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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> By blocking intelligence research in the US, the US is basically ceding the ground to those competing countries on ideological grounds. As a result, they will get ahead and possibly discover new facts.

Couldn't the same be said about the OG Nazis? All of their medical "experiments" on prisoners of concentration camps [1] were unethical, there wasn't even anything of note found out because they were either shit at documenting "experiments" or the "experiments" were just the personal dreams of sadistic "doctors".

There are lines we damn well shouldn't cross, and where it is worth we should sanction violators. We are supposed to have learned from "historical Western traumas and sensibilities", because if not then all the suffering would have been in vain.

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/ns-aerzte-experimente-an-k...

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Are you equating database queries to forced lethal and debilitating medical procedures on prisoners?

You do realize that database queries were an essential part of what made the foundation for the Nazi genocide [1]?

Genocides always begin with data.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers...

Most genocides in history didn't rely on any data (Caesar or Genghis Khan certainly didn't run any population analysis before putting entire cities to the sword) and most databases have never been used for a genocide. The correlation is weak.

What actually prevents genocides is good institutions, not deliberate ignorance.

> What actually prevents genocides is good institutions, not deliberate ignorance.

And you would trust China in that, a country that locks up Muslims in concentration camps and surveillances its citizens to a degree the Soviet KGB and German Stasi wouldn't have dreamt of?

China needs to be reined in and that soon.

I agree with your first sentence. China cannot be trusted. I grew up in late Communist Czechoslovakia, I have no illusions about totalitarian states.

All the more reason why not leave the entire field of human genetics exclusively to them - imagine a future in which rich and influential people can get treatments for certain deadly diseases only in Shanghai and Beijing and China demands not only money, but allegiance for keeping them alive.

As for your last sentence: this ship has sailed some twenty years ago. At the current stage, China can only seriously damage/destroy itself from within. Totalitarian states are weaker than they appear, though. It may very well happen.

> there wasn't even anything of note found out because they were either shit at documenting "experiments" or the "experiments" were just the personal dreams of sadistic "doctors".

As far as I know pretty much all we know about the effects of exposure to cold temperatures from frostbite to eventual death was found in Japanese and German prison camps in WW2. Quite reasonably so, I imagine it to be hard to find volunteering participants for a study where the proposal is "we'll freeze you to death".

I don't think the US is ceding any ground personally. They are probably doing the research intensely but just not public all. All the research done by Nazi's was absorbed by the US during operation paperclip. Most of those heinous nazi scientists were rewarded for their cutting edge work by the US.

Just like paperclip and mkultra. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra Project MKUltra (or MK-Ultra)[a] was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used in interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.

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