Hey man, a never washes his hands, eat off other peoples plate, inhale deeply while others cough, doorknob licking 'its-just-the dang-flu' idiot here. I am 63 years old with one failing kidney who worked unmasked around other unmasked over 320 days in 2020 and on my way to a similar 2021. Here in the oilfield in Texas, its just low on the list for ways to die suddenly. Here is my take:
I think we care about this thing, -worldwide- because it primarily affects old, fat people. Old fat people are abnormally afraid of death and most critically, old fat people run everything. They therefore tell us what to worry about.
Yes it can kill you, so what? So can being fat when you are old - and at much higher rates. No one avoids any of that. Yet for some unknown reason, meaning a few million elitist fat, old f'cks kicking off, we are losing our collective minds.
You are awesome Curtis. I love your writing and I learn something from you almost every time I read Gray Mirror. Death is coming for us all, and 'geologically speaking' haha, in the next instant. I would consider giving this topic near zero time in your head going forward. Move on with your life.
Can we, perhaps, hear some actual facts in the next COVID post about the actual mortality of this disease for those below the average US life expectancy? Or must we continue to rely on the “long covid” complaints of your San Francisco neighbors?
For God’s sake, the one thing always brushed over in these posts is some objective analysis of the data. I know that’s hard to find in almost all public discussion (googling COVID statistics is walking through a minefield of Wikipedia obfuscation, Pravda and culture-war nonsense) but that is precisely what everyone needs.
This post filled in some gaps that you shouldn't gloss over. Set your priors aside and pretend that Covid is serious and you want to stop it. We know how and . . . we're not doing any of the things that work.
For example, my neighbors flew to India and back during the height of the delta outbreak there, while my 4 year old (who already had Covid and recovered after an extra 30 minutes of sleep one night) had to wear a mask inside public places.
If you're not worried about the virus, great, you're in a position that should allow you to see the complete failure of your government to function at even a minimum level of effectiveness. There's lessons in there that are much more interesting than yet another analysis of Covid statistics.
Curtis’ analysis of the failures of government and all of science with regards to this virus are interesting and worth reading. I enjoyed his article calling for a “new science.” His calls for mask-and-needle totalitarianism are annoying because they seem genuinely motivated by an intense fear that Curtis never bothers to explain.
This gives the impression of the exact thing that UR and Gray Mirror have avoided all these years— disloyalty to the truth in service of an attractive policy goal.
Maybe I am statistically illiterate or lazy and simply have not seen the correct data on the Delta variant or such and such… but the most basic information and common sense about this virus continue to leave me with another impression.
"Set your priors aside and pretend that Covid is serious and you want to stop it."
"Predend" is an apt word, as that is exactly what the authorities are doing at the moment - "pretending" Covid-19 is serious. Because this pretense gives them more power. While at the same time they are not doing anything that would actually inconvenience them, personally.
Yarvin is talking about what the state would have done if it was not just "pretending", which is a fair point, but still misses the bigger picture mark. I am not entirely sure if his "solution" is not worse than what we already have, because the assumption that you can just kill off the twin brother of the literal flu by simply quarantining (but for real this time) everyone and everything for a month strikes as one of his autistic thought experiments, like how a perfect level of inter-state competition on Earth will be maintained by an interstellar political cabal armed with Death Star-level space nukes. And lest we forget, we are not here trying to figure out ways how to maximize the power of a totalitarian government, but rather how to maximize the effectiveness of any government. Preferably not a totalitarian one.
I can to an extent see the point of "consider that this was not in fact just another flu that kills predominantly people who have already exceeded the life expectancy of the nation and consider how it illustrates the absolute impotence of our modern state", but it does strike me as a rather useless thought experiment. This is not the Black Death, if some gigachad representative of the Stuart dynasty like Charles II was faced with this "grave threat", he would have most likely simply ignored it and the East India Company would have continued to ship those delicious tea leaves from China completely undisturbed.
Because yes, in a well-adjusted society people do not revere old and fat people to such a degree that when they start dying at a rate of a few percentage points higher than the former average, we have to shut down everything else until this hellish curse is resolved. Even only a month of extreme lockdown and closed borders (assuming this would actually work, which is already a leap of faith) is probably too much of a cost to bear in exchange for saving a couple of years from the life expectancy of the average Boomer. You think those boomers will be able to contribute enough in the span of those extra couple of years to compensate the cost? No way in hell.
Unrelated, but assuming you are the actual Foseti, who used to maintain a very interesting blog back when: I hope you will consider writing again. Or if you are writing somewhere else, or under some other veil, I would like to know where.
Sheer lunacy and for what? So that multi morbid 83 year olds can get 84? Or that landwhales that have to take forty different pills a day to keep existing never have to face up to the reality that their habits might be a tad unhealthy? Instead of trying to wipe out the flu (lol) lets make diabetes (type II) illegal and make 10k steps a day mandatory with thread of corporeal punishment. Just as crazy but at least there would be a public health benefit to that.
I know every comment here is already, "here's why you are wrong, Curtis", but here's why you're wrong, Curtis.
1) Though I am not myself a Chassidic Jew, I have a lot of professional and personal contact with them. Except for two sects, they all stopped keeping any Covid rules in by July 2020. This is the case in America, the UK, Belgium, and Israel. And what happened? Nothing happened. Probably, you could demonstrate that something had been shaved off the the average end of life, and there are a handful of tragic stories (more than any other year, though, is not clear), but that's it. Everyone has had it, and no-one is sorry, no-one is licking their wounds, no-one is doing anything except recounting stories of the bizarre rituals you have to go through to go shopping if you venture outside of Williamsburg. I was the hawkiest of Covid-hawks, but neither my own pride nor my own trust in Yarvin-Sailer-Cochran could withstand contact with reality. As for stories I read in the media of Covid being really bad, I ascribe it 50% to just lies and 50% to a sort of nocebo effect that comes from being exposed to Covid hysteria. Just don't think about it dude, 4 real.
2) Covid-19 appears to have replaced the Influenza virus. No-one knows why that should have happened, because virologists don't know a lot of basic stuff about their discipline, like why outbreaks are seasonal or why they peak. However, it has happened. So, after a nasty transition period where it knocked out some dry timber, Covid-19's lasting effect is to transfer some of the burden of random death from the young to the old and obese. What are you so het up about?
3) This is accusing the Pope of heresy, but 2 basic principles of post UR Yarvinism should, surely, be (1) don't start monkeying around with stuff like virology that neither you or anyone else understands and (2) don't start abolishing universal features of human existence because it satisfies some sort of superficial utilitarian hedonic arithmetic. Now you're talking about getting rid of the common cold. Have you thought about the effect this will likely have on auto-immune diseases, let alone more spiritual matters? Icarus, put down the crack.
Yup Curtis suffers from inability to change his take once its obviously wrong. If Trump did not win in 2016, there would not be no COVID. It would be called another flu like swine flu or bird flu, pundits would have jived about unusually bad flu season, and that would be it.
I had COVID and its a mild flu. I had worse normal flu. The whole disease have with 99.9% survival rate. The average age of death with COVID is higher than goddamn life expectancy.
Of course now they cant go back, coz they wrecked economy fir nothing, so they doubling and tripling down on it.
I can confirm that--nobody in the Jewish (Orthodox) community in Jerusalem follows any of the guidelines (maybe 1 in a 1000 would bother with a mask), nor do the secular care too much about it.
You have massive gatherings at weddings, synagogues and what-have-you and NO massive funerals, in fact, nothing out of the ordinary, yet the government (and a handful of intellectual-yet-idiots) still pretends there is this massive crisis that demands strict laws, that nobody will actually follow. A similar situation is in the Arab/Palestinian population.
I gotta be honest, the "God-Emperor" scenario Curtis describes near the end is actually something like what I pictured really could or would happen, just last March: a strong, coordinated response that would result in a severe, uncomfortable, but definitely TEMPORARY change in daily life, while the competent parts of government took care of things for us. Even if it were five months I could've lived with that. I just can't believe how naive I was back then. I was also a Bernie liberal with only a vague sense of who Curtis Yarvin was, so suffice to say it's been a hell of a year.
The competency delusion is a powerful force that we are inculcated with throughout our statist education. Even China’s “success” in controlling the virus is likely due more to the fact that they knew everything they needed to know from the start. It’s easy to forget how little knowledge we had in the beginning of this thing. The unknowns were huge, and a major factor in the build up of fear.
By the way, welcome to reality. Glad to have you with us.
> In particular, it has long been known that a month-long hard lockdown eradicates all respiratory viruses, perhaps with occasional remnants to be cleaned up by spot treatment.
I think viruses (including respiratory viruses) are more complex than that, and can remain dormant within the body or in the environment for extended periods of time, only to be reactivated by some sort of trigger.
I refer you to this paper: "An outbreak of common colds at an Antarctic base after seventeen weeks of complete isolation"
Even if a month-long hard lockdown did eradicate all respiratory viruses, the perpetrators of this month-long hard lockdown would be evil men who should be appropriately punished for their atrocious crime when they are overthrown by the people they have tormented.
Also, assuming this totalitarian government, do we also have to assume that gain-of-function research went on as in this timeline? Would there even have been COVID? Would there have been obesity? I mean, if it’s such a great and effective regime, it wouldn’t have let any of that happen in the first place
Honestly this Covid situation is a perfect example of the problems Curtis keeps hammering on. On one hand, I have no problem complying in principle and see nothing wrong with masks, vaccines etc. On the other hand, I know that we're ruled by complete ghouls and find myself questioning things I never even noticed before.
Curtis tickles my brain. Whether I agree with him or not, he provides a neural workout.
Based on zero probability of Curtis' prescriptions taking place, I'd say it's time to just take our lumps & move on. I do find it humorous that everyone around me in the suburbs of NYC, is going to supermarkets, concerts, and restaurants unmasked, but they're afraid to go back to the office. LOL.
I admire Curtis greatly. Not enough to venture into the hellscape of NYC to meet him, but enough to appreciate his work & help his grift.
Everyone was about 25 except for me and one other guy and Curtis. The rate of visible "nerdiness" was extremely low; in general, there seemed to be a high level of competence of all kinds, including the sort required for unarmed combat. I hope you guys exchanged email-addresses or whatever; I didn't bother trying before leaving pretty quickly due to the extreme age difference that would have made regular friendly association impossible.
I exchanged emails with a few folks but it would have been nice to have an organized local group sprout up. People seem to be concerned about being doxxed I guess.
I didn’t attend because I’m in my 50s & didn’t that would work well to mix with the ‘kids’. I did offer to take Curtis out to dinner on my dime. He didn’t respond. Probably figured it was a security risk. I don’t blame him, but I thought it was worth a shot so I wouldn’t have to contend with the speed dating round.
If you publish essays at a major online journal and are moving to Connecticut, then you're him. I'm the person with a long beard and a broomstick-cane.
Oh, I guess that wasn't you -- I've just seen your comment above that you were out of town. You could have been the third old guy other than Curtis, though.
There was only one woman there when I left. She was pretty hot. My thought when she arrived with her spouse or lover was, "Well, I guess nobody's going to be discussing sex this afternoon." (I mean social sex-roles, not copulation.)
90% of people on the sidewalk and going into the stores in Sunset Park Brooklyn are masked. There are still "you must wear a mask" signs on all of the storefronts. In the park, where half the people you see are Chinese and 40% of the rest are Mexican or from south of Mexico, almost 100% of the Chinese people are masked, including babies and toddlers. However, most of the Mexicans in the park are no longer masked. Yesterday I saw a Euro woman carefully masking her 4 year old son before leaving the park with him.
Masks are officially required for use of mass-transportation; 100% of bus-riders wear masks -- I can see them through the bus-windows, so I know. I don't know about the subways; I haven't ridden a bus or subway since March 2020.
If you're unslimed and want to lift weights in a gym unmasked, you have to implicitly lie about your slime-status by signing something that indicates your consent to the city's requirement that unslimed people be masked both on the streets and in indoor non-residential places. You may be aware that the city intends to exclude unslimed people from various kinds of places including gyms starting on August 16, enforcement to begin September 13.
City folk vs. suburban folk. I am vaxxed, but I withdrew from events that are taking place in the city based on the new policy. The scummy Mayor will welcomed the pozzed of the world, but not the ‘unslimed’. F him & NYC.
I went to the store yesterday with my husband, and we were two of the seven unmasked people there (they hung a new sign saying they’re forcing all their employees to mask, so would you please mask, too). 4 of the other 5 unmasked people were Asian. This makes me very happy, actually.
Which makes me think, Curtis should write a fictional book, not Gray Mirror. Like, the same general idea, but in the fictional form. It would be much more effective (think, Brave New World)
Once again the same narrative template (every post). A perceptive, sharp analysis with irrelevant asides for a flourish, followed by a messianic call a monarch and his non existent solutions. This provides as much satisfaction as an old omelette.
In this case only an apparently "perceptive, sharp analysis." His analysis of the motives of anti-maskers and anti-lockdowners was in fact myopic and dull if not deceitful. Characterization of the "delta" thing as somehow more horrifyingly horrifying than the alpha version was pretty hard not to read as outright deceitful, but that's a comparatively trivial matter.
How exactly could critical infrastructure and food production, distribution survive a strict 40 day quarantine? Would the livestock of our massive mega farms be fine after not being tended to for 40 days? Crops just left to their fates? Supply chain disruptions due to our half-arsed lockdowns were serious and we are still suffering the consequences. Could we mobilize enough gubmint workers to distribute enough food to keep people from starving during the quarantine? What happens if those workers have a rash of infection among them? Even if that worked, the populace would likely starve afterwards. Imagine the vulnerability to infection of a people emerging from being locked inside for 40 days, pale, emaciated and depressed. How many would turn on each other during being imprisoned, not to mention after being released. Could the water supply be safe after being neglected for that long?
We are human beings with many more needs than simple survival.
Even if we had robotics and automation in place to tend to these things for us, the physical and psychological toll would be enormous.
We would emerge from our caves only to find nothing left to sustain us.
I don't really know anything about Bayes, but it seems like Bayes rule is the simplest way to describe the bi-partisan, class based split on corona virus reactions. If the new information that "you will be exposed to a lethal risk" is something that *greatly surprises you*, then it would, in theory, greatly alter your behaviour. Many new economy people live their entire lives entirely insulated from lethal risk. I work with someone who claims to have "never been injured". Not surprisingly, this person is a covid hardliner.
Another commenter here, Ted Royer says he works in the oil patch in Texas. He is exposed to significant and continuous potentially lethal risk at work. The new information "you will be exposed to a lethal risk" does not surprise him, and does not alter his behaviour.
Yes, it makes sense, but another big factor is the extent to which people are able to think of themselves as ripples in an eternal flow of being or whatever. People who are trapped in their own heads feel as their own death would be the annihilation of everything.
As someone for whom the lockdown has been an unmixed blessing, improving my standard of life far more than a lottery win would have done, I look with a baleful eye towards anything that promises itself as a solution. The virus has come to make what used to be unpleasant now impossible: the open plan office is virtually a thing of the past, the sweatshop's days are numbered.
It's a completely mainstream opinion to say that we shouldn't routinely give antibiotics to pigs and chickens, because doing so allows us to keep them in entirely inhumane conditions. Instead organic farms restrict antibiotics to the sick pigs and keep the rest of them in conditions that are healthy enough that most will be ok relying on their natural immunity. Can't we at least consider doing the same for ourselves?
Is warpslime a vaccine? Vaccines are dead viruses, aren't they? I mean, "dead" in whatever sense it is in which viruses that were never really alive can be dead. Nonfunctional, I guess. Is that what warpslime is, nonfunctional cold-19? Or is it made of tiny plastic robots or whatever? It doesn't make a practical difference to me, but I feel as though the coven of liars is calling it "vaccine" in a malevolently soothing way just in order to lie some more because lying thrills them.
Hey man, a never washes his hands, eat off other peoples plate, inhale deeply while others cough, doorknob licking 'its-just-the dang-flu' idiot here. I am 63 years old with one failing kidney who worked unmasked around other unmasked over 320 days in 2020 and on my way to a similar 2021. Here in the oilfield in Texas, its just low on the list for ways to die suddenly. Here is my take:
I think we care about this thing, -worldwide- because it primarily affects old, fat people. Old fat people are abnormally afraid of death and most critically, old fat people run everything. They therefore tell us what to worry about.
Yes it can kill you, so what? So can being fat when you are old - and at much higher rates. No one avoids any of that. Yet for some unknown reason, meaning a few million elitist fat, old f'cks kicking off, we are losing our collective minds.
You are awesome Curtis. I love your writing and I learn something from you almost every time I read Gray Mirror. Death is coming for us all, and 'geologically speaking' haha, in the next instant. I would consider giving this topic near zero time in your head going forward. Move on with your life.
Can we, perhaps, hear some actual facts in the next COVID post about the actual mortality of this disease for those below the average US life expectancy? Or must we continue to rely on the “long covid” complaints of your San Francisco neighbors?
For God’s sake, the one thing always brushed over in these posts is some objective analysis of the data. I know that’s hard to find in almost all public discussion (googling COVID statistics is walking through a minefield of Wikipedia obfuscation, Pravda and culture-war nonsense) but that is precisely what everyone needs.
This post filled in some gaps that you shouldn't gloss over. Set your priors aside and pretend that Covid is serious and you want to stop it. We know how and . . . we're not doing any of the things that work.
For example, my neighbors flew to India and back during the height of the delta outbreak there, while my 4 year old (who already had Covid and recovered after an extra 30 minutes of sleep one night) had to wear a mask inside public places.
If you're not worried about the virus, great, you're in a position that should allow you to see the complete failure of your government to function at even a minimum level of effectiveness. There's lessons in there that are much more interesting than yet another analysis of Covid statistics.
Curtis’ analysis of the failures of government and all of science with regards to this virus are interesting and worth reading. I enjoyed his article calling for a “new science.” His calls for mask-and-needle totalitarianism are annoying because they seem genuinely motivated by an intense fear that Curtis never bothers to explain.
This gives the impression of the exact thing that UR and Gray Mirror have avoided all these years— disloyalty to the truth in service of an attractive policy goal.
Maybe I am statistically illiterate or lazy and simply have not seen the correct data on the Delta variant or such and such… but the most basic information and common sense about this virus continue to leave me with another impression.
"Set your priors aside and pretend that Covid is serious and you want to stop it."
"Predend" is an apt word, as that is exactly what the authorities are doing at the moment - "pretending" Covid-19 is serious. Because this pretense gives them more power. While at the same time they are not doing anything that would actually inconvenience them, personally.
Yarvin is talking about what the state would have done if it was not just "pretending", which is a fair point, but still misses the bigger picture mark. I am not entirely sure if his "solution" is not worse than what we already have, because the assumption that you can just kill off the twin brother of the literal flu by simply quarantining (but for real this time) everyone and everything for a month strikes as one of his autistic thought experiments, like how a perfect level of inter-state competition on Earth will be maintained by an interstellar political cabal armed with Death Star-level space nukes. And lest we forget, we are not here trying to figure out ways how to maximize the power of a totalitarian government, but rather how to maximize the effectiveness of any government. Preferably not a totalitarian one.
I can to an extent see the point of "consider that this was not in fact just another flu that kills predominantly people who have already exceeded the life expectancy of the nation and consider how it illustrates the absolute impotence of our modern state", but it does strike me as a rather useless thought experiment. This is not the Black Death, if some gigachad representative of the Stuart dynasty like Charles II was faced with this "grave threat", he would have most likely simply ignored it and the East India Company would have continued to ship those delicious tea leaves from China completely undisturbed.
Because yes, in a well-adjusted society people do not revere old and fat people to such a degree that when they start dying at a rate of a few percentage points higher than the former average, we have to shut down everything else until this hellish curse is resolved. Even only a month of extreme lockdown and closed borders (assuming this would actually work, which is already a leap of faith) is probably too much of a cost to bear in exchange for saving a couple of years from the life expectancy of the average Boomer. You think those boomers will be able to contribute enough in the span of those extra couple of years to compensate the cost? No way in hell.
Unrelated, but assuming you are the actual Foseti, who used to maintain a very interesting blog back when: I hope you will consider writing again. Or if you are writing somewhere else, or under some other veil, I would like to know where.
My god, Foseti commenting on a Moldbug post. I am so nostalgic right now, like I'm back in law school again.
Sheer lunacy and for what? So that multi morbid 83 year olds can get 84? Or that landwhales that have to take forty different pills a day to keep existing never have to face up to the reality that their habits might be a tad unhealthy? Instead of trying to wipe out the flu (lol) lets make diabetes (type II) illegal and make 10k steps a day mandatory with thread of corporeal punishment. Just as crazy but at least there would be a public health benefit to that.
Vampires and ringwraiths care more about an extra year of shadowlife than about the ability of children to see one another's smiles.
If we ban corn syrup, seed oils and Glyphosate we'd see that the step count never really mattered. It's all the poisons that are making us sick.
I know every comment here is already, "here's why you are wrong, Curtis", but here's why you're wrong, Curtis.
1) Though I am not myself a Chassidic Jew, I have a lot of professional and personal contact with them. Except for two sects, they all stopped keeping any Covid rules in by July 2020. This is the case in America, the UK, Belgium, and Israel. And what happened? Nothing happened. Probably, you could demonstrate that something had been shaved off the the average end of life, and there are a handful of tragic stories (more than any other year, though, is not clear), but that's it. Everyone has had it, and no-one is sorry, no-one is licking their wounds, no-one is doing anything except recounting stories of the bizarre rituals you have to go through to go shopping if you venture outside of Williamsburg. I was the hawkiest of Covid-hawks, but neither my own pride nor my own trust in Yarvin-Sailer-Cochran could withstand contact with reality. As for stories I read in the media of Covid being really bad, I ascribe it 50% to just lies and 50% to a sort of nocebo effect that comes from being exposed to Covid hysteria. Just don't think about it dude, 4 real.
2) Covid-19 appears to have replaced the Influenza virus. No-one knows why that should have happened, because virologists don't know a lot of basic stuff about their discipline, like why outbreaks are seasonal or why they peak. However, it has happened. So, after a nasty transition period where it knocked out some dry timber, Covid-19's lasting effect is to transfer some of the burden of random death from the young to the old and obese. What are you so het up about?
3) This is accusing the Pope of heresy, but 2 basic principles of post UR Yarvinism should, surely, be (1) don't start monkeying around with stuff like virology that neither you or anyone else understands and (2) don't start abolishing universal features of human existence because it satisfies some sort of superficial utilitarian hedonic arithmetic. Now you're talking about getting rid of the common cold. Have you thought about the effect this will likely have on auto-immune diseases, let alone more spiritual matters? Icarus, put down the crack.
Yup Curtis suffers from inability to change his take once its obviously wrong. If Trump did not win in 2016, there would not be no COVID. It would be called another flu like swine flu or bird flu, pundits would have jived about unusually bad flu season, and that would be it.
I had COVID and its a mild flu. I had worse normal flu. The whole disease have with 99.9% survival rate. The average age of death with COVID is higher than goddamn life expectancy.
Of course now they cant go back, coz they wrecked economy fir nothing, so they doubling and tripling down on it.
I can confirm that--nobody in the Jewish (Orthodox) community in Jerusalem follows any of the guidelines (maybe 1 in a 1000 would bother with a mask), nor do the secular care too much about it.
You have massive gatherings at weddings, synagogues and what-have-you and NO massive funerals, in fact, nothing out of the ordinary, yet the government (and a handful of intellectual-yet-idiots) still pretends there is this massive crisis that demands strict laws, that nobody will actually follow. A similar situation is in the Arab/Palestinian population.
Maybe the most interesting thing I read on COVID since last summer
I gotta be honest, the "God-Emperor" scenario Curtis describes near the end is actually something like what I pictured really could or would happen, just last March: a strong, coordinated response that would result in a severe, uncomfortable, but definitely TEMPORARY change in daily life, while the competent parts of government took care of things for us. Even if it were five months I could've lived with that. I just can't believe how naive I was back then. I was also a Bernie liberal with only a vague sense of who Curtis Yarvin was, so suffice to say it's been a hell of a year.
What a journey you’ve had!
The competency delusion is a powerful force that we are inculcated with throughout our statist education. Even China’s “success” in controlling the virus is likely due more to the fact that they knew everything they needed to know from the start. It’s easy to forget how little knowledge we had in the beginning of this thing. The unknowns were huge, and a major factor in the build up of fear.
By the way, welcome to reality. Glad to have you with us.
March of last year, I should clarify.
> In particular, it has long been known that a month-long hard lockdown eradicates all respiratory viruses, perhaps with occasional remnants to be cleaned up by spot treatment.
I think viruses (including respiratory viruses) are more complex than that, and can remain dormant within the body or in the environment for extended periods of time, only to be reactivated by some sort of trigger.
I refer you to this paper: "An outbreak of common colds at an Antarctic base after seventeen weeks of complete isolation"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2130424/pdf/jhyg00082-0026.pdf
Even if a month-long hard lockdown did eradicate all respiratory viruses, the perpetrators of this month-long hard lockdown would be evil men who should be appropriately punished for their atrocious crime when they are overthrown by the people they have tormented.
Also, assuming this totalitarian government, do we also have to assume that gain-of-function research went on as in this timeline? Would there even have been COVID? Would there have been obesity? I mean, if it’s such a great and effective regime, it wouldn’t have let any of that happen in the first place
I pay by the year so rage quitting has a narrow window.
LOL I just subscribed for this piece and after reading it was tempted to post that I had immediate buyer’s remorse.
But I do enjoy reading thoughtful articles that I disagree with. Gotta get out of that echo chamber occasionally, ya know.
Maybe there’s a pro rata refund?
There is.
Honestly this Covid situation is a perfect example of the problems Curtis keeps hammering on. On one hand, I have no problem complying in principle and see nothing wrong with masks, vaccines etc. On the other hand, I know that we're ruled by complete ghouls and find myself questioning things I never even noticed before.
Curtis tickles my brain. Whether I agree with him or not, he provides a neural workout.
Based on zero probability of Curtis' prescriptions taking place, I'd say it's time to just take our lumps & move on. I do find it humorous that everyone around me in the suburbs of NYC, is going to supermarkets, concerts, and restaurants unmasked, but they're afraid to go back to the office. LOL.
I admire Curtis greatly. Not enough to venture into the hellscape of NYC to meet him, but enough to appreciate his work & help his grift.
The NYC meetup was fun! You missed out
Everyone was about 25 except for me and one other guy and Curtis. The rate of visible "nerdiness" was extremely low; in general, there seemed to be a high level of competence of all kinds, including the sort required for unarmed combat. I hope you guys exchanged email-addresses or whatever; I didn't bother trying before leaving pretty quickly due to the extreme age difference that would have made regular friendly association impossible.
I exchanged emails with a few folks but it would have been nice to have an organized local group sprout up. People seem to be concerned about being doxxed I guess.
I didn’t attend because I’m in my 50s & didn’t that would work well to mix with the ‘kids’. I did offer to take Curtis out to dinner on my dime. He didn’t respond. Probably figured it was a security risk. I don’t blame him, but I thought it was worth a shot so I wouldn’t have to contend with the speed dating round.
So you’re part of the problem haha
Because I wanted special treatment?
No, there were fewer older people, and since you didn’t come, even fewer still :)
I could have been that second old guy!
If you publish essays at a major online journal and are moving to Connecticut, then you're him. I'm the person with a long beard and a broomstick-cane.
Oh, I guess that wasn't you -- I've just seen your comment above that you were out of town. You could have been the third old guy other than Curtis, though.
I do comment threads with only half my brain. I could have been the third! Alas
It’s probably a self-selected crowd of people who read their email and know how to reply to Curtis
I hope Curtis informs his subscribers if he ever travels internationally.
Were there any women there?
A few wives and girlfriends, about what you would expect.
There was only one woman there when I left. She was pretty hot. My thought when she arrived with her spouse or lover was, "Well, I guess nobody's going to be discussing sex this afternoon." (I mean social sex-roles, not copulation.)
Grr
Going to Prospect Park from deep Long Island is a no go under virtually any circumstances.
Of course I was out of town when that happened, hopefully there’s another in NYC before I permanently flee the area.
90% of people on the sidewalk and going into the stores in Sunset Park Brooklyn are masked. There are still "you must wear a mask" signs on all of the storefronts. In the park, where half the people you see are Chinese and 40% of the rest are Mexican or from south of Mexico, almost 100% of the Chinese people are masked, including babies and toddlers. However, most of the Mexicans in the park are no longer masked. Yesterday I saw a Euro woman carefully masking her 4 year old son before leaving the park with him.
Masks are officially required for use of mass-transportation; 100% of bus-riders wear masks -- I can see them through the bus-windows, so I know. I don't know about the subways; I haven't ridden a bus or subway since March 2020.
If you're unslimed and want to lift weights in a gym unmasked, you have to implicitly lie about your slime-status by signing something that indicates your consent to the city's requirement that unslimed people be masked both on the streets and in indoor non-residential places. You may be aware that the city intends to exclude unslimed people from various kinds of places including gyms starting on August 16, enforcement to begin September 13.
City folk vs. suburban folk. I am vaxxed, but I withdrew from events that are taking place in the city based on the new policy. The scummy Mayor will welcomed the pozzed of the world, but not the ‘unslimed’. F him & NYC.
I went to the store yesterday with my husband, and we were two of the seven unmasked people there (they hung a new sign saying they’re forcing all their employees to mask, so would you please mask, too). 4 of the other 5 unmasked people were Asian. This makes me very happy, actually.
Who would win? A monarch with a tyrannical trillion dollar global lockdown, vs some idiot coughing into a freezer?
HAHAHA
Also, despite my other issues with this article, the parable about the Irish flags was awesome.
Yeah for sure, parables and metaphors is why I come here
Which makes me think, Curtis should write a fictional book, not Gray Mirror. Like, the same general idea, but in the fictional form. It would be much more effective (think, Brave New World)
omg - yes!
Once again the same narrative template (every post). A perceptive, sharp analysis with irrelevant asides for a flourish, followed by a messianic call a monarch and his non existent solutions. This provides as much satisfaction as an old omelette.
In this case only an apparently "perceptive, sharp analysis." His analysis of the motives of anti-maskers and anti-lockdowners was in fact myopic and dull if not deceitful. Characterization of the "delta" thing as somehow more horrifyingly horrifying than the alpha version was pretty hard not to read as outright deceitful, but that's a comparatively trivial matter.
How exactly could critical infrastructure and food production, distribution survive a strict 40 day quarantine? Would the livestock of our massive mega farms be fine after not being tended to for 40 days? Crops just left to their fates? Supply chain disruptions due to our half-arsed lockdowns were serious and we are still suffering the consequences. Could we mobilize enough gubmint workers to distribute enough food to keep people from starving during the quarantine? What happens if those workers have a rash of infection among them? Even if that worked, the populace would likely starve afterwards. Imagine the vulnerability to infection of a people emerging from being locked inside for 40 days, pale, emaciated and depressed. How many would turn on each other during being imprisoned, not to mention after being released. Could the water supply be safe after being neglected for that long?
We are human beings with many more needs than simple survival.
Even if we had robotics and automation in place to tend to these things for us, the physical and psychological toll would be enormous.
We would emerge from our caves only to find nothing left to sustain us.
I don't really know anything about Bayes, but it seems like Bayes rule is the simplest way to describe the bi-partisan, class based split on corona virus reactions. If the new information that "you will be exposed to a lethal risk" is something that *greatly surprises you*, then it would, in theory, greatly alter your behaviour. Many new economy people live their entire lives entirely insulated from lethal risk. I work with someone who claims to have "never been injured". Not surprisingly, this person is a covid hardliner.
Another commenter here, Ted Royer says he works in the oil patch in Texas. He is exposed to significant and continuous potentially lethal risk at work. The new information "you will be exposed to a lethal risk" does not surprise him, and does not alter his behaviour.
Does this make any sense?
Yes, it makes sense, but another big factor is the extent to which people are able to think of themselves as ripples in an eternal flow of being or whatever. People who are trapped in their own heads feel as their own death would be the annihilation of everything.
Dirty hands,
clean money,
strong immune systems.
Life will not be contained.
Life breaks free.
Life finds a way.
King Canute
hung up his crown.
What hubris
to believe politics
can contain nature!
As someone for whom the lockdown has been an unmixed blessing, improving my standard of life far more than a lottery win would have done, I look with a baleful eye towards anything that promises itself as a solution. The virus has come to make what used to be unpleasant now impossible: the open plan office is virtually a thing of the past, the sweatshop's days are numbered.
It's a completely mainstream opinion to say that we shouldn't routinely give antibiotics to pigs and chickens, because doing so allows us to keep them in entirely inhumane conditions. Instead organic farms restrict antibiotics to the sick pigs and keep the rest of them in conditions that are healthy enough that most will be ok relying on their natural immunity. Can't we at least consider doing the same for ourselves?
And analogies aren't medical papers
Is warpslime a vaccine? Vaccines are dead viruses, aren't they? I mean, "dead" in whatever sense it is in which viruses that were never really alive can be dead. Nonfunctional, I guess. Is that what warpslime is, nonfunctional cold-19? Or is it made of tiny plastic robots or whatever? It doesn't make a practical difference to me, but I feel as though the coven of liars is calling it "vaccine" in a malevolently soothing way just in order to lie some more because lying thrills them.
I’ve always complained about calling something a vaccine which isn’t actually a vaccine