I would like to think that working in and around law courts for 20 years has taught me something about human nature. Unfortunately, it has not. My opinion is still roughly similar to what it was then because the whole world has only provided data to confirm my base assumptions about human nature.
Economics tells us that humans are rationally selfish. I do not think that they are rational. Most religions tell us that humans are sinful or unreformed, which usually stems from that same origin of human selfishness.
I do not think that humans have a rational capacity for justice either. Humans have a deep seated sense of when they have personally been slighted but practically zero natural empathy or care for when they slight and hurt others. We be sorry after the event but we are more satisfied by seeking and exacting revenge. Revenge also has no rational capacity for justice either. Taken to the illogical conclusion, revenge keeps on going beyond generations and even has the capacity to destroy hundreds of millions of people. The 37 days between Gavrilo Princip killing the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the formal outbreak of the Great War could have been avoided if it wasn't for the unlimited capacity for irrational selfishness moving the fates of nations.
This was the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, May 4th:
There has been a kind of a sleepwalking match to stupidity from the Sydney Morning Herald in the months after Fairfax Ltd was bought outright by Nine Entertainment Co. In a two newspaper city like Sydney, the Herald used to be a centre rightist voice of semi- sensibility which stood in opposition to the populist authoritarian rightist howling monkeys at the Daily Telegraph and the sneering authoritarian rightist propaganda loud hailer of The Australian. The Daily Telegraph and The Australian and the rest of their Greek chorus at News Corp have been singing a song of revenge against China and the Chinese Communist Party almost from the beginning of this pandemic but I didn't think that the Herald would start singing from the same hymn sheet.
I do not understand in principle what the point of yelling at China is. We seem to have started a trade war for no reason at all and which we are losing, which doesn't help either. Even if we assume that the idiotic dumbwittery conspiracy theory that China engineered the virus in a laboratory is true, what good does it do for us to yell at China? Yelling at China doesn't solve the problem that the virus exists, and the Federal Government in trying to combat it is taking active steps to be useless. Other countries are well on the way to rolling out vaccinations but our Federal Government seems uninterested in either governing or actually taking action. Yelling at China is the stupidest and cheapest option because it costs practically nothing.
Let's assume for a second that Peter Hartcher at the Sydney Morning Herald is the Defence Minister and has the power to start a hot war against China as opposed to the cold war which we want to start. If hostilities were to break out, the entire nation of Australia against the might of China would be like trying to fight a Great Wall Wingo pickup truck with a watermelon. You might make a dent of embarrassment with the watermelon but beyond that it would just make a sticky mess and the pickup truck wouldn't care.
We would cry out to our imagined saviour of the United States but the Democrats would dither and blather and blither their way to idiocy and the Republicans would hum and har and hern hern hern their way to inaction. Even 70 years of support for the United States into stupid wars which they almost never win, wouldn't make much of a difference. The United States has enough sense of its own self-interest and self-preservation to not want to start a hot war with China.
Ideally if we were to start a war with China it would want to be between 10:15 and 10:25 on a Monday morning; which is after everyone has had morning tea. We would still lose but at least those people wanting to play at war would have had their tea and bikkies before having a nap. The actual soldiers on the ground who do the work, who have a proper sense of national pride, who see the nation as a concept bigger than themselves and who are prepared to act accordingly, are always far more noble than people sitting behind desks who are ten thousand miles away.
In general we have this weird obsession with China because the narrative of geopolitics for more than a hundred years can not imagine anything beyond some fairy tale wrestling concept of goodies and baddies. We have had a string of baddies including Kaiser Bill, Hitler, Stalin, the Soviets and Communism as a general concept, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban, ISIS, and China fits the narrative as a baddie character very well. China is big, red, and eats rocks. We do not need to imagine the world any more complexly if our designated enemy is nothing more than a big red rock eater.
As for any collateral damage which happens in society, where Asian people generally and Chinese people in particular, become the subjects of racist comments and abuse for something the they are in no way shape or form remotely responsible for, that's just consequences of our irrational revenge seeking selfishness; which results in zero natural empathy or care for when we slight and hurt others. The Sydney Morning Herald obviously thought that this was a good thing which would help them sell future advertising space.
My hope that this story by the Sydney Morning Herald is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing but I fear that it by virtue of being published in two of the most prominent newspapers in the country will have been heard by other idiots who are also full of sound and fury. My hope is that this will actually result in nothing more than the Sydney Morning Herald looking like a bunch of idiots as they continue to sleepwalk into stupidity because this really isn't news. It is sabre rattling which does nothing but to add another data point to confirm my base assumptions about human nature.
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