MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Yet, if you look at a random US "city" in Google Maps, you will see lots of single-family houses with their own backyards and limited access to mass transit.
So, what do you actually mean when you say "urban", "suburban", and "rural" living? Maybe it's something like this.
Urban living: Row houses and apartment buildings, with incidental retail Suburban living: Single-family and two-family houses, and nothing else Rural living: Incidental single-family houses in land that is largely agricultural or undeveloped
My personal tongue-in-cheek definition:
- Urban living: cars are an optional purchase to support specific careers and/or lifestyles. Middle-class aspiration for non-car owners includes frequent taxi/Uber use.
- Suburban living: Working-class respectability requires one car per family (with carless living possible for the childless possible but not ideal). Middle-class aspiration is one car per employed adult.
- Exurban or rural living: Working-class respectability requires one car per employed adult. Middle-class aspiration is one car per licensed driver, with the car being a pickup, SUV or 4x4 if the driver is an employed adult who doesn't drive a van for work reasons.
Note that on this definition, a lot of American "suburbia" falls into the exurban/rural category. This is deliberate. "Urban" living by my definition is compatible with upper-middle-class people having houses with private gardens (many such neighbourhoods in London zone 2/3), though probably not detached ones.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Also we lack evidence exactly because Chinese communist institutions refused to cooperate in independent investigation and actively acted against it - they destroyed data, slaughtered animals on the market, bleached residual evidence and gagged researches. So it is doubly ignorant to use lack of public evidence as evidence of absence.
As you point out, the Red Chinese were destroying both potential evidence that could have supported wet market zoonotic spread and potential evidence that could have supported lab leak. This is not surprising, as the official Chicom position at the time the evidence was destroyed (being enforced inside China with the usual Chicom techniques of truth suppression) was that the virus originated outside China. There is no revealed preference on the part of the Chinese authorities for people to believe zoonosis over lab leak (which is unsurprising - both theories make China look bad, but only lab leak lets them absolve the leadership by throwing a small number of people under the bus). The campaign to suppress the lab leak hypothesis came from the US medical establishment, which did not get access to Wuhan unfiltered by the local Chicom authorities or Chicom-aligned WHO leadership until after any evidence had been destroyed.
I can also reverse it and say that based on the publicly available information none of the animals was proven NOT to be infected with SARS-CoV-2.
You said "provably infected" (in your earlier post), not me. I'm happy to stipulate that any evidence that could prove the infection status of the lab animals at WIV (in either direction) has been lost.
As I said in my first post, the specific cover-up required is implausible (not impossible, but all I have ever claimed is that it is at least as implausible as a zoonosis coincidentally showing up in the home of WIV). The only way WIV can have had access to a suitable starting point virus (i.e. BANAL-52, or some other bat virus more closely related to BANAL-52 than to any bat virus known to exist in 2019) is that a civilian lab which was openly and notoriously conducting gain-of-function research, and seeking to collaborate with UNC and get research funding from NIH on that basis, and which had a financial incentive to boast about and was in fact boasting about their virus-collection programme and large published virus database, was running a separate parallel secret gain-of-function lab with a separate parallel secret virus-collection programme which didn't contribute to the database and that was using separate secret furin cleavage sites that shouldn't work according to the pre-2019 public literature, confirmed in the general case (obviously not specifically for SARS-CoV-2) by post-2019 AI-enabled simulations.
Your response is isolated demands for rigour and (entirely plausibly) slinging allegations of dishonesty at the Red Chinese authorities. But this cover-up would have required dishonesty maintained over several years by academics who did not have an obvious incentive to be dishonest. And from the point of view of the academics, the cover-up failed, and predictably so. If COVID-19 was provably a lab leak, then the Chinese authorities, who are the ones in a position to punish the academics, already have the proof.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Based on the publicly-available information, none of the animals in the lab were infected with SARS-CoV-2 or any virus closely related enough to it to be the starting point for a gain-of-function experiment. And the timing of the required cover-up to make this true but not publicly-available information is not particularly plausible. (Again, the argument is on the ACX debate page, and is Fat Tony intelligible but not short enough that I can make you read it and check the receipts as a condition of debating with me on the Motte).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
I went to German public school, even though my parents could probably have afforded to send me to some private school instead.
Germany has academically selective public schools which have not been overrun by a high-IQ, high-grindset immigrant group. Completely different ballgame to NYC.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Can't think of any from India
Cholera originates in India. That the most famous Indian disease is a water-borne bowel disease whereas the most famous Chinese diseases are respiratory may say something about the difference between the two countries.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
I'm also aware of the Root Claim debate which I've encountered as a wall of text and like 30 hours of videos. I'd love an explanation of why this debate matters, but my tendency is to dismiss it as a gish gallop.
A Gish gallop is a performative one-sided dump of low-quality arguments which is designed to be superficially convincing if unrebutted and to be a lot harder to rebut than it is to generate.
The Rootclaim debate was adversarial, with both sides bringing their best. Multiple observers who found it worth their time to read the wall of text on ACX (I have done) or watch the multiple hours of video (I have not) have confirmed that the arguments being made are persuasive, and that most of them stand up to well-informed, well-resourced attempts at rebuttal. The vast majority of the people who have spent time engaging with it (including me) have come away with the conclusion that the zoonosis hypothesis is at least plausible given the publicly available information, and most (not including me, probably because a lot of the receipts are buried in the 30 hours of video or the documents cited in an already-long wall of text) have come away accepting the argument that zoonosis is orders of magnitude more likely than lab leak.
The Rootclaim debate matters because it involved two smart people with the resources and incentives to produce the best possible arguments based on the publicly available information, and a group of more-or-less neutral smart observers who precommitted to reading a wall of text and watching 30 hours of video, meaning that the debate would not be easily won with cheap debate tricks like Gish gallops (or "spreading", which is the equivalent technique used in actual competitive debate). It represents by far the largest concentration of IQ-point hours applied to the question of "Based on the publicly available information, what is the most likely COVID-19 origin story?"
Not every valid argument can be made comprehensible to Fat Tony. For an uncontroversial example, Fat Tony can't understand Bell's Inequality. That doesn't make hidden variable theories of quantum mechanics correct.
In 2018, there was a proposal made to DARPA called DEFUSE, in which bat coronaviruses would be studied. Human-specific cleavage sites would be added. Transmissability would be increased via gain-of-function. And this would happen in the United States in collaboration with, you guessed it, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. DARPA ultimately rejected the $14 million proposal.
FWIW, an entirely Fat Tony-comprehensible rebuttal of this argument is included in the ACX post summarising the Rootclaim debate. Understanding it might take as long as several minutes, which you apparently consider to constitute a Gish gallop. But the short answer is that a proposal that was not funded, to do research at a lab that was not the WIV, on viruses that the WIV did not have in its collection, is not smoking gun evidence that a modified virus leaked from WIV.
In fact, most of the arguments on either side of the Rootclaim debate are ones that Fat Tony could understand if he wanted to spend the time to do so. The basic lab leak argument is as @porkpiehat gives it. The first-round rebuttal is that the unnatural-looking furin cleavage site doesn't look human-designed either, and that the bat virus from which SARS-CoV-2 doesn't appear to have been at WIV at the time the alleged GoF research was being done (it wasn't found in the wild until after the pandemic). The basic zoonosis argument is that SARS-CoV-2 is awfully similar to OG SARS (which is known to be zoonotic) and that we found the origins of the pandemic in the very wet market stall which a western virologist visiting WIV had called out 5 years previously as high-risk for zoonotic virus transmission, with the first-round rebuttal being that nobody ever found the intermediate host. What Fat Tony struggles with is evaluating the relative strengths of the arguments (and the COVID-19 origins debate is very unusual for straightforward factual disputes in that there are still strong arguments on both sides after this much expenditure of IQ-point hours). In the context of the debate, it is actually the lab leakers who end up falling back on a Fat Tony-incomprehensible argument about why "A lab leak virus that looks plausibly zoonotic just happened to have its first superspreader event at a wet market 10km from the lab" is not an unlikely coincidence - see Rootclaim's post-debate rebuttal.
I'm not going to blame Fat Tony for falling back on "I distrust the clowns who think that vaccines cause autism less than the clowns who think men can cut their dicks off and become women" but the whole point of the Motte is to aspire to be more rational than Fat Tony.
The best versions of both theories imply similar levels of culpability on the part of the Chinese. Zoonosis implies that the Chinese continue to allow an unsanitary practice (the sale of live-caught wild animals in wet markets) that is banned in most western countries, had already caused at least one pandemic (OG SARS) and had been called out as likely to cause others in the future. Lab leak implies that the Chinese were doing a type of dangerous research that was controversial but not banned in the west with grossly inadequate containment practices.
The claim that COVID-19 was deliberately developed as a bioweapon, as opposed to being the result of civilian gain-of-function research of the type proposed in the DEFUSE grant and promoted by Fauci, does not make sense. SARS-like coronaviruses make shitty bioweapons for reasons which should by now be all too obvious, and nukes (which China has) work better than sci-fi doomsday viruses as credible MAD.
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