MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
Based on the publicly-available information, none of the animals in the lab were infected with SARS-CoV-2 or any virus closely related enough to it to be the starting point for a gain-of-function experiment. And the timing of the required cover-up to make this true but not publicly-available information is not particularly plausible. (Again, the argument is on the ACX debate page, and is Fat Tony intelligible but not short enough that I can make you read it and check the receipts as a condition of debating with me on the Motte).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
I went to German public school, even though my parents could probably have afforded to send me to some private school instead.
Germany has academically selective public schools which have not been overrun by a high-IQ, high-grindset immigrant group. Completely different ballgame to NYC.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
Can't think of any from India
Cholera originates in India. That the most famous Indian disease is a water-borne bowel disease whereas the most famous Chinese diseases are respiratory may say something about the difference between the two countries.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
I'm also aware of the Root Claim debate which I've encountered as a wall of text and like 30 hours of videos. I'd love an explanation of why this debate matters, but my tendency is to dismiss it as a gish gallop.
A Gish gallop is a performative one-sided dump of low-quality arguments which is designed to be superficially convincing if unrebutted and to be a lot harder to rebut than it is to generate.
The Rootclaim debate was adversarial, with both sides bringing their best. Multiple observers who found it worth their time to read the wall of text on ACX (I have done) or watch the multiple hours of video (I have not) have confirmed that the arguments being made are persuasive, and that most of them stand up to well-informed, well-resourced attempts at rebuttal. The vast majority of the people who have spent time engaging with it (including me) have come away with the conclusion that the zoonosis hypothesis is at least plausible given the publicly available information, and most (not including me, probably because a lot of the receipts are buried in the 30 hours of video or the documents cited in an already-long wall of text) have come away accepting the argument that zoonosis is orders of magnitude more likely than lab leak.
The Rootclaim debate matters because it involved two smart people with the resources and incentives to produce the best possible arguments based on the publicly available information, and a group of more-or-less neutral smart observers who precommitted to reading a wall of text and watching 30 hours of video, meaning that the debate would not be easily won with cheap debate tricks like Gish gallops (or "spreading", which is the equivalent technique used in actual competitive debate). It represents by far the largest concentration of IQ-point hours applied to the question of "Based on the publicly available information, what is the most likely COVID-19 origin story?"
Not every valid argument can be made comprehensible to Fat Tony. For an uncontroversial example, Fat Tony can't understand Bell's Inequality. That doesn't make hidden variable theories of quantum mechanics correct.
In 2018, there was a proposal made to DARPA called DEFUSE, in which bat coronaviruses would be studied. Human-specific cleavage sites would be added. Transmissability would be increased via gain-of-function. And this would happen in the United States in collaboration with, you guessed it, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. DARPA ultimately rejected the $14 million proposal.
FWIW, an entirely Fat Tony-comprehensible rebuttal of this argument is included in the ACX post summarising the Rootclaim debate. Understanding it might take as long as several minutes, which you apparently consider to constitute a Gish gallop. But the short answer is that a proposal that was not funded, to do research at a lab that was not the WIV, on viruses that the WIV did not have in its collection, is not smoking gun evidence that a modified virus leaked from WIV.
In fact, most of the arguments on either side of the Rootclaim debate are ones that Fat Tony could understand if he wanted to spend the time to do so. The basic lab leak argument is as @porkpiehat gives it. The first-round rebuttal is that the unnatural-looking furin cleavage site doesn't look human-designed either, and that the bat virus from which SARS-CoV-2 doesn't appear to have been at WIV at the time the alleged GoF research was being done (it wasn't found in the wild until after the pandemic). The basic zoonosis argument is that SARS-CoV-2 is awfully similar to OG SARS (which is known to be zoonotic) and that we found the origins of the pandemic in the very wet market stall which a western virologist visiting WIV had called out 5 years previously as high-risk for zoonotic virus transmission, with the first-round rebuttal being that nobody ever found the intermediate host. What Fat Tony struggles with is evaluating the relative strengths of the arguments (and the COVID-19 origins debate is very unusual for straightforward factual disputes in that there are still strong arguments on both sides after this much expenditure of IQ-point hours). In the context of the debate, it is actually the lab leakers who end up falling back on a Fat Tony-incomprehensible argument about why "A lab leak virus that looks plausibly zoonotic just happened to have its first superspreader event at a wet market 10km from the lab" is not an unlikely coincidence - see Rootclaim's post-debate rebuttal.
I'm not going to blame Fat Tony for falling back on "I distrust the clowns who think that vaccines cause autism less than the clowns who think men can cut their dicks off and become women" but the whole point of the Motte is to aspire to be more rational than Fat Tony.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
Berlin is a city-state, so "Berlin city council" has the powers of a state government - this is a case where EU law (which allows EU citizens to vote in "municipal" elections wherever in the EU they live even if they are not a citizen of the relevant country) gives non-German EU citizens more power than the EU intended.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
London and Paris aren't Jewish enough for that to be the driver at tourist buildings in those cities. The idea that you would have enough shabbot-observant Jews going up the Shard or Eiffel Tower at one time to fill a lift is implausible.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Agreed - the Appalachian mountain men are the folk heroes of Red Tribe orneriness now, but in the Civil War era they were the least reliable part of the Red coalition, to the point where West Virginia and Kentucky defected from the rest of the south, and the Appalachian bits of Tennessee were not reliable either.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
I think Gorbachev was doing more than waiting for his regime to die, at least in the 1985-9 period. (After the rest of the Soviet bloc collapses, he does seem to be sitting waiting for the USSR itself to die). I don't know how high his chances of success were ex ante, but he was trying.
And of course Deng in China was trying and succeeding.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
There are two versions of the "cause of the South" that were live issues in living memory and which Yankee elites would have preferred to suppress for good reasons.
The notorious one is race-based citizenship rights. Jim Crow was a live issue for a century after Appomattox, and the last unrepentant segregationist in active politics was Trent Lott as late as 2007. The strand of MAGA thought that talks a lot about "heritage Americans" is being deliberately ambiguous about where ADOS blacks (and feather Indians) fit into their ideal America. The Confederate Battle Flag and the veneration of Confederate veterans was, in fact, used as a symbol of opposition to the Civil Rights and an attempt to link Southern regional pride to the political project of opposing Civil Rights, which is why the symbols are as controversial as they are.
The more serious one in the 21st century is the idea of the United States government as a foreign invader. PJ O'Rourke writes in the introduction to the British edition of Parliament of Whores that the genius of the Anglosphere is that we see bad government as more like a broken toaster than a hostile god. Seeing the government as a foreign invader (either in general, or only when it does something you don't like) isn't that. My (limited by youth and distance) understanding of the symbolism when I was growing up was that the Confederate Battle Flag was used as a symbol of this kind of anti-government sentiment (in much the same way that the Gasden flag is used now) in the 1980's and 1990's before it became a red rag to anti-racists.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
I agree that the CSA would have fallen into the British sphere of influence. I assume that some alternative legal structure for unfree plantation labour could have been worked out that wasn't technically chattel slavery and therefore was acceptable to the British* - something similar was done with unfree sugar plantation labour in various British colonies which never had chattel slavery, although not in the Caribbean. I don't know if the CSA leadership would be savvy enough to do that.
* The UK didn't abolish criminal penalties for breach of employment contracts until 1875, and employment contracts which would constitute indentured servitude according to the modern definition were common.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
They barely showed up in low effort online comments. But it would be a challenge for me to find something on my (English) bookshelf that doesn't extensively use them. Let alone doesn't use them at all.
This is the change. Only LLMs and professional typesetters care about the distinction between hyphens, en dashes and em dashes, unary minus signs and binary minus signs. (All are different characters in LaTeX, but the user has to specify which one they want and generally just asks for a hyphen unless they are in math mode). To see a correctly typeset dash in casual online writing is the LLM tell. I don't think LLMs use parenthetic dashes more than I do - admittedly I use them a lot - but I would typeset them as hyphens unless my work was being professionally edited.
There is also a BrE/AmE dimension in that standard British typography (also used across the Commonwealth) sets a parenthetic dash as an en dash between spaces, whereas standard American typography sets it as an em dash without spaces. So Brits (and most non-American English speakers) who don't read print books imported from the US are seeing large numbers of em dashes for the first time.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
No - that's kind of the point. The mountain west of America (outside a small number of national parks and suchlike) is, objectively, a good place to do highly environmentally damaging mining for the same reasons that the Australian outback is (or the central Asia steppe, which is where a lot of it ends up happening). The arctic is the sort of place where you should be more careful.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Huh? I'm pretty sure that the European countries that did permit the use of their bases didn't declare war on Iran.
Nor did the United States - actual declarations of war are out of fashion nowadays.
The serious point is "Did European and Middle Eastern countries which permitted use of bases on their territory to attack Iran think that this was an act of war?" In the case of the UK, the answer is "Yes" - we didn't allow US use of our bases until we felt there was an appropriate casus belli. (Within the region, Iran considered all countries hosting US bases to be fair game even if the bases were not actively being used to attack Iran, and Starmer announced that this constituted Iran attacking neutral countries allowing the British to act in collective self-defence).
Obviously this is cant and countries were making decisions based on politics, just as a decision about whether America is able to use Greenland to attack third countries in the 2030 War of the Big Stupid will depend on politics and not the text of the treaty.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Sovereign states have the obligation to prevent their territory being used to attack states they are not at war with. If the deal preserves Danish sovereignty (and both sides have said that it does) then it de jure requires Danish permission for the US to attack third countries out of Greenland. (As all other similar treaties with basing rights do). De facto the US could always ask for forgiveness and not permission, although that is true now anyway.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
My working theory is that America is building a Golden Dome autonomous supercomputer satellite swarm, built entirely on the back of the Western Hemisphere and the Monroe Doctrine.
This doesn't make sense given the orbital mechanics. If your space weapons are in orbits below GEO (and there are good reasons for not putting them that high), then they are all over the place. The raw materials are also a furphy - space isn't particularly raw materials intensive.
If American did own LEO at some point in the future, they wouldn't need Greenland.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
REE ores are not rare, although mining them is only viable in countries with lax environmental laws.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
There are also some who suggest that the South was unable to wage a guerrilla campaign (e.g. in the aftermath of Lee's surrender) because of poor or brittle morale. This is untrue; the South accepted an outrageous percentage of casualties that would probably have folded up other nation-states, including the Union.
The South did eventually wage a successful Fabian/guerilla campaign. The first attempt (the first Klan) was crushed, but the white South ultimately "won" (in the form of Redemption and Jim Crow) by maintaining the capacity for organised political violence while exhausting the Feds' willingness to keep enforcing Reconstruction. The South may not have been able to do that under the leadership of the planter class - the Redeemer leadership was much less aristocratic than the CSA officer corps or the first Klan leadership.
Ignoring "lose the war but win the peace", I agree with @Shrike that Shiloh was the easiest place to win the war for the South, in hindsight. If AS Johnston (or even Beauregard, who seems to have been a perfectly competent general) defeats Grant's and Buell's armies in detail (as it looked like they probably would on the eve of the battle) then they hold Corinth, which gives the Confederacy a working east-west railway line, and even at a purely tactical level delays the Vicksburg campaign by a year (or indefinitely if the political impact of being routed at Shiloh ends Grant's career). Delaying Vicksburg by a year means that the war is indecisive by polling day in 1864 and McClellan beats Lincoln. In the best case, a victorious Johnston supported by sufficiently talented political leadership is able to flip Kentucky and the war west of the Appalachians is over. Is the minimal intervention for a time traveller to flip the American Civil War simply warning Johnston about the strategic importance of the hornet's nest?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
That movement seems to be a fairly straightforward job protection campaign among creative professionals (who are disproportionately leftist).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
I think elevator operators are standard in tall buildings which are themselves tourist attractions like the Empire State Building, the Shard, the Eiffel Tower etc.
Of course their real job is mostly guest herding, but they do operate the elevator.
This is a statement of an ideal, but it doesn't always work out that way in practice. Particularly in America, people expect to see certain patriotic (and occasionally religious) observances which they see as non-political, but other people see as political. And in many such cases this ambiguity was created deliberately for political purposes.
To take an example that is now sufficiently out-of-date that it doesn't matter any more, the people who normalised the flying of the POW-MIA flag alongside the US flag intended to make a political point by doing so - namely that the US should not normalise the relationship with (notionally communist but, like China, not particularly USSR-aligned) Vietnam until Vietnam did more to ensure the return of Vietnam War POWs and MIAs. But in the current year, someone who said that flying the POW-MIA flag was an anti-Vietnamese statement would attract funny looks.
"Under God" in the pledge of allegiance has a similar history. The conservatives who amended Bellamy's original pledge to add "under God" in 1954 were making a political point about American Christianity vs Soviet atheism. But Michael Newdow was widely attacked (and probably justifiably so) for making the pledge unnecessarily political in 2002.
In contrast, singing the national anthem before football games really was non-politically patriotic in an uncomplicated way until Colin Caepernik messed things up to make his political point. [That isn't a fact of live, it's a statement about American politics at a specific time. Singing the Spanish national anthem at the start of a Barcelona-Real Madrid or God Save the Queen at a Rangers-Celtic match would start a fight]
You can see a similar argument with e.g. confederate symbols in State flags, explicitly Christian Christmas decorations in quasi-public buildings, and Donald Trump making a partisan political speech at the White House Easter Egg Hunt. Scott Alexander had an excellent blog post built around the idea that flying the pride flag in San Francisco is no more or less political than flying the stars and stripes in Peoria.
Stores didn’t go out of their way to support political causes, made up political holidays, or anything along those lines. Sports used to be just games, music used to be just entertainment and movies were just movies.
Was St Patrick's Day a "made up political holiday" and if so when did it stop being one? Celebrating it was controversial back in the day when assimilation of white ethnic immigrants was a live political issue.
Sports are an expression of local identity, and if that wasn't political in mid-20th century America that was a highly contingent fact about history. A Bowl game between Ole Miss and Notre Dame would have been at least as political as the Old Firm derby if such a thing had happened in the 1880s.
I am trying to think of a time when music wasn't commonly political and/or religious, and I'm coming up blank. Both sides of the aisle thought that rock music was political back when it was controversial.
The first feature-length film ever made was, by some definitions, Birth of a Nation. So movies were frequently political, and sometimes explicitly so, from the start.
It remains LDS dogma that the accounts of pre-Colombian white-looking Christians in America in the Book of Mormon are a historically accurate account of events that happened somewhere in the Americas (LDS archaeologists think that Central America is the best candidate, and Google AI suggests that Joseph Smith came to this conclusion himself as soon as he bothered to read up on pre-Colombian America) in the 1st millenium AD, and that Joseph Smith translated the book from the plates. One minor change is that the LDS Church is now willing to be explicit that the English-language Book of Mormon was an inspired translation made with the aid of seer stones, rather than the result of careful academic study of the inscriptions on the plates, but this isn't a change in dogma - just putting a stop to a bad practice of the early Church endorsing children's picture books which showed Joseph Smith working by candlelight with the plates and a notebook.
There appears to be an active programme of LDS-funded archaeology looking for evidence of Nephite and Lamanite settlements in Central America, which (depending on how serious and well-funded it is) implies that true believing Mormons actually believe this stuff.
I don't think Mormonism needs a historically accurate Book of Mormon - in the same way that Christianity doesn't need a historically accurate Old Testament. The power of mainstream Christianity comes from the Cross and Resurrection, and the distinctive power of Mormonism comes from the restored Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods conferred on Joseph Smith by angels claiming to be John the Baptist and various Biblical apostles respectively. Whether the prequel material is historically accurate or divinely-inspired myth doesn't affect the end result.
It would not be particularly surprising (although I wouldn't bet on it at evens) that after another 100 years of archaeologists not finding the Nephites and Lamanites that LDS Church abandons the literal truth of the Book of Mormon via progressive revelation.
Mormonism doesn't actually need the plates - given that they now openly admit that Joseph Smith didn't rely on the Egyptian text on the plates to prepare his translation, they could pivot to "the Book of Mormon is a modern divinely inspired account of (real or mythological) events in pre-Colombian America that God gave to Joseph Smith through the medium of the seer stones". But I would eat my hat with a seer stone in it if the LDS authorities ever accepted that.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
It is also why politics is shit nowdays. This matters more.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
And in particular liberal Jewish groups like J Street do not qualify as "welcome in anti-Zionist spaces" based on their opposition to Netanyahu's policies or support for a Palestinian state.
The Palestinian/anti-Zionist movement and its western leftist useful idiots really are committed to the idea that there should not be a Jewish nation-state in the Middle East, and consider this to be an issue where agreeing with them is table stakes to be a decent person.
As you point out, the Red Chinese were destroying both potential evidence that could have supported wet market zoonotic spread and potential evidence that could have supported lab leak. This is not surprising, as the official Chicom position at the time the evidence was destroyed (being enforced inside China with the usual Chicom techniques of truth suppression) was that the virus originated outside China. There is no revealed preference on the part of the Chinese authorities for people to believe zoonosis over lab leak (which is unsurprising - both theories make China look bad, but only lab leak lets them absolve the leadership by throwing a small number of people under the bus). The campaign to suppress the lab leak hypothesis came from the US medical establishment, which did not get access to Wuhan unfiltered by the local Chicom authorities or Chicom-aligned WHO leadership until after any evidence had been destroyed.
You said "provably infected" (in your earlier post), not me. I'm happy to stipulate that any evidence that could prove the infection status of the lab animals at WIV (in either direction) has been lost.
As I said in my first post, the specific cover-up required is implausible (not impossible, but all I have ever claimed is that it is at least as implausible as a zoonosis coincidentally showing up in the home of WIV). The only way WIV can have had access to a suitable starting point virus (i.e. BANAL-52, or some other bat virus more closely related to BANAL-52 than to any bat virus known to exist in 2019) is that a civilian lab which was openly and notoriously conducting gain-of-function research, and seeking to collaborate with UNC and get research funding from NIH on that basis, and which had a financial incentive to boast about and was in fact boasting about their virus-collection programme and large published virus database, was running a separate parallel secret gain-of-function lab with a separate parallel secret virus-collection programme which didn't contribute to the database and that was using separate secret furin cleavage sites that shouldn't work according to the pre-2019 public literature, confirmed in the general case (obviously not specifically for SARS-CoV-2) by post-2019 AI-enabled simulations.
Your response is isolated demands for rigour and (entirely plausibly) slinging allegations of dishonesty at the Red Chinese authorities. But this cover-up would have required dishonesty maintained over several years by academics who did not have an obvious incentive to be dishonest. And from the point of view of the academics, the cover-up failed, and predictably so. If COVID-19 was provably a lab leak, then the Chinese authorities, who are the ones in a position to punish the academics, already have the proof.
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