Schroedinger's buns
So, I'm not a professional China-watcher or anything, but I can't help kind of observing it incidentally in the course of monitoring the things I'm paid to watch. It's, y'know, sort of big.
And this is driving me crazy:
First, there was the story about pork buns filled with cardboard.
And I kind of chuckled, and shook my head ruefully, and said "Oh, that China," and refined my theories, which I will someday share with you, dear readers, about how the entire world save Europe is going to hell, and then I got up to get more popcorn, came back, and gently lifted a fold of China out of the way so that I could view the Solomon Islands, and, y'know, munched my popcorn and watched the Solomon Islands, which I am paid to do.
But then there were variations on this story, that the news crew, unable to find unhygienic street food to alarm the audience with, invented the whole tale.
And I sighed, and said "Geez -- those media," and consulted my many maps and realized I'd been watching Tuvalu when I thought I was watching Vanuatu and quickly checked to make sure I hadn't missed anything in Vanuatu -- I hadn't -- and then got up to get more popcorn.
And came back, and thought: "Wait a minute -- couldn't find unhygienic street food?"
It's the perfect face/vase situation. On the one hand, I can genuinely imagine cardboard-filled pork buns, no problem. On the other, it's a little too neat of a story not to be fake. But, going back to the first hand, the "shame-faced confession" that street food was simply too clean to support the malicious intent of creating a scandalous story...well, that doesn't ring true, either.
And yet, one of these must be true. The cardboard buns either did exist, or they didn't.
I can't help assigning exactly fifty percent probability to either fake buns or fake news, and I see no hope of additional incorruptible information coming forward to help me break the stalemate, and that's what's making me nuts.
Perhaps I'll just have to console myself with this option, suggested by some in China: that the government may have set the reporter up in the first place to bring him down as an example of why the public should not trust media reports on food safety.
And this is driving me crazy:
First, there was the story about pork buns filled with cardboard.
And I kind of chuckled, and shook my head ruefully, and said "Oh, that China," and refined my theories, which I will someday share with you, dear readers, about how the entire world save Europe is going to hell, and then I got up to get more popcorn, came back, and gently lifted a fold of China out of the way so that I could view the Solomon Islands, and, y'know, munched my popcorn and watched the Solomon Islands, which I am paid to do.
But then there were variations on this story, that the news crew, unable to find unhygienic street food to alarm the audience with, invented the whole tale.
And I sighed, and said "Geez -- those media," and consulted my many maps and realized I'd been watching Tuvalu when I thought I was watching Vanuatu and quickly checked to make sure I hadn't missed anything in Vanuatu -- I hadn't -- and then got up to get more popcorn.
And came back, and thought: "Wait a minute -- couldn't find unhygienic street food?"
It's the perfect face/vase situation. On the one hand, I can genuinely imagine cardboard-filled pork buns, no problem. On the other, it's a little too neat of a story not to be fake. But, going back to the first hand, the "shame-faced confession" that street food was simply too clean to support the malicious intent of creating a scandalous story...well, that doesn't ring true, either.
And yet, one of these must be true. The cardboard buns either did exist, or they didn't.
I can't help assigning exactly fifty percent probability to either fake buns or fake news, and I see no hope of additional incorruptible information coming forward to help me break the stalemate, and that's what's making me nuts.
Perhaps I'll just have to console myself with this option, suggested by some in China: that the government may have set the reporter up in the first place to bring him down as an example of why the public should not trust media reports on food safety.
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