Neil Ferguson on Covid, Lockdown and Authoritarianism
I do like the sayings and writings of professor Niall Ferguson. He's a good populariser, an approachable public intellectual. This is a good review of the errors made in handling the pandemic, the predictable, and the predicted. The big one being: we knew early on this was a disease that killed the elderly. Why didn't we focus on protecting them? Instead we went into full-on panic mode and shut down everyone. Ferguson calls this the "pandemic of the mind". [BTW, his wife they talk about without naming, is the redoubtable Ayaan Hirsi Ali]
Both the Triggernometry lads, Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster, and the prof himself, go off-piste when they talk about China, about which they appear to know very little: only what they've read, nothing from on the ground, or from knowledgable sources. I wrote a comment: Good sensible talk. But.... Re China and pandemic responses (@30:00 et seq): FF and KK (and prof NF): you all need to study up on the place, preferable with a visit post-pandemic. I live now in HK, have lived, studied and worked in China, have friends and relatives there.
It's not at all the dystopia you imagine, of robot-citizens doing exactly what Beijing tells them. Pre-Covid it's been as lively a place as London in the swinging sixites. (really!). It's easy (and right) to hate on China (on Beijing, really) for its many faults and crimes, and I've done so on a blog for many years -- treatment of Uygurs, censorhip, etc -- but at an individual level it's basically a free country. Even the Neighbourhood Committees are no longer as sinister as NF makes them seem, or as they were when I was ensnared by them in the 1970s. They were, and remain, critical to pandemic control, a bit like Neighbourhood Watch only better, more systematic, more focused -- they do more than just crime watch, and in this case were the front line in implementing pandemic control measures. See here.
Beijing -- hated as it is, including by me -- didn't foist their handling of Covid on any other country. They simply said "this is what we've done"; I remember, in January 2020, watching it day-by-day very closely and I *remember*. They shut down whole provinces. Hundreds of millions of people. Set up their own "Nightingale hospitals" in less than a week. But they never said "you ought do this too". There's no dispute it's been successful. Today they hold county-level officials accountable. If they don't keep the virus under control, they're fired. Do we see this level of accountability elsewhere?
I'm no China fan-boy or China apologist, no matter how much it may seem so. It's just that I don't like hearing less than fully-informed opinions, even when they're espoused by the Triggernometry lads, who I've been following for years (and dearly love!)
