Very cool, NPR. I'm sure there's no reason for an increased amount of Asian-American hate crimes
I didn't click the link because I don't want to give them views. Unlimited WHATABOUTISM replies when you point out the United States is currently dealing with Bird Flu, Listeria, and more covid variants because Americans won't mask, vaccinate, or quarantine.
Meanwhile I have poor white American relatives who still eat squirrel and racoon and frog and other such things because they're easy to catch and free meal. Where's the NPR article about how many Americans are still literally hunting for food because they can't afford to buy food? How do we know an American eating a muskrat wasn't what caused COVID? Where's the studies being done on that?
Racism gussied up as intellectualism is a tried and true method unfortunately.
Tanuki are one of the most popular and ubiquitous of Japan’s magical menagerie. There are few Japanese children who don’t know some variation of this popular tune:
Tan tan tanuki no kintama wa
Kaze mo nai no ni bura bura
Tan tan tanuki’s balls
Even without wind they blowing around
Strangely enough, this song began as a American Christian hymn, “Shall We Gather at the River” written in 1864 written by American poet and gospel music composer Robert Lowry. The song made its way to Japan in the 1970s when it was adapted into a popular enka song, which was then parodied into the children’s tanuki song. The parody version is by far the best known in Japan today, with many unaware of the song’s origin.
Almost everyone sings the identical first verse, but depending on where you live in Japan you might have heard variations on the continuance. This is the version I learned in the Kansai region:
Sore o mite ita oya danuki
Onaka o kakaete wahha hha
When hey saw that, the tanuki parents
laughed so hard their bellies shook.
In truth, there are probably as many variations as there are groups of children in Japan, with new ones being created every day.
What ended up happening with that? IIRC, old sewage samples from Italy from well before Covid is known to have been present in China had Covid in them right?
It seems crazy that such a thing would be shoved under the rug.
It seems crazy that such a thing would be shoved under the rug.
Not when you're trying to start a new cold war and need to make China into a big bad spooky villain. Much easier to paint other countries as filthy coming to eat your pets.
It wasn't really shoved under a rug it was reported by many mainstream sources. All the report says is that covid was found in wastewater in 2 Italian towns in December 2019, before any cases were reported in China. That isn't really a smoking gun that it started in Italy, as December 2019 was also before Italy reported any cases.
What it indicates is that it was likely spreading before people knew it was a thing, which is interesting but shouldn't be that surprising for a novel infectious disease.
I'm not sure you can blame US racism on reporting about covid origins coming from China pushing further and further into animal habitats for meat resources. Not only is that the consensus theory but it's the antidote to the "actually evil Chinese scientists cooked this up in their lab and oh actually they're also incompetent which is why it got loose."
This is the type of rhetoric that leads to stuff like "they're coming to eat your pets!" Reactionaries say the wrong things on purpose to justify their worldview. They know covid wasn't a Chinese bioweapon. They know Chinese people don't eat every animal they can get their hands on. And they know the US's response to covid is why it continues to spread.
They say these things because they want to depict China as amassing WMDs so the US can amass WMDs. They want to say covid was a bioweapon for ethnic cleansing so Isreal can continue murdering Palestinians. Depicting China as eating diseased wild animals feeds the narrative of "gommunism is when no food so they eat bugs and dogs to survive."
The language NPR uses is deliberately inflammatory.
Yeah exactly. The factual narrative from the start has been that COVID came from an animal source, with debate being on what animal it was, from pangolins to bats to raccoons. The conspiracy narrative from the media has been the "Chinese lab leak" hypothesis. Alt left conspiracy about Fort Detrick, or "vaping illness" is unconvincing, and just reminds me about Soviet propaganda trying to blame HIV/AIDS on Fort Detrick. It's not helpful and rather distasteful.
china rang the alarm bell long before covid was even close to being a pandemic and the country was mocked for it. They did all they could to warn us, but somehow this pandemic is still their fault
Watch and be amazed as the story becomes "the dirty unsanitary chineses are coming to eat your pets, just like the Haitans". This is NPR, they've been hemming and hawwing and helping whitewash the current genocide under the veneer of soft heartfelt liberal "inquisitiveness". They serve the interests of empire for people who think they're too smart for maga bullshit. If they're taking the coverage in this direction, I have zero faith in them not doing so as the groundwork for something evil, like laundering pet-eating stories for their rapidly-being-scratched audience.
I mean, fine I guess. That’s a lot of conjecture but I can’t argue with having no faith in npr and other mainstream news. But I find it weird that this is in the dunk tank when just a year or two ago the mainstream press was pushing “Covid was made in a Chinese lab” extremely heavily. Seeing npr support the consensus view on Covid origins in one of their stories makes me breathe a sigh of relief. Where they end up going with it yeah, I don’t know, your criticisms are on point and maybe you’re right. But this isn’t that, not yet.