[apostacy]

It is obvious at this point that China's "zero covid" policy has nothing at all to do with public health.

What many of us do not want to admit, is that our leaders have taken advantage of the crisis for their own benefit. I think most western media is reluctant to report on what is happening in China, because it would start uncomfortable conversations at home.

Seeing the Chinese government so nakedly use what's left of the pandemic to oppress their population is very problematic to our pandemic narrative. People might start to ask if perhaps their governments too have been doing that too.

The official narrative in the west has been that anything the government does to us in the name of protecting us from COVID is always correct and anyone who criticizes it is an evil "anti-vax" lunatic.

[boringg]

Sorry - you so far off base here.

There has been ample reporting about China in the western media and none of your conspiracy related thought process is translating to anything that's happening in the West. If anything its promoting the narrative that the Western response to the pandemic was highly successful.

[apostacy]

What I said stands.

I never said that our media does not criticize China. Of course they do. But they tiptoe around criticizing China in a way which could expose our own hypocracy.

Western media has been pushing the narrative that any level of force by the government is justified, because the pandemic is such an existential threat. They are reluctant to report that the Chinese government is then using excessive force, because it would make people question whether our government over-reacted as well.

[sidlls]

It's more likely that they're just not interested in "hard hitting" news of that sort. It's more profitable to push a narrative that keeps things simmering for the news cycles. Our media aren't controlled centrally: that's just not how propaganda dissemination through the media works in the West (it exists, it's just different).

[boringg]

I understand your comment and thought thread but it has no muscle to it. I don't think any Western country would be at all concerned about your line of thinking because it isn't an issue. The magnitude of the difference between the approaches of Zero Covid China compared to Western countries is quite significant to the point that is almost incomparable.

The other part is that western media doesn't have many sources inside China that can properly report with confidence what is happening without losing their asset.

[Workaccount2]

Last time I checked the US was never welding doors shut on apartment buildings to keep people from going out.

[mindslight]

You don't get to point at perverse bureaucratic incentives years later, in another country even, as validation for general pandemic denial.

In the US, stay at home suggestions are over. Industry shutdowns are over. Mask mandates are over. They've been over for a long time. The scaremongering of "what if these temporary conditions become permanent" has now been demonstrated as fallacious. Our society has basically made it through, thanks to the natural evolution of the virus combined with the technology of vaccine development (plus a lot of people who aren't with us any more). Go watch a World Cup game at a bar, lick a subway pole, move on to another simulation of protest - whatever you want.

Bureaucratically, local healthcare systems seem to still have mask requirements, Covid testing policies, the Doctor Who -esque custom of squirting goop on your hand as a greeting, etc. Will these ever disappear? Mask requirements might even make sense independent of Covid, given that most healthcare settings are high concentrations of people with half of them sick and the other half immunocompromised. But in general, all of these latent results are certainly not more of a problem than the longstanding administrative bureaucracy that grinds doctors and nurses into overworked dust. (I say this even taking into account the effect of masks on the hearing impaired, which needs to be addressed).

People in positions of power will always act for their own selfish interests - one of the very first things the federal government did was give away six trillion dollars to prevent the stonk market from reflecting reality. But that everpresent banal observation doesn't invalidate that there was also a legitimate response to a real problem. We can debate how effective facets of the response are, the accountability of our leaders, etc, but implying that the whole "narrative" is primarily bureaucratic self interest is just nonsense.