4min chapter

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The Case Against Democracy - Curtis Yarvin

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CHAPTER

COVID: A Problem With the Meritocracy

This is, you know, American progressivism, essentially, from the early part of the century. The meritocracy gets corrupted by all this race stuff or whatever. And here's how COVID happens: SARS-1 basically jumps from a bat to a palm sieve and kills about 20% of the people that have it. It's not just a very complex delta COVID, which was a nasty disease,. You know, look like the common cold. It's an important problem. This kind of government by experts principle almost looks like it's no government at all in oligarchies.

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Speaker 1
By the managers, the trainers. Right. And so, you know, what, you know, and this is really, this is very old thing. This is, you know, American progressivism, essentially, from the early part of the century. You know, going back in history, you have this sort of gilded age system in America. Very like China, very corrupt, very effective. You know, and the politicians are these scoundrels, these corrupt people, very uneducated, very bribe. You know, things get done in a messy way. And, you know, the old American elites, you know, I mean, people like Henry Adams, for example, really the earliest progressives. The farther you go back in progressivism, the more I like these people. And they're just like, you know, this society should be ruled by the best people in it. And these people are manifestly not the best people. They are not the experts. They are not the smartest people. But
Speaker 3
who gets to judge who the best people are, coaches? Well,
Speaker 1
at present, who gets to judge who the best people are, are these institutions. Right. And so let me basically, you know, the meritocracy, essentially. Now it gets corrupted by, you know, all this race stuff or whatever. But, you know, let me give you an example of a problem that we're all familiar with and the effect in this. And that example is COVID. You'll remember COVID. And you probably had to all the
Speaker 7
non-remember it from brilliant age. You probably had
Speaker 1
COVID. Yes. So it gets fairly clearly established. It's not really a right-wing conspiracy theory. It's fairly clear that if it didn't happen, it could have happened. And here's how COVID happens. So first you have SARS-1, which basically jumps from a bat to a palm sieve. It's very well established, very nasty disease. And this, you know, SARS-1 is a problem. It almost escapes. It almost becomes COVID. And it kills about 20% of the people that have it. And it's not just a very complex delta COVID, which was a nasty disease, you know, look like the common cold. It's an important problem. The way science is funded, specifically science, including, for example, virology. Virology is not social sciences, very clearly scientific. It's hard science. And the principle of the second half of the 20th century, the way that science is funded, is sort of, you know, consistent with this kind of government by experts principle, which, and the thing about it in oligarchies, it almost looks like it's no government at all. It's just like, no, there's no power here. It's just science. It's not power. It's just science. You know, but when you look more closely at human, at power, there's always human beings involved. And so the result of SARS-1 is that virology becomes important, and specifically bat coronavirus has become important. And the way science, having, like, dropped out of my PhD program, but, you know, some people think of me as a computer scientist, the way science works is you get funding for things that are important and things that matter. And so within virology, basically, people realize that they could get quite a bit of grants by referring to this very real problem with bat coronaviruses. And they basically said, well, you know, this is a serious problem. We deserve a number of pounds to study it. And so they're like, what if this happened again? What if a bat coronavirus emerged? Well, let's go and find all the bat coronaviruses. Let's go to all the bat caves. They literally did this. Let's bring the viruses back. But the problem is these viruses are bat viruses. They don't naturally infect humans, but they can mutate to infect humans, but waiting for them to mutate the very slow and random process. So what if we mutated them? And what if we trained them? What if we put a fewer in cleavage site in? What if we trained them to infect, you know, humanized mice? What if we did this in a Chinese laboratory with very poor biosafety conditions?

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