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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34503 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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There was a hearing today in the house about the origins of covid19: https://youtube.com/watch?v=aXXWRaM-sWQ

I highly recommend watching this. The level of gaslighting being done by the "bat soup" conspiracy theorists here is absolutely a spectacle. I feel like we are watching a narrative being generated in real time here.

Jamie Raskin's seething is particularly incredible. He is now claiming that Covid was Trump's fault because Trump was being too nice to China, and was too nice to Xi. They are continuing on now that The Republicans, and their "conspiracy theories" about covid origins have caused people to lose trust in institutions.

I'm almost at a loss for words at watching this. Absolutely incredible.

They're now saying that this entire hearing is invalid because one of the witnesses wrote this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Troublesome_Inheritance?useskin=vector&useskin=vector

I don't follow. Hasn't this narrative already been thoroughly disseminated?

At the very least, I can think of several indignant posts from this community about how The Man was suppressing evidence of a lab leak. I assume y'all would have been less upset if the media showed any sign of taking lab leak seriously. The partisan lines were drawn on this, oh, right around the first time Fauci had a press conference. Blaming Trump for implausible things goes back way further.

So...what's so surprising about hearing Congress singing the same old tune?

  • -11

I assume y'all would have been less upset if the media showed any sign of taking lab leak seriously.

I did just try and roleplay this out in my head.

What if the media had been super gung ho about "China caused the coronavirus, if it wasn't an intentional leak, well it was so grossly negligent that they deserve massive sanctions".

I can be pretty contrarian at times, but I don't think it would have changed my attitude about the likelihood of a lab leak. Various people have been warning about the dangers of unsecured bio labs for a few decades.

My reaction probably would have been a greater level of worry, that the US was trying to set up a proxy war with China for some reason. Or I'd be more worried about China starting a war and invading Taiwan if they determined they were already hated by the entire planet.

I do wonder if we would have had lockdowns if the elites had an anti-China view, or believed that this was China's fault.

I can certainly imagine a bizarro-world where the lines coalesced another way. What’s harder to say is what real-world actions would have changed accordingly. Does the media howling for sanctions actually make them happen? I’m not so sure; maybe I just discount the agency of the MSM too much, but I think political calculus is pretty insulated from reporting.

Lockdowns probably would have happened more or less the same. There was a huge surge of “something ought to be done,” and the toolbox was limited.

I dunno, the traditional pandemic strategy is like, "gee, I wish there was something we could do, but we know most of this stuff doesn't really work so we'll just have to treat the sick and try to keep them away from vulnerable people" -- lockdownism wasn't born out of nowhere, it was sold as "this is sure working in China, we just need to lock down harder. (daddy)"

If China's sloppy practices had been known to have caused the whole mess in the first place, this could have led to less willingness to embrace their other practices, and more willing to question whether the data they were providing was actually describing the true workingness of their pandemic practices in a meaningful way.

It’s about collecting data and putting it into one place with live witnesses. A bigger microphone to spread the story and hold people accountable.

It’s the difference between having a formal jury trial and having a case in the news.

And they are overall trying to build a narrative on how bad the information environment was in 2020 and all the actors that participated.

The democrats are no longer trying to claim that it came from a wet market. That's the difference.

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