Um… I think you misspelled the US…
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This story on The Atlantic today seems relevant to this thread
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it’s a “five star” beach resort
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Well, if the shoe fits. 
But then, I guess it also applies to Russia, too, these days.
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TBH, this is not a new problem. Idealistic people have advocated for organizations like the UN and the various bodies associated with it (for decades) in order to protect and serve us, the people of the world, no matter what nationality we have. Unfortunately, the big powers have time and again used these organizations for their own ends. If there are failures in the UN or WHO, etc, it’s because of the leaders of nation-states (especially the US and Soviets, and now the US, Russians, and Chinese gov) manipulating it. However, the US has almost always seen these bodies as means to project power, more so than other powers. Trump literally pulled funding as a power move, which is unconscionable, given that we’re in a pandemic.
Contrary to all the yellow peril bullshit being promoted in this thread, China did far better than we’ve done. They let the WHO in, they shut down and they reported their numbers. China, for all it’s very real faults as an authoritarian power, is not the fuck up in this case. the US IS the fuck up in this case. Our government is willingly fucking up the entire world (especially the global south) for a man-childs tantrum.
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I do not disagree with either statement (tho’ China did fuck up somewhat). But that was not my point. One of China’s very real faults is that it used its childish position on Taiwan to prevent the WHO from talking about what Taiwan had done. In a pandemic.
Indeed, all three ‘superpowers’ are behaving - in their different ways - as if the pandemic is also (merely?) an excuse to enhance political/diplomatic capital. The US’s ‘man-child’ is doing it incompetently and cack-handedly. China is doing it much more subtly. We’ve had World Wars, Cold Wars, and I fear we may be in the early stages of a Virus War, just not the ‘germ warfare’ kind feared in the past, but a new diplomatic war fought on the hook of an accidental pandemic.
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“The WHO is too beholden to China, so we are going to withdraw funding, making them more beholden to China.”
Classic Trump logic.
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You beleive the numbers they reported when they were incarcerating anyone that spoke about the pamdemic in the early months? What is your faith in their transparency based on? All the data I have seen of them points at the exact opposite. Hell, this is a government that burried five tropical reefs in sand and killed them to build military bases in the middle of the south China Sea to steal the mineral and transit rights from the surrounding islands and the world.
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they’ve been more forth coming and transparent then my own government.
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I don’t live in China. My family who are working essential jobs don’t live in China. they will not die in china, because we need to “open the economy” for the rich.
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Of course, the difference is that they aren’t the natural rules of the earth, Europeans… so when they do “bad things” it’s more evil, because it upends the natural order of white supremacy… /s
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How are you arriving at this assertion? Do you believe the republican party controls CNN, NBC, ABC, etc? They don’t even control the US Government as a whole, much less what is reported out of local hospitals. What evidence do you have that the Chinese Communist Party is being forthcommimg about the greatest embarasment to their party and culture? Mind you, I don’t believe that it should be an embarrasment to their culture, but I am certain the party sees it as one.
PS. I am not running a government competition, I was just wondering on what data you where basing your statement:
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The UN is not a national government.
Have you been around since 2016? Have you heard a single presser the president done since this all began? Where we’re not going to have any cases or it’s going to be over quickly, with little loss of life? How he prioritized the economy and spread conspiracy theories to the point that his backers were threatening the life of their governor over not being able to get their roots done?
After a rocky start, the Chinese government let in health care workers, reported numbers, locked down cities to save lives.
These are two sets of facts. Our government failed. The CPC did something and they did release numbers… the only reason we have numbers on our side, is because Trump isn’t yet a dictator and he hasn’t replace everyone in our government with hacks and yes men. What we know and what our state and local governments have done are entirely IN SPITE OF our federal government. It’s clear that more people than needed to died because of the actions of our executive branch…
That’s what I’m going by… reality as best as we can obtain it via our mediate landscape. 
Really? Are you entirely ignorant of the history of Communist China?
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As an UN agency, the WHO is not free from government influence; on the contrary, it faces pressure from many governments and especially from the biggest contributors to its budget, including China.
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The amount they give is about half what the US was contributing…
As we should. The more globally connected countries are at a larger risk for things like pandemics! Why shouldn’t they fund a body whose job it is to deal with global health issues. It is in their (and OUR) interest… you know, because pandemics can kill people.
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The problem with the metaphor is not the “bully” part but rather the bit where some nation-states are “children” and others are implicitly the grownups. Nation-states are all bullies. There are no grownups in that world. And referring to nonwhite foreign leaders as children is, uh, problematic.
China → Taiwan, U.S. → Venezuela, Russia → Ukraine, everybody’s got neighbors whose authority they don’t recognize.
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