131–140 of 172 posts
Reading this, my meta conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theories are rarely false, it's just that talking about them at all disqualifies you from being invited to participate in them. Your option is either to be a practical conspirator by joining in, or remain on the outside as a just theorist.
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But why would Ukraine be engineering bioweapons targeting themselves?
Presumably because it would not be deployed on them. Or they would have received assurances of a treatment/antidote being provided. Top $ paid to officials, military aid grants to the country, US security assurances. The research could be done by outside companies, just used Ukraine as a black site to get around existing international laws.
Can you give us a logical reason why Ukraine needs a weapon for mass-suicide?
Other nations may want a such weapon, but why Ukraine may want it to such extent to participate in development of such suicidal weapon?
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That doesn't make sense. The US won and Japan lost, the US could have taken whatever information they wanted to.
It does make a lot of sense. In the most basic terms, almost no American spoke Japanese, let alone at a scientific level. Collaboration would be at the essence. But I think the greater point that you are missing is that you can't walk over a country of 150 million people and achieve total power. Without large doses of good will, collaboration, and soft power, resistance gets in the way of every single goal an occupat…
Biological weapons are not used by the US due to practicality, not morality. 1. It's difficult to manufacture biological agents in large quantities. 2. It's hard to store biological agents for long periods of time, since living things tend to die. 3. It's hard to disperse biological agents over a large area. Spray tanks require flying at low altitude at slow speeds, or multiple deployments at high speeds. Munitions w…
Do we really know what the current capabilities are. It would be top secret. It's been decades of research. I would expect many of these issues have been worked around. I used to think AI was fictional pipe dream. Yet it came to be. > 1. It's difficult to manufacture biological agents in large quantities. Yet the covid vaccine was manufactured in huge quantities in short time. > 2. It's hard to store biological agent…
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There's some interesting analysis of WWII that posits that the nukes were completely unnecessary. Stalin was poised to invade Japan from the north so the US had to act fast. https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-jap... I don't know how accurate this is, but its a good read.
One piece that is always missing in these arguments is - what was the alternative? Blockade Japan into submission? Is hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians dying of hunger better than being killed by an atomic weapon?
Or using it against an actual military target.
The message would have been clear, we can annihilate you if we want and you don't surrender. But they choose to go against the civilian population simply, because they wanted the data, of what a bomb does to a city. And that by that time bombing civilians was already pretty normalized anyway, so trying to save civilian life simply was not an issue.
Biological weapons are not used by the US due to practicality, not morality. 1. It's difficult to manufacture biological agents in large quantities. 2. It's hard to store biological agents for long periods of time, since living things tend to die. 3. It's hard to disperse biological agents over a large area. Spray tanks require flying at low altitude at slow speeds, or multiple deployments at high speeds. Munitions w…
A few engineered viruses can go a long way cheaply. Problem is you cannot control the spread. You need to have a vaccine ready for the blowback.
Some historians say that the English defeated Napoleon at Waterloo because many French soldiers (including Napoleon) had diarrhea.
An important difference between French and English soldiers was that the former boiled water for tea, while the French preferred wine.
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I tend to believe it was a lab leak, but the bioweapon angle never made sense to me. It made more sense as a model to study HIV since I think it uses the furin cleavage site from there. Bioweapons are just too non-selective to be useful as far as I can see, and even if you do have a cure in your back pocket, they can easily mutate or you may have issues distributing cures to your own people. Lest we forget, some covi…
The one reason I think this improbable is because it would make no sense for the US to fund the research relatively transparently through a third party and carry out the research in China of all places. We have a million off the books labs and other areas where such could be done, and also without any transparency in funding or operation. It just looks like a typical case of human hubris. 'We'll never leak this if we take the proper measures' even though there's an absurdly high rate of lab leaks, from labs all over the world - including at the highest biosecurity levels. [1]
Though impossible to measure, it really seems as though the net change in global biosecurity from gain of function and similar research is extremely negative.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
Biological weapons are not used by the US due to practicality, not morality. 1. It's difficult to manufacture biological agents in large quantities. 2. It's hard to store biological agents for long periods of time, since living things tend to die. 3. It's hard to disperse biological agents over a large area. Spray tanks require flying at low altitude at slow speeds, or multiple deployments at high speeds. Munitions w…
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This is a constantly changing area of history, so we're on shaky ground. The diaries of the chamberlain to Hirohito were only published a couple years ago, for example. They implicate the emperor deeply in war-time decisions in a way that contradicts the post-war narrative of a hapless well-meaning buffoon misled by his underlings. I suspect the real reason is close to the usually accepted story, though. Millions of…
they had to quickly repurpose it to be used in the next big thing with whatever tools did the trick, so makes sense
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> Allegedly work was being done on targeting specific ethnicities, like slavs. ... aren't Ukrainians almost all Slavs?
yes, this is why we're on the brink of WWIII. Allegedly Putin is outraged at the betrayal.
We aren't on the brink of anything, Russias not capable of fighting a WWIII, they can't even take Kyiv in over a year.