If the only way you can prevent an ethnic group from being a minority in a region is to ethnically cleanse and systematically murder the people who would comprise the ethnic majority, then what the people doing the ethnic cleansing and murder want seems particularly irrelevant in any decent person's moral calculus.
In the last 3 years, there have been, to my knowledge, five major ethnic cleansings, at least two of which likely qualify as genocides, and one of which definitely so qualifies:
1) Of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh by the Azerbaijani regime. Ethnic cleansing, not likely to be classified a genocide.
2) Of ethnic Amharas in the Amhara region by the Ethiopian National Defence Forces, the Oromo Liberation Army, and other armed groups. Almost certainly genocide by international definitions.
3) Of the entire non-Arab civilian population by Arab militias and both major warring parties (SAF and RSF). Almost certainly genocide by interinatonal definitions, and at this point, I don't think there are many interanational groups who aren't calling it such.
4) Of the Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli settlers and IDF. Pretty much universally recognized as ethnic cleansing, with aide groups and other NGOs marking the region as at high risk for genocide.
5) Of the population of Gaza by the IDF. Pretty much universally recognized at this point by aide groups, NGOs, and genocide scholars, as a genocide, though this is vehemently denied by s dwindling number of blind supporters of Israel as an ethnostate.
With the exception of (5), and to a lesser extent (4), almost all of the information I have about these comes from left media, not because, at least in the cases of (1) through (3), the American liberal and conservative media outlets don't think genocide or ethnic cleansing is happening in those places, but because they don't care enough to report on it extensively.
The left cares about these things, and to the extent that the U.S. is involved, the left is pissed at the U.S. and its institutions (public and private) about it (see, e.g., the anti-imperialist left media reporting and opinions on the Saudis in Yemen, and the U.S.'s role in that conflict).
Something I've been thinking about lately is that, while this blog has long been a site for the discussion of the nitty gritty of American politics and contemporary events, it was also the site of a great deal of, I don't want to say theoretical or philosophical posts and discussions, but let's say the discussion of ideas, both as they relate to American politics and contemporary events, and more generally. I miss the ideas.
Now, so much of it seems to be things like this, little gotchas taken from the Right-Wing-o-sphere that serve as a sort of bait for the folks here who are less inclined to hang out in the Right-Wing-o-sphere.
This is a function, of course, of pretty much all of the discussion here centering around the person who wades most deeply into the Right-Wing-o-sphere, and when I first started hanging around here again, I wanted to blame him, but you know what, I don't think it's his fault. The fault lies almost entirely with the people who fall for the bait (and I've fallen for it more than once myself).
I don't expect OT to ever go back to what it was: communities change, blogs change, and so on, but I think it would be pretty easy to radically change the discussions here just by not responding to bait. Jaybird has done what I think he wants to do by making us all aware of what the Right-Wing-o-sphere is saying and thinking, and I think we can all just say, "Huh," and move on, knowing that taking the bait is pointless.
I get where you're coming from, and I've seen other moderates say something similar (there was even a piece in Axios with moderate House Democrats saying effectively this).
My position is different: I see a very slippery slope from denying non-citizens, documented and undocumented, due processes, to denying citizens such. That is to say, this is not merely an immigration issue, it's a basic Constitutional issue, and more fundamentally, a basic issue of rights, and whether we have them in any meaningful sense.
So yes, Trump tanking the economy is very important, and we should be pushing back on that, but Trump sending anyone to an El Salvadorian prison without due process (and fankly even with it), revoking visas and green cards for political dissent, ICE showing up at schools demanding to see immigrant children for "welfare checks," etc., should freak us all the hell out.
I admit I'm a bit more freaked out about this stuff than moderates are likely to be, because I share some of the political views of the people who are losing their visas and green cards. I'm already anxious enough about my politics that I go out of my way to avoid discussing them anywhere my name might be found (though I've been doxed by local conservatives, who have been to my house and gone after my and my partner's jobs, and you can find my name on the leaked member lists of certain left groups). Even before Trump, it would not have been an exaggeration to say that my politics could cost me my job, and now with Trump, what might they cost me? Or more pressingly, my friends who are non-citizens with similar politics?
Point being, I see all of this as not only a general threat, but a personal one as well. And I think just about everyone else should.
Coincidentally, actual researchers have just shown pretty strong evidence that it came from raccoon dogs. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00426-3
"Arrested at Home Depot with a group of immigrants" just makes it sound like he was looking for day work. You're not helping the case here.
Last summer, I went to a game between the Venezuelan and Jamaican national teams. 95% of the people in the stadium, and literally everyone within 10 rows of me, was Venezuelan. Assuming there were at least 2 gang members at that game, is anyone arrested at that gang (no one, to my knowledge, was, but hypothetically) therefore also a Venezuelan gang member? This is the same logic.
Sorry, that's all I can say to this. He may have entered the country illegally, but when he was arrested, he was here legally, and there's 0 non-circumstantial evidence that he's a gang member, and even the circumstantial stuff is pretty sketchy and relies on us to trust an administration and federal agencies that are known to lie their asses off, and to treat even the slightest connection (like a tattoo of a crown) as evidence of gang membership. It's very weird to see non-MAGA buy this nonsense.
Once upon a time, when I lived in certain neighborhoods and took buses from certain stops (and going back further, to when I hung out in downtown Nashville 30 years ago), I spent a lot of time talking to people experiencing homelessness. I learned a lot from those conversations, but the biggest lesson is that for most of us, homelessness is way closer than we'd like to think. The cracks in the system that lead to homelessness are quite large, and all it takes to fall through it them are one of many pretty common precipitating events, e.g., a head injury, abuse at home (particularly for teenagers and women), surprisingly minor mental illness (though homelessness itself has a way of exacerbating most mental illnesses), or drug addiction (either what we think of as illicit drugs, or prescription drug addiction, which often comes from relatively common injuries), and a lack of resources and support (from family, community, or state).
With this in mind, it makes no sense to see people experiencing homeless as an other, defined by some feature inherent to themselves that makes them homeless, and differences on which make it difficult or impossible for me to become homeless. However, this is how people tend to see homelessness: as a straightforward result of bad choices, caused by something inherent to the people who make them. And this is why people experiencing homelessness remain one of the few social categories, and in particular one of the few vulnerable social categories, that it's OK to treat poorly.
It's interesting that, given the language so many people use to talk about homelessness, the only language people like Jaybird are interested in is the language people trying to change how we see homelessness ask us to use. If I were a better Freudian than I am, I'd say it has something to do with our deep need to not see how alike people experiencing homelessness and we are.
One of the interesting things about homelessness is that we don't want to spend resources on people experiencing it, because we think about them in highly essentialized ways, but we end up spending a sh*t ton of resources on them anyway, as in the article you initially linked. One way to fix this vicious cycle would be for people to think about homelessness differently, and in particular, in a way that doesn't involve moral judgment of people who are experiencing it, and language change is way we can help people get there.
Having a philosophy background, I'm sure you've thought a lot about language and thought (the house of being, speech acts, and so on), and you might even be aware that labels tend to cause us to think in essentialist terms, that is, e.g., when we call someone homeless, we tend to see it as being the result of something inherent and possibly immutable about them, so trying to avoid essentializing labels is one part of a strategy to change the way people think about people who fall into a social category.
Again, focusing entirely on language, or harshly policing language (calling out instead of calling in, as the kids say), are generally bad, but so is a stubborn resistance to language change (a resistance usually explainable, obviously, by the fact that it really does affect how people think).
Anyway, like I said, I'm sure you know all this, but you are temporarily experiencing ressentiment.
Yeah, there's definitely a serious 90s libertarian vibe: a lot of sarcasm, hates everyone (but especially women), hates the government, hates taxes, likes weed and guns, wants to be mostly left alone. The only known politically-oriented person I saw him cite approvingly was Thomas Sowell, which fits with this vibe.
To be clear, the "Registered socialist" (not an actual thing) post was a clear shitpost, in which he also claimed he had 27 mail in ballots, playing on the rightwing belief that the "left" votes multiple times. I don't think there's any evidence he was any sort of socialist.
I'm not a fan of the Biden administration by any means, but if you wanted to bring back manufacturing, the Biden administration's chip and green initiatives seem to be the right way to do it. Those sectors also bring in enough jobs that there are whole non-profits being set up to help with workforce issues.
There's a somewhat heated debate amongst the various types of leftists going on right now on the various social media around the idea of tariffs. A lot of trade unionist types going back to the industrial revolution, and a lot of social democrats in the 20th century, have been in favor of targeted tariffs as a form of protectionism for workers (can't lose jobs to manufacturing in Germany if we have tariffs on German-made goods here in 1840s England, now can we! sorta thing). A lot of internationalists are like, "Tariffs are a form of nationalism. All nationalism is bad. Therefore all tariffs are bad." And the various types of Marxists (including the internationalists) point out that tariffs don't end up helping workers, they just help capital (there are a bunch of Marx and Engels writings to this effect from the 1840s on). It's been an interesting discussion, with good points on both sides (but still, tariffs are bad, and don't help workers!).
Union leaders in the U.S. seem to heavily favor tariffs, particularly on cars, and a year or two ago, their members largely agreed, but recent polling suggest union rank and file are increasingly anti-tariff generally. I suspect that a Democratic mayor of Michigan has to say "Some tariffs are good" to keep on the auto unions good side.
I’m not the one who introduced the term “cold” to the conversation.
Sigh. Alright, man, onto the next conversation, where maybe you'll decide to be a productive participant, or maybe you'll do this sort of sh*t. See you there.
Aha, straw-manning, another common conspiracy-theorist tactic.
No, I'm not saying COVID is just a bad cold. I'm saying its symptoms heavily overlap with other respiratory viruses, including the flu and the various types of viruses that get classified under the common cold. And the majority of people who get COVID, especially healthy people like, say, athletes in the military, experience only the cold-like symptoms. However, COVID is not just a bad cold, because in its more severe form, it is much worse than either the cold or the flu (or at least was worse than the flu, before widespread immunity and vaccination; I haven't seen the latest mortality rate numbers for COVID, but I suspect they've dropped down closer to the flu). And that's before we start talking about long COVID and its various manifestations.
My point is all we know is that 7 Americans who participated in the World Military Games in 2019 had COVID-like symptoms, and that this 7 is not an unusual number for that time in the military, even compared to units that sent no one to the World Military Games. So those 7 people tell us nothing, for better or worse. You'll have to look elsewhere for clues, I'm afraid.
Oh man, by all means, keep talking about alternatives. The problem isn't that you're talking about alternatives on a podunk website in 2025: it's that scientists keep saying there's a very real impact on research because people in power keep insisting that they, the scientists, focus on the alternatives.
I mean, I know in your mind, the conspiracy is more than likely, it's almost certain, and therefore what's actually being suppressed is the conspiracy, but seriously, scientists have been saying for years now that the pressure they're getting is very much from the opposite direction.
Syllogism 1:
If a report is required by law to be released, it is important.
This report was required by law to be released.
Therefore, this report was important.
Syllogism 2:
If a report was not required to be released, but is important, it should be released.
This report was not required to be released, but isimportant (per syllogism 1).
Therefore this report should have been released even though it was not required by law to be so.
If you read the report, or even just the sections I quoted above, you'll see that it says nothing that could possibly lead anyone to conclude that U.S. military personnel contracted COVID at the World Military Games in Wuhan in 2019 without a great deal more evidence. It mostly just looks like about the number of people you'd expect got colds. It just so happens that they got colds a couple months before a worldwide pandemic with cold-like symptoms originated in the place they were. It's weak even as circumstantial evidence goes, if you take 2 seconds to think about it. But you're thinking like a conspiracy theorist, so 2 seconds is more than you have to spare.
So in addition to reconfirming the laziness of conspiracy theory thinking, we have another common feature: draw a conclusion from false information, and when the information is shown to be false, continue to the maintain the conclusion as though it had been proven anyway.
I realize that, post-February 2020, we're all virologists and epidemiologists now, but man, I really suggest reading some of the actual research by virologists and epidemiologists. I even linked a Nature write-up of a recent (published in February) study on the origins of the virus above. It's a good place to start.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Caffeine Rituals”
Congrats. My song got married a couple weeks ago, and it's still very surreal (made moreso by the fact that neither of his parents has ever married).
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/21/2025”
If the only way you can prevent an ethnic group from being a minority in a region is to ethnically cleanse and systematically murder the people who would comprise the ethnic majority, then what the people doing the ethnic cleansing and murder want seems particularly irrelevant in any decent person's moral calculus.
"
In the last 3 years, there have been, to my knowledge, five major ethnic cleansings, at least two of which likely qualify as genocides, and one of which definitely so qualifies:
1) Of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh by the Azerbaijani regime. Ethnic cleansing, not likely to be classified a genocide.
2) Of ethnic Amharas in the Amhara region by the Ethiopian National Defence Forces, the Oromo Liberation Army, and other armed groups. Almost certainly genocide by international definitions.
3) Of the entire non-Arab civilian population by Arab militias and both major warring parties (SAF and RSF). Almost certainly genocide by interinatonal definitions, and at this point, I don't think there are many interanational groups who aren't calling it such.
4) Of the Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli settlers and IDF. Pretty much universally recognized as ethnic cleansing, with aide groups and other NGOs marking the region as at high risk for genocide.
5) Of the population of Gaza by the IDF. Pretty much universally recognized at this point by aide groups, NGOs, and genocide scholars, as a genocide, though this is vehemently denied by s dwindling number of blind supporters of Israel as an ethnostate.
With the exception of (5), and to a lesser extent (4), almost all of the information I have about these comes from left media, not because, at least in the cases of (1) through (3), the American liberal and conservative media outlets don't think genocide or ethnic cleansing is happening in those places, but because they don't care enough to report on it extensively.
The left cares about these things, and to the extent that the U.S. is involved, the left is pissed at the U.S. and its institutions (public and private) about it (see, e.g., the anti-imperialist left media reporting and opinions on the Saudis in Yemen, and the U.S.'s role in that conflict).
"
What the left "seems" to you bears little relation to what the left is or does.
"
Something I've been thinking about lately is that, while this blog has long been a site for the discussion of the nitty gritty of American politics and contemporary events, it was also the site of a great deal of, I don't want to say theoretical or philosophical posts and discussions, but let's say the discussion of ideas, both as they relate to American politics and contemporary events, and more generally. I miss the ideas.
Now, so much of it seems to be things like this, little gotchas taken from the Right-Wing-o-sphere that serve as a sort of bait for the folks here who are less inclined to hang out in the Right-Wing-o-sphere.
This is a function, of course, of pretty much all of the discussion here centering around the person who wades most deeply into the Right-Wing-o-sphere, and when I first started hanging around here again, I wanted to blame him, but you know what, I don't think it's his fault. The fault lies almost entirely with the people who fall for the bait (and I've fallen for it more than once myself).
I don't expect OT to ever go back to what it was: communities change, blogs change, and so on, but I think it would be pretty easy to radically change the discussions here just by not responding to bait. Jaybird has done what I think he wants to do by making us all aware of what the Right-Wing-o-sphere is saying and thinking, and I think we can all just say, "Huh," and move on, knowing that taking the bait is pointless.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/14/2025”
I get where you're coming from, and I've seen other moderates say something similar (there was even a piece in Axios with moderate House Democrats saying effectively this).
My position is different: I see a very slippery slope from denying non-citizens, documented and undocumented, due processes, to denying citizens such. That is to say, this is not merely an immigration issue, it's a basic Constitutional issue, and more fundamentally, a basic issue of rights, and whether we have them in any meaningful sense.
So yes, Trump tanking the economy is very important, and we should be pushing back on that, but Trump sending anyone to an El Salvadorian prison without due process (and fankly even with it), revoking visas and green cards for political dissent, ICE showing up at schools demanding to see immigrant children for "welfare checks," etc., should freak us all the hell out.
I admit I'm a bit more freaked out about this stuff than moderates are likely to be, because I share some of the political views of the people who are losing their visas and green cards. I'm already anxious enough about my politics that I go out of my way to avoid discussing them anywhere my name might be found (though I've been doxed by local conservatives, who have been to my house and gone after my and my partner's jobs, and you can find my name on the leaked member lists of certain left groups). Even before Trump, it would not have been an exaggeration to say that my politics could cost me my job, and now with Trump, what might they cost me? Or more pressingly, my friends who are non-citizens with similar politics?
Point being, I see all of this as not only a general threat, but a personal one as well. And I think just about everyone else should.
"
Coincidentally, actual researchers have just shown pretty strong evidence that it came from raccoon dogs. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00426-3
"
I mean, not doing genocide is something that could be done.
"
"Arrested at Home Depot with a group of immigrants" just makes it sound like he was looking for day work. You're not helping the case here.
Last summer, I went to a game between the Venezuelan and Jamaican national teams. 95% of the people in the stadium, and literally everyone within 10 rows of me, was Venezuelan. Assuming there were at least 2 gang members at that game, is anyone arrested at that gang (no one, to my knowledge, was, but hypothetically) therefore also a Venezuelan gang member? This is the same logic.
"
Ooooooof.
Sorry, that's all I can say to this. He may have entered the country illegally, but when he was arrested, he was here legally, and there's 0 non-circumstantial evidence that he's a gang member, and even the circumstantial stuff is pretty sketchy and relies on us to trust an administration and federal agencies that are known to lie their asses off, and to treat even the slightest connection (like a tattoo of a crown) as evidence of gang membership. It's very weird to see non-MAGA buy this nonsense.
"
Perhaps if Israel agrees to disarm as well.
"
Once upon a time, when I lived in certain neighborhoods and took buses from certain stops (and going back further, to when I hung out in downtown Nashville 30 years ago), I spent a lot of time talking to people experiencing homelessness. I learned a lot from those conversations, but the biggest lesson is that for most of us, homelessness is way closer than we'd like to think. The cracks in the system that lead to homelessness are quite large, and all it takes to fall through it them are one of many pretty common precipitating events, e.g., a head injury, abuse at home (particularly for teenagers and women), surprisingly minor mental illness (though homelessness itself has a way of exacerbating most mental illnesses), or drug addiction (either what we think of as illicit drugs, or prescription drug addiction, which often comes from relatively common injuries), and a lack of resources and support (from family, community, or state).
With this in mind, it makes no sense to see people experiencing homeless as an other, defined by some feature inherent to themselves that makes them homeless, and differences on which make it difficult or impossible for me to become homeless. However, this is how people tend to see homelessness: as a straightforward result of bad choices, caused by something inherent to the people who make them. And this is why people experiencing homelessness remain one of the few social categories, and in particular one of the few vulnerable social categories, that it's OK to treat poorly.
It's interesting that, given the language so many people use to talk about homelessness, the only language people like Jaybird are interested in is the language people trying to change how we see homelessness ask us to use. If I were a better Freudian than I am, I'd say it has something to do with our deep need to not see how alike people experiencing homelessness and we are.
"
One of the interesting things about homelessness is that we don't want to spend resources on people experiencing it, because we think about them in highly essentialized ways, but we end up spending a sh*t ton of resources on them anyway, as in the article you initially linked. One way to fix this vicious cycle would be for people to think about homelessness differently, and in particular, in a way that doesn't involve moral judgment of people who are experiencing it, and language change is way we can help people get there.
"
Having a philosophy background, I'm sure you've thought a lot about language and thought (the house of being, speech acts, and so on), and you might even be aware that labels tend to cause us to think in essentialist terms, that is, e.g., when we call someone homeless, we tend to see it as being the result of something inherent and possibly immutable about them, so trying to avoid essentializing labels is one part of a strategy to change the way people think about people who fall into a social category.
Again, focusing entirely on language, or harshly policing language (calling out instead of calling in, as the kids say), are generally bad, but so is a stubborn resistance to language change (a resistance usually explainable, obviously, by the fact that it really does affect how people think).
Anyway, like I said, I'm sure you know all this, but you are temporarily experiencing ressentiment.
"
Commenters temporarily experiencing shitposting?
"
The bulk of the increase was rubbish fires, not structure or wildfires, in case that's not clear from the linked article.
On “Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s Residence Attacked, Suspect Arrested”
Yeah, there's definitely a serious 90s libertarian vibe: a lot of sarcasm, hates everyone (but especially women), hates the government, hates taxes, likes weed and guns, wants to be mostly left alone. The only known politically-oriented person I saw him cite approvingly was Thomas Sowell, which fits with this vibe.
"
To be clear, the "Registered socialist" (not an actual thing) post was a clear shitpost, in which he also claimed he had 27 mail in ballots, playing on the rightwing belief that the "left" votes multiple times. I don't think there's any evidence he was any sort of socialist.
On “What To Expect When You’re Expecting a Trade War”
I'm not a fan of the Biden administration by any means, but if you wanted to bring back manufacturing, the Biden administration's chip and green initiatives seem to be the right way to do it. Those sectors also bring in enough jobs that there are whole non-profits being set up to help with workforce issues.
"
There's a somewhat heated debate amongst the various types of leftists going on right now on the various social media around the idea of tariffs. A lot of trade unionist types going back to the industrial revolution, and a lot of social democrats in the 20th century, have been in favor of targeted tariffs as a form of protectionism for workers (can't lose jobs to manufacturing in Germany if we have tariffs on German-made goods here in 1840s England, now can we! sorta thing). A lot of internationalists are like, "Tariffs are a form of nationalism. All nationalism is bad. Therefore all tariffs are bad." And the various types of Marxists (including the internationalists) point out that tariffs don't end up helping workers, they just help capital (there are a bunch of Marx and Engels writings to this effect from the 1840s on). It's been an interesting discussion, with good points on both sides (but still, tariffs are bad, and don't help workers!).
Union leaders in the U.S. seem to heavily favor tariffs, particularly on cars, and a year or two ago, their members largely agreed, but recent polling suggest union rank and file are increasingly anti-tariff generally. I suspect that a Democratic mayor of Michigan has to say "Some tariffs are good" to keep on the auto unions good side.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/7/2025”
I’m not the one who introduced the term “cold” to the conversation.
Sigh. Alright, man, onto the next conversation, where maybe you'll decide to be a productive participant, or maybe you'll do this sort of sh*t. See you there.
"
Aha, straw-manning, another common conspiracy-theorist tactic.
No, I'm not saying COVID is just a bad cold. I'm saying its symptoms heavily overlap with other respiratory viruses, including the flu and the various types of viruses that get classified under the common cold. And the majority of people who get COVID, especially healthy people like, say, athletes in the military, experience only the cold-like symptoms. However, COVID is not just a bad cold, because in its more severe form, it is much worse than either the cold or the flu (or at least was worse than the flu, before widespread immunity and vaccination; I haven't seen the latest mortality rate numbers for COVID, but I suspect they've dropped down closer to the flu). And that's before we start talking about long COVID and its various manifestations.
My point is all we know is that 7 Americans who participated in the World Military Games in 2019 had COVID-like symptoms, and that this 7 is not an unusual number for that time in the military, even compared to units that sent no one to the World Military Games. So those 7 people tell us nothing, for better or worse. You'll have to look elsewhere for clues, I'm afraid.
"
Oh man, by all means, keep talking about alternatives. The problem isn't that you're talking about alternatives on a podunk website in 2025: it's that scientists keep saying there's a very real impact on research because people in power keep insisting that they, the scientists, focus on the alternatives.
I mean, I know in your mind, the conspiracy is more than likely, it's almost certain, and therefore what's actually being suppressed is the conspiracy, but seriously, scientists have been saying for years now that the pressure they're getting is very much from the opposite direction.
"
What's great here is your logic:
Syllogism 1:
If a report is required by law to be released, it is important.
This report was required by law to be released.
Therefore, this report was important.
Syllogism 2:
If a report was not required to be released, but is important, it should be released.
This report was not required to be released, but isimportant (per syllogism 1).
Therefore this report should have been released even though it was not required by law to be so.
If you read the report, or even just the sections I quoted above, you'll see that it says nothing that could possibly lead anyone to conclude that U.S. military personnel contracted COVID at the World Military Games in Wuhan in 2019 without a great deal more evidence. It mostly just looks like about the number of people you'd expect got colds. It just so happens that they got colds a couple months before a worldwide pandemic with cold-like symptoms originated in the place they were. It's weak even as circumstantial evidence goes, if you take 2 seconds to think about it. But you're thinking like a conspiracy theorist, so 2 seconds is more than you have to spare.
So in addition to reconfirming the laziness of conspiracy theory thinking, we have another common feature: draw a conclusion from false information, and when the information is shown to be false, continue to the maintain the conclusion as though it had been proven anyway.
"
I realize that, post-February 2020, we're all virologists and epidemiologists now, but man, I really suggest reading some of the actual research by virologists and epidemiologists. I even linked a Nature write-up of a recent (published in February) study on the origins of the virus above. It's a good place to start.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.