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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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C19 - Catchall term to refer to various covid mitigating restrictions, not the disease.

Anti-lockdown protests spread to Wuhan, China

In Shanghai, protesters called for president Xi Jinping to step down while others cried out “give me liberty or give me death” in the city of Chengdu.

^LOL, I don't know what to say about that. I can only hope they get what they want.

So looks like it's finally happening. It's too much even for the Chinese. Enough to go out and protest. 3 years is the upper limit to how long you can carry on with the C19 fugazi it seems.

For the uninitiated: It's really a different world in China. They are still treating C19 with an "abundance of caution". Probably infinitely more caution than most places in the world right now. Notice how all of the protestors are still wearing masks, outdoors! The sad part is that I could have made this post anytime in the last year and it would have been almost exactly the same.

I think one of the frustrating things about C19 was how much it felt like Groundhog Day, regardless of where you were in the world, outside of the US Red States and certain Balkan states- C19 Policies were kept around for so long past their expiry date, time became a meaningless concept.

I mentioned Groundhog day because I made a post about China's C19 excessiveness 1 year ago back in the old country. And keep in mind most countries got rid of the bulk of their restrictions at the time of making that post. My post was about small protests in various places in China. And in a year they have changed exactly 0%.

Many speculated on the reasons behind China's doggedness. Ranging from covid actually being bad and them knowing about it.. because they made it ha!; to China just not willing to lose face.

Not many of those reasons make sense now. China is not run by idiots. It's clear as the day the rest of the World looks down on them for this at the time of writing this. And covid wasn't that bad. So what gives?

Are they that high on their own supply? I think this is strong evidence that China's national consciousness is not connected to the "Real World" enough to actually be a threat to the US long term; A criticism often levied at The Cathedral. GDP can only save you so much from cutting your own dick off. There is really no kind way to say this, they are living in fantasy land.

I maintain that the Chinese think this was a biowarfare attack against them. They're using COVID to screen for their biological counterattack.

  1. Dodgy US NGO Ecohealth was messing around with chimeric coronaviruses in Wuhan - 'loses' their files on what viruses they had back in late 2019.

  2. China thinks the US used biowarfare against them in the Korean war, that's their official history.

  3. Conspiratorially minded Chinese elites aren't going to think 'oh it was just random chance: a sick Laotian bat flew to Wuhan and infected a pangolin who infected people'. They're not going to think an American NGO just happened to accidentally leak an extremely dangerous virus in a major Chinese city. Of course, Chinese BSL-4 biolabs are very well run and safe! Why wouldn't the leak happen in America if it were natural? Their most natural explanation is deliberate sabotage from the same country with a history of using biowarfare against them.

  4. They coped with the virus very well in the first two years, squelching it up until Omicron. Chinese death figures are very low, nearly 1000x times less than the US. Even the Chinese can't lie that much.

Given these assumptions, doesn't it make sense to launch a biological counterattack? The US is 100-1000x more vulnerable than China to biowarfare. China has finished setting up all their totalitarian surveillance structure, they've got camps and everything ready. They're 'justified' on the basis that they think the US shot first. If they release something in America, they'll have the advantage of distance and time, something they lacked the first time.

Maybe the MSS is taking their time, ensuring no evidence leads back to China. It's difficult to make it look like an accident and ensure it's lethal enough to be useful. Maybe the Chinese vaccine industry is suffering delays - they have to prepare a vaccine for the new weapon along with their COVID vaccine work. That might explain China's weakness on that front - diversion of effort. The frontline troops for Taiwan will need to be immune to the People's Liberation Plague. Maybe the nuclear forces aren't quite ready - the new subs and missile siloes take time to field. There could be all kinds of things causing a hold-up.

In conclusion, I think Chinese zero-COVID is a rational strategy to buy time for biowarfare and create an excuse for their ultra-high level of readiness. A few small riots and some economic damage are nothing compared to knocking out the entire West in a single blow and securing hegemony in Asia.

Last time you posted this (a month ago) I said I'd be happy to bet against a Chinese bioattack in the next year. You didn't take the offer, indicating that you think it's not going to happen in the next year. So when is this going to happen already?

The whole point is that we don't know whether it's a bioattack or not. There's plausible deniability. We live in a world where Daszak and the whole Ecohealth team have not even been arrested! How do you separate bioattack from lableak or natural evolution with great reliability? You can't. Let alone determining that it was Chinese specifically.

There is no plausible universe where I can say 'oh X plague has been proven to be a specifically Chinese bioattack, it's not just American propaganda or whatever else'. I can't get my money if I bet. And if I am right, the money isn't worth very much because we'll have bigger concerns like coughing our lungs out.

Okay, let's bet about a "plague" of any origin coming about in the next year.

If you want to be specific, I'd say 'novel disease kills 500K Westerners by the end of 2025' (about when the Chinese should've finished their preparations). That still excludes the chance that their biowarfare attempt squibs out or gets nipped in the bud. It also excludes them using another novel strain of COVID. I'm rather suspicious of how Omicron had such a huge genetic gap from Delta. What was it doing for those 18 months where it was barely evolving? Trapped in ice, in a lab somewhere?

This is a subject that is very opaque and hard to bet on. Imagine betting on 'US elections are rigged in favour of X'. If they're rigged properly, nobody will be able to prove it. And the definition of rigged can be very expansive, from intelligence agencies suppressing harmful stories to ballot harvesting to making up votes wholesale.

500k Westerners? Covid has killed a million Americans alone despite a 0.1% IFR. Most of the damage came from overreaction than the actual disease.

That's a piss poor bioweapon if there ever was one. If that's the most they can muster even in your imagination we've got nothing to worry about.

Well I was thinking about the time it would take to kill. COVID has been going for 3 years now.

Sure, but it's also a million deaths.

After the first covid death, the USA hit 500k dead in about a year. Again, with a 0.1% IFR.