You don’t negotiate with people who want to lock you up inside your house

As some of you might have read, the Netherlands has entered a lockdown again. I kind of feel like sparing you most of the factoids and numbers. There are two things I find worth remarking however. The first is that the UN now predicts 2021 will be a global humanitarian catastrophe unlike anything seen since the second world war.

Of course anyone who has any remotely dignified position in our society (as opposed to your “self-employed” Uncle Bob) always insists on blaming “the pandemic” as opposed to the response to the pandemic, for all the misery we’re now inviting upon ourselves. However, the two big influenza pandemics of 1957 and 1968 didn’t lead to humanitarian catastrophes despite causing more deaths, because we didn’t panic and lock people up inside their homes.

The second point worth making is that this is the horror scenario you’re being warned about:

That’s the total number of deaths in Sweden so far this year, compared to previous years. Of course facts don’t really matter. Apparently, in a representative sample of Dutch citizens, 53% want you to be forbidden from leaving your home, except for visiting the supermarket. I suppose that if delivering food to your home was normalized and made affordable, then we would now have reached the stage where people would ask their government to seal your windows and lock you up inside your home.

If you ever wondered how Anne Frank could be forced to hide in her house or how slaves could be sold at auctions, then I think you want to pay attention now, because a lot of the same basic instincts that led to such atrocities are now being triggered in a lot of people. If you read the Huffington Post, or Buzzfeed, or any other progressive rag, you’re basically told: “Nuh-uh, the modern day descendants of the Nazi’s are actually those socially incompetent nerdy white working class males who make shitty memes on 4chan!”

The irony of course, is that the people who opposed the Nazi’s, or who opposed the slavers, were in fact mainly socially oblivious eccentric white men with extreme political viewpoints. Do tell me: Do you think Henry David Thoreau would be virtue signaling on Twitter right now if he had been born a century later? I think he would have turned into a Ted Kacyzynski kind of figure. What sets such people apart is that they’re inclined to follow their own inner moral compass and desire individual liberty. They’re bad at adjusting to social norms, because that’s what testosterone does to the male brain.

The Nazi’s on the other hand, were dependent on droves of normies who simply went along with whatever caused them the least inconvenience. It’s not some neo-nazi NEET who comments on every obscure conspiracy blog he stumbles upon to complain that the author won’t “name the Jew” who scares me. It’s the people who always try to adjust to the shifting baseline of ever greater absurdity who terrify me.

You’re inevitably going to die, there’s no escape from death. The most you can hope for is to make the Bardo between birth and death somewhat dignified and meaningful. Even that is now denied to us. You’re now expected to spend a year of your life sitting inside, so that elderly people in nursing homes can spend a few more months in a state of suffering and misery.

The more interesting corners of the Internet blame a shadowy cabal that desires a Great Reset for all of this misery, but I think that’s a response more than a cause. The sad reality is that this is what the general public wants, that’s what all the polls show. Middle-aged secular women who happen to be high in agreeableness and conscientiousness are now pathologically afraid of death, everyone else ends up adjusting to that fear. If this were really the product of a diabolical conspiracy, then it would be relatively easy to solve. The reality is that most people want this stuff, with the exception of three groups:

1. Angry working class white males who see through the nonsense. Their relationship status on Facebook is “divorced” and they work at “self-employed”. Their profile picture might be of their dog.
2. People like Sunetra Gupta and John Ioannidis, who have a good understanding of statistics.
3. People whose religious convictions mean they don’t suffer a pathological fear of death.

Unfortunately that’s not really a band you’re going to win a war with. In fact, the past fifty years or so of human history consists of policymakers pursuing destructive delusions that happen to be popular among policymaking circles, your racist uncle Bob commenting on talk radio or the local newspaper comment section that this is a bad idea, only to be swiftly ignored and shown right later.

When angry working class white men want something, then you’re almost mathematically guaranteed to have governments do the opposite. In fact, if you utter an idea that people associate with angry working class white men, then they’re typically not even going to listen to what you have to say, they’re going to be dismissing it out of hand and react with self-righteous hostility.

Society should have done what we have done many times before, which is to bite the bullet. We didn’t do that, so now we get to watch as everything implodes around us: Cascading bankruptcies, mass unemployment, escalating deaths from delayed medical treatment, skyrocketing suicides, alcoholism and drug overdoses, children who don’t really learn anything, PTSD, obsessive compulse disorder and anxiety attacks among vast swathes of the population in the first world. The third world gets to enjoy unprecedented famines, which means the first world gets to enjoy unprecedented refugee streams.

Essentially, lockdowns are an act of exacarbating everything that was already bad about the 21st century: Human subservience to a handful of American tech companies, lack of interaction with wild nature, the dissolution of normal human relationships, excessive cleanliness and the reduction of human beings to passive consumers of entertainment who are always looking for the next quick rush of dopamine.

My friends tell me to be more nuanced: “Yes but he’s a good guy.” “My aunt’s hairdresser’s grandma died after her grandson visited her, so I understand that yadda yadda.” “If I do X then the chance of Y is Z.” No. You don’t negotiate with people who want to lock you up inside your house.

I know that people feel like they’re turning into social pariahs for not supporting any of this, but I don’t really care. If I could blow my life savings to set up a festival with 20,000 guests in attendence, I wouldn’t hesitate a second. The only thing that stops me from doing it is my conviction that I can’t get 20,000 people to show up.

You don’t negotiate with people who want to lock you up inside your house. If someone comes along and says: “Well, I have decided that you’re going to have to spend the next two weeks inside your home” Then you don’t ask yourself: “Gee, I wonder if this is a reasonable demand, maybe I should offer him some sort of compromise, where I can still walk outside for a few minutes.” You go to war against such a person.

“But people are dying!” Yes and I don’t base my notion of human rights on the idea of how many Disability Adjusted Life Years they will save. I don’t support freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, or freedom of religion, because it increases life expectancy, GDP per Capita or the share of renewable energy in our electricity grid. I support those rights, because those rights are necessary for our lives to have meaning.

I believe in the very same civil liberties that men have died to protect, in eras when droves of people died of tuberculosis, or children were paralyzed by polio if they played outside. We’ve lived through eras where a third of newborns died in childhood. Nobody ever thought of locking everyone up inside their homes back then. There was no point when your grandparents said: “Infant mortality rates have dropped below 1%, I think it’s time to have children now.”

The HIV epidemic reduced life expectancy by more than a decade in many African countries, but they never locked people up in their homes: They learned to live with it. The gay community in the United States was decimated by HIV. How did they respond? Did they ask the government to lock them up in their homes, or implement rules on how many people you can screw simultaneously? No, they learned to live with it.

The problem you’re dealing with is that people have been terrorized by the media. The media, like any other for profit business, gives consumers what they ask for. In January and February people wanted to hear “this is no big deal”, so that’s what the media fed them. Then in March they panicked and since then we’ve been stuck in a positive feedback loop, where media feed people stuff to fear and people become more afraid, thus making the whole thing more profitable.

If you’re somewhat tech-savvy, you can block it out of your life. Boomers on the other hand, are stuck being fed this stuff on a constant basis. If you have a phone and make the mistake of visiting a news site, they’ll send you notifications. If, like most boomers, you have no clue how to turn it off, your phone will buzz at random intervals, with some shitty news site sending you a notification that “cases are going up”, ensuring that every boomer panics again.

The thing that the media and the politicians are best at right now, is insinuating things that dumb people will then go on to believe, without being true. They generally don’t outright lie to you, they just plant a lie in your head, they let you do the last few steps in constructing the lie. The politicians for example, are aware that young people have figured out this virus won’t kill them. So, they get up there on TV and say “well, if you attend an illegal party, you could end up on the intensive care”. That’s going to be enough to make some young people too afraid to visit a party.

Yeah, it’s true, you could. The more important question is whether it’s a meaningful risk. Out of 48,300 cases among American college students, two people had to be hospitalized. There are statistically speaking some young people out there on the planet who will end up on the intensive care from this virus, but all the evidence we have shows that the Swine flu would have been more dangerous to those young people. The media don’t benefit from telling you this. Facebook doesn’t benefit from telling you this. In other words, most young people never find out about this.

Another example, this one aimed at angry right-wing men, is the persistent idea that catching COVID19 is somehow going to reduce your fertility. They construct this idea, typically by looking at old people who died from COVID19 and then concluding “their testicles look damaged”! Well, let’s look at the basics once more.  The right wing media wants to earn the same buck off this pandemic that the left wing media earns from it, but right wing people don’t want to be terrorized as much. In other words, the right wing media have to look really hard to find something that Joe Sixpack finds terrifying enough to be bothered with.

You don’t look at dead people to conclude what a virus does in the 99.9% of people who don’t die from it. What we know is as following: People who catch the virus and aren’t hospitalized for it (that is 99.9% of all young adult men), have the exact same sperm count as those who never caught it. People who are hospitalized for the virus, show a decreased sperm count. Why is that? Think carefully. What’s the main symptom of this virus? Fever. When you have a severe fever, your sperm count is temporarily decreased for a few months. This has been known to modern medicine since we first knew how to count your sperm. Somehow everyone forgot about it this year.

The biggest bullshit they will feed you however is the “oh no the virus has mutated” narrative. This genuinely terrifies people who have no basic understanding of biology. Maybe the virus is now deadlier? Maybe the vaccines won’t work? Anyone with a basic level of understanding of infectious disease could explain to you that viruses mutate all the time.

Viruses don’t kill you for fun. Viruses kill you by accident. Birds and bats have higher body temperatures than humans, which is what makes their viruses so dangerous for us. Our body tries to fight the virus through a fever, but the fever merely raises our temperature to the level the virus is used to. When viruses jump from another species to us, that’s when they’re deadliest. As they mutate, they adapt to their human host and thereby become less dangerous.

Similarly, you won’t find a serious epidemiologist who thinks the vaccine won’t work due to a mutation. The virus mutates at a fraction of the pace of influenza, the vaccines will be deployed in the next few months. They think you’ll need to update the vaccines once every few years, to maintain optimal efficiacy. After all, the main thing that sets this virus apart from every other virus is how much attention it manages to get, without being very remarkable.

Dr. Guido Hoffman, speaking about how young children in Germany were scared into thinking there are "bugs on their hands that will kill grandma"

"I cant put my horror into words, it's incomprehensible, the teachers are participating in this also, shame on you!" pic.twitter.com/Vudm49MhH9

— Ian Lyne (@lyne_ian) December 10, 2020

I’m serious when I say I don’t really feel like forgiving the people who did this. All the shitty media rags that put corpses on their frontpage, all the Godforsaken dorks with zero added value for humanity who felt so proud of themselves for ordering a mask in January that they clinged onto the narrative for the rest of eternity, but most of all, I don’t feel like forgiving the people who did this to our children.

Today’s generation of children will have to grow up in the polluted and wrecked planet left behind by the elderly, but those elderly ruined their childhood because they were afraid of dying at an age their own grandparents didn’t even reach. I can’t see this as anything other than a global outbreak of collective psychosis in response to a pathological fear of death.

I know that people try to find a bigger sense of meaning in this. Perhaps the Illuminati want to institute global slavery through the Great Reset. Perhaps the Chinese government released a biological weapon to kill or sterilize us all. Unfortunately, the reality is far more depressing: People are just cowards. Cowardice is a sin, precisely because it is contagious. As soon as men show cowardice in war, their comrades realize they will be abandoned in the heat of the battle, so the cowardice spreads.

Angry working class right-wing men throw a hissy fit when they’re asked to wear a mask in the supermarket, because that’s hardwritten into their DNA. Men are supposed to display defiance and stoicism when faced with a threat. The arrows of the barbarians will block out the sun? Excellent, then we shall fight in the shade! Trump won my heart, the moment he left the hospital and began dancing on stage and throwing masks into the crowd: That’s what a public figure is supposed to be doing. The message you want your government to send is that this is a joke.

Why? Because death has to be treated as a joke. Whether you like it or not, you’re inevitably going to die. That’s something you have to come to terms with. The average person is faced with a large range of anxieties: You’re poor, you’re ugly, you’re going to die, your children are dumb, your wife doesn’t truly love you, andsoforth.

When you amplify people’s anxiety, you make society impossible to sustain. That’s what social media has been doing for years now, by creating echo-chambers. Every dipshit who thinks he is too ugly to find a girlfriend can find a community online who will validate that belief. Every girl who doesn’t like being a girl can find people online who will tell her she is “non-binary”. And every secularized neurotic babyboomer can get an alert on her phone from a local newspaper, insinuating that young people holding secret parties is what is going to kill her.

I didn’t really want to spend any more words on this, but it’s impossible to escape. My recommendation is cliche, but it has to be said nonetheless: I would recommend removing news from your life.