Watching the panicky Catastrophic Lab-Leak Fiasco Failure debate continue to play out, I’ve found it useful to imagine how the WMD debate would’ve played out in 2002 if Twitter had existed, and Bush et al were widely understood to be shameless liars on the scale of the Trumpers.
My sense is it would’ve developed differently, but along similar lines. Bush would’ve asserted the existence of WMD, nearly all liberals would’ve assumed he was lying, some in media would’ve overstated their certainty about the unknowable and called the WMD allegation “debunked.”
Then, Bush-allied intelligence sources would’ve planted stories about Iraqi scientists getting mysteriously ill (or whatever) in the Wall Street Journal (or wherever), and a posse of liberals would’ve arisen to say The Media’s WMD Fiasco Is A Crisis.
Meanwhile the truth of the matter would’ve remained unchanged: No credible evidence of WMD, very shaky evidence, absence of WMD very hard to prove, but the promoters of WMD theories would’ve remained the world’s biggest liars with the worst ulterior motives.
Anyhow, it’s good to communicate with epistemic humility, it’s also good not to let yourself be played for a sucker.
The theoretical stakes of zoonotic vs lab-accident transmission are small, but the material stakes of making it seem like a bigger deal than it is are potentially quite high.
Asking people to be cognizant of whose bidding they’re doing isn’t the same as asking them to lie. It just means they should communicate carefully.
Originally tweeted by Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) on June 9, 2021.
What he said.
I have no idea about the origins of COVID-19 and I think it’s undoubtedly important to try to find out. Everyone knows it won’t be the last time we are confronted with something like it. Trump was such an inveterate liar that it just became easier to discount everything he said than to assume otherwise. And let’s not forget, he lied about all this too, for months, even admitting that he was downplaying the virus just as the Chinese Government was doing. He gets no credit for anything on this subject. Ever.