logicp_writings/corona/corona_situation_totalitarianism.md

Total Corona

---

OVERVIEW

---

The situation we're in is not to be taken lightly, but it is a comprehendible reaction to something of such enormous scope and scale.

The magnitude of assets which will be redistributed are too big to think about, and the number of factors which are being argued in the media as being unique to this state of affairs is, to be fair, unique as well. Depending on who's camp you happen to be in, you might consider it to be less or more significant than the falling of the Twin Towers, and most certainly more significant than the mortgage crisis of 2008.

There are a number of factors which make it difficult to think about:

• The scale of the problem:

How is Authoritarianism Being Enforced

Slowly we have seen our freedom and way of life being taken away from us. It seems long ago that the idea that our way of life would drastically change was a bit absurd, and even ridiculous to think about. Why should we have any reason to expect that anyone would really like to make life more restrictive or coercive unless they really believed in it.

Well, certainly it seems that there are more than a number of reasons as to why someone in a position of public office, or serving in some capacity such as to assert authority over others, with some reasonable expectation that those others are subordinate in some sense, at least within the confines of their relationship to the individual of authority.

The individual might also only represent a greater organization, but still embodies and demonstrates that authority through their being.

Fear

For some, it might be a form of fear. There might be many different things to fear, if you are a living human of this day, in spite of the historically unprecedented standards of living with enjoy.

For some it may be the fear of the absolute. To put faith into a dominant force, ideal, conceptual construct or otherwise, and declare yourself subservient to it. To declare loyalty and alignment. To fall to your knees in devoting to something greater to which your belief in its purpose guarantees one's mind the state of expectation that the fulfillment of goals, as required by that construct, and not necessarily having to be determined by oneself, but in believing that such a construct would have or naturally manifest appropriate goals, is perhaps all that is needed to give one's mind reprieve from some existential burdens.

Why, might you ask?

If one is to focus a single point of reality, then one necessarily ascertains that this singular point is deemed worthy of absolution. It has been chosen as the determination of all existence for some moment which is, as experienced by this mind, binds it with certain expectations.

In the case of a state, its purpose is to fulfill obligations relevant to the continued organization and prosperity of a group of humans. That it performs this purpose in any capacity is normally evaluated on its ability to increase the standard of living. It is expected that the state, if successful in its endeavour, will improve the quality of life and buttress society with the most essential and critical

It is expected that the state, if successful in its endeavour, will improve the quality of life and buttress society with the most essential and critical resources and services necessary to fulfill obligations which meet the expectations of that society. These expectations are, of course, always changing and are the affected by several predicating factors, including:

• The current standard of living
• The historical precedent
• The standard of life in other countries
• The immediate trends within the society:
  • Life expectancy
  • Quality of standard of care (medicine)
  • Education
  • Crime
  • Poverty
  • Rate of prosperity

Given that the evaluation of these factors is by no means simple and is, in some cases, evaluated to produce heuristics where even the quality of their evaluation is unknown and can only be improved by addressing issues of unknown complexity, it is evident that there are challenges to being able to understand whether or not the state is fulfilling their obligations. As the set of obligations and scope of their necessary affects increases, this issue becomes more pronounced accordingly.

Not only is there an issue of complexity within the fulfilling of state obligations, but the trend towards increased complexity is enhanced by the presumption that the purpose of the state is to work in the interest of its citizens. That is to say, that it's first and foremost interest, and arguably its ownly interest, is in the betterment of the lives of its citizens. In a perfectly simple scenario, this might hopefully be the case, but there are, of course, obvious questions which come into play which need to be mitigated if we are to take any of these assumptions seriously.

Holding Office

In reality, the highest level interface to the operations of the state are specified, driven and maintained by those who hold public office. There is no way getting around this reality, if we are to utilize any sort of democractic process, we must necessarily have term limits. In some cases, we might limit the number of terms to 2 terms, but this still creates an incentive towards short term planning and thinking.

Even if we are to assume a scenario where only 1 term is sought, or even allowed, this still creates bias as the ideas inherent within a party represented by individuals, who might only occupy office for 1 term, are driving the party to maintain re-election by other individuals still representing that party. It is not feasible to imagine a system whereby parties themselves only exist for the purpose of fulfilling one term of office, thus the point of expecting bias from the necessity of short-term thinking for the purpose of election and re-election still stands as a massive turd in the punchbowl, so to speak.

This issue tends to be broadly recognized, without controversy, as being true. It is, nevertheless, one which is easy to overlook as we have become accustomed to it. It's all too obvious and a reality of the system, thus it doesn't really present itself as obvious in all dialogues.

What implications does this have?

As there is a bias towards short term planning and scoping of interests, this will necessarily affect the ability of a state to provide the critical resources and services which might demonstrate the capacity of the state to fulfill its obligations.

Because of this, there is obviously going to be an increasein the complexity or even the absolute decidability of whetheror not the state is, in fact, fulfilling its obligations. Furthermore, if the obligations are properly defined, able to be defined, and whether or not these obligations and their definitions are truly relevant. The breadth and magnitude of these expectations and obligations increases in tandem with the complexity necessary to verify its effectiveness, integrity and reliability.

Moreover, as these requirements increase, the resource requirements and legal requirements also increase in kind. It should be reasonable to assume that there is a limit to the responsibilities of the state and that, even if there was no limit to the responsibilities, at a certain point the ability to verify the meeting of these responsibilities will become impossible, as the necessary procedures for verification will become near-infinite or infinite.

Thus, we must ask ourselves, are we expecting too much from the state? What are the most essential duties and artifacts that should be met and produced by the state? What is the limit to conduct when taking into consideration the effect of this conduct on the legality of behaviour by the state's citizens?

Thoush these are rational questions to be asking, they might not be sought in times where rational thinking becomes less prevalent. In the case of a pandemic, or even the fear of a pandemic, logic dictates that the prevalence of rational thinking will decrease, thus these are the types of discussions which should be had, or should have been had, when widespread threats to reason and rational thinking are were less pronounced.

Data

Dr. John Ioannidis: Professor of Medicine, of Health Research and Policy and Biomed Data Science, and Statistics at Stanford Professor Knut Wittkowski: former head of Department Of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, And Research at Rockefeller University Dr. Annie Bukacek: a physician Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: professor of medicine at Stanford University Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg: Pulmonologist from Germany Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi: Professor Emeritus of Medical Microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Data has continued to be a major buzzword, being used by data experts and lay people, those who analyze data, and those who mostly participate in social commentary. No matter who you are, and no matter your area of expertise, simply introducing the term "data" inevitably amplifies ones credibility.

Since the outset of Coronavirus and COVID-19 reporting began, there was a strong emphasis on ensuring that data is available to inform our decisions, decisions of public health officials, and decisions of legislators.

Unfortuntately for us, all of the earliest data came from China. More specifically, it came from Wuhan, a region in China where not only is it well known for its notoriously high levels of pollution, which are arguably the worst in the country, but where it has been broadly reported that its citizens have becoming increasingly frustrated with additional incinerator plants being added to their living environment, causing citizens to decide, in rising numbers, to protest.

For any citizen living in Canada, the notion of there being concerns about trust and honesty when it comes to data from China and data collection by China is not new. This is something that's already been on the news wire over the past year, due to Canadian authorities having arrested a finance executive from Huawei in December of 2018. In addition, there has been a consistent effort to improve the security of network infrastructure, data storage and data migration in any type of IT facility, whether in the public sector or among private companies, due to the assumed threat of spying by China.

With all this in mind, it's a bit disturbing to consider the behaviour of our leaders and international organizations in the time period following initial reports of the epidemic in Wuhan. There are rational reasons for wanting to make use of data coming out of Wuhan at that time, but there was no dialogue challenging the quality of this data, the possible intentions or incentives which might be affected by its dissemination, and what possible reframing of the data might be necessary, if not as a contingency then even just to demonstrate an adherence to principles of due diligence.

This was not demonstrated in their investigation of Wuhan, conducted from January 20-21 earlier this year. China, having been dealing with cases of the virus since at least the beginning of December, collaborated with the WHO delegation and allowed them to leave with the understanding that there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission. This surely can't be a believable narrative, given the posited incubation periods, onset of symptoms and remarkably high transmissibility. The most charitable interpretation of this would suggest incompetence, but in my opinion a charitable interpretation would be, itself, a naive one.

Standards

Dr. Annie Bukacek

Italy

China

______ NOTE 1

Notes from Valuetainment Guest

Deliberate Acts by China

• it appears that the only explanation concerning the responsibility of China needs to consider it most probable that China continued to push a narrative that it was not contagious between humans, after having clear evidence that this is not true.
• WHO pushed this narrative
  • Does WHO not realize that there are reasons to question data coming from China? Question the claims made by Chinese government?
  • WHO avoids any interaction which might require them to recognize the existence of states which China contests as being part of their territory
  • WHO must have known that the virus could be transmitted between humans. For them to push the narrative after it was obvious that this wasn't true
  • Tedros, Director general of the World Health Organization, delayed for as long as possible the formal declaration that the Coronavirus was a global cause for concern, as well as the declaration of it being Pandemic
  • End of January: Tedros recommended that other countries should emulate China's system
  • Claimed Chinese system is a superior model
  • WHO claims China's statistics are accurate
  • These observations do not support the assumption that WHO's purpose or priority is to improve health
  • Helped to spread the Virus
  • Bruce Aldehyde? Senior advisor to the director general "It was very important to us at an early stage of the outbreak to be able to study" - needed cooperation with China
  • China stiff-armed WHO in Wuhan, preventing them a proper opportunity to study the virus
  • Difficult to discern the motive, but it would seem that they should have, at the very least, had concerns about the trustworthiness of Chinese data, based on this alone.

Bill Gates

• 10 billion dollars over 10 years to make it "the year of the vaccines"
• Dr. Gupta - reduce population 2011
• Snopes considers this unfactual, but it doesn't really do a good job of debunking the allegation that Bill Gates is trying to reduce global population
• Video between Gates and Gupta -> talking about reducing population growth