The default, from a position of intellectual honesty, is to asses all the facts of a situation, not just the ones that fit your own biases.
What you are doing is to deliberately strip a situation of context so you can derive your conclusions from a set of preconceived notions instead.
Of course the problem is compounded by the likelihood of your preconceived notions being the result of previous iterations of the same process.
Just so you know, willful ignorance plus prejudice is the bread and butter of racists too; so your approach is flawed both from an analytical usefulness point of view as well as from the moral one.
Magiver’s response here ought to win some kind of logic prize.
A fuckdumb conspiracy theory in China means it’s OK for the president to use racist dogwhistles and for abuse of the asian american community to happen.
That conspiracy theory is causing damage already, I posted this before:
[DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran’s supreme leader refused U.S. assistance Sunday to fight the new coronavirus, citing an unfounded conspiracy theory claiming the virus could be man-made by America.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s comments come as Iran faces crushing U.S. sanctions blocking the country from selling its crude oil and accessing international financial markets.
But while Iranian civilian officials in recent days have increasingly criticized those sanctions, 80-year-old Khamenei instead chose to traffic in the same conspiracy theory increasingly used by Chinese officials about the new virus to deflect blame for the pandemic.](Iran leader refuses US help, citing virus conspiracy theory | AP News)
How do you propose to push back against the Chinese government claims that the virus didn’t originate in China without pointing out that the virus did in fact originate in China?
That would had been this retweet by Zhao of a thread with thousands of people buying into the conspiracy theory.
Reading through those conversations obviouspro-China, pro CT propaganda accounts are everywhere, rather easy to spot too, join in dates starting in February, account names using a name plus a string of random numbers or just random numbers and characters.
There is a propaganda operation at work, how do you propose to address that? Because it’s already having negative effects and the longer it goes on, among other things, it will create more antagonism against China, Chinese people and Asians in general.
And that IMO serves the CCP’s goals just fine.
If you read the responses to Zhao’s and Global Times, don’t you think the people getting angry wouldn’t react like that regardless of what Trump says?
Because a sure way of getting people mad as hell is to do something against them , then accuse them of being guilty of the thing just done against them and play the victim on top of everything.
Trump could spontaneously quantum tunnel into the Sun’s core tomorrow and the CCP actions would still be instigating a backlash of anger and resentment, turning a blind eye to it will only exacerbate the situation.
Conspiracy theories are absolutely rife in the modern world and always cause damage. I’ve ranted about it plenty of times before.
Any major event now is encircled by countless nonsense CTs, many of which don’t even make logical sense and yet do indeed influence governments and social behaviour.
Covid has plenty of conspiracy theories, readily debunked. The “America origin” is just one of them.
One difference of course is the Chinese foreign minister giving JAQ-style support of this CT. He’s an idiot and should probably be fired.
In terms of what the US can do, my advice is:
Reject the CT and pressure the Chinese government to do the same with old-fashioned diplomacy
How about not pushing silly conspiracy theories yourself?
How about not trying to rename a virus to deflect criticism and stoke up further bigotry?
Point it out by all means, but don’t try to rename a virus, that’s being silly.
Thousands in a population of 1.3 billion. How many likes and retweets does Trump typically get, even when he’s saying something demonstrably false?
I live in China; I’ve yet to meet one person who takes the America-origin theory seriously, and in most cases I don’t think people have even heard of it.
I didn’t come across it on Chinese social media and the news, I heard it first on Western news, then had to search for references to it in Chinese media.
The narrative that “The Chinese[sup]TM[/sup] believe America planted this virus” is a gross mischaracterization.
"The German magazine Der Spiegel, quoting anonymous diplomats, said that the joint statement was scuttled by Pompeo’s insistence that it use the term “Wuhan virus” – a formulation frowned upon by medical professionals who say it is stigmatizing.
Pompeo did not deny the report when asked about it, saying that each minister would speak separately but that they had a “common understanding” on the health and economic crisis caused by the “Wuhan virus.”"
It’s a Representative of the Chinese government accusing the US of mass murder.
It’s a big fucking deal to do this. It’s massively arrogant to do it when the spread of the virus was the fault of the Chinese government. I’m glad we have a president who stands up to politically bullies.
I’d suggest you write a letter to the editor and verbally blast your government but you would assuredly lose points on your citizenship rating.
I can totally see the point of not wanting to “taint” a locale with the association of a virus. I think that should probably stop. I don’t think it’s necessarily racist however. It could be used that way, but so could a lot of things.
Sure seems to me that both China and Trump started in the same place: denial and coverup. China has moved on to public health responses, while Trump is stuck in denial and blame game. Oh wait, is Mike Pence still trying to pray this all away?
Pro tip for you: if you’re trying to defend Trump’s incompetence, don’t raise the issue of arrogance. As soon as you mention it, your point totally backfires, as though the baboon of a President has a shred of humility or sense in him.
The spread in the US is partially the fault of the president, who dismantled the National Security pandemic team, who spread false rumors that worries about the virus were a “Democratic hoax”, and who failed to take it seriously and take action within the country until long after he should have based on public knowledge and expert recommendations.
Typical to create a straw man to attack someone. That’s a clear sign that you can’t refute an argument and therefore create another argument in which to do so.
The United States of America was accused of mass murder by a country who actually committed the act.
That’s bullshit and you know it’s bullshit. Yet here you are whining about the verbal pusb-back on such a monstrous accusation.
I’m more concerned about Trump’s stunning incompetence which will clearly lead to thousands, tens of thousand, maybe hundreds of thousands of deaths compared to what would probably happen under any other functioning adult had he/she been elected.
But sure, you can get all bent out of shape about Chinese propaganda. Maybe there should be a trigger warning on each issue of China Daily? Would that help?
Any response to my last post yet? I have repeatedly denounced the Chinese minister for supporting a dumb conspiracy theory, and suggested he should be fired.
You seem incapable of doing anything like this with Trump.