The Lab-Leak Mess
cjr.org
cjr.org
Truth is an absolute defense against charges of libel and slander, but not, apparently, against the charge of racism.
The meanings of "conspiracy theory" according Wiktionary, my favorite dictionary:
> 1. A hypothesis alleging that the members of a coordinated group are, and/or were, secretly working together to commit illegal or wrongful actions including attempting to hide the existence of the group and its activities. In notable cases the hypothesis contradicts the mainstream explanation for historical or current events. [1960s]
The first sentence describes something that certainly does happen. Organized crime syndicates are conspiracies. If somebody tries to hire a hitman to kill their neighbor, they'll be charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Conspiracies are real things that sometimes happen.
The second sentence is where things get interesting. As far as I've been able to determine, this started with the assassination of JFK. Officially, he was killed by a single man who acted on his own and didn't conspire with anybody else. Any theory that posits the gunman was in cahoots with anybody else was a conspiracy theory in the original sense the term. In the aftermath of that, 'conspiracy theory' seemingly became mixed up with the premise of disagreeing with the mainstream explanation. But sometimes the mainstream narrative is a theory about people conspiring. The man who shot Lincoln conspired with others; that's the mainstream narrative in that case and I have no reason to doubt it.
It's all very tiresome.
Why have I suddenly been seeing a bunch of internet comments like yours trying to rehabilitate "conspiracy theory"? Is there some conservative influencer promoting this?
Hunches about conspiracies... okay. Here's a hunch about a conspiracy: Jimmy Hoffa was probably killed by the mob.
Real wacky shit, huh? Here is another conspiracy theory: The reason I'm seeing so many people discussing the term 'conspiracy theory' is because of conservative influencers.
Being genuinely curious is pretty much included in the definition of being a conspiracy theorist.
No need for "conservative influencers" to get this, it's such a simple publicity trick a child can come up with it.
Edit: this is not an extract of the article
«To my mind, staking out the proper boundary between science and politics has been the defining journalistic challenge of the pandemic; it might well be impossible to pinpoint, though we could, collectively, have been more thoughtful about looking, and the errors around the lab-leak reflect that failure. The path forward on that story is the same as it always should have been: cover the context, respect the uncertainty, and report out the underpinning truth; China’s lack of transparency may make this impossible, too, but it remains the goal. »
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...
Ultimately, whether Italy had infections before Wuhan couldn't tell us anything about the origin.
If we had leaders we could trust, and weren't turning every little thing into a political game with two sides pitted against each other we wouldn't have a media that's already primed to be calling out that administrations constant bullshit. I don't know how else you could have expected anyone to act? We don't trust you, and now in hindsight we were all expected to put trust in a theory that came with a side of racism? Boy who cried wolf in real life, it has consequences as we see.
If you want to root cause the mess you need to look at why the media responded the way it did and not at the response of the media and the public it self.
American perspective: We hate the other half of our own country, so we need our media to be crazy. It's all for a good cause.
It absolutely did, we need to step back and figure out why and address those problems.
Still are.
The problem is with the social media fact checkers who have to decide what’s wrong or right. Information was removed without scientific evidence that it was clearly wrong.
I'm going to echo a sibling comment and say that Americans have indeed gone rabid with this politicisation of everything and turning your neighbours into enemies.
I don't think I am, the virus and pandemic was made political last year by the president and the republicans. The first lines of this article are political. How is this on me? Especially when I'm just reflecting and looking back at what happened. covid is politcal, thanks to the republicans making everything political and a culture war.
Do you have a suggestion? Or just disagreeing without offering an alternative? Im not really sure what your trying to get at.
Same advice applies for Republicans/right-leaning people.