False Claims Spreading Across YouTube and Embraced By Chinese Communist Party Media Accuse US Army Reservist of Starting the Coronavirus (cnn.com) 183
Donie O'Sullivan, reporting for CNN Business: Maatje Benassi, a US Army reservist and mother of two, has become the target of conspiracy theorists who falsely place her at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, saying she brought the disease to China. The false claims are spreading across YouTube every day, so far racking up hundreds of thousands of apparent views, and have been embraced by Chinese Communist Party media. Despite never having tested positive for the coronavirus or experienced symptoms, Benassi and her husband are now subjects of discussion on Chinese social media about the outbreak, including among accounts that are known drivers of large-scale coordinated activities by their followers.
The claims have turned their lives upside down. The couple say their home address has been posted online and that, before they shut down their accounts, their social media inboxes were overrun with messages from believers of the conspiracy. "It's like waking up from a bad dream going into a nightmare day after day," Maatje Benassi told CNN Business in an exclusive interview, the first time she has spoken publicly since being smeared online.
The claims have turned their lives upside down. The couple say their home address has been posted online and that, before they shut down their accounts, their social media inboxes were overrun with messages from believers of the conspiracy. "It's like waking up from a bad dream going into a nightmare day after day," Maatje Benassi told CNN Business in an exclusive interview, the first time she has spoken publicly since being smeared online.
Both sides are doing this to deflect blame (Score:2, Insightful)
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China and their communist party are much worse than anything in the US.
Re: Both sides are doing this to deflect blame (Score:3)
Way to reflect the problem the OP just called attention to.
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Thank goodness that no democratic Western government has ever killed millions of people in foreign countries.
Re: Both sides are doing this to deflect blame (Score:2)
Yes, America killed millions of people in world war 2. Excuse us for having to put a stop to all of the bad ism's that Europe creates.
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The US continues to kill millions worldwide, especially with that WMD called "starvation". It shouldn't be a surprise that much of the Third World is turning to China's 'Belt and Road' program for infrastructure development, they've had a half century to learn how the IMF/World Bank's policies destroy their economies.
Re: Both sides are doing this to deflect blame (Score:2)
LOL. We'd have to get up pretty early in the morning to compete with Chairman Mao's record.
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What, 10 million over the course of two decades? Hell, pre-revolution three million died in western China in a single year because it was more profitable to ship rice to Japan and San Francisco than it was to sell it to starving peasants (a friend lived in that area with his missionary parents before the Japanese invaded). There was a lot bad to say about Mao, but at least he never allowed that to happen again.
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Thank goodness that no democratic Western government has ever killed millions of people in foreign countries.
Yes, America killed millions of people in world war 2. Excuse us for having to put a stop to all of the bad ism's that Europe creates.
I'm guessing that the orginal post was referring to civilian casulties in the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq.
If so, "millions" is slightly high. The estimate is 222,000 civilians deaths by the U.S. in Vietnam, 480,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan (although that's an old number [theintercept.com]): so, even adding in a hundred thousand or so for other "minor" wars, still slightly under a million.
The US continues to kill millions worldwide, especially with that WMD called "starvation".
No, I'll have to challenge that one. Turns out world starvation has been going down steadily since the 1950s. That's an examp
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The last few wars, includ
Re: Both sides are doing this to deflect blame (Score:2)
I got this exact comment on a quora post. This is a Chinese or Russian troll.
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No, someone would have copied mine then. I've been on SlashDot since the late '90s (lost the password for the first account, this is my second from something like 2008.) Yes, I criticize the US more than I do other countries, but that's because as a citizen I am partly cupible for my government's and my society's actions. (I wish more people felt the same.) I'm not disgustingly rich so there is very little that I can do to influence the government, but hopefully I can educate other people what is being
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The West may have to go to war at times, because the reality of the world is that evil exists and sometimes there is no other choice but for good people to forcibly resist evil. China's government is an e
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I laughed at Baghdad Bob back then, thinking we were above that. Now I know better. For one thing I've never read anything stupider from any national leader than Trump's idea of using disinfectants as medicine, and everybody in his administration tiptoeing around what he said. Without opposing parties and the free press, we are no different than anybody else.
Re: Both sides are doing this to deflect blame (Score:2)
Sorry, I don't speak word salad. Translation, please?
Re:Both sides are doing this to deflect blame (Score:5, Insightful)
To have a POTUS operating at the same level - to not know that much of medicine is in fact using chemicals to kill bad stuff, and watch him assume he's the first to have this great idea, while failing to realize the hard part of killing within the body is doing it selectively - it's just stunning. This is a man profoundly ignorant of his own ignorance. And then to hear other grownups defend him...
Re: Both sides are doing this to deflect blame (Score:2)
No, this is a demented grandpa who is profoundly proud of his ignorance.
Within a few statements and news cycles or meetings with some of the smartest people in the world who advise you; it would take a extreme case of stupidity to remain unaware of the low level of knowledge one has.
As for the folks defending his ignorance... I hope all these leave public office. A new Boy Scout lead has more leadership skills, moral compass, and backbone on his first day.
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Defend him how? By not playing along with this stupid gotcha game, where anything Trump says must always be evaluated under the least charitable interpretation?
There's more than enough already to criticize, without having to be completely unfair.
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Re:Both sides are doing this to deflect blame (Score:4, Insightful)
We're talking about who's to blame for the outbreak and not who's to blame for the abysmal response to it after decades of warning.
Much worse is that 90% of those abysmal people will be reelected. With all our new found free time, we should be looking for fresh meat for congress, and maybe we can drain the swamp. We can at least sweep the house
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Much worse is that 90% of those abysmal people will be reelected. With all our new found free time, we should be looking for fresh meat for congress, and maybe we can drain the swamp.
Unless we change the population, the "fresh meat" in congress will be just as rotten as the old meat. That's why Republicans couldn't get a decent candidate over Trump last election, and why Democrats couldn't get anyone better than Biden this time.
Re: Both sides are doing this to deflect blame (Score:2)
Instead of repeating Katrina, let's focus on how to fix rather than who to blame. It's well past the point of being petty and stupid. The Democrats are being as petty as Trump is.
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one person is to blame after decades of people not doing their jobs in their jurisdictions...
Effective leadership can go a long way towards compensating for and recovering from a failure to prepare. Sadly, we have had no real leadership, so we lost valuable time to prepare before it really hit.
And also ignoring the fact that none of the hysterical predictions came to pass.
....
Especially when the final fatality rate of the disease will end up being comparable to H1N1, and nothing like the Spanish Flu.
Because the precautions we have taken so far have been enough to weaken the impact of the pandemic, but at great economic cost. Had we been better prepared or reacted quicker than we did then the outcome would be even better and the economic hit wouldn't have been so bad.
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We've had forty frelling years to prepare, and almost nothing was done.
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We've had forty frelling years to prepare, and almost nothing was done.
We had almost 40 years to prepare for WWII and almost nothing was done. But strong leadership was able to mobilize the country and galvanize support and the US was able to gear up quickly. If this were a real "wartime presidency" the US would have already been invaded.
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The Clinton Administration was the only government in my lifetime to actually pay attention to the issue. Their primary concern was bio-terrorism, but the method for dealing with that is not much different than for a natural pandemic. Between distributing "push packs" (cargo containers with antibiotics, antivirals, PPE, respirator and ventilator consumables, etc.) around the country, carrying out tabletop exercises with various states' health and civil defense administrations, helping organize and finance
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We've been **LUCKY** so far, not because we were prepared but because the percentage of patients with serious illness is lower than Spanish Flu (keep in mind that the military was boasting just a couple of years ago that they had recreated that particular bit of nastiness). Clinton's CDC war gamed with a terrorist release of pneumonic plague into ventilation system of a Boulder concert hall, within a week the Colorado healthcare system had collapsed, several adjoining states were close to it a week later,
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The same supplies as 25 years ago? Of course not, we know more now, we have better treatments, better equipment. This is why Clinton put the program under he CDC, as the best qualified organization in the government to make those kinds of decisions. The man may have been a corrupt asshole, but he was probably the most competent resident of the Oval Office in my lifetime.even though hobbled by Newt Gingrich and his band of thieves.
Re:let me guess (Score:5, Insightful)
one person is to blame after decades of people not doing their jobs in their jurisdictions...
Lots of people are to blame for the poor response. A great many were hired and worked under the auspices of the one person you are trying to defend
And also ignoring the fact that none of the hysterical predictions came to pass.
55k+ dead in the US has come to pass and there is no end in sight.
It's easy to whine. It's a lot harder to pinpoint what should have been done differently at the time with the available information at that time.
True, it is easy to whine (I have a few Twitter links I could share). But it is even easier to pinpoint what should have been done differently because people have been pointing it out since the beginning--and it turns out that the Obama admin left a pretty good set of guidelines, which this administration threw out rather than admit to a major crisis in an election year.
Especially when the final fatality rate of the disease will end up being comparable to H1N1, and nothing like the Spanish Flu.
The CDC midline estimates are 12,500 Americans dead of H1N1 in 2009. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandem... [cdc.gov] So we've more that quadrupled that, even after shutting down the population centers, wearing masks in public, and waiting in line to buy groceries.
And it looks like there is a cholera epidemic as well, because you and so many others are dangerously full of shit.
Re:let me guess (Score:5, Insightful)
"Especially when the final fatality rate of the disease will end up being comparable to H1N1, and nothing like the Spanish Flu."
H1N1 had what? 20k deaths in the US over one year? We had over 20k deaths in NY in about 1 month. Also, H1N1 didn't have mass graves or refrigerator trucks to store the dead. .
The nunmber of deaths and fatality rate doesn't really matter when something spreads faster than melted butter. You overwhelm your medical system and more people die. Its going to be interesting to see how many folks in NYC died due to a heart attack and not seeking medical attention soon enough -- or complications of high blood pressure, or untreated (unknown) diabetes -- or countless other things that might normally send someone to urgent care over the last 1-2 months.
I live in CA (Los Angeles) and the picture I'm beginning to see is this particular bug effects high-density living more than anything else. In CA, for the most part, we practiced social distancing daily -- BEFORE the virus. We're not living on top of each other, we don't live with mulitple generations in the same house hold in any meaningful numbers and we have crappy (virtually unsuable) public transportation beyond a very lucky few throughout the state.
Make no mistakes -- this is a nasty bug that spreads scary fast -- just not out doors that well. For folks who's only way to leave their home and return is to enter an elevator and push buttons that have been pushed by hundreds of other folks in your building -- or needing to cram in to subways and busses because NOBODY in town really has a car -- it spreads wicked fast.
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"this particular bug effects high-density living more than anything else."
Notoriously spacious and car dependent Hong Kong has had four deaths.
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"Notoriously spacious and car dependent Hong Kong has had four deaths."
1: They reacted much faster than CA (they were right next to the source). CA is still pretty softly hit.
2: The "spacious" and "car dependent" Hong Kong has a population and size similar to Los Angeles -- which also isn't heavily impacted by covid...
3: I've been to NYC multiple times (used to live in Paterson NJ) -- the subways were filthy. Often saw human waste on the platforms. Buses were sketchy, too. I haven't been to Hong Kong
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"Not to mention there are places in CA and FL with density near that of NYC..."
Please name place one that comes close in size and density. LA city has a similar population to NYC -- but about it's about 40% larger. Much more spread out. Are there PARTS of CA that compare to parts of NYC in population density? Yes -- but the shear numbers of people in NYC (with public transportation the primary mode of transportation) feeds in to how rapidly it spreads. There may be a few places in LA, for example tha
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Ah, yes. It's a... System Problem. One of those where no one in particular is to blame.
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And also ignoring the fact that none of the hysterical predictions came to pass.
I'm old enough to have carried a pager on Dec 31, 1999. As you know, nothing major happened (and my pager did not go off). The response from many was, "what an overblown hoax this whole Y2K thing was." In some cases, it was indeed an overblown hoax ("planes will fall from the sky, nuclear power plants will melt down, yadda yadda yadda") but this was largely a creation of the media. There are many cases though where knock on effects caused by millennium bug issues could have had serious, if not catastrop
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...and at worst there's evidence that he is using them to profit from the emergency (google it).
Sigh. This is (at least) the second time [slashdot.org] you've made this unsupported claim. I "googled it" the last time and couldn't find anything, and I "googled it" again this time and still couldn't find anything.
YOU are the one making the claim, it is up to YOU to support it. If you've found a reputable source that backs up your statement, post a link or STFU.
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I am rather sure that the other poster is claiming this :
https://www.vox.com/2020/4/7/2... [vox.com]
which is not really that good of a play because it's a fund that owns a few shares ... anyway, trump does know how to profit from situations. This is one that he is not profiting enough to make the claim have any teeth
In reference to my claim of profit : please review his hotel stakes in DC as a note. that's been proven 2 times that foreign powers have stayed at his hotel's as a point to show or gain a slight b
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I am rather sure that the other poster is claiming this : https://www.vox.com/2020/4/7/2... [vox.com]
Nonsense. Christ, it's right in the headline of that article that Trump is not making any money over hydroxychloroquine.
In reference to my claim of profit : please review his hotel stakes in DC as a note. that's been proven 2 times that foreign powers have stayed at his hotel's as a point to show or gain a slight bit of favoritism.
None of that has anything to do with rsilvergun's claim that Trump is using his emergency powers to profit from the current crisis. If you want to be useful, maybe you can provide a link to support his claim.
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You're kidding, right? Do you really believe "Trump is not making any money over hydroxychloroquine." is exactly the same thing as "This is one that he is not profiting enough"? Perhaps English is not your first language?
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I don't think you read my remarks correctly or I might have written them incorrectly.
let me try again:
Is Trump is making money off of hydroxychloroquine?
A) Directly, no.
B) Indirectly by owning a fund that own's stock in the maker, Yes.
The article that points it out is already linked.
Does he make a lot, no, not really, based on the way the position in the product is held
And BTW, FYI, English is my first language, then about 8 more I've learned. English is the
most flexible language and most annoying.
I prefer
Re: Both sides are doing this to deflect blame (Score:2)
Why is an article about looned out conspiracy theorists causing problems and helping the Chinese propaganda machine leading to a partisan bitch fest?
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Decades. They warned the frelling Reagan Badministration about the likelihood of another global pandemic, and international travel wasn't 1/10 of what it is today. The only US president that I've ever seen take this (or bio-terrorism) seriously was Clinton, and Shrub immediately disassembled his reaction plans.
Six Degrees (Score:5, Funny)
Judging by the apparent speed of its spread through Hollywood, I've always assumed that patient zero was Kevin Bacon [wikipedia.org]. :-D
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I have to admit, I started an evil chuckle and I am wonder who will make an Evil Kevin Bacon poster child
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I heard they own 5G phones as well (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I heard they own 5G phones as well (Score:5, Funny)
Remember...5G can penetrate tinfoil. Nobody can hide their thoughts from the New World Order.
What good does blame do at this point? (Score:2)
It doesn't matter whether or not it X's fault or Y's fault, or nobody's fault, because the answer doesn't actually change what we need to be doing here and now to deal with it.
Maybe once this is all over we can reflect upon it and see if any particular side was to blame (although I doubt it), but in the meantime we need to just stop pointing fingers and blaming others for the problems the world is facing when we are actually all in this together.
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It doesn't matter whether or not it X's fault or Y's fault, or nobody's fault, because the answer doesn't actually change what we need to be doing here and now to deal with it.
Actually it does very much matter whose fault it is. Because if the virus is a deliberately designed one, those who designed and released it presumably have an antidote.
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1) you assume that there actually *is* a party to be blamed.
2) You assume that whoever is to blame has the antidote
3) More generally, you are also assuming that knowing whose fault it is will somehow change how we should actually be responding here and now. It might, but it also might not. If the people you could blame were already dead for instance, what difference would that make now?
All available evidence points to this being a natu
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That's fine... but it's entirely unnecessary at this stage.
If you are too busy arguing over whose job it is to repair a leak in a boat instead of just repairing it, you will only end up underwater.
In a nutshell, there are more constructive things we should be doing with our time right now than arguing with eachother.
As I said, we are all in this together.
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Yeah, but I'm not in a leaky boat. I'm at home with a shelter-in-place order, and nothing to do but post on /.
CCP's plan: What will happen next (Score:2)
After her life is destroyed, offer her monetary help through proxy in exchange of her "admission" of the conspiracy theory.
YT should nuke those accounts (Score:2)
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We need to fix up free speech laws to allow better recourse for those being damaged by harmful speech. The US constitution does not give a blank check on speech, there are limits when it comes to removing the rights of other people. Corporations will always turn a blind eye until someone is hurt, then promise to fix things, then go back to business as usual.
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Typically harmful speech is what libel and slander laws are for.
"corporations should keep us safe and censor us for our own good " is a position far worse than the original problem.
Deliberate misinformation... (Score:2)
Deliberate spreading misinformation about others should be a crime in just the same way deliberate spreading disease is. The 1st Amendment doesn't apply to 'terroristic threats' free speech is not absolutely it has has been qualified.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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They are wrong! (Score:2)
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No, that's incorrect.
Blame Canada
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I've been waiting almost two decades to post this one again. Thanks for the opportunity!
Times have changed, Slashdot is getting worse
It's full of trolls not articles, where's the "news for nerds?"
Should we all blame Taco?
Or blame that guy Jamie?
Or should we blame some chick named Natalie?
No! Blame Hemos!
Blame Hemos!
It seems that everything's gone wrong
since Hemos came along
Blame Hemos!
Shame on Hemos!
Here's not even a real editor, anyway!
Scientists have confirmed... (Score:5, Funny)
Scientists have confirmed that China is where SARS-CoV-2 has originated. They have sequenced the RNA and discovered fake UL and CE listings as well as a Banggood.com part number.
Address (Score:2)
The couple say their home address has been posted online
Their address isn't a secret.
1835 73rd Ave NE, Medina, WA 98039 [wikipedia.org]
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For those who don't get the (really lame) joke, that's the delivery address for one of Bill Gate's houses.
So far so...good? (Score:2)
Methinks China dost protest too much. This might be poisoning the well against not an accidental lab release, but a deliberate one by China. Laugh, but file it away and watch.
Remember the US deliberately releasing it in China was almost immediately pushed by China, then rolled back as by a rogue "mid level" official.
Let's get out our popcorn and watch and see.
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Newfangled Internet (Score:2)
More and more, that doesn't seem like an advantage.
Youtube hypocrisy (Score:2)
Re:The "anti-conspiracy theorists" aren't helping (Score:5, Insightful)
There are between a hundred and a thousand wet markets in China...But only one of these ten thousand or more wet markets is two blocks from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The wet market (30.6196N 114.2576E) is nowhere near "two blocks from" the Wuhan Institute of Virology (303221.9N 114213.07E). They are about 2 miles apart.
So given that there's at least one wet market in a major city in China, the chances that the institute of virology will be located within 2 miles of a market are pretty much certain.
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Two blocks vs two miles away. Either way, it's walking distance for a researcher to walk there and buy something while contagious with the virus.
Sure. It's not impossible. But do you have any proof that this happened?
Oh, and do you have proof that it was not an American conspiracy? The US wanted to undermine China so it started a virus there, hoping that it would explode and decimate Chinese industry. Do you have anything to disprove that? After all, it's known that the US has a long history of abusing "sub-humans" such as prison inmates for biological tests (https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm). Who says that the US is not doing something s
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If you want to look at other virus' that come out of no where, check out all the hemorrhagic's and even HIV. As humans encroach into wild areas, we find more and more s
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The walking distance is quite a bit longer, and there are about a dozen similar markets that are closer. Does that mean it couldn't have happened that way? Of course not. But proximity is not an argument in favor.
The strongest argument in favor of the accidental release hypothesis is that WIV collects and studies bat coronaviruses, and there aren't other obvious sources of bat viruses in the neighborhood that we know about.
However that's not proof, nor is the lab the only way WIV personnel could be involv
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The market is also across the Yantze River from WIV. That makes it a 14km walk according to Google Maps. A quick search finds about a dozen wet markets closer.
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his 6 digits are high
those in my range are 2001-2002
the 140k-160000 are 1999-2000
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OMG, your cited reference is a nutjob's wet dream. Seriously, you'd post crap like that with a six digit id as a reference.
Look closer at his handle. That's Mikhail from Russia Today.
Re:The "anti-conspiracy theorists" aren't helping (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, the idea that the virus would be any more or less likely to come from a wet market close to or far from the Wuhan lab is a variant of gambler's fallacy. There's nothing remarkable about that as a coincidence, if it were random it would be just as likely to come from that location as any other. And if it wasn't the Wuhan market, it would be close to a government hospital or a research base which would serve just as well for a conspiracy theory. And if it was close to nothing else at all, well a complete lack of evidence has never stopped you tinfoil hatters anyway.
SARS-CoV-2 would make a shitty bioweapon and releasing it on purpose would simply harm anyone and everyone at random, while reducing its future usefulness as a bioweapon.
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SARS-CoV-2 would make a shitty bioweapon and releasing it on purpose would simply harm anyone and everyone at random, while reducing its future usefulness as a bioweapon.
This is the absolutely fucking annoying strawman that keeps being built to "disprove" the idea that this may (not did, but may) have come from a lab. Other than conspiracy theorists, no one is claiming this is a bioweapon or that it was released intentionally.
A lab accident resulting in the release of a non-engineered virus into the wild is not an outlandish idea, but is met with "no, this is absolutely impossible" and the evidence for such is "because if they followed the rules, it would not happen. Sinc
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Sure, it's not impossible that it came from a lab in general, but the conspiracy theories never stop there. And there's no evidence that it did come from a lab at all, so why entertain the idea at this point?
Re: The "anti-conspiracy theorists" aren't helping (Score:2)
We know what species of bat it came from. Those bats are sold at the wet market in Wuhan, and (drum roll, please) studied at the virology lab in Wuhan. There's a reason the lab is suspect. They study coronavirii, and this specific strain.
It could well have come from the lab. China actually imprisoned the first doctor to talk about the virus. I have no idea why you believe anything they say.
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Got the Chinese trolls on here. You have decent English - you know you could make money doing better things than trolling for your government, right?
https://www.latimes.com/world-... [latimes.com]
And
https://metro.co.uk/2020/04/12... [metro.co.uk]
Sorry, troll. Hopefully you won't be visited by the police for this fail.
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They did in fact arrest the first doctor we know brought attention to the outbreak, detained him, and forced him to issue a retraction of his accurate observations and factual statements. Then they got caught when they could no longer cover up the outbreak, so the Party lied and blamed his arrest on the city. Then he died. Did you miss that bit of international news, or was it blocked by the Great Firewall?
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One need not believe in shit like chemtrails to simply observe that if we start from the perspective that if all of the mostly unpunished bad behavior we see reported in the media is the tip of the iceberg, a lot of "conspiracy theories" are wild guesses about what lurks beneath the waters.
Fix that for you. If you don't know what's beneath your proverbial iceberg, the ice underneath can be in any shape. You want to convince people that all of those would be "reasonable", but in fact all of them are just "wild" guesses.
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Any liar can manipulate statistics. They even teach you how to do it in entry level classes. Statistics alone don't prove anything.
The technology does not exist for human beings to create a virus that wouldn't be immediately apparent to have been created by Humans. An analogy would be the tech we are capable of today is equivalent to using MS Paint to try to create false "photoshoped" images that can pass as the real thing to experts. Any microbiologist or bio-engineer would be able to tell with one look at
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I don't need unimpeachable proof that it came from a lab, but it would be nice to have SOME evidence pointing in that direction. And youtube is not evidence.
The problem with conspiracy theories is that people can and do get hurt from them. This couple are getting death threats. Some nutjob showed up at a pizza parlor hoping to expose a pedo ring. Constant harassment still occurs for families of children killed at Sandy Hook. Being anti-conspiracy means being for the truth and for people to be safe from
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Same could be said for wet market vendors if in fact it didn't come from the wet market.
So we shouldn't claim it came from the lab with no proof, shouldn't we also claim it didn't come from the wet market, with no proof ?
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And that's why I said "what you mean by 'proof'". If the testimony of experts is not 100.00% solid, some people won't accept it as proof. And if the proof isn't certain, we must spend lots of time and expert tracking down all the red herrings and spending tax dollars and starting international incidents about it.
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The problem with conspiracy theories is that people can and do get hurt from them.
Well, the Clinton body count list seems evidence enough of that.
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Anti-conspiracy theorists are
I love how everyone is posting their own conspiracy theories and declaring everyone else an anti-conspiracy theorist. In any case we all know what really causes corona virus. Now if you'll excuse me I have a phone tower to burn down.
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Now if you'll excuse me I have a phone tower to burn down.
Better chop it down, if you burn it, you release the ions into the atmosphere which spreads it to other cell towers. If we're not careful, 4G could catch it, too.
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the primary purpose of anti-conspiracy theorists is to deflect blame off of the elites
Speak for yourself! I'm anti-conspiracy theories and I'm not interested in deflecting blame. Blame should fall where the evidence leads us, not where trolls, believers in nonsense or corrupt government think it should fall.
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This [medium.com] is a great takedown of the statistical improbability that COVID-19 is just the result of dastardly meat sellers in the wet markets
Actually, it's a fantastic demonstration that far more people need to learn about statistics. Because the argument is a pile of mathmatically unsound crap.
Also, the same people need a course in biology. The way this virus came to be was two different coronaviruses infected the same animal and produced a chimera. If you are studying a virus in a lab, you don't infect an animal with two viruses. If you do, you won't know which effect is from which virus. Or if you're just producing viruses, you end up wi
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Well, we haven't had a more transparent president in history, Trump is baring more than Johnson every did. He's too transparent as his stream of consciousness is made public. On the other hand, his administration is quite good at refusing FOIA requests.
I find it absurd though that conspiracy theorists actually think the government is capable of pulling most of these plots off; they're inept, disorganized, and can't stop leaks.