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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30724 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Last time you posted this (a month ago) I said I'd be happy to bet against a Chinese bioattack in the next year. You didn't take the offer, indicating that you think it's not going to happen in the next year. So when is this going to happen already?

The whole point is that we don't know whether it's a bioattack or not. There's plausible deniability. We live in a world where Daszak and the whole Ecohealth team have not even been arrested! How do you separate bioattack from lableak or natural evolution with great reliability? You can't. Let alone determining that it was Chinese specifically.

There is no plausible universe where I can say 'oh X plague has been proven to be a specifically Chinese bioattack, it's not just American propaganda or whatever else'. I can't get my money if I bet. And if I am right, the money isn't worth very much because we'll have bigger concerns like coughing our lungs out.

Okay, let's bet about a "plague" of any origin coming about in the next year.

If you want to be specific, I'd say 'novel disease kills 500K Westerners by the end of 2025' (about when the Chinese should've finished their preparations). That still excludes the chance that their biowarfare attempt squibs out or gets nipped in the bud. It also excludes them using another novel strain of COVID. I'm rather suspicious of how Omicron had such a huge genetic gap from Delta. What was it doing for those 18 months where it was barely evolving? Trapped in ice, in a lab somewhere?

This is a subject that is very opaque and hard to bet on. Imagine betting on 'US elections are rigged in favour of X'. If they're rigged properly, nobody will be able to prove it. And the definition of rigged can be very expansive, from intelligence agencies suppressing harmful stories to ballot harvesting to making up votes wholesale.

500k Westerners? Covid has killed a million Americans alone despite a 0.1% IFR. Most of the damage came from overreaction than the actual disease.

That's a piss poor bioweapon if there ever was one. If that's the most they can muster even in your imagination we've got nothing to worry about.

Well I was thinking about the time it would take to kill. COVID has been going for 3 years now.

Sure, but it's also a million deaths.

After the first covid death, the USA hit 500k dead in about a year. Again, with a 0.1% IFR.

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