6 Comments

Mark, I shared some of this on one of your other recent posts, will frame it a little differently for this comment.

I read this article in March-April of 2020 when I was trying to understand what was happening that didn't have any precedent. In the course of reading about China's pandemic protocols from their own official CCP media I also came across story in Foreign Affairs, an international affairs publication supported by and intended for the globalist audience, those who believe in one-world governance, varieties found both on the left and right. It is a highly influential publication in those circles:

Past Pandemics Exposed China’s Weaknesses

The Current One Highlights Its Strengths

Foreign Affairs, March 27, 2020

https://web.archive.org/web/20200328050913/https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-03-27/past-pandemics-exposed-chinas-weaknesses

In the article I found a link to a book:

Rural Health Care Delivery

Modern China from the Perspective of Disease Politics

Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2013

http://library.lol/main/DB87C08A174B849E1EB0476138787AED

('Get' .pdf download)

From the book's official description:

"Diseases are everyday, ordinary occurrences intimately related to people’s daily lives. However, as the metaphor of the “Sick Man of East Asia” emerged against the backdrop of a weak modern China, health care and the curing of diseases were turned into grand state politics with far-reaching implications. This book, starting with the argument for diseases being metaphors, describes and interprets such incidents in China’s history as the Abolishment of Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Patriotic Hygiene Campaign and the Cooperative Medical Services. In an effort to reveal the internal logic of disease politics in the transformation of the state-people relationship, the book analyzes key aspects including the politicization and inclusion of diseases in state governance, the double disciplining of hygiene, legitimacy construction of the state, the remaking of the nationals, and the expansion of the “publicness” of the state. The book argues that disease politics in modern China has developed following the path from nationals to the people, and then to citizens, or from crisis politics and mobilization politics to life politics. In addition, a marked change has occurred in China’s state building: increasingly standard, rationalized and institutionalized means have been employed while the non-standard means, such as large-scale mobilization and ideological coercion, had been historically used in China."

And my own brief overview of the book contents:

https://freedomfox.substack.com/p/the-devious-use-of-infectious-disease

If there was both an agenda to apply the "logic of disease politics in the transformation of the state-people relationship" from individual liberty values to collectivist authoritarian values, as the Foreign Affairs article and the CCP book chronicling the transformation of China in the same manner, would that not inform us that with the development of enough social-science research on how humans respond to massive, sophisticated perceptual and behavioral modification campaigns that authorities given license to embark on them would have a fair degree of confidence they could achieve their desired outcome? Just knowing how percentages of a population will respond to what behavioral modification strategies, not needing to know specifically who responds, would seem to be sufficient information to deduce an overall outcome. Which would tend to support those who say there is a bigger plan in action than what appears on the surface. What say you?

Expand full comment

This reminds me of a swarm of fish I encountered on a forty five foot dive off the Hawaiian islands. The fish behaved in a similar fashion. Amazing.

Expand full comment

Human beings potentially have "rule of law" whereas birds don't. Ergo, one can assign blame and suspect nefarious action where the rule of law has been grossly flouted. Granted that we don't have a very well functioning rule of law, but to the extent that they *say* that we do, then that statement implicates bad motives as well.

Expand full comment