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Imo if you want to know how this all got started you got to go back to that first Velvet Underground album.
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Unfortunately a lot of people outside these forums WANT to believe that it was a accident by a Chinese lab.
And no doubt the coming investigation into the Covid-19 that we’ll do by our first minister will probably take her down, hopefully we’ve got independence by then.
I can’t see the whole of the UK ever getting a full investigation into our response, so I can see why some papers want to chase it and thats what gives me the creeps about it.
I fear for the UKs future as a whole going forward wrt Covid-19 and varients.
IF it got out the lab, then it got in too, no.
We knew about Covid-19 before the UK or US had any cases right?
I’m the leading advocate of the lab leak hypothesis in this forum. If you should attack anyone as a racist for espousing it, it should be me, not jalfrezi.
If an Israeli lab was doing research on exotic bat coronaviruses in close proximity to the outbreak, and all testing of local food, markets, and wildlife came up empty, and the Israeli government refused to do a good faith, open, transparent investigation? Yeah man, I’d think the lab leak hypothesis would be a pretty reasonable thing to look into, and refusing to rule it out without an extensive investigation wouldn’t be anti-Semetic. I’d demand the same for any country in the world.
But this is a pretty slick system: refuse to do an investigation on an eminently reasonable possibility, and then attack people for racism wanting to look into it because there’s “no evidence”. There’s no evidence because they won’t take the reasonable steps to investigate it! How in the world is it racist against the Chinese to want the lab leak hypothesis investigated? Tedros, head of the WHO, wants the same thing as me – a rigorous investigation into all possibilities. I assume he’s a racist as well?
Yeah, but, with all due respect, you always take these kinds of views so it’s not shocking coming from you. It’s not shocking coming from jalfrezi either tbh, but he does pretend to be something different than you.
What kind of views?
Arguing for an investigation into all possibilities is very different from stating, without actual evidence, that the lab leak hypothesis “is the most likely cause,” something that both you and jalfrezi have done. The former is a neutral and completely reasonable request. The latter is builds into a racist conspiracy theory. Framing matters.
How in the world does it build into a racist conspiracy theory? I wouldn’t want to dismiss either the natural origin or lab leak hypothesis. When this all started, I regarded the lab leak to be a lot less likely. It started being more and more likely in my opinion when the investigation didn’t identify any animal vector after extremely extensive testing of wildlife, food, pests, pets, etc around Wuhan. And combined with the Chinese government’s refusal to do the epidemiology and retroactive sample analysis from the end of 2019, which would shed a lot of light on this question, that makes it even likelier. And I still don’t want to dismiss the natural hypothesis, it’s totally possible and should be investigated more.
What’s the threshold? 25% from the lab racist or not racist? 42% lab, racist? 51% is for sure racist, but it’s not clear why.
And I can’t help but comment on the irony of being called racist for criticizing the transparency and accountability of a totalitarian government which is currently engaging in an actual genocide of an ethnic minority. Beyond absurd.
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Obviously @j8i3h289dn3x7 isn’t going to substantiate or justify his lazy smear of racism. This should speak for itself.
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Jman,
Virus originates in Israel. Just assume similar evidence and likelihood for this thought experiment.
One theory is lab leak. Another theory is kapparot. Which is more anti-Semitic?
Kapparot is the wet market here.
Eta: in fact the term “wet market” probably should not be used at all. A wet market is just a place that sells fresh meat. We don’t call a fresh meat market a wet market if it’s here and it’s definitely meant as a bad thing.
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Right, that specific question has been asked of jman and others with, predictably, no answer at all. How is a lab leak perpetrating racist tropes (WHAT TROPES???), but the wet market hypothesis is not perpetrating racist tropes. Like, “Chinese people eat crazy and disgusting stuff” is an actual racist trope.
Sounds like that’s the prime suspect then.
Maybe so, but if so, being wrong about it is not racist.
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Micro it seems like you’re implying that saying the virus probably came from the wet market is racist too. That’d would be really dumb. Scientific consensus of what’s more likely based on prior events isn’t racism. It’s being informed
No I’m not and it doesn’t sound like that. That’s really dumb of you to say. It’s like you haven’t followed any of this, but I know that you have.
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Some posters were implying that the “wet markets in China are different” i.e unregulated.
Edit: When the wt market discussions went a bit of the map that’s when I bowed out of the Covid-19 thread & it was around that time @CaffeineNeeded started posting regularly itt.
Probably around September last year.