Governments pressuring private companies and keeping lists of people they want censored and deplatformed based on what they say should offend everyone. That is fundamentally anti-free speech. It doesn’t matter what it’s about. Preserving this is worth more than silencing these 12 people.
They didn't set up a clinic and stick a "Colored folks only" sign out front.
At the county or state level, they looked at the data and identified that Black and Latino populations were not being vaccinated at the same rate as white populations, and also recognized that the pandemic has disproportionately affected those same populations.
So they committed resources to establish more clinics in areas with high concentrations of the given populations and may have waived certain documentation requirements that are historically more challenging for them to acquire.
The result being that people of means, predominantly white people, took time off of work and travelled long distances to take advantage of the situation. Taking the place of a non-zero number of residents that were the intended recipients.
You did?!? You still have poor neighbourhoods populated predominantly by black and latino people, and the “wealthy people from other zip codes” (there, satisfied?) who swoop in to take advantage of the vaccines intended for these neighbourhoods are still predominantly white... So how, exactly, can you claim to have “got rid of segregation”?
Haha. No. It’s because of politics and TDS. People were taught that this was a Trump theory. That’s all the media needs to say to ensure that nobody will take it seriously and nobody will tolerate anyone else who takes it seriously.
It's so bizarre to me to view him in this way. "Trump thinks something; therefore I must be against it".
I understand not taking his word for anything. But it's such an important issue. To just dismiss it and not try to investigate it, even at the highest levels of our government and public health bureaucracies, strikes me as negligent at best.
> To just dismiss it and not try to investigate it, even at the highest levels of our government and public health bureaucracies, strikes me as negligent at best.
No, it is not. Judge ideas on their own merits please.
These same people ridicule the Space Force, for example, despite it being a reorganization of US Space Command that had bipartisan approval years before Trump even ran for office.
Here I have a little bit of experience. When a person has shown themselves to be a pathological liar, you can't judge their ideas on their own merits because the cost of judging far outweighs the cost of producing garbage ideas. That is why attention is so valuable, there are plenty of people out there who do not make it their trade to espouse nonsense.
This is a good point in general but I don’t think it actually applies here. I don’t know why people keep acting like taking this seriously required believing a word of anything out of Trumps mouth. That isn’t how it went.
Some folks who never supported Trump had their own reasons to examine this. They talked about it, and everyone assumed they got the idea from Trump, and therefore not only did they deserve no attention, but they also deserve no respect, and outright career sabotage by folks like Peter Daszak and to a lesser extent, Anthony Fauci. Many had to work on this in secret because the hyper partisans wouldn’t listen to them, and instead tried to attack them just for talking about it. Take a look at Yuri Deigin and Alina Chan on twitter and go back in their timelines to see how long they have been digging into this.
My hope is not that anyone acknowledges that Trump was correct, although I would view it as a sign of integrity if they did. But whether he was or wasn’t, and whether he got lucky or actually knew something, I don’t care. The real issue comes not from Trump, but their own prejudice, which many are still trying to make excuses for, made them so blind to what, in hindsight, is actually extremely obvious as the most likely explanation. Then they took it further and let their blind hate for Trump also caused them to hate half of their fellow citizens, and they extended that hate to anyone who they even perceived as having thoughts tangentially related to something Trump said.
I could easily come up with probably 5 more examples of something very similar that happened in his orbit that people who only follow left leaning mainstream news have no idea about, or that were spun into complete anti-trump lies by the media and are still believed by people today.
The media are absolutely full of shit. All of them. Real journalism died, hyper partisan “woke” activists have been graduating and taking writing jobs, groupthink and cult-like behavior has amplified, and the executives loved the sky high ratings and revenue they got for being anti-trump. Cancel culture further reinforced this culty groupthink and forced moderate voices out. Hell, people actually try to say Glenn Greenwald went right-wing crazy. Glenn Greenwald! They don’t even realize that it wasn’t him who changed, it was them.
It’s pervasive in tech. People are actually pro-censorship now. And they have convinced themselves that they are the good guys. It’s hard to believe how far we have fallen from rationality in such a short time.
That doesn't mean it cannot be true. It does mean that after 3 years and several thousand fully documented outright lies, the presumption of truth was no longer being granted.
Except he was proven right yet again that social media and old media orgs will censor others and lie to the public when it fits their political agenda.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/ideological battle. That's against the HN guidelines because it destroys the intended purpose of the site—and for that reason, we ban accounts that do it, regardless of which politics/ideology they're battling for.
Crossing into personal attack is also egregious and not allowed here.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Your "politics" are antagonism and scapegoating of The Other. If you were actually conservative, you should be appalled and distancing yourself as much as possible from the MAGA cult.
Antagonism and scapegoating of The Other was, and is, currently the playbook of the democrats at the moment. They don’t have a monopoly on it, but they’re way more guilty of this. It just doesn’t seem like it, because you haven’t heard the other side of the story, and haven’t realized how much has been a total lie from the left. Everyone believes it all, uncritically, for the same reason they dismissed the lab leak.
Folks reflecting on this and saying, what else did we have completely wrong are asking the right question. Folks who think this was a one off, well, it absolutely wasn’t.
I doubt there is even a single “MAGA” person on HN, but you folks like to throw that epithet around to shut down dialog. It’s shameful.
And nobody needs to distance themselves from anyone. If you make a false association, that’s your fault, not theirs. Judge them on what they actually do and say, not on what you (incorrectly) assume they might think.
> Antagonism and scapegoating of The Other was, and is, currently the playbook of the democrats at the moment. They don’t have a monopoly on it, but they’re way more guilty of this. It just doesn’t seem like it, because you haven’t heard the other side of the story, and haven’t realized how much has been a total lie from the left.
I go out of my way to try to understand what conservative punditry has to say on a given subject.
You might be conflating the terminally online left with the much larger and more diverse Democrat party as a whole. Contrast with the GOP, whom with very few exceptions has fully signed on with Trumpism & embraced the sort of ignorant, economically illiterate and frankly insane beliefs that entails. Maybe it's survivorship bias, because anyone with a principled conservative bone in their body has already distanced themselves from the GOP over the last 4 years.
There are absolutely "MAGA" people on HN, in this case salivating over the opportunity to claim Trump was right about something, anything at all(as though it vindicates them or proves something in general, let alone in this case).
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/ideological battle. That's against the HN guidelines because it destroys the intended purpose of the site—and for that reason, we ban accounts that do it, regardless of which politics/ideology they're battling for. We already asked you not to do this once, and as far as I can tell you've done nothing but flamewar ever since. Not cool.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/ideological battle. That's against the HN guidelines because it destroys the intended purpose of the site—and for that reason, we ban accounts that do it, regardless of which politics/ideology they're battling for. We've asked you not to do this many times and you've ignored our requests. Not cool.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Right - instead of trying to debate the veracity of the argument, it was immediately cast as a political battle, and being on the same side as Trump in most urban and most media circles was asking to be ostracized. It’s absolutely poisonous.
How as anybody going to "debate the veracity of the argument"? What information was anybody going to use?
Even so, in the intervening period, even when Trump was still president, several US agency reports concluded that the virus likely did not originate from a lab, and one assumes that they had more information than anybody else.
Do you believe in anything else considered a "conspiracy theory" by the scientific or academic community? This is roughly the level of reasoning people use when arguing that 9/11 was an inside job.
Not really. I believe Armstrong walked on the moon, Oswald shot Kennedy and 911 was a bunch of mostly Saudis flying planes into buildings. I question the attribution of hacks to Russia that often happens, not because I trust Russia or anything but because I'm capable of pulling off some of those attacks myself and I can do so without leaving evidence of what nation I'm in. I assume a team of elite Russian hackers would be more capable than me and could do the same.
Why did you say “anything else”? This isn’t a conspiracy theory. They only detail that is even in question is whether or not one of their samples leaked. Nothing else about what that lab is, or what that lab does, is even in question. They go 1000 miles away to get bats and bat poop and bring it to the WIV to study bat coronaviruses and they modify them to be more transmissible. This is basic virology in 2021 and they have been proudly telling the world that they do this for years. None of that is speculation.
The question of whether one of their viruses leaked out again (yes, again!) that was a bat coronavirus found right by the bat coronavirus lab, or whether it was a remarkable cascade of coincidences that still has no viable complete hypothesis (the “modified” virus doesn’t infect bats anymore), is not one of “conspiracy”.
> Except he was proven right yet again that social media and old media orgs will censor others and lie to the public when it fits their political agenda.
And this differs from "new media" how? You don't like what certain social media and "old media orgs" did? Fine, no problem. There's no media on the planet that doesn't do this to some extent, least of all contemporary conservative US media outlets.
Whether you consider what was done to Trump and others regarding their posts/speeches about COVID and cures for it as censorship depends a lot on how you see the world. Your mileage may vary (because mine certainly does).
I keep seeing this and it just doesn’t make sense. What is more likely, a global conspiracy theory amongst all the tech giants who normally try to outcompete each other into the ground as quickly and with as much humiliation as possible and the Federal government, which they try to evade and subvert at every opportunity?
Or the idea that when COVID first hit it was the conspiracy theorists screaming the loudest about the lab leak origin and given the sudden interest of the US in xenophobia and specifically the anti-Chinese sentiment(hint: it’s not that sudden), it would have potentially resulted in violence against Asian people. And at the same time the crossover theory was pretty much as likely if not more based on what we knew then. Now that more info has been gathered everyone is doing an about-face on covering this issue since it’s become a serious conversation and not a crackpot fringe theory shared with the intent to spread hate.
Maybe what had happened was that initially we knew little and everyone was a bit panicked. Then the crackpots started spreading FUD via the most convenient COVID origin theory to their message. The old media mostly ignored this, dismissing it swiftly without giving it more airtime. Social media was too busy with conspiracy theorist and right wing activists spreading the lab leak theory so they viewed it as false (if 99% of the time what a person says is a lie, why would this particular thing be true?). Then articles like these revived that theory with new information. Most people took in the information as just “hey new data” and left it at that. A few people who were spreading the conspiracy theory version of this story felt vindicated while simultaneously upset because their low quality memes were not really allowed while new the WSJ, the NYT, and Vanity Faire is getting front page treatment because of course excellent writing is more compelling than some guy on YouTube angrily vaping in his mother’s basement.
Nothing was revived with any new information. The Venn diagram that includes the circle of people who were following and investigating this, and the circle of conspiracy theorist Trump supporters, did not ever overlap.
One of these circles was about some bill gates funded bioweapon to implant 5G or some nonsense which they suspected was being done in WIV.
The other was scientists who have known about the work at WIV for years, not based on suspicion, but based on the papers they kept releasing, media interviews, sequencing the genome, and doing science.
But you all TDS’d so hard that you wrote the latter off as the former, and the media went along with it.
It isn’t even a conspiracy theory. It had nothing to do with collusion by tech giants. Their hyper partisan employees just fell into the same TDS trap and decided “lab = conspiracy misinformation, no ifs ands or buts” and started purging people talking about it.
The Vanity Fair article is actually quite poorly researched and written, and misattributes much of the source and timeline, but at least people are snapping out of their partisan blindness on this issue now.
No. It was not a Trump theory. It was commonly believed among Chinese political dissidents. Any Chinese people who don't believe the CCP have speculated this long before Trump even had any thought on this. Please stop relating everything to Trump.
I mean, fair enough right? Figuring out if it started in a lab has zero effect on the mortality rate while Trump making up new lies every day for months about how it's just about to just go away anyway led people to their deaths, plenty of whom probably weren't his followers.
Except it never seemed more credible. People were assigned their opinion that it was more credible, and accepted it uncritically. It was frankly ridiculous if you had the information about the WIV that was being discussed wherever Peter Daszak wasn’t trying to cover his own ass and ruin others careers.
This is a weak and frankly shameful rationalization. Just take the L. People who dismissed this fucked up. People who were jerks about it fucked up even more. Trump Derangement Syndrome is your fault, not Trumps. None of the people who were looking into this or following it were getting their information from Trump. Most of the detractors just assumed they were.
I mean the only person in my life expressing an interest in this was my mom and she got it from the radio program coast to coast. Which is almost entirely crackpot conspiracy UFO bullshit. Still. I didn't tell her it couldn't have come from the lab. I said there isn't really enough evidence to conclude that. I think that was the mainstream opinion. Not that it couldn't have come from the lab, but that there wasn't enough evidence to support that conclusion. It's normal that something like this can take years to sort out especially when the authoritarian government controlling the area would prefer not to have that particular conclusion.
Shutting them up doesn't appear to have been particularly successful. The lab leak theory has continued to be discussed in all kinds of media and many parts of the culture over the last year.
Several media organizations (washington post, buzzfeed) submitted FOIA requests for the emails, and as per federal law, they were released. No leak, normal federal government policy process, driven by mainstream-y media outlets AFAICT.
Twitter has not banned discussion of the theory. Here's a thread from May 27th (Nate Silver) discussing it in some detail:
They did have policies related to the lab leak theory, but it seems like a mischaracterization to say that the banned discussion of it.
The only person I can find who has lost their account over related matters is a NY Times reporter who closed her own account after making some fairly dumb remarks about the theory.
>Shutting them up doesn't appear to have been particularly successful.
The goal posts will move on this, I guarantee it. Suddenly institutional media will claim they've been working on this story the entire time, and all of their pronouncements cajoling people into not thinking about this explanation will be completely memory-holed. I'm not being hostile to you, I'm expressing frustration here because this really does call into question nearly all of the reporting on the broader Pandemic response when we're just fully admitting here that they did this "because Trump". What other stories did they fuck up on "because Trump"?
Go back and look at the reporting on every American war of the last 70 years. You will see the same pattern, and yet Trump had nothing do with any of them.
Go back and look at the reporting on every major environmental disaster of the last 70 years, from DDT to oil tanker spills to lead in gasoline to anthropogenic climate change: same pattern. Trump had nothing do with any of them either.
Hint: the media is pro-status quo. On every story, there are a few outliers who provide contrarian accounts, while the majority take a don't rock the boat (much) approach. Eventually, evidence accumulates, the culture shifts, the media changes direction.
Up thread you are literally arguing[1] that Trump is the "boy who cried wolf" and that his "lies" cost us proper reporting on this. I have no idea what past reporting on wars and environmental disasters have to do with the media making an explicitly political choice about how to cover the possible origins of the pandemic.
It’s easy to spot people who know less than nothing about the situation when this word shows up. Israel is literally not an apartheid state. “Palestine” is literally an apartheid state. This is a demonstration of supreme ignorance.
