> In the age of Covid, salus has taken on a very literal meaning. Some countries have done a poor job of containing the SARS-Cov-2 virus. Other countries are ruled by Xi Jinping. It’s just one data point, of course…
Every time you make an offhand comment like this, I have to wonder. You're a smart guy. How do you look at what has been happening in the world, how do you look at all the statistics available, and conclude that China did the right thing?
I live in one of the _least_ locked down places in the world. Our formal lockdown lasted I think 6 weeks, in March 2020. We didn't even bother to mandate masks until July and, when we did, half the people didn't follow it. Everyone started breaking the rules en masse in October 2020, and what rules there were were formally removed in March 2021.
In spite of this:
* Our mortality rate (deaths per pop) is about half of the US average
* Our hospitals were at no point anywhere close to full
* Mortality rate _and_ fatality rate (deaths per infection) have been more than double in Canada, where my parents live, where their city "enjoyed" one of the strictest lockdowns in the (western) world
Further, every measure implemented here has had absolutely no effect whatsoever of the case rate. We know this, because city hall publishes a convenient chart with all of the dates of policy changes superimposed on the daily case rate. And every measure here had absolutely no effect whatsoever on the hospitalization rate. We know this because we have had three spikes now, under radically different circumstances, and all three of them have been the same:
* The first spike happened during the rather brief window of time when everyone was scared and actually complying with both the rules and the suggestions.
* The second spike happened when everyone was fed up with the rules and routinely breaking them
* The third spike happened after >70% of the population was vaccinated
All three spikes (as measured by daily hospitalization rate) are nearly identical. Each is about 12 weeks long (June 2020-Sept 2020, Nov 2020-Feb 2021, July 2021-Oct 2021. Each peaks around 80 new hospitalizations per day. Each takes about 2 weeks between entering the 'highest risk' category and the peak. (Note that the categories are all suggestions; an upgrade of the risk does not trigger any increase in lockdowns or covid controls, and so there is no reason to believe this is causal). Each falls as quickly as it rose after peaking.
By all available data in my city, lockdowns, distancing, event closures, mask rules, hell even vaccines, have not meaningfully changed the arc of the pandemic in either direction. This is obvious from looking at our data (sources below) and I don't understand how someone as smart as you can look at this and conclude "yeah but China still did the right thing".
We can even take it a step further and look at the actual data collected by the city. I will save you the full writeup, suffice it to say: people >60 years old comprise ~11% of all cases but ~74% of all deaths. As of this moment, across the entire timeline of the pandemic, only one person under the age of 20 has died (22,000 cases in that age group). As it is, only people who were already sick with some kind of significant comorbidity are dying.
Which is all a very long-winded way of saying, not only have all of our controls done literally zero (and this is measured, not projected, not calculated), but the severity of the situation is such that it's not a problem anyway.
So with my covid rant out of the way: I do not understand how you can look at all of this and still conclude that China did the right thing with this virus.
>Our mortality rate (deaths per pop) is about half of the US average
Doesn't say much. It depends on population density, tourism/travel levels, climate, youthulness of the population, access to primary care, number of ECUs, and many other aspects besides, including particular local gene peculiarities and cultural norms (e.g. Swedish people, for example, aren't exactly cordial, they kept social distancing compared to other peoples, way before it was cool, or needed for Covid).
China did a great job despite most/all of the above being against it.
I don't think you or I or most anyone actually knows how or how well China did. What we do know is that even the territories most amenable to locking down or having a good handle on the population's behavior (islands: Hawaii, Iceland, New Zealand) aren't able to prevail, so I call bullshit on China's "success".
I think most of the doubt is due to a knee-jerk reaction that they can't but lie (because, it's China duh!), itself based on western misconceptions of what's going on in China, on cheapo "foreign policy booster" reporting, by western Pravda equivalents like NYT, WP, the Economist, and so on, and of course "soft power" "N"GOs. If you don't trust those sources on Trump, the Capitol, and other matters, you shouldn't trust their global "reporting" either.
Now, there are millions of foreigners living in China, including about 80K Americans. Do they see something else than success? There's also tons of westerners living in Vietnam and nearby countries, which also have comparable success.
If you've lived in such countries (I had), you'll find it's quite trivial (perhaps even more than in the US during the Orange Man Bad craze) to get to the field truth. Heck, even China is hardly Maoist China on that matter, and far from 1980s USSR even.
It's not that I doubt China because they're communist or authoritarian, it's that to believe in their fantastical success at controlling a highly transmissible virus in a country of 1.4 billion people and a huge territory full of large cities would defy reason and logic.
I think the Chinese just figured out that COVID isn't as bad as they initially feared.
If my government and the media here, in the USA, declared success, we'd all see it, let's be honest. If you didn't get a constant stream of news about COVID variants and the latest political battles over the management of the virus, would you even know it were a thing? I sure wouldn't.
But in a way, if they did that, doesn't that in itself count as a vindication of the Chinese system? In any western country, just deciding to not think about Covid is not an option because the media complex will not let you stop thinking about it.
First of all, our media is delivering the propaganda message from our own government. If you remove that aspect, then, what would be the vindication of the Chinese system? That the media is completely beholden to the government? Is that an absolute good?
Despite the corruption and decadence, on the whole, I'd still rather have our system than theirs.
I agree. Even if we argue that for some hypothetical disease the Yarvinite pandemic control paradigm is correct, Covid wouldn't merit it. We know exactly what it looks like if you just ignore Covid and let it rip, because Hasidim, Amish, Florida have done it. TLDR: it's no big deal, and definitely not worth the measures that China took to control it, even assuming that these measures worked as advertised. The correct response to Covid, is wear a coat and stay away from the guy on the bus who sneezes.
Actually, this entire post is like that but you just happen to understand something about COVID. Curtis Yarvin Thought is most useful as a source of good metaphors, interesting categorizations, and the naming of phenomena, not in the validity of its assertions or logical conclusions.
I think it's a mistake to argue with Curtis's logic, for it is not the point. It's what Bob Murphy did in his critique of Curtis's post on inflation.
It's a little bit like the treatment that Thumbelina was getting from the beetles:
> “She has only two legs! how ugly that looks.”
> “She has no feelers,” said another.
> “Her waist is quite slim. Pooh! she is like a human being.”
> “Oh! she is ugly,” said all the lady cockchafers
I get the impression that, like a lot of what Moldbug writes, this was written for his peers as a gateway, rather than for people who have been redpilled for over a decade (like me).
In the event that it's not, I suspect that Moldbug has a too-rosy picture of China. It seems evident even on the face that the country's development has not been "slow and steady", but rather "cancerous and phantasmal". Expansion (or improvement) occurs too often due to rank self-interest, with no regard for the health of the state (cancer) and that expansion is frequently so thinly disguised and cheap that it doesn't count for anything at all. Condemned, empty cities all being dynamited at once. This is Xi Jinping's China?
By all accounts, China is afflicted by much the same malady we are, and is not headed perpetually up to a golden throne, but arcing, perhaps not at its zenith yet, but close. We can read Xi's "talked talk" but we're not seeing a "walked walk", we're seeing gutter oil and paper mache buildings. Americans can laugh at cheap Chinese Harbor Freight junk hitting their shelves, but it seems we get the good stuff, and the Chinese get the junk. This is salus populi? Doesn't seem like it. Even moving steadily, not too fast, which is a good idea, you could at least make sure the food wasn't cooked in feces, and fire Party officials who oversaw building projects which fleeced the government.
I am at the underbelly with a magnifying glass, I know. Not all of China is like this, but much of it seems to be. And from my distant perch and telescopic lens, it looks like China is suffering the same malady that the rest of the world is.
The most common criticism of your writing that I see, Curtis, is that you "don't account for the spiritual element". I happen to think these critics are right about that, but they're also wrong. I myself am an atheist, but I see the gaping spiritual hole they describe. However, what they propose is... The Bagger 293 that dug the hole? Really? Anyway, I don't bring this up because I know the answer, but just to reinforce that I don't think China escapes this without the same kind of spiritual reform we'd need, which might not be something we'd recognize immediately as "religious". It could even be some kind of modification and canonization of Xi Jinping Thought (probably after he's dead) or something similar. But, more likely, China goes down just like we will. Even if it's the "Egypt" in our latter-day Bronze Age Collapse, it will probably be crippled. And trying to make the West more like China won't help us, either, I think.
Your assessment of China (if you live there, forgive me) seems too grim and Western-biased. Do you think most Chinese regard their situation as better or worse than those in the past? Saying stuff like “food cooked in feces,” if not just a pointless cultural jab, is just missing the trajectory of China’s arc: certainly in the near future they’ll be eating just as well as us. Personally, I think food-communism is the next fashion trend waiting to burst from the university doors, as we can see from the soy-bug-schmeet bombardment, so there’s really no need for such hubris.
That said, did you read the end of the essay? I think it captures the spirit of your concern, which rings true. The Chinese have few remaining colorful traditions, no great art, no great architecture (most of ours at least still stands), no modern literary tradition. They can’t replace us and even if we’re decaying in every category, nobody will jump from the weak horse to the weaker horse.
On how the Chinese regard their situation… First, you can look at Taiwan as a suggestion of what an alternative timeline for China could have looked like. Second, when you are talking about the Chinese, do you mean some specific, thoughtful individuals, or the society at large? If it’s the latter, then it’s like asking children about what they think about *their* circumstances. It’s not like their opinion doesn’t matter, but you can’t make decisions or assess the situation as if it were *all* that mattered or even in some way accurate.
1. Grim assessment of China: More like a grim assessment of the predicament of the world, which I *don't* think China is an exception to.
2. Western-biased: Hell, you should hear my assessment of the West, then!
3. Chinese situation improving: Yes, though more slowly than people pretend, and past performance does not guarantee future results. How many countries are "up and coming" has-beens? A lot.
4. Food cooked in feces is literally true, look up gutter oil. How a supposedly benevolent philosopher-king like Xi could let that happen in his country raises a lot of questions about his philosophy, his benevolence, and his kingship.
5. Western food getting worse, having problems, etc: Yes, we're going to be well fucked.
6. End of the essay: Yes I did. Let me get this straight: You strolled in to argue with me, but you agree with me?
You're right, in retrospect I didn't read the beginning of your comment thoroughly enough. Some of your inflammatory language struck me initially as the same mindless patriotardism that infects the right whenever anyone mentions China (that one can see elsewhere in this comment section). Now I see we mostly agree.
That gutter oil stuff is crap, though. America has the least healthy food culture on the planet; we chow down on plastic cheese and pigs'-eyes hot dogs and the like every day. The only difference is we pay not to see it happen. And philosopher-king Xi's only opinion on street food should be *de minimis non curat lex*.
I was a little bemused by the end of your comment because I don't think there's a single time Curtis has substantively mentioned China on this blog without bringing up the "spiritual capacity" question, most prominently in "We don't have to live like this."
I'm not going to go round and round the "whatabout" tree with you. The idea that allowing swindlers to cook food in sewage is fine because it's minimalist ruling is an absurd angle. Going back to the "but food in America..." watering hole doesn't help you, either. My tap has a sophisticated RO water filtration system and we pull drinking water from a special purified reservoir because the water quality in my state is so bad that people would rather get dehydrated than drink it, *but that has no bearing whatsoever on China.*
If China wants to be the beacon for the world, let alone its axis, it will have to change a lot of what it's doing - probably including the gutter oil.
How does it have no bearing? You're judging China based on some publicized LiveLeak videos of the culinary practices of their dirt-poor lowest class, but apparently bringing up how Americans' food culture is far less healthy, and has actually been industrialized into a central pillar of the economy that kills us by the millions, is irrelevant.
China's weakness is only its lack of international ideological institutions. The reason America gets away with our soulless consumption practices, and China gets hammered for street food, is a) the power of the media (there's your "beacon of the world") and b) the American narcissism of the online right.
"Lying flat" does not mean NEET. China doesn't really have many NEETs, as far as I know. Social welfare won't support it. You work, or you die.
"Lying flat" means "doing the absolute bare-minimum necessary to survive." A lot of young Chinese people have concluded that there's no real way to get ahead, and the rewards available are not remotely commensurate with the demands placed upon them.
That this is increasingly viewed as a problem by the CCP would seem to be a big problem for your underlying thesis here.
I think I get what you mean. "Lying flat" specifically refers to people with jobs. But given how shitty many of those jobs are, and how hard one must work in China to have a standard of living that approximates that of a NEET in the US, there's undeniably some equivalence.
But given the work Yarvin has the NEET concept do in his post, I'm not sure that equivalence is relevant. Yarvin seems to imply that people with work to do have purpose and meaning in their lives. The very existence of the "lying flat" concept would seem to put paid to that implication, particularly as Yarvin seems to assume that China is better governed than the US.
Right, Xi is talking about the working-class attitude, which is "lying flat". The working-class state of mind is a certain kind of culture, where one is happy to just be what they are and pursue their hobbies, however pointless they may be judged by society. Like working on junky cars or playing video games.
As I understand this lying flat comment, Xi wants the population at large to adopt the ***middle-class attitude of always striving***. This is consistent with the other thing he said that Curtis quoted, which is that the Party wants to expand the middle-income population, drawing in especially the lower-income people.
Kind of phoning it in lately, not gonna lie. I suspect there's reasons other than writer's block too, so I won't complain too much. If you need inspiration Curtis - I'm sure a lot of us would be interested in your opinion on pretty much anything in our increasingly insane media cycle. That or read and review one of those continental schizos you avoid so much - I'm sure your 'post-leftist' audience will love it.
A remark on the Latin that I hope will be sufficiently gay even for your friend the historian: Your favoured version of the phrase, salus populi suprema lex, omits the verb. More common is salus populi suprema lex esto. I looked up Missouri's Great Seal and found it to use the latter version.
The verb 'esto' is an imperative, giving the phrase the meaning "*let* the health of the people be the supreme law". Without it, one could read it either in that way, or, as you did, as a factual statement – that the health of the people simply is the supreme law. I find this particular ambiguity particularly interesting in that it pinpoints where is meets ought in your politics. That is to say, something other than salus populi can indeed be set up as the supreme law, for a time, but the ultimate effect of loss of 'health' is death – of a people no less than of a person.
Apart from that, you are certainly owed some acknowledgement for being the only guy I know actually to take up Logo_daedalus up on his challenge to "read Xi Jinping Thought". Rather you than me, sir! I do not consider myself qualified to judge your propositions that China cannot create anything like a true cultural aristocracy, or that China will inevitably be destroyed for its want. Instead, I offer something testable – although it'll take a decade.
I assert that life in China is fundamentally lacking for a great many Chinese people, and that they don't anticipate this changing even if they should continue to become richer. And as evidence, I point to the total fertility rate. China's TFR is currently somewhere between 0.9 and 1.05. For reference, the replacement rate is 2.1. Xi is well aware that TFR must rise rapidly to avoid disaster by the middle of this century, and has begun taking steps to reverse the previous one-child policy. I assert that this won't work. China is just not the sort of place into which the Chinese want to bring new life. (True also for non-Chinese, a fortiori.) If TFR is above 1.6 by 2031, I'm wrong. My bet is that if Xi bans contraception and abortion he might be able to get a bump to 1.3.
Certainly most Western countries have the same problem to a lesser degree, with the exception of my own beloved Zion, where even the secular Jewish women have a TFR of 2.1. But if China continues to be significantly worse on this very simple, very unfakeable test of how much skin in the game the people of China actually have, it would be well advised to take Xi's vision of salus populi 'cum grano salis'.
How is the "total fertility rate" any proof that people are dissatisfied with China?
First, it's low in most EU countries too, and of course in Japan. The US is a peculiarity (still not that high, but high), but I'm sure a large part is hispanics and other immigrants.
Second, it's after decades of the "one child" policy, where only one child per family was allowed - a rate of 1.0. This, naturally, does leave a certain impact, and also creates many spoiled only children who'd rather not have children of their own (since they, themselves, must be the center of their world, always).
People will say and do a lot if the incentives are there for them to do so. But women will generally not have and raise children unless either they genuinely want to, or they are made to do so in some fashion. I regard one of the strongest tests of whether people feel good about the future to be whether they want to bring children into it.
As I said, fertility is low in most Western countries (by which I meant high development countries, in this case), but it is generally not lower than in China. Nor was China's TFR ever so low as 1.0, because the one-child policy was applied highly unevenly. While the state-supplied data on this are, shall we say, a little strange, TFR appears to be about as low as it ever has been.
Moreover, the Israeli example does prove that high development and americanization do not inevitably cause sub-replacement fertility. So my interim conclusion is that there's something quite badly wrong with at least some parts of the West in how "healthy" they are to raise children in – but also that China is worse.
The creation of spoiled only children is a good point, because it would shift some of the "unhealthiness" from the environment to the people themselves, making it harder for state policy to reverse the TFR decline. Some Chinese social scientists have spoken of the "low fertility trap" in this connexion. But bear in mind that the one-child policy was never strictly applied in rural areas, and even if China is rapidly urbanizing, nevertheless the young people coming into the cities are very often from two or three child families.
I think TFR is a great metric for measuring "the condition" of a country. Anecdotally, I have spent lots of time in working in economic "boom towns". Wedding rings and babies seem to spring up like daisies when people are well employed and hopeful about the future.
The issue with your argument, which is fine on its own terms, is that you overrate the real power that the CEO, chief engineer, POTUS of the world, Sovereign, etc. has over complex social systems. The only way to "solve Rwanda" in the way you describe is with a bloody bed of Procrustes, at the end of which operation you'd likely have few of the original Rwandans. So you succeed in refuting effective altruists within their own frame, which is easy enough, but the frame of applying an engineering cast of mind to social problems is the problem.
I hate to rain on this People's Liberation Army parade, but I feel like something at least needs to be said about the situation of the Uyghurs. On the one had, I doubt Curtis is bluepilled enough to believe that their situation is just Western capitalist propaganda, and on the other, I doubt Curtis is redpilled enough to believe that ethnically cleansing inconvenient races is an essential aspect of altruism. So where does their, at the very least severe mistreatment, fit into the benevolent omnipotence of comrade Xi?
Like everyone else, I know nothing about China. Don't read the language, never been there. Everyone who guesses what's next for China is always wrong. So it's probably wrong to guess China will eventually succumb to the cool brahmin aristocracy.
Being an American, I DO know something about "Cool." What's Fonzie like? Not like China. Sometimes China tries to be Fonzie, but it doesn't quite work. The Taiping rebellion tried to be Christian, didn't work. Mao tried to be communist, worked out better but Huawei is certainly not a worker-owned cooperative. If they tried to be a Netflix-age liberal democracy it'd be weird, and wouldn't work out anything like it's supposed to. Rainbow flags flying over conversion-therapy compounds, something like that.
The idea of The Party as just a group of effective people loyal to leadership, nothing more, might work for a while. But how different is that from the Civil Service, ideally a group of effective people loyal to process? Wouldn't it be subject to the same corruption over time?
"The idea of The Party as just a group of effective people loyal to leadership, nothing more, might work for a while. But how different is that from the Civil Service[]?"
Indeed. Not to mention the intelligence department of our Party, academia, which requires aspiring members to write loyalty oaths to Diversity. Three of its members recently received the Nobel Prize in Economics for "proving" that, actually, immigration *doesn't* suppress labor wages. Who'da'thunk!
Here's the problem with loyalty: it is not based on reality. It is based on power. Hence, while forcing people to believe nonsense is not strictly necessary to foment loyalty, it is and will always remain an appealing method. "How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?"
Like you I know nothing about China, but I do know a little Chinese, thanks to some guy on the internet named Spandrell (https://spandrell.com/2015/06/03/the-purpose-of-absurdity/): "zhi lu wei ma." Which means, letter by letter, "point deer, make horse." It comes from a story about minister Zhao Gao of the early Qin dynasty who, while consolidating power after the death of the dynasty's first emperor, brought a deer into the palace, presented it to the new emperor, and said he'd brought him a fine horse. Everyone in the court who was like, "Dude, that's a fucking deer, what are you on about?" was not in the court for much longer. It's kind of like The Emperor's New Clothes, if The Emperor's New Clothes ended with the emperor purging that brat and his whole family.
Which is the point. This dream of a Party devoted to reality is just that. And, in my estimation, it represents an insurmountable obstacle to reasonable political action. The only silver lining is that our Party's loyalty spiral has exceeded orbital velocity, and more and more people just can't keep up. And the people who can are hurtling further into deep space. If nothing else, we get to make fun of them. Preferably over the Holidays.
It's interesting to watch Yarvin's path towards the inevitable realization that any World Government along the lines he advocates will be built in China and led by the Chinese.
Apart from the parts on "democratic centralism", this is fairly bland. Democratic Centralism is a terrible idea that should be abolished from any movement. It leads to either psychopathic leaders who engage in massive purges, or weak leaders that can be controlled by the Politburo. Either way leads to disaster.
China is truly bizarre because they will mix in standard Marxist sloganeering with understandings of sovereignty, international law, and philosophy that would fit right in in pre war Europe
Oh, by the way, I have just discovered Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion in my Audible library. It must have been there for months, so chances are high that I added it based on something I read in Unqualified Reservations or here, and then forgot to listen to it. Either way, I'm almost certain that Curtis is the source.
Thanks a lot, if true!
The immediate first impression is that Walter Lippmann writes in a very modern, rational way. I wouldn't have known it's from 1922 had he not been talking so much about WWI and the politicians of the day. The other first impression is that it's obvious that he's really, really smart.
Imagine a Walter Lippmann podcast!
I'm going to have to listen to it again or read it on paper, it goes by so fast. Reminds me of the first several times I heard Curtis talk - it was difficult to follow and to understand his favorite set of metaphors and references, but then got suddenly easy.
Altruism, doing good for others, that's not Xi Jinping, that's not the Chinese Communist Party, that's not even Communism. All these are disqualified for mass murder, the most effective mass murderers, perhaps, but that still does not bring them around from evil to good.
What if the USA already was the good world dictator, yet we let ourselves become corrupted, so we are on the verge of going over the water fall into a new dark age of human civilization, Communist World Domination.
Effective Altruism plus Communist World Domination does not equal Heaven. It equals Hell.
Effective Altruism plus Capitalist USA World Domination does not equal Heaven, nor Hell, yet it is the best we can get.
Communism assumes humans are all angels (at least that all Communists will behave like angels when they get into power, they can stop acting like devils). That's a lie, proven by the hostility and hatred displayed among the Left, even now in 2021 when the Left has never had so much influence and power, they are acting like devils, from a conservative point of view, silencing conservative thoughts in public and private, spying on fellow citizens as Trump Voter equals domestic terrorist but violent rioters and looters demanding the end of the USA are not domestic terrorists, as if?
Communism is hatred and jealousy from lazy folks claiming Communism is good, despite being impossible on a large scale. The beauty and genius of Capitalism is that instead of claiming we are all angels, Capitalism accepts that humans are not angels, so it does not seek to change humans, rather it seeks to accept the truth of humans and provide a framework that we can best live under, the most good for the most people. It expects us to all do what is best for us in this system. Capitalism is the real deal, while Communism is always the fallen world nightmare version of a fake solution.
> In the age of Covid, salus has taken on a very literal meaning. Some countries have done a poor job of containing the SARS-Cov-2 virus. Other countries are ruled by Xi Jinping. It’s just one data point, of course…
Every time you make an offhand comment like this, I have to wonder. You're a smart guy. How do you look at what has been happening in the world, how do you look at all the statistics available, and conclude that China did the right thing?
I live in one of the _least_ locked down places in the world. Our formal lockdown lasted I think 6 weeks, in March 2020. We didn't even bother to mandate masks until July and, when we did, half the people didn't follow it. Everyone started breaking the rules en masse in October 2020, and what rules there were were formally removed in March 2021.
In spite of this:
* Our mortality rate (deaths per pop) is about half of the US average
* Our hospitals were at no point anywhere close to full
* Mortality rate _and_ fatality rate (deaths per infection) have been more than double in Canada, where my parents live, where their city "enjoyed" one of the strictest lockdowns in the (western) world
Further, every measure implemented here has had absolutely no effect whatsoever of the case rate. We know this, because city hall publishes a convenient chart with all of the dates of policy changes superimposed on the daily case rate. And every measure here had absolutely no effect whatsoever on the hospitalization rate. We know this because we have had three spikes now, under radically different circumstances, and all three of them have been the same:
* The first spike happened during the rather brief window of time when everyone was scared and actually complying with both the rules and the suggestions.
* The second spike happened when everyone was fed up with the rules and routinely breaking them
* The third spike happened after >70% of the population was vaccinated
All three spikes (as measured by daily hospitalization rate) are nearly identical. Each is about 12 weeks long (June 2020-Sept 2020, Nov 2020-Feb 2021, July 2021-Oct 2021. Each peaks around 80 new hospitalizations per day. Each takes about 2 weeks between entering the 'highest risk' category and the peak. (Note that the categories are all suggestions; an upgrade of the risk does not trigger any increase in lockdowns or covid controls, and so there is no reason to believe this is causal). Each falls as quickly as it rose after peaking.
By all available data in my city, lockdowns, distancing, event closures, mask rules, hell even vaccines, have not meaningfully changed the arc of the pandemic in either direction. This is obvious from looking at our data (sources below) and I don't understand how someone as smart as you can look at this and conclude "yeah but China still did the right thing".
We can even take it a step further and look at the actual data collected by the city. I will save you the full writeup, suffice it to say: people >60 years old comprise ~11% of all cases but ~74% of all deaths. As of this moment, across the entire timeline of the pandemic, only one person under the age of 20 has died (22,000 cases in that age group). As it is, only people who were already sick with some kind of significant comorbidity are dying.
Which is all a very long-winded way of saying, not only have all of our controls done literally zero (and this is measured, not projected, not calculated), but the severity of the situation is such that it's not a problem anyway.
So with my covid rant out of the way: I do not understand how you can look at all of this and still conclude that China did the right thing with this virus.
Sources:
Austin TX risk level dashboard (shows historical hospitalization rate) https://austin.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/0ad7fa50ba504e73be9945ec2a7841cb
Austin TX daily surveillance dashboard (shows demographic data, and the graph with the policy changes marked) https://austin.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/39e4f8d4acb0433baae6d15a931fa984
Manitoba, Canada covid dashboard (shows all relevant stats for my hometown in Canada)
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/index.html#/29e86894292e449aa75763b077281b5b?rha=Winnipeg
>Our mortality rate (deaths per pop) is about half of the US average
Doesn't say much. It depends on population density, tourism/travel levels, climate, youthulness of the population, access to primary care, number of ECUs, and many other aspects besides, including particular local gene peculiarities and cultural norms (e.g. Swedish people, for example, aren't exactly cordial, they kept social distancing compared to other peoples, way before it was cool, or needed for Covid).
China did a great job despite most/all of the above being against it.
I don't think you or I or most anyone actually knows how or how well China did. What we do know is that even the territories most amenable to locking down or having a good handle on the population's behavior (islands: Hawaii, Iceland, New Zealand) aren't able to prevail, so I call bullshit on China's "success".
I think most of the doubt is due to a knee-jerk reaction that they can't but lie (because, it's China duh!), itself based on western misconceptions of what's going on in China, on cheapo "foreign policy booster" reporting, by western Pravda equivalents like NYT, WP, the Economist, and so on, and of course "soft power" "N"GOs. If you don't trust those sources on Trump, the Capitol, and other matters, you shouldn't trust their global "reporting" either.
Now, there are millions of foreigners living in China, including about 80K Americans. Do they see something else than success? There's also tons of westerners living in Vietnam and nearby countries, which also have comparable success.
If you've lived in such countries (I had), you'll find it's quite trivial (perhaps even more than in the US during the Orange Man Bad craze) to get to the field truth. Heck, even China is hardly Maoist China on that matter, and far from 1980s USSR even.
It's not that I doubt China because they're communist or authoritarian, it's that to believe in their fantastical success at controlling a highly transmissible virus in a country of 1.4 billion people and a huge territory full of large cities would defy reason and logic.
I think the Chinese just figured out that COVID isn't as bad as they initially feared.
If my government and the media here, in the USA, declared success, we'd all see it, let's be honest. If you didn't get a constant stream of news about COVID variants and the latest political battles over the management of the virus, would you even know it were a thing? I sure wouldn't.
But in a way, if they did that, doesn't that in itself count as a vindication of the Chinese system? In any western country, just deciding to not think about Covid is not an option because the media complex will not let you stop thinking about it.
First of all, our media is delivering the propaganda message from our own government. If you remove that aspect, then, what would be the vindication of the Chinese system? That the media is completely beholden to the government? Is that an absolute good?
Despite the corruption and decadence, on the whole, I'd still rather have our system than theirs.
I agree. Even if we argue that for some hypothetical disease the Yarvinite pandemic control paradigm is correct, Covid wouldn't merit it. We know exactly what it looks like if you just ignore Covid and let it rip, because Hasidim, Amish, Florida have done it. TLDR: it's no big deal, and definitely not worth the measures that China took to control it, even assuming that these measures worked as advertised. The correct response to Covid, is wear a coat and stay away from the guy on the bus who sneezes.
Actually, this entire post is like that but you just happen to understand something about COVID. Curtis Yarvin Thought is most useful as a source of good metaphors, interesting categorizations, and the naming of phenomena, not in the validity of its assertions or logical conclusions.
I think it's a mistake to argue with Curtis's logic, for it is not the point. It's what Bob Murphy did in his critique of Curtis's post on inflation.
It's a little bit like the treatment that Thumbelina was getting from the beetles:
> “She has only two legs! how ugly that looks.”
> “She has no feelers,” said another.
> “Her waist is quite slim. Pooh! she is like a human being.”
> “Oh! she is ugly,” said all the lady cockchafers
unfortunately your thoughtful comment is actually irrelevant because are from winnipeg and are therefore a hayseed.
I get the impression that, like a lot of what Moldbug writes, this was written for his peers as a gateway, rather than for people who have been redpilled for over a decade (like me).
In the event that it's not, I suspect that Moldbug has a too-rosy picture of China. It seems evident even on the face that the country's development has not been "slow and steady", but rather "cancerous and phantasmal". Expansion (or improvement) occurs too often due to rank self-interest, with no regard for the health of the state (cancer) and that expansion is frequently so thinly disguised and cheap that it doesn't count for anything at all. Condemned, empty cities all being dynamited at once. This is Xi Jinping's China?
By all accounts, China is afflicted by much the same malady we are, and is not headed perpetually up to a golden throne, but arcing, perhaps not at its zenith yet, but close. We can read Xi's "talked talk" but we're not seeing a "walked walk", we're seeing gutter oil and paper mache buildings. Americans can laugh at cheap Chinese Harbor Freight junk hitting their shelves, but it seems we get the good stuff, and the Chinese get the junk. This is salus populi? Doesn't seem like it. Even moving steadily, not too fast, which is a good idea, you could at least make sure the food wasn't cooked in feces, and fire Party officials who oversaw building projects which fleeced the government.
I am at the underbelly with a magnifying glass, I know. Not all of China is like this, but much of it seems to be. And from my distant perch and telescopic lens, it looks like China is suffering the same malady that the rest of the world is.
The most common criticism of your writing that I see, Curtis, is that you "don't account for the spiritual element". I happen to think these critics are right about that, but they're also wrong. I myself am an atheist, but I see the gaping spiritual hole they describe. However, what they propose is... The Bagger 293 that dug the hole? Really? Anyway, I don't bring this up because I know the answer, but just to reinforce that I don't think China escapes this without the same kind of spiritual reform we'd need, which might not be something we'd recognize immediately as "religious". It could even be some kind of modification and canonization of Xi Jinping Thought (probably after he's dead) or something similar. But, more likely, China goes down just like we will. Even if it's the "Egypt" in our latter-day Bronze Age Collapse, it will probably be crippled. And trying to make the West more like China won't help us, either, I think.
Your assessment of China (if you live there, forgive me) seems too grim and Western-biased. Do you think most Chinese regard their situation as better or worse than those in the past? Saying stuff like “food cooked in feces,” if not just a pointless cultural jab, is just missing the trajectory of China’s arc: certainly in the near future they’ll be eating just as well as us. Personally, I think food-communism is the next fashion trend waiting to burst from the university doors, as we can see from the soy-bug-schmeet bombardment, so there’s really no need for such hubris.
That said, did you read the end of the essay? I think it captures the spirit of your concern, which rings true. The Chinese have few remaining colorful traditions, no great art, no great architecture (most of ours at least still stands), no modern literary tradition. They can’t replace us and even if we’re decaying in every category, nobody will jump from the weak horse to the weaker horse.
On how the Chinese regard their situation… First, you can look at Taiwan as a suggestion of what an alternative timeline for China could have looked like. Second, when you are talking about the Chinese, do you mean some specific, thoughtful individuals, or the society at large? If it’s the latter, then it’s like asking children about what they think about *their* circumstances. It’s not like their opinion doesn’t matter, but you can’t make decisions or assess the situation as if it were *all* that mattered or even in some way accurate.
I'm just going to use bullets:
1. Grim assessment of China: More like a grim assessment of the predicament of the world, which I *don't* think China is an exception to.
2. Western-biased: Hell, you should hear my assessment of the West, then!
3. Chinese situation improving: Yes, though more slowly than people pretend, and past performance does not guarantee future results. How many countries are "up and coming" has-beens? A lot.
4. Food cooked in feces is literally true, look up gutter oil. How a supposedly benevolent philosopher-king like Xi could let that happen in his country raises a lot of questions about his philosophy, his benevolence, and his kingship.
5. Western food getting worse, having problems, etc: Yes, we're going to be well fucked.
6. End of the essay: Yes I did. Let me get this straight: You strolled in to argue with me, but you agree with me?
You're right, in retrospect I didn't read the beginning of your comment thoroughly enough. Some of your inflammatory language struck me initially as the same mindless patriotardism that infects the right whenever anyone mentions China (that one can see elsewhere in this comment section). Now I see we mostly agree.
That gutter oil stuff is crap, though. America has the least healthy food culture on the planet; we chow down on plastic cheese and pigs'-eyes hot dogs and the like every day. The only difference is we pay not to see it happen. And philosopher-king Xi's only opinion on street food should be *de minimis non curat lex*.
I was a little bemused by the end of your comment because I don't think there's a single time Curtis has substantively mentioned China on this blog without bringing up the "spiritual capacity" question, most prominently in "We don't have to live like this."
I'm not going to go round and round the "whatabout" tree with you. The idea that allowing swindlers to cook food in sewage is fine because it's minimalist ruling is an absurd angle. Going back to the "but food in America..." watering hole doesn't help you, either. My tap has a sophisticated RO water filtration system and we pull drinking water from a special purified reservoir because the water quality in my state is so bad that people would rather get dehydrated than drink it, *but that has no bearing whatsoever on China.*
If China wants to be the beacon for the world, let alone its axis, it will have to change a lot of what it's doing - probably including the gutter oil.
How does it have no bearing? You're judging China based on some publicized LiveLeak videos of the culinary practices of their dirt-poor lowest class, but apparently bringing up how Americans' food culture is far less healthy, and has actually been industrialized into a central pillar of the economy that kills us by the millions, is irrelevant.
China's weakness is only its lack of international ideological institutions. The reason America gets away with our soulless consumption practices, and China gets hammered for street food, is a) the power of the media (there's your "beacon of the world") and b) the American narcissism of the online right.
This is just minimizing China's problems and exaggerating America's. Plain distortion, and in bad faith.
"food cooked in feces" If only this was an exaggeration. Unfortunately, it is true. Look up piss eggs for more of the same.
jordan peterson is fisting that spiritual gape, now in chinese also
how great is that firewall though?
"Lying flat" does not mean NEET. China doesn't really have many NEETs, as far as I know. Social welfare won't support it. You work, or you die.
"Lying flat" means "doing the absolute bare-minimum necessary to survive." A lot of young Chinese people have concluded that there's no real way to get ahead, and the rewards available are not remotely commensurate with the demands placed upon them.
That this is increasingly viewed as a problem by the CCP would seem to be a big problem for your underlying thesis here.
If '"Lying flat" means "doing the absolute bare-minimum necessary to survive."', is it not simply NEET "with Chinese characteristics"?
I think I get what you mean. "Lying flat" specifically refers to people with jobs. But given how shitty many of those jobs are, and how hard one must work in China to have a standard of living that approximates that of a NEET in the US, there's undeniably some equivalence.
But given the work Yarvin has the NEET concept do in his post, I'm not sure that equivalence is relevant. Yarvin seems to imply that people with work to do have purpose and meaning in their lives. The very existence of the "lying flat" concept would seem to put paid to that implication, particularly as Yarvin seems to assume that China is better governed than the US.
So, like NEET-meets-Slackers
Aren't slackers a kind of bohemian class?
Right, Xi is talking about the working-class attitude, which is "lying flat". The working-class state of mind is a certain kind of culture, where one is happy to just be what they are and pursue their hobbies, however pointless they may be judged by society. Like working on junky cars or playing video games.
As I understand this lying flat comment, Xi wants the population at large to adopt the ***middle-class attitude of always striving***. This is consistent with the other thing he said that Curtis quoted, which is that the Party wants to expand the middle-income population, drawing in especially the lower-income people.
Kind of phoning it in lately, not gonna lie. I suspect there's reasons other than writer's block too, so I won't complain too much. If you need inspiration Curtis - I'm sure a lot of us would be interested in your opinion on pretty much anything in our increasingly insane media cycle. That or read and review one of those continental schizos you avoid so much - I'm sure your 'post-leftist' audience will love it.
A remark on the Latin that I hope will be sufficiently gay even for your friend the historian: Your favoured version of the phrase, salus populi suprema lex, omits the verb. More common is salus populi suprema lex esto. I looked up Missouri's Great Seal and found it to use the latter version.
The verb 'esto' is an imperative, giving the phrase the meaning "*let* the health of the people be the supreme law". Without it, one could read it either in that way, or, as you did, as a factual statement – that the health of the people simply is the supreme law. I find this particular ambiguity particularly interesting in that it pinpoints where is meets ought in your politics. That is to say, something other than salus populi can indeed be set up as the supreme law, for a time, but the ultimate effect of loss of 'health' is death – of a people no less than of a person.
Apart from that, you are certainly owed some acknowledgement for being the only guy I know actually to take up Logo_daedalus up on his challenge to "read Xi Jinping Thought". Rather you than me, sir! I do not consider myself qualified to judge your propositions that China cannot create anything like a true cultural aristocracy, or that China will inevitably be destroyed for its want. Instead, I offer something testable – although it'll take a decade.
I assert that life in China is fundamentally lacking for a great many Chinese people, and that they don't anticipate this changing even if they should continue to become richer. And as evidence, I point to the total fertility rate. China's TFR is currently somewhere between 0.9 and 1.05. For reference, the replacement rate is 2.1. Xi is well aware that TFR must rise rapidly to avoid disaster by the middle of this century, and has begun taking steps to reverse the previous one-child policy. I assert that this won't work. China is just not the sort of place into which the Chinese want to bring new life. (True also for non-Chinese, a fortiori.) If TFR is above 1.6 by 2031, I'm wrong. My bet is that if Xi bans contraception and abortion he might be able to get a bump to 1.3.
Certainly most Western countries have the same problem to a lesser degree, with the exception of my own beloved Zion, where even the secular Jewish women have a TFR of 2.1. But if China continues to be significantly worse on this very simple, very unfakeable test of how much skin in the game the people of China actually have, it would be well advised to take Xi's vision of salus populi 'cum grano salis'.
How is the "total fertility rate" any proof that people are dissatisfied with China?
First, it's low in most EU countries too, and of course in Japan. The US is a peculiarity (still not that high, but high), but I'm sure a large part is hispanics and other immigrants.
Second, it's after decades of the "one child" policy, where only one child per family was allowed - a rate of 1.0. This, naturally, does leave a certain impact, and also creates many spoiled only children who'd rather not have children of their own (since they, themselves, must be the center of their world, always).
It is not proof but rather evidence.
People will say and do a lot if the incentives are there for them to do so. But women will generally not have and raise children unless either they genuinely want to, or they are made to do so in some fashion. I regard one of the strongest tests of whether people feel good about the future to be whether they want to bring children into it.
As I said, fertility is low in most Western countries (by which I meant high development countries, in this case), but it is generally not lower than in China. Nor was China's TFR ever so low as 1.0, because the one-child policy was applied highly unevenly. While the state-supplied data on this are, shall we say, a little strange, TFR appears to be about as low as it ever has been.
Moreover, the Israeli example does prove that high development and americanization do not inevitably cause sub-replacement fertility. So my interim conclusion is that there's something quite badly wrong with at least some parts of the West in how "healthy" they are to raise children in – but also that China is worse.
The creation of spoiled only children is a good point, because it would shift some of the "unhealthiness" from the environment to the people themselves, making it harder for state policy to reverse the TFR decline. Some Chinese social scientists have spoken of the "low fertility trap" in this connexion. But bear in mind that the one-child policy was never strictly applied in rural areas, and even if China is rapidly urbanizing, nevertheless the young people coming into the cities are very often from two or three child families.
I think TFR is a great metric for measuring "the condition" of a country. Anecdotally, I have spent lots of time in working in economic "boom towns". Wedding rings and babies seem to spring up like daisies when people are well employed and hopeful about the future.
The issue with your argument, which is fine on its own terms, is that you overrate the real power that the CEO, chief engineer, POTUS of the world, Sovereign, etc. has over complex social systems. The only way to "solve Rwanda" in the way you describe is with a bloody bed of Procrustes, at the end of which operation you'd likely have few of the original Rwandans. So you succeed in refuting effective altruists within their own frame, which is easy enough, but the frame of applying an engineering cast of mind to social problems is the problem.
I hate to rain on this People's Liberation Army parade, but I feel like something at least needs to be said about the situation of the Uyghurs. On the one had, I doubt Curtis is bluepilled enough to believe that their situation is just Western capitalist propaganda, and on the other, I doubt Curtis is redpilled enough to believe that ethnically cleansing inconvenient races is an essential aspect of altruism. So where does their, at the very least severe mistreatment, fit into the benevolent omnipotence of comrade Xi?
I think the Uigher situation is more akin to hard handed colonial style temporary detainment rather than genocide
baysed
Bayes'd
and red-china pilled
bayseed
Like everyone else, I know nothing about China. Don't read the language, never been there. Everyone who guesses what's next for China is always wrong. So it's probably wrong to guess China will eventually succumb to the cool brahmin aristocracy.
Being an American, I DO know something about "Cool." What's Fonzie like? Not like China. Sometimes China tries to be Fonzie, but it doesn't quite work. The Taiping rebellion tried to be Christian, didn't work. Mao tried to be communist, worked out better but Huawei is certainly not a worker-owned cooperative. If they tried to be a Netflix-age liberal democracy it'd be weird, and wouldn't work out anything like it's supposed to. Rainbow flags flying over conversion-therapy compounds, something like that.
The idea of The Party as just a group of effective people loyal to leadership, nothing more, might work for a while. But how different is that from the Civil Service, ideally a group of effective people loyal to process? Wouldn't it be subject to the same corruption over time?
"The idea of The Party as just a group of effective people loyal to leadership, nothing more, might work for a while. But how different is that from the Civil Service[]?"
Indeed. Not to mention the intelligence department of our Party, academia, which requires aspiring members to write loyalty oaths to Diversity. Three of its members recently received the Nobel Prize in Economics for "proving" that, actually, immigration *doesn't* suppress labor wages. Who'da'thunk!
Here's the problem with loyalty: it is not based on reality. It is based on power. Hence, while forcing people to believe nonsense is not strictly necessary to foment loyalty, it is and will always remain an appealing method. "How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?"
Like you I know nothing about China, but I do know a little Chinese, thanks to some guy on the internet named Spandrell (https://spandrell.com/2015/06/03/the-purpose-of-absurdity/): "zhi lu wei ma." Which means, letter by letter, "point deer, make horse." It comes from a story about minister Zhao Gao of the early Qin dynasty who, while consolidating power after the death of the dynasty's first emperor, brought a deer into the palace, presented it to the new emperor, and said he'd brought him a fine horse. Everyone in the court who was like, "Dude, that's a fucking deer, what are you on about?" was not in the court for much longer. It's kind of like The Emperor's New Clothes, if The Emperor's New Clothes ended with the emperor purging that brat and his whole family.
Which is the point. This dream of a Party devoted to reality is just that. And, in my estimation, it represents an insurmountable obstacle to reasonable political action. The only silver lining is that our Party's loyalty spiral has exceeded orbital velocity, and more and more people just can't keep up. And the people who can are hurtling further into deep space. If nothing else, we get to make fun of them. Preferably over the Holidays.
Why is "cool" important? It's specific to our own culture, but it's so important here that we think it's essential and universal.
Reminds me of Dinesh-the-cool-cousin...
It's interesting to watch Yarvin's path towards the inevitable realization that any World Government along the lines he advocates will be built in China and led by the Chinese.
Apart from the parts on "democratic centralism", this is fairly bland. Democratic Centralism is a terrible idea that should be abolished from any movement. It leads to either psychopathic leaders who engage in massive purges, or weak leaders that can be controlled by the Politburo. Either way leads to disaster.
stand strong on zanzibar
“Take stock, citizen bacillus,
Now that there are so many billions of you,
Bleeding through your opened veins,
Into your bathtub, or into the Pacific
Of that by which they may remember you.”
China is truly bizarre because they will mix in standard Marxist sloganeering with understandings of sovereignty, international law, and philosophy that would fit right in in pre war Europe
Oh, by the way, I have just discovered Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion in my Audible library. It must have been there for months, so chances are high that I added it based on something I read in Unqualified Reservations or here, and then forgot to listen to it. Either way, I'm almost certain that Curtis is the source.
Thanks a lot, if true!
The immediate first impression is that Walter Lippmann writes in a very modern, rational way. I wouldn't have known it's from 1922 had he not been talking so much about WWI and the politicians of the day. The other first impression is that it's obvious that he's really, really smart.
Imagine a Walter Lippmann podcast!
I'm going to have to listen to it again or read it on paper, it goes by so fast. Reminds me of the first several times I heard Curtis talk - it was difficult to follow and to understand his favorite set of metaphors and references, but then got suddenly easy.
Shark tank dreams
Dunk tank reality
Ozzy bites the heads
Xi bites the hands
but the heart remains
You overcooked the fish
but the hook is in your nose
Orange be ugly, yo!
and everyone was pleased
except those who had to mow the grass
and clean the suicide nets.
Nothing and less than nothing.
Subjected to futility,
in hope of trading beauty for ashes
The staff is broken.
The bowl poured out.
keys jangle,
the scroll opened,
the coal kissed,
tears collected,
the screams
beneath the altar,
are not thrown by
short arms
nor unclean hands.
Altruism, doing good for others, that's not Xi Jinping, that's not the Chinese Communist Party, that's not even Communism. All these are disqualified for mass murder, the most effective mass murderers, perhaps, but that still does not bring them around from evil to good.
What if the USA already was the good world dictator, yet we let ourselves become corrupted, so we are on the verge of going over the water fall into a new dark age of human civilization, Communist World Domination.
Effective Altruism plus Communist World Domination does not equal Heaven. It equals Hell.
Effective Altruism plus Capitalist USA World Domination does not equal Heaven, nor Hell, yet it is the best we can get.
Communism assumes humans are all angels (at least that all Communists will behave like angels when they get into power, they can stop acting like devils). That's a lie, proven by the hostility and hatred displayed among the Left, even now in 2021 when the Left has never had so much influence and power, they are acting like devils, from a conservative point of view, silencing conservative thoughts in public and private, spying on fellow citizens as Trump Voter equals domestic terrorist but violent rioters and looters demanding the end of the USA are not domestic terrorists, as if?
Communism is hatred and jealousy from lazy folks claiming Communism is good, despite being impossible on a large scale. The beauty and genius of Capitalism is that instead of claiming we are all angels, Capitalism accepts that humans are not angels, so it does not seek to change humans, rather it seeks to accept the truth of humans and provide a framework that we can best live under, the most good for the most people. It expects us to all do what is best for us in this system. Capitalism is the real deal, while Communism is always the fallen world nightmare version of a fake solution.
America is a thoroughly communist country.
you must be new here
The original Mayor Daley ruled as Chairman of the Cook County Democratic Committee, not mayor. It worked.
Hey Uncle Yarv I’m gonna need a review on Wolf Warrior CCP propaganda film STAT. Looks like Hobo With a Shotgun tier acting and writing