https://archive.ph/2022.05.13-101020/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/13/business/china-zero-covid-xi.html

    • p_sharikov [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Normally they'd team up with death squads but I guess a virus is more direct

    • GundamZZ [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Liberals are going to call anyone who cares about COVID doomers and "control freaks" pretty soon.

      • Sandinband [any, comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        On the covid sub they've been calling people who take the pandemic seriously "shut ins" or say they actually want the pandemic to continue because they...do things that help prevent spread???

      • ScotPilgrimVsTheLibs [they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Fascists want you murdered because they don't like your skin tone, your sexual orientation, or they simply don't think you're mean and badass enough, but will screech "LIVE AND LET LIVE" whenever they're being the problem especially in a way that makes them part of some kind of in-crowd, from COVID to pollution.

  • justjoshint [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    americans will really tell you with a straight face that they'd rather die than have any inconvenience placed on them by the government no matter how mild and important it might be

      • justjoshint [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        i'll eat like 8 slices of whole wheat bread in a day every once in a while. i can't get enough of this shit. it'll catch up to me but its worth it

        • sappho [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Covid has caused celiac diagnoses to go up 4x. It triggered mine. Eat that bread while you can comrade

      • Z_Poster365 [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Who can blame them when all they have seen is years of dragged out ineffective half measures? I don’t want that to continue either, it was ineffective.

        We needed hard and fast crackdowns way earlier, similar to China. Anything short of that is pissing in the ocean

          • Z_Poster365 [none/use name]
            ·
            2 years ago

            It’s hilarious the victim complex of American Chuds. The restrictions on them, especially in rightwing and rural areas, was basically non-existent. They had to get a vaccine shot and wear a mask in some grocery markets for a couple months. That’s it. Fucking children.

            • CrimsonDynamo [he/him]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Nobody even had to get the shot. Nobody forced anyone. Same with masks outside of doctors offices.

              I live in a small trumpy town, and people kept going to the store and taking maskless selfies and posting them on the local FB pages and saying "look! No mask!" as of there is a single lib within 25 miles of here to "own"

              • Z_Poster365 [none/use name]
                ·
                2 years ago

                Well if they worked for the government or certain companies they did, or they had to quit/be fired.

                • CrimsonDynamo [he/him]
                  ·
                  2 years ago

                  True. I kinda forgot about that. I've always worked for very small companies

              • ScotPilgrimVsTheLibs [they/them]
                ·
                2 years ago

                Hey, a fellow small town burger lefty!

                I remember the absolute outrage too, them claiming that they are oppressed yet I am the odd man (err...enby) out for wearing masks. Soon enough I'll have enough money to GTFO, whether that be in another country or a small enclave in the US idk, I'm tired of being an impostor.

                :ursus-hexagonia: :ursus-hexagonia: :ursus-hexagonia: :ursus-hexagonia: :ursus-hexagonia: :ursus-hexagonia:

                • CrimsonDynamo [he/him]
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  2 years ago

                  I actually chose to live here. It's in the middle of the woods, and I live just far enough outside of the town part to really have to interact with any of them.

                  Pretty much everyone that lives here is related to one of two families, and they all know each other at the store, bar or... The other bar. I just try not to engage, because I stick out like a sore thumb. Everyone has been pleasant, but I can read their yard signs and bumper stickers loud and clear.

                  In the last major election, my wife and I voted for Howie Hawkins. You can check the percentages of how people vote in our township, and out of 300, 8 people voted for him. I have company somewhere

                  • ScotPilgrimVsTheLibs [they/them]
                    ·
                    2 years ago

                    Glad you found somewhere you like. The main reason I want to get away aside from the CHUDs is the fact that I have never really left my hometown and I kind of want to change that.

                    • CrimsonDynamo [he/him]
                      ·
                      2 years ago

                      It's worth exploring, but one big lesson I learned is "you can't move away from yourself".

                      Just make sure you're doing it for the right reasons. I moved away from here a few times and kept coming back

                    • CrimsonDynamo [he/him]
                      ·
                      edit-2
                      2 years ago

                      I have guns.

                      If someone is trying to kill me over this post, I guess they would be doing me a favor since I don't want to live in a world where I'm scared to talk about the fuckin trees outside

              • mao_zedonk [he/him]
                ·
                2 years ago

                as of there is a single lib within 25 miles of here to “own”

                'cept you of course

      • Rod_Blagojevic [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I'm a commie in burgerstan and I barely give a shit anymore. I have to work and there's no institutional support for any ongoing safety measures. There's nothing I can do, so fuck it.

    • Z_Poster365 [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Petulant babies, an entire nation with oppositional defiance disorders

      Libertarianism melts your brain

  • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    As my friends all catch covid due to my school and government give up on doing anything good, and people try to convince me masking is unnecessary, I have nothing but respect and support for China actually doing SOMETHING about the virus still slaughtering globally

    • FreakingSpy [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      The way China handles COVID has been one of the strongest factors in radicalizing me.

      • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        The fact that they have done something about the problems that are threatening to kill us all shows just how good a state the cares even a little bit about its population is. You cab debate if they're really socialist or ever will be til we're blue in the face, whatever it us they are doing is crushing the US and every other imperialist dumpster

  • HauntedBySpectacle [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    The NYT writes a new zero COVID authoritarian China article literally every single day, it's actually stunning how deeply they hate it. A new one every single day for months, I'd be shocked if there was any topic other than the pandemic in general that has ever gotten daily, front page reporting for months on end like that. Absolutely unreal, the bourgeois press are disgusting.

    • Oso_Rojo [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      They’ll publish these articles next to reports of anti Asian hate crimes and never think to change anything

      • Vizuzia [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Ironically if China did nothing to stop covid, treats would stop flowing.

        • TyMan210 [he/him, comrade/them]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          I had to check lol, the article linked in the OP does have it. I see it in every one of these I've looked at

          • HauntedBySpectacle [he/him, comrade/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Thanks for wading through this dogshit. I used to hateread the NYT pretty often but I can't even open these ones anymore, after reading "public health is actually bad, sacrifice poors 2 make line go up" for the 200th time, I just scream or joker laugh when I see these headlines now.

            • TyMan210 [he/him, comrade/them]
              ·
              edit-2
              2 years ago

              In this case I just skimmed for it and then searched the page for the word when I didn't see it lol. I still read some NYT articles occasionally, I've kept up my subscription because for some reason they still give me the student discount even though I graduated almost 2 years ago lol. It can sometimes be fun to read an article just to find the one or two sentences of information that needed 10 paragraphs of framing to spin correctly lol, but I don't use them as my main news source like I did even as recently as a year or two ago

              • HauntedBySpectacle [he/him, comrade/them]
                ·
                2 years ago

                In the past I'd try to read between the lines on their world reporting, and usually could get some useful information after filtering out the pro-US foreign policy tilt, but since the Ukraine war, the coverage is so disconnected from reality it just doesn't feel useful anymore. Liberals live in a fantasyland mind palace as untethered as any QANON nut now. That transition started long before the war, but it feels like a major turning point to me...

                • TyMan210 [he/him, comrade/them]
                  ·
                  2 years ago

                  Oh yeah I agree, I have a socdem friend that I've been trying to slowly convert, and basically every conversation ends with some sort of brainworms and everything gets derailed past that. Thankfully Ukraine hasn't really come up yet, but I'm dreading having to talk about it lol.

                  I've really been appreciating @SeventyTwoTrillion's news updates here lately though, I only noticed them about a week ago and they've already become my main source for basically everything but local news

                  • HauntedBySpectacle [he/him, comrade/them]
                    ·
                    2 years ago

                    I haven't managed to convince anyone completely yet, though I think I've made progress, so perhaps take my advice with a grain of salt. But what I will say, is that I started out as a socdem once, and the communist arguments that were most convincing to me were those that stressed that AES is more democratic and less violent than Western imperialist countries. Dismantle Black Book bullshit, stress the unique extent of imperialist violence (relatively unknown events like the Indonesian mass murders work well because there aren't readymade hegemonic narratives about them), and make convincing cases for democracy existing in China, Cuba, USSR, etc. Reference sources like that Harvard poll showing like 90% of Chinese people like the CPC and like 70% say China is democratic.

                    I also enjoy SeventyTwoTrillion's updates; they're a breath of fresh air from Western-brain unreality.

                    • TyMan210 [he/him, comrade/them]
                      ·
                      2 years ago

                      Yeah it's a slow process, but I hope I've made a little progress at least. It doesn't help that he's in the military, so even when I get him to agree on points like the US not allowing any competing system to succeed or fail on it's own terms, it doesn't automatically follow that that's a bad thing. I think the biggest sticking point is that he on some level feels like a change to socialism/communism would negatively impact his lifestyle, and he isn't quite willing to hold the position that broad positive change would be worth it to him. I don't even know that he consciously realizes that, but that's more or less what it always ends up at. That and the incessant belief that any problems with capitalism can be fixed through reform.

                      I'm hoping I can get him there, but I feel like it won't click for him until he realizes on his own that even if reform was hypothetically a path forward, our government is so broken and dysfunctional that not even milquetoast reform is foreseeable at this point. I'll still be working on it though, however slow it is

    • ferristriangle [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I love how the solution to leftist memes being too wordy is to simply choose long passages that are so powerful that they are seared into your brain after a single exposure, so that we can later reference them in shorthand like this.

    • sourquincelog [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      What, you don't have it memorized? Or stashed away on a clipboard for Ctrl+c+v?

  • MF_BROOM [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Ah yes, it is the zero-covid authoritarian China that is preventing us from moving on from the pandemic! And not the fact that, oh I don't know, our dumb fucking western governments never tried any kind of serious comprehensive response to nip COVID in the bud and have thus created the conditions for the pandemic to continue in perpetuity. Couldn't possibly be that, nope.

      • MF_BROOM [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Well it would be silly to pretend that vaccine hoarding and the "sanctity of muh intellectual property rights" (can't even waive those during a fucking pandemic!) didn't contribute to the abysmal vaccination access in so many of those countries

  • SovietyWoomy [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    The American dream is to flee to China so you can go out in public without worrying about getting covid or getting shot.

  • Sickos [they/them, it/its]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Ugh the only reason China still needs to be locked down is the western world has stopped giving a shit. It's pretty fucking clear at this point that we're just guinea pigs being used to incubate shit for a continuing economic war against China.

  • principalkohoutek [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    the several-thousand-year-old civilization that manages more people than our entire continent and has seen wave after wave of contagious diseases (SARS, H1N1) struggle to be contained and has the ability to react coherently to these problems is standing in the way of progress. sure.

  • Rojo27 [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    How is this even a thing? The world moving beyond Covid? Or the global elite deciding that we'll live with Covid? Because those are two totally different things.

    You can't be "beyond" Covid if you're just going to let it tear through the population.

    • emizeko [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      "beyond any social pressure for government to do anything"

    • Wertheimer [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Moving beyond the need for a sense of smell to own the Commies

  • GrumpigPoopBalls [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    China is both responsible for starting the pandemic by acting like Covid didn’t exist and responsible for prolonging the pandemic by acting like Covid still exists

    :xi-lib-tears:

  • northernflicker [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Once long covid hits critical mass the west will be mumbling a different tune. Everyone is worried about nuclear war NOPE what will destroy the US is pandemics that people had a better grasp of policy on controlling back in the damn 13th century.

    • Glass [he/him,they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Can't wait for the military with shitloads of nukes to have it's dynasty evangelical failson command staff riddled with covid madness

  • justjoshint [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    the cia planted the term "manifesting" in the public consciousness so that people would begin to believe that just imagining things would make them real and it WORKED