The Octonaut

So he can still own it as a white man so long as he allows 30% to be owned by someone black, Cape Malay, Indian, San, KhoiKhoi or ‘coloured’, or indeed many people fitting any of those.

Not because he “isn’t black”.

Lots of countries have rules about local ownership; eg in Thailand businesses and properties have to be 51% owned by a Thai person. Of course the difference here is that for centuries the rules were increasingly enforced to treat certain races as foreigners, to the point of quite literally trying to declare parts of itself independent ie foreign. This creates a weird scenario after the fall of apartheid that is definitely uncomfortable to read but how do you undo centuries of this with carrot instead of stick when it’s people like Musk and Peter Thiel?

Wet market is weirdly interpreted by most in the west as meaning literally wet and inheritently unsanitary. One guy I talked to thought it meant the floating markets like the tourist trap in Bangkok.

A wet market is just the opposite of a dry market - food, drink, fresh goods. A “dry market” is clothes, furniture, devices.

There are unsanitary wet markets, but there are unsanitary Walmarts and Tescos. The western response to demand all wet markets be shut was just pure ignorance and prejudice.

I’m locked out of the Wired article, but if it’s the discourse I remember, then it’s arguing against Italy as the source rather than arguing for Wuhan specifically as the source.

Finding waste water samples from Italy doesn’t prove it came from there. It does disprove the idea that it originated from someone dropping a beaker or eating a bat on a particular street in Wuhan 3 months later.

If it helps, the (main) lab leak theory was conclusively disproven back in 2020 when waste water samples from Italy in September 2019 to December 2019 showed the presence of natural precursors to Covid-19, with signatures indistinguishable from “the” Covid. Lots of people were reporting a strong ‘flu-like’ bout of illness at Christmas 2019. The idea that it leaked from a lab in Wuham in December 2019 makes no sense. Neither does wet markets and bat soup by the way - that was just good old racism.

A troublesome but mundane coronavirus of the sort that millions every year dismissed as a cold had a slight mutation and turned deadly and prolific. I think the knowledge that this can happen at any time scares people far more than the lovely little idea of it coming out of a test tube so we can blame a person or a race or a government for it, direct anger at a tangible foe rather than the fragility of biological life.