them to develop a vaccine for the superflu, enabling them to survive and dominate an outside world which would have been almost completely depopulated. Whether the US government would actually do that in such a scenario, I have no idea.
Would you? Would I? That's what makes it horror.
China can't even make a cell phone without stolen technology and Russia can't put armor on a tank but they are the ones' doing biology?
I suspect that in priniple a viral weapon is just about do-able. Having said that whtether it could be a useful weapon in the sense of being targetable, controlable etc... Why are viruses so difficult to deal with - they mutate quickly apart from anything else. I dunno about farming per-se but certainly if done in the appalling way it frequently is in China then it is a bio-disaster waiting to happen. How a state subsequently deals with (or perhaps "uses" such things) is a measure of it's moral decency.
Some of the videos on Tiktok and Twitter about what's going on over there and how people are being treated is crazy.
Spirilis: This is another reason I don't believe the conspiratard stuff about the Chinese regime creating covid in a lab. Their technological incompetence is legendary. And the fact of covid originating in some species used for food, and jumping to humans in an extremely unsanitary environment where those animals were in close proximity to humans, is all too typical of how epidemic diseases get started.
NickM: The whole covid saga shows why a virus would make a very bad weapon -- not because it wouldn't work, but because it couldn't be controlled. An artificial virus would spread more or less the same way, and like covid, it couldn't be confined to the borders of a target country, not the way everything is interconnected by travel now. If an enemy unleashed a deadly virus in New York city, it would reach London and Tokyo and Shanghai before it reached Connecticut or New Jersey -- and fairly quickly it would reach the country that sent it.
Animal farming in the West is hardly less filthy and disease-riddled than in China. There's no way of doing intensive, large-scale animal farming without such conditions arising. As long as humans anywhere in the world continue the disgusting practice of eating meat, we will never be rid of this problem.
Mary K: For the last three years life in China has been even more of a nightmare than usual. First there were the insane restrictions and lockdowns, far more severe than anything ever even contemplated in the West. I've seen videos of people forced to wait crammed together like sardines to get covid tests -- a perfect situation for spreading the virus. The goal was always controlling people, not controlling disease. Then, now that all the controls have been taken off with zero sensible precautions to replace them, combined with the fact that the Chinese vaccine isn't very effective, the virus is overwhelming the country.
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