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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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Nothing in this article is going to come as news to anyone who's been active in centrist and center-right-leaning media spaces for the last two years but the origin of it might.

What really went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted

Long story short the UK Sunday Times, the Newspaper to which the New York Times' name is an hommage, and as I gather from other british media the de facto voice of the establishment in the UK has endorsed the Lab Leak theory and I'm kind of surprised that no one's seems to be talking about.

The article doesn't mention Fauci by name but his ties to EcoHealth Alliance have been well documented elsewhere, and the article does acknowledge the existence of US health officials desire to bypass US safety and reporting regulations. The article also notes that while release was likely accidental, the Chinese military and intelligence services had expressed interest in using it as a weapon and had begun working on developing an inoculation for the virus over a month before it first appeared in "the wild".

I personally don't have a whole lot to add to the article itself, but I do find myself wondering what now? I expect the US media to try and bury this. After all Fauci is their golden boy, the poster-child "trust the experts". At the same time, he his, along with the behavior of many within the media itself (looking at you Yglesias) the reason that experts are not to be trusted.

If a singular person (small group of people) is revealed to have been responsible for all the death, of all the suffering, of all the economic disruption and all the curtailment of simple human livelihood that resulted from Covid 19 and the associated panic, what crime can you charge them with? Assuming you could find a court even able to try it, what punishment can even approach being proportional?

Assuming you could find a court even able to try it, what punishment can even approach being proportional?

Recklessness and negligence (foreseeably) leading to megadeaths should result in people being tortured for the rest of their lives.

This is basically what happened to people at Guantanamo Bay or certain prisons in Iraq, where the prisoner's crimes were much, much, much less serious.

Have a quick skim through the wikipedia page of what happened there. 'Forced injections' and 'being locked in confined cells' are karmically appropriate but those are just the beginning. Beatings, sleep deprivation, being chained in the foetal position for 24 hours and forced to soil oneself...

If the US tortured Afghans semi-randomly (per Rumsfields complaints about Guantanamo being misused "We need to stop populating Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) with low-level enemy combatants... GTMO needs to serve as an [redacted] not a prison for Afghanistan.") then it is appropriate to torture vastly more damaging people.

leading to megadeaths should result in people being tortured for the rest of their lives.

I'm down for public executions. Preferably using a nuke or large quantities of TNT. Actually public executions will be way more acceptable than torture. And not one of those bullshit injection executions either. It needs to be grand, it needs to be awe inspiring, it needs to freeze the blood of onlookers at the final moment.

You're not really making a coherent argument here, but I guess writing some torture porn for yourself was the point of this comment.

Edit: "If [thing no one thinks was justified] was justified, then [this other horrible thing that I am describing in lascivious detail] is justified too!"

You should tell that to the US government. They clearly do think it was justified since they went and did it and refused to punish anyone for it.