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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   28496 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Many conspiracies continue to exist even when all or most information is publicly available. For example, there was a large scale effort to convince the public that Covid had a zoonotic origin.

I think this is confusing terminology. "Things that a lot of people coordinate to do" or "large scale effort" is not sufficient to describe the normal connotation of the word conspiracy.

The normal meaning of the word requires not only that it be a coordinated plan, but that the plan be for ends that are in some way illegitimate or unlawful. Otherwise, everything that any group does would be a conspiracy -- I don't think anyone would accurately say Catholicism is a conspiracy to teach people the trinity or that elementary schools are in conspiracy to teach children the heliocentric model of the solar system.

So that's why you've got a pretty classic motte & bailey right there -- the first sentence is about conspiracy and the second is about "large scale efforts" and you elide that those are not at all the same referent.

Good point. I suppose a conspiracy would be a group of unpowerful actors trying to maintain a secret. Whereas suppressing the lab leak theory (or the Catholic church suppressing heliocentrism) doesn't require a conspiracy. The powerful can just outright demand compliance, they don't have to keep it a secret.

So the lab leak theory is not a "debunked conspiracy theory". It's not a conspiracy theory at all, since there is no conspiracy. No one is denying that the existence, funding, or research areas of the Wuhan lab. They are just demanding that people not talk about it.

I don't think "the existing, funding or research areas of the lab" are the same as the claim that the specific variant of COVID was not zoonotic in origin.

The lab leak theory (which, btw, I'm probably aligned with you on the object level should not have been discounted as totally-wacky) requires a whole lot more.

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