5 ms·

Please don't spread conspiracy theories. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/no-lyme-diease-is-not-an-escaped-military-bioweapon-despite-what-conspiracy-theo

• deleted 4y ago
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• makeitdouble 4y ago
  With no horse in the race, it seems the WaPo article is trying to prove a negative (that the military had no involvement in spreading a disease) by asserting that it wouldn’t be the first to spread the disease, and had neither a motive nor enough knowledge to do it intentionally. As for most negative proofs, that still leaves plenty of rooms for any other combination of event where some of the above are not true (e.g the military accidentally participating in the spread of an existing disease for instance) That feels like a lost battle to me.
  • acdha 4y ago
    This is how conspiracy theories work by continually shifting to whatever has not yet been debunked — the opposite of the scientific process described in the papers referenced by that article. The theory originally was that this was an escaped bioweapon. Proof going back to the previous century shows that’s not the case; as does basic consideration of the low hypothetical value of a weapon which is slow, not very lethal, and easily managed by basic military hygiene practices; and now we’re left with, what, the claim that the military might have caused slightly faster spread of the same pathogen which was already spreading in the wild? That’s like saying that COVID must be an escaped bioweapon because some PLA soldiers coughed on civilians, and it’s a weak enough formulation that nobody leads with that rather than the dramatic sounding false claim.
    • sidewndr46 4y ago
      I'm not here to support conspiracy theories but you're falling into the same trap: you're trying to prove a negative. In this cause you're arguing it is "not very lethal" and thus not the result of a military weapon experiment. Guess what? The military and humanity at large make things that suck all the time. Just because something is ineffective doesn't prohibit it from being a military weapon. If that was the case we'd never have boondoggles where military spending runs amok and never produces anything useful.
      • acdha 4y ago
        > you're trying to prove a negative. In this cause you're arguing it is "not very lethal". Not quite: I’m saying that it wasn’t new, notably more virulent or resistant to treatment, or different from earlier samples. I’d really recommend reading the full WaPo article and especially some of the links as they help understand how there just isn’t any reason to believe this claim. In particular, notice how this sounds: > If you draw a circle around early Lyme Disease cases, it just happens to be in the middle of that circle. Every part of that is wrong: those weren’t the earliest cases (unless Wisconsin moved while I wasn’t looking) and the distribution is all over. Once you remove the known untrue portions, we’re left with the far less exciting version: > A cluster of cases was detected in an area similar to where other clusters were detected. The cases were not unusual in impact or spread, nor especially close to a base which had switched roles decades before. This is a classic conspiracy theory: there’s no evidence but we’re asked to believe that something with minimal value was attempted, failed completely at its goals but not before leaking, but then was hushed up perfectly for decades by the same group which is supremely good at hiding their traces … except that nobody thought about the possibility civilian medical reports from an escaped bioweapon? There are an infinite number of similar probability scenarios you could dream up but it’s not scientific.
    • makeitdouble 4y ago
      Successful "conspiracy theories" work on unprovable grounds. The obvious ones like faking the moon landing are based on the principle that you can't prove some past event wasn't fake, as it is proving a negative and there is no need to shift anything: the possibilities are infinite from the start. Now, not being provable doesn't mean either that it's a just conspiracy theory, as any successful conspiracy will have enough plausible deniability. To me, the whole endeavour of trying to prove or disprove a conspiracy is a fools errand. You either believe it or not, and can have adiscussion about it, but there's no point in bringing in a scientific process for something that is not science at its core.
• Spooky23 4y ago
  Thank you. I had read this in what I thought was a legit media outlet. Unfortunately it’s too late to edit or delete the post.