I always wondered why there is is much resistance to the idea of lab leak and why the origin of a virus is this political. My conclusion is that this topic happens to go to the root some very important disagreements we are having as a culture.
At the core I see this as being about individual freedom vs big government. If your attitudes are pro-government you really want the most destructive virus of all time to have "spilled over" from nature. Finally, a job only a state can do. "We" need to protect habitats! Fight Climate change! Lock people in their homes and force injections to "protect" everyone. "Well you know, it's not like we WANT to do this but this virus is forcing our hand".
If this is lab leak than it means that your government (not only the Chinese government, US government is implicated here as well) is murderously incompetent to start with and then covered it up with constant lies and gas-lighting and then took all your civil liberties, got everyone who disagreed banned from social media (and I hope that was the worst they did). All the while getting people deeply scared with targeted propaganda and making anyone who just wanted to lead their lives normally out to be a stochastic granny killer.
But of course, if lab leak turned out the be the truth, we would still not see even 1/1000000th of the vitriol directed at anti-maskers be directed at the people ACTUALLY literally responsible for all these deaths as well as the health-, social- and economic mass destruction.
It's always been this way: when government does it, millions of corpses is just so much spilled milk on the way to Utopia.
What scientific problem would actually be solved by panspermia? Obviously, the product of two unlikely events is not more likely than one unlikely event by itself.
Not to mention, we have zero evidence that comets can really seed life and we also have absolutely no reason to believe that any place in the universe is better at spawning life than earth.
The main thrust of the comments here seems to be defending against the idea that Yeltsin was genuinely surprised. It's sad to me because this indicates that the main lessons from this very dark period of "real existing socialism" haven't been learned. Oh well, maybe next time!
JavaScript is really just the tip of the iceberg or maybe the perfect embodiment of modernity.
Looking at it narcissisticly, it's like some kind of divine punishment for younger me who couldn't wait for progress and innovation on basically everything.
At the core I see this as being about individual freedom vs big government. If your attitudes are pro-government you really want the most destructive virus of all time to have "spilled over" from nature. Finally, a job only a state can do. "We" need to protect habitats! Fight Climate change! Lock people in their homes and force injections to "protect" everyone. "Well you know, it's not like we WANT to do this but this virus is forcing our hand".
If this is lab leak than it means that your government (not only the Chinese government, US government is implicated here as well) is murderously incompetent to start with and then covered it up with constant lies and gas-lighting and then took all your civil liberties, got everyone who disagreed banned from social media (and I hope that was the worst they did). All the while getting people deeply scared with targeted propaganda and making anyone who just wanted to lead their lives normally out to be a stochastic granny killer.
But of course, if lab leak turned out the be the truth, we would still not see even 1/1000000th of the vitriol directed at anti-maskers be directed at the people ACTUALLY literally responsible for all these deaths as well as the health-, social- and economic mass destruction.
It's always been this way: when government does it, millions of corpses is just so much spilled milk on the way to Utopia.