This feels misguided to focus on Covid. Political discourse has turned poisonous regardless of topic. Indeed, the discourse has become an endgame for all topics, it seems. Poisoning far too many things.

I think it would be easy to blame how much public discourse has grown. That said, I would still love to see an exploration of it. If folks have good links exploring this more.

For shots that far predate social media, you can look at phonics and how its association with Bush was a part of why many teachers rebelled against it. (Or I've been lied to by Sold a Story? Possible.)

You're right that (American) political discourse is unavoidably toxic, but the article is still covering some interesting and relevant ground.

It takes a lens of China vs. the World Health Organization. China really hampered the investigation. It appears, according to TFA, that they were trying to avoid blame for the zoonotic origin -- not something easily fixed because the "wet markets" are how a lot of Chinese survive.

But of course that just makes it look like they were covering up something even worse -- criminally irresponsible behavior by disease researchers.

So even if you disregard American political dysfunction, Chinese political dysfunction is a serious issue. It's a place where zoonotic diseases can make the leap to humans, and it's going to happen again.

Totally fair. I did not mean my criticism as a complete dismissal of this story. I mean my criticism to be only scoped to the idea that this is not necessarily unique to COVID. (I don't think this is unique to US, btw. The UK has certainly been showing that they can go crazy with toxic discourse. And most of the dysfunction in this story would be in China's realm?)

I still am not clear how to really feel about the COVID story. I never knew what was at stake, as it were. Certainly we should continue to have ever increasing safety in lab procedures. That is true regardless of if this one came from a lab. Similarly, probably wise to not try and build super bugs. But, again, true regardless of this one?

Advocacy for phonics was weird before either Bush. I believe the KKK advocated for phonics before 1988. Using phonics had fallen out of favor years before that.

This feels like it is still to the point, though? Not liking phonics because the KKK was toxic is right in line with the point.

I meant to put other examples. I'd assume diet/nutrition would almost certainly work, but I'm not that well associated with how all of that worked out, historically.

I have no opinion on phonics, nor did I attempt to convey one. I merely noted that the KKK, an organization notorious for inflammatory gestures, advocated phonics, in order to support my point of phonics being a point of contention before either Bush presidency.

Right, I wasn't trying to give you one. I was simply saying that it doesn't really change my idea there. I contended that Bush pushing it brought in some toxic partisan politics. You pointed out KKK pushed it earlier. I assert that is the same thing, just earlier. Different form of toxic discourse, of course, but still a toxic association.

And, of course, "guilt by association" is a named fallacy and is really all I'm pointing out as being at play here.