451–460 of 868 posts
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Are the FBI or DOE assessments public? What I last read in the peer-reviewed public literature seemed to point strongly to animal origin and not from a lab.
I think you are confusing “lab leak” with “lab made.”
> The agency made its new assessment with “low confidence,” which means the intelligence behind it is fragmentary and incomplete. I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain. --- One thing that is, however, quite certain: there are very real political reasons to favor one theory or another. For example, Sen. Tom Cotton is quoted as…
I have family that have worked on developing NBC equipment for the military. The first thing they said when covid was spreading was that it was most likely from a lab. That was before anyone in the news was saying that. So an independent first-look assessment by someone with experience, followed by later finding out that there was in fact a lab there, has me heavily leaning towards it being true. But it doesn't reall…
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> - Democrat aligned mobs routinely invade the Capitol building without facing similar charges It’s the internet, can you link to some concrete instances where they did this? Were Congress people forced to retreat when they did it (assuming your claim is that they were roughly similar in extremity?)?
They attacked the White House and forced the president to flee to a bunker on 5/29 — as referenced in my original comment. Note how that’s called a “protest” and not “insurrection”. (I’d say riot, but protest is closer to the truth than insurrection.) https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/31/politics/trump-undergroun... They interrupted a proceeding two weeks ago. https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5087021-protesters-trum…
Also, disrupting a public hearing open to the public, definitely rude but not actually illegal.
The Gaza protesters were arrested for refusing to leave the capitol, but didn’t force their way into congressional offices nor did they threaten any congress people. Still wrong which is why they got arrested, I guess, but not the same as an insurrection.
I lived in Seattle during CHOP (well, I still live in Ballard), but I never got over to Capitol Hill to experience it (we go downtown a lot, but never Capitol Hill unless it’s hospital related). I don’t think they were any position to overthrow the government though.
Thanks for linking though, and I didn’t downvote you. It’s always nice to know what the right is referring to when they say “the left does it also!” We can compare the behavior of the two sides head on at least.
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I have family that have worked on developing NBC equipment for the military. The first thing they said when covid was spreading was that it was most likely from a lab. That was before anyone in the news was saying that. So an independent first-look assessment by someone with experience, followed by later finding out that there was in fact a lab there, has me heavily leaning towards it being true. But it doesn't reall…
You should realize experience in a tangentially related field and there being a lab somewhere in the area is not the same as insight and evidence. That’s like saying that if a new flu came out of Atlanta, the fact the CDC is there proves it came from a lab, and must be true because someone’s janitor cousin who worked there one summer said it was true. “Low confidence” means that there is a lack of evidence and the st…
(Not to knock Emory students, I love them, but Emory has a relationship with the CDC and grad students can be cavalier)
Can someone help me understand why a lab leak looks worse for China than zoonotic spillover? Why would Senator Cotton need it to be a lab leak to give him more leverage? From what I understand, one theory is that China has for decades tolerated unsanitary wet markets that allowed dangerous diseases to evolve, get stronger, and eventually transmit to human hosts. They'd been warned about this over and over again and h…
Because a lab leak could imply that China had a direct, active role in cultivating or engineering the virus, as opposed to the “mere” disastrous negligence entailed by the wet market theory.
China had a duty to run the lab safely, it breached that duty, and so China is responsible for the harms and losses caused by its negligence.
Missouri actually filed suit against China, and it is set to go to trial next week. It will be interesting to watch. If Missouri were to get a judgement for all the costs created by the virus, it could theoretically collect Chinese-owned assets in the US.
And, the news has been full of stories about one particular Chinese asset the US would like to have held in the US: TikTok.
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Can you please share the reasons why you are skeptical?
A few reasons, though as I note in another comment, I'm not an expert in spillover events, my area of interest kicks in about a week later. So there's a few: 1) People I trust are skeptical, including people who are opposed to gain of function research. I've found Angela Rasmussen to be one of the better voices in terms of discussing the evidence for a natural origin, but she's far from the only one. 2) We have had t…
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I think the conspiracy theorist label is associated with common patterns (believing in a cover up in cases where there's no incentive / the cover up would be more expensive than the crime / the evidence would be impossible to cover up, etc) but in this case these patterns don't apply. The lab leak theory was extremely plausible even assuming no secret conspiracy at all. Lab leaks do happen, that lab did do gain of fu…
You might be surprised how many things labeled conspiracy theories have strong evidence, incentives, etc. but get scoffed at as kooky impossibilities nonetheless - like the lab leak theory.
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> I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain. There's never going to be any conclusive evidence of the source of covid, and anyone claiming they have certainty (who wasn't a witness to a lab leak) is simply lying to you. What they're doing is going along with everyone else worth listening to, who find the coincidence that we were f…
> It's so strange to demand so much more proof of lab origin than one does of non-lab origin. It's not, zoonotic transmission has happened many times, lab leak is the extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/936217
So how many people have to die before this is no longer an extraordinary claim? Bhopal managed to change chemical manufacturing standards with "only" thousands or tens of thousands of deaths; but the 1977 flu is somehow completely forgotten.
Perhaps the death toll is so high that people simply can't believe it? YouTube's fact-checkers recently removed an unambiguously factual description of the 1977 pandemic, ignoring appeals well-referenced into the peer-reviewed literature with no stated justification.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-i-fell-foul-of-youtu...
So there’s a new president and the main intelligence agency changes its position radically in alignment with the new government. Why should we be confident in any other claim they made in the past?
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Back then anyone who suggested the lab leak theory was immediately labeled a conspiracy theorist by main stream media.
The major reason for that is that many were doing this in language that was generally considered racist and/or mixed in some other weird stuff like how COVID lockdowns were like the Jewish persecution, rants about masking, or that type of stuff. I'm not saying everyone did that, but there was a huge overlap.
There was a huge overlap because within a month it became completely taboo for anyone who cared about not being seen as an alt-right activist to say anything about it. Even freaking Jon Stewart got caught in the instant-cancellation blast [0].
A major problem with our world today is that anything that the alt right supports instantly becomes taboo for the rest of us. People are more concerned with distancing themselves from the alt right than they are with finding and supporting the truth—and that goes for just about anything, not just COVID.
[0] https://nypost.com/2023/02/28/jon-stewart-recalls-outrage-af...