Inflation Scaremongering
drummerboy said:
Smedley said:
drummerboy said:
Smedley said:
drummerboy said:
Smedley said:
drummerboy said:
any theory offered with no evidence to support it is by definition discredited.
period.
Wow so now you're saying the natural transmission theory is discredited?
we're running out of theories
there is strong genetic evidence pointing to a natural emergence. evidence, yet again, that you obviously know nothing about it.
please list the lab leak evidence.
your hole is getting deeper, but keep digging. it's entertaining.
I understand you’re a die-hard member of Team Natural Transmission which is great. However I’m not here to debate whether it was natural transmission or a lab leak which you’re trying to pivot to. I’m simply saying that the lab leak theory is hardly “all but completely discredited” as your hero Drum claims. My basis for this is that two of six US govt intel agencies indicate lab leak, including the only moderate confidence assessment of the six , and the most recent assessment of the six.
If that’s not good enough for you than so be it - put on your TNT uni and find someone else to play with today.
Just to be clear - I'm a member of Team Who's Got The Best Explanation So Far.
And yet again, you cling to a poll of government agencies who have provided, by my count, exactly ZERO pieces of evidence for their positions. While you perseverate over how much discreditation constitutes "all but completely", because, god damn it, eff Kevin Drum.
And what in god's name is a TNT uni?
you're very proud of your skepticism and need to see data but in this situation you're being skeptical just for the sake of being skeptical.
these are intelligence agencies. Working with a backdrop of two adversarial or even enemy nations. Of course they're not going to open the kimono on everything they know. I'm guessing it has to do with not compromising sources among other things.
So it's perfectly reasonable to accept their assessments even if they're based on information that's not made public. dismissing the intel assessments because you can't see what's behind them is silly.
I know skepticism in this instance suits your narrative though, so you do you.
first of all, the assessments taken as a whole discredit the lab leak theory. Couple that with the lack of evidence issue, well...
The only thing you're arguing about is the phrase "all but completely".
Also, there is a large world out there, outside of US intel, working on the problem, and being forthcoming with their evidence. You, for some reason, don't seem to care about that, which is kind of odd, I think. You're deliberately ignoring things that undermine you. I am not.
It's not me that's dug in here.
Yeah ok.
Db: "the assessments taken as a whole discredit the lab leak theory."
Reality: “All agencies continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection.”
4th graf
So except for having your facts wrong, you're doing great
Smedley said:
drummerboy said:
Smedley said:
drummerboy said:
Smedley said:
drummerboy said:
Smedley said:
drummerboy said:
any theory offered with no evidence to support it is by definition discredited.
period.
Wow so now you're saying the natural transmission theory is discredited?
we're running out of theories
there is strong genetic evidence pointing to a natural emergence. evidence, yet again, that you obviously know nothing about it.
please list the lab leak evidence.
your hole is getting deeper, but keep digging. it's entertaining.
I understand you’re a die-hard member of Team Natural Transmission which is great. However I’m not here to debate whether it was natural transmission or a lab leak which you’re trying to pivot to. I’m simply saying that the lab leak theory is hardly “all but completely discredited” as your hero Drum claims. My basis for this is that two of six US govt intel agencies indicate lab leak, including the only moderate confidence assessment of the six , and the most recent assessment of the six.
If that’s not good enough for you than so be it - put on your TNT uni and find someone else to play with today.
Just to be clear - I'm a member of Team Who's Got The Best Explanation So Far.
And yet again, you cling to a poll of government agencies who have provided, by my count, exactly ZERO pieces of evidence for their positions. While you perseverate over how much discreditation constitutes "all but completely", because, god damn it, eff Kevin Drum.
And what in god's name is a TNT uni?
you're very proud of your skepticism and need to see data but in this situation you're being skeptical just for the sake of being skeptical.
these are intelligence agencies. Working with a backdrop of two adversarial or even enemy nations. Of course they're not going to open the kimono on everything they know. I'm guessing it has to do with not compromising sources among other things.
So it's perfectly reasonable to accept their assessments even if they're based on information that's not made public. dismissing the intel assessments because you can't see what's behind them is silly.
I know skepticism in this instance suits your narrative though, so you do you.
first of all, the assessments taken as a whole discredit the lab leak theory. Couple that with the lack of evidence issue, well...
The only thing you're arguing about is the phrase "all but completely".
Also, there is a large world out there, outside of US intel, working on the problem, and being forthcoming with their evidence. You, for some reason, don't seem to care about that, which is kind of odd, I think. You're deliberately ignoring things that undermine you. I am not.
It's not me that's dug in here.
Yeah ok.
Db: "the assessments taken as a whole discredit the lab leak theory."
Reality: “All agencies continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection.”
4th graf
So except for having your facts wrong, you're doing great
cherry pick what you want dude. A sentence at a time.
And not for nothing, but the whole point of this conversation is Berliner's take on how NPR covered the lab leak. The majority of the coverage he's referring to, if not all of it, comes from before the intelligence agencies report.
Which means that the report has nothing to do with whether NPR was wrong to downplay it. It's immaterial to the issue at hand.
So, the jury will disregard all references to that report.
drummerboy said:
do you realize that views are not facts?
that piece is largely ****. I'll outsource some particulars to Kevin Drum
- NPR ran lots of stories about Donald Trump's collusion with Russia but never issued a mea culpa when special prosecutor Robert Mueller exonerated him.
.
Mueller specifically said he never even addressed "collusion" because it's not a legal term. However, he did document a large number of links between Trump and Russia. These links are the things everyone was reporting about, and Mueller mostly confirmed that they had happened. He just didn't think they rose to the level of indictment.
- NPR ignored the Hunter Biden laptop story during the tail end of the 2020 presidential campaign. But the laptop later turned out to be real.
.
"Later" is doing a lot of work here. At the time the laptop story was dodgy in the extreme. The narrative about a blind PC repair guy who just happened to contact Rudy Giuliani was bizarre. Multiple outlets passed on the story before the New York Post ran it, and even one of their reporters was so skeptical he refused to allow his byline to be used. Other reporters who followed up on the story found nothing. Giuliani refused to let anyone examine the hard drive. There was never any evidence implicating Joe Biden. The entire thing bore all the hallmarks of Republican ratfuckery and deserved to be treated skeptically by reputable journalists.
- NPR consistently reported that COVID-19 had a natural origin even though there was plenty of evidence that it might have been the result of a lab leak.
.
In this case NPR was entirely in the right. The authors of "Proximal Origins," which supported the natural origins theory very early on, didn't have any secret doubts about what they wrote. There's no serious evidence that Anthony Fauci or anyone else manipulated evidence in favor of natural origins. The lab leak theory was motivated from the start not by scientific evidence but by (admittedly legitimate) suspicion of China's behavior combined with the coincidence of the virus breaking out in a city that contained a major biolab. The lab leak hypothesis has always been unlikely, and over time has gotten ever more unlikely. It's all but completely discredited now.
One reason I dislike media bias arguments is that there's so much media that one can cherry-pick their way into whichever narrative they like. It doesn't even have to be intentional cherry-picking; between the amount of content there is, poor memory, and each reader/listener's own personal biases and habits, it's very hard to definitively show that coverage of a given topic really does have whatever slant someone is claiming.
FWIW, I spent a lot of time during the pandemic walking around various neighborhoods listening to podcasts -- often NPR podcasts. I really can't recall with any great fidelity what I heard about the lab leak theory at the time. My memory of what my impressions were is:
- we didn't have enough information to know much about the origins of COVID-19
- the Chinese government was very unwilling to share information
- transmission from animals to humans is a very, very common origin for epidemics and pandemics
- there was a virus research lab in Wuhan
- there was a market with nearly ideal conditions for animal-human transmission of disease.
What I remember my takeaway being -- again, admitting the unreliability of post-hoc claims about such things, especially this far afterwards -- was that while it was certainly possible an accident during research at the Wuhan lab was the origin, natural transmission was more likely, and in any case at that moment the people who were screaming the loudest about the lab leak theory were whipping up animus against Asian Americans and generally trying to distract from Donald Trump's disastrous response and clearly not interested in any good faith questions about Covid's origins, so until we had more information it was a question probably best tabled until the political temperature cooled enough to make a real investigation possible.
Even now, that still seems like a reasonable take I think. And to the degree that my NPR listening influence that, I think it's to their credit.
Someone will eventually connect the Lab Leak theory to inflation, I hope. Otherwise it may be ripe for its own thread.
dave said:
Someone will eventually connect the Lab Leak theory to inflation, I hope. Otherwise it may be ripe for its own thread.
In 2020, Donald Trump and his supporters were talking about a lab leak theory because they hoped to distract from his poor response and shift attention and blame to China. At the time, most everyone else didn't pay much mind and were more worried about when we would get a vaccine and how not to die.
Now, with the hindsight of several years, some people's memory has inflated this into a gigantic conspiracy by the Liberal Media Establishment to suppress any and all talk about a lab leak theory.
drummerboy said:
And not for nothing, but the whole point of this conversation is Berliner's take on how NPR covered the lab leak. The majority of the coverage he's referring to, if not all of it, comes from before the intelligence agencies report.
Which means that the report has nothing to do with whether NPR was wrong to downplay it. It's immaterial to the issue at hand.
So, the jury will disregard all references to that report.
And the scientific (non-direct) evidence report you posted was from 2023, which the jury will also disregard.
All of this is ignoring the fact that almost every novel virus to infect humans has had a zoonotic origin. The credibility of any other origin theory is working against hundreds of years of history. A lab leak theory would need some concrete evidence for most scientists to take it at all seriously. THAT is the real reason the lab leak theory has generally gotten short shrift. While it's certainly possible, it is nowhere near as probable as a zoonotic origin.
Except for the 56 known lab leaks listed here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents
Smedley said:
Except for the 56 known lab leaks listed here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents
ml1 said "almost every novel virus to infect humans"
your link does not include the word novel.
I'd grade that as non-responsive.
There’s some more inflation for you, dave: one comment inflating by centuries the applicable history of lab leaks vs. zoonotic infections, and another comment inflating the number of human outbreaks in a list of laboratory biosecurity incidents that include isolated infections from contaminated needles and the like.
The most inflated thing here is db's ego in that he apparently still thinks he can win this debate, when we're essentially playing tic tac toe and I only need a draw to win.
DaveSchmidt said:
There’s some more inflation for you, dave: one comment inflating by centuries the applicable history of lab leaks vs. zoonotic infections, and another comment inflating the number of human outbreaks in a list of laboratory biosecurity incidents that include isolated infections from contaminated needles and the like.
not sure about your comment regarding ml1's comment. haven't researched it, but I assume the history of novel virus infections spans hundreds of years, and he didn't imply that the history of possible lab leaks did also. since lab leaks, by definition, could only have a much shorter history. So the number of zoonotic transmission has to swamp the number of lab leaks. Right?
So, what's wrong with his comment?
Smedley said:
The most inflated thing here is db's ego in that he apparently still thinks he can win this debate, when we're essentially playing tic tac toe and I only need a draw to win.
I know. I know.
It's tough to get smacked down so thoroughly and frequently.
Buck up.
Also, regarding Berliner, and I meant to mention this earlier, that the mere fact that he chose Bari Weiss, the hackiest of hacks, to platform his piece is enough to destroy his credibility.
drummerboy said:
So, what's wrong with his comment?
Before labs, every novel virus to infect humans had a zoonotic origin. For any comparison of incidents of zoonotic and non-zoonotic origins, we have about a century and a half of applicable history.
ETA: In other words …
So the number of zoonotic transmission has to swamp the number of lab leaks. Right?
Right.
Ah if only you had noted the platform at the outset of the discussion, you could have saved us both a lot of keystrokes.
i withdraw everything I've said. Npr isn't biased; their Covid coverage was fair and balanced; Berliner is a neo maxi zoom dweebie; and his entire essay is malarkey.
DaveSchmidt said:
drummerboy said:
So, what's wrong with his comment?
Before labs, every novel virus to infect humans had a zoonotic origin. For any comparison of incidents of zoonotic and non-zoonotic origins, we have about a century and a half of applicable history.
ETA: In other words …
So the number of zoonotic transmission has to swamp the number of lab leaks. Right?
Right.
that wasn't my point, but whatever.
The point is that viruses have been known to jump from animals to humans for a very, very long time. I also allowed that a lab leak is certainly a possible origin. But given the history of outbreaks, not nearly as probable as an animal origin. I was not trying to make the comparison you are making.
my point stands even if you substitute "decades" for "centuries." So let's just do that and move on.
drummerboy said:
DaveSchmidt said:
There’s some more inflation for you, dave: one comment inflating by centuries the applicable history of lab leaks vs. zoonotic infections, and another comment inflating the number of human outbreaks in a list of laboratory biosecurity incidents that include isolated infections from contaminated needles and the like.
not sure about your comment regarding ml1's comment. haven't researched it, but I assume the history of novel virus infections spans hundreds of years, and he didn't imply that the history of possible lab leaks did also. since lab leaks, by definition, could only have a much shorter history. So the number of zoonotic transmission has to swamp the number of lab leaks. Right?
So, what's wrong with his comment?
what's wrong is sloppy writing on my part. It usually earns me a smackdown, so I try to be better, but sometimes I slip up.
drummerboy said:
Smedley said:
Except for the 56 known lab leaks listed here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents
ml1 said "almost every novel virus to infect humans"
your link does not include the word novel.
I'd grade that as non-responsive.
^this
I didn't imply that a pathogen has never escaped from a laboratory
ml1 said:
It usually earns me a smackdown, so I try to be better, but sometimes I slip up.
Not a smackdown, and not usually. 
Sponsored Business
Promote your business here - Businesses get highlighted throughout the site and you can add a deal.
first of all, the assessments taken as a whole discredit the lab leak theory. Couple that with the lack of evidence issue, well...
The only thing you're arguing about is the phrase "all but completely".
Also, there is a large world out there, outside of US intel, working on the problem, and being forthcoming with their evidence. You, for some reason, don't seem to care about that, which is kind of odd, I think. You're deliberately ignoring things that undermine you. I am not.
It's not me that's dug in here.