I agree that it is pretty certain. But impossibility is impossible, that’s all
I mean technically Putin could lose in an election.
Is it not also possible that the lack of mass deployment of this novel technology in China so far is due to (1) concerns over the non-existent long-term safety data and/or (2) preference to wait for a made-in-China version (of the same tech), rather than simply because they live behind the wall?
So, we now have a case of life imitating art. Or perhaps just simply Chinese being Chinese. You can make your own determination.
Synopsis: A nursing home in Shanghai calls a funeral home to come pick up two recently deceased residents who reportedly died from Covid. The funeral home workers load up the body bags into their van only to find that not merely one, but both are still alive. That’s right, “I’m not dead, yet!”. So, they wheel the “dead” residents back into the facility and get the hell outta there!
Life
Art
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Maybe he’s happy to use this chance to smash down Shanghai, just like he seemed to enjoy smashing HK. Those uppity coastal cities, with deep and abiding links to the rest of the world, can be such a nuisance.
Guy
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No I don’t think that there is any grounds for those type of conspiracies. Li Qiang leads Shanghai and his part of Xi’s inner circle. Xi himself lead Shanghai previously.
There isn’t any master plan
With the use of such a toxic heavy metal, the conspiracy is getting murkier!
Guy
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That’s interesting, I had completely forgotten that led was the past tense of lead.
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For those who understand Chinese, this is big in Taiwan the last two days.
Ceylan is a Chinese YouTuber who is pretty funny and fled Shanghai, saying how fucked up the system is. His formative years were in Shanghai but has mixed Belgian and Chinese parents and Belgium passport, so could go back to Brussels.
He is popular in Taiwan.
He gets quite emotive at the end and I guess won’t be going back to Shanghai again.
I’d never heard of him until he left Shanghai. It’s weird that all his videos are in traditional Chinese and like half of his videos are about Taiwan when he lived in China for so long.
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People shared his stuff to me before. He was on Bili Bili but got kicked off. I guess the market on YouTube is Taiwan/HK dominant
Obviously time will tell regarding how much of a lasting impact COVID will have on populations throughout the world – however there does seem to be a growing body of evidence suggesting having a bad bout with COVID could possibly result in life-long consequences…and the implications of that, to scale, are quite scary.
Hard to really tell if China knows this and is playing it as safe as possible with its population, at least partly explaining why they are being over-the-top authoritarian, or if the potential long-term threat of COVID to society has no part in their calculus today, and they are acting in this manner solely because of reasons already mentioned in this thread:
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I have also thought about this and whether they know something we don’t.
The other issue is not just having one bad bout, but cumulative mild bouts could also have real implications.
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The CCP cares about people? It’s an interesting theory
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If they are assessing that this crackdown can potentially give their underlings a long-term, sustained edge over the underlings of governments in the rest of the world, especially the West, sure.
4D chess theory here that quite likely is much too charitable – admittedly this is a shot in the dark. At the end of the day though, if this actually holds any water, you would hardly consider their behavior altruistic – they are acting out of national interest.
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I don’t think this “evil genius” hypothesis really works. Though I have little doubt that the original virus was optimized in and accidentally released from the Wuhan lab, I find the idea that China knows something the rest of the world doesn’t difficult to believe. Figuring out that there’s some kind of “ticking timebomb” associated with COVID infection would be extraordinarily complex and require a lot of research, patients, and time, unless we’re assuming that Chinese scientific/virological research is decades ahead of anyone else (doubt it).
Look at how poorly defined the idea of long COVID still is, despite over half a billion confirmed cases at this point and all the researchers around the world trying to get a couple of papers out of the pandemic. I think that if there was some hidden aspect of the disease that’s gravely concerning, sufficiently common for China to have identified, and only China originally knew, it would have been identified elsewhere by now.
IMO, more likely is that China’s knowledge about COVID at this point is similar to the rest of the world’s, but they’re continuing with this strategy for reasons that @OrangeOrganics and others have already discussed.
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It’s also important to remember the context. SARS was not that long ago and was a big deal in China. There was a perception of government failure that time, so this time if they have to choose between doing too much and too little, it’s no surprise if they err on the side of caution.
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God damn, this video is horrifying.
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Vice reports can be incredible. Thanks for posting this, despite the deeply unhappy content.
Guy
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