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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25637 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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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.

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.

Wet-market origin has been discredited at this point - COVID was almost certainly leaked from a lab doing Gain-of-Function research.

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.

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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