Chinese Experts & Zero Covid "Solutions"
Watch this:
China is beloved by our intellectual class because it is believed that intellectuals rule in China, and intellectuals want to rule here, too. No sooner than does a bright boy have a smart idea in China, our intellectuals believe, than that idea is implemented without the hectoring rudeness of uncredentialed simpletons who don't know their place.
Our intellectuals want that power. Or, rather, they want the recognition they believe Chinese intellectuals have.
And our intellectuals are partly right. China is an Expertocracy. It is ruled by Experts. But it is always forgotten than an Expert is not just a person with expertise, but a person with expertise who willingly supports the regime.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing---unless a regime is corrupt. Which ours is, and which China's is.
Then, as Professor Doctor Knut Löschke said, Experts become whores.
Löschke is a Member of the University Council at the University of Leipzig and Member of the Board of Trustees of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences. He said he suffers "from having to witness how natural science is turned into a whore of politics." (He also pees on the Appeal to Non-Authority Fallacy: "I am tired of being told what to be ashamed of by abused, pubescent children.")
Our regime, with it hoary hoard of Experts, brutalized the populace with many coronadoom "solutions". Lockdowns, which only caused pain and economic ruin and helped spread the disease (as does coming inside every winter), masks, which are uselessly asinine and only spread fear, forced vaccination, even of those at almost no risk, which only helped spread mutations (variants) and pain and death.
Yet our regime is not as tight as China's. It does not hold absolute power. There were areas in the USA free of Expert "solutions". These areas were seen to prosper (after many, many, many failed Expert projections of apocalypse). Word got out. And then our regime lurched to other manias. And now all the Blue Cheka sport Ukrainian flag icons.
Our Expert "solutions" gradually lost their force. Not entirely, not finally. But with the regime distracted by needless war, it's not likely they will return, or not with the same force.
China, however, being a dictatorship, is much more uniform. Its regime has tight control over all population centers, and most information. Dictatorships especially cannot admit error, can never say they got something wrong. Because that error must necessarily reflect back on the dictator, who is weakened, which is intolerable.
Xi started in Wuhan with "Zero Covid", and now he is committed. It must be Zero Covid forevermore. Or he has to find a way out that is so distracting that everybody forgets about covid. Yet the longer he stays with Zero Covid, the harder it becomes to forget, and the larger the distraction must be.
It is not a scientific but a moral argument whether Zero Covid is a wise policy. Therefore it is proper to say that Zero Covid is evil, ignorant, abusive, tyrannical (a now-overused word, but oh so apt).
It is, however, a scientific question whether it has worked. It hasn't. It can't. Medically it is moronic. And that's putting it nicely.
By the way, some 90% of China is "fully" vaccinated, the remaining unvexxed souls being far from population centers.
I don't know which image in that video was your favorite. Mine was the part where Experts crammed a swab down a chicken's throat. Now that is funny.
Our good reporter in the earlier thread tweeted (the ellipses are hers): "China tests virtually everything for covid: the 'wind' from North Korea, stray cats, dogs, packages, seafood, sewage, and newborn infants...Giant machines disinfect streets, surfaces...despite scientists finding that the risk of transmission from surfaces is extremely low".
Experts have no choice but to give "scientific" weight to all these procedures. It's either whore yourself out, or suffer the consequences.
Now the reporter also tweeted that senior party officials "said zero covid will be in place for next five years."
Five years!
Here's the reaction:
Beijing Daily ended up removing that line "for the next five years", claiming it was a publishing error. Weibo banned the hashtag "for the next five years" after outpouring of despair
One comment on Weibo: "For the next five years... what is the point of being alive even?"
Xi desperately needs that distraction. Maybe you can guess what it will be.
"Politics trumps science and logic," is how our reporter ended her story. As it must in any Expertocracy.
Buy my new book and learn to argue against the regime: Everything You Believe Is Wrong.
Visit wmbriggs.com.
I find it supremely ironic that CNN would run this piece, with this tone and perspective. Talk about jersey switching. Sheesh!
And completely agree with your point that the regime and its intellectuals love China because of what Augustine called Libido Dominandi