That’s what I am talking about: their seats on the security council. They get a veto, let alone a vote, on world policy. To hell with that.
And no the U.S. is not “perfect” but my criteria wasn’t perfection. A minimum baseline for participation in world affairs is that you do not oppress your people, with a very specific level of defining “oppress.” No saying that the United States “oppresses” minorities, for example, because of genuine differences of opinion on certain issues. My definition would not include Islamic countries even though by most definitions they oppress certain people. Genuine differences of opinion, even if almost certainly logical from a first world perspective , should not be punished.
But we don’t need the UN to act as diplomats. We have have unilateral or multi-nation talks with China or anyone else. If anything, the UN hampers the effort because they are so impotent.
Actually you have it backwards, powerful nations would rather not have the UN controlling arm treaties, they usually want to have the treaties among themselves, but when the shit hits the fan they do need the United Nations.
War with Gwynne Dyer, Part 7:[Goodbye War (1983)](War with Gwynne Dyer, Part 7: Goodbye War (1983))
Incidentally in the current case thanks to the WHO and other international treaties, China did the earliest sequencing of the corona virus genome, and they gave it for free to other international groups working in a vaccine that included a Boston vaccine company that ran the first human tests in the USA in record time.
What you have suggested is that we do select hell by fragmenting international efforts. Toss the baby with the bathwater indeed.
More than several hate crimes. Dozens. Maybe hundreds. My wife witnessed one just yesterday. She had to threaten to call the cops on a bunch of teenagers who were harassing an elderly Chinese man who was putting groceries in his car. They were making al kinds of racial slurs.
*"So when people say “What if people hear ‘Chinese virus’ and blame China?” the answer is, we SHOULD blame China. Not Chinese-Americans. But we can’t stop telling the truth because racists get the wrong idea.[…]
Sorry, Americans: we’re going to have to ask you to keep two ideas in your head at the same time".*
This is the part of the quote that I don’t agree with. There is a difference between educated and intelligent people talking about the causes of a situation and allowing the hoi polloi to do the same.
If you think either Bill or I are in “lockstep agreement with the Right” you’re not paying attention to us at all. Or you believe, as many people seem to, that not being in lockstep agreement with the Left is the same thing. :dubious:
FTR, the last Dynasty in China was foreign (Qing/Manchu 1644-1912). Emporer Kangxi banned foot binding in 1662 but reversed himself in 1668 because the practice was so popular amongst most classes of Chinese.
Screw Maher. Screw Chinese officials, too. But mostly, screw senior US officials who in November were warned of a catastrophic pandemic and just fucked off.
“Don’t blow the scoutmaster” should be right up there. [Political jabs omitted.]
COVID (sorry, I’m too lazy to type the whole formal name) is one of many coronavirii. Labeling the current COVID variants as “the Coronavirus” is misleading. People are lazy. Sad.
The official name of the virus is sars-cov-2. The name of the illness is COVID-19. But in common parlance people say Coronavirus. Everyone knows what that means, and it’s a fine name, just like people can say “I have the flu” without specifying what particular flu virus they have. Nothing lazy or sad about it.
Only because the right wing media marching orders (and some ignorants on the left side of things) are telling you to follow that illogical path.
Again, there is no problem in noticing how dishonorable the Chinese rulers are, specially when attempting to blame the USA; it is just that, once again, the bastards have a point regarding the naming of the virus. The rulers are like the blind squirrel that found a nut.
There are not “coronavirii,” there are “coronaviruses.”
“Virus” is a Latin second declension noun, which in the nominative singular WOULD take the plural -i, if it took a plural, but in Latin, it meant “slime, particularly poisonous slime; venom,” and as such, was a collective noun, not a counting noun, like “butter” in English. “Butters” for “types of butter” is a fairly new usage, and would not be a familiar construction to Romans: “viri” would look like the plural of “vir,” man, so “viri” would mean “men.” “Virii” would look like nonsense, because it would be the plural of the nonexistent word “virius.”
“Virus,” to mean what we use it to mean in English is thoroughly divorced from its Latin meaning. It is completely English, and as such, should be pluralized as an English word: “viruses.”
I’m as bitterly angry at China’s government’s awful response as anyone, but if you want to punish China, you have to have a way to un-punish them, to reward them for good behavior. Without that, there’s no incentive for them to respond favorably to international pressure.
China was already getting punished before COVID-19, which is probably a major reason why they went to such great lengths to keep the outbreak a secret, hoping they could contain it before it became a global issue.
The reality is that the global economy - not just China or the US or EU - is in danger of collapse. This is not the time to be threatening economic warfare with China; we’re better off developing a coordinate global response to pandemics and doing things that encourage China (and all countries) to report openly into an early warning system.
I agree. A systematic scientific naming convention is more informative and less tinged with racism.
I don’t want to go off-topic on this beyond responding to this one comment, but I do have to object. Is being “an obvious idiot” why his shows have garnered 41 Emmy nominations? I listen to him because he’s entertaining and informative (when he cites a statistic from one of those blue cards he keeps on his desk, it’s generally true without any further contextual clarification needed). His panelists are almost always articulate and intelligent and frequently political leaders in both liberal and conservative organizations; the occasional ones that aren’t particularly smart (like a senior Trump campaign advisor that was on once) generally don’t fare well.
It’s true that the first guest with whom Maher has a one-on-one after the monologue and before the panel part of the show is, on some rare occasions, a fringe weirdo, though most of the time they’re accomplished individuals with a lot to say. But yes, sometimes weirdos. He had Milo Yiannopoulos on once, for example. It was marginally useful so that people could see what this weirdo was about, since he’s managed to make himself fairly influential, but not much use beyond that. I think having him on was a mistake, but that doesn’t detract from Maher’s other good qualities. I think having the occasional weirdo on as the one-on-one introductory guest is mainly a ratings gimmick, and I think a lot of the time the impression that Maher “agrees with them” is just misinterpreting him being polite. When the audience boos an unpopular guest, Maher is quick to quieten them down. After all, you have to be nice to the weirdos to get other entertaining nutcases to be willing to come on in the future!
He’s not enabling anything. It’s possible for both of those latter things to be true, as indeed they are. China was the source. The Trump administration, among the countless amount of bungling they did and continue to do, dismantled a US worldwide network of pandemic monitoring organizations (I believe a total of 39 of them), the most important of which was in China and could have alerted us for early preparedness.
…wolfpup forgot to add that Bill Maher is a racist misogynistic bigot, that unfortunately racist misogynistic bigoted views are unfortunately quite popular at the moment (dear I say it: trending) , and that 41 Emmy nominations isn’t a shield to holding racist misogynistic and bigoted views.
And the views expressed by Bill Maher in the quoted section of the OP have already been addressed countless times. They aren’t novel ideas or thoughts, they aren’t new, they aren’t particularly interesting or compelling, and materially won’t save any lives. Its pure virtue signalling.
More on point, after looking at his argument then one considers the source, Maher also gets a ding for his misleading anti-vaccine positions and/or the way he gives a megaphone to anti-vaxxers.
