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Comment by legostormtroopr | Hacker News Reader

There are only 2 reasons I can think of:

1. Because Trump called for an investigation into the Lab Leak Theory. Since Trump is bad, everything he says and does is always bad. This meant that everyone who was anti-Trump said that the lab leak theory was 100% false, definitely a consipracy theory and hence.... bad.

2. Because the Chinese government have used the modern political environment to deflect all critism as racism. Because people often shorten "Chinese Government" to "China" in news (much like the US), they take it that attacks against "China" aren't really attacks against the country but instead racist attacks against the people. Since racism is bad, criticism of China is racism, and investigating the Lab Leak leak is criticism of China - it stans to reason that the Lab Leak theory is racism, and hence.... bad.

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This sort of non-reasoning is all too common now in partisan news sources. They project opinions out to their viewers without any reasoning or supporting evidence. You've spotted a good example on the left. The right does it too with all sorts of racism and antifa nonsense. Oh and apparently the election was stolen. All around our political climate over the last 20 years has gotten progressively more insane and tribalistic.

Another poster in another thread once said that during the Bush and Obama years, safeguards against misleading the US public with counterintelligence ops were removed. I feel like that must have something to do with the explosive growth of the partisan-bullshit-drama-news business. The obvious factors in changing news media are the internet and social media, but I don't think that fully explains the widening divide and eager abandonment of objective reality.

Objective reality is sometimes painful, nuanced, and rarely has tidy solutions.

It is a poor vehicle for a narrative. Thus, it is weaponized by contorting it into half-truths that serve the important purpose of affirming pre-existing values.

The past year has made it extraordinarily clear that the epistemology of science is far too demanding for most people. And that’s okay; it just usually isn’t so starkly obvious.

This is exactly what happened in the late XIX century, when first mass media appeared, and did about the same: they'd cherry-pick evidence to support their prior opinions and painted the oposite side as villains.

Dreyfus affair was the highlight of that phoenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair

Unfortunately, same thing is happening with YouTube bloggers right now: I checked economists of 3 different kinds, and all of them would mostly pick the other's argument, exaggerate it to absurdity, then blame the opponent being socialist/social darwinist/nazi/anarchist/etc.

Most of audience enjoys simple confirmation of their views, and accepts whatever is put in its favor: pure theorizing, demagogic questions, anectdotal evidence and cherry-picked data. Many reject any evidence that puts their worldview under stress -- I personally had this moment with friends, who'd just claim "this is not important, X is always Y, and Y > Z."

The only 2 reasons you can think of start from the supposition that there is strong evidence pointing at "lab leak" as a sensible and sound place to invest enormous resources in trying to prove.

Is it? (the answer is no).

Because the other place that we actually do need to invest enormous resources in researching for viral origins is the wilds of China. Because if it's not a lab leak, then there's a carrier species out there as a reservoir and a series of transmission and exposure behaviors which made it's emergence more likely, and we really need to identify those as well as any potential future viruses which may emerge from the same reservoirs - as was predicted would happen after SARS (and then did, hence COVID-19).

Lab-leak proponents are basically UFO-believers at this point: constantly claiming we need more research into the lab leak, and dismissing any alternative explanations (hence why we're up to "China did secret, undetectable gain of function research at the Wuhan lab")

(1) is a big reason why hyper-polarizing cult of personality figures in positions of political power are categorically bad. Anything they say is mindlessly believed by their cult, and mindlessly disbelieved by their anti-cult.

Government, politics, and politicians are among those things that should be very boring. The mark of a good political leader is that you don't have to think about politics very much during their tenure. Interesting government was a major cause of death in the early 20th century.

Because Trump is incompetent anything he does will be done poorly.

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