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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29231 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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For example, there was a large scale effort to convince the public that Covid had a zoonotic origin. Perhaps it did, perhaps it didn't. But evidence in support of a lab leak was deliberately denigrated by nearly all authority figures. There was no need to maintain a secret channel of communication. Once consensus was established, peopled picked up the signals to stay on side, and ones who didn't were punished. The best evidence in favor of a lab leak (that the pandemic started near a lab doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses) was never secret. It was just not spoken of.

Daszak et al's conspiracy to minimize belief in a lab leak was incredibly unsuccessful at preventing the spread of the lab leak hypothesis despite never being exposed in polite society. Americans overwhelmingly believe covid leaked from a lab. On the other hand, this hasn't turned into even a moderate policy response to this (such as restrictions on biolabs), let alone specifically going after the perpetrators of the conspiracy, so perhaps it was a success as far as virologists who's paychecks depend on the steady flow of grant money are concerned.

As with any right-wing associated belief, believing in the lab leak theory as an educated person requires an incredible amount of intellectual arrogance. You know what all the experts are saying, you know about all the studies and polls of experts and all that sort of thing, and you have to say "No, based on my own knowledge and research, I know better than all those educated and intelligent people". So while the majority of Americans may believe the lab leak theory, those with power and influence largely do not.

That’s a little rich. There are several versions of the theory, and I don’t think most of them would put a person in a crazy conspiracy position.

The version in which China deliberately created the virus and deliberately leaked it, I would agree is crazy. There’s no reason for them to do that and little evidence that they did so.

But the version in which a lab in China known for protocol violations accidentally releases a bat virus and covers it up to avoid embarrassment, I don’t see that as crazy. The incentive to cover up after the fact would be there. Both the government and the lab want to avoid looking stupid. And it doesn’t really require that anyone wanted to make it happen or did anything unusual to cause it to happen. Someone drops a vial that’s improperly stored in the wrong level of biohazard and gets a snoot full of COVID. It’s not that hard to see that happening accidentally.

Facebook initially banned any claims that COVID was man-made, which would include variations on serial passage or direct gain of function genetic modification hypotheses.

When the story that's supposed to become mainstream is so obviously void of common sense, it does not require any arrogance at all to look for an alternative explanation. Lab leak was not a "right-wing" associated belief as far as I was concerned. It should never have been, in anyone's mind.

Since the Department of Energy's partial defection, the mainstream has been turning out study after study "demonstrating" that the lab leak hypothesis is very much less likely than zoonotic origin. You have to disbelieve all of those too.

But it is considered a right-wing belief. It's 2024. But people who even consider the lab leak possibility, like Nate Silver, are constantly attacked from the left for this belief.

It's actually a really good tactic to get what you want. Establish a position and then establish the opposite position as right-wing.

I'm still waiting for Pepsi to try to steal market share by labeling Coke as a "right-wing cola".

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