The media's lab leak fiasco

The fact that you aren't aware of the 1970s flu in the Soviet Union which was caused by a lab leak is telling. Again confident absolute statements from someone who doesn't really understand the topic they are commenting on.

There have been numerous lab leaks that are recorded in history and they happen every year.

After SARS it only took 4 months to identify the intermediate host which was a civet. After MERS, it took nine months to identify a camel as an intermediate host.

18 months later with vastly more scientific resources at their disposal and also technology that didn't exist for the other two like smartphones, no intermediate mammal host has been found yet.

The Occam's razor suggestion for this is the reason for this is the only intermediate mammal host that exists is a humanized mouse with human ACE2 receptors lining its lungs.

You know, the humanized mice that were specifically mentioned as being present in the Wuhan Institute of Virology by multiple sources including grants applied for and received directly stating this.

https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...

This entire comment is the personification of a person who has taken their political identity and with no self-awareness applied it to science. You have no basis for your confidence other than the hatred of your political enemies.

I watched brainwashed GOP folks cling to the WMD in Iraq myth for years after it was proven false. You might not be do different from them.

Because it’s irrelevant and assumes that anyone participating in the discussion was listening to any politician of any kind to begin with. The problem isn’t with ignoring the politicians - something that is nearly always prudent - it’s assuming that we weren’t also completely ignoring Trump.

This investigation was happening among scientists regardless of whatever Trump or Biden or Cotton or Paul or whoever else had to say. But the mainstream left treated them as though they must be dumb backwards thinking Q anon Trumpers who got this idea from him or Alex Jones or some conspiracy nut.

The way that people following this were treated was bad enough, but the most worrisome part is the reputational attacks, largely coordinated by Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth alliance, that these scientists faced. It was a huge risk on their part to challenge someone of his standing in the community, and he was relentless in spreading the meme that these were fringe quacks deserving of nothing but derision for their “conspiracy theories”. In another massive media failure, they were happy to use him as their subject matter expert without bothering to disclose that he’s the one who ran the very same program. And to a lesser extent, Fauci as well.

To be clear, no one suspects that Daszak and Fauci were anything but well-intentioned in their original pursuits when starting and funding this research program. But it’s obvious why anyone faced with the possibility that their decision may have been the reason that this all happened in the first place. And the implications - that their entire organization and much of their life’s work will be shut down immediately - may put even the most reasonable mind in an extremely difficult position.

How would you react upon realizing that your program may very well have killed millions around the globe and destroyed economies? I’d imagine that must be quite a burden on the conscience for anyone who is not a completely sociopathic murderer.

Ok? I don't think it's my job to provide internet randos with infinite links until they're satisfied. If you want more information, feel free to Google. But along the way try to notice whether you proof standard is this high for everything you read, or just when somebody points out racism in action.

Sure. Many things are possible. Twitter could be using an embedded hypnotron in their apps to control elite opinion. But when people are talking about effectively nationalizing one company because they don't like its moderation policies, I think we need more than speculation.

And you might not care about why we have antitrust laws or how monopoly impairs free markets. But I sure do.

If somebody wants to make the claim that Twitter has too much power in some way unrelated to monopoly, they're welcome to take a swing at that. But that's a very hard claim to make in that without an actual monopoly, I don't see a plausible mechanism for unfair dominance. Not only is it possible to compete with Twitter, many companies, some of them with vastly more resources, already do. I'd say the rise of TikTok demonstrates there's no particular barrier to entry, and Gab and Parler are eternally claiming success in attracting millions of users.

We probably can't "simply" do that, in that the Constitution is a document with actual meaning.

I would also note that there are existing platforms that effectively make political views a protected class. It turns out they are not very popular, because most people don't want to hang around with people for whom the 14 Words are an important political view.

In practice, a platform can either have haters or the people they hate. Insisting a platform accept all the haters means you're guaranteeing the people they hate will go elsewhere. That's why Twitter has moved away from the sort of policies you favor. As an example, look at when Milo Yiannopoulos led a wave of racist abuse toward Leslie Jones. Twitter had to choose between keeping her (and a lot of her fans and people who just don't like open racism) or Yiannopoulos and his fans.

So the notion that we should override the Bill of Rights to make Twitter platform everybody is not only anti-freedom, but also won't in practice work. If somebody doesn't like Twitter's rules, they should do what you're doing: post somewhere else. There are platforms ready and waiting to take them.