5 ms·

> I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china The likes of Alina Chan and Richard Ebright are "easy mode" counterexamples

by zkms 3y ago

> I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china The likes of Alina Chan and Richard Ebright are "easy mode" counterexamples for your statement. I'll swing for the fences: Even Tom Cotton was -- at least once, I am exceedingly uninterested in combing through all his tweets and media appearances -- careful to distinguish between "lab leak" and "intentional act", despite being brazenly political and probably inspired by anti-China animus. From the thread beginning at https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126 https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126: "Let me debunk the debunkers. @paulina_milla and her “experts” wrongly jump straight to the claim that the coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon. That’s not what I’ve said. There’s at least four hypotheses about the origin of the virus: 1. Natural (still the most likely, but almost certainly not from the Wuhan food market) 2. Good science, bad safety (eg, they were researching things like diagnostic testing and vaccines, but an accidental breach occurred) 3. Bad science, bad safety (this is the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, with an accidental breach) 4. Deliberate release (very unlikely, but shouldn’t rule out till the evidence is in) Again, none of these are “theories” and certainly not “conspiracy theories.” They are hypotheses that ought to be studied in light of the evidence, if the Chinese Communist Party would provide it. We ought to be transparent with the American people about all this. Maybe some of these so-called experts think they know better. I don’t. And they really don’t either."

mjburgess 3y ago
[flagged]
- the8472 3y ago
  Last time I checked our democracies are still running on the premise of informed voters. If discussion of hypothesis needs to be suppressed during a 3-year-long "emergency" then we have an issue.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    > If discussion of hypothesis needs to be suppressed during a 3-year-long "emergency" then we have an issue. Unfortunately, we do have an issue. Ignoring that it is one will not solve it, nor will brushing it under the rug by the lame attempts at disinformation removal. We need to face the fact that a decent amount of our population is acting out of anger and fear, often irrationally and without evidence, and that they were used and manipulated for political and monetary gain and it has gotten passed the point where it can be walked back. Social media is a vector but not the cause. I don't know what the answer is, but we certainly do have an issue.
  - toofy 3y ago
    i think you’d find that in just about every significant crisis of any significant timeframe plenty of examples of clamping down on witch-hunts in these very democracies. am i advocating for this? of course not, however, we have countless examples where conspiracies and just plain paranoid thinking spun out and resulted in very very real atrocities. significant atrocities that were much more real and much more severe than “oh woe is me, i was muted on a social media site.” again, i’m not advocating for this, but any conversational talking point surrounding this topic which ignores those issues is not a serious one.
    - gordian-mind 3y ago
      Could you please elaborate on what atrocities were caused by conspiracy theories?
      - panarchy 3y ago
        https://www.stuyalumni.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Anti-Asian-ppt.pdf https://www.stuyalumni.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Anti-A... "In the first four months of the pandemic, there were 145 reports to the NYC Commission on Human Rights of coronavirus-related Anti-Asian hate incidents. That’s 12x the year before." "⅓ of Americans report they have witnessed blame on Asians for the outbreak"
        gordian-mind 3y ago
        I'm sorry, is saying that Covid originated from China a conspiracy theory? Or do you maybe believe that this was caused by Trump calling it 'China flu' a few times? Now, that's a conspiracy theory.
      - krapp 3y ago
        The obvious example is the Holocaust. Violence (including mass shootings and church burnings) inspired by replacement theory and incelism. Anti-vax beliefs led to more deaths due to COVID, and greater economic and systemic stress than otherwise would have occurred had a significant number of people afraid of adrenochrome harvesting and the New World Order not purposely undermined pandemic control efforts. Currently the "groomer" conspiracy theories seem to be headed towards some mass cultural violence event towards trangender people, with politicians openly calling for the "elimination" of transgerism, but that remains to be seen. But let's ask what atrocities have ever been prevented by conspiracy theories? None. QAnon has been more of a hindrance to efforts to combat child abuse and human trafficking than a benefit, and they were entirely focused on "decoding" the Podesta emails and "exposing" satanic rituals in the Democratic Party while Epstein was going about his business. It should go without saying that none of the doomsday scenarios the COVID conspiracy theorists predicted came to pass. All they accomplished was making the pandemic worse. And no doubt the seeds of paranoia and mistrust they laid will make the next pandemic worse as well. Hell, even MKUltra wasn't uncovered by conspiracy theorists - it was exposed by accident through an unrelated FOIA leak. NSA spying? The Simpsons did a bit about that before Snowden, but conspiracy theorists were going on about mind-control rays being beamed through televisions and mass hypnosis. These people want the world to believe they are the the ones constantly telling truth to power, the only ones who can see the dark truths hidden behind the curtain, and they'll insist they are always right. But at best they only coincidentally appear to be right, in the same way as a stopped clock, and always in a way that does more harm than good.
  - DocSavage 3y ago
    I’d love “informed voters” though from what I see of social media, it does anything but inform through its creation of cliques and upvoting based on popularity, not veracity or even reasoned argument. One example is the switch to paid blue checkmarks on Twitter. Prior to the switch, there’d be some semblance (not great) of debate on comments. Now, all the musk fans and RW-oriented subscribers completely dominate so all you see in response to a Dem or “RINO” tweet is reflexive comments calling the OP lies, incorrect whataboutism, conspiracy theory of the day, etc, with more reasoned fact checking buried way down. This is particularly pronounced with any tweet about the Trump indictment with little discussion of the substance of the indictment. The crackpot hypothesis/meme of Paul Pelosi’s attack being a gay love spat is another example. The participants didn’t even want to read the police report before moving on to another conspiracy theory about the report’s generation. Reasoned discussion would be great. It’s just not happening.
    - coding123 3y ago
      That's probably because for the years prior the same people were bashed into the ground for their beliefs. Now that it turns out it's more true than not, they're probably mad. aka, you're on the other side now.
- zkms 3y ago
  > It's trivial to find people inside your echo-chamber being well-behaved --- this doesn't answer what a platform's moral responsibility is to society. I am not a Republican, Tom Cotton is incredibly far away from anything which could be considered my "echo chamber", and I never claimed he was well-behaved. I chose him specifically to make the specific and narrow point that even brazenly political actors were careful to explicitly distinguish between accidental/unintentional release and an intentional release; and also made clear that "intentional release" was the possibility they regarded as least likely. This was in response to the comment I replied to, whose author said "I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china". I think most people -- political leaders and otherwise -- are perfectly capable of distinguishing between "high-risk research goes tragically wrong" and "a bioweapon was released on purpose". If anything, these hamhanded efforts (equating a prosaic "people and/or equipment messed up" scenario to "intentional release of bioweapon", making spurious accusations of racism, claiming that the case for a natural origin is ironclad, government agencies refusing to hand over relevant documents to Senators with the right to see them, etc) to censor discussion and impede investigation of the former has fueled incredibly noxious conspiratorial thinking.

by zkms 3y ago

mjburgess 3y ago

[flagged]

the8472 3y ago
Last time I checked our democracies are still running on the premise of informed voters. If discussion of hypothesis needs to be suppressed during a 3-year-long "emergency" then we have an issue.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  > If discussion of hypothesis needs to be suppressed during a 3-year-long "emergency" then we have an issue. Unfortunately, we do have an issue. Ignoring that it is one will not solve it, nor will brushing it under the rug by the lame attempts at disinformation removal. We need to face the fact that a decent amount of our population is acting out of anger and fear, often irrationally and without evidence, and that they were used and manipulated for political and monetary gain and it has gotten passed the point where it can be walked back. Social media is a vector but not the cause. I don't know what the answer is, but we certainly do have an issue.
- toofy 3y ago
  i think you’d find that in just about every significant crisis of any significant timeframe plenty of examples of clamping down on witch-hunts in these very democracies. am i advocating for this? of course not, however, we have countless examples where conspiracies and just plain paranoid thinking spun out and resulted in very very real atrocities. significant atrocities that were much more real and much more severe than “oh woe is me, i was muted on a social media site.” again, i’m not advocating for this, but any conversational talking point surrounding this topic which ignores those issues is not a serious one.
  - gordian-mind 3y ago
    Could you please elaborate on what atrocities were caused by conspiracy theories?
    - panarchy 3y ago
      https://www.stuyalumni.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Anti-Asian-ppt.pdf https://www.stuyalumni.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Anti-A... "In the first four months of the pandemic, there were 145 reports to the NYC Commission on Human Rights of coronavirus-related Anti-Asian hate incidents. That’s 12x the year before." "⅓ of Americans report they have witnessed blame on Asians for the outbreak"
      - gordian-mind 3y ago
        I'm sorry, is saying that Covid originated from China a conspiracy theory? Or do you maybe believe that this was caused by Trump calling it 'China flu' a few times? Now, that's a conspiracy theory.
    - krapp 3y ago
      The obvious example is the Holocaust. Violence (including mass shootings and church burnings) inspired by replacement theory and incelism. Anti-vax beliefs led to more deaths due to COVID, and greater economic and systemic stress than otherwise would have occurred had a significant number of people afraid of adrenochrome harvesting and the New World Order not purposely undermined pandemic control efforts. Currently the "groomer" conspiracy theories seem to be headed towards some mass cultural violence event towards trangender people, with politicians openly calling for the "elimination" of transgerism, but that remains to be seen. But let's ask what atrocities have ever been prevented by conspiracy theories? None. QAnon has been more of a hindrance to efforts to combat child abuse and human trafficking than a benefit, and they were entirely focused on "decoding" the Podesta emails and "exposing" satanic rituals in the Democratic Party while Epstein was going about his business. It should go without saying that none of the doomsday scenarios the COVID conspiracy theorists predicted came to pass. All they accomplished was making the pandemic worse. And no doubt the seeds of paranoia and mistrust they laid will make the next pandemic worse as well. Hell, even MKUltra wasn't uncovered by conspiracy theorists - it was exposed by accident through an unrelated FOIA leak. NSA spying? The Simpsons did a bit about that before Snowden, but conspiracy theorists were going on about mind-control rays being beamed through televisions and mass hypnosis. These people want the world to believe they are the the ones constantly telling truth to power, the only ones who can see the dark truths hidden behind the curtain, and they'll insist they are always right. But at best they only coincidentally appear to be right, in the same way as a stopped clock, and always in a way that does more harm than good.
- DocSavage 3y ago
  I’d love “informed voters” though from what I see of social media, it does anything but inform through its creation of cliques and upvoting based on popularity, not veracity or even reasoned argument. One example is the switch to paid blue checkmarks on Twitter. Prior to the switch, there’d be some semblance (not great) of debate on comments. Now, all the musk fans and RW-oriented subscribers completely dominate so all you see in response to a Dem or “RINO” tweet is reflexive comments calling the OP lies, incorrect whataboutism, conspiracy theory of the day, etc, with more reasoned fact checking buried way down. This is particularly pronounced with any tweet about the Trump indictment with little discussion of the substance of the indictment. The crackpot hypothesis/meme of Paul Pelosi’s attack being a gay love spat is another example. The participants didn’t even want to read the police report before moving on to another conspiracy theory about the report’s generation. Reasoned discussion would be great. It’s just not happening.
  - coding123 3y ago
    That's probably because for the years prior the same people were bashed into the ground for their beliefs. Now that it turns out it's more true than not, they're probably mad. aka, you're on the other side now.
zkms 3y ago
> It's trivial to find people inside your echo-chamber being well-behaved --- this doesn't answer what a platform's moral responsibility is to society. I am not a Republican, Tom Cotton is incredibly far away from anything which could be considered my "echo chamber", and I never claimed he was well-behaved. I chose him specifically to make the specific and narrow point that even brazenly political actors were careful to explicitly distinguish between accidental/unintentional release and an intentional release; and also made clear that "intentional release" was the possibility they regarded as least likely. This was in response to the comment I replied to, whose author said "I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china". I think most people -- political leaders and otherwise -- are perfectly capable of distinguishing between "high-risk research goes tragically wrong" and "a bioweapon was released on purpose". If anything, these hamhanded efforts (equating a prosaic "people and/or equipment messed up" scenario to "intentional release of bioweapon", making spurious accusations of racism, claiming that the case for a natural origin is ironclad, government agencies refusing to hand over relevant documents to Senators with the right to see them, etc) to censor discussion and impede investigation of the former has fueled incredibly noxious conspiratorial thinking.