The West and Russia/China are already at war. You don’t win a war by taking the high road. You win a war by destroying your enemies.
Yes, we know. 
Guy
And yet again, @afterspivak waves his hands vaguely at some unspecified comment made by somebody else, asserts that this represents a devastating takedown, rolls his eyes, and wanders off into the sunset with his intellectual superiority confirmed.
Why can’t you just answer the question? Why did you continue to trust people who not only lied in the same manner that the CCP lied, but continued to lie about all sorts of other things? If you managed to spot (or guess at) the first lie, why weren’t you on the lookout for others?
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I’m not sure if you’re being facetious or if you actually think this represents a valid argument. What does the nature of the Chinese or Russian government have to do with the behaviour of the US government?
Western governments kept pace with China almost from the outset of “the pandemic”. They implemented all the same policies, and in unguarded moments explicitly revealed that they were looking to China for inspiration. Neil Ferguson was chuffed to bits to find out that Western governments were, in fact, completely uncontrained by considerations of legality or human rights. Taiwan - and I bet plenty of other countries - was buggering around with various COVID-related strains in at least one biolab (Nangang, IIRC). Given Taiwan’s attitude to health-and-safety, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Taiwan’s vaccine-evading “outbreak” in 2021 was a consequence of a leak from the Nangang lab.
So why accuse China of this and that while simultaneously claiming that The West were blameless? The thing is this: China doesn’t even pretend to be “democratic”. Chinese governance is based on the hallowed legal principle of praecipio ita esse, while the West purports to be better than that. Whatever China might be - and I think none of us would put it high on a list of desirable places to live - at least they’re not hypocrites.
They all lied about the synthetic nature of SARS-CoV-2. They lied about NIH involvement. And they just kept on lying. They instituted laws and extrajudicial arrangements to ensure they could not be contradicted. I can think of no official pronouncement that (with the absolute clarity of hindsight) was actually true, and I bet you can’t either.
There was one egregious instance of the CECC saying something which was so obviously untrue that I swear they were just challenging somebody to say “now wait a minute”, so that they could drag them into court and ruin them. Simply because they knew they could.
Incidentally: I think there’s an important distinction to be made between the claim of a ‘lab leak’ and ‘a synthetic virus’. The latter claim is subject to proof or disproof by examining the virus itself, and I think it’s been shown with a high degree of confidence that SARS-CoV-2 is synthetic. A ‘lab leak’ is much harder to prove or disprove because it involves human intent. How exactly would you determine whether this ‘leak’ was intentional or a mistake?
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Good grief man, can we just stop with the destroying? Haven’t we destroyed enough already? When will you be satisfied? Do you really think turning China or Russia into a glass parking lot would constitute “winning”?
Here’s a little primer on old-fashioned behavioral science. If you put a rat in a cage and give it random electric shocks, it will eventually just curl up in a corner and accept its fate. This state is “learned helplessness”. However, if you then introduce another rat the first rat will attack the second rat, on the basis that something must be causing the electric shocks and this stranger seems as good a target for its ire as anything else. The rat, understandably enough, cannot grasp that it is in the middle of a horrible experiment being run by a more intelligent being.
See any parallels here?
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We have gone over this all-or-nothing approach countless times.
No doubt you have forgotten those moments too.
Now please excuse me.
Guy
The threat of nuclear war with China has existed for decades. A simple search can show history of the constant threat that China has posed to the US and the world. China’s nuclear arsenal achieved a range milestone in the late 90’s prompting alarm in the U.S. government and a global scramble to upgrade missile defense shields across the Pacific and Europe, as well as early warning systems.
And the issue is two-fold, as China is also helping to arm its proxies. Take for example the Pakistan nuclear missile test in 1998 — China was responsible for helping Pakistan develop the technology that increased Pakistans ability to strike deep into Indian territory. God knows what else China has done for North Korea, Iran, and other proxies.
And, it’s only gotten worse. Even without global Covid catastrophe, the threat is there — add Covid, and the potential only increases.
In 2021 China demonstrated that they can orbit the earth and then precisely strike a target with hypersonic missile. They have also helped North Korea and Russia to create “Container Launchers” which could be placed on Container Ships or Freight Trains - North Korea demonstrated one of these launches around the same time. A scary prospect for potential Trojan Horse when China regularly blankets coastlines with their ships in everyday trade.
Hence it was absolutely critical to deny and “debunk” any possibility that the virus came from a Chinese Biolab. The US had to ensure there was an “off ramp” for tensions, it had to deescalate in any way possible.
I have no idea what you’re talking about here. There is no “all or nothing” claim being made. All I’m suggesting is that your sudden refusal to contemplate any further lies following the first one is odd, to say the least.
You seem to be suggesting that the US had to go full headless-chicken mode in order to avert nuclear war. I’m no diplomat, but can you see any flaw in the following message to the public:
“It appears that the novel disease currently circulating may be caused by an engineered virus. We have no definite proof of the country of origin, or of deliberate intent. It may indeed be accidental. We would like to reassure everyone that it does not appear to be a lethally-dangerous pathogen. Some of you may get sick, but in all likelihood you will come to no harm, and we are ensuring that the best medical care is on standby should you require it. We shall not retaliate; no good can come from it. America will survive.”
In other words, they could have done what the Great Barrington Declaration called for. This would have run effective cover for the NIH, too: it would have all blown over in a few months, nobody would have even bothered investigating, and it would have been eventually written off as just one of those unfortunate things. It appeared initially that this was, in fact, the official line … and then suddenly it wasn’t.
What on earth was the point in artificially inflating a Cheems disease into Godzilla? Why were all the initial decisions apparently aimed at increasing the corpse count? Why did every country follow the same path? This seems to be completely at odds with your hypothesis, since the eventual outcome would be public animosity directed at China and demand for retribution (see @Gain’s post above). Remember Asian people getting attacked in the streets?
Not just the same way. They lied for and with the CCP. The people who are responsible for proventing a pandemic spread lies and played politics in favor of China that contributed to the spread of the virus.
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Exactly.
We don’t know if the world did retaliate though.
It’s possible the variants were retaliatory — strategic to “flood the zone” with a version of Covid that was less harmful that could squeeze out the original variant — similar to how Covid squeezed out common flu for a period of time.
We also don’t know if the original variant was an Ethnic weapon designed to spare most Han populations while severely affecting Non-Han populations. Taiwan was mostly unaffected until long after new variants were circulating , and for a period China made a full recovery and reopened. Maybe the new variants didn’t spare Han populations like the first variant and then China was hit hard for another year.
Or, maybe China was just using a supply chain attack by shutting the country down while everyone else was opened up.
We just don’t know.
The main concern was first the world needs to get rid of Covid.
2 ways to get rid of it was to use Covid variants, and to use Vaccines.
While everyone is trying to put out the fire, the government was simultaneously focused on supply chains and ensuring China could not come out on top — which they almost did for a couple years there.
Another concern was that China was expecting retaliation — the PLA General communicated fear that the U.S. was even planning a nuclear strike on China, which prompted Millet to confirm that Trump did not have any such plans.
Why would Chinese Military expect to be attacked by a full on nuclear-first-strike if China wasn’t guilty of something very serious to begin with?
The insight here is that China planned it, executed it, and then waited to be attacked in retaliation. China spent the fall of 2019 priming social media. All of China’s Diplomats opened Twitter accounts in August/Oct 2019 and used these accounts to spread propaganda when the outbreak went public. China was also gearing up for this by adding force majeure language to the Phase 1 deal for “unexpected events” as a way for China to sign the deal without having to actually follow through on it.
Instead the West has taken a measured economic approach instead of a military one.
I haven’t seen you use the “all-or-nothing” argument for quite a while now. If all-or-nothing actually means anything here, I still think it’s closer to what you’ve done rather than what anyone else has done.
Like I said to you 15 months ago (to no response of course — presumably that’s where the conversation got too difficult, as usual).
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Problems with @finley 's evident addiction to all-or-nothing approaches have been addressed in meticulous detail by @yyy . I have nothing more to add, sorry.
Guy
You, and perhaps @yyy, have utterly misunderstood my position here, possibly deliberately - and in any case accusing me of “all or nothing” thinking when your position is that the medical authorities cannot possibly have done anything wrong - despite solid evidence that they did - strikes me as a pot&kettle scenario.
Most of my arguments focus upon fitting observable facts into various hypotheses. @yyy, I think, seems somehow compelled to look for a moderate position in which governments are merely bumblers and mistakes were made. Unfortunately, there are far too many observed facts that cannot be shoehorned into any moderate position. The hypothesis congruent with the largest number of observations is that governments conducted a malicious, concerted assault on the global population - mostly psychological and financial in nature. The fact that this is extreme - and of course it is - offends your view of the Western world as a place where, as in heaven, nothing ever happens. Or at least nothing truly bad ever happens.
Your hypothesis - which is at the opposite extreme to mine - is congruent with almost none of the observed facts, which I suspect is why you wander through these threads with your nose in the air, resolutely refusing to engage in any sort of debate.
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Well, the US has never been particularly trustworthy in these matters, have they? Heard of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident? Let’s say the whole thing was unequivocally the fault of the NIH. Nothing like threatening a war (or playing brinksmanship) to detract from a fuckup of that magnitude, eh?
Maybe they did, but then the question remains: why on earth did the entire planet go along with it all, to China’s gain and everybody else’s loss? Let’s not lose sight of the fact that the virus itself was a pretty pathetic bioweapon. In the economically-active age bracket, the impact was minimal to nonexistent. The harm came almost exclusively from the psychological, medical, and economic measures imposed by countries determined to “defeat COVID”, and the US is/was an outlier in that regard. Look at the statistics from other countries to get a more sensible picture of what SARS-CoV-2 was inherently capable of.
China put on a big show of carefully-choreographed propaganda: yes, they did some lockdowns that disrupted supply to the West, but that caused far more problems for the West than it did for China. They seem to have targeted the harm done to their own people in ways that minimized harm to the country as a whole.
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Correct. We’ve had three years of “believe and follow all of what govt/media/ big pharma say about masks/ vaccines and covid” and nothing about what the actual science, uncorrupted data and common sense says.
If you’re so sure of yourself and your stance against @finley, all the “evident” flaws in his opinions and points, then why not debate with him yourself?
What “all-or-nothing” approaches of his? Please support your criticism with evidence. This is simply a strawman.
Been looking forward to this for a few years now. Still waiting…
No need to bring Talking Heads into it 
How true this has been 
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I wondered if anyone would get the reference
The position that “civilised” countries are run by people who are constitutionally incapable of doing anything wrong strikes me as incredibly dangerous (and also within hailing distance of Supremacist ideas). It means that when they DO do anything wrong, the first instinct of half the population is to find excuses for them, rather than to hold them to account.
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The first instinct I would suggest is to accuse those who question authority or the narrative being sold of being an apologist for the Chinese, Russians or whoever they are trying to deflect incomming criticism to.
Works very well too and name calling is much easier than actually making an excuse or addressing criticism, in fact I would suggest it requires next to no thinking at all.
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A neat overview of the lab leak perspective here:
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/covid-19-gain-of-function-us-research
The evidence of a possible laboratory creation revolves around a multi-year US-led research program that involved US and Chinese scientists. The research was designed by US scientists, funded mainly by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Defense, and administered by a US organization, the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), with much of the work taking place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)
A stitch in time saves nine? Maybe not, if you dont have to wear the jacket.
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Yes.
Idk if you’ve noticed, Russia invaded a neighbouring country because they think it belongs to them, and China keeps threatening to do the same to another country called Taiwan, where you reside (or at least used to).
You think Germany and Japan were defeated in WWII by the Allied Forces playing fair?
No.