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Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

wsj.com

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Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#951

Post by [deleted] »

che_shirecat wrote: post #391
cld8483 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What should the consequences be? The abolition of modern virology, roll the clock back on them a hundred years. Allow the development of vaccines for extant viruses, but completely ban all Dr Frankenstein activities with viruses. No more "invent a virus in a lab to beat nature to the punch" horse shit, with is flagrant weapons development under the cover of civilian research. As soon as the virus started circulatin…

Hackernews now advocating for burning books, wow. This is the end result in allowing political ragebait threads instead of focusing on tech and startups.

[deleted]

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#952

Post by PathOfEclipse »

vikingerik wrote: post #948
PathOfEclipse wrote: post #926

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you get 2% from? I tried searching for what "low confidence" means when given by an intelligence agency, and in the process I'm finding a lot of people like yourself that apparently like to pretend it means whatever they want it to. > But it's not really likely at all. Is that what low confidence means in this context? After digging, I finally found a news site that said something that sounds credible: http…

I said don't focus on the number, I was simply using 2% as an illustration for how such a headline can be constructed to be misleading. Since you didn't read my post I won't read the rest of yours.

You say "don't focus on the number", and then say in the same sentence "it's for illustration." Well, if you pick a terrible number, don't you think that affects the quality of your illustration? See, your illustration was as bad as the number you pulled out of a hat to construct it, but if you refuse to learn from criticism when presented to you, then I'm certainly not going to waste any more time on you either.

To recap, you assumed "low confidence" means "highly unlikely", which is false. The 2% number you chose, is, let's say, very illustrative of your mistaken assumption.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#954

Post by PathOfEclipse »

zamnos wrote: post #946
PathOfEclipse wrote: post #927

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people in this world just put their blinders on and distort new information to fit their preconceptions and biases? What do you think "low confidence" means in the context of an intelligence report? I tried finding out myself, and I mostly just found people like yourself pretending it means whatever they want it to. I was surprised to find, at CNN, of all places, something that actually sounds credible: " ht…

Yikes, what's your definition for "shitty theory" then? Something that's "not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion" sounds pretty shitty to me. Literal shit lets you draw more conclusions about the defecator than that!

What do you think a theory is? A theory is by definition unproven. With enough evidence, it becomes proven and therefore no longer a theory. Then there's the grey area in between, where a theory seems plausible but there's not enough evidence to be conclusive about it.

A "shitty" theory is one which completely lacks evidence supporting it and/or has far more evidence that contradicts it. The covid lab leak theory is not "shitty" by either metric.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#955

Post by undersuit »

mwbajor wrote: post #287
boxed wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there's a reservoir. That's why there was a lab in the first place. There are many more viruses in those caves. Many many. And tourists literally pay money to go into such caves, and look up to the ceiling to look at the bats. Bats that may at any time shit into their eye with one of these new viruses. And then on top of that people catch them and sell them live to slaughter them at home to eat. Again, this…

So if a tech from the Wuhan lab on one of these expeditions, does that count as a leak?

My pet theory is that one of the people who procure live samples for the lab was infected already from their most recent trip and they went to have some food at a local Wuhan market.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#956

Post by nl »

B8MGHCBekDuRi wrote: post #592
nl wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you were part of the 96% of the World population which is not American, you would know the feeling. I'm not American, nor do I live in America. And while I have some sympathy for pointing out "the world is not the US", the majority of the comment was bald whataboutism: > "At least a leak is not intentional like killing hundreds of thousand of innocent people by bombing their homes. Leak doesn't mean engineering…

What about "People in the USA are grieving because of China virus created to kill us, but we won't do anything against China because the first step of grief is denial"? How does this sound? It's completely normal to me to answer: well my friend, first of all a leak is a mistake, it's not intentional since, you know, the first who paid where the Chinese themselves, it would be pretty stupid to do it intentionally. But…

> what about all the countries that the USA has relationships to, to their advantage only, after killing their citizen, without even apologizing?

As I said: literally whataboutism. And that is just a distraction tactic used to deflect attention from the issue at hand.

In some limited circumstances it may be a legitimate tactic, for example, when it is relevant to highlight that the person making the accusation has a bias. For the most part, however, even if the person making the accusation is a hypocrite or has double standards, this does not mean that their accusation is false.

https://theconversation.com/whataboutism-what-it-is-and-why-...

It's completely legitimate to have a discussion about US imperialism. But not to try to deflect a discussion about Chinese recalcitrance by deflecting it like this.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#957

Post by undersuit »

boeingUH60 wrote: post #6

Nothing seems certain at this point, but, let’s say the pandemic was actually caused by a lab leak. That’ll mean the world was brought to an economic standstill and millions of people died because of the errors and carelessness of some people…will there be consequences? What will be the assurance that such deadly mistake won’t occur again? If it was actually a lab leak, then it’ll definitely rank as the most costly a…

>millions of people died because of the errors and carelessness of some people…

Which people? Should a lab tech in China receive consequences because religious people in America believed in the promises of their pastor and went to church and were sickened?

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#958

Post by xwolfi »

himinlomax wrote: post #862
xwolfi wrote: post #805

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im in China myself and I dont mind if it's a lab leak, better than saying we re degenerate Pangolin eaters :D However, it's hard to be too trusting of the US, I want to believe them but they just shot 3 balloons in hysterical panic that were just their own weather balloons just because we sent 1... so sometimes they seem to be wrong and we should keep an open mind. The best would be that a bat shat on a pangolin a la…

> However, it's hard to be too trusting of the US The question is not whether to trust the US [government] in absolute terms, the question is whether the democratically elected US government that is bound by the rule of law, strong institutions providing checks and balances and the Freedom of Information Act can be trusted more than the autocratic Chinese communist party that is accountable to absolutely no one.

The communist party is as accountable as the CIA. It works the same way, handwave a little national security here, assassimate a little critic there. The CIA is not Chinese.

But, Im not saying the department of energy is the CIA, Im saying it s made of the same american citizens who can fear us sometimes to the point of sending million-dollar missiles towards canadian weather balloons, see ? It's a matter of belief for me: are they objective and we screwed up, or are they hysterical and we dont know really? A democracy can absolutely elect lunatics if the population is afraid, as well.

Im certainly not saying the communist party is better, so not sure why you brought it up. Maybe part of the general hysteria, you think criticizing the US is a sort of patriotic duty for me or something, and Im like a red communist spouting Mao like a demented on the streets... but we can be anti communist in China and not impressed at all by the US general performance.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#959

Post by kcplate »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #588
jimbob45 wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a thought experiment, who would have access to the most information in the world outside of the sitting POTUS? The richest man in the world? Surely Trump of all people would be the most qualified to make such a claim.

Trump was... not an ordinary president. In particular, he didn't pay very much attention to his briefings. He may have had access to the information, but there's less indication that he used that access, and plenty of indication that he frequently shot his mouth of contrary to the facts. Whether he did so in this case is not proven, but the parent's argument doesn't work for the particular president in question.

While he may have been less than attentive to these things, he would use every bit of information that was available to him to advance his agenda and he had people around him who read/in those briefings who knew and support his agenda. Certainly his agenda pre-pandemic as it related to China was pretty much an economic war for lack of a better description.

If your intention is to motivate Americans away from Chinese products, what better way to do it then to use a scary virus that seemed to emerge from China to that end.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#960

Post by fallingfrog »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #855
fallingfrog wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be counterproductive.

Why? We should santion them worse than Russia.

When you “punish” a nation, you are primarily punishing its most vulnerable people. Who then hate you and turn to their leaders for protection.

Meanwhile and especially in China, the leadership has to save face and look like they’re doing something, so at minimum they will retaliate in kind.

The larger issue too is that the west seeing themselves in a superior position where they can punish a nation as big as China like it was an unruly child is the attitude of someone whose understanding of international politics is 40 years out of date. It ain’t like that anymore.

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