Snowden revealed quite shocking information, and I think it is safe to say the secret of mass surveillance was going on for much longer than 4 years.
Im not aware of any way you could know that or the relative proportion of each.
Where do you get your certainty here?
You want the fact that I can't prove you wrong to be evidence that you're right, and that's not how logic works.
"The overwhelming majority of conspiracies likes this, especially ones in fundamentally civilian organizations like science labs, don't survive a year if that."
How do you know that the overwhelming majority of conspiracies don't survive a year if that? It's like sampling sick people and concluding that all people are sick. Without an estimate of the number of conspiracies that actually are kept hidden (which to me seems nearly impossible), how could you possibly know the proportion as you claimed?
This seems like a base rate fallacy to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
I'll put my money on bureaucrats being dumb over globalist nation state super autocracy every day.
I don't think it's very much a stretch to believe that pervasive observations of bureaucracies leaking and making mistakes serves as evidence that genuinely true Hidden Conspiracies are vanishingly rare. But you do you.
You're still missing the point: GGGP didn't argue in any “direction” at all; all they said was you can't know for sure what you claim.
> I don't think it's very much a stretch to believe that pervasive observations of bureaucracies leaking and making mistakes serves as evidence that genuinely true Hidden Conspiracies are vanishingly rare.
Sure. But don't then put your “hopefully not a stretch” guess in such cocksure terms.
> But you do you.
And you, obviously, you.
Part of any conspiracy theory is positing a great totalitarian enemy who is able to keep all these important truths from The People. The PRC is economically large and somewhat questionably ambitious. It's absolutely not the kind of super state people want to imagine.
When? There's a pretty short window where a WIV scientist might have known the subject they were studying had escaped the lab before the PRC did. Certainly by January 2020 the PRC could've clamped down on those scientists.
Spies caught outside the country don't tell me much about internal operations.
ETA: I think my thinking here is pretty colored by Tank Man, whose name is unknown. The CCP claims they don't know anything about him. Even if that's true, presumably he had friends, family, and fellow protestors who have decided it would be a very bad idea to even give his name.
Not after the top PLA vaccine researcher, Zhou Yusen died, allegedly "falling off the roof of the WIV" in May 2020. That sends a loud message.
Yours is a world where disproof rules, and conspiracies are assumed true until proven false. I'm sure it's entertaining, but it's not "true" any more than mine is.
In my world, Oswald probably shot JFK and covid was probably a natural virus, because those are the hypotheses that demand the least of the existing evidence. I'm willing to change my priors with more evidence, but not because of the lack of disproof of an entertaining counter-hypothesis.
I don't personally hold an opinion one way or another on JFK, but the fact is that the information on what happened still hasn't leaked out.
It took until 1992 for what appears to be the truth to be discovered, 3 decades with far more people involved in the process, and a much darker outcome than a man being assassinated.
See McNamara's recollection of that meeting in 1992.
http://web.archive.org/web/20210621032149/https://www.nytime...
Even closer to the SARS-CoV-2 case, the 1977 flu pandemic killed ~700k people and near-certainly arose from a research accident, probably a failed vaccine trial:
> The 1977-1978 influenza epidemic was probably not a natural event, as the genetic sequence of the virus was nearly identical to the sequences of decades-old strains.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/
That article argues that vaccine trial accident doesn't count as a "lab accident", which seems like legalistic wordplay to me; but I believe the historical context is good.
But in 1978, the WHO wrote:
> Laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bul...
It took decades for the consensus to change, and there's still been no official admission (though note the unverified personal communication from C. M. Chu via Peter Palese in Gronvall's paper, 27 years after the accident).
The USSR successfully manipulated many prominent Western civilian scientists (and subsequently Western newspapers) into buying the "bad meat" Soviet cover-up story, hook, line, and sinker: to the point that they publicly chided the American military for still believing in the "anthrax factory leak" theory:
> But Dr. Alexander Langmuir, a former director of epidemiology at the United States Centers for Disease Control, who presided at the session, said Tuesday that based on what he knew so far, "the current position of the U.S. military needs thorough re- examination; that is clear.'
> Dr. Philip Brachman of Emory University, a U.S. anthrax expert who has advised the Central Intelligence Agency on the incident, said the Soviet talk was a "landmark report" providing "a pretty good indication that this incident was an outbreak of gastrointestinal anthrax" from eating contaminated meat.
> Dr. Alexander Langmuir, a former chief epidemiologist for the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, agreed that the Soviet account was "very credible so far" but added that he hoped to obtain further details during the Soviets' weeklong stay.
The "bad meat" Soviet coverup story was fawningly parroted in _Science_ in 1988: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.3358121 (full text at https://sci-hub.se/10.1126/science.3358121) and also ended up in prominent American newspapers like the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/14/world/russians-explain-79...) and Wall Street Journal (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/04/13/s...), from which the above quotes are taken.
How did this happen? Why did this work so well? Because scientific methods designed for operation in adversary-free environments are catastrophically unfit for drawing dependable conclusions when intelligent motivated adversaries have tampered with the available data. The Western civilian scientists were thinking like...scientists, so they got easily manipulated into producing and disseminating literal Soviet disinformation while believing they were furthering the causes of science and of fighting anthrax. Oops:
> Three Soviet officials came to visit the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., on 11 April: Pyotr Burgasov, retired deputy minister of health; Vladimir Nikiforov, infectious diseases chief at the Moscow Institute for the Advanced Training of Physicians; and Vladimir Sergiyev, director of the Institute of Parasitology and Tropical Medicine. They gave the same explanation as in 1980, but provided many more details, convincing some long-time doubters that the account was true. U.S. intelligence officials still maintain a military facility was involved.
Spoiler alert: Pyotr Burgasov was part of the response to the leak and part of the Soviet biowarfare program.
The argument for a natural origin of Sverdlovsk anthrax is tragically familiar: establishing a highly plausible way it could have been zoonosis, along with providing evidence consistent with a zoonosis. From the _Science_ article:
> The citizens of Sverdlovsk did not have to look so far to find the bacillus. It has been endemic to the region for centuries.
> The source of the outbreak was traced to a single 29-ton lot of bone meal (cattle feed) sold in March from a factory in Aramil, 15 kilometers to the southeast of Sverdlovsk. It must have taken in and ground up the bones of animals who died the previous year of anthrax. Its product clearly contained live anthrax. An official investigation found that the factory did not follow the prescribed heating and pressure treatment methods. The feed it produced went to a state farm, where veterinarians inoculate the animals, and to private owners, whom state veterinarians often do not bother to visit, according to Burgasov. On the approach of the May Day holiday, animals are slaughtered, generally the weakest (in this case, the sickest) first. The meat from the private butchers is thought to have triggered the outbreak, Burgasov said.
It's only collapse of the USSR that enabled the truth to come out in public. Two Soviet pathologists, against KGB orders, had kept some autopsy samples, which (along with a defector's testimony) annihilated the "bad meat" cover-up story. Turns out the outbreak of airbone anthrax that happened in the same city as the industrial-scale weaponized anthrax spore factory was indeed caused by the industrial-scale weaponized anthrax spore factory! https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/11/sverdlovs...
What is known is the nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. Both areas WIV sampled and they refuse to share their records with WHO or the NIH.
Is it possible? Sure! Is it likewise possible that some of the circumstantial claims about WIV are true? Sure! But if someone made this thing, someone else would have told us by now.
[1] This is science! There are notes and logs and backups and email and chat and whiteboard photos and conference attendees and visiting scholars, all spread around a population all trained to compete with each other.