People have been asking for a blog post on the coronavirus crisis, and I've demurred. Mostly because I have little facts to add. I'm no virologist, no epidemiologist, I basically know nothing useful about the virus, and I'm not in the business of making up shit or speculating for clicks. I try to offer insight in this blog and I really have no insight about viruses.
Is the virus man-made? I don't know. Is it just the flu? I don't know. Did China release it on purpose? I don't know. Was it made by Americans to fuck with China? I don't know. Is bat soup that good? I don't know! I'd say I'm sorry that I'll never get to try it at this point but nah, I've had the chance but never tried it. I'm high-openness but not that high. I've never even tried cat meat. Or bugs. Or pangolin! Oh pangolin. That I wouldn't have minded trying. Friend tells me it's pretty good.
What I can write about is the all sorts of realizations I've had over this already 3 months of global crisis. And I'd say by far the most salient thing that's struck me is the sheer amount of bullshit going around. People literally making up shit all the time and peddling on Twitter, on Reddit, on WhatsApp, everywhere there's an audience.
And sure, some of that is Hasbara, i.e. covert state propaganda by China to shit on America, by America to shit on China, etc. But you can mostly tell the state-sponsored fake news: it's yelling CUI BONO!! to anyone with a room temperature IQ. "US intelligence sources have concluded that the virus was made by China". Oh, really? You don't fucking say.
But by far the largest portion of fake news is random people doing it I guess for lulz or to get attention. And oh man are they fucking annoying. Back when the very term "fake news" was coined in early 2017 by the US mainstream media to blame it for Donald Trump's election, I remember thinking what a pathetic cope the whole thing was. Then some countries started making government "Fake News Suppression Taskforces" and I thought the whole world had gone insane. Surely people making up shit on Twitter isn't a big deal?
I retract that. Shoot them all. Every single one. Put them against a wall, shoot them in the head, and then feed them to the dogs that China isn't eating anymore. The whole heaps of disinformation going around getting everybody and their mother confused, it's infuriating. Shut the fuck up already. 10 million cases in China! Cover up in Italy! Vietnam is not testing! Animals spreading it in Australia the government isn't acting! Shut up. Now. Sheesh.
Then again there's a reason why so many disinformation gets an audience at all. Where are the experts? People who supposedly know what they're talking about respect to virology and epidemics have been saying pretty much every single possible take on the pandemic. I thought Economics was the dismal science which is not really a science and you can find an economist taking 2 completely opposite takes on every conceivable topic. Well, they're not alone anymore. Is the virus man made? Got two experts saying yes and no. Is the virus more or less deadly than we think? Experts disagree. Do we actually need ventilators? Well, it depends. Will the virus become endemic and come back every winter? Who knows.
It's been more than 3 months since we got the complete DNA sequence of coronachan and we still don't know the real death rate! Just yesterday a new paper came in saying that a lot more people are infected than we think so the death rate isn't that much higher than the flu. Just the flu! Is it though? The death rate in some Italian towns shot 6x compared to last year, that's not the fucking flu is it? Oh well, nobody knows shit.
Nobody Knows Shit. That's the real moral of the coronachan story. We don't have a fucking clue about anything. It's 2020 guys, and a lot of people just realized that. This is gonna be a fun decade.
On my personal opinion about coronachan, again not about the actual science of the virus, just its societal repercussions. As my followers on Twitter know, I'm a big fan. One thing we *do* know, even though the media and all the hysterical virtue signalers out there deny it, is that the virus pretty much only kills the old and weak and the fat. This blog has always been a supporter of eugenics, and also a deplorer of the modern life cycle where people just marry too late, have kids too late, and die too fucking late. I firmly believe that people should have children in their early 20s, be grandparents in their 40s and have intense and enjoyable lives so that their bodies are exhausted by their 60s and die in their mid 70s at the latest. Aldous Huxley started doing hard drugs in his late life and died while tripping on LSD age 69. If everybody did that we wouldn't have had to murder the world economy for corona.
That said, that's not the world we live in, and yes many of us have parents or grandparents who we don't want dead just yet, so I get it when people get emotional about it. But one (at least men) should be able to abstract oneself from personal circumstances and see the whole picture. Have you guys been to rural Japan? Or rural Italy by that token. It's miserable. You have no idea how dark and sad a country's culture becomes when you have more old geezers than toddlers. Not to mention public finances. Japan is basically murdering itself, having fallen into a vicious trap where there's too many old people taking pensions and using the national healthcare system, and the government raising the taxes of the young generation making it even harder for them to have babies to solve the problem. Sure, to this date the country has been rather conservative in taking immigrants, but it's still literally dying off, and the effects on the culture at large and the national psychology are there for everyone to see. Despair, detachment, sadness and ennui.
If it takes 10 million 80+ year olds dying of pneumonia to solve that, to get taxes low again so people can actually make money again and form families and have babies and have spare time to write books and scripts and songs, to revive the culture, well bring it on coronachan. BTW this is not just me being evil, every single Japanese under 50 will tell you that all the problems in Japan are caused by the 老害, "old vermin". And yet when coronachan comes to put the vermin out of their misery, people start panicking. Ah, the humanity.
On politics, what will happen next? Finance types sure have been enjoying the crisis. Moldbug, i.e. Curtis Yarvin, has been having a field day with the collapse of the financial markets worldwide, writing a few pieces on how financial policy could be fixed to deal with the pandemic. I've always liked the Unfulfilled Financial Engineer part of Moldbug's career so by all means go take a look. It's been funny seeing how every country but especially the US is printing money like crazy, all restraint thrown to the window. 6 trillion? Sure. And more coming! Talk right now is for USD 2,000 *monthly* for every American resident until the crisis is over. Nobody will remember Andrew Yang (serves him right for letting his wife dominate him in public during the campaign) in 3 months but hey, I was into UBI before it was cool.
Alas I also have no financial advise to give. Bitcoin fell a lot but has recovered a bit; stocks collapsed until the Fed started artificially propping it up, real estate seems to be taking a big hit on the collapse of the global tourism industry. Oil is so dead it's quite funny really. We're at (or almost at) pre 1973 oil crisis levels! Who see this happening 2 years ago? Hell, 1 year ago? Again, nobody knows shit.
But I guess what most people want me to talk about is international politics. Will China came ahead after the crisis? Well whatever the volunteer (and paid) Trump propagandists tell you, China surely is looking, and most importantly, feeling good after corona. China may have produced the virus, but it got it under control in record time given the circumstances. And it got it done precisely because it had the administrative apparatus that Xi Jinping has been introducing for years, the very weapons of totalitarianism that China has been criticized for the last 5 years. Massive surveillance, complete control of the internet, party cells in every neighborhood and residential compound. China got hit bad, but it recovered, now restaurants are open and people are back to work. 4k dead officially, 80k infected. Say it's double that, it's still nothing.
Meanwhile 1 million infected in Europe, another 1 million in the US. The EU completely collapsing as a political actor, with European countries not only not helping each other but actively sabotaging them, e.g. France confiscating medical supplies bought by Italy from Sweden as it passed through French territory. Trump denying the whole thing, then getting shamed by Tucker Carlson to do something, then getting AMOG'ed by state governors into taking a harder line than he wanted, then pushing for hydroxychloroquine as a cure all, then having the whole Cathedral campaigning against the treatment, preferring people die than proving Trump right.
The Chinese are watching Tiktok all day, which in China feeds them government news videos randomly among the first 10 or so videos, and last month it was all about "see these dumb white people not wearing a mask! Partying as the virus spread! Saying it's like the flu! What are they thinking?!". So yeah, the Chinese are feeling very damn smart right now. Which I think it's great. As you all may know, my stance is that the world needs political diversity. China is the only world power not under the control or influence of USG, the Cathedral and progressive ideology. No Globohomo down there. China was way more admiring of the West 10 years ago, when they felt poor and inadequate compared to the wealth and sophistication of the West. Now they think they're rich and smart and we're stupid and incapable of manufacturing even fucking paper masks. China is making a point of selling medical equipment as a diplomatic endeavor, "winning hearts and minds". But the fact remains that the West is physically incapable of providing basic goods for the healthcare of its citizens. Which is something you'd expect of the Third World.
So yes, the prestige of the West in Asia is pretty much dead. I hear in Vietnam (a very poor country with a long land border with China who has nonetheless masterfully managed to control the outbreak) people cross the street when they see white people because they think they might be infected. We laughed when people stopped eating Chinese food in February because of corona. Casual racism against Asians is cool because they're kinda small and well behaved. Hell, Brad Pitt could beat the shit out of Bruce Lee! These Asians they just suck. And now they got the virus hahaha. Oops, shit, it's us who got it. 10x prevalence! Oh fuck fuck.
So by April the Chinese don't look dumb, they actually look too smart. Devious! Hence the Redgov (i.e. the Republican Party and the Military Industrial Complex that funds it) propaganda machine (which is smaller than Bluegov by an order of magnitude but getting quite big now under Trump and Bannon) are openly demonizing China and basically begging for war. China covered the virus up for months! (looks notes) ... 2 weeks (looks newer notes) 6 days! That the West had 2 months (that's 6 x 10 days by the way) advance notice and still pretty much did nothing to prevent contagion doesn't really matter. I get it, I get it. Nobody likes feeling incompetent. And there's good reasons for China-Western hostility. Trump from the beginning has an agenda of reducing commercial ties with China so that manufacturing goes back to the US. Which is a great idea. And the Pentagon just wants more money and Cold War 2 is the perfect excuse for it.
The Pentagon is very greedy and very (very) wasteful but for better or worse they are the only political actor with enough money to be able to resist the Leftist political machine in America so, sure, good for them. China is also enjoying the hostility, it has made its population so much more loyal to the government. Arms races are a great thing. We owe much of our technology to them. But again, Cold War 2 has been gearing up for years. Corona is just yet another excuse to drive it up.
The whole thing is just sad, though. Sad and dumb. Lockdown is boring. I'm not that much of an introvert to enjoy it. And the whole official response is just retarded. Why can't we get antibody tests for free and a certificate of immunity to be able to do a normal life? Why can't old and vulnerable people be left to die be isolated and the rest of us be allowed out? The world economy is gonna contract something like 30% in a year. The whole thing is crazy. Where are the greedy Scrooge Capitalists furious with the shrinkage of their bank accounts, using their billions to force governments to open the economy? Trillions left there on the table! The Corona crisis has proven that the driving force of world government isn't greed or evil. It's just bureaucratic cover-your-ass. Do No Harm. Or more exactly, Do No Harm That You Can Be Blamed For. If everything goes to hell *but* bureaucrats had been following their manuals to the T and can't be blamed for it, everything's cool. But don't innovate! Oh no, you might be blamed for the results. Or take credit for the success! And we can't have that either. Nobody is better than anyone else. Just shut everything up and if people die it's their fault.
Oh yes, people have asked me if the corona crisis is going to end Bioleninism as we know it. Well it sure seems that people have less interest in transexual men trying to force normal people to have sex with them or the plight of Somali taxi drivers struggling to organize a competent jihad with their meager Uber earnings. Gotta say it' s been quite hilarious to see the grunts of the Cathedral trying to shoehorn their causes into the corona crisis. Black people more affected! Men are dying more but the nurses in the hospitals are mostly women! Can't get an abortion while on lockdown!
But let's all remember: the progressive memeplex is a means to an end. The end is absolute power, a tight single-party regime. Feminism and Globohomo and all that are things that in recent decades have helped organize leftist movements to that end, getting people motivated and loyal. That indeed has changed. Right now the easiest way to achieve absolute control is go absolutely hysterical about Corona, and that's exactly what we see in the left, many of whom are pushing for outright economic communism.
But corona will pass. Worst case scenario it will infect everyone and after herd immunity it will go away in less than a year, so corona-hysteria isn't a viable long-term strategy. Nobody is talking about climate change these days, of course, the whole thing was bullshit and we have better things to think about now; but I'd imagine we'll go back to the good old progressive days of Climate-histerical-globohomo very quickly after corona disappears. I guess someone could run a single-party regime on pandemic grounds, "just to prepare for the next virus". But that's not gonna work in any large-ish country; very hard to get enough people motivated to staff it on those grounds. Bioleninism works because it motivates large amounts of people. That's not gonna change.
So yes, the whole crisis has been rather underwhelming. Just lame and gay, as pretty much everything. No massive financial collapse. No political collapse (although California declaring itself a nation-state has been interesting). No war, no riots, no nothing. We'll see though. The loss of prestige of the Western ruling class will have some consequences. The EU is looking particularly bad. I'd be surprised if it survives this long term. At any rate it has absolutely lost the ability to expand its power any further. Lost the legitimacy to do that, I'd say forever. America is in a different plane, I don't see secession happening and partisanship isn't that much worse than it's always been. At any rate the crisis isn't quite yet over. Some countries (Germany most importantly) are now opening up, but Russia and Japan are only getting started, so restrictions on international travel are going to stay well into summer if not beyond. The world economy may take some unforeseen hit in a few months. These are interesting times, just not amazingly entertaining ones. Yet again that's what degeneration looks like. A process, not an event. The Romans also thought that everything was lame and gay. Then the Goths sacked Rome. But it took a while.
