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.
in my experience, a pure reputation destruction post is generally non-credible, and you posted an establishment media interview on someone who supports twitter: of course they have a bone to pick.
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 was initially rapidly 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.
Mehdi Hasan is proof that MSNBC can air someone who's as much of a shouty partisanship-addled blowhard as Fox's Sean Hannity.
Investigative journalist Lee Fang goes deeper into Hasan's allegations about Taibbi – plus Hasan's history of plagiarism & viewpoint-flexible controversialism-for-pay at:
Anyone who has seen the interview knows Mehdi wiped the floor with Taibbi and pointed out humiliating mistakes in his reporting -- even Taibbi accepted that.
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.
I did watch it. Mehdi Hassan found two errors in the entire body of work: One acronym (Taibbi wrote CIS when it was supposed to be CISA), and one date that he got wrong.
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.
So, Hasan was a plagiarist as he fluffed powers-that-be for partisan credibility – including an example Fang cites from Hasan's 2012 book).
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.
> there is a chance that the NSA did intercept Carlson’s attempts to secure an interview with Vladimir Putin
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.
There was no conspiracy about the sacklers and the opioid epidemic. It was obviously true the first article that was written about it.
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.
> How many former spooks signed a letter claiming it had all the hallmarks of a russian information operation to influence an election? 50?
This was then promoted to "russian disinformation" and treated as fact far and wide across the media.
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.
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.
The statement that “there are objects that appear to be flying that we sometimes fail to immediately identify” is not something that most people would allege is a conspiracy theory.
The statement that “those UFOs are populated by aliens and the government knows this!” is a conspiracy theory, and has little evidence.
The moniker “conspiracy theory” seems somewhat limited on the whole. I can’t think of a better name right now, maybe “public theory” vs “academic theory” ?
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.
It's more peculiar that I've seen more and more folks make this claim, even though it seems not to be true at all. The person responding to you is using RFK Jr as proof? Yikes.
I’d argue that when he was muckraking against Goldman Sachs and the “Great Vampire Squid” of investment banking, he was already at least bordering on “pat conspiracy” territory.
People noticed less because he was muckraking for the “right side”.
When people with influence confidently label and laugh at conspiracy theories, and one or more turn out to be true, it becomes easier for some to trust the people who find conspiracies everywhere.
One can, but in practice it seems like more people just won't believe the "official story" anymore. That's the behavior that I've seen manifesting lately.
Well that's kinda my point: trusting the official story is known to be not rational behavior, where rational ~= "aspiring to have a maximally accurate / minimally inaccurate model of reality.
It's only one claim in a large body of independent evidence pointing to bat coronavirus research at WIV being the source of the pandemic. Additionally, the collaboration between US-based coronavirus researchers and the Wuhan group dates back to 2013. The fact that the virus appeared pre-adapted to replicate rapidly in humans also is not aligned with previous zoonotic origins, where an adaptation process could be tracked over time as the genetic sequence evolved. Furthermore, the Ecohealth Alliance grant proposals to DARPA etc. for work to be done at WIV involved direct modification of the spike protein sequence, which in Sars-CoV2 has a codon usage pattern optimal for human cells. The question of whether WIV had the original bat coronavirus sequence that was modified into Sars-CoV2 is opaque due to WIV's deletion of their online database of sequences and further refusal to cooperate with investigations.
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.
Are you looking for cnn, msnbc, fox, or one of the other media corporations fueled by pharma alone to write an editorial telling you why something is true?
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.
> Are you looking for cnn, msnbc, fox, or one of the other media corporations fueled by pharma alone to write an editorial telling you why something is true?
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.
The Twitter files were a conspiracist field day. Very easy for people to take random quotes or figures out of context and use them to support their preconceived notions. It's amazing how many people are handwaving "look in the Twitter files" as proof of their claim that has no evidence otherwise, or has even been long since disproven. It's not surprising at all to see the same polemicists and grifters tout the same line every time something happens that can be spun to "prove" their point.
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.
All you need for a market cluster is one infected person to visit once, & pass the infection along to one or more people who then also spend time there and pass it on. There's no challenging "why" needed.
Yes, but the coincidence of 3 gain-of-function researchers being the very 1st simultaneous infectees would be far more remarkable than a crowded place being the 1st spot that's noticed as a cluster.
No matter the origin of a new highly-nfectious respiratory disease, certain dense public places will quickly turn up as locations-of-spread.
But 3 researchers with likely larger-than-average scrupulosity about infection risks, working on increasing the virulence of bat viruses? Pretty sus!
> It misleading presents that the furin cleavage site had to come from gain of function
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.
They are also already present in wild coronoviruses and the initial cluster don't support a lab leak theory, even if they were sloppily working on gain of function via that mechanism.
"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)."
"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.
edit 2: I can't reply to you, stainablesteel. HN thinks I'm posting too much. I am done after this, maybe they are right. I would reply to you with this, though:
---
The furin cleavage site did not have to come from gain of function research. My "wall of text" explains that pretty clearly, even for a layman. That claim is what I said was debatable.
Whether or not it came from GoF research remains to be seen. This article didn't expose any new information, with the possible exception of the names of the WIV researchers.
I have a question for you: what do you think would change the lab origin theory were proven? What should have everyone have done differently during the pandemic? What should we do differently now? I genuinely want to understand your opinion.
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.
Sure its evolutionarily possible to insert 12nt. Inserts are not common though. Whats key is that the insert -in a 30kbp sequence was at exactly a position that would give it functional properties to allow the virus much higher tropism for human tissues. Furin cleavage site appear to selected against in bats.
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
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"
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.
"Ad hominem" is a great defense used frequently people with bad reputations for serially lying and misleading. If someone is a repeat offender of passing along misinformation, what they claim should be discounted regardless of whether one likes the claims or not. The people associated with this story have shit reputations and the article rests on anonymous sources. It may not be wrong, but someone would have to be a fool to ignore the credibility and reputation of their sources.
Taibbi, Shellenberger, Greenwald — these are not people with “shit reputations.” These are serious and credible journalists with views outside the mainstream. You may not like them, but I strongly dispute their reputations merit serial dismissal of their views. This is precisely what’s wrong with the current discourse on the left.
Thank you for saving me some clicks to figure out who this guy is. I was a bit skeptical about how sensationalized the article is relative to the substantive content of his sources
