Trump has fired and gutted our pandemic response experts, continues to dismiss the advice of experts in his administration, has held up testing because he thinks having a lower number of confirmed cases makes him look better, wanted to keep cruise ships stranded at sea to keep numbers down, claims the test kits WHO has made available are “bad” and inferior to the ones he has a financial stake in, continues to lie about the availability of tests, calls reporters “nasty” for asking him hard questions about his response and denied them access, tells the states they’re on their own because he’s “not a shipping clerk”, has tried to blame Obama for his own actions, and continues to pretend that everything is fine, there’s nothing to worry about, and his response has been “perfect”.
Of COURSE calling COVID-19 “the Chinese virus” isn’t racist and doesn’t promote racism. People in Europe and the Americas being beaten and shunned because they’re suspected of being Asian - just ignore that. Only flukes.
“What has more effect on our lives and our well-being?”
On the one hand Trump being non PC on the other the CCP continuing to suppress and distort information which is the thing that contributed to the outbreak and spread of the virus in the first place.
That had a pretty frikkin’ big effect throughout the entire planet, didn’t it?
It’s amazing to see the cognitive dissonance at play, the CCP seeks to use the US as a scapegoat, plain as daylight; you outright state you don’t care what goes on over there and yet in you come complaining about me of looking for scapegoats and ignoring things.
And “Fringe politicians”?, the spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry, really? A regime infamous for it’s iron grip on what is allowed to be said (which as pointed was one of the factors that created the current situation), and you hand wave that away as some fringe politician, presumably not representative of what the Chinese Communist Party line is?
I guarantee you if the CCP didn’t want that man to say those things he wouldn’t be their spokesman, he’d be an organ donor.
And yeah, I can see you care not one jot about the use of propaganda against you by a foreign country. Propaganda that includes threats like this:
By the way, I’m neither in the US or a US citizen, perhaps that’s why I’m not interested in being dragged down by the counterproductive, navel-gazing, Pavlovian reactions you have going on and prefer seeing the bigger picture.
The bigger picture is that a regime that has this to say about liberal democracy should not be cut any slack when they engage in propaganda to further their goals.
You are obsessed with one man, I’m looking at geopolitics that play out over many years and,so is the Chinese Communist Party; so if you keep things like this over the US everyone loses as the CCP makes gains.
I’m not “cutting them slack”. I’m ignoring them, because their propaganda is worth as much as North Korea does when it claims that UN food aid is tribute being paid to Kim Jong-Un.
Pretending that their internal propaganda is of any importance only empowers it.
Frankly, I’m not sure what you even expect to gain by doubling down on this “IT’S ALL THE CHICOM’S FAULT” angle. Are we going to go to war with China now because their government mishandled a viral outbreak? Will the mass utterance of the magic words “Chinese virus” somehow cow the Chinese government and people into bailing out the cruise ship industry? Is the ghost of Deng Xiaoping going to descend from the celestial realm to personally apologize to Donald Trump?
What, precisely, is your endgame here other than “tell the dastardly Yellow Peril what for”?
…Trump isn’t simply being “non PC.” Trump is disseminating propaganda. Trump and his administration are guilty of suppressing and distorting information. Trump lies at every single press briefing. The constant disinformation broadcast from the White House is going to get Americans killed.
We get it. You think “China bad.” But the actions of the Chinese government are irrelevant to the general context of this thread. This thread is about the language Trump and his administration have chosen to use, and how that usage is being used both as propaganda and a dog whistle to his many racist followers. The actions of the Chinese administration might have had (comparatively) “a pretty frikkin’ big effect throughout the entire planet.” The actions of the Trump administration is going to have a devastating effect on the lives of the American people and none of those devastating effects can be laid at the feet of the Chinese.
This post, in both style and substance, better resembles a conspiratorial screed than a good argument.
The answer to "why would Trump call it the Chinese virus?: has already been answered. He’s deflecting blame. He has a stated enmity with China. He’s doing exactly what China is doing in your post where they claim that the disease originated in the US.
The idea that the WHO is owned by China is straight out of a right wing conspiracy. They are part of the UN. They came up with this policy years ago because they noticed that naming viruses after places (same as naming them after animals) often led to incorrect assumptions.
Not calling it the Wuhan virus does not in any way deny that it started in Wuhan. Not calling it the Chinese virus does not in any way deny that it started in China. Every article about the virus or disease indicated it started in Wuhan, China. Renaming the virus would be a stupid way to try and hide that.
And then you ignore that the claim that it started in the US was new for China. China had previously admitted that it started in Wuhan. They were doing this back when the disease was named COVID-19. So, if the WHO was trying to hide the origin, they would have been going against what China wanted at that time.
Nothing in your small wall of text really holds up. There are better explanations that do, and they don’t require any conspiracy between China and the WHO.
US intelligence realized as early as January that the situation was out of control, and they knew that, in all likelihood, the contagion had spread well beyond China’s borders and quite probably circulated within the global aviation system. Trump and some of his surrogates downplayed it - at a time when they were in a position to mitigate its spread.
More than that, compare the situation in the United States to those of South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Germany, and other advanced countries. We failed to take it seriously. We failed to prepare for a pandemic response, despite having the capability to do so and the federal level’s awareness that the situation was a very real possibility as late as last year.
The WHO gets massive amounts of funding from the Chinese. They also get massive amounts of funding from the US, of course, but the US doesn’t apply the type of pressure that the CCP does. I’m sorry that you haven’t been paying attention and your knee is jerking, but anyone who has been awake at all in the past 2-3 years can pretty much see exactly how the CCP operates. One has but to look at the recent NBA fiasco about Hong Kong for an example that pretty much everyone should know about. Or, spend 5 minutes and see how the CCP applied pressure on global air line companies to change the designation of Taiwan. And compared to this, those are minor things. If they applied that sort of pressure to the NBA and air lines, why not the WHO, especially when they have the leverage?
The thing is, if you are going to be skeptical about something like this, you need to do a bit more research than you have apparently put in. You don’t see any motive for why the WHO might be doing and saying what the CCP want, but that shows your massive ignorance on the subject. The WHO has been accused of fairly large scale corruption for a while, not just by right wingers. This is mainly at the top and in it’s administration. The money China pours into the organization is reason enough for why the WHO is doing what it’s doing. Now, if you want to say that isn’t happening, that’s fine. I’d love to see some data you base that on. As for why the CCP would want or even need the WHO, again, there is plenty plausible for that too.
As for Trump trying to deflect, that is certainly part of it, and I never said differently. He fucked up…by the numbers. The reason the disease is pretty much out of control in the US at this point is because he fucked around, doing his usual chaos thing and whatever time we could have had to prepare was squandered. That said, you can pretty well track when he started doing his ‘Wuhan virus’ and ‘Chinese virus’ schtick, and that coincided pretty well with when the Chinese started to shift the narrative and directly or indirectly attempt to say this call came from the US. Again, sorry you haven’t been paying attention…honestly, it’s probably not your fault because most main stream media sources aren’t even touching this, and, again, seem to be drinking from the CCP kool-aide. I’m getting a lot of this from places like China Uncensored and the notorious pro-American site Al Jazeera English, who have both run plenty of pieces on it. I’d love to show you main stream media cites that you need to convince you, but, frankly, I don’t give a good god damned in trying to convince you or anyone here. You will think it’s a CT until this starts to get more coverage in the regular press, and not before. And since the CCP does similar shit to what they did with the NBA, Hollywood, several EU countries that took belt and road money, myriad politicians in many western countries, the WHO and…well, the list goes on and on…it’s highly unlikely you ever will. Fine by me. I won’t bother to link to the info I’ve seen as I know it won’t pass muster for anyone here…and I know few, if any will even bother with looking at it anyway.
This thing with the CCP has been ongoing for a long time. People simply aren’t paying attention. What’s sad, to me, is folks KNOW that the CCP deliberately was stifling the information early on, and they allowed this outbreak to spread massively. They arrested people (they actually continue to do so) trying to get the word out, deliberately didn’t tell their own health care workers, got the WHO to sit on this repeatedly, shunned the CDC when we offered to go there and then turned around and said the US didn’t even try and help early on, and basically fucked up in every way you can on something like this. Which is why this thing is a global pandemic (something the WHO resisted calling it for a long time). The CCP was directly to blame for that. Yet, you don’t really hear much about any of this in the news. Why? Any other country that did what the CCP did would be being roasted for the massive impact this is having world wide, for the rising death toll. But the CCP is coming out of this smelling like a rose. They have managed to turn this whole thing around from massive fuckup to China Saves the World(tm…arr)!! How? You don’t know, and you don’t care, and you aren’t even trying to find out. You post some bullshit about this all being a CT with zero thought, and clearly zero knowledge of even the basics of what’s happening. Hell, I could shoot more holed in my own narrative and I’m pretty sure what I’m saying is correct.
If you are going to be a skeptic then BE a skeptic. Learn something about this. Dig a bit deeper. THEN come back and tell me why and how I’m wrong. Hell, maybe you’ll convince me. If not, and I’m just a nutty CTer then you can fight ignorance for those who are as clueless as you are on this right now. Plus, you will learn some stuff. So, everyone wins.
This is just a small sample (which I pretty much picked at random, just to demonstrate that you can just Google this stuff if you want to really even dip a toe in). There are tons of articles on this, though most probably won’t get on the radar or even be acceptable to most 'dopers. And for everyone one of those, there are ones like this.
I clicked only 2 of your 5 links. (There is an SDMB tradition that you excerpt from articles you want Dopers to read.)
Your first link has zero to support your claim except its own link to your 2nd link. But I fired up my No-Javascript-Browser just to read N.Y. Times. That article DOES confirm your claim … sort of:
So what are we left with? Finger-pointing to see who started it — a Chinese functionary or Donald J. Trump, Leader of the Free World?
Is China (or “the CCP” as you insist on putting it) at least as despicable as the U.S.A.? Sure! At least until the U.S.A. was taken over by “the Trump Organization.”
BTW, did you ever address my question up-thread?
China could have acted earlier. The US should have acted earlier, and now a lot more people in the US are going to get sick, die and not least of which torpedo our economy.
Wuhan went into a hard quarantine on 23 January, which is almost 2 months ago. War time President knew long before the experts that this would be an epidemic should have started preparing for the battle instead of only a propaganda ploy of shutting down travel from China.
Shrug. I told you I picked them at random. Also, it’s not just some functionary, and the Chinese system doesn’t work like the US wrt some flunky speaking off the cuff and spouting something that the rest of the government doesn’t agree with. If that was the case, the guy would have been shut down…hard. In addition, you skipped the state run media part. Again, it doesn’t work like US or any other western media, in that it doesn’t say things the government doesn’t want them to say…or, again, they get shut down. Hard. I can find you more articles if you like, but as I said there are plenty. Not sure about this SDMB tradition you refer too…I usually skimmed even the craziest CTers links, for laughs if nothing else. You can do what you like.
As for the past bit, the CCP IS China…just ask them. This isn’t the Chinese people doing this, it’s their fucking government. There really is no comparison between the US and the CCP. Fuck up that our government generally is, it’s not in the same universe of despicable as the CCP is, and it’s laughable to even try and compare them unless you are either deluded or completely ignorant.
As to your question:
Do I acknowledge that the US has fucked up, done stupid or even evil shit? Certainly. I think that the list of misdeeds by the US is nothing compared to even the very evil shit the CCP has done in the last decade. The real difference is that the CCP gets a pass by nearly everyone, even when they KNOW what they are doing is incredibly evil. Again, it’s hard to even take a comparison seriously, as it shows either a hand wave of what the CCP does on a regular basis (we won’t even get into the truly horrific historic shit they did for their history starting in 1949, just the recent evil shit for, oh, say the last 2 decades) or just pure ignorance and heads buried in the sand. That’s kind of what I see on this issue under discussion. Most people seem to be completely clueless of what’s going on, or how the media they listen too, the politicians and institutions they trust and the information they get is being manipulated by the CCP. It’s a lot more pervasive than people seem to think or realize, so they are thinking this is just some nutty right winger conspiracy. And I, who apparently am both a Trump supporter and a right winger saying this has zero credibility.
That’s kind of why I haven’t bothered with a ton of cites when I’m asked stuff like you asked. I did that more for laughs and to see what you’d say or do…or what other posters would. The fact that several CCP officials or ‘medical professionals’ have made these accusations about the US has gone nearly unnoticed or, more accurately unnoted, as we have stuff like that all the time, with off the wall politicians saying or doing stupid or contrary stuff. Hell, or President contradicts HIMSELF. But China and the CCP don’t work like the US government, or any other western government. It’s more like the North Korean government in how it operates…just with vastly more money and power. But people don’t think about it that way, they think that the CCP and China are just like us and work just like us, or very similar to us. They don’t. So, it IS a big deal when their state run media says something, or when a CCP official says something like that, as it’s not just some flunky or contrary news article, it’s either implicitly or tacitly approved by the inner counsel and Xi. There are, of course, factions in the CCP, and some of those are certainly opposed to Xi and his faction, but when THEY do stuff to make Xi look bad or seem to contradict him it’s much more subtle. If they did this and Xi didn’t like it, those people would disappear or be on show trial or ‘house arrest’ the next day, and the state run media would be falling over themselves to condemn and re-work the narrative.
The first instances of the disease were in November. Health care workers in China were concerned by late November and were trying to get the word out in December. They were shut down. People trying to say anything about it were shut down. Locally, CCP officials went so far as to encourage folks to do community activities together. There were CCP and state media people saying there was no issue at all. They covered this up until, basically, they couldn’t any more. It was too big. During that time, people who were infected went all through China, and to pretty much every belt and road country, as well as a lot of other countries, and spread this thing far and wide. By January it was already out and spreading fast. THEN the CCP was forced to do your ‘hard quarantine’. Which was way too late to contain the outbreak. And it was all because the CCP didn’t want it to happen, knew it would hurt China’s economy and so tried to cover it up.
Certainly the US fucked up for our part. Trump et al were too busy playing stupid political games and denying it themselves. No one rode herd on the CDC and they tried to do their own test kits that would test for not just this virus but related ones. Which was a major fail. Then the kits were delayed and not in the pipeline when our own outbreaks started to get big.
The difference, however, is that the US wasn’t the initial outbreak. Instead, we had it basically everywhere. Look at a map of the US wrt the trajectory of the outbreak. Both coasts and several large areas in the interior. In China, you can track a similar trajectory and see it spread out from one area (Wuhan) and then across China…and to basically everywhere Chinese people go, which is pretty much world wide. And the reason is because from the first outbreak until your January 23rd date, the CCP sat on this and allowed it to spread. The WHO played along, even condemning countries that tried to put in travel restrictions from China. Of course, by the time countries realized this thing was out and spreading fast it was really too late anyway.
They absolutely will not acknowledge the distinction between natural-language reference to things happening in a region, and forced-language reference to a phenomenon by its geographic origin.
This is why we should not have debates with Trump supporters or their ilk. There is only fighting. Not talking.
People were reassigned, not fired; expert advice is conflicting but not ignored, cite, what was your solution to the disease on cruise ships?, cite, cite, so what, the states DO have more power than the Prez in many areas, and some opinions you hold.
No. It is a response to the lies, coverups, and influence the Chinese Communist Party is giving the world.
Uh, now that is going the other way. Again, Chinese rulers were incompetent and did evil in arresting the early whistleblowers, and that is not a good or logical reason to minimize what it is happening in the USA.
A long time ago I pointed to that kind of argument that looks at the worst in others to minimize the gross and bad things happening in the USA as a “Susanita argument”
One very famous Latin American cartoonist, Quino, had one a comic strip called Mafalda. Where Susanita (the very rich and conservative girl) told Mafalda that she always looked at news and reports about what very bad people were doing to others in other places in the world. So she felt glad and good living in Argentina (While the dirty war was going on).
The point Mafalda made (actually the great Cartoonist Quino) was:
“That is not good Susanita, you have to compare to others that are better than you, not with the ones that are worse so as to become a better person”
I’m paraphrasing there, and then Susanita told to Mafalda:
“C’mon, who would do such a dirty move* to oneself!”
And the moral of the strip was very clear, Susanita was the one with the dumb point, it is not perfect to look at the worst nations and come with our shortcomings as mostly inconsequential. We should be looking at what the best efforts of nations that are doing better with this pandemic; of course, many supporters of Trump think that doing that is nasty or bad reporting.
If you were paying attention you would know that COVID-19 is the disease; the virus is ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2’ (SARS-CoV-2). Quite a mouthful. In a verbal communication, ‘Chinese virus’ works better.
‘Suspected of’ being Asian? Yeah? Who is being beaten and shunned? That is one crazy post.
A few weeks ago there was a local story that business in Chinese restaurants was down and it might be due to fears of the Wuhan virus. In San Francisco, the only county in the USA with a plurality Chinese descended population. And the article did not ask whether ALL restaurants saw a drop in business because of SARS-2 worries.
Beaten and shunned? If this was even happening, do you think people would forget where the epicenter is if Trump was your puppet?