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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30419 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Never... It'd actually be kindof interesting on the 1% this is the thing that Berlin wall's China: The western elite would either have to pivot really fast ,spin hard, or put up with the newly opened China basically being the first of the new generation of revolutionary governments who reject the technocratic class.

Same way monarchist Europe all fretted about Constitutional brittain and then America... then Brittain and the Dutch and the rest became the old guard against republican France... then all the contitutional, repulican, and remaining absolutists all tried to contain bismarkian nationalist Germany then they all were allies almost imediately after ww1 to try and contain socialism... then swung back again to contain fascism... then again to contain internationalist post-war industrialized communism...

Its very likely a chinese revolution would bring in an ideology going hard on right wing Arch-American slogans, the kind our elite loath in their own population, you see it not just in this case but the Hong Kong protests waved American revolutionary slogans, the Chinese Expat and nationalist community, especially the falun gong, is littered with major American-Patriot influence... the Taiwanese swing this way on a lot of stuff.

And right as our own elite are doubling down on treating these as hate symbols, and these sentiments as dangerous extremism... (not to mention what would be revealled if it came out every western figure China was funding or buying off, something the new revolutionaries might tweet out before any of their leaders can tell them no those are their bargaining chips)

.

There's a real chance our elites would try t snuff that revolution out rather than let every ideal they ever scorned coalesce there.

They've long seen the chinese leadership as people like them or even people to be admired (remember all the glowing new york times pieces on how China was a model for how the us should run its economy back in the 2010s?)... And they'd rightly perceive that a full throated movement rejecting the CCP and the Chinese bureaucracy could easily coalesce into a wider movement rejecting them...

There's a reason the US prefers former communist countries to become failed states and only became more aggressive against Russia after it converted to capitalism and nominal democracy... young systems of governments run off ideas, and the most prominent ideas are always the ones taboo elsewhere

There's a real chance our elites would try t snuff that revolution out rather than let every ideal they ever scorned coalesce there.

Our elietes aren't going to look a gift horse like 'China unironically embracing The West' in the mouth. It would be a huge vindication for liberal values. It would be a geopolitical upset.

remember all the glowing new york times pieces on how China was a model for how the us should run its economy back in the 2010s

That was off the back of more liberal Hu Jintao. Xi has proven to be more authoritarian and more inclined to sabre rattle.

Our elietes aren't going to look a gift horse like 'China unironically embracing The West' in the mouth. It would be a huge vindication for liberal values. It would be a geopolitical upset.

I've seen no evidence that our elites hold liberal values, so I don't how China embracing them would be equivalent to embracing the West, and if China went actually liberal, we'd probably see hostilities increase.

The problem is that The West these protesters want to embrace already ceased to exist.

Well jeez, nobody tell them that!

What's left of the west would probably still be an improvement in many ways over what they have right now.

But it would have big ramifications for whether our elites would welcome this new China with open arms. Lets put it this way. Wildest dream outcome for the protesters, Xi is overthrown and a new government founded on individual liberties and the rejection of technocrats replaces it. This would be so appealing to me that I'd immediately start learning Mandarin so I can move there / defect to China.

Lockdowns made... some kind of sense in 2019/early 2020 when we had few other tools and the pandemic could have still turned out to be deadlier based on the reports coming out of China. In the past four-odd years conditions have changed. And anyway, Zero Covid has been a much more unhinged regime than the US lockdown ever was.

lockdowns never made sense at any point w/re to covid; there was zero scientific evidence to support them, lots of historical evidence against them, and the costs were enormous

it's why lockdowns were not apart of any pandemic planning

at best, the people pushing lockdowns were midwit morons who bought into suspicious Chinese claims about covid numbers and control even though they admit those numbers were not independently verified and the Chinese have a history of lying about these precise topics

Can you actually cite the evidence against, please?

weird you didn't ask the other person making the opposite claims for evidence, huh

There's a difference between "I think lockdowns sort of made sense" and "science says that lockdowns don't make sense." (It's that one of those gets called out on not citing sources.)

If you say "there is evidence", you're gonna have to expect people saying "well show it then."

you chose to paraphrase similar statements as different in order to justify your one-sided demand for "evidence"

when you do that, it appears to me to be the attrition game in online comments and not genuine search for evidence (not that it necessarily isn't)

I'm working on a top level comment or post w/re to this topic; when/if I post it, I'll tag you.

you chose to paraphrase similar statements as different in order to justify your one-sided demand for "evidence"

The two statements are:

Lockdowns made... some kind of sense in 2019/early 2020 when we had few other tools and the pandemic could have still turned out to be deadlier based on the reports coming out of China.

And

lockdowns never made sense at any point w/re to covid; there was zero scientific evidence to support them, lots of historical evidence against them

The second of those marshals "evidence" to support itself; the first does not. Claiming evidence and not providing any is worse than not claiming any to begin with.

Looking forward to your post!

your claim is

Lockdowns made... some kind of sense in 2019/early 2020 when we had few other tools and the pandemic could have still turned out to be deadlier based on the reports coming out of China.

requires zero evidence to support? there are various assumptions around lockdowns, their effects, and various other things around COVID19 known at the time at all to buttress this statement

is this because it's just intuitive to you? in any case, it's not a supportable argument

this is basic one-sided demand for rigor and justifies my treatment of your comment

More comments

Well the Chinese numbers speak for themselves. Let's say the Chinese are lying and took 10x more deaths than they admit. That means they took 40 deaths per million. Officially they took 4 deaths per million. The US took over 3000 deaths per million.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Our too-little too-late omnishambles lockdowns were pointless, the Chinese lockdowns actually worked. I can't imagine that the Chinese could actually cover up three orders of magnitude worth of deaths. How do you conceal that many 'disappearances'?

the chinese numbers certainly do speak for themselves

discussing just how fake they are and making up hypotheticals guessing how off their fake numbers are is a waste of time

I'll concede the 2020 numbers for china were likely similar to the numbers for other surrounding countries which were much lower than much of the West

The US took over 3000 deaths per million.

this metric is plainly dishonest because with and from are not separated and each country uses different metrics to fill in these categories making comparisons very difficult

Our too-little too-late omnishambles lockdowns were pointless, the Chinese lockdowns actually worked.

or china had preexisting immunity to a covid virus which was circulating in 2018

this would explain why countries in southeast asia all had similar numbers irrelevant of their response

I can't imagine that the Chinese could actually cover up three orders of magnitude worth of deaths. How do you conceal that many 'disappearances'?

it wouldn't be "disappearances," it would just be labeling their deaths at something else which, given our experiences in the West in the last few years, it shouldn't be hard to imagine how some deaths can be labeled as something else, e.g., the CDC right now lying and mislabeling tens of thousands of R0-R99 deaths over the last few months and how they mislabeled hundreds of thousands as being killed by covid when the best you could say is they died with a positive covid test in the last month

and when it comes to China and the sheer bulk of people they have, it becomes easier to obfuscate death and causes of deaths because they have far more total deaths per a year than the US, which has demonstrated the ability to mislabel hundreds of thousands of deaths as something else

If your only KPI is COVID deaths per capita, lockdowns are fine. Unfortunately the cost-benefit equation versus practically everything else is hilariously awful.

Let's say the Chinese are lying and took 6000 deaths per million. That's the thing about lying; they're not restricted to small lies.

How do you conceal that many 'disappearances' then?

Just the other day we're hearing about a few hundred people protesting over the strict COVID measures in China. You're implying that these measures never worked at any point if China experienced US-level death tolls. So why did they stick with them? And how are the Chinese concealing 10 million dead from their families, friends, satellites and economic indicators?

People die all the time. Especially old people. If you want to know how many people die, you need mechanisms to collect that information. In China, the government of China controls all those mechanisms.

the Chinese lockdowns actually worked.

That means they took 40 deaths per million.

Makes 0 sense.

Effective lockdowns = Less absolute number of deaths, not fewer deaths per proportion of those who got the disease. What would a lockdown do for someone who is already sick?

The fact that their proportion of deaths is orders of magnitude lower than the Global mean should raise the "China's pants are on fire" alarm, not "lockdowns worked".

E - If it's deaths per population instead death per number of people who got sick then it's back to square one.

E - If it's deaths per population instead death per number of people who got sick then it's back to square one.

?????

I'm talking deaths per million, not deaths per million who got sick! You could easily check this by looking at the stat I linked to.

If you think the Chinese are lying massively, provide some evidence! Are they burning huge numbers of bodies? Did they have a suspicious fall in mobile phone number usage? There's been talk about this - the Epoch Times stated that 21 million phone numbers had been lost, suggesting a very large death toll. Other people have fact-checked that and said there's no way to be sure.

I maintain that if we can hear about a few hundred protestors in Shanghai or various Chinese cities, the world wouldn't have missed hundreds of thousands of Chinese deaths from COVID! These people have families and jobs, they can't just disappear. In Xinjiang maybe but elsewhere?

My bad, I replied assuming the wrong metric.

In which case yes lockdowns did work, given a tortured defining of the word work.

I don't think the optimal covid response involved lockdowns, but that doesn't mean the best case is "midwit morons". A week / month-long lockdown wouldn't have been that bad - even lockdowns as they were just weren't that bad compared to the 200-year history of american political/economic mistakes!

Covid's mortality rate was, on a log scale, only a bit worse than the flu. Diseases with 10-100x higher mortality rates can exist - smallpox, the original SARS, etc - and lockdowns would be justified for those.

A week / month-long lockdown wouldn't have been that bad

Quite to the contrary, these would have been the worst lockdowns. They would incur extreme costs while at best postponing the epidemic for a week or a month. The strongest argument for lockdowns was "flatten the curve" until you compare the capacity of hospitals vs infection rate and find out that it would take years of lockdowns for hospitals to churn through all the cases. Anybody with two brain cells knew that lockdowns will not be there just for a week or a month, that was deliberate tactic in order to persuade population and opposition to accept them. Once the laws and edicts passed lockdowns became what they were.

Also another point that passed by a lot of people was that the early ancestral strain had R0 of around 2.8 and I remember reading about how lockdowns may be able to push that bellow one. The delta strain had R0 of over 5.0 and no amount of reasonable lockdowns or masking could flatten that one: lockdown delta was basically as if no measures ancestral strain. But by then the idiocy was already entrenched, washing of hands, lockdowns and masks were turned basically into religious ritual - something akin to killing cats during plague. Something has to be done, lockdowns are something so let's do it.

lockdowns do not work with flus irrelevant of the cost of them

best case is "midwit morons"

the best case for the people who pushed lockdowns is they're midwit morons who were duped into believing dumb things; it only gets worse from there by assigning them nefarious actions to protect themselves, seize power, etc.

lockdowns were not a part of any pandemic planning guidelines in early 2020 because of their enormous cost and the lack of evidence supporting their efficacy; this was all changed, on a dime, and trying to determine exactly what caused public health derps to launch into a society-wide experiment with incredibly high costs is difficult but it cannot be because of good literature about costs and effects because it did not exist

even lockdowns as they were just weren't that bad compared to the 200-year history of american political/economic mistakes!

what do you think was the economic cost of lockdowns in the USA (which continue to accrue)? if it's not over at least $5,000,000,000,000, we're not being serious about the economic costs alone with those costs continuing to accrue

Diseases with 10-100x higher mortality rates can exist - smallpox, the original SARS, etc - and lockdowns would be justified for those.

smallpox was not stopped with lockdowns and historical evidence does not support the claim they worked at all let alone "were justified"

the original sars sputtered out in almost all places without lockdowns at all making any claims lockdowns were needed to be bunk

your comments rely on assumptions which are simply false; perhaps you can come up with some real disease or make up a hypothetical one which justifies a lockdown

any disease which is deadly enough to justify lockdowns wouldn't need lockdowns because people would voluntarily do it themselves just like they did in the early days of the covid hysteria

the comparison would be between what people do voluntarily and what people do in a government thug enforced lockdown; the more justified a lockdown would be, the smaller the difference in any proposed benefit from the lockdowns

and even if one were to come up with a hypothetical which just-so justifies lockdowns, the history of failure by the public health establishment w/re covid demonstrates they are fundamentally incapable of making the right call and nothing at all which has happened since their catastrophic failure has changed to think they would be any better in the future

lockdowns were not a part of any pandemic planning guidelines in early 2020 because of their enormous cost and the lack of evidence supporting their efficacy; this was all changed, on a dime, and trying to determine exactly what caused public health derps to launch into a society-wide experiment with incredibly high costs is difficult but it cannot be because of good literature about costs and effects because it did not exist

Sources on pre-2020 pandemic planning and the evidence against lockdowns?

the original sars sputtered out in almost all places without lockdowns at all making any claims lockdowns were needed to be bunk

Wasn't the original SARS contained because, unlike COVID-19, people weren't contagious before they got symptoms?

I don't play the sources game for lower comments, but doubly so when the sources demands are one-sided and/or for easily findable materials (e.g., pandemic guidelines in 2019)

Wasn't the original SARS contained because, unlike COVID-19, people weren't contagious before they got symptoms?

no

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