China Jails Citizen Journalist for Wuhan Reports (bbc.com) 211
A Chinese citizen journalist who covered Wuhan's coronavirus outbreak has been jailed for four years. From a report: Zhang Zhan was found guilty of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble", a frequent charge against activists. The 37-year-old former lawyer was detained in May, and has been on hunger strike for several months. Her lawyers say she is in poor health. Ms Zhang is one of several citizen journalists who have run into trouble for reporting on Wuhan. There is no free media in China and authorities are known to clamp down on activists or whistleblowers seen as undermining the government's response to the outbreak.
What's worrying (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's worrying (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's worrying (Score:4, Insightful)
Thank goodness USA never jails whistle-blowers. Oh wait...
If you read the CCP's propaganda from their spokespersons on twitter, you'll find this is perfectly line with what they say. The immediate implication of "Everyone's just as guilty" is "so really, it's not practical to do anything about it, and no one is justified in calling anyone else out on it." Which is an attitude of inaction the most culpable parties - who host no intentions of reform - are more than happy to see widely adopted.
The simple fact is that if China caught up to the US on human rights - and the US made no progress at all - that would still represent astounding progress for freedom and liberty. China's present practice of rounding up anyone who says anything that is remotely dissimilar to the official line not something that exists at all (except perhaps in the a vaguely corrupt periphery) in the US. The US press's coverage of the US administration the last four years has been almost uniformly critical, and I'm not aware of any reporter or blogger who has been sent to prison because of it. The US is absolutely in a position to criticize China for how they treat their citizens, and we should be outspoken in doing so.
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You know what would have got her in the biggest trouble, contacts with foreign agents, the government destabilising kind. They probably let the citizen journalist run around for months as bait and tracked all those who contacted them. When foreign agents were exposed, that would have made the citizen journalist look extremely bad in the eyes of the court, it would not be exposed for national security reasons but the unlucky victim of foreign government games would face the penalty of those foreign governmen
Re:What's worrying (Score:5, Interesting)
Why wouldn't they do it openly? The whole point of the exercise is to suppress dissent and maintain power.
Loosely translated: Kill a chicken to keep the monkeys in line.
One needn't look that far back into Chinese history to see how this plays out. If the communist party loses their grip on power, their heads will be on sticks and their wealth will be confiscated (only to repeat the cycle again). So they are going to go down swinging. In the interim, they're spiriting their ill gotten riches overseas at an astonishing rate.
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Wow, the chinese text I posted is stripped from the comment above. What the fuck.
Here is a description of the Chinese saying I included:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: What's worrying (Score:2)
No, that is primitive technology.
We surpassed that a long time ago, here.
Our propagsna is so advanced, we indeed do not make people do what we want. We make them *want* what we want.
Example: Notice how it's "not censorship" if a private entity does it? No need to kill the first amendment, if you get attacked by the average person for criticizing e.g. YouTube's "moderation" (which is in lockstep with the will of the dear leaders).
We can even have opposition parties and third parties, because everybody believ
Re: What's worrying (Score:2)
Bingo. American society claims China brainwashes, uses propaganda, and utilizes censorship all while ignoring any self-reflection of these matters. In every sense of the way these are alive in our culture and yet the difference is how well they are hidden. I think most of Europe is a bit more educated but not completely sure...
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is that they do it openly.
This is usually a sign that they don't know what they're doing. Those who know they're doing something bad try to do it in secrecy in order to keep doing it. So there is still hope that China learns and eventually stops with it.
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Re: What's worrying (Score:2)
It's both actually. People like to attack China as an Authoritian government. Chinese generally believe this is the role of government, to be like a parent. In a big family, a child that mocks its parents is likely to be made an example of, and siblings may likely appreciate this outcome (saying the person deserved it). Chinese culture really doesn't know any better but likewise the question exists if China allowed more squeaky wheels, would the whole system fall apart... Chinese people do the best at bei
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Re:What's worrying [is that they do it openly] (Score:2)
Would have been a much better FP, but as things stand, about 1/4 way down the AC-FP-derailed discussion.
However I would have to disagree with you on the merits. The whole point of self-censorship is to do it in public to create the appropriate climate of fear. In the US it's less the government than the rich bastards with lawyers. At least most of the time they just get financially destroyed rather than imprisoned.
He's been jailed for four years? Whoa. (Score:3, Funny)
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Compare "imprisoned," Gilligan.
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Re: He's been jailed for four years? Whoa. (Score:2)
She.
Not Slashdot China is, young padawan.
Rice. Not hot grits.
Re: He's been jailed for four years? Whoa. (Score:2)
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China follows US (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine being a publisher who reveals war crimes and being subject to torture, solitary confinement in an unheated cell, and facing trial for life imprisonment. China? No, that's the current state of adversarial journalism [freeassange.net] in the US.
Here's 75 minutes of Assange trying to do harm reduction with Clinton's State Department, only for them to sweep it under the rug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Careful about throwing stones there, bucko.
Warm up first! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Warm up first! (Score:2)
I think you need your reality distortion bubble checked, Americ-o.
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The differences between China and the US are very large. One of them is they are authoritarian and therefore they can be much more honest or at least much more crude when they lie. They are very much concerned by the US stirring up things and when they see people running around selling subversive stories they intervene in authoritarian manner.
Our system is 'managed democracy': the system organically uses extensive propaganda to arrange for everyone to despise someone like Assange so it doesn't bother them i
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I was going to mention the recent events in Florida too. Another journalist subjected to an armed raid and malicious prosecution.
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Extended isolation is a torture technique.
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I think one can be critical of the US and other western countries, but it is a false equivalence to equate publicising officially secret information with just reporting facts one can observe on the ground in real life.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not supporting whether or not the information that Assange revealed should have been secret here - it very likely should not have been. But there is a reason the whole Wikileaks was more than a bit cloak and dagger.
Re: China follows US (Score:2)
Human rights are a scam but I wonder if you could expand on your words...
The biggest example I know is that many American rights are considered "God-given" and inalienable. Yet we commonly deny them to those who do not have American citizenship. Therefore human rights see rather mutable relative to citizenship and loyalty...
Yup, nothing to hide (Score:5, Insightful)
In case you were wondering why China is accused of making this in a lab one way or another, this is an example of why.
- Totalitarian state.
- Currently wiping its ass with human rights standards via running concentration camps for "bad" ethnic minorities.
- Known aggressor across the world via industrial espionage.
- Terrorizes citizens who question the almighty state.
- Known by major states to have lied about what it knew and when it knew it about this.
But sure, it would completely out of character for such a "very responsible regime" to be playing God with viruses in a lab that is down wind of a meat market, even if the goal was to just understand the virus and not create a bioweapon. Clearly, it was all the fucking Pangolin's fault.
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Clearly, it was all the fucking Pangolin's fault.
It's the Pangolin's fault that it tastes so good!
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The only thing speaking against the bioweapon theory is the virus itself. It is not nearly dangerous enough to be used as a weapon. For a virus to be used as a weapon, you want one that kills the vast majority of victims almost instantly. Preferably so fast that the victims are dead before they can spread the virus further than the wielder intended.
Don't get me wrong, I do not want to downplay the effects of the corona virus, but anyone who would would want to make a bioweapon would base his efforts on some
Re:Yup, nothing to hide (Score:5, Insightful)
The only thing speaking against the bioweapon theory is the virus itself. It is not nearly dangerous enough to be used as a weapon.
It's not just that, it's been analyzed and has none of the hallmarks of a virus which has been modified to be more hazardous.
On the other hand, it could definitely have been a virus they were studying in a lab and which got out. It hardly matters if they were planning to develop defenses against it or weaponize it if this is what happened; either way China would be definitively responsible for its release.
On the gripping hand, either way the response is the same. Nobody is going to do anything to bring China to heel because it's way too late for that.
It came from the wet markets (Score:2)
So China's trying to keep too many questions about the wet markets from being asked. Because
That it's too late to do anything (Score:2)
is literally the CCP's biggest propaganda push. They want you to roll over and take it by pretending they're just too big, powerful and important (oh and benevolent, *cough*).
It's exactly what they've been saying about the trade war and decoupling from the US economy, as just an example. It's not true, they need us and the EU and other western nations a hell of a lot more than we need them.
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Tell me which nation isn't too greedy to stop doing business with China over mere abuses of human rights. It's just too profitable to let them crank out our tchotchkes.
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It's not just that, it's been analyzed and has none of the hallmarks of a virus which has been modified to be more hazardous.
What hallmarks are those?
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elefino. I could go look them up but what I do know is that that's what the experts say. If you think otherwise, hit me with some knowledge, Jack. I'm ready to receive your wisdom.
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ok, now you motivated me to do a more diligent search. This is the best I could come up with [nature.com]. Their points seem to be two-fold:
1) The binding protein isn't the most efficient possible construction, theoretically a protein could be constructed that would bind better to the ACE2 receptor.
2) It would have been easier to build on previously published virus backbones, rather than try to modify a new one.
Because of those two points, they conclude that the virus was naturally evolved, rather than designed (or modd
That's not even remotely true (Score:5, Insightful)
COVID-19 is the perfect modern bioweapon because it has the ability to incapacitate a national economy while not killing enough people to be considered a true WMD. If it were highly lethal, under international norms it would be considered a justifiable basis to retaliate with nuclear weapons. China is absolutely fucked in such a conflict because they have enough nukes to make life hell for the US and Russia, but not enough to bring either country down. We, on the other hand, will destroy them utterly in such an exchange.
Nobody's going to nuke China (Score:2)
Go look up an incident between India and Pakistan from a few years ago. A bunch of Pakistani terrorists attacked a major building in India and Pakistan knew it was gonna happen and didn't tell Ind
Re: Yup, nothing to hide (Score:2)
Yes, agreed, mostly.
On another note ... hate to tell you, but what do you think Guantanamo Bay is? (It's just one of many black sites globally, by the way. Just Poland's former state leader if he thinks they are any different ftom concentration camps.
So, high horse, meet ground.
You forgot to add (Score:2)
The problem is that because China has such a horrible government it's easy to tar them with a brush because, well, they deserve it.
Police have been known to tack charges onto a criminal already looking at life in prison just so they can close out some cases. That's not actually justice though, it's convenience.
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It's easy to accuse. But there are multiple examples of coronaviruses mutating in the wild and jumping to humans - SARS, MERS, and I think a couple others. In the absence of any evidence, the only reason to believe it came from a lab would be a thirst for conspiracy-theroy mental masturbation. People have needs, I guess. And politicians in the US have a need to maintain a boogeyman and push blame on them. Much more than the Chinese need a piss-poor bioweapon made out of coronavirus.
Wow, the 50 cent army has mod points (Score:2)
With how cheap y'all are I would have thought you'd have enough slashdot accounts to mod me down more than a single -1.
Restrained with a feeding tube (Score:5, Insightful)
According to the article, she's being fed with a feeding tube and restrained to a table. How long before her body gives out? It's depressingly interesting that economic prosperity has pushed China further toward being a fascist police state. There's apparently a real, bitter cynicism at most levels of the Chinese government. Maybe this is all a result of China's never having participated in the Enlightenment and the lack of any political agency for the Chinese people. Or maybe the Chinese government has just bought off the middle class since it effectively created its middle class. Either way, losing four years of your life for something like this seems horrific to me, and it's probably MEANT to seem horrific. China really had a chance to be great before it was totally weighed down with "Xi Jinping Thought."
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"China really had a chance to be great before it was totally weighed down with "Mao Zedong Thought".
FTFY.
Re: Restrained with a feeding tube (Score:2)
Seconded. So much lost potential.
Just because some kids did not get a therapy for their triggers, and are now living it out on the backs of a billion people.
Re: Restrained with a feeding tube (Score:3)
The lack of an enlightenment period is so significant... it feels like a completely missed opportunity that shall never return though.
Actually four years? (Score:2)
Or four years + "suicide" or + "re-integration camp"?
"picking quarrels and provoking trouble" (Score:5, Funny)
The difference between China and the US?
Most of the US would be in jail under that standard of conduct.
NBA Hypocrites (Score:5, Insightful)
The NBA is owned by billionaires (Score:2)
We've been told our entire lives that Capitalism equals Freedom and if only China would get more Capitalism they'd get more Freedom. Turns out that's a lie. In fact the exact opposite is happening. Chinese Capitalists use t
Re: The NBA is owned by billionaires (Score:2)
Free markets without free people. - Andrew Klavan
Is the Chinese Communist Party so insecure? (Score:5, Interesting)
There might be something lost in translation, but "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" does not sound like a major crime to me. Another standard phrase is "spreading lies and rumors". The standard CCP response to any dissenting view is to suppress it, stamp it out, and ideally, make like it never happened. The poor Chinese cannot even partake of the ancient sport of taking the piss out of politicians. I do not think it is permitted to utter the name "Winnie the Pooh" in China.
Re: Is the Chinese Communist Party so insecure? (Score:3)
The 1st part of the Chinese Constitution is China is a socialist state and your cannot undermine this. The charge is effectively a way to say someone was unsermining the state which because of Chinese nationalism could lead to quarrels or other incidents... It's pretty clear to people famiiar with China but I can see how the charge seems ambiguous... it effectively kind of is...
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It appears this 'journalist' is linked to the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) https://thegrayzone.com/2018/0... [thegrayzone.com] .
It's a front for the US .
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Defending human rights. Well, there you are then. This wicked woman is obviously in league with the western imperialists. Calling herself a 'journalist' is clearly a deception to conceal her subversive activities.
By the way, is sarcasm permitted under communist rule?
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Who says they'd notice? Even here we don't spot it. Call it trolling instead. Everything is trolling.
Loved pilgrims being dumped on during Thanksgiving (Score:2)
About how they spread smallpox and should return land and pay reparations. Well, should we address more recent matters first? By jailing journalists who tried to report the pandemic, China is showing that the pandemic is at least due to malicious cover up rather than an accident. What reparations are they going to pay for hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars of economic damage in US alone? If we take all the land owned by Chinese nationals and give it to Native American tribes, can we th
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What reparations are they going to pay for hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars of economic damage in US alone?
The majority of those deaths were preventable even given China's delaying important information, especially in the US, given effective leadership.
You Next (Score:3, Insightful)
And you'll be next. Disrespecting the US government like that. Think that will be allowed, too?
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Sorry, different AC here, but Anti Vaxxers should be prosecuted/sued, a lot.
They are promoting harm to others, and selectively ignore every shred of evidence showing that vaccines are effective, good, and are not fucking linked to autism/
Re: You Next (Score:4, Insightful)
Vaxxer here, but no. Everyone has the right to be an idiot and say idiotic stuff, and they should have.
We have necessary restrictions (libel laws etc), but that should be enough.
Re: You Next (Score:5, Insightful)
The nice thing about freedom of speech is it reveals to the world the true nature of an individual.
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Exactly. I'd rather know to avoid an idiot by the things he says than by the things he does (to me). The former is usually safer :-)
Trouble is you can't avoid these idiots (Score:3)
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No they aren't, they are hiding inside with masks on self-quarantining.
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Yup, also today's idiot is tomorrow's forward thinking genius. It all depends on what happens tomorrow. Just look at the geniuses who saw the housing crash coming, every supposedly brilliant financial mind in the country along with the vast majority of 'sane' and 'responsible' people. Then the crash they foresaw happened and they were forward thinking geniuses... then all the sore losers who caused the crash by refusing to believe it happened turned their rage on them and they went back to being idiots.
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"Just look at the geniuses who saw the housing crash coming, every supposedly brilliant financial mind in the country along with the vast majority of 'sane' and 'responsible' people." thought they were idiots.
Slashdot really needs to allow edits, at least until there are replies or moderation. Or possibly just with a transparent revision history.
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We also have laws relating to causing harm to other people around you.
Not getting vaccinated and infecting them causes harm to them.
Choosing not to get vaccinated is not something that will likely impact you personally. The people it will impact are all the people you infect while you're walking around as a plague bearer.
It would be one thing if we could tell who that is, but we can't. It's clear that COVID has super-spreader events where one individual infects dozens of other people. In some cases [go.com], one ind
Re: You Next (Score:5, Informative)
You mean the Bell's Palsy that occurred at exactly the same rate in the experiment group as it did in the general population (who didn't get the vaccine)? That Bell's Palsy?
The only thing unusual about that experiment was that there were no cases in the control arm. So a cynic might suggest that saline injections prevent Bell's Palsy. It's about as likely as the coronavirus vaccine causing it.
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I don't think anyone has the right to order someone else to take a vaccine.
However, the society as a whole should have the right to refuse treatment of a disease if someone refuses to take a vaccine out of choice.
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Society should not have a right to refuse treatment of disease, save maybe a standing capital punishment order.
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> Society should not have a right to refuse treatment of disease
Put it this way. Under resource constraints, a sane society should prioritise treatment for the vaccinated.
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A sane society IS prioritizing treatment for those people... it is providing a vaccine.
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So let me get this straight, a statement which essentially says society has an obligation to provide universal healthcare makes you assume I'm a republican?
Have you considered the possibility that I just don't buy into the current political wind suggesting that it is okay to hate people and let them die simply because I felt different precautions were reasonable and they lost a dice roll?
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I don't think anyone has the right to order someone else to take a vaccine.
However, the society as a whole should have the right to refuse treatment of a disease if someone refuses to take a vaccine out of choice.
Shunning them should be sufficient. No vaccine? No concerts or airplane rides for you. If you don't give a damn about other members of your society, society should not give a damn about you. Already many schools won't accept your unvaccinated children (which seems reasonable anyway, since anti-vaxxers should want to home school their kids so they are not exposed to science or anything). Hell you can't even take your dog many places without proof it has had its shots.
Anti-vaxxers are not going to like th
Re: You Next (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone advocating that society has the right and the responsibility to prosecute and punish people for not taking vaccines or exercising any other of their freedoms SHOULD themselves be prosecuted with laws, but just that. You don't have a right to order someone else to take a vaccine. Simple as that. Believing you do, in my opinion is more dangerous than any other stupid opinion anyone else may have about anything else.
Now let's turn that around. Anyone advocating that people have a right to put other people in danger without their consent should be prosecuted with laws. You don't have a right to put anyone else's life at risk without that person's express consent. Simple as that. Believing that you do, in my opinion, is more dangerous than any other stupid opinion that anyone else might have about anything else.
We prosecute people for drunk driving because they are unnecessarily putting other people's lives at risk. I would argue that prosecuting people for being around other people while unvaccinated against a deadly disease is not meaningfully different from prosecuting people for drunk driving except in the level of risk involved. And the amount of time the average person spends breathing around other people is usually much, much, much higher than the amount of time that a typical drunk driver spends behind the wheel, which means the numbers aren't what you think they are.
So your odds of killing someone after getting coronavirus once is about a hundred times greater than your odds of killing someone by driving drunk for an entire year. And even if everyone gets vaccinated, that risk will drop by only about a factor of twenty (assuming 95% effectiveness). If we fail to stop this virus, unless you literally live in a cabin in the woods and gather your own food, you *will* get it at some point, and you *will* spread it to other people. Given the numbers above, justify why you think it's unreasonable to prosecute someone who refuses the vaccine while continuing to participate in society.
It's important to understand that approximately *nobody* is advocating prosecuting and punishing people for merely refusing the vaccine. People are advocating requiring vaccines for anyone participating in parts of society where an unvaccinated person poses a real risk (including shopping in stores, working in offices, participating in sports, going to the gym, eating in restaurants, etc.). If you are opposed to vaccines on principle, you can certainly feel free to go out in the woods, build yourself a cabin, and never interact with anyone else, and nobody is going to bother you about not being vaccinated. That is your right.
What is not your right is rejecting that vaccine arbitrarily, then putting people in danger unnecessarily by continuing to participate in society as though your presence doesn't pose a significant threat to their safety.
Being a part of a society has benefits, and with those benefits come responsibilities. One of your responsibilities as a member of society is to not do things that infringe unnecessarily on the rights or safety of others. Many people don't have the luxury of being vaccinated because of medical conditions that would cause the vaccine to be dangerous for them. The only way to not i
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Failing to do something which mitigates the risk someone else faces is not 'putting their life at risk.' Unless one bred COVID-19 in a Chinese lab or otherwise takes an action with the INTENT of spreading COVID-19, they are no responsible for the risk it poses.
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Failing to do something which mitigates the risk someone else faces is not 'putting their life at risk.' Unless one bred COVID-19 in a Chinese lab or otherwise takes an action with the INTENT of spreading COVID-19, they are no responsible for the risk it poses.
Tell you what. Don't repair your rotting front steps, and then when somebody comes over to your house and falls through, breaking a leg, we'll see if your claim that failing to do something to mitigate their risk is not putting them at risk. Hint: You'll get successfully sued into the poorhouse. As a homeowner, you are responsible for maintaining your property in a safe manner, and applies to gross negligence even if you post No Trespassing signs.
So what you are arguing is simply inconsistent with the wa
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"Failing to do something which mitigates the risk someone else faces is not 'putting their life at risk.' "
No true.
e.g. driving at 100 mph in a zone limited to 50 mph is putting other's life at risk.
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That isn't failing to do something which mitigates risk, that is actively doing something which causes risk.
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Uh huh, do you have any examples in which it is actually possible a reasonable and sane person didn't intend harm? No. Didn't think so.
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"Tell you what. Don't repair your rotting front steps, and then when somebody comes over to your house and falls through, breaking a leg, we'll see if your claim that failing to do something to mitigate their risk is not putting them at risk. Hint: You'll get successfully sued into the poorhouse. As a homeowner, you are responsible for maintaining your property in a safe manner, and applies to gross negligence even if you post No Trespassing signs."
Civil liability isn't relevant to the discussion at hand. S
Re: You Next (Score:4, Interesting)
And exactly how do you keep track of who has been vaccinated and who has not? Perhaps a national registry managed by the government? And how are you going to prove which unvaccinated individual transmitted the disease to you by simply walking past you on the street? Maybe everyone should just get a "I am vaccinated" tattooed on their forehead?
Easy. Before you can return to work, the government requires your employer to verify that you have your vaccination passport. Same for returning to various other activities. You can't fully prevent people from doing things like shopping, but you can say that if you come down with coronavirus, if other people get sick and report that they were near you in a public place, you can be prosecuted for attempted murder in the second degree. That should discourage almost all but the most clinically insane people from refusing the vaccination, and the rest will build their little cabins in the woods. Either way, problem solved.
The COVID virus has about a 1% mortality rate when you factor in those with symptoms and the vast majority of people who are asymptomatic. Stop treating the virus like an extinction level event.
I'm pretty sure if you go into your local high school with a gun and shoot 1% of all the students, they'll give you the chair or the needle. Clearly, then, a 1% death rate is unconscionable when it is caused by a deliberate act. Unfortunately for your argument, refusing to vaccinate is a deliberate act. See the problem?
BTW, in the post you replied to, I used much more conservative numbers of 0.1%. Your numbers make refusing the vaccine seem even more sociopathic by comparison.
The virus itself is not the problem it's the mitigation measures rammed down everyone's throats that have did far more harm.
Citation needed. From what I've seen, the problem is the mouth-breathing idiots who forced the mitigation to be relaxed a month or two sooner than it should have been. Other countries that didn't have anti-maskers shouting "muh raaahts" and who took strict, swift action to clamp down nationally were able to completely eliminate their coronavirus outbreaks, and their economies are doing much better than ours [bloomberg.com].
The places that got hurt the most were the ones that did nothing, followed by the ones that reopened too soon. That's what the numbers show. If you want to argue otherwise, you're going to have to bring in some real numbers to refute those facts.
This, BTW, is exactly what the people on the left said would happen, because it is exactly what scientists who studied the 1918 pandemic found had happened way back then. It is unfortunate that we had elected leaders who were so clinically incapable of learning from history — who were so utterly anti-science and anti-intellect that they couldn't think straight — running the show. The result was, predictably, that a whole lot of people got hurt, particularly the working poor, because the Republican governors, Republican President, and Republican Senate conspired to lead the public astray and seriously hurt the effectiveness of coronavirus mitigation.
There's nothing complicated about this. A complete idiot can see that a virus can't spread if there's nobody to spread it to, and if the virus only lasts a couple of weeks, if you can get everybody to keep to themselves for a couple of weeks, the virus goes away. It takes a special kind of moron to argue that this strategy can't work, because it has worked everywhere that it was actually tried.
But no. It's more important to put the rights of the dumbest people ahead of the rights of everybody else in the vain hope of keeping the economy strong just long enough to get reelected... an election which he still lost.
Sorry, but I'm really tired of being nice about this. The American right wing butchered a third of a million Americans, and people like you, spreading lies, compounded the problem. You should be ashamed of yourself.
Re: You Next (Score:2)
False. Society has all and every single method in itâ(TM)s employ to prevent and/or dampen the impact of a pandemic. The vaccice is the âniceâ option. There are many more options which are a lot less nice. Donâ(TM)t like it? Donâ(TM)t want it? Great, remove yourself from society then. Unless you actualy want those less nice options.
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At least the other troll feeder was smart enough to change the Subject.
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Exactly. That is a double edged sword of where we are today.
Much of the original framework (or at least propoganda) of the Constitution as implemented would be more effective today than during various periods in the past and a lot of baggage has occurred letting people water down the authority of the people. Today you'd have to suspend and reimplement in order to shed most of that baggage, toss out political or popular court rulings, keep more modern ideas of equity while restoring the pieces limiting feder
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Re: Enjoy your new masters (Score:2)
Yeah, cause when I see Stalin on the horizon, I sure long for those times when Hitler invaded me ... --.--
You dickheads are so full of yourselves, it's a wonder you don't explode.
Re: Enjoy your new masters (Score:2)
Hitler was an Austrian.
Re: Enjoy your new masters (Score:2)
Next you're going to tell me Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't German. Please...
Re: Enjoy your new masters (Score:2)
Ok:
Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't German. Please ...
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There were a lot of US Presidents in power during China's gradual rise to power. China was not powerful enough to be a significant threat for a while. They then switched to mostly capitalism as their economic system, which fueled their growth. It was hoped that capitalism would open up their gov't also.
But that premise failed. Now they are a large dictatorship that has a mostly capitalistic system. The idea of "capitalist commies" was unheard of a few decades ago, such that it caught us off guard. Singapore
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If "well-documented" means "totally fictional", sure. The US backed Kai-shek and the Nationalists (Kuomintang), until suspending aid because of corruption and mismanagement. It takes extremely creative reinterpretation to turn that into any kind of support for the PLA and CCP.
Did you post as an AC because you don't want to be flagged as part of China's 50 Cent Army? Or because you don't want to admit that you are a product of NYC's failing high school system?
Re: (Score:2)
And your source for this is...?
I mean, I don't want to say it would take a gullible, ignorant moron to believe that the US would back both Communists and the people fighting Communists during the 1940s and 1950s -- at the height of the Red Scare -- but that is pretty much what it would take, especially to claim that the US supported Communist revolutionaries "to a much greater degree" than the KMT government.
The US poured hundreds of millions of US dollars into bolstering KMT with materiel, even going so fa