zlacker

>>lazycr+(OP)
The WHO is a useless organization. For political reasons, it will be necessary to engage, but hopefully US authorities will not treat it as an information source.

The US should use its own primary sources in future to evaluate disease spread. China will lie to the WHO and the WHO will protect it.

But to know the truth, we should use our modern equivalents of Key Hole. There is no truth but that which you have examined yourself.

>>renewi+17
There is no winning with you... Of course it cannot be too powerful, because then nationalists would scream bloody murder and refuse to have anything to do with it.

The WHO is a forum to coordinate strategy and exchange information. Obviously, this requires a minimum of good faith, which seems to be difficult for some countries (yes, particularly dictatorships). But even then, it is better to have them within, collaborating on their terms, than to leave them outside, in which case it would be even harder to get any information out of them.

So yes, China will lie, which will make life worse for epidemiologists and governments across the globe, but not as worse as it could be with China being entirely uncooperative.

It is not the world police, and it won’t come anywhere and do anything against the local government’s wishes. Otherwise the screams world be even louder, and justifiably so.

>>kergon+3d
I don't think anyone wants the WHO to be powerful. They want the WHO to be honest. And they aren't. But that isn't the WHO's fault or anyone working there. It's a property of what the WHO is.

>>renewi+Md
> They want the WHO to be honest. And they aren't

They are working with what they have, which comes from governments and governmental health agencies. If they don’t have information, they say ‘we don’t know’, even though everyone knows that the most likely scenario involves emergence in China.

If one wants them to be able to coerce information out of China, then by definition it would need to be more powerful.

>>kergon+hf
If they are "working with what they have", then they should not speak from a position of authority.

Authority is derived from something being something that everyone has. In the past, achieving that goal practically guaranteed authenticity to within a comfortable enough quanta for everyone to work with.

With more advanced remote sensing equipment, the decreased cost to publish, reach one can attain for relatively little cost nowadays, that is no longer a luxury we can all afford to continue to entertain. We must all see with our own eyes. In the case that is frustrated or made impossible, it should not a surprise that the world acts as badly as it does.

This is why the collective lie is the most powerful weapon fielded by modern civilization, and why there is such a jockeying for control of what the definition of allowable evidence is. Perception management is a weapon of mass destruction, and should be called out for what it is.