This is such a clickbait. Everybody reading that title imagines that they tested spreading of some contagious disease (and put it in the same category as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36256831) - but what was tested was how the bacteria was moved by the air in the subway. They tried a common soil bacteria that they believed was harmless (and which wikipedia says "is thought to be a normal gut commensal in humans").
"""And while the people who conducted these experiments did so under the belief that the bacterial species they used were harmless, it has since been revealed that they can cause health problems."""
The bacteria used there was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_subtilis "This species is commonly found in the upper layers of the soil and B. subtilis is thought to be a normal gut commensal in humans."
We live surrounded by bacteria, an probably often by Bacillus subtilis - because it is a common bacteria found in soil.
It's not clickbait. It's completely unacceptable to perform biological experiments on people without their consent. It doesn't matter if you think the bacteria is harmless, it's an extreme violation of human rights to test on a unknowing citizens.
In my opinion actually big tech that has been pushing these boundaries a lot.
A lot of new services are really experiments on society. Tracking, Adtech, A/B testing. Move fast and break things, but don't forget that at the scale these companies operate, one of the things to break is our entire society. Especially social media bubbles have caused a lot of polarization IMO.
I feel the social responsibility in these companies is severely lacking. And because they're getting away with everything, the Overton window shifts in that direction.
So all A/B testing is unethical? Like figuring out if people navigate your desktop site better depending on whether it uses a menu bar or hamburger menu?
Why is a product change ethical if it's done not as part of an experiment, but it becomes unethical if it's part of an experiment? If the end user has the exact same experience in both cases?
Presuming you have thought your argument through and can defend it justly: You better not fucking change my desired PM 2.5 or <insert other environmental factor>.
But this wasn’t a biological experiment on the citizens, which is the issue. It was an experiment to test the spread of material in a subway system.
The article is claiming without support that this was pathogenic biological testing on people, which is not the case.
Let’s assume instead they used a harmless chemical tracer. Would that still count as a violation? What about releasing flour through ducts?
The issue with the article that makes it click bait is they are making a claim of “germ warfare”, insinuating that citizens were exposed to dangerous infectious agents which is simply untrue.
If the article approaches the subject honestly, and then question wether such action was ethical, even using a harmless substance, that would be one thing. But as it’s written, the article pushes misinformation, which is a shame, because it’s clearly an important subject.
The did experiments on US citizens, they spread a bacteria in the SF fog to see if it would be spread to the citizens in SF. They picked a bacteria they thought was harmless, but showed up brightly on a stain for microscope slides. Turns out some people are actually harmed by this bacteria, but again, bio-warfare testing on an uninformed US civilians. A war crime. They actually killed someone:
On October 11, 1950, eleven residents checked into Stanford Hospital in San Francisco with very rare, serious urinary tract infections. Although ten recovered, Edward J. Nevin, who had had recent prostate surgery, died three weeks later from a heart valve infection. The urinary tract outbreak was so unusual that the Stanford doctors wrote it up for a medical journal. [0]
I dislike the emphasis on the "US citizen" part. Would it have been any better if they had done it to us Canadian citizens instead? Or to any other nationality?
Were the people wearing glasses? Did they have curly hair? It's not mentioned because it makes no difference. Calling out that they're US citizens or Canadian citizens implies that these people are somehow first-class people, and everyone else is riff raff − fair game for such experiments.
That isn’t what I said, I’m being specific about who these experiments were done on. I resent the implication that I think any other people based on where they were born or where they live are less in any way. I strongly disagree with that.
Well first you’re talking about a different situation than the article.
In addition, in the San Francisco case you link, it was not established that the bacteria caused the death you are referring to.
> The lower court ruled against them primarily because the bacteria used in the test was unproven to be responsible for Nevin's death. The Nevin family appealed the suit all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to overturn lower court judgments
Again, blankets statements rather than facts don’t help discuss the issue. Nuance is best.
I for one think they should not have done any of these tests, and that they crossed clear ethical boundaries. But I’m not going to create misinformation, “beg the question”, appeal to emotion, or point to false cause to convince someone that it’s a wrong and immoral thing to do.
These types of arguments are why we had so much confusion, and lack of educated discussion around Covid and vaccines, the pros and cons of nuclear power, etc etc.
I'm responding directly to the parent comment, but I'd argue that spreading this same bacteria by smashing lightbulbs in a subway full of people, and spreading it in a fog in SF, a city full of people, then seeing if those people had the bacteria in their bodies is essentially the same type of situation as the article. What do you see as differences?
So the US government didn't prove in a court of law that the US government killed someone with the US government's illegal experiment, that it didn't even admit was happening? This is the standard of proof here? If so, I'm going to guess the other atrocities the US has committed and not taking full and complete responsibility for can't be discussed either? When the system in power refuses to accept blame for it's actions, we just have to take its word or it's misinformation? Come on. Let's think about some other cases the highest court in the land got obviously wrong and then consider your argument.
- Dread Scott v Sanford. held the U.S. Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of black African descent, and thus they could not enjoy the rights and privileges the Constitution conferred upon American citizens. [0]
- Buck v. Bell, is a decision of the United States Supreme Court, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in which the Court ruled that a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, "for the protection and health of the state" did not violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. [1]
- Korematsu v. United States, decision by the Supreme Court of the United States to uphold the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast Military Area during World War II. [2]
- Plessy v. Ferguson, which the Court ruled that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal" [3]
(Oh, and since I don't want to only talk about civil rights cases, since that might not carry much weight for you, how about property rights:)
- Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005),[1] was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court held, 5–4, that the use of eminent domain to transfer land from one private owner to another private owner to further economic development does not violate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. [4]
I could go on but I don't feel like going through all these horrible cases. How will we ever square this perfect arbiter of truth, the Supreme Court's multiple fuckups with our examination of truth? I'd recommend using your eyeballs and sound judgement. How am I creating misinformation by quoting wikipedia and then linking to it so anyone can read the source material? To compare this with COVID misinformation is egregious.
I think you misunderstand my issue or the argument here.
You are arguing what? That spreading bacteria, even one that was believed to be benign, is a violation of personal rights? Well I agree with you 100%, and if that’s surprising, then the point has been missed.
The issue I have is an article that serves only the purpose of inflaming without informing. We can all claim moral outrage, and then point “look.. horrible things.. horrible people”. What purpose does that serve? It has become the standard of communication on social media. How does it serve this discussion to point out all the way the US government and the courts have failed us? Your list is tiny compared to the true scope. Ask any Native American.
Does that prove in this case a person was killed by the actions of spreading bacteria by light bulbs? Clearly it cannot. So then what’s the goal of the argument? Slippery slope fallacy? Appeals to emotion?
Instead give me an article with substance and facts, and nuanced discussion. Why were those choices made in the past. Did those people believe they were doing good, and not doing harm? What lead to that occurring? How to we prevent it from occurring again? How do we educate ourselves so we don’t make equally well intentioned but harmful decisions.
If an article claims a bacteria is pathogenic, and harmed people by its use, then I require it prove it to me. Otherwise it’s conjecture. If so, treat it as such, and say “let’s all look into this further”. If an article won’t, then it’s immediately suspect, and its conclusions can’t be trusted.
Moral outrage is no path towards truth, fairness, and equality. Those things require more from us. More from our discussions. Arguments appealing to emotion (even ones that are well researched linking to wikipedia) don’t help. The comparison to Covid discussion is apt, since many people linked to Wikipedia or other sources, citing all sorts of things, in order to bolster their logically incomplete, or entirely emotional arguments.
Imagine instead an article that said “possible benign bacteria used to study germ contamination”. Then went on to discuss the facts, facts such as opportunistic infections, or even questions about the case you brought up and wether that was a fair trial and if not, what evidence supports it not being (other than “US court bad corrupt”) and then, it asked my questions above.
The problem is that media today needs ad money to operate, and “pathogenic bacteria released on citizens” gets a LOT more clicks. And then the moral outrage that follows make everyone feel good, but doesn’t make the world a better more educated place.
If we don’t do better in our journalism, and in our discussions, then your list above is doomed to get longer and longer as time goes on.
For those interested in how to have better discussions, and write better articles, check out the following:
I’m arguing that willfully experimenting on people with bio weapons without their consent is illegal and immoral. It’s a war crime per the Geneva Convention. I don’t even know what a violation of “personal rights” means. Is that a legal term?
You tried to “well actually” the acts this article is talking about, spreading bacteria to people via crushing lightbulbs in the subway. Well actually they didn’t infect people with this, they just crushed lightbulbs full of it in a crowded subway without getting anyone explosed’s consent.
Then I presented a similar action, where they didn’t just spread the bacteria in a subway and measure the air, which I suppose someone could argue wasn’t trying to infect people with this bacteria if you’re a literal minded child… no, they spread it in fog and MEASURED THE PEOPLE. The point was to infect people. This negates your point about the govt not trying to infect people in the busy subway and just measure the air, because it’s clear they tried to infect people in SF and then measure that infection. People being infected was the point.
So, now your next point is well actually, many years after the man was killed by a remarkable and rare UTI cluster in SF directly after the bacteria was released to the SF population, and this man and a few others contracted this rare illness but this man died from an infection right afterwards, actually the SUPREME COURT of the United States said that the family of this man didn’t prove that he was killed by this experiment. Years after the fact. Years after he was dead and gone, and it was next to impossible to link his death with this disease beyond. Reasonable doubt because of the government’s negligence in performing this experiment without gaining people’s consent. How would his doctors have known to look for this or try to treat it right?
But, now you’ve fallen back to a position where the tenor of the argument isn’t how you want to discuss things, and you’re linking some dumb ass article about formatting arguments in a manner that doesn’t make you seem quite as wrong.
but sure. It’s clickbait. Everyone is wrong except you. Calling out your nonsense is not conducive to good discussion. Never mind the fact that you compared some pretty no nonsense comments I made about actions the government took and admits to now to Covid, vaccine, and nuclear misinformation. Not sure how you think that isn’t a logical fallacy and conducive to “better discussion”. But go off. You’re on a roll
You’re still arguing against me on a position I agree with. It’s very possible that the man died of these actions. Also I stated the actions were unethical. So why are you upset?
However, neither you or I have proof of that, which is the point. Because without it, without facts, people won’t learn and make better decisions. One side can always conjecture about things, as there’s no proof. Just like there was no proof provided in the article (even though we can make assumptions, that doesn’t make it fact, and is a dangerous road to follow even if we feel morally justified in doing so).
The point which you are avoiding is that the article does a very poor job making your case (as does your arguments here). As I agree with the premise that these things were unethical and dangerous, I take offense with an article that does a disservice to the topic for the purpose of clicks. I also take offense to your string of arguments, using morality posturing, and citing cases that have nothing to do with the topic at hand, trying to point out where the US court has fouled up, to prove that MUST have done so here, which does not follow. (This is a slippery slope and composition/division fallacy, ie.. because the court screwed up in your specific cases, it MUST be guilty in the other)
> You tried to “well actually” the acts this article is talking about
> you’re linking some dumb ass article about formatting arguments in a manner that doesn’t make you seem quite as wrong
My comment has always been about the quality of the article. And the link is not an article about formatting arguments, so I have to assume you didn’t actually read or check the link.
It’s a link outlining logical fallacies and biases, to help with better critical thinking skills, both in writing, and in evaluating content that we read / listen to / debate, etc.
Here’s a Wikipedia link instead, since you posted a number of Wikipedia links.
I urge you to read through them, and note where your arguments and thinking are at fault. I do on a regular basis, and it’s helpful. The link I posted links to posters and card that can aid in remembering them.
Also worth reading, a discussion on the dangers of moral posturing in debate as discussed by Socrates.
“Human societies require people who disagree to cooperate and trust each other. They must also allow for disagreement and productive discussion of competing views. Yet, virtue signaling undermines all of this.”
(not mentioning Socrates and Aristotle to prove something or lend weight, only to show these concerns on how we discuss moral and ethical topics go back a very long time)
I mean, this study was done in 1966. The IRB was established in 1974.
I'm not saying we should celebrate this research, but ... we already learned the lesson about being careful with human experimentation? If there's a more recent study that circumvented the IRB or that the IRB okayed despite obvious problems, there's an interesting discussion to have there.
But I'm more in the camp above, that this pre-IRB study wasn't particularly egregious, at least by the scale of atrocities of early 20th century research.
That’s not the issue at hand. The issue is an article claiming pathogenic material was tested on people.
An article talking about the ins and outs of IRB process approval would be much more informative, or going into detail about what is and is not ethical.
False or at best misleading statements of pathogenic biological tests on people bring us no nearer to actually talking intelligently about the issues or making better decisions.
How does the bacteria spread amongst the subway? HUMANS. They are the substrate.
“ They wrote that clouds engulfed people as trains pulled away, but that they "brushed their clothing, looked up at the grating apron and walked on." No one was concerned.
Army scientists concluded that it took between four and 13 minutes for train passengers to be exposed to the bacteria.”
If they put the bacteria in the system with no human interaction I’m sure the study would be much less valuable.
I'm not sure why you are leaving out the fact that they also used Serratia marcescens, which is considered pathogenic[1].
As for the other bacteria, what they used was not the "common soil bacteria" Bacillus subtilis, but Bacillus atrophaeus[2] which was known as Bacillus globigii at the time. I think this is the only clear factual mistake I can find in the article.
The article also claimed that Bacillus globigii is now considered a pathogen, but I can't find much information about it outside of the referenced book. I'll leave it to someone else to weigh in on this one.
I think the more click-baitey aspect of the article title is that they didn't specify that this occurred 60–80 years ago; it's phrased as if this test recently happened. The US defense agencies today sure aren't perfect, but they certainly aren't this reckless anymore. The fear during the first few decades of the Cold War instigated a lot of poor moral decisions by the US Government that can't just be extrapolated to the organization today.
You're either endorsing literal battery/assault or perhaps overlooking some context.
Challenge studies involve consenting individuals and the actual events in the article don't.
I presume GP's example of splashing water would be on unsuspecting, non-consenting people going about their daily business, as was the case with the Subway in the article.
Then the question should've been "is it ok to perform experiments on uninformed participants" or "would it have been ok if they splashed water instead".
The doesn't try to explicitly link their question to the article and instead its prose is a hypothetical.
Instead, the guy ask if its ok to splash water. I can't think of any reason why splashing water would be the line at which its no longer ok to have an experiment. I certainly can see uninformedness being a reason not to have an experiment but that's a different question and so it would get a different answer.
You should deploy critical thinking skills. Splashing water on someone is in fact assault (or more accurately battery).
But that's besides the point, which isn't very hard to understand. The point is that just because a substance or act doesn't seem harmful _to you_, doesn't mean it doesn't violate someone's rights.
Agree. Article contains misinformation and should be flagged. In fact the bacteria in question is often and readily consumed. Not to mention the fact that we are awash in bacteria all the time.
The source stating that the bacteria are considered pathogens, is selling his book. The link to the National Academy of Sciences is also broken.
Also most bacteria can be opportunistic pathogens, depending on the situation, even the ones in our gut.
So while the ethics can be deemed questionable, the article presents the situation as if harm was certainly done, when in the most likely case not a single person was adversely effected.
I agree. But what does that have to do with an article that presents unjustified assertions? The issue is that if you call something pathogenic, and make the case that people were harmed, then the article should support that which it doesn’t. Hence it’s click bait.
Let’s say I want people to take the Covid vaccine. Should I write articles with appeals to emotion, quotes from people writing books, and circumstantial evidence?
Or let’s say I want to point out that Covid vaccines carry risks. Should I write articles with appeals to emotion, quotes from people writing books, and circumstantial evidence?
Bad articles and bad science are not okay just because we agree with the assessment.
It talks about how the CIA worked with Dr. Mary Sherman and Dr. Alton Ochsner to develop a cancer causing bio-weapon intended to give Castro cancer, but ultimately became part of the plot to assassinate JFK when that fell through.
Jeff Kaye is doing great work digging through the archives about US Biological Weapons (BW) use during the Korean War (on the north and on China), and has made a few notable recent discoveries. I recommend reading his work.
I think the takeaway is that the CIA doesn't do anything nefarious nowadays. After all those sizeable reforms and firings, the CIA is now a completely benign entity. After those famous reforms that they had. It is now for instance illegal for the CIA to have psyops propaganda campaigns targeting American civilians for instance. Thank god for all those reforms that they have had. Those good old CIA reformed fellas.
I also agree that the CIA has been completely reformed and all wrongdoing was in the past; it really doesn't make any sense to examine their conduct too closely today, that just makes everyone's life worse. I would also like to note that myself and my family are not under duress but unfortunately cannot make physical appearances at the moment.
The CIA is not an independent organization. They are directed by the president and have congressional oversight. Keep in mind thar these "nefarious" programs, as far as I know were not hidden from congressional oversight. This stuff just isn't an election time issue.
Radiological testing on the now infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex:
[1]
> Pruitt-Igoe was not proof of a Cold War logic; it did not display the “inevitable” failures of planned housing. It was an organized sabotage—and a clandestine site for radiological weapons experimentation. These studies were conducted on innocent and unconsenting civilians, who were mostly poor, mostly Black, and mostly women and children.
> Residents in some areas of [St. Louis] noticed unusual activity in the days and nights throughout 1953 and into 1954,” Dr. Lisa Martino-Taylor writes in Behind the Fog, an examination of the United States’s Cold War-era radiological weapons programs. “Large puffs of a billowy powder were sprayed into the air by strangers in passing vehicles affixed with spray devices. The luminous powder lingered in the air behind the slow-moving vehicles.”
But what's the connection between radioactive contamination and the failure of Pruitt-Igoe? Wikipedia doesn't seem to mention any contamination issues, but says that deteriorating building maintenance and social conditions (crime, poverty, segregation, etc) were to blame. Radiation didn't vandalize the elevators or mug residents in the hallways.
> Wikipedia doesn't seem to mention any contamination issues
FTA:
> St. Louis’ baby teeth were, indeed, packed with radioactive metals. The study found that children who grew up at the height of the Cold War in 1963 had 50 times as much Strontium-90 in their teeth as children born in 1950.
I'm sure we'd know a lot more should we ever be deemed worthy to know.
> What is left in St. Louis are unanswered questions, and unknowns that extend further still. The Army’s documentation alludes to “certain special tests,” still unidentified. “Thus,” Martino-Taylor writes, “an unidentified set of additional covert test in St. Louis was conducted by the Army Chemical Corps, SRI, and Ralph Parsons Company that rose to a classification level higher than ‘Secret.’”
> Ralph Parsons Company—now Parsons Corporation—is a defense, intelligence, security, and infrastructural engineering firm headquartered in Centreville, Virginia, down the street from the Central Intelligence Agency.
> A lot of data from these studies has gone missing; discarded by the Army and other entities. Nothing you need to worry about. At one point in her research, Dr. Martino-Taylor traveled to California to put in a copy order for boxes of Philip Leighton’s papers. She had hoped to find that his files contained more information on the St. Louis experiments. Instead, Stanford University pulled the collection the very next day. As of 2022, the materials remain in the possession of Stanford’s general counsel, closed to the public.
---
> Radiation didn't vandalize the elevators or mug residents in the hallways.
Never mind that illegally, secretly, and non-consensually irradiating the residents is a wildly worse crime in itself, the social conditions you point out are part and parcel of the same mindset responsible for all it.
It's not about which kinds of the crimes are greater; it's about which kinds of crimes have a more proximate impact on the success or failure of a community. Obviously the secret irradiation of people is a worse crime than vandalizing all the public spaces of a building, but if that irradiation goes unnoticed by the community at that time, then it will have much less effect on property values / etc than petty vandalism.
They wanted to know the long term consequences of syphilis. At a time when we had a readily available cure for it. What do you suppose the value of this study was other than to learn how to weaponize a disease?
Regarding MKUltra - the only reason we know what we know about it, after the CIA director directed in 1973 that all documents on it be destroyed, is that some of the MKUltra documents were mislabeled and not destroyed. They were discovered in a 1977 FOIA request.
Remember when the CIA spent six years putting together six thousand page report on the torture it conducted and then "lost" it right before it was to be delivered and then "found" it again once it was clear that they weren't going to get away with that lame excuse?
Use of the term dates back decades, and it's popularity accelerated through Bush the Younger's reign (for obvious reasons I think, Bush was widely perceived as an idiotic puppet, a theatrical figurehead for the real government (e.g. Cheney and co.))
> Horrific, yet sadly not the only time the US government has used bio weapons on their own population.
Hyperbole. You are saying that the US government used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_subtilis (the bacterium in question) to attack the US population, which is clearly an exaggeration on several fronts.
They are saying that the bacteria discussed in the article probably shouldn't be called a "bio weapon" and/or that the the situation described in the article is meaningfully different from the other situations brought up.
The wikipedia link talks about how this bacteria was known to be safe, even in the 50s (years before the test in the article) when it was understood to be found in large quantities in natto (the Japanese food).
I’m waiting for the articles where people are convicted of crimes…
I won’t hold my breath, for justice anyway, just for protection from my government experimenting on me without consent while policing themselves and accountable to nobody.
Beyond quaint; I think a lot of people born after genuinely find it hard to comprehend the mindset. (Maybe we're just still in cultural shock from winning. If we won so handily it couldn't have been big of a deal, was it?)
I encountered this with a friend when discussing MKUltra recently. He was hung-up on the why. But why? Why did they do it? Well, despite the reputation for its straightlacedness slapped on the decade after the fact, the 1950s were actually a rather wonky time culturally in America. (Flying saucer madness... hm. Sounds familiar.) A time when a lot of rather sensible people were at least open to the possibility of far-out ideas like telepathy, extra-sensory perception, and brain reprogramming. And these same sensible people were lying awake at night in genuine terror that the Soviets would develop telepathic brainwashing agents before red-blooded Americans did. Their motivations, as bizarre as it seems to us today, were quite straightforward.
I always felt I lacked context on the why, since I'm not American and all.
But now I get it. Over here, uncomfortably close to Russia, until 2022 people thought Russians have some scary stuff in store, considering they've spent an estimated $600bln on modernizing their military.
They may still have some scary stuff in store. They just started with truly nasty attacks on the population by blowing up dams. Sure they don't have good troops or supply lines, but WMDs, and especially bio programs, don't need many trips or long supply lines. And are, compared to tanks and aircraft, both cheaper and easier to develop and maintain as part of a massive military expenditure.
Right now, when they are getting more desperate, is getting closer to when Putin may feel compelled to push the red button.
Not in quite the same way with people's imaginations running away from them. Perhaps important to remember how opaque the USSR was at the time -- e.g. when Chernobyl blew up, no one outside the USSR knew until radiation drifted over the border, and large riots were often received as only vague word of mouth rumour in the West. In such an information void, your imagination fills in the details. Especially if you worry about their industrial capacity, and maybe even secretly wonder if they do have a better way of organizing society like they claim, in terms of pure brutal results. A closer analogy today would be with China, and how paranoid some people were with the offensive potential of a balloon.
Middle? It had just begun and will get worse before it gets better, but now world has 3 big players. Plus plenty of smaller ones with matching egos. Look what China is doing, very smart from longterm perspective
Since the cold war ended it's now obvious that we both a)vastly overestimated Russia's capacity and b)pressured them into a lot of military spending simply because they felt they had to do so because of how much we were spending and all our sabre-rattling.
The only people who "won" were the very military-industrial complex Ike warned us about.
If it is about the cold war, that would have been the USSR, not Russia. And they did act against the West (WWII disagreements aside, starting with the blockade of West Berlin), they planned for attacks on Western Europe, etc. The idea that the USSR and Warsaw pact were somehow just reactive isn't true.
Might the West have overestimated their capacity: probably yes (especially in later years), but the conflict was still very real.
> b)pressured them into a lot of military spending simply because they felt they had to do so because of how much we were spending and all our sabre-rattling.
Yes, that was the Soviet (Russian) perspective. They felt pressured to keep up with the US. But the flipside is that the inverse was also happening; America spent tons of money developing new weapons and capabilities because the Russians were doing the same. For instance, the F-15 was developed into the air superiority fighter that it is because the Mig-25 was (mistakenly) believed to be similarly capable.
Too often the "Soviets were afraid of America" narrative is used to suggest that America was an aggressor and the Soviets were hapless victims of this aggression, forced to spend by America. But the truth is that both sides were doing this to each other, and besides, the whole of it was arguably started by aggressive Soviet expansion before and after WW2, for instance the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in which the Soviet Union conspired with the Nazis to divide up Poland, Russia's subsequent refusal to allow Poland to become independent after the war, and the persistent Soviet threats to invade western Europe and incorporate France, the UK, etc into their "union". The "Soviet Union" was a farce of a union, a fig leaf over Russian imperialism.
There was real and actual danger to the millions of people killed and maimed in the proxy wars between the US and USSR. But aside from a few acute crises, there was very little danger to civilian Americans or Russians living their day-to-day lives. Arguably, there is far more danger today due to gun violence, which has killed vastly more Americans than Russia ever did.
On that subject, I cannot recommend enough an episode of a Lawfare-related podcast (ChinaTalk) called "Hoover, Communism, and the FBI" [1], which explore the life of J. Edgar Hoover, the zeigeist of the early twentieth century, and an revisiting the "red scare" in light of the since declassified information of Russian spying networks on US soil.
Related to this is the "Venona project" [2], where US agency could break the encryption of old soviet telegraph, and learn a great deal on soviet spy network.
Not sure how many people would have preferred the USSR to eventually win... Also, the US wasn't conducting "biological warfare in the NYC subway". They were trying to assess how pathogens might spread in the event of an actual attack.
Well, they couldn't exactly run realistic and viable computer models in the years of 1949-1969... so they took a harmless, commonly used model organism, and conducted tests.
Something science teachers do as a simple experiment now (with various substances), something Mark Rober even did on his own channel with 'Glo Germ' powder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5-dI74zxPg
My all time favorite is still when we tested chemo-like AIDs drugs on foster kids without guardians. Side-effects to include:
"rashes, vomiting and sharp drops in infection-fighting blood cells as they tested antiretroviral drugs to suppress AIDS or other medicines to treat secondary infections."
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Operation Sea-Spray:
Operation Sea-Spray was a 1950 U.S. Navy secret biological warfare experiment in which Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii bacteria were sprayed over the San Francisco Bay Area in California, in order to determine how vulnerable a city like San Francisco may be to a bioweapon attack
People got sick and one person died, all from bacteria they thought to be harmless at the time.
"This test was one of at least 239 experiments conducted by the military in a 20-year "germ warfare testing program" that went on from 1949 to 1969. These experiments that used bacteria to simulate biological weapons were conducted on civilians without their knowledge or consent."
I’ve recently been reading about MKUltra, and I wonder if the 60s was a crazy time or if the more recent “bad projects” are simply not yet declassified.
There has been a serious uptick in posts about US germ warfare from really weird sources like Medium and insider. Are the Russians planning some sort of biological attack and trying to create fertile environment?
The deaths and the life altering consequences of unknown diseases on countless people appear to be the result of undisclosed secret experiments by their own government.
No accountability, no payments to surviving family members nor those directly affected. Just "toys" to be played with and discarded at will. When people seek justice, just lots of gaslighting and bureaucracy in return.
Of course it's fine to down vote if you feel the need, it's just not constructive to use it for "unpopular" ideas.
Do not fear. The popular ideas will rise to the top which is good for people looking for validation. The less popular ideas, but often more interesting stuff will slip down the list, and the downright atrocious stuff will be down voted and sent to the very bottom.
I made the Reddit comment because I have notice that HN community is often voting for popular ideas over intellectually curios ones.
That's a great feel-good story for gun lovers - but you might want to check the actual history of civvies with guns trying to fight against armies which were determined to win.
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943?
Semaine sanglante (Paris) in 1871?
Edit:
> Anyway don't support this view, I don't own guns. I'm just saying that blatant disregard for peoples safety is why...
+1, but yes and no. These sort of "+5 sigma" clicky stories really push some people's buttons...but I think the real drivers of "don't trust the Government" are elsewhere. I'd point to the routine crap of American municipal government - which often resembles the daily drama of a bunch of low-functioning Junior High students. The whole "rich get richer, everyone else gets screwed" shift in the U.S. economy (and Democratic Party) over the past ~60 years. And the endless, strident screams of right-wing political edgelords.
I think the primary example that's going to come to mind for all Americans is the American Revolution, which was successful, if I recall correctly.
I don't really like this tone of 'lecturing' people, as though they don't understand and you do. Well-informed people have legitimate differences of opinion on these questions.
I sure hope they don’t. That’s a terrible example.
The British homeland was 1) an ocean away in the 1700s and 2) extremely distracted by numerous other conflicts and 3) had pretty much the same firepower that a civilian and privateers would have.
None of those things apply now.
IMO the Taliban is a much better analog. And you of course have to mix in the horror of a true civil war which in America’s case pretty much everyone came out of thinking no one won.
I honestly don't understand in which part of my comment you think I'm in favour of civil war.
I'm merely pointing out that attempting to argue against guns from the perspective of 'popular resistance against tyranny never going to be successful' is far from the best way to argue against guns. It has been successful before, and the country's entire foundation myth rests on one of those instances.
There's many ways to argue against gun proliferation. This is a bad one. It's particularly bad one to use on right-of-centre Americans. But people on the Internet disagree, love using it, and they've been incredibly successful in using it to win over suppo- oh, wait.
I didn't suggest that you're in favor of it? Was not my intention so sorry if it came off that way!
I agree with the overall thrust though: this is not a winning line of argument. But I'm not sure what is, to be honest, given that this issue has become quasi-religious. Eventually we'll have enough dead kids (and enough dead old people) to start questioning this religious conviction, but yeah, logic or history won't get us there.
I appreciate your reply and I hear what you're saying.
So much of life has become political, and so much of the political has become pseudo-religious. People no longer have positions on policies, they have articles of faith on politics. It's not a great basis for a dialogue, unfortunately.
"going to come to mind", yes. But much of what Americans "know" about the American Revolution is popular myth. In actual history, it was one of the western theaters in the Anglo-French War - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-French_War_(1778%E2%80%9.... Spain was also fighting against Britain, and there was a serious threat of a combined French/Spanish invasion of England. Britain had to make some hard choices about priorities, and decided to focus its efforts in places that weren't the 13 Colonies.
That sounds cool...but Afghanistan and Vietnam were proxy wars, where the U.S. decided that holding onto a basket-case country was not worth the cost. And the actual military defeats occurred after the U.S. forces were gone.
American Revolution was not actually "Pilgrims against Britain", it was one of the western theaters in the Anglo-French(-Spanish) War.
Perhaps the U.S. pro-gun folks need to advertise more widely that their imagined "victory scenario" is "turn the U.S. into a smoking crater/basket case, which the U.S. Army won't think is worth holding onto"?
You'd give up your right to self defence to a government that would "turn the U.S. into a smoking crater" before they would return the power to the people?
Very few wars in history end with defeating every single last enemy, ie in WWII style. Most come to same conclusion - 'its not worth fighting anymore'. That requires sane leader of course, or deposition of insane one.
Mujahideen equipped with small arms have been successfully fending off professional armies for decades, most recently the U.S. military in Afghanistan.
I also know people with this view, but I do judge them for it because its pragmatically nonsensical. It made sense back in the age of muskets when well-regulated colonial militias could enforce the will of the colony (and when colonies got together, they could even hold their own against a major European power, albeit one located across an ocean).
These days, nothing individuals (or even groups of individuals) can acquire holds a candle to what governments (the US being a world leader in this regard) are equipped with, so there is no endgame for gun ownership as a means of defense against one's government.
> These days, nothing individuals (or even groups of individuals) can acquire holds a candle to what governments (the US being a world leader in this regard) are equipped with, so there is no endgame for gun ownership as a means of defense against one's government.
Even back in colonial times, your single musket was no match for the hundreds of muskets and handful of cannon that the government was equipped with. If the government wants to kill you -specifically- then it's going to do that.
As a defense against tyranny, firearm ownership is effective in the same way that putting your valuables in a safe is effective. Neither are an absolute defense, but both raise the level of effort required from the attacker.
For example, regardless of whether you think there actions were reasonably justifiable, the conflict between the Bundys and the BLM would have gone _very_ differently had the Bundys not been armed. They would have absolutely been quietly steamrolled by the government: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff>
FedGov could have rolled in tanks, helicopters, or jets to eliminate the Bundys with zero friendly casualties, but that was a cost that they were entirely unwilling to pay.
Again. If the USian government really wants to get you or your people, specifically, you cannot (and have never been able to) stop them. They've more money and men and materiale than you could ever hope to accumulate. This has pretty much always been true.
We did not have a problem killing hundreds of thousands of them, and the US military would be significantly less "careful" suppressing an actual American rebellion.
>US military would be significantly less "careful" suppressing an actual American rebellion.
I think that's very wrong. The second point, is that around 44% of US households are armed. That's a couple hundred million. The only hope the army would have of suppressing them is if half of the US households assisted the army.
If it was an actual popular uprising, the army would be absolutely incapable of stopping it.
I never argued it made practical sense. I was making a point that, when Biden goes on TV after a shooting and kind of hints at the idea people should give up their guns, they might if they felt like they could trust their government more than they currently do.
It's a big ask for people who almost have a religious belief in the right to bear arms to give them away.
Stories like this one, and countless others, including the poor treatment of whistleblowers are why we Americans can't have nice things.
You'd have a stronger case if Americans were opening fire on people in the government or military that were violating their rights instead of schoolchildren, the LGBT community, and minorities.
Trade unions and revolutionary parties have kept weaponry, trained members and organised resistance to state repression (for example against strikes). This tends to build into worker's councils (in some languages called soviets) under revolutionary conditions.
Of course, it's unlikely the capitalist ruling class would willingly allow legalising such practices.
I am 100% in support of what you've said, but there is one case where someone surprisingly got away with armed resistance against the government: Cliven Bundy[0]. The guy just stopped paying the government to graze his cattle on common ground, the feds came to sieze his cattle as a form of payment and were confronted with hundreds of armed guys he managed to rally to his cause. They backed down and left.
It's not quite the story of the little guy standing up for what's right against a tyrannical government though, just suggests that in some parts of the US if you show up with enough guns and outnumber someone you can intimidate them and get away with it.
You mean that guy that wanted free grazing and used public (our) land without permission? or paying? Used those same guns to keep others off the ground? That selfish money-grubbing demagogue? Yeah that was a high point in US history for sure.
Yep that's the one, doesn't seem like a very nice guy as evidenced by his Wikipedia page having a special "Racist Comments" section. Reading that page a bit more suggests that he's actually pretty lucky to not be in prison after his confrontations with the government. Turns out the prosecution were inept and his trial got thrown out:
> On January 8, 2018, Judge Gloria Navarro declared a mistrial and dismissed the charges because the federal government had withheld potentially exculpatory evidence
I haven’t read about it, but that quote doesn’t make it sound like the fed was inept but rather corrupt, which is where we started talking about why people want guns.
He got into this situation because they were waving their guns around, and got out of it through the courts. You're suggesting there should have been a threat of gun violence against the prosecutor and that this somehow would've helped his situation?
Ruby ridge and Waco (though that is less clear) happened, and the only person to "revolt" about that used a farming material bomb.
"We need guns to protect us from authoritarianism" has always been a fucking lie. No gun owners protested and started a rebellion after the patriot act.
The few times gun owners HAVE "rebelled" it has been for incredibly stupid reasons like "I don't want to pay taxes for the land my cattle have grazed on"
Again and again it always comes back to "but muh revolutionary war!"
An aberration. Great Britain was a little fuckin busy during that period, what with the existential threat of the hundred years war, and a largely inept King.
Great Britain sent only about 50k troops during the entire affair.
Had they not been so busy, it likely would have looked a lot more like all the times India tried to get uppity.
40K Americans were able to beat the greatest empire at the time.
In the last few decades, a rag-tag group of goat herders and farmers managed to kick out multiple empires using only basic fighting equipment. This is all despite having air supremacy, satellite imagery, night vision, tanks, body armor, and a 10:1 ratio of troops.
The overwhelming majority of experienced combat veterans have been out of the US military for almost a decade. You can see this reflected it in how ineffective the current organization is.
If tyranny does strike the US again, I wouldn't want to be on the side of the tyrants.
> 40K Americans were able to beat the greatest empire at the time.
40K Americans and lots of assistance from the French, including their navy.
The American war for independence was a proxy war between empires in which the colonies were pawns, and if not for one of those empires the American insurgency would have been crushed, regardless of whatever the myth of American exceptionalism has probably taught you.
As a minority in the LGBT community, I'd appreciate if you didn't go on pretending that disarming me is somehow magically going to lead to a better outcome for me.
You are, obviously, free to have any opinion you like. But my existence is not a rhetorical device for you to exploit while trying to take away my rights.
I am trying to disabuse people of the idea that the right-wing "2A warrior" actually gives a fuck about anyone's rights. We should have seen them all out in protest for what happened to Daniel Shaver, where were they?
Merely owning guns isn't going to stop the government from infringing rights, we need collective action that is not being taken by the people who claim they need guns to defend their rights. Meanwhile children are being murdered in numbers. So we get the worst of both sides of the argument.
This is such a clickbait. Everybody reading that title imagines that they tested spreading of some contagious disease (and put it in the same category as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36256831) - but what was tested was how the bacteria was moved by the air in the subway. They tried a common soil bacteria that they believed was harmless (and which wikipedia says "is thought to be a normal gut commensal in humans").
"""And while the people who conducted these experiments did so under the belief that the bacterial species they used were harmless, it has since been revealed that they can cause health problems."""
This is such a weasel language, everything can cause health problems (is water harmless? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication).
The bacteria used there was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_subtilis "This species is commonly found in the upper layers of the soil and B. subtilis is thought to be a normal gut commensal in humans."
We live surrounded by bacteria, an probably often by Bacillus subtilis - because it is a common bacteria found in soil.