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kleinbl00  ·  721 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: April 6, 2022

I finished rewatching Chernobyl last night. I figured it would be poignant in light of certain genocidal campaigns in and around the Near Abroad and I was correct. It is fundamentally a study in the tragedy of cronyism, in which a fundamentally unfair system rewards those who work the system best, not those who are best for the system.

The most natural approach to disaster within a command economy is "do whatever you can RIGHT NOW to solve the problem RIGHT NOW." The whole of the structure is reactive. COVID zero gave China a PR win after a PR disaster; no apparatchik in their right mind is going to alter the flight plan. So what's going to happen is a lot of old people are going to die, which from a demographic standpoint is exactly what China needs to be competitive long-term. Not the sort of calculus you get to do in a free society but when you've normalized concentration camps?

Yearly Fluvid shots at the local CVS makes a lot of sense in a capitalist economy. When you've got totalitarianism and Sinovac? You do whatever doesn't get you sent to a work camp.