Neither do I. However, unregistered foreign agents should be strictly forbidden. They're just a more boring version of spies, which all reasonable agree should be illegal.

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If you aren't personally taking money from foreign agents to run influence campaigns, this won't affect your ability to say crazy stuff even a little.

Not necessarily. If these are authentic beliefs based on correct information, then sure, even bad opinions are part of Western democracy. OTOH, if these are based on foreign disinformation, governments need to do a better job shutting that down. And the organizers themselves should have a counter-intelligence investigation done on them, because some of them are literally paid by the Russian government.

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A US based example is Wyatt Reed, who is funded by the Russian government's Sputnik news, and "coincidentally" spoke against support for Ukraine at an "anti-war" rally. People have a right to express their opinions, but they don't have a right to engage in psychological warfare on behalf of foreign powers.

If China was on the dark side of the moon and had design their policy without communication with other humans, this would be a defense, but it is not.

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China knows that almost all other nations have stopped lock-downs and quarantines a long time ago for three reasons:

a. they are incredibly disruptive to human quality of life

b. COVID has an absurdly high R0 and is very difficult to control from spreading

c. The mRNA vaccines are exceedingly effective at preventing severe disease

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China is also still doing weird things like practicing surface disinfection which has been shown to be more or less worthless as COVID does not reliably transmit through surfaces, but through airborne droplets.

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Their policy is arguably bad even in a vacuum, but obviously absurd when given what everyone else is doing. It's an open question if we could have stopped COVID from becoming endemic if we had rigorously enforced quarantine during the first few months, but that's been a complete impossibility for a long time now. I was in favor of very strict quarantine at the beginning, but policy needs to change with the times.

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A vaccination first strategy is the best path forward, along with general infectious disease control steps like mandatory paid sick days for all workers, requiring health care providers to stay home when sick, etc.

Because both of those are the wrong answer. The solution was always vaccination, but they've made extensive mistakes over the long term with that. Zero COVID was always deranged, but people shouldn't need to risk being infected with diseases by health care workers who are known to be sick.

The thing that is startling to many is the sheer hypocrisy of this after China has been using torture-like lockdowns to fight COVID on one hand, and then cavalierly infecting people by having contagious health care workers spread the infection on the other. The US has been fairly consistent in the last year with a "we have a vaccine that works very well, so please get it," policy, by comparison.

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Only a month ago ten people died in a fire, exacerbated due to COVID restrictions, and Chinese officials commented, “Some residents’ ability to rescue themselves was too weak … and they failed to escape.”

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China is an extreme authoritarian state that has mishandled COVID extensively. They don't need your defense.

>Who gives a damn about the rule of law, amirite?

No morally decent person cares about this all that much. If you do, you support Iran executing teen girls for protesting for human rights.

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The better question is whether copyright lines up well with economic incentives and ethics, and that's a long discussion. The TLDR is it does more good than harm at present, but there is a lot of harm in the process and it might not always be the best way of organizing art.