lawnchair_larry

Governments pressuring private companies and keeping lists of people they want censored and deplatformed based on what they say should offend everyone. That is fundamentally anti-free speech. It doesn’t matter what it’s about. Preserving this is worth more than silencing these 12 people.

Nah, candidates ghost all the time.

Please take your racism and concern trolling elsewhere.

Glad it was "taken advantage of", racism has no place here. Disgusting that people think this is ok.

Why did you say “anything else”? This isn’t a conspiracy theory. They only detail that is even in question is whether or not one of their samples leaked. Nothing else about what that lab is, or what that lab does, is even in question. They go 1000 miles away to get bats and bat poop and bring it to the WIV to study bat coronaviruses and they modify them to be more transmissible. This is basic virology in 2021 and they have been proudly telling the world that they do this for years. None of that is speculation.

The question of whether one of their viruses leaked out again (yes, again!) that was a bat coronavirus found right by the bat coronavirus lab, or whether it was a remarkable cascade of coincidences that still has no viable complete hypothesis (the “modified” virus doesn’t infect bats anymore), is not one of “conspiracy”.

Antagonism and scapegoating of The Other was, and is, currently the playbook of the democrats at the moment. They don’t have a monopoly on it, but they’re way more guilty of this. It just doesn’t seem like it, because you haven’t heard the other side of the story, and haven’t realized how much has been a total lie from the left. Everyone believes it all, uncritically, for the same reason they dismissed the lab leak.

Folks reflecting on this and saying, what else did we have completely wrong are asking the right question. Folks who think this was a one off, well, it absolutely wasn’t.

I doubt there is even a single “MAGA” person on HN, but you folks like to throw that epithet around to shut down dialog. It’s shameful.

And nobody needs to distance themselves from anyone. If you make a false association, that’s your fault, not theirs. Judge them on what they actually do and say, not on what you (incorrectly) assume they might think.

His cognitive dissonance is very strong right now. Give it some time. Some people get there faster than others.

This is a good point in general but I don’t think it actually applies here. I don’t know why people keep acting like taking this seriously required believing a word of anything out of Trumps mouth. That isn’t how it went.

Some folks who never supported Trump had their own reasons to examine this. They talked about it, and everyone assumed they got the idea from Trump, and therefore not only did they deserve no attention, but they also deserve no respect, and outright career sabotage by folks like Peter Daszak and to a lesser extent, Anthony Fauci. Many had to work on this in secret because the hyper partisans wouldn’t listen to them, and instead tried to attack them just for talking about it. Take a look at Yuri Deigin and Alina Chan on twitter and go back in their timelines to see how long they have been digging into this.

My hope is not that anyone acknowledges that Trump was correct, although I would view it as a sign of integrity if they did. But whether he was or wasn’t, and whether he got lucky or actually knew something, I don’t care. The real issue comes not from Trump, but their own prejudice, which many are still trying to make excuses for, made them so blind to what, in hindsight, is actually extremely obvious as the most likely explanation. Then they took it further and let their blind hate for Trump also caused them to hate half of their fellow citizens, and they extended that hate to anyone who they even perceived as having thoughts tangentially related to something Trump said.

I could easily come up with probably 5 more examples of something very similar that happened in his orbit that people who only follow left leaning mainstream news have no idea about, or that were spun into complete anti-trump lies by the media and are still believed by people today.

The media are absolutely full of shit. All of them. Real journalism died, hyper partisan “woke” activists have been graduating and taking writing jobs, groupthink and cult-like behavior has amplified, and the executives loved the sky high ratings and revenue they got for being anti-trump. Cancel culture further reinforced this culty groupthink and forced moderate voices out. Hell, people actually try to say Glenn Greenwald went right-wing crazy. Glenn Greenwald! They don’t even realize that it wasn’t him who changed, it was them.

It’s pervasive in tech. People are actually pro-censorship now. And they have convinced themselves that they are the good guys. It’s hard to believe how far we have fallen from rationality in such a short time.

Nope. False dichotomy.

Nothing was revived with any new information. The Venn diagram that includes the circle of people who were following and investigating this, and the circle of conspiracy theorist Trump supporters, did not ever overlap.

One of these circles was about some bill gates funded bioweapon to implant 5G or some nonsense which they suspected was being done in WIV.

The other was scientists who have known about the work at WIV for years, not based on suspicion, but based on the papers they kept releasing, media interviews, sequencing the genome, and doing science.

But you all TDS’d so hard that you wrote the latter off as the former, and the media went along with it.

It isn’t even a conspiracy theory. It had nothing to do with collusion by tech giants. Their hyper partisan employees just fell into the same TDS trap and decided “lab = conspiracy misinformation, no ifs ands or buts” and started purging people talking about it.

The Vanity Fair article is actually quite poorly researched and written, and misattributes much of the source and timeline, but at least people are snapping out of their partisan blindness on this issue now.

Haha. No. It’s because of politics and TDS. People were taught that this was a Trump theory. That’s all the media needs to say to ensure that nobody will take it seriously and nobody will tolerate anyone else who takes it seriously.

There are mountains of evidence. Proximity to the lab is barely the tip of the iceberg.

Except it never seemed more credible. People were assigned their opinion that it was more credible, and accepted it uncritically. It was frankly ridiculous if you had the information about the WIV that was being discussed wherever Peter Daszak wasn’t trying to cover his own ass and ruin others careers.

This is a weak and frankly shameful rationalization. Just take the L. People who dismissed this fucked up. People who were jerks about it fucked up even more. Trump Derangement Syndrome is your fault, not Trumps. None of the people who were looking into this or following it were getting their information from Trump. Most of the detractors just assumed they were.

Depends how old you are. Feels like yesterday to me.

> Israel is an apartheid state

It’s easy to spot people who know less than nothing about the situation when this word shows up. Israel is literally not an apartheid state. “Palestine” is literally an apartheid state. This is a demonstration of supreme ignorance.

Someone should let these people know that nobody gets put in jail based on the facial recognition’s decision, so their “concerns” are impossible. Not only that, but if anything, it’s less likely to find darker skin tones at all, so it will favor minorities, not hurt them.

It’s a shortcut for manually digging through databases to identify people. Any identification is followed up with investigation, just as it would be if a human matched it. No decision is made by the machine.

So, no, it’s not racist at all.

This is not exactly accurate. But it’s easier to get to the full story if people accept the lab leak of an unmodified virus as a possibility. However, the “assertions” are misleading and have been debunked. The virus does appear to be chimeric. There is a missing link in both hypotheses, but the lab leak hypotheses offers a few possible explanations. The zoonotic hypothesis still doesn’t have an explanation for that part.

And a study just released has also contradicted this “assigned opinion” being weaponized by the vaccine virtue signalers.

> The odds of "putting things in your body" having any effect on you are far less than the odds of getting Covid again, even if those odds are low.

Regardless on one’s position, this is simply baseless bullshit. Please don’t spread it.

Man am I ever sick of this attitude. That high ground you’re looking down on other people from certainly has an extremely weak foundation based on what we know currently.

Consider a little respect and humility. You might be wrong. Many of the the loudest voices throughout this whole covid affair are currently muffled as they can’t eat and talk at the same time, lest they choke on their massive servings of humble pie for being so wrong about something they were so certain about.

Because it’s irrelevant and assumes that anyone participating in the discussion was listening to any politician of any kind to begin with. The problem isn’t with ignoring the politicians - something that is nearly always prudent - it’s assuming that we weren’t also completely ignoring Trump.

This investigation was happening among scientists regardless of whatever Trump or Biden or Cotton or Paul or whoever else had to say. But the mainstream left treated them as though they must be dumb backwards thinking Q anon Trumpers who got this idea from him or Alex Jones or some conspiracy nut.

The way that people following this were treated was bad enough, but the most worrisome part is the reputational attacks, largely coordinated by Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth alliance, that these scientists faced. It was a huge risk on their part to challenge someone of his standing in the community, and he was relentless in spreading the meme that these were fringe quacks deserving of nothing but derision for their “conspiracy theories”. In another massive media failure, they were happy to use him as their subject matter expert without bothering to disclose that he’s the one who ran the very same program. And to a lesser extent, Fauci as well.

To be clear, no one suspects that Daszak and Fauci were anything but well-intentioned in their original pursuits when starting and funding this research program. But it’s obvious why anyone faced with the possibility that their decision may have been the reason that this all happened in the first place. And the implications - that their entire organization and much of their life’s work will be shut down immediately - may put even the most reasonable mind in an extremely difficult position.

How would you react upon realizing that your program may very well have killed millions around the globe and destroyed economies? I’d imagine that must be quite a burden on the conscience for anyone who is not a completely sociopathic murderer.

You’re incorrect on nearly all of this and haven’t “broken out” of the forced narrative. All I can suggest is you go back to the primary sources yourself. Don’t take my word for it, don’t take your preferred media outlet’s word for it. Dig it up and decide.

The lab leak is overwhelmingly likely. It’s the Occam’s Razor without question. It’s still a hypothesis to be clear. It’s not proven. It could be wrong. But if we are assigning probabilities, it’s extremely one sided. It should have been the leading hypothesis from the beginning.

But Trump said it, so it must be wrong. We must find reasons for it to be not only wrong, but worthy of ridicule. And when those narratives fall, we must keep shifting the goal posts. And when that doesn’t work anymore, we must blame our failure on republicans in some roundabout way.

Sorry, that’s not how we science. We have to put the damn political tribal warfare away for a minute.

This is kind of doing the same thing that the “fact checkers” are doing. There is indeed a lack of proper studies to validate it. That’s the problem. There are mountains of evidence that show it as very promising and worthy of a proper study. That’s what people are asking for. The FDA keeps saying not to use it, because we don’t know for certain that it works, because we haven’t had any rigorous RCTs to validate it, even though it appears by all accounts to be an extremely valuable tool. They don’t claim that it doesn’t work. They don’t claim that it’s harmful (we know it’s not, it’s been broadly deployed for like 30 years and is known to be far safer than the vaccines, which are already quite safe, at least in the short to medium term). Also, this article is misinformed on the dosage requirement, which has been raised and addressed - looks like sibling comment called this out as well. See, it’s clear who actually follows the science, and who disregards the science but brow beats others with phrases like “follow the science.” Other things known to people following the science? Schools are safe to open and masks don’t do shit outdoors because the probability of infection is < 0.1%. Many of us knew this was the latest science long ago, but again, we weren’t allowed to talk about it, lest someone call us the R word (republican).

To not drop everything and study this aggressively is criminally negligent imo. I believe I read that we have finally decided to fund looking into validating what appears to be strong evidence. But it’s 30 years old, dirt cheap, and not patented. And all of this only came to light well after we sunk billions into vaccines. So, there is not exactly a profit motive or a strong appetite to potentially upend all of that. But if people unwilling to be vaccinated are willing to take that instead, it might be the only hope for herd immunity. Because there is no way we will get there by vaccines alone. Too much of the population are refusing the vaccines.

Here’s the thing, no, they don’t.

You recently said this to me:

”Part-time Portlander here! You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Please stop basing your worldview on Infowars talking points.”

I’ve obviously never seen anything produced by infowars and this was a dismissive epithet, doing exactly the problem described here. You’re one of them. And my point you were responding to was objectively true.

This is the opposite lesson you should be taking away from this.

None of these links are authoritative, they’re just NPC left activism.

I used “NPC left” to differentiate from the “reasonable left”. The people who follow folks like AOC and Ilhan Omar, as opposed to the more mainstream moderate left. Nothing to do with right wing or alt-right anything. And I am not even going to entertain this stupid white supremacist lie that folks of a certain activist persuasion love to fling at everyone and everything with no basis whatsoever. That’s not a thing, and you need to join the rest in coming to terms with the fact that narrative is completely manufactured nonsense. Hopefully you weren’t one of the many who fell for the CNN hoax about the white supremacist catholic kids supposedly antagonizing the indigenous man, but after that happening repeatedly, it should give you pause before believing claims like this.

Nevermind that “NPC” doesn’t even appear in your links, so this is some massive goalpost shifting.

One of them even says “snowflake” is an alt-right white supremacist word. Is anybody still supposed to take this shit seriously?

It’s definitely unproven, yeah, but so obviously the most likely explanation and should have been explored seriously from the beginning. China’s denials should have never been taken seriously.

It’s not “right wing” or pro-Trump at all, but this NYT explanation is hilarious. It’s just a joke reference to the simulation theory, and refers to someone who has their opinions “assigned” to them, left or right, and doesn’t imply disagreement.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=NPC&amp=true...

And almost none of them are employed prior, so it makes sense he has not worked with them, and makes it suspicious that 3 working people went to hospital.

This was the most depressing realization of the past year for me. Otherwise smart people too. Including a large percentage of this site. They got nearly every story wrong, and only some are just starting to realize it.