They Boil Babies In China Don’t You Know
A while ago a tweet passed across my feed from an account called “Songpinganq”. It was about Chinese restaurants selling a meal that featured a luckless fish which had been deep-fried from the neck-down so it was still alive while it was being eaten.
This was disgusting, of course — but when I looked up the phenomenon I found that it originated not in China but Taiwan.
China does have terrible standards when it comes to animal welfare — torturing animals and endangering humans. But it’s hardly unique in that. I believe they kill and eat more dogs in Vietnam (proportionally to its population size). They eat live fish in Japan. Chinese factory farms are appalling, of course, but look around the world. Ours are pretty damn disgusting too!
I remembered “Songpinganq” popping up on my feed before. Jordan Peterson had quote tweeted a video of a woman jumping from the window of a burning building. “This girl couldn’t escape through her door because of lockdown,” Songpinganq had added. “Sheer horror from the totalitarians of the CCP,” Peterson commented, “Admirers of communism (those still exist and are somehow acceptable) take note.”
But hang on: if the woman couldn’t escape from her building because of lockdowns, why were there so many people in the street? Does it not make more sense that she couldn’t escape from her building because it was on fire?
Everyone is wrong on Twitter every now and then. But there’s being wrong by mistake and there’s not drawing a distinction between truth and falsehood. Accounts characterised by the latter are depressingly common — often posting videos and pictures out of context with unsourced and unverifiable captions stapled on.
I’m not alone in recognising that a lot of what Songpinganq has promoted to their tens of thousands of followers is total garbage. Even Snopes stepped in to point out that videos claimed to feature “one year baby…being sent off to a quarantine camp” was a kid in a cute astronaut outfit.
The funniest example of Songpinganq being wrongpinganq occured last night. I feel bad for picking on Jordan Peterson here because he has a serious Twitter problem. As I write, he has tweeted fifteen times in the last two hours (not including retweets and replies). Some friendly soul should probably change his passwords and give him a week off.
But he has a huge audience — 3.9 million followers — so he should be more careful about how he addresses them. He quote tweeted Songpinganq once again hours ago, adding “such fun in unbelievable techno-nightmare CCP hell” to a video that featured — and I’m not making this up — men having semen forcibly pumped out of their penises. It was a fetish video, of course, and from Britain, though what it was meant to be boggles the mind. If China wanted to force men to give up their semen — for some kind of esoteric breeding programme? — there would be cheaper, easier ways to get it, no?
Look, if you think I want to defend the Chinese government then you’ve completely missed the point. I believe the CCP has erected a cruel, dehumanising and culturally stultifying form of techno-corporatism — and that its response to COVID has disproved the sneaking assumption, which I might once have shared, that it is underpinned by some form of cold rationality. I’m sure there are horrors being perpetrated there. God knows we shouldn’t dismiss claims out of hand. No doubt there were sceptics in the 1930s sneering come on, you don’t really think they’re murdering Jews for the sake of it do you? and come now, a “gulag” system? Pull the other one.
But the fact that there are horrors taking place doesn’t mean that every claim regarding horrors taking place is true. It feels like you can say anything about China online and a subsantial amount of liberals and conservatives will mindlessly promote it. “In China you’re banned from sleeping if your social credit score is too low – a little drone appears and shoots you in the face with a water pistol.” “OMG, they’d better not try that in America.”
We have to sift what is credible from what is unlikely, and what is unlikely from what is sheer bunkum, because while we all agree that the CCP is bad — well, most of us anyway — the scale of that badness matters. It matters in explaining the roots of our unhappiness with the world. It matters in assessing our foreign policy objectives. It matters because the truth is fundamentally good — and not just because directing ourselves towards it makes it somewhat less likely that we will end up accidentally showing our Twitter followers fetish porn.
Good examples. The CCP benefits when otherwise normal people go off the deep end. Much easier to dismiss the actual horrors when people are promoting extreme fiction.
This @Songpinganq account has also been boosting Western ethnonationalist content. I'll bet its not really a Chinese-origin user, or is at least someone grifting off the Western reactionary ecosystem in the vein of @stillgray.