Common sense proposed the lab leak. Was absurd and scary how easily it was dismissed in pretty much the entire Western media, not only the US. Even this forum got subjected to it.
It was not just “common sense”. I was reading in-depth articles about the GoF line of research and all the characters involved (Ralph Baric, Shi Zhengli, etc) back in March/April 2020. Basically the entire body of circumstantial evidence pointing to the lab leak hypothesis was known and reported within months of the start of the pandemic. Every in-depth article written since then has been mostly a rehashing of what various bloggers and alternative news sites had already published.
It's not "potentially" racist. It was being spouted by racists and directly leading to violence against asians in America and elsewhere. When this behavior is seen, and with the standard lack of any nuance in both reporting and social media, making such claims publicly if you're less than 95% certain is irresponsible.
There is a huge reason to downplay it, especially in the USA, until things could cool around it or things could be worked out 100% factually and it is a science related - basic Psychology.
Even in my small town of 7000, an Indian lady was assaulted to "get back at those Chinese for giving us COVID (which doesn't exist and is just made up by the lame stream media)".
No this isn’t a good reason to shutdown actual scientific discussion and this whole thing felt like a red herring specifically played up to shut down dissent.
Anti-Asian hate crimes are a real thing, but both black and white Americans endure them at a higher rate[1]. Further, these types of attacks went up across the board during the pandemic however Asian based hate crimes represented only ~8% of these attacks with most other ethnic groups having way more attacks targeted at them[2].
Seems to me like an example of cherry picked statistics being used for political gain. Asian hate crimes being something that became way more common during the pandemic is simply not grounded in reality.
I don't think we should reject reality just because we're concerned others can't handle that reality without reacting violently. The notion that we should downplay certain ideas because of crimes committed by people that misunderstand those ideas is not something I can get behind, sorry. Do you post on reddit a lot? The phrasing of your argument and the intermittent spacing has that reddity vibe to me.
jkhdigital|2 years ago
HKH2|2 years ago
ekianjo|2 years ago
Arainach|2 years ago
wait_what|2 years ago
That reason?
Hate Crimes - https://www.npr.org/2021/08/12/1027236499/anti-asian-hate-cr...
Even in my small town of 7000, an Indian lady was assaulted to "get back at those Chinese for giving us COVID (which doesn't exist and is just made up by the lame stream media)".
edgyquant|2 years ago
Anti-Asian hate crimes are a real thing, but both black and white Americans endure them at a higher rate[1]. Further, these types of attacks went up across the board during the pandemic however Asian based hate crimes represented only ~8% of these attacks with most other ethnic groups having way more attacks targeted at them[2]. Seems to me like an example of cherry picked statistics being used for political gain. Asian hate crimes being something that became way more common during the pandemic is simply not grounded in reality.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/737681/number-of-racial-...
https://www.justice.gov/crs/highlights/2021-hate-crime-stati...
joenot443|2 years ago