RV86 · HackerTrans

il y a 5 ansdiscuss

I wanted to add -- the two most compelling pieces of information I've seen that make the lab accident theory more plausible to me are: 1) The verified existence of the bat-originating corona virus that killed 3 miners with Pneumonia some years ago being housed/researched in the WIV 2) David Baltimore of Cal Tech's remark ""When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus. These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2"

RV86

il y a 5 ansdiscuss

Thanks for the recommendation. I will check this out asap!

To return the favor, I recommend checking out the Lapham's Quarterly issue on "Epidemic" that collected historical writings across many instances of widespread plague and disease.

RV86

il y a 5 ansdiscuss

IMO, determining the origin of the virus is of much more consequence than who was right and who was wrong back in 2020. If the virus crossed over naturally, it's reasonable to conjecture that this sort of thing is going to happen more and more often in the future. If it was human error in a lab, I would actually be relieved -- this seems like something that's much easier to correct. FWIW, I do think available evidence supports a lab leak more than any other hypothesis.

RV86

il y a 12 ansdiscuss

Calling Snowden a 'traitor' is a very ill omen for us as a country. There are many parallels to Ellsberg, but I feel that he had more public defenders/support than Snowden. We've moved even farther to the stance that any action taken against/criticism of the state is unpatriotic and a stone's throw away from traitorous. This was especially the mentality immediately after 9/11 and it clouded our judgment so much that having a reasonable discussion about invading other countries was impossible. 13 years later, we've traded our own privacy and the respect of most of the world for bombing the intractable enemies our war-like tendencies created in the first place.

It's also an ill omen that Andreessen, one of the poster-children for a transformative, open medium would come down on the side of a secret, power-drunk apparatus vs. a civil disobedient who used said medium to try to wake up a complacent populous.

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