{"id":83978,"date":"2022-12-01T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-12-01T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=83978"},"modified":"2022-12-01T09:47:57","modified_gmt":"2022-12-01T15:47:57","slug":"if-you-cant-stand-it-stand-it-no-longer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=83978","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;If You Can&#8217;t Stand It, Stand It No Longer&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I know a few people with contacts in the Chinese diasporic and dissident communities.  They&#8217;ve been telling me for the past few years &#8211; even before the pandemic &#8211; to watch out for what&#8217;s going on in China.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To Americans inured to rioting in Minneapolis and Portland, the news of riots in Shanghai, not long after rioting in formerly-free Hong King, might elicit an ignorant shrug.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it may not be immediately apparent how striking it is to see scenes like this in China:  a man, yelling &#8220;Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death&#8221; (at 3:08), is dragged away by police and militia&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"More and more protests: &quot;There is only one disease in China, and it is called not being free!&quot;\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/etsNfRVeddI?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8230;and then dragged back by the passersby. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Chinese subjects, forcefully re-capturing someone arrested by the cops<\/em>.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s a little like the famous Tienanmen Square guy putting down his groceries, pulling a Molotov Cocktail out of the bag, and setting the tank on fire.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Lest you feel too happy, it gets much worse.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Around 7:15, the story follows a fire call at a large apartment in Xinjiang.  Firemen have a hard time reaching the building at all, due to Covid lockdown restrictions.  Since the building is locked down, the fire escapes are locked shut &#8211; and the death toll was horrific (as the cell phone conversation captured around 7:30 shows).  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Around 8:35:  residents unblock a neighborhood that had been sealed off for over three months, and send the police running.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I know &#8211; don&#8217;t give Tim Walz any ideas, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But the people were not amused.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Various whispers from the dissident community &#8211; which you can credit or not, as the attribution is pretty much all underground &#8211; is that a whooole lot of Chinese students and emigres are the children of party members who are trying to get their families ensconced somewhere safe before things blow up.   Whether that&#8217;s wishful thinking or prescience, time will tell.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On the one hand, totalitarian dictators are generally very good at seeing to their own survival (until they&#8217;re not).  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On the other?  In 1980, the record shows Ronald Reagan was just about the only person who could see the USSR collapsing.  In historical scale, it all happened <em>so <\/em>quickly after that &#8211; almost too quickly for the left to claim they&#8217;d predicted it all along. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Is China the same?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>More on this in the future.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I know a few people with contacts in the Chinese diasporic and dissident communities. They&#8217;ve been telling me for the past few years &#8211; even before the pandemic &#8211; to watch out for what&#8217;s going on in China. To Americans inured to rioting in Minneapolis and Portland, the news of riots in Shanghai, not long [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83978"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83984,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83978\/revisions\/83984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}