Here’s the thing: Juxtaposition has editorial weight. When you say, “I don’t think that this was a lab leak, but [gestures vaguely at all the past lab leaks],” you are effectively arguing that a lab leak is a likely cause in this specific situation. It is literally the same game that Trump plays in his speeches, and it allows him to say that he “never said” a particular offensive thing when he absolutely conveyed that message.
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Oh so he’s “just asking questions”
What indication do you have that this is the case? That this conversation isn’t happening constantly?
That Baker doesn’t address it, even though the many debunkings of this idea dating back to last February do. Does not mean that framing is valid. That this is how that conversation goes, or that no one is addressing whatever real concerns do exist here.
The “just asking questions” approach thrives on ignoring things. And just like the admission that there is no evidence but it still must be. It is incredibly familiar.
My point, you have found it.
This shit is old hat. A lot of it is warmed over from claims about everything from AIDs to Limes Disease. Cropped up with SARS1 years ago, and Swine Flu. With China subbed in for places like Plum Island.
“I have indepenantly discovered this widely trafficked false claim through logic and reason ™” complete with the hand waves and debate and questions are the important blah blah approach is an insanely common way of washing conspiracy for the main steam. It was Glen Beck’s stock and trade, and Joe Rogan basically made his name on it.
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Sorry, misread you as criticizing the article due to its age, rather than criticizing Baker’s arguments for being outdated by 6 months. Retracted!
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I probably just should have linked one from like 1988.
This shit isn’t fresh.
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Yet that’s exactly what Nicholson Baker would say in this circumstance. I’m not saying you are NB, but this is no proof that you’re not.
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Before 2020, this was a major concern of a lot of very knowledgeable computer scientists, poll and voting experts, and many on the left. A really good documentary was made about it back in 2006: http://www.hackingdemocracy.com/
Painting someone with ONE opinion that you disagree with as an enemy gets us nowhere. In fact, it can fan the flames of conspiracy theories - when people see reflexive rejection of open inquiry even when it’s done carefully with legitimate research, it hardens people’s notions that “the other side” isn’t thinking.
So, should we not study these viruses and just let them devastate us when they erupt from the natural host into human populations? Talk about consequences! Willfully ignorant is no way to go through life.
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No one ever said Andromeda Strain was working theory.
This is a fair criticism of the article and I think it’s a weakness. I think likening it to Trump’s cynical attempts to de-luminate discourse places motives on Baker that are both unfair and incorrect. This is a writer held in high esteem for many years of considered work. People commenting here might not know who Nicholson Baker is, which is understandable, but the immediate ignorant attacks on his motives, character, and credibility are disappointing. One can disagree with both the two major premises of the article, and provide evidence that refutes his points, without focusing (almost entirely) on the writer himself.
I’m confused. Does he have any evidence or doesn’t he?
There is a difference between highlighting the dangers of pathogens escaping from (or being stolen from) a laboratory – as was done, for example, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists nearly two years ago – and writing something like this (emphasis added):
What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed.
If you’re going to make those sorts of claims, you’d better have something concrete to back them up.
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There are many other methods of study than intentionally creating recombinant viruses that are intentional harmful to humans. Accepting any and all lines of scientific processes without question is turning off one’s brain just as much as “not believing in” science.
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For some more of my famous tortured analogies, here’s basically what you’re saying:
It’s a beautiful, sunny day. You run into a fellow on your way into the supermarket, and he says, “You know, it’s going to rain in an hour!” Despite the beautiful skies, you check the weather apps on your phone and they all say that it’s going to be clear all day. Then the guy says “You may think it’s weird, but NOAA has occasionally accidentally triggered thunderstorms with its experiments in the past!” Let’s just go on the assumption that there’s an outside probability that could happen. Even imagining that NOAA weather experiments are a real thing, the guy is making a pretty weak argument no matter how you look at it.
That’d be one thing. But in this case, the gentleman is also selling umbrellas. THEN things start to smell particularly fishy.
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And this is where we go off the rails. There is no evidence for this whatsoever, at least with Covid. Does the military do this kind of stuff? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t put it past them, even if biological weaponry has a nasty habit of not respecting boundaries, but to even suggest that for covid-19 is s wrong on every level.
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Those scientists weren’t speaking specifically about COVID or China. They were speaking in hypotheticals and Baker chose to position those hypotheticals as reality. Not just possible. Then he tried to set it all up by saying “well I could be completely wrong, but let’s discuss it as if I weren’t”. The article comes off as an attempt to muddy the waters. What research facilities do is important so I’m not sure what he thinks will happen. We will close our research facilities or start asking China a Russia to close their facilities because they couldn’t possibly be safe? This is no different than claiming Lyme disease escaped from a bio weapons lab. Real scientists are discussing this. Dropping an opinion like this into the public space where conspiracy theorists will take hold of it is a tad irresponsible.
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If you consider these BBS comments “censorship,” then you are just as guilty of “censoring” criticism of the fact-free article.
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The only book I ever read by Baker was a novel about a guy who used his ability to freeze time to rape people. Is there any reason anybody read anything he wrote after that?
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Isn’t any hypothesis a possibility by definition?
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“So, should we not study these viruses and just let them devastate us when they erupt from the natural host into human populations?”
Your reply was about more than covid-19, it was about this practice generally. That’s Baker’s other major contention in the article - that even if covid-19 didn’t get transmitted this way (I don’t think it did), the practice of doing this is risky and wrong.
“Does the military do this kind of stuff?”
Seriously, like read the article! I don’t mean this in a disrespectful way. Virology labs worldwide are doing this all the time. Nothing to do with the military. Not trying to create a weapon. With all good intentions. But there are risks and consequences.
New York Magazine isn’t a peer-reviewed journal.
And I’m sure that on a peer reviewed journal this article will not be published, because is a long series of unproven conjectures.
A good solid theory even if written say, by a clerk in a Swiss patent office, will be accepted by the scientist. But it has to be a scientific theory.
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Would you like to interview me about it, to add an artificial, thin veil of legitimacy to your theory?
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