Comment by CodesInChaos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CodesInChaos | Hacker News Reader

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> On May 2, 2011, President Barack Obama announced that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had located and killed Osama Bin Laden. The agency organised a fake hepatitis vaccination campaign in Abottabad, Pakistan, in a bid to obtain DNA from the children of Bin Laden, to confirm the presence of the family in a compound and sanction the rollout of a risky and extensive operation. Release of this information has had a disastrous effect on worldwide eradication of infectious diseases, especially polio.

> On May 16, 2014, the White House announced that the CIA will no longer use vaccination programmes as a cover for espionage. The news comes in the wake of a series of militant attacks on polio vaccination workers in Pakistan, with legitimate health-care workers targeted as being US spies. The attacks have forced organisations such as the UN to suspend polio vaccination efforts in Pakistan, and have severely hampered anti-polio efforts, with parents refusing to have their children vaccinated. News of the vaccination programme led to a banning of vaccination in areas controlled by the Pakistan Taliban, and added to existing scepticism surrounding the sincerity of public health efforts by the international health community.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vacci...

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Yeah I remember hearing about this and being similarly appalled. I get it. The US really wanted to kill Bin Laden. But the manner in which they did it is sickening.

The ends cannot justify the means.

> The ends cannot justify the means.

Oh they absolutely can in an utilitarian sense. But a basic utilitarian argument would tell that jeopardizing an entire region's vaccine rollout program to get revenge on some asshole already living the rest of his life out of a hole was not worth it.

And any utilitarian thinker who wanted to do the op would tell you that they weren't going to get caught, so that outcome won't be relevant to their calculus.

Is that good reasoning? No.

Is it what some humans will do? Yes.

> And any utilitarian thinker who wanted to do the op would tell you that they weren't going to get caught

Then they aren't being utilitarian because they are not including the risk into their cost calculation.

Or at least not a good one. Definitely not "any"

edit:

Oh I see this now > who wanted to do the op

Yeah any person can make any false argument to justify a conclusion they wanna reach. You don't have to be utilitarian for that. Just unethical.

> Then they aren't being utilitarian because they are not including the risk into their cost calculation.

Sure they are.

They just estimate the risk much lower than you do.

You have no way to know who's right for sure.

Maybe they legitimately have found a really low-risk way to massively increase utils by cheating / mistreating a few people.

I don't know of a way to protect utilitarian systems from such conditions.

> News of the vaccination programme led to a banning of vaccination in areas controlled by the Pakistan Taliban, and added to existing scepticism surrounding the sincerity of public health efforts by the international health community.

If I recall correctly, the conspiracy theory that emerged was that vaccines were secretly being used to render the people sterile.

It is interesting how 8 years later nearly the same line of thinking took hold in the West (albeit with claim of injected mind control chips) amid anti-vaxxers.

The actual program of sterilizing indigenous people and experimenting on black people in the US sure didn't help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_of_Native_Americ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study

Notions of conspiracy form easily when reality provides so much material.

Israel also sterilized Ethiopian Jews without their consent

Considering the United States forcefully sterilized some 70,000 people, and that there is an ongoing investigation over nonconsensual sterilization procedures being performed by the government three years ago, your handwaving over “conspiracy theorists” is pointless.

After all, it isn’t like the government has a long history of eugenics, forcefully drugging people for weeks at a time with combinations of LSD, barbiturates, and other fun stuff, right?

Our government would never do that.

> Considering the United States forcefully sterilized some 70,000 people, and that there is an ongoing investigation over nonconsensual sterilization procedures being performed by the government three years ago

Context is everything. The US government did that in the context of their genocidal war against indigenous peoples. There were fully transparent laws on the books that rewarded people for murdering native populations. No conspiracy needed.

As for your claim from 3 years ago, you've thrown out an allegation without providing any evidence. Involuntary sterilizations likely do occur, but that's far from an indication of a systemic government conspiracy.

The context of COVID vaccines was a global pandemic, not a genocide.

Also, nobody has shown up at the hospital yet to discover that their ailments were caused by a malfunctioning mind control chip delivered in a vaccine. Defect rates for such a "chip" if it existed would not be that low.

> Of the 7,600 women who were sterilized by the state between the years of 1933 and 1973, about 5,000 were African American.

Stop lying. You come in with a false faith argument and can’t be bothered to research elementary facts.

Where is the evidence for the claim that they happened systemically 3 years ago?

> there is an ongoing investigation over nonconsensual sterilization procedures being performed by the government three years ago

Where do you see the word systemic?

And once again, your question could be easily answered with Google. Seeing as how you’re the one that came in sprouting completely incorrect information that would have been easily avoided had you just bothered to skim the Wikipedia article on the topic, which would also have answered this particular question, I humbly request that you DYOR.

"Three generations of imbeciles is enough" doesn't ring a bell for you, eh? Those who don't read history...

>It is interesting how 8 years later nearly the same line of thinking took hold in the West (albeit with claim of injected mind control chips) amid anti-vaxxers.

That line of thinking always existed in the West, among the "Mark of the Beast" set. The interesting thing is the degree to which it, and conspiratorial politics in general, became so normalized in such a short time. Also how the anti-vax movement switched from a generally leftist ideology to being captured by right-wing identity politics.

The parties have realigned around populism.

Interesting how many people realigned their values instead of changing their party loyalty.

Indeed, although some of the same groups still feel supported but just not for the same reasons as before.

One thing that boosts conspiracy theories is the existence of conspiracy agencies in the government.

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