And don't call it the "Spanish Flu," it's the "Kansas Flu."
So in this particular case, a way blaming might help would be to recognize those organizations and governments that were incapable of preventing the spread of the disease and to recognize in the future a quicker need to mitigate and not to assume China will take care of it, assuming China deserves blame. It may also help by recuperating the economic loss by holding those responsible for it and requiring payments. These are common things that happen in all walks of life and the international context is no different. People and countries shouldn't get to walk away from massive fuck ups if it is possible to hold them to account. At least we can try.
Exactly. Things have recently been declassified that makes me very surprised pandemics like this hadn't already happened a few times in just the past few years. For example: https://news.yahoo.com/suspected-sars-virus-and-flu-found-in...
I'm a reasonable man, I find accountability a positive virtue. I'm also not a foolish one, for I understand trying to assign blame for an act of god is definitely NOT normal. And I understand the "blameless post-mortem" is a tech-industry standard well understood, so I am surprised to find the "blame game" card being played here. Consider:
Every time a hurricane rolls off the coast of west Africa and trashes the Eastern seaboard, you don't see the US blaming west Africa.
You don't see Missouri trying to pin the Joplin tornado onto neighboring Kansas/Oklahoma in order to recoup billions of dollars of damages and loss of human life. You DO get a technical NIST report that is blameless (I have worked with this particular data) [0].
When an earthquake originates in one country but flattens the city in a neighboring country, you don't see one sue the other.
When a typhoon hits SE Asia, they aren't trying to readily assign blame.
What can be assigned blame is a nation's reaction to this force majeure. At that point the people should be holding their own leaders accountable, as the assumption should always be that the neighbors are incompetent, and our own leaders are the best. That is inconvenient for the current President precisely because he politicized the disease. If he had not politicized it, his followers would be more amenable for blameless post-mortems (literal post-mortems, let's remember people are dying). Unfortunately his response was lackluster, and rather than taking accountability (you know, the virtue I agreed w/ y'all on at the beginning), he would rather shift blame. But this implies that he was relying on China to do its part. Which then begs the question: If the US President wants to blame China, why was he sitting back and relying on China on good faith when no other nation was?
To summarize why I don't believe the bullshit that is "assigning blame" for SARS-Cov-2:
- Accountability is a virtue
- Blameless postmortem is a huge cross-industry technical standard, so abandoning that is immediately suspect
- US President politicized the disease; due to this he has political motivations to avoid the virtue of accountability and how he guided the US response (making the act of "blaming" even more suspect as being a political reaction)
- Doublethink of "Did the US President really rely on the Chinese response? Blame them, not him!" (only enabled because of politicization)
There are ways to understand why things went wrong and how to prevent them in the future, without assigning blame. Blameless post-mortem. But that's now been politicized.
[0] https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/NCSTAR/NIST.NCSTAR.3.pdf
I've demonstrated that everything except blame is useful when doing analyses of engineering failures or disaster analysis. I have professional experience in this both in the computer science world and in the traditional engineering world.
Identifying root causes like "lack of testing prevented deployment of limited resources optimally which exacerbated these effects: X, Y, ..." is a useful and actionable way to identify and address problems. And then people can look at these blameless analyses and make their tough decision, and then go beyond and demonstrate accountability for their choice. This can be repeated as many times as necessary all around the world, within nations or across nations in a collaborative response (such as the joint vaccine development initiatives).
Adding "blame" just exacerbates emotions (political or personal or what have you), clouds judgement, and usually results in a worse outcome by whatever measure of the disaster (usually number of deaths). That's my "unstated reason": blaming is an active choice that leads to more deaths as history has shown repeatedly, whether by famine due to supply chain issues plus political rejection of food aid, or a "not invented here syndrome" of rejecting medical supplies, or societal instability resulting in mass protest and political revolution (and more death and starvation), for example.
I don't blame Trump for Covid. Just like I don't blame China for Covid. There are a set of things China could have done differently, just like Trump could have done things differently. "Blame" is really saying "Trump should have never had to do any preparation differently because China should have done things differently," which is the definition of living in an alternate reality. Life says "tough shit" and doesn't treat him like a special snowflake. Plus it does not inspire confidence in the kind of leadership principles the President is following: just how many other things is he relying on others like China to do so that he doesn't have to make any preparations?
If I were inclined to distrust China, instead of blaming them I would be crapping my pants with how emphatic the President repeatedly assures the American people that he relied on them to manage such a disaster for him (and us). That is what he is saying when he tries to blame them.
I think China did as well as they could -- it was a bad outcome because it escaped -- but shutting down their entire society for a few months to bring their new cases down to 0 was effective for them. Sucks it escaped their borders but it's no longer their problem at that point. And it is scary that the whole free world is looking at the authoritarian regieme and going "gee they got down to 0 new cases" and then look at the Leader of Free World USA's high daily new case load and cringing. And then looking in horror at Want-To-Be European Leader Of Free World Germany reopening and watching their daily case rate rise.
In sum, while I think "Spanish" flu is more factually incorrect, I see talk about a "Chinese" flu as more acutely harmful. So - 1918 flu, COVID-19, IMO.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Qiushi#February_2020_disa...
"Citizens reporting on the epidemic have been made to disappear" would be a more factual description. And as can be seen from the first article linked above, "disappearance" doesn't necessarily lead to a fatal end.
There is some not-direct-but-still-relevant support for being inclined to think that death is not entirely out of the question for those reporters, e. g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...
But again, I think you were right to call me out on speculating. We just don't know, and if there's one thing we don't need more of right now, it's speculation from non-experts like me. Thank you.
There was no worldwide censorship of Covid-19. So what must be "interesting" is the lack of any real argument being made in your post, instead leaving a convenient gap where an argument should be so everyone can get into a trollsy debate about projecting their own political feelings upon this awful contentless comment.
Regarding the false equivalence though, I didn’t imply that, since I don’t think you need to go so deep into the interpretation of words. If any point was to be made in my comment is just the plain wording “Spanish/Chinese flu” associates the location and its people to the stigma. This, repeated over time, contributes to the social imaginary. Not every one knows the historical facts so well, and many people hearing the words “Spanish flu”, missing the context, will still make the negative associations. And let’s not forget that for a considerable part of the population in USA (not in Europe though), Spanish means “speaks Spanish”.