8 ms·

My personal feelings are that all 3 are possible, but approximately 0.0001% of people will actually consider the likelihood of each one, but rather, most will c

My personal feelings are that all 3 are possible, but approximately 0.0001% of people will actually consider the likelihood of each one, but rather, most will choose whichever one is most convenient and comfortable to believe in. Of course as an Asian person, whatever people believe in will have a direct impact on me. I remember after 9/11, the amount of awful things that were said and done to the Sikh population in my city. It didn’t matter they had literally nothing to do with the attacks. People were angry and wanted someone to blame.

anonymousisme 6y ago
As a white American in Beijing during the 9/11 attacks, I experienced lots of not-so-surprising behavior from my Chinese hosts. Many Chinese felt that America deserved what they got. Tensions were still high from the "Hainan Island Incident" only a few months earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainan_Island_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainan_Island_incident
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > Many Chinese felt that America deserved what they got. I don't see how their opinion matters, since they're misinformed and orchestrated by the CCP. The Hainan incident was caused by a Chinese fighter pilot running into a US surveillance plane. The former is agile, the latter is not, so that's the fault of the fighter. Also, a plane in distress doesn't need permission to land. For the CCP to make a big deal out of that when there's no other runway available shows their true nature - evil and authoritarian. The CCP has been at war with the US since the 1950s over ideology. If the US was not their enemy, the CCP would just pick another country. I've noticed that otherwise intelligent people seem to place significance in "man in the street" conversations with people who live in totalitarian countries and have no power. There's a phrase for that, useful idiot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
  - labawi 6y ago
    FWIW, when we heard of the incident, I think the prevailing sentiment was that America deserved it, and we are unrelated to China (in Europe). America has made a lot of enemies and inflicted a lot of damage and terror for what seems as both good and bad reasons. After all the one-sided "interventions", I find it hard to disagree that America (not the Americans affected) deserved something in return.
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
      > America has made a lot of enemies and inflicted a lot of damage and terror That's simply false, as shown by reactions when the US doesn't get involved as "global policeman." A country that chooses the communist ideology chooses to be an enemy of the US, not the other way around. There's this opinion by snowflakes that they can comment on what they don't understand, but that's just childish.
- d10r 6y ago
  As long as we stick to the concept of nation, we likely have to live with such issues. This is how group identity works, sometimes to your advantage, sometimes to your disadvantage.
Robotbeat 6y ago
I assign non-negligible probability to each of them. I don't know. But I hate the stupid racism and hate around it. COVID-19 attacked every country. With the exception of, like, New Zealand (but it affected them as well... had to shut down their borders, etc). These viruses are a threat to all humanity. I just want us to fight them better and help everyone. I think it's super important that we both simultaneously hold China accountable (rhetorically, in the social sphere at very least) for aggressive expansionary actions (i.e. vs Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines) and human rights abuses (Uighur, etc)... ...while simultaneously trying to help everyone do better, including the Chinese, to face common threats (like novel viruses, climate change, etc). And we must not start up a new Cold War with all its proxy conflicts, death, and unnecessary economic suffering and threat of annihilation.
- krustyburger 6y ago
  Unfortunately, avoiding a new Cold War is something that would take equal effort from both sides. If just one side is eager to wage such a battle, it will happen unless the other side acquiesces at every turn.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    Maybe. But annihilating isn’t really in anyone’s interests.
    - int_19h 6y ago
      Actually annihilating, no. But a Cold War isn't that - it's a constant threat of such. Which can be very useful to manipulate public opinion - and there are plenty of sociopaths in politics who deem the risks worth the reward.
- spondyl 6y ago
  > But I hate the stupid racism and hate around it. COVID-19 attacked every country. With the exception of, like, New Zealand (but it affected them as well... had to shut down their borders, etc). As someone who lives in New Zealand, we were still "attacked" by covid all the same. The only difference arguably is the coordinated response from our government compared to others. Some of that is presumably culture too (we don't have a document held to a pseudo-religious standard ie the constitution for example) although being too laid back can have its consequences too if emergency health laws were to be abused in order to infringe on personal freedoms for example
tripletao 6y ago
If SARS-CoV-2 emerged due to the WIV's research activities, then it was potentially with the knowledge and funding of the American government, via the EcoHealth Alliance. Racism is always stupid, but in this case it's particularly so. This absolutely shouldn't be China vs. USA, and it's deeply unfortunate that the Trump administration's early, characteristically unsupported rhetoric made it so. The WIV's safety was probably below American standards, but probably closer than a wet market is to American agricultural standards. So it's ridiculous to think a lab vs. natural origin makes it "more China's fault". If the CCP is currently covering up a lab accident, then they're probably quite unhappy that they've been "forced" to do so, and wishing in retrospect they'd instead decided a year ago to publicly blame the rogue, American-funded researcher. Long before the pandemic, this was an obscure academic debate, between virologists who wanted to perform certain risky experiments and others who thought they presented an unacceptable risk: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097416/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097416/ With the possibility (absolutely not proven; but not disproven either) that such an experiment has just killed 2.9M people, that debate takes on a terrible new significance.
- fighterpilot 6y ago
  Anti-Chinese racism is stupid and toxic, yes, but you're missing the point. People here generally aren't blaming China because that's where COVID-19 originated. That would be stupid. No, they're blaming the CCP for covering it up in the early days, which allowed it to spread and become the global pandemic which it became. Big difference. It's not China's fault that COVID originated there (lab leak or otherwise). It is their fault for covering up the scale of the problem and thereby helping it spread.
  - tripletao 6y ago
    The article is about the earliest origins of SARS-CoV-2, whether that arose from the activities of the WIV or naturally. My comment is as well. Once the pandemic emerged, the CCP's response was certainly terrible in many well-known ways (e.g., their attempt to suppress Yan Limeng's initial alarm, and the disappearance of multiple citizen journalists from Wuhan), though it's impossible to know whether a better response could have suppressed its worldwide spread. That's a separate question from those earliest origins, though.

anonymousisme 6y ago

As a white American in Beijing during the 9/11 attacks, I experienced lots of not-so-surprising behavior from my Chinese hosts. Many Chinese felt that America deserved what they got. Tensions were still high from the "Hainan Island Incident" only a few months earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainan_Island_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainan_Island_incident

redis_mlc 6y ago
> Many Chinese felt that America deserved what they got. I don't see how their opinion matters, since they're misinformed and orchestrated by the CCP. The Hainan incident was caused by a Chinese fighter pilot running into a US surveillance plane. The former is agile, the latter is not, so that's the fault of the fighter. Also, a plane in distress doesn't need permission to land. For the CCP to make a big deal out of that when there's no other runway available shows their true nature - evil and authoritarian. The CCP has been at war with the US since the 1950s over ideology. If the US was not their enemy, the CCP would just pick another country. I've noticed that otherwise intelligent people seem to place significance in "man in the street" conversations with people who live in totalitarian countries and have no power. There's a phrase for that, useful idiot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
- labawi 6y ago
  FWIW, when we heard of the incident, I think the prevailing sentiment was that America deserved it, and we are unrelated to China (in Europe). America has made a lot of enemies and inflicted a lot of damage and terror for what seems as both good and bad reasons. After all the one-sided "interventions", I find it hard to disagree that America (not the Americans affected) deserved something in return.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    > America has made a lot of enemies and inflicted a lot of damage and terror That's simply false, as shown by reactions when the US doesn't get involved as "global policeman." A country that chooses the communist ideology chooses to be an enemy of the US, not the other way around. There's this opinion by snowflakes that they can comment on what they don't understand, but that's just childish.
d10r 6y ago
As long as we stick to the concept of nation, we likely have to live with such issues. This is how group identity works, sometimes to your advantage, sometimes to your disadvantage.

Robotbeat 6y ago

I assign non-negligible probability to each of them. I don't know. But I hate the stupid racism and hate around it. COVID-19 attacked every country. With the exception of, like, New Zealand (but it affected them as well... had to shut down their borders, etc). These viruses are a threat to all humanity. I just want us to fight them better and help everyone. I think it's super important that we both simultaneously hold China accountable (rhetorically, in the social sphere at very least) for aggressive expansionary actions (i.e. vs Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines) and human rights abuses (Uighur, etc)... ...while simultaneously trying to help everyone do better, including the Chinese, to face common threats (like novel viruses, climate change, etc). And we must not start up a new Cold War with all its proxy conflicts, death, and unnecessary economic suffering and threat of annihilation.

krustyburger 6y ago
Unfortunately, avoiding a new Cold War is something that would take equal effort from both sides. If just one side is eager to wage such a battle, it will happen unless the other side acquiesces at every turn.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Maybe. But annihilating isn’t really in anyone’s interests.
  - int_19h 6y ago
    Actually annihilating, no. But a Cold War isn't that - it's a constant threat of such. Which can be very useful to manipulate public opinion - and there are plenty of sociopaths in politics who deem the risks worth the reward.
spondyl 6y ago
> But I hate the stupid racism and hate around it. COVID-19 attacked every country. With the exception of, like, New Zealand (but it affected them as well... had to shut down their borders, etc). As someone who lives in New Zealand, we were still "attacked" by covid all the same. The only difference arguably is the coordinated response from our government compared to others. Some of that is presumably culture too (we don't have a document held to a pseudo-religious standard ie the constitution for example) although being too laid back can have its consequences too if emergency health laws were to be abused in order to infringe on personal freedoms for example

tripletao 6y ago

If SARS-CoV-2 emerged due to the WIV's research activities, then it was potentially with the knowledge and funding of the American government, via the EcoHealth Alliance. Racism is always stupid, but in this case it's particularly so. This absolutely shouldn't be China vs. USA, and it's deeply unfortunate that the Trump administration's early, characteristically unsupported rhetoric made it so. The WIV's safety was probably below American standards, but probably closer than a wet market is to American agricultural standards. So it's ridiculous to think a lab vs. natural origin makes it "more China's fault". If the CCP is currently covering up a lab accident, then they're probably quite unhappy that they've been "forced" to do so, and wishing in retrospect they'd instead decided a year ago to publicly blame the rogue, American-funded researcher. Long before the pandemic, this was an obscure academic debate, between virologists who wanted to perform certain risky experiments and others who thought they presented an unacceptable risk: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097416/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097416/ With the possibility (absolutely not proven; but not disproven either) that such an experiment has just killed 2.9M people, that debate takes on a terrible new significance.

fighterpilot 6y ago
Anti-Chinese racism is stupid and toxic, yes, but you're missing the point. People here generally aren't blaming China because that's where COVID-19 originated. That would be stupid. No, they're blaming the CCP for covering it up in the early days, which allowed it to spread and become the global pandemic which it became. Big difference. It's not China's fault that COVID originated there (lab leak or otherwise). It is their fault for covering up the scale of the problem and thereby helping it spread.
- tripletao 6y ago
  The article is about the earliest origins of SARS-CoV-2, whether that arose from the activities of the WIV or naturally. My comment is as well. Once the pandemic emerged, the CCP's response was certainly terrible in many well-known ways (e.g., their attempt to suppress Yan Limeng's initial alarm, and the disappearance of multiple citizen journalists from Wuhan), though it's impossible to know whether a better response could have suppressed its worldwide spread. That's a separate question from those earliest origins, though.