Too many people are confusing the two. Whenever lemmy.ml or its devs do something stupid, people go “Lemmy is getting worse and worse,” or “I’m leaving Lemmy,” or worse, “I’m leaving for Beehaw.”
If you’re using Beehaw, then you’re using Lemmy. Lemmy is the software these instances run on. If you don’t like lemmy.ml, join another instances that have rules that match your philosophy. Some instance hosts authoritarian or fascist shit? Turn to another Lemmy instance. Lemmy.ml is not even the biggest instance. People who just joined and are unfamiliar with the platform will just think the entire Lemmyverse is run by autocratic admins if we don’t get our terminology right.
The data is literally from the CCP itself, so you don’t need to question it. You trust the CCP right? The CCP claims a COVID mortality rate of 0 after April 2020, which is downright idiotic and requires the suspension of disbelief to work with. Based on that, I won’t even make an effort to believe that the CCP’s figures are in any way trustworthy.
The entire reason why this isn’t a simple discussion, and why we have to use the “excess mortality” as a proxy metric in the first place, is because the CCP lied and fudged the data into order to present “zero covid” as a success. Had the CCP simply shared the actual COVID death rate, this would’ve been a matter of simple comparison, but they didn’t.
However, that is fine. Data scientists can construct statistical models to account for the discrepancies. The Economist’s Model illustrates this well. While estimates for the US, Germany closely track the actual numbers reported with some specific gap, CCP-China’s estimates diverge sharply from their reports. The average estimate for China is worse than US or any other Western nation, unless you pick the “massaged” figures they have reported, which are certainly false. Only the lower bound of the estimate can be considered better.
This claim is hilarious in any context, but even moreso in the context of COVID. China has been gaslighting people about the pandemic from the very beginning, and repressed whistleblowers who attempted to warn the world about it. The world lost crucial weeks and months of much-needed response time because of the CCP’s obsession with controlling the narrative even when the extent of the problem was obvious. Why jail medical workers who spoke out? Pointless cruelty, especially considering the news was all over the place at that point. Why spread misinformation about vaccines? And why bother fudge the numbers when the discrepancy is obvious to any observer?
I’ve already made it clear I’m not on your side, or the CCP’s side, Ms./Mr. Tankie. There’s a reason why tankies are, and continue to be, a fringe movement within the left almost everywhere: You’re faced with the Sisyphean task of attempting to sell the CCP as a force for good, which is extremely difficult considering the fact that the entire world is aware of the CCP’s nature as a repressive, totalitarian regime.
Call me “lib” all you want, at least non-Tankie leftists are actually somewhat effective at improving conditions of the working class (compared to CCP’s “achievements”, which are a sad joke). European socialists can point to successes in both labor rights and on the social front (LGBT rights in China are an even sadder joke). The only thing tankies succeed at these days is shilling for the CCP, for Russia, for the Taliban, or for whatever regressive, repressive, authoritarian “anti-western” / “anti-US” force is popular nowadays. My bad, they’re also remarkably successful in alienating people from the wider leftist movement - but thankfully, tankies are still seen as a joke and beyond parody in most of Europe, so we don’t have this problem over here yet.