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Comment by Flozzin | Hacker News Reader

I would think, the US or practically any other country would have a huge incentive to be able to blame China for this entire mess. And those incentives would far outweigh having to move a few labs. Plus, "It's China's bad practices that put the world at risk, not the great wonderful lab practices that happen in the US." That would be the line.

There would also be notoriety for the person that would blow the lid off a lab leak. There are plenty of other industries that have eaten there own.

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The problem with putting the blame solely on China is that the US funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

If the lab leak hypothesis proves to be true US research funded by NIH may be the cause.

I hear this a lot, but I don't understand how people think it's worse. How is a lab leak worse than the virus emerging from a wet market? At least if it's a lab leak it was while doing potentially life-saving medical research.

Lab leaks might be able to be avoided, it was human fault, also people really want to blame China so it's kind of wish fullfillment.

Wet markets are able to be avoided as well. Unfortunately people have largely been convinced that perpetual animal genocide is necessary.

Right, this is what I was thinking. Like with a quick Google for "wet markets" prior to 2019 I see tons of articles warning about the dangers and calling for China to close them:

2007: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-foodmarket-idUSHKG2...

2012: https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2012/12/wet-markets-in-china-...

2013: https://qz.com/141596/chinese-bats-carry-viruses-primed-to-c...

2017: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/china-ground-z...

I was more aware of this danger and I guess the lab leak theory sounds more like a sci-fi plot to me before the pandemic.

Not necessary, but tastes great

When your pleasure is causing suffering, maybe that should be a prompt for self-reflection.

Everyone in the first world causes vast amounts of suffering to humans across the globe just to maintain our standard of living. Just by being on the internet, we've all decided we're okay with this, and won't voluntarily stop causing suffering for our pleasure.

I have reflected upon it, and decided I don't care. Anyway, animals would be the last on the list of things to help if I decided to act truly ethically. It feels nice to pretend you're ethically superior though, posting photos of vegan food with an iPhone, so I won't blame anyone for it.

> perpetual animal genocide is necessary.

Meat as a staple food is literally not genocide, because an actual animal genocide would literally lead to famine. Making silly comparisons like this doesn't make your position sound reasonable.

Does rephrasing it to "animal war crimes" make it any better?

Not at all. What's the war? Do animals even have a concept of war? Don't two parties need to know they're at war for it to qualify as war? Humans aren't killing other animals because animals are a threat to their way of life or their values.

Maybe you want to call meat eating a moral crime, and you can make that argument, but you keep pulling in these tangential human-centric concepts like "war" and "genocide" in an attempt to make the normalized meat diet seem as morally perverse as possible, but I think the hyperbole is doing the opposite. If your position is the rational one, you shouldn't come across as irrational.

No, humans are enslaving and torturing multiple species because they taste good. And I'm the irrational one? Because I value not causing suffering over personal pleasure? If that's irrational, then fuck whatever is considered rational. It IS morally reprehensible. Just because they aren't human doesn't mean they don't suffer. If there were a group of humans that were perpetually imprisoned, tortured, and eventually murdered, we would call it what it is: genocide. It fits the definitions laid out by the UN.

> perpetual animal genocide is necessary.

The argument that there are groups of food animals that constitute peoples in the sense used in the definition of genocide and that destroying them as a people is a necessary instrumental method to meat production is...not obvious.

Given how often it happens, it looks to me more like we've just been lucky so far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

So with the exception of gain-of-function research, it's not that it's worse exactly, but it's finally put "do we really need to be taking so many risks?" under the spotlight.

The blame is squarely with the authorities in China.

There was a virus, they knew there was a virus. They held a massive party with the virus, it got out to the world. Then they locked down.

https://www.thestar.com.my/news/regional/2020/02/06/wuhan-ne...

This is the (well documented and well known) event that should be the focus of ire towards the authorities in China.

You may be underestimating the hysteria this could generate locally.

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