Yep. He is a jerk. Lots of people are. If some jerks goes around using racial slurs, do you think changing the well-established naming system would really get them to stop?
Perhaps it was I who was unclear:
Of the 832 incidents reported in California, many included anti-Asian slurs and references to China and the coronavirus. One assailant yelled about “bringing that Chinese virus over here” during an attack against an Asian-American man at a San Francisco hardware store on May 6. The assailant reportedly also said “Go back to China,” “F---- you, Chinaman” and “F— you, you monkey.” In another San Francisco incident on June 9, someone threw a glass bottle at a woman putting her child in a car seat and yelled, “Go home Ch—k.” And in Santa Clara on June 16, a man kicked a woman’s dog and then spat at her, saying, “Take your disease that’s ruining our country and go home.”
Anecdotal evidence is, “This one Asian guy I know told me that a dude in a MAGA hat accused him of bring over the virus to destroy America.” 832 incidence report in California alone (and this report was in June 2020) is not anecdotal; it is actual data. Some of these might have occurred anyway even without the shit-stirring of calling the already designated SARS-CoV-2 the “China Virus” (a term that was used almost exclusively by conservative ‘news outlets’ and repeated in tweets and public statements by Trump as a transparent dog whistle) but perpetuating stereotypes is something that science—and particularly medical science, which has had and continues to have its own problems with inequalities in diagnosis and treatment—should strive to avoid.
Stranger
I can recall a time when liberals used analytical science to drive policy. Perhaps that is no longer the case.
More to the point. What good do you suspect changing the system? Will racists no longer race? Seems to be a feel-good change driven by reports not backed up by firm evidence.
Your evidence is the one that is the flakiest, the changes were made already before the pandemic, powerful bigots insist on changing it now for ignorant reasons, seeing how the Biden administration joined the WHO again, your point is a moot one.
In truth there does not seem to be any good reason at all to have changed. I think we have reached an agreement that racists are still going to race no matter what system we use. So it was changed why exactly? Seems it was changed so we could all feel good that we did something.
Something ineffectual, but something nonetheless.
But he’s not just some guy. He’s (was) the president. If he never uttered the phrase ‘wuhan virus’ or ‘wuhan flu’ or ‘china virus’ etc, you’d have been hearing it a lot less. In fact, if he never once used any of those phrases, fox news probably wouldn’t have used them either and all Fox news has done over the last 5 years is act as an amplifier for him.
If the first case was shown to have originated in the US, do you think Trump would have been okay if people in other countries called it the “America Virus” or the “Patriot Flu”?
Several hundred viruses have American names. I posted a list of some viruses with place names.
I would sort of suppose (but have no proof) that President Trump and his ilk would have invented racist terms with or without the old naming system. The old naming system probably did not provoke them, the new naming system probably will not dissuade them.
That is to say changing the long-standing system will not help. So why bother?
This completely made my day! The total lack of self-awareness is awesome. It’s not like you dug up some tweet from 5 years ago, either.
The point is not to give apparent legitimacy to bigotry by reinforcing it with incorrect and aberrant notions of culpability. Just as we no longer name countries after exploitative racist diamond magnates or for the home nation of sadistically brutal monarchs with genocidal tendencies, we should also aspire to find more descriptive and less prejudicial colloquial names for pathogens, as we have done by referring to the Human Immunodeficiency Virus as “HIV” and the resulting syndrome as “AIDS”, instead of the original monikers of “the ‘gay plague’” and “Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome (GRIDS)”.
Virologists have gotten along thus far with calling SARS-CoV-2 as “sars-cov-two” which has no more vowels or is any more difficult to say as “China Virus”, and doesn’t carry any undue connotations. The variants can be referred to by a simple designation “bee-one-one-seven” instead of the misleading “Kent variant”. Given that people have no difficulty remembering the alphanumeric numerators of figures from a forty-year-old science fiction franchise, it doesn’t seem that it would be a grave challenge to use this neutral nomenclature for pathogens as well.
Stranger
You’re reminding me of that SNL sketch of the reading of a will and they inform the dead woman’s sugar baby of the venereal diseases she had. She was so old the diseases still had racist names.
It was never named “the China virus.” It would not make sense to name a virus after a huge country. It was named after a city. That did not keep a bigot from inventing a racist term for it. Using the traditional naming system did not create the problem. Changing the traditional naming system will not solve it.
Maybe he’s being too wordy for you and you’re missing it. This was a decision by the medical science community to not legitimize and spread stigmatization by labeling diseases by origin. Nobody hoped to eradicate racism with the move.
There was probably stigmatization under the old system. I suppose it will continue under the new system. Changing the traditional system because some people are racists will not stop those people.
Now what the has to do with Cecil Rhodes is a good question. As I said, we are eager to do things that do not much help. We are eager to feel as if we are doing something useful rather than actually doing something useful.
But on the other hand, it is not as if this is worth getting upset about. While the change will do little good, it will also not do much harm.
But again, it’s about choosing to not be part of the problem. If a bulldozer is knocking down your neighbor’s house, it doesn’t make a difference -but it does matter - if you go out and help push it.
Seems to me it is about doing things that make us feel as though we are doing something useful. Rather than doing something useful. The former is easier than the latter.
But we can probably agree enough pixels have already died discussing this.
Seems to me a lot of your posts in this thread are defending the use of a racist term.
Just because one simple* act won’t stop racism, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. By that logic, we might as well keep calling Brazil nuts [n-word] toes. because not doing that doesn’t stop people from being racist.
Or, we could look at it differently. We can accept that racism isn’t going to be ended overnight, but if we chip away at it little by little, we can further the cause. Systemic racism is going to take a long time to overcome, but that doesn’t make it okay to be overtly racist. And, with that, being overtly and openly racist signals that it’s okay to continue being systematically racist behind the scenes.
And now you’re telling us what ‘we’ agree on?
Have you considered not speaking for others? I mean, people from China have said, specifically, that calling Covid the Wuhan flu has been problematic for them. So just fuck those 2000" people that have been victims of racism, specifically, because the phrase ‘Wuhan/China Virus’, right?
*By simple, I mean, like, really really simple. How hard is it to replace Wuhan virus with Covid or Coronavirus. Personally, as far as I’m concerned, at this point if you’re still saying that, you’re going out of your way to be racist.
We seem to have no problem with variant names like H1N1 for flu viruses.
I am not aware of any such a post I made. Could you please paste it here in the discussion? Many thanks.
In a thread about outdated virus naming conventions you said…
It should be noted that just because you feel something ought not to cause offense, doesn’t mean it isn’t offensive. And when the it requires almost no effort to say ‘covid’ instead of ‘wuhan flu/virus’, why push back?
In response to GIGObuster pointing out that people are affected by such naming conventions you defended them by saying:
When Stranger on a Train reposted GIGObuster’s article, you doubled down with:
This next one, I think, is just awful. You were given a link showing that 2000+ people have been victims of racism, very specifically, because of this and you dismissed it.
Next up we have these two:
Racist people continuing to be racist isn’t a good reason to continue doing something offensive.
Again defending the use of a term that offends a lot of people and, for some reason, deciding that other’s feel the same way.
What this all boils down to, at least the way I see it, is that ‘racists are gonna race’ is you defending doing something racist. To be clear, I’m not calling you racist, I’m calling you out for defending a racist practice.
If I start using the n-word on a regular basis because I’m not racist and not using it isn’t going to stop actual racists, does that make it okay? The WHO changed their naming convention in 2015 specifically because they saw the negative impacts it had on the people from the regions things were named after.
By the way, the list of diseases you posted with US based names…how many of those were named after 2015?
Maybe it’s time to revive the “French disease”.
In related news, I am now growing the fig variety “Wuhan”.