> [..] building hospitals and distributing vaccines. Eh, I remember those pop-up hospitals they boasted about which ended up being glorified cages. I remember

> [..] building hospitals and distributing vaccines. Eh, I remember those pop-up hospitals they boasted about which ended up being glorified cages. I remember the headlines were something like "China builds a hospital in a week!", and then we heard nothing more after they were forced to tear them down before they fell down. Turns out you can't actually build something to last in a week - the concrete won't even set. Regarding developing and distributing vaccines, I really suspect this is why the WIV didn't share their latest COVID sequencing data and took their database offline. (They claimed it was due to hackers, but they could have easily sent the database on a shipped hard drive or hosted it in the Alibaba cloud.) It could only serve to incriminate them and it gives them a few weeks head start for generating a vaccine. (It ended up being awful anyway and the local people choose not to take it due to a loss of faith in the CCP - for the same reason they still import their baby milk powder from abroad.) > By doing a better job at it than democracies, the CCP could buy some praise from the public, but I'm unable to speculate whether the average Chinese citizen feels their government was heroic or not. If you control all external media, why even bother doing a better job? You can simply claim the rest of the world is awful outside of China and that the CCP is the best thing since sliced bread. > [..] as long as we keep voting our more radical representatives in, and being angry with the 'other side', the less likely we are to unite and overthrow the corrupt show of two-party politics. Right, the only thing that happens in a two-party system is that one side is slightly less disappointed than the other. You find yourself voting for what you perceive to be the lesser evil. > Thanks for joining me under this aluminum tent I think these ideas are worth probing out as long as everybody involved remembers which parts are fact and which parts are speculation. When we confuse the two it becomes less fruitful.