Posted on 03/20/2020 7:28:40 AM PDT by Kaslin
The World Health Organization and other sensitive souls have instructed us to stop referring to the new strain of coronavirus as the "Wuhan" or "Chinese" flu because of the racist connotations. I'm disinclined to curb my speech to placate Chinese propagandists, and it seems to me the aversion to those terms is less about racism than about averting blame. But in the spirit of comity, and avoiding disparaging an entire nation, I'm happy to call it the ChiCom Flu moving forward.
There are many traditional naming conventions that don't really make that much sense. Somewhat weirdly, for example, we often name diseases after the people who "discover" them -- Hodgkin's disease after Thomas Hodgkin, Parkinson's disease after James Parkinson, and so on.
But naming viral diseases after places -- Guinea Worm, West Nile Virus, Ebola, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, etc. -- is probably just intuitive. Viruses "come" from someplace, after all, and thus people gravitate to those names. I doubt we came up with "Lyme disease" because of some deep enmity towards Connecticut.
Anyway, "COVID-19" or "H1N1" don't exactly roll off the tongue.
The latter was, until very recently, widely referred to as the "Spanish flu," a virus that killed around 675,000 Americans and tens of millions of others around the world in the early 1900s. "Spanish flu" has now retroactively fallen into disfavor as well. And to be fair, there is some historical evidence that the virus may actually have originated in China or France, so if we must call it the French flu moving forward, so be it.
But while the Spanish have a good case to be annoyed, the Chinese government does not. As Jim Geraghty notes, the Communist Chinese have been far more effective in stopping the spread of information about the coronavirus than in stopping the spread of the coronavirus itself. Today, for example, China expelled most American journalists from the country.
Early on, the Communists destroyed samples and suppressed vital information that could have helped mitigate the damage of this new strain of coronavirus. The government also silenced doctors who warned about the disease. Some were censured for "spreading rumors" or sharing test results with colleagues, and some were forced to write self-critical public letters -- a Marxist mainstay -- admitting that the warning "had a negative impact." The Chinese Communists probably let 5 million people leave Wuhan without screening, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The Chinese Communists, like all Communists, hide societal problems. There is no crime, disease or addiction in the collectivist state. This kind of secrecy and dishonesty can be disastrous, especially in a highly interconnected world.
Though millions of Chinese have been lifted out of extreme poverty through free trade, with modernity comes some basic responsibilities -- for instance, not killing everyone in the world with preventable zoonotic diseases.
The Chinese regime is perfectly capable of administering an array of authoritarian policies to suppress the rights of its own people. But it's apparently unable to exert even mild cultural pressure warning them that their eating habits can be extraordinarily dangerous and hold the potential of creating massive socioeconomic problems.
If reports are correct, it was in Wuhan's popular "wet markets" that vendors were selling the bats -- and possibly snakes -- that may have caused the COVID-19 outbreak. "Wet" because the meat sold in its unsanitary stalls was only recently slaughtered.
This kind of thing happens quite often. And not always in China, of course. But the avian influenza was likely transmitted to humans from chickens in a "wet" market. Scientists have been warning for years that the eating of exotic animals in southern China "is a time bomb." Acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) also originated in China, and probably jumped to humans through bats. Other coronavirus strains are also likely connected to bats.
I hate to thrust my Western cultural values on anyone, but maybe it's time to stop eating bats.
It's important to stress that it's not the Chinese people who are the problem. Just look at their success in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United States. The ChiComs are the problem. If the Chinese government spent as much time working on educating its people and regulating dangerous markets as it does on secrecy and propaganda efforts, maybe it wouldn't have to worry as much about diseases being named after it -- or about the catastrophic death and economic pain their negligence helps cause
The Communist Party of China and ALL of their running dogs need to go. Hong Kong and Taiwan need to liberate Chine.
China’s Chernobyl.
And yes, Taiwan and HK need to liberate the Chinese people from the evil CCP. American needs to COMPLETELY DECOUPLE from the CCP. Stop feeding our enemy for cheap goods.
As if their disgusting, conniving people weren’t enough
Exactly! That incident was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. The Wuhan Flu is China’s Chernobyl!
The ChiComs made matters worse by covering up the truth about the origins of the Wuhan virus, withholding useful, lifesaving data and information.
Han Flu would be racist.
China is a place, not a race.
Cheered on by the libs.
I wish the EU luck with insisting on the Huewei 5g network after China exported their virus to Europe. Next time China can send it through the 5g network. China leads the world in emitting CO2, they cheat on their deals, never honor them, built their industries stealing western technologies that they now compete with the West,spies on the world, conceals viruses and facilitates global pandemics,maintains a trade surplus with the entire west except Germany, has every intention of eventually locking the west out of their domestic markets in favor of Chinese companies, fix their currency to disadvantage the West, suppress their people, built a military that threatens everyone in the region, etc.There is no advantage to dealing with this toxic parasitic economy. It is time for the West to cut this enemy off completely and return them to an agrarian society.
WuFlu
Wuhan Flu
Chinese Flu
Commie Flu
ChiCom Flu
CCP Flu
Time to do to the Chicom regime what Reagan and Bill Casey did to the Soviet regime.
When the dust settles, and it willl, there will be perceived winners and losers.
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Single-payer health care and socialized medicine will be as politically dead as the military truckloads in Italy and the open pit mass graves in Iran.
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Dems will be seen as petty whiners, trying to call them from the bench, while Trump leads on. The fall elections are essentially over.
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China’s goal of world economic dominance is fully wrecked. They are deeply humiliated. They caused this pandemic that has destroyed the world economy and health, everyone knows that.
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America, one again, will save the world.
A lot of this involves how the wealthy elite who have spent years acting over our society thinking that they knew what was best for us are greatly connected to China with business and investments there. I recall reading some years back about the very serious financial and credit situation developing there (many there were bankrupt and defaulting on loans) and it foster a Soviet Union type collapse. It is not unusual to go to places like Shanghai and Beijing and see all of these big, bright new office towers that are at best half or three quarters empty.
Basically you are dealing with a Third World country with a very nasty and authoritarian regime that built up all sorts of modern infrastructure and made some wealthy and powerful and above all corrupt Western business and political interests even more so. However, as a Third World country in many instances, it is not surprising that a contagion like this got that foothold and spread the way it did and in turn expose all of this.
I’d like to see the Chinese symbol for “middle” become the universal symbol for quarantine. A rectangle struck through with a vertical line in the middle, Yellow tape, signs, placards where needed, telling people don’t go there. That would make the CCP fume with rage.
You watch...in the final months of the election cycle, the media and the Chinese propagandist's on social media will be running with the idea that there was no need for Trump to destroy our economy. That he went way overboard and it's all his fault for the economic pain it caused.
Now, his conservative/(R) base will know better. However, the "independents" and (D)'s that voted for him in 2016...and whom he must get again...might be persuaded to vote against him.
If TRUMP.45! really wanted to PO them off he shoulda just mentioned the name...”Gen Douglas MacArthur”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
;)
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GunnyG@PlanetWTF?/WNW!
SemperTRUMP!
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Xiaoping’s Red Plague
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