The problem is, that explanation didn’t work. The meaning of your partial quote does not match the meaning of his full sentence. In fact, your reply appears to assume things that only make sense if you ignore the rest of that sentence. That does make it come off as a misquote.
He’s made it pretty clear that he takes issue with you quoting part of a sentence. I have to agree with him on this. I hate it when people do that to me. I’ll make a long post, and then have a single aside that isn’t the main point quoted, and refuted, as if that somehow proves me wrong. They will infer things I didn’t say, even if I directly said the opposite. My usual response is just “Please do not quote me out of context.” But sometimes I get just as irritated as Stranger here.
In this thread, you keep on attacking him, and then chastising him for not letting it go. That makes no sense. The only two ways to end a conflict where someone is offended by what you said are (1) to walk away or (2) apologize to them. And it’s not like doing the latter prevents you from also saying that it was all just a misunderstanding.
If you want to not engage, you can not engage. But chastising him is itself a form of engaging. Saying he can’t handle things or attacking his character are in fact attacks, even if you don’t call him mean names. As is misrepresenting him as only being upset because he disagrees with you. Or just being so hatefully condescending. You just can’t keep being such a dick to someone while demanding they need to let it go.
(And please don’t try to turn this into a contest. At no point did I say that Stranger was being any nicer. Nor am I even arguing that my post is nice.)
Oh, and has this lesser official ever faced any consequences for his actions? Has he at least profoundly apologized and laid on his sword to hopefully not get punished?
China is an authoritarian one-party state. They’ve been known to jail dissidents. So it would seem weird for this guy not to face any consequences if he spoke out of turn and went against what the Party wanted to put forth. I would conclude that the party put out the message intentionally, and used a lower tiered official for plausible deniability in the rest of the world.
That’s one part of why it’s hard to compare a country with freedom of speech to one without. There’s a lot less the US can do to stop people from spreading misinformation. I don’t think that’s fairly characterised as “the US” spreading it, though.
This is how I know you are just taking sides here and not looking at the discussion fairly.
Look at how rudely Stranger has been towards me: I’m “snide”, “passive-aggressive”, engaging in “spiping”, “rhetorical chicanery”, “low level agitation” etc. Then look at the pains I have gone to to not engage with that, and to try to only respond to the specific points discussed on topic (which never got a response BTW).
Not to mention I compliment Stranger on his scientific knowledge and ask him politely to get back on topic.
It’s absurd that you would characterize this as me attacking him.
You know, fuck this, I’m done with the Dope. So well done, you got me. FWIW I never intentionally misquoted anyone (and I’m not even sure what the point of doing that would be).
Yeah, the Chinese government is a known bad actor. They’re not even remotely on the up-and-up most of the time, and are historically prone to coverups, propaganda, etc…
I’m not surprised in the least that they tried to cover it up and then subsequently try to change the narrative on how it started. It’s totally the kind of thing they do, and without a free press, who’s to say otherwise, in either direction? The main source of info is from their government, and they have proven suspect.
That said, I also subscribe to the idea that they did NOT create the virus or anything like that.
Personally, I’m amazed at the number of Chinese apologists on the Internet; I have more than half a suspicion that they’re basically CCP people tasked with doing so, considering how absurd a lot of the China cheerleading seems to be on other sites like Reddit.
I mean, I’m reading along, and you haven’t satisfactorily addressed his complaint about your quote-snipping. A simple, “Sorry, I didn’t intentionally change the meaning, but I see what you’re saying” would go a long way. What you’ve written comes across as pretty plaintive. If you gotta go, you gotta go; but you’re not in the right on this one.
I don’t think they created it out of base elements. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it were modified in a research lab. The fact that that point of view was actively censored and those considering that as a possibility were demonized ought to be alarming.
I’m not even too convinced of that. I think (and I’m not an immunologist, virologist or epidemiologist) that it’s most likely the natural occurrence that they’re saying it is.
But it’s also pretty much incontrovertibly proven that the Chinese government engaged in some kind of attempted face-saving coverup, and in doing so, managed to not share information in a timely fashion, and delayed containment and mitigation measures for the rest of the world. That sort of thing is inexcusable; IMO it reflects worse on the Chinese government/CCP than had they just been open and transparent about a naturally occurring virus popping up in Wuhan and that they were doing their best to contain it, and welcome foreign scientists to come help.
Instead, they engaged in obfuscation, delay and tried to control the message, and by doing so let the virus take more of a foothold/spread faster than it might have otherwise.
I think the point is, no matter whether it is about your virus lab, nuclear weapons, murdered journalists, VAT, whatever, to a first approximation you (the dictator) always, always, deflect, dissemble, disinform, obfuscate, lie, duckspeak without hesitation or thinking about it, and it doesn’t matter what actually happened (which is whatever you later say it was, anyway). (And if millions die of disease, famine, or war, well, them is the breaks, but remember it’s never your fault.)
A few weeks ago, it came out that a drone attack in Afghanistan was a horrible mistake and that the US military was investigating itself to try to figure out how to prevent future errors like this.
It was awful–no enemy combatants were killed, but an aid worker and several children were–but unsurprising. What was surprising is that it took the government of the US only weeks, not years, to admit their mistake.
Governments freaking hate taking responsibility for their fuckups. That’s true of the US government, the Chinese government, and every other government I’ve ever heard of.
The difference is that in a totalitarian government, there’s much less pressure to admit to fault. The Chinese government is terrible, and part of being terrible is never having to say you’re sorry.
I don’t think it was a lab creation, that seems silly, but I too am agnostic on whether it was a leak or not. It’s very clear that the terrible government of China had no interest in any possibility of looking bad, and actively shut anything down that might result in egg on their face.
Which was my essential point in the statement that was truncated to eliminate everything but the impression of surreptitiously supporting a conspiracy theory. It really doesn’t matter whether you subscribe to some conspiracy or not about the origins and information about the vector of the virus did harm to trying to limit the scope of the pandemic, and the lack of transparency and essential refusal to allow an independent review of the Wuhan Institute of Virology forestalls efforts to gain knowledge about lab escape (if that occurred) or to assure the general public that this was a result of some natural vector path, be it a field researcher who was infected (a not infrequent occurrence), a concern about the Wuhan ‘wet market’ and bushmeat (long highlighted by epidemiologists as a spillover risk), or some other pathway to species transfer.
This is true, but it is worthy of noting that the United States has been extremely cagey about discussing their armed drone programs from the very beginning, with the excuse being that e initial programs were a CIA-run activity that required tight operational security for effectiveness, and even when they were dicusssed—generally because some third party brought the issue to light—the explanations could be charitably described as “evasive”, such as this one:
One could (and should) argue that government secrecy in any form begets autocratic-like behavior, not even because the goal is to be autocratic but just because people and organizations tend to avoid accountability for misdeeds. Liberal democracies have checks against these in the form of a (nominally) free press, representative civilian oversight of military and intelligence activities, and protections (albeit very limited) for whistleblowers. Autocratic regimes like the Peoples Republic of China have none of these, and thus often reflexively lie or conceal even when it is unnecessary and harmful to preventing future errors.
This is pretty much my take as well. It’s possible that it escaped from a lab and that it’s a modified virus, but there’s no evidence yet that it is. Local and national officials clearly engaged in some sort of cover up but there could have been motives that go beyond the lab leak hypothesis. My initial hypothesis was that China was a) probably confident that they could contain the virus; and b) nervous about the economic damage that panic about a pandemic might cause.
In my mind, the unspoken part is what we’re beginning to find out now, which is that China, Inc. isn’t necessarily the economic juggernaut many of us thought that it was, and the smart ones in CCP are justifiably pouring themselves some extra glasses of baijiu at night worrying about the ramifications.
Don’t let them chase you off. I for one appreciate your contributions to this site.
The original poster of this thread is a jerk with a severe case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome. Ignore them and be done with it–it’s not worth the effort to unpack their posts.
Now that’s what an actual, non-passive-aggressive airing of grievance looks like. No beating around the bush or “I’m being so nice, I don’t understand why the poster isn’t just going along with me,”; just a blunt appraisal of what bothers you. I don’t agree with the assessment, but respect that you had the forthrightness to just come out and say it, unlike the poster in question who continued to insist that he had done nothing wrong by truncating the quote so severely that he actually removed the actual point in it.
Agree (mostly) with the first part of your thread, not the second.
Both posters have their quirks. Socially, both have screwed up here and elsewhere in the past. This thread is a pretty good example of how both could stand to behave better.
But from a purely intellectual “who is the most technically correct poster?” POV on this particular issue, Mijin was clearly not right. We can argue if either could have handled things better, but let’s not be mistaken on that point.
Accepting criticism when found to be mistaken, painful though it may be, is just as important online it is in person, if not more so, and this is definitely a case where criticism, even valid criticism, was not received well.
