Wearing Masks as IQ/Personality Test

https://twitter.com/johnlundin/status/1275789424744452097

Hard to argue with this take.

This Gallup poll from April shows 42% with a HS education or less as saying they have never worn a mask in the past week, vs. just 20% of those with college or postgrad degrees.

It also certainly tallies with my observations here and would also tally with common sense, as it was obvious that they work since around March at the latest.

While there were some intelligent critics of the lockdowns, almost all the anti-masks people I can recall commenting here were barely literate blathering about Bill Gates’ chips and linking to weird YouTube videos.

tfw when no latina floomer gf

Another study I came across suggests that this is correlated with psychopathic and Dark Triad traits.

“I knew that traits from the so-called Dark Triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) as well as the traits subsumed within psychopathy are linked to health risk behavior and health problems, and I expected them to be implicated in health behaviors during the pandemic. There is also prior research suggesting that people high on the Dark Triad traits may knowingly and even deliberately put other people’s health at risk, e.g., by engaging in risky sexual behavior and not telling their partner about having HIV or STIs,” Blagov told PsyPost. …

Blagov found that lower levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness were associated with a reduced likelihood of endorsing health recommendations related to social distancing and hygiene. In other words, people who were less sympathetic/cooperative and people who were less responsible/organized were less likely to engage in preventative measures.

In addition, people who scored higher on the psychopathic subtraits of meanness and disinhibition tended to show less interest in social distancing and hygiene. Meanness and disinhibition also predicted the endorsement of behavior that puts others at risk of infection, such as touching or sneezing on high-use surfaces in public. Disinhibition reflects poor impulse control, while meanness describes the lack of regard for others.

“People scoring high on these traits tended to claim that, if they had COVID-19, they might knowingly or deliberately expose others to it,” Blagov told PsyPost.

“One potential implication from this research is that there may be a minority of people with particular personality styles (on the narcissism and psychopathy spectrum) that have a disproportionate impact on the pandemic by failing to protect themselves and others.”

This also tallies with my observations. The more aggressive floomer types do generally tend to be disagreeable people (to put it diplomatically).

And common sense. While there are perfectly rational costs/benefits arguments against, say, lockdowns, wearing a mask is so easy, cheap, and trivial that it does make sense that aggressive signaling against it would elevated psychopathy levels, on average.

On a practical note, I do wonder to what extent this might explain in East Asian success at containing Corona, vs. failure in most of the rest of the world.

From Richard Lynn’s comprehensive overview, we know that psychopathy levels follow Rushton’s classic r/K schema, where Northeast Asians > Europeans > other races.

Anatoly Karlin is a transhumanist interested in psychometrics, life extension, UBI, crypto/network states, X risks, and ushering in the Biosingularity.

 

Inventor of Idiot’s Limbo, the Katechon Hypothesis, and Elite Human Capital.

 

Apart from writing booksreviewstravel writing, and sundry blogging, I Tweet at @powerfultakes and run a Substack newsletter.

Comments

  1. Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.

    If you are new to my work, start here.

  2. Kent Nationalist says

    To play Devil’s Advocate, AE has showed before that more educated people can also be more likely to believe stupid and wrong things, like that blacks are as intelligent as whites

  3. Felix Keverich says

    https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/masks-and-education.png

    Men – 29%

    Women – 44%

    Evidence suggests that masks is a measure of political conformity, not intelligence. Also, consider the fact that US universities are basically liberal indoctrination centers, and it becomes logical that the more college education you have, the more conformist you become.

  4. Fuerchtegott says

    Wear mine for groceries, but not once washed it.

  5. EldnahYm says

    These results might also correlate with non-conformity.

    EDIT: Felix beat me to the punch.

  6. Chris Mallory says

    I only wear one when I take my wife to hospital appointments. I ordered one with a Confederate Flag for those visits.

    Otherwise, no I will not wear one. I also do not wear seat belts. Every election since 1988 has seem me write in “Willie Nelson” for every office because anyone who wants power over other people should not have it.

    On a practical note, I do wonder to what extent this might explain in East Asian success at containing Corona, vs. failure in most of the rest of the world.

    East Asians are little better than hive mind insects.

  7. Not Raul says

    A lot of them don’t actually believe those things.

    How can you tell what someone actually believes? It isn’t what they say they believe. It isn’t even what they might think that they believe. What people truly believe is reflected in what they actually do.

    There are a lot of affluent people who say the politically correct things; but then vote against anything that might increase the number of poor black and brown families living in their neighborhood.

  8. Daniel Chieh says

    East Asians are little better than hive mind insects.

    You fit in well with dear Latina hottie.

  9. Not Raul says

    Masks reduce the spread of the disease.

    If people put expressing their tribal affiliations before protecting the population, that ain’t right.

  10. anonymous coward says

    Still beating the dead coronahorse.

    A more interesting question is why the deaths y’all so eagerly anticipated never materialized.

    At this point I think it’s obvious that a) corona complications are an autoimmune disorder, and b) corona deaths are due to medical error; specifically, Western industrial medicine treating an autoimmune disease as if it isn’t.

    In that vein, insisting on mask compliance is pretty dumb.

  11. Not Only Wrathful says

    “You either cover your face and lock yourself at home, or you’re an imbecilic psychopath” says perfectly well-adjusted blogger, confusing psychopath for the antonym of conformist, and imbecile for anything that makes him uncomfortable.

    “East Asian mask wearing has led to super performance in Coronavirus test” he adds. Ignoring that life is about much more than becoming a computer game hermit.

    “But think about all of those deaths” he blurts out, without pause. Neglecting entirely that East Asian self-expression, once the financial resources for it exists, seems to amount to running away from anything that looks like life.

    “But muh numbers,” he flops out as culmination; mean nothing in the context of even one little other fact, like that 59% of Chinese men smoke.

    Life is a joy and is infinitely complex. Reducing the choice of mask wearing, or not, to an IQ test, says everything about the diminished perspective of the reducer and nothing about the real world.

  12. Dacian Julien Soros says

    Yeah, I had similar smart ass thought about masks, as long as I was working on Zoom. And then I had to do some paperwork in person. It’s 30 degrees all day long. You have to wait outside because covid. I am not sure what was more oppressing wearing a mask – the bike or the subway.

    How smart would it be now to turn to farm workers, meatpackers, truckers, and bricklayers, and ask them to wear masks, because covid? Romanians are mostly that sort of workers, not wankers on Slack. I’d imagine Russians too depend on the millions who sweat enough at work, so that they don’t feel the need for a gym or a muzzle.

    The disease will infect everyone that is to be infected, and will kill everyone that is to be killed. There will never be high adherence to masks, there will never be a vaccine, there will never by a drug, and the ventilators are a crapshoot. There is no need to be a patronizing hikikomori.

    At least, I am pretty sure none of us is impressed.

  13. TelfoedJohn says

    If only mask-wearing was correlated with ugliness.

    Incidentally, what has happened in burka-wearing regions? Has modesty cut down the infection rate?

  14. Evidence suggests that masks is a measure of political conformity, not intelligence.

    I suspect both personality and intelligence are factors as the author of this blog suggests.

    Men – 29%

    Women – 44%

    Isn’t male intelligence on a flatter bell curve, i.e. more male morons and geniuses than females?

  15. If it’s an IQ test, then it’s a test for midwit IQs. More likely, it’s a test of conformity, which correlates with education.

    http://ocla.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Rancourt-Masks-dont-work-review-science-re-COVID19-policy.pdf

    Masks don’t work, as anyone with an actual understanding of virus transmission can tell you. (Spoiler alert: Anatoly “Corona Will Kill Millions” Karlin is not one of those people.)

  16. I also do not wear seat belts

    You want to be “thrown clear” of the car in accidents, right?

  17. inertial says

    Major cities in Brazil require masks since April and it didn’t slow the spread any. Is it because compliance in Brazil is low or do masks only work for East Asians?

  18. a measure of political conformity, not intelligence

    On any question, there are really three groups of people:

    1. People who know something about it.
    2. People who do not know something about it and either have no opinion or “conform” to the opinions of those in group 1.

    3. People who do not know something about it, and believe that they have a God-given right to have an opinion on it despite their manifest ignorance, and that the answer to any question can be discovered by their brain using rhetoric and no math.

    I don’t want to hear the opinions on coronavirus from all these commenters who haven’t done any math since they failed algebra in high school. I’m not going to show them any level of intellectual respect. You want to call me an elitist? Fine. I’ve called myself a populist but never an egalitarian. I believe in equality under the law, but not that everyone’s equally capable. There are competent people and there are incompetent people. “Everyone’s entitled to an opinion,” I say no, they aren’t.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUTZmSyDErg

  19. The % always seems suspect to me. In very democratic leaning central Portland usage is close to 100% in stores but ~15% for people just walking around. Although maybe more people than I think never leave their house unless in a car…

  20. inertial says

    No one really knows whether masks work or not, so the first group is null. You obviously belong to the third group.

  21. Felix Keverich says

    You realize that unless your mask has expensive FFP2 filter on it, it doesn’t actually protect YOU?

  22. The question is…

    are you wussy Care Bears

    or

    rough and tumble Bad News Bears?

    I say go with BAD NEWS BEARS!

    Karlin’s Kids:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASzFs4_4kvk

    Real Kids:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSQxtMWJzGQ

  23. Mr. Hack says

    Felix says:

    You realize that unless your mask has expensive FFP2 filter on it, it doesn’t actually protect YOU?

    True or not?

    BTW, I’ve been wearing a painter’s mask during this season, I think that it has more of a filter than others that I’ve seen out there. I only go out shopping about 1-2 times per week and let it rest in my car where the temperatures can reach to more than 140 + Fahrenheit. It’s basically an oven, so I think it’s killing anything that might attach itself to my mask?

  24. Education level is not necessarily a hard and fast correlation with intelligence towards the upper bounds.

    I tend to find that most graduate and post-graduate programs are geared towards people of above-average to high intelligence with a certain modicum of discipline and a willingness to conform to institutional expectations. The price of exercising too much intellectual independence is loss of status/access.

    As such, I find that people who are educationally attained are certainly bright, but they tend not to count too many great luminaries or points of brilliance among their ranks. Indeed some of the brightest and most brilliant minds in my circles are drop-outs from either undergraduate or graduate programs. I tend to think that possession of ultra-intelligence is almost a disability as it can become very difficult to make one’s way in the world unless one has a double helping of social awareness, a well-concealed lack of empathy, and/or moral maneuverability.

    Another facet I find about the well-educated is that some of them possess tactical blinders to protect themselves from dangerous opinions, information, or evidence. I have a very dear friend of mine in mind who is extremely highly-placed at a public university. Brilliant, but almost deliberately incapable or ignorant outside of his sphere. Seems to me to be a very rational, intuitive response to protect his excellent income, high status, and outstanding access to opportunities. Not asking too many interesting questions is a good survival strategy.

    And on the other hand, those of lesser intellect often posses a better set of instincts and a more reliable character.

    In the United States, the above-zero prospect of cataclysm means sending the right signals is very important in terms of building/developing local communities. Finding a set of people that can be relied upon and who share enough attributes of the western tradition of civilization so as to make a common cause could become a question of survival.

    Since the mask is very visible endorsement of a particular set of facts, rules, and prejudices, it is a very interesting way to establish a set of characteristics about a particular individual. I tend to think that intelligence is secondary to belief, faith, and ethos. I also tend to think that mask-wearing in the United States is something that corresponds to trust in the system. Those who are well-educated owe a great deal to the system and are more likely to accept popular consensus – after all, they are part of the established order. And therefore, less likely to be willing to explore or countenance pessimistic social outcomes.

    In East Asia, societies and their governments have demonstrated a far greater degree of commitment to their national, ethnic, and cultural cardinalities in recent decades. It is very natural and normal thing for those regions to add the mask to the public uniform. There is a great deal of social and cultural precedent, and for many people there I think it comes quite naturally, and may even be seen as a social relief for some.

    The implication of this idea that intelligent people wear masks and the unintelligent, and sociopaths, do not, is an artful method of reducing the status of non-mask wearers. A rebel risks being branded a moron or an idiot. And the odd non-conformist savant risks the Bobby Fischer treatment.

    So, it is certainly smart to wear a mask, as far as access to status and the public spaces is concerned – but whether it is the right and proper thing to do: I’m not so sure. In my view, as I have expressed on my own site, the facts and evidence are neither here nor there – the use of reason, logic, and scientific method is usually in the service of some higher (or lower) ethos. Much of what has been written and done about the virus serves less overt purposes.

    One throws up a literal wall between oneself and others when the mask is donned. There are no clear rules for how the masked and unmasked should treat each other – there is a latent hostility between the two camps that is not entirely unuseful. The mask accelerates the decline in social cohesion – sometimes there is a fellowship between mask-wearers but often I find that those with the mask will avoid comradeship with other mask wearers for the sake of the public good.

    The people that do not wear masks I think are finding themselves more and more willing to engage with other naked-faces. This is proving to be a great opportunity for building bridges and establishing new relationships. There are not so many activities going on and the need to create one’s own activities leads to improved social cohesion amongst those who publically signal non-compliance.

    By wearing a mask one could possibly save a life – by not wearing a mask one could possibly engage in social genesis (also a very easy and cheap way to publically withhold consent from the established consensus). And all this is said without taking into account any of the data regarding the virus’ nature – much can and has been said – and time will tell. It is certain, at least in the United States, that mask wearing is as much about signaling as anything. It is becoming a deeply political act.

    But I do think it is an oversimplification to reduce mask-wearing to an intelligence-based shit-test.

  25. Last time I checked, the logic was, if everybody wears a mask, we each protect the other from what our own throats are spewing out. Can`t say I wear it everywhere, but hell, at least I have it on in the subway/bus, and many do not even bother anymore.

  26. I find it interesting, walking around Athens, to see who wears a mask and who doesn’t, who wears it but has it lowered so it is no longer a mask but a rather unsightly cravat. I saw two people with lowered masks who looked like they were married or lovers, talking to each other. He was East Asian in appearance, she was probably Greek.
    It was over 30 Centigrade in Athens today and wearing those things is uncomfortable after a while in hot weather. You start off wanting to prove your social responsibility and high IQ but push comes to shove, the mask sweats and steams up and bit by bit you become f@@king uncomfortable.
    At least in the case of younger people, mask-wearing strikes me as a marker for social conformity, faith in messages picked up from TV and perhaps timidity.

  27. ” it doesn’t actually protect YOU” -Narcissistic tendencies can be mitigated by rational thought but one must have the capacity for it.

    This is not just about YOU. This is about everybody. Masks reduce R0 if worn by everybody even if masks are imperfect. There are studies that definitively demonstrate that 80% mask usage reduces R0 to below 1 which extinguishes the epidemic.

    One of the reason that CDC and WHO were de-emphasizing mask wearing is that their chief policy of flu prevention is vaccination. One may suspect that they are not too happy with Asian countries which manage to contain flu epidermis with much lower vaccination coverage because of the culture of mask wearing. For this very reason CDC would sponsor research showing that masks are not 100% effective while not emphasizing the role of mask wearing in stopping epidemics. And indeed some studies show that wearing a mask will not protect you if you spend long enough time among the infected who do no wear masks. But the studies do not look at the situation where everybody wears a mask, the infected, in particular The time of infectiousness is finite so the assumption of ‘long enough time’ is fallacious in their studies.

    This is very western, specifically American approach that de-emphasize coordinated group actions. People are expected to be atomized and concerned only about their on asses. This is why the Prisoner Dilemma is so popular in American psychology and sociology. But it is the most primitive lowest level scenario:

    The Prisoner’s Dilemma, as played by two very dumb libertarians who keep ending up on defect-defect. There’s a much better outcome available if they could figure out the coordination, but coordination is hard. From a god’s-eye-view, we can agree that cooperate-cooperate is a better outcome than defect-defect, but neither prisoner within the system can make it happen. – Scott Alexander

    Smarter solution need coordinated actions. They can be sabotaged by the defectors. The defectors are usually the selfish and/or idiots.

  28. nokangaroos says

    It´s hard to argue with the observable fact that disciplined East Asians who wear masks as a matter of course but without any ado fare much better than rugged individualists who refuse for no better reason than because.
    This also means the statue-toppling baizuo who believe in the objective reality of their oh-so-tender “feelings” are more quintessentially American than they (or their opposition) want to hear 😛

  29. WorkingClass says

    Post-grads are wearing their mask. Post-grads are smart. Therefore smart people are wearing their mask? You tell me. I only have an associates degree. Post-grads also support BLM.

    I think there are times when wearing a mask is a good idea if you are sharing an indoor space with the public. I appreciate being informed when those times arise. And if you don’t want me in your building without a mask I will wear one or stay outside. But I am 100% opposed to government mandates regarding masks.

    Being an old, White Deplorable I am acquainted with some men who won’t wear a mask simply because they resent being told they must. If you follow twitter you know that belligerence is not limited to the Proles.

    I am not convinced that intelligence is a reliable indicator of mask wearing behavior. Advanced degrees yes if the poll is accurate. But intelligence?

  30. He’s being facetious.

  31. Is it a coincidence that smoking rates have fallen precipitously amongst teenagers and young adults while suicide rates have skyrocketed? Smoking is a powerful and life-affirming activity. Nicotine, alongside DMT is one of nature’s “God Molecules”. And for what it’s worth, smokers appear to be significantly less impacted by coronavirus than non-smokers. The fact that 59% of Han Chinese men smoke, and that smoking is much more tolerated in East Asia than in the West is further proof of East Asian superiority.

  32. I haven’t read your “prior work”, and I don’t plan to. But this article is simply a rant.

  33. That is not true, ordinary masks offer limited protection as well, though the greater benefit is that they protect others by greatly restricting air outflow (e.g. when one coughs, or talks), which is especially important in indoor environments which is where the vast bulk of infections seem to take place.

    Here is a graphical demonstration:

    https://vimeo.com/399120258

    For an even earthier demonstration, see this meme.

    So the effects multiply when everyone wears them, it seems that 80%+ adoption results in r0 < 1 even in the absence of lockdowns.

    This is why IMO comments to the effect that "if you're such a fearful loser then wear a mask, har-har" mark the person making them as an idiot, or a psychopath, or both. They are signaling a fundamental unwillingness to participate in solving collection action problems. My bet is that these people also litter more, less likely to return wallets, get their children vaccinated, etc. The more of them you have, the less civilized, capable, and – bluntly – idiotic your society becomes.

  34. sudden death says

    Once again returning to the initial most pessimistic (or probably most optimistic from herd immunity crowd POV) script here, which was calculated from initial Chinese data in January where main assumption was done as if virus would spread without any countermeasures taken anywhere in the world.

    Now we are at roughly Feb 17 on that script with nearly 10 million infected but just official known deaths have overshot even that most gloomy prediction by nearly 2 times in reality where prediction was 264 k dead while at the moment we have nearly 500 k dead worldwide:

    https://imgur.com/sJFywUP)

    After half a year, obviously good thing from all this – even without vaccines/drugs, clearly it can be contained and stopped (S.Korea) or even eradicated (Taiwan, N. Zealand) without most drastic possible countermeasures, as long as someone in power gives a damn and reacts seriously early enough. Also it can be stopped even with all variatons of CCP’íed China patented nonsense (ignore&deny everything early, silence the news&whistles, let it spread massively to the point of collapsing people outside, then complete shutdown, start welding everybody inside etc), but all modern economy goes down the drain.

    Herd immunity may be all well and good in wild populations, but it is a useless concept for agricultural or human production systems. Crop, meat or industrial production cannot work where large numbers of the producers are sick, so the implementing wet dream of immunners where all the world gets sick very quickly and roughly half a billion die, would most likely lead to the collapse of industrial civilization at least in short term.

  35. I think in general it is impossible to make sense of the coronavirus situation, and I have ceased trying. It is too weird and contradictory. No point getting into it.

    People who don’t believe in masks are probably just those who are have lost faith in the experts – they are aware of all the anomalies and contradictions and weirdness here.

    But they are also being incredibly cruel and insensitive to the fervent mask believers – people who are very afraid need to feel they have an effective course of action to follow. And I would not deny that to anyone who needs it.

    My own practice is to wear masks in stores – you are required to here in NYC – and when I find myself in crowded streets. Otherwise no. I personally suspect that I already had the virus. I almost never get ill, and this winter I had a very strange and long respiratory illness that just refused to fully go away for a long time.

    I think we should be respectful to those who fear this thing and take reasonable measures in public.

    In NYC, I can report that mask wearing is back up to 95%+ – and 100% in stores. That despite this, NYC is supposedly one of the hardest hit areas on the world is just one of those strange anomalies.

    I think we have to recognise that the materialist-sciency types will naturally be very fearful in times like these, and show them compassion.

  36. JohnPlywood says

    That was an excellent post. It describes the situation perfectly. Thank you for taking the time to type it.

    Unfortunately, the alt-right seems to attract a lot of mentally handicapped individuals with a paranoia about “conformity” and “control”. Kind of like a lot of feminists are obsessed with men trying to “control” them. Unsurprisingly, a lot of these people on the right complaining about being “controlled” are disgusting hermaphroditic feminists of a truly repulsive nature; an actual amalgamation of feminine and masculine attributes. Many of them are even full blown Jewish “females” hiding behind gentile usernames. They must be controlled, censored, brainwashed, spanked in public, groped and spraypainted upon, at all costs, until they assume the appropriate gender.

  37. Anyone who wears a mask is a stupid faggot and natural slave.

    COVID will not harm you if you are not old, diseased, or obese.

    Anyone who is old, diseased, or obese is free to take whatever measures necessary to protect themselves.

    Not my problem, not my responsibility.

    I will not wear a mask. I will not get sick, because I am young(ish) and healthy. Anyone insisting I wear a mask is insisting I undignify myself for their own stupid, fat, lazy benefit. Fuck them, fuck you.

    Anyone who wears a mask who is not old, diseased, or obese, is an hysterically fearful, pathetic faggot slave. Period.

  38. one really knows whether masks work or not

    We know that masks can work, and that their real world performance is usually far above their certification level.

    For example, in one real world testing, – e.g. FFP1 mask by 3M filtered 98,6% of particles larger than 0,007 microns. The virus which causes COVID-19 is 0,09 microns, and the droplets which contain it far larger than that.

    So FFP1 mask can filter 98,6% of particles above those more than ten times smaller than the relevant virus we are trying to prevent, and far more than ten times smaller than the water droplets that contain them.

    • Pathetic thing is that the whole epidemic could be preventable, with some basic equipment and training of the population to use it. That is – preventable without need for the brutal lockdowns we have seen.

    I’m still out of office. But when we go back in some weeks, our office has agreed to install air purifiers with HEPA filters, and every personnel has agreed that they are going to wear FFP3 masks. Although I don’t know if anyone will wear eye protection.

    Regardless, if everyone followed this, there should be almost no workplace transmission (but of course, most offices in the world, will not follow this). I am wondering what the point of the lockdown was, when we could have foreseen this kind of possibility, and stockpiled this equipment (also at a national level). Offices should never have needed to close – just people should have sat in the office with a certain discomfort of the mask and gloves.

  39. Kratoklastes says

    If that’s Scott Alexander’s characterisation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, he’s a fuckwit.

    The PD is a naïve, full-information, comparative-static introductory demagogic example.

    The entire point is to show that even if individuals are purely self-interested and have perfect information, under certain payoff structures a ‘one shot’ equilibrium can result in a less-than-preferred outcome if collusion is impossible. (If collusion is permitted the PD model is no longer relevant).

    Bear in mind that all payoffs are known to all participants, with certainty.

    It is the payoff relativities that ‘drive’ the situation towards the ‘counterintuitive’ solution.

    That’s the point that about 70% of undergraduates (and 99% of psychosophasters) don’t ‘get’ when they are shown the PD: they simply think that “Defect/Defect” is always the outcome – i.e., they don’t actually understand how to find a Nash Equilibrium (if it exists) from a payoff matrix.

    .

    It would not matter if the participants were “two very dumb libertarians” or two fuckwits that do whatever Scott Alexander does (FWIW he’s a psychosophaster-charlatan – a byword for dilettantism and innumeracy).

    All that matters for the PD to work is that there is no credible ex ante trust between the two people who have to make a (simultaneous) decision and that there is a specific structure in the payoff matrix and that collusion is not permitted.

    .

    So his view is typical psychobabble fucktardism: assume away the key condition (i.e., no collusion) and declare yourself as possessing the ‘god’s eye view’.

    Well played, you stupid cunt, because the ‘god’s eye view’ is already a known known – even to the participants.

    That’s the whole point.

    And let’s stipulate: the introductory, first-week-of-semester pedagogical model is not “all there is” to Game Theory. It is designed so that even half-trained midwits can get some handle on core concepts.

    This is another common thing observed among psychosophasters: the tendency to think it’s a ‘Gotcha’ to critique a superior discipline’s highly-simplified elementary pedagogic models, on the basis that you’ve “discovereed” the “shocking secret” that these models are highly simplified. In other words… pretend that the discipline doesn’t know that the introductory models are highly simplified, and hope that your audience is ignorant enough that they don’t know better (a good bet if your audience is psychosophasters, journalists or Karen from HR).

    This was Kahnemann’s entire schtick (in other contexts): pretend that mainstream economics claims that all decisions are one-shot comparative-static full-information constrained-maximisation problems… then setup an artificial set of choices with near-zero payoff differentials, and feign that you’ve ‘refuted consumer rationality’ when the results look like a set of coin tosses.

  40. I have ceased trying. It is too weird

    There have been quite a lot of obvious implications for anyone watching the drama of the last few months, although mainly just negative things about the low capacity of the governments and populations in Western countries.

    For example, that Western people are far too stupid for risking dangerous things like civilian nuclear energy. The population wouldn’t even follow basic mitigation instructions if there was an accident, and the governments would respond in a confused and muddled way to any disasters.

    That even in the regions of Russia, provincial people are more hygienic and less disordered, than in some of the most wealthy and successful Western countries like England.

    • It was also useful for seeing popularity of some of the bit “nihilistic” assumptions of the modern mind. For example, many people, and even health experts, were trying to calculate the “cost” of death, in terms of life years lost by each person who will die in the epidemic. So therefore – they seemed to argue – we shouldn’t worry as much about the deaths of old people, than of young. On this topic is one of the few times I would prefer the morality of the Romans, or at least Cicero.

  41. Dicentim says

    The rest of us have somewhat prominent noses; most masks aren’t airtight at the edges because of that; East Asians are flat faced.

    Not expressing an opinion here about this whole pandemic thing as I don’t know enough and I don’t tend to believe things when people try so hard to persuade me; also, not saying that masks stop the virus or that they don’t, but if they do, it could be a factor.

  42. Philip Owen says

    KN95 and N95 work too. They have a marginally higher spec for water soluble particles than FFP2. FFP2 wins on oily particles – not a CV19 problem but hayfever …

  43. Morton's toes says

    Surgical masks are next to useless except in very limited circumstances.

    John M. Barry

    (professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and Distinguished Scholar at Tulane’s Bywater Institute)

    author of:

    https://www.amazon.com/Great-Influenza-Deadliest-Pandemic-History/dp/0143036491

    quotation is from p. 457 of the book, Afterword, where he encapsulates the lessons for our future actions from the influenza epidemic 1918+

  44. Philip Owen says

    Hayfever. Respirators have done miracles for me. My usual summer brain fog goes when my respirator is on. So I wear it walking in the open air. Passers bY suspect I have the virus.

  45. Put mask in pocket, put on in closed spaces or crowds

  46. another anon says

    While we are talking about IQ, Unz.com proves again it is the home of most elite high IQ writers and commenters.

    Yes, (((they))) were lying to you about everything. Not only the (((virushoax))) (((climatehoax))) (((evolutionhoax))) (((shootinghoax))) (((holohoax))) (((moonhoax))) and (((nukehoax))), but also (((ancienthoax))) and (((Romehoax))).

    https://www.unz.com/article/how-fake-is-roman-antiquity

    Hopefully, more true history of Great Tartaria and Great Mud Flood for the Western audience will follow.

    Wake up, sheeple! Remember, the truth is out there!

  47. It explains why the balkans has a rather low IQ score. Intelligence is decent, on par with other europeans, but psychopathy/sociopathy is ludicrously high, and agreeableness basically negative

    They get the data mostly from schools. The tests are not graded. Therefore, 75% will simply not even bother since they personally get nothing out of it

    It certainly fits my personal experience, and explains why even the highly educated delve into conspiracy theories – in such a society such schemes and conspiracies are considered normal

    A good strategy against human adversaries (always aplenty), but not so good for making a west-fetishist liberal democracy

  48. Robert Dolan says

    I have a fairly high IQ and I wear the mask only when it’s required.

    I do not think wearing the mask is a sign of intelligence at all and I do not believe that poll.

    They’ve lied so much about Covid I don’t believe anything they say. The death rate is a tiny fraction of what they claimed.

    In addition….I doubt that a mask is able to stop a virus anyway. Wearing the stupid mask is like erecting a chain link fence to stop mosquitoes.

  49. Barbarossa says

    It seems to me that the masks are performative for a great number of people. I see a lot of people wearing them half assed, or the type wearing them alone in their car. A lot of it is Kabuki theater.

    My own mask is a Crusader style great helm. This is not a particularly political stance, but more in line with my place as “Impaler of Sacred Cows” and “Great High Omnipotent Court Jester”.

    Some people get a kick out of it, but a great many don’t even batt an eye. Strange times indeed!

  50. china-russia-all-the-way says

    There are too many comments to read through. Many high quality comments might be missed because of saturation. I wish there was a mechanism to prune bad commentators. Maybe a periodic community vote to boot 1-2 commentators (or nobody) for dragging down the intellectual environment by being low quality and tedious?

  51. Exactly. The 600,000 white British people who left London might say that they left for ‘fresh air’ or to send their kids to ‘nicer schools’ but we all know why. Intelligent people are often just better at deluding themselves, especially since intelligence correlates with all sorts of empathic personality traits and ‘moral’ people don’t like to acknowledge hard truths. I don’t like it when people point out that intelligent people think this or that and so they must be right (like when people say that liberals are more intelligent).

    On the point of morality, I would say that the character aspect could influence intelligent people wearing masks more often. Conscientiousness, agreeableness, empathy, they’re all correlated with intelligence. Intelligent people are also more likely to be overcautious and anxious. I guess the point is that while the decision to wear a mask is objectively rational, it doesn’t necessarily reflect hyper-rationality on the part of the decision-maker, rather a more complicated admixture of rationality and personality.

  52. I saw a clerk in a store wearing a long bird beak mask making him look like the doctors in the pictures from the time of the plague. Looks great! Perhaps a gas mask from surplus military gear shop would work. The masks from the Yugoslavian military look especially insect-like and would certainly cause a stir.

  53. I wear N95 mask at work, though I’m not sure it is absolutely necessary – I walk through rivers of industrial bleach and clouds of chlorine gas on a daily basis. Any virus would find that environment rather uncomfortable. (Chemical plant that makes disinfectants. I’m normally a polymers guy, but there’s real good money in disinfectants right now, and learning a new chemistry set is fun).

    I found N95 to be less hassle to use compared to full face respirator, and it delays trace chlorine gas from getting to my sinuses long enough so I can hike 5 stories up a reactor platform to where I need to be. So I’m pretty happy about that.

  54. JohnPlywood says

    You call other people “faggot” and “slave”, but your resistance to cooperating with the authorities by wearing a mask during a pandemic just shows that you are nothing but an irate dyke who is obsessed with men trying to “control” her, because it is your top priority in life stubbornly and mindlessly disobey the Man. Traditionally, you would be grabbed by the hair and escorted to the nearest dungeon, for a perilous night of asssex.

  55. Jatt Arya says

    I also do not wear seat belts

    Ok retard let me print off a Darwin award. If you live in a crime infested area this is understandable, although they do make under steering wheel holsters.

  56. Not Only Wrathful says

    Boring to point out, but correlation is not causation. Sao Paulo has had ubiquitous mask wearing for almost two months and has ever increasing cases. Meanwhile, no one wears masks in London and cases have been falling and falling.

  57. nokangaroos says

    If Jefferson had believed in a “right” to antisocial behavior he´d have written an Amendment (though the SCOTUS may still find it is subsumed under the First).
    Even the Prophet (pbuh) had more contagion sense (“If you hear of an outbreak do not go there lest you infect yourself; if there do not go elsewhere lest you infect others.”).

  58. Yeah but they conducted that study at Howard University.

  59. anonymous coward says

    …during a pandemic…

    There is no ‘pandemic’. Look at Africa, India or South-East Asia.

    These people aren’t dying. Whatever was causing excess mortality this spring wasn’t the virus; the idea that Africans and Indians aren’t being infected with COVID is preposterous.

  60. I ordered a latex Donald Drumpf mask for the monthly, or so, occasion that it cannot be avoided. Im all about giving the Commie-in-chief due credit for his handiwork.

  61. another anon says

    If Jefferson had believed in a “right” to antisocial behavior he´d have written an Amendment (though the SCOTUS may still find it is subsumed under the First).

    Yeah.
    If the “Muh founding fathers” “Muh constitution” types lived in these times and started bitching that vaccination is plot by John Jacob Astor to exterminate them and quarantine is affront to their FREEDUMMM, the founding fathers themselves would apply nine-o-cat tail treatment on their backs, followed by swift hanging if they continued bitching.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1775%E2%80%931782_North_American_smallpox_epidemic#Quarantine_methods

    Members of the English colonies as well as English officials were proactive in establishing quarantine guidelines in order to protect the public. One of the earliest recorded examples of this was a quarantine established in 1647 by Puritans in order to prevent the spread of disease from ships coming from the Caribbean. In 1731 an act, entitled “An Act to Prevent Persons From Concealing the Smallpox”, was passed. This act made the heads of households mandatory reporters for smallpox; these individuals were required to report smallpox in their house to the selectmen of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Infected households would then be indicated with the placement of a red flag.[4] In South Carolina, sentinels were to be posted outside infected households and infectious notices were required to be posted. In many colonies islands were set up to quarantine individuals coming in by ship. This decreased the chances of smallpox being introduced via trade or travel. By the late 1700s, almost all colonies had quarantine laws in effect in order to diminish the hugely damaging effects that smallpox could have on their communities.

    https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/how_vaccination_helped_win_the_revolutionary_war.html

    But lesser known is George Washington’s bold decision to vaccinate the entire Continental Army against smallpox. It was the first mass inoculation in military history, and was vital to ensuring an American victory in the War of Independence.

  62. JohnPlywood says

    Trumpers when there is no pandemic: HERP DERP SHITSKINS GOT NO HEALTHCARE SYSTEM CUZ THEY LOW IQ LAFF AT DEM

    Trumpers when Donald Trump’s odds of re-election are near zero: SEE THEM NAGGERS AINT GOT NO CORONAVIRUS SO THIS SHIT’S BEEN FAKED. STOP SAYING TRUMP CAN’T WIN ITS GIVING ME CHILLS.

    India’s caseload has been surging the past few days, and nobody really knows for sure what’s going on in Africa. As we all saw in the last 4 months, things can change very rapidly. That not all corners of the world have the same death rate at any given time, doesn’t make this pandemic fake. This is something that’s going to unravel over the course of years.

  63. Otherwise, no I will not wear one. I also do not wear seat belts. Every election since 1988 has seem me write in “Willie Nelson” for every office because anyone who wants power over other people should not have it.

    Then you should advocate for Demarchy. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarchy

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

  64. Not a good comparison. Smallpox could kill up to 30% of those contracting it, including many younger people. It was a hundred times worse than the coronavirus. The response to a disease needs to be proportionate to the seriousness of a disease. Individuals and in some cases even towns were quarantined during smallpox epidemics but note here that it was sick individuals being put under quarantine instead of everyone being told they had to stay home and most of the country having almost all economic activity shut down for months.

    Shutting down an entire society was never the standard procedure here in the U.S. to deal with an infectious disease. It was not done in the flu epidemics of 1968 or 1957. In the 1957 flu epidemic the New York Times said everyone needed to stay calm. Compare that to the hysterical media reaction to the current epidemic. Only in the worst of cases, the 1918 flu epidemic, was there large scale shutdowns. Even then many shops and businesses stayed open and, here too, we are talking about something much more serious than what we have now. Lengthy mass lock downs were never done in the U.S. because it was understood they were not effective and also infringed upon people’s freedom. It was only the decline in a widespread belief in the value of freedom in the current U.S. population that enabled them to be imposed with little resistance. This would not have been done in the era of the founding fathers or even 50 years ago if it had happened then.

  65. Pericles says

    As I recall, the US experts and authorities at first told the populace that masks were ineffective (“the noble lie”, I suppose). Once a sufficient supply of masks had been secured for the important people, masks suddenly became effective and even required.

    When this whole thing started and various globalists were flown all over the world from Wuhan and released without testing or quarantine, it seemed clear that the global establishment didn’t really mind if Corona-chan spread.

    (Imma skip the modelling, done by the expertiest of experts.)

    Instead of putting the vulnerable in quarantine, everyone was locked down. (Though not in Sweden.) But then the authorities managed to infect the vulnerable anyway, by not keeping the quarantine anyway. Ranging from using moronic staff who don’t know or care about that sort of thing (Sweden and elsewhere) to actually sending diseased cases back to the care homes (Cuomo, New York City). I suppose they followed best practices as set by experts full of expertise.

    And then when it’s politically expedient, suddenly a lockdown is no big thing. There are no covidiots anymore, let the kids play around a bit, what are you, a Nnnnazi?

    “But this time we mean it! Listen to us, bigots!

  66. Pericles says

    Should Nicotine gum be considered a nootropic?

  67. Pericles says

    Have you broken any statues lately?

  68. by not wearing a mask one could possibly engage in social genesis (also a very easy and cheap way to publically withhold consent from the established consensus).

    All that verbiage to conclude that is reasonable in terms of cost/benefit ratio to make new friends from the likely unintelligent and sociopathic part of the population by running a greater risk of infection. You are writing satire, right? A hospital stay is not cheap.

  69. Max Payne says

    Just let it go man. Just let it go.

    So far boobs, Indian food and now masking are all g-loaded/high IQ.

    Bro… You can’t just keep saying the things you like are high IQ. Totally not cool.

  70. jimmyriddle says

    There are a lot of confounding factors.

    Eg Do you use public transport, or do you drive? (Women are less likely to drive).

  71. Sao Paulo and London differ in many ways. Public transportation in Sao Paulo is mainly by buses which are standing-room only and packed shoulder to shoulder. If you want to trot out “correlation is not causation” to any effect, you need to go into path analysis in its modern form, i.e. causal analysis as developed by Judea Pearl.

    https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ssu/1255440554

  72. Not Only Wrathful says

    None of thousands get infected in Oslo gym experiment. Participants acted like people with social anxiety, but didn’t wear masks. Acting weird therefore the real protection from both infection and connection, not masks.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/health/coronavirus-gyms-fitness.html

  73. Not Only Wrathful says

    Public transport was basically empty and everyone was wearing masks; meanwhile the tube in London is full and people are almost as packed in as Tokyo.

  74. anonymous coward says

    India’s caseload…

    …is absolutely irrelevant when I’m talking about mortality.

  75. Europe Europa says

    I’m surprised mask wearing is not a lot higher in Britain, because Brits are hardly courageous libertarian types in most senses. Brits are the definition of domesticated wimps, most would consider a butter knife to be an offensive weapon, while all the blacks and Muslims are tooled up and ready to “slice man up” as they say.

    Even British police don’t carry guns, the reason harking back to the same reason Brits as a whole don’t have weapons, they are so despised in Britain not even the police are trusted with them. We hear a lot about countries like Sweden and France, yet I bet whites in those countries are more tooled up than Britain.

  76. Pffffft. Stormer crowd is as pacifist IRL as they come!

  77. another anon says

    Have you broken any statues lately?

    Statues?
    What statues?
    It is scientifically proven you cannot make human being out of stone or metal.
    It is not possible.
    Do you have any evidence that “statues” were ever real?
    Not photoshopped pictures.
    Not Hollywood movies.
    Not crisis actor “witnesses”.
    Actual, real, PHYSICAL EVIDENCE that any “statue” ever existed.
    Show your work, statuecuck.

  78. Hard to argue with this take.

    Not at all.

    Generally people with high IQs are nonconformists. Wearing a face mask is just doing what you are told without regard to the facts of efficaciousness.
    Sadly, today a college degree, earned in the last thirty or forty years, says nothing about your IQ. This country’s colleges and universities are full of conformist idiots. Merit has little to do with college admission or graduation. The main goal of colleges and universities is to produce conformists.
    The poll, was of course, was conducted by word of honor, thereby giving virtue signalers the upper hand.
    I see people driving their car…alone…wearing a mask. I see people mowing their lawn…wearing a mask…at best these people are conformists…in reality probably idiots.

  79. That is not true, ordinary masks offer limited protection as well, though the greater benefit is that they protect others by greatly restricting air outflow (e.g. when one coughs, or talks), which is especially important in indoor environments which is where the vast bulk of infections seem to take place.

    And you believe retaining CO2 in your body is a good thing??? A mask, without a valve, that restricts air outflow also restricts air inflow…and you think that is a healthy situation??? Strange that a person with that opinion would call anyone else an idiot.

  80. Barbarossa says

    I do know somebody who ended up at the ER from excess CO2. She was a little too ambitious about keeping the mask on all the time and was starving for good air.
    Some of this may be because most of the homemade masks I see are such thick cloth. It seems like as gauzy as possible would still give most potential benefit with the intense discomfort.

  81. Barbarossa says

    That’s great that someone went with the plague doctor look. I have a surplus gas mask and considered it, but went with the helm for greater absurdity. I also have a mail shirt which I’ve considered wearing, but haven’t yet.
    At the very least, it’s worth taking advantage of the opportunity to do ones’ grocery shopping dressed like you are going to the siege of Constantinople.

    I’m not so much a skeptic of masks as being potentially helpful, but I dislike the absurd levels of paranoia many people seem to be adopting.

  82. Is that really true though?

    I think any sane person has to recognize there is something deeply weird going on here.

    New York supposedly did a terrible job, but I am seeing near total mask wearing here, even on streets and even while jogging, and indoors its 100%.

    Meanwhile, Anatoly says in the Moscow subway he’s seeing like 40% mask wearing rate, and the numbers are much better than NYC.

    A country like Vietnam supposedly did a great job – Vietnam is a crowded country that has a way of life and an infrastructure that makes social distancing impossible. Its not built for that. Anyone who has been there knows that. Moreover, the mentality of the people is disorganized and chaotic. Thats why I love it.

    And then China – we know that Chinese officials lied about this and covered it up for weeks. During that time travel was unrestricted – yet somehow, Shanghai and Beijing did not get the virus and it was entirely contained to one city.

    Then people like Ron Unz and Anatoly Karlin, as well as the mainstream experts, were confidently talking about the mortality rates when it was well known that we cannot assess mortality rates because no one was doing widespread testing and there was known to be a large number of asymptomatic infected. It didn’t matter. They pronounced away anyways.

    There is much, much more that is anomalous and weird here.

    I think the Covid scare has to be seen as a related phenomenon to the Floyd riots – we live in a time of disintegration that is prone to irrational panics and widespread anxiety.

    We do see widespread irrationality sweeping the globe – it would be extremely surprising if our reaction to Covid was the one pocket of rationality and completely unrelated to the larger events and trends in our global culture.

    The Covid form of irrationality seems merely to be suited to the “sciency” control types, who are generally anxious and fearful about death because they are materialists. But today everyone has some kind of panic suitable to their concerns.

    We live in a time of disintegration.

    The Covid situation reminds me of IQ studies – glaring anomalies and discrepancies are simply ignored and swept under the rug in order to maintain the illusion of knowledge and control.

  83. The first benefit of masks is prevention of own goals. It seems likely that one path of infection is by fingers touching a surface contaminated with infectious viral particles, and then later touching the mouth, nose, or eyes.

    Almost any mask offers good protection against those kinds of flubs. It is virtually impossible to inadvertently touch the mouth or nose while wearing a mask.

    The second benefit of the mask is it contains within itself some part of the material ejected by coughs, sneezes, and normal respiration. The mask is a filter. There may be leakage around the edges, but nothing that would be sprayed or hurled several feet toward another person’s face.

    For the benefit of others, some filtration is much better than none. Sociopaths won’t see it that way, but most responsible people will.

    The third benefit of the mask is that most of the air being breathed in by the mask wearer is also being filtered to some degree. A good mask design presents a substantial barrier to infectious particles trying to get through because a good mask design has depth, and ideally, several layers.

    The viral particles are liable to stick to almost anything they hit.

    If you happen to walk through a cloud of invisible but infectious viral particles hanging in the air, a good mask will filter out some part of the cloud. In fact, almost any mask will filter out some part of the cloud. The reduction in viral load may let the mask wearer’s innate immune system quickly gain the upper hand, and crush the remaining viral invaders before they ever get established.

    I suspect that healthy people with vigorous response from their innate immune systems would never even develop antibodies for COVID-19.

    If your shopping trip includes more than one stop, it makes some sense to simply continue wearing the mask after the first stop, rather than removing it, and putting it back on at the second destination. The driver you see wearing the mask may be in between multiple stops on a shopping trip, and is sensibly trying to avoid scoring an own goal.

    Removing the mask and putting it back on several times in the course of a shopping trip may make sense to low IQ types who can’t process the entire equation, and who become perplexed and/or indignant at the sight of a person wearing a mask while driving a car.

  84. I guess that the debate about whether western societies can ban islamic women from covering their faces in public has now been settled, hasn’t it?

    The statistics on whether the mass use of masks reduce disease spread in entire populations are still not conclusive, but they very much DO reduce disease spread in a hospital or clinic setting, so it seems likely. Coronavirus or not, I think the old days when someone would come in to work or board an airplane sick, and just cough and sneeze without a mask, are hopefully over.

  85. Kratoklastes, April 19, 2020

    https://www.unz.com/isteve/kaiser-permanente-data-on-hospitalizations/#comment-3846616

    Going outside without a mask is what I do now. It’s what I have done all my life. It’s what I will continue to do.

    That’s because I’m numerate, and I’m not an 80 year old with chronic lung or heart disease.

    utu, April 19, 2020

    https://www.unz.com/isteve/kaiser-permanente-data-on-hospitalizations/#comment-3846653

    Nobody cares what is your level of fear of dying or how numerate you are or how old you are (btw, you are 55, aren’t you?). You should wear a mask so you do reduce chances of infecting others, so you do not cause discomfort and anxiety in others.

  86. Dieter Kief says

    Not wearing masks as a general rule, but doing so for the elderly when not self-isolating is a test of civility and citizenship – and Switzerland, where everybody is still self-isolating from one another is doing quite well in this test.

  87. Robert Dolan says
  88. The nature of your response is indicative of a strongly held set of presumptions.

    I suppose that can be healthy.

    Granted, you did add the qualifier ‘likely’, but it would seem that you reject my central thesis that non-masking wearing people are neither unintelligent or sociopathic. We seem to be also working from potentially irreconcilably different appreciations of both the risks and significance of Plague 2020.

  89. JohnPlywood says

    Wrong. People take a few days to die, wait a little while for these people to stop dying.

    Also, mortality isn’t the definition of a pandemic. As long as the virus is spreading, it’s a pandemic.

  90. Though not in Sweden.

    Oh yeah, and Sweden’s been doing great!

    As I recall, the US experts and authorities at first told the populace that masks were ineffective (“the noble lie”, I suppose). Once a sufficient supply of masks had been secured for the important people, masks suddenly became effective and even required.

    If you don’t understand how science works, this kind of “flip-flopping” does appear damning.

    Ranging from using moronic staff who don’t know or care about that sort of thing (Sweden and elsewhere)

    They use “moronic staff” because anyone intelligent has far better options than caregiving.

    I suppose they followed best practices as set by experts full of expertise.

    Do you have any evidence actual epidemiologists told them to do that? Probably just dumb politicians dumb politicianing. And if the experts are wrong, the solution is to stop listening to them and look for new experts. It’s not to start listening to math-free word-salards produced by 90 IQ internet commenters.

    “But this time we mean it! Listen to us, bigots!

    No one here is gonna call you a bigot.

    The Alex Jones fan is immunized against all dangers: one may call him a bigot, racist, fascist, nazi, it all runs off him like water off a raincoat. But tell him his IQ is low and he has no money and you will be astonished at how he recoils, how injured he is, how he suddenly shrinks back: “I’ve been found out.”

  91. the one they call Desanex says
  92. Depends. If you are over 70 it will kill you in 10-15% of cases, if you also are fat or with diabetes or heart problems you already got your 30% or more. So, if you catch it because you’re too stupid to care and pass it on to me because I cannot avoid having to shop for food I should make sure to get revenge before it’s too late.

  93. The Alex Jones fan is immunized against all dangers: one may call him a bigot, racist, fascist, nazi, it all runs off him like water off a raincoat. But tell him his IQ is low and he has no money and you will be astonished at how he recoils, how injured he is, how he suddenly shrinks back: “I’ve been found out.” – True but no only for Alex Jones fans but for almost everybody in America. The ‘loser’ meme penetrated American psyche to the marrow of its bones. On the second thought Blacks might be the least susceptible to the ‘looser’ meme.

  94. New York supposedly did a terrible job

    I believe there was no lockdown in New York and little “mask” wearing, when the epidemic was spreading through the city in mainly late February/March.

    am seeing near total mask wearing here, even on streets and even while jogging,

    But this is months after the first wave developed of the epidemic in New York. Moreover, the masks are not certified N95 standard, but only the less tested kind of “medical mask”.

    Moscow subway he’s seeing like 40% mask wearing rate, and the numbers are much better than NYC.

    Moscow had two and half masks of one of the world’s most expensive and strict lockdowns – with the digital gulag – , which they began quite early (relative to epidemic development).

    Despite this though, Moscow already has something like 310 deaths/million, and from excess mortality it is likely a lot higher. (For comparison, in Japan there are only 8 deaths/million).

    were confidently talking about the mortality rates

    Back in March fatality rate was estimated at 0,66% by Lancelet.
    https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S1473-3099%2820%2930243-7&#8242;
    And the view in June (after anti-body testing) is still quite similar. (Obviously this will vary a lot between countries with different age structure of the population). https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01738-2

    Vietnam is a crowded country that has a way of life and an infrastructure that makes social distancing impossible. Its not built for that. Anyone who has been there knows that.

    A lot of these third world countries were locking down more brutally, than in Europe or America.

    They don’t have the same economic system, and they weren’t confident about their health systems.

    Floyd riots – we live in a time of disintegration that

    These are very overdetermined riots.

    Floyd riots was beginning with a real problem – American police brutality. But displaced by media onto arguments about racism, – for USA presidential electoral season.

    Masses were available and angrier for protesting, because of the lockdown and economic destabilization caused by it.

    It looks so overdetermined that I don’t see how you can call it “mysterious”.

    is prone to irrational panics and widespread anxiety

    Coronavirus is not an irrational panic. The problem was response by governments and people has been irrational, and part of this was insufficient panic, – or insufficiently early panic.

    Covid form of irrationality seems merely to be suited to the “sciency” control types, who are generally anxious and fearful about death because they are materialists

    There’s nothing irrational to want to prevent the pandemic (rather the opposite). The irrationality (or rather, incompetence) was the way it was attempted.

    If there is infection fatality rate of 0,66% and reproduction number of 3, then this implies millions of deaths and economic devastation.

    On the other hand, this could have been prevented by fitting the population with adequate, certified PPE and mandating that they wear it. (“Medical mask” is not such though). The lack of understanding of this, and that it wasn’t stockpiled (unlike in Soviet times) is – irrational.

  95. this could have been prevented

    And of course travel bans from late January, would have resulted with a lot of countries having far smaller and easier to suppress first waves.

    Economic cost from travel bans is minimal, compared to the extremely expensive lockdowns that were common around the world only a couple months later.

  96. Not wearing masks as a general… test of civility and citizenship

    How is not wearing masks a ” test of civility and citizenship”. So shall we falsify your strange theory? It would imply that Japanese have less “civility and citizenship” than Americans.

    By the way, irrelevant to coronavirus. Just wearing masks when you walk in the city streets, improves indicators of cardiovascular health. This helps reduce exposure to the harmful effects of air pollution.
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2662779/

  97. I don’t think we are going to agree on this.

    I’m surprised your bullshit meter doesn’t tell you something is off. I’m not making any bold denialist claims like some do, because the data is simply insufficient and too contradictory for any kind of bold claim.

    The New York Times is reporting today that the American infection rate is 10 times what was officially thought, which means the mortality rate is lower than the flu.

    For some reason, this dramatic info will not alter anyone’s attitude. Karlin will not post about it. No one will be any less afraid.

    I’m not a conspiracy theorist but it is obvious to me that there is just a tremendous amount of bullshit with this virus – not intentionally, I just think there has been a general breakdown of rationality today.

  98. Toronto Russian says

    Northeast Asians > Europeans > other races

    “Other races” beat Covid just fine when they are masters of their own fate and used to having adult responsibilities. The Caribbeans’ income depends a lot on not scaring away tourists by uncontrolled epidemics, and they aren’t part of a bigger, affluent society that can always feed them (unlike ghettoized minorities in Western Europe and America). They’re on their own. So their leaders (both white in Cuba and black/mulatto elsewhere) controlled it hard, and with a few exceptions successfully.

    Paralysed by the COVID-19 pandemic and decimated by the resulting unemployment from four months of inactivity, Barbados’ important tourism industry will fully reopen next month…

    The reopening plan was revealed during a press conference moments after Minister of Health Jeffrey Bostic confirmed Barbados was now free of active COVID-19 cases, amid 35 days without a new infection, and all previous patients being discharged from isolation at the Harrison Point, St Lucy.
    https://www.nationnews.com/nationnews/news/246360/tourists-fly-july

    It went as far as a battle between the police and gangsters over breaking social distancing rules in Jamaica.

    The night of drama began with a police team pinned down by heavily armed gunmen Monday night in the Lizard Town area of Tivoli Gardens after cops ordered home hundreds of persons who gathered at a wake being held for an alleged gangster. Coronavirus curfew and social-distancing restrictions make such gatherings illegal under the Disaster Risk Management Act.

    The police’s intervention reportedly triggered a fierce firefight between gunmen and the security forces, with arsonists allegedly flattening the market facility while making their escape.

    Head of the Corporate Communications Unit, Senior Superintendent Stephanie Lindsay, believes that the market was set ablaze as a decoy.

    “Gangsters lit the Rae Rae Market. The team went into the area because they had heard of a gathering of over 200 persons at a wake, so the police asked them to disperse,” said Lindsay.
    http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/lead-stories/20200610/vendors-victims-again-rae-rae-market-burnt-ground

    The measures paid off and there will be a reopening for tourism in July.

    Africa is a mixed bag: the president of Madagascar believes drinking a herbal remedy is all that’s needed to beat disease, some others try to exorcise the virus by shamanic rituals, but there are also extreme quarantines (Botswana makes more people quarantine in facilities than in their homes, and kicks out infected foreigners) and elites setting an example.
    https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/unbelievableme/20692558/2527273/2527273_600.jpg

    https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/unbelievableme/20692558/2501049/2501049_600.jpg

  99. Its also something people who are afraid do to feel they are safe and in control. I think that’s a big reason. A lot of what people do is to give themselves a feeling of control, however false.

    Not just for conformity.

  100. AnonFromTN says

    The disease will infect everyone that is to be infected, and will kill everyone that is to be killed.

    That’s pretty fatalistic. Like Russian saying “destined for gallows won’t drown”. Personally, I prefer a less fatalistic worldview, expressed in Protestant saying ‘God helps those who help themselves”.

  101. Getaclue says

    Your statements are laughable — leave it to the “Elitists”, because they don’t have an Agenda, Political or otherwise? They’re just impartial intellectual gems like you consider yourself?– those being ridden over by the “Experts” should just shut up and comply, pay taxes, and stick their arms out for what “vaccines”/poisons Bill “depopulation” Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation Eugenics loving “Elites” might want to inject? Stick a Face Burka on and do as your told by the likes of you? Get lost.

    The record of the “Elites” is the real Idiocracy, in just about everything these days — except they actually do have an intent at work behind it — and it’s purely evil. Here’s a link as to some of the record of the leader of your acclaimed “math” doing “non-algebra” failing buddy types during this fiasco. Neal Ferguson did some great “math” on his bs “Models” — another “Elite” hero of yours? The stupidity of what you say actually puts you right into his “Elite” company.) : https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/faucis-flip-flops/

  102. AnonFromTN says

    One of the reason that CDC and WHO were de-emphasizing mask wearing is that their chief policy of flu prevention is vaccination.

    As far as CDC is concerned, the reason is simple: like all branches of the US government, CDC serves profiteers. There is a lot more profit in vaccines, than in masks. That determines what CDC promotes. If you believe CDC, you might as well believe State Department, tabloids, or tarot card readers.

  103. Getaclue says

    James Corbett of Corbett Report has an excellent site that refutes all of this type bs in the article above and most all the comments here lauding the “Elite” and their efforts on our behalf as to the CVirus — he actually documents — out of their own mouths and documents — exactly what the “Elites” — Rockefellers, Gates, Rothschilds et al have been planning and are now executing as to Medical Martial Law in order to strip the “non-Elites”, or Peons as they see them, of every human right possible. They plan to “depopulate” as many Peons as they can by “vaccine” or otherwise and they will use “Climate Change” and/or Medical Martial Law and their limitless resources, bought off “Experts”/Faucis and compliant NWO Mainslime Media to do so — just as we have been seeing now for months.

    The fact those here fail to see this Agenda for the most part, in the articles or comments, would tend to show you are not quite the geniuses many of you portray yourselves to be — lording it over those you don’t think are up to you in “IQ” level and fierce intellectual talent — i.e. you are missing the boat completely by not understanding what is actually going on as to what has been sprung on us — it’s not exactly been hidden by those now doing it….

    I challenge anyone to actually fully review and consider what James Corbett has completely and exhaustively documented as to the truth of what is going on and then to actually rebut it in any HONEST manner. You can’t: https://www.corbettreport.com/

    As to Bill Gates, along with the Rockefellers his “Fathers” in all of this, he is another Eugenics and “depopulation” promoter who hides himself with 100s of millions of dollars of PR work/propaganda, just as they did, as a “philanthropist” (in the reality the bought off Media doesn’t mention he’s actually doubled his wealth since he started “giving” and half his “Foundation” is actually a Family Trust that the other half feeds….) — Please watch this documentary as to him and his “doings” and then try and tell me that Corbett has not completely proven Gates is nothing but a complete and total fraud — as well as a danger to humanity: https://www.corbettreport.com/gates/

  104. pay taxes

    People who believe in the Bill Gates vaccine conspiracy don’t pay much in the way of income taxes.

    Eugenics loving

    You say that like it’s a bad thing…

    Bill “depopulation” Gates

    You want to help the radical green cause? Keep trying to get people to associate pro-natalism with these crazy crackpot theories.

  105. You’re writing nonsense. Mechanical testing of 3M masks, have shown above 96% filtration of particles above 0,007 microns.

    • Or in another study of unnamed/unbranded N95 mask1 by University of Massachusetts. At 0,1 microns, the filtration by the N95 mask is around 95%.

    https://i.imgur.com/leM7z0G.jpg

    And this is N95 mask (and those of us who prepared are mainly getting N99 masks and above).

  106. bullshit meter doesn’t tell you

    Infection fatality rate of around 0,6% has been quite consistent in different studies from March onwards.

    It could be somewhat higher and lower, and I don’t think our implications are very changed.

    American infection rate is 10 times what was officially thought, which means the mortality rate is lower than the flu

    What was the arithmetic for this?

    If infection rate is 10 times higher than officially reported, – then 25 million people have been infected in America (official numbers are 2,5 million).

    Currently, over 128000 have been killed.

    So, if it’s true that ten times more people are infected than officially reported, infection fatality rate would be over 0,5% in America (so many times higher than flu – this would imply between 10-25 times higher infection fatality rate than flu).
    https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

    For some reason, this dramatic info will not alter anyone’s attitude. Karlin will not post about it. No one will be any less afraid.

    Has Karlin claimed there is a dramatically higher than 0,5% infection fatality rate?

    I’m not a conspiracy theorist but it is obvious to me that there is just a tremendous amount of bullshit with this virus – not intentionally, I just think there has been a general breakdown of rationality today.

    Yes, in terms of the governments’ and populations’ incompetent responses to it.

    But many things of the virus have been consistent since with evidence and studies we were reading in February. For example, that it is transmitted mainly airborne, or that it probably has an infection fatality rate of around 0,6%.

  107. Dieter Kief says

    The Swiss are civilized enough to self-distance when in public without wearing masks. The result is pretty good. – And the result is even better in the old Alemann-regions like Thurgau, Sankt Gallen, Appenzell, etc., because there the self-distancing without masks works even better than in Switzerland as a whole (there were early on some CO-19 hotspots in Tessin and the Geneva-region – where people kiss more – on average (and were closer to Northern Italy, the hotspot of hotspots in Europe).

    For those able to run google-translate – or understanding German: Read Beda M. Stadler and Gunter Frank on Achgut. They understand better than Anatoly Karlin and others what’s up with CO-19. The biggest difference: CFR – Kalrin 1% – Frank and Stadler (a retired Epidemiologist/Virus-specialist) – 100% sure that CFR is below 0,5% – and very likely more in the region of 0,1% in Switzerland / Germany.

    Her is Beda M. Stadler on CO-19 – Why We Were All Wrong

    https://www.achgut.com/artikel/corona_aufarbeitung_warum_alle_falsch_lagen

    And her is Gunter Frank, a doctor – Frank has written about ten articles about CO-19 here is the last one, saying: It’s over:

    https://www.achgut.com/artikel/bericht_zur_coronalage_23.06.2020_rinderwahn

  108. Marshall Lentini says

    Some people just seem to like the gimpy pseudo-safety of wearing a mask. It is probably a measure of testosterone more than anything else. Hence, more women wear masks.

    But some things about it can’t be reduced to a single trait. For example, 100% of people are aware of the stupidly low fatality rate, and that of those, most are elderly or sick already.

    Some view this low fatality rate with something close to hysteria, a thespian element plainly visible, and ache for the spectacle of control. Some call it “concerning” and usually side with the hysterics. Some, who haven’t taken the bait, view it as another risk one takes in simply being alive, unwilling to admit that so few casualties, and of such quality, warrant extremism.

    Alas, the controlling pseudo-hysterics, and the nerdy guy who dazzles you with numbers and just wants to save his grandma, after all, generally win against the “nihilists” who want to get on with life without too much interference from the busybodies.

  109. Yung Jung says

    From a purely personal pov i cant really see that this pandemic is going on at all.
    I live in Sweden, which is the black sheep above all right now in a covid context. “Lots’ of ppl are said to be dying, but if you ask around most ppl dont even know anyone who has had it, this in a country under no lockdown, where nobody wears masks and where social distancing was a thing for two weeks. I know six ppl who has had corona (thats more than anyone else i know) all but two are over 65, all but one is fat, at least one has heart problems and high blood pressure, none of them died and none of them was treated in a hospital. Im not saying corona is a hoax but isnt it weird that so few seem to have had virus?

  110. After reading a lot of information concerning the efficacy of the masks for virus threats and applying a bit of physics and common sense (a virus is MANY orders of magnitude smaller than holes in a mask) I came to the conclusion that the mask is the uniform of The Man. It displays one’s very mistaken belief that our herders know what’s best and the wearer is loyal to his herder.

    I don’t like being someone’s livestock. I don’t wear a mask. I am a college graduate.

  111. (a virus is MANY orders of magnitude smaller than holes in a mask)

    Respiratory viruses hitch a ride on respiratory droplets that people expel through their mouths and noses whenever they speak, breathe, cough, sneeze, laugh, etc. Those droplets are much bigger than the virus and are visible to the naked eye. A single droplet in a sneeze can contain 200 million virus particles. The masks limit the range and spread of these droplets, which is the whole point. The droplets are the medium through which respiratory viruses are spread. By containing the medium, you contain the virus.

    https://www.ishn.com/ext/resources/Issues/2020/06-June/ISHN_RockfordF_0620_pic.jpg

  112. live in Sweden… none of them died and none of them was treated in a hospital

    So far, Sweden has around 500 death/1 million. 1 in 2000. So something like if you know 100 people, then there is maybe 1/20 that you know someone who has been killed with coronavirus.

    weird that so few seem to have had virus?

    It depends on testing rates in the country. So Sweden doesn’t have very high testing rates, – therefore only 65000 people have been diagnosed (0,65% of the country).

    Death numbers are really high (over 5000) though, which might indicate a million people have been infected (if infection fatality rate was the half percent).

  113. virus is MANY orders of magnitude smaller than holes in a mask

    That’s nonsense from studies which were doing mechanical testing of N95 masks. E.g.

    N95 mask1 has something like 95% efficiency for particles at 100 nanometres.

    https://i.imgur.com/leM7z0G.jpg

    (Also note that this virus (itself around 100 nanometres) is travelling in the air in much larger water droplets).

  114. sudden death says

    https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/https%3A%2F%2Fd1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net%2Fproduction%2Fa7d3f775-cc47-4c33-b04a-d18df4de4a22.jpg?fit=scale-down&source=next&width=700

    Scientists have discovered that the virus behind Covid-19 causes the infected cells to grow stringy protruding branches — a highly unusual structure that allows the virus to attack several cells at once

    Researchers led by the University of California San Francisco have released the first ever close-up images of the spaghetti-like tentacles that were taken using an ultra-powerful electron microscope.

    “There are long strings that poke holes in other cells and the virus passes through the tube from cell to cell,” said Professor Nevan Krogan, director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute at UCSF who led the project. “Our hypothesis is that these speed up infection,” Prof Krogan said of the “nasty and sinister” branches.

    The images taken by scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) laboratory in the US and University of Freiburg in Germany will be published in the medical journal Cell on Saturday.

    Most viruses do not cause infected cells to grow these tentacles. Even those that do, such as smallpox, do not have as many or the same type of branching as Sars-Cov-2, the virus behind Covid-19.

    https://www.ft.com/content/2690623a-6824-4837-a36d-73519b77aa7a

  115. sudden death says

    being not a medic, idk how much ominous is all that talk about using cancer treatments against SARS 2.0 , but would not be much surprised that sometime later it will be anounced that this shit virus may cause cancer in survivors too:

    The discovery has highlighted a number of drugs that could be deployed against the disease, most of which were previously being developed to treat cancer. Prof Krogan said cancers, HIV, or Sars-Cov-2 were all searching for the “Achilles heel of the cell”. 

    “It totally makes sense there’s an overlap in anticancer drugs and an antiviral effect,” he said. 

    https://www.ft.com/content/2690623a-6824-4837-a36d-73519b77aa7a

  116. I do not know anyone who has it, and even in the world of cyberspace I have only encountered one person who said he came down with it (and recovered – he did not even go to hospital) and another who said he tested positive but is apparently asymptomatic. I am no medical expert but I have read extensively about plague and cholera outbreaks and the 1918 flu and this is clearly less virulent than any of them.

  117. Random Passer By says

    I’ve had a family member hospitalized and left with permanent(?) complications.

  118. sudden death says

    Life after “recovery” even from “mild” infection might not be that rosy at all:

    “What we are seeing is very frightening,” Prof. Gabriel Izbicki of Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center told The Times of Israel. “More than half the patients, weeks after testing negative, are still symptomatic.”

    In Bnei Brak, at Israel’s first community clinic, doctors have been seeing a spike in recent days in the patients with pains that appear to come from nowhere.

    “It can appear in the arms, legs, or other places where the virus doesn’t have a direct impact, and if you ask about the pain level on a 1 to 10 scale, can be 10, with people saying they can’t get to sleep,” said Eran Schenker, director of the month-old clinic in Bnei Brak run by Maccabi Healthcare Services. “It’s something which we’re starting to see much more in the last week.”

    He stressed that his patients are not all newly recovered. “Some of them had coronavirus in March, so they may have been recovered for months,” he said.

    Izbicki, director of Shaare Zedek’s Pulmonary Institute, also emphasized that many of his patients have long been declared coronavirus-free. One of the biggest surprises, he said, is that there is no predicting which patients will find the disease hard to shake, and which will not.

    “There is no correlation between seriousness of disease during hospitalization and extent of symptoms afterwards,” he said, discussing preliminary results from his study on recovered patients who were treated in hospitals and coronavirus hotels.

    “Within the symptoms that we checked for, we revealed general weakness among the majority of patients alongside shortness of breath, sustained cough, and other complex breathing and pulmonary issues,” he said, adding that he is also familiar with the freak pains that Schenker discussed.

    These pains — seen in young patients and old alike — have doctors scratching their heads. Schenker said: “Painkillers block the pain but don’t relieve the source, but we don’t know how to address the source and you can’t be on painkillers the rest of your life.”

    https://www.timesofisrael.com/its-frightening-doctors-say-half-of-cured-covid-patients-still-suffer/

  119. E. Harding says

    In America, if anything, mask wearing has been boosted relative to Europe precisely because of its Trump-related politicization. Also, never forget that Americans are some of the most conformist people on Earth:

    https://twitter.com/Fritschner/status/1282091215463354373

    Mask wearing is the right course of action, obviously, but it seems to me the real American failure is near complete reliance on private action to do everything. The government can close businesses and tell people to wear masks (though not even enforce that), but it can’t do contact tracing, restrict internal travel, or enforce quarantine of infected and contacts to save its life (possibly, as Greg Cochran suggests, due to longstanding anti-quarantine dogma among fake Western “experts”). Socialism, after all, is when the government does stuff. China’s, Burma’s, Korea’s, Uganda’s, Norway’s, Tunisia’s, and Cuba’s governments all do stuff. America’s doesn’t.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/10/03/why-quarantines-wont-stop-ebola-from-spreading-in-the-u-s/

    Also, remember: advocates of the imperialists’ system can never criticize China ever again, for any reason. China doesn’t kill hundreds of thousands of its own innocent people.