for the sake of honest conversation, can you list what conspiracy theories you're referring to? because the last few conspiracy theories i can remember somehow all turned out to be true. so i'm really concerned with what is truthful here, i hope you can help.
edit: i'm even more genuinely interested now because i'm being downvoted, but all i'm seeing in that interview is the tv host interrupting matt every time he tries to answer a question, this is so weird to me.
Investigative journalist Lee Fang goes deeper into Hasan's allegations about Taibbi – plus Hasan's history of plagiarism & viewpoint-flexible controversialism-for-pay at:
https://www.leefang.com/p/mehdi-hasan-plagiarized-pro-spanki...
As for the plagiarism, the article in question is from over 20 years ago, hardly a slam dunk nor is it a representative of his journalistic career. The only reason Fang wrote that is because Mehdi accused him of Islamophobia, it's just petty and desperate nonsense.
The other Fang allegations – including that Hasan now condemns & slurs people for the same sorts of socially-conservative views Hasan once espoused (& maybe still holds in his heart?) also seem well-sourced.
Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity have also "wiped the floor" against remote guests, on their shouty home-field cable TV shows. It's a medium for idiocy: slick & shameless verbal bullies win there, and anyone who adopts their news/views from such interactions remains stuck in a partisanship-addled haze.
Then he hammered Taibbi for an hour on those two errors, as if he were a career fraudster, instead of a lion of journalism.
Mehdi Hasan is a fraud, an establishment actor on a failing corporate propaganda news network no one takes seriously. A tool of his billionaire owners and of the Biden neocons.
Petty and desperate nonsense indeed.
https://thebanter.substack.com/p/matt-taibbis-puff-piece-on-...
they did, this isn't insane to believe either, they did this to jeff bezos too. US intelligence excels at signal intelligence, this isn't a conspiracy. it then goes on to make even less sense:
> Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency
duh, but obviously putin is, why are they deflecting? this is low quality reasoning that fails to address any meat of the arguments.
plus, what does any of this have to do with matt? and covid? its like every time i ask a question there's more and more deflections away from the original topic. its so strange.
Not to say that this is wrong, but it is a biased source. Statements like, "This whole pandemic could have been reshaped" have no content. It misleading presents that the furin cleavage site had to come from gain of function. It doesn't address why the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market cluster exists at all. It is based on rehashing public information and anonymous sources. All signs point to misinformation.
No matter the origin, certain dense public places will turn up. But 3 researchers with likely larger-than-average scrupulosity about infection risks, working on increasing the virulence of bat viruses? Pretty sus!
What does that even mean? That you don't trust these people? Isn't that, definitionally, ad hominem?
it did. this isn't debatable anymore. there's literally grants written by american scientists proposing this pre-covid, the lab in wuhan was doing the legwork.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211107119
"Harrison and Sachs’s (1) claim that alignment of sarbecovirus Spike amino acid sequences illustrates“the unusual nature of the [SARS-CoV-2] FCS” is misleading. FCSs are common in coronaviruses, and present in representatives of four out of five betacoronavirus subgenuses (8). The highly variable nature of the S1/S2 junction is easily ascertained by inspecting a precise alignment of sarbecovirus Spikes (Fig. 1C)."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8689951/
"As more bat CoVs are sampled, it is possible that another SARSr-CoV will be discovered with an S1/S2 FCS insertion. FCSs have evolved naturally in other non-sarbecovirus families of betacoronaviruses (Wu and Zhao 2020). Therefore, an S1/S2 FCS emerging in a sarbecovirus is consistent with natural evolution. Even so, the knowledge that scientists had a workflow for identifying novel cleavage sites in diverse SARSr-CoVs and experimentally characterizing these cleavage sites in SARSr-CoVs—likely in a manner that makes the resulting recombinant SARSr-CoV practically indistinguishable from a rare SARSr-CoV with a naturally emerging FCS—makes it challenging to rule out an artificial origin of the SARS-CoV-2 S1/S2 FCS"
It's saying they can arise naturally and it's hard to distinguish origin. Your claim is debatable on its own, and sar-covid-19 GoF resource origin is extremely debatable, even unlikely. At any rate, this article doesn't appear to add anything new to the discussion beyond mixing some anonymous sources with existing public information in a sensationalized way.
edit: let me add, I don't want you downvoted. It may be that this it came from gain of function research at WIV and that the Huanan market cluster was a result of this research. But as of right now, there are other better explanations. I await the Directorate of National Intelligence declassified information this article claims is coming. I do not see how this would have changed the global response to the pandemic.
there is literally a grant written by an american scientist who sent money for that exact research to that exact lab. a literal paper trail as a grant, and a paper trail in funds.
no amount of text wall can deflect this.
There is no known source from where it came from, coronaviruses often recombine, but there is no other known sarbecovirus from where the fcs could have come from.
Bob Garry tries to explain away his documented "I cant think of a plausible natural scenario for how this 12nt insert occurred" in an interview here.
What is often totally ignored by virologists and evolutionary biologists with potential funding to loose if a kab origin is proven is that the WIV was partner in a proposal to insert exactly the sort of furin cleavage site we see in SARS-CoV-2
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
Then like magic (a unicorn as Bob Garry says) a SARS-related CoV appears, appears down the road from the lab, that is highly infectious to humans, with the first ever furin cleavage site in a sarbecovirus, which even Zhengli Shi says was a recent inroduction to humans: "almost identical sequences of this virus in different patients imply a probably recent introduction in humans"
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.22.914952v1
Lab escape through a lab acquired infection with a SARS related virus is by far the most likely scenario and should be the default hypothesis to disprove.
Natural origin scenario requires a series of events to occur, each very unlikely.
Maybe you're actually the one falling prey to false information, and harming others by spreading it. From the article:
The Taibbi-Hasan debate speaks to the sorry state of affairs in the U.S. news media. Every journalist gets things wrong occasionally. Taibbi has conceded that he made an error in one of his tweets, though not in his congressional testimony, and swiftly corrected it. Many of Hasan’s claims have been debunked, including his false claim, first flagged by journalist Aaron Mate, that he “never said a word about the Hunter Biden story" and of course this CISA-EIP issue. Hasan’s version of journalism means never correcting his own falsehoods. But since Hasan works for a cable news network where exciting a polarized audience is the chief performance metric, he is sure to benefit from the gotcha-style assault on Taibbi.
See Twitter's own lawyers: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-lawyer...
Just MKUltra
Iraqi WMDs
Tuskegee Syphillis
Free Brittney
Hunter Bidens laptop
Iran Contra
NSA surveillance
Watergate
CIA and the crack epidemic
The Sackelers and the opioid epidemic
Robert Kennedy coverup
Need I continue....
The statement that “those UFOs are populated by aliens and the government knows this!” is a conspiracy theory, and has little evidence.
On Hunter Biden's laptop, somehow there's terrible evidence but the Republicans in the house are supposed to have the laptop and somehow there's no evidence to share? Why is it the Republicans keep having all this great evidence that they can never share with us? Also see the MyPillow guy and his election stealing evidence. Most recently the Republicans said we've lost the guy that was going to give us all the great evidence. Somehow. We won't share his name with you but we can't find him.
Another example is Hillary Clinton and Benghazi. That was a horrible tragedy, but they've had 10 investigations of it and spent millions and millions of dollars and they never came up with anything more than we hate Hillary Clinton and she's terrible. Sometimes these conspiracy theories have real information behind them, but much more commonly they're just created to demonize someone. I'm certainly willing to consider that Biden or his son could have done something bad, but where's the evidence?
What specifically is the actual conspiracy around "Hunter Bidens laptop"? I am not trying to be dense. I just don't understand I think where the conspiracy is.
This was then promoted to "russian disinformation" and treated as fact far and wide across the media. The New York Post were locked out of their twitter. Links to the post stories about the contents of the laptop were blocked. Even in private messages. Facebook etc did very similar things
What a massive conspiracy theory that all those american spooks, media outlets, silicon valley behemoths had colluded to lie and suppress a story to help their favored candidate. No way they'd do that! Has to be a nutjob consoiracy theory! Must be.
No. All true. No russians spooks involved. Plenty of "former" cia a load of whom, having been caught in the lie still now work for and are paid by cable news. Who obviously don't care about lying to you.
You've got to be able to hold two things in your head at once. A loathing for Trump, that's easy but at the same time as noting there is a very real, very serious problem here that is scary as hell. Much scarier than Trump could ever be.
Imagine your perfect candidate. Imagine their policies, imagine them getting them adopted to improve the country the way /you/ think best.
Now realise they have zero chance, no matter how popular with Americans because your ideal policies don't align with whatever the most powerful CIA & FBI factions are.
The fight for democracy is always happening and always has. Trump is not the existential threat and never has been.
While we're here he's not in putin's pocket and /he/ decided to arm Ukraine against russia and did it where Obama refused. Turns out Alfa bank server was a conspiracy theory, so was the "russian bounties for US servicemen" when he was trying to withdraw from Afghanistan. The steele dossier is an embarrassment beyond reckoning.
Keep right on hating trump and hating putin, I sure do. Just keep your brain operational while you do that.
The Hunter Biden laptop did reek of a Russian operation. It was clearly an attempt to hurt Biden in the 11th hour.
Even if the content is genuine, which everything I've seen appears to be, the story behind it is clearly fabricated in an attempt to launder hacked/stolen data. Unless you believe that Rudy Guiliani is a paragon of honesty.
Anyways, I think it's wrong that the White House attempted to discredit and aggressively remove the content under false pretenses.
At the same time, I think it's important to recognize that the content can be real AND a foreign intelligence campaign at the same time. Russia tried to interfere with the 2017 French election by dumping hacked information[0]; in my opinion, they learned from that failure and realized they needed to launder future leaks so they werent transparently hostile foreign interference. Enter the Hunter Biden laptop.
[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/successfully-countering-russia...
But 1) Russian had nothing to do with Hunter's laptop and his Jared-Kushner-Roger-Stone level sleaze. A level of sleaze we consider normal because "But them! They do it! They're worse and they hate us." Repubs and Dems both say it about the other and excuse their own. All of it is utterly revolting outside of partisan divides and has led to ever increasing levels of contempt for government and the media covering it. That's a big problem. Bigger?
2) There was no alfa bank server. That one is astonishing that it wasn't a joke from the first 5 seconds of being tried on and tried on it really was. The source of it is interesting, have a look.
3) There were no russian bounties in Afghanistan. Undermining an elected president pursuing a policy with popular support with a lie. And it worked until Biden picked up that policy and took it forward to completion. Wow. Jaw meet floor.
4) The Steele dossier and every story (and everything, including warrants based on it), is a total joke.
So there's 4 occasions where our (entirely valid?) fears were used against us such that our /right/ to forming our own opinion was taken away. And we need to be honest that our revulsion of Trump was also an influence. That same thing tried on Biden would not have passed the sniff test as these should not have. Do we trust democracy or just end it now? I'm going with the former - even when I don't like who gets elected.
Russia couldn't have done that more effectively. Russia has been used as an excuse and a motivation and method to do that. Our fears have been used as a tool. Doesn't make Putin a good guy and neither was Saddam. WMD being a lie didn't make Saddam a better guy either. Same playbook, no?
Do you think Sanders was supported by Russia as was claimed? He had a huge popular support. Maybe he was? Evidence?
I was surprised to learn the FBI never examined the DNC email servers claimed to be hacked by Russia and the contents published by wikileaks. The source has the credibility affected the Alfa bank made-up-story. Maybe it was Russia? Evidence is not what I thought it was. You?
Which is worse for democracy. Russian interference? Or Interference using the fear of it? The second should not be a thing.
Would be interesting to know the process and details that led to that.
There is nothing wrong with theorizing either, but conspiracy theories often start with the conclusion, and then try to find what facts can fit that narrative. That’s how you can discern more critical theories from just made up stuff or disjointed data points to fit the narrative.
Overall, the most plausible scenario is that WIV researchers collected the original bat coronavirus sequence from cave(s) in southern China, then applied various research procedures such as serial passage through humanized mice lines and cell cultures, along with specific CRISPR-type modification of the spike protein, to generate a virus with optimal properties for replication in humans, which accidentally spread to human researchers and the people around them (including a superspreader event in the wet market). From there it spread globally by train and then airplane, causing millions of deaths and trillions in economic damage.
Why does it matter what the origin was? This kind of reckless and irresponsible research must be strictly curtailed to prevent it from happening again. There are dozens of mammalian viruses in nature that are harmless to people but which could be modified by these processes into novel pandemic threats to which human populations have little innate immunity.
The COVID vaccine reduce transmission, as demonstrated by the analysis of infections in prisons.
COVID causes far more heart complications than the COVID.
COVID totally has caracteristic found in nature; see SARS epidemic in 2003, or MERS.
“ amounted to government coercion to censor content or, worse, that Twitter had become an actual arm of the US government.”
More so this is filed in their defense in a lawsuit. Hardly proves anything
There are studies (Boston I recall) showing medical workers got infected more frequently the more shots they had.
I haven’t seen a single study that shows covid caused any heart complications at all. Just drivel on social media. We know for sure the mRNA shots cause various forms of heart problems.
Covid having some characteristics found in nature and some not found in any other coronavirus in nature does not prove your point.
Source?
Go read the damn twitter files. That is the source.
Are you questioning the veracity of the data given in the twitter files? Because even the executive branch didn’t do that.
I am looking for specific evidence that substantiates the claim that was made. "Go read the damn Twitter files" is not evidence anymore than "Google it".
> Are you questioning the veracity of the data given in the twitter files? Because even the executive branch didn’t do that.
This means nothing to me, because you have not provided any supporting evidence for your claims.
Have a nice day.
The fact that you refuse to link to any specific evidence makes it seem like you know this and aren't acting in good faith.
Exercise is good for you
The government has assigned an agent to follow you when you leave your home, and listens to you through your cellular telephone
Excess refined sugars is bad for you
Isn't this an interesting argument structure?
>People don’t trust the news media, and it’s easy to see why. Major news media organizations reported inaccurately that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. They dismissed as a “debunked conspiracy theory” the real possibility that COVID-19 could have escaped from a lab. And they have perpetuated false narratives around everything from rainforest destruction to biological sex to crime.
Pretty clear bias here, so readers should be aware that everything presented has some degree of motivated reasoning.
People noticed less because he was muckraking for the “right side”.
Wet markets and gain of function research should both be banned.
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/mehdi-hasan-dismantles-t...