China

[theprestige]

No, you cannot say that about DeSantis. If you're referring to Rebekah Jones, she's a delusional fraud. You should have made that claim about New York and Cuomo, you would have had a better argument there.

"Better" in one sense, but worse in another.

It doesn't really matter to her argument whether Florida's government really is a miserable pile of deplorables who are mishandling Covid and lying about it to their own citizens and the rest of the world. Her point is, she could say the same thing about China.

Her comparison might nettle someone who's stanning for Florida, but it certainly doesn't help anyone who's stanning for China. And to the degree that it's intended to rebut your criticism of China, it depends on the application of an ignorant and hateful stereotype. She's attempting to address the arguer rather than the argument. "You're criticizing China? Well, I bet you like Florida, so there!"

 

[theprestige]

And my support or non-support of countries doesn't depend on whether or not I agree with their government. Only whether they are justified in their actions or not.

I support Fascist Italy not because I agree with their government but because they're justified in getting the trains to run on time.

 

[The Atheist]

No. They are currently invading other countries in the South China Sea.

Uninhabited reefs are not countries.

Not so. This is obvious fact.

Nope, it should be in the CT section. Allegations unsupported by facts, other than the PPE.

 

[Boudicca90]

I will say that I'm more worried about the reefs than I am any geopolitical jockeying going on between China and the other countries in the region.

Keeping their ships stationary and dumping their poop and other waste directly onto the reefs is causing an ecological disaster and we need to put pressure on China on that front.

 

[Roboramma]

How would you know? None of the numbers coming out of China are reliable. Not death tolls, not infection rates, not economic numbers, none of it.

Sure, you can't be completely confident about the numbers. But it's not like they could hide a pandemic from the public. I know literally no one who has had covid here, neither friends or friends of friends. But from my smaller circle of friends/family abroad (I've been here a long time...) I know people who had covid, and among friends of friends I know of people who died.

My experience shouldn't convince anyone, but there are limits to the spread of the pandemic here where people would actually believe the low numbers.

The economic numbers are similar. I run a yoga studio in Shanghai as well as traveling around the country doing seminars. I know how much money I made last year. I also know how crowded the restaurants I eat at, etc. are. I know how many people I see on the airplanes with me when I travel. I have friends doing business around china and know what their experiences are. My girlfriend has a clothing brand and I know how much money she's been making this year. Everyone I know has had a pretty good year, with a few bumps here and there.

My experience and that of people I'm close to isn't conclusive of any particularly precise numbers, but it's not consistent with the economy falling apart. We all experienced problems when covid first hit and had a couple of bad months. There have been a few ups and downs when a case or two is reported in a particular place and suddenly people stop going out for a couple of weeks, or can't travel (I had to postpone a trip to Chengdu earlier this year for the reason), but again the negative bumps all seem to be correlated with the news of what's happening, so no real disconnect there.

When it comes to vaccination, again, everyone I know has been vaccinated. Even when I went to Qinghai, a very rural place and one of the poorest parts of China, earlier this year my guides had both been vaccinated, and this wasn't long after vaccination had begun.

 

[Boudicca90]

Sure, you can't be completely confident about the numbers. But it's not like they could hide a pandemic from the public. I know literally no one who has had covid here, neither friends or friends of friends. But from my smaller circle of friends/family abroad (I've been here a long time...) I know people who had covid, and among friends of friends I know of people who died.

My experience shouldn't convince anyone, but there are limits to the spread of the pandemic here where people would actually believe the low numbers.

The economic numbers are similar. I run a yoga studio in Shanghai as well as traveling around the country doing seminars. I know how much money I made last year. I also know how crowded the restaurants I eat at, etc. are. I know how many people I see on the airplanes with me when I travel. I have friends doing business around china and know what their experiences are. My girlfriend has a clothing brand and I know how much money she's been making this year. Everyone I know has had a pretty good year, with a few bumps here and there.

My experience and that of people I'm close to isn't conclusive of any particularly precise numbers, but it's not consistent with the economy falling apart. We all experienced problems when covid first hit and had a couple of bad months. There have been a few ups and downs when a case or two is reported in a particular place and suddenly people stop going out for a couple of weeks, or can't travel (I had to postpone a trip to Chengdu earlier this year for the reason), but again the negative bumps all seem to be correlated with the news of what's happening, so no real disconnect there.

When it comes to vaccination, again, everyone I know has been vaccinated. Even when I went to Qinghai, a very rural place and one of the poorest parts of China, earlier this year my guides had both been vaccinated, and this wasn't long after vaccination had begun.

Clearly you can't be trusted. According to Ziggurat, everything and everyone is suspect over there!

It's good to hear the experiences of someone who lives there and not just what right-wing propaganda tells us what they imagine is happening.

 

[Orphia Nay]

It's good to hear the experiences of someone who lives there and not just what right-wing propaganda tells us what they imagine is happening.

Before Covid I had a long talk with some friends who work in China (one is Chinese, one is Australian).

They think it's hilarious the stories they hear right-wingers and even left-wingers say about China.

The stories about surveillance and military hawkism, for example.

They are free to talk and move about.

They compare these stories to the stories some Chinese tell about the USA being a military complex and cruel to its people.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

Not so. This is obvious fact.

While travel from Wuhan to other parts of China was prohibited in order to try to contain the spread of COVID, China continued to allow travel from Wuhan to other countries. At the same time, they were also denying that the virus could be spread person to person. They were also on a global buying spree to grab up as much PPE as they could from other countries. Why would they do all this? It was obvious what the results would be. The only logical answer is that they wanted to spread it globally so that other countries would be hit as hard as they were. They didn't want to be the only country to suffer negative effects from COVID, that would put them at a competitive disadvantage.

****, he's onto us!

Since you've figured that out already it won't be long before you guess the rest, so I might as well tell you now. You see, China and some people in the US (OK, all democrats) conspired to create a virus that would preferentially target republican voters - because we knew they would rather die than give up their freedoms.

But producing a virus with just the right combination of infectiousness and deadliness is tricky. Our first attempt wasn't quite right, but we released it anyway in the hope that if enough people got infected a more virulent strain would appear. So we spread it all around the World to get the best possible chance, and sure enough a few months later Delta popped up. Meanwhile we deliberately spread misinformation suggesting the original strain was more deadly than it is, to trick moderate republicans into taking the vaccine.

But why would we do this if we wanted them dead? We are not the heartless bastards you imagine. Our goal isn't to kill republicans, but to eliminate them - by whatever method works best. So we didn't put microchips or viruses in the vaccine, we put hormones in it that attack various parts of the republican brain. One awakens dormant empathy, that debilitating mental state that many democrats suffer from. Another suppresses their natural skepticism, making them lose interest in conspiracy theories and believe the lies that scientists and other communists democrats tell them.

The stroke of genius here is that democrats can take exactly the same vaccine and it won't affect them at all, so when masses of republicans suddenly start voting Democrat nobody will suspect the real cause!

 

[dann]

You misunderstand. I'm not saying the polling numbers about people's opinions are wrong. I'm saying that the numbers which people (both within China and here) are using to evaluate whether or not the CCP did a good job are not reliable. Sure, they're satisfied. But why are they satisfied? Because the CCP tells them that the death toll is low? Because the CCP tells them that the economy took a small hit? These are the things which aren't reliable.


I haven't forgotten that. Rather, you have failed to realize that this is necessarily comparative. People evaluate what's going on compared to what they think either could have gone on, or to what's going on elsewhere. But if your sources of information are corrupted, that's going to corrupt your evaluation of the pandemic response.

And for most Chinese, their impression of how their government responded is going to be largely dictated by what that same government tells them about that response. Do you really not see why that basically invalidates public opinion as an accurate gauge of that response?

For some reason, you seem to think that the Chinese are as dumb and gullible as Trump Republicans. The ones I've met aren't, and they seem to be pretty well informed about the rest of the world, in particular about the pandemic response in the rest of the world, and especially about the pandemic response in the USA. The latter, probably because the truth makes the USA look bloody awful in comparison to China.

Read some more reports from Western journalists in China about the country's pandemic strategy since you don't believe anything from the Chinese authorities. You could learn something that you could then tell your fellow conservatives.

 

[Ziggurat]

For some reason, you seem to think that the Chinese are as dumb and gullible as Trump Republicans. The ones I've met aren't, and they seem to be pretty well informed about the rest of the world, in particular about the pandemic response in the rest of the world, and especially about the pandemic response in the USA. The latter, probably because the truth makes the USA look bloody awful in comparison to China.

Read some more reports from Western journalists in China about the country's pandemic strategy since you don't believe anything from the Chinese authorities. You could learn something that you could then tell your fellow conservatives.

Western journalist reporting on Covid in the US isn't actually good. Why do you think it's any better in China?

Do you suffer from Gell-Mann amnesia?

 

[Boudicca90]

Western journalist reporting on Covid in the US isn't actually good. Why do you think it's any better in China?

Do you suffer from Gell-Mann amnesia?

So now no sources are good enough for you.

This attitude reminds me of how some Marxist-Leninists I know will try to shut down any criticism of Xi. "You can't trust western sources when it comes to China!"

 

[Ziggurat]

So now no sources are good enough for you.

No actual sources have even been presented. The point about most sources being bad (and most are) is that public opinion is not a reliable metric of how well a government is actually performing. The US is not immune to this either, just look at all the glowing press treatment of Cuomo until they turned on him.

China invests heavily in propaganda and information control. Are you claiming that they're wasting their money? That it doesn't have any effect?

 

[Boudicca90]

No actual sources have even been presented. The point about most sources being bad (and most are) is that public opinion is not a reliable metric of how well a government is actually performing. The US is not immune to this either, just look at all the glowing press treatment of Cuomo until they turned on him.

China invests heavily in propaganda and information control. Are you claiming that they're wasting their money? That it doesn't have any effect?

No, it can definitely have an effect, we can certainly see that here in our country. But I don't believe the Chinese people are nearly as gullible and stupid as Fox News, Newsmax, or OAN viewers.

Just because China uses propaganda, doesn't mean the Chinese people can't still see through that propaganda and still like their country based on their own subjective feelings.

 

[Ziggurat]

No, it can definitely have an effect, we can certainly see that here in our country. But I don't believe the Chinese people are nearly as gullible and stupid as Fox News, Newsmax, or OAN viewers.

Oikophobia strikes again.

 

[dann]

So now no sources are good enough for you.

This attitude reminds me of how some Marxist-Leninists I know will try to shut down any criticism of Xi. "You can't trust western sources when it comes to China!"

I am a Marxist and don't take any sources for granted, Western or Chinese. But I do remember the first three or four months of reporting from China when their very effective pandemic strategy was described as inhumane and dictatorial by almost all Western media. Even though I should have known better, I tended to believe those stories until I saw a report from a Danish camera crew going through actual quarantine and isolation when entering China. That was an eye-opener! 'Oh, so that's what it is! Pretty rational pandemic measures all the way through.'

Until then, people trying to break Chinese quarantine rules were invariably portrayed as heroic freedom fighters, kind of like how American anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers see themselves nowadays.

 

[dann]

Oikophobia strikes again.

You consider Fox News, Newsmax, and OAN to be your home?!

 

[BobTheCoward]

Before Covid I had a long talk with some friends who work in China (one is Chinese, one is Australian).

They think it's hilarious the stories they hear right-wingers and even left-wingers say about China.

The stories about surveillance and military hawkism, for example.

They are free to talk and move about.

They compare these stories to the stories some Chinese tell about the USA being a military complex and cruel to its people.

free to move about? Did they scrap hukou?

 

[Ziggurat]

You consider Fox News, Newsmax, and OAN to be your home?!

Yeah, no. The USA is my home. Those are just news sources, and not even ones I pay much attention to. The point was about stereotyping of populations. Boudicca90 has a negative stereotype of Americans, and a positive stereotype about Chinese. Why? Oikophobia. It's quite common among progressives.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

There is a difference between having a negative view and seeing room for improvement.
The "America is no.1" mantra makes it impossible to learn from other countries that have come up with solutions to the same problems American currently has.

 

[Boudicca90]

Oikophobia strikes again.

After 4 years of Trump and the rise of fascism and white supremacism in this country, and the rise in bigotry that followed, yeah, I have become afraid of my country. That doesn't mean I would rather live in China, since I feel I have an obligation to continue serving my country, as stupid as that feeling is.

And my way of serving my country now is to oppose the rise of the far right and make the government subservient to the people for once instead of corporations.

74 million people saw what Trump did to this country for 4 years and decided "Yep! I want more of that!" And that is absolutely frightening.

I am a Marxist and don't take any sources for granted, Western or Chinese. But I do remember the first three or four months of reporting from China when their very effective pandemic strategy was described as inhumane and dictatorial by almost all Western media. Even though I should have known better, I tended to believe those stories until I saw a report from a Danish camera crew going through actual quarantine and isolation when entering China. That was an eye-opener! 'Oh, so that's what it is! Pretty rational pandemic measures all the way through.'

Until then, people trying to break Chinese quarantine rules were invariably portrayed as heroic freedom fighters, kind of like how American anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers see themselves nowadays.

Same here, I try to look at every source independently. I even read right wing sites that I feel are more trustworthy, like National Review.

Unfortunately the biggest problem with our mainstream media isn't really political lean, but sensationalism. They are all desperate for ratings and will take any side on any issue that gets them the most attention from viewers.

And occasionally I fall into that trap too, that's why it's always good to have a critical eye.