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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7441 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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I have the opposite opinion: I don't understand why people keep talking about the lab leak because I don't understand how it changes anything.

China is already an enemy of the US who can probably conduct whatever research they want. Even if the US makes a deal and threatens sanctions, they can agree and conduct it in secret. And declaring war on them is almost certain to cause millions if not billions of causalities (MAD), while shady research merely has the potential.

Gain of Function research is already a bad idea, and we can take (and are taking) steps to prevent the next manmade pandemic, regardless of whether or not COVID was manmade.

Prosecuting Fauci and other American scientists involves more than proving the lab leak, they must also be involved, and it's an uphill battle when people who we know committed crimes (like O.J. Simpson, Bill Cosby), let alone did something unethical-but-maybe-technically-legal (like Mark Zuckerberg), avoid justice. My philosophy is that it's more important to prevent future crimes, which in this case means making laws against shoddy or unmonitored wet lab research; but again, we can and should do this without proving COVID was artificial.

Censoring the lab-leak hypothesis - we should already not be censoring even "misinformation", and COVID shows how that fails, including that some of the censored claims may have been correct (such as masks not as effective as stated). The fact that now even leftist media says the lab leak is plausible makes its censorship especially egregious, even if it eventually gets disproven.

COVID provides many lessons on how to prevent and handle future pandemics. In particular, the plausible explanations on how it may have originated from the lab provide lessons on the former. But it doesn't technically matter whether they happened, just whether they're still plausible after scrutiny, and even that doesn't really matter, because the regulations can and probably should cover other hypotheticals.

The simplest explanation is that arguing lab leak makes one (EDIT: look more like) a principled free thinker, which is usually a coveted niche. Once the MAGA movement gave lab leak a bit of status, it worked as a tribal signal, too.

I think this dynamic applies because the lab leak discourse mostly occurred via social media. It wasn’t like the Rogers Commission or a criminal trial. Even the people who insisted that it merits war with China had no expectation of getting that outcome. Thus the debates revolved around status games.

Where do I go to cash in these "principled free thinker" points or claim my elevated status in said status games? Because all I got in real life was accusations of being a conspiracy theorist. And I'm sure if I brought it up now, I'd be greeted with classic Hillary-style "What difference, at this point, does it make?" responses, just like people are doing in this thread.

Because it seems like all I got for being a principled free thinker was having to quit my job and move states to avoid a vaccine mandate. Somewhere the elevated status and MAGA babes got lost, and Peter Thiel won't send me a check or return my calls (granted, I'm probably too old and hairy for him).

Now this is the type of argument I actually find matching the mood. "It might be a lab leak but it's not worth the costs of caring" is exactly what we do with a lot of zoonosis already. We could stop eating meat, but no one wants to enough.

But it would be good then if people would say that, that our cost benefit analysis has decided on this not really being a big deal and we don't really care.

Prosecuting Fauci and other American scientists involves more than proving the lab leak, they must also be involved, and it's an uphill battle when people who we know committed crimes (like O.J. Simpson, Bill Cosby), let alone did something unethical-but-maybe-technically-legal (like Mark Zuckerberg), avoid justice.

What sort of argument is this? O.J. Simpson was, in fact, prosecuted, even though it was an uphill battle, and he ultimately got away with it. If we routinely go after individual murderers even when some of them get away, it seems reasonable to go after someone who's responsible for shutting down half of the world.

Censoring the lab-leak hypothesis - we should already not be censoring even for the excuse of "misinformation"

Yeah, but we are. People who did it (and are still doing it) should be made to answer for it, and a specific example where in their crusade against misinformation they ended up promoting it, and protecting liars, seems like something useful.

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