Comment by methodical | Hacker News Reader

Comment by methodical | Hacker News Reader

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Except they haven't at all, lol

By "the “conspiracy theorists” keep turning out to be right" do you mean like how Trump won the election in 2020, Biden is an actor, Obama has been hung for treason, people around the globe are dropping dead from the vaccine, etc.? These are the people I'm talking about when I speak about conspiracy theorists, people reasonably sitting on the fence when there is conflicting information are not. You speak in absolutes about how _everybody_ who presented the possibility of a lab leak was banned and labeled a xenophobe, and while I cannot speak onto your anecdotal experiences, I never saw this in any platform I participated on at the time, in fact (as I shared in another comment on this thread), I leaned towards the likelihood of a lab leak after getting recommended a very popular youtube video on the topic from a very popular channel. As far as I know, that video is still available, although it has obviously been a long time since I last watched it.

Part of how cults are started is creation of a us versus them mentality, often where it doesn't exist. I believe this is why so many conspiracy theorists with more extreme beliefs might misconstrue their experiences in discussion around the topic, when in reality those discussing the very legitimate possibility of a lab leak never got much flak (anecdotally, as I said).

Precisely this. I don't care to speculate, read, or give a single care in the world about this. I think the hope for stopping GoF research is about as high a chance as the world "putting a pause" on AI. And this thread is littered with all of the usual conspiracy head-nods.

I think we should know more about the origins of COVID but I haven't seen a single discussion of this that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles.

And I'm not making excuses for anyone or saying the CDC/Trump/Biden are blameless and innocent, but I kinda don't know what the point of these conversations are at this point.

> I haven't seen a single discussion of this that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles.

None ever will from your perspective if you're citing "head nods" and dog whistles.

I don't know what that's supposed to mean.

No, sorry not sorry, I don't really put much stock in the analysis of people that immediately link this into their unsubstantiated handwavey global conspiracies.

I've seen articles, research, professionals talking about the evidence. Which aren't headnods and whistles. And I read it. And that's why I don't have any strong opinion, contrary to whatever I think is being implied in your comment. But comments? Public discussion? It's the same thing every time.

Skepticism is this cool thing where instead of assuming an unclear premise and then immediately linking it to bigger, even less substantiated conspiracies theories that thereby reinforce how "true" my assumptions must be!!... I accept that I don't have the full picture.

> I haven't seen a single discussion of this that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles.

> None ever will from your perspective if you're citing "head nods" and dog whistles.

It means that if you consider mentioning the lab leak theory an automatic dogwhistle for bioweapon then of course every single discussion about these lab leak immediately dove-tails into various other conspiracies or whistles. It's circular reasoning and you're making it impossible to express nuance.

Well now you're definitely making up stuff I didn't say and don't think. Thanks but no thanks. Like, I'm pretty annoyed that what I did say managed to get that twisted in your head, especially when I took multiple attempts at indicating that I am doing my own research and keeping an open mind, but thanks for kinda just demonstrating my point. Waste of time. Speculative nonsense and infighting so someone gets to be right. It's just silly.

So we're very clearly, I absolutely 0% think that talking about a lab leak means the speaker thinks that it was an intentional bioweapon leak or something. At all. Like, that's just straight up strawmanning in my head, but you kinda just projected that on me...

You never said this?

> And this thread is littered with all of the usual conspiracy head-nods.

> I think we should know more about the origins of COVID but I haven't seen a single discussion of this that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles.

You literally said "I haven't seen a single discussion of this [the lab leak theory] that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles"

So where are the head nods and dogwhistles in this thread? At what point did this discussion, just like every single lab leak discussion you've seen, dove-tail into conspiracies and whistles? Because I don't see the whistles and head nods in the current thread about this (this being the lab leak theory). They're all either deleted or flagged at this point for me.

You're remembering incorrectly or your experience was narrow. At facebook, censoring discussion of a possible lab leak was literal written policy which wasn't changed until June of 2021: https://reason.com/2021/06/04/lab-leak-misinformation-media-...

And Twitter's files showed that the government (through multiple departments), members of Congress, and private companies were directly sending lists of hundreds of names of people to ban or deemphasize for talking about it.

From your own article, we learn that your claim is wrong:

> we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps

This illustrates the problem nicely: because there was so much blatant lying about the virus being a bio weapon, people forget that there was all along more sober discussion about it being a possible leak of a natural virus and that those discussions were never banned.

You’re similarly misrepresenting what little was in the “Twitter files”, no doubt because terms of service violations are a lot less exciting.

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