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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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Really, really disappointed with that post of his.

-Civil war era US had a tenth of present day US population. Scott surely knows this.

-mostly old people died now so low QALY losses compared to say, Spanish flu.

He knows all this, he's smart, we know this, yet he doesn't say it. Why?


I dislike how he brushes over 'lab leaks'.

Ironically, most of US lab leaker proponents are (probably) brushing over a the fact that covid was not made by the 'bat woman' Shi Zhengli in Wuhan, but was made in a US lab in Montana as part of a project to 'Defuse' bat coronaviruses in wild bat populations by circulating particular strains of viruses in them.

This seems outrageous and is perhaps a coverup of something darker, nevertheless there's fairly compelling evidence for it such as the animals in which covid easily spreads are not typical Chinese lab animals.

This is a complex set of claims which it'd take some serious effort to verify, but it does seem plausible and explains anomalies such as the disclosure of the genome by Shi in early '20 etc.

Anyway on the link there's an entire podcast episode that goes over it in detail.

I've always maintained that responsibility is shared between the superpowers, that's a huge part of why nobody's prepared to accept what happened or do anything. The Chinese have eagerly been saying 'oh it was made in America' and vis versa. But neither is prepared to do anything about it, they want to pretend it never happened lest the enormity of the disaster waft back onto them. Propaganda is all they're willing to do.

This applies especially to the community of experts (that Scott is a member and cheerleader for), full realization would be shattering to their authority. This disaster was made by the experts, whether in China or America or both, it was them.

mostly old people died now so low QALY losses compared to say, Spanish flu

He literally talks about this in the post.

Civil war era US had a tenth of present day US population. Scott surely knows this.

He changed that paragraph from "deadliest" to "highest fatality" when several people in the comments pointed out that the civil war was still more lethal per capita.