3 ms·

Great, so I suppose it's metastasized. How about the rest?

• baryphonic 6y ago
  My intended point about the CCP was that their censorship is often a hint about what is true and embarrassing (or even destabilizing to the regime) and this is beyond the pale. I did not intend to make some strong claims about the absolute veracity of rumors on Chinese social media; rather, I tried to convey (and I admit that my success at this was clearly mediocre) that censorship is often a clue about where to look for the truth. I don't really put much stock into the idea that this particular woman was patient zero. But it doesn't exactly matter. A better example would have been a case everyone knows about and that is uncontroversial: that of Dr. Li Wenliang. He told the truth that the virus was a coronavirus and probably similar to the original SARS virus, but it was inconvenient to the state, and so he was hauled in by the police for "making false comments on the Internet." If I amended my initial comment and simply used the uncontroversial case of Dr. Li, rather than discussions about the WCDC or Wuhan Institute of Virology, I think it stands to reason that I would not have been accused of "Gish galloping" (thank you for teaching me a new phrase, by the way). Not that you'll believe it, but I really had no intention of overwhelming you or anyone else with rumors as a distraction; I was trying to add a couple of examples to illustrate An asymmetry between American and Chinese censorship.