I agree with you that this needs to not become any kind of a racial thing against Chinese people. But I'm going to stick with the facts, especially when someone is trying to paint a counter-factual lie of a narrative.
Please don't propagate this term, I understand your feelings but this term was absolutely intended to divide and using it can cause harm to Asian Americans.
Is that confirmed, or just hypothesized?
> and yet I don't see folks going around calling it the bat flu.
It's not a flu. But I wouldn't have a problem with people calling it the bat plague or whatever.
> but calling it the "wuhan flu" and "chinese flu" appears to have begun by a concerted effort to deflect attention from the administration's mishandling.
Given the attributed source of the first uses (of which I am aware) of the term "chinese flu", that seems almost certainly true.
> but this term was absolutely intended to divide
No, it was intended to evade. That's different. You said it yourself: "deflect".
Why is placing the place of origin on China (the nation), and the blame on the Chinese government, confused with placing the blame on a race?
(Yes, there are bigots and jerks who are looking for an excuse to go get racist on someone. There are some. I'm not sure that we should change our language just to avoid giving them an excuse, though, in the same way that we didn't go to these extremes for H1N1. There may be some damage to some actual people - and let's be clear, people who don't deserve it - but free speech is also a value that I uphold. I don't think we should let bigots and jerks control which words we're allowed to use.
And I've seen you elsewhere cite the Nazis and their statements about the Jews. Well, by that point, it will be time for measures equivalent to what we're doing for CoronaVirus, because the damage will be severe.)
It already is. My (conservative, right-voting) non-Chinese Asian parents are slightly nervous about being in public in our town, and my dad's car's mirror was smashed a couple nights ago.
> But I'm going to stick with the facts, especially when someone is trying to paint a counter-factual lie of a narrative.
COVID-19 is its scientific name: Coronavirus Disease 2019.
If you say covid-19, you can still disagree that it can be a dogwhistle, you can just say it that way because you want to stick with the scientific facts.
> And I think there is some value in factually pointing that out, and not letting the government of China create some it-was-some-US-soldiers fairy tale.
I agree that there's value in this. Letting Chinese propaganda and digital interests (continue to) run rampant is, from my layman perspective, a mistake. See TikTok and Discord for examples.
I also think it can be done in a way that doesn't catch families like mine in the crossfire: e.g. "that article is wrong, covid-19 actually started in China."
And over again.
Imagine if you're about to go skydiving and I'm responsible for packing your chute. As I pack, you notice a cord looks badly frayed. I tell you, "The cord is totally not frayed! They all look like that." Then I tell you, "Don't worry, we'll replace it before you go out." Then you find out we didn't actually replace it, and you look up on the internet that it can easily kill you. Then I say, "I knew it was a problem all along but we have a plan in place to handle that."
Would all of that make you feel less or more afraid of your skydiving experience?