To date and across most of the globe, Corona seems to have benefited the Establishment, whatever it may be at any particular time (with the exception of Brazil’s Bolsonaro, who took himself out of the game at the start and is now unable to even fire his Health Minister).
Although the MAGA people have made a great deal of Trump’s bump in approval ratings ~46% now relative to ~42% in January, in reality the improvement seems to be pretty marginal relative to other countries. Sampling changes in European leader approval ratings over the immediate past 1-2 months, Giuseppe Conte has gone up from 52% to 71%; Macron, previously pummeled by Yellow Vest unrest, has gone up from 33% to 46%; Merkel has gone up from 53% to 64%; Boris Johnson has gone up from 42% to 55%. Incidentally, I can also now confirm that this “rally around the flag” effect is active in Russia as well. Whereas Putin’s approval rating dipped from 65% to 60% after his controversial move to “nullify” Presidential terms, they have bounced back up to 72% in the latest VCIOM poll after his March 25 speech on coronavirus-related economic measures.
But will these bumps last as quarantine weariness sets in? Presumably not – over time, I imagine ratings will come to depend on the effectiveness of national responses to the crisis in both epidemiological and economic terms.
As this process unfolds, which political factions should we generally expect to win out in the world? And which to lose out?
In a Twitter poll, 44% of respondents said “The Right” while 29% said “The Left.” I think there’s a case to be made for both of those positions, though I expect much will depend on national context.
Populist Right:
- Was usually stronger on and earlier to institute travel bans.
- General association with opposition to “open border” policies.
- Can more readily offload blame on China.
- Conservatives, at least in the US, are much more “chill” on the epidemic than liberals. (Might change if/as bodies pile up).
- Predictive failure of liberal media elites and handshakeworthy experts, e.g. masks disinformation (e.g. voxsplaining they don’t work while their founder bought them for himself), “travel bans don’t work”, wide-ranging failure to predict scale of the problem (while pushing woke anti-racism narratives).
I expect this to be stronger in Italy, and perhaps Europe more generally. In particular, Salvini – one of the earliest politicians in the world to call for banning air flights from China – may capitalize on this.
However, this vector is going to suffer a setback in Brazil, and possibly in the US; though it’s hard to say, as Trump seemingly flip-flops from “shut it down” to “but think about the Line!” every few days.
The Left:
- Generous welfare policies proposed generally nicer for working class people than the Right’s preference for bailouts and supporting employers. E.g., note that many or most European countries, including even Tory-run Britain, are going to be compensating most of the salaries of people that are made redundant. Many have expressed support for Universal Basic Income for the duration of the lockdowns.
- As regards the US in particular – Trump Bux are a joke ($1,200 is a single month’s rent for many people), and there’ll be much greater demand for M4A, more sick leave, etc.
- Increase in support for protectionism in context of US difficulties with getting something as seemingly trivial as increasing face mask production. (Though this is at least as much an issue of the populist/nationalist Right).
I would expect this effect to be stronger in the US than in Europe, which already tends to have much more extensive welfare states (while being less “woke” than US leftists).
And, for that matter, perhaps in Russia, where fiscal hawkishness coupled with low personal savings puts the sustainability of long-term lockdown measures under question.
neoliberalism.txt (as distinct from The Left):
- Would seemingly suffer, as Open Borders, Chimerica, and free trade are all classic neoliberal positions.
- Trump (and Bolsonaro) are hardly making a good case for national-populism.
- Despite the failures described above, there nonetheless seems to be something of a “rehabilitation” of the value of experts – especially on the background of “swine right” politicians and pundits (e.g. see this Daily Show compendium of very bad takes). According to the polls, Dr. Fauci has become the most trusted voice on Corona for the American public.
Last but not least, note that all of the above speculations involve a general tilt of the population in one direction or another but forego consideration of possible changes in underlying demographics.
However, it is a sad but not unrealistic prospect that some countries – most prominently, perhaps, the US – may mostly or entirely fail to control the epidemic, resulting in statistically significant shifts at the demographic level. In a worst case scenario, something like 10% of the Silent Generation may croak before November. These are predominantly white, Republican voters. Furthermore, we can expect that once the coronavirus is done with its early “cosmopolitan” phase – politicians, skiers, global elites – it will then hit the poorest and less educated hardest. Amongst US whites, that’s mostly Republicans – even more so, specifically Trump voters. Will Trump be able to hold onto, say, Florida after such a major demographic shift?
At the very least, I certainly find it very ironic that in my observations of the comments to my Corona poasts, it the precisely the people who are most obsessed by things like the percentage White share of the US population and the social and electoral implications thereof who are also the most nonchalant about the prospect of these trends effectively getting put on “fast forward” by Corona-chan. Again, speaking of the worst case scenario of several million dead, the broad-spectrum ideological shift towards the nationalist-populist Right has to be very substantial just to cancel out the effect of pure demographics!!
I am not making any predictions. Half a year is an eternity in politics, especially in the midst of a pandemic whose future development is still a mystery. But hopefully even these rather scattershot speculations can spur productive discussions.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
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Thoughts -leftism (in the sense of direct money transfers to unemployed, etc.) appears to have benefited enormously from this pandemic, even if actual leftist candidates (e.g., Bernie) haven’t. Leftwing identity politics has absolutely suffered in all respects. Sinophobia has risen, Russophobia (and, weirdly, Iranophobia) has correspondingly fallen, even though Sinophobia is very blatant scapegoating and there would have been no better country on Earth for this pandemic to have started in than China. Western countries would have bern totally unable to handle it; if it happened in the developed East it would have been treated less seriously than MERS for two months. Third world wouldn’t even have detected it.
So, neocons and economic leftists win, I’m guessing.
We’re nonchalant because Blacks are getting hit harder.
Florida is tropical; it hasn’t suffered very hard. Inner city northern Blacks have bern hardest hit so far.
This is really the heart of the matter – what everyone wants to know. There would be a lot of symbolism, if Merkel and Macron got it, but it is probably too much to hope for. Should be a rule that all leaders of globohomo need to be infected with the latest global pandemic.
One of the really interesting aspects of this is how often the politicians have evoked war. Some see this not just as banal rhetoric, but as a kind of way of scapegoating, or forcing some measure of unity behind the system. As though, they would like to go to war in reality, a general mobilization, but can’t due to nuclear weapons, so they’ve seized upon this virus. If so, I’m not sure that the end of it will be as easy as declaring victory. But, then again, I suppose Saddam did that.
At least in the U.S., the left tends to have more savvy media elite types than the right. I expect many of the people in that Daily Show clip for example really are dumb, not just incompetent. Given that, it would be no surprise if the left wins the propaganda war subsequent to this crisis. I’m not making any predictions either, just saying that one advantage the left has is that their White members aren’t as dumb as the swine right.
Foreign policy is a low priority for voters on both the right and left. I think that’s always important to keep in mind, when politicians attempt to blame China for the crisis.
I predict that those who control the media will use it shape the narrative and benefit their preferred political faction. For example, if border closures are seen as a form of racism as opposed to legitimate policy, they won’t be part of the policy debate, and national-populists espousing such measures will see no bump in approval ratings. So my money would be on establishment forces in every country using this crisis to reassert their dominance and control over the population.
Unless, it’s a very weak regime/country, in which case corona could turn it into a bona fide failed state. There is a good chance that this will happen to the Ukraine. The Ukraine is already a failed state by many metrics.
The establishment does well in early stages of any crisis, but the night is young.
The reason this is so wobbly is that the political benefits point to more socialism, more nationalism, less liberal nonsense, power for people doing real work, and for military-police. That’s historically a very sensitive combination and so far everybody is running away from it – the awkward 20th century thing that we are genetically burdened with.
Every society is going to have social policies – that’s what having a society means. (God forbid we call them socialist).) And every normal, healthy group will sooner or later focus on developing mainly itself – meaning ‘nationalism’, borders, mutual solidarity, us-against-them. ‘Imagine‘ is for the birds.
Crisis, wars, plagues, starvation, massive poverty – all of them accelerate the process towards social nationalism (you are free to switch the terms). So what do we do? Are we rational to do what has to be done, or are we paralysed by endless past analogies?
I don’t know how this is going to play out, it could end up as a fight to death between reality and its needs versus endless scary memes and false analogies in order to preserve status quo. The status quo might not be salvageable. Maybe we should burn the libraries, trash Hollywood movies, forget the past, and do what we know has to be done. The meme about ‘those who forget the history…‘ writes itself. We might literally know too much to fix this.
A very good question and a very good topic. I’ve been wondering about this for a while now.
It’s all pretty complicated. Let’s not forget the advanced age of the two current Democratic presidential candidates. Their personal profiles are somewhat demographically representative, too, just as with the creaky old Pelosi and Schumer. Yes, I know that Bernie appeals to youngsters, but he very much represents an aging political philosophy that some people attach themselves to for socially romantic reasons.
I think the liberal front lines (geographically speaking; i.e., the west coast and NY) of the US coronavirus epidemic will make all other regional US outbreaks pale in comparison. Why? Because “conservative” isn’t just a political view, it’s a personality type. Conservatives (in the US) tend to be more far more insular than liberals (which is the main reason the left is far more politically organized at the grass roots level than the right is.)
For many conservatives, social distancing isn’t so much a medical precaution as a way of life. Retirement homes, nursing homes and cruise ships aside, it would be interesting to find out if I’m correct and determine if political orientation has any correlation to acquiring the virus or dying from it (despite the “coronavirus knows no political affiliation” rhetoric.)
One thing I find interesting – yet pretty anecdotal from my perspective: I seem to hear about men dying from the disease far more than I hear about women dying from it. Am I imagining that?
Anyway, the heavy hit liberal regions of the CA and NY won’t suffer that much in terms of reduced voter numbers – at least in the presidential election – because of the electoral college system. (Makes you wonder if Michael Moore might be swayed on that issue. Even a little bit ??) As AE said, it’s the swing states that are the real issue. We’ll see.
Disease appears to kill men more than women (60% – 40%, some say even 70% – 30%). It is not surprising. Women are more resistant to diseases in general and to flu-like diseases in particular.
This seems to be an effect of “rallying around” which happens in times of war, pandemics, general disasters, earthquakes and tsunamis and so it’s independent of politics, unless you really screw up big time (or at least are seen as having screwed up, like Bolsonaro and, partly, Trump). This is why politicians love wars, pandemics, etc.
On the other hand, the effect is temporary. I doubt the popularity of a mediocre politician like Conte will last, also, it can be argued that he screwed up in the beginning or Italy wouldn’t have had so many cases.
Merkel is like a demon-bitch from hell, she’s been in power for twenty years in Germany and nothing seems be able to remove her from there, nor decrease her popularity. Even corona-chick failed. For some reason, Germans still love her, but Germans have a tendency to love weird things.
Macron got “lucky” with the epidemic in that it removed gilletes jaunes, but France is not having good numbers and if things go on in the rhythm they are going, they will have more deaths than Italy and Spain, and protest may start again once (if?) this ends. Boris Johnson is still an incognita, he’s just starting, but if he survives the virus he may become very popular. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right? (Actually, I don’t think that’s right, usually it makes you weaker, but Nietzsche said it and it sounds cool).
A lot of the right wing posters here are not really right wing, but are libertarians, which will tend to psychologically interpret any wide ranging government measures like community lockdowns as oppression. Those people who claim to be pro-white or right wing but support policies that end up decimating the white voter base really deserve to be done away with. Although maybe community lockdowns are too drastic, but then the libertarians will also view widespread random testing as too invasive in nature, and Singapore already tried the wide spread testing route which failed to hold the line, and parts of Japan are moving towards lockdown too.
L]ibertarians scored lower than the other two groups on agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion. They scored low (similar to conservatives) on Neuroticism, and they scored quite high (similar to liberals) on Openness to Experience
Macron is in full damage control, and according to French poll numbers, trust in his government is declining after an initial bump. His government is in damage control mode and riddled by scandals. I’m no expert in Spanish politics but apparently Sanchez is also losing trust in polls. This epidemic has been a huge blow to EU and pro-EU politicians. Maastricht and Schengen went up in flames and the European establishment is trying to save the Lisbon treaty.
Definitely. Supplying the West with a most devastating epidemic is one thing, but having all the medical supplies made in China too is a bit much. There will be a void internationally as the US turns inward and allocates resources to repairing the erosion of its dometic productive capacity, probably by a program of forced cartelization. Asset stripping of innovative firms in the name of shareholder value will be outlawed. Domestic populations in the West will be given an upgrade with training programs. China will not be confronted militarily, but they will begin to feel insecure as America switches to favouring India with investment and technology transfer.
Warren Buffet and others whose investments in China had been the most profitable of all their holdings will see an enormous breach in their wealth. Citizens will demand that their state protect them rather than focus on efficient economic growth as a global solution to global problems. Airlines and the property market will become dreadful investments.
Half of all white Americans are over 44 years old; the most common age is 58. The future was slow but sure deline and rats leaving the sinking ship of identity, The shock of hearing of the concurrent white death toll magnified in media obits of celebrities will elicit Dread Risk and result in whites forming a self-protective block exhibiting group think.
Breitbart are claiming China is now burning people alive in incinerators. Not sure what to make of that, although if it was true I wouldn’t be surprised.
China is the country that has opened massive concentration camps to brutalise and murder tens of thousands of Uyghurs, and they are hardly even trying to hide the fact. I doubt they’d have any qualms about incinerating Chinese people who were in any way an inconvenience to them.
Latest news is that blacks are dying at a higher rate than whites, perhaps due to higher rates of obesity and hypertension. This might make a difference In Wisconsin or Michigan.
The economics are really the interesting thing. This is a pretty big stress test on the weaker members of the EU, especially the South. The South wants Eurobonds. The North, with its hordes of parasitic invaders, will be reluctant to take on more parasitism. This is not something that the bulk of the public in the North will embrace.
Corona-chan is a big deal in Europe – mark my words.
I don’t understand your definition of “neoliberal” – it seems you refer to a caricature of the contemporary meaning of “liberal”, in which case what is the purpose of adding the prefix “neo”?
The word “neoliberalism” was invented in recent years by leftwing writers to describe the repopularity of classical liberalism, among conservatives – after the meaning of the word “liberal” had been changed and appropriated by leftwing politics during the 20th century.
In a widest sense, “neoliberal” is simply a replacement for saying “bourgeois reactionary”. However, specifically, it refers to a new fashion in some unpopular politicians (e.g. Pinochet, Thatcher, Fujimori) in recent years, for Austrian School and Chicago School economical-social concepts.
People described as “neoliberals”, have often supported more closed borders immigration policy. For example, in anglosaxon politicians, – the most “neoliberal” politicians have been Margaret Thatcher and John Howard, who supported more closed, selective immigration. This is also at national level – I see a trend that classically more liberal countries like Switzerland and Australia, have more selective immigration concepts, while more statist countries like Germany or Russia, are using open borders policy, although just to support certain industries.
In Russia it’s “neoliberals”, who are often arguing to close borders with Caucasian countries and Central Asia, or introduce selective immigration, and would prefer more skilled human capital. (While on another side, oligarchs, state, and even church and Patriarch Kirill, support open borders immigration from Central Asia, because they only need unskilled labour for their construction industry interests, without interest in human capital levels.)
–
If we look at “Chicago school”, which was the main referent for “neoliberalism” as a critical term.
Milton Friedman opposes legal immigration in the context of a welfare state, although he supports illegal immigration, as long as it remains illegal, and does not result in obligations to the immigrant (so he has a very eccentric view).
Gary Becker is supporting open immigration, but believes that immigration has to be privatized and sold on an immigration market, and this will result in selection of skilled immigrants. http://www.iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/IEA%20Challenge%20of%20Immigration%20web.pdf
The most popular Chicago School person noways, is Thomas Sowell – he just more correctly, or pragmatically, says it is not abstract question that economists can answer – but depends on who are the particular immigrants.
What’s the relation of free trade and coronavirus?
The most antiprotectionist countries like Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong – responded quite strongly to coronavirus epidemic.
More protectionist countries and leaders like Trump’s America or the EU, have been quite nonstrict in initial stages of epidemic.
This causation more than correlation probably, as larger agglomerations, are on average more protectionist than small ones (with some strange exceptions of protectionist small countries like Israel). And small countries generally (with an exception of some North West European ones) seem to have panicked more in response to coronavirus, compared to large countries.
6 million uyghurs
You should be more careful with Breitbart and the Epoch Times of Falun Gong.
Burning people alive is a very loaded meme. During and after WWII people who were coming out of concentration camps were horrified by cremation and the meme “they are burning people there” was born. For some people it meant literally that people were burned alive. It was a much stronger meme that “they are gassing people there” because of conditioning that took place before and during WWII about gas weapons so people expected to be gassed sooner or later. Pretty much everybody had gas mask training and had a decent gas mask at home. On the other hand the cremation for Catholics, Orthodox and Jews as a taboo. They have never seen it before.
I mean to write: *”Correlation but not implying causation”
Ratings are transient. Perhaps the most important lasting effect of corona will be the surge in informal economy. People are already changing their attitudes towards paying taxes. as the government go all out to demonstrate that giving them money is not a good idea.
In a longer run, it might benefit the right, but it won’t be the right as you know it now.
The media in Britain was reporting yesterday that blacks and other non-whites are significantly more likely to get the virus than whites. Apparently a third of people in hospital in the UK with Coronavirus are non-white, Britain is about 15-20% non-white according to official stats.
I wonder whether that is actually true, or whether this is just yet another version of anti-white propaganda, trying to suggest that non-whites are always victims, they’re even more victimised by a virus than white people are?
In rural southern Vermont, I’m really impressed by how quickly the locals connected second home owners returning to pass the lockdown in more relaxed circumstances to their likely contaminating the local grocery stores. There’s always been resentment, but now it’s hissing, squinty-eyed resentment.
A friend in rural northern Ontario said the local store threatened to turn away cottagers but hasn’t actually done it yet.
These examples seem like a gain for conservative mentality.
VTDigger published a hardship piece on Covid-19’s impact on undocumented farmworkers in Vermont. The comments were uniformly unsympathetic. Whereas, before the current excitement, they published a hardship piece on a black Vermont State representative that got a lot of concerned comments.
If consumption has to taper off, resentment of those not affected will spike. And those not affected include a lot of public employees and other beneficiaries of government largess.
The rightward shift might not show up in party loyalty so much as in each party’s platform.
So far, the only angle I’ve heard as an explanation for the disparate impact on blacks is the already existing health disparity. Nothing about behavior.
Globalism is the obvious loser from this. Obviously. Could there be any event more likely to motivate European peoples against globalism than a pandemic started in China?
This means nationalism in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, because demographics still allow it, but something weird in the US and even weirder in Canada.
One point against the above, 9/11 would also have seemed a perfect motivator to European peoples against globalism, but then verboten ideological movements take a lot of time to mould themselves into the right shape and gain support.
The right shape seems to be Orban, Salvini and Brexit Conservatives. No racism, no conspiracy theories, moderate economic policies, moderate social policies and then gradual implementation of the nationalist agenda.
Anatoly – “note that many or most European countries, including even Tory-run Britain, are going to be compensating most of the salaries of people that are made redundant“.
Not quite so in Britain. The idea is that employers “furlough” their staff but DON’T make them redundant. Instead, the State will pay 80% of their salary for an indefinite period, until the crisis is over. The whole point is for them not to lose their employment. War Socialism, as Churchill would have called it.
The same will apply to self-employed people, the State will pay (IIRC) 80% of their average profits over the last 3 years, up to £40,000.
If you’re made redundant you just get standard, not very generous benefits. But it’s hoped the measures above will reduce redundancies and enable firms to keep skilled staff.
Good news is those working outside the tax system (illegals mostly) get sod-all. All salaries are reported to the tax office when they are paid, so HMRC (tax man) has a pretty good idea what people were earning.
A good number of these Dissident Right — libertarian — types have permanently discredited themselves with their response to this crisis. There is indeed an argument to be made against the implementation of lockdowns, and you’d think theses edgy types could make them (can lockdowns work in a multicultural society with tremendous wealth disparities?), but no — they immediately reverted to hysterically parroting libertarian talking points: “muh economy”, “muh constitution”, “muh conspiracy theory”, “it’s just the flu, bro.”
Anatoly has pointed out in the past that right-wing nationalists suffer from a lack of human capital. Covid-19 exposes that, so my guess is that the public will go with the perceived strong horse when this is over, aside from the demographic situation mentioned in the article. That will be liberal authoritarianism, however labeled.*
What could have been:
What we got instead:
*Seattle Police Chief: Call 911 When You Hear Hate Speech
https://dailycaller.com/2020/04/01/seattle-police-chief-911-hate-speech/
Orthodox Jews also hard hit, the Israeli press (Haaretz, JPost) are pretty clear that they’re ignoring the distancing rules and paying the price.
And this won’t help:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/07/us/face-masks-ethnicity-coronavirus-cdc-trnd/index.html
On social media and in interviews with CNN, a number of people of color — activists, academics and ordinary Americans — expressed fears that homemade masks could exacerbate racial profiling and place blacks and Latinos in danger.
“I don’t feel safe wearing a handkerchief or something else that isn’t CLEARLY a protective mask covering my face to the store because I am a Black man living in this world,” tweeted Aaron Thomas, an educator in Columbus, Ohio. “I want to stay alive but I also want to stay alive.”
His tweet has more than 121,000 likes.
at this point i’m just gonna accuse AK of being dishonest. America is in a civil war. that changes everything completely. Democrats are deliberately trying to sabotage the country every step of the way. no other first world nation trying to respond to the virus is in a civil war. the Trump Admin is doing well considering the ludicrous circumstances.
What makes you think any of these reasonable policies you mention will actually be pushed? It’s not as if corona has shown us something that wasn’t apparent long before. The same actors who pushed neoliberal trade policies are still in power, and they will continue to push for neoliberal trade policies and resist mercantilist common sense. The calculus of self interest and ideological hardheadedness has not changed among the people who matter, and so neither will policy.
So CNN are basically claiming that if a white man covered his face in normal times people wouldn’t find that threatening or negatively stereotype it? I highly doubt that.
Most people feel threatened by anyone obscuring their face in normal times, I think race is an irrelevant factor in that.
@Europe Europa
Everyone gets the virus. only some get disease severe enough to get counted in statistics.
Why do so many people think if you are not symptomatic you are not infected and infectious?
Given the latitude of the UK and vitamin d’s effects on immunity one would expect anyone who is darker skinned to have a down regulated immune system at this time of year, and so to suffer from the disease more.
In the context of the US, I’d expect blacks to be worse effected in the northern states than the southern ones for the same reason. And every state save Alaska is a long way south of the UK.
That said who knows what the demographics of the uk are at the moment, especially London, where this outbreak is currently worse. No meaningful conclusion can be drawn from the ethnicity data.
The only interesting thing from the data was the distribution of age ranges in the ICU.
25 percent 0-52 (but no one under 30 is really affected so 30-52?)
50 percent 52-70
25 percent 70 and over.
Is this a consequence of poor govt. messaging that this a disease that only affects the elderly resulting in younger people not taking precautions, and the elderly being hyper cautious, or is this a disease which primarily affects those of late middle age.
i’ve made my position on this question very clear. China will make out on this virus. they will get Joe Biden elected, and all their problems with the US will go away, clearing their path to eventually displacing America as the leading power on this planet.
they will get to kill thousands of Americans and cost the US 2 trillion dollars or more, and they’re going to get away with it scot-free. no manufacturing will ever move back to the US, indeed, the opposite will happen. deindustrialization of the US will continue apace and, eventually, even US car manufacturing will start to disappear.
in the US, the virus will wipe out Republicans permanently. Democrats are poised to take monopoly control of the US starting in January 2021, and the replacement of europeans will begin in earnest. tax paying, law abiding european men will be turned into Mules. the establishment of UBI may occur under the Biden Administration, locking in a certain countdown clock on the US. no western nation can survive UBI for long, and the US is in one of the worst positions to endure UBI. the money for UBI will be taken from the Mules and given to their replacements, who will be flooding in under the Biden Admin policy of total open borders.
after that i put the odds of conflict at no higher than 50-50. european men will likely accept losing their country and being turned into Mules. virus ‘lockdown’ was a good test run for how compliant they will be to Democrat Governors grinding them into wet shit.
Not sure about the UK situation, but in the US many blacks are obese and that’s one of the reasons they are being more affected in some regions (apparently fatsos and diabetic people can get more problems with corona, I don’t know why since it affects the lungs and not the stomach!).
The other explanation would be is that this is an “alt-right” nazi virus designed to get rid of non-whites, lol, but that doesn’t seem to be the case as the majority of victims so far are “creepy old white men” (women and children less affected, feminazis are happy too).
As for political consequences, I fear it will lead to further isolationism (both in terms of countries isolating themselves and determining their own borders or enacting random travel restrictions, bye bye Schengen, but also in individual terms, “social distancing” and less trust and less human warmth unfortunately are here to stay (for a while, at least).
I was wondering if masks become commonplace in the west would distinctive patterns on the mask be mandated by law to reduce the annoymising effect of the garment.
Possibly distinctive attire?
No problem, someone invented masks with mouths printed on them, they can be black, white, asian or any race, actually you can even have the picture of your own mouth and nose.
https://faceidmasks.com/
Another option would be transparent plastic masks, I don’t know why that didn’t catch on, I guess plastic is less comfortable, or it’s not porous and you can suffocate?
Anyway, I don’t think that blacks and Latinos wearing masks are less intimidating than blacks and latinos NOT wearing masks, if you see a group of black youths coming towards you, with or without masks – run away bitch, corona is the least of your problems now, lol.
I notice that Italian poster about “anti-Chinese prejudice” doesn’t actually say the same thing in Italian and English. The last sentence in Italian translates as “Free me from prejudice”, while the English sentence is “eradicate the prejudice”, which seems quite a bit stronger and more critical in my opinion.
Is the difference in wording a subtle attempt to imply that “racism” is an Anglo thing, or am I just reading too much into it?
It’s funny how every single ideologue under the Sun is claiming that Coronavirus had proven that their ideology is true and will win in the end.
My prediction: things will be exactly the same as before, and much sooner than you expect.
Not in Ohio. Slightly more women than men have died.
elicit Dread Risk and result in whites forming a self-protective block exhibiting group think.
Getting a little bit too simplistic and melodramatic here, Sean.
Which faction will benefit?
The “money printer goes brrr!” faction of course. Whoever prints the most will print the best. US will hit $30 trillion in debt years ahead of schedule, and US debt to GDP ratio will be a thing of beauty.
At that point, it won’t be about virus anymore – finance charges on debt alone will cause difficulties for Federal Government budget. Repayment in real terms will become mathematically impossible. Inflation, even hyperinflation, will be seen as a desirable goal rather than a threat. US was able to inflate away WW2 era debts before, but this time demographics and technology will cause deflationary pressure to prevail. Inflation is impossible in sufficiently automated service economy with declining demographics.
When US enters deflationary spiral in the face of $100’s trillions of debts, we will finally do a monetary reform, and hopefully eliminate the parasitic finance sector and focus our efforts on something more productive. My favorite is space program, leftists want to focus on Green stuff, which is less critical i think, but still better than what we have now.
Future is looking bright for “money printer goes brr!” faction. 🙂
In Europe, this is additive to Brexit. Britain leaving costs them a pool of money. Meanwhile, Spain, Greece, and Italy will probably want corona-bailouts of some kind.
One weird dynamic is that a subset of the alt-right is both highly bullish on the potential harms of the coronavirus and Sinophilic. E.g., here’s Andrew Anglin unironically arguing “It’s just the flu, bro!”:
Dmitry, there are these extended historical/geographic/theological definitions, which if I was to delve into whenever writing about any ideological clustering would leave me unable to ever leave the keyboard. And there is neoliberalism in the common sense way that it is generally understood in the modern West, both by neoliberals (e.g. on /r/neoliberal) and by their opponents. Broadly speaking, they are social liberals – very much pro-gay marriage; economic centrists to conservatives (opinions vary on welfare, but they insist on low business regulations, privatization, free trade, and general economic freedom); tend to favor “humanitarian interventions” in FP; highly anti-Russian, not so much anti-China though that has been changing in recent years; generally pro-Open Borders.
In good times the group is a drain (a friend in need is a pest) so people become irreligious and uninterested in their community. Death is common and accepted but there is something much worse than dying.
In bad times being a member of a community has great benefits. Breaking down barriers within a group is in effect putting up barriers to other groups. Hard times make hard people.
The shocking medical lapse of Boris Johnson is of someone who is both of part non white descent and an albino which is after all an underlying medical condition. That is a splendid genetic mix for the virus. I think it is fair to say if he was merely citizen Johnson he would most likely be dead now.
I was thinking of his face. If you take it in even at a slight angle, it seems very abnormal. Maybe, a sign of genetic load? Or his exotic origins?
I had the idea that maybe you could feed a picture of his face into some computer program that would evaluate it’s overall symmetry and other features and give him a prognosis for this disease.
Drop the autistic definitions and spend some time on r/neoliberal.
Ramzpaul is the first to come to mind. He’s a prominent figure in the Dissident Right, a self-described “former” libertarian, who has badly discredited himself by parroting flu truth talking points from the Z-Blog, a website run by a business owner negatively impacted by Covid-19*. His videos are all filled with deflections, distortions of fact, and cherry-picked data. His latest video features a UFO in the thumbnail. He included a picture of an alien spacecraft in an attempt to portray his critics as the fringe conspiratorial ones. As I admitted previously, there are valid points to raise concerning the lockdown, but I don’t see these people mentioning any of them. What I see, instead, is the peddling of conspiracy nonsense.
Here’s a short summary of Paul’s talking points from the last few videos I watched:
This is true. However, Paul’s statement is really only a half truth. Things are getting better in Spain because the country is under heavy lockdown; the same is true of Italy. Paul omits that context. What Paul is falsely implying here is that Covid-19 was never a big deal to begin with, and it will go away on its own. Maybe, but probably not. The only places that have this under control at the moment did the opposite of what he recommends — total lockdown for several weeks.
2.”Germany is fine, only a 0.2% death rate”
At the time he made this statement, there wasn’t enough data available to make this claim with any certainty. It’s possible the CFR falls to below 1% when this is all over, but I’m pretty sure it will be higher than 0.2% in any case. Also, the reported mortality in Germany is now much higher than when he first made that claim. Paul cherry-picked Germany because it was having the best case outcome while ignoring what was happening in neighboring countries at the same time.
Wuhan, locked down for far longer, just reopened. They are doing fine. China is busy supplying the world with masks and medicines again. Sure, the economy will suffer, but it’s not going to be the Great Depression 2.0. The circumstances are very different now. Of course, politicians could do something that makes it worse, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way.
A few weeks after he made that claim, hotspots emerged in Spain, New York City, and New Orleans — among other locations. We now have lots of hotspots everywhere. The areas that have not gone full meltdown instituted early quarantines and aggressive testing and contact tracing.
That’s unlikely. It’s already pretty hot where Covid-19 is spreading in East Asia; the heat there has made practically no difference. The “go away in summer” thing is a mostly a myth. Viruses don’t go away simply because it’s hot outside. They start in winter because people are in close contact with each other, allowing the virus to spread. Cases drop in summer because by then so many susceptible people have gotten it that herd immunity has taken effect, among other things like effective social distancing. If you release the lockdown prematurely, this is going to burn through the population and a lot of people are going to die. Cov-19 is already the third leading cause of death in this country.
Paul made this bet in a previous video back in March, IIRC. He’s saying that it’s all a doomsday hysteria that will end soon. This is a strawman, however. No one is claiming the world is ending. Paul is exaggerating here so he can look prescient when the worst case scenario inevitably doesn’t happen. It’s a disingenuous argument.
Breaking news: terrorists nuke Chicago, millions dead. Ramzpaul comforts the masses: “I can still buy a hamburger where I live, so it couldn’t have been all that bad.”
When the economic argument didn’t work, he moved on. In a more recent video, he includes an American Founding Father (Ben Franklin, I believe) in the thumbnail. He implies that lockdowns are bad because liberty … or something. But did American liberties go away after the 1918 Spanish Influenza? No. Your constitution will still be here when this is all over. In my opinion, you don’t have any right to spread a deadly pathogen around. And no, there is no absolute right to assemble in the United States and there never has been. You have to get a permit to protest or to assemble in some locations, so public safety is taken into account. A similar logic applies here.
This is cherry picking. The 100k figure was the lowest bound on a range given “if everything is done perfectly.” If nothing is done, that same health official — Dr. Anthony Fauci — estimated 2.2 million deaths.
That’s complete nonsense. First, the US has the most cases of any country in the world by a large and growing margin. The US is also barely testing in many locations compared with advanced countries like South Korea, so the point is invalid; the US has tested fewer people as a percentage of the population than South Korea. It is possible that the model is indeed correctly predicting case numbers or that numbers are off due to the model not accounting for the lockdowns RamzPaul opposes. Cases have indeed declined in New York, as he mentions. But he purposely ignored the context just as he did with Italy and Spain: New York is under heavy lockdown. What happens when you release that lockdown prematurely?
This is definitely not the flu, bro. Covid-19 deaths are far outpacing conventional influenza. How many times in recent memory has a British Prime Minister been incapacitated in ICU for the flu? Consider that hospital beds are already at near max capacity in many areas. Imagine that lockdown lifting everywhere tomorrow. Here’s what would happen in short order: hospitals overrun, 10 – 20 times annual flu deaths with maybe 20 – 30 times the number of hospitalizations, shortages of medicines, hoarding, an economic collapse as panicked people stay home anyway, possible urban riots as cops call in sick, loss of government legitimacy as guys like Ramzpaul here said that grandma was less important than the GDP.
His comment section is likewise filled with embarrassing, conspiratorial comments from aged Boomers. Many claim the government is just labeling any death as Covid-19, despite the impossibility of that for two reasons 1) decentralization among the states means that the feds have to be far more competent and organized than they have ever been previously; that’s a conspiracy well beyond even 9/11 truth 2) we can count deaths and see what’s happening with our eyes: death rates have spiked and morgues in hard-hit areas like New Orleans and New York are overflowing.
Other comments accuse people of blanket hysteria or engage in other conspiracy theories. Worse, this kind of sentiment seems to have cost a Louisiana pastor his life:
Here’s a similar take from an economic populist / Southern Nationalist and former alt-right reactionary (now disillusioned):
Granted, OD is a controversial ~alt-right website, but I mention it because the people behind it are within the same general sphere as Ramzpaul and other flu truthers. There are lots of other charts and graphs on this website that disprove the comparison between seasonal influenza and Covid-19:
http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2020/04/01/the-flu-vs-coronavirus-iii/
*I can’t prove this for a fact, but I’m pretty sure of it based on his previous comments. I wonder if he doesn’t have an ulterior economic motive.
The difference now is the polar star of policy is no longer rising living standards, it is wellness in one country. Anyone trying to operate with the old assumptions is going to cause a lot of death; the media will point the finger and one deceased living relative maybe something else. There is a possibility that the West is too weak and the hyper-capitalists will sell out to China totally and yet stay in control. Either way it is a watershed: I cannot see things continuing as they were before.
Oh, you want to criticize someone (The Z-Blog) for putting “business interests” before safety and health?
Let’s ask Bill Gates what he thinks of that.
Not like the vaccine industry is relying on this threat to sell billions upon billions of test kits on top of antivirals and vaccines. Many of the drugs are produced from abortion, which is itself the ultimate dysgenic act of a suicidal culture.
Americans are pretending to not notice who bears this “economic pain.” It isn’t Bill Gates, nor is it virtually any large corporation. Heck, a casino in Philadelphia has been granted a special waiver to continue construction. I wonder (((who)) owns that?
Even if one were to argue that some lock down is necessary to save the health care industry, the idea of an extended lock down, which is what is being discussed, is tied in deeply with this next big corrupt industry.
One of the sadder parts is that they’re going to make the moronic “anti-vaxxers” feel vindicated.
Sweden has been doing just fine without a lock down and just advising people to watch out. Only old and sick people and migrants who didn’t listen to any of the warnings are dying.
The median age of the dead in Finland is 81, the same as life expectancy here.
The only crisis is the panic. Some sort of a strange mass psychosis has made people treat a flu like it’s the black death and now the sunk cost fallacy is going to keep people defending the insane shutdowns.
I can only see it being bad for Trump. He was in a bad spot to begin with, but with the economic damage that will not be fixed by election time. And there is the potential of covid-19 literally killing off his thin margins. The only thing that will potentially save him is the weak Dem showing from demented Biden. All Dems had to do was put forward a non-divisive empty suit and they could have won, but apparently the only person they could find was elderly with early Alzheimer’s.
Sweden’s cases are ramping up now
it’s possible, and would be great if so.
but.
politicians/political parties–DSA for example, or the voices in the Republican party like Cotton/Hawley that realize Populism v Corporatism is the new alignment spectrum–alone have little chance at toppling the Consensus of Correct Opinion (aka Neoliberal Corporatism).
to really take advantage of this moment, there will need to be citizen organizations–whether that’s Labor Unions (gig economy workers are ready to blow, as are service industry and grocery folks) or, perhaps, new models of business that are worker-oriented.
elaborating further on that last bit: if the big brains of Silicon Valley/tech generally were focused on “disrupting” (un)ethical models instead of profit models, you might see them amass institutional power on behalf of workers/consumers that could be pointed with the same scale/force as the current profit oriented tech firms (Facebook, Uber etc) have.
An example of Ramzpaul logic: “The official estimate is now predicting 81,000 deaths. So we crashed the economy for what basically happened two years ago.”
No mention that w/o lockdowns the number of deaths could have been 800,000 or more.
The meme was originally produced and disseminated by Allied propaganda because the Allies were literally burning German civilians alive during their firebombing raids of Dresden and other German cities. It was a kind of “preemptive projection” by the Allies in the propaganda and psychological aspects of the war. You loudly accuse your opponent of what you yourself are doing in order to deflect from your own actions.
Sweden is playing with numbers
.
If “as much as four fifths” means subtraction then the actual numbers in Swede could 5 times higher than reported.
Can they play this number trick against the exponential growth for long?
Ramzpaul and other white nationalists should be asking another question: Is Sweden making more room for immigrants from ME, Asia and Africa by letting white parents and grandparents die in this epidemic?
You understand that the life expectancy of 81-year-olds is something like an additional 8 years?
Anyway, I’m sure Boris Johnson is very old, he’d have croaked later this year anyway. Guys who are as unhealthy as Boris Johnson are pretty rare, so it’s not an issue if suddenly millions of them spend weeks in hospitals. (Even if they survive, that’d be a burden, but it wouldn’t happen, because basically everyone is lean and fit.)
That’s it, isn’t it?
AK is quick to bury the American ethno-populist-nationalist Right as usual, but our demographic overlap with the Republican party is marginal and our political interests are almost perfectly opposed.
The death of the GOP as a political force would almost certainly be a boon to right wing dissidents in America, freeing us from the “Thatcher Effect” of fake MAGA populism and putting the neoliberal world order’s right-flank watchdog and snitch to sleep.
A large majority of the American “alt-Right” with Right-wing priors was “radicalized” through libertarianism rather than conservatism. Those of us who’ve been both tended to be libertarians first, cons second (usually as a compromise with practicality) and then ethno-nationalists. An increasing number of disaffected Leftists are shifting to ethno-nationalism and this will likely accelerate as the glaring hypocrisy of “Merchant Socialists” like AOC becomes ever-more-obvious.
Corona-Chan’s hastening of the Day of the Pillow may be the swan song for the GOP that will clear the stage for the legitimate, grassroots Right to flourish.
Anything that helps put the animated zombie skin-suit of Chimerica out of the world’s misery and leaves any portion of the territorial US open for radical right wing reform should be cheered by all peoples of the world.
White Nationalism is a legitimate non-interventionist peace movement willing to not only monkey-wrench the MIC but also global finance capital – AFAIK, the only one. The world we want to help create is much closer to the one AK seems to prefer than what he’ll get from any alternative alternatives.
Wait for the economic pain and years of austerity, concerns about things like immigration surge then. Plus Trump is never going to have high approval levels, the US is so divided politically, and right down the middle.
No way the Italian economy survives this, the Euro and the Eurozone financial system is finally in its existential crisis. Sanchez fully deserves criticism after the feminist march nonsense. France is in a death spiral and it is just a matter of time until Salvini takes over.
When is the Greek government going to get a move on and grant Eldorado Gold the final permits for Skouries. I assume the government in Greece is doing well, seem to have handled the border and corona virus week?
In summary, the dissidents have permanently discredited themselves by moving closer to mainstream conservatism. They should have argued against lockdowns but didn’t, so now those who argued for lockdowns will be the winners since the lockdowns worked. Uh sure. How’s Bernie by the way, my man? Haven’t seen him for a while.
If m4a is adopted, will the share of defense spending fall to 2% of GDP? What are the implications of m4a on US military bases in Asia and Europe?
OT, but what are the suggested replacements here for GDP, since most people here seem to think that GDP is inadequate as a measure?
Libertarians deserve to be done away with.
Some very good sheep here, indeed.
I presume you’ve seen that the EU’s chief scientist has resigned, three months and a week into his four year term, because the EU’s response to CV19 has been non-existent?
When the solids strike the ventilator the EU can’t agree on anything, every nation for itself.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8198367/Head-EUs-science-panel-quits-COVID-19-response.html
Below is from yesterday’s Guardian
While the Guardian reported this in its live blog yesterday, there’s no story on it today. If the top UK scientist resigned and criticised the government it would be the main story.
Well in his defence, the high temperatures kill the coronavirus defense does make sense, but most transmissions are happening in airconditioned or tight spaces, which partly negates that.
It’s not on the BBC front page either. Amazing. At least they report it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52212390
Not to defend Bolsonaro–I really never cared for the guy–but if he’s getting vetoed by his ‘own’ generals, maybe he just isn’t that establishment after all. Maybe he’s just some random dude who got lucky and won an election … sorta like Trump.
You can’t just allow what you want to happen to skew your analysis of what actually is happening. The former is ideology, while the latter is reality. Substituting ideology for reality is self-deception, bad faith.
And here comes the black pill: if this flu-coup succeeds in ushering in a globalist dictatorship over the West, it won’t long work to the benefit of any populist movement, whether of the left or the right. That’s why we deniers feel compelled to denounce this hoax as loudly as we can while we still can, because once ‘Blue screen of death’ Bill has his vaccine ready, all bets are off.
The NEETs.
Milions are forced to stay at home, and go unemployed. Voluntarily, or not so much, everyone on earth will be forced to join the ranks of the one faction that has been historically underestimated.
This is not about virus defenses and temperatures. This about that you may not argue against the lockdown on the basis that lockdown produced low number of fatalities.
People in most countries support socialism because there aren’t many wealthy nations really. Put simply, the wealthy nations are USA, Canada, Australia, NZ, UK, the Germanic nations, Japan, and that’s about it really.
Even France is a borderline case, many French people would not consider themselves as wealthy as Germans and British I would suspect and indeed most of the migrants want to get to Germany or the UK, not France.
It seems an effective antibody test (‘have I had it and recovered?’) for CV19 is some way off, if this guy is right.
https://www.research.ox.ac.uk/Article/2020-04-05-trouble-in-testing-land
More than half of the dead in Stockholm are Somalis. The only ethnic Swedes who are in danger are either those who happen to have some severe undiagnosed condition or those who are in old folks’ homes and aren’t in charge of their own fate. The same in France, America etc – it’s spreading among Arabs, blacks, religious Jews and so on.
Corona-chan is objectively pro-white. This disease is nothing to high IQ, conscientious whites and East Asians.
Well, if Boris Johnson survives this disease he is going to be one of the clear political winners. Given his personality I’m sure he thinks it was worth the risk.
I would have done the same except for the hand shaking since I’m a big germaphobe. (Which is why this is all so funny to me. It’s like the rest of you just discovered that other peoples bodily fluids are disgusting.) That was pretty stupid since he would have had a perfect excuse to wear a mask and not shake, get double PR points for meeting corona patients and for setting an example of hygiene.
I believe that Lombardy and Northern Spain have IQs that are no lower than rural England, the Flanders, or the Rhineland, have you been taking your anti-psychotic meds lately?
I guess the problem is that the right wing in Anglo states have an distinctive disbelief of everything the establishment says, so they still instinctively reject it even then the TPTB does something that make some semblance of once in a while.
Let’s have some fun with this: Suppose Russian-agent Tulsi Gabbard used her military connections to get this virus into China so it would work its way around the world to take out the aged corrupt DNC machine who engineered things against her. The only person you didn’t mention was Hillary Clinton, but let’s assume she too was a target. Everything could then be pinned on China.
OT because I’m a rebel:
Romanian study of the Flynn Effect shows a slow and lengthy decline during the postwar era, a rapid increase between 1967 and 1977, a historical peak in 1989, a dramatic decline between 1990 and 1995 and a slow recovery since then.
The study was published in Intelligence
https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.intell.2020.101430
An article in romanian with excellent questions; it also has a decent graph:
https://www.edupedu.ro/efectul-flynn-in-romania-concluziile-celui-mai-mare-studiu-cu-privire-la-inteligenta-romanilor-dragos-iliescu-nivelul-din-1989-a-fost-cel-mai-mare-pe-care-romania-l-a-avut-in-iq-dupa-care-a-urmat/
The money quote: “The Revolution and the post-communist reforms had the effect of a war”
Currently Romania has an increase of 3.4 points per decade.
The researcher says that Nordic countries have negative Flynn Effect and Japan has a 7 points/decade increase. Chad samurais vs virgin Sweden Yes!
Why doesn’t Karlin do an article on Indonesia?
My cynical take from looking at the Audacious Epigone blog is that a significant portion of the it’s just the flu posters here are arguing in bad faith, that they do not believe in fact, believe that it is the just flu, but they want a total collapse of society, basically a Somalia Mk2, that will happen to a significantly worse response, and that they believe that they, like Cao Cao, will be the king of the hill in the event of a societal collapse. and that they will benefit the most from the impending coronavirus chaos caused by the botched response.
New Jersey is closing all county and state parks, supposedly because people “failed to maintain social distancing.”
I’m sure this will be defended as necessary.
Shocking revelation per MoA. It appears that US government shipped millions of masks and other supplies to Israel, after poaching them from the American hospitals.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/04/jared-kushners-anti-virus-priorities.html
https://www.moonofalabama.org/images10/feds1-s.jpg
https://www.moonofalabama.org/images10/fed2-s.jpg
Anyone can make a Reddit sub – and then attract liberal students to post in there, as those are main demographic of people in reddit, and it’s quite funny example of word determinism in the internet (because the word neoliberal, included “liberal”, then a large enough proportion of people in the internet will misunderstand its meaning, and it is interpreted as just referring to normal liberals).
This is not how a word is used in texts or books, and besides – it is meaningless, because there is no need to add a prefix “neo” – as this new meaning referring to the leftwing interpretation of liberal.
So these are simply liberals in the normal sense e.g. “Liberal democrat” party in the UK, rather in “Liberal democratic party of Russia”.
Autism is eternal, Anatoly.
In terms of ideological trends – “neoliberal” countries, in the normal (invented by leftwing professors) sense of the word, are generally responding more rigorously to an epidemic.
Countries like Estonia, Czech Republic, Latvia, seem to have the best testing in Europe.
Estonia even has a website with live data of its test results https://www.terviseamet.ee/et/koroonaviirus/koroonakaart
dweeb
In England, you will see lack of social distancing even in lockdown, and Russia is not that much better.
Finland is not exactly representative.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B9KWZIGpYLU/
In my own opinion, i think the politicians are playing with the life and health of the people.
I mean, that is in their job description.
Perhaps not the playing part.
Alright boys, time to worry:
https://www.jiujitsutimes.com/judo-champion-bjj-practitioner-cyril-boulanger-has-died-of-covid-19-at-age-37/
That’s the first death I’ve read up on of a healthy person and Brazilian ju-jitsu is significantly more demanding athletically speaking (vs lifting or running) so this guy was in shape; explosive strength and long-lasting stamina.
I know being French he probably was a smoker but still…
I still REFUSE to wear a mask. It’s muh FREEDOMS dog!
https://media.makeameme.org/created/if-he-dies.png
Shit the old lady in the liquor store on her little scooter wasn’t wearing one either and if she won’t I sure as shit won’t!
I meant AK. Sorry.
Most Trump supporters love Israel so will probably consider that to be perfectly acceptable, even though they’d be furious if it was done for the benefit of any other country.
So this is why they are keeping these facts hidden from the American public, and even Jerusalem post, which broke the story, had to edit its headline: they now claim that masks actually came from China with US DoD acting as a delivery service. lmao
What are the meaningful differences between neoliberals and neoconservatives?
By the way, Estonia and Czech R. are among the least religious countries in Europe. But then, so is Sweden.
(As for Latvia, I still maintain that it’s not liberal or ‘neoliberal’ in any reasonable sense of either word.)
Neoliberalism is neoconservatism for goys.
Neoliberals invade for “human rights and protect minority ethnic groups.” Neoconservatives invade to “topple dictators and preserve a rule-based world.”
Their goals(and often methods) are different but in practice they act pretty similarly. Both seem extremely fervent for intervention in the world.
Czech Republic is usually touted by the right as a “strong Christian nation”.
Then again, the word “Christian” seems to have taken on a new meaning lately. Many on the right seem to use it in much the same way as they use “based”, or “patriot”. It often doesn’t seem to mean “Christian” in a literal sense.
M4A will have no effect on US defense spending or US military bases. US has no shortage of dollars just like US has no shortage of kilograms.
US defense spending will increase, and US military bases will be enlarged. Specific example – Trumps’ Space Force has began a rollout of Starlink military network being built by SpaceX. This system will be comprised of 1000’s and potentially 10,000’s of command and control satellites around the globe. Construction and deployment of automated assets managed by this network is expected to make a significant contribution to US GDP.
Both more neoconservatism and neoliberalism are meaningful in American than European contexts .
Neoconservatism was started by leftists (liberal in an American sense) Jews who recognized that American conservatism (being pro-military) needed Jewish voice and influence to secure interests of Israel after the 1967 Six Day War when America was overflowing with anti-war and anti-military sentiments during the Vietnam War. Jus another example of Jewish cripsis to forward Jewish interests. Similar to Marranos joining early Jesuits or gays infiltrating Catholic Church in post Vatican II in 1960s.
Neoliberalism for Europeans it is liberalism on steroids. Laissez-faire economic liberalism with emphasis giving supremacy to finance capitalism. For Americans, since the term liberalism is understood as leftists progressivism and tolerance in the realm of social mores, neoliberalism may mean somebody like Bill Clinton: fuck everything that moves and has an orifice but support the fiscal conservatism, meaning privatization, low taxes, deregulation of financial institutions.
Both TBRS and Chieh are correct, I’d also add:
Neocons are basically Jewish-American nationalists; many if not all of them have made peace with Trump after it became clear his agenda was at least just as much MIGA as MAGA.
The overwhelming majority of neoliberals remain extremely hostile to Trump.
Think, say, John Bolton vs. Samantha Power, or JPod vs. Julia Ioffe, Bill Kristol vs. Steven Pinker, etc.
Maybe strong but not numerous:
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/FT_17.06.16_czechRep.png
My understanding however is that church attendance is strong among those who still believe in something. Also, I’ve seen polls alleging Czechs are the most hostile towards Muslims.
Neoliberals want to transform the world into a single entity with centralized power of bankers, media and MIC nexus. Neoconservatives want the same except that on each step of the transformation the role of Israel must remain central so in the end the prophecy of Isaiah explicated by David Ben-Gurion in 1962 is fulfilled:
The economic devastation is going to be so without measure that I’m going to vote for the rickettsiae.
Here’s another take from Tony Martel. He posts over at Occidental Dissent.
Martel is quoting Tucker Carlson, who seems to be running interference for president Trump’s plan to “reopen the economy.” Obviously, that will have to happen at some point, and maybe difficult decisions lie ahead. I’d appreciate more honesty and less obfuscation on this subject, though. Maybe we really will have to sacrifice 500k – 1 million grandmas for the economy. Regardless, I don’t buy what’s been written here. For instance, “the models are wrong.” Well, if that’s the case … why? Likely, the older models being used don’t account for the effects of large scale quarantines; Western projections on their effectiveness before China implemented them seem to be wrong, so probably those models based on previous assumptions are wrong, too. Even if they are totally wrong, that doesn’t necessarily mean what detractors want it to mean. We have undeniable, observational evidence of increased mortality rates. That can’t be explained away with flu truth conspiracy theories. Release those quarantines all at once and without any semblance of a plan to mitigate their effects, and I’ll bet they end up being right.
More:
Reason: quarantines.
Reason: quarantines.
Reason: quarantines.
That doesn’t account for the worldwide flooding of hospitals and morgues concomitant with Covid-19 spread. Also, the majority of seasonal influenza cases aren’t tested for anyway, so that observation is questionable to begin with. Further, when a person is infected with a virus, it will sometimes alter the host cell such that it is more difficult for other pathogens to infect them. Viruses are greedy and have evolved to spread their genome around — wouldn’t make too much sense to allow competition with other infectious viruses. There is a chance, depending on just how Corona works, that it is merely out competing influenza for hosts; Covid-19 is more contagious, after all. This could explain the observation Carlson is making here. If true, that makes the situation worse, not better.
My guess: this is just Tucker Carlson pushing BS conspiracy theory nonsense on behalf of Donald Trump. His cult followers are dumb enough to fall for it.
That’s nothing to base healthcare policy on. The guy is taking a few numbers he doesn’t’ understand and hoping, without evidence, that it means what he wants it to mean. The US has tested only a fraction of its population for Covid-19 with serological methodology. Therefore, it is not possible to assure the quoted statement is true.
What Martel is implying here is that Covid-19 is intrinsically less dangerous than people think. That’s incorrect. The virus, due to people having no acquired resistance, is intrinsically worse than seasonal influenza; it’s only a question of by how much. It doesn’t have to be the Black Death for it to be bad; it doesn’t even have to be the Spanish Influenza, either. If Covid-19’s effects have been mitigated at all, it is only because world governments have ignored flu truth and have, instead, instituted travel restrictions, quarantines, and social distancing. Remove that and allow the virus to spread uncontrolled (like the flu) and the mortality rate will be anywhere from 4 – 10 x times higher (or greater). The more honest way to look at the situation is to argue for or against that. Making claims that there’s a secret deep state conspiracy theory out there trying to trick you into staying in your home for some unknown reason or that all doctors just happened to mislabel seasonal influenza with Cov-19 is just dumb.
Let me put this another way. Say a manic comes to your neighborhood with a gun and starts shooting everyone in sight. The mayor tells everyone to stay inside, rightly thinking that will lower fatalities. There are initial projections of the death toll before home sequestration. They are high. Then, after everyone has stayed inside and the death toll has been counted, it’s much lower than the initial estimate. An internet personality then goes around claiming that guns themselves aren’t as lethal as advertised and that people panicked for no good reason — “the world went mad!” (what Ramzpaul is claiming in his latest outings … and doomsday nonsense about how the world will never be the same again because muh lockdowns). Therefore, the next time a crazed gunman comes to your neighborhood, just ignore him and probably very few people will get hurt because they didn’t last time due to guns being mostly harmless.
Does that make any sense to you? Better argument: cost of staying inside > cost of doing nothing.
In other articles, Mr. Martel claims people can prove their manliness by ignoring Covid-19.
Reality:
It’s sort of funny how these American white nationalists rushed to put themselves and “muh economy” ahead of their people’s lives as soon as TSHTF. Basically, the entire movement has just been discredited. FBI: 6,000,000. Alt-right: 100,000.
Nope, Biden is a disaster, and Sanders has quit. There are some negative poll numbers about Trump’s handling of the crisis but Biden is in no position to capitalise.
https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2020/04/08/622612/trump-poor-job-on-coronavirus-cnn-poll
“the models are wrong” – The models are adaptive. New data are incorporated and they are recalculated. Yesterday’s projection will be different form today’s projection. In the early exponential phase once you get the doubling rate a short term prediction is easy but once the countermeasure begin to work and R0 begins to diminish the moles are more difficult. The mortality rate is also hard to predict as it depends on age profile, how the most vulnerable are protected, medical system response in time of stress and being swamped and improving treatments as more experience is gained.
I kept checking IHME model
https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america
they kept revising its and modifying the interface. Now I can’t find predictions for individual states. Anyway, they predicted numbers of deaths are being lowered.
“Neoliberalism” is the most popular leftwing descriptor of “classical liberal” ideology, as it became fashionable again in recent times.
“Classical liberalism” is a very influential intellectual fashion that in recent decades influences a lot of important politicians, from Thatcher to Orban, so “neoliberalism” is not an empty way of describing something, if it refers to classical liberalism. However, it often seems to be a replacement of “bourgeois reactionary”.
“Classical liberalism” (the word used supporters of the movement)/”neoliberal” (the word used by opponents of the movement) – is a necessary terminology to introduce, because the common meaning of “liberal” was changed during the 20th century, and as we all use this word now, associated with a centrist politics. E.g. Liberal Democrat Party of the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Democrats_(UK)
Generally adding “neo” in front of something, seems especially the way to make it sound more cool or evil in the early 2000s – likely because of the Matrix films, or some fear of Latin.
Libertarian can’t handle complexity. They have only one tool that they use in all situations: more liberty and less government. So obviously people who are not cognitively endowed are attracted to libertarianism because it is so simple. You only have to suppress or lack natural human impulses. Marxism is more challenging so the Left has a better human resources than libertarians. Libertarianism attracts people who have a serious empathy deficit with fast decaying social relatedness function that leads to out-of-sight-out-of-mind mentality. They can see things in terms of atoms while they are not well equipped to deal with molecules or aggregates and the phase changes are beyond their comprehension. They operate at most on the level of the first law of thermodynamics. They think as if everything was reversible. The 2nd law and entropy is beyond their comprehension. Their vision of the world is that where entropy is vey high as any attempt of organizing the world is knee-jerk resisted by them. One could say it is a very cowardly approach as they rather live in the worst of the possible worlds than in a better one which would require cooperation to lower the entropy, higher energy inputs and greater risks of breaking down. On the psychoanalytic level they are like the babies who were traumatized when taken off from mana’s tit, so there is no more trust and faith left in them for fear of being rejected again. And most of them are hypocritical just like Henry David Thoreau who while extolling and preaching the self-reliance while living in the cabin on Walden pond had his mother doing laundry as she lived just few miles away. In the end they can be really mean spirited. When they want to kill a lot of people they always chose the mass shooting so they can take pleasure form every individual they are killing. Even suicide bombers are on a higher human development than them. Libertarian deserve both contempt and pity. Some of them are salvageable, some of them will burn out with age just like it is the case with psychopath who become more human when old. The reason we have a misfortune to having them is because libertarianism is a tool of oligarchy that helps to break down society and make it impotent. Every libertarian is a used idiot of oligarchy.
Latvia is usually described as one of the most neoliberal countries in Europe if not the world, as all the “Baltic tiger” states are described, to the extent articles and books use this terminology.
For example, Prime Ministers of Latvia and Estonia are winning Hayek awards.
https://www.valitsus.ee/en/news/estonian-and-latvian-prime-minister-awarded-hayek-prize-liberal-economic-policy
You can see in terms of connected ideology with Czech Republic as well – low government spending, boasting about their cutting tax policy, reducing size of government (they also match in ideologically connected things like support of gun owning and anti-collectivist rhetoric).
On the other hand, leftwing critics are writing that “neoliberalism” is the reason for the collapse of Maxima supermarket of Latvia.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25085827
So the divergence of terminology – “classical liberal” is what you call it, it you feel warmly to the ideology. This is the prestige term. While “neoliberal” is the word used by leftwing critics, in books and articles, as it sounds more neutral than “bourgeois reactionary” (no neoliberal had ever describe themselves as “neoliberal”).
One good thing about the corona is that one hears from friends and family that you haven’t heard from in months or years.
Czech Republic is usually polling as the most atheist country in the world, so this is something which might make them more unpopular with Americans.
On the other hand, externally there is popularity for an ideology and rhetoric which is quite similar to American Republican ideology.
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This is because externally there is popular rhetoric of “classical liberal” view i.e. the “neoliberal” ideology, as described by critics of the ideology.
Although Vaclav Klaus is originally just neoliberal in the articles.
https://www.cerge-ei.cz/pdf/wp/Wp68.pdf
But now he is becoming “hyper-neoliberal” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23745118.2020.1709368
Neoliberal is not scary enough sounding – you have to be “hyper-neoliberal” nowadays. The non-Mao equivalent of adding “imperialist” to “running dog of capitalism”.
Excellent comment but:
There are probably quite a few sixteen year old libertarians who grow out of it by the time they are, perhaps, eighteen.
What’s John Bolton doing among the neoconservatives when he’s not actually Jewish himself, though? Ditto for Jeane Kirkpatrick back when she was still alive.
I find it bizarre how British people see Boris Johnson as very right wing. He openly supports amnesty for illegal immigrants and regards his involvement in legalising gay marriage as one of his greatest achievements.
During this crisis he has also implmented the most socialist policies of any country in Europe, literally writing a blank cheque, those are the words he and his chancellor used. Nigel Farage is also seen as far-right, yet a few days ago he was openly calling for Universal Basic Income. Britain seems to be undergoing a left wing coup by people who masquerade as right wingers and nationalists.
Fivethirtyeight reports Donald Trump’s job approval / disapproval at 44.6% vs. 50% as of this morning. That represents only a modest gain. It’s still far below reelection threshold. Joe Biden is still the favorite. The demographics just aren’t there for the republicans anymore. Barring a debate meltdown or a freak occurrence, Biden (or a replacement democrat) will be the president of the United States this time next year.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
That’s not the same thing as his job approval rating. It’s a cherry picked figure to make him look more popular than he really is.
Libertarianism is surely one of the more crazy anime crossovers, as it tries to prove anarchism, using assumptions of classical liberalism.
It’s like some kind of “create a society Kropotkin could live in, without violating assumptions of John Locke, Adam Smith and David Hume”.
But probably it has a positive cultural influence in America, as it might help to introduce illiterate youth to read interesting concepts of English philosophy – Lockean proviso, invisible hand, theory of comparative advantage, “harm principle”.
This article is not so uninteresting, as it includes one of the reasonings for classically liberal influenced politicians, to support more selective immigration systems. (As Milton Friedman said in an otherwise eccentric speech, free immigration to welfare is not a good kind of free immigration.)
Author has quite an amusing aristocratic attitude to work, writing like its “valorization” will automatically be read as a bad thing.
Some quotes:
“Dawn/SPD radicalize the exclusionary construction of ‘work’ in opposition to ‘unadaptables’ and ‘scroungers’ who supposedly live off the work of others, thus combining a populism directed against established forces with a hyper-neoliberal welfare chauvinism that associates the category of ‘unadaptables’ with entire minorities such as the Roma and ‘immigrants’ and thus also dovetails with an anti-minorities illiberalism, all the way up to SPD’s demand for a ban on Islam in the Czech Republic in the name of ‘freedom’…”
“Here, the neo-liberalism that the VV broadly shared with the ODS was radicalized into a hyper-neoliberal welfare chauvinism directed against ‘scroungers’, which in turn (in contrast at least to the earlier ODS) linked up with an illiberalism directed against ‘minorities’ – with the signifier ‘unadaptable’ serving as a nodal point equivalentially linking both categories of undesirable citizens.”
–
“The party again combined a populist opposition between the ‘citizens’ and the ‘godfather party mafia’ with a hyper-neoliberal welfare chauvinism pitting ‘decent people’ against ‘people who have no interest in working’ (SPD, 2017) – with Okamura railing against ‘unadaptables’ and ‘parasites’, defined as ‘someone who is capable of work but does not work long term’, and calling for taking away their benefits in favour of ‘the decent and the working’ ”
ODS’s construction of a small state tied to neo-liberal fiscal policies. ANO’s later populism (after 2013) becomes less technocratic and more people-centric while emphasizing ‘hard work’ in its construction of the ‘people’, but once again in a populist manner against the ‘traditional parties’. It is in the discourses of VV and Dawn/SPD, by contrast, that exclusionary constructions of ‘work’ are radicalized both in hyper-neoliberal fashion against ‘unadaptables’ in the area of social policy and as an illiberal category encompassing ‘unadaptable minorities’, ‘unadaptable immigrants’, and eventually ‘Islam’.”
Libertarianism is simply incompatible with HBD, which is why some people like to refer to it as White Identity politics, which I think is certainly true to a certain degree.
True.
Smarter ones leave before it comes to that. And the dumb rather read Ayn Rand, the woman who literally was infatuated with a psychopathic murderer.
Conservatism isn’t necessarily libertarian free-market fetishism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Tory
It’s hard to follow your reasoning.
m4a is projected to cost $3.4 trillion over 10 years.
$3 trillion is a hefty chunk of a $21 trillion economy. If federal spending in the amount of 1/7 of the economy is devoted to healthcare, it will increase taxes, add to the deficit, and possibly pare back spending in non-healthcare areas of the budget. One of the largest items in the US federal budget is defense, which came in at 3.2% of GDP in 2018.
It is logical to ask if so much of federal spending is spent on healthcare, will defense spending as a percentage of GDP will fall? What are the implications for US military bases in Asia and Europe if the share of defense spending falls? Can you answer this question without going off about space war?
I suspect you’re right. The end result might well be the ruthless crushing of any kind of populism. And the ruthless crushing of any political dissent of any kind.
We have a situation in which, thanks to the hysteria, governments can get away with giving themselves almost any emergency powers. What’s the first thing they’re likely to do? Outlaw anyone who questions the established narrative on CV. It will be childishly simple to extend that to outlawing anyone who questions the government on any issue.
And so far the populists haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory. The dissident right is probably finished as a political force. Not that it was a significant political force to begin with.
Despite the large number of immigrants, well off travelers and international flights, California hasn’t been hit badly at all. Early school and job closings might have something to do with it. So is everyone staying inside except essential workers. Los Angeles is cutting bus routes all the time. But essential workers like nursing home workers, grocery store and pharmacy clerks often don’t have cars and take buses. The big chains can move people around closer to home.
I haven’t looked at the Ca statistics for a few days. Feel free.
Here’s a thought. Christmas gatherings and traveling. December is a month of parties at work, home, schools clubs organizations and other parties. Then the traveling. And everybody gets sick in January.
In the short term. His long-term prospects depend on the extent of the economic damage.
The current political leaderships in the West all face the same problem. Massive short-term increases in popularity, but when the medical crisis is over people will soon forget their fear and start wondering whatever happened to the economy. Boris had better have a plan for dealing with that.
Voters have the attention span of a six-week-old kitten.
I believe the minorities hardest hit is probably not true. The minorities and anti White Whites are always complaining, minorities are hardest hit with everything. If a measles epidemic hit Wyoming the media would find a few black kids with it and publicize them.
We’re always hearing about how sickly minorities are because of racism. It’s just another lie by the media. And if it’s true, who cares, not me.
My apologies if i wasn’t clear.
I think you meant $34 trillion over 10 years. True, it looks like a lot of money, but it is actually a bit less than what US will spend under current system.
No, taxes will not go up. People will make a lot of noise and certain tax rates may go up, but taxes (as in actual revenues to the government) will not go up (Hauser’s Law). US Fed Gov revenue is always 18% GDP (14-20% range, extremes are self leveling as high tax take booms lead to recession busts), doesn’t matter what the rates are.
Yes, M4A will add to the deficit just like everything else in that $24 trillion pile. This will force interest rates down. If banks make their stand at 0% Rubicon, Federal Reserve will monetize this just like they have monetized $5-6 trillion in securities currently. My preference would be to nationalize the Fed and Primary Dealer banks, and drive rates negative, but even if this is not adopted, Federal Reserve monetization will make any large scale government program viable.
US defense spending is projected to fall as a %GDP to 2.5% from about 3.2%. I doubt this will happen – GDP will decline this year making defense larger as a percentage, and defense contractors need business (Boeing bailouts etc). Also, US will likely start another war somewhere, if history is any guide.
US military bases will be upgraded and expanded – they are not going anywhere, even if defense spending is lower in %GDP terms.
” because once ‘Blue screen of death’ Bill has his vaccine ready, all bets are off” – If only Bill Gates vaccine could inoculate people against libertarianism I would be all for it.
• Only a populist movement could bring a major challenge to the neoliberal order and offer a viable alternative.
• No populist movements can take off unless it has a communitarian character which means that it must be leftist and nationalist.
• Only a new incarnation of fascism will do.
• The toxin of libertarianism is the greatest obstacle to any genuine populist movement.
• No more disputes with libertarians or communists.
• Libertarians and communists are not to be talked with; they are to be eliminated.
• All libertarians and communist must perish.
Libertarians are like 1 % of US voters and they don’t exist in Europe at all. If you think libertarians are an obstacle to anything then you’ve clearly spent all your time on online politics with no visits to the real world.
Perhaps, but government doesn’t need our taxes. It simply has the federal reserve print (really, Electronically create out of thin air) whatever number of currency units it needs.
Wait six months and see what state the economy is in then. Polling numbers at the moment are meaningless.
There will likelier be a shift in favor of instituting a universal basic income and universal medical insurance in the USA, not a call for downsizing domestic government.
I’d hope there will be an upsurge in support for cutting the number one thing that wastes the money otherwise available for UBI and universal medical insurance: war and empire.
This means the military budget, bloated by overpriced weapons systems, decade-long wars and occupations with little relation to our actual defense, an imperialist network of 700-plus bases far abroad, and the trillions in cumulative interest we have paid on the portion of the Fed Gov debt attributable to the past 60 years (especially the last thirty years) of such spending,
Republicans could lead the charge to take money wasted on war/empire AND money spent on non-citizens and spend it instead to directly help all US Citizens below the elite plutocrat level. I won’t hold my breath.
Thoroughly agree that communism and libertarianism are unworkable extremes that must be avoided.
An old hag like you should understand what is happening. Or perhaps once you did understand but since then you forgot on the account of your old age. The class system in the US always was strongly color coded. The true leftists were defeated and the ones that are left are not allowed to talk about economic disparity between classes so they found a crack in the system by replacing the class with race. The leftists have been driven to this position by old hags like you and all kind of garden variety republicans who prefer the leftists playin the racer card so the poor whites are antagonized and end up acting against their own economic interest and together with libertarian lackeys of oligarchy support old hags like you. Would you rather have a united class warfare of poor whites and non whites against the old hags like you? No, so stop bitching. You got yourself a sweet deal. It is exactly as you wanted it to be.
In other words, you are literally afraid of the flu. But you are telling us not to be afraid of SARS-CoV-2.
Maybe you just have no idea of the relative danger. I have spent all my life shaking hands with people, and most people I know did the same. No doubt sometimes the people shaking hands have an infectious disease, like the flu or the common cold. I don’t know of anyone who got infected by a disease which sent him to ICU. Perhaps Covid-19 really is more dangerous.
This is the political world in which we now live. The Economic Right and the Social Left are now joined at the hip. The Economic Right is very much in favour of open borders. And the Economic Right is very much in favour of the Social Justice agenda because they want to distract people’s attention away from economic issues.
The Economic Right-Social Left coalition is the ultimate combination of civilisation-destroying evils.
And most of those libertarian voters are only interested in legal dope.
The CV crisis will effectively eliminate libertarianism as a political philosophy. If CV really turns out to be a big deal libertarianism will be exposed as having no answers to the crisis. If CV turns out to be no big deal libertarianism will be exposed as having no answers to the resultant economic devastation. Either way it’s over for libertarianism.
“Libertarians are like 1 % of US voters and they don’t exist in Europe at all.” – It’s not about the number of voters but about the prevailing sentiment in America which is libertarian. You will find already it in Tocqueville.
Europe is fortunate by not having libertarianism yet, however it is making inroads among the young, particularly in the post Soviet countries just like another American gift to the world, the Pentecostal religion in Latin America that is as toxic as libertarianism. I have more hope for Europe than America.
Well thanks for the response that is on point but I am still having trouble following the reasoning on finances.
If annual government expenditure increases by $3 trillion+ to pay for m4a, how will it be possible to cover it without a large tax increase (government revenue as a percentage of GDP)?
We are speculating about the medium and long term so for this discussion let’s assume that m4a passes in the early 2020s. Defense spending as a percentage of GDP falls to 2.5% in 2025. Will this not affect the ability of the US military to project power globally?
If in 2025, defense spending falls as a percentage of GDP from 2018, do you think US military bases will probably expand?
You are no conception of reality, if you did then you would be aware that jews are the ones that have been at the vanguard of anti Christian, SJW globalism, etc. The enemy was always the jew.
They’re closing down the supermarkets for Easter here in Australia. Also, the cops in Victoria (most left-leaning state in the country) slugged a woman $1600 for taking her daughter out for a driving lesson. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-09/l-platers-learning-to-drive-under-coronavirus-restrictions/12131826
Personally, I think it’s bullshit, since it was just the two women in the car and they were members of the same family. From what I’ve heard, Victoria is the only state that’s banning driving lessons in the time of Corona.
Disgust with hand shaking is common among passionate Onanists where a hand is de facto an extended sexual organ. Then the germophobia might be just an exculpatory rationalization.
A church is not something you ‘attend’, it’s not a social club and serves a completely different purpose.
P.S. This is why in Orthodox Christianity the word ‘church’ refers only to the organization; the building with congregants is a ‘temple’.
Reflect on how ridiculous the phrase ‘temple attendance’ sounds, and you’ll hopefully see why ‘church attendance’ is as ridiculous.
It’s only left-wing people who see Johnson in this way and it’s how they see every Tory. It’s just their way of mobilising, although it is one of the things that contributes to the stupidity of British political discourse.
Correct. Voters do have a short attention span. This disease panic will burn out, eventually. There are some tentative indications it has already peaked in Europe though not the USA. The economic pain will last a lot longer.
Easy – just like US treasury funds current $trillion deficit. Treasury issues debt of various duration (bonds, bills, notes), and “investors” (major banks and financial institutions) buy it on the open market. Then they turn around and sell those bonds, bills, notes to Federal Reserve at markup for a nice profit. It is so easy, a trained dog could do it. There is a matter of finance charges (interest on debt is one of the largest Federal Government expenditures at the moment), but conveniently, by law Federal Reserve is required to remit all profits (such as Treasury interest) back to the Treasury. This is a problem that solves itself. For debt held outside Federal Reserve, 0% or negative interest rates are a solution.
Basically, you will see debt to GDP ratio going through the roof rather than tax increases.
Nope. Defense spending is always increasing (in raw numbers). What makes it shrink in %GDP term is idealistic assumptions about GDP growth – people thought US economy was going to do great. Well, we are entering Great Depression II, GDP is going to tank. So each dollar of defense spending will be greater in weight relative to GDP ($1 in defense from $100 GDP is 1%, if GDP tanks 50%, that same $1 will become 2% of GDP, but not because defense spending got more funds).
Will Great Depression II affect the ability of US military to project power globally? Unlikely, far more likely it will strengthen it. We are looking at up to 30% unemployment. This means weapons factories will be running full capacity just so people have jobs. Likewise military recruiters – the Army loves unemployment and poverty. Everybody knows US got out of Great Depression by taking part in World War II. Temptation will be strong to take a chance on World War III. Expect more wars.
If we are still stuck at 10-20% unemployment by 2025, and World War III is chosen as a means to boost GDP similar to WWII scenario, you bet US military bases will probably expand.
I don’t think it has anything to do with Orthodox vs Western Christianity, it’s simply a question of language. In Hungarian, the word for church (the institution) is “egyház” and the building is “templom” (so, temple). Hungary is not Orthodox. (Though theologically speaking, Catholicism is the closest to Orthodoxy and vice versa.)
Not a bad idea for Biden to stay out of the limelight right now, not only because he’s probably in no mental state to lead, but he also gets to avoid association with all this.
There is an incredibly loud vocal minority of lolberts on Serbian internet (they call it “Slobodarstvo”)
The sheer delusions and the haphazard construction of their ideology is marvel to observe
A good chunk of them is obsessed with this idea of a “sovereign Serbia” which would decide it’s policy independent of the US, EU and Russia
How?
By using the power of muh free market ofcourse
I think Trump still has a fighting chance. The psyops to shift blame on China has worked splendidly.
Agreed, but it’s only thanks to Democrats choosing a retarded vegetable as their candidate, I think Mikey could’ve beat him easily
Both Democrats and Republicans keep squandering opportunities for easy wins
If the election is decided by Russophobia vs Sinophobia as you pondered earlier then Sinophobia wins easily, going by propaganda Russia is a gas station with nukes while China is a rising superpower which just poisoned the world and crashed the economy
One win for Trump is he gets to pin the blame on the inevitable US economic bubble bursting on Corona instead of having it pinned on him by his enemies
How big will the fallout from another Trump victory be? Last time there was lots of salt mining, but will be see some actual violence this time (probably not, American “revolutionaries” are all talk no bite)
I would’ve tormented you at school.
A retarded vegetable is exactly what they want. They want a president that can do anything his handlers tell him to do, a corrupt and brainless oaf that will say empty Hollywood script platitudes and be a ceremonial role like the queen of England, this is their perfect president.
Agree. But there is also a counter psyop:
New York’s coronavirus outbreak originated mainly in travelers from Europe, new studies show
https://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-coronavirus-outbreak-mainly-came-from-travelers-from-europe-2020-4
What do you get if you cross a neo-liberal with a neo-conservative?
A chair in Victoria Nuland’s and Robert Kagans’ living room. (I do not think they have children? If so, such cross breeding project had failed like so many of their policies).
The models are adaptive and still wrong. You update the data so the model reflects reality (you have to because it was wrong) and it’s still not predictive, it’s wrong again.
Even lots of the people doing computer modelling don’t seem to understand what computer modelling can and can’t do.
If a computer model is not predictive (if it’s even capable of being wrong) then it’s essentially just a video game mechanic. You can revise the model to bring it’s immediate state back into line with reality but that doesn’t address why it diverged from reality in the first place.
You can’t model the rabbit population in Kentucky predicatively. Why should we think anyone can actually model the spread of a virus?
There will be umpteen computer models to choose from so we can retroactively choose the one the one that happens to get lucky and then pretend like that model is predictive.
Is the problem a human capital problem or an ideological problem among the American altright? Maybe the problem is not low IQ or stupidity in general but libertarianism? And once you get rid of the libertarians the ideological situation will better a whole lot better?
liberal and conservative cancel and you just get 2x neos
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c6/NeoTheMatrix.jpg/220px-NeoTheMatrix.jpg
Your nonsense is amplified by your attempt to sound knowledgeable and smart. Obviously models have a predictive ability. Even random farts have predictive power of the next year suns spots though admittedly they are burdened with huge errors. You can always determine errors +1 day at +2 day and +3 days and keep the record of it. As a model is updated with +1 day data its predictions for the following days will change but these prediction can be kept in memory as well and then compared: for example what the model said about April 7 prediction on April 1, April 2,…., April 6. From that you learn what is your model depth. If the model is good with greater learning ability the depth of subsequent adaption should be grated than that of former adaptations and if not then each adaptation will predict, say, + 10 days with a similar, say 15% error, meaning that regardless of data your models can never better that 15% for 10 day ahead prediction.
Bringing up the computer games, I guess, you wanted to point out that models do not need to be physical but could be heuristic, i.e., not all tricks in the model are strictly stemming from the well defined physical processes but from heuristic approximations just like in computer animation the calculation of shadows and light passing through water does not follow exactly the laws of scattering and refraction but their approximations and in the extreme case can have non physical parameters. In animation it is done to save computation time, yet, often the heuristic approximations are good enough to fool your eye.
If you model an epidemic in NYC you can make it as complex and physical as you want by including varying population densities and age profiles between NYC boroughs and communication patterns between the boroughs even if you do not have epidemic data for the individual boroughs. Once the various countermeasure are implemented you begin do tune your parameters concerning communication patters. But you can say fuck it and make it simple and primitive. You may not care what is going on in the black box and just assume some S-function with three or four parameters to describe the function by fitting it to data as they come and you do not need to care what the parameters describing the S-fubction really mean in the real world. This would be a heuristic approach which would have some predictive power thought it would be shaky after the inflection point but once you passed the inflection post it would be decent again. However if the epidemic had several waves you would be assed out with just one S-function.
A few weeks into the pandemic, it should be clear to even the most dedicated advocate of openness that there are some upsides to having a nation-state government with control of its currency and borders, and domestic capacity in key areas such as food production, medicine and precision engineering.
https://unherd.com/2020/04/coronavirus-could-kill-off-millennial-smugness/
I am pretty sure you could find similar “Slobodarstvo” in each post communist country in Eastern Europe. It would be interesting to zoom in on their leaders and find out connections they have with some American think tanks that trained them via scholarships, literature, organizational know-how and money. Probably it all stems form the same center: CIA=>Koch=>Cato=>Mises=>Rockwell=>(Mises, Rothbart, Ayn Rand). They target.young boys at gymnasium and high school level. And they are probably loved by the post-communists who are busy becoming fervent capitalists on the stolen property preaching the property rights and by all foreign agents of influence preaching that the capital has no nationality and all those who do not like the genuine nationalist movements. They are much more damaging and toxic than any sovok deadeners could ever be.
OK.
All of which is to say you can’t actually predict the spread of the virus with a computer model.
Not obviously. If it is burdened with huge errors I would not call it predictive. It’s a semantic dispute over what “predictive” means. The way you are using it you can say that of course reading goat entrails has predictive power. It’s burdened with huge errors and isn’t remotely accurate at predicting the future but it does make predictions.
You can continuously adjust the model so it basically acts as a record of what you already knew.
Then you can assume past performance determines future results, which is strictly false. Not improbable but not certain.
And half of the things you would have to know to have accurate models, are not known and will be argued about for a decade.
And you could do the same thing with goat entrails anyway. You read the goat entrails and of course your predictions are wrong, but if you keep making predictions, compile all the data and backwards reinterpret, you can maybe come up with a heuristic way of reading goat entrails.
It’s not to say heuristic models are useless, they are useful. By putting all the actual data (after it is known) into the models to update them, and making all the numbers work and reflect reality, you can determine heuristics.
But that’s not predictive. You can’t predict what the data will be ahead of time. You can only backwards model after all the data is known.
And when is the inflection point anyway? Is anyone touting models that are making predictions in the 2-3 day window? I’d buy that as at least theoretically do-able, if we had accurate data about things like virility and method of transmission, but we don’t and experts will argue for years. But these models are all trying to predict 1+ years out for the length of the pandemic (whatever that will end up being).
That is why, as it is, you already have umpteen competing models predicting different outcomes. If one of them ends up accurate it will not be because it was predictive but lucky. But all of them can be backwards updated to reflect the real data after the real data is already known, and that can be useful for finding things that influence the transmission of the virus and account for differences between boroughs. After the data is known and the models have been retroactively corrected. It can’t predict the data in advance (except by the luck of the entrail readers).
How much is the better Northeast Asian response related to this?
https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3079176/battle-against-coronavirus-east-asian-societies-and-cultures-have
The models are wrong.
So, the models account for what we’ve been doing, namely lockdowns / social distancing and so forth. The falling projections don’t necessarily indicate Covid-19 isn’t or wasn’t dangerous, just as I explained.
Falling pneumonia deaths means there’s a conspiracy to reclassify cases as Covid-19.
Actually, no:
The same logic likely applies to influenza reporting, etc. It does not indicate a conspiracy theory.
I never even think about infectious disease and I can’t remember the last time I had the flu. If I have to shake hands, the feeling of someone else’s sweat on my hands is so unnerving that there’s zero chance that I’m going to use that hand to touch anything important until I’ve had a chance to wash it. All the corona hygiene advice is pointless for me since I’m already stricter than the recommendations.
I was actually trying to stomach relaxing my hygiene standards at the beginning of this corona thing, hoping that I would catch it early to develop immunity, but I haven’t had any symptoms.
I do, I’ve known lots of late middle age men who ignore health problems and keep working until something like the flu finally breaks the camels back. (My dad ignored health problems for years and refused to go to the doctor until flu finally pushed him to have a heart attack. We thought he would finally get better when the doctors would diagnose his problems but it was too late, he survived the flu but died a few months later anyway.) Boris Johnson fits the stereotype perfectly with his young girlfriends, partying like he is a young man and trying to work as Prime Minister while sick.
I have long lived families on all sides and a lot of my relatives have lived to well over 90, some up to 100. At that point it’s a recurring episode of “X has the flu, X has been hospitalized, everyone come see X in case this is the one that kills X” and then the various investigations over who failed to wash their hands and killed X with the flu.
It is killing the same way that flu does which means that most people have no reason to worry about themselves, just their old and sick relatives.
Are the Germany deliberately undercounting coronavirus deaths? How many deaths have there been for pneumonia or respiratory problems lately above the normal levels?
There are so many problems with the alt-right/dissident right that it’s hard to know where to start. Libertarianism is probably the least of the problems.
The human capital problem would seem to be the biggest problem. And the number of people who clearly have mental health issues. Way too many crazies. Way too many conspiracy theories. Then there are the Hitler fanboys. And the ones who think it’s still the 1950s and are still worried about commies under the bed. The obsessive Jew-haters. Too much hatred and not enough rationality. The out-and-out rabid racists.
It’s a movement that acts as a magnet for losers and the mentally ill.
The pozzed are not exactly supermen.
Computer models predict whatever you want them to predict. You keep fiddling with the model until it gives you the answer you want. They’re like astrology (although astrology is bit more rigorous).
Computer models are a tool of propaganda, not science.
The way these things work these days is that you decide what the correct answer is, based on ideology and/or emotion, and then you torture the data until it agrees with you.
Of course not. In many ways they’re as bad as the alt-right. But they do attract better human capital so their propaganda is much more effective. And they’re much better organised and much more disciplined.
The struggle between the SJWs and the alt-right is like seeing a disciplined army come up against an untrained leaderless rabble.
“Computer models are a tool of propaganda, not science. “ – Yes and no. Broad invalid generalization.
” torture the data until it agrees with you” – Again invalid generalization. What you describe only may apply to fitting to the existing data that may or may not turn out to be a good predictor of the new incoming data not used in the fit. But even when you do fitting there are tests and procedures that if followed won’t permit overfitting. The general rule of thumb is to do it with a minimal number of parameters where the minimum depends on data noise and number of data points.
As I see it, AK has lost some edge due to overanalysis. In my view, globalism inc. is losing, thanks to C-chan.
all nationally/”racially” conscious peoples, from Czechia via Russia, China to Japan, Korea are, mostly, winning (even when they falsify the stats)
EU as some kind of super-state is evidently dead
borders have been resurrected
affluent Western countries are in turmoil, and I don’t see that no borders-gay-import aliens policy is winning. It is evidently losing (although founding peoples are not yet conscious enough)
Afro- Muslim “invasion” simply- ceased; Erdogan is on his knees; global South, although not directly hit-yet- is shown to be utterly irrelevant & incompetent
NGOs, Soros… might be dead as well
only nation-states have some future, more or less
A lot of people think this crisis will benefit the anti-immigration movement, but I’m not sure about that. I suspect that if travel restrictions are implemented, it won’t be against immigrants it will be against “non-essential” travellers, ie tourists.
There’s already been tension and conflict breaking out in many countries over people from the cities travelling to their holiday homes in more rural areas, this has caused a lot of arguments and problems in Britain and I’m sure it’s the same in other countries. Frankly I doubt this crisis will make much difference to immigration, it’s tourism and the freedom to travel that is likely to be affected if anything.
“If it is burdened with huge errors I would not call it predictive.” – What you would call it is irrelevant. Predictor is a predictor. Bad predictor produce large errors and good predictor small errors. It is all about quantifying the errors and how small they need to be for a predictor to be useful in particular application.
“You can continuously adjust the model so it basically acts as a record of what you already knew.” – And how do you think astronomy was developed that lead to excellent prediction by Ptolemaic model and then Copernican model?
“Then you can assume past performance determines future results, which is strictly false. Not improbable but not certain.” – It works in science. It works for insurance companies. Drivers with history of accidents pay higher premium. That the insurance abuse it is another issue. BTW: strictly false and improbable are not synonyms.
“And half of the things you would have to know to have accurate models, are not known and will be argued about for a decade.” – As long as the model produces useful prediction why it works is purely academic. It becomes an issue when the model blows up. When your car works you do not question why it works but once it breaks down because of bad oil the car maker may try to figure how to make the car more tolerant of bad oil.
“compile all the data and backwards reinterpret, you can maybe come up with a heuristic way of reading goat entrails.” – This is legitimate approach when developing a heuristic model. Sometime it works and sometime sit does not. Herschel observed sunspots and developed a model that supposedly helped him to make bets on wheat futures based on number of sunspots.
“But that’s not predictive. You can’t predict what the data will be ahead of time.” – No, past data may contain information how the future data will be. You observe and stalk somebody to learn their patterns so you can plan the place and time of their assassination. In developing this model you do not need to have a theory of what is going the mind of the target.
In the penultimate paragraph you are all over the place. Mostly shouting.
“That is why, as it is, you already have umpteen competing models predicting different outcomes. If one of them ends up accurate it will not be because it was predictive but lucky. ” – Even it it was just luck I take it. I’d rather be with lucky than with a loser. But when there are different models to they are not generated randomly. Three models (theories) were proposed to explain Kaufmann–Bucherer–Neumann experiment. All were legitimately based on sound physics. But only one turned out to be also confirmed by the Relativity Theory though it took another 20 year to prove experimentally that the one agreeing with Einstein also produced the best agreement with data. Was it luck that Lorentz before Einstein came up with this theory?
You seem to be some kind of nihilist or contrarian. If you arguing in a bad faith consider working on your character and if you argue because you are ignorant consider applying yourself to studying.
Trump seems to have acquired some self discipline. He is sticking to scripts written for him. He is taking this seriously.
This reminds me of the old joke about a headline saying “Meteor Hits Earth. Minorities Hardest Hit!”
Libertarianism has an amazing power to attracts all kinds of kooks. And it is very likely that it turns relatively normal people in to kooks. Just testing for libertarianism will be an excellent litmus test that would suffice to weed out most of all undesirables.
“are you now, or have you ever been, a Libertarian?”
Anti-establishment views are not incentivized. Some guy uploading on Bitchute, who has been doxed and fired from his workplace, and who, as a consequence, relies on bitcoin donations, probably won’t be able to match the budget of the latest Hollywood blockbuster.
Would you agree that a bad predictor is worse than no predictor at all?
Anti-establishment views were not incentivised in Tsarist Russia either but the anti-establishment camp still produced effective propaganda and they won. Lots of anti-establishment political movements have won despite their views not being incentivised.
There are competent anti-establishment political movements and there are incompetent ones. There are anti-establishment political groups that have a clear idea of what they’re trying to achieve (and how to sell their ideas) and there are others that don’t have a clue.
The anti-establishment political movements at the moment are both incompetent and clueless.
Air traffic will decline a lot, and what remains will be pricier and more complicated, this fact alone reduces immigration. Borders getting closed even in Africa will reduce the flow of immigrants further still. Mass unemployment and an economic depression are bound to reduce immigration further still. That said, I don’t think it’s going to reduce immigration to zero, and I don’t think it’s going to be the long term solution. But its secondary effects are unpredictable, so even something stopping immigration long term might come out of it.
Has anyone noticed that New Zealand has done unusually well, a lot better than expected for a neoliberal nation? Far better than even Singapore, Korea, or Japan. Their number of new cases has already declined for 5 days, and they have only 1 death so far, so they already got things under control, they also locked down very very early, compared to say, the UK or US, or Spain. Maybe having a young female mother with a toddler as head of government helps in this case? And unusually among neoliberal governments, they also enacted a foreign home ownership ban when they were elected, against the strong opposition of the real estate industry.
How I Marion Marechal doing, I can’t read French so I can not follow. She seems to be politically competent right winger in France.
True, I think this crisis will make the cost of air travel significantly more expensive which by default will increase the financial barrier for many would-be immigrants regardless of any law changes.
In terms of things like the Syrian migrant crisis though I don’t think it makes much difference, in fact the EU have already said that the illegal immigrants coming into the EU from Turkey are exempt from the lock down. Germany banned even fellow EU citizens from entering Germany, but said that the rules don’t apply to “asylum seekers” and that they can enter Germany and apply for asylum as normal.
This Corona crisis seems to be making Britain more parochial and insular. People in more rural parts of the country are becoming increasingly hostile to second-home owners from the cities, especially London, going to their area during the lock down. There are reports almost daily of people being shouted at or their cars being vandalised.
I doubt this translates into increased opposition to mass immigration though. Most of the rural villagers with this parochial mentality are leftists, especially in places like North Wales and Cornwall. These people see opposing English people, especially Londoners, coming into their villages as a form of class warfare and also because many of them are simply anti-English. This really is nothing more than a form of internal conflict, most of these people would be less hostile to third world immigrants than they are towards people from the South East/London.
Fits with Bill Sardi’s hypothesis of corona rise is related to tuberculosis rise.
I think the left is winning at the moment. Many right wing “anti-socialists” are now openly calling for socialism and demanding things like Universal Basic Income and nationalisation of businesses. This crisis has demonstrated how quickly notions of libertarianism and free market capitalism fall apart at the slightest hint of panic and uncertainty.
Most self-proclaimed right wing capitalist types are hypocrites, they only want minimal government interference and taxes when they are personally doing well, the minute things go bad they are shouting and demanding someone else pays, “to save muh economy!!!!!!”.
Their nationalist party governs in coalition with the centre-left. It is not racist, not engaged in idiot conspiracy theories about Jews, socially moderate, economically moderate and makes gradual reasonable requests.
There is a simple formula and unsurprisingly doesn’t involve chiliastic kookery. It is the same as that used in the Visegrad countries, by Brexiteer Conservatives, New Democracy in Greece and Salvini in Italy. Marine (Le Pen) is constantly trying to use it in France but her surname stopped her from being elected.
Trump may also be following this path slowly, which is key. Slowly close foreign wars, slowly close the faucets of immigration and slowly look to implement policies that stop the government from undermining society.
But then mentally unstable internet posters scream about why hasn’t he done everything instantly that their fevered imagination wants.
They were doing the same in Hungary, but now women pay zero income tax after having a certain number of children….an obviously extremely forward thinking policy that would never have passed at the beginning of his time in power.
I don’t think that businesses asking for what is essentially compensation when the government puts their customers in home detention and forces them to close is what you think it is.
Or maybe you are just a moron?
autistic indeed.spectrum off the scale.
https://www.cnet.com/news/three-space-rocks-spotted-burning-up-over-three-hours-on-the-same-night/
mcohen says:
March 26, 2020 at 9:15 am GMT
the 3 rocks are flying through space and will flash light on the earths inhabitants.a bright light unlike anything seen before and then we shall all ask.
who are we that walk as kings and devour all the gifts of life.
• Replies: @Daniel Chieh
That might be bad for classical liberal policies, but it is going well for ‘right-wing’ parties themselves at the moment
He hasn’t done a single one of those things and he’s meant that they will be ratcheted up even more when he loses power in 1/4 years
Well my theory is that being a young mum with a toddler may make her have more skin in the game so to speak, compared to the likes of Trump, Bolsonaro, or Macron, and so she is a bit more on the dot.
The Bolsheviks won through extreme, terroristic violence. That is one of the hallmarks of communism. It never comes about peacefully through propaganda. Heck, you can go one further. In places where literacy is high, it never has taken hold except by external invasion. In other words, their propaganda has never worked, where people can read.
If this corona thing is just the flu, why would you go out of your way to gain immunity to it? Put another way, why don’t you just not be a germaphobe and develop immunity to as many different communicable diseases as possible? I ask this because I, myself, am not a germaphobe, but am going way out of my way to avoid catching corona. However, I am operating on the premise that this isn’t just the flu.
My pet theory is that right wing nationalists from English speaking nations tend to be too individualistic, or maybe right wingers in Anglo countries are just psychologically more individualistic compared to left leaning people?
New Zealand didn’t have a choice, the moment Australia locked down they had to follow. Because of the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Tasman_Travel_Arrangement. Australia and New Zealand essentially act as a Block when it comes to such important issues.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D2Byr4zU0AEhOR5.jpg
I have to laugh when naive Anglo evangelicals/Protestants refer to Catholic and Orthodox East Euro nations as “strong Christian nations” as if the churches in those countries would recognise evangelicals/Protestants as their fellow Christian brothers. Many Catholic and Orthodox countries have a track record of persecuting minority Christian groups (particularly Protestants) to rival many Muslim countries.
In my experience Orthodox and particularly Catholics see their churches as the only true Christianity, and would not regard evangelicals/Protestants as even being Christians, they might as well be Muslims as far as they’re concerned. Catholics and Orthodox generally begrudgingly recognise each other because they share many of the same traits like Mary worship and believing Jesus is still dying on the cross forever, but both see evangelicals/Protestants as frankly an entirely different religion altogether so it’s amusing that it’s mostly evangelicals/Protestants who cheer on “strong Christian” Eastern Europe because they would frankly be lucky if a Catholic or Orthodox church even allowed them to attend a service.
What I can see in one of the most civilized cities of North-Western Europe, people are not obeying advice to lockdown, and viewing like this is a relaxing vacation. Vast majority of the population are not wearing masks outside, children run around in groups, neighbours talking in the street, and everyone is too close in narrow corridors of supermarkets. Perhaps too much civilization and success in these countries, has resulted in a sense of invulnerability – or perhaps it is something genetic, or perhaps too much habituation in the ideal of an aristocratic contempt for panic.
On the other hand, in failed third world countries, populations are panicking a bit more healthily. For example, in Ukraine everyone was wearing a mask since two weeks ago. And Ukrainians now report their neighbours to the authorities if they break lockdown rules, or post on social networks videos of neighbours who violate them.
Canada is a real interesting case. I honestly have no idea about the future here but it can’t be anything good.
We’re a mix of people from all over the world, and they all hate whites, but they also hate each other. Whites continue to pretend that race doesn’t exist and that if they’re “nice” to the non-whites it will be reciprocated.
They’re also encouraged to be more proud of their ethnic identity than their new Canadian identity. Weird as hell. I just want one white country (other than Eastern Europe) to have the balls to maintain its white majority and I’ll move there instantly.
We’re at different stages of being cucked.
Italians still have some group identity and nationalism left in them. So they need a softer message that will sink in more. Anglos have been cucked for decades and they can use harsher propaganda against us. It’s all about slowly boiling the frog.
Not to a discussion it is not. To interpret other people’s words you have to know what they meant by them, and what you think is the correct definition is irrelevant to how they use the words. This is called semantics. Thinking other people’s definitions of words are irrelevant in a discussion with other people is highly aspergerish. You probably think everyone is contrarian if you approach discussion this way. I am not even sure yet whether we disagree with each other.
I never claimed it wasn’t useful. I specifically said it was useful. It’s just not a crystal ball. It’s useful for understanding the present and the past, and understanding mechanics. But not for predicting the future, at least not all the time. Sometimes is is and sometimes it isn’t. There is a method for determining which is which, which I will tell you.
Duh. I said it was strictly false and not improbable, so obviously I am not using them as synonyms.
Actually I was typing.
Maybe. You seem like you have Aspergers, in that you deny the existence of semantics and also because you are consistently belligerent and insulting to everyone to who disagrees with you. Stupid people also do this. But honestly you do not seem so stupid that you should be insecure, you seem actually intelligent. So probably you lack any people skills and have difficulty interpreting others. But that’s irrelevant to whether or not computer models can predict the future. We all have our flaws.
Back to the issue:
Except you won’t know until afterward, which isn’t pre dictive, it’s retro dictive. But on the subject of most of physics this isn’t a problem. If you come up with a model that is retroactively descriptive, it will also be future predictive. This is because the laws of physics are static.
The spread of a virus (and anything system that contains any biological component) is dynamic. It means the mechanics of the system change over time. This is (part of) why modelling yesterdays data cannot predict tomorrow with regard to a dynamic system. (The other big issue is sensitivity to initial conditions and exponential divergence over time).
You’re fine with being lucky, so you’re fine with betting on the predictions of a lucky goat entrail reader. Right is right no matter how. But there are many goat entrail readers, and you will not know which one is lucky until the whole issue can be viewed in retrospect. How will you put your money down before the game is over?
Being lucky can make you right, but it does not tell you what will happen in the future until the future is over and in the past. I too have this method of predicting who will win the 2024 election, simply wait until 2025 to make your prediction. Lots of people will predict lots of things. How will you know who will be lucky in advance of knowing what happened anyway?
Being lucky is not a predictive mechanism. It’s just random chance. Who will win in 2020? You’ve got a 50/50 shot. If we have 2 people with different opinions, one of them is virtually guaranteed to be lucky. But just because that one ended up right does not mean that person has a deterministic model for US politics or that they can see into the future before it happens. Maybe they even have a model for US politics, but just because they got lucky on a 50/50 chance does not mean any of the mechanics of their model are accurate.
To rule out luck, they would have to consistently (accurately) predict the future before it happened at a rate significantly greater than random chance would allow them.
That’s certainly possible for many things. But it is impossible for a computer model of US politics. It cannot be done.
The reason why is because US politics is complex and dynamic. The spread of a virus (AKA the reproductive rate of a biological organism) is a textbook example of Chaos. It cannot be modeled predictively. If you do not understand why I can give you a topic to study yourself: The works of Edward Lorenz.
There are some things computer models can do (and do well) and other things they fundamentally cannot do at all. Modelling the spread of this virus in advance of observing it falls into the latter category. Even many people who make computer models for a living do not seem to understand the difference. Of course it can be modeled, and that model can be useful, in retrospect. But it cannot predict what will happen before it happens at any greater rate than random chance or astrology.
You should look at the terriers of the Down Survey some time, or read about the transplantation to Connacht. Or look into mass rocks or priest holes, or what happened to the priests when they were caught. Or how many churches were burnt down in 1798.
Libertarianism seems American especially and almost uniquely, and it is also inevitable that people will try to make this in America.
The reason is because, classical liberal political philosophy has been the basis of the Founding Fathers. So any movement to utopian anarchism, which does not violate the political project which was raison d’être for American independence – will have to be built with the materials of classical liberalism.
Colouration of this utopian anarchism, also relates to pioneer spirit of America’s frontier. It’s also compatible with the literary heritage of 19th century Transcendentalism – in which, America’s first serious literary movement includes books like Walden, about going to live in a forest, independently from society and its external authorities.
–
Ayn Rand – is something quite different. It seems to be more like wildly romantic “socialistic realist” murals, to support 1940-1950s New York capitalism. Although I have not read her books, just reviews of those books.
Her books seem to be about a naive but beautiful young businesswomen, skyscrapers (which are like Mount Olympus of 20th century New York, hundreds of metres above the poor mortals below), and good looking wildly independent industrialists – and a romance between those independent industrialists, in those skyscrapers, with those naive young businesswomen.
I assume they have a positive value, for illustrating some ideals of social darwinism, independence from society, and the importance of businessmen in creating value through innovation – as well as having the cool aesthetics of New York of that time.
Her books are very promoted and selling well in Russian, where from reviews they look like they are more popular with women – probably just because this mix of wealth, power and romance.
Didn’t cause any explosions 🙁
That certainly happens. But not all of computer modelling is propaganda. The way it gets used in the media and in the public consciousness, it’s a mixture of propaganda and astrology.
Propaganda because sometimes people contort the models for rhetorical purposes, astrology because a lot of people just don’t understand how modelling works and seem to view it as a form of soothsaying by haruspices in white lab coats.
Certainly a lot of modelling can be legit though.
The best way to sort wheat from chaff is you have to pay attention to their track records prior to their revisions, and you have to separate when they’re modelling static things from trying to model dynamic things, and you have to pay attention to the assumptions they are coding into the model with their data and how valid they are.
A computer model that predicts where artillery shells will land before they are shot can be very accurate.
Any computer model that makes it way into public debate over policy concerns is probably either propaganda or astrology.
She was habituated to some Soviet propaganda about America – that America is an experiment in social darwinism and there is a robber baron on every street*- but she probably thought, like a lot of people to such propaganda – “that sounds like a perfect countryy”.
Then when she immigrated to America, and after a several years living there (as is inevitably for every immigrant) she lost the rosy glasses, and became disappointed actually existing America doesn’t correspond to the image of social darwinism, laissez-faire capitalism, and wealthy men that she could marry.
I bit off-topic*, but the new OPEC+ deal looks like unmitigated disaster for Russia. Putin voluntarily castrated Russian oil industry. Russia is set to permanently lose significant chunk of its oil production as a result.
*Corona is all the rage these days, but in the end the disease just means a bunch of dead old people. Putin’s bizarre response to this crisis places the future of his regime (and Russia) in question.
Of white countries, in Europe mainly only the few ones with “neoliberal” governments seem to be working competently – Estonia, Latvia, Czech Republic, Hungary.
On the other hand, almost all yellow countries are seeming to contain the epidemic to a higher extent, and with less lockdowns. Asian populations are responding more obediently, and governments acted a little earlier.
Japan has the strange one though. There was pause of a month in the development of the epidemic in Japan. This month of delay has allowed some manufacturers like Sharp to change to production of personal protective equipment.
Oversupply to fallen demand, resulting in making oil storage full, will have caused oil production to have to close down, anyway – although it will shut down the production via the price mechanism, when prices fall below marginal cost of production for various countries.
This will still happen with this deal, but perhaps in a slightly more equal way with Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has a far lower breakeven price for oil sales than Russia (this is the cost including developing) – they have the lowest breakeven price in that sense in the world. Moreover, – and I guess relevantly – Saudi Arabia’s marginal cost of production is also the lowest in the world.
So Saudi Arabia will continue to shipping oil as much oil as they can, even if prices are around $5. In terms of market share, without the deal, they would probably increase relative market share while losing absolute sales, as other countries will start surely shutting production when price of oil falls below the marginal cost of production.
I can understand that. I cannot understand why the Kremlins decided to step forward and castrate themselves. Now, high-cost producers including US will have less reason to cut.
I agree. I also think that Saudi Arabia cannot produce at $5 per barrel, because it will eventually collapse, and it cannot produce anything in a civil war. Then prices will skyrocket. I also think it’s better (for Russia) to keep America in economic turmoil for longer.
Saudi Arabia has forex reserves to last a couple of years at $30 oil, at which point they’ll have to abandon their dollar peg, leading to hyperinflation and impoverishment of their population. Saudi Arabia cannot live with low oil prices at all.
This agreement will greatly reduce Saudi income, and there is no guarantee it can spark a lasting oil price rally, given that global demand plunged by up to 30m bpd by some estimates. Saudi Arabia is arguably the biggest loser from this deal.
This just shows superiority of Western political system on this issue. It’s a bad idea when your Tsar/”national leader” has the authority to decide the country’s oil output, because “national leaders” are rarely economic experts.
In a simple case of a coin toss a predictor can be better than a random guess or worse than a random guess. The worse than a random guess predictor when negated becomes better than a random guess predictor. Just do the opposite what it predicts.
What they really mean is “white” or “European”. They are happy to see a white people stand up for themselves. However, given how cucked American Evangelicals are on race, and the USA in general, they can’t say that straight up.
Just like white Americans, especially Evangelicals, use Israel as their proxy for the white ethnostate they want in their repressed desires. They can’t have it so they substitute Israel as white, and the Arabs as the non-whites.
White Evangelicals almost all want the country to return to a white, Protestant country the way it was in its founding. Sadly almost none have the balls to vocalize this, and most probably don’t even realize they desire this.
Why would fall in oil price because of coronavirus, be a cause of civil war in Saudi Arabia? Saudi Arabia will be the last country in the world, that can produce oil at profit, as they have the lowest breakeven price and marginal cost of production. So they have an easier situation than much of the world.
As for internal instability. They are a Middle Eastern country, and most Middle Eastern nationalities are stereotyped as being political unstable.
But structurally Saudi Arabia looks like one of more stable Middle East countries. 90% the same religious group, with most of the population intermarried to each other through tribes, and related to a single ruling family with tens of thousands of members. Unlike Syria, it is not a minorityreligion, which is ruling a majority population of the different religion. And unlike Syria/Yemen, it is not a poor country with African-level of youth in its population pyramid.
Saudi Arabia is a relatively wealthy population, with quite a high median age for the region (over 30 years), one of the highest obesity rates in the world (80% of the population overweight).
Riyadh can be 40°C all summer. So even despite national stereotype of Arabs as people who are easily angry, I doubt such fat, middle aged, well fed, wealthy, religiously homogenous population, will leave their airconditioning to go into hot streets, to fight civil wars, because of a low price of oil.
Saudi Arabia will lose a large proportion of their income, but they will still generate income in this price environment, while many oil producers will lose their income completely and shut down production, if/when oil prices fall below marginal cost of production.
To a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia is also losing tens of billions of dollars, by closing down Mecca and its tourist industry – but at least its not their main industry (I wonder more how Greece will be fed).
This deal is like a free gift to America. But if coronavirus epidemic continues at this level to destroy oil demand, then it is quite a worthless gift to America. America has one of the higher marginal costs of oil production, so they will have to still shut a lot of their oil production via the price mechanism, if/when oil storage starts to become full, and if price would become low enough that marginal cost to produce and transport the oil is higher than the price.
Yemen has a pretty impressive age pyramid. It has a lot of oil and gas too – some say more oil reserves than the entire Persian Gulf region – which makes for an interesting combination.
Some believe that Saudi Arabia is intentionally de-stabilizing them so that it can prevent them from exporting, as well as to steal some of their oil.
limpdick BoomerCons BTFO
GOP going Full Socialist bb!!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2020/04/10/daily-202-gop-senator-s-coronavirus-plan-get-federal-government-to-cover-80-percent-of-wages/5e8ff9a4602ff10d49ae218f/?utm_campaign=wp_the_daily_202&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_daily202
Given the fact that the US Shale oil is mostly consumed domestically we could see tariffs on oil imports.
Trump has already indicated the possibility and the campaign finance contributions by the oil sector in an election year will help drive ‘bipartisan consensus ‘.
Statistics I’ve seen indicate that USA used to export millions of bpd worth of refined petroleum products before the crisis. This business will definitely be gone if USA decides to impose tariffs.
Tariffs produce winners and losers in the economy, and overall I expect that USA will only hurt itself if they decide to impose tariffs.
Not necessarily. The air fares of immigrants and refugees will be paid by the taxpayer.
The globalists are not going to give up on mass immigration that easily.
It’s also possible (in fact likely) that the COVID-19 hysteria will lead to a further fall in birth rates throughout the West. So the globalists will be arguing that immigration is more necessary than ever.
That’s the temporary bump in popularity that incumbent governments, and the Right, always get in a time of crisis. People get scared and run to grab Nanny’s hand.
When the crisis subsides but the economy is in ruins, most small businesses have disappeared for good and unemployment remains extremely high that temporary bump in popularity will dissipate. Six months from now incumbent governments could well be very very unpopular, and I suspect that the Right will be seen as offering no answers other than giving handouts to billionaires and mega-corporations.
You don’t win through those methods unless you have a certain amount of mass support. The parties of the Left in Tsarist Russia (and until 1917 the Bolsheviks were just one of several leftist parties) had enough mass support to win.
The Communists in China had a great deal of mass support.
And Communists in the early to mid 20th century were very very good at gaining the support of those who could read. They tended to have a lot of support among intellectuals.
It’s certainly possible to pay off the large relief spending that has been enacted so far, and that will be enacted during the remainder of this year, without more taxes.
But the establishment of either party won’t go for the solutions.
One solution is to have our God-given natural resources under the ground be publicly owned, rather than let a tiny number off people continue to arrogate those resources to their own private “ownership.”
A massive amount of revenue can be generated from the sale of oil, natural gas, minerals, metals, and water extracted from the earth under the USA (and in our territorial waters). Currently, most of those revenues flowing to a very small percentage of people: the owners, executives, and large shareholders of energy corporations.
Instead, the natural-resource revenues could payoff the 2020 relief spending (and the 2020-21 “stimulus” spending that these folks may institute to bring the economy out of the depression induced by their lockdown).
After those are paid off, the natural-resources revenues can fund a Universal Basic Income. It should be paid to all US Citizens age 21 and over who are not currently serving a felony prison term.
In addition, some much larger chunk of the earnings of billionaires could be confiscated to pay for the 2020-21 relief and stimulus spending, past and forthcoming.
Other options for paying off part of the 2020-21 relief and stimulus spending, and then to fund part of a UBI:
Almost identical crooks and warmongers who pretend they’re really, really different from each other.
White and mostly-white, nominally christian peoples Continue to have few children, consistently much below replacement rate, throughout the UK, Europe, and Russia.
Africans and Muslims of various racial backgrounds already in Europe continue to have children above the replacement rate. There is no serious movement to deport, sterilize, or otherwise reduce the numbers of said Africans and muslims in Europe.
So the Afro/Muslim takeover of the UK and Europe proceed apace, Barton, even though we both wish it weren’t so.
There could be something to that. In the Anglosphere the political Right is associated with selfishness, greed, short-sightedness and yes, excessive individualism. The Anglosphere political Right has for years been anti-tradition, anti-community, anti-society. So the supposed right-wing nationalists are not true nationalists. They don’t give a damn about society. They don’t have a sense of social responsibility. To be honest, most of them are motivated purely by hatred of dirty foreigners rather than by a deep love of their own national traditions.
Maybe in European countries there’s more of a history of right-wing politics that is supportive of national traditions, and of traditional communitarian social values. More of a pro-social right-wing political history.
Also the Anglosphere right wing nationalists seem to have little sense of history.
Someone had to say it.
Scapegoating China is a fantasy. Everyone knows who the communists are and everyone knows who the finance oligarchs are. Hint: they’re from the same tribe.
E. Michael Jones is one of the few non-economists that understands that there is an eternal war between usury and labor/production. Bankers typically want NO PRODUCTION because they want to just be able to debt rape the civilization top to bottom and extract the wealth and assets of the land that way. America is a country run by banker oligarchs. They will lend out money to be used for UBI and the debt will eventually become unsustainable and then there will be austerity, asset stripping, and financialization of any government owned enterprises – which I don’t think there is really much left.
My conspiracy theory is that “sustainable development” which is about protecting huge amounts of land in the name of sustainability is depopulating the countryside so that when the final step of the debt rape game happens they can seize all of the rural land and all of the resources and oil that are in them.
Read Finance Capitalism and its Discontents by Hudson and ask yourself why finance oligarchs would offshort labor. The answer: because they want to make money on labor arbitrage AND they simply don’t need production because the mode of existence of wall street is parasitic and doesn’t require real production. Plus, the less production there is the more easy it is to load everyone up with debt.
One of the main conflicts in the main German right-wing party AfD is between greedy liberal-conservatives who basically want a more Islam-sceptic liberal party and supporters of what is called social patriotism (sozialer Patriotismus).
In 1990’s there seemed to be a real tension between Silicon Valley and Wall Street. The latter was afraid that the fast growing new money from computer industry on the West coast could pose the challenge to the old money and its power on the East coast. But there was no threat as the new money entrepreneurs were libertarians w/o a sense of culture and national awareness. They were easy pickings.
White nominally Christian women are much more “liberated” than practically any other type of women in the world, and that’s true in both the West and in Russia/Eastern Europe.
Lately there’s been some opposition to feminism in Russia/Eastern Europe, but in both feminist, careerist women who have no time or interest in having families are fundamentally the norm compared to most other parts of the world and that’s why practically all white countries have low fertility rates.
In the UK at least I find that most right wing types are perfectly ok with this country being full of blacks and Indians and other non-whites, just as long as they’re not Muslims.
Even the “far-right” here does not support an ethno-state in Britain, even though many would applaud Eastern Europe and Israel for having ethno-state style policies. Most of the British right is completely resigned to the fact that Britain is a multi-ethnic nation, in fact I would argue many of them have Stockholm syndrome about it and actually want to see the multi-ethnic society be a success, just so long as it remains nominally Christian.
While important, it is not decisive. African & Muslim populations are not self-sustainable; crises like this one lead inevitably to some kind of Darwinian behavior which will be, if necessary, inscribed in Constitution.
In short: liberal democracy with equal rights & social programs will globally vanish in next 2-4 decades: Liberte, Egalite & Fraternite will have disappeared. And, along with them, colored parasites.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/485522-sweden-coronavirus-worst-death-count/
What is the point of sharing this?
Don’t just post a link, at least have some commentary.
Subversive leftist radicals are pretty much a self-organizing class. They enjoy each other’s writing, but I don’t think anyone else does. And as a group, I don’t think they can be swung, so I don’t think there can be a 1:1 comparison between Left and Right because under most sets of conditions, subversion is easier, and it is easier to tear something down than to build something up.
That’s not to say none of their ideas were important. Clearly, they had some very important ideas, about strategy, like employing the idea of racism
In peasant societies, it is easy to offer the peasants more status at the expense of their landlords. This is why such differences in status were often heritable in communist societies, so the next generation of peasants could feel like they still had status, even though the pickings were slim. This was the reason for communism as a mass movement, though it is somewhat exaggerated, and many peasants weren’t really communists. Unfortunately, Bioleninism is basically a one-way street. As an organizing principle, it simply does not work for whites, who have an unparalleled record of accomplishment, including the moon landings, and so the highest status in a natural order. Many loser whites actually obtain higher status by becoming traitors.
From coronopolitics back to corona health implications a little bit – it seems this somewhat has flown under radar as 54% of the so called asymptomatic cases from Diamond Princess cruise still had lung damage revealed on CT scaning, even if less severe than symptomatic cases. As we can see this shit left even the medical scientists quite confused and the reinfection possibility still rears its ugly head from time to time almost constantly:
https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/ryct.2020200110
Okay. There’re two extremes on how Sweden has dealt with the global pandemic. Whaduhyuh think?
Here’s another which concerns the suggestion that a covert Chinese government research program went afoul:
https://youtu.be/XMJ0EmMfb3U
Whaduhyuh think?
The Swedish government should have been more strict on enforcing social distancing. Triage is necessary and clear-headed, objections to this is harmful sentimentality. Overweight and disobedient Somalis are life unworthy of life, the author should feel shame for trying to concern-troll people with that.
I don’t think it is very useful to hold the Chinese government to blame for the start of the virus, I am more annoyed by their hypocritical attitude towards other countries.
Despite their new age nonsense, the visual quality of that video is good.
According to Haidt (moral psychology), people become more right-leaning when concerned with cleanliness or threatened by something unclean. It ties into the purity/sanctity moral module, which promotes right-leaning views.
https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion-ebook/dp/B0052FF7YM
The Epoch Times newspaper was founded in 2000 by John Tang and a group of American Falun Gong members. Though the newspaper is known for it’s focus on news about China and its human rights issues, it has become known for its support of U.S. President Donald Trump and a 2019 report showed it to be the second-largest funder of pro-Trump Facebook advertising after the Trump campaign. Basically Falun Gong TV is Anti China Pro Trump/NeoCon.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Hongzhi
The founder and guru of Falun Gong.
So why are right wing Americans and Britons corona skeptics when you can expect the opposite? And what explains Jair Bolsonaro, who is basically an old fashioned right wing Latin American like Galtieri or Pinochet, and is the furthest thing from a libertarian?
I’d like to say that I think this will change the mind of liberals, but it seems to only show itself in inconvenient ways.
At the supermarket:
First they had paper bags. They were good quality, but eventually replaced by plastic, so as not to “hurt” trees. Then the plastic was replaced, so as not to “hurt” the ocean. You were left with BYOB cloth bags or incredibly cheap paper bags that are guaranteed to split in half – sometimes I see old people walking, from their home to the supermarket, trying to carry groceries in them. It is very sad. Anyway, now, in some places, they have banned the cloth bags because of germs, and you are stuck with the guaranteed-to-split-in-half paper ones.
I feel like banning plastic bags was elder abuse, by smug SJWs.
I’ve only read it once or twice, but I find it fascinating. Opposition newspapers seem so rare these days – it is hard to understand how its business model works. (They run adds on Youtube.) And how it survives against attempts to sabotage it. Then there is that performance troop Shen Yun.
It’s hard to understand how any of it works. Cult economics? Secretly funded by Taiwan? I can’t wrap my head around it.
I think right-leaning people have an easier time dealing with trolley dilemmas. Our response to Coronavirus is essentially a text book example of a trolley dilemma. On another forum I’ve argued with the “we can’t put a price on a human life!” hysterical liberals. Because right-leaning people are more inclined to focus on unintended consequences and/or the downside of any measure, they are also inherently more critical of the costs of the lockdown.
In addition, the shut down has taken on religious characteristics. Haidt and others have noted that people are inherently religious, and they will imprint those religious instincts onto other belief systems – see virtue signaling, cancel culture, etc. A great example is how leftists will often circle and chant in protests – a universal religious behavior recognized by many anthropologists. I live in a White progressive neighborhood and noticed early on that one of my neighbors (a Google employee!) was preaching “crush the curve” like a Victorian church lady. She’s also the decedent of early Protestant settlers and is thus likely selected in favor of strong religiosity (another theory for why Jews and Protestants are drawn SJW). By contrast, the right is either non-religious and HBD or Christian, and thus less susceptible to transposing inherent religious enthusiasms onto government mandated public policy.
(I’m not familiar enough with Bolsonaro to have an answer).
These things, together, allow for greater skepticism of the party line on Coronavirus. That’s my theory anyways.