Introducing Ape Quest.
Explore ApeFest, check in at events, meet new Apes, and collect stamps for chances to win rewards, including the exclusive merch we just brought back from Seoul.
Ape Quest starts here, but the adventure doesn’t end at ApeFest: https://t.co/AZokbJhzWO
@DestructibleR@SimuLiu I don’t know Simu’s views but I despise Chinese people claiming Taiwanese things as their own. And I totally think that’s what he was doing.
@SimuLiu I’m Taiwanese and I love to see non-Taiwanese take an interest in our culture. I certainly won’t cry about cultural appropriation.
One thing I don’t love: A Canadian-Chinese actor trying to represent Taiwanese people!
It’s pretty mind-blowing that a prominent American academic is willing to say this publicly. A disturbing shift in the Overton window. (I’m genuinely taken aback—have Reich’s colleagues/employer commented on this stuff?)
As some of you know, as early as April 2020, I had floated the sensible opinion that the lab leak hypothesis should not be so handedly dismissed on Facebook, citing references from elsewhere. My account was suspended and the post itself was removed.
This was more than a year before the public destigmatization would occur (thanks to Jon Stewart in June 2021), suddenly depriving this viewpoint of its cooties and conspiratorial stench.
It was also successfully-coded as a racist trope. Only God knows how on earth they managed to do such a thing given that the alternative hypothesis (Chinese people eating bat soup) was far more racist.
Oh wait, now I get it! This worked primarily because of our stupidity to conform, combined with widespread CENSORSHIP on social media platforms so that only approved narratives could percolate.
In the time since, the lab leak story has proved to be more than plausible (even the US DoE concludes as such).
It’s hard to think about the counter-factual but please for a moment, just imagine that Twitter/Facebook did not comply with the Biden-Harris admin request.
Instead of taking 18 months relying on someone the MSM had anointed with sainthood (St. Stewart) to publicly discuss it, many people would’ve been openly talking about the possibility of a lab leak as early as I was, circa April 2020. Citizen journalists and researchers could collaborate and find each other more easily.
Maybe the public pressure would’ve allowed virologists to speak their minds knowing there was widespread support of this view, and not have been pressured by Fauci to change their minds.
Maybe some public pressure would’ve put media and government pressure on Fauci earlier on, rather than give the very culprits - the people who went around the government policy on GoF research -the time to regroup, the time to censor our posts, the time to cover up their own tracks, and in the process give China time and space to scrub the seafood market clean, stall on conducting an independent inquiry (which they refused for more than a year and when they finally did the investigators were hand-picked), and all involved to hide the evidence (at the Wuhan Institute of Virology). Australia had asked for an independent investigation and instead was slapped with trade tariffs and other economic retaliatory measures.
We have not fully accounted for the consequences of Meta’s speech suppression. But it is absolutely not trivial because it likely prevented us from knowing the truth about one of the biggest coverups in our lifetime.