I’m guess it’s far more prosaic, in just that he’s a high profile person running for office and has been getting death threats? 
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Whaddya call someone who graduated from medical school at the bottom of their class?
“Doctor”
I figured out a while back that, when approached in a public place and asked, e.g., “do you consider yourself open-minded?” or “would you like to be making money in your spare time?” my go-to answer is, “No I am pretty much set in my ways.” (And without any other context, those are both really awkward questions to ask a complete stranger in the 1st place)
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Your average MD doesn’t know jack shit about vaccine production, biological weaponry or epidemiology. These are very specialized fields.
Nobody has used biological weapons on the battlefield since half-baked efforts by the Japanese in China in WWII
The reason being that it’s far too easy to infect your own people by accident or by subsequent enemy efforts. It gets researched but on things which can be contained easily by vaccine.
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I would consider myself fairly open-minded for my age and demographic, but anyone wearing an RFK Jr. shirt has provided me enough evidence to dismiss them as ridiculous per se.
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There’s a thing Cory Doctorow says periodically, usually I hear it in an interview he gives while promoting his most recent book. It goes, and I paraphrase, that even if you are a regular ol’ rational person, you are allowed to believe one conspiracy theory.
Now I will agree that there’s a difference between bioweapons and chemical weapons. But… there are definitely IRL accounts proven to be true later, that were thought to be conspiracies in their first days:
U.S. Army doctors in the Philippines infected five prisoners with bubonic plague and induced beriberi in 29 prisoners; four of the test subjects died as a result.[13] In 1906, Professor Richard P. Strong of Harvard University intentionally infected 24 Filipino prisoners with cholera, which had somehow become contaminated with bubonic plague. He did this without the consent of the patients, and without informing them of what he was doing. All of the subjects became sick and 13 died.[13][14]
In 1950, to conduct a simulation of a biological warfare attack, the U.S. Navy sprayed large quantities of the bacteria Serratia marcescens – considered harmless at the time – over the city of San Francisco during a project called Operation Sea-Spray. Numerous citizens contracted pneumonia-like illnesses, and at least one person died as a result.[35][36][37][38][39][40] The family of the person who died sued the government for gross negligence, but a federal judge ruled in favor of the government in 1981.[41] Serratia tests were continued until at least 1969.[42]
From 1963 to 1969, as part of Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense (SHAD), the U.S. Army performed tests which involved spraying several U.S. ships with various biological and chemical warfare agents, while thousands of U.S. military personnel were aboard the ships. The personnel were not notified of the tests, and were not given any protective clothing. Chemicals tested on the U.S. military personnel included the nerve gases VX and Sarin, toxic chemicals such as zinc cadmium sulfide and sulfur dioxide, and a variety of biological agents.[51]
In 1966, the U.S. Army released Bacillus globigii into the tunnels of the New York City Subway system, as part of a field experiment called A Study of the Vulnerability of Subway Passengers in New York City to Covert Attack with Biological Agents.[48][52][53][54][55] The Chicago subway system was also subject to a similar experiment by the Army.[48]
I know CIA ≠ U.S. Military.
I got it.
But there’s plenty of IRL examples of U.S. government-actors known to experiment with biological… agents… on people outside of a battlefield context, people not regarded as The Enemy, people who were often clearly not consulted and had not given consent (in the above cases of civilians especially).
Cory says I’m allowed one conspiracy theory.
So far, I haven’t really narrowed down my one freebie.
I do loosely track what I know to be exceedlingly ugly, uncomfortable facts that were once regarded as conspiracies or theories or both.
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Does “they’re all out to get us” count as “one” 
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I edited my last remark to note the last time bioweapons were used on the battlefield was WWII China. They were either entirely ineffective or indistinguishable from disease outbreaks associated with the brutality of the conflict and went largely unnoticed by the rest of the world. The real kicker being that the war criminals (Unit 731) were spared punishment. The US left them go in exchange for their experimental data. Which turned out to be utterly useless. Apparently sadism was more important than scientific methodology.
The frequency of involuntary human experiments with germs gives me the willies. The most infamous was the Tuskegee Experiments with syphillis.
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What is the protocol here, can I have one conspiracy theory I actually believe in - and several pet conspiracy theories I don’t actually believe in (but just kinda like because they are funny and imaginative)?
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I wonder how he feels about the perennial favorite “The Jews secretly control everything!”, historically held by great many otherwise rational people…
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I would challenge the “otherwise rational” part of that. This theory is so metastatic that it will affect pretty much every part of their lives. Also, at least with science-rejecting CT, believing one tends to lead to belief in others. Very rarely do i see folks who actually limit themselves to just one.
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Your response feels very bait-like to me. And it feels toxic to me because at least prima facie your words feel like someothing not being posted in good faith. I held off replying because I try not to react impulsively to baiting.
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Cory Doctorow is of Jewish decent.
- If you remain unclear about how “he feels”, I suggest you stop by his blog:
- To echo what @docosc has said, anyone who harbors something as toxic and stupid as what you wrote clearly demonstrates they are not rational. Full stop.
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Yes, that’s why I brought it up. My point, and in hindsight I should probably have made it more explicitly and with less snarky assholishness (my apologies for that!) is that I don’t think there’s a safe amount of conspiracy theories to indulge. It’s a dangerous mindset that easily taints your thinking - and it’s hard to stick to just one conspiracy theory if you get into the conspiratorial mood.
There are actual conspiracies by actual bad actors, as referenced above (e.g. the CIA’s MKUltra, or the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra) that may seem outlandish and overly convoluted but have a basis in reality. I believe that Cory was referring to a need to seriously consider those, in contrast to indulging in baseless conspiracism (e.g. the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the myriad of moronic child and cousin conspiracy theories).
And yes, while it’s easy to go down a rabbit hole once one starts, it’s just as easy not to be a dope and know when you’re straying into borderline territory.
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A couple years ago, I read an interview with Emily St John Mandel, author of “Station Eleven”, a post-apocalyptic novel published in 2014 and set after a devastating pandemic. She was asked if she found it surprising that a book about a pandemic came out just before an actual pandemic. She said something like “Before I did the research for my book, I would’ve been surprised. Once I studied the history of pandemics a bit I found that another pandemic was inevitable, and one that happened ‘soon’ would be the least surprising thing in the world.”
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Almost like asking “what are the odds of an actual war breaking out so soon after a novel about a war?” Sadly those things happen all the time.
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