This article is big cringe.

I want to live in a world where I can be moved by art and music and literature without having to come up with elaborate apologies for that work or for its creators.

Translation: I want to live in a world where nothing ever challenges me, makes me think, or makes me uncomfortable. I want my room to be padded, my ideas to be anodyne, and the status quo to remain firmly locked in place. Furthermore, I want to toss the past in the trash without engaging with its ideas, or understanding why those there thought the way they did, or what it means that our beliefs now have changed. I want the sanitized, the pasteurized, the banal, the pabulum that allows me to luxuriate in tranquilized thoughtlessness. Please give this to me because thinking hurts.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

This article is ridiculously bad. Not sure how it could be more wrong if it tried.

Did they just find the most clueless, incompetent person to write it they had available? There’s not a single idea or significant statement that’s even remotely correct in it. This person doesn’t understand evolutionary biology, transmissibility, epidemiology, basic practices of science, how laboratories work, virology, or really anything at all.

What’s completely odd about this piece is certain facts and suppositions in the article contradict other facts and statements in the same article. I’ve seen this a lot lately specific to the Covid pandemic, where people seem to have two competing, mutually exclusive narratives in their head and then don’t seem to realize it when they pen an article about the topic.

Let me be very clear on this: even if this author were arguing for the lab leak hypothesis, I’d still be saying the same thing because to put it in the bluntest terms, she doesn’t have any clue what the fuck she’s talking about. Just none.

I was sad to see that at the end of the article her mini-bio says that she “has been writing about biological weapons and the evolution of infectious disease for 25 years.” Just…how? I should’ve become a writer then if this is the barest degree of proficiency to allow you to have a flourishing career. In my field that would just not fly because the things I build have to actually work.

I wish we had better experts.