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Would you write the same response about chemical or nuclear weapons research? I hope not.

Yet we've just spent the last year proving that biological warfare will be potentially more deadly than chemical or even nuclear warfare.

Decades ago we banned research into those other weapons and implemented international treaties and inspection regimes.

Even the possibility that this could have been a lab leak should scare the whole world and motivate a massive reform of these labs and the experiments people are conducting.

I hope the people in power don't share your complacency.

The same reflexive denial happened on HN. Yet the lab leak theory has always been consistent with the situation. It's also always been the best fit to the behaviour we've seen from the various actors.

I'd also assign a small but non-zero probability to the US not wanting to point the finger because they prefer the scenario where the general population comes to believe that the lab accident was responsible, but no hard evidence is ever produced.

Why? Because it seems like US institutions and people (right up to Fauci) were involved in this research and may not want the domestic blowback.

Conveniently the CCP don't want a paper trail either.

I'd be pretty sure the various scenarios have already been gamed out in both countries.

Edit: Not sure why this is being downvoted, but just in case it’s a reflex because I mentioned Fauci: yes, he was head of NIAID, and yes, the NIH did fund this type of research at the WIV. The grants are public information.

Are you saying EcoHealth/Daszak do not have material conflicts of interest in this matter? On what basis?

You're also forgetting that these people are scientists. Scientists only look at the facts and are completely unbiased - they aren't like normal humans, who might be worried about their entire livelihoods being cancelled (or worse) if the world realises their research is too dangerous to exist. And scientists who work for political organisations are the most unbiased of all. /s

A proper investigation would not include Peter Daszak at all, due to his immense conflicts of interest on this topic, and his behaviour since the outbreak occurred.

Wuhan is nowhere near the caves where these bat viruses have been found. It's over 1800 kilometres to Southwest Yunnan, for example.

Intent.

NPR are a bit dangerous in some ways, because their reputation for being trustworthy (on most topics anyway) means that a lot of people take all of their reporting at face value, rather than applying some critical thinking or cross-checking what they read. Yet NPR do have biases, and in recent years have engaged in the same sort of selective reporting and narrative-shaping as other outlets, just not quite so blatantly or to the same degree.

It's even worse when you consider that central banks have been deliberately keeping wages down through decades of inflation targeting, while ignoring asset prices. And fiscal policy has done nothing to compensate for this. It's actually made things worse by imposing much higher taxes on earned income than on capital gains and other wealth. The perfect recipe for greater and greater inequality.

What percentage of the people being kicked off these platforms are actually Nazis? It seems very close to zero.

The article is about girls outperforming relative to boys. In that context anything which penalises boys benefits girls, by definition. This is basic logic. I'm not sure what else can be said here, so let's leave it at that.

Sorry, what? I gave an example of a teaching method which creates difficulties for boys relative to girls. You agreed boys have trouble with it. What is left to discuss?

How can they not benefit women? The article is about the relative performance of men and women, and this factor reduces the performance of men.

Imagine reading that men perform better in their careers, and saying to women:

"The amount of insecurity in the thread is a little embarrassing ladies. Let's be open minded and entertain the possibility that men are indeed more capable and that societal constructs drag down their educational opportunities."

Male primary school teachers are a tiny minority, and that's true globally.

Would you consider kindergarten teaching to require a specific gender? Or carpentry? If not, please explain how you are going to persuade a huge number of women who wanted to be kindergarten teachers to instead become carpenters, while also persuading an equal number of men to do the reverse. That is what your target requires (across many occupations). It will never happen.

A great deal of teaching is built around the idea of students sitting still in one place for a long period of time, listening intently and working quietly. Boys seem to have a lot more difficulty with this (on average) than girls do.

That's one example but there are plenty of others.

This is often forgotten. In aggregate, for every woman persuaded to become a bricklayer instead of a kindergarten teacher, a man must be persuaded to do the reverse. This is just never going to happen across all industries.

So? How does any of that prove Switzerland is xenophobic?

The difference between colour blindness (equality before the law) and your examples is that your examples are not mutually exclusive. You can save the rainforest and the arctic at the same time. You cannot give the final scholarship place to both the Cambodian and the African American. Whatever you give to one is taken from the other, and it cannot be any other way.

About two thirds are from the EU28/EFTA countries.

However: There are twice as many Asians in Switzerland as there are people from the Americas. There are also more Africans than there are Americans. The fifth largest immigrant group are from Kosovo (almost as many as France and way more than Spain or Austria). There have been multiple waves of immigration and the country is actually very diverse.

https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/population/m...

Switzerland has one of the largest immigrant populations in the world per capita: 29.9% according to the link below.

Very few countries are ahead of this. Even Australia is only 30%, and Canada (which has often led the world in immigration statistics) is 21.3%.

Perhaps you can provide some evidence for your statement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...

Quite a few people who voted against this did so purely because they didn’t want private companies controlling the system.

If the proposal had been for the government to issue and control the identities, it may well have passed.

How is that fair to the child of Cambodian refugees whose entire families were murdered, and who started from less than nothing in America? “Sorry, your skin isn’t as dark as Oprah’s so she’s more deserving”?

How will your two dimensional seesaw work when there are millions of dimensions to consider in making these “adjustments”?

And what does your dream unbiased society look like? It sounds like a colour blind society to me. So why deliberately move in the other direction?

And once implement your schemes, and then the fixes to correct the problems it introduces, and then the fixes for those fixes, how are you going to reverse it all?

Conversations like these make me extremely glad that I don’t live in America.

The whole point of the story is that he is black and gets treated unfairly (accused of a crime) because of that. It’s fundamentally about the racial discrimination that was rife at the time.

Take that one element away by making him white, and it remains an interesting story but now it’s about something very different, and I doubt it would be as famous today. It’s also not clear Harper Lee would have bothered to write it.

No, it was already very well accepted that you shouldn’t throw white people in jail for crimes they didn’t commit. It was not well accepted if the accused was black. The challenge was to persuade people (many of whom were racists) to see the accused man as equal to a white man before the law, and deserving of the same treatment as a white man would have received. In other words, to persuade people to be blind to his colour in their assessment of the case.

There are plenty of novels about defending people against crimes they didn’t commit. This one is about much more than that.

Is an Asian child who is born poor less deserving of help than a black child who is born poor? If so, why? If not, why not?

And if your ultimate goal is a society where race is irrelevant and we all treat each other equally, exactly how does doing the opposite get you there?

The point was not that modern anti-racists are wrong because they disagreed with MLK on some topics, it was that they are wrong because they completely reject colour blindness, of which MLK’s famous statements are one well-known example. Perhaps I should have picked a different person or just not mentioned him.

Again: It’s about the specific idea, not a person. And the idea is what is being hijacked, to mean almost the opposite of what was generally accepted.

Sure, but that's not important to the point I'm making. If you asked almost everybody even two years ago what "racism" or "anti-racism" meant, and what Atticus Finch stood for, you would have gotten some version of "colour blindness" and probably some reference to MLK, because that one speech is what they consider the best expression of the view. Whatever else MLK said is irrelevant - it's about the specific idea that most people associated with anti-racism.

The modern "anti-racists" have very different beliefs, which would have very little support if the implications were spelled out clearly to everyone, and therefore these beliefs need to be laundered and disguised as something more respectable. Hence the language games.