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March 2022
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This is my correspondence with members of a small group of writers self-styled as China Writers Group. They mostly write non-fiction books about China while I write fiction with Chinese characters and China as a backdrop. As one of the writers bemoaned the phenomenon described by the title of this blog, I tried to comfort him with the following irreverent response:
It's a disease of the human mind known as confirmation bias, characterized by the logic commonly used by the afflicted: "My mind is made up, don't confuse me with facts." But there are consequences for people who insist that the headlight of an on-coming train is the light at the end of the tunnel. You can try to save them but they will refuse to be saved, because the lies that they willfully consume provide the opiates for their jaundiced and prejudiced mind. There is probably nothing we can do but prepare ourselves for the inevitable eventuality and witness the spectacle further away from the collision. As I have been prophesying ever since Trump was elected especially since the trade war, the fall of the empire is coming, and it will happen in our lifetime, perhaps sooner than expected because of Trump and the Covid-19 pandemic. Fully half of Americans and a third of Canadians to this day do not comply with even half-ass measures advised by the authorities to help stem the tide. The result is a foregone conclusion. My first reaction at the beginning of 2020 when I saw that China decided to shut down Chinese New Year—we'll have to admit that shutting down Wuhan was nothing compared to shutting down Chinese New Year; it was a sign that SARS-2 was deadly serious--I said "America is f*cked!" I didn't say that out of spite, malice, or schadenfreude. I didn't do any detailed analysis. I didn't do any mathematical or statistical calculations, and I didn't research with any computer modeling. It was just intuition ... right from the gut. Maybe it's my confirmation bias. But my confirmation bias is better than America's confirmation bias. Like it or not, it's based on fact. It was reported that thousands of doctors, nurses, and hospital workers in Wuhan were infected even before they knew what hit them, and many died. My hunch was correct so that was that. It was an on-coming train, folks. By the way, Canada (we-the-north) is now royally and spirally skewered after our rule-of-law prime minister Trudeau junior stuck his head up Supremo Trump's pompous ass. Keystone pipeline more than ten years in the making and billions invested dissipates into thin air like a wisp of Trumpian fart, and Biden is going to hit Canada with his Buy American MAGA 2.0 campaign. No mercy for morons who trumped the king of morons by burning their bridges for flatulence. Since getting relief from China is out of the question with all the bridges burned, Canada can trade with the other Five Eyes allies Australia and England (Scotland and N. Ireland will be dancing the Scotxit and N. Irelandxit; New Zealand has one foot out of the Five Eyes door). As if. This is what happens when the people put a buffoon in charge. Finally, just to demonstrate how clever the people are who proudly call themselves the Five Eyes Alliance; in Chinese, the ass-h*le is known as the fart-eye. They are the alliance of the five ass-h*les. Anybody care to join? Joking aside, confirmation bias is an insidious and infectious disease. We must be vigilant and we must inoculate ourselves against it. Peter Man
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