Today in motivated non-reasoning
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You probably saw the ProPublica/Vanity Fair story claiming to validate the LAB LEAK theory that was (needless to say) hyped up by various professional contrarians.
Who, for media people, would win? A Senate staffer with a 30 day Nord VPN free trial or epidemiologists and virologists with peer-reviewed studies and sound methodology?
Ah pic.twitter.com/F2AhJ1a7bc— vocational politics stan account 🫳♨️ (@Convolutedname) October 29, 2022
It turns out to have been based on a single course who also appears, at least with respect to this issue, to be a total crackpot:
In the days after ProPublica published a searing expose based on a close reading of Communist Party memoranda in Mandarin, it called in at least two translators, according to three people familiar with the exchanges.
That’s right: In the days after.
Friday, ProPublica and Vanity Fair published a joint investigation about an upcoming report by a research team commissioned by Senate Republicans which found that the Covid-19 pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.”
The allegations in the piece were explosive. The piece dubbed the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has long been the subject of focus by lab leak theorists, a “laboratory institute in crisis” before the pandemic with a safety environment that was “far more troubled than previously known.”
The Pro Publica/Vanity Fair article relied on Toy Reid, a State Department China analyst whose close readings of Chinese Communist Party documents apparently unveiled revelations that all other observers had missed.
“Party speak is ‘its own lexicon, Reid explained in the piece, cautioning that even native Mandarin speakers might not understand it. “It’s almost like a secret language of Chinese officialdom. When they’re talking about anything potentially embarrassing, they speak of it in innuendo and hushed tones.”
But Reid’s “party speak” interpretations, quickly came under scrutiny from some journalists and experts on China, including many native Mandarin speakers, who said the story was based on a mistranslation.
“You got the tense wrong,” Jane Qiu, a China-based writer, wrote in a tweet that was echoed by other Mandarin speakers.
It’s genuinely weird to me how many pundits — some of them liberals — are heavily invested in the LAB LEAK theory being true lack of evidence notwithstanding. But “uncritically accepting the claims of some guy who claims to have indemnified a new language” really seems a over-the-top even for this crew.