Isn’t this the problem of the day? Why do city people and rural people disagree so much? Why is that such a predictor of voting habits? Are we really so different from each other?
Yes, it’s much more urban vs rural than red state vs blue state. Demographics are similar in most states. Why? Mostly one group wants to force their values on the other.
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Kari Lake is in deep trouble. Expect another fake anthrax scare to drop in 3,2,1…
Not really. I think city people have been had to live with adiversity around them and are more forgiving of others situations and vote accordingly.
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Agree, those that live around all walks of life normally end up more compassionate and empathetic towards ever, and less overall judgemental and needing to force their beliefs on people.
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I tend to think globalization is a major part of the reason. Capital has continued to gain power relative to labor since the 1980s.
The college educated has still seen their wages to up. The working class has not.
Related to globalization, i think liberals have come to favor more pluralistic values. Because they have so much cultural power, this tends to be pushed on the entire country.
Conservatives with more traditional and nationalistic values created their own cultural spaces that supported their own views. Unfortunately rush limbaugh, fox news, and their heirs have come to dominate a lot of this space and it’s really unfortunate.
Also, liberal theology seems to have failed in some critical way. Fundamentalism and secular humanism are both ascendant at the moment, and that doesn’t help either.
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AZ01 called for R, so Ds slim chances of house majority die.
If I live in town and I call 911 I expect a response in 5 minutes. If I live on a farm, maybe a half hour. I’d better be more self-reliant on the farm.
If I live in town and put up with the pollution from cars (“pollution” before we worried about CO2), I’m okay with forcing everyone to pay for catalytic converters. If I live in the country where the wind blows the trivial amount of auto pollution away, I’m not.
Same for clean water examples.
Living close together makes you more communitarian. Further apart is more libertarian.
Kids grow up on the farm. Those looking for “new, different” move to cities. Those who prefer the traditional home values stay on the farm.
Same story for those who want to be engineers or computer programmers or scientists or advertising execs or big firm lawyers. Rural is for the people who didn’t want to do those things or couldn’t do them.
If I’m in a minority, say I’m gay, I move to the big city where I can find a “community” of people like me.
So some of it is self-sorting.
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Yes
I just realized that if the pandemic is the result of a research-related incident then yes, uncovering the origin would definitely help prevent the next one. But we don’t even need Congress to investigate. Certain research that has the potential to start pandemics should be banned and defunded. For example, there’s no need to create chimeric coronaviruses in a lab. Scientists have been concerned about this since 2015 and it’s time to ban this research, just in case.
This is a nonpartisan issue and I’m sure we can all agree that we don’t need research that could result in millions of deaths.
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I think we can all agree that if anyone is to prevent future pandemics it’s not the republicans
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It becomes a bit like de-nuclearizing. How do you even make sure it is banned in places like China?
Yeah. I’m okay with banning it in the US, but I doubt that will prevent a Chinese lab from producing a hybrid virus.
That being said, the evidence is still overwhelming for covid being a natural virus that evolved in bats, and jumped to humans either in a lab (where bat viruses were being studied) or in a marketplace, possibly having passed through some other mammal, first. We really can’t prevent that from happening again without wiping out all non-human mammals. And I kinda like to eat meat.
And even if some viruses might be created in a lab, we know that a large number of deadly human viruses evolved on their own. Measles, polio, ebola, zika, smallpox, … are all naturally occurring viruses. Some of them are relatively new-to-urban-humans. There are plenty more where those came from.
As I said, I agree that it seems unlikely that the benefits of creating chimeric viruses are worth the risks. But I don’t think US politicians have the power to prevent Chinese scientists from doing that research.
I agree with you here. If we proved it was an engineering experiment, we would more aggressively cut those experiments.
But I disagree with this. An issue can be theoretically nonpartisan, like global warming, but we still vehemently disagree on how dangerous it is, who is responsible for it, and what should be done about it.
This issue is decades old. It persists because we can’t agree.
You can’t, but maybe you don’t trade H-Bomb blueprints with people you don’t trust.
The alternative (which maybe we tried) is you do trade blueprints, but also try to babysit them.
I disagree mostly and there is a boatload of important common ground. Amplifying the importance of a few issues and then fighting over them is a political stunt we need not indulge.
Confirming the origin would indeed be a good thing, but I don’t think Marjorie Taylor Greene and Gym Jordan are the proper people for this sort of inquiry.
This article seems to bring a lot of circumstancial evidence that it originated from the lab - not necessarily engineered - from what could be seen as bad working conditions and some safety failures. Not really things that you can guarantee won’t happen even with regulations in place, as these safety failures would already be going against the regulations in place.
COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside a Wuhan Lab — ProPublica
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I think this is already true, at least in a lot of cases.
But the line is not always clear. For example, research that does not intend to create new and more deadly strains of a virus can just happen to do so.
My understanding is that this was the point of contention between rand paul and fauci. Fauci said no chimeric research was funded (at least in china?) Paul pointed out a particular experiment that was funded and happened to produce a more deadly strain and claimed fauci was lying. Fauci was told paul he didn’t know what he was talking about.
In my memory, paul said such ridiculous things about covid, despite being a physician, that he has lost all credibility in my eyes.so i tend to think he was intentionally lying about the research in a way designed to confuse people.
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