2024 ELECTION THREAD

Luciom, I would advise you to adhere to the directions I gave to the thread or face a long deserved ban.

The source of which was the Chinese themselves. Here's one of the earliest NYT articles from the emerging pandemic, published 01/25/20:

A group of 19 Chinese scholars also called on the government to do more to regulate the trade and the public to stop eating wild animals.

Source:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/25/world/asia/china-markets-coronavirus-sars.html

nytimes

China’s Omnivorous Markets Are in the Eye of a Lethal Outbreak Once Again (Published 2020)

yes it was a Chinese government organized narrative to deflect blame over a lab **** up.

the lab controversy at this point is more about whether human made modifications were applied afterwards to get SARS-CoV-2 infective for humans, or if it was just a wild strain under analysis there which had already jumped the barrier naturally, but the more time passes the more the lab origin of the outbreak is accepted as reality by more people

Except the previous SARS outbreak was attributed to the same thing by the Chinese, so your narrative about their narrative is a fabrication. From the same article:

At the peak of the SARS outbreak in 2003, the authorities banned the sale of civets and culled the existing stocks, but within months they ended the ban and trade had resumed as before.

SARS was found in civets, they culled them because they were a reservoir.

afaik they didn't find SARS-CoV-2 (the human-infecting variant) in bats or other animals in wet markets

Wild animal markets. That was the entire subject of the linked article.

so in order of preference:
not being the epicenter of a once-in-a-century global pandemic (oiacgp)
>
being the natural zoonotic epicenter of an oiacgp
>
manually creating an oiacgp.

in a world where lab leak was true and known by some, diverting blame to a natural cause center would be step 1.

fwiw 19 chinese scholars is proportionally equivalent to 0.08 haitian scholars. if one haitian scholar called on their country's u.s. immigrants to do better and stop eating cats/dogs, would it be 125x more likely that the rumor was true?

-wuhan's BSL-4 lab specializing in bat viruses, including gain of function research to make bat viruses optimally contagious for humans to study worst case pandemic scenarios, happened to be the global epicenter of a new worst-in-at-least-100-years-optimally-contagious bat virus. coincidence!
-the lab had a public internet database of all its sequenced strains of bat viruses, which it took down with no explanation in oct '19 and never restored. coincidence!
-in 2018 peter daszak (uk interloper to a us charity affording him the means to live in the hamptons) spearheads his nonprofit's

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-grant-darpa/

The Intercept

Leaked Grant Proposal Details High-Risk Coronavirus Research

ELECTION 2024: i haven't followed this year's campaign closely, but judging from past presidential runs, i don't understand not just spending 3 months campaigning hardcore in the 3-5 most critical swing states that are most likely to decide the election. small towns, big towns, everywhere. would the benefit be offset by alienating the rest of country? i feel like default blue/red voters nationwide would cheer on their candidate going for the jugular in swing states.

And Trump keeps bringing it up.

Trump Doubles Down

Neo-Nazi group helped fuel rumor

For these white nationalists it's mission accomplished.

that article is trash - it treats extreme outliers as if they are standard ie yes there are rat farms and you can eat rat

but even in a major city you'd need to spend a bunch of time research where to find it and even then you'd need to be in the right area

here i am searching for bamboo rat in beijing and surrounding provinces

0 hits

well the south is where all the weird stuff is eaten anyway so let's go to the south then

now we find 4 of them

so it exists, it's there, but again this is literally like having an article talking about how americans are always eating bear meat and snakes and alligators and while technically true and we have all of that available for purchase and eating and millions of dollars of it is sold per year, it's still exceedingly rare and you'd need to really seek it out and via specific places as well

now this isn't to say there are only 4 places with it, but i think the point is very well made

that garbage article treats all that stuff as standard when i've literally never seen any of that

sea worms, jellyfish, organs of pigs and chickens (liver, brain, kidneys, stomache, etc) were fairly common "gross stuff" that we wouldn't eat but as farther as everything else, i literally never saw it

i'd occasionally see a dog meat restaurant if i was near the border of north korea or vietnam but that's mostly because ethnic koreans and vietnamese eat that stuff

so why am i saying all this, because he never says anything other than "19 chinese scientists said please don't eat animals" and doesn't list who they are or what organization etc

and... in a country of thousands of scientists, finding 19 to take an unpopular opinion wouldn't be difficult

for example there are 3.5k licensed architects and engineers in america who will publicly sign their names declaring 9/11 is a hoax

and he's also doing stuff like acting like a tweet with 45 million views is meaningful - that's not in a country with both rampant bot accounts and a billion people who are overwhelmingly all active on social media - my own weibo had thousands of "followers" and i never even used it just made the account and then ignored it, checked in on it years later and had like 36k followers (which were probably 99% bots) so it's incredibly dishonest for him to paint that as a meaningful metric

i'm absolutely appalled that nyt would post that trash

I didn't read much basis in your response to match your outrage with what the article actually got wrong. You seem to be railing against the objective facts it conveys. The actions it described were that of the Chinese government, so it's not just a selective group of scientists that you portray it to be.

That all sounds plausible except for the fact the last pandemic from the same region was attributable to the factors the article discusses. And except for the fact that it was very early days in COVID, so to believe the Chinese government had both already determined a lab leak was the cause and they had time to formulate a comprehensive cover story stretches credulity.

NMNM

The "eating pets" thing isn't the even problem, it's how cavalier the guy is repeating or amplifying whatever he comes across without considering the consequences. A bigger problem still is that he consistently frames things in a way that villainizes migrants, particularly those that tend to be the most politically vulnerable, poor, and darker-skinned.

I feel I owe you a response.

A) Yes, I am parsing the difference between those labels. Jumping straight to "that's racist" is getting old.

B) I don't really care about the distinctions when it comes to the cat eating stuff. Doesn't affect me one bit.

Yeah, just think how this would have played out pre 2015. "This fat moron just saw something on TV and repeated it in front of millions without even looking into it. That alone disqualifies him from being President". We've got to stop with the soft bigotry of low expectations when it comes to conservatives. I'm as guilty of this as anyone and since how regular people need to treat conservatives is a common topic on this forum, I'll do much best to start holding them to the same standards I would hold a normal human.

Im trying to find the post that violated the rules?

There’s a ton of problems and none of them is THE problem cuz it’s just a bed of nails at this point

1. Trump is an objectively stupid old man with low attention span or focus. ‘I saw it on tv’ should be disqualifying of any presidential candidate, it’s infinitely worse when that guy served as the president for 4 years. People would argue he says these things he knows are false because he knows it would rile up his base, but at this point I don’t think you could convince me he’s not too stupid to actually believe these things which becomes a problem because

2. Trump and his base are a revolving door of misinformation. His base spews bullshit, trump reads it and amplifies it saying ‘did you know this is happening?!?! I saw it on the internets!’ So that same bullshit is fed back to his supporters which is now legitimized cuz a former president and the Godking of the Republican Party is now the one saying it which becomes a problem because

3. Trump supporters can be boiled down to 3 groups. Group 1: trump represents a means to an end therefore they’ll handwave anything he says as ‘you can’t take him literally’ or will argue ‘words don’t matter, policy does’ or ‘ya fine but the real issue is blahblahblah.’ Group 2: trolls who are down for the cause for the lulz (see: PB and mongo as examples). Group 3: unhinged lunatic conspiracy theory nuts who are happy to do a J6 cuz of trump or call in bomb threats to a small town an upend their life cuz someone posted a joke about dog eating on Facebook, or go to a pizza parlor with an AR15, or, and this cannot be stressed enough, have proven to be so dangerous and menacing that people who have offered any pushback like the Arlington thing are so ****ing terrified of the consequences of trump speaking their name out of his mouth and having to live their lives in constant fear or threats and neverending menacing or doxxing that they won’t press charges or demand consequence for his illegality

All in all trump is a cancer that has metastasized into normal society. Defending him, politics be damned, is a sign of amorality

Hear hear!

His excuse when fact checked on it was that he saw it on TV. No idea if he actually did was lying or just confused on where he saw it. The best case scenario for him is easy to argue against, so I just did that.

It’s just an unforced error for no reason other than ‘Kamabla spoke about my boring rallies’ and an apologize for nothing mentality that has defined Donald trump

500k Haitians in florida, 300k are registered voters, trump won florida in 2020 by I think 250k votes

The longer he insists on dragging out Springfield for no reason that makes sense, the likelier it is that florida inexplicably becomes a battleground state

Yowsa!

if russian media repeatedly wrote about the rattlesnake meat problem in america and continuously wrote about americans eating rattlesnakes and all the problems that caused and they never once mentioned how obscure it was

we're dealing with a country larger than all of europe combined geographically and almost 2x the population of all of europe

you're going to find anything you want so long as you look for it in the right places

like you can find videos of americans eating seals and whales and hunting walrus and iguanas and alligator etc - but to pretend like that's not some niche thing is criminal - especially when the entire focus of the article is implying it's the norm

nowhere do they point out how that stuff is all specific to some regions and even in those regions highly uncommon

if you fly into China tomorrow, bring a guide to translate for you, and stop at every single market and restaurant you see, you're never going to come across any of that stuff the article mentions as if it were commonly eaten

you'd need to ask your guide to go online to do some research and then they'll get back to you and say "hey i found it, we just need to take a 6 hour flight and then a 2 hour bus and we're there"

and no, there's no credibility behind "and 19 chinese scientists agree" which neither introduces nor follows up on it

but go ahead and put aside your rattlesnake soup and raw narwhal lunch which you'll chase with fermented mare's milk for a moment and go ahead and respond again calling my condemnation of that highly misleading (and intentionally so) article as just me "raging"

Roadkill is that RFK ? who pulls over to pick up dead geese?

Or I'll just ask them to take me to 武汉华南海鲜批发市场.