I talk a lot about China not because I have any interest in Chinese communism, as some infected by team…

I talk a lot about China not because I have any interest in Chinese communism, as some infected by team sports culture think. I use China as a key contrast. For example, the enormous pressure in late-2022 for China to ‘live with’ Covid. /1 https://t.co/q5iftny2ys https://t.co/VMidJlmdnH

Most of the pressure came from the West, who proudly let the pandemic breed and then spread internationally. Particularly the great old Anglo powers in the US and UK, led by libertarian halfwits. China implemented a public health response WE invented, in the West. /2

It tried to control spread of the virus. It managed to control that spread a long time. Meanwhile the libertarian halfwits kept pumping more and more virus into global circulation, using a new ‘save the airlines and our recreational travel’ public health approach. /3

As with Australia and NZ, China showed Covid was quite easy to not only control, but even smash entirely. But that effort is pointless, if the rest of the international community is pumping out infected travellers, and prioritising its ‘economies’ (i.e the status quo). /4

Sure, the young in particular in China sometimes rebelled against pubic health restrictions, fed a steady diet of social media. That’s what social media will do anywhere, entrench adolescent worldviews of freedom. /5

And ‘welding up doors’ is ham-fisted, absolutely. But China is not yet a rich country. It knew letting a novel lethal pathogen spread would decimate many of its poor communities. Act first, ask forgiveness later is often the thin line between survival and catastrophe. /6

I highlight China because the West in particular is collapsing under an ideology of market-driven societies. The deliberate absence of leadership of any form. The idea that just letting everybody do whatever they like will spontaneously generate optimum outcomes. /7

It’s an ideology of the privileged, who in reality don’t know how to make a ham sandwich, and have lived for too long in cultures where the hard, nasty work of survival has been hidden from view. /8

Where most of the hard labour is done by cheap imported workers, and outsourced industrial capacity in distant invisible lands. Like China. We’re the ‘let them eat cake’ cultures, thinking our lifestyle lives are some default state of nature, or a product of our democracies. /9

We’re just the children of the most recent empires, that’s all. Living off our earlier conquests. That’s shifting rapidly now, Asia is resurgent, while we wallow in ideologies from another age, attributing our lovely lives to our democratic ideas. /10

All while distressed and puzzled every day about why our politics is a sewer and populist sociopaths keep winning elections, while we ‘live with’ pandemics. We’re Rome in its dying days, all empires do this. /11

I also shared this today. Our ideologies even have full-time institutional bodies to ensure the status quo never shifts, like productivity commissions, and Reserve Banks. Our productivity commission would call the Industrial Revolution in China right now ‘picking winners’. /12 https://t.co/Dxv997R1Ln

The last Industrial Revolution, several centuries ago, ushered in the Western empires. We haven’t noticed the new Industrial Revolution underway in Asia, already years-old. Think about this. What China is doing with renewables and EVs may *save us from extinction*. /13

From catastrophic climate change. And that saving would be called ‘picking winners’, by our ideologies. The magnitude of the stupidity we’re living under, it beggars belief. We’re a cult of freedom and markets. There are no markets, all change is led. /14

Silicon Valley for example, the engine room of about the only industrial activity the West still retains, was created by the US Navy. Not by any market or spontaneous effort from a fictitious ‘people’. Market economies never existed, except in our heads. /15

They were always only kept afloat by imported slave labour and offshore factories. Like I often say, meaningful change comes only from catastrophe. Without catastrophe, social status games dominate life. Asia is the least damaging catastrophe that can save us now. /16

It beats letting pandemics rip or runaway climate change incinerate us, as methods to collapse our status quo. Internally all sides and all serious commentators will mindlessly drone on about ‘the economy’, that great fiction of our status quo. /17

None of that will change anything that needs changing, it’s designed to prevent any change. Nor can we vote any of these problems away, elections are a laughable status game that are just football for governance. The massive disruption from China may save us. /18

Even that may not be enough. But it’s easily the most palatable option facing us right now. It’s no accident our status quo is ramping up Yellow Peril politics more every day. It knows the threat to its existence. /end