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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28463 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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I consider it more of an "incompetence theory", which should always be at least somewhat plausible to anyone familiar with how often even experts screw up. The real conspiracy theories were in the vein of purposeful release scenarios, engineered bioweapons, etc.

This was the weakman that media put forward as the representation of range of lab leak theories to tar them all as wild insane conspiracies, so that all the "sane" people should accept zoonotic origin as the only truth. Accepting any potential lab leak - even "innocent" one - would torpedo the whole "believe the science" shtick. Careers of scientists were damaged, social media accounts were banned and people were canceled just for mentioning "lab leak", there was no space for nuance. So let's not pretend that we had anything approaching to reasonable debate on the matter. This is what I mean that "they pulled it off".

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