You are confused about the purpose of the UN. It is not a deliberative legislative body to create world policy. It is a forum that realizes that international coordination and peacemaking is important, and every nation should participate regardless of their own internal policy.
I’m not really happy that Russia and China have permanent seats on the security council. But the US is also not perfect.
It’s better that we sit at a table and talk things out with other nations present, than sit in our respective nuclear bunkers and try to guess what the other party is thinking.
If your idea of a stable world order is a hegemony of a US-led military/democratic coalition, maybe you should stop supporting a party that wants to tear this down to see what happens when every country goes it alone.
I believe the WHO director implied or actually said that Taiwan was a province of China. In any event to take a look at this YouTube — there’s a lot of tension between Taiwan and this guy.
University of Southampton analysis indicates that if the Chinese government would have acted three weeks earlier then 95% of the viruses spread would have been avoided. If China would have acted two weeks earlier 86% of the spread would have been avoided.
“Blame China” doesn’t even really mean anything. We can blame individuals there all we want, but I’m more interested in the actions of people who are actually answerable to me.
But part of Bill’s point is that we should also be pointing fingers at their cultural practices that harm us all, even if it’s politically incorrect to do so.
No, it does mean something, and that’s an odd statement coming from someone always claiming to make statements based on scientific evidence. It appears fairly clear from the evidence that Patient 0 was in Wuhan, that the cause of it was a zoontic virus that was likely due to the wet markets in exotic animals that the Chinese authorities underplayed or misunderstood the seriousness of, and which AIUI have now been banned.
In fact this is the third covid 19 like virus to come out of those wet markets. SARS, the avian flu, and now covid-19. There has been some reporting that China has reopened its wet markets once again. But of course the authoritarian government over there has kicked out a lot of Western reporters — so who knows.
I think this is Bill’s point from the OP. In China, they have cultural practices (wet markets) that appear to be the source of these disease outbreaks in humans. The Chinese government closed these down after the SARS outbreak, but somehow somewhere sometime after that reopened and became normalized again. This is an area where the Chinese government SHOULD take blame - they had/have the power to close these down, and did not (they’re able to shut down places of worship and censor the internet, ferchrissakes). If you think about it that way, this whole mess may have been avoidable if China had no wet markets. Blame should not be placed on Chinese people living in China or anywhere else - the government in China should own this mess.
