Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27939102

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27401935

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

The question of whether one of their viruses leaked out again (yes, again!) that was a bat coronavirus found right by the bat coronavirus lab, or whether it was a remarkable cascade of coincidences that still has no viable complete hypothesis (the “modified” virus doesn’t infect bats anymore), is not one of “conspiracy”.

Folks reflecting on this and saying, what else did we have completely wrong are asking the right question. Folks who think this was a one off, well, it absolutely wasn’t.

I doubt there is even a single “MAGA” person on HN, but you folks like to throw that epithet around to shut down dialog. It’s shameful.

And nobody needs to distance themselves from anyone. If you make a false association, that’s your fault, not theirs. Judge them on what they actually do and say, not on what you (incorrectly) assume they might think.

Some folks who never supported Trump had their own reasons to examine this. They talked about it, and everyone assumed they got the idea from Trump, and therefore not only did they deserve no attention, but they also deserve no respect, and outright career sabotage by folks like Peter Daszak and to a lesser extent, Anthony Fauci. Many had to work on this in secret because the hyper partisans wouldn’t listen to them, and instead tried to attack them just for talking about it. Take a look at Yuri Deigin and Alina Chan on twitter and go back in their timelines to see how long they have been digging into this.

My hope is not that anyone acknowledges that Trump was correct, although I would view it as a sign of integrity if they did. But whether he was or wasn’t, and whether he got lucky or actually knew something, I don’t care. The real issue comes not from Trump, but their own prejudice, which many are still trying to make excuses for, made them so blind to what, in hindsight, is actually extremely obvious as the most likely explanation. Then they took it further and let their blind hate for Trump also caused them to hate half of their fellow citizens, and they extended that hate to anyone who they even perceived as having thoughts tangentially related to something Trump said.

I could easily come up with probably 5 more examples of something very similar that happened in his orbit that people who only follow left leaning mainstream news have no idea about, or that were spun into complete anti-trump lies by the media and are still believed by people today.

The media are absolutely full of shit. All of them. Real journalism died, hyper partisan “woke” activists have been graduating and taking writing jobs, groupthink and cult-like behavior has amplified, and the executives loved the sky high ratings and revenue they got for being anti-trump. Cancel culture further reinforced this culty groupthink and forced moderate voices out. Hell, people actually try to say Glenn Greenwald went right-wing crazy. Glenn Greenwald! They don’t even realize that it wasn’t him who changed, it was them.

It’s pervasive in tech. People are actually pro-censorship now. And they have convinced themselves that they are the good guys. It’s hard to believe how far we have fallen from rationality in such a short time.

Nothing was revived with any new information. The Venn diagram that includes the circle of people who were following and investigating this, and the circle of conspiracy theorist Trump supporters, did not ever overlap.

One of these circles was about some bill gates funded bioweapon to implant 5G or some nonsense which they suspected was being done in WIV.

The other was scientists who have known about the work at WIV for years, not based on suspicion, but based on the papers they kept releasing, media interviews, sequencing the genome, and doing science.

But you all TDS’d so hard that you wrote the latter off as the former, and the media went along with it.

It isn’t even a conspiracy theory. It had nothing to do with collusion by tech giants. Their hyper partisan employees just fell into the same TDS trap and decided “lab = conspiracy misinformation, no ifs ands or buts” and started purging people talking about it.

The Vanity Fair article is actually quite poorly researched and written, and misattributes much of the source and timeline, but at least people are snapping out of their partisan blindness on this issue now.

It’s easy to spot people who know less than nothing about the situation when this word shows up. Israel is literally not an apartheid state. “Palestine” is literally an apartheid state. This is a demonstration of supreme ignorance.

It’s a shortcut for manually digging through databases to identify people. Any identification is followed up with investigation, just as it would be if a human matched it. No decision is made by the machine.

So, no, it’s not racist at all.