Saturday, May 15, 2021

The plague worsens!

As the birdemic grows "ever more serious," with a "record number" (uh, 29) of new local "cases" (positive PCR "tests") in one day, the government of Taiwan is threatening to implement lockdowns, which it never did all through 2020. Every conversation I have with, like, everybody here revolves around how the situation is getting "more and more serious." A few students are taking a day off today because their parents are afraid, and one parent has asked me if we're planning to switch to online "classes."

(In other news, the government is warning that overuse is causing severe scare-quote depletion and that rationing may become necessary.)

To help people visualize just how grave the situation has become, I put together this pie chart based on the numbers being reported in the press.


(No, I didn't just make an all-blue circle by hand and label it as a joke. This is what Google Sheets produces if you feed it the numbers and tell it to make a pie chart.)

No matter how many people I point this out to, no one will even come close to admitting that this is not an emergency and that the government may be overreacting just a tad. Not one single person. The responses I get are about at the level of, "But, but . . . Brawndo's got what plants crave!" And this is in one of the best-educated, most-numerate, highest-IQ countries in the entire world.

"Not even trying" is a phrase Bruce Charlton likes to use with reference to modern science's non-pursuit of the truth. Well, here we have a case of not even lying. The Taiwan government doesn't even bother to cook the numbers. They report the real situation, tell people to panic anyway, and can be sure they will do so -- because the human race is apparently vastly, vastly stupider than even the boldest misanthrope of centuries past had ever dared to imagine.

5 comments:

jorgen b said...

So 29 sheeple tested positive for having had the vaxx and now the sky is falling.

Bruce Charlton said...

It makes perfect sense, on the assumption that the world is a totalitarian prison, and prisons (to some degree) must always be in 'lockdown'.

If there are birdemic deaths, then we "need" lockdown. (Because.)

If there are no (or just a few) deaths, then we need lockdown - to keep it that way.

If positive tests (aka "cases") are rising, then we must intervene to break the trend.

If positive tests are falling - then we need to initiate or continue lockdown in order to 'beat' the disease.


I could continue - but all of the above 'reasons' have been given in the past year in the UK - and there are more. Whatever happens, or does not happen, we will always 'need' lockdown.

But it may well be that lockdowns are one of those 'holding the wolf by the ears' things. The longer they continue, the more dangerous it is to stop them.

Taiwan is apparently in a rare position that the world government will not tolerate in the long term; they are an *anomaly* in the direction of autonomy - and in a US client-state, too. What is amazing is how long they have been able to stand-apart from the US and the developed world. Perhaps They are not worried about Taiwan causing trouble - in the way that They are clearly worried about some of the Anglosphere nations.

Bruce Charlton said...

To get back to the subject of your post - in the face of such astonishing inability to comprehend evidence on the part of the masses, we need an understanding that goes beyond 'idiocracy' - because the block affects very intelligent, and numerate, people.

The phenomenon is, in fact, absolutely mainstream. I came across earlier than most people, perhaps, because I was involved in so many political correctness witch hunts. It is a total inability to reason, to make logical steps and then act upon them.

It seems to be related to the bureaucratic structure of society; in the sense that people 'know' the 'answer' - that is, people (at the low levels) know what they 'have to' DO; therefore any reasoning is just time wasted. When evidence and reason leads to the 'wrong' answer, then it is immediately forgotten or discarded.

Such an attitude was all-but universal in the university and health service bureaucracies. It was regarded as 'pointless', yet also wrong, to discuss whether a policy was good, and whether it ought to be implemented. Discussion was only allowed about How policy would be implemented.

And vice versa; virtue was demonstrated by enthusiastic embrace of top-down policy, and effective implementation.

I had some experience of interacting with very high level bureaucrats - e.g. Chief Medical Officer and government minister; and it was clear that they too were merely 'following orders' and did not feel themselves able to evaluate or resist policies. I would be willing to bet that the same applies even at a global level.

The real strategists are apparently very few and at a very high level - perhaps the supernatural demonic level - and everybody below that level regards themselves as 'implementers' and therefore coherent thinking is futile and forbidden.

In essence, thinking remains possible - but conclusions must be disconnected from evaluations, decisions, actions. The prime logical move of 2021 is the non sequitur.

Epimetheus said...

In other words, the Ahrimanic spiritual strategy pretty much complete. For all intents and purposes, freely-willed human decision-making has been eliminated from the Earth. They might as well cut down on the brands of peanut butter and cereal next.

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

"we need an understanding that goes beyond 'idiocracy' - because the block affects very intelligent, and numerate, people"

Yes, it's something other than stupidity, but I haven't figured out exactly what.

K. West, five years or hours, and spiders

I was listening to some David Bowie last night and was struck by the album art for  Ziggy Stardust . Right above Bowie is a sign that says ...