Politics

[rm1369]

Originally Posted by IndyNorm

I'm sure people are/will try to play the blame game with China to distract from the shitty job Trump is doing, but I'm not trying to do that. I'm pointing out the root cause of the outbreak, which the Chinese government is fully responsible for. Yes we were completely unprepared for this, Trump is an asshole, and the Georgia governor looks pretty incompetent. All of those things need to be corrected, but none of those issues are any way the root cause of why the outbreak happened. This is the engineer in me talking, but if the root cause of a problem isn't fixed then the problem is likely to re-occur. The only way this fix will happen is for the world to collectively hold the Chinese government accountable or at least get them to agree to work with the rest of the world on containment the next time this happens. And while I can't vote on this to happen, I can try to spread awareness in an attempt to have this gain enough momentum for it to become an actionable issue. I doubt it'll happen, but I can at least try.

Anyway, that's my take, and rest assured it hasn't blinded me from the lack of preparedness and shit show in Washington.

That’s fair, I don’t disagree at all. Unfortunately I’m concerned we are trending again towards nationalism which tends to hurt the whole idea of global cooperation. There is a whole lot of things that the international community should be addressing with China, but the only real way it works is when a majority of the international community stands together. That often requires partners to cooperate more and not allow side issues to threaten the cooperation. I just don’t see that with the current political climate. Trump is a large part of that obviously, but not the only part. Europe is having its own issues with Nationalism. That makes things significantly easier for China.

And my fear is that the current administration will use this to not only hide their own domestic failures with the virus, but to continue weakening international alliances. The WHO certainly has questions to answer as well, but that type of international organization actually needs strengthened, not weakened if you want to minimize future issues. But I don’t believe that’s the current goal.