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James Palmer Profile picture
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Nov 30 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
incredibly weaksauce response from Propublica to the absolute excoriating of their story by experts, in which not only do they not name the "independent translators" but they excuse the fact that an piece published in November - key to the article! - was actually an August ...
piece that was reprinted because there were 'slight differences.
Nor is there any addressing of the gross lack of context for the quotations given in the story, taking propagandistic party statements at *face value* and imbuing hidden meaning to them *by leaving out the second half of the sentence*
No mention of the fact that one of the experts *they quote* in the story has privately disavowed their use of his statements when asked about it.
This is fucking disgraceful and I'm really angry about it. This was an incredibly shoddy, badly presented piece of journalism; they did not address the issues here and I am really shocked. The initial errors were bad enough; to attempt to defend them is inexcusable.
If anyone knows who the "independent translators" commissioned were, DM me. I'm going to be looking into how this happened - including how the story was funded (reportedly by a grant from Sam Bankman-Fried).
again, any serious investigation at this story should be looking at -

a) why a Party branch newsletter - the equivalent of a corporate newsletter - was presented as 'scientists were saying' and given credence as a serious document
b) how a piece built around documents in November survives them being reprints from *August*

c) why routine safety language *used throughout China* that year was presented as something unusual or special
d) why a single guy was presented as some magical investigator for having not very good Chinese and using a routine VPN tool.
This is without even going into the scientific criticisms!
(to give credit here, the pandemic grant people - partially because I was talking to at least one of them! - stepped heavily on the story afterward when they saw the errors!)
two out of three of their own translators say their translation of a key sentence was wrong!

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More from @BeijingPalmer

James Palmer Profile picture
Dec 1
I'm seeing a lot of people taking this as some huge change, but there's been a push for elderly vaccination for almost the entire year. the problem has been deep reluctance and difficulty in doing it, not will.
government capacities are also *very* stretched at the moment, between maintaining zero-covid and political repression. the manpower to carry out a difficult set of persuasive/coercive tasks for the elderly - who are often in rural areas - can't be magicked up
you can ease off zero-covid controls, but then you get the winter outbreak *before* the vaccination campaign has taken effect. and you can't ease off (by their thinking) political repression
Read 4 tweets
James Palmer Profile picture
Nov 30
Jane is on point here as usual but sometimes these are also *the same dudes* - either behind closed doors or openly, because social conservatism has plenty of room for horrible male horniness.
roy moore was a social conservative, he also repeatedly hit on teenage girls and many (not all) social conservatives said that was fine and are approving and encouraging of the marriage of young girls to older men.
I would add that one of the things my mum, who was a teenage Australian evangelical (of a very different stripe to US evangelism, in a lot of ways), is shocked by in US evangelism is how blasé most of it is about divorce.
Read 4 tweets
James Palmer Profile picture
Nov 30
I think that a *major* contributor to lab leak narratives has been editors and reporters' conviction that they were being bold, investigative contrarians - which has led to some extremely shaky decisions based on very little or no evidence.
people fell in love with their own image of the story rather than anything that could be supported or proved, and damaged the ability to ask genuine questions in the meantime
they've also completely neglected *actually interesting* lines of investigation around the cover-up around Huanan market, from its ownership to the connections to the wildlife trade to the failure to properly test animals. (see @mstandaert who has been on this)
Read 5 tweets
James Palmer Profile picture
Nov 30
again @propublica it's not just that the translation was bad and the context wildly misinterpreted, it's that you *presented information from it* in a deliberately misleading way
For example, the article says, “Even at the BSL-4 lab, they repeatedly lamented the problem of the three ‘nos’: no equipment and technology standards, no design and construction teams, and no experience operating or maintaining [a lab of this caliber].”
here's what the *document you're quoting* says

*At the outset of construction,* the Wuhan P4 Laboratory faced the dilemma of the three nos: no equipment or technical standards, no design or construction teams, and no experience in operations and maintenance—but ...
Read 6 tweets
James Palmer Profile picture
Nov 29
(2025) wow I really can't believe how good the JAR-JAR BINKS show was but Tony Gilroy pulled it off.
what I actually want to see them giving him is a Mon Mothma show set in the early days of the New Republic
it was a surprise when S2 of Andor had a three-episode arc involving him protecting Baby Yoda though.

THIS IS CANONICALLY POSSIBLE.
Read 4 tweets
James Palmer Profile picture
Nov 22
firing La Porta looks like a *very* sketchy decision based on these messages. it's clear that there was confusion over (vetted by Ron Nixon) but that isn't deliberate deceit. this was an editorial error, not the journalist's responsibility.
he literally says the call to publish is above his pay grade! he was doing his job here - there was an editorial failure in going ahead with a single source based on overconfidence in its veracity. the firing seems panicky as a result of the panic the story caused
this wasn't a reporter pushing something unwarranted, this was a reporter passing on an important claim from a source and being asked *by the editors* to work up something based on it! I hope the AP union acts on this.
Read 4 tweets

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