economics

Lockdown

Wu Flu is off topic, but the holiness and lies surrounding Wu Flu is on topic.

What South Korea did is the application of Germ Theory to control a pandemic. What we are doing is the application of Germ Theory to justify the same agenda as Green New Deal and anti capitalism was proposed to justify.

What South Korea did, worked, and did not require the shutdown of society and the economy. South Korea used testing to lock up the sick, not the healthy, while governor Cuomo forced people coughing Wu Flu into old people’s homes to raise his death count.

Lockdown as actually implemented is not an effective measure (they lockdown white taxpayers and small businesses, not nams and holy quasi government businesses, they lockdown parks and beaches, but not public transport) Everywhere that people did not take effective measures to control Wu Flu, meaning everywhere in the West, Wu Flu rose by a factor of ten every ten days, at which rate it was bound to run into herd immunity fast.

It is now exponentially approaching herd immunity, with an exponential decay rate of a factor of two every four weeks.

Which means that most of the deaths are now behind us. Total deaths, yet another bad flu season, lockdown or no lockdown.

229 comments Lockdown

Pooch says:

Which means that most of the deaths are now behind us.

Lockdowns are unfortunately not behind us. We are seeing battle lines drawn in real time, with blue districts enthusiastically extending lockdown and red districts easing restrictions.

The Cominator says:

Steve Johnson and the rest of the lockdown morons BTFO!

Starman says:

@Cominator

When someone goes out at this date, proclaiming that we must believe institutions that were caught lying, and then promote Communist Revolutionary’s lockdown “solutions,” then they are probably shills. And you’re right, they really do need the CR treatment. I’m tempted to start asking them RedPill on Women questions. A lot of these shills (example: Jan Martense) also overlap the anti-space travel/anti-Mars settlement, anti-tech shills as well. Nearly every single anti-tech poster I’ve found on electronic forums failed the RedPill on women test. Anti-space colonization types were exposed as anti-natalists.

Steve Johnson says:

Fed shill #1 is immediately replied to by his buddy Fed Shill #2. Not suspicious at all.

Starman says:

@Steve Johnson

Ah, finally you are posting on the lockdown post now!

JanMartense says:

A lot of these shills (example: Jan Martense) also overlap the anti-space travel/anti-Mars settlement, anti-tech shills as well.

Step 1: Receive a (polite and honest) question about a specific detail of a poor analogy you came up with involving space travel.

Step 2: Obsessively rage against the questioner for the next 72 hours, all while making up laughably baseless accusations (“anti-tech shills”, “anti-natalist”).

Step 3: ???

I know the old joke about “living in your enemy’s head rent-free,” but you’re not even important enough to be an enemy…

Steve Johnson says:

This is a guy who thinks it’s a hard test to spot the scientific inaccuracies in Star Wars. You can judge someone based on what he thinks would be a challenge to someone else.

Starman says:

@Steve Johnson

I didn’t want to make Mister Grumpus watch entire episodes of The Expanse to see what’s wrong. It only takes a few seconds to see what Star Wars screws up.

But you like wasting other people’s time by unresponsive posts endlessly repeating numbers proclaimed by institutions that were caught lying.

The topic of this post is on the lying institutions themselves, not the fake numbers they put out.

Steve Johnson says:

You seemingly can’t distinguish between the various ways that the progressive machine lies:

1) Straight up lies – makes up some number of some countable thing, calls it true and dares anyone to disagree – the absolute rarest of cases and only done under extreme duress because it’s so easy to catch and discredits the whole enterprise when it happens.

2) Shading the truth through shifting definitions – flu deaths, for example. Some number of real, actual deaths happens, CDC has an internal pressure to give out flu vaccines (possibly just for the simple reactive reason that “vaccines are good” because the wrong people oppose other vaccines so it’s a reliable tribal marker and a way to stick it to the rubes) so they blur lines and interpret things in such a way that some number of real, actual deaths are attributed plausibly to a cause.

3) Complex, impenetrable, *secret* models with vaguely defined inputs: the global warming hoax.

You motte and bailey between positing the 2nd case of attributed deaths being manipulated to inflate the WuFlu deaths and then switching to the 1st case of them lying about easily verifiable things – creating fake dead people who never existed (and issuing death certificates for those made up people). The 2nd is plausible but is debunked by the increase in the death rate. The 1st is insane and is your fallback.

The institutions were caught in type 2 lying over flu; not type 1 lying.

Starman says:

@Jan Martense

You are still arrogantly doubling down on your incompetence on Mars and space travel. There was no politeness, you shill.

Starman says:

Now why is Steve Johnson avoiding this post, hmmm?

Could it be because he is a shill?

Steve Johnson says:

I’m “avoiding” this post because I don’t scan for new posts like it’s my job because it’s not my job to monitor this blog; unlike you and Cominator.

Steve Johnson says:

The flu deaths is a lie, btw.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-covid-19-deaths-to-flu-deaths-is-like-comparing-apples-to-oranges/

But these arguments, like the president’s comments, are based on a flawed understanding of how flu deaths are counted, which may leave us with a distorted view of how coronavirus compares with it.

When reports about the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 began circulating earlier this year and questions were being raised about how the illness it causes, COVID-19, compared to the flu, it occurred to me that, in four years of emergency medicine residency and over three and a half years as an attending physician, I had almost never seen anyone die of the flu. I could only remember one tragic pediatric case.

Based on the CDC numbers though, I should have seen many, many more. In 2018, over 46,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses. Over 36,500 died in traffic accidents. Nearly 40,000 died from gun violence. I see those deaths all the time. Was I alone in noticing this discrepancy?

I decided to call colleagues around the country who work in other emergency departments and in intensive care units to ask a simple question: how many patients could they remember dying from the flu? Most of the physicians I surveyed couldn’t remember a single one over their careers. Some said they recalled a few. All of them seemed to be having the same light bulb moment I had already experienced: For too long, we have blindly accepted a statistic that does not match our clinical experience.

“Flu deaths” is a statistical estimate based on allocating some or all pneumonia deaths to flu and is done by CDC to “influence behavior” and drive people to flu vaccines (probably because they get a thrill from lying).

jim says:

> “Flu deaths” is a statistical estimate based on allocating some or all pneumonia deaths to flu and is done by CDC to “influence behavior” and drive people to flu vaccines

There are substantial excess deaths during flu season, and there are substantial excess deaths during Wu Flu. But dying specifically of Wu Flu seems to be rare, just as dying specifically of flu seems to be rare. It is more that flu season is a stress on top of everything else, and Wu Flu is a stress on top of everything else. We also get substantial excess deaths during heat waves and cold snaps, but you don’t see reports “umpteen thousand people died of cold”. Maybe we should.

A lot of these deaths are iatrogenic. Going to hospital is dangerous, regardless of what ails you. There are enormous differences in death rates between hospitals, and these do not make the news either. That news, we definitely should see.

Flu vaccination is also a stress on top of everything else, and somehow the data that would tell us how many excess deaths correlate with flu vaccination is a lot more closely held than the data on how many excess deaths correlate with flu season.

Steve Johnson says:

The seasonal norms of death rates include “flu” deaths so the typical flu season doesn’t put them out of the ordinary; WuFlu on the other hand, has been seen to double and quadruple the seasonal death rate in places hard hit. Yes, some number of that is malice but the disease is real and deadly (again, not “deadly” compared to the black death but deadly compared to anything else out there that routinely goes around – 1% of cases die, maybe more).

Iatrogenic deaths are a constant for anything that brings on severe stress or severe decline in overall health – no matter what if you end up sick enough to end up in a hospital there’s a risk doctors will kill you (or more likely nurses will). For the most part, however, doctors don’t really like to kill you so actually try to learn how to avoid doing that (again, nurses are probably on the other end – women see someone weak and are so repulsed that they probably think that person deserves death). So flu or WuFlu and if you get sick enough to need to be hospitalized some people are not coming out alive; lots more need hospitalization for WuFlu though and lots fewer people survive the treatments for WuFlu. It’s deadly.

We also get substantial excess deaths during heat waves and cold snaps, but you don’t see reports “umpteen thousand people died of cold”. Maybe we should.

Because they can use this to talk about “global warming” they actually do say this about heat waves. Example:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49628275

They talk about deaths from cold weather when they can imply that it’s about mo money for dem programs:

https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/2/1/18356969/brutal-cold-contributed-to-3-deaths-in-chicago-during-polar-vortex

Every death is multi-causal; even cancer (if your immune system was stronger it could have caught the tumor early) or some car accidents (if you were more robust, you might have lived).

Steve Johnson says:

H/T on the cancer example to Aiden MacClear’s recent excellent blog post:

https://aidanmaclear.wordpress.com/2020/04/04/the-absolute-state-of-healthcare/

JanMartense says:

I’ll just make a general logical clarification here: knowing that Corona is indeed more deadly than the flu, and believing that the current lockdown approach is ineffectual, are not mutually exclusive. As South Korea, whose response I touted before, illustrates perfectly.

Steve Johnson says:

Shills use this type of distraction constantly and forget it or fail to notice that it’s been contradicted immediately. They then immediately go back to posting as if they had never seen the counterargument.

This was characteristic of CR (whom I was the first to call out as a shill, btw) and is being constantly illustrated by Cominator and R7.

The Cominator says:

JanMartese you originally claimed South Korea had a lockdown, I pointed out you were lying and Jim pointed out that you were lying. The truth cannot be shilling. You were arguing that lockdowns worked yesterday now that Jim has forcibly come out in favor of my position that the lockdowns were a leftist scam from their inception you are trying to claim that you were never for lockdowns.

Corona-chan is SLIGHTLY more deadly than the flu, but the best course of action was probably to do nothing and most of the deaths “from” it seem to be in actuality deaths from Cuomo trying to deliberately kill people.

Steve you are just completely full of shit, you compared this unironically to the truly horrifically deadly 1918 flu which wiped out the majority of whole army camps. This is NOTHING like the 1918 flu.

Steve Johnson says:

Steve you are just completely full of shit, you compared this unironically to the truly horrifically deadly 1918 flu which wiped out the majority of whole army camps. This is NOTHING like the 1918 flu.

Shill tell is that you intentionally misread something to fit it to your list of scripted approved responses.

This is the exchange you’re describing:

Dave:

If the COVID death toll surpasses one million in the USA, it will take several years as the disease spreads slowly in places where people practice social distancing and do not use public transportation.

Me:

The Spanish flu didn’t take several years and it was worse at spreading.

https://blog.reaction.la/science/wu-flu-manufactured-crisis-real-deaths/#comment-2561763

The comparison was to the *speed of the spread* of a disease that spread less effectively than WuFlu but the shill sees this and goes back to his scripted response because formulating his own response is above his pay grade; he’s only authorized to pick the pre-written replies.

JanMartense says:

JanMartese you originally claimed South Korea had a lockdown…

Yes, and I was correct. As BC pointed out in the same thread, “lockdown” originally referred to any period where people (even if it just the sick and their contacts) were isolated in their houses. I also posted an article from March, detailing how SK did exactly that, which used the word “lockdown” to describe their actions.

By April the media had twisted “lockdown” to exclusively mean keeping *everyone* in their house, for long periods of time, a blatant definition-change maneuver which you swallowed hook, line, and sinker. Now you’re just trying to use semantics to desperately distract from the fact that a prompt and sane reaction is, in fact, effective.

The Cominator says:

What South Korea did is NOT locking down the entire population which is the commonly understood meaning of lockdown here so it is you who are using semantics and not I.

So I repeat that South Korea did not have a lockdown they had a traditional quarantine using modern technology effectively. The US government is of course not competent to do this because progressivism (the one thing I agree with Steve Johnson on) so we were probably better off only banning the very few types of mass gatherings South Korea banned and otherwise doing nothing.

Steve Johnson says:

Lockdown as actually implemented is not an effective measure (they lockdown white taxpayers and small businesses, not nams and holy quasi government businesses, they lockdown parks and beaches, but not public transport)

“Effective” isn’t binary. These measures slow the spread because they do keep some people out of contact with carriers hence the decline in new cases. They might even be kind of actually aimed at doing so by some of the people who push for and implement them.

The problem is that that action is all that is within the mental Overton window of anyone who implements policy in the US. We need S Korea / HK / SG / Taiwan style policies but we don’t have a government competent enough to carry them out or willing to consider them because they go against the state religion in ways that the functionaries smell instinctively.

That’s what we (in our thing) need to be hammering away at and shills like Cominator and R7 are distracting from that by bringing in normie-tier fake opposition memes designed to lose and humiliate the people who hold them like “it’s just a flu” and “lockdowns don’t work” – note the suspicious similarity between the latter and all the official epidemiologists who declared confidently that “quarantines don’t work”.

The Cominator says:

“The problem is that that action is all that is within the mental Overton window of anyone who implements policy in the US. We need S Korea / HK / SG / Taiwan style policies but we don’t have a government competent enough to carry them out or willing to consider them because they go against the state religion in ways that the functionaries smell instinctively.”

The US permanent government is corrupt and ineffective (even if they wanted to stop the crisis which they don’t) because progressivism and pretending women and NAMs can do jobs they can’t do and because the president can’t fire people. Sure I don’t disagree and never said I did.

Doesn’t mean the lockdowns weren’t a scam.

Steve Johnson says:

Doesn’t mean the lockdowns weren’t a scam.

Literally no one argued that they weren’t – you merely pretended that people (including me) did so because that was the only way to fit this to your script.

Whether it’s a paid for script or you’ve been memed into running the script isn’t too interesting to me.

The Cominator says:

“Literally no one argued that they weren’t ”

Literally a lie and literally wrong. Jan Martese argued South Korea had a lockdown (they did not) and that ergo they worked.

Steve Johnson says:

Now you’re shifting definitions.

The scam is the American lockdowns – which are still partly effective because they do reduce contact and hence slow the spread of the disease. They are a scam in the sense that they are not the most effective way to do so and that the measures in them are desired for other reasons.

The Korean (and HK and SG and RoC) lockdowns are not scams in any way except possibly in the petty merchant style corruption way where the tracking app is written by a company that’s owned by a clan member of the official in charge of handing out the lockdown app contract.

Saying “lockdowns don’t work” is entirely wrong. Saying “lockdowns are a scam” is correct but misleading (western lockdowns are a scam, but still partly work) and saying Asian lockdowns are a scam is entirely wrong.

The Cominator says:

“Now you’re shifting definitions.”

Thats funny I’m generally accused of being spergishly literal and a broken record.

“The scam is the American lockdowns”

All of the lockdowns are scams to destroy the American and world economy in order to make sure Trump is not reelected and to increase the power of the permanent government/priesthood.

“The Korean (and HK and SG and RoC) lockdowns are not scams in any way except possibly in the petty merchant style corruption way where the tracking app is written by a company that’s owned by a clan member of the official in charge of handing out the lockdown app contract.”

South Korea DID NOT have a lockdown period. They quarantined people based on an app. Businesses were never closed. China’s lockdown (if it was ever intended to succeed) didn’t work. I have not followed what was done in Hong Kong and I don’t what you mean by “SG”.

“Saying “lockdowns don’t work” is entirely wrong.”

No it isn’t. Japan and South Korea did great, no lockdowns. Sweden is doing fine, no lockdown.

“saying Asian lockdowns are a scam”

Once again China’s lockdown didn’t work. South Korea and Japan never had lockdowns.

Steve Johnson says:

I have not followed what was done in Hong Kong and I don’t what you mean by “SG”.

SG is the ISO country code for Singapore.

Steve Johnson says:

South Korea DID NOT have a lockdown period. They quarantined people based on an app. Businesses were never closed.

You’re dead wrong.

This is the 2020 GSL (global StarCraft league):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQCPWv5wQnI&list=PLo2fPnM8EiQxmXj1HAlxkSWoEecgc6Wql&index=1

It takes place in a studio in Seoul.

This is the 2019 GSL.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0q2Mj4A_C8&list=PLo2fPnM8EiQyzh_uTzrnKymevHJjFCZ_y

Skip forward to the shots of the studio. Notice a difference? In 2020 there’s no studio audience. In 2019 there is a big studio audience. The 2020 season was even delayed because of shutdowns of businesses:

https://twitter.com/afreecaTV_gl/status/1224467603629821957

jim says:

> > South Korea DID NOT have a lockdown period. They quarantined people based on an app. Businesses were never closed

> You’re dead wrong.

> This is the 2020 GSL (global StarCraft league

In South Korea mass gatherings were banned, military bases went into lock down, and schools were shut down. But you could still go to the pizza joint and have a pizza, you still go to your office every day. The activities the priesthood hate and fear the most were never shut down.

There were restrictions on stores, restaurants, and gyms, but generally not prohibitive restrictions. The economy was not tanked. There was no general widespread shut down of business.

Steve Johnson says:

Arguing semantics over what qualifies as a shutdown is pointless.

South Korea shut down specific things including some businesses; it did so with the aim of curbing the spread of a very dangerous disease.

The US shut down many more things (and left other things still operating) with the *pretext* of stopping the spread of the dangerous disease. This has slowed the spread of the disease at a higher cost than was needed and less effectively than could have been done in another way.

jim says:

We need to argue semantics because people are using the same word to describe what the East Asians did and what the Europeans did, while these are very different things. The economy was never closed. Not even the infamous sex clubs were closed.

Steve Johnson says:

You can solve semantic debates via fiat; no need to argue.

If you enforce the use of the term “Asian shutdown” / “Asian lockdown” to mean generally what South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan did for the purposes of discussion we can talk about substance rather than motte and bailey’ing over “lockdown”.

I’m fine with having different words to describe the different reactions.

Starman says:

@Steve Johnson

“Arguing semantics over what qualifies as a shutdown is pointless.”

It is very much on point. This post is about these lying institutions.

You, Jan and aswaes all quoted numbers from proven dishonest institutions like “scientific American,” “BBC,” “CDC,” and others. Combine that with the use of enemy language, I suspected that you were a fed shill. Your answer to my RedPill on Women question verified that you’re not a fed shill.

Speaking of which, where did Jan Martense go? If that’s his real name, I can understand why he refused to answer.

Steve Johnson says:

You, Jan and aswaes all quoted numbers from proven dishonest institutions like “scientific American,” “BBC,” “CDC,” and others.

More classic shill behavior from you R7; I gave categories for Cathedral lies and you either can’t understand them or have to ignore them since they’re not on script.

Also pretty astoundingly stupid to call out the blog post at SciAm as a lie since that was calling out a CDC lie. You liar’s paradoxed yourself – “SciAm always lies but that means CDC was telling the truth”.

The SciAm post was a blog post by an actual person (Jeremy Faust) who has an actual twitter feed where he also calls out the FDA’s position on remdisvir as being fishy:

https://twitter.com/jeremyfaust/status/1261443576124211200

Starman says:

@Steve Johnson

Scientific American promotes the global warming hoax.

And that article was Scientific American declaring that we were never at war with East Asia, and were always at war with Eurasia.

It declared that similar deaths from Flu in years past didn’t happen, and COVID19 was totally different yo. And that the CDC was insufficiently pious.

I can understand why some people pray that the cities and their urbanite faggots should be nuked.

Steve Johnson says:

That article was a blog post by a real person who called out a lie; you don’t call out a lie when you are revising from having been at war with Eurasia to East Asia, you simply declare it so. That blog post was the opposite of that.

That real, actual person also called out the remedisvir bullshit on his twitter feed.

You’re wrong and are too stupid to notice or too stubborn to admit it.

jim says:

Tell me when he compares and contrasts Remdesivir with Hydroxychloroquine. (On which we have data that has actually been published traceable to actual identified doctors treating actual patients)

Namefags lie by telling half the truth.

Starman says:

@Steve Johnson

I called you a shill earlier because you unironically rely on evil and dishonest sources. That same man you quoted was attacking the CDC for insufficient holiness. And you went on cheered him on. Because he questioned Remdesvr.

Stop putting your trust in these evil and murderous institutions.

Starman says:

This is the man that Steve Johnson is demanding that we put our trust in.

What next? Put our trust in quackademic Fauci?

Believe Neil Ferguson (creator of the fake COVID19 models), who didn’t even believe in his own models, but expected hysterics like you to believe them?

Steve Johnson says:

This is the man that Steve Johnson is demanding that we put our trust in.

This is obviously too subtle for you but to get at the truth through a fog of lies you have to look for actual evidence and actual evidence is basically anecdote. When anecdote contradicts the Cathedral line, go with anecdote.

This guy is *reporting* that his anecdotal experience as a practicing doctor is that he has seen plenty of cases of gunshot deaths and opioid deaths – both with similar numbers to CDC’s flu number – and hasn’t seen a single flu death – ever. He then reports that his colleagues have seen the same thing.

I’m not saying to trust him as a source – the only namefags that can be trusted are Sailer and Cochran – but I’m saying to take his report as evidence. That he also points suggestively at another lie is more evidence for him having good intentions but still under the constraints of namefaggotry.

This stuff is pretty basic neo-reactionary epistemology R7.

You bringing up Fauci and Neil Ferguson is more shill behavior of dragging the discussion back to the pre-written talking points. Not only do I not endorse Fauci, I condemned him before I specifically knew about his particular existence:

https://twitter.com/CovfefeAnon/status/1229526679665676293

Reminder that the senior positions in the CDC are staffed by the careerists who were willing to push the “everyone has to be concerned about AIDS” line.

That’s a strong selective filter for dishonesty.

In February I condemned Fauci without knowing his name or of his particular existence.

jim says:

Anyone who speaks the truth on Wu Flu is going to talk about Zinc+Hydroxychloroquine+Azithromycin, among other things. If they remain silent on that, they are liars, even if they are using part of the truth to imply a lie, so any attention you pay to them will make you worse informed, not better informed. Even if they are speaking half the truth, the wrong half is likely to cause you harm.

Steve Johnson says:

To be totally explicit, Fauci made his career at CDC with that fraud; Fauci was appointed director of NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease) in 1984 and was the head of AIDS research specifically until 1995 according to this document which says he was “head of AIDS research until this year”

https://www.soa.org/globalassets/assets/Library/proceedings/record-of-the-society-of-actuaries/1990-99/1995/january/rsa95v21n4a26.pdf

Part of the politics is misrepresentation or misthinking about what the risk groups are worried about and so forth and so on. We haven’t caught up with the changing times. There are certainly politics. One of the most interesting things that’s happening with the people in AIDS research is that they’re all leaving their positions. You want to track what’s going to happen with AIDS research, look at the following. Bob Gallo just resigned from the NIH and got his own separate research institute at the University of Maryland. Tony Fauci stepped down as head of NIH research on AIDS. Harold Jaffe just stepped down; he’s going to go to Emory University as head of its epidemiology department. James Curran has just resigned and he’s going to Emory also.

Why are they all leaving now? I want to make a prediction. This may be totally wrong, but my guess is they know that they can’t finagle the numbers anymore.
There’s something I didn’t throw in here–all the AIDS data you get are finagled in some way. The AIDS definition has changed formally five times since 1984; each time the number of people included in the AIDS definition is larger. If you say in 1984 there will be so many hundreds of thousands of people by such and such a date, and you’re not there and you increase the number of people you include in the definition, and you keep doing that, you keep getting close to your prediction, even though you’re not really playing fair.

Steve Johnson says:

Correction: he saw a single pediatric death from flu.

Starman says:

@Steve Johnson

Neither you or Strannik are fed shills, but despite Strannik’s tradcuckery, I never saw him promote evil and dishonest institutions. Nor did he unironically quote models and numbers that were faked by these institutions.

Steve Johnson says:

R7 – CDC and vox and NY Times were the ones pushing “no masks” and “just the flu”. They were lying because they lie in a very specific way; they lie by implication. Sometimes they even tell the truth when they can use it to make a plausible case for what they want. They don’t make up death certificates; they don’t invent diseases that don’t exist.

The overall deaths aren’t fake.

To be absolutely clear; we should open up because we are incapable of doing this:

https://twitter.com/michaelvkim/status/1258987354934538248

Millions of people will die as a result. Those deaths are because we are an ungovernable mess of a country as a result of progressivism – an evil and insane state religion.

Saying the deaths are fake, then you open up and there are millions of dead sets you up to be condemned as having willfully killed them. This is amazingly obvious trap the Cathedral is setting and you and Cominator are doing your best to walk everyone else into it.

jim says:

> Saying the deaths are fake, then you open up and there are millions of dead sets

Sweden never closed, and their excess death rate is not significantly different from anyone else’s, and not significantly different from yet another bad flu season.

You are obviously not a shill, but you are giving us shill memes that were never supported by the early evidence, and have been discredited by the evidence that we now have.

In the beginning I had an open mind on the shill story. Maybe they had something, maybe they did not. It eventually became glaringly obvious that they did not.

One should rely as far as possible on evidence that one can personally verify. I personally verified classical physics, special relativity, that the earth is spherical and very old. I also personally verified that there is something mighty weird happening at the quantum level. I did this more as point of principle, that one should oneself check out the truth, than that I had any doubt about these issues.

But often you have to rely on other people. So, which other people? You are failing to exercise adequate care about which other people you are relying on.

We live in a world where murderous lies are high status and enforced with terrible violence, and even if we did not live in such a world, one always must be careful in who one believes.

Starman says:

@Steve Johnson

“Millions of people will die as a result.”

Again you promote Neil Ferguson’s fake models!
Neil, by his own private actions, didn’t believe in his fake models, he expected hysterics like you to believe them.

Starman says:

@Jim

“Anyone who speaks the truth on Wu Flu is going to talk about Zinc+Hydroxychloroquine+Azithromycin, among other things. If they remain silent on that, they are liars, even if they are using part of the truth to imply a lie, so any attention you pay to them will make you worse informed, not better informed. Even if they are speaking half the truth, the wrong half is likely to cause you harm.”

Exactly.
Steve Johnson is hung up on believing these evil people. He should give us an explanation on why.

Steve Johnson says:

You make the same argument that Steven J Gould makes against IQ; “you can’t trust this guy, therefore this prediction made by other people also can’t be trusted”.

Shill or stupid.

Steve Johnson says:

Steve Johnson is hung up on believing these evil people. He should give us an explanation on why.

Explain the fake death certificates first or just find one single one that’s fake – referring to a person that there’s otherwise no record of.

Starman says:

@Steve Johnson

“Explain the fake death certificates first or just find one single one that’s fake – referring to a person that there’s otherwise no record of.”

Deaths from cancer and heart disease are real deaths, the fakery is labeling these real deaths as “COVID19.” Something that Jim, others, and I keep endlessly repeating to you over and over again. Which you keep ignoring over and over again. This is very dishonest. Is this an urban thing? Is this habit common to verbal IQ people?

Because I need a better explanation than “Steve Johnson is an urbanite faggot.”

Steve Johnson says:

Deaths from cancer and heart disease are real deaths, the fakery is labeling these real deaths as “COVID19.” Something that Jim, others, and I keep endlessly repeating to you over and over again. Which you keep ignoring over and over again. This is very dishonest.

This is shill confirmation.

You have started with “COVID19 deaths are overclassified” then when people point out the TOTAL DEATHS you respond with “the death totals are faked” then you immediately forget that until someone brings out the total deaths and you do the same song and dance again.

You’ve done this over and over and you do this on multiple subjects.

You follow this up with namecalling to posture at being high status in the group and having the right to exclude but you don’t have that right and you’re not.

You’re the fag here and a massive net negative to have around.

Steve Johnson says:

You are obviously not a shill, but you are giving us shill memes that were never supported by the early evidence, and have been discredited by the evidence that we now have.

The best evidence is showing about 1% deaths from this and huge transmission rates if you have open contact.

Sweden isn’t a case of unrestricted contact because as I demonstrated Swedes are taking it upon themselves to socially distance.

South Korea is taking serious measures to contain and extinct this and places that don’t take those same measures are going to go to 60% – like Lombardi did, like jails and aircraft carriers did and yes, unlike Diamond Princess where people are able to isolate themselves so it only spread to 20% or so.

I don’t know where you’ve been getting your information but I recommend listening to the podcasts Greg Cochran has done with James Miller (futurestrategist) and following Cochran’s twitter feed because disagreeing with him in one of his areas of expertise is not a reliable formula for being correct. For example see his latest post:

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2020/05/13/how-far-weve-come/

It’s fairly simple; everyone alive is susceptible; no one is immune (it being a novel zoonotic); the disease is highly transmissible with normal contact and it’s not contained. It either goes to 60 or to 0 and holding it at 3% isn’t possible in the long term.

jim says:

> The best evidence is showing about 1% deaths from this and huge transmission rates if you have open contact.

If you have an enclosed crowded population in which old people are massively over represented, as for example the Diamond Princess, you get 0.2% of the total at risk population dying.

For a more normal age distribution, you get 0.1 to 0.2% of the infected population dying, and herd immunity sets in long before the majority of the population are infected.

Herd immunity sets in pretty quickly, suggesting either that the great majority of the population is naturally resistant, or that R0 is only markedly above unity for a small minority of super spreaders. The South Korean data indicates that a tiny number of individuals are responsible for the vast majority of cases, consistent with the superspreader minority hypothesis. Once most people in the superspreader minority get sick and recover, you are fine. The latest outbreak in South Korea is a gay who managed to have intimate sexual contact with seventy people in three days.

Bringing back stoning might be more effective than lockdown.

jim says:

> listening to the podcasts Greg Cochran has done with James Miller (futurestrategist) and following Cochran’s twitter feed because disagreeing with him in one of his

I don’t listen to Greg Chochran after catching him in politically correct lies. One lie, all lies. He is the equivalent of the intellectual dark web, better described as the intellectual slightly off white web. People go looking for the good stuff, don’t get it.

The Cominator says:

This blog is an absolute lie, San Francisco is filthy and full of homeless drug addicts social distancing there is impossible but yet deaths are low confirmed cases are going down. Obvious herd immunity is obvious you are not a shill but for some reason are believing evil shills even when they are obviously wrong.

This evil Cathedral shill’s blog post contradicts almost everything Jim said in his manufactured crisis real deaths.

Starman says:

@Steve Johnson

I have, from the beginning when I realized this was a hysteria, stated that other deaths were being counted as “COVID19.”

And you have repeatedly demanded us to believe in dishonest people similar to Ron Fournier. Which other people called out when their Armageddon didn’t happen.

I suggest a whiteboard space for the Armageddon date on your sandwich board. That way you can keep changing the date when the apocalypse fails to occur.

JanMartense says:

I have, from the beginning when I realized this was a hysteria, stated that other deaths were being counted as “COVID19.”

Ok, let’s assume you’re correct and all “COVID 19” deaths are due to heart attacks, unrelated pneumonia, and other typical causes. Why, then, have the TOTAL number of deaths increased? Why did total deaths in Bergamo spike 300% compared to last year, while South Korea saw no increase? What is killing these people?

Steve Johnson says:

Ok, let’s assume you’re correct and all “COVID 19” deaths are due to heart attacks, unrelated pneumonia, and other typical causes. Why, then, have the TOTAL number of deaths increased? Why did total deaths in Bergamo spike 300% compared to last year, while South Korea saw no increase? What is killing these people?

Fucking crickets from R7 (of course) even though he posted seven comments here since you posted this.

Previously when I pressed him on this all he came back with was “the death totals are fake” – intentional ambiguity to avoid the argument. Does he mean there are fake death certificates? That would be responsive but insane. Does he mean misclassification? That would be simply repeating his initial claim which was disproven completely by the evidence of a spike in the total deaths.

He’s trapped and so has to evade.

Starman says:

@Steve and Jan
The death rates are fake. Why?
Confirmed cases numbers ignored asymptomatic carriers. Deaths from other causes counted as COVID19.

As for extra deaths, you might want to ask people like Nipples Cuomo who had policies deliberately designed to increase the number of deaths… even with that, the Armageddon predicted by the fake and gay models didn’t happen.

So I have a helpful suggestion for you urbanite faggots, instead of buying a new sandwich board every time Armageddon fails to materialize, simply install a whiteboard space for your Armageddon date. A great investment for you and your buddy, Ron Fournier.

Steve Johnson says:

You have no actual reply so you throw up squid ink.

Let’s take your whole comment:

The death rates are fake. Why?
Confirmed cases numbers ignored asymptomatic carriers. Deaths from other causes counted as COVID19.

To which multiple people have pointed out many times that the total deaths in the areas that are hard hit are up by a massive amount.

As for extra deaths, you might want to ask people like Nipples Cuomo who had policies deliberately designed to increase the number of deaths… even with that, the Armageddon predicted by the fake and gay models didn’t happen.

Pure squid ink plus name calling. Those are explicitly extra deaths counted as corona deaths.

Unless your position is that Cuomo sent covid patients into the nursing homes then also sent in assassins.

So I have a helpful suggestion for you urbanite faggots, instead of buying a new sandwich board every time Armageddon fails to materialize, simply install a whiteboard space for your Armageddon date. A great investment for you and your buddy, Ron Fournier.

More Steven J Gould style argument. “This one guy has a mistress and made a model therefore the entire field of epidemiology which modeled the spread of every other infectious disease is wrong”. The problem with epidemiology has been that they were ignoring their own models and saying stuff like “it’ll die out” for no reason back when it was possible to contain this to China; then saying stuff like “eh, it’s not that bad – the flu is worse” (you know, your position) when it got out of China and could have been contained with a few tests and isolation.

All that and you still never answered the fucking question. Why are total deaths in Bergamo up 300% with very few of those deaths being in hospitals? Home gas leaks?

jim says:

> All that and you still never answered the fucking question. Why are total deaths in Bergamo up 300%

Good question. But before he answers that question, you answer the question about “lockdown” in South Korea.

> with very few of those deaths being in hospitals?

How do you know that? How many of those deaths were in hospitals? Given that we now know that the ventilator treatment of Wu Flu killed people, probably regardless of whether they actually had Wu Flu or not, deaths in hospitals are not necessarily indicative of the lethality of Wu Flu. If you put every old and frail person on a ventilator because ventilators are holy, you are going to kill a lot of them.

Maybe the data supports you, but I would like to see the data, not just your bombastic assertion.

The trouble was that ventilators were treated as a magic instrument that pumps life into people, rather than a method of ensuring that an unconscious or paralyzed person continues to breath. Used in this manner, they are lethal. Maybe this was largely a crisis of the medical establishment getting drunk on magic rituals.

A lot of the deaths are the result of casual resort to drastic heroic high status medical interventions. Medical establishments like to do this stuff, just as bureaucrats like to shut things down. The former kills people, and the latter ruins people. Announce a crisis that gives the medical establishment excuse to do what it wants to do, and bureaucrats excuse to do what they want to do, a whole lot of bad stuff will ensue, supposedly proving that the crisis is real.

Deaths not in hospitals are pretty good evidence that the crisis is real, even if it is being hyped. Do we have substantial excess non hospital deaths?

Starman says:

@Steve Johnson

“To which multiple people have pointed out many times that the total deaths in the areas that are hard hit are up by a massive amount.”

Up by a “massive amount”? Your buddy Neil Ferguson’s prediction of millions of deaths didn’t happen. Your other buddy, Ron Fournier, predicted millions of deaths in Georgia three weeks after Georgia ended lockdowns in April. It’s now May and Ron Fournier’s… and your Armageddon prediction didn’t happen.

And now you are defending Nipples Cuomo? Fuck you.

Steve Johnson says:

The whole paper is available through the pdf link.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20067074v3

The official numbers of COVID deaths was coming from deaths in hospitals; go to a hospital, die of ARDS (iatrogenic or not) and that goes in the COVID count – this is what all the “with not of” is about – they claim that this is inflating the COVID death count. The actual total death count is much higher – exceeding the projected annual deaths by a minimum of 150% based on the data from the last 5 years.

We perform a counterfactual time series analysis on 2020 mortality data from towns in Italy using data from the previous five years as control. We find an excess mortality that is correlated in time with the official COVID-19 death rate, but exceeds it by a factor of at least 1.5. Our analysis suggests that there is a large population of predominantly older people that are missing from the official fatality statistics. We estimate that the number of COVID-19 deaths in Italy is 49,000-53,000 as of May 9 2020, as compared to the official number of 33,000.

and this:

The Population Fatality Rate (PFR) has reached 0.26% in the most affected region of Lombardia and 0.58% in the most affected province of Bergamo. These PFRs constitutes a lower bound to the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR). We combine the PFRs with the Test Positivity Ratio to derive a better lower bound of 0.61% on the IFR for Lombardia. We further estimate the IFR as a function of age and find a steeper age dependence than previous studies: we find 17% of COVID-related deaths are attributed to the age group above 90, 7.5% to 80-89, declining to 0.04% for age 40-49 and 0.01% for age 30-39, the latter more than an order of magnitude lower than previous estimates.

Turns out to be quite deadly to the old but much less deadly to the non-old.

From deeper in the paper:

Using this model for New York City which has population YMR of 0.62%, we obtain the lower bound (mean) on population IFR of 0.50% (0.62%). This is similar to our estimate from combining age-dependent IFR from Italy data. It is also consistent with a lower bound of 0.55% IFR estimated by combining the NYC COVID-19 PFR (including probable deaths) of 0.25% with a TPR of 0.45% as of early May, independent of the Italian data. From our YMR model, if we take 0.62% IFR estimate together with 0.25% PFR, we find that 40% of NYC residents are already infected. However this number decreases if the actual IFR is higher than 0.62%. As of April 22, with 9900 confirmed deaths, this IFR of 0.62% predicted 19% IR which was in good agreement with then estimated IR of 21% from seropositivity tests.

When a pretty random test (people in grocery stores) were tested a few weeks later it turns out that only 21% of NYers were positive so the actual IFR is significantly higher than their estimate for the lower bound.

A lot of the deaths are the result of casual resort to drastic heroic high status medical interventions. Medical establishments like to do this stuff, just as bureaucrats like to shut things down. The former kills people, and the latter ruins people. Announce a crisis that gives the medical establishment excuse to do what it wants to do, and bureaucrats excuse to do what they want to do, a whole lot of bad stuff will ensue, supposedly proving that the crisis is real.

Absolutely – but there are excess deaths of people not in hospitals.

jim says:

Good evidence, which is what I like to see.

OK, killing more people than the usual bad flu season in some places, some of the time. A lot of the people it kills were due to die fairly soon anyway, but it is also killing quite a few people that were not due to die for quite a while.

These people are mostly fat people, who have obesity related immune dysfunction. Wu Flu attacks the immune system, particularly in the lungs. The one two punch of obesity plus Wu Flu sets off something like a massive auto immune reaction, mostly in people that already have obesity related auto immune issues, which reaction shuts down oxygen absorption in the lungs, without, however shutting down carbon dioxide removal. But fat people are not the only people with wonky immune systems, though fat people are most of them.

OK, we have a real problem. To which South Korea, Taiwan, and Queensland have a real solution.

But enough of medicine: To get back on topic, no matter what the crisis, the bureaucracy says: “Something must be done. Lets do everything on our wishlist, because that is something.” Bureaucrats just like shutting things down – except for things, like public transport, run by bureaucrats. If they cannot shut down a pizza parlor for CO2 emssions, will shut it down for Wu Flu.

And so, naturally we see a massive propaganda offensive for their agenda, and a massive censorship offensive against anything contrary to their agenda, such anything that actually works, and any evidence that their agenda does not work.

If it is lockdown holding back the mighty and terrible tide, Queenslanders having ended lockdown, after successfully ending Wu Flu, should now be dying like flies, and people in South Carolina should soon start dying like flies, having opened up when Wu Flu is still going.

Do you really expect we are going to see anything happen in South Carolina after lockdown different from what was happening before lockdown?

And even less does it look like the recently lifted lockdown in Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas was holding back a mighty wave of death.

When South Carolina lockdown ended, deaths rose from a mild flu season to an ordinary flu season, and then fell back to a mild flu season.

When the other states ended lockdown, no apparent effect. Depending on how you look at the data, maybe the lockdowns have some effect, but they don’t make any large difference – no mighty wave of death is being held back by propitiating the sun god with human sacrifices.

Starman says:

@Steve Johnson

Not only are you defending Nipples Cuomo, you are unresponsive when we point out that the institutions are lying. You continue to assume that everyone here trusts lying institutions and trusts their fake papers and fake models.

The Cominator says:

“To which multiple people have pointed out many times that the total deaths in the areas that are hard hit are up by a massive amount.”

Which Jim and many other posters have pointed out are iatrogenic. Wu Flu doesn’t kill many people, Andrew Cuomo and others like him do.

The Cominator says:

“Good evidence, which is what I like to see.”

The problem is the data is from Italy… Italy is an extreme extreme outlier where the hospitals were probably killing people Cuomo style but they also got overwhelmed and people were Italian style hugging Chinese from Wuhan then going home and kissing their grandparents…

So its best to just throw out data from Italy as its unique situation will likely not be replicated elsewhere, as I said from the beginning.

Starman says:

@Cominator

Now that Steve Johnson correctly answered my RedPill on Women question. I’ll have to make a new one for Jan Martense, assuming “Jan Martense” is a pseudonymous handle. If it’s a real name, then I’m not going to ask.

I usually assume that people here are posting under pseudonyms because this blog is packed to the gills in thoughtcrime to the extent that it’s content is invisible to Progressives and their shills.

jim says:

You don’t need a new one. A shill cannot give you the right answers, even if you feed them to him. The test works because the answers, or even the issues, are not allowed on their script.

JanMartense says:

Nah its a pseudonym, fire away.

Atavistic Morality says:

I’ve never once thought you were a bad faith actor or a shill, but your communication could use improvement my friend. You’re constantly ambiguous and out of context even if you don’t realize, I believe if you were specific you wouldn’t have gotten into this fight.

For example, I told you in the other thread I didn’t see any connection with the statement you were answering, and there was none by your own admission, only somehow you assigned blame to the original poster. It’s up to you to answer properly to what you reply and assign context.

If someone says that lockdowns are useless, in a western context, and explicitly mention economic shutdown and you protest vehemently, you’re bound to be misunderstood. I got your point when you explained yourself, but you really make a poor job of it.

I don’t know why you couldn’t just be explicit from the get go and also stop getting into confusing semantics using enemy terms. For this conversation, because of wide use of the media, lockdown means that you forcefully close every single shop and business and you make sure the entire country starves to death, and you certainly make sure you don’t use the Zelenko Protocol and you make sure you don’t test anyone and you don’t quarantine the sick. Because this is what the media and its hundreds of articles and minions call lockdown.

Yes, technically speaking the word lockdown in that context is probably wrong by definition if you stick to the dictionary, and actually makes a lot more sense to use in a context of isolating the sick, not the healthy and smashing their business, but it’s not how it’s being used.

So when an user says that “lockdowns don’t work” he is saying that gulaging the healthy, smashing their businesses, banning the Jew cure and not testing and quarantining the sick don’t work. And Jim has been explicit about this.

And when they say that SK didn’t have a lockdown they mean they didn’t do that.

Next comment below you’re again ambiguous with semantics, let’s stick to one definition for lockdown and call the other thing quarantine or whatever please, or like you did in another comment, call it Asian lockdown or something.

It’s frustrating to see people argue because of semantics and miscommunication instead of actually arguing the point and calling each other shills, it’d be awesome if you guys did that. I’d actually like to see a conclusion to the open debate between jim and aswaes about the veracity of the data. So far I haven’t seen anyone give a reasonable and plausible explanation to what is being shown in the graphic on topic, on thread.

Whether it’s you, Jan or aswaes who has it, I’d be happy to read it.

jim says:

Asian lockdown is a good term. Restrictions, but not a plan to shut down the market economy on a germ theory rationale instead of a global warming rationale.

The restrictions being narrowly targeted on the basis of real, rather than hypothetical, infections. Shutting down the schools was overkill, but schooling is not very useful. Most kids learn anyway.

Although kids are not harmed by Wu Flu, they might have transmitted it to grandma. Costs nothing, and is plausibly beneficial.

Steve Johnson says:

Thank you for pointing this out; I generally try to be short and my posting on twitter has clearly created some bad habits in leaving out context for the sake of brevity.

As far as the substance goes; I’ve tried to be clear and complete on this thread.

The one substantive and amazingly, blindingly wrong position that R7 and Cominator have take is that the *disease* is fake; R7 goes on to further assert that the numbers of dead in total – not just the dead attributed to WuFlu – is made up. That’s not semantics.

As far as the difference between Sweden in policy and the US and the similarity of outcome my instinct is that Swedes voluntarily did the useful parts of what was required of white Americans anyway and the colonizers did what American prog vote banks did so that practically speaking, the same outcomes have so far happened from the same general behaviors. However, this is a tentative conclusion.

jim says:

Sweden did not tank its economy – and neither did South Korea. Big difference, and we need a word for this difference in order to think about it and talk about it.

A word that puts South Korea in the same category as the US is a misleading word that obstructs thought and discussion.
If South Korea did not shut down the sex clubs, it is not in lockdown.

Japan is an intermediate case: Japan had, and has, stronger restrictions than South Korea, but when they talk about the economic impact of Wu Flu they say stuff like ‘Supply chains have been disrupted, mainly due to the suspension of economic activities in China and other regions. That prompted the government to downgrade corporate profits and business sentiment, saying they were “in a weak tone” and “deteriorating,” respectively.’

Notice the conspicuous lack of any mention of the suspension of economic activities within Japan, because, by and large, economic activities within Japan has not been suspended, while in the US the meat supply line has been shut down because progs are morally opposed to meat.

The latest outbreak of Wu Flu in South Korea is a gay that had 7900 contacts in sex clubs over a few days – the clubs are jammed packed, and were not closed.

Steve Johnson says:

South Korea didn’t tank their economy but Sweden at least partly did. The numbers I’ve seen which are kinda, sorta trustworthy show Sweden having about as much of a decline in economic activity as the US.

https://www.aei.org/economics/international-economics/swedens-coronavirus-results-dont-make-the-case-for-reopening-the-american-economy/

This cites Sweden as having a forecasted decline of 3.4% of GDP vs a 2.9% decline in the US. I take these numbers with a huge grain of salt but they point in the same direction as the other evidence.

Agreed that we should call the response in Asian countries an “Asian lockdown” to preserve the important distinction.

jim says:

“Forecasted” – meaning a lie.

Forecasts are always political.

If South Korea did not even close the infamous sex clubs, not a lockdown.

Japan also forecasts a decline in economic activity, which forecast is not a lie, and I know it is not a lie because they explain on what it is based, and it is based on other countries closing down economic activity.

Steve Johnson says:

Granted it’s not great evidence but it correlates with other evidence and I’ve got no better, contradictory evidence for what’s going on economically in Sweden.

Here’s something randomly selected off the top of my head:

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/by-year/2020/?area=SE

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/by-year/2019/?area=SE

Reported movie box office receipts.

Last reported weekend was week 12 at $18,446 gross.

Last year week 12 – $879,446 gross.

jim says:

Which box office receipts reveal that the movie theaters in Sweden are still open.

Likely many people are choosing to not go to the theater because of Wu Flu, but that is an individual choice, not a lockdown.

Further, you are comparing “Bloodshot” with “Frozen”, which likely vastly swamps any effects of Wu Flu.,

Steve Johnson says:

I looked back to other years and the $800k last year was a low number – $820k 2018, $1.9m 2017, $2.1m 2016, $1.9m 2015. Looks like the trend was downward but the reaction to the WuFlu caused a collapse.

My point is that Sweden even though not formally subject to Asian style or western style lockdown nonetheless has people practicing social avoidance to probably about the same degree and so the spread there is going to be in line with what happens in the rest of the West. It’s not a control group where people didn’t alter their behavior.

Starman says:

@Steve Johnson

“American Enterprise Institute”

LOL

Starman says:

For the shills, Jan Martense, Steve Johnson, and others:

It’s time to see what kind of shills you are.

Pick an answer:

Should we make pornography illegal?
[A] Yes, because pornography is the tool of those dirty Jews who plot against the White family.
[B] No, because pornography allows us to learn about various fetishes and alternative sexual practices, and that is valuable knowledge.
[C] No, because male desire for sexual gratification is not causing society any problems. Now, we should ban gay, tranny, and cuck porn. And we should ban romance novels.
[D] No, but Child Porn with those 14 year old children should still be illegal.
[E] No, but we should require all porn actors to wear proper PPE, in order to protect the actors and actresses from venereal diseases (such as the super deadly COVID19), and to teach the viewers — who are often our own sons — to use contraceptives. Porn is spiritual poison, but it’s not realistic to ban all of it, so we should focus instead on protecting the sex workers — who are often our own daughters in college — from exploitation and bad working conditions.

jim says:

Steve Johnson is not a shill

His posts are valuable and informative. Don’t chase him away.

He does not have to take the red pill test, though I am curious as to his position on red pill issues, but he is posting under what may well be his true name, which would make it impossible for him to pass, or even take, the red pill test, or even acknowledge that other people are talking about red pill issues.

The giveaway for a shill is that he is not posting under his true name, but still cannot even acknowledge red pill issues, revealing that though we do not know the true identity behind the post, his Human Resources Department does know the true identity behind the post. Steve Johnson’s Human Resources Department may well know who is behind his posts, but not because his job is posting stuff, merely because he may well be using his true name.

Still, I would like to hear him on the red pill, if only to tell us why he cannot speak on it. But not because I suspect him of shilling.

Steve Johnson says:

First of all, thank you.

Second, no, not my real name and I’ll gladly take any red pill test you or anyone wants to give out.

You can check my twitter feed (CovfefeAnon) for plenty of high grade WQ red pills if you don’t want to give the specific test here.

jim says:

You posted, as CovfefeAnon:

> Women rebel against all men; it’s the first story in the Bible for a reason.

Good framing – the red pill expressed from a position of moral authority – the red pill with the white pill attached, giving the meta message that not only is it the nature of women to shit test authority, regardless of the rightness of that authority, as Roissy minion of Satan truthfully tells us, but that this is wrong, and family, society, the Church, and the state have to deal with it, as Roissy, minion of Satan, neglects to tell us.

I declare your twitter feed a pass of the red pill test for shills. A shill would not be able to acknowledge the existence of that twitter feed, let alone claim it.

ten says:

Quick reminder on how Roissy is a minion of Satan?

jim says:

Roissy tells the truth, while Satan is the father of lies, but Roissy sells Satan’s solution to our problem: Watch the decline from the poolside.

That said, Roissy is great, and everyone should read his old stuff from beginning to end.

But a man needs to own a woman, he needs a house, and land and children. A man that does not own a woman breaks, and a rotating collection of whores is not ownership.

If she is free to suspend cooperation at any time, men are disinclined to invest in her and her children. You pump and dump, so that if you are lucky, you dump her before she dumps you. You spin the plates to avoid being spun. There is always someone more alpha than you are. You pump and dump because it hurts less that way. Evolution shaped you that way, evolution makes it hurt, so that you would not waste time looking after a chick that becomes pregnant with Jeremy Meeks’s demon spawn. Evolution has planted the knowledge in you that investing in a woman you do not own is a bad investment.

You don’t plant trees on land you don’t own, and if you don’t have some land and plant some trees for your grandkids, it hurts.

Roissy truthfully tells us how to operate in defect/defect equilibrium with women. But the point is to achieve cooperate/cooperate equilibrium.

This morning my wife, after making me my morning coffee, “jokingly” threatened to charge me with rape, domestic violence, and all that. Just friendly joking ha ha. She observed that this would make her rich, which made it not very funny at all. I “jokingly” quoted the Old Testament, and “jokingly” pointed at the ocean. (Implying that if she called the cops on us she might go for a very long swim.) Haha. Just having fun. We laughed. I laughed for real, because when I pointed at the ocean, I passed her shit test, and she loved me for passing her shit test. Alpha male backed by the supreme alpha male. She points at alpha cop, I point at alpha God. She points at my assets, I point at the ocean.

That is how you reach cooperate/cooperate equilibrium.

Let us imagine two mafia guys. Cops put each one in separate cells, and tell them.

“If neither of you rat the other out, we will punish you for carrying a gun without a carry permit and stuff. If you rat your pal out, and your pal fails to rat you out, you get off free, your pal takes all the blame, and gets the electric chair. If both of you rat each other out, we will let you off with forty years in prison. If you don’t rat your pal out, and your pal rats you out, you get the electric chair.”

The prisoner would be much better off if he was sure that the mafia would kill the rat.

In a prisoner’s dilemma, you want and need external enforcement. It is in a woman’s individual biological self interest to be in a situation where if she runs off with the wedding singer, she gets dragged back on a leash and beaten, and the wedding singer gets beaten to death, just as it is in the prisoner’s individual self interest to be a member of an organization that will kill him should he rat on the other prisoner.

Women are unable to reproduce, because they have an abundance of choice, and no way of irrevocably escaping choice. So they love a man who can deny them choice. Trouble with Roissy’s framing is that he correctly says that women love bad men, and correctly concludes you should be bad, but fails to notice that a good man can be strong enough to take away a woman’s unwanted freedom.

polifugue says:

>I “jokingly” quoted the Old Testament

What are some good Old Testament quotes for these types of situations? I know what the NT in particular St. Paul says, but I’m admittedly unfamiliar with the OT.

ten says:

A very good answer, thank you.

The Cominator says:

Okay not a shill just not that smart and not willing to admit that he got took by a scam of Cathedral induced mass hysteria.

Starman says:

@Cominator

Steve Johnson is pretty much like Spandrell, an urbanite caught up in the Wu Flu hysteria. Spandrell is one of the great sensei of the woman question and RedPill. And he’s one of the few blackpillers who are not shills.

Steve Johnson says:

“Not smart” is being unable to distinguish between the levels of deception that the Cathedral runs on.

The first Cathedral play on this was to *downplay* the severity – “the flu is worse” “this won’t be a pandemic” “stigma is worse than disease” all from official Cathedral publications and use this level to block possible effective measures (masks don’t work, quarantines are outdated and don’t work) that could have prevented this – such as screening entrants from foreign countries that could have come here from China or could have come here from places that were allowing Chinese in. They succeeded at that because although Trump saw through it he didn’t have the backing in his own bureaucracy to act on it until it was too late (or he didn’t see through it until it was too late) – he banned travel from China on the exact day that Yarvin argued that he would never do so.

The next Cathedral play was to block testing when it was still possible to confine this to a few cases and isolate the infected; first FDA declares an emergency which legally meant that only CDC could produce tests then CDC drags their heels and finally produces a faulty test while actively blocking people from using privately developed tests which could be done in any hospital with a lab.

All these moves were made specifically to seed the country with an unstoppable epidemic – and they succeeded. The play was multifaceted but there were two main motives – first, traditionally in every emergency the Cathedral gets items off its wish-list and second, because they wanted to scapegoat Trump.

Now the Cathedral play is to meme the other side into claiming “its just a flu” to get Trump’s supporters to pressure Trump to make some kind of decree which will then later be spun into Trump being responsible for the wave of deaths that follow. Trump’s only real weapon is his popularity with his base (which translates to popularity in the security forces that are run by members of his base for one) Through your mindless gainsaying you have fallen for this op completely or you are a shill pushing this.

Atavistic Morality says:

The comment is very insightful and totally plausible, but about the last play there is a problem.

People claiming it’s just a flu don’t necessarily believe that is really “just a flu”, just not that deadly and definitely not enough to justify the gulag (this is the hysteria R7 and Cominator are talking about), people need to get back to work, people want to get on with their lives.

It could backfire and play out like you’re saying, but if you keep feeding the fear you are also justifying the gulag, which is possibly far worse. As you’ve said in other posts, the USG is useless and they’re not going to implement any useful measure, they might as well just fuck off so people can at least prosper on their own. Likewise in my own country.

So which is worse, to maintain gulag and people starve, or to let people get back on their feet removing the gulag with the risk of certain accusations? Which will hurt Trump worse?

Personally I’d a 100% support Trump removing gulag, but even if he didn’t I’d still vote for him if I was American, but of course no one here is anywhere close to representing the average voter.

Starman says:

@Atavistic Morality

Yup.
COVID19 isn’t “just the Flu” for the many nursing home residents, that Nipples Cuomo deliberately mass murdered when people started to notice that the dishonest institutions were counting people dying of cancer and heart disease as “COVID19 deaths.” He and other Democrats needed more real COVID19 deaths.

Steve Johnson says:

Why did they need more real COVID19 deaths when they could simply make up fake death certificates which you claim they have been doing and are still doing?

Maintaining consistency in delusion is difficult.

jim says:

They are not making up fake death certificates. They are certifying fake cause of death on real death certificates.

They are also applying a helping hand to ensure real Wu Flu deaths.

None of this is exactly lying or exactly murder – but it is not exactly the truth either. Even though there is a big spike in the death rate every cold snap, non one gets certified as died of cold. It is creative statistics, and creative medical treatment.

There is a real and substantial rise in excess deaths associated with Wu Flu, but a lot of it is people who need medical treatment, such as cancer patients, not getting it, and a lot of it is people getting inappropriate and dangerous medical treatments, for example people who can breath unaided getting ventilators instead of oxygen. Some of it is stuff like giving electric shocks to a heart that is still beating, but beating so slowly the alarm goes off – using heroic and dangerous high status doctor administered medical treatments, when nurse administered low status treatments would likely be far more effective and far safer.

And then after you have killed a bunch of patients, you have to write up cause of death – and it is far more politically correct to write “Covid-19” than “oops, we killed off another loser”.

Those alarms go off far too often, often for entirely innocuous and trivial reasons, and every time they go off, it is a justification for doing stuff that is likely to kill the patient. In the better hospital the nurse just glances at the patient, says “How are you feeling?”, the patient says “fine”, and the nurse resets the alarm, but in the worse hospitals, they are required by regulation to have drama and bullshit every time, because in a nice hospital, they have nurses and doctors that they trust to act responsibly, and in a bad hospital, they regulate the crap out of everything because they cannot trust anyone.

You want to have nurse administered and self administered treatment as much as possible, because the nurse and orderly administered treatments are far less likely to kill you.

And if you must have doctor administered treatment, such as cataract removal, make sure it is a doctor who removes sixty cataracts a day, five days a week.

Mister Grumpus says:

@Jim
“…because in a nice hospital, they have nurses and doctors that they trust to act responsibly, and in a bad hospital, they regulate the crap out of everything because they cannot trust anyone.”

Boom. All this “workflow systems” and “regulations” and “business process automation” and crap. It’s all to try to keep the wheels turning when the Interchangeable Retards human resources paradigm has been imposed from outside by gunpoint. I get really mad about it.

And of course that goes for neighborhoods and cities and countries as well, etc.

I’ve seen outfits run like a fucking top — and be nice about it too — with the crudest IT imaginable. Typewriters, carbon paper and file folders I shit you not.

yewotm8 says:

Nobody here is claiming that fake death certificates have been made. You are interpreting others’ words so poorly that it comes across as intentional, since how could somebody who is so smart in other areas be so bad at understanding the context of what is being said? You are picking fights with people instead of giving them the benefit of the doubt, or even asking them to confirm.

Steve Johnson says:

R7 absolutely is:

https://blog.reaction.la/science/wu-flu-manufactured-crisis-real-deaths/#comment-2561765

R7:

You know that the death numbers are made up (man falls on head, oh look! COVID19 antibodies… obviously he died of COVID19… Truck runs over a man…).

aswaes replies:

Look, these are the raw weekly death (all cause) numbers in England and Wales for the last 11 years up to this year:

with a table of deaths.

R7’s reply in its entirety :

All faked. As Jim said, “if one lies, all lies.” When a man with COVID19 antibodies gets run over by a truck and the institution lists the death as “COVID19” instead of “run over by a truck,” that institution’s numbers cannot be trusted.

Again, your lying numbers are fake and gay.

Back on 28 April:

https://blog.reaction.la/culture/the-logos-has-risen/#comment-2536714

R7:

Pretty much everyone who believes the fake COVID19 numbers, models and graphs… and continues to support an indefinite lockdown, are urbanites who have no idea where their food comes from.

My reply:

In a non-handwaving “the models are fake” way explain exactly what is “fake”.

R7:

The death rates are fake.

The context is that the counterargument against “they’re just shifting other deaths to COVID” is “the actual death rate – the number of dead people – has gone up by a factor of x [depending on the place]”.

R7 absolutely is asserting fake death certificates – not just death certificates with fake causes listed on them that correspond to a real death.

Starman says:

@Steve Johnson

Word-thinker detected.

The Cominator says:

None of that shows any evidence R7 EVER claimed they were making up deaths that didn’t exist, only that he (correctly) said that some places were changing cause of death to covid.

Steve Johnson says:

Shill 1 backs up shill 2 with a stubborn denial of what shill 2 plainly wrote.

“He never said the death rates are fake”.

Literally said exactly:

The death rates are fake.

jim says:

The death rates are fake, in the sense that most people recorded as dying of Wu Flu have complex and unclear cause of death.The death rates are fake, in the sense that they don’t report large numbers of deaths from cold when excess deaths rise in a cold snap.

The death rates are real, in that there is an excess death rate.

The excess death rate is fake, at least in New York, in that they are deliberately causing people to die.

The Cominator says:

Lol death rates being fake don’t imply made up death certificates only massively underestimating asympomatic cases and falsification of cause of death.

Steve Johnson says:

Porn isn’t a problem, porn is a symptom of women being free to make their own sexual choices and serves as video evidence of female misbehavior in the absence of appropriate (father -> husband) authority in her life. People who argue against porn are implicitly blue pilled and fail to accept female nature even when presented with literal video evidence of bad behavior; crimestop makes the misbehavior invisible to them.

Romance novels actually do do harm because they feed into a delusion that women are prone to – that they’re special and desirable and men are dying to fight over her and that following her instincts will make exciting things happen to her and she’ll live happily ever after.

Gay porn shouldn’t exactly be banned but should be used as evidence in criminal trials for sodomy – barring video evidence (or other blatant behavior) sodomy should be politely ignored if gays are polite enough to make themselves ignorable. Breach of this politeness is a capital offense because of the undermining of social cohesion.

C obviously.

Starman says:

@Steve Johnson

Ok, you’re not a fed shill.

Dave says:

Here’s one for the Christians:

Satan tells women that their husbands are abusive jerks who deserve to be plundered in divorce court. God tells women to obey their husbands (or fathers, if unmarried). Any church that doesn’t remind women daily of these Biblical facts needs to be closed, gutted, and turned into a Pizza Hut.

JanMartense says:

For the shills, Jan Martense, Steve Johnson, and others:

It’s time to see what kind of shills you are.

Oh goodie, another edition of Jim Jeopardy! Always fun.

Should we make pornography illegal?

Porn is bad (it ruins a woman’s future value just like all forms of whoring), but trying to ban it confuses cause and effect. The cause is women lacking any kind of male authority figure to lead them. If you ban porn while leaving the rest of the current system in place, these women are probably going to find some other way to whore themselves.

You really need to marry women and them obligate them to obey their husbands. If you did that there wouldn’t any porn (or prostitution or cock-hopping) in the first place.

Propaganda which encourages women to cheat (e.g. romance novels) obviously should be burned, or at least given to bluepilled men so they can see the problem firsthand. So yeah, I’d say answer C.

Also, answer E (“protecting the sex workers — who are often our own daughters in college — “) is some grade A trolling, I gotta give it to you.

Starman says:

@Jan Martense

I consider your thoughtcrime to be sufficient.

You are not a fed shill.

By jim
Source: Jim

BC says:

The higher level of deaths in Sweden is probably from keeping the kids in school. We’re going to be hit by another wave once we reopen the schools.

The Cominator says:

Me: Close the schools.

Normie: Because of coronavirus?

Me: Coronavirus?

Starman says:

@Cominator
LOL

I’m wondering why Steve Johnson keeps believing in booty call Ferguson’s fake models?

If it’s to close the schools, then that’s a much better reason than “Steve Johnson is an urbanite faggot.”

Fred says:

Kids don’t die from or transmit the virus much, so this is unlikely.

jim says:

We know that kids don’t die of it, or even get noticeably sick. We do not know whether they transmit it.

Dave says:

There was a British super-spreader who traveled from China to Italy and home to the UK, infecting dozens along the way, including his nine-year-old son. The son went to school with it and was in contact with 170 people but infected none of them.

Dave says:

How ironic that progressives shut down their indoctrination centers for nothing.

Karl says:

Maybe we are approaching herd immunity, but the the Spanish flu was active in 3 waves. Maybe it is also the weather that prevents the spread and we get a second wave at the end of the year.

I think this is plausible because the number of persons someone is likeley to infect depends on the weather. Thus in summer, a smaller percentage of the population that is resistant suffices for herd immunity than in winter.

If we get it, a second wave will be used as justification to implement lockdowns that are even more severe or at least the attempt will be made. It depends on who is in power whether the attempt is successful.

The Cominator says:

“Maybe we are approaching herd immunity, but the the Spanish flu was active in 3 waves. Maybe it is also the weather that prevents the spread and we get a second wave at the end of the year.”

This is due mostly to mutation which is another reason why slowing the spread is a horrible idea, Covid is subject to mutation and is not antigen stable which is why its best to get it over with quickly so it has less time to mutate.

Karl says:

Well, if it is due to mutation we should see a Covid wave every year from now on, just like we get a flu wave every year. Most people fear covid far more than the regular flu, so that would then be an opportunity for the cathedral to demand lockdowns every year for any activity it hates. I don’t think they’ll pass up on such an opportunity. I don’t think they can, even if some parts of the cathedral would want to.

Anyway, my point was that most deaths are only behind us if we look at the next few months only. I think it is likely that we have it behind us only in the sense that the flue is behind us in any summer. There will be another wave with more deaths next winter. I’m not saying this wave will be more serious than a regular flu wave, just that covid might stay with us for quite some time, maybe forever like the flue will be with us forever.

WuFluBelieverNat says:

Jim, when is the Good Orange God Emperor going to helicopter Fauci and all the other Calvinists, restore us to Medieval Christianity, glass the West Bank, boot 6 gorillion Mexicans back over the Big Beautiful Wall, and finally institute muh neo-feudal outer space Indian caste system?

I’m not sure how long I can hold out for my quota of underage eugenic harem.

jim says:

Took Augustus twelve years to put Rome in order, and he had death squads.

Starman says:

And then, more than three Centuries later, for Constantine to finally permanently fix the Jihad-complete problem.

aswaes says:

@Steve Johnson

Thank you for your sane and intelligent comments. Apparently I was already enjoying your twitter content without knowing it was you. I agree with everything you argue under this post, except for the flu numbers. I’m not informed about flu mortality, and as an epidemiology noob, I think it was very reasonable to suspect that it may have been another “noble lie”. Nevertheless, Cochran thinks the numbers (90k) are more or less correct. So advisable to drop this line of argument to prevent unintentional disinformation.

Also, thank you for your good work against the public defecators.

@Jim

They are not making up fake death certificates. They are certifying fake cause of death on real death certificates.

The official SARS-2 number in the UK is 33k. The real number is double that.
What do you think about England and Wales all cause mortality numbers? 0.1% of their total population died *on top of* their 10 years average. And the official SARS-2 numbers are ignoring half of those deaths. If they wanted to exaggerate, why would they do this?

even though there is a big spike in the death rate every cold snap

Please look at weekly numbers in England and Wales, past 10 years. Not once in the past 10 years has there been a week when deaths spiked more than 2σ, until this year’s 2σ, 7σ, 7σ, 9σ, 14σ, 10σ. Look at this graph. Don’t you see the explosion? Same in Italy, NYC, Spain, and France. Next, Brazil.

but a lot of it is people who need medical treatment, such as cancer patients, not getting it,

Come on Jim, cancer patients don’t die from not getting their poison for a couple of weeks.

and a lot of it is people getting inappropriate and dangerous medical treatments

In places like Bergamo, most people died at home. Yes, medical treatments are net negative (when you shut down hospitals, death numbers drop). But they’re not affecting SARS-2 death numbers to a first and second approximation.

Now let’s address a more meaty and controversial argument. Go to this website and look at Sweden’s, Austria’s, and Switzerland’s daily death numbers. Look at Sweden’s neighbor’s numbers. Austria’s daily deaths are completely smothered. Switzerland, same. Switzerland and Austria brand of lockdowns crushed the plague. Sweden’s nordic neighbors, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands are obviously in exponential decay, though they didn’t crush the plague quite as dramatically as Austria and Switzerland did.

Now, Sweden’s daily deaths made a peak, but it’s not clear if it’s exponentially decaying. The next 2-3 weeks will clarify. Probably their current base of exponent is hovering very close to 1. At current, possibly constant, rate, they would reach 30k dead (lower limit of my estimate) in 300 days. Also you should probably double their official death numbers (as in England, Italy, and NYC), which would mean they reach 30k in 100 days (barring another exponential wave).

Now look at Italy. Italy style lockdown: obvious exponential decay (definitely not stuck at constant).

Spain. Was in exponential decay since early April, now seems stuck at constant.
Turkey. Was in exponential decay since mid April, lately constant (a regime of curfews on weekends, cafes forced to close, other businesses open)
Belgium. Exponential decay until early may. Now constant.
USA. Slightly decaying, can slip back to constant. Looks like Sweden’s graph.
Brazil. Exponentially increasing.
Iran. Stuck at constant or slightly increasing again.

So what I get from this is that Austria and Italy style draconian lockdowns do crush the plague. I don’t know what’s going on in Spain. They were crushing it, now it’s constant, maybe their population is too undisciplined to follow state guidance or they are relaxing the measures too early.

The problem with comparing USA to Sweden is that it’s like comparing a single state of America to the entire Europe. Measures and populations are almost as heterogenous in America as they’re in Europe. Clearly Spain’s draconian measures are not working as well as they would with an Austrian population. Clearly, inner city negroes and hispanics, but also incompetence of local governments in some places is impeding the success of curfews.

By doubling the official death numbers (since in England and NYC, almost half of deaths are at home and not counted officially) and multiplying again by 100 (1% IFR), I estimate current attack rates:
Sweden 7%, Norway 0.8%, Denmark 2%, Switzerland 3.7%, Netherlands 7%, Italy 10%, Spain 11.4%, Turkey 1%, France 8%, Belgium 15%, Russia 0.2%, USA 5%, UK 10%, Brazil 1.3%.

This is consistent with many recent serology results.

In other words, almost everywhere, it is only the beginning of the plague unless you forcefully drive it to extinction.

Reminder: the economic aspect of lockdowns is a completely separate argument from the lockdown question itself. The lockdown question is: do you need to temporarily lock down (curfews) a local population *if* there are 10s of thousands of untracked infections out there, and *if* you want to stop the plague before herd immunity.

The Chinese locked Wuhan down, because they thought, at that point of the contagion (10s of thousands of untracked infections), masks and social distancing didn’t suffice to pull R_0 below 1. Wuhan’s seroprevalence was at about ~10% when they killed the plague.

Starman says:

Fake numbers from dishonest institutions.

jim says:

> In other words, almost everywhere, it is only the beginning of the plague unless you forcefully drive it to extinction.

Your model predicts that Sweden should still be rising by a factor of ten every ten days. Obvious it is not. It has seen most of the excess deaths it is going to see. Your model does not predict the disease going on forever and eventually killing a huge number of people over a long time. It predicts the disease continuing to soar rapidly by a factor of ten every ten days until it has killed a huge number of people over a short time. This is clearly not happening. Your model has been falsified by events.

Brazil’s numbers are exponentially increasing, but they are still quite low.

Thing is, in every lockdown, soft, harsh, or nonexistent, numbers soared. Until they did not soar any more. Brazil is late to join the game, and its exponential increase is slower than most, probably due to tropical climate and widespread use of prophylactic chloroquine against malaria.

When you have disease increasing by a factor of ten every ten days during lockdown, it is obvious it is going to very quickly soar until it very quickly hits its natural limit.

And the natural limit seems to be roughly similar to all the other new flues. Sweden hit its natural limit. Queensland and South Korea are nowhere near their natural limits, but that is contact tracing, not lockdown.

Where places stop the disease before it reaches its natural limit, it was not lockdown that stopped it. South Korea is a success story, never had lockdown, Queensland is a success story, no longer has lockdown. Conversely, when a place does nothing much, and hits its natural limit, that natural limit is not much higher without lockdown than with lockdown.

As for Britain’s excess deaths, their hospital system is remarkably murderous at the best of times. Cuomo was deliberate killing off people to juice the death rate. Excess deaths are generally a reliable indicator, and they generally indicate a substantial undercount of Wu Flu related deaths, probably because people who were very ill from something else were pushed over the brink by a mild Wu Flu that was not noticeable enough to be tested for. Very few people die directly from Wu Flu, just as very few people die directly from other flues. They die from Wu Flu plus this, that, and the other. But in New York City, they indicate a hospital system turned into a murder machine – doubtless you have seen that nurse video. I don’t have any evidence that England’s excess deaths were of the New York type, but England’s excess deaths, whatever is causing them, seem to have stopped, and they stopped unrelated to lockdown. The lockdown did not stop them from rising, therefore the lockdown did not cause them to diminish.

> Sweden’s daily deaths made a peak, but it’s not clear if it’s exponentially decaying.

If it is not rising, it is going away. Lockdowns empirically fail to have much effect. The disease rises till it hits its natural limit. Plausibly that natural limit is smaller with lockdown, but it is not enough smaller for the effect to be obvious, and the natural limit is just not that high.

Locking down the sick clearly works. Queensland in Australia has had six, count them six, Wu Flu related deaths. Obviously it is not herd immunity that has ended the disease in Queensland. It is South Korean style contact tracing, vigorously locking up sick people, and vigorously testing any contacts of sick people. But the empirical evidence is that locking down the healthy does not have any substantial effect on the spread, that empirical evidence being the initial spread, where everyone that did not do the South Korean thing got a factor of ten rise every ten days, lockdown or no lockdown. Queensland has locked down travel, and if they re-open travel likely a problem will ensue, until the disease dies out in the rest of the world, but they are re-opening their internal economy. McDonalds is open, the nurses in the hospitals do not wear masks. South Korea never closed McDonalds. They did not even close the sex clubs, though obviously they should have.

> By doubling the official death numbers (since in England and NYC, almost half of deaths are at home and not counted officially) and multiplying again by 100 (1% IFR), I estimate current attack rates:
> Sweden 7%, Norway 0.8%, Denmark 2%, Switzerland 3.7%, Netherlands 7%, Italy 10%, Spain 11.4%, Turkey 1%, France 8%, Belgium 15%, Russia 0.2%, USA 5%, UK 10%, Brazil 1.3%

You assume your conclusion, and then deduce that the evidence must support your conclusion, without, however, bothering to examine the evidence.

That exponential growth in death rate stops when it does indicates either that most of the population is naturally immune, or that it is is a small minority of super spreaders that are the problem, and when the minority reaches herd immunity, then it is over.

aswaes says:

Your model predicts that Sweden should still be rising by a factor of ten every ten days

No it doesn’t. It depends on how people treat it. I’ve watched people radically alter their behavior where I live: from extremely careless to extremely scared, back again to carelessness. And the numbers seem to show. If the R_0 is very close to 1, you’ll see constant (in fact extremely slow exponential) number of daily deaths until you saturate the susceptible.

they stopped unrelated to lockdown

How do you know that? I don’t see this.

I don’t have any evidence that England’s excess deaths were of the New York type

They are of the Bergamo type. Which is to say, grandpa dies at home (because he caught it before the lockdown), he’s not registered as a SARS-2 death. As murderous as New York’s hospitals were, they didn’t put much dent in the final IFR, which was 1% in Italy, 1% in France, 1% in Spain, 2% (and still counting!) in Diamond Princess (high average age), and I bet when they do serological studies in England, will turn out 1% in England. There seems to be a parsimonious theory that explains all these cases and all the serological results at the same time.

The lockdown did not stop them from rising

Yes. There’s a three week lag. When the lockdown starts, for the next three weeks you’re watching the exponential increase of the past (# of deaths), until suddenly exponential decay hits.

Lockdowns empirically fail to have much effect.

In some places they worked, in some places probably not so much. Austria and Switzerland aced it. Italy worked reasonably well. Wuhan also. UK was about to become Bergamo probably.

You assume your conclusion, and then deduce that the evidence must support your conclusion

No the numbers are ESTIMATES. They’re predictions that can be falsified by seroprevalence studies (they won’t be). It is a fact, however, that Sweden’s performing 10 times worse (in terms of per capita deaths) than its neighbor Norway, and Norway’s pretty much done with the plague. Sweden, not yet.

South Korea is a success story, never had lockdown

Yes. The ideal is to act early and smother the plague in its cradle by tracking and proper quarantines (which is to say quarantine the sick, not the healthy). Lockdown is the failure mode (that is if you can’t stomach 0.3%-0.7% population death rate. One might argue 0.3% is a reasonable sacrifice to save the economy. I don’t know the answer to that, and I don’t pretend to care about the abstract millions that might die).

I said:

And the official SARS-2 numbers are ignoring half of those deaths. If they wanted to exaggerate, why would they do this?

What do you think about this? Ockham’s razor says they’re just as clueless about this as the floomers.

When the 10% seroprevalence result that I predict comes from England, what will be your response? That 10% is the herd immunity level?

The Cominator says:

I don’t think this one has ever been given a redpill on women test.

aswaes says:

Shut the fuck up retard.

The Cominator says:

Asswipe thinks he has status around here lol.

aswaes says:

I think you’re retarded.

The Cominator says:

For the same reason idiots thought Trump was retarded. Dumb people like you can’t evaluate smart people like me.

Of course you could just be a shill.

Starman says:

@aswaes

Answer my RedPill on Women question, state the answer, don’t just say the letter. This shouldn’t be hard, Steve Johnson and Jan answered and even explained the answer.

The Cominator says:

From now on we should call him asswipe, even if he gets this right.

I’m getting the sense that the Redpill on woman test is the perfect shill detector, but the WuFlu question is if not a perfect intelligence test a good one. Its possible to be low IQ and have the correct view on WuFlu. Its really not possible to be 130+ and fall for the WuFlu scam though.

WuFlu doesn’t kill (very many) people, Andrew Cuomo does.

aswaes says:

I will not answer to imbeciles. If Jim demands that I pass a test, I’ll take the test.

Starman says:

@aswaes

What’s the matter? It’s been answered. You can’t just see the answers and explanations?

You’re not in a position to call anyone an “imbecile.”

The Cominator says:

Asswipe trying to assume status again. You don’t decide who the imbeciles are around here asswipe.

You come in saying look at muh fake and gay epidemological data and models, screaming man bear sweet and sour ching chong holocough flu pig is real I’m super serial.

Than people far smarter than you (including Jim) have pointed out repeatedly that your info is fake and gay and doesn’t fit the past and that furthermore epidemologists have outed themselves as climate scientists by another name, a group that can’t be trusted and is en masse for the helicopters in any sane society and then you either change the argument and don’t discuss the holes in your argument or double down on your bullshit.

If not a shill just a stupid asswipe, asswipe.

jim says:

I don’t like people calling each other idiots on this blog. Speculations about intelligence are a waste of space.

However, the argument about individual intelligence has legitimately arisen in the question of models.

The model is that Wu Flu is a fire, and there is a lot of kindling ready to burn, and only lockdown is keeping the fire from burning out of control.

OK, why did the fire blaze up rapidly, with straight exponential growth by a factor of ten every ten days, lockdown or no lockdown?
Why?

And then suddenly stop growing and start to slowly fade?

Why?

This looks like a fire that has run out of kindling.

And it looks like a fire that runs out of kindling after burning roughly similar amounts of kindling, lockdown or no lockdown.

Reconcile your model with the data. If you are not interested in reconciling your data with your model, you are a shill. If you don’t notice your model is inconsistent with the data, an idiot.

aswaes says:

@Jim

Sweden must have had a spreader subpopulation, and this subpop reached immunity. Now the general population’s R_0 is below 1, without lockdown, and this proves that their non-lockdown measures work to pull their R_0 below 1. Comparing with Norway, Sweden would save a couple of thousand lives with lockdown.

I will investigate if other nations replicate Sweden’s sufficiently small R_0 with their post-lockdown (relaxed) regimes.

Just to make clear, is it your opinion that without lockdowns, Italy, UK, NY would have the same total fatalities, up to, let’s say, a factor of 2?

Can you restate your IFR estimate? And what are your current attack rate estimates for NYC, CA, USA, UK, Sweden, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium?

If you think lockdowns don’t make a difference, do you explain variance in fatalities (between countries) by variance in the size of spreader minorities?

jim says:

South Korean contact tracing and involuntary quarantine works, and Queensland replicated it successfully. Queensland had lockdown, largely ended it on the grounds that it was successful, and has only minor second wave problems despite being, like South Korea, nowhere near herd immunity for any subpopulation.

Sweden is very slowly approaching herd immunity, Switzerland and Germany, which have lockdown, have the disease collapsing – but only collapsing once it ran its course through the superspreader subpopulation.

Obviously something is happening to check the spread well before general and widespread herd immunity: I conjecture the following theory:

What happened is that the disease arrived among superspreader affluent people, people who fly all over the place. Because these people are highly mobile, it went everywhere, and got all of them, and then hit the churches and synagogues, where affluent people gather.

And it then it ended among affluent people. Now it is spreading in the ghettos, and its spreading slowly, and ghetto herd immunity is setting in slowly, perhaps because ghetto people are less mobile, so it does not hit everywhere simultaneously.

To explain the pattern: Voluntary caution reduces the spread to less than one among most prudent, affluent people. They get it from a minority of imprudent affluent people, like the gay in Korea who had intimate contact with seventy random strangers in three days.

But if you have ghettos, you get the slow burn problem. Was a superspreader jet setter problem, became a super spreader homeless problem, particularly in San Francisco. Now, in Sweden and the US, it is normal ghetto and barrio resident (who is unaffected by lockdown, which is directed at affluent white taxpayers) problem.

Sweden is waiting for its Muslim immigrants to reach herd immunity.

jim says:

> If you think lockdowns don’t make a difference, do you explain variance in fatalities (between countries) by variance in the size of spreader minorities?

It is absolutely obvious that South Korean contact tracing and involuntary quarantine make a huge difference – Queensland is white, and like South Korea, contained the disease. Queensland had lockdown, but now lockdown is over, as Queensland converges to South Korean practice. Obviously Queensland is not remotely near herd immunity, and yet they do not have a major problem.

If you do not do adequate contact tracing and quarantine, then it is like AIDS – it spreads among subpopulations.

What I think is happening in America, is that the superspreader jet setter subpopulation now has herd immunity. The homeless population largely has herd immunity. We are waiting for the ghettos and the barrios to reach herd immunity.

jim says:

Looks to me that spread in barrios and ghettos is slower, but the entire barrio has to hit herd immunity. Spread among jet setters is faster, but only a very small subpopulation has to hit herd immunity. That theory makes sense out of what we are seeing.

That theory is irrelevant to places, such as South Korea and Queensland, that successfully implement contact tracing and involuntary quarantine.

The Cominator says:

Answer a redpill on women question asswipe, Jim has already stated he does not think lockdowns work asswipe and that much of the data is fake and gay asswipe.

Atavistic Morality says:

So what I get from this is that Austria and Italy style draconian lockdowns do crush the plague. I don’t know what’s going on in Spain. They were crushing it, now it’s constant, maybe their population is too undisciplined to follow state guidance or they are relaxing the measures too early.

This is starting to be annoying.

Your model fails, evidence points out your model isn’t accurate and evidence points out lockdown doesn’t necessarily help at all unless specific circumstances unaccounted for are present, as shown by comparison between different lockdowns or no lockdowns systems, so you slander the population of Spain and assign blame and imaginary crime without any shred of evidence. It bothers me specially because I’d know better than you, being a Spaniard and having to go every weekend to buy stuff to the city and seeing the reality of it all. In Spain, people have been a lot more careful than in Sweden by first hand observation if the accounts of the media about Sweden are realiable, but they are dying by double the rate or worse (there’s been confirmed places where the central government is making up the figures because the local authorities have double their numbers, so which is true?). And it’s NOT because urban concentration in the cities, the highest rate of death is Castilla-La Mancha.

How is your epistemology different to progressivism? If your model can’t account for something don’t make slanderous assumptions, maybe consider your model might be wrong and something is different in reality. You’re arguing like climate change acolytes, make up whatever you don’t like and doesn’t fit because you MUST be right no matter what.

Let’s see if you can address convincingly everything Jim said, without making up and assuming anything please.

The Cominator says:

He may not be a shill but he isn’t very smart but he likes (in the manner of a progressive of only slightly above average intelligence, what Teddy Spaghetti would call a “midwit”) to cite official “science” to prove hes smarter than “rubes” like me or Starman and when a nuclear crater is blown in his argument (ie falling cases in San Francisco despite San Francisco being filthy and social distancing being essentially impossible there) he avoids the subject. Hes also too stubborn to admit he got swindled.

The Cominator says:

Nevermind I thought you were responding to Steve Johnson, aswaes who I will subsequently dub asswipe is likely a shill.

aswaes says:

I didn’t mean offense, and I don’t mean to slander your people. I say it as I see it, I say much worse things about my own people (deservedly), because as far as I know, the things that I say are true.

So correct my mistake. What do you think is causing Spain’s resistance to plague decay.

Atavistic Morality says:

This is not about my people specifically, what bothers me is that you’re making things up to cover holes in your model, instead of doing the right thing and improving the model. That’s why I insist you finish the debate with Jim since there’s no point in my intervention except to keep the debate in good faith. If your assumption had validity, Portugal and Greece would probably be victims of it as well, Italy is already doing bad, then I guess they’d be doing even worse. The social dynamics of these 4 countries are very similar.

I couldn’t tell you exactly what’s the deal, that’s the point of the debate, otherwise I’d have no interest at all. Spain and Portugal are geographically the same country, there’s no real separation, both have lockdowns, difference is brutal. Sweden doesn’t have a lockdown, even if they are socially responsible, they cannot be avoiding less social activity than Spaniards who have been gulaged at home for months now, but they’re dying far less. The proof of it is in the economy, Sweden might be down, Spain is a fucking crater.

If I had to assume something, I’d say that most deaths are old people in nursing homes and they’re dying because they’re being killed like in NY, after all, the government officer in charge of them is Pablo Iglesias, hardcore communist since youth, happy public progressive and pro Venezuela regime. But they also have leftist governments in the other countries, so… ?

If there’s a mistake it’s getting too emotionally involved and arguing from a set viewpoint instead of the evidence, that’s the only mistake. We keep looking at the evidence, and we keep looking for the explanation, we don’t decide we are right and change things around to prove it, that’s all, no big deal.

So I insist about this last point, I’m not trying to put you in the wrong. For me, this is not about being right but rather what’s exactly the truth, so the model must be fully supported by the evidence.

aswaes says:

Thanks. Noted.

aswaes says:

Hey Atavistic Morality,

Do you guys have a UK style office for national statistics that publishes weekly mortality numbers? I want to know by how much Spain is undercounting SARS-2 fatalities. Spain’s undercount can’t be as severe as UK’s, because the lower bound of Spanish IFR I compute using official wikipedia numbers, and this new survey’s 5% infection rate estimate (for samples collected between 27 April and 11 May), is already 1%.

aswaes says:

Never mind. Found it.

So 30 604 excess deaths (to 27k official). So Spain’s IFR must be between 1% and 1.3%.

Starman says:

@aswaes

Are you going to answer the RedPill on Women question anytime soon?

Nobody trusts any institutional office of statistics.

aswaes says:

@Contaminator and R7,

I’m not interested in interacting with you. Go shit somewhere else.

If Jim requires me to pass a test, I’ll take the test.

Starman says:

@aswaes

Blah blah blah.

It’s very telling that you’re refusing to answer the woman question.

You are a shill promoting fake numbers and fake graphs.

jim says:

I don’t think he is a shill – but his failure to answer the woman question is suspicious.

More relevantly, I would like him to address the issue of why the disease is apt to initially zoom rapidly, then peak. Lockdown seems to have little effect on the rate of spread, though it looks like it affects the size of the peak by a factor of two or so.

But the “we are doomed without lockdown” theory fails to explain why rapid exponential growth stopped everywhere. (Except Brazil, which has slower exponential growth, and is still far from its peak.)

Dave says:

Rapid exponential growth stops everywhere because people wake the fuck up and cease all unnecessary contact, whether the government tells them to or not, because they don’t want to die.

Laugh at them if you want, but not everyone is young and healthy like yourself.

The Cominator says:

“Rapid exponential growth stops everywhere because people wake the fuck up and cease all unnecessary contact”

There is some of that but there is a time limit, DeSantis has yet to reopen bars here in Florida but a few have reopened up as “restaraunts” and they’ve rapidly filled up.

Dave says:

Such creeping complacency ensures a decade or more of local outbreaks, re-igniting like a burned-out Tesla and creating a lot of friction between young people who want to have fun and old people who want to live. Most businesses will adjust their rules to favor the older clientele because that’s where the money is.

Atavistic Morality says:

@Dave

Ironically, I think that the conflict between R7 and Cominator vs aswaes, Steve and Jan is mostly a generational thing. Older people are likely to be more concerned as you said.

The Cominator says:

[*Deleted*]

jim says:

Here we win arguments by evidence and reason, not by driving the other guy away with abuse.

I purge this forum of people who argue in bad faith for ulterior motives. Please don’t move in on my job.

The Cominator says:

They are repeating arguments that have been debunked by you or by events in the manner of CR… and pushing a narrative that in practice is in line with the agenda of CR.

So having won the argument and with them not accepting their defeat and their shame how should we respond to them?

jim says:

I have asked them to explain the peaking and the initial rapid exponential growth, which appears uncorrelated to lockdown. If they continue to ignore the peaking, then unresponsive. You know how I deal with unresponsive commenters.

jim says:

I regret that some people have been rude. We should debate the evidence not the person. I apologize.

But we really do have a shill problem. I would like you to address the woman question, and also address the issue of the disease rapidly peaking almost everywhere.

You do need to respond to the woman question, because we have a shill problem.

You are also talking past the issue of the disease having exponential growth, then peaking. What is causing the peaks? It obviously is not lockdown. You need to respond to me on rapid exponential growth and peaking.

German and Switzerland have rapid exponential decline, and maybe their exponential decline is rapid, while Sweden’s is slow, because of lockdown, but the theory you are pushing fails to explain why the peak everywhere seems unrelated to the lockdown. Lockdowns do not prevent, or even significantly affect, the rapid exponential growth. And yet, then it peaks.

Why?

Cadfael says:

Interesting twitter thread that seems to support Jim’s contention that Social Distancing and Shelter in Place doesn’t affect the trajectory of the disease (Contrary to intuition).
https://twitter.com/boriquagato/status/1261705308302270466
Bottom line: there is no statistical effect of Social Distancing on death rates, and Shelter in Place may actually negatively affect death rates. As the author says: “we just spent $4 trillion closing the barn door when the horse has already jumped the fence.”
CDC’s own pre-pandemic planning stated that Social Distancing doesn’t work once prevalence of the infection has reached 1% !!!
Probably the growth peak comes from Dem govs running out of retirement communities to send sick people to.

aswaes says:

Should we make pornography illegal?

I choose option

[C] No, because male desire for sexual gratification is not causing society any problems. Now, we should ban gay, tranny, and cuck porn. And we should ban romance novels.

Civilization starts with privatizing child rearing/reproduction. The way you privatize reproduction is by backing (covenant) husbands’ authority over their wives and children, and by recognizing husbands’ right to punish trespassers on their property (including wives and children).

Human female is hypergamous, and will actively disrupt social relations around her to see if she can get a better mate. By disrupting male hierarchies, she’s forcing men to compete for her. By disrupting (shit testing) her current mate, she’s exploring if she should trade up.

A way to reduce this disruption in social relations, is to allow corporal punishment by husbands. Human female understands status the way a female gorilla understands it, and in order to make her think that her husband’s status meets her hypergamous standard, she has to believe that her husband could, anytime, irrupt into murderous violence.

Further, a significant portion of human females start cruising for alpha dick at a disturbingly early age. A solution to this problem is chaperoning daughters, and shotgun marriages, regardless of age.

aswaes says:

Lockdowns do not prevent, or even significantly affect, the rapid exponential growth. And yet, then it peaks

I think: After a lockdown is instituted, R is still above 1 for a few days, for two reasons: intra-domicile transmissions, and delayed onset of symptoms (today’s measured number of cases reflect, on average, num of cases from 5 days ago).

It indeed looks like lockdown or no lockdown, peaks happen in similar schedules. In the lockdown case, [onset delay: 5 days] & [intra-domicile transmission = R reduced, but still above 1 initially] make the num of cases look like: first no effect for a few days, then slower exponential, then peak. So in Italy, cases peaked 11 days after lockdown, and . Deaths peaked in 17 days. From 9 March to 28 March, doubling rate of daily deaths goes from 5 to 9 at an inflection point around 19 March. At peak, R is no more dominated by intra-domicile transmissions, and is below 1. In this paper they estimate R went from 3 to 0.67 [although I didn’t vet their method for computing R] in France.

In Sweden’s no-lockdown case, masks and social discipline was enough to take reproductive ratio of the responsible majority to below 1. Exponential increase in total cases reflect a subpopulation in which R was/is high. This subpopulation was/is starting self-dampening outbreaks in the general population (outbreaks self-dampen, because responsible majority’s R is below 1). As the spreader subpopulation overtakes its internal peak (daily case number of the spreader community starts diminishing), the number of self-dampening outbreaks in the general population (started by the spreaders) start diminishing also. Thus the overall daily number starts diminishing. At this point, general R is below 1 and reflects the reproductive ratio of the responsible community. This R is probably larger than what lockdowns achieve after they peak (such as France’s 0.67). Hence the slower decay of Sweden.

I’ll check infection rates of ethnicities from serological surveys to see if the “slums” conjecture holds.

[So, I’ve come around on the lockdown question. In populations that don’t have discipline problems, lockdowns reduce fatality to considerable extent, but are not strictly needed to stop the plague at no more than a few percent rate of infection. Masks and awkward social rules will have to stay though, unless/until the plague is locally extinguished.]

[Iran’s situation looks like they’re losing grip]

jim says:

> > Lockdowns do not prevent, or even significantly affect, the rapid exponential growth. And yet, then it peaks

> I think: After a lockdown is instituted, R is still above 1 for a few days, for two reasons: intra-domicile transmissions, and delayed onset of symptoms (today’s measured number of cases reflect, on average, num of cases from 5 days ago

And yet, we see the same turning point whether lockdown is instituted early or late.

> It indeed looks like lockdown or no lockdown, peaks happen in similar schedules

Which is inconsistent with what you just claimed. Address the contradiction. Address not just Sweden, but South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Tennessee, and Iran.

South Carolina has been out of lockdown for three weeks, Georgia, Texas and Tennessee for two weeks, and rapid exponential growth has not resumed. Iran ended lockdown on April 18, and death rate responded by going into exponential decline starting April 20th.

Ending lockdown obviously had some effect, particularly in South Carolina, but the effect was underwhelming. It is absolutely obvious that lockdown is not holding back a massive tide of death that grows by a factor of ten every ten days.

South Carolina simply hit its peak after lockdown ended. What causes the factor of ten every ten days growth to end? In South Carolina what ended it is not lockdown, for it peaked after lockdown ended.

Observed behavior is that lockdown has no significant effect on the initial exponential rate of growth (maybe shifts it from a factor of ten every nine days to a factor of ten every eleven days) no substantial effect on the time at which we hit the peak, and moderate effect on the size of the peak.

Peaking is unrelated to lockdown.

> Iran’s situation looks like they’re losing grip

You are relying on fake news. Don’t do that. They are evil, angry, hostile people who hate you, and tell you lies that will harm you. Everything you read in the papers is a lie by evil people who intend to harm you in any way that they can, who want you dead, want your children dead, do not want white people to have sex, and especially do not want white people to have marriage and children. The reason the news does not cover hate crimes against white people is that they give each other high fives whenever the hatred that they spread against white people results in white people being murdered or driven out of their homes. They celebrate every time one of our warriors is killed in pointless endless wars that they instigate against people far away, in lands of which they know nothing, and when the warriors come home prosecute them for war crimes because they defended themselves against enemies out of uniform hiding behind women and children.

In actual fact Wu Flu deaths in Iran grew by a factor of ten every eleven days till March 21st, remained at steady constant death rate to April 20th, and since April 20th the death rate has in steady slow exponential decline. Imposing lockdown had no effect in Iran, and ending lockdown had no effect in Iran.

The decline is painfully slow, but it is exponential. Death rate in Iran falls by a factor of two every twenty eight days, which means that most of the deaths are behind them now.

I don’t think you are consciously and intentionally shilling, but anyone who uncritically presupposes that what appears in the mainstream media bears any relationship to the truth is a dangerous source of hostile enemy fake news intended to harm us.

Don’t do that. That is why people call you a shill – because you write as if enemy lies issued by those that want us dead are uncontroversial truth. They hate us, they hate you, and they hate themselves. Hatred and evil consumes them and drives them mad.

What appears in the legacy media are the ravings of evil angry dangerous madmen, and they only matter because the madman is dangerously powerful.

In Iran, introducing lockdown had absolutely no effect, and ending lockdown had absolutely no effect. The epidemic is over, in the sense that it is in exponentially declining phase, and most of the deaths are behind them now.

In the American states, lockdown had some effect, and ending lockdown had some effect, but the effect was modest. Ending our human sacrifices to the gods has not caused the end of the world.

Starman says:

@aswaes

Looks like you’re not a fed shill.

aswaes says:

[D]aily [D]eaths: DD
[D]aily New [C]ases: DC

Texas: To me it shows they didn’t enforce a European style lockdown, because their DD and DC are still making all time highs two months in. As far as I know, this happened nowhere in locked down Europe: Europe style lockdown follows a very regular pattern: DC peak in about 10 days, DD peak in another 8-10, and both curves collapse. [I can think of three possibilities: (1) Keeping the churches open bit them. (2) Rules were not enforced on minorities: not a real lockdown. (3) Stay-at-home orders were half-hearted and weren’t enforced on anybody.] Maybe a Texan commenter can inform me.

Latest trend in Texas: DD and DC double every 42 days. Indicative of 1.1≤ R ≤ 1.2. To me, this predicts 10-15% final attack rate if they keep doing whatever they’re doing now. If they relax more (hotels, cafes, bars, theaters, malls fill up), worse.

What does your model predict for Texas? What do you think is their current attack rate (I think it must be ~0.5%)? What do you think will be their final attack rate?

If Texas’ curve starts decreasing sans new measures in coming months, I’ll agree that I was fundamentally wrong.

Georgia: Similar to Sweden. If uptrend doesn’t resume soon, I’ll admit that I was fundamentally wrong.

Tennessee: DD curve is consistent with European lockdowns. Slightly increasing (maybe noise) since opening. If it stops going up, refutes me. If doubles periodically in coming months, consistent with what I think.

South Carolina: DC curve is flat. DD curve possibly declining. If it doesn’t periodically double in the coming months, refutes me. Lockdown was too short to produce an effect that can be distinguished from social distancing & masks.

Indiana: Lockdown had no effect. Minorities at work?

Iran: I brought up Iran based on their DC curve, which is on an uptrend since 3 May. Their DD is not increasing, and I shouldn’t have brought up Iran, since I think they straight-up stopped tallying deaths, China style. Iran and Italy were comparable in early March. Do I believe that Iran massively outperformed Italy? No. They’re lying. [Bringing up Iran was careless spammy behavior on my part. I apologize.]

anyone who uncritically presupposes that what appears in the mainstream media bears any relationship to the truth is a dangerous source of hostile enemy fake news

I don’t read MSM except to find out what the inner party wants the outer party to think. On the topic of SARS-2, I trust Western governments’ all cause mortality data. Names of the deceased must be accessible on demand, and so fraud could be proven relatively easily. So this type of data should be reliable. Spain’s and France’s all cause mortality numbers are very close to their official SARS-2 death numbers. UK was undercounting (~55%). This tells me Western governments’ official SARS-2 death numbers are basically reliable.

I also rely on serological surveys to estimate IFR. Spanish government’s randomized 60k study looks solid. The method is solid. Could the numbers be made up? Maybe, but everywhere such studies come up with concordant numbers (Wuhan, New York, France, Indiana, Diamond Princess). (Ioannidis’ work is bad). Basic reproduction ratio numbers from various articles also seem to live in reality (as Wuhan and Bergamo attest).

Finally, I keep pestering you about this to make sure I’m not misconstruing anything: are we in agreement about IFR (1%) and current attack rates (deaths_per_capita * 100)?

jim says:

> To me it shows they didn’t enforce a European style lockdown, because

It shows that to you because you insist on believing in lockdowns regardless of evidence.

Your model predicts Texas medical facilities should be overwhelmed, but in fact about two percent of beds are occupied by Wu Flu patients. There is a colossal discrepancy between your priors and casual observation. It is a big state, Wu Flu is an insignificant problem.

New Mexico and Texas are next door to each other and have similar characteristics. New Mexico has hard lockdown, one of the hardest in America. Texas has ended lockdown. New Mexico deaths have risen to twenty per million per week. Texas deaths are stable at about nine per million per week.

What is your explanation for this?

Starting lockdown had no substantial effect visible in the data anywhere, ending it has no substantial effect visible in the data anywhere.

What works is testing, contact tracing, and quarantine.

> are we in agreement about IFR (1%) and current attack rates (deaths_per_capita * 100)?

California data indicates an IFR (Infection Fatality Rate) of 0.1% to 0.2%

Everywhere the disease very rapidly grows exponentially and then suddenly stops growing. This only makes sense if it is running out of fresh people to infect. A reasonably large portion of the population has to be naturally immune, or recently exposed to the disease and became immune. An IFR of 0.1% to 0.2% is improbably high, not improbably low. We are obviously approaching herd immunity in most places that do not have effective contact tracing and quarantine, and we got here without 1% of the population dying.

San Francisco has public transport and poop on the streets. How can lockdown be holding back doomsday in San Francisco? Doomsday failed to arrive on schedule. Time to examine your priors. Wu Flu is over in San Francisco, therefore a significant proportion of the population must have been infected, recovered, and gained immunity.

That the disease is ending in Santa Clara County indicates that a significant portion of superspreader subpopulation has become immune. If 1% IFR, they would be stacking the bodies like cordwood.

When you see contradictory and inconsistent data, and you also see censorship and history being rewritten, you should explain inconsistencies by assuming lies and murder. The data that is being disappeared is more likely to reflect reality than official data.

Your belief system implies that the cataclysm should have happened many weeks ago.

Take a look at the Rt data. Lockdown is imposed, the Rt does not drop enough for it to be visible in the data, lockdown is ended, the Rt does not increase enough for it to be visible in the data. The Rt starts out high, then it drops as the virus runs out of new people to infect, as with any other flu.

The South Korean contact tracing indicates that a small minority of people tend to infect twenty or so other people, including half a dozen people of the same small minority, but most people don’t infect anyone. Once most people in the superspreader minorities have developed immunity, the disease naturally dies out.

In Santa Clara county, the disease has run its course. In Texas, only run its course in the big cities and near the major highways, so Texas probably has more deaths ahead than behind, but doomsday did not happen in the big cities, and it will not happen in the boondocks.

Starman says:

@aswaes

” On the topic of SARS-2, I trust Western governments’ all cause mortality data.”

And that is why you are Mr. Asswipe.

aswaes says:

You insist on believing in lockdowns regardless of evidence

Lockdowns replicate Europe’s success in some states, and they’re apparently useless in others. A draconian lockdown (curfews etc) must, a priori, crush the spread — possibly after some delay. This is what we see in Europe. Where we don’t see crashing curves, people must be finding a way to put themselves in close proximity with strangers. Two alternatives: (1) the curves are not informative due to vast measurement error; (2) this is not a viral plague, but a miasma.

Your model predicts Texas medical facilities should be overwhelmed

I don’t see how my model predicts this. 1500 dead, 150k infected, @3.6% hospitalization, must be ~5400 cumulative hospitalizations so far (2 months).
One source says 1680 current hospitalizations. I don’t see any contradiction here.

New Mexico […] Texas […] What is your explanation for this

I don’t have an explanation. Since the numbers kept growing, a subpopulation must have disobeyed stay-at-home orders. Why faster spread in NM? I don’t know.

California data

That USC study by Neeraj Sood et alia (samples collected on 10-11 April) estimates 221k – 442k infections. LA county has 1,913 deaths recorded so far (yielding 0.86% – 0.43% IFR). For their 0.1% IFR estimate to hold, current infections must be at 1.9m (19%) in LA county. They say they’ll repeat the study every two to three weeks. I can’t find any follow-up. If they confirm 19%, and the LA county deaths don’t skyrocket to 19k in a month, I will submit.

the disease very rapidly grows exponentially and then suddenly stops growing. This only makes sense if it is running out of fresh people

But this isn’t what happened with 1918 Spanish Flu, right? There were waves. The causes of the waves aren’t very clear. Among possibilities: variation in temperature (seasonality), new mutations, variation in human behavior (sub-populations with varying transmission rates).

A reasonably large portion of the population has to be naturally immune, or recently exposed to the disease and became immune

It was not so in New York and Lombardy. If not in NYC, not anywhere.

Doomsday failed to arrive on schedule [in San Francisco]. Time to examine your priors.

If this truly is the end of the story for SF, absent a serological survey that shows infection rates at double digits percent, I would change my beliefs about how contagion networks progress. It would show that even though SARS-2 is a respiratory infection transmitted via droplets in the air, its contagion characteristics were like AIDS: confined to a very small minority.

[PS:New Information from Sweden: Antibody survey from late April puts Stockholm at 7.3% infection rate. Stockholm recorded 1864 deaths so far, IFR := 1% would predict 180k/2.37m = 7.5% infection rate]

jim says:

> Lockdowns replicate Europe’s success in some states, and they’re apparently useless in others. A draconian lockdown (curfews etc) must, a priori, crush the spread

Nuts.

According to your priors, not according to my priors. According to my priors, they are just demon worshiping priests claiming to cast magic spells. They are suppressing unholiness, not suppressing contagion. It is like religious Jews thinking they are clean as a result of ritually splashing themselves with water, but not using soap. and ritually cleaning stuff that is ritually unclean due to cheese crumbs, but not actually cleaning stuff that is actually unclean due to human contamination. You are not suppressing contagion if you are not tracking the origin of cases. If you do not ask “how did this particular person get infected?” you are not seriously interested in doing anything to actually stop people from getting infected. If you have no real interest in stopping people from getting infected, nothing you do is likely to stop people from getting infected, and we can see in the numbers that it is not doing anything to stop people from getting infected. Lockdowns come and they go, and have near zero impact on the numbers coming or going. When lockdown is imposed, deaths per week per million population keep growing at the same rate, when lockdown is lifted, it keeps falling at the same rate.

New Mexico and Texas are very similar states with a common border. New Mexico has a draconian lockdown, one of the most draconian in the US, Texas ended a very mild lockdown on April 20th. Obviously New Mexico is going to hell in a handbasket, and Texas was doing OK in lockdown and is doing OK without lockdown. When lockdowns are imposed, and when they are lifted, we don’t see any significant effect, and I don’t see any substantial likelihood that they would have significant effect. If you are not actually trying, you are not actually going to succeed.

My priors seem to be markedly more successful in predicting events than your priors.

> It was not so in New York and Lombardy. If not in NYC, not anywhere.

NYC was mass murder. Lombardy is far away, and you and I are ignorant of what went down there. When the disease gets loose in an old people’s home or an aged care facility, and nothing is done, it is apt kill half of them or most of them, but when the disease gets loose among San Francisco homeless, near zero impact. This tells us much about old people’s homes, little about the disease. South Korean contact tracing is telling us much about the disease, and what it tells us is that a small handful of superspreaders are responsible for the spread. One superspreader infects twenty normals and six other superspreaders, but the twenty normals only infect a handful of additional normals, who then don’t infect anyone else. The problem is that you have to lockdown superspreaders and suppress superspreader behavior – and if you have one superspreader in an aged care facility, they are all going to die in the midst of draconian lockdown, which is what was happening in New York City, and is now no longer happening, because the superspreaders all got sick, and either recovered or died.

It looks like people in an aged care facility are exceptionally vulnerable because a superspreader can impose contact on them that they would not acquiesce to if they were in their own homes. Superspreaders tend to be in a position of authority. Gays also tend to be superspreaders, but at least they spread it mostly to gays.

jim says:

> But this isn’t what happened with 1918 Spanish Flu, right

It is what is happening with Wu Flu.

Starman says:

@aswaes

Mr. Asswipe thinks a magic food fairy supplies his grocery store because he is a limp wristed urbanite faggot who never worked with his hands or had a real job.

Mr. Asswipe is also defending Democrat mass murderers, Nipples Cuomo of NY, Bill DiCommio of NYC, Murphy of NJ, Tom Wolf and his transformer “health” minister of PA.

aswaes says:

Your model predicts that LA county’s current infection rate must be ≥19%.

Author of the study you cited, Neeraj Sood, was also among the authors of the Santa Clara county study. So you should trust him (I don’t). His team should be doing antibody surveys these days. In three weeks, we’ll hear about it. If they don’t find ≥19% seropositive, you must revise your model. Let’s revisit this in three weeks.

jim says:

> Your model predicts that LA county’s current infection rate must be ≥19%.

Nuts. That is your model, not mine, and your model has been massively and thoroughly falsified by events. Your priors are not working. Update your priors.

Obviously the homeless in San Francisco are not observing lockdown, and equally obviously, they are no longer getting Wu Flu. Wu Flu spread mighty fast among the San Francisco homeless, and went away mighty fast. My model predicts that the low seropositivity rate is not going to have increased significantly, because observation shows very few new cases among the San Francisco homeless. Seropositivity in LA is likely to increase because the state and local governments are still negligently or deliberately inflicting Wu Flu on the vulnerable. The homeless are vulnerable, and therefore provide a highly desirable source of body count for people grabbing power on the basis of Wu Flu. It looks like the homeless in LA are still getting it from superspreaders administering homeless relief, but it is improbable that they are still getting it from other homeless.

For the San Francisco homeless, Wu Flu is over now, and has been over for quite a while. Whatever the seropositivity rate, stick it your model and smoke it. If only three percent are seropositive, that fits my model just fine, based on the South Korean data about superspreaders. I will conclude that the superspreader rate is less than three percent of the homeless and/or that the superspreaders are mostly government employees operating homeless shelters and hospitals, most likely the latter. Quite certainly the latter in LA. If you identified superspreader populations and behaviors, you would likely find a seropositivity rate of eighty or ninety percent. But no one wants to identify them, for fear that they might get the crap beaten out of them while police look the other way, much as will happen if you worry out loud about gays donating blood.

The Cominator says:

Why don’t you locktards just admit you’ve been pwn3d and aren’t nearly as smart as you think you are.

Cadfael says:

Still don’t get aswaes explanation of lockdown effects on homeless in SF. Poop on the streets, were the homeless there better at social distancing? I recall a report from a month or two ago that some of the homeless there were infected.

Cadfael says:

Lots of stories in March and April how the homeless were expected to be hit hard. Now its very difficult to find any concrete numbers on homeless deaths. Isn’t that the dog that didn’t bark?

Pooch says:

I’m slowly coming around to the idea that violence may start sooner rather than later in the US. Sundance at CTH has been warning that post-lockdown, “there may be roadblocks, sabotage, skirmishes and political violence” for a while now.

It sounded insane initially, but It’s starting to make sense as free and non-free zones are forming around the country completely along party lines. Lockdown protestors are armed. Jogger protestors are armed. Throw in the Flynn situation with Obama personally implicated and it seems like something may be brewing.

Pooch says:

Oh and throw in an election year on top. That’s a lot of factors at play.

Theshadowedknight says:

Sounds like a party!

BC says:

There’s already been plenty of violence but non of it directed from Trump’s faction. Escalation is sure the be the result of the election no matter which way it goes.

jim says:

General Flynn’s case and the war crimes cases are violence directed at Trump’s faction under color of law.

If Trump leaves office peacefully, he and his family are probably not going to be shot and dumped in a ditch. They will be arrested under color of law and Epsteined, along with numerous members of his administration and some republicans.

Karl says:

Lockdown apparently didn’t have much effect in Germany. The following is a report from the RKI in Germany, which advises the government and is therefore expected to produce numbers supporting goverment policy. Look especially at figs. 2 and 4. The figures show cases by day, obviously in decline for a while. Try to find out from the pictures when lockdown started.

https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus/Situationsberichte/2020-05-16-en.pdf?__blob=publicationFile

Lockdown (schools, restaurants, non-essential shops etc closed) started March 23. By then, case were already in decline.

Mass gatherings were banned on March 9. Arguably this was effective.

Oliver Cromwell says:

Arresting people on beaches is obvious theatre.

In other respects, how different really are Swedish and American situations?

Sweden has officially no lockdown, but most people are mostly staying inside anyway. Some aren’t.

USA has officially a lockdown, and most people are mostly staying inside. Some aren’t anyway.

jim says:

> In other respects, how different really are Swedish and American situations?

Millions unemployed and critical supply chain shortages in essential items such as meat.

Oliver Cromwell says:

“Millions unemployed and critical supply chain shortages in essential items such as meat.”

I’m not disputing that many of the consequences of the distancing have been amplified or manufactured by politicians, but Sweden’s curve flattening is probably also due to distancing.

What we are seeing is the pareto principle at work, where 80% of benefits of the distancing come from 20% of the distancing. But that doesn’t mean distancing does nothing.

The Cominator says:

This is actually a fair argument, the 20% effective portion would be the things South Korea actually shut down.

Steve Johnson says:

Your ability to simply change positions when you’re wrong without ever acknowledging the change is the only constant in your posting. This was your first comment ever on this blog.

https://blog.reaction.la/war/the-reichstag-is-on-fire/#comment-1825700

Also I think James Comey was working with Flynn and Mike Rogers (as a double agent) he could not have been this politically inept and gotten to where he was.

and now:

https://blog.reaction.la/economics/lockdown/#comment-2563297

South Korea DID NOT have a lockdown period. They quarantined people based on an app. Businesses were never closed.

Except for those businesses that were closed, right?

jim says:

> > South Korea DID NOT have a lockdown period. They quarantined people based on an app. Businesses were never closed.

> Except for those businesses that were closed, right?

So, what businesses did they close in South Korea? Tell us.

The most recent outbreak of Wu Flu in South Korea was a caused by a gay international traveler who spent three days and nights in the sex clubs. What! The sex clubs are still open?

The Cominator says:

LOL

Steve Johnson says:

I don’t live in S Korea and don’t know anyone there but the biggest international thing out of there was suspended and now goes on without a studio audience.

Links are above from earlier in this thread.

To be totally clear, I’m calling out Cominator’s constantly being wrong about everything then simply shifting what he claims he was saying or ignoring his previous predictions.

Even S Korea taking *any* measures against WuFlu is something Cominator would have denied because according to him the whole thing was an op and it’s just the flu. Leaving aside the herd immunity angle because there’s no point in arguing about something when the answer will be clear in a few weeks we know with a high degree of confidence that this is about 1 – 2% IFR; far far more deadly than almost all flues.

The Cominator says:

You are lying and projecting. I never said South Korea did nothing I said that South Korea did not have a lockdown and they did not.

Oliver Cromwell made the point that so called social distancing may have a pareto distribution in terms of effectiveness and I said that may actually be a fair point and then I SAID the 20% measures which are effective probably coincide with what South Korea did.

You claim I was wrong about everything but I said this thing was overblown and likely to have death rates similar to a bad influenza (while not exactly being an influenza virus) while you were projecting millions of deaths based on fake and gay models.

I was way more right than you were, death rate may come in slightly higher than a bad flu but this is do to Cuomo and some other Democratic governors deliberately killing people.

Steve Johnson says:

I never said South Korea did nothing I said that South Korea did not have a lockdown and they did not.

You are consistently wrong and are now simply lying. You specifically said that there were no business closures. Then you said 20% measures are effective only after your “no business closures” claim was disproven. Quote from you on this thread:

South Korea DID NOT have a lockdown period. They quarantined people based on an app. Businesses were never closed. China’s lockdown (if it was ever intended to succeed) didn’t work. I have not followed what was done in Hong Kong and I don’t what you mean by “SG”.

You are a liar with whom it is impossible to have a discussion because you simply rewrite your past positions.

Side note is that you are also taking the exact Cathedral position of “quarantines don’t work”; yes, locking down the healthy like in the US isn’t the minimal impact way to isolate the sick but it does “work” in slowing the spread of the disease.

You claim I was wrong about everything but I said this thing was overblown and likely to have death rates similar to a bad influenza (while not exactly being an influenza virus) while you were projecting millions of deaths based on fake and gay models.

So you’re now claiming that your old position is that this is about as deadly as the Spanish flu but won’t spread as far (because the models are “fake and gay”)? Because a “bad influenza” is the Spanish flu (which this isn’t as deadly as IFR-wise); or are you simply too imprecise (or stupid) to make a distinction between death *rates* (i.e., deaths per case) and death *counts*?

Starman says:

@Steve Johnson

You should have a whiteboard space for the Armageddon date on your sandwich board, that way, you can change the date every three weeks.

The Cominator says:

“You are consistently wrong and are now simply lying. You specifically said that there were no business closures.”

What businesses closed? I’m waiting for your answer and Jim himself has asked you. Maybe concert halls and sports stadiums? It seems that bars nightclubs restaraunts and sex clubs did not close.

I said that maybe Cromwell had a point because he said something intelligent that if social distancing is a spectrum there is perhaps a Pareto distribution in effectiveness that corresponds with the limited measures taken by South Korea, the ONLY intelligent point you have made is that the US government is not competent enough to track the virus the way South Korea did.

“You are a liar with whom it is impossible to have a discussion because you simply rewrite your past positions.”

You are projecting your own arguments in dishonesty in bad faith onto me. I’ve been pretty consistent on WuFlu and being anti lockdown. You were still talking about muh millions of deaths either yesterday or the way before based on fake and gay liar Niall “Mad Cow” Ferguson’s model.

“Side note is that you are also taking the exact Cathedral position of “quarantines don’t work”; yes, locking down the healthy like in the US isn’t the minimal impact way to isolate the sick but it does “work” in slowing the spread of the disease.”

It doesn’t seem like it slows it very much. I’m certainly not against quarantining the sick and never said I was. The Cathedral wants to keep everything closed (until a vaccine) so the economy will go into the greatest depression ever.

“So you’re now claiming that your old position is that this is about as deadly as the Spanish flu but won’t spread as far (because the models are “fake and gay”)? Because a “bad influenza” is the Spanish flu (which this isn’t as deadly as IFR-wise); or are you simply too imprecise (or stupid) to make a distinction between death *rates* (i.e., deaths per case) and death *counts*?”

No I’ve said multiple times this is no Spanish flu (a truly deadly and scary disease). I’ve said the death toll should come in at or less than a “bad” flu season, it looks like I was wrong in the sense that the death toll is going to come in slightly more than a bad flu season BUT this is because of Andrew Cuomo and a few bad Dem governors sending sick people to nursing homes in order to deliberately kill people.

jim says:

> I don’t live in S Korea and don’t know anyone there but the biggest international thing out of there was suspended and now goes on without a studio audience.

Dropping the studio audience is not a business shutdown.

It is you, not Cominator, who are consistently wrong and refuse to acknowledge your errors. If they had shut down the sex clubs, I would have thought “very limited shutdowns”, but it is not even very limited shutdowns.

Meanwhile, the place that seems to have been most successful in the white world in controlling Wu Flu is Queensland, which did have shutdowns, but seems to have largely re-opened.

Every government that has demonstrated competence at dealing with Wu Flu, which is, as far as I know, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Australian State of Queensland, is acting like lockdown was just a stupid idea.

We should be learning from success, not from failure.

Lockdown without good contact tracing and quarantine works about as well as no lockdown without good contact tracing and quarantine

If, on the other hand, you have good contact tracing and quarantine, lockdown is irrelevant.

Steve Johnson says:

[*deleted*]

jim says:

Not a business closure. You were wrong. Admit it.

Stubbornness leads to unending waste of bandwidth. You are wasting bandwidth. People in South Korea adjusted their activities for Wu Flu. They were not put out of business by ham fisted bureaucrats. They continued their business activities, with adjustments to reduce risk. Or, in the case of the sex clubs, an alarming lack of adjustments to reduce risk.

When you are wrong, you make assertions with double the confidence, substituting self confidence for evidence. Stop that.

In place of evidence and argument, you write as if evidence and argument was not needed, because everyone already knows and has conceded that you were right all along. You are obviously not a shill, but this is the behavior that makes shills so irritating.

We are flooded with unreliable and misleading information about Wu Flu, because it has become intensely politicized and censorship has been escalating, and you are not helping.

I repeat: Where we see competent and successful response to Wu Flu, we either do not see lockdown, or see lockdown abandoned. We should copy success, not failure.

Steve Johnson says:

[*deleted*]

jim says:

Mighty weak sauce. Not a lockdown.

Starman says:

@Steve Johnson

South Carolina is opening up, maybe this time there shall be Armageddon prophesied by Steve, and verily Steve says, bodies shall pile up on streets from Charleston to Upstate SC. Prophet Steve sayeth, “this shall come to pass, verily I say unto thee.”

Oliver Cromwell says:

“Dropping the studio audience is not a business shutdown.”

Without wading into a semantic debate, it will certainly reduce short run GDP as opposed to business as usual. People dont buy tickets, people dont get trains and planes there, people don’t stay in hotels nearby, people dont eat restaurant meals because theyre away from home…

Granted SK is far less economically damaged than the US; people I know there are still going to work normally with inessential jobs. But it isn’t entirely undamaged.

jim says:

Steve Johnson has a point, but making that point in the form of “South Korean Lockdown” is an untruth, that wastes space by diverting discussion into semantics. He, not The Cominator, is quibbling over semantics.

If he had said “Well, South Korea is doing some stuff that is bad for economy also”, that would have been true, and OK, and we could then debate how much harm reasonable precautions take. (They obviously should have shut down the sex clubs, but failed to do so.) But I am not going to debate whether South Korea has a lockdown, because South Korea does not have anything remotely comparable to a lockdown.

The South Koreans do a thorough analysis of the chain of transmission of every case, and when you read these chains, it is obvious that people are conducting life as normal.

Pooch says:

I have yet to see lockdown proponents make any other point beyond “we must lockdown because lockdowns work”.

The Cominator says:

South Korea banned certain types of mass gatherings and closed schools, to my knowledge no businesses not even bars, nightclubs and sexclubs as Jim says were closed. Big concerts and such though were suspended for a duration.

jim says:

Voluntary distancing is not the same as arresting white male taxpayers for going to the beach. There is an enormous difference.

The trouble is that distancing is being holiness spiraled, with a massive censorship offensive, with the internet archive submitting to censorship to rewrite our past.

Under these circumstances, all readily available information is unreliable, and you should not rely on it.

Oliver Cromwell says:

I know people in a lot of countries, so I am getting first hand accounts of what is going on in a lot of different countries.

Each country is in its own political bubble, only dimly aware of what is going on in every other country, and mostly blaming any problems on some local politician, oblivious to the fact that the same problems are in dozens of other countries.

But mostly people are staying inside most of the time because they are frightened, for themselves or for others. But, they are not actually staying inside all the time, which is why exponential growth continues but with a smaller time constant.

That is except for South Korea and Taiwan, where normal life continues.

Statistics say that Sweden has not seen any rise in unemployment. That might be because voluntary distancing gives most of the advantage in controlling the disease with little of the cost, or it might be because in Sweden it’s illegal to unemploy people. Unclear to me at this time.

jim says:

> except for South Korea and Taiwan, where normal life continues

Normal life is returning to Queensland. It is clearly not herd immunity, because Queensland has had very few deaths, which is why they are returning to normality. I conjecture that it is thorough contact tracing and cheerful willingness to lock up carriers and potential carriers.

Oliver Cromwell says:

Sure, I’m not disputing that that approach is both possible and superior. I’m just disputing the inference that because in Sweden many pre-COVID activities are legal, these activities continue to actually take place at anything like the same level.

ten says:

I know some dozen people in sweden working in retail and restaurant, and every single one of them has told me that they, and every single one of their colleagues, has been put in the pipeline to get fired.

This pipeline-to-get-fired is one of the more or less all encompassing union deals that sometimes are made law and sometimes just acts like it was a law – employers can’t fire their bartenders or dishwashers just because they are bleeding money through their ears and customers are absent. Instead, it takes a couple of months.

We should expect to see some swedish unemployment statistics rise after this period, which should be in about a month.

(For some other types of employment, auguring employees’ future firing isn’t a thing. It isn’t _really_ illegal to unemploy people, but some forms of employment demand comically overdimensioned reasons for termination)

Dave says:

Your friends must be working for big corporations that are getting paid by the government to keep people on the payroll. If such rules were applied to small private businesses, the owners would empty their bank accounts and flee the country.

Atavistic Morality says:

Well, let’s be real, small private businesses must do no end of illegal things to survive all the time, like a man has to do to have a successful marriage. Because progressives hate kulaks and hate men.

Also, happy to see @ten give some first hand account about what’s going on in Sweden.

Dave says:

The problem with scapegoating small businessmen is that anyone with enough capital to start a business with employees has enough capital to buy a cabin in the woods and retire.

Men and beasts will patiently endure a hundred generations of abuse and exploitation if allowed to reproduce above replacement. Progressivism is failing badly on that count and starting to run out of white male kulaks.

Oliver Cromwell says:

Both of these things ring true from my experience in a nearby country.

The bottom of the “normal” employment tree is insulated from being laid off by unions and laws.

Meanwhile, the actual bottom of the labor market consists of self-employed vendors who operate on practically no margins, barely manage to pay themselves a bottom tier wage, and have no protections. Statistically, though, those people do not become unemployed because they were never employed to begin with. They’re just business owners who are making less profit than before.

ten says:

Triple no. Not (only, but at least one) big corporations, no government payment of wages to any size corporation going on in sweden, and these systems have been in place for at least 50 years without scaring off the businesses.

Won’t pretend i know how they make it work since i agree with your premise that it is insanity. We have “tax haven” levels of corporate tax, instead 65% income tax (depending on where you live and how you count, so actually international corporations like it in sweden, maybe it’s just a payoff situation where the pros outweigh the cons.

ten says:

And since my retort that international business likes it in sweden was not a response to what you actually said, but to its polar opposite (sry), i would add that responsiveness to market mechanics is less crucial in a stable environment, and sweden has during the entire current economic paradigm been a very stable environment.

Usually, the worst cases are a somewhat big problem – many stories of companies desperately fighting for the right to fire a useless employee, year after year. You get used to the abuse, and you circumvent these forms of employment.

Right now, the normal case is bound to be a huge and growing problem.

Dave says:

There are three possible states: (A) business as usual, (B) voluntary lockdown, and (C) mandatory lockdown. (A) allows COVID to double every three days, which very soon leads to (B) or (C), and after two or three weeks, deaths peak and gradually taper off. (C) is only slightly more effective than (B) because most people are not stupid and do not want to catch the Wu Flu.

It was business as usual in Guayaquil, Ecuador and Manaus, Brazil until one person came home from Europe and infected 100 people, who then spread it likewise, and suddenly the morgues were overflowing. Such outbreaks will become less frequent and less severe as people wise up to the danger, but COVID will smolder for a long time in places where South-Korean-style testing and isolation just isn’t feasible.

In any place with a typical Western distribution of age and health (aircraft carriers and prisons skew young, and homeless people look much older than they really are), herd immunity is reached at several thousand deaths per million. If there is no tip, there is no iceberg.

jim says:

> herd immunity is reached at several thousand deaths per million.

Bullshit.

Several thousand is plausible when no one takes individual precautions and people are incorrectly treated using ventilators, but we have now wised up on that. More importantly “voluntary lockdown” is not lockdown, because without the lock in lockdown, we don’t get millions unemployed and critical supply chain shortages.

Dave says:

What do you call it when meat-packers don’t show up for work because they’re afraid of COVID? Or pretending to be afraid of it to get their $600 a week.

Severe outbreaks only happen where people are ignorant about COVID, which tend to be places where the doctors are ignorant too. There’s a learning curve for both.

Dave says:

A shirk-down?

jim says:

I am not aware of meat packers choosing to not show up because of Wu Flu.

I am aware of meat packers losing their jobs because the Wu Flu crisis is being holiness spiraled – for example YouTube yanking videos by prestigious epidemiologist, Google falsifying their search algorithms yet again, the internet archive in hot water for archiving Wu Flu thought crimes. People who fail to destroy the economy are being insufficiently holy. Since there are a whole lot of people being insufficiently holy, holiness gets enforced. Where holiness is not being enforced, the economy is not tanking.

Pooch says:

I have seen reports of meat packers (who are mostly non-white it seems) complaining of being forced to show up. Not sure if it’s a legitimate concern for their safety or they just want an excuse to get the unemployment gravy train.

I have also seen black mayors of cities around the country refuse to open their cities Because “racist” in an attempt to further milk unemployment benefits.

pyrrhus says:

“Where holiness is not being enforced, the economy is not tanking.”

Indeed, here in Tucson there is zero enforcement at either the city or county level, and everyone except the older retirees is going about their business with great enthusiasm….

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