https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/dont-be-a-useful-idiot
"Don't be a useful idiot
No, the United States wasn't funding bioweapons research in Ukraine; this was part of a long-running effort to pay off ex-Soviet scientists so they wouldn't take their talents to South Tehran"
Good read.
@pete Just like Fauci never funded gain of function research in China. Peter this is not the dark ages or kindergarten you need to stop being myopic and grow up
@Tusk Gain of function research has proven to be irresponsible. Quite likely even criminally negligent.
But it is _not_ on the same moral level as funding offensive bioweapons research. Not at all. And no-one is seriously accusing Fauci of funding that.
@pete Gain of Function Research is the foundation of enhanced bio-ware. how you don't see this is astounding.
@Tusk By that standard, what _isn't_ a foundation of bio warfare?
Highly infectious pathogens simply aren't good offensive weapons, because they pose a huge risk to your own people. The only plausible exception is to use pathogens that _aren't_ particularly deadly, in conjunction with social manipulation. It's plausible that china is doing that; it is not plausible that the US is doing that.
Stop being a useful idiot.
@pete Well judging by the side affects of the jab that originated from a lab leak out of bio-lab funded by Fauci for a pathogen they had already patented......naivety is the best way to fight covid. Along with fake PCR tests, face diapers and mandatory synthetic gene therapy treatments.
This was back in the day when this kind of things were controversial.
Nowadays big pharma corpocrats brag about them in public, although not openly (yet). This is nothing compared to what people in the industry hear about nowadays in regular or even informal meetings.
His argument amounts to: I didn’t lie to you about Sars-Cov-2 so when I say the people who *did* lie about it are *now* telling the truth you should believe me.
That’s a huge level of trust he’s demanding.
There’s no evidence the labs kept their good mission all the way from the nineties to now.
Given Wuhan, it’s perfectly reasonable to speculate the US has been doing the same elsewhere.
I haven’t seen evidence that’s a fact — but it isn’t an outlandish claim.
Dismissing it as “Russian propaganda” doesn’t make me less likely to believe it. Everything the establishment doesn’t like is dismissed as propaganda. Even the Freedom Convoy was dismissed as a Russian ploy to destabilize Western democracy.
Everyone is bad but some people are worse.
That includes journalists and the author of the article.
Perhaps we just found his level of bad
@lucash_dev Read that article again, more carefully. It'd do you some good.
@pete I reread it carefully and didn’t change my understanding.
There are bio labs there. It’s public knowledge. They were created and funded for a good reason. Some of what happens there is classified.
The above is true of both Ukraine and Wuhan.
His only argument against the labs in Ukraine being used the same way as the ones in Wuhan is that is a justification for Russian aggression and “I’m telling you so”.
I didn’t think it was true. Now I’m wondering.
@lucash_dev Huh? We don't have evidence that the biolabs in Wuhan were making bioweapons.
We have solid evidence that Russia is not making arguments in good faith. They are not the ones who should get the benefit of the doubt here. Berenson's explanation makes sense: they hired a bunch of offensive bioweapons researchers to do peaceful research, including bioweapons defense and detection. That's totally ok.
Gain of function is developing bio-weapons.
I’m not giving the benefit of the doubt to the Russians.
I’m keeping an open mind on a possibility that now seems plausible. Whether the Russians can use it as an excuse for war is irrelevant to it being true or false.
I thought it was a remote possibility— seeing all the people who kept dismissing gain of function research in Wuhan as conspicuous theory do the same with Ukraine makes me suspicious
I definitely *don’t* give the benefit of the doubt to people who were doing gain of function research in Wuhan.
If they *could* be doing it covertly in Ukraine it is likely they would.
That of course, doesn’t make Putin the good guy, or even “less bad”.
@lucash_dev ...and gain of function research is not offensive bioweapons research. Don't mix up the two.
@lucash_dev @pete a more even keeled response to Alex's piece is to say...we don't really know the purpose of bio labs in ukraine but we have as far as we know not been using them ever against ukraine or russia and as freedom maximalists should take the position of anti-war which includes criticism of both russia and also the USA.
@pete good article. Berenson inspires confidence. Honestly you don’t need thirty years to dismantle the labs, but it makes total sense to keep the brains busy, so they don’t go to work for some “worse” guys.