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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   1525 thread views

Transnational Thursday for March 13, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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As long as it's clear that blaming China openly will not help with either cleanup or preventing further accidents, there's no point in doing it. If China says (through less-than-public channels) that yeah, we screwed up, we're sorry, let's stop the blame game and instead let's think how to handle the mess, it makes practical sense to play along.

Do want to note here that there is always one way to absolutely prevent further accidents which does absolutely require openly blaming China i.e. starting WWIII. Fucking around with pandemic pathogens in insecure ways is one of the things where that option does have to be considered; consider the death toll that would have resulted if COVID had had the case fatality rate of plague.

I said at the time something along the lines of "I sure hope it's not an actual bioweapon use, because if it is that's casus belli". I stand by that conditional. The actual situation is not quite at that level.

I do think you're being a naïve first-order consequentialist here, though. Lies are never free. Even leaving aside RenOS's good points regarding levers (and sure, Chinese popular opinion has little effect on PRC government actions, but Western popular opinion has an effect on Western government demands which do have an effect on PRC government actions), our institutions going along with this damaged popular trust in them, which is a big deal. The WHO is trusted far less these days because it bent over backwards to play the PRC's tune. Wikipedia had a crisis over this issue which led to a near-complete purge of conservatives via Parable of Lightning, damaging its legitimacy. The US's dissident right grew, raising the likelihood of a civil war there. These are not small costs.

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