or, Why the Best Bioweapon Is a Weak Bioweapon

Early in the “pandemic,” Scott Adams heard a rumor that the new virus affected non-Chinese more fatally than the Chinese, so he speculated. If I remember correctly, his speculation was that a biological weapon directed against a race of people was an inevitability, and that perhaps it was happening now. Specifically, the Chinese “communists” harbored an itch to eradicate Uyghurs. Perhaps SARS-CoV-2 was a new instrument of that ongoing genocide, and it had gotten out of hand.

I do not follow Adams, and do not know how he ultimately settled, in his mind, this Ultimate Uyghur Sanction, but I was impressed by one thing: Adams was willing to consider wild possibilities, including one that most people resisted on what seemed like grounds of squeamishness, the squeamishness of people afraid to be called “racist,” or “conspiracy theorists”: that the virus was built in a lab, and may have even been deliberately deployed as a bioweapon.

More than a year and a half later, and now the likelihood of the so-called Lab Leak Theory is commonly recognized as quite high. The worm turned.

Early on, I advised that, according to the Precautionary Principle, it was pure foolishness not to consider the possibility of a conscious bioweapon release. The reason to parlay the principle was simple: one considers a danger to prevent the worst outcomes. Early on, the Precautionary Principle was used to justify extreme mitigation efforts. But that was considering only the virus as a menace. By considering its threat potential, on the other hand, we might fend off other possibilities — those worse than a mere mass death.

Worse?

Yes.

The trouble with bioweaponry is that its deployment is negative sum: it is almost impossible to contain a virus, and the virus you deploy against your enemy will likely bite back at you.

With China, though, there is plenty of “surplus population.” So if the virus’s creators had prepared an inoculation in advance, and were willing to get rid of some population surplus, while also destroying much more of their enemy populations, that remains a possible strategy.

But there is a simpler method. If you want to destroy your enemies, what you want is not a real killer virus, but a virus that is actually not that dangerous … but which, with the right propaganda also deployed, can be made to seem more dangerous than it is. Indeed, a weak bioweapon is the perfect kernel for a psychological operation to get one’s enemies to over-react and weaken themselves.

Which is what happened.

Not only have western nations — weakened by standard churning state politics and China-funded race-baiting psy-ops — over-reacted to the contagion with psychologically destabilizing mask mandates and economically and culturally destructive lockdowns against commerce, they now deploy a very risky set of pseudo-vaccines, which may end up killing more people than the disease they are supposed to defend against.

I don’t know much about what is actually happening, but I do know that it is easy to manipulate mass men. 

And that is what we have here, the culture of Late Stage Churning State Capitalism is filled with Last Men, the gender-rending fools of our decadent culture. Our politics is now crazy, our government policies crazier, and our culture, laziest, ready for Lying Flat, the ultimate nincompoopery of a witless, ill-informed, culture of marks.

Grifted by the authorities, we accept as true things that are obviously false.

What things? You know, things like notion that the pandemic was an existential threat. No. Our reaction to it was. Are we fulfilling a civilizational death wish, or have we been pushed by Chinese (or globalist?) machinations?

I suspect the latter, but don’t rule out the former. Conspiracies are possible, but invisible hand processes still dominate most major trends.

In any case, we must contemplate the possibility that the pandemic could be the result of a conspiratorial threat — of warfare — so we can steal ourselves against our own destruction. It is easier to unite in the face of a concerted threat than against a mysterious menace; easier to accept losses, easier to become heroes.

twv