I mean the reality of all this is most western nations fly way to by the seat of their pants when it comes to perpetration mostly because of money. Not that they don't have the money, but more that the people in charge like to have the money instead of it sitting in say a warehouse in the form of inventory for supplies for when things like this occur. Also, I think a major sense of "this only happens to them" kind of mentality kind of washed over the west. Sure, we did have a few more minor outbreaks occur that started in Asia and then moved westward, but we never really got hit hard like they did. So while those countries learned, adapted, and prepared for this day after getting hit repeatedly pretty hard the west kind of just went on with business as usual. I mean not 6 months ago I could hear people laughing at people wearing face masks all the time in pictures coming from Asia. Now I am seeing it happening here almost over night in an unorganized and panic buy manner.
We just didn't take the time to prepare. If anything we had a major opportunity to look at how it went down in those nations handling it so much better today and learn from it so this day wouldn't be as bad. But like most things until it is on your doorstep and slapping you in the face usually you just write it off as it not being a problem. I mean if in the budget proposal fight last year in the US if people were trying to push in medical surplus and perpetration for 20-30 billion more dollars we would have heard outrage about "how are we going to pay for it" but since this has happened it likely will never be a problem again. But now those same people aren't batting an eye at spending 2 trillion recently and probably another one at or bigger than that level sometime in the near future. Money isn't the problem. The willingness to not just give it to insanely rich people with a lot of it already instead of having it sit statically somewhere in limbo seems to be the problem. At least when it comes to leadership.
Last edited by Low Hanging Fruit; 2020-04-02 at 02:17 PM.
Not to mention destroy early research data, fudge the statistics that could constitute a warning, downplay it as much as possible on the international stage trough their pressuring of the WHO, and make pouty faces when countries would bar chinese travellers from entry... as late as February...
"It is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks, and become one with all the people."
~ Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang, "Ethics for Tomorrow"
No.
Why should they?
China downplayed this our intelligence agency knew in January shortly after this whole thing started. They already knew China lied.
You can't know someone is lying but then pretend they aren't, and then turn around and be like "hey you lied pay me reparations!"
It was on us to prepare once we knew but we didn't.
Oh look, the "Impeach the mf" people are defending China. How predictable!
We dug our own tomb wrt this when for some god forsaken reason countries decided to let China join the WTO and the rest of international orgs
Not much to do except get over it and realize those orgs are nothing more than useless bodies in the long term
Is it their doing?
China didn't purposefully make the virus. Viruses happen.
China didn't make anyone respond the way they did. If not for the fact that some of these "THIS IS ALL CHINA'S FAULT" people are outside of the US, I'd think that they're victims of our own Fox News. Because at least that would make sense. As far as the viewers of Fox News are concerned, this virus was all a hoax until March, then suddenly it became real, and why didn't China tell us anything about it until March?
Meanwhile, despite all the "China didn't tell us how bad this was!" craziness, we can simply go to Google, hamfist "coronavirus" into the search box, date range it to December and January... and find that literally every virologist on Earth was talking about this being a major problem all the way back in December and January. Fox News, Donald Trump, and all the crazies of the internet can lie, but timestamps don't. China could have been screaming red alert as loud as can be, but it's hard to believe that would matter when we were even ignoring the experts until March.
Japan had to delay the Olympics which was the most anticipated event in that country in decades. I can't find it for sure but I would imagine at least 90% of Japanese hate China lividly right now.
No because China is only guilty of negligence in a vague manner and there's no way to measure the damages for reparation. Highly subjective forms of punishment are to be avoided.
At best, we could say their culture may have helped this virus make the jump, but that doesn't make China responsible. We also don't blame any of the countries of the world for the millions of strains of colds, flus, and other diseases that mutate and/or jump species throughout the year. As the US's coronavirus-deniers like to point to this being just a tough flu, it's worth pointing out that the flus that kill thousands of people every year are new mutations that started somewhere too. Viruses happen.
Let's just assume for a moment that you could "force" China to pay reparations
Here's your choice:
1) Punish China
2) Get the Economy running smoothly as quick as possible after this all cools down.
You can't have both.
People should be more concerned with how their own governments are handling this.
Last edited by Egomaniac; 2020-04-02 at 04:56 PM.