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The media's lab leak fiasco

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Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#721

Post by admax88q »

shaicoleman wrote: post #709
admax88q wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I don't buy it. You're moving the goalposts. Censorship is when they prohibit information being distributed. It looks like Government Health Agencies are just not believing the evidence and are therefore not recommending it. They're not saying "don't talk about it" they're not saying "don't research it" they're saying "the evidence so far is inconclusive, we don't recommend treating with it" That's not censorshi…

> Just found this overview by NIH on why they don't recommend treatment. What do they recommend? Wait until you're sick enough to go to hospital. This a year in a half into the pandemic, and you don't see the problem? Compare this to the treatment protocol of the FLCCC https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/i-mask-pl... > Maybe, but they're not censoring anything in my books. I'd estimate about 90% of soc…

You started by claiming

> Part of the problem that there is censorship on publishing in the big journals.

and so far your evidence is censorship by youtube and facebook.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#722

Post by triceratops »

the_optimist wrote: post #702
triceratops wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Russiagate is just one prior example. It was patently false from the outset What is "Russiagate"? What about it was "patently false"? The Mueller investigation got multiple indictments against Russian nationals. They also obtained convictions of people working in the Trump campaign or administration for election-related offenses. They found evidence of Russian attempts to influence voters in swing states by illegal…

DOJ indicted ham-sandwich Russians, then later retreated. Only process crimes charged (lying, interfering). Buying ads on social media isn't illegal, and the amount was de minimus (< $30k). FARA crimes were reverse-engineered, selectively prosecuted, and didn't related to Russia in any way. Everything about these headlines is an utter farce.

> indicted ham-sandwich Russians, then later retreated.

Citation needed.

> Only process crimes charged (lying, interfering).

Why lie or interfere if you didn't commit any crimes? These aren't random Joes with bad/no legal representation who didn't know what they were doing. You have to assume they were doing it to cover up more serious crimes and assumed they would be pardoned. Which turned out to be true.

> Buying ads on social media isn't illegal

Foreigners buying political ads is illegal. Citizens using money owned by foreigners to buy political ads is also illegal.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#723

Post by ric2b »

iammisc wrote: post #562
throwawayboise wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the virus was man-made, then its release was either accidental or deliberate. Both of these possibilites need to be allowed until disproven. If it was deliberate, then why?

This seems obvious. I don't think it was deliberate. But whether deliberate or not, the virus achieved many policy goals for the ccp. Firstly it got rid of Trump who was before covid in charge of one of the best economies in the USA and would have had an easy path to reelection. The virus was a black swan event that caused that to go away and trump.to make several mistakes. It also got joe biden elected which we know…

> Firstly it got rid of Trump who was before covid in charge of one of the best economies in the USA and would have had an easy path to reelection. The virus was a black swan event that caused that to go away and trump.to make several mistakes. It also got joe biden elected which we know the CCP preferred.

This sounds super far fetched. When Covid began to spread the democratic candidate wasn't chosen yet and this theory completely relies on the Trump administration to completely screw up in the eyes of the public. I don't have a high opinion of Trump, but the US government is a lot larger than him.

And then if they're caught it turns the entire planet against them. It sounds like a massive risk just to get rid of a somewhat annoying president 4 years early, it's not like he was threatening war or anything like that.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#724

Post by busymom0 »

avivo wrote: post #482
neither_color wrote: post #34

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…

From the OP: "There is just more disagreement and dissension than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to people and speak to them in a more relaxed way. My strong suspicion is that this is true across domains of expertise, and is creating a lot of bubbles of fake consensus that can become very misleading. And I don’t have a solution." I've also found this to be true on HN, though slightly less so. Th…

> There is just more disagreement and dissension than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to people and speak to them in a more relaxed way.

That's been my biggest problem with most conversation I have. Nuance has been lost.

> fake consensus that can become very misleading

It's PREFERENCE FALSIFICATION / Social desirebility bias: Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures. It shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities. Preference falsification is the act of communicating a preference that differs from one's true preference. The public frequently convey, especially to researchers or pollsters, preferences that differ from what they truly want, often because they believe the conveyed preference is more acceptable socially. It include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India’s caste system:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674707580

Why would anyone admit to being a [Insert anything against the establishment/mainstream media narrative]? You just get vilified and attacked.

I know several people and many qualified people (doctors) who got banned from YouTube, FB, IG, Twitter, Reddit and got "Disinformation" label slapped on their posts. Even on HN itself, there was a strange stink in the responses to a few of my comments simply stating that we shouldn't simply ignore this theory. Most people were responding with links to places like Snopes, Politifact, NYTimes, WaPo, MSNBC etc - places which have shown their biases several times in history but people kept trusting them as "authoritative" sources. The "fact checkers" were doing nothing more than narrative control but it was enough to chastise people. Some were really mean comments. I would expect such responses from Reddit but I wasn't expecting it on HN. The biggest irony was that we were being accused of being in a cult.

Does anyone think these platforms will now go back and "uncensor" those accounts? Will apologies be issued? I doubt it.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#725

Post by busymom0 »

Good article but author is wrong about "Cotton attributed this to malice". That's not what his statement said. He simply stated that there is a level 4 super lab in Wuhan which works with similar viruses. That alone is not malice. The virus could have leaked from the lab by accident because of poor practices - that's not malice. Malice would be if it was intentionally leaked. The intention is what scientists and intelligence is supposed to do. One could also say that China banning on national flights and closing off areas while allowing international flights and not providing correct info/warnings to other countries is what real malice is.

> But Cotton did one thing that those other sources didn’t do — he speculated a little. At the end of that clip he says “we still don’t know where coronavirus originated. Could have been a market, a farm, a food processing company. I would note that Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”

> Where Cotton differed from the consensus is that he attributed this to malice, which is not what the scientific articles said (but also isn’t a scientific question) and was not the NYT’s preferred interpretation of events.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#726

Post by retox »

fartcannon wrote: post #464
Animats wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event. Which is a big problem. In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources, which may indicate confirmation, and data items from the same source via different paths, which don't.

I think this is a good place for authorship attribution AI's. A plugin that will identify text that resembles known PR and propaganda and links to the original source. Is this a real review or is this person writing their review from a script? Am I interacting with a real person or someone paid to sway the public opinion of something on a forum? Edit: Maybe we could prevent more influence by Satya @ MS and the like.…

The site https://www.churnalism.com/ tried to do something like this before ML was accessible, but it seems to have died on the vine just a year later.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#727

Post by Moodles »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #720
Moodles wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the other team "decided to create a racist flamewar". They met in a room, those angry old white men, and decided, together, that the best strategy is to create a racist flamewar. Someone suggested they should try to handle the problem, but everyone else disagreed. Someone else was like, fuck it, a racist flamewar is clearly the best strategy to get ahead, and his cisgendered straight colleagues all agreed that…

Show me on this doll where the reality hurt you. When Trump and company knew the virus was going to be a threat, they allowed air travel to maintain at current levels to pack people into airports like sardines. Their response was NOT to be responsible but instead try to pretend that the problem did not exist and to scapegoat the Chinese by calling it "China Flu," "Kung Flu", and "Wuhan Virus." And you are so INCREDIB…

I love how you object to mentioning "cisgendered straight colleagues" but not "angry white men', because the latter is non-ironically relevant in your mind. I feel sorry for you that you see the world through that lens, and yeah, I'm not bothering to give you serious replies because you aren't either. "Decided to create a racist flamewar" was when I stopped bothering. We're obviously not going to see common ground at all if you actually see it that way. Nobody decided to create a racist flamewar.

Also:

German Measles

Zika virus, from the Zika forest

Spanish Flu

MERS: Middle East Respiratory Syndrome

Ebola, from the Ebola river.

But sure, Wuhan virus was obviously racially motivated. Bad angry white men. Very bad!

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#728

Post by MisterBastahrd »

Moodles wrote: post #727
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me on this doll where the reality hurt you. When Trump and company knew the virus was going to be a threat, they allowed air travel to maintain at current levels to pack people into airports like sardines. Their response was NOT to be responsible but instead try to pretend that the problem did not exist and to scapegoat the Chinese by calling it "China Flu," "Kung Flu", and "Wuhan Virus." And you are so INCREDIB…

I love how you object to mentioning "cisgendered straight colleagues" but not "angry white men', because the latter is non-ironically relevant in your mind. I feel sorry for you that you see the world through that lens, and yeah, I'm not bothering to give you serious replies because you aren't either. "Decided to create a racist flamewar" was when I stopped bothering. We're obviously not going to see common ground at…

I mean, there's nothing inaccurate about what I said. Don't clutch those pearls too hard.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#729

Post by Moodles »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #728
Moodles wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how you object to mentioning "cisgendered straight colleagues" but not "angry white men', because the latter is non-ironically relevant in your mind. I feel sorry for you that you see the world through that lens, and yeah, I'm not bothering to give you serious replies because you aren't either. "Decided to create a racist flamewar" was when I stopped bothering. We're obviously not going to see common ground at…

I mean, there's nothing inaccurate about what I said. Don't clutch those pearls too hard.

So they actually decided to create a racist flamewar did they? They just called it "wuhan flu" to "scapegoat the Chinese". That's all 100% accurate in your head.

Your problem is you're assuming malicious intent as fact. It's completely impossible to know what someone is thinking, so you should just assume they're not evil racists planning racist flamewars I think.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#730

Post by the_optimist »

triceratops wrote: post #722
the_optimist wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DOJ indicted ham-sandwich Russians, then later retreated. Only process crimes charged (lying, interfering). Buying ads on social media isn't illegal, and the amount was de minimus (< $30k). FARA crimes were reverse-engineered, selectively prosecuted, and didn't related to Russia in any way. Everything about these headlines is an utter farce.

> indicted ham-sandwich Russians, then later retreated. Citation needed. > Only process crimes charged (lying, interfering). Why lie or interfere if you didn't commit any crimes? These aren't random Joes with bad/no legal representation who didn't know what they were doing. You have to assume they were doing it to cover up more serious crimes and assumed they would be pardoned. Which turned out to be true. > Buying a…

>Citation needed. read the docs > Why lie or interfere if you didn't commit any crimes? Fundamental misunderstanding of justice and the US justice system. > buy political ads "political"

Not here to open your eyes for you, but again I appreciate you exposing your perspectives to the light.

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