All of them. Even the ones of your enemies. Sometimes you need to know the other side’s angle to understand if you’re unknowingly biased.
Totally. Here's the thing: 95% of the time I see someone argue what you're arguing online, it's from someone who only believes completely false news sources (rather than biased).
If you mean the Breitbart subscribers who also get the “other side” from Fox, then yes I agree with that characterization.
I like to read international sources like DW, RT, Al Jazeera, and of course BBC. How do other countries want me to interpret current events?
I see a very different dynamic reading the article. Remember, at the time this all happened Trump was still very publicly backing the Chinese government's response. Tom Cotton was very much bucking the party line in calling the CCP liars. What I see over and over throughout all of this is repeated conflation of "lab-leaked" and "man-made". Tom Cotton absolutely never even insinuated that the virus was man-made, only…
Yes I agree there was a lot of conflation of man made and lab leak, but I much more frequently saw people dismiss lab leak because of arguments focusing on man made, than people saying they believed the man made hypothesis because it could be a lab leak. That might just be my social circle though. Similarly, I can't recall a time that lab leak wasn't considered a conservative conspiracy among my social circles, and t…
> Similarly, I can't recall a time that lab leak wasn't considered a conservative conspiracy among my social circles, and that does include a conservative group from my hometown. In the exact same groups I do recall a rapid swapping of position on masks however.
That seems to imply what I was saying: The confusion wasn't purely partisan. Though, partisanship certainly didn't help with nuanced communication.
I found the partisanship on both sides of the aisle absolutely appalling during this pandemic.
China is more monolithic than the USA because uniformity is what their culture is structured to establish. In the West, we have an underlying belief that dissent and debate result in better decisions and more circumspect awareness of complicated situations. We tolerate insolence, dissent, and other unpleasant behaviors specifically because we know they serve a purpose. That doesn't happen with a top-down ("democratic…
Have you ever been to China? There are rich kids there with Lamborghinis and polo shirts. And families with iPads at MacDonalds. And peasants on bikes pulling rickshaws. And an amazing variety of vegetables. And steak Dianne. And lobster Thermidor. And aluminium siding salesmen. And scientists trying to cure malaria. And clerks who commute on Vespas. And gorgeous 18 year old women with legs as long as giraffes dancin…
So? What's your point? Have you heard the CCP made Jack Ma disappear and reappear and disappear again and reappear again and then disappear again?
There’s only a spec of difference. I don’t know anyone suggesting that the lab leak was of a natural origin. The theory is that the lab created the virus and it leaked.
I think there’s some nuance here. The virus could have a perfectly natural origin in bats, but not be able to infect humans in its original form. There are many ways the virus could have come to infect humans, such as by manipulating it directly, via gain of function research, or even just by a random mutation that managed to infect a lab worker (seems unlikely since it’s alleged there may have needed to be an interm…
I know I got downvotes already but I guess that’s what I meant, that in a lab setting human researchers would have been manipulating the virus. I meant that I don’t think anyone is saying that researchers captured a novel COVID variant in nature and just held it in a lab until it leaked.
If the lab theory holds any water, it’s almost certain that humans were manipulating the virus in some form.
That’s why I don’t see much of a distinction between a lab leak theory and a human-made or human-manipulated virus.
They're scared they might say something wrong and get fired, shamed, and ex-communicated. Who isn't? The people that answered "I'm not" to that question, those people are the problem. Let's get them fired, shamed, and ex-communicated.
I might believe that more if all the people I know IRL who talk about being afraid of being fired/cancelled/whatever weren't also the exact same people shitting out talking point after talking point from the exact same news sources with no critical thought whatsoever.
So can't they do that and still work a job?
Or what else, if they can't? They starve? Or I have to go to work and provide them food?
If you spout a bunch of nonsense about Climate Change being a hoax, don't be too surprised when a lot of people start ignoring or even deriding the things you say. Even if the wolf does eventually show up.
Facebook's policy page only mentions censoring content suggesting that the virus was "man-made". Did Twitter actually ban users who suggested _only_ that the virus leaked from a lab? I'd be surprised because I follow some fairly big accounts there which have posted about the lab leak theory. https://about.fb.com/news/2020/04/covid-19-misinfo-update/
What’s the difference? I suppose it is possible that the Wuhan bat hunters found this virus occurring naturally and just, you know, kept it around without telling anyone...
There is a huge difference! For one, suggesting it was man-made lends credibility to the conspiracy theory crowd ("plandemic", "they manufactured it to enslave you", etc), which is probably why the press over-indexed on debunking it. Also, it could imply that there was some intent behind it appearing when and where it did, when there may have been none (Hanlon's razor applies until a proof to the contrary appears). My understanding was that the theory that the virus was man-made was debunked, but I have not been paying much attention to what was happening to the stories saying it may have been an accidental leak from a lab, and given China's record, I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that there was research happening on it, it got out, and that was then covered up.
There’s a question as to why that fake consensus emerged. But I think the more troubling question is: How did people let the original story of what Tom Cotton even said go so badly awry? Essentially Cotton said something that was then transformed into a fake claim of a Chinese bio-attack, then the fake claim was debunked, and then the debunking was applied to the real claim with little attention paid to ongoing disag…
I hate how it feels like there's such a "collective narrative" for everything now days with the internet. Whenever I talk to people about recent news stories in real life it feels like everyone is just repeating talking points they read online. Its like we've been absorbed into the internet consciousness and talking to a person is like talking to "the internet brain".
Isn't that how it's always been. People just regurgitate the media they consume. It used to be sermons at church. Then it moved to print, radio and tv. Now it expanded to the internet/social media. Whether we like it or not, we've all been programmed by the media that we consume.
"Whoever controls the media controls the mind" - Jim Morrison
Yes I agree there was a lot of conflation of man made and lab leak, but I much more frequently saw people dismiss lab leak because of arguments focusing on man made, than people saying they believed the man made hypothesis because it could be a lab leak. That might just be my social circle though. Similarly, I can't recall a time that lab leak wasn't considered a conservative conspiracy among my social circles, and t…
> Similarly, I can't recall a time that lab leak wasn't considered a conservative conspiracy among my social circles, and that does include a conservative group from my hometown. In the exact same groups I do recall a rapid swapping of position on masks however. That seems to imply what I was saying: The confusion wasn't purely partisan. Though, partisanship certainly didn't help with nuanced communication. I found t…
Yeah that's fair, it's never going to be easy for the general public to stay correctly informed on rapidly evolving technical topics. But once some piece of misinformation got too deeply entrenched on one side the partisanship took over pretty hard. Maybe that's nothing new, I am relatively young, but something about it does feel like it's getting worse.