Is there really anything stopping an evil government from just poisoning the water supply to commit a massacre/genocide/ethnic-clensing?
from DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world on 29 Jun 06:25
https://sh.itjust.works/post/41185090
from DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world on 29 Jun 06:25
https://sh.itjust.works/post/41185090
Random thoughts just popped in my head and I just remembered that all the water in a given city is all centralized. Just add poison and boom, eradicated an entire city who are full of dissidents/opposition as punishment for voting the “wrong” way, or for a protest, or if the population is filled with “filthy undesirable [Insert Racial Group Here]”, or something like that.
Kinda unsettling to see that we are all just attached to “the grid” 😖
#nostupidquestions
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Genocide is unlikely as people can stop drinking after finding out it is poisonous, especially if the poison is fast acting. There has been many cases of industrial mining companies poisoning rivers.
River ecocide will probably alert the authorities first. www.waternz.org.nz/Story?Action=View&Story_id=242…
It has to be a slow acting poison and not easily detectable or something so new that no one knows about… yet. Example…PFAS - www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC2eSujzrUY
Seems like there has been break-ins though to water supply - linkedin.com/…/elisabethbraw_is-russia-trying-to-…
The chance of them pulling it off with nobody noticing or saying anything is very low, it’s not a one person operation. Then depending on the speed of the poison it would become obvious that there’s something in the water very quickly and people would stop drinking it.
No.
But…
The adage that “the dose makes the poison” is working in your favor here. A large city supply delivers millions of liters of water per day; by the time you dilute your poison into millions of liters of water you’ll either be adding absurd amounts of poison (someone is going to notice massive line of tanker trucks queued up outside the treatment plant), or you are dealing with large - but not unweildly - volumes of something so horrendously toxic that it’s still deadly when diluted that much. There are very few substances that toxic, and someone is going to notice if you start procuring hundreds of liters of botulism toxin or Vx because at that point you are dealing with outlawed chemical warfare agents
Not only that, the water supply is linear, so to keep the water dangerous, you gotta keep adding the substance.
Just worth pointing out, changing water source in Flint Michigan and not adding corrosion inhibitors seemed to do an excellent job for a short period.
Oh yeah, that is the other way of poisoning a water supply, sabotage it so that it keeps poisoning itself
See also the Camelford disaster
Finally I get to be a superhero …. By the power of long showers I help make it impractical to introduce enough poisons into our water supply
Excellent song by one of my favorite bands!
Unsure why you’re getting downvoted (this is “No Stupid Questions”, after all), but I’ll give my 5 cents:
Reason 1:
The people is essentially the reason why a government has power. Without the people (and their support), the government governs a whole lot of nothing, and they will be forced to do labour themselves.
Reason 2:
Poisoning the water is not very accurate, and may lead to both the death of many whom already are supportive of the government (which will create distrust), and people only getting sick depending on the amount they drink (the dose makes the poison).
Reason 3:
Despite a population having a lot of dissidents, these people still work and contribute to society in some ways. It has to get pretty bad before it will be “worth it” to remove them from society.
Reason 4:
Even if it’s so bad that you’re looking at an open revolt against the government, poisoning the water will only really yield MAD, which is usually undesirable.
Ultimately, it’s unlikely desirable for any government to do this, as there are better ways (for the government). However, there have been some attempts at genocide through water supplies before, so it’s not completely unheard of. Check out Project Coast.
Regarding “No Stupid Questions”, I submit for your consideration the following: www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyiNW33MpAo
spoiler
stupid questions not allowed
I dunno, at this point im pretty sure trump could demand the death or every first born and americans would bend over. It is beyond wild that we have not had an armed uprising yet, and i gave up hope that we will ever have one years ago.
If you live in an open and transparent society: there will be an investigation and there is a high chance they will find out. You’ll be expected to take care of the mess with disaster relief for the survivors. Also about 40% of the people did vote for you. Also even the ones who did not vote for you still pays tax.
If you live in a dictatorship: police brutality is cheaper and is a bit more selective in it’s targeting.
The international backlash would be pretty severe.
Its called the Geneva Suggestions
Lots of people drink bottled water, soda, beer, or other drinks not immediately connected to the water supply. Furthermore, poisons are unlikely to remain undetected long enough to kill the entire population. While a strong dose of a deadly poison like cyanide can kill in minutes it’s likely to be detected quickly due to how rapidly its effects begin to show up.
A slower-acting, accumulating poison like dimethylmercury could potentially kill more people because its effects don’t show up immediately. On the other hand, the delayed effects of the poison would provide the victims a chance to retaliate against the poisoners.
Either way, it’s a very crude and unfocused attack against a population which is unlikely to achieve any political aim besides wanton destruction and outrage.
Racial / cultural supremacists wouldn't want to kill anyone of their preferred (usually their own) group, and certainly not a significant number of them. They'd basically have to gerrymander the water supply to arrange things so that only those they want to be poisoned actually get poisoned.
That's 1) expensive and 2) someone's going to notice.
It would be far easier, and cheaper to go full genocide and start shooting.
In one case, active in the world right now, the "undesirables" live in one area, and rather than poison the water, the supremacists have simply cut it off. They've also implemented the "start shooting" strategy.
I wish them all a crippling attack of conscience, and if not that, the inability to distinguish who they want to shoot from who they don't want to shoot.
How do you feel about fluoride?
I don’t know how to feel about it.
On one hand, people should probably be brushing their teeth anyways, so if you brush your teeth and also have flouridated water, seems a bit excessive?
But on the other hand, life is stressful and I’m dealing with depression and I often forget to brush my teeth… so like… idk I don’t have enough info to have a strong opinion on it. There’s pros and cons to both side of the flouride debate.
There’s only pros. It’s proven to prevent cavities in children and adults, much better than brushing alone.
There’s also the sad fact that not every kid is taught to—or sometimes allowed to—brush their teeth.
I hope there’s nothing secretly sinister about it.
I mean, sure, this could endup just being FUD like with the antivax conspiracy theory, but it also has the potential of being another Microplastic polluting shit like PFAS that nobody knew was harmful for many decades.
So for things I have low-info on, its best to not hold a strong opinion, rather than risking beliving in the wrong thing. I keep my mind open to different points of view.
Nothing sinister at all. It has a long and proven track record. Which you can check out if you don’t want to be low-info anymore. Doctors and dentists support it.
But there’s a subset of people who want us to go back to disease-ridden serfs, because when your teeth are falling out and 3 out of your 5 kids died young from disease and you can barely make rent, you’re too distracted to care what other people are doing.
It already happens. Look at things like pipeline leaks poisoning the water supply for certain native groups. There’s obviously protests against such projects that will inevitably lead to said poisoning, people get arrested for protesting, and then they do the project anyways.
Nope.
A function economy 😂. Jk
But being realistic to your answer, it’s possible to be done, but everyone involved would have to be in on it, assuming you wanna get away with it. The US has extremely strict and aware water safety protocols. It would take just 1 whistleblower to takedown this operation.
Orr just someone having one those water treatment facilities running Windows XP and increasing the chlorine content. Has happened before.
Had. HAD. The US has fired many/most of its inspectors.
75% of American drinking water requires treatment for one thing or another. One of those treatments is supplied by a single vendor out of a single plant in a flood-prone area. Apparently only recently did it receive federal staffing to improve security. This is only one of the many weak links in a supply chain with now absolutely zero oversight.
I wish I was kidding.
Trump gonna Trump 🙃
The next president is absolutely f*****
How many people go days without drinking tap water?
<img alt="Sodie pop woman from my 600 pound life" src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/iIAFe7zaCRU/maxresdefault.jpg">
There are some people who only drink sodie pop.
I mean… why do that?
If the government want to kill people in a country where they can get away with it they’ll just send armed men to shoot them.
Poisoning water supply is something the joker would do in a comic book, but on reality it won’t make a lot of sense for any big city. Going there and shooting people is probably much more effective, less expensive and let you with a not-poisoned city to settle with your own people.
Republicans are downright nonsensical and suicidal in their shittiness, for whatever weird reason. Obviously, if they thought it through, they wouldn’t do that…or vote for trump or support anything he’s doing.
The real question is how to get them to actually notice that they don’t get what they want when they do awful shit. They tend to just argue and whinge and turn red-faced and whiny instead. Then: more horrible shit.
If you want to kill a whole lot of people, your police will suffer and eventually quit if you just have the execute people en mass. This happened to the Nazis and it’s the prime reason the gas chambers were constructed.
The police need to feel like they are doing the right thing.
I suppose there’s staging a “terrorist” attack as an excuse to invade/nuke some other country
A very fundamental part of that is the amount of moving parts. Every person in the chain that is required for the thing to happen, has to either support the thing or otherwise follow through.
This very concept is what has saved us from nuclear apocalypse so far. Very literally so.
My city facilitated that a decade or two ago by building new indoor reservoirs specifically for water treatment. Now we have a small handful of facilities set upon for massive chemical insertion and holding about half a day’s worth.
That being said, you’d still need the cooperation of people at each site, security at each site, truckers and suppliers. But that’s only one city: multiply that by the thousands of cities plus now you’d need huge amounts of chemicals that someone would surely question. That’s a lot of moving parts.
is that a hypothetical?
when there’s lead in US drinking water the government just ignores it if it’s in a poor neighborhood
Or floride
jk
Developed world, we should follow medical advice for water quality
US, no fluoride in water, only lead.
The only evidence that fluoride makes you stupid, is that you probably grew up drinking fluoridated water, and say stupid shit like that.
Did you take me seriously? I said jk, did it need to be /s?
most people did
You’ll have to excuse them, they grew up drinking fluoridated water.
I don’t really understand the thought behind the question. In the sense of legality? Obviously. In the sense of someone saying something? Obviously. In the sense that people have free will? No. The people that work at water facilities are typically technically government employees. If all of them suddenly went rogue would you count that as “the government doing it”? Because they wouldn’t be acting in line with the government, but they’re still “the government.”
So, no, but actually yes, but actually no.
It’s like saying “what’s actually preventing a secret service member from shooting the president?” Nothing? Everything? How do you answer?
looks at Flint, Michigan
They don’t even have to add the poison themselves
Yeah, there are systems in place — water is tested regularly, and lots of people are involved, so it’d be hard to secretly poison it without someone noticing. But if a government is evil enough to try something like that, they’d probably use other methods anyway. Most real-life atrocities happen through laws, force, and fear — not movie-style poison plots. What really stops it is people paying attention and speaking up.