Aug 19, 2022 03:26 PM
(This post was last modified: Aug 19, 2022 05:48 PM by C C.)
In addition to the real outrages committed by governments in the past, one can openly carry on a wide variety of conspiratorial inanity in the West, ranging from the "Moon landing was faked" to Pizzagate. Even the expat, "paid to be anti-Western" propaganda shills prosper here unabated on YouTube and social media.
There are always outlets in the U.S. that are free to challenge authoritarian narratives, especially since (in the Anglophone sphere) the latter primarily depend long-term upon private sector activity to maintain and propagate them, rather than a government that is perpetually enslaved to a single party or camouflaged dictator.
Contingent administrations may align with cancel culture trends and the ideological policies of certain academic institutions and their corporate sycophants, but those administrative intervals are temporary -- they can and are replaced by political rivals (it's a volatile, modifiable landscape). Whereas the governmental orientations in China and Russia are ideologically static, "eternal", and brook no counter-narratives, protests, and objections to their supremacy.
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Anywhere but here
https://www.science.org/content/article/...party-line
China now insists the pandemic didn’t start within its borders. Its scientists are publishing a flurry of papers pointing the finger elsewhere.
EXCERPTS: When Alice Hughes downloaded a preprint from the server Research Square in September 2021, she could hardly believe her eyes. The study described a massive effort to survey bat viruses in China, in search of clues to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. A team of 21 researchers from the country’s leading academic institutions had trapped more than 17,000 bats, from the subtropical south to the frigid northeast, and tested them for relatives of SARS-CoV-2.
The number they found: zero.
The authors acknowledged this was a surprising result. But they concluded relatives of SARS-CoV-2 are “extremely rare” in China and suggested that to pinpoint the pandemic’s roots, “extensive” bat surveys should take place abroad, in the Indochina Peninsula.
“I don’t believe it for a second,” says Hughes, a conservation biologist who’s now at Hong Kong University...
[...] The idea of a pandemic origin outside China is preposterous to many scientists, regardless of their position on whether the virus started with a lab leak or a natural jump from animals. There’s simply no way SARS-CoV-2 could have come from some foreign place to Wuhan and triggered an explosive outbreak there without first racing through humans at the site of its origin. “The idea that the pandemic didn’t originate in China is inconsistent with so many other things,” says Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who has argued for more intensive studies of the WIV lab accident scenario. “When you eliminate the absurd, it’s Wuhan,” says virologist Gregory Towers of University College London, who leans toward a natural origin.
Yet Chinese researchers have published a flurry of papers supporting their government’s “anywhere-but-here” position. Multiple studies report finding no signs of SARS-CoV-2–related viruses or antibodies in bats and other wild and captive animals in China. Others offer clues that the virus hitched a ride to China on imported food or its packaging. On the flip side, Chinese researchers are not pursuing—or at least not publishing—obvious efforts to trace the sources of the mammals sold at the Huanan market, which could yield clues to the virus’ origins.
Wu Zhiqiang, a virologist at Peking Union Medical College who is the lead author of the Research Square preprint, wouldn’t say whether the government vetted his study, which is still under review at a journal. But he denies that his results were influenced by Beijing, let alone cooked up to please it. “We do not represent the government or anyone else,” writes Wu, who says his team is not arguing that the pandemic originated outside China. “We just stand by our data, and all our data are open access.”
Yet Holmes, who has close and long-standing ties with Chinese scientists, worries they have become entangled in the government’s political messaging. “There’s clearly an official narrative that’s come down from on high that appears to be: ‘The investigations have been completed now, and they couldn’t find where it came from,’” Holmes says. “It’s no longer China’s problem—this is about a problem from elsewhere.” He says his collaborators in China have become increasingly guarded, wary of contradicting that narrative with their own findings and opinions... (MORE - details)
There are always outlets in the U.S. that are free to challenge authoritarian narratives, especially since (in the Anglophone sphere) the latter primarily depend long-term upon private sector activity to maintain and propagate them, rather than a government that is perpetually enslaved to a single party or camouflaged dictator.
Contingent administrations may align with cancel culture trends and the ideological policies of certain academic institutions and their corporate sycophants, but those administrative intervals are temporary -- they can and are replaced by political rivals (it's a volatile, modifiable landscape). Whereas the governmental orientations in China and Russia are ideologically static, "eternal", and brook no counter-narratives, protests, and objections to their supremacy.
- - - - - -
Anywhere but here
https://www.science.org/content/article/...party-line
China now insists the pandemic didn’t start within its borders. Its scientists are publishing a flurry of papers pointing the finger elsewhere.
EXCERPTS: When Alice Hughes downloaded a preprint from the server Research Square in September 2021, she could hardly believe her eyes. The study described a massive effort to survey bat viruses in China, in search of clues to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. A team of 21 researchers from the country’s leading academic institutions had trapped more than 17,000 bats, from the subtropical south to the frigid northeast, and tested them for relatives of SARS-CoV-2.
The number they found: zero.
The authors acknowledged this was a surprising result. But they concluded relatives of SARS-CoV-2 are “extremely rare” in China and suggested that to pinpoint the pandemic’s roots, “extensive” bat surveys should take place abroad, in the Indochina Peninsula.
“I don’t believe it for a second,” says Hughes, a conservation biologist who’s now at Hong Kong University...
[...] The idea of a pandemic origin outside China is preposterous to many scientists, regardless of their position on whether the virus started with a lab leak or a natural jump from animals. There’s simply no way SARS-CoV-2 could have come from some foreign place to Wuhan and triggered an explosive outbreak there without first racing through humans at the site of its origin. “The idea that the pandemic didn’t originate in China is inconsistent with so many other things,” says Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who has argued for more intensive studies of the WIV lab accident scenario. “When you eliminate the absurd, it’s Wuhan,” says virologist Gregory Towers of University College London, who leans toward a natural origin.
Yet Chinese researchers have published a flurry of papers supporting their government’s “anywhere-but-here” position. Multiple studies report finding no signs of SARS-CoV-2–related viruses or antibodies in bats and other wild and captive animals in China. Others offer clues that the virus hitched a ride to China on imported food or its packaging. On the flip side, Chinese researchers are not pursuing—or at least not publishing—obvious efforts to trace the sources of the mammals sold at the Huanan market, which could yield clues to the virus’ origins.
Wu Zhiqiang, a virologist at Peking Union Medical College who is the lead author of the Research Square preprint, wouldn’t say whether the government vetted his study, which is still under review at a journal. But he denies that his results were influenced by Beijing, let alone cooked up to please it. “We do not represent the government or anyone else,” writes Wu, who says his team is not arguing that the pandemic originated outside China. “We just stand by our data, and all our data are open access.”
Yet Holmes, who has close and long-standing ties with Chinese scientists, worries they have become entangled in the government’s political messaging. “There’s clearly an official narrative that’s come down from on high that appears to be: ‘The investigations have been completed now, and they couldn’t find where it came from,’” Holmes says. “It’s no longer China’s problem—this is about a problem from elsewhere.” He says his collaborators in China have become increasingly guarded, wary of contradicting that narrative with their own findings and opinions... (MORE - details)