[goldstategop]

You're right its not affecting politically protected groups right now. Still its not too much to hope that the medical advice will be take seriously by every one. One thinks of how people ignored AIDS til it spread beyond control and no one wanted to offend gays as documented in Randy Shilts' book And The Band Played On. The last thing we need is professional medical judgment again being compromised by political considerations.

[Wilhelm Tell]

Hong Kong is full of hardworking Chinese people. If HK gets shut down by the disease, most likely the leftists will gloat that an important center of commerce was closed. Hong Kong represents a mixture of some of the best things in Asian and Western culture. AIDS was the perfect politically-correct disease ironically because it made victims of people doing what the left sanctions (the gay lifestyle and promiscuity in general, and the drug culture--some of the most self-destructive elements in our society). It will be hard to make a "victim class" out of people who share the trait of happening to breathe air. Maybe the left will argue that SARS is a good thing because of overpopulation--the left seems to welcome disasters as long as they affect "those people" on the other side of the globe. The flu pandemic of 1918 claimed millions of lives. Today people are much more mobile. We don't even know how long someone can be infected with SARS before symptoms appear. It will be interesting to see what political fallout will happen if this disease is man-made. It reminds me of a line in the movie "The Great Dictator," "I have just discovered the most wonderful weapon--it will kill EVERYBODY!"