Premium 172: Playing Fast and Loose with Virology

Lol this bitch using the new York times as a reputable source. You know, the people who have run propaganda for Ukraine, whitewashing Nazis and more famously, lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction

William

This article has a fucking paywall, no wonder people don’t read as much

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-risky-virus-research-in-wuhan 😗😗😗

Trillbilly Worker's Party

yall are awesome and i for one appreciate some REAL TALK outside of the drama msm noise. thank you for your courage✊

emmag

⎛⎝(⌒ⱅ⌒ )⎠⎞

💅🏼💅🏼💅🏼

Trillbilly Worker's Party

I know this is late but the line about bats hibernating in the winter sent me down a rabbit hole - the "intermediate horseshoe bat" seems to be a likely culprit for zoonotic origin so I tried to figure out if they hibernate. Surprisingly, not much (English language at least) info on them but I did find a paper (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10694-019-00888-8) where the authors stated "There was a considerable difference in species-specific abundances between seasons. R. affinis [...] had many more individuals in summer than in winter (24 000 vs. 14 000)". Checkmate Tom!

I think it is entirely possible but also very unlikely especially when the occams razor is a zoonotic origin, and I agree that the origin ultimately doesn’t matter. Our world is indeed full of coincidences.

Fellow Worker

Okay now be honest for two seconds—nobody said this was “grown in a lab.” I don’t believe that and have never believed that. Only that it’s worth interrogating the question. And whether you want to acknowledge it or not, there’s respected scientists on both sides of the question—far from a settled deal. And ultimately it doesn’t fucking matter and I’m tired of talking about it.

Trillbilly Worker's Party

iT cOuLd OnLy bE gRoWn iN a LaB https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/science/bat-coronaviruses-lab-leak.html

Fellow Worker

"The Darpa proposal, leaked to the pandemic origins analysis group Drastic, show the team had planned to take sequences from naturally occurring coronaviruses and use them to create a brand new sequence that was an average of all the strains.... Although, the grant proposal was rejected"

Aaron H

TLDR happy for everyone or sorry this happened to yall whichever fits here

Lmfao get em tom

Julian Berman

ngl, i'd still listen. though it does raise the question, who IS the InfoWars of our ideological persuasion? Does SJ get that honor? Knowledge Fight doesn't count

¶

Y'all really made me navigate this pile of shit app just so i could see Tom post an article with the spongebob type-casing smh I demand compensation for this labor

Go off, king.

ben shull

never doubted your bat expertise

j_kirb

GETTEM TOM

Andrew Owens

😂😂🤣🤣🤣

Terra 💕🌎💕

We got Tom so mad he’s gone full Boomer on us

Fellow Worker

"Anonymous source confirms US Foreign Policy position"

G W

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/10/05/wuhan-us-scientists-planned-create-new-coronaviruses-funding/ YoU gUyS aRe TuRniNg inTo ThE LeFtiSt iNfO wArS

Trillbilly Worker's Party

Funny and fun episode, thanks

Cole Heideman

Fuck the haters. Lab leak ftw Where’s my shirt. Lol Peace

The talk about the lack of "faith" on the left is interesting and hits close to a point we all ought to think about. The success of any revolutionary movement comes down to whether you've got enough people who are ready to die for the cause. It's easy to see how people living in say pre-revolutionary Haiti/Russia/Cuba could be enthralled by a movement promising them something better, and there's a certain amount of immediate desperation and long-lived immiseration that tends to lead to such a point. Can you think of any such movement in the here and now? Best I can come up with are the various overlapping Indigenous and environmental struggles ongoing at the moment, but outside of a few wins in places like Bolivia most are still struggling to grow from underneath whichever boot is currently pressing downward. I guess my point is that there are different kinds of "faith" and we ought not to confuse the passive/intellectual sort with the active/inspiring variety.

Richard L

Death Panel did an episode on Lab Leak in the early summer. Most of the efforts to see where it came from is a means to provide cover for the ruling class who failed spectacularly to prevent the spread and protect the people.

Alexander Bassett