Indeed, it seems plausible. The background of my comment is that the lab-leak dipshits are the ones who push the idea with a subtext implying that the lab created the virus, or cultivated it for bioweapon purposes. But genetic studies show that it clearly came from wild animal populations, so I very strongly doubt the lab was the first and only introduction into the human population.

It wasn’t the vaccine, that was just a cursed year. Everybody born in 1798 has died, too.

Yup, I believe that’s what I said, with some thoughts on how to tell the difference.

Well, oil companies did put a poisonous additive in fuel for decades, but they did it right out in the open. They advertised it on gas station signs, and said it was for anti-knock purposes. They still put it in some general aviation fuel. Why should we presume they’d have to do it secretly?

Throwing this out there: What if he really did kill himself, partly as a way to get back at the people who let him take the fall, because he knew it’d look super sus?

That document is laughable. In only the first few paragraphs, I ran across reliable indicators of pseudoscience scams, like asserting that there’s some “scientific establishment” that he’s up against. Not a very powerful mafia then, because there are tons of dipshits pushing the lab leak hypothesis. Then, there’s the Absence of Evidence Fallacy. (It is not evidence of absence.) That’s as far as I got.

Go ahead and call me closed-minded, but c’mon, Ken should put his best evidence up front. If he has it, which I doubt. Especially when the alternative explanation is so damn plausible: The Wuhan Institute for Virology was put in Wuhan to study the viruses in local wildlife because Chinese authorities recognized the potential for human transmission, and so they built a lab to study the viruses. And that’s why the lab would’ve had the virus in it. Maybe it did have a leak, and some infections came from there, but biological systems are messy and imprecise; the virus probably jumped to humans many, many times over many years, and set up the conditions for a pandemic.

Consider the HIV/AIDS epidemic in North America. We used to think that it all traced back to Patient 0, a flight attendant who liked to get busy around the world. Then, researchers found the virus in stored blood samples going back to the 1950’s. The virus had been in the human population for decades before blowing up.

Reality is often complex, without intuitively-clear lines of cause and effect. The abstract thinking needed to understand it is beyond many people, so they latch on to simple, obvious, and wrong explanations, like the lab leak theory.

Seriously, though, there’s a key difference: Conspiracy theories require an ever-growing legion of circumstances and co-conspirators to make them work. Like for chemtrails. A secretive government plot to poison us with chemicals sprayed from airliners? Seems simple, but: Pilots have to be in on it. Airline mechanics have to be in on it. Chemical companies have to be in on it. There has to be a transport network and storage facilities, so truck drivers have to be in on it. The tanks have to be loaded onto aircraft, so airport workers have to be in on it. Et cetera.

Real conspiracies, by contrast, reduce down to simpler explanations. You can take moving parts away, and it still makes sense. Tax havens? Shell corporations? Corrupt prosecutors? Corrupt courts? Sex trafficking? Pedophiles? That’s lots of specifics that all point to one thing: Rich and powerful assholes doing rich and powerful asshole things because nobody can stop them.

I was briefly tempted by a winterover job there. It’d be a pay cut, plus a year and a half of continuous winter, and I’m not totally convinced that the U.S. would still exist by the time they’re supposed to pick us up.

Hahaha, that’s what I love the most! The downvotes come flying fast 'n furious on driving-related posts. It’s so consistent, across any social media or forum site. I can only speculate, but I think it’s the cognitive dissonance, because know from extensive real-life observation that driving makes people miserable and angry, even while they claim to enjoy it. Thus, it’s really easy to make observations that puncture the illusion.

Our criminal “justice” system sucks, period. It’s about vengeance, and racism, not about rehabilitation. We should reform it from top to bottom for every crime, not simply exempt one in particular because folks wanna zoom-zoom.

John could just follow the law. I love these discussions, because drivers get so angry when I call out their criminal behavior.

Oh, my heavens, a THIRD PARTY! /s

Yes, these devices cost money to produce, install, and operate. Don’t want to pay for one? Stop breaking the law.

Food is even more fundamental to survival than our four-wheeled toys, but if you habitually go to the grocery store and eat without paying, you’ll end up in jail. Shelter is more important, too, but that doesn’t mean that I can just take up residence in any house or apartment that I please. I’d go to jail for trying.

So, I really have no sympathy for the claim, “we can’t take away cars!” Take them away from people who can’t be bothered to follow the laws that let us live together in society, even though they knew the consequences. Maybe sell them off and use the funds to provide food and shelter to the homeless.

Agreed. The best solution, as always, is to design streets and roads so that driving unsafely feels unsafe, so that everybody naturally slows down. Until that happens, this is a good program.

What happened to “don’t do the crime, if you can’t do the time,” or, “shoulda thought of that before breaking the law”?

This scheme would reduce ticket revenue, though. And if criminal scofflaws have to pay, good, fuck 'em. The New York taxpayers shouldn’t take on the burden. The scumbags could avoid the cost trivially.

But that is exactly what happened, and it’s what the article is about. “Hunt down” is an idiomatic phrase in English, and it would be not at all unusual for me to, say, hunt down a USB adapter in my office. Leaving that detail out of the headline would be burying the lede.

It’s not normal or proper for the DHS to subpoena information about citizens who express an opinion to government officials. This is transparently an action undertaken to intimidate. The language used in the headline conveys the meaning much more clearly than a “neutral” (read: complicit) phrasing would.

Apparently not. ¯\(ツ)/¯

If you have the privilege to ignore “politics” while people are gravely suffering in real life, is it so hard to just ignore it in your Lemmy feed?

Yes. Very much so. Calling it a “virus” is an analogy to simplify the concept to a sound bite, and an author like Neal Stephenson made a “mind virus” central to the plot of his book, Snow Crash. But strip away the literary liberties, and it’s based on real neuroscience. See, for example, this article from a few years ago.

Quote:

It is well-documented that for example words like “reptiles” and “parasites” were used by the Nazi regime to compare outsiders and minorities to animals. Strongmen throughout history have referred to targeted social groups as “rats” or “pests” or “a plague.” And it’s effective regardless of whether the people who hear this language are predisposed to jump to extreme conclusions. Once someone is tuned into these metaphors, their brain actually changes in ways that make them more likely to believe bigger lies, even conspiracy theories.

I have this pet theory that the fact that some of the first TV broadcasts were Hitler’s speeches is more than just a historical curiosity. Broadcast media (i.e. radio) had come along just a few years before. Right after it provided a way for authoritarian leaders like Hitler to reach great numbers of people with their spoken words., the world saw an explosion of right-wing populism at a scale never seen before. I suspect it’s not just a coincidence. (The Nazis certainly understood the propaganda opportunity.)

It certainly resembled a viral outbreak.