All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[WestPhillyPunisher]

No...

That is absolutely "You Wind Up In GITMO..." stuff right there.

Okay, curbstomped, THEN sent to Gitmo.

If anyone thought that the GQP was going to go back to being the GOP, and distance themselves from Qanon...

Well, Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Lauren Boebert are still in Congress, after running on it. But other members aren't exactly rejecting it now, either. Freshman Congresswoman Kat Cammack, of Florida, went on a Qanon show and asked people to start following her on social media.

Between Trashy Greene, Boobert and now this harridan, it sounds like the GQP are looking to set up a batshit crazy version of 'The Squad'. Delightful.

[Mister Mets]

COVID-19 ‘Likely’ Leaked In Lab Accident, Says Top House Foreign Affairs Committee Member

Republican Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas accused China of engaging in “the worst cover-up in human history.” Well, of course a smacked ass Qpublican floated that already debunked theory about the virus.

The debunking has been debunked. This isn't to say that we know for sure what happened, but there is now serious speculation that it was a lab leak.

Earlier in the month, the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists noted the evidence for the lab leak theory.

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-...-box-at-wuhan/

There was a lack of the traces usually seen when a virus emerges naturally. And there were two institutes near Wuhan engaged in "gain of function" research, in which viruses and diseases are modified to be more dangerous, as a way to discover more information about how these function.

Natural emergence was the media’s preferred theory until around February 2021 and the visit by a World Health Organization (WHO) commission to China. The commission’s composition and access were heavily controlled by the Chinese authorities. Its members, who included the ubiquitous Daszak, kept asserting before, during, and after their visit that lab escape was extremely unlikely. But this was not quite the propaganda victory the Chinese authorities may have been hoping for. What became clear was that the Chinese had no evidence to offer the commission in support of the natural emergence theory.

This was surprising because both the SARS1 and MERS viruses had left copious traces in the environment. The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months. Yet some 15 months after the SARS2 pandemic began, and after a presumably intensive search, Chinese researchers had failed to find either the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, or any serological evidence that any Chinese population, including that of Wuhan, had ever been exposed to the virus prior to December 2019. Natural emergence remained a conjecture which, however plausible to begin with, had gained not a shred of supporting evidence in over a year.

And as long as that remains the case, it’s logical to pay serious attention to the alternative conjecture, that SARS2 escaped from a lab.

Why would anyone want to create a novel virus capable of causing a pandemic? Ever since virologists gained the tools for manipulating a virus’s genes, they have argued they could get ahead of a potential pandemic by exploring how close a given animal virus might be to making the jump to humans. And that justified lab experiments in enhancing the ability of dangerous animal viruses to infect people, virologists asserted.

With this rationale, they have recreated the 1918 flu virus, shown how the almost extinct polio virus can be synthesized from its published DNA sequence, and introduced a smallpox gene into a related virus.

These enhancements of viral capabilities are known blandly as gain-of-function experiments. With coronaviruses, there was particular interest in the spike proteins, which jut out all around the spherical surface of the virus and pretty much determine which species of animal it will target. In 2000 Dutch researchers, for instance, earned the gratitude of rodents everywhere by genetically engineering the spike protein of a mouse coronavirus so that it would attack only cats.

A CNN piece notes further coincidences. Three people working for the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized due to an unknown illness in November 2019. The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention moved its laboratory in Wuhan on December 2, 2019, which affects operations and brought it closer to wet markets.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/29/world...cmd/index.html

It's not a great look for the media that they were suggesting a legitimate hypothesis was racist and degunked. Jonathan Chait wrote about it earlier in the week for New York magazine, considering the debunking an example of groupthink and a reflexive pushback against anything that can help Trump.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021...stigation.html

The basic factual contours of this episode are pretty simple. There has never been a clear expert consensus on the virus’s origins. There were a handful of scientists with unusually robust social-media profiles expressing strong views:

But if you actually dug into the quotes that experts were giving reporters, many of them were fairly restrained, indicating that they leaned toward the hypothesis that the virus emerged through natural contact.

While some journalists took the question seriously, many of them bluntly conflated the lab-leak hypothesis with different claims made by Trump and his allies: that the virus was originally created as a biological weapon, or even that China intentionally started the pandemic. Story after story depicted the lab-leak hypothesis as clearly false and even racist.

The outlets that fared worst were those like the Guardian, Slate, and Vox (which is owned by the same company that owns New York Media), which embraced a “moral clarity” ethos of forgoing traditional journalistic norms of restraint and objectivity in favor of calling out lies and bigotry.

In recent days, as the scientific groundswell behind the lab-leak hypothesis has grown louder, it has been possible to watch the objections form on Twitter, where the motivated reasoning is often undisguised.

Matthew Yglesias looked at how the lab leak hypothesis fit existing priors.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-medias-lab-leak-fiasco

What Cotton said at the hearing is that the Chinese government’s official story about the seafood market was wrong, which was something that was at the time also being floated in Vox and The New York Times and Science and the Lancet. Where Cotton differed from the consensus is that he attributed this to malice, which is not what the scientific articles said (but also isn’t a scientific question) and was not the NYT’s preferred interpretation of events.

But that was the actual parameter of the debate; Fisher thought this illustrated a point about the abstract functioning of systems while Cotton thought it illustrated a point about the malign intent of a foreign adversary. Belluz, a science journalist rather than a foreign policy writer, entertained both interpretations as consistent with the facts. And it seemed like a fairly classic foreign policy sort of argument. Throughout history, hawks see malice and threat behind everything that happens, while more dovish people tend to see misunderstanding and confusion. You can imagine the Tom Cotton of 1914 talking somewhere in Vienna about the Serbian government’s obvious complicity in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand while the Max Fisher of the time says the difficulty controlling the Black Hand and its operations reveals the fundamental weakness of the Serbian state.

Jim Geharty of National Review has been on the beat for a while, and is currently doing a victory lap.

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-m...keeps-growing/

https://www.nationalreview.com/corne...n-of-covid-19/

There are bipartisan calls for an investigation into the origins.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/0...-theory-490951

President Biden agrees, and has called for an intelligence review.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/co...AKuTEs?ocid=st

[The Cool Thatguy]

The debunking has been debunked. This isn't to say that we know for sure what happened, but there is now serious speculation that it was a lab leak.

Earlier in the month, the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists noted the evidence for the lab leak theory.

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-...-box-at-wuhan/

There was a lack of the traces usually seen when a virus emerges naturally. And there were two institutes near Wuhan engaged in "gain of function" research, in which viruses and diseases are modified to be more dangerous, as a way to discover more information about how these function.



A CNN piece notes further coincidences. Three people working for the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized due to an unknown illness in November 2019. The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention moved its laboratory in Wuhan on December 2, 2019, which affects operations and brought it closer to wet markets.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/29/world...cmd/index.html

It's not a great look for the media that they were suggesting a legitimate hypothesis was racist and degunked. Jonathan Chait wrote about it earlier in the week for New York magazine, considering the debunking an example of groupthink and a reflexive pushback against anything that can help Trump.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021...stigation.html

It's almost as if people instinctively disbelieve a man who spews racism, lies and all kinds of bullshit on a regular basis.

I thought there was an old story about that? About a boy, this wolf and sheep?

And Trump's change seemed to only come when he needed a scapegoat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94MsoVGua_U

[Mister Mets]

It's almost as if people instinctively disbelieve a man who spews racism, lies and all kinds of bullshit on a regular basis.

I thought there was an old story about that? About a boy, this wolf and sheep?

And Trump's change seemed to only come when he needed a scapegoat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94MsoVGua_U

The media still has a duty to not be wrong.

And as we can see from the results that followed, the Roberts' courts ruling striking down the pre-clearance rule of the VRA was a mendacious decision. There are people whose grandfathers were slaves alive today.

What is the significance of that as a criticism of Shelby County V. Holder?

Mets will still not admit that all these Republican passed laws are voter suppression, and has not voiced any support of the For the People Act.

Mets is sure that some of the criticisms are overblown, so that the goal post of every passed law touching on elections being voter suppression is a very high bar.

I don't think I've been asked about the For the People Act. I am okay with parts of it. I have long supported federal matching of small donations. I don't object to prohibiting materially false statements about elections, providing the FEC a blue-ribbon advisory panel or making candidates reveal their tax records.

I am suspicious of any effort to create an independent commission for gerrymandering that does not define what the final product should look like. While giving legislators the ability to choose their constituents is a bad policy, I am also concerned about the possibility that someone's going to figure out a way to game a so-called independent commission. Should the independent commissions try to create geographically compact districts that preserve communities of interest without considering the political impact? Should they also work to offset a mismatch between popular vote and congressional representation resulting from the natural advantage Republicans currently have in geographic sorting?

I've long argued that efforts to make Election Day a federal holiday seem to be more about partisan advantage than allowing voters to choose the individual who represents them in political office, as the majority of elections are decided in the primary.

I do think DC statehood is mainly an effort to get two reliably Democratic senators. If representation matters, retrocession offers that.

[The Cool Thatguy]

The media still has a duty to not be wrong.

Yes, but they lack the ability to be perfect.

And as we've seen with the rise in Asian hate crimes, they have to be careful as well. Especially when the commander in chief took a certain delight in inflaming things when it suited him.

Trump's lied and spied on the media, the lack of credibility falls onto him.

[Tami]

New Oath Keepers indictment just dropped; adds more names; provides more details of planning and coordination. Worth a read:

United States of America v Oath Keepers

At a GoToMeeting5 held on November 9, 2020, PERSON ONE told those attending the meeting, “We’re going to defend the president, the duly elected president, and we call on him to do what needs to be done to save our country. Because if you don’t guys, you’re going to be in a bloody, bloody civil war, and a bloody – you can call it an insurrection or you can call it a war or fight.” PERSON ONE called upon his followers to go to Washington, D.C., to let the President know “that the people are behind him.” PERSON ONE told his followers they needed to be prepared to fight Antifa, which he characterized as a group of individuals with whom “if the fight comes, let the fight come. Let Antifa – if they go kinetic on us, then we’ll go kinetic back on them. I’m willing to sacrifice myself for that. Let the fight start there. That will give President Trump

what he needs, frankly. If things go kinetic, good. If they throw bombs at us and shoot us, great, because that brings the president his reason and rationale for dropping the Insurrection Act.” PERSON ONE continued, “I do want some Oath Keepers to stay on the outside, and to stay fully armed and prepared to go in armed, if they have to . . . . So our posture’s gonna be that we’re posted outside of DC, um, awaiting the President’s orders. . . . We hope he will give us the orders. We want him to declare an insurrection, and to call us up as the militia.” WATKINS, KELLY MEGGS, HARRELSON, HACKETT, PERSON THREE, PERSON TEN, and others known and unknown attended this GoToMeeting. After PERSON ONE finished speaking, WATKINS and KELLY MEGGS asked questions and made comments about what types of weapons were legal in the District of Columbia.

[Malvolio]

It's almost as if people instinctively disbelieve a man who spews racism, lies and all kinds of bullshit on a regular basis.

I thought there was an old story about that? About a boy, this wolf and sheep?

And Trump's change seemed to only come when he needed a scapegoat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94MsoVGua_U

This. Even if a broken clock IS correct twice a day, one would still want to double check with a clock that isn't broken first.

I apologize in advance if I sound like I'm mixing metaphors.

[CSTowle]

On the possibility that the virus leaked from a lab, given that they were working on Corona viruses in a lab in Wuhan it would be insane not to consider the possibility or to dismiss it because it also happens to serve as a distraction from the failed policies of the previous administration and some morons want to blame all vaguely Chinese looking people for what might not even be a lab leak or (if it was) wasn't intentional and likely killed a lot more Chinese folk than we'll know for a very long time. If ever.

If anything the backlash at the suggestion is akin to the sort of science denial we complain about on the right. It's important to recognize that and try to do better. If we can investigate it (though that might be difficult given there's not much upside for China being transparent) we might be able to help advise and tighten security measures so it doesn't happen again. Or, if it seems as though it wasn't a leak, we can cross that off of the list legitimately.

[Mister Mets]

Yes, but they lack the ability to be perfect.

And as we've seen with the rise in Asian hate crimes, they have to be careful as well. Especially when the commander in chief took a certain delight in inflaming things when it suited him.

Trump's lied and spied on the media, the lack of credibility falls onto him.

The media should accurately describe the level of uncertainty.

It doesn't help if there's a situation where someone on the Republican is incorrectly fact-checked. That pushes the narrative that the media is against Trump or conservatives or whoever.

[The Cool Thatguy]

The media should accurately describe the level of uncertainty.

It doesn't help if there's a situation where someone on the Republican is incorrectly fact-checked. That pushes the narrative that the media is against Trump or conservatives or whoever.

The media isn't the one with several intelligence agencies at their beck and call.

They're also not the ones who stood arm in arm with Putin and attacked the US intelligence agencies.

Trump had no credibility. Why is that everyone's fault but his?

And lets not pretend that anything would ever stop Republicans from acting like the victims.

[green_garnish]

The media should accurately describe the level of uncertainty.

It doesn't help if there's a situation where someone on the Republican is incorrectly fact-checked. That pushes the narrative that the media is against Trump or conservatives or whoever.

The media has a long history of admitting when they are wrong and how they are wrong. No political party has that history (nor most of the folks who post on any of these forums, for that matter).

Let's face it though. The media has a duty to the fundamentals of the United States to be "against" Trump and the current flavor of what being Republican means. That criticism is critical to our survival as a concept, a country, and to freedom. If the media is viewed as impartial to that, they become part of the problem.

[Mister Mets]

The media has a long history of admitting when they are wrong and how they are wrong. No political party has that history (nor most of the folks who post on any of these forums, for that matter).

Let's face it though. The media has a duty to the fundamentals of the United States to be "against" Trump and the current flavor of what being Republican means. That criticism is critical to our survival as a concept, a country, and to freedom. If the media is viewed as impartial to that, they become part of the problem.

The media should report facts as facts, and be careful not to report opinions as facts.

If the facts go against Trump, as is often the case, so be it. If it seems that the media is lying about Trump, obscuring information that it is helpful to him, or making up attacks, that can end up giving him more power.

The media isn't the one with several intelligence agencies at their beck and call.

They're also not the ones who stood arm in arm with Putin and attacked the US intelligence agencies.

Trump had no credibility. Why is that everyone's fault but his?

And lets not pretend that anything would ever stop Republicans from acting like the victims.

It's easier to criticize Republicans for acting like victims when they're not provided with legitimate grounds for doing so.

This isn't about Trump's credibility. The media mishandled a news story, suggesting that a legitimate theory had no merit and failing to address it vigorously enough.

It is a massive indictment of the media that two posters here, who are well-informed and intelligent people, believed that the lab-leak hypothesis was debunked, when that's not the case any more.

[Malvolio]

When the media don't know what the facts are, they become impatient. They start to speculate on what happened or what might happen. And if enough of them and enough of us believe one specific speculation, that becomes the conventional wisdom. However, we should not mistake conventional wisdom based on speculation for actual facts.

[The Cool Thatguy]

It's easier to criticize Republicans for acting like victims when they're not provided with legitimate grounds for doing so.

This isn't about Trump's credibility. The media mishandled a news story, suggesting that a legitimate theory had no merit and failing to address it vigorously enough.

It is a massive indictment of the media that two posters here, who are well-informed and intelligent people, believed that the lab-leak hypothesis was debunked, when that's not the case any more.

One possible truth does not vindicate a thousand lies.

Republicans play the victim regardless of facts. Cry wolf enough times, and there might be one.

The media has a responsibility to not inflame the situation too. As sensationalist as the media is, the last thing we want is them taking the word of known liars.

There's a reason why reporters are required to say 'alleged murderer', regardless of the evidence against the accused.

With over a thousand lies to his credit, Trump and those who support him have only themselves to blame.

The Nazis were against animal cruelty and smoking. The Soviet Union outlawed lobotomies. But there's a reason why they are not regarded as human rights organizations.

[green_garnish]

It is a massive indictment of the media that two posters here, who are well-informed and intelligent people, believed that the lab-leak hypothesis was debunked, when that's not the case any more.

Is pretty much a larger indictment that a moderator here is suggesting that the media is less responsible than the republican party or conservative thinking.