I didn't click the link because I don't want to give them views. Unlimited WHATABOUTISM replies when you point out the United States is currently dealing with Bird Flu, Listeria, and more covid variants because Americans won't mask, vaccinate, or quarantine.
Meanwhile I have poor white American relatives who still eat squirrel and racoon and frog and other such things because they're easy to catch and free meal. Where's the NPR article about how many Americans are still literally hunting for food because they can't afford to buy food? How do we know an American eating a muskrat wasn't what caused COVID? Where's the studies being done on that?
Racism gussied up as intellectualism is a tried and true method unfortunately.
In Japan there's a children's song about the tanuki (The Japanese raccoon dog) that includes a mention of raccoon dog's balls.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yKrbaWGhqc
Tanuki are one of the most popular and ubiquitous of Japan’s magical menagerie. There are few Japanese children who don’t know some variation of this popular tune:
Tan tan tanuki no kintama wa
Kaze mo nai no ni bura bura
Tan tan tanuki’s balls
Even without wind they blowing around
Strangely enough, this song began as a American Christian hymn, “Shall We Gather at the River” written in 1864 written by American poet and gospel music composer Robert Lowry. The song made its way to Japan in the 1970s when it was adapted into a popular enka song, which was then parodied into the children’s tanuki song. The parody version is by far the best known in Japan today, with many unaware of the song’s origin.
Almost everyone sings the identical first verse, but depending on where you live in Japan you might have heard variations on the continuance. This is the version I learned in the Kansai region:
Sore o mite ita oya danuki
Onaka o kakaete wahha hha
When hey saw that, the tanuki parents
laughed so hard their bellies shook.
In truth, there are probably as many variations as there are groups of children in Japan, with new ones being created every day.
Ohhhhhhh so that's what tanooki Mario is?
Show
I guess his left leg is conveniently covering his swaying balls
I guess his left leg is conveniently covering his swaying balls
Dohza spicy meatballs!
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
What ended up happening with that? IIRC, old sewage samples from Italy from well before Covid is known to have been present in China had Covid in them right?
It seems crazy that such a thing would be shoved under the rug.
It seems crazy that such a thing would be shoved under the rug.
Not when you're trying to start a new cold war and need to make China into a big bad spooky villain. Much easier to paint other countries as filthy coming to eat your pets.
It's typical "White Man's Burden" bullshit.
It wasn't really shoved under a rug it was reported by many mainstream sources. All the report says is that covid was found in wastewater in 2 Italian towns in December 2019, before any cases were reported in China. That isn't really a smoking gun that it started in Italy, as December 2019 was also before Italy reported any cases.
What it indicates is that it was likely spreading before people knew it was a thing, which is interesting but shouldn't be that surprising for a novel infectious disease.
I guess I'm just not sure why if it was in both China and Italy in December '19, everyone is so sure it started in China? Like the reason people think it started in China is that that's where it was first detected right?
EDIT: I don't even believe it didn't come from China, because if this line of reasoning was correct, I'd expect China to have pointed it out more (in the vein of "The moon landing wasn't fake because it was, the Soviet Union would have said something"), but I'm just not sure why it's wrong.
This isn't even evidence that it didn't start in China. If the report stated that covid was found in wastewater samples in Italy before similarly dated wastewater samples in Wuhan that would at least be evidence, still there'd need to be much more evidence to support a theory
Right but what is the evidence that it did start in China? Is there a reason other than "that's where we started noticing it first?"
I'm being sincere here, not Ft Detrick memeing
Afaik researchers are nearly 100% sure that Covid evolved from bat coronaviruses in Southeast Asia. So the virus would first spill over into humans there. Being that Wuhan has some of the earliest confirmed cases, it makes since it would start there or thereabouts. I haven’t read too much on this but that’s what I understand.
Obviously it could have started elsewhere if Covid was artificially created from those bat coronaviruses in a lab (which is where the various lab leak conspiracies come from). And some wastewater samples question the consensus view of things, although they don’t necessarily provide an alternative explanation and Covid might’ve been spreading earlier than we know. But I don’t believe there’s any doubt that it evolved in some way from bat coronaviruses in Southeast Asia-so if natural origins is the case, then it had to have started there
Okay that makes a lot of sense, if it clearly evolved from existing viruses in another species, it needs to have come from where that species is living with that virus.
I don't think I saw it anywhere in this thread, so I'll point it out here: covid is a variant of SARS. SARS likely originated among cave bats in China and spread once humans came into contact with them.
SARS was identified in 2003 when a major outbreak occurred. It spread to numerous countries, including the US, Canada, France, and South Africa. It had nearly 20 years to mutate into covid-19 in a variety of locations. For all we know, it jumped to another species of bat in Europe or the US then caused the pandemic in 2019.
Do you have a source for this stuff? I’m not an expert by a long shot, but I’ve never read anything suggesting that sars-cov-2 was descended from sars-cov-1, in fact most things I’ve read say they are completely different lineages.
Only what I've seen on Wikipedia and in news reports when the pandemic hit. I'm no expert on viruses, either. As far as I know, there hasn't been any conclusions about where covid-19 evolved.
I just think western media tries to blame too much on China without much evidence themselves. We could be in a similar situation like the Spanish Flu, which started in Kansas but no one reported it until it hit Spain. China may be the first to report both SARS and covid-19, but may not be the origin of one or both. The virus could have easily started in Vietnam or Cambodia, for example.
As far as I know, there hasn't been any conclusions about where covid-19 evolved.
Afaik the direct ancestor hasn’t been found, but every coronavirus from which Covid-19 evolved comes from Southeast Asia. SARS splits off a bit before evolution into Covid-19 so the one can’t be descended from the other.
That’s my understanding at least. Vietnam, Cambodia, anywhere in that region I’m willing to accept, but beyond that I think you need lab leak to make the theory work. Fort Detrick I’m not opposed to but there are mountains of evidence pointing to natural origins and calling into question not just lab leak from China, but lab leak in general, so I’m more inclined towards natural origins.
Looking into this more rn it seems another reason China was identified as the origin point is because initially that was where we found COVID’s closest known relative - in Yunnan specifically. However it seems that even closer relatives have now been found in Laos. Still not a direct ancestor, but you might be right that Covid didn’t originate in China itself.
Ok say it was, how does this excuse USAs abysmal covid response that allowed over 1 million people to die?
I am now convicted the US government accidentally made covid in a lab and lost it. There is no other reason we would be hearing so much about it
I'm not sure you can blame US racism on reporting about covid origins coming from China pushing further and further into animal habitats for meat resources. Not only is that the consensus theory but it's the antidote to the "actually evil Chinese scientists cooked this up in their lab and oh actually they're also incompetent which is why it got loose."
genetic samples from infamous Wuhan market
This is the type of rhetoric that leads to stuff like "they're coming to eat your pets!" Reactionaries say the wrong things on purpose to justify their worldview. They know covid wasn't a Chinese bioweapon. They know Chinese people don't eat every animal they can get their hands on. And they know the US's response to covid is why it continues to spread.
They say these things because they want to depict China as amassing WMDs so the US can amass WMDs. They want to say covid was a bioweapon for ethnic cleansing so Isreal can continue murdering Palestinians. Depicting China as eating diseased wild animals feeds the narrative of "gommunism is when no food so they eat bugs and dogs to survive."
The language NPR uses is deliberately inflammatory.
It's not weird to describe the consensus origin of covid as infamous. It is infamous.
"It's not weird to describe the consensus view about North Korea as a mysterious and reclusive hermit kingdom"
Yeah exactly. The factual narrative from the start has been that COVID came from an animal source, with debate being on what animal it was, from pangolins to bats to raccoons. The conspiracy narrative from the media has been the "Chinese lab leak" hypothesis. Alt left conspiracy about Fort Detrick, or "vaping illness" is unconvincing, and just reminds me about Soviet propaganda trying to blame HIV/AIDS on Fort Detrick. It's not helpful and rather distasteful.
china rang the alarm bell long before covid was even close to being a pandemic and the country was mocked for it. They did all they could to warn us, but somehow this pandemic is still their fault
This is good though? The more the media reports on the natural origins of Covid over weird bioweapon conspiracies the better
Watch and be amazed as the story becomes "the dirty unsanitary chineses are coming to eat your pets, just like the Haitans". This is NPR, they've been hemming and hawwing and helping whitewash the current genocide under the veneer of soft heartfelt liberal "inquisitiveness". They serve the interests of empire for people who think they're too smart for maga bullshit. If they're taking the coverage in this direction, I have zero faith in them not doing so as the groundwork for something evil, like laundering pet-eating stories for their rapidly-being-scratched audience.
I mean, fine I guess. That’s a lot of conjecture but I can’t argue with having no faith in npr and other mainstream news. But I find it weird that this is in the dunk tank when just a year or two ago the mainstream press was pushing “Covid was made in a Chinese lab” extremely heavily. Seeing npr support the consensus view on Covid origins in one of their stories makes me breathe a sigh of relief. Where they end up going with it yeah, I don’t know, your criticisms are on point and maybe you’re right. But this isn’t that, not yet.
