Jack Ma to send 500K coronavirus test kits, 1M face masks to US

My original post:

>I have no doubt his intention really is to save lives, but a secondary motive is surely also PR. Perhaps the Chinese state had some role in this, as well. I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I could see a possible benign conspiracy like them using Jack as a proxy to distribute these.

I said it was a secondary motive, and that it was a benign conspiracy theory. I only leaned this way due to the fact the outbreak originated in China and because Jack Ma may not have been able to do this without the approval of the government. That means it's fairly likely he either had to request approval, in which case the government may have approved for PR reasons, or it's possible they reached out to him and proposed or demanded it.

Even if it were the Chinese state doing it formally, I'd still say the primary motive is to save lives, even if there were also other motives. Like how the primary motive of the Belt and Road Initiative is to increase trade and uplift poor countries, but there are many other motives, as well. Again, this is the case for all large governments, not just China - the difference here is just the lack of separation between private and governmental action in China, which makes it difficult to tell to what extent this is Jack and to what extent this is the state. If it were somehow proven the state weren't involved in any way, then I would think it was more likely than not that Jack didn't have ulterior motives.

Either way, it's not something I care much about one or way the other. I wasn't the original person to say it was a power move - I just disagreed with the parent poster who suggested it being a global initiative made it less likely to be a power move. No matter his/their motives, it's very good he and/or the Chinese government are doing this.

You're right. I swear I saw some article that said that South Korean drive through would text results as fast as 15 minutes, but looking at a couple more reports just now all said 24 hours.

I'm guessing you have nothing to refute because you don't have an opinion that matters. Have a great day!

/End of pointless conversation with you/

No, influence does not go in only one direction. If it did, it wouldn't go upstream! The TV news broadcasts to us, not the other way around.

In the short term, though, you're mostly right. News media firms program to increase audience engagement. Rachel Maddow didn't particularly enjoy turning her program into all-Trump-all-the-time in mid-2015, but she couldn't really help it. There was a large portion of the cable news audience that couldn't resist the frisson that came from seeing that one guy who had said mean things to people on that one TV show now saying other mean things to other people on the news. These morons would tune into to anything Trump (to some extent, they will still), and as Les Moonves observed it was "damn good" for the bottom line.

It's tempting to assume that the modern news media firm doesn't really care about which direction their product points. The particular cars that crashed don't really matter when the morons just want to see car crashes. We could hypothesize an efficient market and be smug in the sure knowledge that there are no long-term trends. Or, we could pull our heads out of our asses and actually observe the trends.

Maybe USA is so irredeemably racist that China is an easy mark for this sort of media malpractice. Somehow our racism has ignored all of sub-Saharan Africa? And somehow Israel is not only not despised, but is actually celebrated, despite the fact they are every bit as awful to Palestinians as China is to Uighurs? This is a strange reflection of common USA prejudice!

In fact, Israel purchases (often with USA tax money) large quantities of armaments from USA armaments manufacturers. The moment they stopped doing that, or alternatively the moment their rivals seemed likely to purchase even more armaments in hopes of finally destroying them, would be the moment they were seen in a very different light in USA news media. In the long run, every stupid misguided war USA or its proxies fight is preceded by a long run of news media demonization. Maybe that's just a natural thing, but I'm suspicious.

Uganda sent aid to China as well. So what.

Literally anyone can send aid to anyone, often for political gains.