Bats and racism

A few points about China, coronavirus, and racism:

*   does Sinclair Davidson not mind at all that his blog for old fools is crammed with comments using "chinks" for Chinese since the outbreak of the coronavirus.   He certainly doesn't care enough to insert his own objection into threads or posts - not that I can see.  Update:   doesn't he teach at a tertiary institution that has lots of high fee paying Chinese students?    Wouldn't RMIT find this lack of control over his own blog concerning (remembering that commenters are forever complaining that certain words are on a "ban" filter that stops their whole comment ever being published.)  In other words, he could stop the casual and repeated use of a word almost universally regarded as offensive/racist if he wanted, but he doesn't.  Why?  

*  I had missed this about the "bat video":

As news of the Wuhan virus spread online, one video became emblematic of its claimed origin: It showed a young Chinese woman, supposedly in Wuhan, biting into a virtually whole bat as she held the creature up with chopsticks. Media outlets from the Daily Mail to RT promoted the video, as did a number of prominent extremist bloggers such as Paul Joseph Watson. Thousands of Twitter users blamed supposedly “dirty” Chinese eating habits—in particular the consumption of wildlife—for the outbreak, said to have begun at a so-called wet market that sold animals in Wuhan, China.

There was just one problem. The video wasn’t set in Wuhan at all, where bat isn’t a delicacy. It wasn’t even from China. Instead it showed Wang Mengyun, the host of an online travel show, eating a dish in Palau, a Pacific island nation. Sampling the bat was simply an addition to the well-trodden cannon of adventurism and enthusiasm for unusual foods that numerous American chefs and travel hosts have shown in the past.

That's from a Foreign Policy opinion piece, that needs a subscription to read the rest of the article, which goes on to talk about how the idea of Chinese being dirty disease carriers has a long racist history.  Unfortunately, though I cannot read the whole article.

*  I have made comments over the last couple of years about how I wish that the Chinese (and other nearby Asian cultures) could get over the traditional medicine ideas that eating certain animals carries certain specific health benefits, usually (I think) based on the perceived spirit characteristic of the animal.   The harm I referred to, though, is to the endangered wild animals caught up in this quasi magical belief system.  I don't really care if people eat something wild that is not endangered (insects or rats, for example), although I guess I have a general bias towards the idea that eating farmed animals generally is a safer thing to do from a "risk of catching exotic disease" point of view.  (Even then, a lot depends on the hygiene in the farms too, I guess.)

In any event, I don't see an objection to the eating of endangered animals for a fanciful health benefit is a racist thing:  just in case anyone was going to throw that at me.