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China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

theguardian.com

241–250 of 385 posts

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#241
post #75

The the American leadership constantly calling it by the region name you can understand why an authoritarian regime would want to control discussion of the origins by experts. The risk is of their research being weaponized by said demagogues.

Bill Maher has an amusing monologue on that topic [1]. I don't think it is wrong to call it the Wuhan virus, and if the Chinese don't want the bad publicity associated with the virus, they should do something about these wet markets. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEfDwc2G2_8

The same Bill Maher who wanted a major recession to bring down Trump?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3SjtG5lwOI

Maybe we should stop listening to these people?

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#242

Tinfoil hat: I'm not keeping active track, but I passively perceived a sheer drop in mentions of the fact that Wuhan has China's first "biosafety level 4" laboratory, coinciding with an increased lambasting of the US's handling of their infections in the general media (" The Wuhan virus is now the American virus "), along with a streak of random US-critical posts (" What is the worst thing the US government has done?…

I'm not so sure I buy the Reddit controlled by CCP (or heavily influenced) argument. Simply because in /r/China, /r/ChineseLanguage, and /r/HongKong I see frequent posts that are highly critical of the CCP and China in general. They have many upvotes and it doesn't look like people are being banned or posts are being removed. It is nowhere like /r/Sino. I'm not trying to defend the CCP here, but just trying to say th…

All the anti-China subs has grown multitudes more users than Sino since last year, easily enough to drown out pro-Chinese voices. Statistically, we should see more anti-Chinese bots and manipulation occurring.

Also all available research doesn't suggest CPC has foreign manipulation toolset on western social media, except last years twitter "disclosure" about state level manipulation on HK without any explanation and attribution. Turned out to be ~200 twitter accounts, which... ok could be from Chinese state or bored PRC nationalist script kiddies.

Also 50c doesn't operate abroad, they don't engage in argumentation, only lazy platitudes about positive Chinese news items - they don't draw attention to negative news. All the shill accusations doesn't account for this fact that 50c glorifies instead of defends China. The latter pattern requires too much effort. Official 50c are mostly state employees trying to meet msg quotas on domestic social media. Also China would not waste English proficiency trolling on reddit, English speakers with proficiency to trick western audiences are making bank working in industry and not the state. Chinese foreign propaganda MO is pouring a few hundred billion buying ad space in foreign news papers. And lately they've been growing twitter and other microblogging platform accounts for their diplomats to troll US. See US bioengineered weapon.

E: Just to add the parsimonious explanation about the amount of pro-Chinese perspectives is that the vast amount of Chinese diaspora is engaging online discussions since they are witnessing the effects of western propaganda targetting their country. There is a ridiculous amount of biased reporting out there. Increased sinophobia etc, it's in their interests to clear the air which occasionally leads to doubling down on nationalist rhetoric.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a lot of value in paying/blackmailing the moderators. You can clearly certain subreddits, such as r/worldnews, becoming increasingly pro-China. The mod team played a huge role in this, as they have been perma banning people who post a lot of anti-China comments. I’ve for instance had several accounts banned (one simply for sarcastically saying “Thanks China”) - there were also a thread on r/China where plenty…

r/China is very much an echo chamber of its own though. These days the line between criticizing the Chinese government and full blown sinophobia is getting rather thin.

Nice CCP shill account

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#244
post #201

Because academic research can't be rushed. One of the requirements for an advanced degree is publishing papers, and if coronavirus related can easily bring attention and get the paper published, students would try taking the fast track. This is not good for research in general. There was a huge debate back in late Jan. early Feb. on Chinese social network about a paper didn't get peer-reviewed spreading all over plac…

It’s disingenuous to suggest that China has inserted a chain of government committees in between researchers and journals, for the purpose of improving the veracity of the research. Given the CCP’s history of censorship boards, it looks like a case of the usual CCP strategy of filtering the release of information in order to save face.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#246

I'm trying to be a good bayesian reasoner here but the particulars of this specific case are all so tangled and piecemeal. The conspiracy theorists among us are having an absolute field day with the current events and it's easy to see why. According to my bayesian analysis, I believe that the most likely cause of this virus is a wet-market infection, followed by a slip-up at a lab, with—by high margin, in very very l…

>I can't reconcile that there's not much for the CCP to gain on the world stage by releasing this thing.

Is causing the social, political, and economic collapse of an arch rival nation state not the natural perogative of empire scale nations?

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#247

Tinfoil hat: I'm not keeping active track, but I passively perceived a sheer drop in mentions of the fact that Wuhan has China's first "biosafety level 4" laboratory, coinciding with an increased lambasting of the US's handling of their infections in the general media (" The Wuhan virus is now the American virus "), along with a streak of random US-critical posts (" What is the worst thing the US government has done?…

I'm annoyed with the connection between SARS-CoV-2 and bioweapon. This is such a garbage bioweapon for two reasons: This doesn't kill military aged men and it cannot be readily shut off. American scientists have nailed down when the cross over event occurred and how it happened. The world's top virologists also have said multiple times that this is not a bioweapon, people who have studied viruses for decades. But peo…

No one is saying its a bioweapon, merely shoddy containment in a facility that did viral research, the research could have been entirely altruistic, its still their fault for letting it out of the lab and then hiding the fact, arresting doctors and journalists and letting it spread. When they could have been letting other countries take precautions to prepare for it and shut down travel out of the country sooner instead of telling the world there is no real danger, no human to human transmission, and everything is fine.

On the other hand, prefaced with the fact that it isn't one, or was still under research if that, bio-weapons are just as effective when they disrupt an economy and infrastructure and a virus targets the elders or those at an age of those most likely in leadership positions. So it doesn't have to kill military aged people to be effective. Again, this is likely not one, but the disruption its caused and economic hit its taken is in line with how modern wars are fought. They only need to overwhelm medical facilities, its like the case with mines, they don't kill so much as maim, because maiming soldiers puts a greater strain on an army to keep them alive, transport them and treat them (even though they'll never return to the battle field), then if they were simply dead. You kill a soldier, they're down a man, you maim/disable a soldier, they're down a man, two other soldiers needed to evacuate him, they're down transport needed to get them back to a medical center, and several medical personnel needed to treat them and get them stable. You want to cripple an army, you don't kill it, you make it so the soldiers barely survive and need assistance, or you take out their resources, this virus does a good job of both.

A virus only has to severely disable economies and create a strain on resources to be effective at crippling an opponent, if its not especially deadly, it can spread further, if it puts enough soldiers in hospital beds, especially senior leadership, its effective. Even if this isn't a bio-weapon, it actually would be pretty effective as one assuming you already had the vaccine, which no one does.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#248
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The soundness of the argument isn't the issue. The problem is the world model where P(Virus starts in Wuhan) = 1. That probability is only 1 in hindsight, where the probability of everything is 1 because it has already happened. In foresight the probability was not 1. And whatever city the virus started in was going to have a BSL-2+ facility studying infectious diseases. I'm probably sitting within 2-4km of a BSL-3 f…

I don't quite follow your point. My model assumed implicit knowledge that the virus originated somewhere in China, but not in Wuhan. Maybe I should have made that more explicit. We could change the model to not have any implicit assumption about location. Then instead of dividing by the population of China, we'd divide by the world population. The result should be the same, assuming we appropriately adjust our prior…

Well, I'm not qualified to explain this so I'm probably wrong in the detail, but a sketch of the thinking:

P(Came from WIV|Global Epidemic starts in Wuhan) ~= 97%

However, P(Started Near a BSL Rated facility|Global Epidemic) is also high (not going to estimate it).

But you have assumed that P(Global Epidemic starts in Wuhan) = 1; which is not true. P(Global Epidemic starts in Wuhan) is probably quite low and they got unlucky because it had to start somewhere. In this context, that assumption is tantamount to flipping a coin then saying "P(Heads) = 1". It isn't, P(Head) = 0.5 but it does happen sometimes.

If we assume P(Global Epidemic starts in Wuhan) = 1 (because it did happen) then P(Came from WIV) is either 0 or 1, because it either did or didn't happen in the same way that the virus started in Wuhan.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But this is a completely bullshit argument. Is it though? I think that it makes a lot of sense.

Yes, it is. Any argument akin to "I don't need to provide evidence of anything I accuse you of because you lie about things" is complete and utter bullshit. You would basically be just as bad and intellectually dishonest as the CIA, in that case. You always need evidence, regardless of the nature of the accused person or entity. You could be accusing Stalin himself; you still need evidence

> Yes, it is. Any argument akin to "I don't need to provide evidence of anything I accuse you of because you lie about things"

Either you didn't understood the point or you don't want to address it.

The point is that if China's regime tries to portray the fact that they operate a coronsvirus military research lab a few meters from the outbreak's alledged epicenter as nonsense while at the same time they try to pin the blame on the outbreak on military coronsvirus research work conducted by other nations.

I mean, if a work accident committed by China's military is ruled out as outlandish then why are they pushing conspiracy theories akin to area52 aliens as reasonable and plausible?

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