On The Origins of COVID-19

The question of where COVID-19 came from is of scientific interest, mostly, but unfortunately it has been politicized and used with racist overtones, e.g.: Trump’s calling it “the Chinese virus.” The worst part of it, to my mind, is that the ‘edgy’ branches of the media are also digging into the story in search of some kind of conspiracy angle, which is going to serve to further fuel less-disciplined conspiracy theories. This shit-show is going to continue for the forseeable future.

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Stupid

One could make an argument that racism makes people stupid, because racism is, at its core, a symptom of intellectual laziness. The racist must ignore massive mountains of facts and shelter the racist ideas from enquiry, since they cannot withstand even cursory examination. It’s plain old dumbass.

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No Consequences

I’ve read through the powerpoint deck that was circulating among the Jan 6 coup plotters. It’s on archive.org [arch] and it’s pretty interesting reading. It occurred to me that it’d be an interesting series of postings, to go through it a couple slides at a time, except it’s 36 slides of unadulterated bullshit and that would be a pretty hefty load for us all.

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