Conversely, I challenge any liberals to send me a link to a liberal leaning board where they engage conservatives in polite conversation.
[For hypothetical sake, you can leave out this one.]
Perhaps you could label your threads with your desire. I know the mods have accommodated at least one request to narrow the topic on at least one thread.
He’s still here. Some people more to the right are already gone.
Yes, but only for the public health officials. Plenty of media had headlines claiming the idea was debunked; I linked two articles, do you want me to find more? The public health officials were ‘only’ trying to hush up the idea to prevent adverse publicity about their own activities.
Which is shocking, because of course it matters. How are we to prevent the next pandemic if we don’t know how this one started? And it plays into the conversation about whether gain-of-function research is too risky. If an unmodified virus can escape, so can a modified one.
An article that talks up how safe lab procedures are without mentioning the 4 escapes of SARS virus from 3 different labs since the original epidemic was ended. At least one was caused by improperly inactivated virus. 
Yes, and stigmatising one possibility before the answer is found hinders that process and makes it harder to discover the truth. Even if the Idiot-in-Chief is supporting that possibility.
Saying you don’t know is fine. It’s saying you do know, trying to silence anyone who disagrees, and then later admitting you don’t that makes you look bad, and for good reason. Either you didn’t do your due diligence or you were trying to mislead the public, and either way that makes you untrustworthy.
Now, speaking of misrepresentations:
This is an egregious misrepresentation of what I said. I am ‘upset’ that the media and public health officials made a great effort to claim it was extremely unlikely, including headlines declaring it was ‘debunked’, and anyone who disagreed was literally censored from social media. I am even more ‘upset’ that this hush-up may have made it harder for the actual investigators to discover the truth. (On the other side, Trump’s actions probably also hindered the investigation by increasing hostility with China.)
As I said before, people who want to prevent another pandemic very much care, and that should be all of us. Even Fauci thinks it worth investigating now Biden is President. (Also, it wouldn’t be from a wet market via a lab, but from samples collected directly from bats roosting in caves. It’s important research, but if procedures at the lab are not safe enough that’s something we need to know and correct.)
I stand by what I said. Certainly my specific ideas could be wrong, but there is an entire group of people doing everything they can to dismantle US democracy through suppressing facts, restricting minority rights, gerrymandering, and now through spreading plague. This group has a large contingent that celebrates the confederacy, which inspired Nazi Germany.
It is no stretch to say that the Republican party and their conservative apologists are evil Facists and must be fought at every corner.
The US is in the fight of its life and it stuns me that reasonable people still defend the Republican party and argue we ought to be “nice” to the exact group that thinks that the handmaids tale is a utopia.
Forgot this bit in my reply. The people who already distrusted the media and were inclined to distrust public health officials certainly care. Giving them evidence suggesting their mistrust is warranted is particularly disastrous in the middle of a pandemic, when it is extremely important that everyone follows public health advice.
When everyone calls [generic] you out for being a disingenuous asshole for things you keep repeating over and over, your options are:
Claim that everyone else is a hivemind oppressing you for ‘speaking the truth’ or ‘daring to go against orthodoxy’ or even just ‘having different views’; or
Accept that the reason everyone is call you a disingenuous asshole is that you’re a disingenuous asshole, and maybe you should try being less of a disingenuous asshole.
It’s no surprise that the people involved tend to go for the first option. Everyone is the hero of their own story, after all.
Both of these are textbook examples of concern trolling.
I know I’m making broad generalizations here, but the people Just Asking Questions about why the lab leak theory wasn’t addressed more seriously aren’t concerned about preventing the next pandemic; they’re the ones not doing shit to stop the current one. If your concern is truly about getting these people to trust public health officials, then why focus on the handful of headlines from left-leaning publications that you cited instead of focusing on the literal mountains of headlines in conservative media directly attacking them using blatant misinformation?
This is ridiculous. Fauci is getting death threats because he’s supporting mask mandates, vaccines, and lockdowns, not because a few people are concerned about inadequate reporting on this one pet theory.
eta: This is exactly what I’m saying – nobody bitching about how certain media outlets or public health officials have addressed the lab leak theory is arguing in good faith.
And the articles made it clear that what was debunked was deliberate engineering.
Anyone who only reads the headlines is going to misunderstand a whole lot of news on a whole lot of subjects.
Which caves, according to one of your cited articles, also had tourists in them who were wearing no protective gear.
Is it a good idea to make sure that labs working with hazardous organisms follow proper procedures? Yes, it most certainly is. Does that require that we find out for certain and as fast as possible exactly how this particular virus got to humans, when there are clearly multiple possible routes for it to have done so? No, it does not.
Suppose we did prove (though I don’t know how it would be possible to do so) that the means of transmission was one of those tourists in the bat caves, who had a minimally symptomatic case and doesn’t even know it but who gave it to someone who worked at the wet market, or who worked at the lab for that matter. If we could prove that case zero contracted covid-19 directly from bats in the cave as a tourist: would you then say that precautions didn’t need to be taken at laboratories?
< removing post because I misread the response>
That is not true. The PBS one doesn’t even mention deliberate engineering; the subheading is “Scientists dismiss the idea that the coronavirus pandemic was caused by the accident in a lab”.
The Vox article mentions both and claims to show that both are wrong. Note the headline says ‘conspiracy theories’ debunked, and the article then goes on to discuss both the engineered virus and natural virus leak theories.
I was going to say @QuickSilver answered the rest, but I see he’s deleted his post. I would have said the same thing, so not sure why…
Reposting. Should not have second guessed my initial read.
What? Why not?
I think it behooves us to examine every possible vector of transmission. Since the bats aren’t new and the caves aren’t new and the visitors and researchers aren’t new it may indicate that the virus may have recently mutated recently and may be spreading to more animal species.
I don’t understand why you or anyone would draw that conclusion.
After thinking about it, none. It’s just easier to overgeneralise than to write something long and complicated in order to be accurate about what you mean.
I didn’t think I was. And I don’t want to guess wrong what you mean, so please can you explain what you are referring to?
Surely it’s obvious I didn’t mean literally every disagreement? It’s hardly the same as misrepresenting someone else’s words, like steronz did mine.
That was exactly my point: that I wouldn’t expect anyone to draw that conclusion.
I have to get some other things done today. Might return to this thread later.
I guess I just don’t understand your point.
But go ahead and live your life. I’ll wait. 
It might, but his use of the term “deterministic”, which has specific implications for the nature of physical law and the predictability of particular outcomes, confused the issue. That’s why I explicitly asked him back in post #1609 what he meant by the phrase “a deterministic universe” in post #1600.
He never bothered to answer that question, possibly because he didn’t understand it, so at this point he has only himself to thank if we’ve been “arguing at cross purposes”.
I don’t understand your point either. Your conclusion appears to be a strawman.
If the pandemic started with a tourist, probably tours of the caves should be banned. If it started at a wild animal market, such markets need to be better regulated or even closed down. If it escaped from a lab, then safety procedures need to be reviewed or better enforced, possibly around the world as well as in China.
I’ve been pretty busy with contract negotiations the last little bit, so haven’t had time or mental energy to participate on the boards, but today I chose to take a bit of time and try beating my head against a wall recreationally rather than professionally a little bit.
I’ve only really read the last week or so of this thread, so maybe I missed a bit of context, but when you say:
You mean that is should be obvious that you meant the exact opposite of what you actually said?
I think @thorny_locust’s point was pretty clear.
If it did originate with tourists, then maybe caving should be restricted. But that wouldn’t mean that labs should see that this originated with tourists and so lower their own safety standards.
Whether or not it came from a lab, they should always be reviewing their safety procedures and making sure that they are following best practices.
Sure, it’s his fault for using a term he probably didn’t mean - but you can still apply common sense.
So say we all.
No one could conceivably think someone else was suggesting this, so why bring it up?
Yes, but whether or not a virus recently escaped from the lab is important information when doing this.
I can’t believe anyone is actually arguing this point.