The hotel looks funny, I don't hate it, however the comparison doesn't apply.
Sorry about the late reply - I had somehow missed your response. Of course, I completely disagree with your analysis here.
Firstly, I think the Soviet hotel comparison absolutely stands because it explains effectively why authoritarian totalitarian regimes inevitably do very dumb things from time to time. It doesn't mean you need to have a Stalin or a Mao and it has nothing to do with the Western media being fake news which is low hanging fruit that you're grabbing at which has nothing at all to do with anything I said.
"Let's build bio lab"
"Where"
"In the middle of Wuhan"
"Sure"
*Everyone else silent because they fear getting killed*
(This never happened)
Mao is long dead, China is long gone from being a Maoist mess with "anti-revolutionary" laws. It's not 1951, it's 2020.
Yeah, this is a reductio ad absurdum argument and these always look insincere to me. I'm not saying they didn't have the nerve to correct a senior commie because they feared they would be summarily executed. But anyone who has worked a real job knows that correcting your boss is a delicate matter, and the more important the topic (and the dumber the boss' opinion), the more delicate it is. The Chinese system has always to large degree valued loyalty ahead of competence, going right back to Mao's "Red Expert" euphemism and it seems that Xi has re-enforced this during his tenure after his perception that things were getting too loose under Hu. And so while today these bureaucrats and scientists may not fear summary execution as much (although some do fear it a little and China has a rather startlingly high rate of executives who jump out of windows) they certainly do fear potential career (and freedom) consequences for embarrassing a senior commie official, not exactly known for not being ruthless, vindictive bastards. If you're a Chinese scientist who has been told to do something stupid by a commie official who likes to tell everyone he's trained as an engineer but actually is pretty ignorant on the topic being discussed, it's a hell of a lot easier to do what you're told and hope for the best than take the career-political risk of trying to correct the decision. And that thinking still definitely applies in the modern PRC, especially around politically sensitive topics.
And hey, at least this way you get to live in a city with stuff going on and can go home to your family on week nights, instead of having a long drive back and forth to the middle of nowhere every weekend.
However, there is indeed a virology research lab in Wuhan. It's a bio-safety level 4 lab that's opened in coordination with the French. Many simply ignore this.
If the virus did come from the lab, where's the French at? Where are French scientists speaking up? This theory has as much validity as the USA launched a bioweapon theory, which some Chinese believe. There is no way a virus will just simply escape from a bio-safety level 4 lab, unless one is willing to entertain the idea of either French or Chinese researchers intentionally infecting people.
I also disagree with this take. Firstly, you aren't clear about how much French supervision there is. Did they just get paid nicely to say "this conforms to Western safety standards" then hop back on a plane, coming back once or twice a year for a conference while letting the Chinese get on with it? And then you presumably understand the Chinese enough to know that even if the French have in theory an active research presence on site (which you are not specific about), then the Chinese will still have loads of angles and scams going on that their French "colleagues and partners" are to be kept in the dark about (with varying degrees of success). Everyone who has worked with the Chinese, especially in Chinese companies, has seen this shit going on. And the French can't prevent the Chinese from Chinese lax attitude to safety, penchant for fuck-ups and reckless ambition to copy/steal Western science and technology, irrespective of whether or not they're prepared to handle it safely.
Discussions of US related bioweapons is censored as well. It will make more sense to use this as an obfuscation.
No, sorry, that's just obviously wrong. For the Chinese state, which is known to be censorious as fuck, tolerating a conspiracy theory is basically the same thing as endorsing it and if the Chinese state were to embrace that conspiracy theory and allow the Chinese Internet to discuss it, then it's obviously an act of war that will demand severe retribution. And a billion Changs who have been misled to the point of genuinely believing that the PRC could maybe go up against the US in a war where bioweapons are being used and therefore there are no rules - and not be obliterated in a few hours - would probably get a lot harder to manage. And this is to say nothing of the fact that if you allow people to speculate it's a bioweapon (i.e. acknowledge the possibility of it) then that is a hell of a lot worse than the flu, people will get more difficult to manage for this reason too and also you also open the door to the implication that maybe it is a bioweapon but it wasn't the Americans who released it.
The lab wasn't even able to test the virus, you honestly think it can produce fucking bioweapons?
Yeah, says the Chinese Communists. But they are not a reliable source, are they?
I can't prove it is a bioweapon, just like you can't prove it is bat soup and disgustingly unhygienic wet markets, but some signs point to it being a bioweapon and you're not doing anything to convince me otherwise.
www.youtube.com
twitter.com
archive.ph
). I wanted to get these done though and posted in case anyone was wondering where I was/if I'd finally been WuFlu'd, and also so I could test whether my script was working. Looks good so far: I should hopefully be able to catch up quicker and stay current a little easier with this now. (Hopefully!)
