It’s been close to two months since the quarantine started. I can no longer stand upright without the use of crutches. I weigh 87 pounds currently. I look like a much handsomer version of Christian Bale in The Machinist.
Not too much has changed since the last post. Things are still boring. I’m still spending way too much time on the internet. I’m also actually missing work for the first time in my entire life.
Perhaps one of the most interesting factors of this pandemic, is how much blatant over-reach certain authorities are exercising. When people have been whipped up into a high enough state of fear, they tend to relax their morals and let authoritarianism creep into their lives. They become more inclined to give up their freedoms for some minuscule sense of security.
We’re inching ever closer to that dystopian form of government wherein authorities use facial-recognition software to single out the “bad apples” and keep people in line. Similar systems are currently employed in China, tied into their glorious social credit score system:
Police forces in numerous countries are currently using drones to check up on people, even going so far as to peep into people’s backyards to make sure the lower classes aren’t gathering in groups. How very 1984:
These authoritarians often create and impose rules on others that they themselves refuse to abide by. The examples from the last month alone would be enough to fill an entire post, so here are two that happened to revolve around personal grooming:
It also turns out that most first world countries handled Covid19 about as incompetently as humanly possible, with very few places having actually taken effective measures. One such place was Taiwan. The same Taiwan whom the World Health Organization decided to actively ignore back in December. Taiwan then proceed to actively ignore the WHO and do things their own way. Here is an explanation as to why Taiwan barely had to employ much of a lockdown and is currently living life normally:
The WHO didn’t take Covid19 very seriously until March 11th, as outlined in my last post. They actively warned against travel bans and consistently downplayed the virus at first. Taiwan ignored all this advice and started treating this like a serious outbreak since the beginning of February. Part of their reasoning had to do with being hit so hard by SARS 15 years ago. They didn’t want to make the same mistakes, so they were extra cautious, and it paid off.
It’s also important to keep in mind that most Asian countries already have a culture of wearing masks in public. Masks work, so these countries already had a layer of protection in effect from the beginning. Meanwhile the “health experts” were providing this information elsewhere:
Who knows how many lives would have been saved if: a) we had an adequate stockpile of mask beforehand, and b) the above misinformation hadn’t been so widespread. Hopefully these mistakes aren’t made again, and more countries are properly prepared the next time this happens.
Finally, before I head out, here is China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Information Department™ calling Covid19 the Wuhan virus, only to start railing against the term a month later:
This change of heart lines up conveniently with the time Mr Zhao starts to push a theory that the coronavirus was brought to China via the U.S. military. The CCP narrative changed from “this is our fault” to “this is their fault”, so he starts using the WHO as a shield to deflect any criticism of the CCP on social media. It’s quite the clever tactic.
Despite the impressive title, this account is seemingly just a means of propaganda propagation. It’s to give the optics that China has an open representative on twitter. The funny thing about this, is that twitter is blocked in China, as are most non-Chinese social media sites (they use Weibo). The CCP doesn’t want its citizens using any platform that it doesn’t have ultimate control over the information on. The average Chinese citizen isn’t seeing anything this guy posts. He’s employed by the CCP to broadcast on China’s behalf on non-Chinese social media.
For all the talk of Russian meddling, and constant accusations from blue state boomers about people being “bots”, I have yet to see any suspicious Russian accounts on twitter. Ever. I’ve definitely looked. Perhaps I need to look harder. Meanwhile, it’s amazing how many accounts like this there are on twitter:
“Kate Carter” here is responding to Mr Zhao’s post about the U.S. Military bringing Covid19 to Wuhan. She also just so happens to “Love Chinese Fantastic Government System”. Seems like a totally legit, organically-created twitter account. It makes me wonder if there are U.S. government officials on Weibo with handles like 中国是最好的 actively spreading American propaganda. There probably are. I’d go looking for some, but Weibo is kind of a nightmare to navigate.