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Is Hasan Piker the left’s biggest problem—or its best shot?
(www.motherjones.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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United States | News & Politics
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Developed countries staying developed isn't really remarkable.
Developing countries becoming developed is actually remarkable, because countries usually end up stuck in underdevelopment as they're ruthlessly exploited by the global economy. China is finally escaping a trap that has ensnared the rest of the Global South.
Compare that to a developed country like the US seemingly falling into underdevelopment. The contrast is remarkable, too.
China became developed by embracing market capitalism. China had decades of braindead economic policies with gigantic failures resulting in millions of deaths.
Lots of other countries have done this as well all over Asia and elsewhere.
Countries stuck in development hell usually suffer from weak Institutions, mismanagement, corruption, lack of diversification, ideological insanity, and such.
The best comparison to China is Taiwan.
It didn't embrace it, it used it. The commanding heights of the economy are still controlled by the Communist Party and the economy is still centrally planned. That's why, during the pandemic, they could tell the market to shut down and implement the government's Zero COVID restrictions. Politics are in command. The only market economies that could show similar results from the pandemic were islands that didn't need to actually shut the economy down because they could simply restrict travel.
Yes, the Chinese government is able to be very oppressive, if it chooses to. At times this can have good outcomes.
Their political system suppressed information around COVID, which arguably made this whole situation a lot worse for everybody. The super harsh measures in China might not have been necessary otherwise. China systematically undercounted their COVID death toll by at least a factor of ten as well.
The failure of China to be transparent about the lab leak fueled conspiracy theories and misinformation worldwide.
I'm sure the West didn't have anything to do with creating and spreading lab leak conspiracy theories to smear China.
Even if they under-counted by a factor of ten (which seems like a pretty extreme estimate) they still outperformed other non-island market economies by a significant margin. Their official death rate was 85 deaths per million. I'm no mathematician but I'm pretty sure that means, by a factor of ten, the "real" death rate was 850 deaths per million.
Now lets look at those other developed countries you listed:
Sweden: 2,798 per million
Finland: 2,058 per million
Switzerland: 1,611 per million
Japan (another Island): 597 per million
France: 2,616 per million
Looks like China did amazingly well, even if you inflate their numbers. In the same order of magnitude as Japan, a literal island.
Yes, their total lockdowns were effective.
Believing China’s numbers outright is naive.
I literally multiplied their numbers by a factor of ten, the same one you used. I imagine the official count might be off, but a factor of ten is extreme. Yet, even when I did that, they outperformed the world.
We could have done that. Instead, we were marched to our deaths.
That's why COVID was my radicalization moment.
COVID misinformation and the results were terrible, agreed.