And I don’t care what they say, sans evidence. They’ve been wrong before, particularly when the lie was what the administration wanted to hear.
So, evidence first. Russia meddling, Trump’s abuse of power etc were both fine because copious evidence was presented.
For the China death toll thing…surely it can’t be weeks later and still the very best evidence is the observation that some crematoria are really busy? Which we’d expect anyway after being closed for two months?
US intelligence is still not losing any sleep over your skepticism.
Yeah you said that in your previous post.
Do you have anything to respond to the points I just raised (1. dearth of evidence compared to other intelligence reports, 2. the fact they’ve been wrong before, 3. whether anything exists beyond the urns observation and 4. why that observation is irrelevant)?
Let’s start with post #87.
I’m more than happy to look at evidence. Believe you me, having lived in Mainland China for 15+ year, my kids were all born in China, my wife still carries a PRC passport, I am sure I have more relatives in Hubei Province than anyone on these boards, my Chinese family have been fucked over by the Chinese government, all that said, I need more than unnamed sources within the US intelligence agencies, or other completely non-attributable sources. I can think of multiple Occam’s razor plausible explanations for the “proof” you spout.
cite please that actually shows some kind of verifiable evidence that calls into question all of my personal sources?
Post 87 isn’t the cite. Thanks for playing comrade.
Since this point hasn’t been addressed yet, in the time since this was posted, Taiwan’s released the email it sent to WHO:
That’s it. That’s the entire email.
Taiwan’s Health Minister states
This completely ignores that:
a) The WHO protocol is that all novel infectious diseases should be treated in isolation until H2H is explicitly ruled out, as is common sense.
b) The Original Chinese government announcement already stated the cases were being treated in isolation so Taiwan added no new information.
The whole “Taiwan warning” story has turned into a giant scandal of a massively puffed up claim that ended up being revealed as a nothingburger.
This is a completely ridiculous assertion. The US didn’t reach 1000 deaths per day until April 3rd, two and a half months after the virus was allowed to spread unchecked throughout the entire country. Italy never reached 1000 deaths per day. If you honestly believe the Chinese government was able to hide multiple thousands of deaths per day, you might as well give up now and swear fealty to our new overlords because they possess reality distortion technology far beyond our best science.
That this cynical piece of horseshit is still being peddled indicates how much the West wants to deflect blame by involving China in a swirl of suspicion. There’s absolutely zero ways and kind of credible analyst could ever square China having 1.2 million cases with the evidence we have now, let alone 3.3 million. Anyone involved in this that has access to Johnson knows these figures are ridiculous but they’re still leaking them to the public to try and cast a narrative they know to be false.
Just to add. It is called the Chinese CDC because it was modeled after the US CDC. It is staffed with a serious amount of folks that worked at the CDC, interned at the CDC, have graduate degrees and PhD’s from US universities with alumni connections to the CDC.
It’s on a conspiracy theorist that would claim rogue Chinese CDC staff decided to only route concerns thru Taiwan. Anyone in the Chinese CDC that sent up a flare internationally went thru their address book and connected with the Taiwan health connections, WHO, the US CDC and other countries.
I mean, no shit sherlock, China and Taiwan have been playing this game since before 1949, since before the PRC entered the UN. That covid 19 is a political pawn in the China Taiwan game should surprise no one.
All that said, only a complete nincompoop would think that a Chinese doctor whistleblower would put all of their warnings into one basket and route it through Taiwan. Thanks for playing
Post #87 was the one where I sent my reply to you by email, because I did not think you were arguing in good faith.
Not long after that, a mod asked you to calm down and attack the argument, not the man.
Since you told me you do not have access to your email, I have now sent my response to you as a PM.
If you’re going to bring that tangent of the thread back here, I urge you to focus on the actual issues and not with line-by-line pithy responses.
Also NB, I’m not wedded to any particular idea here. If a cover up has happened, I want to know about it. That’s why I am asking for evidence.
You can send me all the PMs you want but if you have the gall to boldly deny all the matter-of-fact evidence I had to lay out to you then what’s the point? It is you who is not arguing in good faith by refusing to accept the truths that were laid out in front of you. At one point you claimed that I said China always lied. Then you retracted it. Then you said it was “all inaccurate”. I can’t believe anything you have to say anymore.
And I’d love for you to point out the personal attack because there was none. I pointed out all the falsehoods in your posts which you still cannot counter because they’re all true.
I have no interest in this matter whatever the outcome may be. I don’t have access to US intelligence reports claiming China covered up the extent of the coronavirus outbreak. But I’m more apt to believe US intelligence than the Chinese government because we know of their penchant for cover ups.
Let’s go over what happened with this, and I’ll explain why you are not arguing in good faith.
I listed three people as saying that the Chinese government always lies, including you.
When you pointed out that you had not said that, I immediately said mea culpa and apologized to you personally. I had seen your comment about the WHO and lumped you in with the others, but it was wrong to put you in that list and I acknowledged that without hesitation. I want to engage in an honest, mature debate here.
OTOH, you said that no-one had claimed the Chinese government always lies. When I showed you that was incorrect, did you retract it and/or apologize?
No, instead you gave an implied insult by saying “anyone with half a brain” would know that those comments were just hyperbole (note that still neither of the other posters have confirmed this interpretation).
And you also decided to repeatedly mention my apology, I think it’s about 5 times now, as some kind of smackdown card you can play to ignore any points that I put to you.
I think it is pretty immature, frankly, and is an impediment to a real debate.
Not accurate (again). You put a condition on your retraction that it was conditional on this thread because I could have made such a claim in another thread. When I had to ask again for proof, you backtracked again. When you forced me to lay out all your falsehoods and I mentioned the above, you said “It is all inaccurate”. I asked you to point out any inaccuracies of what were clearly in the posts and of course you couldn’t respond. What was inaccurate of me calling you out?
I did concede that one person said so, but what do I need to apologize for? Did I hurt your feelings? I maintain that anyone with “half a brain” understands generalized hyperbolic statements. Just like I thought I understood when you mentioned “all the US intelligence agencies” blaming Russia for election interference back in 2016. When I cited your claim as an example of hyperbole, you doubled down and said you meant all, and this time, not only US intelligence but international agencies as well. So naturally I asked for a cite, and then your new excuse was that it was a nitpick. And no reference or mention of international intelligence agencies. When this was pointed out again, you said this was inaccurate as well. I’d like to hear what was inaccurate about this.
Listen, I don’t need or want your apology. You can retract it for all I care. It has the same worth to me as a death threat from you, i.e. zero. I only mention it because you keep denying these self-evident truths. I don’t know how long you’ve been living in China but you can’t do cover ups here like the CCP does. You of all people are the least justified to call for an honest debate.
Well I think your post largely speaks for itself, but there’s one thing I have to push back on, because it speaks to my character:
Not at all. My apology was unconditional.
The only reason I said you had not made such a remark in this thread, was because I was using precise language. If I just said you have never made such a remark, then I could be potentially wrong, as I had not checked all your threads.
And then, when you objected even to that phrasing, I immediately said Fine; I’ll agree you never said it.
Now, for the love of god, can we get back to discussing the topic?
WTF does this mean? You still haven’t listed all the inaccuracies when I called you out.
LOL, ok.
Well then I denounce your claim that all Muslims are terrorists and should not be allowed in the United States. That’s bigoted and racist. You didn’t say it in this thread but you might have in another. I’ll retract it once I’ve gone through all your posts and made sure you really didn’t say something like that. Oh, and even if you didn’t say it here, you might have on another board or social media site so if you could tell me all the sites you’re active on and give me your user names I’ll start investigating. It might take some time but you understand, I want to be precise.
Because it’s stupid and we already did it. It’s not a fair summary of the discussion, it’s just meant to provoke me. If I take the bait and point-by-point explain what’s wrong with what you said we’ve gone in a loop and we’re doing all that stupid shit again.
The topic of this thread is about the real death toll in China. I for one want to discuss it.
For me it was an honest mistake that I originally included you in that list.
But fine, let’s play this game then. The next thing that happened was that you objected to my phrasing, so I immediately agreed that you have never said anything like that anywhere.
And, I object. Your turn to demonstrate civility.
I listed out all your bullshit one by one but you couldn’t even respond to one of them. There’s nothing inaccurate about all those points because they were taken verbatim from the posts. So now that you’ve been exposed, you want to just ignore it and just continue like it never happened? Unh-uhhhhh.
What are you objecting to?
At the moment, we have:
Radio Free Asia relaying some local sleuthing. While they are, in theory, a propaganda outlet, I somewhat doubt that they are still operating in an anti-Communist propagandic way and largely exist simply because somewhat forgot to cut the budget a couple of decades ago. I also find it relatively unlikely that they are operating under the command of Donald Trump, even though they are nominally part of the US Federal government.
Leaks from the White House. Not particularly reliable, given the current President. (Though, there are arguments to be made that he’s more in support of China than he is against them - so long as it’s in his personal interest.)
The Economist doing a sanity check. Pretty reliable, though it only tells us that the numbers are probably politically influenced. It doesn’t tell us much about what the real numbers should be.
Historic and contemporary reporting that local Chinese leaders act to suppress information that would make them look bad, even if it screws up the central government, regularly and often.
Xi Jinping continuing to wear a mask as of two weeks ago, despite the country ostensibly being free and clear of disease.
Overall, we have a variety of imperfect information from Liberal, Conservative, Domestic, and Foreign sources that all imply that China is lying. While none of the information is particularly great, the fact that there’s general agreement across that variety of sources seems somewhat meaningful.
I wouldn’t bet one million dollars on the matter, but the safer bet would be that China has produced fraudulent numbers. How much of that is centralized deceit versus distributed deceit is unclear, though it’s unlikely that the central government would somehow be blind to the fact that all the information that they are getting is worthless so, when they support it in public, that does seem like a clear intent to mislead.
And that sort of things is, exactly, why people have encouraged more push-back against China. This is not particularly new nor novel behavior, on their part, and it is detrimental to the rest of the world just as their economic and political shenanigans have been.
Ideally, we would confront them on such matters in a way that is liable to be useful and productive. Instead, our strategy has been to harm our own economic power, make the US less attractive to other nations, allow China to go chat up and seduce everyone else so that they can have even more of this sort of free negative influence on the world, and made it clear that the primary motivation at this point is that China help out in the 2020 election for Trump’s side.
China is probably lying about their fatality rate. But the people here (in Washington DC) are lying about some stuff that’s also real real important, if you want something to happen to make the world a better place.
I replied to you by both PM and email.
I’m just choosing not to do it here because this thread is about an actual topic, not just you trying to provoke me.
Don’t play dumb. You are trying to analogize to what happened between us earlier in this thread (although in an obviously inflammatory way).
Well, what subsequently happened is I bent over backwards to be accommodating and civil towards you once again. So, your turn: take back what you just said in a mature way. Can you do that?