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March 1, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:25
Coronavirus Updates: Death Rate! Styx and Stef
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Hi everybody, back here with Sticks, Hex and Hammer 666, because you see 665 was taken, so we had to just step it up one more.
And we're going to talk all things coronavirus today, and I know you've been following this very closely.
What was it that first grabbed your attention?
How early was it in the outbreak that you began to sense that something was amiss?
Right as it began, because the story started not to make sense very, very early on.
And the thing is, and you may have experienced this too, sometimes you get news tips from other places, including from China, potentially, or people who have traveled there.
And the things I was seeing, people making claims that there were more cases than expected, I think there were some people that told me that a new virus had broken out even before it was admitted to by the Chinese government.
This is why they don't want to be part of the larger internet, I think.
And it was clear that something was going on simply by the response being censorship, essentially, in its purest form.
Well, it's funny, too, because this is something that Mike Cernovich talked about in the excellent movie called Hoaxed, which everyone should check out at hoaxedmovie.com, and it'll be back out on iTunes in a couple days.
This is March 1, 2020.
But I don't think people realize that, you know, people like you and I who've been massaging the tender spots of the Internet for lo these many years, we kind of have a tentacles...
Reach into the hearts and minds of the world.
I don't even know how many contacts who are constantly sending me information to get out on the show.
We're kind of jacked in.
We have our own sub-internet of the actual internet, and the amount of information flowing in is considerable.
And, of course, we look like just guys at a studio or wherever you are in your room.
But the fact is that we actually have quite a matrix going on of information flow.
Yeah, and it's wonderful. I mean, that means that things can get out there ahead of the news cycle, which tends to spin and sanitize everything.
Whereas if you or I lie to people or we make mistakes and we don't immediately apologize and do our best, we get dogpiled by people that watch the content because they have the ability to interact directly.
If CNN does that, nobody dogpiles them.
They'll have the comments closed on their story.
And so they don't really, I don't think they really fact check as much as independent content creators at this point do, especially if they've branched out beyond just mainline tech, which is getting kind of screwy anyway.
Like if they have an alt tech presence, Discord servers and all of these other things, Zoom and all these things they use to communicate with people, there's a lot more accountability.
Well, that's actually very interesting that you point that out.
It hadn't really crossed my mind, so good on you.
But thinking of CNN, of course, what happened was, I don't even remember, it was like what?
Last year, early last year, where the whole sort of Covington Kids thing happened.
And it took them forever to finally end up settling with Nick Sandman for all of this stuff.
And holy crap, I mean, that kind of delay means that the energy and the sting of correction is kind of diluted by the passage of time.
Whereas you're right, of course, we get this immediate feedback.
I mean, the funny thing is, like, when I'm doing debates with people, I just did a bunch of debates with lefties just this last week.
And I have a chat open.
I have a Discord server for supporters of the show.
And I'm getting, like, real-time feedback.
And it really is a pretty wired situation.
And you're right, especially if they turn off the comments because, you know, the modern world is a battle between the writers of mainstream media articles and the comments section.
They turn that off and they get nothing.
I mean, they get this very slow-walking, maybe possible one-in-a-million legalese response.
But that's about it. That's why I think Twitter is starting to fiddle around with the idea of having posts that don't have comments on them because all the lamestream pundits have probably complained, oh my god, people are fact-checking me in real time.
It's like with the Sandman stuff, with the Covington kids.
While the story was still breaking, people like you and I were actually getting the video, the raw footage was being sent.
I think 10 people sent it to me or more.
The raw footage that showed that the reports that I was reading in real time were totally wrong.
But the problem is all the pundits and the people that work with CNN and these groups, they're not going to take time to check that.
They don't have the time to check that.
Even if they have staff, they're getting so overwhelmed, number one.
Number two, they're getting their marching orders from some editor, and so they have to bounce back and forth with them.
And actually, ironically, it reminds me of the reason why China didn't respond to coronavirus.
Because what you had were bureaucrats and doctors bouncing back and forth information before the decision could possibly be made, because of the way communism works, to send it to a higher level.
And then it had to bounce back and forth further before Jinping actually knew that there was a problem.
So it took them weeks.
And then their initial response was, hey, let's sit back and just censor things.
Well, it's funny too because people are really invested in our shows.
I mean, people – you have your whole clank army and people who make all the jokes and references.
And so people that are really, really invested, they've, I guess – Invested in us being right or at least correcting mistakes.
So, you know, everyone has a morning mantra, you know, the morning mantra, you know, I'm smart enough, I'm strong enough, and gosh, don't let people just like me.
Well, my morning mantra generally runs along the lines of don't mess up too badly today.
Don't mess up, you know, because, you know, you're walking right to the edge of the Overton window, right to the edge of acceptable discourse.
Don't mess up because people, of course, have invested a lot of time and energy and support In our shows, and so they don't want to see us lose credibility by messing up.
So I think of that, and of course, I run things through.
I had a whole chat before each of my debates for an hour or two with people running through arguments, getting feedback, and I'm sort of aware that we represent particular communities that are invested in us, and they really care.
People don't have that general relationship with places like CNN, where they're invested and they care, and it's like a friend in the living room, so to speak.
And so the very The personal nature of what it is that we do has given us a lot of pinball-like feedback to help course-correct before things go astray.
Yeah, that's actually very interesting.
I hadn't really thought about that whole matrix of correction, but it's very strong and quite powerful.
So I remember, too, because I think you were around for Ebola and stuff.
I've covered a whole bunch of these outbreaks before, and I was always like, yeah, it's not going to be that big a deal.
Yeah, it's tragic for the people involved, but it ain't going to go mainstream.
It ain't going to spread worldwide for a variety of reasons.
But boy, this one, I mean, I was actually funny because I was just in Hong Kong for my documentary Hong Kong Fight for Freedom.
I'll put a link to that below.
I was in Hong Kong in September of last year, I guess, shortly before this outbreak, which is actually I've heard rumors traced to sort of late October.
And one of the things that I talked about was the opium wars and how much the local mandarins would cover up the problems, like when the British were sailing up and invading and taking over everything.
All the local Mandarins are like, oh, it's fine.
It's fine. You know, they're not that strong.
We've got them, Your Excellency or whatever he was called in Mandarin at the time.
This sort of cover-up and this pathological shoot-the-messenger culture that has these kinds of cover-ups occur, I was like, okay, so you've got a population which certainly does eat some rather off-the-menu There's rice farming which tends to breed a lot of bacteria.
There's not the best hygiene habits in the world, not much of a culture of hand washing.
You've got the largest human migration happening at the same time, the Chinese New Year, and you've got a communist government in charge of things who's going to cover everything up until it's almost too late to save humanity.
And you put all of these things together and it's like, yeah, okay, yeah, this is the one.
Unfortunately, all of the evil planets have aligned to make all of this stuff flourish like wildfire.
I think the two most concerning things to me so far, number one is the fact that, not the death toll, the death toll is at the moment calculated to 3%.
Now, you can argue that that'd be higher if people didn't get hospital beds, and it probably would be.
But that, in and of itself, is an Armageddon.
What is really bad is that a fifth of the people, if five people are infected, you've got a family, you've got Ma and Pa and three kids, one of them will have serious condition or even be in critical condition if they are all sick.
And it knocks people out for three or four weeks.
And that's a fairly average case.
Three weeks is a fairly average length of time to be sick with this.
That's a long time to have viral pneumonia.
Can you imagine gasping for breath for three weeks and not having a spot in the hospital?
You know, with no ventilator or anything else, no medication because there are shortages.
Oh, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just, a friend of mine wanted to bring his kids over yesterday and he said, you know, my youngest has a cold.
Now, I knew it was just a cold.
I wasn't concerned about anything else.
And I sort of hated to say, man, we got to wait because, I mean, I'm the show.
Like, if I get a cold and my voice gets messed up and I got headaches all the time and I'm low energy, it's like, That's kind of significant.
And, you know, I'm just a guy with a with a cast.
And so it's it's boy, it's a lot bigger when you've got whole manufacturing facilities swamped up with this stuff.
Exactly. I think their manufacturing capacity is still only at 85 percent and month over month is down considerably.
The other major thing is always the possibility of mutation.
We saw this with Ebola.
Technically, the coronavirus we're dealing with is already a mutation.
Now the thing is, and you're actually right, because I'm religious about washing my hands.
Whenever I go out anywhere shopping or whatever, when I come back, that's the first thing I do.
I don't quite understand people that don't do that because I tend to be slightly a germaphobe.
But the thing is, it's not even just coronavirus.
It's just a good idea anyway.
Even the common cold can put you down for a couple of days.
And it sucks. It sucks to be sick.
Now, there is a kind of concordance in history that I was sort of sent by this and looked up to this.
So, unfortunately, with this cycle of history, it was about 100 years ago that the Spanish flu emerged, and 20 to 50 million died from this disease, and 500 million people were infected.
And this was during a time, of course, of much less rampant travel and interaction between countries and cultures.
And in the traditional reality that the most moral countries tend to get screwed the most by history, it was only called the Spanish flu because the Spanish government was one of the few Western governments that didn't suppress and censor news of this.
But the actual origin, according to – I'll put the links for this below – The actual origin of the Spanish flu was...
Ding, ding, ding! Yes, that's right!
China giving its other gifts to the planet once more.
And I'm not trying to suggest the numbers are going to be the same.
I wrote this tweet this morning.
History, same story.
Just different costumes.
It's like, great! China is now delivering another wonderful virus to the world, just like the Spanish flu.
And, you know, kind of racist to call it Spanish, not the China flu.
And I don't know why it's not called the China flu.
This one definitely started in China.
But I guess everyone's so PC now, you can't call a spade a spade.
But there is this kind of tragic repetition in history that when you start to see it, it just feels like your, you know, Groundhog Day, but this time with coughing.
Well, it's the Kung Flu, but I think the Black Plague initially as well originated in China.
That's right. It swept through China for several years before it managed to escape through the trade lines through the Near East, actually, and enter the Mediterranean basin.
This probably happens due to the tropical environment.
We've seen the same thing with exotic diseases in Central Africa.
The idea that it's bigoted, by the way, to call it exactly what it is, it originated in China.
I don't call it the China flu because, I mean, at this point, it's a worldwide pandemic.
But to call it that, you know, saying that that's xenophobic, which is the initial reaction of Vox and Huffington Post, as opposed to writing an article about, hey, thousands of people are dying, maybe you should wash your hands.
They were focused on what it was being called, and I thought it was surreal.
Can you imagine if it had been back during the Spanish flu era?
They would have had a problem with the term.
They wouldn't have had a problem with the disease.
Well, you see, what you've got to understand is that it's white privilege.
Even if only 1% of whites are in the very top, it's all whites.
But if the disease actually originates in China, you can't refer to it as a Chinese disease.
That's just the reality. But it is the Trump disease, remember.
Huffington Post declares that to be the case.
Oh, okay. Let's dive into this one.
Oh, good. Good baiting hook in the water, my friend.
I'm all over that, like an eel on a piece of sushi, whatever that is.
Okay, so this...
Hoax thing is really, really kind of fascinating because now the mainstream media tried to put the new find people hoax, the new Russia collusion hoax out just a day or two ago because Trump was talking about, he was at a rally, right?
He was talking about how the Democrats are saying that he's flubbed and messed up the whole response to the coronavirus and he referred to comments that he was messing up the coronavirus response as a hoax, right?
And so what happened was they immediately pivoted and shifted to, Trump said, coronavirus itself is a hoax.
And they really, really tried to get that.
You could see that coming up and morphing and mutating, almost like a virus itself, in real time.
You could see. It was absolutely fascinating.
Parable. Oh, Trump says that criticisms that he's mishandled coronavirus are a hoax.
And then, you know, within a couple of iterations, it's Trump calls coronavirus a hoax.
And they really tried to get this one going.
I mean, what was it?
Was it Brian Williams or someone who had, you know, noted corpulent liar Michael Moore on the show?
And Michael Moore with his breathless, I've always said that this is the most dangerous president we've ever seen, but this is far beyond the pale, blah, blah, blah.
And so at least we were spared Michael Moore lecturing us about health.
But so all of this, they tried to get it going.
And I mean, people jumped on this.
And it came, of course, initially from conservatives just saying, look, this is just complete lie.
This is a complete fabrication.
And they seem to be walking it back.
I haven't seen much of it this morning.
And even Facebook has put out, if people post this, they put out little things saying, hey, this is factually inaccurate because I guess calling it a lie and propaganda and disinformation in a presidential race is too strong.
And I don't know what's changed.
Maybe it's social media, maybe it's...
But, you know, I did a whole series of videos back in 2016, the untruths about Donald Trump just pulling apart all the lies about the guy.
But this one seems to have both emerged and been decapitated within 24 to 48 hours.
And that's actually a pretty good response time for viral disinformation.
Yeah, well, I mean, think about it.
It's peak orange man bad when you have a hoax about the idea of hoaxing.
We've never really seen this before.
I think the reason that they grabbed this particular bullshit back had less to do with trying to be fair.
Like in Facebook's case, it's obvious Zuckerberg's not a huge fan maybe of the Dems at the moment because he sparred with Warren, but he's not a Trump fan or anything like that, and we've got a visitor here, so bear with me for just a moment.
I think really what it ends up being about, though, is that they have a better mind for strategy than a lot of Dem strategists.
Especially the far left, like the Bernie Bros and stuff, are so terrible at strategy and optics at this point that I think some in Silicon Valley are literally trying to help them.
Now, let's talk about the mortality rate.
A friend of mine sent me this.
The American College of Cardiology Bulletin, and again, I'll put the link to this below, Overall, they say the case mortality remains low at 2.3%.
However, the mortality rate jumps to 6% in hypertensive, 7.3% in diabetics, 10.5% in patients with cardiovascular disease, and 14.8% for patients greater than or equal to 80 years of age.
And this They said, notably, the case mortality rate for underlying cardiovascular disease, 10.5%, is greater than in patients with underlying chronic respiratory disease, 6.3%.
Now, that is very, very interesting and, of course, a little terrifying because we're hearing, I mean, I've talked about this, you know, half of Chinese males are smokers, much fewer women, which is probably why it's affecting more men than women.
But cardiovascular disease appears to be, according to this bulletin, particularly susceptible to this virus.
We kind of blend all of these mortality rates together, and then there's something thrown in usually about old people being more susceptible.
But You know, the cardiovascular thing, the chronic respiratory disease, diabetics, hypertensives and so on.
It is really a slice and dice and you can't really blend all of this mortality into one.
It's like grouping smokers and non-smokers together in lung diseases.
I mean, it's not fair.
I think some of that might be due to the fact that there is going to be naturally more of those things in the older population simply having been tested for.
So it's sort of like with coronavirus when we talk about death rate and things like that.
We have to understand there's a differential between different nations and the number of people who have been actually tested.
Like here in the Netherlands, for example.
Right now there are 10 cases actively in the Netherlands, one critical.
But in some cases, you have countries where there's only one or two cases.
There could be just as many people infected, but there was less of an effort to actually test.
This is why, like in Iran, I think at this point it's a lack of testing rigor that's causing an effect where it looks like it's more lethal in Iran, like there's a new strain or something.
I have a feeling, though, that it's just that they're underestimating the number of cases by possibly an order of magnitude.
There could be 2,000 cases in Iran easily right now.
And that would basically account for that number.
I think when we're talking about people with cardiovascular, long and so forth problems, that's going to skew towards the older generation.
People who are older are more likely to have developed adult onset diabetes because they're adults.
They've had more time to abuse their bodies potentially.
Well, and of course, people whose health is compromised through bad luck or bad habits, like 70% of health issues result from lifestyle decisions.
You choose ill health a lot of times.
People who are overweight, people who, and also people who don't get enough sleep.
It's actually kind of important. Your immune system is very responsive to how much sleep you get.
Now, here's something else.
I wanted to run through a couple of headlines, get your thoughts on them.
After just one week from the outbreak, Northern Italy is already considering expanding its hospital bed's capacity because one in 11 patients We're good to go.
Yeah, I'm just thinking of a situation in which instead of people being in a hospital bed with potentially a ventilator or at the very least a couple of aspirin or something, they're in a situation where they say, I'm sorry, there's no room at the hospital.
The best we can do is send you home and tell you to keep hydrated and how high the death rate could climb.
If it's two or three percent, which is a pretty good guess of where it is with proper treatment, with proper nourishment in a population that's in northern Italy is relatively well off, South Korea, urban China tends to be better off than the outlying areas where you're getting an underestimation of cases anyway, I think. Imagine what it would do to a population that was densely, like if it hits Bangladesh or the slums of Hyderabad or Mysore or something like that.
Here's some other numbers that had me, well, a smidge concerned.
And I just wanted to warn all of my lovely Mandarin-speaking friends that they're about to hear some syllable butchering as I run through the names.
But in Diego, 1900 Shinjionji church members have been tested for coronavirus.
1300 had symptoms and 600 did not.
Among those 1300 with symptoms, 87.5% were confirmed with the virus.
But out of the 600 without symptoms, 70% were confirmed with coronavirus.
And either maybe there's the odd natural immunity person out there, but that, of course, is prior to the week, two-week, I've heard even estimates more, of when you can become infectious without actually having any symptoms.
And that is some pretty scary numbers.
And that definitely accounts for the fact that if a person, the testing that they're doing is not 100% accurate, it's like I think 70 or 80% or some crazy low number like that.
The fact is, if you're testing tens of thousands of people, you're occasionally going to get someone who's negative two or three tests in.
They send them home because they don't have symptoms, but they're actually infected.
They can develop it later.
But I mean, apparently, and I saw this in the news.
God, it had to have been back in January.
I think I saw an article where they said that actually viral shedding in the asymptomatic cases, while it was lower, it was still high enough to be of concern.
It was still significant, specifically through sweat and through saliva.
Which would be a huge problem.
You know, your mother has coronavirus, she goes daily, comes back, eats an ice cream cone with her kid or something, and the kid gets infected and everyone's all flabbergasted about how it happened.
Also, and this is something I reported on some weeks ago, pets may carry the virus.
A dog has tested positive for COVID-19.
And you have, of course, I'm sure, seen the tragic and horrifying videos of Chinese people destroying pets out of fear of the virus.
But, you know, dogs are, you know, you can stay home, but oftentimes your dog is roaming around.
You know, if you need to let your dog out because you're sick and the dog has COVID-19, the odds of the dog, you know, peeing, licking, sweating, shedding, being petted by other people when it's out there roaming around, that also seems to be kind of a jetpack on the spreading situation.
Yeah, well, cats don't seem to be able to get the coronavirus, so Jana here is very happy.
I'm actually holding her up at the moment.
The thing about dogs is that I believe that in the test involving the canine, it was a weak positive.
So what we may be seeing is just that the virus is capable of temporarily residing within the nasal passage or something, but it would still definitely be of concern for someone who's like really chummy with their dog and they're like playing with it constantly and something.
Yeah, I guess they get infected, unfortunately.
I'm not so sure that the dog, under usual circumstances, I'm wondering how the dog would be infected unless its owner were already infected.
Like just going out for a walk, I suppose if someone bends down to pet the dog and sneezes all over its face maybe, but I'm assuming, thankfully, that's probably not that common.
Well, let's hope so.
Now, in the general move to rebrand an incident or accident or release or weird evolution or whatever the source is, we'll probably never know –
There is, of course, this I think we're good to go.
But this goal to politicize it in America and make it just another ridiculous cudgel with which to beat down the orange man is really sad and pathetic.
And it just shows this terrifying lack of empathy, you know, at a time where people are dropping like flies in various places around the world.
And I've been sort of watching your tweets as you talk about the countries that it's spread to, to sit there and say, okay, well, we have this tragedy, we should really work to deal with the source.
And there's a lot to criticize, as I said, in the Chinese government.
Now it's just like, well, Orange Man, bad, and it's the Trump virus and so on.
But Tulsi Gabbard, who, you know, not somebody I have a huge amount of respect for, although she seems to have a pretty good workout regime, but she tweeted this.
She said, hashtag Coronavirus USA is a tragic legacy of John Bolton's reckless agenda.
In 2018, he closed NSC's global health security and forced out Rear Admiral Zimmer, leaving the White House without a pandemic response team to act in a timely manner to protect our people.
And John Bolton is like, you know, the old Seinfeld show.
Newman is like Bolton!
That cheese-grating, soup-straining, mustachioed psycho is back in the news.
At this time, he's not driving for war.
But, you know, this guy leaves this trail of tears and disaster everywhere he goes.
Well, Bolton's nuts, but I'm wondering exactly what a pandemic response team would be able to do.
So far, the only main outbreaks we have in the U.S. are the Kirkland case, actually, now in Washington State, our first death in the United States.
That one, though, it appears that a nurse, I guess, visited Italy or something and came back and was working in an old folks home, which is basically biological warfare at that point.
She should definitely lose her job over that.
And then a handful of other cases, but until literally the other day, there really weren't any active cases for the most part to speak of.
The response in the United States, considering the population and the amount of travel, has been pretty good, I think.
Yes, and I have my doubts that it's going to spread hugely in the West.
There is a lot of communication.
There is a I do find it a little bit odd that it's people like you and I who do the research, who talk to the experts, who get the facts from the tentacled network of subterranean brilliant people who follow our stuff and the mainstream media is politicizing.
Well, first of all, they downplay, and then they call reasonably researched facts a conspiracy theory, and then they report those reasonably researched facts as facts and completely ignore the fact that last week they were calling it a conspiracy theory.
And then everybody else who's at the front lines of information, they get called.
Why is it coming down to you and I and like 20 other people in the world to tell the facts about this kind of stuff when you think of the amount of money and resources that these guys have in the mainstream media?
man, I just, I can't imagine what it must be like to work in that kind of environment How much biting of your tongue and how much silencing of any initiative to pursue the truth must be going on in these factories of phlegm-based propaganda.
Yeah, remember, preparing for coronavirus for the possibility of shortages or buying N95 masks or whatever was considered paranoid fear-mongering a month ago.
Now it's considered totally normal.
They all encourage it, all of the lamestream outlets all around the world.
Governments and their health organizations.
But literally a few weeks earlier, they were calling people like you and I crazy for suggesting that that might be something you might want to do, that it might get worse, that it might become a pandemic.
I don't even think the CDC has declared it a global pandemic yet.
How many thousands of people outside China have to have it before you say, okay, well, it is in the globe.
It's no longer just in Asia.
It's in Europe and it's in these other places in the world.
It's encompassing thousands of people.
We've got thousands of new infections a day.
How is that not a pandemic?
And how is it not something that should be responded to?
People have to understand that even just an economic downturn can cause problems that they should prepare for.
They don't need to build a bunker.
They don't need to have...
Now, they should. They should have a ham radio and a gun and things like that if they can because they're cool, but they don't need those things.
But having a little bit of food on hand, it's not paranoid to lay in an extra can of beans and a can opener, of course.
Yeah, you don't want to be doing that when you're weakened.
All right, so get comfy with your cat because I'm going to do a tiny rant here.
It's just bubbling up in me like old Vesuvius, and then I want to get your thoughts on it.
Because to me, there's a very sort of big angle to this.
I mean, bigger even than the disease, which is big enough, which is there's something that's happened in the world, which is everybody says, man, all these old rules are just square, man.
Yeah. We've got to break down all the old rules, which are just prejudice and all of that, and then people try doing that, and then massive disasters end up resulting, and smart people say, oh, okay, that's why there were these old rules.
That's why... And no, not all the old rules are good, but not all of the new breakdown of rules is good anyway.
Like, there used to be a rule around not letting young men and women get drunk and have sex together because there'd be a lot of...
Of regret, of false accusations of outright rape and unwanted pregnancies and STDs.
So there was some kind of social management of hypersexuality.
And then people said, hey, man, that was just square stuff.
We've got to get out there and mix it up.
And it's like, okay, well, now you can see all of this breakdown occurring, breakdown in marriages, breakdown in health, and breakdown in trust and positive relations between the genders and so on.
And in the 60s, they all got together and said, hey, you know, soap is just a bourgeois construction.
Let's have a commune where everyone shares everything and we don't bother washing because, you know, washing is just something that's put out by the soap manufacturers so they can profit off your germophobia.
No offense.
And then, of course, they all got together in their hippie communes.
They all got sick.
They all got scabies like, oh, that's why we have soap.
That's why we have some, you know, personal boundaries around us.
Now, this pandemic or this spread of this illness, what it does, of course, is it reminds people why some reasonable borders might not be the worst thing in the world.
Why it's not necessarily a terrible thing to, oh, I don't know, have the majority of your pharmaceutical manufacturing take place actually inside your borders where you can control the health and productivity of the economy as a whole.
And this idea that Getting rid of borders, this sort of whole globalist project where they say, we're going to achieve diversity, making everyone exactly the same, like some fashion designer saying, we'll achieve fashion diversity when everyone dresses like they were in Star Trek, the first generation.
And this whole globalist project when people are saying, you know those countries that put up their borders, like Russia closing 2,300 mile border with China, Russia's got almost no infection.
So maybe borders...
There was some reason why they were around, some reason why they were enforced.
And if this kind of spread of illness reminds people why border security might not be the worst thing in the world, that goes very much against this sort of globalist agenda of erasing borders, mixing all cultures together until there's nothing left of anyone who's individuated.
And I think that's one of the reasons why the mainstream media has a relationship to this illness that is fundamentally and pathologically ideological rather than factual.
Yeah, absolutely.
Disease spread has definitely been promulgated in part by globalism.
Now, there's the positive and negative side of this.
The idea that people should be able to travel and see other cultures, that they should be able to buy things from other places, I think is completely positive.
The problem is that what we've got is a situation now where if you challenge any iteration thereupon, by corporations usually, Saying that they should be able to do whatever the hell they want, they should be able to control things internally, that they should be able to bring in whatever form of migration that they need for their cheap industry, you're called a bigot.
Well, obviously that's not the case, and it does help to spread disease to some degree.
I think another thing, you're definitely right about certain groups of people, it's like, and I don't know about your specific feelings about vaccination.
But I'm assuming that you don't have the completely free-range mentality, like basically chew a root in order to feel better.
I'm a big fan of not dying of smallpox and not having my face ravaged, you know, Bryan Adams-style by smallpox.
And the eradication of smallpox was one of the great modern advances of medicine and so on.
I mean, my sort of personal thoughts, which are obviously completely or relatively uninformed, Boy, there seems to be a lot of vaccinations going on, and that does seem to be quite a strain to put on a young immune system.
I am somewhat concerned that in America, legal action in response to problems arising from vaccine appears to be virtually impossible to mount because of specific laws or precedents that were passed.
So I do have some concerns.
Overall, I love the idea of vaccinations, you know, a hair of the dog that bit you, It cures the potential hangover, so to speak.
But like all things that start with good intentions and generally out of the free market, it gets politicized and then the good drains out of it and the bad sweeps into it and you end up with something very different from where you started.
I would agree. And the basic point would be this, though.
There are some people who take that mentality questioning, well, you know, do we need 200 vaccines?
And then they throw out the baby with the bathwater and they say, well, coronavirus isn't a problem, go lick doorknobs.
And really, I hear that from people.
There are even people that are on the right at this point that do that, but that tends to be a fairly left-leaning sort of proclivity.
I've noticed that it's like a lot of Bernie fans.
They're like, well, we don't need these vaccines.
The pharmaceutical industry is evil.
And it's very, very interesting to see, actually, considering that these people usually have just gotten through telling you you're a science denier because you're not morbidly worried about glaciers melting.
Oh, it's so funny. Yeah, I was actually, I think one of the second or third videos that I did, and this would be back in I think 2006, oh lord, time flash, was, you know, I don't really think we have a lot to worry about in the short run based upon global warming, and I sort of went through all the reasons why.
And, you know, it was 14 years ago, and, you know, whatever you think in terms of the long term, I was right about all of that stuff.
Manhattan isn't underwater.
Al Gore isn't broadcasting from his underwater home by the sea.
Neither is Barack Obama, who just bought, as you know, something in Martha's Vineyard right by the water level.
And so it is one of these situations where, you know, people just seem to be right kind of consistently based on principles.
And the other thing that seems to happen as well is that the causes of these disasters and the disaster from coronavirus in the West, to me, is not going to primarily result or even top five result from, The death count, again, with due sensitivity to how tragic and awful it is for the individuals involved, it is things like the fact that the vast majority of antibiotics and other medications are manufactured outside the USA, a lot of times in China.
Now, you sort of say, okay, well, what's the problem with this?
It's free trade, it's free trade.
It's like, but it's not.
It's not free trade because the reason why everything was off-source to China, everybody knows this, why did manufacturing...
Everybody knows this in Canada after the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Everybody knows this in America who studied the issue with any reasonable objectivity.
Manufacturing didn't just disappear to China because Chinese workers get paid a lot less.
It disappeared because the regulatory burden and the union burden and all of that stuff that happened in America and other places in the West became so...
The environmental side assessments, the OSHA, the...
You know, hey, I'm all for protecting...
I'm all for protecting the health and safety of workers, but not to the point where they can't get medicine in 20 years because all the manufacturing went overseas to a communist dictatorial regime that seemed to foster illness in its environment like an obsessive psycho social killer researcher with a petri dish from hell.
So there is no genuine safety and security in this world and trying to flee to that ends up with you in the black cloak of tyranny.
The reason why everything fled overseas was this hyper-regulation, interference with free trade, free relations, the free market in the West.
And now we're sort of seeing the price of that.
And when you start to talk to people about root causes, I can see their eyes just kind of glaze over.
It's like, yeah, but we have an emergency now to deal with.
And it's like, but all we do is constantly jump from these emergencies to emergencies without ever dealing with root causes.
Of course, manufacturing is going to start coming back to America, to other places in the West, because China is slowing down, the supply chain is crapped out, and people do need their medicines.
So there is going to be a resurgence, and nobody's going to look at root causes, and nobody's going to try and deal with those root causes.
It's all just playing whack-a-mole, and it's kind of frustrating.
Yeah, I'm optimistic that over the next decade or two, there will be more of a backlash against the worst effects of globalism.
What I would say, though, is coronavirus or anything like it causing that.
How many people have to die before people realize that we've been doing the wrong thing?
See, the problem is that this epidemic is literally only an epidemic because of the centrality of a far-left economic system in the first place that looks out for its own money interests.
The Chinese government didn't decide to say, well, we just don't think this virus exists.
We think these people are provocateurs, so we're going to censor them on WeChat or whatever.
They didn't say that. They immediately got worried and they said, well, we're just going to hope this will be like SARS or something that's not highly transmissible.
Some people might die, yeah, but we can always quarantine it later if it becomes a problem.
But we would rather just pretend it doesn't exist, hope that nobody notices it exists so we don't have to do anything and they just assume it's a bad flu year.
And then, you know, they won't have to worry about an economic downturn.
It's very, very funny when people who are very pro-globalist, who tend to be far left, endorse this sort of basic policy.
It's very funny when they actually like that kind of centrality.
Well, I mean, this gives me a bit of a facial tick, so I'll try to manage my deep emotional response.
But, you know, you've probably heard a million times about how the Europeans came to North America and infected the locals consciously with smallpox blankets, which is all just a bunch of propagandistic Marxist garbage.
There wasn't even a germ theory until the late 19th century.
There's one letter that suggested it potentially, that there's no evidence it was ever carried out.
But okay, so if...
State actions or government actions or centralized coercive actions are responsible for the spread of disease.
Okay, well, I hope that leftists, although I don't have much hope for it, will stop talking about smallpox blankets that are a Marxist fantasy from 150 or 200 years ago and actually start talking about the fact that here we have an actual government that has facilitated the spread of Of a worldwide disease that is killing people by the thousands and infecting people by the tens of thousands, probably much more, and is going to cause significant economic, health, and even political dislocation around the world.
Here we have a government that covered things up, but I bet you next time you go into a course in university you'll only ever hear about Europeans in fantasy small box blankets.
You won't hear much about how the Chinese Communist Party facilitated the spread of this disease.
Oh, if it's covered at all, it'll have an orange man bad section talking about the U.S. response and how Trump should have known better.
He should have been prescient enough to warn the Chinese, but he didn't because he's racist and hates Asian people.
That's probably about what it would say.
Oh, yeah. Well, that's going to lead us.
We'll wrap it up here.
That's going to lead us to our next topic, which is Bernie Sanders proudly pointing out that the majority of his donors are teachers.
Oh! That's just great for the next generation, isn't it?
All right. Well, listen, thanks very much.
Just give people your vital statistics on the web if you can.
Make sure they can find your erudite conversations.
Yeah, they can look up Sticks, Hex, and Hammer.
I'm on all sorts of websites or tarlwarwick.net.
And if they can spell that, then definitely, you know, upper IQ. It's really nice to have that kind of filter.
It's like the silent X in my last name.
Can you find me? Yeah, like mainstream media articles.
This recently just expelled my name wrong.
In half of them.
Anyway, thanks a lot for the chat.
Enjoy your, I guess, evening in your local environment.
And I guess we'll chat again soon, as soon as we can wrestle all of the great challenges of our differing time zone, which is kind of our IQ test for getting together.
But yeah, thanks. Appreciate the conversation.
Very much enjoyed it.
Hopefully I don't get coronavirus.
It is here in Demon, actually.
Oh, well, stay safe, stay indoors, and breathe through your cat.
I believe that's the takeaway from this conversation.
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