This article in the FT caught my eye:

Outside investigations have suggested Uighurs are being forcibly sterilised and children are being separated from their communities. Leaked documents, revealed by the Financial Times, show that the most common reason for detention in the camps was a violation of family planning policies; the second most common reason was being a practising Muslim.

A few years back, China changed it’s birth control policy from “one child” to two. At the time, I wondered why they maintained any limit at all. After all, China’s birthrate is far below 2 per family and China’s population is set to fall dramatically during the 21st century. (India’s population will exceed China’s later in this decade.)

This FT story provides one rationale. China is a very authoritarian society, but not completely lawless. The real problem is that their laws are too repressive. Having this law on the books provides a legal pretext, a sort of fig leaf, for the crackdown on Uighurs.

Many commentators like to call China “communist”, or “Marxist”. This is nonsense. I’ve been there, and I can assure you that there is absolutely nothing communist about modern China. Instead, China has basically become a fascist nation:

1. Authoritarian
2. Nationalistic
3. Bullying
4. Han-supremacist
5. Mixed economy
6. Intolerant
7. Misogynist
8. Teaches a fake history that ignores the CCP’s crimes while emphasizing how China was victimized by others.

That’s almost a textbook definition of fascism.

In recent months, the new national security law in Hong Kong has garnered a lot of criticism, and deservedly so. But it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that even today Hong Kong remains much freer than the rest of China (except Taiwan), while Xinjiang is far less free than the rest of China.

Did I mention that America’s president encouraged Xi Jinping to put the Uighurs into concentration camps? Perhaps I need to, as you won’t hear that fact from GOP Congressmen demanding that America get tough with China.

PS. Sad to see that political correctness has come to Taiwan. They plan to rename their national airline, which is currently called “China Airlines”:

“The ministry should make China Airlines more identifiable internationally with Taiwanese images to protect Taiwan’s national interests,” said legislative president Yu Shyi-kun of the independence-leaning party DPP. “Overseas it is mistaken for a Chinese airline.”

Gee, I wonder what would make outsiders assume that an airline that was specifically named “China Airlines” is a . . . you know . . . a Chinese airline. Names can be so confusing.

PS. Here’s a very good article on conservative cancel culture.

Back in April, I saw some people making the argument that social distancing is a bad idea. They claimed that it would only delay the inevitable, and that herd immunity was the only plausible endgame. One fewer Covid-19 death today would mean one more death in the future.

We still don’t know many things about Covid-19, but one thing we now know for sure is that this argument is wrong.

Tyler Cowen has a new article pointing to the discovery that progress is being made on treatment:

First, a cheap steroid known as dexamethasone was the first drug shown to reduce death in Covid-19 patients, and the trials proving its effectiveness came from the U.K., with Oxford University playing a prominent role. In one sample, the drug reduced deaths among a vulnerable group by one-third (it is less effective for milder cases). Dexamethasone is now a part of treatment regimens around the world, and even poor countries can afford it.

The WSJ reports:

This month Gilead released more data showing that severely ill patients treated with remdesivir were 62% less likely to die than patients with similar characteristics and disease severity. A separate analysis found that 74.4% of severely ill patients treated with remdesivir recovered within 14 days compared with 59% of a control group.

We have a better idea of how to use ventilators. We know to keep patients on their stomachs. We know better how to protect nursing homes, meaning that relatively more of the infected are young. We are closer to a vaccine; indeed many promising vaccines are making rapid progress.

As a result, the infection fatality rate seems to be falling fast. To be sure, we don’t have precise estimates, mostly due to changes in testing rates. But a great deal of evidence suggests that the death rates actually are much lower than back in April. In a few months, they will be lower still. Social distancing and masks don’t just delay Covid-19 deaths; they also buy enough time to prevent them.

This does not necessarily imply that social distancing is a good idea—perhaps the costs exceed the benefits. But the argument that precautions were doing nothing more than simply delaying deaths has now been proved wrong. That’s one fewer theory that we need to worry about.

PS. This is interesting:

From Argentina to South Africa to New Zealand, countries in the Southern Hemisphere are reporting far lower numbers of influenza and other seasonal respiratory viral infections this year. In some countries, the flu seems to have all but disappeared, a surprise silver lining that health experts attribute to measures to corral the coronavirus, like mask use and restrictions on air travel.

PPS. Trump does really bad things almost every single day. So if I fail to comment on a specific example—say the stunt he’s pulling in Portland—you should not take that as evidence of a lack of outrage.

PPPS. This tweet got me thinking. What if you put 250 woke people into an auditorium and forced them to watch 5 straight hours of old Monty Python episodes. How many would survive the ordeal?

Readers of the New Yorker (which describes itself in Trumpian terms as the best magazine that ever was) were recently told the following:

One study suggests that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated in emergency rooms suffered from injuries inflicted by police and security guards, about as many people as the number of pedestrians injured by motor vehicles.

Louise Perry reviewed the scientific study on which is was based:

I did my best to work out a rough estimate of the true proportion of 15-34 year olds visiting the ER who had suffered legal intervention injuries, and arrived at a figure of 0.2% (you can follow my working in this thread). So I believe Lepore’s claim to be off by a factor of several hundred.

Because New Yorker readers are a superior breed, with Bayesian reasoning skills, they will dutifully reduce their estimate of the frequency of police beatings by a factor of 300, once they are informed of Ms. Perry’s correction.

Those that don’t see the correction will assume that 1/3 of all ER admissions of young people (at a minimum) are for people who were beaten by police after they were injured in a traffic accident, in what can only be described as adding insult to injury. That’s because New Yorker readers are good at math, and understand that 2/3 plus 2/3 equals 4/3.

PS. I learned early on not to trust the press. The photo below describes a dispute between my dad and a neighbor over a garage. I recall (back in the 1960s) my dad telling me that the newspaper got the facts wrong. And that’s despite the fact that my dad’s brother was a reporter for this paper (The Capital Times). I was reminded of this story by a Matt Yglesias tweet that I saw today, describing a very similar dispute in Maine.

In which country is a politician more likely to get into trouble for not showing sufficient loyalty to the president?

1. Venezuela
2. Switzerland

Here’s the WaPo:

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) came under fire Tuesday from the far-right flank of the House Republican caucus, who accused her of disloyalty to President Trump and later called on her to step down from her leadership post.

Members of the House Freedom Caucus chided Cheney, the chair of the House Republican Conference, for supporting Anthony S. Fauci and breaking with the president on recent foreign policy issues. Cheney stood her ground in the closed-door meeting, firing back that the conservative agitators were the ones who typically lack loyalty to Trump and fellow Republicans.

Did I fall asleep and wake up in a different country? Is this now our system of government? People in the legislative branch are now supposed to show “loyalty” to people in the executive branch? How about the head of the FBI; should he also show loyalty?

PS. Here’s Switzerland’s current president:

. . . but Covid-19 is interested in Trump.

It seems that Trump has gotten bored with the whole Covid-19 thing:

President Donald Trump’s failure to contain the coronavirus outbreak and his refusal to promote clear public-health guidelines have left many senior Republicans despairing that he will ever play a constructive role in addressing the crisis, with some concluding they must work around Trump and ignore or even contradict his pronouncements.

In recent days, some of the most prominent figures in the GOP outside the White House have broken with Trump over issues like the value of wearing a mask in public and heeding the advice of health experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom the president and other hard-right figures within the administration have subjected to caustic personal criticism.

They appear to be spurred by several overlapping forces, including deteriorating conditions in their own states, Trump’s seeming indifference to the problem and the approach of a presidential election in which Trump is badly lagging his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, in the polls.

Once-reticent Republican governors are now issuing orders on mask-wearing and business restrictions that run counter to Trump’s demands. Some of those governors have been holding late-night phone calls among themselves to trade ideas and grievances; they have sought out partners in the administration other than the president, including Vice President Mike Pence, who, despite echoing Trump in public, is seen by governors as far more attentive to the continuing disaster.

“The president got bored with it,” David Carney, an adviser to the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, a Republican, said of the pandemic. He noted that Abbott directs his requests to Pence, with whom he speaks two to three times a week.

Playing golf in Palm Beach is so much more fun.

Question for those of you who laughed when I said Trump was the worst president in US history. Be honest. Could imagine any other president showing such total disinterest in doing anything at all about one of the greatest crises of the 21st century? Seriously?

PS. In case you don’t know, this is a reference to Trotsky’s famous remark:

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you