Reply to this post and keep the convo going, or start one of your own!
I just noticed this watching the replay live, and the Tucker Carlson story is littered with commercials. How much money do you suppose that cost to do? I donât think that kind of marketing helps the ads, or deter people from watching.
But itâs funny as F. Tucker is mad, I mean look at the tick marks, thatâs crazy! That has to be 5 digits per commercial, there must be a dozen. Swansonâs working overtime, I hope theyâre getting overtime, but I doubt it.
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Just watched a clip of nbc news now from a couple days ago and it mentioned Israel briefly, and I want to venture this is what triggered Ana, lumping every casualty into one number, âexchanging missile fireâ, and very clever to leave Iron Dome out for a different piece, but also very brazen to show the Iron Dome so soon after, wasnât that yesterday?
Back to back coverage, one depicting a mutual clash, the other Israel defending themselves with superior firepower⌠superior to even that of the United States, I mean holy geez, Iron Dome?! Our wall is like that swimming suit you absolutely didnât want to wear but your parents made you wear for your friendâs birthday party, and now weâre at the party and itâs even worse than you thought
Why did we have to build a wall? An actual wall? It wasnât even engineered, a piece is about to fall off into the gulf from erosion, so you know, not only do we have to wear this stupid swimming suit, the cheap material rips right down the back, and now Americaâs childhood is scarred for life.
Right? Real bad, oh I remember what those swimming suits are called, speedos.
What a nightmare.
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Missed most of the show because I was catching up on it, got to the lab leak story, and was then fuming mad at the coverage. This became way too long for a comment, so Iâm posting it here. TL;DR is that the coverage was irresponsible, very badly informed, and bolsters a narrative that has been killing our Asian American brothers and sisters. TYT really should get a science advisor of some sort one of these days.
The issue is not just that coverage got the story wrong, but that the coverage itself was highly problematic. TYT is conflating two things that, and this is extremely dangerous: since December of 2019 âlab leakâ meant it was a human engineered virus, but that changed more recently to instead mean âthe Wuhan lab had a sample, whether they knew what they had or not, a researcher was infected and unknowingly spread it asymptomaticallyâ.
The first case â human engineered â is NOT POSSIBLE. This is settled and has been for about a year now. If it was man-made the DNA would show signs of how we cut it up and spliced it back together. No researcher from any country has found any evidence of this, and all agree it arose naturally. This âhypothesisâ is geared for a new cold war (for the politicians) or a new hot war (for the military; cf Daniel Ellsbergâs recent Pentagon Paperâs follow up, for instance), and is embedded in a history of sinophobia that has been fueling anti-Asian hate crimes. Itâs dangerous malpractice for TYT to be implying this âhypothesisâ has any credence.
Is the second case â accidental exposure of a researcher who then transmits it â possible? Improbably yes, and this has always been the case. There is no evidence for this case, and no new evidence has emerged. All the evidence we still have points to zoonotic transfer from a wild animal to an unfortunate person who came into contact with said animal. Is this evidence definitive? No. We donât know either for sure, but the evidence currently â and only â suggests wild zoonotic transfer. Saying âWhat ifâ and acting as though new information is available is childish, at best, and serves a nasty and dangerous imperialist agenda, at worst. This is why (link below) a lot of scientists are upset about colleagues breathing life into this gossamer claim. And no, just because there is something in any journal, doesnât mean there is now evidence: that is the beginning of understanding if evidence exists, not its conclusion. Not to mention the Lancet isnât exactly a bastion of reputability. They still have shit smeared all over their face from when they published Andrew âFuckingâ Wakefieldâs obviously fraudulent study that said vaccines cause autism (yes, it was obvious; whomever reviewed that study should have lost their job over okaying that article).
But what about, as Cenk said, that itâs an 'incredible coincidence that there is a lab right next to where a pandemic-causing virus emerged? Well, riddle me this, why do marine biologists love having institutions right next to bodies of water?!? How about geologists being in places that are geologically interesting? Because they want to study that aspect of nature; itâs their job! If this was an institute in the Gobi desert or up in the Tibetan Himalayas and a pandemic emerged from there, THAT would be suspicious. We donât put virology institutes there because there arenât a lot of human-animal interactions to cause new viruses to emerge. China has a region where that does happen, so of course itâs in everyoneâs interest (especially the scientists) to put an institution in Wuhan near this region. Doing so is only suspicious if Florida has a plot to foment harm through shark bites because, after all, theyâre where the sharks are and have a lot more shark bites than Montana!
When is TYT going to get a science advisor? To date, with Jonâs specific coverage of climate change the one exception, I can not remember a single science story that TYT has covered in a legitimate way, and members who are scientists have been complaining about this for years. Itâs not like you need to pay someone, either, most scientists are more than happy to explain their research (and itâs good practice to talk to people not involved, fyi). Plus, you have a number of scientists in your audience that can help weigh in and provide guidance for your coverage. Instead you pull a clip from Fox News? The only part of that clip that is relevant is the fact a scientist was willing â seemingly happily â to go on to that show. I donât know about how journalist professors view Fox News, but itâs one that I would never allow a student to cite in my physics classes.
Scientists are upset by the few (including non-expert scientists) fueling this at the expense of attacks on Asian Americans, including their colleagues:
- âDivisive COVID âlab leakâ debate prompts dire warnings from researchersâ, Nature, May 27, 2021. /articles/d41586-021-01383-3
The evidence about the âlab leakâ
- âThe COVID lab-leak hypothesis: what scientists do and donât knowâ, Nature, June 8, 2021. /articles/d41586-021-01529-3
I just made an account coming from the lab leak video. I was planning on starting a thread about it but you beat me to it and did a great job too. I was not gonna make a post as long or as elegant as yours. I would like to add that this topic really shows how it is very hard to get people on the same page about anything, especially scientific topics even at their most basic.
If you havent read the book Spillover by David Quammen, read it it is fantastic. It was written in 2012 but has chapters about different viruses. I think you would enjoy it since it touches on what scientists know and donât know about viruses and where they come from. The Ebola chapter in particular is great because we dont know where exactly it comes from. Scientists essentially only know the middle and end of the Ebola story but not the beginning.
I have a hypothesis that is grounded in research to explain why COVID vaccines are more effective than flu vaccines. Influenza viruses spillover between animals and humans all the time and it is all kinds of animals, it creates a huge diversity of variants already. SARS COV2 and viruses that are almost identical to it have only been found in bats. This means that animal to human spillover happens way less than in the flu. This lack of regular spillover created a monoculture essentially of SARS COV2. Even though the news puts out stories about new SARS COV2 variants and yes there are differences for sure, I am still not worried about them too much compared to influenza variants. It is precisely because every SARS COV2 variant comes from this monoculture, so even though mutations do happen, less of them happen compared to influenza. Because of this, I think that is why the COVID vaccines are way more effective than we expected them to be.
Ill end on this note, we need to forget about exploring who and when patient zero happened and instead focus our energy on researching animal reservoirs and spillovers. The hunt for the original spillover event is stupid because scientists already have found SARS COV viruses that are pretty much identical to COV2 in the blood and stool of bats they catch. We need to talk more openly about animal spillover since people forget that viruses have to come from somewhere in nature. It drives me nuts that people think that science is magic just because they dont understand it. Scientists are getting burned at the stake still, metaphorically rather than literally.
Fin
lols good luck out there matey!
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TYT does not support any claims of COVID-19 origination.
In fact, whenever we bring up claims for such things we absolutely include every nuance of skepticism and critique.
COVID numbers is another example, though we donât sound trumpets every single time, we know the under reporting is caused by politicians trying to hide the gravity of their terrible choices.
COVID coming from a Wuhan lab isnât the believable story, weâve already covered the investigations that do support the idea that COVID evolved from a wet market.
And before we start pointing fingers at cultural practices, we always make it known that the USA is certainly no arbiter for healthy practices.
We think everything is hunki Dori because everything is wrapped up neatly in plastic for your consumption.
Meat disassembly has buckets placed under the machines so you can urinate and not lose your place on the line.
Labor efficiency means forgoing the need to wash your hands.
Theyâre wearing gloves after all.
No one believes the lab accusations anymore than wet markets or bats.
Because the USA STILL questions the WHO, even though the USA was part of itâs conception, and have held a seat at the head of the table ever since.
Trump completely neglected those duties as President, and now we want to blame China, even though WE are the ones that are always self asserting ourselves as Chinaâs watchdog, and that the USA is always first when it comes to staving off the âevils of communismâ.
We demonize socialism as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk play commie party with the American Peopleâs taxes.
While we demonize any social spending for ourselves, blocking ourselves from a comfortable life.
What program are you watching?
That doesnât sound like TYT to me.