I like how versatile the like button is. The “Ok, fair enough” like is very useful.
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Senior Biden official suggests water fluoridation causes dain bramage.
There is no new content regarding the origins of covid in an article that is clearly presenting a narrative that U.S. intelligence wants to push, i.e., that the thinking on this issue is changing, things are happening, people are saying, officials are warning, etc. The same base “story” has been published numerous times in multiple outlets now with no actual new information about the origin of covid; it being clickbait is not mutually exclusive from being de facto propaganda. I mean Judith Miller was propaganda, and if you don’t think so then we just won’t agree on this.
There has been much written about the ongoing and escalating espionage battle between the U.S. and China in recent years, and a number of covid origin rumors have emanated directly from that sector including the one from SpyTalk that a top Chinese official (Dong) had defected with covid secrets that Red State and other outlets were pumping. Maybe @CaffeineNeeded can update us on how that story turned out.
An important consideration is that if the lab leak theory is correct, some of the best direct evidence supporting it is likely going to come from espionage, not publicly available information. As an example, if no one at WIV had symptoms plausibly attributable to COVID during the key period, that’s strong evidence against a lab leak. That’s the official line. OTOH, if some variant of the oft-leaked report of people being hospitalized for flu-like illness is accurate, then that would make a lab origin look more plausible. Since we can’t look at any classified intelligence, it’s at least interesting to know how people who can see it, like the national security advisor, are leaning. Of course, they could always pretend to find something convincing for reasons other than the weight of the evidence, so it’s definitely necessary to look at things critically.
Not everyone is as caught up as we are and it’s a topic of interest to people. Why do UK tabloids keep publishing The Winds of Winter news even though there is no news and the status is still “probably never coming out”? Because people read the articles.
But the article continues to say that 2 out of 3 intelligence agencies assess with low confidence that it was natural origin. If that’s fuel on the fire of blaming China, it seems like very wet wood.
The article just reads to me like a straightforward “here is what is happening” story. Not every report on the ruminations of the intelligence community is propaganda. Sometimes they’re happy to just discuss things that don’t need to be kept secret for the sake of national security, particularly if they can throw a bone to a reporter who has been useful when they do want to get a story out.
I think it’s sort of a weird accusation to make because the line in the media earlier on was that it was obviously natural origin and it was Trumpist fake news to speculate otherwise. Now they’re contradicting this with the bombshell news that… a majority of US intelligence agencies still think it was probably natural origin. The speculation of yours that this is “propaganda” is impossible to arrive at if you’re not already a lab-leak skeptic. I think you’re seeing ghosts and that this is just a news article and a fairly reasonable assessment of the state of play.
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If it’s just clickbait then why not ask Bieber or someone familiar with his thinking about it? These reports have decidedly broken in one direction since the WSJ article and Biden ordering intelligence agencies to “get to the bottom of it” or whatever nonsensical Misson: Impossible II fantasy plot everyone is latching onto here where the CIA/NSA (aka The Good Guys) solve it while the scientists are tied up in a closet somewhere. The opinion among Democrats has increased to 52% lab leak according to a new Politico/Harvard poll. Something is driving that and it’s not a mystery:
“Usually, our polls find a big split between Republicans and Democrats, so this is unique,” he said. “More conservative media have been carrying the ‘lab leak’ issue, and it’s been a Trump talking point from the beginning, so we expected people who lean Democratic would say either ‘It’s not true’ or ‘I don’t know.’ But the belief is bipartisan.”
Guy knows media drives this but is baffled by the results. The obvious answer is that media drives this and people pretending not to notice are doing some weird head-in-the-clouds charade when centrist outlets push it. So the question isn’t “What’s causing it?”–the question is “Where can I bet on it getting odds?”
A big part of it is that people just really don’t like zoonotic-origin type explanations. People have a bias towards feeling that big, important events ought to have big, important explanations and they are also more inclined to believe explanations involving the decisions and actions of people as opposed to law-of-large-numbers, mysterious-workings-of-chance explanations. What I would say is that the unjustified certainty early on that a lab leak was vanishingly unlikely suppressed this tendency and that now, when the media and the apparatus of government have become more equivocal towards it, the natural tendency of people to believe the more conspiratorial explanation is asserting itself.
Your explanation here is something along the lines of “intelligence agencies are behind a lab-leak push in the media to induce an unusual level of support for this idea in the public, so that they can build support for anti-China action”. I would argue that every single element of this is missing in action. That is, US intelligence remains generally of the opinion that zoonotic origin is more likely, this article is not an example of a lab-leak bias (it’s just a reasonably balanced piece), the level of support for the idea in the public is very normal, and there is no hint that anyone is proposing anti-China action on the basis of this hypothesis.
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It’s right there in the article as a direct quote from a known Hillary-leftover neoliberal China hawk. Like I said upthread, this is a foreign policy layup opportunity for these people. Where the virus originated from doesn’t matter when they can apply pressure for free. Of course they have go-betweens selectively leaking these stories to sycophant journalists. That’s not even slightly controversial.
Rand Paul’s comments should be very familiar to some here, it’s basically what was said in this thread a few months ago.
Dunno haven’t read gatewaypundit for the latest covid conspiracy stuff in awhile.
Rand knows better. He’s doing this on purpose. What for, I’m not exactly sure.
Are you just saying this because he’s a doctor? Because so is Ben Carson. Bret Weinstein was a professor of evolutionary biology and is deep in the ivermectin/vaccines are dangerous conspiracy holes. Living in internet bubbles rots people’s brains.
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The Chinese virus truthers have rap songs? How come we don’t have that in the US?
Shuffle on 2+2 has been spreading this crap for a month now. I was wondering where he came up with it.
The theory first surfaced Jan or Feb 2020 - not that this statement gives it any more weight but it’s resurfacing, I guess. At that time, IIRC, the US government were removing various info about Derrick from the interwebs (probably coincidence)
I’ve wandered into that covid thread a few times but each time Toothsayer and chez’s posts made me retreat pdq.
Are the cliffs of all this that a zoonotic origin is still the most likely scenario? I haven’t kept up very well after the initial debate, but there is a definite increase in deplorable-adjacents telling me that the lab theory is established fact.
I don’t know, but I do know that if I say I think there’s a <=5% chance of it originating in a lab in China then I get called a racist here lol.
And if I point out that saying the Chinese are excellent scientists is a racist trope I get banned for a week for “naked racism”.
So, no comment.
Do these people have a common understanding/articulation of the lab theory? As far as I can tell, there’s some blend of:
- The virus in its current form was manufactured in a lab and intentionally released.
- The virus originated in animals that were collected for a lab; the lab workers were infected by the virus and subsequently spread it to the local area. (The virus could have been transmitted to humans either at the collection site or in the lab.)
- The virus was being studied in the lab, but then was transmitted to humans after scientists at the lab conducted GAIN OF FUNCTION research on the virus.
But I’ll admit I haven’t been following this too closely.
Mainstream media bad. CENSORSHIP ARGLEBARGLE. China bad. COMMUNISM.
Anyway I’m theoretically receptive to any possibility, it just seems like these people are dunking prematurely.