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PaperclipPerfector  22d ago (text post)   1531 thread views

Transnational Thursday for March 13, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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So, now we know they lied - which we knew for a long time - and now we have an undeniable proof they lied.

As usual life is a bit more complicated than that. The medical experts still don't believe in the lab leak, and they have explanations when asked that sound convincing but I don't have the expertise to evaluate. You don't have to believe, and it's entirely possible they were told what to think and are now rationalizing it, but that doesn't change that their is a counter narrative to this explanation which is still present, and is quite potent.

I doubt the truth is particularly simple.

This means that anything as rock solid as "undeniable proof they lied" is unlikely to apply to most, and those it does apply to it would be impossible to prove.

I agree that a lab leak seems like a great explanation, but I don't have the expertise to evaluate if that's more likely than normal transmission explanation and we have to take a beat and admit to ourselves that a lot of devotion to the lab leak hypothesis stems from frustration that it wasn't allowed to be considered in the moment, not from the fact that it honestly seems more epistemically reasonable.

I am not talking about one specific medical expert, which can honestly be convinced it's zoonotic (or not). I am talking about governmental and scientific establishment that have been for extended time pushing the dogma that only one version of the events is possible, and others are not just incorrect, but wild conspiracy theories driven by ignorance and racism, and anyone who even considers them, even gives them a platform by discussing it, should be immediately expelled from the polite society. This is what the big lie was, and this is what should have lead to consequences. Disagreement about complex subjects is normal. Suppressing one of the sides - and yet, with knowledge that there are at least very good and very strong arguments behind it - and making openly discussing the merits and arguments of the sides impossible - this is the big problem. It's not taking one side that must be rejected - many very smart people and very honest people sometimes took a side that turned out to be wrong, and there's nothing shameful in that if they honestly defended what they thought was true with honest arguments - but trying to put the jackbooted foot on the scale is what is wrong. And what makes it infuriatingly wrong is that at the same time they knew that what they are suppressing is not some random cookery (which shouldn't be suppressed either, but at least here you could understand why they made this mistake) but the position that had at least as strong, if not better, argument than their own. It was pure anti-scientific and anti-societal exercise of power, and society should have reacted to it much stronger than it did. Since it did not, it will happen again.

Absolutely agree with most of this - suppression happened and was a problem, but just because of that doesn't mean we for sure have a consensus/lies.

Again, my point is that the lie wasn't "it's zoonotic". The lie was "it's zoonotic and there's nothing to discuss anymore, and anybody who keeps saying it's possible that it's not zoonotic is a racist idiot". "The truth is X" may be true or false, and we may not know which for a while, but "the consensus is X and there's no good argument for Y" is a proven lie. It still may turn out X is true, but - at that point of time - the claim that there was no good argument against X is what was the lie. And that was definitely a deliberate lie, not a mistake, because people who claimed it knew that there was a good argument against zoonosis - good enough to convince BND. Maybe BND was ultimately duped - it can happen. But it at least established a strong controversy and not a consensus. However this controversy is resolved, the lie had happened.

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