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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

Three points:

1. It is always going to be a little suspicious, at the very least, that the first COVID-19 outbreak happened in the same city as a virology institute. (Conversely, if we had a bizarre viral outbreak in Atlanta, I would have very similar suspicions.)

2. Nobody is going to start a war with China. On top of the centuries-old reasons that attacking China is stupid, they have nuclear weapons.

3. If it was released from a lab, it was almost certainly the result of an honest accident. SARS was very serious and China would have wanted to invest in research intended to prevent the kind of problems we are having now. If that research led to an accidental exposure and release of this virus, that would be a very cruel cosmic joke on us all, but it wouldn’t be a conspiracy for global domination or anything stupid like that.

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I guess, but the last major hop from animal to human was the Hendra virus in Australia in 2017 -- going from fruit bat to horse to human [1]. This was in the Brisbane area which I'm sure has viral research labs nearby, but because they're Australia, nobody even began to speculate as much.

Sometimes shit happens, and it's deeply human to want to create the fantastical explanation. Not saying it couldn't happen it's just again, not the simplest explanation at all, and so it's really just not very likely.

2. Someone sure would start a trade war though.

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170815095124.h...

It's really strange to me that you call this a "fantastical explanation" when there have already been 2 accidental lab releases resulting in human illness and death that were acknowledged by the Chinese government of a virus in the same family (SARS-CoV-1):

https://www.who.int/csr/don/2004_04_23/en/

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-07/02/content...

From the WHO link, 4 people died, and they were tracking 300 contacts.

So a million times less severe.

Conspiracy Theorists will rant about the WHO being a China shill though, you can never win.

> Nobody is going to start a war with China.

Hopefully you are right, and I share your opinion (if that is what it is) that there will be no war in the immediate aftermath of covid-19. But I need to point out that the cited remark represents a kind of absolutist statements about the future that have had a chronic tendency to be wrong up through history.

There is definitely a risk for war with China as long as the US have a considerable number of weapons pointed against China, a war triggered either by intent or by mistake. The best way IMO to avoid the risk of war is to work towards total disarmament under the oversight of transparent and neutral international agencies. And discredit the warmongering on all sides.

Somehow and unfortunately I don't anticipate that such initiatives will be accepted by the world main powers, or by a frightened and easily manipulated public, any time soon.

Disarmament doesn’t prevent war. It only prevents winning. “Transparent and neutral international agencies” are a pipe dream.

Furthermore, remember what I actually said. The main reason there won’t be a war with China is because China is too dangerous to attack. When China was less well armed than they are today, they ended up at war much more frequently.

Why does the US “point weapons” at China? Same reason. We don’t want them to attack us or our allies, though our commitment to those allies has turned less credible in recent years. In both cases, the basic principle is the same: si vis pacem, para bellum. That is the only way to preserve peaceful coexistence between states that have fundamental differences and distrust between them. Which, after all, is the same basic reason different countries exist in the first place.

You make it sound simple, and simple is certainly compelling. It is however just a theory, and as it happens it's the same theory (to the extent that logic and theories has anything to do with such) that has lead to 2 devastating world wars. It's time to reconsider, and try a different theory, before the 3rd one wreaks havoc on us all. I have great faith in the prospect of brilliant minds finding solutions in the face of adversities like this race towards mutual destruction.

Unfortunately, many if not all of our brilliant minds are either tied up in how to convince people to buy stuff, or how to enable first-strike capability (enabling 'winning' in your theory). It doesn't bode well.

Hey, you left out brilliant minds moving virtual representations of stocks and futures around to shave off fractions of a cent millions of times a day.

sorry - my bad!

> as it happens it's the same theory (to the extent that logic and theories has anything to do with such) that has lead to 2 devastating world wars.

It appears that you are arguing that those starting the world wars did so because they were suicidal. On the contrary, it seems probable that they started those wars believing it was possible to win them.

No, you misunderstand in that case, sorry if I was unclear. I think people who "start" wars are an anomaly, the vast majority of wars are started as a consequence of a long chain of events, among which the notion of mutual deterrence and the accompanying need for an arms race is one of the most important. Outbreaks of world wars are the empirical proof of failures of that doctrine, and it has happened 2 times with devastating consequences.

Let's understand that mutual deterrence is not the way to prevent world wars already. Let's urgently try other options.

Quite the contrary. The road to the Second World War, at least in Europe, was paved with the good intentions of pacifism and appeasement, and the naïveté of assuming that someone like Hitler could be negotiated with. Britain and France could have chosen not to involve themselves in Hitler’s war (France even tried to make that choice once it started going poorly for them) but that would have done nothing to stop the war from happening. There was a fundamentally irreconcilable difference between Poland and Russia, who wanted to exist, and Germany, who wanted to forcibly depopulate Poland and western Russia and resettle that land with Germans.

You are correct, the interwar period is generally not considered an arms race, especially in the early period there were serious and to some extent successful attempts at arms reduction. But one is not correct to conflate pacifism with appeasement, the former a movement borne out of a sincere hope that the disaster that was WWI would never repeat itself, the latter a British policy that hoped to direct the German expansionism towards the USSR only ("no more territorial demands in Europe").

Among liberal democracies there was an anticipation that Germany would annihilate the USSR, and that Germany could be handled after that, a complete miscalculation. They could have thwarted the military buildup in Germany through other means than war, for example through boycotts like the US currently is so fond of. Or by granting the League of Nations better and sharper tools, but they chose not to. So there was an arms race, but it was mainly between Germany and the USSR, until the west realized that it was too late for Germany to be controlled.

As a side note, your theory that "Disarmament doesn’t prevent war. It only prevents winning." and “'Transparent and neutral international agencies' are a pipe dream." aligns well with fascist ideology. Not that you necessarily harbor such leanings. It just aligns, and is definitely very far removed from the ideas that underpin for example the United Nations, which could give you some pause.

> As a side note, your theory that "Disarmament doesn’t prevent war. It only prevents winning." and “'Transparent and neutral international agencies' are a pipe dream." aligns well with fascist ideology.

Not as much as your style of naive pacifism did, when theory was forced to turn into practice. Fascists are aggressors who will exploit any weakness to their advantage. They don't negotiate in good faith, they will cheat on any disarmament treaty they can, and international agencies are a joke to them. Understanding the world as it is rather than as we wish it might be means understanding that people like that exist.

Having extraordinarily powerful nuclear weapons as a deterrent is a primary reason most of Europe is enjoying the longest uninterrupted period of peace since maybe the Roman Empire. Failing that, "neutral international agencies" who actually had the power to keep the peace could only exist if those agencies, themselves, were an armed hegemon. People with guns always get their way against people without guns. And it just so happens that there is an armed hegemon that actually keeps troops deployed across most of Europe and has done so continuously throughout this long period of peace.

Yes, well. More fascistic talk, the Roman empire was a great inspiration to them too. Again, try and contrast these ideas with the principles on which the UN was founded.

You and your fellow arms race proponents will win, of course. Your prize will eventually be a smoking, poisoned world, billions of people dead or suffering irreparable damage, unspeakable pain (much like large swathes of the Vietnamese and survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have endured), to a large extent uninhabitable where maybe, just maybe some tribe in the deep south will survive to tell the tale of the human folly that ruined the world for millions of years to come, a proud and conceited civilization who thought they knew it all. Congrats.

> Again, try and contrast these ideas with the principles on which the UN was founded.

The UN wasn’t founded by a bunch of pacifists. The pacifists surrendered and collaborate with the fascists. That’s your side. The people who founded the UN killed fascists and tried to build a new world order on the promise, “never again”. A promise that has been broken time and time again.

We’re living in the longest period of peace since before the Middle Ages. I’m not admiring the Roman Empire by pointing that out, I’m admiring the world that exists today. A world in which no one in living memory has had to die to re-litigate territorial claims over Alsace-Lorraine or the succession to the Austrian crown. Not only do you have no explanation for how this world works, you would tear down the structures that keep it peaceful in the name of pacifism.

Yeah, well you could have asked politely what I actually mean before loading the big cannons against a straw-man of my opinions through the course of this thread. I don't feel particularly obliged to expound at this point, but rest assured I'm no pacifist, particularly not towards fascist empire builders. It's just that I have several other goals too - the survival of the earth, and our species, civilization and cooperation among peoples etc. It's probably too complicated for you. Have a nice day.

> Yeah, well you could have asked politely what I actually mean

Says the guy who's been calling me a fascist.

2). If you include civil war and if you allow that civil war to be a war of factions within the CCP then you're wrong. There will be a new leader of the CCP, call him / her China's Gorbachev (and SARS2 is China's Chernobyl) and this will eventually lead, with assistance, to the de-Communization of China within at most 15 years but possibly just two.

update: possibly 6 months.

Is Xi in poor health?

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