PS: Greetings Mr. Moderator,

You're probably right, I just think it would be fun to see all those bobbleheads on the idiot plate talking about Africanized Coof.

BTW, The new Deadly Africanized Covid Variant was first detected in four fully vaxxed travelers...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FFC53NUXIAEqae5?format=jpg

Dr. Masupu also assures us that this new variant did not come from an untreated AIDS patient.

☮

PS: "Deadly Africanized Covid Variant”.

I don't know, Adam. That name would probably just encourage the Bai Dien administration to open up the borders even wider. We got the bees already, now for the people. After all, we didn't turn away those poor Ebola patients, and that worked out fine, so far ...

PS: Regarding the airports: First off, just over the last decade airports have been built in places that didn't even have train service and nothing but a 2-lane road 15 years back. Now, besides a brand new runway - often having to be carved out of the mountains that are much rougher than W. Virginia's - the place may have high-speed rail service too. My point though, is the there is very much brand new infrastructure.

It's a lot easier to start from scratch, at least when the people in the way of eminent domain or poor peons, than it is to keep fixing up the old stuff. I guess you'd have gone into the Chinese subways at some point, Mr. Hail? There were 5 cities with subways in ~ '10, but now probably dozens of them, many dozens, maybe. They are gleaming, because they are new... well, and because there are no negro thugs too.

I will point you to one more post, in which I make this comparison - "Chinese vs. American infrastructure - "From Scratch" vs. Repair modes".

https://www.peakstupidity.com/index.php?post=869"

OK, that was a digression. I imagine the comparison are between these gleaming new terminals and some of the older American ones, both for smaller cities and the hub airports. There's something about newness, but then some of the other items, the cleanliness, fellow-passengers (of course), etc. are about what type of people go through the terminal. As for hubs, though 20 years old now, that McNamara terminal in Detroit is still amazing to me and usually plenty clean enough.

Finally, to address your point, we can get the internet with no password required, and 1/2 the time without even putting up with any ad or official log-in page*, at the small airports now. The internet at the Atlanta Hartsfield main terminal asks for a name and an email address, but it can be all be made up. I appreciate all this very much. The convenience factor is one thing, but more important to me is the lack of intensive spying.


* I mean, a "log in" page just for saying "yes, I accept the terms." What terms? Who the hell knows?

PS: Mr. Hail, I agree with you on your take of the Chinese (Oriental in general?) mindset. There's not much of "we follow the rules because we should have order, and we need to set a good example". It's much more as you wrote. The corruption there is inherent in the society, at least at this point in history, down to a level just above the family.

As for the specific example of running red lights: Holy moley, I wish I'd taken video of this one intersection near a hotel that I stayed at twice! The intersection was a madhouse - pedestrians, bicyclists, scooter riders, cars, city buses, you-name-it were all somehow mixing it up therough there with nary a wreck that I saw. (We did see one nearby one time, but luckily it was nothing major - scooter v pedestrian, as I recall.) This intersection was cleaned up by a few years later - '09, maybe, with more traffic barriers. Honestly, I was disappointed to see that. I kind of liked the "Wild, Wild, East" that I saw first.

On the matter of swindling, it's not just against foreigners, or course, but in the recent past, since we were the rich ones, I'd guess we were easy marks. The stuff I really don't get is when it's stuff like fake eggs made out of concrete. Yeah, that's one I learned about. I mean, is it really cheaper to form those realistic looking concrete eggs vs. getting 'em from chickens? I guess it is!

PS: Omicron?

I think they should run with “Deadly Africanized Covid Variant”.

☮

PS: Mr. Hail, first of all I don't mind any of the comments I've seen here, and I enjoy the discussion. I'm not always linking to my own posts just to say "hey read my blog", although occasionally thats's what I do on unz, but more often it's so I don't need to repeat myself. Therefore, I thank you not only for re-reading those 2 posts on China, but for reading them the 1st time too.

I understand your nostalgia memory idea. That might apply somewhat in my case, but not to the specific changes that I've wrtten about. I had seen the freedom in '07, and it took knowing some people over there to get the idea that not everything is as it seems. The very specific changes in internet access* and control of phone SIM cards is something that is a clear cut change toward less freedom. Of course, the going cashless is even more of that. On the latter, I'm going more from reports and reading than personal knowledge. Back in '17 cash was still used a lot, but the phone payments were coming in.

I'm not replying to the points of your comment in order, but I'll address the rest in more replies.

* To add a little more to that, it wasn't so much that I was told to leave the internet cafe in '09. Maybe slipping the girl 2 more Yuan would have helped, but I left on principle. The thing is, with most business being much smaller and more local there (at that time) than it is here, I would guess the owners would get the point more "hey, we're losing business with this ID crap." Over here, it'd be a shrug and "I just work here."

PS: Omicron?!! Mr. Alarmist, do they expect us to all know the Greek alphabet now? Hell, "Delta" (as you know) is from the aviation phonetic alphabet, and what happened to Alpha, Beta, Gamma ...?

Still if it's down to omicron already, I think this virus is just plain out of ideas. Or else, we are dealing with a new version of the clap that is specific to some of the "looser' sorority houses.

PS

Mr Moderator, thank you for the reply and the links to #1450 and #1451, which I remember reading at the time and are definitely applicable here. Thank you also, and in general, for tolerating my long comments which in some cases may be tangential to the main points in the post.

I was curious to hear what kind of changes came across just between 2007 and 2009, which although only a two-year period saw a global financial crisis in the meantime, pointing to the PRC-regime insiders "never let a crisis go to waste"?

Re-reading some of your #1450 and #1451, am reminded of what I asked myself after leaving China at the very end of December 2019 (about the same time the first news flashes came out to the effect of: "mystery virus sickens people in a city in Chinese interior, authorities say nothing to worry about" --- I saw this headline around the time of my exit from China), I remember asking myself: "Am I just imagining this turn-for-the-worse? Am I falling into a nostalgia trap?"

I told myself I was basing the impression of a major shift on firm datapoints of what things were like, and as a since-famous phrase has it, on "lived experience." I see some similar anecdotes in PS-#1450/51 to those I'd have written. I also sense from a lot of your words in those posts that you must have had a similar suspicion as I did in writing down your impressions and recollections, that there was a nostalgia trap going on, a nostalgia lens for times of more unlimited-seeming opportunity. For as everyone knows the first encounter with a foreign place is the sharpest; they speak of a 'honeymoon' period in which all is great, lasting days or weeks, maybe months in some cases.

To 'remember' anything, the nostalgia trap presents a risk. It's something we have to consciously "correct for," I think. Over-correction may be a risk too. Was it really so bad/good as I say? What are my motivations for saying this? Am I saying x because the specifics of my personal situation were better, or the time of years was better, or some other specifics? I asked myself these questions, because you have to evaluate your premises.

It helps to focus in on specifics, the way things work, the ease with which things were/are done, and maybe the sense of the role of the state/regime in society (the latter gets hard in practice because it is subjective).

Maybe the rate at which Chinese drivers run red lights---which seems to be the norm now absent police, but was definitely the norm in 2010. A strange part of the East Asian mind is that despite a common stereotype the typical White American develops for them in our time as super-rule-abiders, generally they are a "rules don't apply if you are good enough" culture. And if you have a car, why would you respect a red light or whatever just to let swarms of pedestrian-peasants overtake you? So this red light rule is a helpful suggestion. (A cultural East Asian attitude, IMO; rules are generally always negotiable).

Another, maybe the rate at which swindlers will approach foreigners to try to sell them something overpriced or otherwise con them out of money? I'm not sure which way this points, but obviously more swindling is worse.

Maybe the ease of the use of cash, instead of always-traceable card-based money payments? These are good data-points to fix on.

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To get on with it, here lesson is for those who haven't been (lately): *Don't enter China in our time as a foreigner and expect to ever be able to use the Internet.* yes, you will be able to use it here and there, but mostly it's a real pain. Consider successful use of the Internet to be like a gift rather than an expected right.

If you are reliant on any aspect of digitized life, you'll meet hurdles or inconveniences of a kind which would be intolerable to a typical digital-life person as we've grown to known them in the Smartphone Age. The Spanish proverb "A bird in hand is worth a hundred in the air" comes to mind. (OTOH, there is something charming about this, effectively a partial return to pre-Internet life, once you adjust to it.)

In PS-#1451, you say that in 2009 you were once rejected by a cafe from using the Internet because they asked for an ID. In 2010, I don't remember thing being a problem, but I also didn't have a smartphone (which were rather brand new at the time). My impression is, and in my subjective experience, both a lot more of the global Internet was accessible and ID rules, if applicable, were laxly enforced at worse. I can say for sure that I easily used the Internet on public computers there without ID. I remember people even using Facebook in such places, later strenuously banned.

An analogy for those who haven't been to China (lately): Imagine the world of the late 2000s or so, payphones still exist but are increasingly harder to find and some don't work. And imagine those payphones are the only places you can use the Internet. And further imagine when you enter one of the payphones, you'll have to scan your photo ID to log on.

A lot of people are ashamed of the USA because of the often-dilapidated, sometimes-almost-Third-World quality of US airports, and weave theories about how to tell a lot about a country by its airport(s). I've heard lots of people independently do this, and the US, sadly, stacks up poorly.

Think of any metric to judge on to accommodate travelers: bathrooms, cleanliness, availability of drinking fountains, place to rest, quality of fellow passenger, security experience, length of wait times, I could go on and on. For China, if you visit one of their premier prestige-project airports like Shanghai-Pudong, and I suppose almost all general foreign entries will tend to enter through such major int'l hub airports, it'll look good, and the temptation to turn into one of those "Metallic-Man"-type PRC fanatics.

But as of the late 2010s (mid-2010s?), there's one thing about their airports that scores a hard 'Fail' grade, which is availability of Internet. There is no way to use it without scanning your passport at a kiosk, the kiosk of which is hard to find and when I saw it several times in 2019, one or both in the terminal didn't work. In other words, maybe you'll get access, maybe not. But if you do, everything you do online is monitored, guaranteed. For international travelers reliant on the phone as communication, this is a serious headache.

This is just one snapshot of the reasons behind my changed impression of China. As I cast my mind back to remember, a lot of the features of the Corona-Panic as we've known them have very recent precedents in PRC-China itself. The takedown of Hong Kong --- after a strong resistance in 2019, which conveniently went silent in 2020 because of a flu virus, and many of its leaders disappeared into prison --- is also a part of the general trend, and in that case integrates perfectly with the Corona-Panic as political weapon, stories of which play out all over the place, without even touching the USA's use of same.

PS

This is a good read on the moronic strain ... maybe it’s to sell the new pills, since Africa has largely resisted the vaxx BS.

https://off-guardian.org/2021/11/27/the-omicron-variant-magic-pills-or-solving-the-africa-problem/

PS: Thanks for your opinion about China based on your own experience. Your interval - '10 to '19 was a good one during which to see the changes for the worse taking place there Totaltitarianism-wise.

For me, even '07 (first time I saw the place) just to '09 showed me a change. I saw a more prosperous, or at least glitzy, country in '17, but one in which much freedom had been lost, as compared to a decade earlier.

I've written on this - see "Dashed high hopes for China"

Part 1:

https://www.peakstupidity.com/index.php?post=1450

Part 2:

https://www.peakstupidity.com/index.php?post=1451

Part 1 is more on the clamp-down on internet browsing, while Part 2 is focused on payments, from "Cash is King" to the phone apps.

PS: I agree that one can't trust information that comes through the social media outlets unless one has lots of knowledge of and trust of the people sending it and MAKING it (the video).

Yes, I think the Chinese CCP regime would have been favorable to the idea of creating a panic in that country and the rest of the world. Fear sells. Fear helps sell Totalitarianism.

Not to toot my own horn (OK, that's what it is!), but as I remember that early time - February '20- in the PanicFest, I wasn't so sure about these massive deaths in China to begin with. I have known for a while that you can't trust the BS out of the Chinese media, though one would think "if this news got out, I wonder how bad it REALLY is?!" However, locking down whole apartment buildings foe weeks with heavy chains on the doors, never mind the logistics, is a typical CCP move. It projects power and scares the rest of the people. It is also the type of move that "showed" the West "see, now this is how you take care of this deadly problem!"

As the PanicFest started in earnest in the US in early March '20, my common-sense telling me "hey, I don't know anyone who even got sick yet, haven't heard of anyone in this neighborhood with lots of elder people getting hospitalized, and nobody I know knows ANYONE who has died from this" was enough to realize the BS right off.

When they closed the schools in the middle of that month, I was just glad for this silver lining - let the parents think some more about homeschooling.

PS

"I have read too much from dupes on how ''China knows how to do pandemic control' and 'they took care of it.', etc. Nah, it's really hard to get good info about China."

This kind of flu-virus demagoguery was not at all limited to China, but was seen, basically, everywhere. It was part of what the Corona(-Panic) phenomenon was.

Few wanted to hear what the actual experts were saying, which was "generally, you won't stop a flu virus from spreading." "Don't do destructive lockdowns over a slightly-worse-than-usual flu virus."

For the sake of argument alone let's say that the China numbers are correct (note: 100% they are false, one way or another, but for argument's sake...), that is still not success because China turned into a dystopian nightmare slave state, I mean worse than it already was, and damage done by the so-called "pandemic control" is probably easy to demonstrate to have been many times worse than the virus absent any "pandemic control," as it was everywhere else.

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I have been in PRC-China twice, once ca.2010 and once in late 2019. I noticed a difference over 9 years, between my visit at the opening of the decade and my visit at the close of it. I perceived to be a real change in mood, a tighter and gloomier political environment, a considerably more comprehensive Internet censorship, and even foreign chat apps would only spottily work, cannot guarantee a communication line under the Chinese Internet (or PRC Semi-Internet, PRC-Intranet?).

I described the phenomenon I perceived to several correspondents as what must have been a consciously chosen "North Koreanization" of political life and on degree of openness and related things.

At the same time, some aspects of their outward-facing culture like TV shows and celebrity culture seem to more consciously and directly emulate Japanese and S.Korean models (which they tacitly thereby recognize as successful) (and we have to recall that ALL content on tv there is state-controlled, often literally and sometimes just effectively), even with higher per-capita GDP and all that, their political culture shifted towards N.Korea.

That is not the direct political scientists say is supposed to happen. So it was a policy from the top. The extreme moves brought along under the Corona umbrella in 2020, they were not out of nowhere.

PS

"have seen WeChat videos"

That reminds me. Those leaked "social media videos" that began emerging maybe in late Jan 2020 but which were definitely current in Feb 2020, depicting people flopping on the ground, as if falling dead spontaneously on the street in front of (implied) "overwhelmed hospitals" --- mass death of biblical or confucianist-maoist proportions, from the Wuhan-Apocalypse-Virus...

Those damned videos played a substantial role in stoking the evil fires of Corona-Panic. Even if they were quickly forgotten about, they did their job at the right moment. It was like a form of atrocity-propaganda meant to push a people into a war-frenzy, except this was a war against ourselves.

Social media videos. They look absurd, viewed in the light of day, but in early Corona-Panic world in which people began live-action roleplaying a zombie movie, based closely on plots of movies they'd seen, they seem just compelling enough to just enough people. My memory tells me quite a view Steve Sailer commenters of the day, even those who soon thereafter turned Anti-Panic, seemed to believe the videos. Voices skeptical or critical were absent or muted.

I ask: Would you be surprised, at all, to learn in a few years or decades when something gets declassified or the like, that those videos were deliberate disinfo meant to create fear and induce lockdowns? In other words, a psy-op.

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None of this should be beyond the pale of discussion. Does PRC-China, as a regime, see the global Corona-Panic as good for itself or bad for itself?

If they see two or three years (or more?!) of endless waves of Corona-Panic and Re-Panics and all that comes on the coattails thereof...if they see that as as good for them, good for the PRC-China regime, would they use mass-scale deception, including forms of deception which end up getting many people killed? Yes or no?