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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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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.