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RE: Alarmist,

I don't know if Maddow used the term "reproductive rights," exactly, but she may well have. What is for sure is that her opening segment was about that same-old-same-old issue that could have been recorded almost any day in her, what, fifteen-year TV run. No lead-off with the China protests, which qualifies as 'news' in that it is 'new'!

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@Mr Hail, “reproductive rights” is the new buzz-phrase to attempt to put some distance between the old “my body, my choice” gang and the Anti-vaxxers who coopted it in the end.

It is no longer your body, nor your choice.

How about, “Snuff it, if you can’t tough-it.” Because. Parenting. Hard.

PS: SafeNow, I think I barely remember seeing "Twilight's Last Gleaming". That's an interesting theory. He is definitely making himself out to look obsessive and crazy, but to the Chinese people too.

I would not compare the motives for the US war in VietNam exactly to the Covid~Zero business. I see no motive other than sheer stupidity for the latter. I could well be missing something ...

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PS
Mr. Hail wrote: The anti-lockdown protests in China:An interesting 'coda' to the Corona-Panic phenomenon, which is a distant nightmare now in most of the West.
For those with extra neverves to wreck about counterfactual western risks: The mildly right wing website Tichy's Einblick wrote yesterday, that Angela Merkel was on her way to Australian or New Zealandishly rigorous lockdown measures at Easter-time 2021. And as was now leaked, some backdoor auto-industry interventions managed to hold her back at the last minute.
Main driver in Angela Merkel's ear was - one of those mentally super-virology-focused=restricted but very verbose and telegenic women virologists (there are quite a lot of those). In this case: Melanie Brinkmann - who at times looks like a sister of Jacinda Ahern of New Zealand lockdown fame... - the two women's mindsets are almost clones of one another.
https://tinyurl.com/mryvxj6c

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This Covid-chart below, shown by the bayesian master statistician and mathematical entrepreneur Professor Norman Fenton of London, speaks more than thousand words - lots of Chinese might prefer to love it over risking to be loved to death by their government!

https://twitter.com/profnfenton/status/1596948154339196930?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

PS

Tucker Carlson, Monday Nov 28, went on the attack against China:

https://www.bitchute.com/video/pWyD2wcS09t9/

The first twenty minutes are on the China question.

As I have written here before, these opening segments amount to a newspaper editorial, or series of related editorials, delivered in the inefficient form of reading-in-front-of-camera... This is postmodernity and so it has to be. At least Tucker's producers haven't forced him to do Tiktok bits instead of what he does now. (note: the phrase THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE was coined a very long time ago now, but the dear-departed professor who coined it would be not surprised to see our world, I think.)

Checking in on the early-hour CNN and MSNBC feeds of about the same prime-time slots, I see the one was talking about like this: "Experts agree: Trump should NOT have met two anti-Semites last week," and then MSNBC Rachel Maddow (who now is semi-retired) going on about reproductive rights and the need for a law to Protect Women etc etc., -- but no China.

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Follow-up from mentioned in earlier comment:

"Died Suddenly" documentary, released Nov 2022, making some big waves so far; view here:

https://rumble.com/v1wac7i-world-premier-died-suddenly.html

(Don't bother "googling it," as you won't find it. )

I post this without having viewed it. What I hear is, they hit all the good points of those against the mass-injection campaign pushed by the Panic pod-people in 2021, but then controversially wander into territory of an outright endorsement of a theory that the injection-pushers at their core are a cabal who want to fulfill the Guidestone prophecy of killing off a large portion of humanity.

(DuckDuckGo top result is: "New 'Died Suddenly' Film Pushes Unfounded Depopulation Claims..." which at least mentions the documentary, vs Google which simply blanks it out entirely.)

PS: Mr. Hail. regarding your 1st comment, I would agree with "double standard", but not with "implicit apology". I really think that some of the people you have in mind have an UNconcious double standard. They look at China and think "look at that Totalitarianism - yeah, you rise up, Chinese people, for democracy - we are the shining beacon on the hill" (still??)

At the same time, they think of '20 in the US and go:

"Well, yeah, I mean we had to close businesses here - that was all just common sense and perfectly legal - not Totalitarian in the least, oh no! Yeah, and the beaches too, and the schools, but I think it was about a month longer than it should have ... We're Americans though, just living in freedom - notice that we did not go beating up those idiots that refused to wear face masks or wouldn't take the shots because they are afraid of needles... We are so, so tolerant here."

PS: M, my source had told me months ago that the Shanghai lockdowns were done as a way to get at former-President/former CCP Head Jiang, whose finance world is based in Shanghai. Though 95 years old, the guy is very powerful due to his being very rich, so is a rival of Mr. Xi. So, this was done to fight a "political disease", in the way you nicely put it.

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Here is a theory. Background: In the Burt Lancaster movie “Twilight’s Last Gleaming,” Lancaster seeks to expose the real motive for the otherwise-inexplicable crazy Vietnam War: Show the Soviets that the US was so vicious, so insane, they’d better not try anything big. Fast-forward: Xi, seeing the US fight the proxy war, and make noises in the Western Pacific, desires to show he is a vicious, crazy guy. Either to deter US aggression vs China, or, to deter US fighting against a Xi invasion of Taiwan. Maybe the above is Xi’s motive, and maybe not; but it sure is the result.

PS There must be something else going on here, right? Old Xi can’t be this clueless, can he?

PS

"The Chinese people can put up with a little, no, actually, a LOT of Totalitarianism, when 'their' government provides not only the Iron Rice Bowl that Chairman Mao reneged on, but a Golden Rice Bowl"

The essence of the East Asian and his wily ways is hard to pin down. Why do they do what they do?

I've mentioned or alluded to this in a number of comments here: something that I think I've come to understand profoundly but that (I think) the huge majority of White-Westerners do NOT understand or are even completely unaware of: "we" very consistently misinterpret what's going on with "them," what they're up to, what they're after, what they're thinking, why they do the things they do.

In other words, "we" often treat them like exotic-looking White-Westerners. We then at the same time give them a pass when they do immoral or etc things (the commonness of lying, cheating, deception, rule-bending, their seemingly inborn trait or colluding to create monopolies in economic-sectors where-ever they go). Why give them a 'pass'? Because they're foreigners or non-Western, and have this-n-that recent tradition of blah-blah-blah... (This adds up to an Asian Privilege existing, very seldom identified in the form I mean and never commented upon).

I don't know if I've explained that adequately, but this is just the Comments section, where thoughts fly loose and free.

We get a lot of contradictory ideas about China. Mr. Derbyshire like to say his belief is Chinese are, by long-held instinct, terrified of anarchy more than anything (owing to periodic large-scale death events during anarchic periods), which I guess is his explanation for the apparent passivity you observe during "non-anarchic" periods?

The explanation of observed passivity in China suggested here is per-capita GDP gains. This is not a bad idea at all, but somehow it doesn't quite satisfy me. (When South Korea was having major GDP gains in the latter 20th century, it also had its highest protest levels.)

Mass protests in Wuhan in early 2020 during the first round of cruel lockdowns could have spared the Panic-and-lockdown-NOW idea-contagion from spreading to our own decadent elite and the empowered abundance-of-caution-ist matriarchical-feminist types and their male counterparts such as the effeminate prime minister of Canada.

That's about all I've got now.

Thanks in advance, Mr Moderator, for keeping us informed if you learn anything from your sources there.

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The anti-lockdown protests in China:

An interesting 'coda' to the Corona-Panic phenomenon, which is a distant nightmare now in most of the West.

There are considerable lingering second- and third-order effects of the Panic, of course, the guilty were never punished for pushing Lockdownism and all the rest, and there remains debate about exactly how many "died suddenly" because of the quasi-coerced injections (by the way, has anyone seen the "Died Suddenly" documentary, recently released?), and more still (certain social and cultural damage). But it is not the visceral, front-and-center matter that it was during those terrible two-or-so years that will forever darken the name of "the early 2020s."

I notice many in the West who are indirectly cheering-on the protests happen to be the SAME PEOPLE who were lockdown-pushers, lockdown-lovers, and other Panic standard-bearers from spring 2020 to early 2022. The same type of agenda-setting, prestige media and 'regime'-adjacent media outlets. From pretty consistent and eerily uncritical Panic-support for two years (as if caught in a religious trance), to now suddenly cheering-on of a foreign Anti-Panic movement (though of course that's not likely all it is, just the trigger).

I refer to the sanctimonious sort of people Adam Smith mocked in "The Daily Stupid" by using actual verbatim statements demanding severe punishments and ostracization for delusional non-Panickers, evil Anti-Panickers, all dissidents, refusers, opt-outers, and non-vaxxers, but altering the targeted group to LGBTQs or Blacks or something that would cause outraged frenzy among the same set.

Remember: those people in the West were still "at it" even into the early weeks of 2022! There is no trace of this once-fanatical belief of theirs in the China Protest coverage; the Corona-Cult has not quite fully collapsed, but the important people no longer are actively with the cult and the momentum (or magic) is gone.

(1) When WE protested the illegal-and-immoral destructive Lockdowns and all the rest in 2020 and 021, we were selfish, reckless, racist, sexist, deluded or monstrous people etc etc etc.

(2) When THEY (Chinese) protest lockdowns in late 2022, it's reported either neutrally or mildly celebrated and encouraged. (Report from Twitter-land: whoever has his paws on the 'algorithm' magic dust is showing pro-protest tweets unsolicited.)

I guess these are easy observations, the (1) vs (2) double-standard. Maybe too easy.

Do we take solace in that this is the closest we get to an implicit apology from our decadent agenda-setting elite who turned into cowardly Lockdown-pushers in 2020 and have refused to settle accounts for their criem against the people?

PS: Was the "4 Pests" campaign the one that had them killing all the swallows? The "Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom", followed by the unofficial "and then mow them down with a Red bush hog" one. Yeah, I know someone who's maternal grandfather starved to death - just a statistic out of that 45 million...

I'll check out and compare/contrast your linked articles. I have one saved in a tab, I think it was NPR that seems to think the Chinese people are getting uppity or too restless or something ...

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It's anyone's guess as to what portion of these measures are against what we would call disease and what portion are against political "diseases", such as Xi's would-be rivals.

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Two interesting viewpoints of US media reaction:

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/new-york-time-decides-lockdowns-are

https://michaelpsenger.substack.com/p/chinese-protest-the-same-lockdowns?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web

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“Zero COVID” is the new “Four Pests” campaign. It to the deaths of 45m before the CCP backed off on that, so theoretically Xi has a few more lives to go.