[hongsy]

What really grates at people’s nerves?

Uncertainty. Not knowing when you will end up testing positive and be whisked off by one of the commissar’s white costumed goon squads in the middle of the night. If you don’t agree, that’s when they typically come, like the NKVD secret police back in the Soviet Union. And not knowing what will happen to your children, your elderly parents and your pets if / when that day comes.

https://austrianchina.substack.com/p/tragedy-and-hope-in-sha...

[ChadNauseam]

Very interesting. Not doubting the severity of the situation, but I'm curious where you get this info – you seem to have knowledge of the inside baseball (like emergency meetings held by CCP admins) and I don't know how to trust that it's accurate.

[woutr_be]

Out of experience in Hong Kong, this is exactly what happened. People weren't afraid of testing positive, they were afraid of being taken away to a poorly maintained quarantine facility for two weeks. Even your close contacts would be quarantined for two weeks, making it so that many people (unsurprisingly) lied about who they met, or where they went.

For people, who live paycheck to paycheck, this would essentially destroy their livelihoods. They would be out of money (since they won't get paid for weeks), could potentially not feed their families, and are at risk of losing their jobs.

[kenneth]

Indeed, that was exactly the issue in Hong Kong and when the likelihood of having this happen in HK with the mandatory tests and rising cases started to skyrocket, that's when I left to go take refugee outside the madness. Ironically, I promptly got covid in Europe and it was no big deal. The disease itself is no big deal, the real risk is authoritarian governments who have gone mental. All of my friends who have gotten covid in HK are keeping it very secret, which explains how we only have a bit over 1M reported cases, vs. likely 4M+ cases in 3 months (out of a population of 7M).

And we have it easy in HK. What's happening in Shanghai is far scarier. They're literally going around forcibly imprisoning people and starving them, and killing their pets arbitrarily. In HK they only tried to kill people's hamsters, but at least didn't go for our dogs. If they had gone for my boy, that's when I'd turn full revolutionary.

[lanamo]

fellow HK gweilo here - me too would have gone full John Wick mode! it is impressive to witness such a mass psychosis, but if you touch my dog, then...

[woutr_be]

They wouldn’t even blink twice when they take your dog away. When I returned to HK in January, the entire experience was so dehumanising. You’re literally treated like cattle, from the moment you get off the plane, you’re just following a long queue, going through different station, and end up waiting for hours without anyone telling you what’s going on.

Everyone on my flight ended up waiting for over 12 hours i the airport, because people tested positive. Not a single person came to explain what was going on, it took several passengers shouting at staff to get bits of information. I saw a woman with kids break down in tears because she too had been there for over 12 hours.

Don’t even get me started on the two week quarantine, I felt like I was treater as a prisoner. I’ve lived here long enough to not expect decent customer service, but it wasn’t my choice to be locked up for two weeks, the least staff can do is treat people nicer.

[ksec]

>fellow HK gweilo here

LOL. May be after the lockdown we should make a Hong Kong HN gathering event.

[4ggr0]

> The disease itself is no big deal

Well, not for you personally I guess.

[leohonexus]

A lot of it is public information though, if you know where to look.

[kkfx]

People have more pressing issue I imaging: food shortage is not a matter of incertitude, it's already there, lack of space is another. If you have enough propaganda to put some people, who happen to live in very comfortable homes, with gardens etc, food coming from the outside as anything else and they still get payed as usual probably only few will revolt.

That's indeed the Great Reset/World Economic Forum model https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s... only they imaging to been able to substitute large homes with garden with a Virtual Revolution alike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Revolution capsule homes with metaverse-alike seats. A modern version of the classic panem et circense.

IMVHO China want to change it's demography quickly so they have to manage some justified enormous amount of "elderly" deaths to lower their mean population age. They need more young and they can't even nourish actual adults. A pandemic as excuse, with proper "cures" (not to cure but to kill), pushing people to suicide, ... is a mildly effective technique. In the meantime they can test countless of things and nearly no one will spot them. Some might see this as a so extreme theory that follow some flat-earth believers, and that's exactly why it might be a "good" one: the classic Goebbels "kill 100 children and the entire world will be against you, kill 100M and no one will believe, almost anyone will remain silent or even criticize those who speak".

I suggest a small reasoning in the end:

- did we agree that Earth is overpopulated?

- did we agree that IPCC/GIEC reports on climate might be realistic enough to be called true?

- did we agree that any human being rightly want to live better and so no demand of real, tangible "food rationing, lifestyle changes" can happen and be effective without some enormously real or mocked emergency (cfr. the classic Capitalism and Freedom)?

That what you think it can be done from here to 2030, a VERY short period of time in social changes terms, to completely transform the society? In the past we used wars, but with nukes it's not much a good idea AND wars tend to kill more young that old people...

[throwaway4good]

I don’t think it is ok to compare covid quarantines to concentration camps.

[mdp2021]

That is not a comparison, it is a description and an identification (a "classification", in ML terms).

[DiogenesKynikos]

When people hear "concentration camp," they think about the Nazi camps during WWII where people were gassed, starved or worked to death. They don't think of a large makeshift hospital that you go to for 10 days, in which you're given 3 hot meals a day, and in which you spend your time lying in bed, trying to fight off boredom by scrolling your smartphone.

This sort of hyperbolic language is silly, and is disrespectful to the memory of people who perished in actual concentration camps.

[mdp2021]

Diogenes, while I agree that «hyperbolic language is silly» and occasionally «disrespectful», if we let "history", the non progressive instances of history, eat up our language then we would lose something extremely precious.

«"When people hear they think"» is an enemy of language and more.

If you wanted to interpret «"occasionally"» in the first sentence of this post as "seldom", because "when people hear they think", instead of "according to occasion", which is what was meant, then that very sentence would be disrespectful. But you should know this was not what was intended.

You know how it works with servers: strict in the output, tolerant in the intake.

[DiogenesKynikos]

The term "concentration camp" is almost entirely associated with the Holocaust.

The people using that term to describe makeshift hospitals want their listeners/readers to draw that connection.

[mdp2021]

> The term... is almost entirely associated

By whom? Who tells you the speaker considers their association(s) relevant? They are not entitled to assume those associations outside their own mind (and even inside it, that does not seem proper mental hygiene nor proper process).

> The people using that term

False. /Some/ people - irregardless of the number - use language that way. Other people do not, and hold that treatment of language in contempt: they do not care about "familiar" language in which a clan of two or two billion decide that they will interpret some term in some way specific to them. (What does 'familiar' mean just a few terms earlier?)