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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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C19 - Catchall term to refer to various covid mitigating restrictions, not the disease.

Anti-lockdown protests spread to Wuhan, China

In Shanghai, protesters called for president Xi Jinping to step down while others cried out “give me liberty or give me death” in the city of Chengdu.

^LOL, I don't know what to say about that. I can only hope they get what they want.

So looks like it's finally happening. It's too much even for the Chinese. Enough to go out and protest. 3 years is the upper limit to how long you can carry on with the C19 fugazi it seems.

For the uninitiated: It's really a different world in China. They are still treating C19 with an "abundance of caution". Probably infinitely more caution than most places in the world right now. Notice how all of the protestors are still wearing masks, outdoors! The sad part is that I could have made this post anytime in the last year and it would have been almost exactly the same.

I think one of the frustrating things about C19 was how much it felt like Groundhog Day, regardless of where you were in the world, outside of the US Red States and certain Balkan states- C19 Policies were kept around for so long past their expiry date, time became a meaningless concept.

I mentioned Groundhog day because I made a post about China's C19 excessiveness 1 year ago back in the old country. And keep in mind most countries got rid of the bulk of their restrictions at the time of making that post. My post was about small protests in various places in China. And in a year they have changed exactly 0%.

Many speculated on the reasons behind China's doggedness. Ranging from covid actually being bad and them knowing about it.. because they made it ha!; to China just not willing to lose face.

Not many of those reasons make sense now. China is not run by idiots. It's clear as the day the rest of the World looks down on them for this at the time of writing this. And covid wasn't that bad. So what gives?

Are they that high on their own supply? I think this is strong evidence that China's national consciousness is not connected to the "Real World" enough to actually be a threat to the US long term; A criticism often levied at The Cathedral. GDP can only save you so much from cutting your own dick off. There is really no kind way to say this, they are living in fantasy land.

I maintain that the Chinese think this was a biowarfare attack against them. They're using COVID to screen for their biological counterattack.

  1. Dodgy US NGO Ecohealth was messing around with chimeric coronaviruses in Wuhan - 'loses' their files on what viruses they had back in late 2019.

  2. China thinks the US used biowarfare against them in the Korean war, that's their official history.

  3. Conspiratorially minded Chinese elites aren't going to think 'oh it was just random chance: a sick Laotian bat flew to Wuhan and infected a pangolin who infected people'. They're not going to think an American NGO just happened to accidentally leak an extremely dangerous virus in a major Chinese city. Of course, Chinese BSL-4 biolabs are very well run and safe! Why wouldn't the leak happen in America if it were natural? Their most natural explanation is deliberate sabotage from the same country with a history of using biowarfare against them.

  4. They coped with the virus very well in the first two years, squelching it up until Omicron. Chinese death figures are very low, nearly 1000x times less than the US. Even the Chinese can't lie that much.

Given these assumptions, doesn't it make sense to launch a biological counterattack? The US is 100-1000x more vulnerable than China to biowarfare. China has finished setting up all their totalitarian surveillance structure, they've got camps and everything ready. They're 'justified' on the basis that they think the US shot first. If they release something in America, they'll have the advantage of distance and time, something they lacked the first time.

Maybe the MSS is taking their time, ensuring no evidence leads back to China. It's difficult to make it look like an accident and ensure it's lethal enough to be useful. Maybe the Chinese vaccine industry is suffering delays - they have to prepare a vaccine for the new weapon along with their COVID vaccine work. That might explain China's weakness on that front - diversion of effort. The frontline troops for Taiwan will need to be immune to the People's Liberation Plague. Maybe the nuclear forces aren't quite ready - the new subs and missile siloes take time to field. There could be all kinds of things causing a hold-up.

In conclusion, I think Chinese zero-COVID is a rational strategy to buy time for biowarfare and create an excuse for their ultra-high level of readiness. A few small riots and some economic damage are nothing compared to knocking out the entire West in a single blow and securing hegemony in Asia.

Agree with @sarker. It seems that even if major powers develop bioweapons, the nuclear truce has held. Why are bioweapons different than nuclear weapons?

Sure you can have deniability, but if Covid-19 were an actual bioattack, it would be a laughably bad attempt. All it does is kill old people who are burden on the system - when China because of the One Child Policy will be hit the hardest by the demographic collapse. If anything Covid is great for China, as it kills older less productive people, and lets the young refill the ranks.

Maybe the nuclear forces aren't quite ready

What does this mean? Is China going to launch a plague, then launch nukes? I'd argue bioweapons only make sense as a deceptive attack, crippling the West before they can strike back with nukes or other superweapons.

Maybe the Chinese vaccine industry is suffering delays - they have to prepare a vaccine for the new weapon along with their COVID vaccine work. That might explain China's weakness on that front - diversion of effort.

This is a far more important argument than you give it credit for. The advantage right now for the US especially is a specialization in research of 'hard sciences,' with biology/medicine being a lucrative and prestigious field. Virology maybe not, but I'd be surprised if Western defense agencies didn't have a much better understanding of viruses than standard academia.

What does this mean? Is China going to launch a plague, then launch nukes? I'd argue bioweapons only make sense as a deceptive attack, crippling the West before they can strike back with nukes or other superweapons.

China doesn't quite have second-strike capability against the US at the moment. They can cause some damage certainly, but a lot of their arsenal could be taken out with a pre-emptive strike. This has implications on the credibility of threats and deterrence. China obviously would want a secure arsenal before taking any risky moves like invading Taiwan. Hence they are building missile siloes and a new class of missile submarines for 2024-25.

I'd be surprised if Western defense agencies didn't have a much better understanding of viruses than standard academia.

I would. Biology and medicine is a huge field, and the vast majority of the research is conducted either in the open (at universities etc., and published in public journals) or by private companies. The US military has some research capacity (Fort Detrick etc.), but it is tiny compared to "standard academia".

Sure you can have deniability, but if Covid-19 were an actual bioattack, it would be a laughably bad attempt. All it does is kill old people who are burden on the system - when China because of the One Child Policy will be hit the hardest by the demographic collapse. If anything Covid is great for China, as it kills older less productive people, and lets the young refill the ranks.

Honestly the biggest frustration of COVID is that it provided a convenient out for the biggest Demographic issue of most affluent states right now and yet every major economy dug the hole even colossally deeper instead of taking the short-term hit to fix their issues.