Corona’s sales were dented slightly after Mexico shut down breweries at the height of the pandemic, but not because of demand. In October, the company said that a jump in grocery and liquor store sales of Corona beer and other branded products had more than covered the 50% drop in restaurant sales.

Very suspicious how rich “white” countries are getting the vaccine first, considering the elites usually go out of their way to virtual signal concern for disadvantaged third world types, especially on health issues.

That really just goes to back up claims that the “vaccine” is a kill shot aimed at squarely at whitey.

I think this whole “cope” way of arguing is emotive, defensive, and low IQ.

Its basically just declaring that anyone who disagrees with you is “coping”. If based on my personal knowledge of chaotic Vietnam I doubt its numbers, I’m “coping”, etc, etc, so on and so forth. If China is known to be corrupt, chaotic, and obsessed with face, so one doesn’t trust them, one is “coping”, etc, etc, so on and so forth.

Its a posturing, signaling way of arguing thats without substance. Its meant to shut down challenges with mockery and posing as superior.

Ifs a disturbing new anti-intellectual trend that is growing together with an authoritarian strand in the West.

Very suspicious how rich “white� countries are getting the vaccine first,

Such as Israel? Those cunning Jews aimed the kill shot at themselves too? 😉

What is China’s excess mortality? Shouldn’t we look at this first before celebrating their great success in combatting Corona? Do they even publish this statistic?

You’d think that people would be asking this question but so far I haven’t seen anyone even mention it.

There is a widespread misconception amongst “COVID dissidents� that Corona only cuts off a year or just a few months from life expectancy, based on the average age of death. But life expectancy does not go down by one year with every year you age – the typical 80 year old Italian, for instance, has a remaining life expectancy of 10 years, not 1 year. Statistically, this implies not infrequent cases where two or three decades of potential life are lost. As for non-lethal, but QoL-impairing outcomes, there are many reports of lingering tiredness, physical underperformance, and distortions of sense of smell (“parosmia�) even amongst very young people. Long term effects on health and robustness remain unknown. This confirms my earliest judgments from January that while Corona is from the worst disease to get, it’s still something you would very much want to avoid.

This assumes that a healthy 80 year old is as likely to die of Covid on infection as an unhealthy one. Obviously that is not true. A diagnosis of a number of health issues by competent doctors is clearly a strong indicator of low survival rates.
More – The Grim Reaper is almost certainly a better guesser of health than the best of our doctors. He will identify people whose time is near up with great accuracy. At any age failure to survive covid implies a very great probability of a short life-expectancy without covid.
This will no doubt be researched in due course and I predict “survivors” will have extended life-expectancy.
(so 2.5 average years of LE is wrong – 2-6 months I suspect).

On non-deaths – I’m still waiting for any stats on who gets long covid. This seems to be a secret (and thus generates suspicion). My guess is that there is a similar relation to existing health issues and already short LE for the individual.

Totally agree that the threat is the Economic reaction, not the virus. Even your 2.5 years of LE is pretty small. That is the equivalent gain of 10 years of progress in healthcare (EU). The effects of say failure to identify cancer early will be a chunk of that. Add in all the other health stuff, murder, suicide, poorer lifestyles in the K recovery, and that is the genuine issue for today.

Another interesting feature of today’s thought climate, is that priorities get repackaged as “ability”.

One can only wonder whether the incompetence of US policymakers will continue to expand in the coming new year. Enough vaccines were created to meet the prediction of 20m vaccinated by years end. With only two days to go, only 2m have been vaccinated – what’s up with that?

Nice post Mr. Karlin – you’ve been my main man on this topic and your predictions seem to have been fully vindicated.

If anything, lockdowns have a pronounced mortality-reducing effect (reductions in traffic accidents are one obvious factor)

US traffic fatalities in Q2 2020 (i.e. the height of the lockdowns) were only 2% down from Q2 2019. In absolute numbers, this amounts to 302 people whose life has been saved by lockdowns.

On the other hand, we know that US mortality rates had been going up every year after 2009 (except 2019.) This has been extensively discussed here on unz.com; the extra deaths were determined to be deaths of despair. Well, the factors that caused this despair applied in spades in 2020.

Did you address the theory of an accidental (not deliberate) virus release from a lab or did I miss it?

Six months ago I thought that the probability of that was 10% or less. I gradually raised my estimates and now I think it’s closer to 50%.

Countries like Germany, France and Great Britain also have a high degree of social solidarity, demonstrated in the world wars, yet there mask wearing is less than in Japan. Why is this?

UK: Only 50 Healthy People Aged Under 40 Have Died with Coronavirus Since Start of Pandemic

A better strategy would have been to isolate vulnerable demographics (i.e. elderly people and/or those with underlying conditions) and allow the rest of us to go about and catch the virus, as one would any seasonal flu. Young and healthy people had virtually no risk of dying from this, if such a strategy had been pursued, the older workers could have been given much more generous amounts of money from the government as a form of back pay, as there would be way less claimants.

While hindsight is 20/20 (hah) I think it’s worth pointing out just how bad the Western (particularly West European) coronavirus response policies have been — not just in terms of easily quantifiable factors like deaths and GDP decline, but in the more vague and vaporous social effects and likely future economic repercussions.

Take for instance the effect on young people and their education, who have been unable to attend college and/or school (depending on country). I can tell you all from firsthand experience that online learning is an absolute joke. It’s bad enough for college, and utterly useless for schools. I’d imagine either we will see a huge increase in fails and dropouts, or standards will be forced to drop dramatically this year. This will further damage their future job prospects, which will already be difficult enough.

You also have massive rises in reported instances of depression due to lack of socialisation among teens. Expect mental health problems, substance abuse, etc. all to rise notably. Younger children who require regular socialisation for their mental development will likely see long-term problems due to being isolated from their peers for such a lengthy period — even in countries that didn’t shut schools, playdates, afterschool hobbies, etc. all practically ceased to exist.

Between the lockdowns themselves and the social stress of them, countless young relationships have ended. The entire early/mid-20s demographic is out of work too, and many will have moved back to their families. The effects of this year and the slow emergence from recession will likely delay family formation and lower fertility rates even further.

Of course it’s not just the youth that is affected, but ordinary people of all ages. How many marriages will break up due to the stresses of this year? How many children will have their families destroyed, or worse, never be produced at all? How many lost jobs, bills unpaid, evictions, etc? We have yet to see the full force of this as most governments are either blocking evictions or heavily subsiding lost income, but for how long? Even things like people being unable to perform their hobbies that keep them sane, like going to the gym, will have a knock-on effect that we can’t yet appreciate.

The extended familial and community ties which are so essential for a healthy and happy life, not to mention for things like first houses and having kids, have been further undone in many Western nations this year. We move more quickly now along the road to total social atomisation, a world of many miserable individuals unconnected to their fellows.

And what the raw GDP numbers do not reflect is perhaps the most important issue of all, that this year has seen the greatest transfer of wealth from the masses to the elite, perhaps in all of modern history? Maybe someone can educate me on that question. But the fact remains than an untold number of small businesses have closed, never to reopen. Jobs have been lost that will likely never return. But of course services still need to be provided, and not only have the largest of businesses weathered the storm, many have performed better than ever. If your local clothes shop has closed after being shut by rolling lockdowns for months on end, the average person will simply turn to Amazon. So while the raw numbers may not look ‘that bad’ if your GDP decline is only 5-10%, the reality beneath those numbers is that the economy has seen a major restructuring towards a much worse and more destructive model.

No doubt there are a thousand other factors I have missed — please post them in the replies — but I think this goes to show that the quality of a country’s response to corona goes much deeper than is apparent.

My conclusion is that once our lack of state capacity, social cohesion, and inability to control the pandemic became clear back in Spring, the only reasonable thing to do would have been to march unflinchingly into the grapeshot with those brave Swedes. In a loose formation, of course, with all the reasonable precautions and preventative measures that entails.

Demonstrated 80 years ago. No longer, I’m afraid. And likely there is a HBD answer, or at least a cultural one, for the European distaste for masks.

I’m not conspiracy-minded on this issue, but there are at least two possibilities, which appeal to the imagination, in a science-fiction type of way:

1.) everyone gets a vaccine: some groups receive the sterilization shot, others receive saline solution to disarm people’s fears.
2.) all this talk about racism and disparate impact has been a highly elaborate plan, instituted over decades, with trillions of dollars in outlays, just to prioritize the vaccine for blacks (sterilization), and give them it first.

Though, even I would be surprised if blacks got the vaccine first. For one thing, I think they would be afraid to take it. Imagine, if Africa and blacks were the priority? How afraid would they be to take it, then?

Great post! You have been one of the most knowledgeable people out there on this topic and we are fortunate to be able to interact with you on it.

Do you have any predictions on when the borders will be opening up, particularly between the USA and EU and between the USA and Russia? There may be economic pressure to do so for the summer tourist season. Do you expect there to be be special vaccine passports?

I can’t imagine the societies and culture have changed all that much. In your opinion, what has really changed in the last 80 years in Western Europe that has made there less social solidarity?

Almost as if there has been a drastic change in the Governments, societies and populations of Germany, France and Great Britain since 1945

Come on

The catastrophic conflicts, collapses of empires and mass migrations caused by the former 2 and the recent mass influx of Africans and Middle Easterns, for example
There’s also the 1960s cultural revolutions, mass uprooting of the countryside, false sense of security caused by last 2 decades of relative peace and prosperity, etc.

The reasons are too many to list, honestly

politely but firmly sequestering a few tens of thousands of people for a couple of weeks

Romania did that in spring but it didn’t matter in the autumn wave. Running a longish term quarantine within the EU is impossible due to a mobile population endowed with weird things like human rights protected by laws.
The fines and quarantines decreed in spring were deemed unconstitutional and were stricken down.
With Romania having an election in autumn the biggest parties were not eager to annoy the voters with more ineffective lockdown theater like quarantining Bucharest. Democracy works!
The anti mask nationalists won 9% of parliament seats which is amazing for a party that is 1 year old.
Excess deaths are obvious if the comparison period is a year but they probably will smooth out if you look at 5 years periods because most of those who died of C19 would have died in the next few years anyway.
This also means that the economic harm was inflicted by lockdowns and fear. C19 deaths hit far more welfare and pension recipients rather than productive demographics.
With hug-a-chinese initial rhetoric, giant BLM rallies, anti mask sentiment in early days and Cuomo’s murderous incompetence the american left didn’t cover itself in glory, but owning the media machine is a big advantage because it allows them to rewrite history and blame the Republicans for their own mistakes. That means that rightoids are wrong by definition.

Britain has always been a country of immigrants. As the poem by Benjamin Zephaniah goes,

The British (serves 60 million)

Take some Picts, Celts and Silures
And let them settle,
Then overrun them with Roman conquerors.
Remove the Romans after approximately 400 years
Add lots of Norman French to some
Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Vikings, then stir vigorously.

Mix some hot Chileans, cool Jamaicans, Dominicans,
Trinidadians and Bajans with some Ethiopians, Chinese,
Vietnamese and Sudanese.
Then take a blend of Somalians, Sri Lankans, Nigerians
And Pakistanis,
Combine with some Guyanese

And turn up the heat.

Britain has always been a country of immigrants. There is no such thing as a pure Brit or a native Brit. Brits are the original mongrel race, and it has never affected social cohesion in the past.

Among the pundits who “got it right�, Curtis Yarvin with his piece written at the end of January for American Mind also looks quite prescient:

“ At the moment, what Western scientists are saying about the virus may be slightly understated but is generally true. What Western scientists are saying about what Western governments should do about the virus (by Chinese standards, nothing) is strange and unsound. The Chinese regime is right to ignore them.

Pervasive error means politics corrupts everything it can. Politics cannot corrupt virology. It can corrupt public policy. Its virology is science. Its public policy is…weird.

For this virus, there is no way our experts could rethink that public policy in time. Either we get lucky, or the virus is replicating in America within a few weeks.�

When doing analysis, the most common fallacy is to overcomplicate matters.

Human stupidity is usually the most accurate answer to most puzzles. In the case of Corona, I take any grand claims about permanent damage to state capacity with a pinch of salt.

East Asia had a dry-run with SARS. This was something many East Asian themselves were writing about in the early days of the pandemic, contrasting the Western/Eastern responses. And then they had MERS.

The West hasn’t had a significant pandemic scare for a very long time, so collective memory atrophied. It isn’t really much more complicated than that. The real test is what happens in the next pandemic, because then everyone will be far wiser from the getgo. If we see a repeat/re-run of what we saw thus far, then we can make more long-lasting conclusions.

It’s also worth thinking about Japan, which didn’t do what Korea or Vietnam did, yet seemed to escape better than most anyway. So it’s not clear it a question of policies. Many people wrote about Japan’s culture of cleanliness and orderliness as contributing.

The big debates about lockdowns sort of miss the point. The big failures were in testing and tracing. Sweden’s failure in testing is still something that puzzles me. The only European country that seemed to get the message was Slovakia, which committed to a mass testing strategy (for EU standards) by selecting 1% of the population each and every day. But they did this way too late, already far into the 2nd autumn wave.

In reality, as Paul Romer persuasively argued, that number should have been at least an order of a magnitude higher than that. The cost of a mass-testing regime would be easily saved by being able to pick up cases far earlier and being able to track them easier. The less said about the haphazard tracing infrastructure the better.

As for Sweden’s excess death, looking at the most vulnerable, there were an early spike but the secondary wave has been less intense.

Looking at November, when the 2nd wave was in full swing, there’s not much evidence that there has been a big hit.

The 1918 Spanish flu by contrast was truly catastrophic. This will be a blip by comparison.

If we take the simplistic test of excess deaths + GDP loss, Sweden will have come out better than most. Our debt/GDP will have increased by very marginal amounts and still land at a very low 41% of GDP.

So if there are any significant mutations ahead of us, far more serious than the current one shapes up to be, we are more than ready.

I think Swedish Family mentioned it in another thread, 10K deaths for Sweden isn’t really much, especially given that deaths in other causes have been below-average. That still doesn’t excuse the cataclysmic failure on testing & tracing, though.

72% of Britons support Boris Johnson’s recent decision to return to a lockdown.

I don’t doubt this for a second, the figure, if anything, is probably higher but so what? A similar percentage probably believe that Crimea is Ukraine; you can’t have your cake and eat it. In the UK, as part of the emergency measures, ofcom has effectively prohibited the broadcast media from any dissent with respect to lockdowns, a mirror image to the situation in Russia where the broadcast media had almost certainly been “asked nicely” not to stir up panic regardless of what Putin has said. This is why most Russians, yourself and others notwithstanding, are remarkably relaxed about this and most western office plankton have gone Howard Hughes. Obviously containment would’ve been by far the best outcome, but once that fails you’re in trade-off land and European governments don’t seem to care about anyone besides wealthy pensioners*, so ruining the lives of kids, teens and young adults for months on end and wrecking their prospects to protect the former was always going to happen. The latter are too servile to seriously object anyway even when they were aggressively blamed for the second wave starting in September when anyone with half a brain could see it was seasonality.

*The UK’s boomer gibs have a “triple lock”, this means that out of the three metrics that the government can use to increase them, the one that increases them the most is chosen. Due to the sheer number of, generally low paid, service workers losing their jobs, the average employee’s pay in the uk has gone up, so that has caused considerable increases in state pension payments (the dole for over 65s).

Another Japanese (and Korean) secret: not testing anyone.

No testing -> no cases -> no deaths from Covid. Easy-peasy!

And what the raw GDP numbers do not reflect is perhaps the most important issue of all, that this year has seen the greatest transfer of wealth from the masses to the elite, perhaps in all of modern history? Maybe someone can educate me on that question.

According to USA Today, the net worth of the 614 billionaires in America has increased by 931 billion dollars since March of this year. Jeff Bezos, for example, is now 90 billion dollars richer.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/12/01/american-billionaires-that-got-richer-during-covid/43205617/

It’s discouraging (though I must admit to the facts) to see the democratic countries failing in their competency to self-govern while authoritarian and even totalitarian governments in East Asia succeed in rational governance.
This question is larger than just the Corona crisis. Can democracy work (better)? Are we doomed to needing authoritarian government to keep the trains running on time?

Most major European nations are “mongrel” nations, I don’t know why it’s Britain specifically that gets lumbered with that label.

The native Germans and French are probably more genetically diverse than the native British, bordering so many different countries with varying genetic types.

Thulean Friend has a good point that the Asian countries had recent experiences with epidemics and were more ready for this one. The real comparison will be if God forbid another one comes in a few years.

That having been said, democratic New Zealand handled this crisis brilliantly.

LOL, I did a terrible initial job of predicting corona’s impact -I initially thought the rich world would almost entirely be spared due to wise policy, and incorrectly overemphasized testing as a sufficient predictor of a good response. I always understood the capacity of the virus to spread and basically correctly estimated the IFR, but I thought Western countries would basically all deal with it as well as South Korea and it would become a disease of the poorer nations. At least I updated reasonably quickly, calling the New York pandemic and 500K American deaths (more than 10K just in March) the day before the first recorded New York case. However, given the evidence of corona spreading less in hotter climates, I went to underestimating its spread in the hotter climates at that time (I ultimately ended up being basically right on Indonesia). My worst prediction in February was that coronavirus would have a mild economic impact, as countries would not be so foolish as to implement lockdowns (again, I was going off South Korea implementing no lockdowns, and no other countries implementing mass lockdowns in response to a respiratory virus ever before in history -I thought lockdowns were something quite unique to Chinese Communism).

I was also initially quite opposed to travel restrictions and was quite disgusted by Moldbug’s Missionary Virus piece.

Also, South Korea did not institute localized lockdowns, which is how its pandemic is currently at ~1000 cases per day-but Thailand and China are instituting local lockdowns right now. I expect Thailand and China do better at pandemic containment than South Korea, but, ultimately, the vaccines will save them all.

But as we see from the above table, Taiwan, Australia, Iceland, and South Korea – all countries that notable managed to contain their outbreaks at a low or negligible level – actually saw an overall reduction in mortality.

Taiwan and South Korea never had lockdowns, though New Zealand had a harsh lockdown and excess mortality was negative relative to a year ago.

despite the irony of Europeans having brought modern epidemiology into China in the first place

BTW, here’s the Report of the International plague conference held at Mukden, April, 1911. Clearly a much better pandemic response in 1911 Shenyang than almost anything in Europe in 2020.

https://archive.org/details/reportofinternatinte/page/249/mode/1up

Good post by AK, but there are two nitpicks of mine: While it is true that corona could have mutated in a way that made vaccine development harder, the quick development of multiple vaccines should be taken as evidence that vaccines for various diseases could be created if society were serious about it. Corona got a lot more attention than the average infectious disease, but in general society underinvests in vaccine development. The same is true of antibiotics or microbiology more generally. Unfortunately, I don’t see too many people learning this lesson(just like with quarantines). This doesn’t really contradict AK’s post, but it is a point which I think should be raised in AK’s summary.

I think AK also should have spent more time bashing health authorities. He mentioned governments, media, academia, and pundits, but almost nothing on the health establishment. It’s worth pointing out how dumb their advice was. AK mentioned early bad advice on masks, but the early advice on hand washing was particularly dumb. There was never good evidence that COVID was spread primarily through surface contact, much less that hand washing did jack all, but nevertheless the brilliant health authorities were advising people they mainly just needed to wash their hands. Anyone with half a brain can look at the many current and historical examples of highly contagious infectious diseases spread by coughing, sneezing, or to a lesser extent kissing, and figure out that surface contact is unlikely to be the cause behind such a widely contagious disease. But that’s way too much for the people who work at the CDC or WHO.

Slow migrations of populations originating from this circle are not the same as mass airlifts of illiterate Bantus into your country in the 21st Century

The British Isles crown dependencies did similarly, (maybe not jersey) and have the benefit of being run by vestigial aristocrats and financiers rather than an irritating harpie.

What do people think about the possibility that the Wuhan leak was an inside job? Chinese dissidents – to include the divergent types like the Hong Kongnese, Taiwanese, Singaporenese, and Falun Gongnese – do not seem any more sane than their Communist counterparts. Even if safety protocols were sufficient to prevent an accidental release, would they have precluded sabotage from a malefactor who was determined to circumvent them? Given the timeline of events that saw essentially prescient reports of a novel disease in Wuhan from Western intelligence and the simultaneous activation of various CIA-associated Chinese dissident assets, is it not more likely that the Chinese were sent to do their own dirty work compared to foolhardy suggestions by Ron Unz and others that the US sowed the seeds using uniformed GIs in Wuhan under false, but utterly transparent pretenses?

The leak came from the lab, but it was done by the same Chinese who are now exploiting American foreign interests to their own ends under various guises – the Wengui “Miles” Guos and the Epoch Times and New Tang Dynasty TVs of the world. These people do not fundamentally appear to be any more sane and eugenic than their Communist Chinese counterparts, yet they are being allowed to exploit the American people to fulfill their own goals by the US government because why, exactly?

Well done, Mr. Karlin. I read a lot of people left and right and you are among the few to reliably follow the data where it leads.

They have less social solidarity than in the past, the authorities were less consistent with mask advice, they lacked experience with SARS like East Asia had, and what attempts at social solidarity there were often unproductive. For example in the U.K. they had this gay thing where you are supposed to clap for the NHS. In a pandemic situation where the authorities have completely failed, the medical establishment at all levels should have people on their ass demanding to know why they screwed up so badly. That way maybe next time they will have some incentive not to screw up so badly.

I also don’t think Europeans are as paranoid about their health as east Asians.

A really interesting and intelligent post (the cartoons were a nice guilty pleasure as well!).

“The result is some piecemeal and largely reactive adaptations of all of the above methods – lockdowns that are economically ruinous but not harsh enough or long enough to achieve full suppression, coupled with patchily enforced mask wearing, scant effort devoted to contact tracing, and travel restrictions that are introduced after the horse had already bolted. All of this accompanied by straight-out showmanship, such as breaking up beach or park outings (infections in the open air are freak occurrences), or making gloves compulsory along with masks even though infections through surface contact are also freak occurrences (a more particular idiocy that I believe might be quite specific to Russia). For bureaucrats and politicians, the appearance of appearing to be doing something is more important than whether it actually works or not.” – Nailed it!

But here’s another angle: almost certainly COVID came from the asian so-called “wet markets”. This is where our seasonal flu comes from. We could have ended flu season decades ago, with little real effort, but the global elites (asian and non-asian alike) just didn’t care enough – the seasonal flu was just a cost of business, something to put up with. Except now: oops!

More generally: there are lots of other fun diseases starting to spread: Dengue, Chagas, enterovirus D68 – and in general our elites are just ignoring them. Cost of business, and the elites and their children so rarely mix with proles or fly in commercial airplanes and public terminals. And the asian “wet markets” are still in full operation, recombining and mixing all manner of pathogens in all manner of species and trying them out on masses of people…

In our arrogance we thought we had mastered Nature, and infectious disease could be ignored as background noise. Nature had other ideas. With about ten billion people and counting, all flying back and forth, the world is a huge Petri dish. We may eventually reduce Corona to a nuisance, but the easy way or the hard way, it’s never going to be the same.

China doesn’t publish any firm demographic statistics, but it has published the results of a nationwide seroprevalence survey from April which confirms the official death statistics are roughly correct:

China CDC finally announced the results of a nationwide seroprevalence survey (the blood draw took place in Wuhan in April, so after 8 months)
antibody prevalence in Wuhan 4.43%
in Hubei excluding Wuhan 0.44%
Outside of Hubei: 2 out of 12k people https://t.co/g8gbBHMTz6

— Chenchen Zhang 🤦ðŸ�»â€�♀ï¸� (@chenchenzh) December 28, 2020

I suppose a silver lining to the Biden win will be improved relations with EU and likelier removal of border restructions/recognition of vaccine passports.

I think this whole “cope� way of arguing is emotive, defensive, and low IQ.

Its basically just declaring that anyone who disagrees with you is “coping�. If based on my personal knowledge of chaotic Vietnam I doubt its numbers, I’m “coping�, etc, etc, so on and so forth. If China is known to be corrupt, chaotic, and obsessed with face, so one doesn’t trust them, one is “coping�, etc, etc, so on and so forth.

Its a posturing, signaling way of arguing thats without substance. Its meant to shut down challenges with mockery and posing as superior.

Cope can be real, but the term is thrown around far too frivolously, yes.

…declaring that anyone who disagrees with you is “copingâ€�
…whole “copeâ€� way of arguing is emotive, defensive, and low IQ.

Unfortunately true. AK has staked his ground back in February and won’t move.

His own numbers show that for people under 50 the increase in fatalities compared to flu is a factor of 2 to 5, with those in their 20’s close to equal outcomes. That is Flu 4.0 – in other words about as deadly as 4 years of flu for non-elderly.

I can see the emotional attachment to prolonging the lives of older people – and a few other groups with similar health profiles. By all means, keep them live as long as we can. But let’s be open about it and adjust our societies accordingly: compensate the young for lost income and missed opportunities.

This common sense argument has been pushed out from allowable discussion – and AK is doing the same here with his ‘coping‘ canard. We have a capitalist world, if you take something away from me that you benefit from, you need to pay.

What AK’s argument boils down to is a tyranny by the old – their longevity is sacred, their assets pumped up, their comfort not disturbed. In the meantime, the young stare in isolation at blinking screens, forgo education, mating ritual, and an ability to make a living. The weak elderly are protected in the ‘Zoom’ jobs, watch their investments skyrocket while governments issues debt that the young will be expected to pay.

As long as this reality is avoided we are not having a real discussion. The endless belly-aching about ‘excess deaths‘ (almost all for people in their 70’s, 80’s or really ill younger ones) and complete silence about he impact on everyone else is a form of mental tyranny. It is not something that AK with his ‘coping’ routine should do.

Singapore allows Vietnamese and mainland Chinese to enter without having to quarantine. Cope.

A better strategy would have been to isolate vulnerable demographics (i.e. elderly people and/or those with underlying conditions) and allow the rest of us to go about and catch the virus, as one would any seasonal flu.

This is basically the Swedish strategy, only that we didn’t — and still don’t quite — protect the old and frail and from time to time also locked down parts of society.

The openess we did enjoy was a blessing, though.
Had I lived in London or New York, some of my fondest memories of the past year would never have been.

In the case of Corona, I take any grand claims about permanent damage to state capacity with a pinch of salt.

For what it is worth, I don’t think that any suggestion that Corona itself made any damage to state capacity was suggested. If anything, it might have been slightly supportive by exposing the weaknesses present in Western governments, rather that this is indicative of a generally reduced level of state capacity that makes it ultimately unable to respond to serious challenges as whole.

To quote Roko in Twitter:

@davidmanheim or @anderssandberg or anyone else really:

Is there actually a plan for shutting down international air travel in the event of a really serious virus? Or do the adults in the world just kind of "wing it"?

— ExiledInfoHaz (@ExiledInfoHaz) January 26, 2020

An easy mistake here is to laud certain governments as efficient and others as not; all governments are significantly inefficient by the nature of their being. However, even so relative to each other, some governments are even more ineffectual in accomplishing necessary goals and can be more so gutted by crisis.

Additionally, from a nationalist’s point of view, emphasizing the risks of disease is important not only because it is a potentially a bastion of conservatism(several 2008 studies found that conservatives are more innately tuned against disease), but it is one of the strong arguments against freely open borders.

Yet the total number of Corona dead — even accepting the massively gamed numbers — is an inconsequential blip. The damage done by the lockdowns is orders of magnitude worse, and there is no good evidence that lockdowns, masks, etc. etc. etc. did a thing to limit what deaths there were. It has also ushered in dramatic new levels of arbitrary government control that will NEVER go away now that our “leaders” have the taste of lockdown blood on their tongues. They can now order lockdowns for ANY flu season because reasons.

As I’ve said all along, if we had done absolutely nothing and not had a media and political panic, 95% percent of people wouldn’t even be aware that anything unusual was going on.

Conspiracy overload theories tend to fail. Odds of naturally occurring is highest, followed by odds of accidental release, etc. Its usually safe to bet on the stupidity of people, less so on the ability of intelligence agencies to coordinate precise measures.

I’d believe the CIA randomly releasing a virus that backfires, for example, much more so than them trying to coordinate various assets in a grand scheme. At any rate, the idea of a novel pandemic sweeping the globe is not new and arguably was due to happen by now.

several 2008 studies found that conservatives are more innately tuned against disease

Well, that proved to be completely wrong, didn’t it? In fact, the whole idea didn’t make sense with anyone with a basic understanding of conservatism, which only says anything about human threats, not natural ones. And today’s most widespread versions of conservatism don’t even have anything to say about human threats, instead grieving for the family of George Floyd and calling Dems the Real Racists for supporting increased penalties on cocaine in 1996.

Bolsonaro is ranting about how the vaccines are going to turn you into an alligator

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihang

The term owes its origin to Mughals, who compared the ferocity of the Akali with that of crocodiles.

Researchers reveal that the Covid-19 virus was in the US long before it reached China and that India was its original source.

https://www.unz.com/article/china-ten-predictions-for-2021/

>

Yea, Karlin got Corona Chan pretty much spot on. Also, boo! on the last effort post on the topic, since it means no more miss Chan pictures.

Anyway, to me, the biggest story of the year and the biggest accomplishment of miss Corona Chan was dropping 10 year Treasury rates below inflation target of 2%. We have been there before, but never as deep and as long, and this time, we are unlikely to come back up.

My own post on February 24th:

As proud member of the “smol brain/just a flu� optimist faction, i say this pandemic is nothing to worry about for people of breeding age. If anything, it will reduce long term health care costs by running through the old people.

It will be blamed for upcoming recession for sure, but that recession was long time coming anyway. On the bright side, it will give Central Banks an excuse to print money, so once stock markets drop a few 1,000 points, it will be an amazing time to buy. Negative interest rates will make Basic Income easily affordable to support global demand. Few million or 10’s of millions of deaths are a rounding error for a population gunning for 8 billion.

It will all turn out great in the long run – few people even remember 1918 flu today, we will get over this one as well.

Indeed it was an amazing time to buy for the stock market, but Basic Income was a bit frustrating – I expected more rationality from US government since it was obvious $trillions would need to printed anyway. It was good that we were able to credit $1,200 to ordinary people, but subsequent lack of action was dysfunctional and only reinforced my view that future digital dollars must be distributed via Federal Reserve system directly to the people and bypass Congress zoo.

It was fun to watch 10 year yield bottom out at 0.3-0.5% and while i did not get the negative Fed funds rate i have been clamoring for (boo! Powell for stopping at 0%), as long as 10 year real yield is negative, I’m good.

From Q3 2019 to Q3 2020, US financial system has created $7.2 trillion in free money to give out to those asking for it. (Total credit outstanding increased from $74.6 trillion to $81.8 trillion).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TCMDO
It was an impressive accomplishment for the ruling oligarchy and they have much to thank Corona Chan for. Good on the American oligarchs, I do hope they enjoy the free $trillions and buy something nice.

Regardless, debt service costs on $81.8 trillion are such that nominal rates can’t rise much past 0% ever and forever which means conventional textbook economic concepts such as “money”, “savings”, and “capital” are increasingly obsolete. Future is coming faster than I originally anticipated and for that, miss Corona Chan will have my eternal gratitude. I will almost miss her when she is gone.

I’d say that there’s some truth to it(larger amygdala hasn’t been disproven, I believe), but current weirdness of “signal against the opposite tribe mindlessly” gives us what our kind host has noted:

Even as “the libs� scurried to “clean up� the public record of their predictive failures – Vox recently proudly announced it had deleted two tweets from March about mask-wearing – this “Anti-Masks Cause� was subsequently monopolized by American rightoids, and since stupidity is contagious, by their ideological brethren across the world. It’s one thing to be wrong out of excess caution and professional groupthink, it’s quite another to seize the mantle of stupidity and proudly don it one’s head. Like making geocentrism a lynchpin of your political identity after Galileo.

And so, the rising crop of righteous geocentrists are having quite a day. It does serve a purpose, but probably not worth it.

"Groups benefit by adopting beliefs that make you unacceptable to other groups..best beliefs for signaling allegiance to a group are beliefs other groups condemn..one motivation for adopting a belief is simply that an opposing group believes the opposite" https://t.co/3vD2Gdqith pic.twitter.com/fKxrlVZEol

— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) September 4, 2020

overemphasized testing as a sufficient predictor of a good response

You do testing and contact tracing in order to quarantine potential virus carriers. If you do not quarantine them there is no point of testing and contact tracing. I am afraid that in many places they did not get it and were just going through the motions of contact tracing without effective quarantining. This like the difference between taking a reservation and holding it as Seinfeld explains it:

East asians already wear masks during regular flu season. Majority of them probably look at the anti mask people in the west as complete morons who are selfish to the extreme that have death wishes for themselves and everyone around them.

This is true. For them mask wearing isn’t something new. It’s harder to get to get an entire country to wear masks when no one has done it before.

Botching the response on purpose? I do not think that showing to China that the West can take losses as Tyler Cowen speculates makes much sense. OTOH early in the epidemic when the theory that the virus was seeded in Wuhan by DIA operatives was being formulate and toyed with and the counterargument to the theory was the magnitude of the blow back suffered by the West I considered the “botching the response on purpose” a possibility as a way of making the whole wold, at least the part that botched the response, turning against China. Make your own people suffer so they are ready to hate your enemy. However subsequently I did not see enough China blaming, It was rather anemic and subdued, so my explanation for the botching on purpose must be dismissed, though there will be plenty of opportunities to vilify China in the future.

To be fair he advocated lockdown in march, but not the forever lockdown that Western Europe and Blue America have adopted, but he really ought to have had more foursight. Authoritarian regimes can turn draconian policies on and off like a lightbulb, when democracies enact similar measures an entire bureaucratic eco system is created around them which makes them very difficult to repeal which was the primary reason I was against these from the start, once it has become endemic.

I’ve said before that I agree with you mostly on this but with some caveats. The hysteria cuts across generations and is only slightly worse for those in older age groups for whom Corona is extremely dangerous to. Far too many Zoomers and millennials already spend unhealthy amounts of time staring and screens and are already indifferent and/or scared of the physical world. A large number in that age cohort who’ve got secure office jobs are quite happy to sit at home all day, a lot of the rest are extremely supine. There’s certainly going to be a generation of seriously messed up kids coming through the pipeline though, there was even before this, and it’s going to be very bad once they start getting into decision making positions. My own opinion is that the western response has fast forwarded by about 20 years a lot of unpleasant and dystopian tends.

The populations haven’t seen such a drastic change in terms of growth nor in age structure and nor in terms of density.

The entire case for effectiveness of masks appears to be:

– Asians wear masks
– Asians are smart
– Therefore, masks work

This is not convincing, not anymore. I see masks compliance around me at nearly 100%, and yet they say that we are in the middle of the second wave. My lying eyes tell me that masks don’t work.

Masks obviously slow the spread (compare the second wave in the relatively maskless Russia), but they are extremely insufficient to stop the spread.

7,7k words? Damn, so that’s what you were doing instead of writing about the Great Bifurcation!

Now that I’ve made the mandatory joke, let’s see…

Yeah, for a demographic that insists on genetics and IQ and so on and so forth, there seem to be a lot of… dumbshit among the “right” wing too. If left vs right can even be used anymore. I avoid it.

A specific brand is a sort of melodramatic crybaby sort of seething, usually full of religious fervor. And you damn well can easily see that their g factor is insufficient for them to actually comprehend the religion they’re worshipping so much – and you know instantly they make a quote about muh satanists muh atrocities muh this muh that and then nothing. And they just cry and cry and cry. I like to drop violent “solution” hot takes there just so see the (dis)honesty of their words. But I digress. These tend to be staunch antivaxers. There’s also a current of “americanized” conservatives that are of course Qtards. Very few “cold” or “soulless” nationalists like myself (though I would claim my brand of rightoidism has an infinite more soul than their shallow rightoid equivalent of virtue signalling)

I think there’s an agreeableness component in here too – and everyone knows that despite having relatively high IQ’s – Europeans are far less agreeable than Asians.

For example, a close friend of mine from college, who is probably about as intelligent as myself or slightly less so, but has a better work ethic, is a staunch conservative, Ben Shapiro listening, almost-bible thumper. Which I guess is good enough for a modern woman. Staunch (and I mean STAUNCH antivaxxer). So it’s more than just IQ.

On the other hand might just be Dinarid/Balkan insanity/schizophrenia. Who knows.

A lot of antivax can also be blamed on the dumb politicians and the producers which all look like weak little slimey goobers. For me personally that’s one of the biggest off-putting factors. Ugly mouth breathing soft food chewing soylent drinking skinnyfat cuckbois that are on top of that all smug and insistent (in that holier-than-thou manner I described a lot of Serbian “rightoids” except in a liberal/pozzed) are probably one of the top 5 bloodlust-inducing phenomenon in the world.

If they hired some actually strong and handsome and charismatic people, not associated with globohomo to peddle the vaccines, these problems would be averted. But then again modern politics have become spiritualized and vaccines and taking corona seriously ended up being in the pozzed camp, so it’s automatically heretical to the “based” people. Sad!

In the UK people tend to comply with the mask rules to the minimum extent, in that they will put a mask on when they enter a shop, but immediately remove it upon leaving. Most will do this between different shops on the same street, when you’d think it would make more sense and be easier to just keep the mask on.

I’ve noticed that people who take mask wearing more seriously and wear one at all times in public are almost always foreigners.

…and just in time, the fourth wave of COVID is on its way:

https://www.statnews.com/2020/12/29/public-health-experts-grow-frustrated-with-pace-of-covid-19-vaccine-rollout/

And once upon a time, China had the majority of the world’s COVID cases. I expect Poland and France to be almost entirely negrified by the end of the century.

I said this in the other thread but I would like hear a counter argument to it. If the current régime is hostile, why would one want to support policies which one believes will lead to increased social stability (and thus régime legitimacy)?

Do you still believe America can be saved through participation in mainstream society (and if so, why?) or is there another reason?

Assuming for the sake of the argument that this is all true, I don’t see why “la politique du pire� shouldn’t be applied to this.

If America is redeemable then it might make sense to support policies that would lessen popular unrest, but if America in its present socio-political formation is too decayed to be reformed then it would be best to hope for the enactment of policies that will increase national revolutionary consciousness.

The USA is already at 60% “non-Hispanic� White Americans, better to have a financial crisis, hyperinflationary conflagration, a major military defeat against a peer great power, mass unemployment and new “Hoovervilles� or something similar now rather than when the internal positions are worse.

https://www.unz.com/akarlin/soviet-corona/#comment-4371947

Anatoly, what are your thoughts on the current British coronavirus strain?

One might wonder whether it would be more prudent for East Asian countries to offer vaccinations to people in the Russian Far East and perhaps Siberia as well once they will fully vaccinate their own populations. Thoughts? It would be logistically easier than shipping in a lot of vaccines from European Russia, no?

I wonder if illegal immigrants to the US–including newly arriving ones–are also going to get promptly vaccinated against the Coronavirus.

The second reason is that we haven’t made any particularly radical discoveries about Corona, or the best ways of suppressing it, which remain – then as now – centered around universal masking, centralized quarantine, mass testing, and travel restrictions.

Since September results from about a dozen studies have been published showing that Ivermectin is the most effective treatment for Covid and the most effective prophylactic against SARS-2.

The circle is far far smaller than that. As far as ‘mongrel nations’ go, Britain is one of the least mongrel, not having seen a significant shift in genetic composition for 1000 years, likely 1400 years. The last great invasion was in 600-ish, when Muhammad was still alive! AlexanderGrozny is just repeating pro-Third World migration talking points.

Ancient invaders transformed Britain, but not it’s DNA

Let’s be clear about what an mRNA vaccine physically is. It is an RNA sequence in a lipid nanoparticle. “Lipid� means “fat� and “nano� means “small.� To make the vaccine, you make the RNA, then put it in a fancy mixer with some special-ass fat. Done.

An official course of the Moderna vaccine is 200 micrograms. 60kg of a chemical we’ve known how to make for a year would have averted this whole shitshow.

For the institutions, however—Actively harming 450 people is much bigger than passively letting 250,000 die. Sorry, Grandma!

In Massachusetts, the Moderna vaccine design took all of one weekend. It was completed before China had even acknowledged that the disease could be transmitted from human to human, more than a week before the first confirmed coronavirus case in the United States.

https://graymirror.substack.com/p/2020-the-year-of-everything-fake

thoughts?

All I know is if you wanted to travel now is the time before ticket prices return to normal. Mexico, Panama and Brazil have remained open 95-100% of the time to people from Canada (cheapest was a round trip to Sao Paulo for $550 + tax). A subsidised government vacation if you will.

Yeah it’s shit you have to wear a jihad mask on a plane like a Mohammedan terrorist for the plebs to feel safe (and get tagged by IR from 80 IQ airport employees) but at least the flights aren’t packed anymore ass-to-crotch.

As for the other nonsense posted here. Two types of people in the world, those that made a fortune during the crisis and those that failed microbiology.

Of that 3% though, many are not Black African but Black Caribbean

Is shipping really a bottleneck for vaccination?

…in both incidence and sheer magnitude of idiotic rhetoric, there’s no doubt the righties have ascended head and shoulders above any other political faction, adopting patently losing and incorrect positions that there were under absolutely no obligation to adopt, and which were often outright schizophrenic and self-contradictory to boot

So why did rightoids insist on scoring own goals? One can speculate endlessly, but ultimately I think it comes down to them having something like 10 fewer IQ points than liberals on average, and 5 fewer IQ points than leftoids. Stupider people tend to make bad decisions and adopt losing positions. Stupider people tend to make bad decisions while putting themselves in a position where they can easily and not even all that unfairly be portrayed as psychopaths by people who dislike them and who also happen to control 90% of the media and tech.

The Corona-chan must be commended for exposing the stupidity and psychopathology of the rightoids. They will remain oblivious to their own deficiencies and will continue to pontificate about the IQism and the HBDism but they won’t be taken seriously as possible partners in any political project, not even as boots on the ground though still they will be exploited as a revenue source to cynical authors of VDare like Derbyshire or Sailer. Recruiting them will always lead to self-inflicted implosion just like attempts to turn dysfunctional and criminal Negros into Black Panther fighters. The only role that the rightoids can play well is that of useful idiots.

Who are the rightoids? They are not conservative Catholics or conservative Evangelicals. They are not even the often morally deficient Chamber of Commerce Republicans. How can you identify them? This comes to the ethical test. This is not about the IQ score. They are the ones who fail on the Kant’s Second Categorical Imperative. Most of them are still pre-human and some of them are already post-human. In either case they are not a part of humanity.

The big failures were in testing and tracing. Sweden’s failure in testing is still something that puzzles me.

Yes, this failure needs looking into. Björn Olsen, in an interview with Malou von Sivers, touches on the differences between the Swedish and Norwegian test-and-trace setups here (from 02:02 on):

And as he notes earlier in the interview, Sweden and Norway both had excellent virus figures going into early fall, so there is little excuse for Sweden’s poor showing (unlike in spring, when everyone was groping in the dark).

Of that 3% though, many are not Black African but Black Caribbean

And where did those Black Caribbean originate from? If anything I have found the West Indian blacks to be far worse than African blacks. This is a result of Jamaican ‘Yardie’ culture. And the London murder statistics speak for themselves.

Tokyo’s seropositivity rate of almost 50% – would the low mortality of the virus there be solid evidence that mask wearing reduces the severity of the disease?

Whence thither?

I’m not sure this is what you meant. In nonliterary English, the meaning is literally: “From where to there?�

I think you meant: “To where now?� (or “Where do we go now?�). In literary English, that would be “Whither now?�

I thought the same on reading the post, but it felt like nitpicking. For what it’s worth, “whence, whither?” works to my (Swedish) ears, but “whence, thither?” doesn’t.

Words like whence, whither, hither, and thither are relics of a time when English was a synthetic language, i.e., words expressed not only ideas but also relationships to other words.

Interestingly, куда (where or whither) is as ambiguous in Russian as in English. Swedish still maintains the distinction between the current direction (“whither” [vart]) and the point of destination (“where” [var]).

Thanks; that Boldmug piece was excellent, and made sense all the way. The 1976 flu scandal reference was the best part of the piece. The “COVID civil liberties machine” reference was also great -Vox was preparing for doing exactly this in March. Definitely one of Boldmug’s above average pieces.

Interestingly, куда (where or whither) is as ambiguous in Russian as in English. Swedish still maintains the distinction between the current direction (“whither� [vart]) and the point of destination (“where� [var]).

Come to think of it, “куда” strikes me as every bit as straightforwardly unidirectional as the Swedish “vart”.

So:

whither = куда = vart
where = где = var

Mostly agree, but two points:

US poverty rate also went down a lot due to CV stimulus. I doubt Brazil is very unique here.

China’s world reputation went down due to CV. Whatever the precise cause, it was their disease and they spread it worldwide. Don’t forget their ambassador’s threats against Italy for travel restrictions. You can also see this in all the governments dumping China’s 5G spyware hardware, and the new rift with Australia. American propaganda isn’t great, but China’s is consistently horrible.

Advocating for a lockdown without an exit is in effect a ‘forever lockdown‘. As we have seen, the goalposts move very easily.

I agree that the hysteria is a cross-generational phenomenon and that many of the designated victims (mostly the young and healthier) have been supine. It still doesn’t justify dismissing any discussion as ‘coping’ by ‘hoaxsters’, or whatever is the narrative of the day.

The situation is very clear: we have a massive health epidemic that impacts one part of the population dramatically more than the rest. That part of the population also happens to be the main asset owning generation around. It benefits them to freeze the situation, close everything and protect themselves. It doesn’t benefit the rest of the people, au contraire, most are foregoing huge opportunities, income, experiences, etc…

There is a concerted effort to muddy up this clear situation: vague age-group statistics, alluding to ‘long corona’, an outright lying. The ‘coping’ meme is simply a part of the defense by the corona beneficiaries. All I say is that we need to discuss it in its full context, winners and losers, and policies need to take that into account. So come on, geezers, are you going to pay?

Also, in a bold move, Hong Kong is now catching COVID cases through sewage (undoubtedly this technique will be transferred to the mainland, given the recent spikes there):

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3115674/hong-kong-fourth-wave-more-50-covid-19-cases

“The big failures were in testing and tracing.” “Yes, this failure needs looking into. ” – The answer is very simple. Why Sweden would develop a countermeasure that would undermine its herd immunity strategy? For the same reason they failed to protect the elderly in the first wave. Hands off laissez-faire philosophy has its inexorable consequences.

Covid exposed many bloggers in the extremely gay HBD-sphere as neurotic freaks. How many balding IT dorks were hoarding masks and hand sanitizer, confidently predicting millions of dead Americans by the end of 2020, back in February? It is to laugh.

https://www.unz.com/isteve/black-history-month-2/#comment-3693453

Yeah, man! We only got 450,000 dead Americans by the end of 2020, only ninety-seven times as many as dead Chinese! Absolutely miniscule crisis!

An informative post, Anatoly — but I wish you spent more time going into how Corona-Chan DESTROYED Virgin Trump and carried Chad Biden to victory. I never get tired drinking COPEr tears, myself. One should never be afraid to craft drinking cups from the skulls of your enemy.

Read about a third of the thread but want to comment. AK you deserve credit for being right on a lot of Corona predictions.

What I observe so far it seems both sides of an argument if there is one to be had are right. It really comes down to values. A lot we still can not tell. For example excess mortality over five years, trade offs economy VS deaths.

Values I mentioned is stuff like killing grandma. Righties were always more callous in this regard. Plus more of them are small business owners. I think a lot of the left falls on the side of lock downs for completely selfish reasons. Free money. Most of them work for government and UI benefits are very generous.

I think the worst is to come. A lot of seed crop was eaten through the pandemic. You can see this with red VS blue state divide in their respective fiscal health.

Asians definitely proved they are smart even if we take into account they had several pandemic scares.

I think states that had least GDP fall are well set for what is coming.

Funnily enough, Wuhan’s claim to culinary fame is in its breakfast foods (过早 is what it’s called locally), all of which are extremely carb-heavy and almost entirely devoid of animal proteins. You have 热干é�¢ which is noodles with sesame and chili sauce, é�¢çª�, which is a variety of donut, é±¼æ±�糊粉, which is a starchy, vaguely fish-scented noodle soup, 三鲜豆皮, which is rice wrapped with bean curd skins… You get the point. I’ve been there and there’s really nothing good to eat, meat-wise. So my favorite pet theory is that since the locals have apparently never seen a proper meat-based meal, they thought bat soup sounded delicious…

In all seriousness, the zoonotic origin is likely a byproduct of the increasingly common practice of farming exotic animals like pangolin for use of their body parts for traditional Chinese medicine. Some pangolin-farming peasant probably passed through Wuhan on the way to his backwater Hubei hometown prior to the Lunar New Year and it spread from there. BSL-4 leak is a more likely source than you’d think, I would peg it at closer to 40%. Wuhan isn’t tier 1 like Beijing-Shanghai-Guangzhou or even a leader in biotech the same way Shenzhen leads in high tech. It’s not a decent magnet for second-rate/less ambitious youth on a national level even on the same scale as a place like Chengdu in Sichuan is. Migration would mostly be from the Hubei hinterland, and only from the subset which is too lazy or dumb to compete at a Tier 1 level. I’d think human capital in Wuhan would be markedly inferior even to former Soviet countries.

People even after all these months, still seem to talk as though “mask” refers to a single type of object, rather than wide range of filters, which likely have different effectiveness. (e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28799710 )

From excess of caution, if the population was fitted, trained, and made to wear the highest level of respirator that could be afforded (or higher than appropriate i.e. N99 respirators*) when interacting with people not from their household, we could unambiguously predict that rates of infection could have been reduced below 1. This should be a mechanical question.

On the other hand,, even wearing surgical mask will likely reduce the rate of infection, ceteris paribus – and in certain circumstances, making everyone wear surgical mask would be enough to reduce the rate of infection below 1.

In any case (even if you put the whole population into N99), anything based on making the population wear more PPE, is an extremely economic policy to reduce infection rates, compared to lockdown.

–
*Of course, this was unrealistic to expect during the pandemic. But there is a planning failure, that governments hadn’t stockpiled enough respirators to distribute to the whole population for use during pandemics. But in Soviet times, there had been preparation for chemical warfare, that included stockpiling of hundreds of millions of gasmasks around the country. So governments can afford to stockpile for this kind of national disaster, with a few years of preparation – and spending some billions to prepare for pandemics like this should have been more common.

It’s possible that social distancing, masks, and various other hygiene measures, are reducing viral load that people are exposed to, and that possibly lower viral load initially exposed to could reduce severity of the disease in people after they are infected other things equal.

If that was true, there would be a further argument in support of social distancing and wearing of masks.

However, are not these seroprevalence estimates considered to be quite unreliable for various reasons? In this case, it seems to be based on testing employees of a single company. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.21.20198796v1

You need to talk about the HCQ suppression and fake research scandals.

Same for Cambodians. Weird how no one mentions them. Too hard to believe that their zero deaths has anything to do with competence or whatever I guess

my more pessimistic predictions

I would say main thing I felt you might have missed to discuss in early months, was the seasonality of the pandemic.

This seasonality had been predicted in February or March by people like General Secretary Xi Jinping and President Trump.

What later seemed inaccurate in early coverage of this topic of seasonality, was probably underestimating the extent to which this virus is transmitted indoors as opposed to outdoors. As a result, people were expecting the causal mechanism for its seasonality might be more through the absolute humidity rates of the outside air, rather than behaviour changes.

However, we saw in Europe a very strong seasonality, perhaps not due to changing absolute humidity rates, but rather likely as a result of the behaviour change that European people go outside more in the warmer weather, and possibly are also opening the windows inside (resulting in lower indoors transmission rates as well, while in the winter people are more resistant to opening the window due to the cold).

On the other hand, transmission rates of the virus showed a u-shaped relation to the UV index. Too strong sun, also causes people to stay indoors more, where transmission rates were higher. Air conditioning inside public buildings in hot countries, probably also contributed to the transmission. So that the highest transmission was in the summer months in regions like the Middle East, contrasting with the European situation.

–

In terms of the cultural difference between Europe and East Asia – this can be in relation to public understanding of airborne diseases in general.

Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and China, had experience with SARS in the early 2000s. But in South Korea and Japan they also seemed to show greater awareness of how to reduce airborne transmission, despite not having experience with SARS. This can be a result of public’s dislike of air pollution in these countries.

Aside from the cultural difference in terms of use of masks, in Europe, people don’t seem to be aware of air purifiers and HEPA filters. In Europe, there has been some lack of sense that installing HEPA filters in the office might be more effective, than obsessing about cleaning surfaces.

–

At least, there is one area Western European policies, was slightly less stupid in early months, than the authorities in Russia, Pakistan and South Korea -at least they didn’t obsess in early months about spraying disinfectant chlorine onto the pavements, or entrances of buildings.

Even in the “fog of war” of early months, this spraying of disinfected on the streets was like pure superstition.

In the early months, Great Britain ordered to the population not to wear masks. English people have obeyed their leaders, and there was almost no mask wearing in the first wave of the epidemic.

After English people were told by their government to wear a mask inside (in end of July, if I recall), English suddenly all were belatedly wearing masks inside public buildings and shops, although still not commonly in the streets outside.

This showed that United Kingdom’s population was very herd-like and obedient to the authorities – unfortunately the Kingdom’s politicians, are not very sensible or intelligent, to say mildly.

In the first wave of the pandemic in the Kingdom, the government was obsessed with washing hands and singing at the same time.

London’s leadership believed that singing “happy birthday” twice while washing their hands, would somehow prevent an airborne virus.

Here was an example that belief in “magical rituals” and “incantations”, is not something only in Africa, but can still exist in 21st century Europe.

Well, wearing a mask outside has little merit, open air transmissions being very rare, no? Especially when there’s noone around

Masks have been very widespread in Greece – it didn’t stop an uptick in the autumn and the declaration of another lockdown in November, still going on.

Unless they were just spraying diluted hypochlorous acid in a Hot Zone. It’s not very harmful, very hard to find in most countries still, but eats Corona Chan’s spikes off in a jiffy. Best kept secret of this pandemic!

France in the Second World War is not the first thing which springs to mind when I think of social solidarity

Sometimes I ask myself on this website when I come across the latest “The Jews are secretly eating children have been since the Middle Ages and are suppressing the Truth about it by promoting Darwinism” Unz Review article, why do I read this garbage?

This essay is excellent. This is why I bother to sift through all the garbage. . . and zero genuflections towards diversity, feminism, LGBTQZXCV, progressivism and the rest of the abominable American State Religion.

The issue is between eastern rightoids, who support ethnic homogenity, social conservatism, as well as big government( for their own group) – they did much better at understanding the Covid threat, as they do not like things that weaken the country/ethnicity/group, and western rightoids, who are too libertarian of the type “don’t tell me what to do”, “muh free market”, “liberty”. This anti-community, libertarian stance is born out of extreme narcissism and lack of care for even their own group. They have gone crazy due to the restrictions on their personal liberty precisely due to the lack of care for their own group and thus lack of understanding that Covid will ultimately weaken them, including their countries and their ethnic groups

The western rightoids proved to be dumb. The eastern rightoids performed relatively well.

The difference comes from the different attitudes – western rightoids saw anti-Covid measures as something that will restrict their freedom, while eastern rightoids correctly understood that not reacting to Covid will weaken their country and their group.

And yes, East Asia is right wing – socially conservative with relatively big income inequality. But it is also more left wing than western rightoids due to their sense of common group, culture and community, as well as suppport for a strong government as something that is ultimately good for the right – as strong government is needed in environment of ethnic and country competition.

Looking at how dumb and naive western rightoids are, it is not a surprise that they got totally taken over by (((liberals))) and are being wiped out. Naive and narcissistic people that could be easily used due to their lack of care for their own group, caused by too much self-obsessed muh liberty narcissism. This led to their demise.

The eastern rightoids are still in game, so the 21st century will be a battle between a West, taken over and terraformed by liberals, and the eastern rightoids.

In this sense, Karlin is right to notice the stupidity of western rightoids. Your only hope is a win for the East and a multipolar world where there is a place for different systems and cultures. But you are too dumb to get it, and too invested in propping up something (the old West) that is dead and taken over by parasites. Propping up the Empire that will eat them later.

To be straight about this, you make a lot of good points.

But I have to put in a list the things you state without any evidence:
– “10 megadeaths” (on current trajectory, including vaccinations. Even Burn-Murdoch can give no support to such a claim; see also 4th point below. Also you are ignoring the “low-hanging fruit” view – how many of the persons most susceptible to bad outcomes have already been hit? A first vs. second wave severity comparison seems to give credence to that view. Also what about the possibility of near future sub-par death numbers, and their effect on life expectancy?)
– “no pre-existing herd immunity” (Are you trying to imply there was also zero pre-existing immunity? Impossible to prove or disprove without highly unethical experiments, but critical thinking should strongly doubt that number is zero or even close to zero)
– “mass variolation” (I had also for three weeks liked that idea, until I realized we have no idea about the long-term aftereffects of Corona on surviving patients!)
– “third-world undercounting” (of deaths!? Those require zero sophisticated technology to count and report.)

You completely ignore:
– critical thinking on mRNA

I also see a lot of trolling in your article. Although you give lip service to criticizing leftoids, it is clear you believe you can virtue signal your better understanding (and higher IQ) by cheap-shots on clueless folks who at least tried to think for themselves (you get my stab at leftoid NPCs here?)

Overall more a letdown than a epiphany of an article.

Good recap. Thanks.

I still believe more viral load = more morbidity/chance of infection. I think morbidity and chance of infection are on the same scale. As in no infection/mild infection/severe infection/death. I belive immune system and quality of care are also involved. So a study that controls all three is probably very expensive and hard to put together.

With this in mind even if you are in a situation where there is a lot of exposure it would be hard to tell if it was the viral load you received or if you are fat or what treatment you received at onset had the most impact on your outcome.

There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that viral load makes a difference like healthy young doctors in Wuhan dying. Or a woman getting sick from her “it’s a hoax” husband by making out and then she is the one that dies and he is a fatso.

Wait sir you don’t think jews are eating children?

On Covid 19 and masks, i will recommend the discovery of an asian professor – salt your masks. The salt coating actually increases filtration efficiency of masks and kills the germs falling on the mask. It can be used for a long time period.

It is now backed up by 3 studies using various masks and materials.

Good discovery.

I agree with the serotological reasoning. I also think they do not have a high %.

Sure, I certainly don’t dispute that “more viral load = more morbidity/chance of infection.� Not ofc that masks reduce all those things

It would seem to be intuitive that wearing a mask would reduce but not eliminate the amount of incoming viruses from the environment, thereby reducing viral load and all things being equal resulting in a relatively milder course of illness for the mask-wearer who gets sick:

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/wearing-a-mask-may-reduce-how-sick-you-get-from-covid-19#:~:text=%20%20%201%20It%20has%20been%20thought,may%20translate%20to%20less%20severe%20illness…%20More%20

Is that wrong?

I think we are all on the same page here. What makes this confusing is that we discussing both the reason why we think 50% serotogical study is bunk and that viral load effects outcome.

Maybe the difference is in individualism vs collectivism, top-down Eastern society vs. more consensus driven Western cultures, where the public is supposed to have an input on decision making, instead of some big head man barking orders and people obeying, deference to authority among Eastern cultures, Confucianism among Far Eastern cultures meaning you have a culture that gives more deference to what experts say? Shame driven face-saving cultures among Far Eastern societies leading to greater conformism on perceived crucial issues? More social pressure among Eastern societies to wear masks, and social pressure having a larger impact in controlling individual behavior in more collectivistic shame driven Eastern cultures, where conforming to social norms is all important? I cannot think of any Eastern societies that has the equivalent of a New England town hall meeting of deciding community issues, or Athenian style democracy among ancient Eastern societies.

“ Tokyo’s seropositivity rate of almost 50% – would the low mortality of the virus there be solid evidence that mask wearing reduces the severity of the disease?�

No. Some races have more natural immunity. It’s very obvious. Masks do nothing positive and cause a good deal of harm.

The demographics statistics on Jamaica are interesting. There are contradicting sources and some statistics look weird which makes me wonder if they are correct.

According to World Bank Jamaica had 65 year life expectancy in 1960 rising up to 74 years in 1995 but since then the growth has completely stagnated and the life expectancy remains at 74 today. That means life expectancy was close to Western level for many years but because of the stagnation is now a step below. The high life expectancy isn’t too weird, life expectancy in general is high in the Caribbean and there are Caribbean countries with black population that has Western level life expectancy (Barbados and Antigua and Barbuda). But life expectancy completely stagnating for the last 25 years? That is interesting, what would be the reason for that?

Wikipedia puts Jamaica’s fertility rate at 1.46 (2017) while World Bank puts it at 1.98 (2018). That’s a big difference. Neither would be that surprising. To compare, Barbados has had below replacement fertility since the 80s (by any source) so I could imagine Jamaica being at 1.46.

We only got 450,000 dead Americans by the end of 2020, only ninety-seven times as many as dead Chinese! Absolutely miniscule crisis!

Yes, a whole 0.13% of the population, at least half of whom would have died anyway, Corona or not. What a crisis.

So we would have had 332,357,437 people instead of 331,907,437 people (est. as of Dec. 19). We must be barely hanging on given this massive reduction in population.

Yet the number of people negatively impacted by lockdowns, etc. is in the tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions. A crisis? Yes, and it was entirely created by our idiot “ruling class.”

Mr. Karlin

A fine blog post and there is not one obvious flaw in what you have written here. BUT you do not even hint at the elephant pooping in our living room here.

Old people have a propensity to die. Our society-culture deals with this fact with immense waste and destructiveness. If you were really clever you would take advantage of the opportunity to open this can of worms. Hint: Ray Kurzweil is a goddam idiot.

I wondered about the natural immunity thing. Of course, even if East Asians turn out to have more immunity than Caucasians, that doesn’t help us. We still need to take more proactive measures. Or are you saying the measures have had literally no effect and the virus would have advanced at the same rate if nothing had been done?

It is not true they would have died this year otherwise. The excess mortality stats clearly show 400k more deaths this year than normal.

One can only wonder whether the incompetence of US policymakers will continue to expand in the coming new year. Enough vaccines were created to meet the prediction of 20m vaccinated by years end. With only two days to go, only 2m have been vaccinated – what’s up with that?

I would suspect how late the FDA granted them Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs), Operation Warp Speed’s (OWS) transitioning from plans to operations in this domain and how that accelerates, and Pfizer’s no warning manufacturing “oops” as well as their until very recent total disdain of OWS. And from the CDC’s tracking page (always read the fine print! Like those Johns Hopkins folks didn’t for all cause mortality):

Healthcare providers report doses to state, territorial, and local public health agencies up to 72 hours after administration. There may be additional reporting lag for data to be transmitted from the state, territorial, or local public health agency to CDC….

Numbers reported on other websites may differ from what is posted on CDC’s website because CDC’s overall numbers are validated through a data submission process with each jurisdiction. Differences between reporting jurisdictions and CDC’s website may occur due to the timing of reporting and website updates. The process used for reporting doses distributed or doses administered displayed by other sites may differ. Data will be regularly updated on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Updates will occur the following day after a federal holiday.

So with the preceding mentioned delays, and without yet having today’s update, we have 1 million vaccinated and reported to the CDC by 9 am EST by Wen the 24th from an unreliable source I clipped, and 2.2 million by Monday the 28th, just four days later and including the Christmas holiday.

That’s a nice doubling time, we could soon hit the wall of distribution, 11.4 million doses on the 28th and that’s probably more up to date. Allow for reporting delays, but also allow for new types of places starting to get inoculations like nursing homes, the 2020 target of 20 million could and may well be hit very early in January. If it’s say within around a week, also note including the New Year’s holiday, we shouldn’t quibble.

A lot of libertarians really shot themselves in the foot with their denialism. The incompetence of the government was clear enough but hard to blame CDC and WHO for counseling against masks when you’ve committed yourself to denying that masks make any difference or that the virus is even dangerous.

“East asians already wear masks during regular flu season”: and anyone with half a brain would immediately wonder if this has had any effect on flu epidemics in the past compared to the West. So far, epidemiologists have found none.

One thing is for certain though – Jamaica certainly isn’t a high fertility country like Nigeria or such.

…A similar percentage probably believe that Crimea is Ukraine…

I doubt that one person in a hundred in the UK has the tiniest bit of interest or knowledge regarding whatever is the issue with Ukraine and Russia.

But here’s another angle: almost certainly COVID came from the asian so-called “wet markets�. This is where our seasonal flu comes from. We could have ended flu season decades ago, with little real effort, but the global elites (asian and non-asian alike) just didn’t care enough – the seasonal flu was just a cost of business, something to put up with.

While your overall message about elites just not caring about infectious disease control is correct, and in the US extends to our public health community infamously including our incompetent CDC, new flu strains happen in all sorts of ways, and wet markets are I’m pretty sure a very small source compared to a zillions farms where humans and pigs, and/or maybe birds are in close proximity.

Flu is unusual or maybe unique for human virus pathogens in having its genome separated into segments, with one or very few genes per segment. So one source of drastically different strains, “antigenic shift” is from a human, pig, or maybe bird getting infected by two strains at once, producing hybrid viruses that have segments from both, and a competent strain that transmits better in humans (and/or pigs or maybe birds) breaking out. Or you could just have a zoonotic jump to humans. One way to track shifts is in variants that are so different the H and N proteins are given new numbers, like the 1918-9 H1N1 getting replaced by H2N2 in the late 1950s, and that getting replaced by H2N3 in the late 1960s.

Antigenic “drift” is much more common, and it’s just regular mutations happening to what our adaptive immune systems latch onto to make antibodies. Unlike a bunch of viruses for which we have what I call “eternal” vaccines, our bodies target parts of the flu that are not “conserved,” they can undergo major changes and the virus will still virus. That said, the adaptive immune system’s memory of old flu strains is reported to be very good, tested for example in 1918-9 pandemic survivors. It’s just that ecologically, new flu strains are favored over ones a lot of people are already immune to.

The paper

Dynamic Change of COVID-19 Seroprevalence among Asymptomatic Population in Tokyo during the Second Wave
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.21.20198796v1

according to Google Scholar has zero citations. This may mean that the claim is such a great outlier that nobody mercifully would cite it or even try to correct it for fear of embarrassing the authors. Which is too bad. I would like to know what possibly went wrong. While the sampling was spatially distributed it was limited to employees of one company that had several locations in Tokyo. So it is possible that the results are correct but they may not be extrapolated to the whole city or something went wrong with testing.

I think the idea is if you assumed threshold of amount of viral load to create infection can be low, and if causal masks people wear is only reducing viral load you are exposed to a level that is still often above that threshold (i.e. commuters with cloth mask with no face seal), and if the average severity of illness correlated positively with the amount of viral load provided initial exposure, and that non-severe illness could still provide immunity after.

Japan has had no real lockdown (Japanese government does not have legal power to order real lockdowns), so the level of “fleeting social contact” working people have in Tokyo is very high all year. On the Tokyo metro – 7 million passengers a day. Meanwhile, Japanese are stereotypically introverted and might have significantly more infrequent non fleeting social contact than would expected in Europe.

The probability that average residents would each day have fleeting social contact to infected people could be hundreds or thousands of times higher, than having non-fleeting social contact.

I agree that it sounds like the more implausible explanation for what is happening in Japan. More likely, that the better hygiene and higher introversion, is just reducing the reproduction of the virus, so that fewer people are infected each day.

Japanese have uniquely low mortality from Corona relative to anyone else, despite having the highest median age of any country

The numbers would not really make sense. Japan doesn’t show excess mortality in for the months known so far in 2020.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.09.20143164v9.full-text So imagine how low the infection fatality rate would have to be, if you assumed that half of Tokyo was infected.

–

Still it is strange about the fact retail and public spaces can be running as normal in Tokyo (minus the tourists) – densely populated city of 37 million, dependent on mass transit, didn’t have lockdowns, and where the virus has been freely circulating at least to some extent all year? Meanwhile London is periodically completely frozen.

“But what masks do (unless my logic is very wrong) is create a selection effect…” – Frankly I do not follow the logic. If we plot infections number versus the viral load for two identical countries A and B that differ only by practice of masking the curve of A where masking is practiced would not exceed the curve B where masking is not practiced anywhere. There would be no amplification of infections in any region of viral loads due to masking.

Even the not too polite company as the UR commentariat has turned out to be won’t tolerate advocacy of gerontocide. People who bring it up providing that they are not provocateurs are missing something basic in their psychological make up. They are at odds with fundamental values of our civilization, not just Western Judeo-Christian civilization. How people like you came to being and what unfortunate events in your life lead you to the point of entertaining the ideas of killing old people should be looked at and remedies what to do with people like you should be considered. Should the society put you on an ice floe?

… Further, ivermectin is just one prominent example of the array of early treatment options — safe, cheap, simple, and highly effective. Hydroxychloroquine, doxycycline, fluvoxamine, vitamin D and C, and a number of others. This is HUGE news which, unfortunately, is never mentioned on MSM.

Recent Japanese lab study on mask effectiveness using real virus aerosols. Note that the scale in graphs is logarithmic.

Effectiveness of Face Masks in Preventing Airborne Transmission of SARS-CoV-2
https://msphere.asm.org/content/5/5/e00637-20/article-info

The authors qualify:

To allow quantification, we conducted our studies by using a relatively high dose of virus, and under these conditions, it is possible that the protective capacity of the masks was exceeded.

meaning that the results possibly would be better if done on lower dose levels.

Providing that there is a minimal threshold of virus load that needs to be crossed to initiate infection a nonlinearity must be introduced in data analysis of mask effectiveness that leads to the inequality:

N(virus with masks)/N(viruses w/o masks) > N(infections with masks)/N(infections w/o masks)

The right hand side of the inequality can be even zero when the left hand side is larger than zero. The effectiveness of masks is higher than what the ratio of mask-to-no mask viral dose indicate.

NB: I have noticed that some people wear super duper masks like N95 or better but the masks have the exhale valve which means that the most important role of masks which is to reduce the amount of virus pumped into the environment is defeated.

I believe that in time of emergency like the epidemic the corners can be cut and repurposed drugs should be studied but I understand the inertia and resistance coming from the official medical establishment to keep the quackery and charlatanry under control. Even the best well intentioned medical practitioners can be fooled by their results particularly when they are too well intentioned. The double blind standard in studies on medical treatments efficacy was introduced for a good reason.

Which strategy is / was right depends on on success of vaccine development. Not long ago the general public was told by experts that it is not sure a vaccine would be developed and if one would be developed it could take years. Without the vaccine I am not sure whether the “elimination” strategy is the right one. In this situation some combination of selective protection for vulnerable people and “flattening the curve” or even herd immunity could be right. People would have had to learn to “live with the virus”. Now we know different vaccines have been developed fast enough, so in hindsight is has become clear which strategy was right – the elimination strategy.
Anyway in such a situation of uncertainty in which we were some months ago it would haven best to assume a vaccination would be developed soon enough and choose the “elimination” strategy. If a vaccine would not have been developed one could have started with “flattening the curve” strategy. Also people in relevant positions have probably had information about the good progress in vaccine development.

Also, in a bold move, Hong Kong is now catching COVID cases through sewage

Read the article more closely. They’re using sewage for monitoring, RT-PCR is a very sensitive technique thanks to PCR’s ability to double a sample of DNA in each cycle, so if there is some of the two bits of RNA still hanging together in the sewage, you can detect it. Doesn’t mean it is from viable viruses, to find out you need a BSL-3 lab to try to culture samples, and this has been done with some COVID-19 patients.

Last time I checked which was a long time ago COVID-19 was not thought to be a major threat in transmitting this way, certainly not compared to the normal way, unless perhaps bad plumbing turns sewage into aerosols. Which is believed to have happened in Hong Kong with SARS, which doesn’t normally transmit very well except by a relative few superspreaders. So you might expect it to be like what we’ve lately been reading about asymptomatic spreaders, if it happens, it’s not going to be a major driver of the pandemic.

Although 3M mask’s exhale valves are designed to push the emission in downward direction. Also one could put a surgical mask over it to fix that.

A salt coated surgical mask gets close to N95 and FFP 2 masks in filtration efficiency, but fit will be worse.

I heard somewhere that the disdain for old people could be a western thing. The West definitely leads the world in elderly homes and those were death traps back in the Spring.

Libertarians’ response to masking is psychotic in essence. Very similar to their response to the seat belts requirements in 1970s. Then a ‘research’ was done to demonstrate that seat belts would increase fatalities because drivers would be engaging in more risky behavior. The ‘risk compensation’ meme was entered into the debate:

The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation, Sam Peltzman, Journal of Political Economy
Vol. 83, No. 4 (Aug., 1975), pp. 677-726

“Technological studies imply that annual highway deaths would be 20 percent greater without legally mandated installation of various safety devices on automobiles. However, this literature ignores offsetting effects of nonregulatory demand for safety and driver response to the devices. This article indicates that these offsets are virtually complete, so that regulation has not decreased highway deaths.�

Lo and behold in August 2020 some hacks from some business school published this gem:

Risk compensation during COVID-19: The impact of face mask usage on social distancing
https://www.onmedica.com/documents/mask_compensation_manuscript

Consistent with risk compensation, we found that participants indicated they would stand, sit or walk closer to the stranger when either of them was wearing a mask. This form of risk compensation was stronger for those who believed masks were effective at preventing catching or spreading Covid-19,

Even in this thread ‘peterkike’ (#125) claims that masks are killing us: “Masks do nothing positive and cause a good deal of harm.” Libertarian psychosis seems to be incurable.

That libertarians are idiots is beyond dispute. That their idiocy keeps procreating and that they were not weeded out by some evolutionary process demands an explanation. They persist because their idiocy is useful to some groups of interests. The only role for libertarians is to play the role of useful idiots.

In 1970s it was the Auto Industry that was opposing the seat belts requirement that was benefiting from libertarian useful idiocy and now in 2020 and the universal masking issue we may speculate that it is the Big Pharma that benefits from the activism of libertarian useful idiots. Why the Big Pharma? The paradigm of fighting flu like epidemics was developed over the years with the input form the Big Pharma that excluded the non-pharmaceutical countermeasures. The Big Pharma is in the business of selling drugs and annual vaccines. That’s why WHO and CDC were poo-pooing masking in the beginning. Technically they were not lying. Still in May 2020 CDC even published the meta study justifying their position. They knew already then that they were wrong so they were covering ass at that point.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article
Nonpharmaceutical Measures for Pandemic Influenza in Nonhealthcare Settings—Personal Protective and Environmental Measures (May 2020)

Although mechanistic studies support the potential effect of hand hygiene or face masks, evidence from 14 randomized controlled trials of these measures did not support a substantial effect on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.

Finally after August 2020 they publicly endorsed the universal masking:

CDC director Robert Redfield said face masks may be more effective than a vaccine in preventing individual coronavirus infections�
https://www.businessinsider.com/cdc-director-masks-better-than-vaccines-at-stopping-coronavirus-2020-9

The World Health Organization’s senior official in Europe said Thursday that blanket national lockdowns to curb the spread of COVID-19 wouldn’t be necessary if governments could convince their citizens to wear masks.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-europe-who-masks-could-prevent-coronavirus-lockdowns-school-closures-dont-work/

Take-home point: The only role for libertarians is to play the role of useful idiots.

By monitoring viral load in sewage in Thessaloniki they could show how effective their lockdown was. Now I can’t find the graph but here is one article.

https://www.ekathimerini.com/259307/article/ekathimerini/news/increase-in-thessalonikis-wastewater-viral-load-slowing

There seems to be a correlation between level of patriotism and willingness to comply with COVID restrictions and lock downs.

I would say the English have lower levels of tolerance for lock downs and COVID rules than Ireland and other European countries. Other Europeans seems more inclined to be of the opinion that their governments are taking these decisions in the interests of the population, whereas English people seem more more skeptical and cynical of it.

I think this is fundamentally because English people are a lot more atomised and less patriotic, less motivated by the argument that they should do something that inconveniences them if it benefits society as a whole.

The statistics will probably show that more affluent society is more people are in retirement and nursing homes. But there is something about our culture that goes back to Christianity that makes it more likely to rebel against family bonds. We are supposed to be loyal to the Truth and if family bonds prevents you from reaching for the Truth you may have to cut the family bonds:

For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.

And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. (Matthew 10)

Catholic church put a lot of energy to increase the number degrees of consanguinity in marriage in order to weaken the family and tribal bonds. Perhaps not enough in regions of Sicily or Calabria where mafia flourished.

This seems to be mainly an Anglosphere and perhaps Germanic trait than a Western trait as a whole. In the UK it’s a common stereotype that Spanish and Italians don’t put their elderly parents into old peoples homes but look after them at home instead.

I don’t know if old peoples’ homes are common in Russia/Eastern Europe, but I would assume not.

https://canoe.com/news/world/china-mocks-u-s-over-covid-19-with-lego-like-cartoon

WW2 proves that isn’t true. Their solidarity during the war was patriotic and anything but atomised.

Anyway, I think the first thing we have learned from COVID is this: 1 COVID death is an unspeakable crime of the CCP, 4600 COVID deaths is a tragedy, and 450,000 deaths is a statistic unworthy of mention.

There was a time I would have bridled at what you said but now I mostly agree. I think libertarianism can offer some useful insights on some issues but observing ideologues trying to be Armchair epidemiologists has really disillusioned me.

It is weird how people are disputing a medical fact that has been true for over a century.

We keep talking about asians and their countries is because they dealt and are dealing with covid so effectively. And prevalence of mask wearing does help alot.

Masks lowers r0. It doesn’t stop it completely. It takes nation wide effort though, not just your area. Without nationwide effort, it is why citywide and individual state lockdowns are simply stupid, just crashes the economy.

Widespread rejection and disdain for our elders and Western civilisation in general among Western youth began with those who came of age in the 1960s and has been promoted and incentivised ever since by those who dominate media & education. Those born in the 1940s & 50s are now experiencing some of the same disdain they displayed towards their own parents and communities. If it is even possible to return to the pre-60s normalcy it would require some kind of struggle, like a multigenerational economic depression or perhaps a traumatic civil conflict.

“mass variolation� (I had also for three weeks liked that idea, until I realized we have no idea about the long-term aftereffects of Corona on surviving patients!)

At last, one of the few who seems to have noticed this. It looked ok at the start and, despite some unsettling indications, it may still turn out to be ok but what a hell of a gamble on the long term effects of a new disease. [email�protected]

“… the emission in downward direction…” – This is not good enough. Universal masking works because it both reduces the amount of virus put into the environment in the exhale phase and the amount of virus passed by mask during the inhale phase. The mask with the exhale valve go against the whole philosophy of masking. It rather fits the “I am protected and fuck you” schools of philosophy.

If everybody had N95 mask with the exhale valve it would be OK. But there are too many who wear only N50 masks that’s why for their sake the exhale valves should banned. The exhale valves belong to industrial masks not medical masks.

Along the same line of the mystery explanation for differences between meds/nords etc… The Peru/Ecuador death numbers are interesting to consider along with Greg Cochran’s past comments on the Amerindian genetic adaption to altitude (apparently inferior to the Himalayan one): https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/islands-in-the-sky/

There was much talk of racial variation in covid response that ended up a nothingburger in the early part of the pandemic, but this seems more than coincidence. Bolivia has a high death rate too.

Combo of direct negative effects of living at high altitude + corona might trump a potential genetic effect once investigated – but an interesting question to look into.

Why would you post something so callous, so lacking in empathy?
A grandfather dying in his wheelchair. His daughter calling the morgue for her deceased loved one.

Perhaps democracy(Ala Western style, not the more paternalistic /authoritarian Asian style ‘democracy’) may not be so effective in terms of policy making and enforcement , especially in times of crisis. This is a weakness of Western style democracy.
Moreover, most Westerners hate the idea of any intrusion to their ‘personal freedoms’ and the idea of ‘human rights’ are so pervasive in Western psyche that Asian style draconian policies will only lead to mass rebellion against those policies in Western democracies. Lack of social cohesion and tendency for non conformity is a Western trait which is not so much of an issue in East Asia.

I think if another similar pandemic strikes , the same issues will resurface. I am not too optimistic that Western politicians have learned much from this pandemic apart from how to politicize issues via a pandemic.

We are lucky the Sars-Cov 2 virus is not so lethal but contagious, and the mutation rate is far less because of unique proof-reading replicase in Coronavirus compared to other RNA viruses. There will be more pandemics to come. If the virus in such a pandemic is a high mutation rate RNA virus, combining easy and initial asymptomatic transmilitability with later stages of high mortality, I don’t think humanity will be ready. The devastation from such a pandemic will make the current one as a mere blip. We are lucky this time.

The only role for libertarians is to play the role of useful idiots.

According to USA Today, the net worth of the 614 billionaires in America has increased by 931 billion dollars since March of this year. Jeff Bezos, for example, is now 90 billion dollars richer. See my comment #29. The lockdowns have made the rich even richer so the lockdown proponents are the useful idiots of Bezos and the rest of the billionaire class. The libertarians are the ones on the side of the small business owners driven into bankruptcy, their workers who have lost their jobs, and young people who have had their educations and lives disrupted and economic futures crippled.

This year has seen a remarkable trashing of individual liberties, governments in many places revelling in the opportunities to introduce virtual police states on the back of a virus. The virus will eventually depart, perhaps even in the new year. The freedoms lost may take much longer to be regained, if ever.

It is interesting to compare the UK with Greece. In the latter, mask-wearing was already common in the summer, but it did not stop an autumn uptick in cases and deaths. Then Greece went into a second lockdown in November, still going on, which seems to have been more about social control than actual disease prevention, with some state practices not seen since the military rule period of 1967-74 returning. For the most part, Greeks have put up with it but then there is that authoritarian DNA in their 20th century history that the British do not have. Cases and deaths seem to be declining but that is after seven weeks of lockdown, and many small businesses that barely survived the spring lockdown in Greece have gone under.

I find it odd how the Irish seem to be much more willing and positive about their government imposing lock downs at short notice and even more stringent rules than in Britain, such as only being allowed to travel a maximum of 5km from their home and police checkpoints being set up to enforce it.

The British government have not imposed rules like that and set up police checkpoints because it would be extremely difficult to enforce here, people would not take it well. I think they would need the military on the streets to impose such rules here.

I’m not saying the British government won’t eventually enforce curfew rules and have checkpoints, but I strongly suspect they will be manned by soldiers, not police.

Yes I think this is quite true for East Asians in general. We tend to believe in experts of their respective fields and certainly don’t question or doubt expert opinions as much as Westerners tend to. Has its pros and cons, of course.

Another thing is, especially in the so called Sinosphere countries , we believe in ‘meritocracy’ rather than ‘democracy’. We don’t necessarily view every opinion by every individual as having equal value or importance. Every opinion needs to be judged by its merits. In a way, I have to admit, to a certain extend, it’s my belief too but not as rigid as Neo-Confucianists. Historically, we used to revere and almost worship the smart and the scholarly. In ancient Chinese dynasties to be the top scholar of the country was a very huge thing, worshipped to almost God like status. Also, many of us (still) believe that the majority of mankind are not smart and unable to decide what is best for the country. That should be left to the smartest elites. The belief is that Democracy at its purest form leads to anarchy and instability if you leave decision making by concensus to the majority who have conflicting interests and presumably ‘lesser intelligence’. The majority is thought to not necessarily know what is best for themselves or their country. It is the ruling elites who must lead the way and enforce the policies, the majority is to adhere and obey. It’s based on Confucian ideals of the relationship of the Ruler and the ruled. The ideal ruler should have the character of a sage to be both wise and intellectually superior to the rest. Of course meritocracy failed the Sinosphere countries in the past especially when their scholar-bureaucrats only knew Confucian ideals but were totally ignorant of Western superiority in science, maths and technology. To me Asians have a cult of worshipping the smart, the well educated, the learned and intellectual as well as ‘high culture’ but nowadays many more worship mammon. In the past, in Sinosphere societies, businessmen were considered amoral and lower social status than peasants. Scholars were held in higher regard. See:-

https://mmsamee.weebly.com/ancient-chinas-social-classes.html

I also agree, conforming to social norm is important to us. However, wearing a mask to partially protect us from covid 19 is generally viewed as common sense rather than a social norm here. East Asians are very concerned about self preservation and the idea is there is no harm done at all in donning the face masks. To us Western politicking and huge debates about wearing or not wearing masks in this pandemic amuses us Asians. It is a total non issue here. The idea of infringing on one’s personal freedom is also amusing to us and never came across our mind – generally we think such persons as selfish. Whether the masks work or not is besides the point, we just think it’s common sense to wear those masks. If it does not work, well the virus spreads anyway. If the masks work a bit, we somehow get protected a bit. Where is the harm? and the thought of the government infringing our personal freedoms just because Government laws insist on mask donning never occurred to us – the whole Western arguments abt personal freedoms vs mandatory mask donning seem nonsensical to us Asians. We often discuss this and shrug in disbelief that it is an issue in the West.

Ireland had a civil war in the 20th century and war with British rule before that. The Republic also has a background of emergency practices, often used against the IRA. It is a small country, not very densely populated, and police can probably see people a mile off.
The UK, especially England, is a different matter.

“Whether the masks work or not is besides the point, we just think it’s common sense to wear those masks.”

Maybe there is an East Asian difference. During the Korean War, Westerners made much of Chinese “brainwashing”. The Chinese probably thought of it as encouraging group cohesion or something like that.
I would be more inclined to wonder if certain practices help or harm rather than just assume it is good because Johnson, Mitsotakis or Mao say so. For example, mass campaigns to kill sparrows and small birds orchestrated by Mao had disastrous effects but Chinese were doing what they were told to do – like with the masks. With regard to masks, wearing one, especially in hot weather, causes me to have attacks of breathlessness, enough to make me seek out a quiet spot and lower it a bit to improve my breathing. Are you really sure masks a) protect you from the dread contagion and b) don’t have harmful side-effects of their own?

because I can’t understand the contempt

You are aware that you still seem to expect some empathy for Goyim from an ethnocentric Jew?

Perhaps you’re being a bit idealistic here.

You brought up interesting observations. Thank you.
To be honest, I am not sure if masks actually protect us, even a bit, from the contagion. I remember being told by a medical friend(but I did not verify this) that masks prevent the infected from spreading the virus but not the uninfected from catching it.
I think masks can have some undesirable side effects. I am allergic to wearing masks at prolonged periods : I get allergic rhinitis and very bad post nasal drip.
Yes, I think Westerners do have some points in their doubts about mask wearing in this pandemic – my reply to 128 was regarding Asian views about the issue : it’s not really social norm, it’s appeal to so called ‘common sense’.
I think there are just too many conflicting views about mask donning protecting us from the contagion that I give it benefit of doubt. The allergic issue (in my case) is not too concerning for me personally.
In fact this East Asian appeal to common sense or intuition may also be a reason why they were not so curious about the sciences in the past and stagnated in that field for the longest time.
Regarding the example of Mao, yes you are right about the weakness of Asian more pro-authoritarian thinking. The ideal ruler is supposed to be sagacious in Chinese thought but how often do you get a so called sagacious leader…. And even worse expecting even a so called ‘sagacious’ leader to never make grave errors or stupid policies. This is the weakness in such ideals. Killing sparrows is not the worst of Mao’s lunacy. Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward massacred millions of Chinese. I actually blame Mao and his enablers for the near destruction of Chinese civilization on Mainland China. Indeed, in practice, even in past dynastic times, rulers relied on the advice of supposedly smart scholar-bureaucrats. In Chinese history, Emperors were disaparaged for their folly and refusal to heed sound advice from officials, the corruption and incompetence of many scholar-bureaucrats are also well known – these are all weaknesses of the meritocratic system. Democracy, meritocracy, whatever systems devised have their strengths and weaknesses.
And many times in dynastic times, the Confucian Ruler-the ruled relationship can be offset by rebellion by the people based on the principle of Mandate of Heaven(derived back from Zhou dynasty to justify their overthrow of the Shang). If the Ruler was inept and the country experienced disasters (supposedly due to the Ruler’s moral failings), this principle okayed a rebellion to dethrone the dynasty and install a new one. These elite replacement transitions were often violent and chaotic. I think democracy, theoretically at least, provides a less violent and humane way for such transitions – unfortunately the political elites in the West(and other democratic countries) have learned the skill of manipulating the population to retain and maintain power.

I think different political systems or thought are more successful or less depending on the circumstances. Just my opinion.

I believe scholar officials have a greater batting average over 2500 years give or take a few centuries than eunuchs, emperors listening to eunuchs, or leaders produced by democracies.

We are lucky the Sars-Cov 2 virus is not so lethal but contagious, and the mutation rate is far less because of unique proof-reading replicase in Coronavirus compared to other RNA viruses. There will be more pandemics to come. If the virus in such a pandemic is a high mutation rate RNA virus, combining easy and initial asymptomatic transmilitability with later stages of high mortality, I don’t think humanity will be ready. The devastation from such a pandemic will make the current one as a mere blip. We are lucky this time.

We could still be lucky with a future cirusvirus pathogen like the one you posit, for not all parts of a virus can mutate and still result in it being viable. For enzymes, imagine them as a lock, into which a key must fit more or less precisely.

These parts of the virus are “conserved,” and if unlike the flu the body’s response manages to include targeting of conserved parts of it, both natural and vaccine immunity can be “eternal.” See all the RNA vaccines with higher mutation rates for which we have such vaccines, like measles and polio.

Testing is a waste of time, Oriental countries don’t bother, covid just isn’t a big deal.

Point taken and agree with you.
It’s just that the way our politicians (especially those of the so called ‘big powers’, Western and non-Western) responded to this pandemic crisis is so pathetic with all the partisan politickings and geopolitics. There was near total breakdown in international cooperation and in democracies, cooperation of political parties. If we had a virus like the one I posited, and if these leaders behave the same way(which I think they would), the situation would be very dire till we have the vaccine ready.

I am not sure. There were always a lot of court intrigues and the constant fear was to lose the Emperor’s favour or worse, incur his wrath. Many a scholar official were beheaded because of the machinations in court and what was most feared was the “nine familial extermination” :-
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_familial_exterminations
Brutal and evil punishment ensuring no relatives or even friends would be alive to avenge!
Perhaps smarter ones were ‘scholar hetmits’ – smart fellows who refused to serve the Imperium and lived as recluse in some secluded mountain minding their own things….

You don’t think Covid is that struggle that brings us together?

Covid is that struggle

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/20/europe/greta-thunberg-coronavirus-climate-change-trnd/index.html

https://time.com/5918448/greta-thunberg-coronavirus-climate-change/

And the World will be as one…

Perhaps smarter ones were ‘scholar hetmits’ – smart fellows who refused to serve the Imperium and lived as recluse in some secluded mountain minding their own things….

This.

The wise know that true containment is to be found in simplicity.

Why are you such a moron? Are you mentally retarded?

Now if you had written about ten METALLICAS, I’d be even more interested.

The native British typically have very substantial Celtic, French, or German genes. That is it. Not Arab, African, Pakistani, or any of the other components of the recent ongoing immivasion and destruction of Britain.

https://www.ancestry.com/corporate/international/press-releases/DNA-of-the-nation-revealedand-were-not-as-British-as-we-think

Biggest news of the day: China and EU sign the massive BIT trade deal. This comes after RCEP. You fucked up, Donald Trump.

Ten Megadeaths implies that 10 million have died from Covid-19

Biggest news of the day: China and EU sign the massive BIT trade deal. This comes after RCEP. You fucked up, Donald Trump.

As for Trump-tards – your only chance was to cooperate with China, Russia and Iran. But you are dumb animals so you blew it. Enjoy being wiped out from the US.

Look forward to AK’s response to this rather significant admission by the UK “Authorities.�

By the way, let me note yet again that many of the people pushing severe lockdown, and accusing others with contrary views of “coping�, have the type of job that enables them to keep working and earning online. That’s our gifted but this time mistaken author. By contrast, tens of millions of people in the USA, and Russia, don’t have that luxury.

Many lockdown advocates also do not have children. They in particular don’t seem able or willing to acknowledge the great psychological and spiritual, educational, and even physical harm that accrues to our young children from the destruction of normal social interaction in school, church groups, playgrounds, restaurants, massive hours on blinking screens rather than in the company of actual human beings, not being able to see smiles and facial expressions, not being able to make friends, not being allowed to exercise, compete, and simply enjoy team sports, etc. That’s our talented but badly mistaken author again.

Who’s selfish, then? People who keep their jobs, homes, vehicles, and hope for the future and lecture about the “need� for lockdown to people who ARE losing everything, including their family businesses built over generations, including their life savings, or soon to lose it all.

People who have no children of their own and either don’t realize the terrible costs that lockdowns impose on our children, or don’t much care, or think they can decide for us that “it’s worth it.â€� THAT’s who is most selfish here.

Ten million is a realistic estimate of what the death toll would be without any lock downs or distancing measures.

Thank you, Mark.

This would be an especially suitable time to impose a hefty tax on the income of the billionaires and their corporations. That is, a tax hike big enough to take every additional dollar they have made because of the police-state lockdowns that they have supported imposing on us and our families.

Take their ill-gotten extra profits and pay them directly to the people whose family businesses or jobs have been destroyed (as intended) by the lockdowns. Bezos and the other scum who run or have huge stock-holdings in Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Target, etc., can readily afford to cover the cost of FULLY replacing their lost income, as well as paying their past due mortgage, business, vehicle, and student loans. They should be made to pay or barred from doing business in our country.

That leaves the question of how these plutocrats and their government lackeys can ever compensate for hundreds of thousands of elderly people dying alone without ever seeing and holding their children and grandchildren again (the elderly people who have the misfortune to have families who are so unduly frightened and hysterical as to submit to the „order“ to never be with their parents and grandparents in person until quote allowed). We know two families who told their elderly relatives not to attend their own grandchildren‘s wedding! They haven’t ever held their new grandbabies (and one great-grandbaby), either. Sick. We know someone who died and whose relatives were mostly too hysterical to attend his funeral. Also sick.

Something more than higher taxes will be appropriate as lawful punishment for these plutocrats and other pro-lockdown bullies, though they can never make up for the unnecessary despair and loneliness they have caused.

You hit the nail on the head, Beckow.

FWIW, my nearly-80-year-old Mom and her numerous non-hysterical, fairminded friends of similar age agree with you. Most haven‘t altered their lives much during the plan-demic, and almost none of them expect younger people to give up their livelihoods, social and romantic lives, and prospects for the future. God bless them. Would that more people, of all ages, were as rational and GENUINELY compassionate as they are.

Good for you, my sensible Swedish friend. Glad to hear it.

Once my work and our children‘s schooling went all online, the first thing we did was effectively move from Hysteria-fornia to my Mom‘s house on the East Coast (in a still-hysterical and authoritarian jurisdiction, but generally more open and free than Cali, which doesn‘t take much).

The children are now closer to my Mom than ever, and they have a network of our old family friends showering attention and affection on them, dining and praying and drinking together at her house at least every week. They go to the playground without being harassed by thugs with badges, at least so far. They may even be able to play Little League baseball and attend summer camp here, while that may not be quote allowed in California in 2021.

Be with your parents and grandparents, people. Live and smile and breathe and stand up to tyranny and poverty pushed by hysterics.

Perhaps smarter ones were ‘scholar hetmits’ – smart fellows who refused to serve the Imperium and lived as recluse in some secluded mountain minding their own things….

It was extremely common for officials to grow disgusted with petty politics and retreat to the mountains.

One of the things that kept China stable for so long was this culture of the “drop out” – you could simply opt out of society if you weren’t interested in getting involved in its stupidity, or were different or had a deeper or larger vision in any way. “Drop out culture” was respected and accepted by the mainstream – entire mountain districts were crawling with hermits.

What led to all the revolutions in the West, is that there was no real drop out culture, so if you were different, you had to fight to gain social acceptance. The social rules were the “logos”.

And the more intelligent members of society are always drop outs – beyond a certain IQ, you cant take mainstream life seriously anymore, with its petty ambitions and fears.

Later, lots of Europeans found escape in the exotic colonies of Eutopean powers, and in the newly opened up primitive places, but after that dried up, the pressure was back on.

Its a pity.

I thought about this for awhile, and I think I disagree pretty considerably(though not totally). Its an image, similar to the “oriental despotism” idea that was popular in the West, but it is largely inaccurate to understanding Chinese culture and history, and indeed overstates the amount of state centralization that China possessed.

China hasn’t really had a “big man” society for thousands of years, the last one that might fit would be Emperor Qin(and as I’ll note later, I’m skeptical). The notion of a divine Emperor was ultimately much more Japanese and Zheng Chenggong noted the tremendous lack of enthusiasm in Chinese soldiers to “die for the Emperor” as compared to his native Japan. The Emperor as a God-King concept seemed to have been dismissed in most practical levels, and opposed even by the Emperors themselves, for example, when Tang Taizong(probably China’s greatest Emperor) mostly refused to waste time by going to shamanistic activities as the intermediary of the heavens.

Some Emperors(as suggested by Sinotibetan) were quite tyrannical, like the Yongle Emperor of Ming but as a general rule, the emperors seemed more frustrated than dominant(even tyrannical emperors can only kill people, not increase the organization or efficiency of systems). Tang Taizong was effective but only through tireless politics(that took quite a significant personal strain on him), Tang Xuanzong appeared to burnt out and allowed the An Lushan rebellion to overtake him – the same can be said of the Wanli and Jiajing Emperors(and countless others, really), and that’s not considering the ones that were dominated by concubine politics or family clans. The extremity of this could be seen where courtiers attempt to actively deceive the Wanli Emperor on the basic point of Japanese negotiation(they lied to him that the Japanese accepted their loss, while the Japanese claimed victory – a hilariously insane contraversion of reality), but also in the number of agencies for spies that were needed because of lack of faith in the local officials.

So in practice, I think that there’s actually more consensus needed in China due to the expectations of multiple overlapping unspoken rules and expectations, and you can sort of see this even in casual things; a CEO in the West can be expected to downsize his company without much comment, while in Asia there are “social considerations” that may be applied to him.

That said, yes, I think there’s more respect for an “expert class” such that deference is extended not toward any specific individual, but toward the idea of a class of individuals who have education(and this is where you see even the modern Chinese obsession with credentialism). That, and collectivism means that orders to mask up and fall in line can happen, but this is not usually a dynamic or speedy process(I believe the Wuhan administration, fittingly, concealed CORVID from the central government as well).

China, in particular, really should be seen as the child of the great beasts of bureaucracy, because then as now, its really most notable for having a huge number of mostly well-educated and reasonably intelligent individuals in a position of authority responsible for others, and this has been noted elsewhere that China is an “excellent middle manager country,” which ultimately really rather sidelines both the notion of exceptional godlike leaders or mass popular agreement to future objectives. This can work well, when the levers of the great beast of bureaucracy agree on what it is to do(and they did, with Corona), but imo that’s usually not the case. Rival politics are endemic, with the major modern change that the ancient family clans have been broken forever.

You make a lot of assumptions about AK without knowing him.

It should be noted that he also supports UBI and as far as I know, as never signaled against financial support for those disadvantaged by the pandemic. If anything, I believe that he once opined hope that pandemic support would lead into more general acceptance of UBI.

Income inequality is higher in China than the US.

Its almost as if in China, the government forms an independent oligarchich bloc that will brook no rivals to its right to exploit the people, and can apparently do so more harshly than elsewhere.

But hey, appearances are what matter, not substance. A Chinese oligarchhas his power limited by an autocratic government. Must be a victory for the prople, not autocracy.

Or maybe such state interference ends up deterring innovators?