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I, like the rest of the country, feel like nothing good will come of the election. However, I feel this way for a slightly different reason than your average person, and probably closer to the average Mottezian.
I actually don't really care too much who is president. Either one of them would IMO do a good enough job. I mostly care whether the president impacts my everyday life or causes nuclear war. However, though it isn't his fault directly, having Trump in charge would impact my everyday life negatively, mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me, from all my friends and family, along with people starting to (erroneously, IMO) see and declare that racism and sexism is everywhere again. It'll start causing fights between me and my wife again. My workplace and all local institutions will start making statements about how they're standing up to Trump and racism. Under Biden, I have truly enjoyed some nice peace and respite from politics.
However, I find this state of affairs to be very irritating. It feels like the left, or at least the leftists in my life, are taking an infantile tactic: we better win or we'll whine and complain for 4 years. I don't respect sore losers, and moreover, I don't like the fact that there is no path forward for the right.
Scott said this back in 2016:
Scott was absolutely correct here in how it played out. But what option does this leave the non leftists with? If the Democrat wins, then the currents move left. We get leftism enshrined into law over the next 4 years, because to the victor go the spoils. If the Republican wins, then the undercurrents move left, and more and more people get radicalized towards the left.
Is there a way for the currents to move right without the undercurrents moving left? Or is Trump just uniquely bad at making that happen? I'm tempted to say that this is just the fact that Trump is a polarizing figure, but at the same time, all the leftists I know scream bloody murder whenever a Republican is in command. They were infantile under George W Bush. And though I wasn't around then, I know many people who are still salty over Reagan and act like he was the worst.
I am not expecting the same level of whining we saw in 2020. One reason is we don’t have COVID so fewer bored leftist. The second reason is it’s tough to cry wolf for the tenth time and still get people outraged.
This doesn't really seem true. Back in 2016, I wasn't upset about Trump winning the way that other people were, but I did have some pretty significant concerns about what I would have described as a high-variance Presidency. What the hell is this weirdo going to do? I didn't know and thought it was reasonable to be concerned that it would be something actually catastrophic for Americans. And then... pretty much nothing. After a pretty ordinary three years, things were actually looking pretty good heading into 2020 and I figured Trump was probably going to win a fairly easy reelection on the strength of a potent economy and there just generally being not much in the way of actual bad outcomes for Americans or even anything all that radical that anyone could point to.
This is where the narrator voiceover comes in to correct me that 2020 was not in fact a fairly normal year lacking in chaos or bad things for Americans.
I'm really not sure how we got the narrative that the liberals were crying wolf over the bad things Trump was doing, and then an actual catastrophe happened as a result, and somehow you still think they were crying wolf?
Firing 30 people in Beijing did not result in the Coronavirus pandemic, that's absurd.
Eliminating the people in charge of keeping China honest on containing pandemics only a few months before China proceeds to not even try to contain a pandemic and blatantly lie about it seems like it might be a little related. Sure, they may have failed to contain it if they did try.
To be fair, the more important line of defense would have been keeping China honest on enforcing the rules about live animal markets they implemented after SARS and then stopped enforcing after a few years; I'm having trouble finding a hard timeline on that, but that's definitely primarily Obama's fuck up.
Wet-market origin has been discredited at this point - COVID was almost certainly leaked from a lab doing Gain-of-Function research. Changes to regulations around wet markets would have done absolutely nothing to stop the pandemic.
That said, the idea that the US could have done anything whatsoever to keep China honest in this regard is a joke - too many people in the US government had their fingers in this particular pie for them to be able to do anything about it.
Can you cite proof of this? I wouldn't mind being able to prove this to some people I know.
I actually don't have a single source that sums everything up - I'll go looking for one that ties everything up, but unfortunately all the good summaries I have so far carry the kind of undeniable political valence that makes them not terribly effective at convincing regular people.
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My impression was that that wasn't the case: I know there was some series of fairly thorough videos recently that I didn't watch where two sides presented their positions, and the judges ultimately came out in favor of the natural origins hypothesis.
Not certain what I think, though my priors definitely would lean toward lab leak, but I haven't looked at any concrete evidence.
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I don't know much about what they were doing there other than the articles you posted and similar ones that I remember from the time. The only specific position they mention from the CDC was a woman who trained Chinese workers to search for pandemic outbreaks. That does sound useful but since you're saying that the Chinese blatantly lied about it and didn't even try to contain it then detecting the pandemic wasn't the issue and having more Chinese government workers trained to do that wouldn't have helped. I don't know what leverage the CDC would have had to make the Chinese government be honest about anything.
Even in that article some of the people involved were skeptical that it would have made a difference:
China wasn't letting the CDC investigate:
I certainly don't think the CDC was capable of containing a pandemic in China given that they failed to do so in the US and that every other government that tried to contain it also ultimately failed, with the exception of a few island nations like New Zealand. Probably the only things that would have helped would be banning wet markets and banning gain of function research, but it seems like we've moved on now and nobody is going to do either of those things.
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