> ... Evidence in favor of leak theory lowers the status of the media and raises the status of Tom Cotton but doesn’t drastically alter the policy landscape.
That's a very peculiar statement coming from someone who just admitted to missing the 21st century's biggest story to date. And I suspect he's now being too quick to discount the effect on not only the political landscape, but the journalistic landscape as well.
It's incredible. If the lab leak theory is true, then a virus escaped from a lab in China and caused the deaths of millions of people. And at the time this happened, the Chinese government did everything it could to hide that from the world. And for some reason, a large part of the US media and tech establishments went along with the ruse and were nice enough to censor or attempt to discredit/destroy anyone who suggested that the virus didn't come from a wet market, but instead possibly came from the Institute of Virology down the street.
And if we somehow find that all of the above is true, there are people who say that this isn't really a big deal from a policy perspective? What in the actual fuck??
If it had been a lab in Colorado, under the nominal supervision of some Trump crony, I think it indeed would have been something of “a big deal from a policy perspective”!
I like Yglesias, but it’s pretty blinkered to limit “policy impact” to “what to do about biological threat research”. Maybe this means having unanswerable autocracies around is bad and we should try (however ineffectually) to change that state of affairs?
That's a very peculiar statement coming from someone who just admitted to missing the 21st century's biggest story to date. And I suspect he's now being too quick to discount the effect on not only the political landscape, but the journalistic landscape as well.