GBear4Life said:
blungld said:
I'm strangely disappointed. I thought you would show yourself to either communicate differently after my post and acknowledge the good points and those you disagree with in approachable, human terms, or you would at least have retorted with some sophistication even if you just went full defensive.
Nope. You just did exactly what my post described. Black and white, no listening, programmed response , and a whole lot of projection. You can't see it. You don't get it. You don't want to get it. So fine. Just do what you do and I guess feel like you are right and that is all that matters?
Your diatribe wasn't sophisticated at all. I don't know why you felt entitled to a response at all. Your post amounted to apologizing for SJWs by appealing to vague, BS moralizing about how one ideology cares about people and fairness and another ideology doesn't. Framing a topic with moralizing language that presupposes one side (your side -- shocking) stands on the moral high ground, and that everything to others (me) is "black and white". Why? Just because.
Victor Davis Hanson (I know, I know,he is no Bill Maher)From the outset, the world noted the close proximity of a P4-level virology lab in the hills near Wuhan. Its staff was known to have studied coronaviruses similar to SARS-CoV-2.
Most in the West knew from the prior 2002-2003 SARS epidemic that the Chinese government had habitually covered up the origins and transmission of that virus.
So naturally, speculation immediately focused on the role of the nearby lab, even as the Chinese blanketed the global media with the official explanations of a natural viral birth amid the wet markets of Wuhan. We were variously told that pangolins, bats, and snakes were the petri dish culprits for the global epidemic. They may be, but then, again, the recombinant viruses from them might have escaped not from a butcher's hook but a scientist's vial.
Chinese government propagandists blasted any doubt of their narrative as illiberal. Its methodology was often embraced as useful by the American media. If one discussed the possibility of some role of the lab in global catastrophe, the question was almost deliberately obfuscated and recalibrated as a "conspiracy theory" accusation (the Chinese were adept in using such a loaded American expression) that the lab had made a bioweapon or that a natural virus had been let loose intentionally.
But few mainstream observers ever floated such theories. Usually, they instead questioned the safety practices of the laba concern echoed by U.S. embassy officials in Chinaand wanted assurances from China about its abilities to prevent accidental releases of a coronavirus under study.
Instead, they were stonewalled. Stories spread of data destroyed. Researchers disappeared. Official dates surrounding the origins and transmission of the virus were altered constantly.
Yet the more China in Orwellian fashion tried to modulate its own prior communications about the lab, the more American media also joined its chorus of demeaning legitimate inquiries, and the more it became clear that China was terrified of any scrutiny directed toward the top-secret facility.
After all, on January 23, in fear of the growing contagion, China forbade travel in and out of Wuhan, but not to European and American airports that, for a while, kept such routes open. When they finally closed, Americans were blasted by the Chinese (and Joe Biden) as racists for doing what Beijing had done earlier. Only the U.S. media would accept that the Chinese were not racists for allowing their own citizens, at a time of contagion, to travel abroad to the U.S. in a manner they could not fly freely at homebut yet the Americans were dubbed bigoted for allowing them to continue to do so as well for a critical week.
In contrast, far less vituperation met a series of contradictory, constantly changing, and often downright illogical declarations emanating from the best and brightest at the World Health Organization, the CDC, the FDA, NIH, and from the Surgeon General.
We were at different times told that the virus was not transmissible from human to human. Travel bans were expressions of illiberal panic not reflections of ancient scientific quarantine protocols.
The FDA's monopoly over test kits was supposedly the best and most rapid way to ensure that millions got into the hands of doctors and hospitals.
