Horrible bitch
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Policing is beyond repair there
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I don’t even understand where he is coming from? “No fixing” what? You’re not allowed to point out discrimination? “Get away from back people” is basically the modus operandi of Apartheid South Africa
The piece only skims the surface so its not easy to understand from just reading it. His position is essentially that the real racism is that of black people against white people. From that he concludes that if we’re being honest about the right way to deal with racists, white people shut cut out black people because they are (seemingly uniformly) irredeemably racist. It’s a sort of valuable insight of a thought experiment conducted by a moron whose premise is stupid and who then proceeds to kick himself in the dick on his path to working through the thought experiment
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His trajectory over the past decade is absolutely bizarre.
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It might be if his turn occurred in isolation, but he is but one of many public figures whose mask came off in the MAGA revolution and then publicly spiralled.
I think the mask idea might miss an important part of what has happened with him. He went from being a lefty-libertarian saying nice things about Sanders to where he is today in about 10 years.
It might sound stupid, but I think we can reach misunderstanding of what was going on with Sanders support by assuming that people who aired support of him, or even even his “lefty” ideas were actually genuinely ideologically left. The horseshoe theory is often overused as an explanation, but people lurching from Sanderslike ideas to fascism, sometimes back and forth repeatedly, has not been rare occurrence.
Gosh. Separated at birth? Looking in the mirror and hating what you see? Struggling to fathom it.
I just think the famous aging white guy racist thing is like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. They’ll just keep trying it until someone survives it intact. I just think it’s unlikely.
I have a Dilbert desk calendar. Been a staple stocking filler for Christmas the past few years. I find it quite funny. I didn’t know anything about the author, but he’s letting himself down here.
Just draw your cartoon and shut yer yapper!
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It seems the idea , once widely dismissed as a conspiracy theory , is slowly gaining more traction. Finding definitive proof however , in the face of Chinese obstructionism and partisan hysteria in the US , seems like something of a long shot.
Personally I never subscribed to the theory , but I never could quite shake completely the coincidence that the outbreak happened so close to an institute that just so happened to be studying the very thing that was unleashed on all of us.
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The thing about this is how it is reported. The open-ended headline on the BBC leaves enough room for mischief by politicians and various wannanebes - particularly if people read no further.
If the virus was modified or “created”, then I am fairly confident we would know. Most likely (if this is as reported) it was a “leak”, from the routine study of local viruses - which happens in all countries (the study part and ideally not the leak part). It is important to draw the line between intentional mischief and a mistake from the off.
The study or viruses and other highly contagious agents are done in Category 4 facilities. The processes, guidelines and practices within Cat 4 facilities are taken very seriously, everywhere. This seems like a breakdown in those procedures and beyond the obvious, horrible, consequences, it will likely damage the Chinese BioTech and Pharma industries. Already there is a push to move activities out of China but this, if it gains sufficient momentum, will accelerate that process further.
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Maybe more of a China thread topic, but the problem is their inability to be transparent and open. The Chinese government is incapable of admitting any kind of mistake.
Significant difference between the ‘engineered virus’ of the conspiracy theory in 2020 and the ‘fuck up’ theory that Wray is talking about.
The geographic coincidence was never much of an argument, simply because the reason the institute is there is because that region was known to have a very large population of these unknown and potentially dangerous viruses. Escaping from the lab and being brought into Wuhan from the hills might not look radically different.
Escape from lab seems plausible to me. Hopefully, at the least, it prompted an overhaul of security and containment measures at such facilities, world wide.
It seems the Republicans are on an anti China agenda at the moment, and this fits into that wider narrative. The anti China agenda will prompt a new Cold War, or worse.
There’s a very popular saying in China ; ‘Don’t believe anything until the government denies it.’
It’s been a really weird turn in the story, but far more normal has been the utter failure of the reporting on it. News should always approached in what nerds refer to as “Baysian”, but really just means putting new information into the context of what we already know. When news is approached like that, rarely does a story move the needle that much. This is one of those times, and so it’s incredibly irresponsible to report it as such.
What is important to know as the “what did we know prior to this” framing, is the intelligence community was really blind to where it came from and we not able to chime in with any meaningful input. A report was published in autumn 2021 in which the 8 relevant agencies reported their independent conclusions. 4 of the 8 plus leaned towards natural origin, but with weak confidence. The FBI was out alone on leaning lab leak. The other 3, which at the time included the DoE, said the intelligence didn’t enable them to make even a weak case either way. The summary of the National Intelligence Committee, which pooled all 8 independent reports together was to say that intelligence was unable to really say too much about it.
In contrast the confidence among the scientific community is really strong. They have evidence from multiple lines of investigation, obtained from different groups, that come together to tell a story about natural transmission (actually 2 separate transmissions) from the wet market. They lack any meaningful evidence in support of the lab leak and critically have evidence that goes someway to refute the lab leak hypothesis.
So, what is this news? It is that one of the 3 agencies that previous had a “no opinion” no has a “weakly agree” take in favor of the lab leak. It is newsworthy. It’s interesting to think what might have changed since October of 2021 to move them by 1 point on a 7 point scale. But it doesn’t even more the needle on the collective intelligence community’s assessment. It certainly doesn’t move the needle on what the totality of evidence is.
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