Rate Rosie Spinks

[OldRooster]

Haven't seen her posted yet. Rosie Spinks is a London-based journalist who reports on the travel and tourism industry. She is best know for writing a Feb 5th opinion article for the New York Times calling the US travel ban to China racist.

Opinion | Who Says It’s Not Safe to Travel to China? (Published 2020)

The coronavirus travel ban is unjust and doesn’t work anyway.

www.nytimes.com

The coronavirus outbreak seems defined by two opposing forces: the astonishing efficiency with which the travel industry connects the world and a political moment dominated by xenophobic rhetoric and the building of walls.

Sadly, one doesn’t have to look far for evidence of these top-down decisions morphing into outright racism within the general population, a trend that has a long history in the narrative of outbreaks such as this one.

Coronavirus shares something in common with other kinds of civil disruption, natural disasters or emergencies that affect localized travel industries: Its destructive power lies not in the actual risk but in the perception of that risk. Numerous experts have said that the majority of people who contract coronavirus will experience it as a respiratory infection they will fully recover from. But the extreme reactions — the canceling of flights, closing of borders and level-four travel warnings — seem more appropriate for something much worse.

Therein lies a familiar unfairness. When it comes to travel, the perception of risk is rarely meted out objectively. Consider the level-two travel warning imposed by the State Department last month in the wake of the continuing Australian wildfires. It advised travelers to consider postponing their trips because of extremely poor air quality and the threat of evacuation in the monthslong fires. Just a few days later, it was reduced to level one, reportedly in response to the direct appeal of Prime Minister Scott Morrison to the Trump administration. Similarly, in the 2017-18 flu season, when the United States had a particularly bad outbreak, the respiratory virus resulted in an estimated 61,000 deaths and 45 million symptomatic cases — but no travel warnings.

With the rhetoric surrounding coronavirus, however, it appears the astonishing growth of the Chinese travel market in the past 15 years did little to rid the industry of the impulse to treat Chinese travelers as “others” in the face of doubt and uncertainty. Canceling flights, cruises and locking down borders when it’s not advised by international agencies will be not only an act of economic self-harm but also a wasted opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the past.

 

[Deleted member 2621]

Ugh...

 

[OldRooster]

 

[john2]

The average woman looks like this (and a little bit more uglier than this) where I live IRL.

Nothing to puke about.

 

[OldRooster]

Here she is in 2016 giving a xTEDtalk. Age 26. Lol at the state of TED talks. it is something about how being a woman writer is ground breaking and how she is discriminated against. Apparently she is oblivious to the fact that like 70% of writers/journalists are women.