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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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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.