The military tested bacterial weapons in San Francisco in 1950 • Hacker News Board

Re: The military tested bacterial weapons in San Francisco in 1950

#51

Post by UnoriginalGuy » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 1:51 PM UTC

brillenfux wrote: post #38

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pre 2001 a lot of people would claim that we are also against torture, extrajudicial kidnapping, secret trials, locking people up without trial, mass surveillance, and unprovoked wars. Things change. Just as between WWII and the cold war people likely claimed "we'll never let stuff like what the Nazi's did happen again!" then the country(s) feel threatened and the gloves come off.

When was this "in between" you speak of? The cold war pretty much started with WWII.

Per Wikipedia: "Historians have not fully agreed on the dates, but 1947–1991 is common" (WWII ended in 1945 for reference). But the cold war was a slowly building thing that took many more years to reach fruition.

So now that we've dealt with pedantic complaints that are wrong anyway, do you have any substantive problems with what I said?

Re: The military tested bacterial weapons in San Francisco in 1950

#52

Post by geomark » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 1:52 PM UTC

LiweiZ wrote: post #35

dr_zoidberg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I always found "fascinating" about conspiracy theories is how educated, smart people can be convinced by some of them. It's just something that I can't understand.

Sometimes the more you know, the more possibilities could be out there. We are not in a 100% transparent world. A single signal could mean a lot that one is not able to see. So based on some signals we could observe, there come related explanations. We could label a category with different tags. Conspiracy theory is one of them. Though I do believe that conspiracy theories weigh people's motivations more, which is no…

Yeah, I think you are kind of circling around a central issue. Some evidence emerges of something untoward happening and the conspiracy nuts jump on it. There ends up being a lot of noise on top of a little bit of signal. People who fancy themselves rational dismiss it while the nuts keep amplifying it. Then much later more/most of the story comes out and sometimes it's a lot worse than the nut jobs even speculated.

Re: The military tested bacterial weapons in San Francisco in 1950

#53

Post by freehunter » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 1:53 PM UTC

wodzu wrote: post #47

halviti wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're curious about the chemtrail crowd, I'd recommend the "documentary" 'what in the world are they spraying' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf0khstYDLA It's one of the many conspiracy type videos out there, and I don't endorse the content in any way.. I just find this stuff fascinating

What I find fascinating about the conspiracy theories is that the moment you start believing in one you will start believing in most of them. As if the logic gate in the brain suddenly stopped working.

It's kind of like "what else are they hiding from me". If the government could lie about X, they could like about Y.

Re: The military tested bacterial weapons in San Francisco in 1950

#54

Post by talmand » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 1:57 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #25

abhinai wrote: post #10

"... the court held that the government was immune to a lawsuit for negligence and that they were justified in conducting tests without subjects' knowledge.". I sincerely hope there was some rationale to this decision that I do not know or understand. Otherwise it would be very hard for me to have any faith left in our judicial system.

Countries are in general immune to lawsuits (sovereign immunity). The federal government has waived that immunity in many cases (e.g. Federal tort claims act) but it's still the overriding rule.

I've always heard it described as the US federal government has to give you permission to file suit against it.

Re: The military tested bacterial weapons in San Francisco in 1950

#55

Post by talmand » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 1:58 PM UTC

Shivetya wrote: post #5

bayesianhorse wrote: post #3

To their defense, they seem to have thought that they were using harmless bacteria. The background seems to be that they wanted to test the distribution of the bacteria rather than the effects on humans (which they thought to be zero any way). Add to that the fact that bacterial infections often hitchhike on other injuries, infections or conditions, it's not clear that the death was entirely the fault of the particul…

I would hope NO state would do such a thing in the current time. We are well past the point in civilization to accept this type of action from any state or organization.

Was there ever a time that such actions were acceptable to the people that they were performed on?

Re: The military tested bacterial weapons in San Francisco in 1950

#56

Post by pdkl95 » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 2:06 PM UTC

nmrm2 wrote: post #37

pdkl95 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just MKUltra - there is a long history of what I would describe as "shockingly unethical" experimentation in the US. The US Government (usually military) is probably the most common actor and/or funder, but they are not the only responsible parties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio... This is why a lot of people (myself included) take a hard-line position of any kind of testing involvi…

If the IRB regime had existed in the 40's, I doubt it would've have stopped this and other experimentation. IRBs are effective at checking back everyday scientists. I somehow doubt an IRB panel would be need to be consulted by someone powerful enough to have the authority to load a crapton of bacteria onto a boat and spray it into SF.

Of course it wouldn't have stopped everything, but it would have helped - probably a lot. When everybody is getting their 3rd-party stamp of approval, those that do not are a lot more conspicuous.

Also, one of the steps in a typical IRB process is to sanity catch mistakes. As mentioned in another post, the people spraying bacteria over SF probably believe they were doing a "safe" experiment about dispersion properties. In an environment were it was regularly expected use an approval process, there might have been a chance for someone with biological knowledge to inform the experimenters of their error.

Re: The military tested bacterial weapons in San Francisco in 1950

#57

Post by flashman » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 2:08 PM UTC

golergka wrote: post #48

They did indeed break the code, in particular, provisions 1 and 9 (it is unclear whether they implemented facilities for point 7 or not), however: they reasonably believed that the experiment was harmless (and they were mostly right, given the experiment's scale), and the data they collected would be very usable for saving civilian lives in case of bacterial attack. So, I'm not saying that it's OK, but it's unreasona…

They clearly weren't harmless, human experimentation can always be argued to save lives (regardless of its morality), and such offences should be under strict liability (which applies whether or not the act was malicious etc).

Re: The military tested bacterial weapons in San Francisco in 1950

#58

Post by pavel_lishin » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 2:09 PM UTC

wodzu wrote: post #47

halviti wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're curious about the chemtrail crowd, I'd recommend the "documentary" 'what in the world are they spraying' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf0khstYDLA It's one of the many conspiracy type videos out there, and I don't endorse the content in any way.. I just find this stuff fascinating

What I find fascinating about the conspiracy theories is that the moment you start believing in one you will start believing in most of them. As if the logic gate in the brain suddenly stopped working.

Pardon me for this comment, I'm low on coffee this morning. It's going to be mostly rambling, but I'll try to keep it short.

I remember reading and hearing that one of the reasons young people get addicted to things like heroin, etc., is due to the fact that schools, parents and government told them that things like beer and marijuana were deadly in any amount - then they would go on to have a few beers at a party, and maybe smoke a joint, and when they wake up the next morning with no negligible negative effects, they reject everything else they've been taught - including warnings about things that are that dangerous.

Re: The military tested bacterial weapons in San Francisco in 1950

#59

Post by andreyf » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 2:17 PM UTC

markonthewall wrote: post #49

golergka wrote: post #48

They did indeed break the code, in particular, provisions 1 and 9 (it is unclear whether they implemented facilities for point 7 or not), however: they reasonably believed that the experiment was harmless (and they were mostly right, given the experiment's scale), and the data they collected would be very usable for saving civilian lives in case of bacterial attack. So, I'm not saying that it's OK, but it's unreasona…

I am not sure how you could possibly tolerate that military entity broke the law and made biological experiments on humans, especially when the said experiments resulted in a tragic loss of lives. This is pure evil.

What law did they break, exactly?

The experiment wasn't on humans - the position of the CDC is that humans were unaffected, and the data gathered was about how harmless bacteria spread through a densely populated city, to better protect those humans if a harmful agent were to do the same.

At a time when biological warfare was a reasonable threat to make plans for, I don't think it's wholly unreasonable to consider these kinds of simulations justified.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/15/us/judge-s-decision-expect...

Re: The military tested bacterial weapons in San Francisco in 1950

#60

Post by richcollins » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 2:18 PM UTC

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #18

abhinai wrote: post #10

"... the court held that the government was immune to a lawsuit for negligence and that they were justified in conducting tests without subjects' knowledge.". I sincerely hope there was some rationale to this decision that I do not know or understand. Otherwise it would be very hard for me to have any faith left in our judicial system.

>rationale to this decision They probably argued that the test was more like surveying defenses than an experiment. i.e. "we need to try it because we need to know if we should be concerned about the Soviets doing it with seriously harmful bacteria." Additionally, when you do anything involving a group that large there's bound to be an few outliers. Winning the lottery, getting bitten by a shark and dying from compli…

Are you attempting to justify this? If I ran a "harmless" experiment over a population of 100M that happened to kill 10 or 20 "outliers" should I be exempt from consequences as well?