The other day, I saw this meme making the rounds on Facebook:
First of all, China does have a vaccine against COVID-19. Several vaccines, in fact. (More on that in a moment.)
More importantly, I don’t believe for a second that China has “recovered” from the pandemic at all. As I’ve written before, I’m prepared to accept that they’ve done a better job tramping down the virus than Western countries. They locked down and sealed off the epicenter of Wuhan - which may have suffered ten times as many COVID infections as officially reported - to a degree that would never happen in a democratic country. But I remain very skeptical that life in the country has returned to what passes for normal in a dictatorship.
It turns out that when you jail anyone who reports on what the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t want people to know, you can make things look very rosy indeed:
Zhang Zhan, a 37-year-old former lawyer and citizen journalist who was arrested in May while reporting from Wuhan, has been sentenced to four years in jail.
Zhang was arrested for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” – an accusation commonly used against dissidents, activists and journalists – with her video and blog reports from the Wuhan lockdown. Last month she was charged with disseminating false information.
On Monday afternoon, just hours after the trial began, Zhang’s lawyer said she had been sentenced to four years in jail.
The prosecution of 10 Hong Kongers detained in mainland China after allegedly attempting to flee to Taiwan also began Monday, amid a crackdown apparently timed with the Christmas period to avoid western scrutiny.
The indictment sheet released last week said Zhang had sent “false information through text, video and other media through the internet media such as WeChat, Twitter and YouTube”.
[…]
Zhang had denied the charges and said all her reports about the outbreak response were based on first-hand accounts from locals. Her video reports were often critical of the secrecy and censorship.
“Ordinary people saying something casually in WeChat might be summoned and admonished,” she said in one report. “Because everything is undercover, this is the problem this country is facing now.”
WeChat is also commonly used among the Chinese diaspora in democratic countries, and people who use it to support democracy in Hong Kong are mysteriously getting their accounts suspended. Funny, that.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg (in a piece that uncritically accepts that China “used its authoritarian system to virtually eliminate the virus”) reports that people around the world remain very wary of taking a Chinese vaccine against COVID-19:
Of all the developing countries testing China’s Covid-19 vaccines, few are friendlier to Beijing than Pakistan. In the years leading up to the pandemic, China financed nearly $70 billion across the South Asian nation on roads, railways and power stations, and Pakistan now has two Chinese clinical trials underway, with even senior government officials being inoculated.
Yet interviews with people in Karachi, the nation’s biggest city -- as well as in other developing nations from Indonesia to Brazil, together with surveys and official comments -- show that China has failed to assure the millions of people who may have to rely on its vaccines.
“I won’t take it,” said Farman Ali Shah, a motorcycle driver in Karachi for local ride-hailing app Bykea, as local shops closed early ahead of an 8 p.m. virus-induced curfew. “I don’t trust it.”
That mistrust, and the reliance of dozens of poorer nations on China to inoculate their populations could set the stage for a major global political headache if citizens offered the Chinese vaccine feel they are being given an inferior product.
China’s vaccines were meant to score a clear diplomatic win for Beijing, shoring up ties with dozens of poorer nations amid an anticipated shortage of Western-developed shots. But there has been little information about how the Chinese versions have fared in final-stage clinical trials, with just the United Arab Emirates and China itself endorsing the vaccines for emergency use so far. Meanwhile, some U.S. and European companies have published data on the safety and efficacy of their shots and started to deploy them.
There’s a lot of skepticism around the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines - thanks, “Doctor” Wakefield! - but they are trusted much more than anything from China or Russia. In the long run, a system in which people are allowed to report on their governments’ failures produces much more trust than one in which people are locked up for saying the wrong thing.
Of course, even in the United States - especially in the United States - saying the wrong thing on social media can still be weaponized against you. Not by the state, but by budding Morozovs who’ve decided you must be personally destroyed:
Jimmy Galligan is an 18-year-old college freshman from Leesburg, Virginia. He may also be cancel culture's Count of Monte Cristo.
Some months ago, Galligan—who is biracial—posted a years' old, three-second video of a white, female classmate using a racial slur. Galligan had sat on the video for a long time, waiting for the moment it would do the most damage. After the girl—a cheerleader named Mimi Groves—was accepted to the University of Tennessee, the time had come.
"I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word," said Galligan.
The video depicted Groves, who was 15 at the time, and had just obtained her learner's permit, saying "I can drive, [slur]." The remark was not directed at anyone in particular. The brief video clip featuring it circulated on Snapchat until it was obtained and saved by Galligan, who had grown furious at how often he heard his white classmates using the N-word.
Galligan shared it publicly in June. In response, Groves lost her spot on UT's cheerleading squad. Then the university pressured her to withdraw from the school entirely. The admissions office had apparently received hundreds of messages from irate alumni demanding blood. Groves is now attending a community college.
[…]
Everyone roughly 25 and older should thank their lucky stars that they completed adolescence before the age of social media and ubiquitous camera phones, because the country's most important newspaper apparently thinks it is appropriate to shame teenagers over their juvenile behavior. This is the very worst aspect of cancel culture—the burning desire to hold people accountable for mistakes they made as kids, even if they have long since learned their lesson and grown past them—and the Times has fully embraced it.
As we saw during the Covington incident in early 2019, no one is in a forgiving mood these days.
As for Michael Green, it’s not just that he rushed to judgment and sicced his followers on a teenager, but that he wants to stay angry at him. He’s asked point-blank if he wants the kid to repent and become a member of a more harmonious society, and his answer is a definitive “no.” The anger is precisely the point. It’s the 93 octane fuel on which Twitter runs.
We all do terrible things when we’re younger. Heck, we all do terrible things when we’re adults. And we should be called out for it - but also be given the opportunity to grow and make amends. I’m not exactly the same person I was last month, much less when I was 15.
Groves shouldn’t have her life destroyed because she used an awful racial slur on Snapchat a few years back. And, for that matter, Galligan shouldn’t have his life forever defined by something he did before he’s old enough to legally purchase alcohol.
Nicholas Grossman, at Arc Digital, says the real villains here are the adults using these teenagers as proxies in their never-ending culture war:
Adults use these teenagers to advance preconceived arguments, often while claiming they’re standing up for them, or for kids like them; adults who should know better, or who do know better but don’t care.
Coaches at the University of Tennessee kicked Mimi off the cheer team and administrators pressured her to withdraw from the school. These adults said they received hundreds of complaints from “from outraged alumni, students and the public,” which includes adults who are affiliated with UT, and adults who aren’t but decided to make it their business anyway.
Adults at The New York Times decided this incident merited national news coverage, and published the names of previously unknown teenagers, thereby setting both up as targets for public hatred and harassment. If anyone googles Jimmy or Mimi’s full name, this will be on the first page for years. Maybe forever.
Adults on social media jumped on this story, including some with large followings who publicly denounced one or the other teenager using harsh language, thereby encouraging others to do so.
More broadly, adults in the entertainment industry market music that uses offensive language to teenagers, and spend millions trying to get them to think recording artists are cool. Adults throughout the country promote multiculturalism as a core value. And adults denounce teenagers for fully embracing music made by artists of different ethnicities. These aren’t all the same adults, but you can see how teenagers might find the overall message confusing.
We might regret it later, but there’s just something so intoxicating about being part of a righteous mob, isn’t there?
The other day my right eye exploded. Today my brain exploded.
First, there’s the apparent high people seem to get from participating in a mob. Anyone who has a social life seems to be susceptible to this to some degree. And then, there’s the part where the mob keeps piling it on *in order to justify the mobbing*.
But two wrongs don’t make a right.
I guess that’s a silver lining of growing up in isolation: the resultant tendency to use one’s mind instead of jumping on the bandwagon is a good thing overall, albeit damaging to one’s social life since no one wants to be friends with the nerd who questions the underlying motives of everything.
Speaking of nerds, kids learn by what we model, not what we preach. Parents can do a lot by modelling appropriate behaviours...in everything, including social media. And many parents do.
But I’m sorely disappointed in the behaviour of educational institutions. What would happen if they sent out a message stating that it was not appropriate for them to discipline a student for a minor incident that occurred somewhat out of their (temporal) jurisdiction?
Perhaps they should try it.