Excellent control: Singapore started off following Western (mal)practice on the Mask Question, but after reversing stance, mask wearing became universal to an extent that didn’t occur in the US or any North European nation.
This pattern also checks out within races in the US – Latinos (87%) are higher than Whites (62%) or Blacks (69%), whose numbers are probably comparable after adjusting for Whites being more rural; while Asians are highest of all (89%).
There’s interesting psychology research which suggests the instinct for these behaviors is something ingrained from birth:
White babies started to cry more easily, and once they started, they were more difficult to console. Chinese babies adapted to almost any position in which they were placed; for example, when placed face down in their cribs, they tended to keep their faces buried in the sheets rather than immediately turning to one side, as the Caucasian babies did. They briefly pressed the baby’s nose with a cloth, forcing him to breath with his mouth. Most white (and black) babies fight this maneuver by immediately turning away or swiping at the cloth with their hands, and this is reported in Western pediatric textbooks as normal. While the average Chinese baby would simply lay on his back, breathing through the mouth, accepting the cloth without a fight. There are movies of this: they are apparently quite striking, and should be on YouTube. I talked to a prof who showed these movies to students in a class at an Ivy league university: they really, really hated it. They should emigrate to a different reality – one of those probability lines outside the Blight, full of butt-kicking pixies, avuncular gay men, Melanesian super-hackers, and female Fields medalists. And unicorns.
Later, he looked at Navajo babies: they’re like Chinese, only more so.
Latinos being most a mix of indigenous American and Iberians (on whom see later), their high mask compliance is not surprising.
So is it just a Mongoloid vs. Caucasoid question? I suspect there may be intra-White differences too, since European data suggests that compliance in Spain and Italy is at basically East Asian levels, whereas the Nordics are at the other extreme.
(There are no Slav countries in this sample, but I will say that even in Moscow, compliance – having initially started high – soon plummeted, and is now at around 30% in supermarkets and public transport, and close to 0% in the streets. I have heard anecdotal reports that it was a similar story in places like Poland and Ukraine, where initial compliance was very high but was abandoned after 1-2 months).
Could mask ease be some side effect evolves in peoples with longer history of agriculture in general?
Greater psychological comfort with public anonymity?
I do think there’s something to it. I am good friends with one Greek [M] – Anglo/German [F] couple in London, where the man is fine with wearing a mask, something that he puts on and forgets about after a while, whereas the woman is very uncomfortable, reporting feelings of stress and “suffocation”. A Spanish Twitter user replies to me that it’s the same with him and his Finnish wife.
Personally, I am very much in the former category (perhaps due to my 35% non-EE ancestry).
However, internalizing these observations, it does sort of become easier to see why North European-descended right-wing types, who tend to be higher in disagreeableness and psychopathy than the population average in the first place, tend to react so aggressively to being “told to wear the mask.”
That said, one can observe such behavior even amongst Mongoloids, if far more rarely:
#McDonalds worker beaten up in #HongKong after he asked customer to wear face mask pic.twitter.com/uJ4DtrTy61
— RT (@RT_com) July 18, 2020
But even such extremes are informative. So far as I know, no East Asian shop workers have been murdered for telling their customers to put on a mask, as has happened several times in the US, as well as with a bus driver in France.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Science does not matter. If science mattered, then that idiot Fauci wouldn’t have been telling us to not wear masks in spring. No, the whole mask mandate is just so goodwhites (and boomers) can take mask selfies, which are the most virgin, low-energy meme possible and thus perfect for goodwhite (and boomer) psychology.
Also, I guess this will be memory-holed:
https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234095938555260929
Thanks for being so prompt with making my point.
Posing in masks may be “virgin” and “low energy”, but that doesn’t make signaling against them “Chad” or “high-energy”, I am sorry to say.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1286924478405136384
Very interesting implications. Personally I find masks detestable. They are uncomfortable, sweaty, and make it more difficult to breathe — however I will wear one in a crowded place, especially if mandated.
Recently the government here in Ireland made it mandatory for masks to be worn on public transport and some businesses have followed through with similar regulations. The era of maskless Ireland has ended, but the general distaste for them is still strongly evident. People will wear their mask getting on the bus, and then immediately remove it when out of the driver’s view. On trains and trams there is no enforcement at all, with the rail staff not even wearing masks. Only in close-quarters businesses such as barbers have I seen universal compliance — supermarkets, bars, etc are largely maskless despite many having regulations.
It doesn’t surprise me that ‘being told to wear the mask’ is so unpopular here. In my experience the Irish despise being told to do anything, especially by authority. There has been a cultural distaste for taking orders from government going back to British rule, for obvious reasons. Wearing a mask has undeniably submissive undertones, even if it is sensible for health reasons — and however illogical one might know the feeling is, they do feel decidedly undignified. I also think a large part of the distaste for masks is down to physical discomfort, I know many people have reported similar experiences as myself in regards hating the sweaty warm air of masks on their face — this may be relatively unique to North Euros.
This new evidence for an inbuilt psychological reason seems solid though, and an important explainer for why Europeans are generally anti-mask.
What if the west cannot give up its claim to universality without sinking even deeper into last man nihilism? Maybe mass immigration is a way for it to prove to itself that its civilizational achievements/goals have universal value/attractiveness?
Please do a retrospective on your “Europe & Mankind” article. It is imo the best article you have written.
To test the hypothesis, you need to find out how masks are worn in Yakutia, Kalmykia, etc. If the Yakuts and Kalmyks wear masks more than the Russians-then your assumption is confirmed. If the Kalmyks and Yakuts wear masks on the same level with Russian, it means racial hypothesis does not work.
Judging by the pictures, masks are really more popular there
https://news.ykt.ru/upload/image/2020/03/98907/main.jpg?1585996255
Are people confusing conservatives with libertarians here? Libertarians tend to score higher on disagreeableness and lower on conscientiousness, while both conservatives and liberals score higher on agreeableness, and conservatives also tend to score higher on conscientiousness (I forgot the data on liberals), basically libertarians are liberals who score high on disagreeableness and maybe psychopathic traits.
Can anyone blame Americans for not wanting to wear masks given how they’ve been repeatedly gaslit by the CDC and media on this issue? First they were told that not only did masks not work, buying masks for personal use made them Bad People because it would mean that they were taking away vital PPE for nurses and hospital workers. Now, not only are masks Good, NOT wearing one makes you a Bad Person and possibly incurs fines/prison sentences. Factor in the proven non-lethality of the virus (the only people at risk of dying from it appear to be the very old and those with obesity-related preexisting conditions like diabetes), and I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to wear a mask. The “scientific community” has only themselves to blame for this situation; they’ve now joined journalists and political parties in the growing list of institutions that have suffered a catastrophic loss of public trust.
My personal observation from the Balkans is that people here have also lost patience with mask laws. In Albania, where I was living for four months due to the lockdown, the government brought in a mandatory mask law on July 15 (that means that during lockdown, masks were NOT required, though everyone wore them anyway). Nobody is obeying it, not even supermarket workers (who have been required to wear masks and gloves since March), and the police aren’t enforcing it (the punishment is a 2,000 L fine, about $18). Maybe about a third of people on the street have a mask on. I was only asked to put a mask on once, when entering a Rossmann.
In North Macedonia, where I was over the weekend, mask law compliance was a little higher than in Albania, but not by much. I rode a bus from Struga to Skopje and we got pulled over by a cop outside Gostivar, who yelled at us for not having masks on (not even the driver had a mask), but that’s all he did: yell. I ate at a restaurant in Skopje whose owner literally only put his mask on when he was serving my food and had it off the rest of the time.
I’m in Serbia right now and mask law compliance is nonexistent. Many of the police aren’t even wearing masks. I put the mask on before going into a store or mall, but like in Albania, nobody cares (interesting fact here: Serbia is the first country I’ve been to where malls don’t temperature gun people at the entrance). The government here won’t reimpose lockdown after the riots earlier in the month; thank God somebody is standing up to this nonsense.
According to a close friend of mine who lives in Thailand, the Thais have stopped wearing masks entirely (mask compliance there was near 100 percent during the height of the “pandemic”). Bars and restaurants have stopped making patrons and employees wear masks.
I’m not militantly anti-mask because there’s certain contexts in which they make sense. Airplanes/airports? Yeah, I’ll wear a mask there (of the three times I’ve gotten seriously sick in the past three years, two occurred after long flights). Interacting with the elderly? Put a mask on. Hospitals/clinics? Put on the mask. But from the perspective of many people, draconian mask laws now—with the virus receding and its lethality/effects better understood—just seem like an arbitrary imposition of power.
That’s a very positive way to spin “herd-like mentality.”
It is true that freedom is suffocating to those who want to be smothered and smothering is suffocating to those who want to be free. But this is just a loosely described metaphor.
For truth, consider, that if you lie a Chinese adult face down on a bed, they will move their head, unlike a Chinese baby.
This is because keeping your head in place is so infantile that whole demographics of babies don’t even do it, nevermind adults.
I’m not sure you have a good understanding of what psychopathy means.
As for the agreeableness – disagreeableness axis, it is pretty silly. It holds that whether someone goes along with another’s mandates/arguments is determined by a very facile and fake trait, rather than how they feel and think about that mandate or person.
Rates for Yakuts might be a test of the idea that it is related to ancient urbanization and fear of strangers, or something earlier.
I haven’t followed that case closely, but according to this French ethnonationalist site
https://www.fdesouche.com/1397583-bayonne-un-conducteur-de-bus-en-etat-de-mort-cerebrale-apres-avoir-ete-sauvagement-tabasse-par-une-bande-de-jeunes
the names of the perpetrators are Mohamed C., Mohammed A., Moussa B. and Selim Z. I suppose there might be an HBD explanation here, but it’s got nothing to do with differences between native Europeans.
In Germany there are claims though that there are marked differences between different political views. A recent survey claims to show that AfD voters are the highest (43%) to answer “I haven’t gotten used to anti-Corona measures like mask wearing, compliance is difficult for me”, after that come the economic liberals from the FDP (35%), whereas it’s only about 10% for voters of other parties:
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/deutschlandtrend-2277.html
Now to some extent this might be propaganda of the Merkel regime and part of its war against the opposition, but given the amount of nutty Corona-denialism I’ve seen among AfD sympathizers (much to my dismay) I think there’s at least some reality to it.
In general, most people are complying with the mask wearing in shops and public transport, though behaviour has unfortunately gotten quite lax among a sizeable minority, since there’s no real enforcement. I’ve used public transport two or three times in recent weeks, and you always see people who have masks, but leave their nose uncovered, and even some people who don’t wear any masks at all. Was in a bakery recently, and one customer came in without a mask and was allowed to buy without a word of reprimand, even though there’s a fat sign outside “We can’t serve you if you’re not wearing a mask”.
Are there measurements for propensity for risk-averse behaviors between races?
Serbia ain’t crowded. I only wear it in closed spaces where it’s mandatory or when there’s a shitton of people around (pretty much only in closed spaces anyway). On the other hand, it’s summer and hot as hell here, so the streets are empty anyway. No real reason to wear it
Is it even possible to control this thing without resorting to China-like measures, even with a naturally compliant population and mask wearing? Japan seems to be proving the opposite, as for NZ, it is an island nation, plus the epidemic had not had a wide enough base among the population before lockdowns were instituted. Even China is having trouble keeping on top of things in Xinjiang, though maybe it is because that place is a rural backwater? But then Heilongjiang is also sort of a rural backwater and the Chinese managed to contain an earlier flareup there. And I do not think the even authoritarian Western political systems like Russia are willing to throw people in jail for 5 years for not wearing a mask, and executing people for punching out a police officer enforcing a quarantine like what the Chinese do. And there is the problem as to what to do with the asymptomatic people, just put them in camps until a vaccine is here, and they can be injected so their infectivity goes down? As for Japan, they apparently just decided that the economic cost of lockdowns or economic disruptions are not worth the cost of full coronavirus suppression.
Didn’t woman in ancient Greece wear veils? And in ancient China, I believe there was sex segregation. During the Tang, the veil hat became a popular item of fashion for women.
I did once have a fleeting idea that mask compliance might have something to do with hiding sexual characteristics of the face.
Was it less common to shave in Northern Europe than Southern? That is my impression. Then there is the color variation, more common in Northern Europe, which is often notably present in beards.
I put on masks for enclosed areas and never really saw much of the emotional aspects to it: it either was a relatively low cost effort to potentially help others, or an opportunity to look like a ninja.
Mask wearing is a common Asian practice, including during flu season as a form to protect others from infection. To an extent, excessively signaling care for others is fairly Confucian(its even in the language traditionally, where saying that “I am not kind enough” is common).
There’s an HBD angle to mask wearing alright. The more conformist you are, the more you wear.
The mask wearers are what aristotle described as, ”natural slaves”
This entire experience has been an excellent example of the poor cognitive quality of the present day American Right. The downstream effects are evident.
Or maybe people are just retarded pieces of trash?
In New York City, mask wearing is in the 90% on the streets and subways for all races, highest for whites. In stores, masks are required and there is generally full compliance, except for the odd case here and there I’ve noticed. Many people even wear masks in cars.
I am generally the only person on the street who does not wear a mask, or part of a tiny handful. I do wear a mask on the subways and in stores, mostly put of respect for other people.
I’m very surprised at the mask wearing numbers Anatoly is citing here.
I regard mask wearing and the general response to this as part of a trend that I observed beginning in the 90s, towards the extreme elimination of risk from life.
Whatever you think about this virus, it’s impossible to claim that our response to it is not related in part to trends that for instance took all the monkey bars and other exciting things out of playgrounds because they’re dangerous, or the attempt to ban violent videogames.
Globally, the world has less tolerance for risk, and tends to see more and greater dangers than it did before. This will inevitably have an effect on our cognitive processes – I hesitate to say distort.
Its also related to trends like refusing to let old people die gracefully in a natural way but instead squeezing out a few months or years more at any cost and even in extreme pain.
Mask wearing probably tracks ones materialism and general fear level, as well as comfort with death. Predictably, fear and materialism are today highest in Asia (because of the Great Reversal, where Asia and the West exchange roles), and in large technology driven cities like New York.
Masking is a weak ass practice especially in nations where your medical privacy is protected by law.
You need to wear a mask sir
Can’t wear a mask, I have a condition
What condition?
None of your business. Are you going to refuse me service due to my disability?
At this point your average minimum wage illiterate cow will realize that his pay grade probably indicates his level of intelligence and not to question the human anymore.
Now if masks prevented people from talking I’d be the biggest supporter for it. That’s a benefit for everyone. Force people to wear masks in public so they can shut the fuck up. I would donate BOTH my nuts for that.
In all honesty, the present peccadilloes of the Right seem fairly minor compared to those of the Left. Anyway, a Right-leaning regime would have probably prevented a lot of the initial spread.
A libertarian paradise? A lot of people on the right are just mentally retarded pieces of trash.
I’ve been in Berlin and Vienna recently and, as an Englishman, I’ve been astonished at the conformity of the people.
First, I wondered into a small empty shop, not realising I had to wear a mask. I was immediately accosted by an older couple who, while they may well have had a point, lectured me for about 6 paragraphs in German. It was obviously a language I do not understand, yet they seemed to feel they were fulfilling a need of theirs. Possibly unfairly, the Stasi came to mind.
Later, I noticed that, even when no cars were anywhere in sight, and I was happily crossing the road, locals would just stand and stare at the red man. One person watched me set off and followed me, but then he looked up, saw the red sign, and quickly shuffled back to the pavement, utterly confused. I would have thought an English sketch show, portraying the same scene, to be a bit too broad and exaggerated for my tastes!
On the other hand, Berlin, in the summer at least, may be the most liveable city I’ve ever visited. The buildings are certainly not beautiful, but the sense of space is liberating, especially when combined with the Northern European tendency to have things well maintained. The people too generally look good. Not as stylish as the Italians, but healthy and attractive and open.
One place was a bit odd, it is called the Young African Artists’ Market. It is considered really cool.
I’ve spent plenty of time on that continent and know many people from there quite well. None of them would be caught dead in that place were it in their home country. It was a slum without the charm, and with hopeless (German) tourists all crowded in. At the side sat various stoned Africans, with the aggressive, aggrieved look that gets you excluded back where they claim to be refugees from.
I suspect Berliner politics are extremely naive, and therefore this great city will be far less amenable in 20 years, but then nothing lasts forever…
I hate to pull an “another anon” on this, but I’m increasingly not sure about that. American Rightism is increasingly defined by a dogmatic resistance to cooperation and increasingly impossible goalpost setting. These are actual structure weaknesses; an organization, for example, can only achieve its goals if they are realistic within its resources. American Rightism doesn’t really begin to have resources because of this same strange “individualism” display, to the extent that no one actually works together and so any notions of, for example, an “alternate” tech ecosystem is moribund not only because of liberal suppression but because even without suppression, the Right can neither fully use the resources of its human capital and appears to begin with a lower pool to start with.
In a more traditional hierarchial structure, this would be avoided by having enforced obedience to a specific caste, creed or individual but American rightism has married anti-hierarchial attitudes with anti-cooperative attitudes. This might have been adaptive at one point, but is grossly maladaptive for the modern world: it is genuinely lacking in productive or organizational power.
This makes any American Rightist equivalent of, say, the Leftist “march through institutions” basically impossible and makes Rightism resemble less of an organizational entity and more of a form of psychological masturbation exercise while actually having no concrete gains whatsoever. As “another anon” noted, the Left was also under attack but they proved capable of organizing under assault and have since captured the commanding heights. Now, as oppressers, they are larping as the victims. This is delusional but not nearly as dangerously delusional as the Right’s inclniation to larp as Cato as if they were Rome, and the opposition was Carthage. In truth, the positions are reversed.
Madcap theory #1:
East Asians find it easier to control because they have flatter noses, with smaller nostrils. This keeps the air they inhale warmer and moister; so it maintains the mucosal barrier better, denying Covid easy entry and limiting its initial replication once inside.
In Xinjiang, they have Turkic noses, explaining their extra issues, while in Scandinavia, which has had very few cases, even without lockdown in Sweden, they have evolved similar keep-air-warm-and-moist nostrils.
The countervailing force to this is climate humidity and temperature, which works in the opposite direction.
As one is an evolutionary result of the last of the other, this would be predictable.
Air conditioning is also a factor. Indeed, it dries out the mucosal barrier so much that it turns people into full-on mouth breathers, utterly removed from their nature.
There! I’m sure everyone can find some of their prejudices confirmed in my semi-scientific theorising…
Or maybe people are just mentally retarded?
Yes, this is a remarkable and widespread delusion.
You’re too harsh on the right as regards organising though. It isn’t that they’re anti-hierachical or anti-cooperative, it is just that the majority of people on the right are too wedded to their personna of being calm, logical, strong and safe to recognise the marginalised position that they are in.
In other words their vanity gets in the way of them expressing where they really are, and this renders them ineffective. It also makes them appear menacing and fraudulent to those on the left.
Recognising that all cultural levers are held by progressives is not enough. Instead, the right needs to realise that their society is long gone, and that they need to build something new.
The above analysis excludes the tiny number of LARPing internet Nazis. They are the weak-willed innocents, who have sought security through possession by the left’s demons.
How did they get the parents to consent to having their baby irritated? Are these infants orphans or foster children?
Iirc it was during a time when highly unethical(by modern standards) experiments were conducted; there are more extreme examples, like the infliction of a phobia of furry plush toys on a baby by scaring him with loud noises at the same time to demonstrate that phobias could be acquired.
Latinos may be better at mask wearing in than Europeans, but Latin america – in fact the Americas as a whole from tail up till at least the Canadian border – seem to be the place where ‘rona has finally first spread out of control and unable to be controlled. Now can HDB super-determinists come up with a reason for that? 😉
I don’t doubt HBD explanation but I think it is a multi factor problem. Max compliance goes up when you feel corona in your life. Once you start hearing people are dying or seeing the effects of it such as non stop ambulance sirens this is when you start to wear masks.
Also people in general are practical. While you may see HBD type of compliance on the street in the stores it goes to 100% by all races.
MAGA signaling against masks is just that impotent rage.
Early I speculated something like this about why English people were not wearing mask, but it is not correct at all.
Now, after government changed its advice, most of the English people are wearing masks. That is to say, the earlier bad behaviour (not wearing masks), is the responsibility of the government of Great Britain, not the normal population. Government had said masks were not effective, so people obediently didn’t wear them. Once government later says masks are effective, the behaviour of the people in the street reversed.
English are following very carefully government advice, and have a high amount of trust in view of the powers, and follow it very obediently and responsibly, as can be seen when the official advice changed in relation to masks.
Reality was quite different from what I had thought earlier. Now even teenagers are cycling with masks on, after government modified its position on masks. Also even a couple people are masks while they are driving in cars.
A sad thing is the masks are still mostly medical masks, and not yet adequate supplies of N95 ones or above, which would be more effective.
I fear that the Left just has some in-built advantages, due to evolutionary psychology. In order to take resources from others, you need to form coalitions and plot, and sometimes put verbal pressure on people. To a certain extent, politics is like a vector sum of speech – it matters who naturally talks more. And there isn’t an obvious solution to bridging the gap.
In my view, the Left did not win a true contest – it only inevitably succeeded through the march of time, because subversion works mainly in one direction. It is easier to create and distribute subversive art, than it is to destroy it. It is easier to let in migrants, than it is to deport them. It is easier to lower standards, than to raise them. Make new laws, than repeal old ones. Relatively facile to subvert institutions. Hard to build new ones, and practically legally impossible (though perhaps not technologically) to build ones which are actually designed to be resistant to subversion.
Personally, I can only see two possible paths for the Right: 1.) technological solutions, like coming up with a workable alternative to traditional currency – something hard to tax. Or employing chatbots to turn off the woke from Twitter. Or, 2.) outbreeding the others. And I’m thinking #2 is probably the best bet, though it will take countless generations, if it works at all.
anybody in the US can plainly see that most mexicans don’t wear masks. there’s literally 30 million of them here and maybe 25% of them wear anything. it’s mainly mexicans dying in the border states. LA hospital admissions are like 85% mexicans. mexicans in the US are used to obeying zero laws, as encouraged by Democrats. but who knows if they would follow these laws anyway – Mexico has one of the highest death totals in the world, so i’m guessing they pay no attention to medical rules or laws there either.
“I’m very surprised at the mask wearing numbers Anatoly is citing here.”
i’m on the ground in the US and have no idea where those numbers came from.
who wears masks the most? the upper class europeans. over 95% compliance there. then east asians – lower rent Chinese people and southeast asians don’t always wear anything. then the middle class europeans. then the white trash people, who are 50% at best and wear lots of bandanas and other marginally useful stuff. then mexicans, who mostly don’t. then africans, who don’t. not enough indians or MENA people around where i’ve been to put any numbers on them. orthodox jews notably don’t wear shit, and were a big part of the problem.
second, among europeans it was New Englanders who died the most, not southerners, not people in the midwest, not even other northerners. the ‘smarter’ New Englanders deliberately ignored everything the Trump people were saying in the first 2 months, then the ‘smartest’ northerners in the country, the New Yawkers, killed themselves for months riding the subway.
third, “Americans” means almost nothing now that the left has forced the US to be a jumble Brazil polyglot nation. there’s no good way to control what a dozen competing groups do, let alone have a unified medical response to anything. africans and mexicans just do whatever they want. and they did a lot of the dying, but they get counted as “Americans” when the media wants to portray a picture of middle class tax paying suburbanites dropping dead from a lethal virus killing everybody in it’s path.
lastly as noted many times, AMERICA IS IN A CIVIL WAR. what other nation responding to this virus is in a civil war? maybe, possibly, that affects things. there’s people out on the streets everywhere.
The opposite of a no-mask reprimand is a reprimand for wearing an N95 mask. There should be a gazillion N95s (note no made-in-China prefix) available; one less aircraft carrier, what the heck. Oh, btw, A medical article I read recently said that if an N95 has metal nose clips, tightening the nose clips increases rather than decreases leakage; I assume because it creates deformations elsewhere. I love counterintuitive science; at first I am highly skeptical, but where it is proven, it is fascinating.
Since females have higher verbal IQ, you need more female right wingers, but unfortunately that does not go very well with white shariah?
Hilariously, women formed a significant part of ISIS’ networking and communication capabilities, literally enforcing Shariah.
One of the more amusing things about this is that we are expected to believe that disorganized, chaotic, and extremely crowded countries like Vietnam, where people live in tiny rooms used only for sleep and life is designed to be lived in crowded streets, and where discipline and rule following is routinely flouted (the traffic!), where corruption and bending corners are rampant, suddenly morphed into a rule following German-style populace, and were able to efficiently implement a nationwide lockdown.
Ditto for Thailand, etc. I don’t even believe the numbers from China – another rule breaking, chaotic, crowded country that is not known for releasing accurate figures or allowing honest reporting of a negative nature. And we know that for several weeks authorities did not lock down travel and tried to suppress news leaking out – ample time for the virus to spread across China, yet somehow it very politely agrees to stay localized in one city.
I’m not necessarily doubting the numbers of deaths or illnesses in all of these cases – maybe Vietnam really did have almost no deaths – just pointing out that patterns are not matching up.
Another interesting feature of this is the way both sides selects the data that supports their case and ignores all other data – when an honest assessment of the state of the data is that it is contradictory and does not point to any clear storyline or pattern.
I’m not even saying this isn’t a deadly pandemic – for all I know it’s exactly what the worst doomsayers say it is.
I am saying that simple pattern recognition shows that something is amiss here, and that the psychology of the reactions have taken on a life of their own and are worth studying in their own right.
Btw, about half of my fellow non-street-maskers comrades in arms are East Asian, with whites being the least represented (although I’ve noticed some working class whites not wearing masks) so I’m not at all sure about this theory.
I don’t think there’s much of a connection between that baby experiment and adult mask compliance.
Whites including Northern Europeans routinely comply with all sorts of onerous rules and regulations.
As far as comfort goes, the best masks, the N95 ones, are the least comfortable to breathe in because they actually filter the air a lot, so your breathing does feel restricted a bit. But most people don’t wear those in the US. Most people wear simple cloth masks that are not as restrictive.
I was in Manhattan recently and mask compliance seemed to be universal. All the whites seemed to be wearing masks. I only saw a few blacks and Latinos not wearing masks, and they looked like loitering construction/maintenance workers taking a break or something.
In the more densely populated urban and suburban areas in the US, all the middle/upper middle class whites seem to be wearing masks in my experience.
The US is a huge country with lots of very low density exurb and rural areas where “social distancing” is just the norm and routine, even inside many stores and buildings. That’s where most of the complaining and lack of compliance among whites is coming from. These are areas with no cases, no major links with urban areas, very low density, where masks are not really necessary. I don’t think most of the whites in these areas would fail to comply with mask rules in other denser parts of the country like NYC.
With praise like that, need a link!
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/struggle-europe-mankind/
More evidence against the theory –
Also from China, we have seen the most videos of people having to be aggressively taken into quarantine by violent police – this does not suggest a compliant and docile population respectfully following government measures. Rather, it suggests a widespread, or at least pervasive, resistance to government safety measures and distrust of government. We can assume the videos were a fraction of the total number of such instances, and that lower levels of non compliance were even more pervasive.
Which is exactly what you’d expect from China’s raucous, free for all culture (a good thing), and does not fit the theory of a compliant, docile people.
Videos of this nature have not emerged from other countries as far as I am aware.
I wouldn’t be opposed to wearing masks if:
It really was a natural occurring pandemic like 1918.
If the virus really was all that dangerous.
If they had been counting “virus deaths” like any doctor would count any other form of morbidity.
If it hadn’t become a political tool to bash Trump with.
If they hadn’t lied about it from the get-go.
If they won’t tell me I have to be vaccinated to be in public.
If I could believe anything the “experts” are telling me.
If WHO wasn’t just another pay to play operation.
If Bill Gates didn’t have the patent #666 for Luciferase.
If the House bill #6666 for contact tracing was never proposed.
If 5G didn’t kill all the bees in my neighborhood over the last 12 months.
If the vaccine wasn’t full of nanoparticles to control your body and mind.
If the news media wasn’t completely propaganda with no journalism to be found.
If social media didn’t censor conservative voices that disagree.
If the “protests” really were peaceful.
If the FBI hadn’t tried to frame is constitutionally, democratically elected President.
If George Soros types didn’t corrupt ever institution in the world.
No, I wouldn’t oppose the mask at all.
Do women really have greater verbal IQ? The greatest poets seem to have been men. Though, no matter, I agree with your unwritten premiss that women have a major impact on politics, partly through the mechanism of their unique verbal wiring.
My own theoretical model would be that verbal IQ, while not unimportant, is secondary to word count. It is less a problem of vocabulary or ideas, than it is one of emotional volume and assertiveness, and platforms (Verbal IQ helps with taking over platforms). People are more motivated by social pressures and cowardice than ideas.
As to courting women politically, about a year ago, there was some controversy in China, where the government had a database of “breed ready” women. However ham-handed it was, IMO, women who would be offended by it (feminists), when the country has the disastrous TFR it has, are absolutely unreachable, and it would be a mistake to court them. Better to go after the ones who are not feminists. Most of these will not court controversy, regardless, but some might make good mothers.
Berlin is ruled by crazy leftists and actually already seriously dysfunctional in many ways (routine bureacratic matters like getting a new passport which are done fairly quickly in many other German cities take many months there; and there’s also more serious stuff libe Arab criminal clans possibly trying to infiltrate the police force, aided in this by schemes for more “diversity”). Only reason I’d go there is for visiting the museums tbh.
Are many businesses choosing Potsdam, and/or other Brandenburg locations over Berlin due to government issues?
I was in Potsdam a decade ago, and wished I had money to invest in real estate there. I figured that they’d draw a lot of tech from Berlin.
No idea about what’s going on in Potsdam tbh (not that much I suppose). But Berlin isn’t really an economic or financial centre like many other capitals anyway, it lost much of what it had as a consequence of WW2 and the 40 years of being a divided city. Today it’s the biggest recipient of funds from the economically successful German states like Bavaria (Länderfinanzausgleich, a scheme where the German states which still have sound finances transfer huge amounts of money to states that have been ruined by incompetent and corrupt left-wingers). Basically a black hole where money is wasted and leftists, Arab gangs and drug-dealing Africans congregate. imo it really was a mistake they moved the capital there again after reunification, that should have been off the table after the dissolution of Prussia.
If discomfort with face mask wearing has a genetic component, then I wonder why the alternative of a face shield has not been proposed yet?
I know a face shield might look silly, but your breathing will not be obstructed, you will not feel uncomfortably sweaty, and your face is not covered-up like a burglar. It’s even a more courteous gesture towards deaf people, who rely on lip reading to communicate.
American Rightism is weak and not true Rightism. It is merely the other side of the liberal coin. A truly Rightist (think Italian Fascist/Evolian) State would have instituted country wide measures like preventing people from leaving their house in stricken cities, had them surrounded by the Army with no ability to enter and exit and stopped any flights.
American Rightism is diluted with liberal values and therefore can never be considered a true Right but rather a more left-centrist position
Virgos have more misaligned chakras than Sagittarians, too – thankfully it’s amenable to homeopathic treatment by using a 1:100000 dilution of goji berry extract, then waving the remedy in front of the patient’s favourite dreamcatcher while sitting under a pyramid topped by a purple crystal.
That has the same scientific content as your babbling about some psychosophaster checklist-charlatanry – which has the same empirical foundations as Briggs-Myer ‘INTJ’ horse-shit.
I know, I know… it’s just my Oppositional Defiant Disorder talking: ODD being the rehashed name for drapetomania.
Typical fucking Aquarius, amirite?
Sweden apparently patterns like other North Europeans in terms of mask compliance. But the epidemic is pretty much over there. Wonder when Karlin will admit he was wrong about the severity of Covid. I know he used to make predictions every new year and then assess them the next year. Would be honest of him to admit when his prediction isn’t borne out here.
Most northern European governments recommended against mask wearing so wearing a mask is non-compliance here. That’s why you see almost no one wearing masks here: people are complying on masks, it’s just that the government doesn’t want us to wear masks.
Our media is right now trying to whip up a second wave panic and making front page news about the new mandatory mask policies of various European countries. The government reiterated that there’s no plan to make masks mandatory.
Our right-wing nationalist opposition tried to make a big deal out of corona and the inability of the government to acquire masks for everyone but they were muffled by the media and branded troublemakers for interfering with crisis management. It’s another lesson of what really matters is whether you control the media and the institutions – our media has no problem simultaneously telling us that pushing for masks makes the Democrat party of the USA heroes while the same push for masks makes the True Finns villains.
Unlikely.
If the shoddy quant of the psychosophasters is to be believed, on average women have higher verbal facility than they do quantitative facility.
That’s not the same as them having, on average, higher verbal facility than men.
For decades dummies made the same claim about women’s “pain tolerance” – because they thought that “pain threshold” meant the upper bound that can be tolerated by a subject. In fact, the study they used to make their specious claim, involved detecting the point at which a stimulus goes from ‘bearable’ to ‘painful’ (i.e., the threshold is the lower bound, and is very slightly higher in women). The fact that women have a higher lower bound says absolutely nothing about the relativities of the upper bounds.
These journomath-meets-psychocharlatanry made-for-HousewifeTV vignettes generate a little frisson of “girl power” tingles for a little while, and then it’s time to watch Ellen so they don’t see the comprehensive refutation.
They’re Good Germans, and Little Eichmanns as well.
Scared, weak and – most of all – utterly innumerate. And therefore easy to bewilder with selective statistics and a constant drumbeat of high-production-value propaganda with one central lietmotif: OBEY US OR EVERYONE WILL DIE.
It’s like a gigantic IQ test. In a just world, anyone who pays the slightest bit of attention to government apparatchiks on this or any other issue, would be excluded from the electoral franchise: they have the mental sophistication of the little girl in Schindler’s List screaming “Goodbye Jews!“.
As with all controversies (e.g., vaccinations, gun rights, reproductive rights, corporate personhood, race/IQ) there are mouth-breathing retards who are right by accident – who see the opportunism of the political class for what it is, but would have a 180° change of heart if their side was giving the marching orders. Stopped clocks and what-not.
That doesn’t change the fact that it’s easy to be right for the right reasons – the chief right reason in this case being the pathetic failure of the virus SARS-nCoV2 to generate meaningful numbers of non-trivial health conditions in otherwise-healthy individuals. Almost all the deaths being counted as COVD19 home runs, are actually RBIs where the runner is already on 3rd; some unknown-but-large proportion of people infected with SARS-nCoV2 do not develop any symptoms worse than a mild cold.
Casually observing obese fuckwits in face nappies LARPing ‘Contagion‘ might be entertaining, except for the fact that ‘social distancing‘ means that movement through a supermarket is slowed to the pace of the most retard-bovine herd members.
That issue – flabby-armed, glazed-eyed (μ-σ)IQ fucktards waddling around and getting in my way – is why I moved to getting groceries delivered way back in in mid-2018.
I gladly pay $169 a year to compose my order from my desktop, and have someone else pick it out, pack it, and deliver it to my kitchen bench. If you make it clear early on that you’re prepared to make them replace sub-standard fresh stuff (fruit etc), the system works.
“The greatest poets seem to have been men.”
The greatest poets of antiquity were anonymous and composite.
I agree that the composers of the best sustained long epics were male – because Virgil, Milton, and Alighieri were male. I am less convinced of a sex difference in the hymnic / psalmodic tradition however. Enheduanna and Sappho were truly brilliant.
Air conditioning is also a factor. Indeed, it dries out the mucosal barrier so much that it turns people into full-on mouth breathers, utterly removed from their nature.
No, wrong. Suboptimal air conditioning systems increase the relative humidity of the cooled air, assuming the uncooled ambient air is humid.
Most air conditioning systems are suboptimal.
Germans have always struck me as alien in their temperament. I think in terms of personality that we and French people are much closer.
Usually in shops or public transport, but still rarely outside.
How dumb do you have to be to think this is something that actually makes sense to do?
Are these the people who also wear masks while driving their car alone?
Glad the Danes and Swedes avoided the NPC “wear a mask” shit-test. Apparently, Sweden is not always “yes”.
Quite a lot goes on in Potsdam. It has Europe’s largest film studio, and a lot of IT.
When it comes to craziness, stupidity and disconnectedness from reality the Right has been catching up fast to the Left, and may even have overtaken it in the past few years.
And if Unz Review gives us any kind of snapshot of the current state of the dissident right then I’d say they’re well ahead of even the Social Justice Left in craziness/stupidity.
Sad but true.
The Right’s human capital problem seems to be steadily worsening.
Regarding baby crying. My father told me this story. For a long time I thought it was a true story until I read a similar one in a novel. So I am not sure how true it is. 🙂
The year was in 1937, December. Japanese was advancing in the Yangtze delta toward Nanjing. In my father’s village, people were hiding in the fields. There were two new born babies. One was quiet, the other wanted to cry, so the parents covered the baby’s mouth but for too long. They had to wait for the advancing columns to pass by, after all. And the quiet baby lived and the other baby was killed.
Or it might simply be man biting dog kind of news.
define significant.
You seem to have natural disdain for the Right, based on your political compass. Name one position greater than tranny-insanity. Name one thing even close.
There were probably a lot of times when crying babies were killed. For example, in Colonial Era America, I bet Hannah Dustin’s baby was killed by Abenakis (1697), after crying.
Might have effected genes.
It’s not so much disdain as massive disappointment. Especially with the dissident right. The madness of the Social Justice Left presented them with an extraordinary opportunity and they’ve blown it pretty spectacularly.
As a disillusioned leftist with contempt for the Social Justice Left I had high hopes for the dissident right a few years ago.
I must admit that that is a challenge! The tranny-insanity really is staggeringly crazy.
But how about the Hitler fanboys on the far right who really believe that they can win people over to their Hitler enthusiasm and that National Socialism can make a comeback? That certainly must count as being equally detached from reality?
A man becoming a woman is metaphysically/conceptually impossible. A revaluation of Hitler is just dependent on a change in the current power structure; unlikely maybe but obviously not impossible and obviously something that will happen in the next few hundred years. The fact you compare the two just shows how much your brain has been fried by oversocialisation.
Stupid is as stupid does.
For this reason European tribal conservatism probably has a brighter future ahead of it than American individualism. In Hungary mask compliance is very high. In Italy, as Karlin notes, conservatives don’t have problems maintaining social hierarchy, and Salvini was even ahead of the curve on lockdowns and mask wearing. It is also probably true that in culturally homogenous countries like Hungary, or Japan, people are more willing to sacrifice their freedoms for the greater good. In a fragmented divided country like the US that sort of patriotism is on the wane.
tranny-insanity, much like creationism on the right, is one of those stupidities that doesn’t really matter much in most people’s daily lives. It is just a convenient flag to fly with little consequence. Rightists who get bent out of shape about tranny issues are like magpies chasing tinsel – it just doesn’t matter compared to so many other issues that do matter – immigration, elite corruption, environmental degradation, etc.
America Right is the pussy Right. They have imbibed liberal values and true rightism is not possible in the American context because their religion is fundamentally liberal.
True Rightism, would br far more extreme than the American Right. Going all the way and being “extreme” (according to normies), would be what would recruit new people to their cause. The American Right does not go far enough
Preliminary notes I think affect the reliability of the hypothesis:
Spain and Italy were particularly hard hit in medical and psychological terms so it would useful to have comparable countries like Greece and Portugal included as well.
The Scandinavian countries and Netherlands’ governments continue to refuse to advise mask-wearing as of yet, much less having activated their propaganda organs (I use this term in a neutral manner) in favour of the practice. Hence posing the question of compliance is faulty in those regions.
The word for “true right” is “Phalangist”. Generalissimo Franco, and assorted Lebanese executioners were Phalangist.
If fairly watery and inoffensive parties like Germany’s AfD continue to be treated like social pariahs and bugaboos, then it seems inevitable that they will be replaced with more aggressive, fundamentalist parties.
Without a boundary between the sexes, it is doubtful that external borders can be maintained ideologically. If you are forced to use someone’s pronouns, how likely is it that you will be allowed to argue against immigration?
https://twitter.com/jonnytickle/status/1239515105529860097?s=20
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EKncnk8XkAIjx2M.jpg
Belorussian MTZ 82 Tractor on Vietnamese Currency.
How would you compare Dutch or Belgians to English?
That’s possible but there’s no real reason (other than wishful thinking) to think it’s going to happen.
More aggressive, fundamentalist parties might well prove to be even less successful.
In Europe it seems like the Loony Far Left (the Greens, etc) are on the rise at the moment. Which is certainly very depressing. If you think I have disdain for the Right don’t get me started on my loathing for the Greens.
And in the Anglosphere it seems to be repulsive groups like antifa that are attracting politically active young people.
As far as the US is concerned it seems likely that the Cultural Revolution will really kick into high gear if Trump is re-elected.
We live in interesting times.
The Greens aren’t far left. That is why Die Linke and SPD hate them. The Greens represent overeducated and upper middle class German voters who are virtue signaling. There is probably no party that is more “status quo” at this point than the Greens. That is very different from a Marxist left trying to overthrow capitalism.
Collectivism…based?
There are some differences between Greens and Linke/SPD (also between the latter, foreign policy and attitudes to NATO and the US are a sticking point on the federal level), but speaking of “hate” is a massive exaggeration. Greens and SPD are currently coalition partners of Die Linke in Thuringia and Berlin, and there have been SPD-Linke coalitions in Brandenburg (and with the PDS, the predecessor of Die Linke, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern too).
It’s also a mistake to imagine that SPD and Die Linke are somehow dominated by working class militancy, both parties nowadays have a dominant contingent of bourgeois hipsters who are primarily motivated by open borderism and “antifascism”, so totally compatible with the Greens.
That being said, the most likely coalition after the next federal elections in fall 2021 is CDU/CSU-Greens, which will be Merkel on steroids with even more “refugee” mass immigration and repression of all dissidence.
Speaking of eccentric post-Soviet rulers…
Still much better than Trump.
Always thought Belgium was the most similar country to England, the food is quite similar, architecture very similar with often the same roof styles, terraced housing and brick used often. The Belgian people also look virtually indistinguishable from the English as well being quite a bit taller and paler than the French but not as tall and blonde as the Dutch.
It’s funny how critics of my coronavirus coverage never specify which predictions precisely were wrong.
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/corona-scorecard/
I have a simple rule. Unless a global virus kills 1 mllion people in 2 months, across the globe, it should not be taken seriously