Wuhan Coronavirus: Megathread - Got too big

[Carnavoyeur]

New analysis of how long Corona has been in our state, based on the date of onset of symptoms rather than the date of confirmed tests. Has some nice graphics comparing the two ways of dating cases, and Detroit's curve vs. the west side of the state.

https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-health-watch/coronavirus-came-michigan-earlier-thought-records-show

(archive)

San Diego added these stats recently as well and it just goes to show how naive it is to think that this somehow, miraculously, wasn't already spreading in December and January.

 

[MrBlueSocks]

Its nice people are starting to see this. A big reason people like 1984 is that its evil government is very right leaning "all work no fun, always keep watch" so entertainmenters and pop culture were always preaching it. The problem is its absurdly unrealistic and is as good of a story as fucking Rise of Skywalker

Meanwhile Huxley a teacher, labourer, factory worker and layabout who also happened to have taught the autist that wrote 1984, had a pretty great understanding of how to keep people in line and what makes people tick. According to mr.1984, everyone talks about politics and theory and was about following the rules and keeping the boss's favor. But Huxley knew most people just talked about films or trying to get laid or other frivolous things and even during the worst times with the most suffering, they typically didnt fuss over things they felt they had no control over.

Of course making a world where pop culture, degeneracy, and modern society is evil would never truely be preached by the (((entertainment industry))) but with how disconnected people are from it we can start seeing how much better and more relatable brave new world is. Even the concept of the benevolent captains of industry, like how redditors see bezos, musk, and gates can be traced back to what Huxley saw in the US with the treatment of Ford, among others

I've got to ask, have you actually read the book, or are you just going off popular representations of it? Because that's not how I remember it at all. I think there's a lot in 1984 that is very relevant to current societal trends. So much it's scary, even if it has become a lazy meme.

- The plot of 1984 only concerns the outer party members, who concern themselves with IngSoc and party business and political theory. The 90% of the population who are the proles are kept amused with computer generated soulless popular music, propaganda, and never ending manufactured war. The inner party exercise power for its own sake and know it's a scam.
If we do:
Inner party - Swamp pedo globalists.
Outer party - SJW, blue checkmarks , right-thinkers, hollywood gobshites, woke journalists, leftist academia.
Proles - The rest of us just being drowned in this shit.
Can you see any current examples of:
Memory holing, rewriting the past to suit the needs of the present, deleting inconvenient data. Have you seen any BBC output from the past 10 years? Facebook and Google censorship?
Constant Manufactured Crisis, hmmmmmm.
Computer generated dumbed down popular culture ?
Control of language to control modes of thought?
Electronic, always-on entertainment/surveillance system . Compulsory Corona tracking app?

Though I completely agree with you that BNW is also important and prescient. I just think your criticisms of 1984 don't hold.
Sorry for off topic. I did wonder a month back if we should have a thread just for "Off topic follow ups spawned by the Wuhan mega thread" .

Just wanted to drop this here.
View attachment 1304020

It's like some people still think those comedy masks are for their protection. Dumbasses.

 

[Feline Supremacist]

I've got to ask, have you actually read the book, or are you just going off popular representations of it? Because that's not how I remember it at all. I think there's a lot in 1984 that is very relevant to current societal trends. So much it's scary, even if it has become a lazy meme.

- The plot of 1984 only concerns the outer party members, who concern themselves with IngSoc and party business and political theory. The 90% of the population who are the proles are kept amused with computer generated soulless popular music, propaganda, and never ending manufactured war. The inner party exercise power for its own sake and know it's a scam.
If we do:
Inner party - Swamp pedo globalists.
Outer party - SJW, blue checkmarks , right-thinkers, hollywood gobshites, woke journalists, leftist academia.
Proles - The rest of us just being drowned in this shit.
Can you see any current examples of:
Memory holing, rewriting the past to suit the needs of the present, deleting inconvenient data. Have you seen any BBC output from the past 10 years? Facebook and Google censorship?
Constant Manufactured Crisis, hmmmmmm.
Computer generated dumbed down popular culture ?
Control of language to control modes of thought?
Electronic, always-on entertainment/surveillance system . Compulsory Corona tracking app?

Though I completely agree with you that BNW is also important and prescient. I just think your criticisms of 1984 don't hold.
Sorry for off topic. I did wonder a month back if we should have a thread just for "Off topic follow ups spawned by the Wuhan mega thread" .


It's like some people still think those comedy masks are for their protection. Dumbasses.

I had a really cool English professor who cited BNW as a Western liberal democratic society critique and 1984 as a USSR/Iron Curtain Communist/Socialist one. Two sides of the same coin.

 

[deeplyhigh]

The University of Minnesota published a puff piece about the “MN Model” and the people involved in creating it. The public noticed some rather interesting things, such as the fact that it was created over the course of a weekend, largely by “associate professors” who just got their bachelor’s degrees last year and have never worked in infectious disease modeling. The taxpayers gave the University about $1.5 million for this weekend’s worth of near-undergraduate level work.

Source/Archive

 

[Gustav Schuchardt]

I had a really cool English professor who cited BNW as a Western liberal democratic society critique and 1984 as a USSR/Iron Curtain Communist/Socialist one. Two sides of the same coin.

1984 comes out of Orwell's experiences in the Spanish Civil War, the fact the British intelligentsia were a bunch of Stalin worshipping commies and this passage about the disappearance of the notion of objective truth from the world. The bit about 'a combination of Fascisms' reminds you both of Nazis and Fascists on one side and Communists on the other in WWII and 1984's world filled completely with totalitarian superstates with nominally different but in practice very similar ideologies.

https://orwell.ru/library/essays/Spanish_War/english/esw_1

This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish war be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books, and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never existed will become historical fact, and schoolchildren will learn about it generations hence. But suppose Fascism is finally defeated and some kind of democratic government restored in Spain in the fairly near future; even then, how is the history of the war to be written? What kind of records will Franco have left behind him? Suppose even that the records kept on the Government side are recoverable — even so, how is a true history of the war to be written? For, as I have pointed out already, the Government, also dealt extensively in lies. From the anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science’. There is only ‘German Science’, ‘Jewish Science’, etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs — and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.

But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future? Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can't come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn't come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday's weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can't violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist. We in England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this belief. Don't resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modern industrialized state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?

Consider for instance the re-institution of slavery. Who could have imagined twenty years ago that slavery would return to Europe? Well, slavery has been restored under our noses. The forced-labour camps all over Europe and North Africa where Poles, Russians, Jews and political prisoners of every race toil at road-making or swamp-draining for their bare rations, are simple chattle slavery. The most one can say is that the buying and selling of slaves by individuals is not yet permitted. In other ways — the breaking-up of families, for instance — the conditions are probably worse than they were on the American cotton plantations. There is no reason for thinking that this state of affairs will change while any totalitarian domination endures. We don't grasp its full implications, because in our mystical way we feel that a regime founded on slavery must collapse. But it is worth comparing the duration of the slave empires of antiquity with that of any modern state. Civilizations founded on slavery have lasted for such periods as four thousand years.

When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind them no record whatever. We do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek and Roman history, how many slaves’ names are known to you? I can think of two, or possibly three. One is Spartacus and the other is Epictetus. Also, in the Roman room at the British Museum there is a glass jar with the maker's name inscribed on the bottom, ‘Felix fecit’. I have a mental picture of poor Felix (a Gaul with red hair and a metal collar round his neck), but in fact he may not have been a slave; so there are only two slaves whose names I definitely know, and probably few people can remember more. The rest have gone down into utter silence.

A lot of the themes that would appear in 1984 are in this essay too

George Orwell: The Prevention of Literature

The Prevention of Literature, the essay of George Orwell. First published: 1946 by/in Polemic, GB, London

www.orwell.ru

Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has often been pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian. Their repressive apparatus was always inefficient, their ruling classes were usually either corrupt or apathetic or half-liberal in outlook, and the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against perfectionism and the notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true that prose literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy and free speculation. What is new in totalitarianism is that its doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also unstable. They have to be accepted on pain of damnation, but on the other hand, they are always liable to be altered on a moment's notice. Consider, for example, the various attitudes, completely incompatible with one another, which an English Communist or ‘fellow-traveler’ has had to adopt toward the war between Britain and Germany. For years before September, 1939, he was expected to be in a continuous stew about ‘the horrors of Nazism’ and to twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of Hitler: after September, 1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that Germany was more sinned against than sinning, and the word ‘Nazi’, at least as far as print went, had to drop right out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8 o'clock news bulletin on the morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start believing once again that Nazism was the most hideous evil the world had ever seen. Now, it is easy for the politician to make such changes: for a writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance at exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else suppress them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses will seem to stiffen under his touch. Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. It might be otherwise in an ‘age of faith’, when the prevailing orthodoxy has long been established and is not taken too seriously. In that case it would be possible, or might be possible, for large areas of one's mind to remain unaffected by what one officially believed. Even so, it is worth noticing that prose literature almost disappeared during the only age of faith that Europe has ever enjoyed. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages there was almost no imaginative prose literature and very little in the way of historical writing; and the intellectual leaders of society expressed their most serious thoughts in a dead language which barley altered during a thousand years.

Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops. This was well illustrated by the Spanish civil war. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. There were only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

Gov. Wolf threatens counties that defy him and reopen early — whlm

Governor Wolf attacked local elected officials making plans to reopen in defiance of his shutdown orders calling them selfish and said they are cowards deserting the pandemic battlefield. In recent days elected officials in a number of counties including Columbia, Schuylkill, Dauphin, Lebanon, Beave

www.whlm.com

Fuck this asshole,

Fuck this fucking nazi asshole.

I am a coward? I AM A FUCKING COWARD? Because I disagree on you with policy? I've continued to go out to my fucking job, where I get no appreciation 99% of the time, where I get treated like shit by Commie Liberal Shitheads (my area is super blue). and I get called a Coward.

Get Fucked you useless fucking wannabe Hitler, I hope you get Covid and fucking die.

https://archive.vn/fpfl1

 

[Twinkletard]

I worked at the office today, just opened up. They're letting people with health issues to work from home still. I don't mind at all.

 

[Iceland Heavy]

Gov. Wolf threatens counties that defy him and reopen early — whlm

Governor Wolf attacked local elected officials making plans to reopen in defiance of his shutdown orders calling them selfish and said they are cowards deserting the pandemic battlefield. In recent days elected officials in a number of counties including Columbia, Schuylkill, Dauphin, Lebanon, Beave

www.whlm.com

Fuck this asshole,

Fuck this fucking nazi asshole.

I am a coward? I AM A FUCKING COWARD? Because I disagree on you with policy? I've continued to go out to my fucking job, where I get no appreciation 99% of the time, where I get treated like shit by Commie Liberal Shitheads (my area is super blue). and I get called a Coward.

Get Fucked you useless fucking wannabe Hitler, I hope you get Covid and fucking die.

https://archive.vn/fpfl1

Governor Wolf attacked local elected officials making plans to reopen in defiance of his shutdown orders calling them selfish and said they are cowards deserting the pandemic battlefield.

Is this nigga serious? I normally dislike the dipshit governors being called 'little hitlers' since I just dislike it when nazi comparisons get thrown around constantly but this really does sound like something you'd expect to hear from Hitler autistically screeching in his bunker.

 

[ColtWalker1847]

Again with the prepper food hoarding victory-garden thing. Stahp. It isn't happening.

The issue consumers will face going forward is bottlenecks for high-end foods (notably animal products) because of safety protocols at processors. That's it. Access to basic items like grain/flour/meal, produce, salt, spices, legumes, etc will not be interrupted.

These basic foodstuffs are not going to become scarce or prohibitively expensive. The opposite is going to happen. Think about what's happening to oil right now, it's same thing with food. Grain elevators, cold storage facilities, vegetable cellars, coops, sties, and pastures are going to be full to the brim with food that they can't sell at a decent price in the fall because there is a global recession and demand fell off a goddamn cliff (also likely a Trade War with China).

Willie Nelson better start tuning his guitar because Farm Aid is really going to be needed next year. Farmers are fucked. Processors are panicking. Consumers are fine as long as they can cook from scratch. Got it?

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

Is this nigga serious? I normally dislike the dipshit governors being called 'little hitlers' since I just dislike it when nazi comparisons get thrown around constantly but this really does sound like something you'd expect to hear from Hitler autistically screeching in his bunker.

OH MY GOD.

We need to bring back that Screaming Hitler meme, and put the words of the Governors who want to keep closed forever in it.

 

[Meat Poultry Veg]

I love how this thread stopped being about the virus.

I worked at the office today, just opened up. They're letting people with health issues to work from home still. I don't mind at all.

I live in California, ruled by Gavin "The 21st Century's answer to Jefferson Davis" Newsom. Since I work for a corporate hellhole that receives GatesBux, everyone is abiding by draconian masking and social distancing rules or working from home. I'm in the latter camp. If this company, allegedly a scientific company, says I can return to the office for work but have to follow these bullshit rules, then I will cite "health issues" as a justification for continuing telework.

I'll simply not tell them that my health issue is a severe allergy to totalitarianism. (And I may as well start working from a non-pozzed state without telling them).

 

[Rudy Russo]

Outside China

4,714,540 confirmed / 313,665 dead / 1,705,407 recovered

4626636 / 310385 / 1653089 yesterday

USA

1,508,168 confirmed / 90,338 dead / 283,178 recovered JohnHopkins
1,514,243 confirmed / 90,922 dead / 356,383 recovered Infection2020

1486423 / 89550 / 272265 yesterday JohnHopkins
1501165 / 90330 / 346389 yesterday Infection2020

Spain

231,606 confirmed / 27,709 dead / 150,376 recovered

230698 / 27563 / 146446 Two days ago

Italy

225,886 confirmed / 32,007 / 127,326 recovered

225435 / 31908 / 125176 yesterday

France

180,051 confirmed / 28,242 dead / 61,843 recovered

179693 / 28111 / 61327 yesterday

Germany

176,551 confirmed / 8,003 dead / 155,041 recovered

176369 / 7962 / 154011 yesterday

 

[CWCchange]

Chinese-approved shilling currently "trending" on Twatter:

Oh boy! Two whole billion dollars of aid worldwide, after trillions spent in the U.S. alone!

 

[Meat Poultry Veg]

Chinese-approved shilling currently "trending" on Twatter:
View attachment 1304481
Oh boy! Two whole billion dollars of aid worldwide, after trillions spent in the U.S. alone!

If you want to know the truth, take whatever's trending on Twitter and believe the opposite.

 

[The Big O]

Chinese-approved shilling currently "trending" on Twatter:
View attachment 1304481
Oh boy! Two whole billion dollars of aid worldwide, after trillions spent in the U.S. alone!

Insulting chump change for the multiple national economies that got kneecapped (especially the USA.)

 

[ColtWalker1847]

Insulting chump change for the multiple national economies that got kneecapped (especially the USA.)

To be fair a lot of that was self-inflicted. Two weeks turning into a month-and-a-half plus is what really did it in.

 

[JosephStalin]

Articles from today's Reason.

Yes, people will not forget the tyranny of the little Hitlers and their respective Gestapos. Next time don't expect a whole lot of cooperation. We may still see direct action here, in certain oppressed areas.

https://reason.com/2020/05/18/public-health-measures-enforced-by-violence-arent-as-healthy-as-governments-pretend/?utm_medium=email

https://archive.vn/TZoPV

Agree, way past time for states to end their house arrests. The cure has been worse than the disease. And the long-term social effects from the cure do not bode well for the country. The economy will come back long before trust in government and law enforcement return.

https://reason.com/2020/05/18/texas-admitted-it-cant-enforce-its-covid-19-lockdown-more-states-should-do-the-same/?utm_medium=email

https://archive.vn/oYv6n

On a side note, just another reason for the UN to get the fuck out of the USA. Worse than useless.

https://reason.com/2020/05/18/united-nations-gender-neutral-language-twitter/?utm_medium=email

The United Nations Wants You To Stop Saying Gendered Words – Reason.c…

archived 19 May 2020 02:56:08 UTC

archive.vn

 

[Kiwi Lime Pie]

I am a coward? I AM A FUCKING COWARD? Because I disagree on you with policy? I've continued to go out to my fucking job, where I get no appreciation 99% of the time, where I get treated like shit by Commie Liberal Shitheads (my area is super blue). and I get called a Coward.

Not only that, but the article reports:

Keep in mind that Wolf’s former business, a cabinet supply company in York County, was granted a waiver to keep operating during the statewide closure of non-essential businesses. When questions arose, the waiver was yanked by state officials. But, various media reports indicated that the business continued operating after the waiver was yanked.

Although our governor hasn't been this egregious, she made sure her constituent interests either stayed open as essential or were to first to get approval to go back to work. I realize politicians on both sides do this sort of thing, but it still sucks for the average folks whose employers are closed or operating at less than 100% and hoping to resume full operations as soon as reasonably possible. It certainly does little to change the average person's opinion that politicians care about their special interests more than anyone/anything else.

If this company, allegedly a scientific company, says I can return to the office for work but have to follow these bullshit rules, then I will cite "health issues" as a justification for continuing telework.

If my office was allowed to reopen but with required temperature checks and such, my boss may be more willing to tell me to keep working from home and checking in three times a week like I have been as opposed to having to do that every day until further notice.

Insulting chump change for the multiple national economies that got kneecapped (especially the USA.)

It's not surprising China would think that throwing a token sum of money at the problem (their current bad image/reputation) will make it go away. It's worked in other situations.

n a side note, just another reason for the UN to get the fuck out of the USA. Worse than useless.

https://reason.com/2020/05/18/united-nations-gender-neutral-language-twitter/?utm_medium=email

The United Nations Wants You To Stop Saying Gendered Words – Reason.c…

archived 19 May 2020 02:56:08 UTC

archive.vn

With all the legitimate global concerns happening right now, this is what the UN wants to designate as the biggest concern? Talk about first world issues.

 

[OlgaOfKiev]

Trump has just shared a letter that he sent to the World Health Organization.

Tweet / Archive

Spoiler: Letter to WHO

In it, he includes bullet points indicating the failure of the organization to document information about the disease and its spread. He also notes how Tedros acted as a puppet of China by not criticizing them and allowing China to refuse to cooperating with any outside organizations.

The letter ends with Trump threatening to reconsider the US's membership in the WHO and make the funding freeze permanent.

 

[Leonard Helplessness]

Trump has just shared a letter that he sent to the World Health Organization.

Tweet / Archive

Spoiler: Letter to WHO

View attachment 1305049
View attachment 1305051
View attachment 1305052
View attachment 1305053

In it, he includes bullet points indicating the failure of the organization to document information about the disease and its spread. He also notes how Tedros acted as a puppet of China by not criticizing them and allowing China to refuse to cooperating with any outside organizations.

The letter ends with Trump threatening to reconsider the US's membership in the WHO and make the funding freeze permanent.

I expect them to respond by screaming racism.