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Comment by Morg | Hacker News Reader

HIV (just to be clear, I have no clue wether HIV was assisted by some military programmes, but I can safely say such "mistakes" have been made in the past by the same army, like when they used to test nukes for example)

Luckily this time it's a simple pc virus we can easily disassemble and counter - I think cyber war's still miles better than the alternatives.

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No, you can't "safely" say that. You've no evidence that the US military has ever been involved in creating a wide-scale biological pandemic. This is just conspiracy theory bunk.

I'm not sure how you can reasonably compare testing nuclear weapons to the supposed propagation of HIV, either. These two things have nothing in common.

Alright, you want details ? During the testing of nuclear weapons, the US had no problem testing the secondary effects of nukes through radiation far beyond the blast zone, by putting boats with soldiers to watch the thing.

It was widely known at that time that radiation was bad for you mkay, and that nuclear fission bombs were nuclear fission bombs, i.e. accelerated nuclear degradation bombs and drained all their explosive power from radiations, that kill mkay.

In the past, biological, chemical, explosive weapons were tested on rocks, plants, prisoners, personnel, unsuspecting local populations, etc. by the nazi regime, the US govt, the USSR and France - that are widely confirmed.

I wouldn't put it past THOSE people to do such a thing, would you ?

So really, if you want to say it's IMPOSSIBLE or UNLIKELY that they would've done that too, without knowing the consequences - I suppose you must be right.

Yes, the US has done bad things, and AIDS is a bad thing, but it doesn't follow that the US caused AIDS. After all, nature has had no trouble creating pandemics without any deliberate human help over the centuries.

(just to be clear, I have no clue wether HIV was assisted by some military programmes, but I can safely say such "mistakes" have been made in the past by the same army, like when they used to test nukes for example)

That means I just used the HIV word to connect to the concept of bio weapon testing gone wrong - weapon testing gone wrong.

The reason why is that one of the most popular theories on HIV is that the US military had a part in its development.

I don't know and I don't care, those people have such a bad karma even AIDS wouldn't make much difference - just read the disclaimer next time ;)

> That means I just used the HIV word to connect to the concept of bio weapon testing gone wrong - weapon testing gone wrong.

This means you just randomly connected unrelated things.

The connection doesn't even make sense at a basic level. If the US knowingly put sailors in boats near nuclear blasts to test for radiation effects, it wasn't a mistake. It was an intentional act. It makes no sense to say that this implies that super-HIV could have been accidentally released in the wild by the US government.

> The reason why is that one of the most popular theories on HIV is that the US military had a part in its development.

Popular among conspiracy theorists, perhaps, not among the general population or among experts in the field.

> I wouldn't put it past THOSE people to do such a thing, would you?

This is amazingly bad logic.

  The US has done some bad things.
  This is a bad thing.
  Therefore the US did this.
  Q.E.W.T.F.

There is no link here, except in your own mind.

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