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Sci-Fi dystopia or real world?
A drone appears when people start singing from balconies in protest at the lack of supplies after being forcibly locked in their homes.
“Please comply with covid restrictions. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing.”
And for extra added dystopian flavour…
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A certain hope. My partner is from Shanghai Even people who are members of the Chinese Communist Party are fed up with the incompetence of Xi Li Ping and his cronies
This kind of thing has me thinking (cautiously) that, although it is reasonable to assume the ChiComCold came from a Wuhan lab leak related to gain-of-function research, it is also reasonable to assume its creation and release was not a deep-laid cunning plan hatched by Xi himself to weaken the west.
That said, it may not distress Xi unduly if Shanghai, close to Hong Kong and more influenced by it than most of China, takes a hit. I assume he is not looking to repeat Mao’s “great leap forward” (1957 – 62) with its 38 million starved to death (and etc.) – but there again, Mao may not have been consciously looking for that outcome himself. I’m not sure how much we would know if the same were happening in more remote parts of China.
There’s an easy cure for that here in some parts of the USA. A neighbor of mine lives across the alley, literally a stone’s throw out of the city boundary where it’s legal to shoot. Somebody flew a noisy little 4-prop drone over us for several minutes while we were talking across the fence; he excused himself and went into the house emerging with a 12-gauge and a box of #6 birdshot and loaded up. As soon as the drone (at an altitude of maybe 30 feet, well below rooftop level) crossed his property line he fired a single blast which dropped it into his garden in little plastic pieces.
Some idiot realtor came running up the alley, screaming at the top of his lungs that his expensive little camera-laden drone had been destroyed, and he was going to sue and ruin his life. My neighbor looked at him, grinned, and said, “And here I thought it was a government drone trespassing on my property below legal altitude. Let’s call the sheriff’s department and get this all sorted out, since I’ll be charging you with trespassing, invasion of privacy, being a peeping Tom, and issuing of terroristic statements. Wanna bet who they believe since I’ve got a witness right here?”
Oh, I failed to mention that my neighbor retired from the county sheriff’s department. It would have been funny watching this big-city jerk trying to deal with small-town law enforcement.
I have two friends who were born and raised in China. They both tell me that:
1. 2022 has always been the super crucial year for Xi to consolidate political control, primarily because his term was originally supposed to be up in 2022.
2. The main faction inside of the CCP that’s opposed to Xi is based on Shanghai.
3. The current covid lockdowns in China are coincidentally happening mainly where the CCP members opposed to Xi live.
To me, what’s happening in China now, including what’s noted in the OP, increases the chance that COVID was an intentional biological weapon developed and deployed intentionally to weaken the west and to weaken Xi’s political enemies inside China. YMMV
The video in this tweet shows the singing/screaming from high-rise windows that brought the drone to the scene.
That just gets you dead in China.
I recommend people look at the whole thread of 26 tweets by Eric Feigl-Ding. He has family in Shanghai and speaks the local language. The thread has videos and reports from several sources describing the struggle of Shanghai residents to get food. On the 24th tweet he says that the situation is not yet apocalyptic, but points out that in a city of 26 million “Even 1-5% of 26 mil is = MANY hungry” and says flatly that “if China loses control—millions may die.”
One imagines that a bit of modern archery using a fowling blunt fired from a dark corner of one of the rooftops would do the necessary?
A drone crashed to the ground without obvious signs of being shot down would just be an “unfortunate accident” possibly attributable to bats.
😀
There are some cool transmitters – schematics available on the net – that overcome control of a drone when it gets closer to you than to the controller. The easy build just blocks the controller signal and so puts the drone into “home” mode, and it turns around and goes back to the controller. The really neat ones take over control. (Developed after Heathrow Airport had some drone issues.)
Good for here, but they’d probably get you shot in China.
Given the massive use of drones by Ukraine, from the Bayraktar to tiny phone-drones, I imagine the field of counter-drone systems will grow exponentially in the very near future.
Tim B. (April 10, 2022 at 4:39 pm), we are obviously on the same page as regards Xi’s attitude to Shanghai, and he controls which areas get deemed worthy of lockdowns, so you have a point. My reasoning only follows if you think Xi both could foresee and would regret what looks to be a serious cost even to the power of the Chinese state, but as I noted in my comment, Mao didn’t. (And Xi doubtless values Chinese state power that he controls much higher than any other kind.)
It also affects my reasoning about what Xi would and would not do if we imagine he actually believed his own propaganda and so thought the stern social discipline imposed by the Chinese Communist Party would let him easily control a pandemic that effete freedom-allowing western governments would be unable to control.
I still find more likely the idea that Xi, like western lefties, merely weaponised this when it appeared in ‘a crisis is a terrible thing to waste’ mode. However it doesn’t do to underestimate how far someone who bids you…
…will go.