It is astounding to see that people don't revolt. Just get to the streets and kill everyone in uniform from whatever service they are, burn police stations and resume normal life. What will authorities do? Send the army into a 20M city?
Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views
101–110 of 167 posts
Re: Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
More like totalitarianism, that all well known communist systems have also been more or less totalitarian is something to think about tho.
This is not an accident. In 1888 (long before any socialist or communist country existed to validate the theory), the American socialist Benjamin tucker predicted that the Marxist form of socialism and it's derivates would necessarily lead to totalitarianism, with some eerily prescient predictions born out by the experiences in Venezuela, Cuba, china, USSR, etc. If anyone claims that state socialism will have any oth…
Yeah it's ridiculous that people keep using this no true scotsman fallacy argument about communism, even after 100 years of large scale experiments that all lead to the same outcome, with enormous loss and suffering.
Re: Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the opposite: that China is a powder keg ready to go off at any moment - and the leaders know it very well and are generally pretty afraid of things blowing up. There are a lot of protests in China we don't hear about. Something about Chinese (in China) ... leads me to think they go big on memes. They revolt unlike anything we know of. Do you remember the video form Feb 2020 in Wuhan? The madness, hospitals f…
Revolutions use angry young men as fuel. China's young men population is proportionally small. Further, due to the legacy of the four-grandparent-policy and Confucian respect-for-elders tradition, the young that exist have high family responsibilities. Perhaps there will be something new in China - something that comes from the same place as revolution but without the testosterone.
> China's young men population is proportionally small
But their population of young women is even smaller.
Re: Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views
#104One thing that I observe about how China deals with COVID: leadership assumes that they have perfect control over perfect people. Therefore they try these type of solutions like complete lock-down of a city of 26m people. They assume that they are perfect as leaders, so planning is perfect and takes everything into consideration. They assume that people will execute their orders perfectly, even under extreme hardship…
> leadership assumes that they have perfect control over perfect people
Only androids that are physically unable to empathise would make such an assumption. That's literally the definition of android from Philip K. Dick, and the basis of cyberpunk stories like Blade Runner. In this case the androids are the Communist Party of China and are trying to contain a virus with no knowledge or understanding how tens of millions of citizens would react to being locked in their tiny homes risking starvation.
Re: Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views
#105What really grates at people’s nerves? Uncertainty. Not knowing when you will end up testing positive and be whisked off by one of the commissar’s white costumed goon squads in the middle of the night. If you don’t agree, that’s when they typically come, like the NKVD secret police back in the Soviet Union. And not knowing what will happen to your children, your elderly parents and your pets if / when that day comes.…
Very interesting. Not doubting the severity of the situation, but I'm curious where you get this info – you seem to have knowledge of the inside baseball (like emergency meetings held by CCP admins) and I don't know how to trust that it's accurate.
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Re: Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views
#106One thing that I observe about how China deals with COVID: leadership assumes that they have perfect control over perfect people. Therefore they try these type of solutions like complete lock-down of a city of 26m people. They assume that they are perfect as leaders, so planning is perfect and takes everything into consideration. They assume that people will execute their orders perfectly, even under extreme hardship…
This is communism in a nutshell. The government decides the people are forced to follow. Even if it results in millions dead.
And absolute monarchism, and classic dictatorship, fascism, etc. Communism isn't the only ideology which usually ends up totalitarian.
Re: Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views
#107One thing that I observe about how China deals with COVID: leadership assumes that they have perfect control over perfect people. Therefore they try these type of solutions like complete lock-down of a city of 26m people. They assume that they are perfect as leaders, so planning is perfect and takes everything into consideration. They assume that people will execute their orders perfectly, even under extreme hardship…
> They assume that people will execute their orders perfectly, even under extreme hardship China has also taken 1 billion people out of poverty in just 3 decades. > For all its failures, democracy at least has taught us to incorporate the human imperfection into the process and the decisions. Since we’re talking counter evidence: - Singapore is a benevolent dictatorship - Japan’s schooling system prepares its citizen…
"China" didn't do that. The Chinese people did that after Deng Xiaoping got into a position where he could stop the government actively destroying all progress in the country.
And whilst I used to be impressed by this "lifted a billion people" take, the reality is that lots of countries industrialized, modernized and huge numbers of people left behind agrarian poverty. This isn't unique or special and in fact when ranked against other countries like Taiwan, Korea, Japan - let alone countries like the USA or UK - China has turned in one of the worst performances. China still has widespread poverty and in many ways is still a developing country, 80 years after Europe utterly destroyed itself in WW2 and Japan had two of its major cities leveled by atomic bombs.
There's really nothing impressive about China beyond the sheer number of people the government has managed to hold back. If your foot is constantly on the brake of a very large vehicle, lifting your foot even half way will cause a lot of mass to start moving. That doesn't mean you get credit for it.
Re: Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views
#108One thing that I observe about how China deals with COVID: leadership assumes that they have perfect control over perfect people. Therefore they try these type of solutions like complete lock-down of a city of 26m people. They assume that they are perfect as leaders, so planning is perfect and takes everything into consideration. They assume that people will execute their orders perfectly, even under extreme hardship…
At least the current evidences (excluding Shanghai) has shown that the virus can be contained. Yes, there are cases, but cities have managed to contain it and people are normally back to normal after two weeks semi-lockdown. Of course, with Shanghai keeps having new cases, things may change. The government is pushing for old people to get vaccination. Old generation in China are not getting vaccinations because they…
Yes if you ignore all the times when it doesn't work, then lockdown works. It's an irrelevant tautology with no intellectual or scientific merit.
There is no Shanghai exception for lockdown as a scientific policy, just like there is no Swedish exception. To decide if a policy advertised as based on universal biology is working you need to evaluate all the evidence, and cases where it doesn't work either disprove the theory or require refinement. As nobody can come up with a plausible refinement that means it's disproven.
Re: Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views
#109Does anyone understand why China is willing to implement these extremely draconian lockdown measures, but not to mandate vaccination? As I understand it the main reason why the virus is still so dangerous there is due to the low vaccination rate among the elderly population. I'm not saying I personally support forced vaccination, but I'm surprised that the CCP doesn't, given they're willing to forcibly detain people…
Peter Zeihan says that they never secured a supply of mRNA vaccine. Instead, (partly because of national pride) they created their own non-mRNA vaccine, which does not work as well.
I don't know who Peter Zeihan is or what authority he claims, but you probably should stop listening to him if he spouts idiocy like this.
The BioNTech vaccince - an mRNA vaccine - has been produced and shipped not just by Pfizer in the US but also by Fosun Shanghai, since all the way back in December 2020. If you know anyone in HK for instance, chances are high that they were vaccinated with Fosun mRNA vaccine. This is not a secret or anything...
Re: Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views
#110What really grates at people’s nerves? Uncertainty. Not knowing when you will end up testing positive and be whisked off by one of the commissar’s white costumed goon squads in the middle of the night. If you don’t agree, that’s when they typically come, like the NKVD secret police back in the Soviet Union. And not knowing what will happen to your children, your elderly parents and your pets if / when that day comes.…
I don’t think it is ok to compare covid quarantines to concentration camps.
That is not a comparison, it is a description and an identification (a "classification", in ML terms).