Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.

This is every single post in this thread in my opinion, so when I see it, I feel compelled to respond.

I also don't think that most were unsubstantiated, most were pointing out the logical fallacies and lack of facts of posts, or other things like people accusing me of being pro china simply because I think this is all unknowable.

Sorry to keep editing. Additionally, this thread started late at night, and while many reasonable comments with great exhaustive expressions of my same opinion did get posted by calmer people, before that happened, it was a lot of conspiracy pile on. My opinion was that thinking a leak did happen wasn't some kind of conservative gotcha they think it is, and that maybe didn't happen isn't some kind of leftist thing or whatever the problem is with it not being a leak. Not enough people talk about just doing something about the ongoing world crisis and instead want to frame it in ways that are politically advantageous, and you see it the vast majority of comments I replied to, this mindset that someone must be blamed, and then people who are ashamed of that claim they really just want to find out the truth, but the people who know anything about epidemiology really wonder what use that would be at this point. This is the majority of my comments here and this feels pretty substantive, and the real discussion that people elsewhere are having on this topic.

So, I also felt like I wasn't doing anything wrong here. I could've just down voted but people also say you shouldn't just downvote if you disagree?

You linked to a single case report. It does not establish any type of causal link at all. That single person was most likely going to develop ALS at the time whether he had been vaccinated or not.

It's not gotchas. It's just history and reasoning. Logic. It's persuasive to people who are willing to think. But no amount of reason will convince someone with an agenda.

> If the point of treaties is to be broken, why bother signing up to them in the first place?

As your buddy godelski pointed out, governments do things for optics, political grandstanding, etc. Why did germany and the soviet union sign the nonaggression treaty? Also to appease the naive masses who believe in fairy tales. So that naive people can say nobody is working on chemical or biological weapons since a treaty says so. See, this nonaggression treaty is proof germany and the soviet union will never attack each other. Genius logic.

> The first arms control treaty was the Washington Naval Treaty, which was signed when most countries were literally unable to find the resources to keep up with the naval arms race and proposed by the one country that could.

No. It was proposed by the one country that had isolationist political pressure against naval buildup due to our history and founding fathers warning against standing armies. It was proposed by the one country to kneecap british attempts to enforce navy limits. Also, the Washington Naval Treaty was a complete failure? It set the stage for japan to build more resentment which led to ww2.

> not least of which is the lack of its use in conflicts after WWI, even in existential state conflicts like WWII or the Arab-Israel wars.

Chemical weapons were used in iraq-iran war. In the syrian war just a few years ago.

> The same reason why we have laws against murder.

There are laws against murder because murder exists. People murder. So the treaty against chemical weapons must exist because chemical weapons exist?

It would be great if chemical, biological, etc weapons are never used. But you'd have to be absolutely naive to think that every major nation isn't working on chemical or biological weapons. It's like all the naive people who claimed that government agencies stopped collecting our data after getting caught in the 70s. Of course they didn't stop collecting data. They increased the gathering of data.

I live in a country where biological weapons wiped out a significant portion of the native population. Do you think such a country is working on biological weapons? If one major country is, then so is every major nation around the world.

The real world isn't an utopian fairy tale. No matter how much one wishes it were. But it's a free country. Believe whatever you want.

>> no amount of reason will convince someone with an agenda.

You're exactly right. You already know.