BrickHorn

Tell me you don’t play guitar without telling me you don’t play guitar. His solo is so fucking basic. Is it heartfelt and soulful? Yeah, sure. And it sounds okay. But the riffs are all beginner level shit. I mean, windmilling your arm doesn’t make playing the same note five times in a row impressive. I won’t argue that Prince isn’t a showman. He certainly is. But his technique is not impressive.

Prince is vastly overrated, both as a musician and as a guitarist.

That shit is so good over spaghetti.

The First Amendment’s primary purpose is to ensure the unfettered right to express political opinions, which is why corporations can anonymously donate unlimited wads of cash to political candidates. Oh also, if an individual American wants to write about politics, they need the government’s explicit approval.

But at least Ags are focused on the very real fact that Biden pressured Eli Lilley to drop prices so that their stock would tank, they would get acquired by another company that would immediately monopolize the insulin market and raise prices even higher, and President Biden would pocket 10% of the resulting profits. Which is obviously the way the world works in reality and is not at all hallucinatory conspiracist fiction. Christ almighty. 35% of American voters have the mental acuity of a 9 year-old on LSD.

I like how Alex goes on that guy’s TV show and claims that all TV personalities worship Lucifer, and the host of the TV show that Alex is spewing this shit on just nods and looks genuinely concerned about all those satanic TV hosts running around out there.

No, you have it backwards. The coincidence is offered as evidence of a lab leak. The burden of proof is on the one advocating the coincidence as having any kind of deductive value. And that is only true if the Wuhan lab is unusual in a relevant way.

Usually, in one of your posts.

Exactly. Lab leak theorists will toss overboard all allegations of nefarious intent to keep their leaky boat (pun intended) afloat. “I’m not saying China was developing a weapon or that this was purposeful or that Covid-19 was manufactured by genetic modification. But… it’s still likely that the disease was in the lab building and got out on accident.” But when it comes time to convict, all of those caveats are forgotten and implications are conveniently left uncorrected. For an example of this, just see Anastasis’ post above. He watered his shit down like a 6th street martini on dollar drink night.

That doesn’t answer to my question, and in fact exemplifies the logical error I initially pointed out. You’ve drawn a target around an arrow that already landed. China has approximately 60 BSL3 level labs. How many were conducting research on coronaviruses?

Good question. How many?

There’s no consensus one way or the other. Various groups, including government agencies, disagree on their conclusions. My point is not that this question is unimportant. It’s that it may be impossible to answer definitively based on the available evidence. I don’t have a position which is correct. I just recognize flawed logic when I see it. Maybe additional context will make the “too coincidental” argument weightier. But as typically stated, it’s just not that compelling.

I don’t have a dog in this fight and don’t give a shit one way or the other. My point is the “too coincidental” gut feeling driving a lot of the lab leak theorists is based on a woefully incomplete picture, which is typical of conspiratorial thinking.

Correction:

It’s amazing how unlikely a connection can appear when you leave out critical contextual information. For example, Wuhan is a massive city of over 12 million inhabitants. It’s not at all an unlikely candidate for a disease to originate. There are a lot of potential Patient Zeros in the area. And Wuhan is not unique in its proximity to a high-level virology research lab, either. One 2020 estimate counted 62 individual BSL3-level lab complexes in China. Want to bet that those 62 labs are collectively near most of China’s population? If a disease originated naturally somewhere in China, odds are high the location of that natural origin would be near a high-level pathogen lab. That has nothing to do with cause-and-effect, it’s just pure probability and statistics. And consider a salient difference between the Wuhan lab and the others: Wuhan is a BSL4 facilty, which implements even higher safety standards (and thus reduces the chances of a leak). It’s a lot less impressive a coincidence when you frame it honestly. “What are the chances a natural outbreak would start near one of the country’s 62 high-security pathogen labs?” Pretty high, actually.

Dilbert caters to engineers’ misguided sense of comprehensive intellectual superiority. Office Space rightly mocked that arrogance.

Yeah this is a really short-sighted media strategy. Wow. Guess I’ll watch Liga MX tonight instead.

If it makes Pink Floyd enjoyable, then psilocybin really is a miracle drug.

Here’s a question for you: can vegetarians take communion?

I’m starting a business selling shirts that say “I spent two weeks praying for eternal salvation at Asbury University, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.”

I made a similar investment when I traded my cow for magic beans. As soon as they figure out how to sprout into a giant beanstalk, I’m going to climb it and steal a goose that lays golden eggs.