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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   32489 thread views

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?

All else aside, it is absolutely breathtaking that the mainstream position circa May 2020 was that lab leak was a "racist conspiracy" and that "they have super sketchy meat markets, really dirty people spreading all sorts of diseases" was the thing that decent people believed.

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?

I still think the worst crimes were the government responses rather than the actual disease. Yes, someone screwing up with a highly contagious virus and then covering it up is a Bad Thing, but I can still figure out why someone acting basically rationally would do that. The insane suite of policies that accomplished absolutely nothing other than economic ruin and political chaos on the other hand... well, it's still not fully legible to me how we wound up there. I would prefer to start with punishment for the policymakers than the scientists.

I will always think of the places where liqour stores were essential business, but churches and religious services were not.

At least in CA, few liquor-licensed businesses sell only alcohol - there's just not enough clientele. The vast majority are restaurants, convenience stores, or groceries. Particularly with regard to off-sale-only licenses, there's no distinction between "bottle shop that only sells wine" and "Safeway that has a wine aisle in addition to 30k sq. ft. of groceries. It would have been legally difficult to make distinctions on the basis of "if business sells alcohol, then not essential" without also impinging food-sellers (particularly given the lazy & wooden ways that alcohol law is enforce in the state to begin with).

Alcohol withdrawal can kill you. Forcing liquor stores to close would've put more stress on hospitals at a time when they were predicting overflow (remember all the temp hospitals, etc).

I definitely agree some churches were treated very unfairly but liquor stores is a poor comparison.

If only that was the worst... We had places where somebody bathing alone in the sea was arrested, but healthy seniors were forcefully housed with sick people, essentially sentencing them for horrible death. And literally nobody bore any responsibility for that, or even apologized for any of that.

In theory the lockdowns made sense to me.

But when I saw that aspect of it starting to form, I realized how much of a shitshow it was going to be.

It’s nice when society’s priorities match mine.

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