A Scatological Fact about China

This is not dinner-table fare, so I'll put it past the jump. I trust your judgment about whether or not you would enjoy reading such things.

Writing at Townhall, Mark Lewis mocks Gavin Newsome and walks unknowingly into an error.

Interestingly, there is often a code of honor among thieves and sometimes among savages.  Gavin Newsom cleaned up San Francisco when somebody of equal barbarity and degeneracy came to that city.  The Chinese laughed at him.  Not even the horde of mass murderers called the CCP is decadent enough to allow people to defecate on their streets.  

That's not at all true, actually. Having lived in China myself twenty years ago, I learned that it was ordinary and normal for a class of people -- toddlers -- to be encouraged to defecate on their streets. It is usual to clothe them not in diapers but in open-crotch pants, and to have them simply squat down in public and defecate whenever they feel the urge.  The parents therefore do not have to go through the unpleasant labor of changing diapers, merely in exchange for... well, everyone else putting up with it being done this way.

Indeed the whole business is handled rather differently, and much less pleasantly, in China. Public toilets are often a single reeking trench that is washed out only a few times a day. If you must have a civilization -- Lewis' piece is constructed against barbarism -- here is one of the most ancient and renowned of them, and it is certainly no better than San Francisco is getting to be. Barbarians would have the decency not to use city streets, through the simple measure of not using cities. 

1 comment:

  1. Gringo11:10 PM

    Dogs in the US stop and drop wherever they want. But if dogs are walking with their human owners and defecate on the street, their human owners scoop up the poop.


    Could Chinese parents not do the same?

    Decades ago I had a Chinese roommate, one of the first in the wave of Chinese students to attend US universities. He had been a Red Guard as a teenager, so had direct experience of the coercive power of the state.

    He said that if someone on the street in China had fallen down, no one would try to help him up. Apparently that civic duty did not extend beyond what the state forced you to do. Thus the indifference to what your infant left on the street.

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