For the record, two of the biggest whiners about conservative thought not getting respect around here (@Sam_Stone and @octopus ) both want us to believe that the situation in Afghanistan was caused by pronoun choices or diversity training.
This is apparently the height of conservative thought this place needs to foster.
Meanwhile, the Taliban are entirely focused on military and economic issues, and spend no time worrying about their stance on social policies at all, which is why they were so efficiently able to outperform the US in Afghanistan!
Wait, that’s not true at all.
No, conservatives think that the Taliban have the right stance on social policy.
Men fight.
Women stay at home.
Because men can’t fight as well when women are around.
True, they probably agree with @octopus on pronouns (and a lot else too)
There’s basically 3 possibilities:
(1) is less likely because although they were doing the gain-of-function research at Wuhan, it was not being done on Coronaviruses (at least not officially), and scientists who studied the Covid-19 virus haven’t found any markers that would support the idea.
(2) Is pretty plausible, given researchers were definitely studying bat coronaviruses in the Wuhan lab, and unlike many other diseases, it would not be immediately obvious if this one escaped; in most people, the symptoms resemble the common cold.
(3) Certainly possible. If you think this is more plausible then you can come up with the arguments in favour.
If I could, I’d edit my previous post to make it clear I meant (2) and not (1), but I can’t. Now that you understand what I meant, do you agree with me?
Oh sure, a naturally-occurring virus that was transmitted via a lab leak is entirely plausible. The word “originated” was rather ambiguous, hence my confusion.
Which is not to say that animal-to-human transmission is implausible. I am aware of the current theories regarding the origins of AIDS, for example, or bird flu.
I could have made it clearer, but I was replying to a post contrasting direct animal-to-human transmission, so I didn’t think to. It’s really hard to think of all the different ways people can (mis)interpret my posts beforehand.
Somehow,
unmodified bat coronavirus being studied in Wuhan lab that escaped
is more plausible than
bat coronavirus that jumped to some other species that was being sold infected people at Wuhan wet market
. . . despite the extra step?
And the other examples we have of animal to human transmission, including Swine flu, Ebola, and H1N1. But, sure, a lab leak is the most likely. 
I want to highlight this exchange, in one of the many Afghanistan threads, between Martini_Enfield and myself, and DemonTree’s attempt at a “gotcha!” moment:
Let me see if I can unpack this. We’ve got:
Martini_Enfield putting forward a perfectly valid reason why people might think it would be a bad idea to annex Afghanistan. But of course “woke social justice types” are just emotional wah-wah babies (or words to that affect) and that’s why they would oppose annexing Afghanistan.
My response is to highlight how curious it is (here, in the pit, I’ll go ahead and call his post what it is: bad faith, disingenuous, shit-posting-borderline-trolling) that he would use such loaded language, effectively mocking “woke social justice types” by use of the label alone. I also question how/why he would discount the possibility that these “woke social justice types” might in fact have a good reason to be opposed to annexation, particularly as the one he puts forward seems to rely on premises that I suspect would be shared by people on the left (that annexation would lead to an unending insurgency and that would, at least implicitly, be a bad thing to have to deal with).
DemonTree then responds to my critique of martini’s incredibly disingenuous and bad faith argument with words to the effect of: “Oh, seeeee! Doesn’t feel so good when it’s conservatives doing it people on your side, eh? Now you know how it feels to be accused of holding to positions for stupid reasons!”
/summary
But you see, DemonTree, that completely misses the point. This isn’t an instance of diverging facts, with one side chanting “Fake Newz!” and “sheeple!” in response to well-sourced scientific claims and the other side accusing them of being deluded/ignorant/buying into or spouting propaganda. This is an instance where we are to believe that some how, even with shared premises (the whole thing about unending insurgencies being “bad” and all–a strong disincentive to certain courses of action) and perhaps even a shared conclusion (that maybe we shouldn’t annex Afghanistan), Martini_Enfield, conservative jackwad, is just CONVINCED that “woke social justice types” couldn’t have arrived at that perfectly sound conclusion through reason. Because even where there may be common ground, he can’t possibly contemplate that “woke social justice types” might arrive at their shared conclusion through logic.
So the equivalent left to right argument would be if I were to put forward the proposition that: “I can see how some people might be opposed to kicking puppies because it would be needlessly cruel, and we should generally avoid doing needlessly cruel things, but if a CONSERVATIVE were to come out against puppy-kicking, it’s probably because they somehow have tied puppy-kicking into some whacked-out QAnon-like conspiracy theory involving ‘democrat politicians’ feasting off the life forces of puppies as practice for then doing the same to children. Stupid fascists!”
I don’t want to get into a lengthy debate about origins. Those articles seem interesting and do make the lab leak seem a little more probable. I’m still going with natural origin, though I’m not as confident as I was.
My main point is that Octopus was making fun of “the woke hive mind” or whatever insult he’s thinking of for thinking animal origin is at all possible. There’s no way to know for sure at this point.
That’s the last I have to say about this hijack.
Who knew posting on forums was a CCP version of microturkering. How much you making?
You still owe me a reply,
Bzzzzz!
It’s simple. Humans live in a deterministic universe and are governed by physical law. One’s perception of reality is not an obligation on the rest of the universe.
Shouldn’t you be firing up the ovens or something? Aren’t you eager for the great purge?
“I can believe in magic unicorns if I want and I don’t want people to call me nutso.”
Um, okay.
Not the great purge; the great resistance.
My mistake! But be careful with the nutso unless you’ve checked your database on who is afflicted with what.
Just shut the fuck up.