An appeal for an objective, open, transparent debate re: the origin of Covid-19
It's a mantra at this point that polarization has gotten out of control, but one of the biggest effects it seems to have is this reverse-psychology effect<p>I'm in a big American city, and I remember that until the online kids and snarky liberals started moralizing about mask protocol, there wasn't as much resistance to wearing masks among right-wing crazies.<p>I remember when there was that controversy about 5G networks interfering with bird migration patterns and meteorology, but as the fringe conspiracy crowd started spinning up crazy theories about how 5G was going to brainwash or sterilize or force-feminize people over the airwaves or whatever it was, most people I knew stopped talking about it, seemed to forget that they had ever thought it concerning. It reminded me of the time people were worried about pollutants causing hormonal changes in indicator species, and then Alex Jones started talking about how "they're turning the frogs gay" and the meaningful version of that discourse vanished too.<p>I view the same kind of thing as happening here, as well as a lot of other places. It's made me wary of the sport of finding what crazy things my political enemies believe to make fun of them, because it seems like the net effect of this is creating "opposite" erroneous beliefs with no evidence