Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[hector13]

My uncle posted something about the US government deliberately injecting syphilis into black folk in the South in the guise of free healthcare between 1932 and 1972.

A quick Google and Wikipedia article later, and I discovered the real story is not necessarily that far off; they wanted to see what the long-term effects of untreated syphilis was on black men to see if it developed differently than in white men, so they went and found some folk with syphilis by offering free healthcare to black folk, didn’t tell them they had syphilis, observed them, actively prevented them from getting treatment for syphilis when penicillin was found to be effective, and only stopped when it was leaked to the media what they were doing, despite releasing medical papers for the 40 year period they were doing this.

Then I discovered another Wikipedia article about American doctors deliberately infecteing Guatemalans with syphilis and other STDs because they wanted to find a means to prevent it for soldiers, then penicillin. It included a particularly harrowing excerpt in which... well, it was unpleasant. Bonus points for this occurring during the trial of Nazi doctors doing horrific things to concentration camp prisoners during the war.

I’d like to know where this disconnect between the desire for discovery and completely de-humanizing people comes from, but also, I really don’t.

[Reelya]

To let the horror of the Guatemalan experiments sink in, note the word "orphans" and "orphanage" appear repeatedly in the article.

In order to advance in their careers, they opted to stay and continue observations on subjects of the Syphilis experiments, including data collections from orphans, inmates, psychiatric patients, and schoolkids.

[pisskop]

The idea of the us government; or any government, using its minority population, or even just some rural and isolated group, is nothing new.

We tested various wartime gases on civilians and 'blind volunteers'.
syphillis is a good example.
Stories about drugs being fed into soldiers who didnt fully understand what they agreed to?
Stories about infected rice being air-dropped over in china, London bioterrorism tests in their subways, japan being the largest test subject (for nuclear bomb) in history, something something buzzword nazi testing, psyche wards and their resplendent histories.


A lot of tests arent 'experiments' in the traditional sense these days.  Just like imperialism is dead-but-not-really-its-just-now-taken-a-new-twist, a lot of testing is applied field tests.   Use an opportunity to study something.  Ever hear of this poor guy?  The lines arent a s clear any more, and I guarantee that all private firms and governments have some awful skeletons in their closet.  Not a single exception.

P:  its funny how when pressed for more examples, I struggle to readily recall them, even though Ive heard about so many throughout my academic studies . . .

[Loud Whispers]

A lot of tests arent 'experiments' in the traditional sense these days.  Just like imperialism is dead-but-not-really-its-just-now-taken-a-new-twist, a lot of testing is applied field tests.   Use an opportunity to study something.  Ever hear of this poor guy?  The lines arent a s clear any more, and I guarantee that all private firms and governments have some awful skeletons in their closet.  Not a single exception.

Ouchi's not the best example, his family was the one pressuring doctors to try the impossible and keep him alive.

However you did miss the most infamous Japanese medical "testing" and perhaps the most infamous of all, unit 731

[Reelya]

Reminds me I saw a thing on the Dirlewanger Brigade the other day. Nasty stuff.

At the end of WWII, Herr Dirlewanger himself tried to escape but got caught. He was then reportedly beaten to death by some Polish prison guards, and the authorities merely went "oops, he seems to have succumbed to injuries sustained during the arrest. What a shame".

The Dirlewanger Brigade is associated with its commander, Oskar Dirlewanger, a sadist called the most evil man in the SS.

Seriously, this guy was a c*nt. Basically they made a military unit made up of murderers and rapists and those declared criminally insane, then put a convicted pedophile rapist in charge of it. Then gave them the duty of policing civilians in the occupied territories.

EDIT actually this bit was good:

On 28 April 1945, SS-Sturmbannführer Ewald Ehlers, who commanded the 73rd Waffen Grenadier Regiment of the SS within the Dirlewanger Brigade, was hanged by his own men. He had been a former commandant of Dachau concentration camp who had been convicted of corruption

The Grenadier Regiment was one of the regular army units which had been seconded to the Dirlewanger near the end of the war to try and get some use out of them in holding back the Soviets. So these regular army guys looked at the ex-death camp officer that had been put in charge of them and decided to just lynch the guy.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I've always been struck by the arbitrary and pointless nature of the US plutonium medical tests. So in the 40s they start having a decent enough supply of plutonium, never before seen, right?

And so they ask themselves - "Hey, do you think this stuff kills people?" And so they inject plutonium into a bunch of random hospital patients. "Yep, it kills people."

This isn't the 20s. They knew how radiation worked. Presumably they saw that it killed rats. There is no possible reason why even an amoral person would want to do this test.

So if you were wondering why they went ahead and detonated Trinity even though they were only 90% sure it wouldn't cause a global atmospheric firestorm centered on Nevada, these are the kind of people who made that decision.

[George_Chickens]

Reminds me I saw a thing on the Dirlewanger Brigade the other day. Nasty stuff.

At the end of WWII, Herr Dirlewanger himself tried to escape but got caught. He was then reportedly beaten to death by some Polish prison guards, and the authorities merely went "oops, he seems to have succumbed to injuries sustained during the arrest. What a shame".

Oskar Dirlewanger is one of the most horrible of the lot. He was a convicted child rapist, who was given a slap on the wrist due to his ties to the NSDAP. Just read the accounts of him, they are incredibly cruel.

“We blew up the doors, I think of a school. Children were standing in the hall and on the stairs. Lots of children. All with their small hands up. We looked at them for a few moments until Dirlewanger ran in. He ordered to kill them all. They shot them and then they were walking over their bodies and breaking their little heads with butt ends. Blood streamed down the stairs. There is a memorial plaque in that place stating that 350 children were killed. I think there were many more, maybe 500."

“Or that Polish woman" (Schenk doesn't remember which action it was). "Every time, when we stormed the cellars and women were inside the Dirlewanger soldiers raped them. Many times a group raped the same woman, quickly, still holding weapons in their hands. Then after one of the fights, I was standing shaking by the wall and couldn't calm my nerves. Dirlewanger soldiers burst in. One of them took a woman. She was pretty. She wasn't screaming. Then he was raping her, pushing her head strongly against the table, holding a bayonet in the other hand. First he cut open her blouse. Then one cut from stomach to throat. Blood gushed. Do you know, how fast blood congeals in August?"

“There is also that small child in Dirlewanger’s hands. He took it from a woman who was standing in the crowd in the street. He lifted the child high and then threw it into the fire. Then he shot the mother."

“Or that little girl who unexpectedly came out of the cellar. She was thin and short, something about 12 years old. Torn clothes, disheveled hair. On one side we, on the other Poles. She was standing by the wall not knowing where to run. She raised her hands, and said Nicht Partizan. I waved with my hand that she shouldn't be afraid and should come closer. She was walking with her little hands up. She was squeezing something in one of her hands. She was very close when I heard a shot. Her head bounced. A piece of bread fell out from her hand. In the evening the platoon leader, he was from Berlin, came up to me and said proudly: ‘It was a master shot. Wasn’t it?’ He smiled proudly."

[dragdeler]

-

[Iduno]

Reminds me I saw a thing on the Dirlewanger Brigade the other day. Nasty stuff.

At the end of WWII, Herr Dirlewanger himself tried to escape but got caught. He was then reportedly beaten to death by some Polish prison guards, and the authorities merely went "oops, he seems to have succumbed to injuries sustained during the arrest. What a shame".

Oskar Dirlewanger is one of the most horrible of the lot. He was a convicted child rapist, who was given a slap on the wrist due to his ties to the NSDAP. Just read the accounts of him, they are incredibly cruel.

I don't remember Strom Thurmond being punished for being a child rapist either.

[Reelya]

Because he didn't do that according to the law. I'm assuming that's related to the fact that he got a black maid pregnant back in 1925 when he was 22? There's been no accusation of rape, and the maid was either 15 or 16. Both are legal under South Carolina law:

https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/south-carolina-statutory-rape-laws.htm

In South Carolina, it is illegal for an adult (someone 18 or older) to have sex with a minor (someone younger than 15), even if the sex is consensual. Those who break the law have committed statutory rape.

So, what he did was not illegal, according to that criteria. It *may* have been illegal at the time purely under adultery and/or race mixing laws. But we have in fact decided in this modern day that such laws are themselves immoral. Also, according to all accounts he did pay for the kid including putting her through college.

Also, calling consensual sex between a 22 and ~16 year old "child rape" is also potentially being being deliberately obtuse and/or misleading.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

He was an adult, and she was a teenager. Hence it is rape. Of course that is kind of irrelevant since the law in 1925 would rarely if ever prosecute a rape of a black woman by a white man.

You'd have to be very naive to think that a violent bigot like Strom Thurmond going after his family's black maid during the nadir of American race relations could be anything other than rape.

[Reelya]

But it's not rape. The definition of a minor in SC is under 15, which the person was not. Hence she was of legal age of consent. He didn't break any laws.

a minor (someone younger than 15), even if the sex is consensual.

Whether you think something is wrong is unrelated to whether something is illegal or not.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Slavery and the Holocaust were legal too.

[Reelya]

What a stupid statement. Someone could use the exact same logic as you're using to justify re-banning same-sex relationships, and they do. You're really drawing your own arbitrary line here and saying it's somehow the objective reality, if you say that (completely legal) consensual sex between those two people is wrong because you say it is wrong, but if someone else has a different definition of "wrong sex" to you, they're not free to hold that opinion, or else they are monsters.

EDIT:

Seriously, you're comparing something that is entirely legal sexual activity between two legally consenting people to the holocaust. Don't pull that shit and then get offended if the homophobes say, compare gay sex to the holocaust, because you've just given up that right.

[LordBaal]

The rolling balck outs are geting out of hand and more than rage inducing.

We are getting to the point the hours without electricity are almost the same ammount with power. If the trend keeps going then we can expect to soon have a few hours of power every day, or every other day. In fact some regions of the country are already there from some time ago, I live in a industrial city that is also a comerce hub so our suffering has been spared for a long time I guess?