I was curious how many sessions, and how long the sessions were. A Guardian article[1] suggests the sessions were 2 hours long, once a week, and the typical total time for participants was 200 hours.
The overall process sounded a bit like something you see in military basic training, but with the additional wrinkle of the paper they made the Harvard students write beforehand...outlining their core beliefs. Drill instructors in basic training do a sort of less deep version of this. They observe people and try to induce stress with personalized yelling and screaming based on observations and some amount of data on the person (detailed "job" applications, ASVAB tests, etc).
Having been through basic training (OSUT) and done my own cadre time at the JFK Special Warfare Center at Bragg... I have never experienced nor customized training to a student based on their beliefs, or background, etc. The training is to the standard, not to the student – and ain't nobody got time to look at student's records anyway.
Perhaps you're younger? It was, at one time, pretty common to base the rage abuse on the recruit's religion, place of birth or induction, personal items/photos in the locker/wallet, observations on what made the recruit react, records, tests and so on. It was not hidden or subtle. There was a pretty big swing in the training in the 90's, following the Tailhook and other scandals where the physical stuff, constant swearing and humiliation was phased down. There have been a few rounds of this, over the years, usually following pressure from a scandal.
I've also been in basic training, but in the late 1980's. I definitely got the personalized plan. I also got to hear the DI yell about other people's specific details. Who didn't have a father listed, who had a criminal record, who had to fill out details of pre-induction drug use, who almost flunked the ASVAB, who had a GED instead of a high school diploma, what idiot would be a JEE-HOVAS-WITNESS and so on.
And worse. Didn't happen in my stay, but "blanket party beatings" and other hazing for some recruits was sometimes encouraged. My DI was more careful with physical stuff, though he did have this thing where he would drive his stiff hat brim into your eyes, lips, ears, etc. And quite a lot of saliva sprayed in my face whilst being yelled at.
I grew up with an Army 101st DS/JAG/Judge. They do this at home too. During the same time period. My “personalized” training was reminding me my father left, I wasn’t his son, I was a ne’er-do-well, I’ll never amount to anything, I’m lucky my mother found him, and that I was lazy.
F’king brutal for an 11 year old.
I left home at 17 after I graduated early and scored 99/100 on the ASVABs just to rub it in his face, didn’t join, and went into tech for the last 20 years and made more than he has seen in his lifetime. The training worked.
Damn. It’s really impressive you were able to turn that treatment around into such a motivating force.
I often half-jokingly say I am raising my kids too cushy for them to ever create something extraordinary. Extraordinary achievements take extraordinary effort, and history seems to show the necessary drive for extraordinary efforts comes from brutal lessons that teach endurance and perseverance.
Or as the saying goes…
Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times.
I suggest you read Bret Devereaux's "This Isn't Sparta" [0] series. He dismantles the myth the "hard times" cycle you mentioned.
For contemporary examples, just look at North Korea or Russia. Life is undeniably harder for citizens living in these countries, but where is the expected "strength" and "good times" that should result?
Timeframe too. Are they not yet out of the hard times phase? The idea I think fits into the wider complexity that is life—those operating in the hard times regime are burning a wick that eventually runs out and the situation becomes intolerable or non operational. At which point strong men step up and say “to heck with this I’m going this direction” in the ensuing anarchy and try to erect some degree of order in another direction.
In the complexity of life we can only afford so many mistakes before they take a toll and opportunities become squandered and one is effectively outcompeted. It’s like a sick tree, once under assault nature has creatures that read the signal, insects bore into the wood, fungus finds a home, slow rot begins. All the while the tree still stands, but eventually the strong winds come and in that condition the tree gives way. What precise balance North Korea sits at with their cohesion is probably not known, even by them, just guessed at.
I generally agree however, opportunities are endless if you have the right mindset. Yes, it takes its toll, however a strong will creates oneself and if you have the drive to learn or take a direction, you’ll do it. Bonsai tress are heavily stressed trees whose outcome becomes something remarkable. Some withstanding generations. The support you gain keeps you upright, pruned, watered, and living. Don’t leave yourself alone in the woods, find people willing to give you support.
Yeah, I don’t see it as motivation or a positive in my life. I was on that track regardless but he still would say things. He didn’t care. Now that’s he old, it’s different, he looks back with fond memories and calls me his son now. Ironic. I don’t hold it against him, it’s who he was. He truly believed it all. 3 tours of Vietnam and 3 Purple Hearts will do that to a man. I respect him. I did things vastly different with my children.
Thank god you are so understanding. There's a whole generation of soldiers who went through Iraq and Afghanistan who're loaded with PTSD and the feeling of "no one understands" is what drives so many to suicide
My brother. My friends. I was the only one who didn’t go. I stood there’s at MEPS with a life-decision. I stand by my decision. I also have a great connection with those who chose different. We, the elder millennials, paid a heavy price for freedom. Like you said, some paid the ultimate price.
Here-in lies the problem. I’ll leave it as is because freedom means different things to different folks depending on where they stood. I totally get what you’re saying.
Sorry for your losses. I served in Afghanistan and although I came out relatively mentally unscathed I lost a friend and also had soldiers under my command who were completely destroyed by PTSD.
The thing I wrestle with every day is whether it the price was worth it at all.
Unfortunately the aphorism is created by victims of trauma in order to justify their experience. "Hurt people hurt people" is accurately based in reality.
I desperately wish this were true, I really do, but in my experience, it gives aggrieved men the justification for acting like assholes.
It might be describing men out there, but for every one it describes, it enables ninety-nine others to act a little less compassionate, a little less kind, and a little less human. That's why despite good intentions, its existence is a net negative in terms of the utility of the idea.
The irony of discussing this in a thread about Ted Kaczynski cannot be lost on either of us.
> Kaczynski’s experiences at Harvard — his studies, overlapping with his roughly three-year participation in Murray’s experiment — helped create the Unabomber.
"That stress, that struggle, and that suffering [him] changed as a person," certainly rings true. And rather than these hard times creating a stronger Ted, it changed Ted into the Unibomber.
Undoubtedly true. There was nothing and no one strong to guide Ted through his pain and suffering — and so he became antisocial. This is no different to many other men, who suffer less, but do not adapt to it in a way that is virtuous.
The same can be seen with fatherless boys and men in inner cities. No one is there to guide them through the suffering (sometimes a strong, “masculine” mother will be enough, at the cost of the nurturing element), and they turn to gangs to find guidance.
There are no strong men to guide the suffering. No men that have been brutalized by life, but have learned to move forward without becoming brutalizers themselves.
Maybe; hard times brutalize men. Those that can learn to prosper, even a little, will pass it down to the younger ones. And so the younger ones will still suffer, but less so, and learn to prosper more — and pass it down, and so on. And then through generations of this cycle we will reach good times once again. At which point, there will be no suffering to learn from, at the peak of prosperity, and it will be squandered — repeating the cycle.
More that hard times kill everyone who isn't strong. Strong men kill other cultures, and then redefine their own as good. Good times let a thousand flowers bloom. A thousand flowers create conflict and hard times.
Evolution and selection bias are the most powerful forces in the universe. The world is the way it is not because it's just or moral, but because everything that didn't survive, didn't survive.
To pick just a handful of obvious counter examples: Bill Gates was comfortablely upper middle class, Steve Jobs comfortablely middle class, both with solid family lives.
Intense hardship creates mostly trauma. While highly traumatized individuals may have excellent strategies to cope with specific stresses, they also keep paying the price for it and walk around with the triggers and limitations of the unhealed trauma - which ultimately decrease their ability to face challenges in open, highly creative, sustainable ways.
Think of how much toxic masculinity is mixed into army culture for example.
I completely agree with this and think it's spot in. Think what you want, but you have to really want something that's difficult to get. If you're too comfortable you lose that hunger.
> Perhaps you're younger? It was, at one time, pretty common to base the rage abuse on the recruit's religion, place of birth or induction, personal items/photos in the locker/wallet, observations on what made the recruit react, records, tests and so on. It was not hidden or subtle
Funny that you're mentioning older protocols in a thread about 60s mind control...
The military around that time was seen as a "correctional" institution to turn bad boys into men. Everything you describe about personalized treatment is a necessary step to breaking the willpower of someone with any sort of oppositional/defiance disorder.
You have to figure out their mental weakpoint and rub both shit and salt in that wound to bring them to heel, because they won't listen to reason or respect/fear authority otherwise-- these are the types who'll laugh in the drill instructor's face. They'll do pushups and clean toilets all day out of spite.
All of this should have started changing post-Vietnam.
I have certainly experienced and given 'personalized' treatment, but it was never about going deep on personnel records – and always about the character, performance, and expectations at hand.
I was glad to see a topic in which most HN contributors seem freely critical of US actions, which is not the case with more recent events.
Talking of MK programs, I wanted to emphasize how far these agencies could go awry, see the alleged LSD poisoning of an entire French village in 1951 [1].
Most criticism comes with the implicit belief that the US has cleaned up its act since the terrible experiments of the Cold War era.
That's an intellectual fallacy it's easy to fall prey of: if most cultures and nations have committed heinous acts in their past, one should assume they are still doing terrible things to this day.
MK-ULTRA is dead, but history teaches that one day we'll learn of something even worse that's occurring right under our noses in 2023. It is disingenuous to criticise what the CIA and other three letter agencies have done, while not being totally opposed to their existence to this day. Who knows how they are experimenting with people on US soil, how they are fomenting revolts and financing drug lords in South America today.
Sadly, any such criticism can be easily waved away by calling it a conspiracy theory, which is how they keep operating with impunity. The only difference between an outlandish conspiracy theory and history are the existence of declassified government documents.
I jumped to the section on Europe and the only entry for the last 20 years is:
> In late 2019, CIA agent Anne Sacoolas hit and killed a British teenage pedestrian named Harry Dunn with her car, while she was driving on the wrong side of the road, near the RAF Croughton base in the UK where she and her husband (both CIA agents) worked.
This is a great text. Most internet English language forums have a heavy American culture bias. So it's not easy to find places to talk in a calm and unbiased manner about US imperialism.
In a couple 100s of years , history will be talked about this era of "Pax Americana" and the lengths that the US Gov went trying to cling to its power.
Is it good, is it bad? Depends on where you are really.
I think it'll be a lot shorter than 100 years. It didn't take 100 years for the British empire to collapse. It showed its weakness during WWII, and the Suez crisis put the old dog out of its misery a mere 10 years later. Chernobyl preceded the fall of the USSR by only 5 years.
How long after COVID will America fall? China's already brokered peace in the Middle East between our best friend and our worst enemy in the region. The Universe has a sense of humor. Given the historical precedent, will we mark the end of the US empire with China negotiating peace in occupied Ukraine or in occupied Palestine?
I'm clearly the furthest thing from a patriot, but I am fairly certain the history books will place our collapse somewhere between the Soviet Union and the British Empire on the atrocity scale. If we outdo Churchill's genocide in India, it's going to involve nuclear hellfire, and then there won't be any history books to remember it by anyway.
And on NK there's no internet at all. So what? Why this fixation in changing the focus out of the US with whataboutism? Others' worse actions dont make ones bad actions better.
It’s not really whataboutism to say “I like the US empire better than other wanna-be empires because not a single wanna-be empire allows you to meaningfully criticize it”
The US did bad things to its own people like bikini atoll and MkUltra and the Tuskegee Experiments. Maybe it even did things like stage 9/11 as a false flag (there were real plans to stage a similar false flag in the 70s to support a war against Cuba) - even if it did, I’m allowed to speculate about it or even claim it to be true online. In China try to mention Tiananmen Square. Even if the US empire is evil, which I think is a bit overly harsh at the general level while agreeing that many of its individual actions have been evil, it’s better than any of the other empires.
America is the first (and maybe only, ever?) major
imperial power that allows such open discussion of
its atrocities.
I did not claim that America was the first imperial power to allow public dissent. That, as I'm sure you'd agree, is manifestly untrue.
So it's unclear to me what point you're attempting to make by pointing out a single instance of prior public dissent in the British Empire.
Particularly since Swift's work of satire was not exactly a direct criticism of the British Empire, nor a catalogue of its atrocities.
If you do the minimum feasible amount of research and read the Wikipedia article, you will learn that it was largely a parody of other such popular contemporary treatises, a thing that is easy to miss in 2023 if you aren't familiar with the context in which "A Modest Proposal" was written.
Back to my original post... I certainly don't think America was the first to allow such dissent. I think it is the first to do so on such a scale.
(I also don't necessarily think America allows such dissent for entirely noble purposes. As has been often pointed out, legitimate criticism and evidence often gets lumped in with whackadoo fake conspiracy theories and is therefore discredited by default in the public's mind. The end result is a more effective form of suppression than could be achieved by direct totalitarian repression. The US government will let you talk about the MKUltra experiments or Guantanamo all day long because barely anybody will believe you, or care.)
The scale is an artifact of the ease of publication today. I agree that the speech allowed today is greater than ever before. Your point stands.
The US First Amendment is indeed unique, but it came from a tradition[1][2]. And it's not so long ago that US citizens were prosecuted for sedition. And this is not totally unique to the US or Britain[3][4].
> In the mid-1890s Edmund Dene Morel was working for Elder Dempster as a shipping clerk based in Antwerp, when he noticed discrepancies between public and private accounts given for the import and export figures relating to shipping from the Congo.[5] Morel deduced from the steady export of firearms and cartridge, against the disproportionate mass imports in rubber, ivory and other lucrative commodities, that no commercial transaction was taking place.[6] He concluded that the use of force was the only explanation: the consistency of the exchange could only be supported by a state-led system of mass exploitation.[7] Resigning from his role in 1901, Morel turned to journalism to investigate and raise awareness about the activities of the Congo Free State authorities, establishing his own journal in early 1903 – the West African Mail.[8]
Your post is showing as downvoted for me right now. I tried upvoting it so it doesn't show as greyed out. Thanks for sharing this resource; I had not come across it before and I think it is a valuable resource to share and a meaningful contribution to the discussion on this topic.
>That's an intellectual fallacy it's easy to fall prey of: if most cultures and nations have committed heinous acts in their past, one should assume they are still doing terrible things to this day.
>MK-ULTRA is dead, but history teaches that one day we'll learn of something even worse that's occurring right under our noses in 2023.
I can’t help but reflect how much of the tragedy, conflict, and war in human history has been caused by these agencies run amok.
What’s striking about these MKUltra type programs is the magnitude of horrible things stemming from a relatively small number of clandestine operatives doing insane experiments on the population.
Based in the article in The Times yesterday, I’d say we can confidently add global pandemic to this list, and a reminder that the US doesn’t have a monopoly on this particularly deranged form of violence.
Up until 2019 I’d say the USA was the worst offender, but let’s hope no one ever catches up to what China did in Wuhan.
> I can’t help but reflect how much of the tragedy, conflict, and war in human history has been caused by these agencies run amok.
A relatively small amount most likely. Maybe on par with the amount that has been caused by yellow journalism (e.g. the Spanish-American war, anti-ethnicity political cartoons). Most of anything "caused" by them is not from them running amok, but from them doing the job they were ordered to do by higher officials.
And, of course, we only rarely see what they prevented from happening.
Nope, didn't quite mean that. What I meant was the overall gravity of what was the pandemic.
Quite possible that something that happened in one place was much more serious, or even totally different in other place, and in other places it was life as usual.
For me the jury is out there, if indeed there was a pathogen out there. For all you know it could have been a radiation leak. In other cases it could have been cases of cold or flu.
What I can confidently say is that it was not the pandemic of large proportions as it was made out to be. (no one I knew died). What I can also confidently say is that no one can really say with a high degree of certainty that it was a virus, the tests (PCR) are flaky, the symptoms can be attributed to many things etc. etc.
> MK-ULTRA is dead, but history teaches that one day we'll learn of something even worse that's occurring right under our noses in 2023.
In the grand scheme of American violations of human rights, MK-ULTRA barely even registers. I can think of a dozen worse things we know are happening right now off the top of my head. Trump and Biden's internment camps, the tent cities in every US city, kids as young as 12 working in slaughterhouses, solitary confinement in prisons... I'll spare everyone from this turning into a rant.
At least we can rest assured that everything we've been told of what's going on in Ukraine and the causality the underlies it is True.
Outrage at things in the past is easy, but if we want to really improve the world it may be necessary for smart people to stop refusing to think clearly on current events.
I don’t know about this counterexample. Refusing to think clearly is what Russian apologia is made of. A world in which only the US has agency and only the US can do wrong is not clearheaded.
Yet not "enhanced interrogation," which is arguably a continuation of MK-Ultra experimentation. That has plenty of defenders, though I'd argue both the Iraq War and Guantanamo Bay aren't as universally despised as you claim.
Although one must be critical of these events, please be aware that soviet undermining is active in pushing these subjects. Just don't give up all hope and throw any babies out with the bathwater i guess.
I thought the invasion of Iraq and use that f Guantanamo are universally accepted to have been pretty idiotic even by super power standards. The USA gained no security and lost inordinate amounts of money, blood and good will.
I think sometimes the typos are speech-to-text artifacts. For instance "used that" would be phonetically similar to "used at" and I could see that easily tripping up STT. I know people that use STT and don't review the output before sending so I get weird text messages from them from time to time.
Yeah it is just you. Non-American users aren't Russian/soviet bots. It is interesting to see the tactics in discussion being used here: add conspiracy to facts so they seem less plausible.
Have you seen these typos? These aren't just "I don't speak the lingo" typos.
And if I was attempting to bend the narrative, a good tool for that might be a counterargument that, tho apparently strong, is actually weak. Let's not be naive about how this works.
I'll just save some quotes here since I really like them:
> Kaczynski likened science to a “surrogate activity” that is “directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward” or some sense of fulfillment.
> “Scientists work mainly for the fulfillment they get out of the work itself,” he wrote. “… Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research.”
The scientists who DO usually start from goals, don't want to grope around "just for the science" and spend ten years on how "tail spike protein x interacts with blah blah blah"... the ones who aren't blind are usually cast away and made fun of not being "pure scientists" and cast away as "translational". It's an entire caste system lots of people have created for themselves.
So these "translational" people either go back obediently to doing the pure stuff, or they just leave and go to biotech / pharma.
The field is better off viewing those two as two sides of the same coin, but to keep people in the walls they've built a "if you do translational science, you're an outcast and should never come back!"
That is powerful writing. Powerful by orthodox literary standards. In my own notebooks I regard that kind of writing as bad. I call the trap that it falls into "letting language do my thinking for me."
Consider "directed toward a goal that people set up for themselves in order to have some goal to work toward." I've dropped the words artificial and merely. What work were they doing?
I think that the word artificial is imposing a binary, "natural" versus "artificial", on the way that we think about goals. The paradigm of a natural goal is having sex to start a family. The paradigm of an artificial goal is playing golf. Which is science? It has to fall in the artificial bucket, so it is like golf, and therefore of low value.
If I were writing in my own notebook, I would think that I had tricked myself. I've persuaded myself that science is low value. I look for the clever argument that I've used; its not there. I've been incautious in my use of language, stuck in the word artificial and failed to wonder whether there are any artificial goals that are surprisingly valuable.
merely is heavy with implications. One might set oneself a goal in order to have something to work towards, to avoid the tendency to sipping and sampling which so often defeats the aspirations of gifted beings. This might be within a larger context; the aspiration may be towards a noble and lofty goal. merely trashes all that. A simple little word that slots in easily, merely making the words flow more smoothly. And yet it has smuggled in heavy negativity. Once again language does our thinking for us, guiding us towards a conclusion, and concealing from the author his lack of justification.
Turning to the second quote, one notices that blindly is a powerfully pejorative word. Who wants to be blind? Here is does triple duty, with three meanings. First, we are doing science because we are curious about something that we do not know. It is a cliche to call such groping in the dark blind. So no-one can disagree that science marches on blindly. The phrase "real welfare" intensifies the negativity. Notice the weasel word real. Nothing and nobody can meet the test of having regard to real welfare because the word real licences us to raise the standard for what counts as welfare into an unknowable, remote future. Science must confess to not being able to foresee ultimate consequences and confess a second time to being blind.
The third meaning of blind refers to the reasonable critique. It is hard to respond appropriately to even foreseeable medium term consequences and scientists often fail to do so. Is this reasonable critique actually justified? The claims made by the previous two meanings of the word blind were true, even if unimportant, so it is tempting to nod this through. The third meaning gains our approval by the momentum of the first two meanings; another example of language doing our thinking for us.
If we can escape the momentum of language, the example of Louis Pasteur will spring to mind, or Humphrey Davy investigating flames to invent the safety lamp. Scientist sometimes pay close attention to the foreseeable, medium-term welfare of mankind.
Is it true to say that science marches on, obedient to the psychological needs of scientists, government officials, and corporate executives? Yes, this is obviously true. Yet it is only that sneaky little word only (which I left out; did you notice?) that makes this important.
Ponder the tale of medicinal chemist trying to explain to his boss that it is actually the mice that are in charge. Science can only march on if it obeys the mice. Leaving them out misses the point entirely. That little word only both makes the ringing phrase important-if-true and hopelessly-false.
Notice how hard this overlong comment works to expose how language does our thinking for us. It is an example of Brandolini's Law. Cultivate a horror of powerful writing, before it tricks you into believing falsehoods. No-one is coming to save you. Untangling how language does our thinking for us is too much work.
It is kind of true that the neoliberal lense through which science and academics are directed and funded is a form of ideology which is not always parallel with the improvement of the human condition, and I would argue at times it is even contrary to improvement of the human condition..
But there is no replacement ideology which can guide science uniformly toward an objectively better human condition. That is because any such ideology is as beholden to capitalism as neoliberalism. Science cannot escape the overarching power of capital while still depending upon it's forces to propel it.
Thus I agree it is an artificial goal, but more than a lie told by controlling beurocrats, it a lie told even to its adherents, as is inherent in ideology. Further, it is an inescapable lie produced by the organization of means.
The answer to this ideological trap we find science caught in is succinctly responded to by Star Trek. Post-capitalist post-materialism is what liberates science from these constraints, not some "opening of minds" accomplished through terrorism.
I think you get the wrong idea. What he basically says is that scientists mostly do science because they enjoy doing it, and everything else he says is a consequence of that. People in general tend to gravitate to activities which they enjoy in terms of process, and science is no exception. Usefulness of their work would be a nice side effect, but people rarely do things purely for result, especially when it's something that requires a lot of time and efforts. Basically we are inherently hedonistic creatures and there's no way changing that.
Scientists indeed mostly do science because they like it, but it's supposed to be that way and it's supposed to be funding managers that are responsible to direct that towards the welfare of humanity. That they don't is a matter of ideology. Kaczinsky made a mistake in attribution of responsibility, scientists aren't supposed to bear that responsibility in our system.
"obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research.”
If you are going to defend the ramblings of psychopathic terrorists because they vaguely resemble semi coherent critical theory, at least read all the words.
People have been called out and framed „Conspiracy Theorists“ (CT) for saying, years ago, that those government programs are one of the causes of amok runs in the US, repeatedly killing innocent people, i.e. in schools.
Is it now allowed to talk openly about MKUltra, CIA involvement and amok runs? Or do CTs still need to hide, even after media outlets like Washing Post write about that, conforming its existence?
I genuinely think the true conspiracy theory is that many theories are made up and pushed in the same venues as more or less provable theories, and used to discredit the grain of truth within those conspiracies as generally crazy.
"CIA mind control" was a loony theory until it was basically proven that the CIA was in fact drugging tons of people in an attempt for mind control and then letting them loose on society.
Hell wasn't the NSA dragnet a "conspiracy theory" until proven by Snowden?
If you have all these "babies kept in the basement of a pizza parlor that hosts punk shows" theories surrounding a handful of real things, ie "why did Epstein have the reach he did? Why was he made the financial advisor to a billionaire with no experience?". It basically makes all these points lose credibility due to their closeness.
The older "Project Echelon", I'm not sure how much has been confirmed about it's capabilities but it certainly did exist and was the precursor to Prism.
You can find lots of examples in movies from the 90s joking about how the NSA will know if you say certain words, like "bomb", on the telephone. They almost definitely did :)
in the San Francisco corners of counter-culture, CIA mind control with LSD was a common and well-known story past the late 1960s. Also J Edgar Hoover, terror of Red America, was a cross dresser; various stories about the JFK Assassination involving the US Secret Services; support of dictators in South America and the Middle East.. lots of things like that. Stories and attitude like that was one of the many reasons Mr Clean-cut Los Angeles Defense Ronald Reagan especially despised that crowd.
The thing that always gets me about the JFK assassination, is after JFK fired Dulles, he was then put in an important position in the Warren Commission and would work out of his home on the investigation, despite no longer working for the agencies.
People shout about "Deep state" stuff all the time but these guys really did have an inordinate amount of power that was not on a leash whatsoever. They do things the President is ignorant about. If the President can be considered not on a need-to-know basis, whatever is happening by that agency is effectively a "deep state" operation, regardless of if you believe there's a vast deep state conspiracy.
forgot to mention the most obvious one from that time.. millions of regular people against the Viet Nam war, and that war did not stop. Those ten years turned many ordinary US citizens into cynics, and gave fuel to the more extreme stories that were passed around.
Same with the Alex Jones "they're turning the frogs gay!" meme. Completely dismissed, but there's plenty of studies showing the pesticide atrazine (which is what Jones was referencing) is an endocrine disruptor.
Same with the "COVID came from a lab leak" theory. Because Trump said it in 2020, it was universally dismissed. 3 years later, there's now a strong case for it.
I hate anti-CT people. Questioning is the way of science. If someone wants to question whether the US arrived to the Moon or not, let them, dont discredit them Let them look for evidence and present their case. What are we afraid of?
Same happened with the 9/11 stuff. In the quest of looking for answers after the questioning, maybe we will get more knowledge. But instead people stayed with the first government sanctioned story and accepted it blindly .
Same happened with the WMD story... society has to learn to be more skeptic, and to value those that question and look for answers.
Too many things get dismissed as conspiracy theories, that’s true.
But the CT mindset of absolute certainty doesn’t do its adherents any favors. Skepticism should extend to one’s own beliefs, and claims of actual conspiracies need evidence.
The stupid chemtrail thing is a perfect example. Any thinking person can see the insanity required to get everything wrong about airplanes, weight, parts per million, and airport logistics.
Yet to this day there are people who don’t just belief the conspiracy theory, but hold an unshakable belief in it.
Some of those people were probably right about WMDs and other things. But so why? Stopped clocks and all that.
A conspiracy theory mindset is toxic to actual reason.
Everyone that was right about WMDs got it right because literally no physical evidence was ever given to the public. It was clear as day to anyone skeptical. Let's stop trying to rewrite history.
They aren't discredited because they asked questions but because they don't understand existing evidence and because their "evidences" are either already debunked or were nonsense in the first place.
But they don't stop, you have to repeat they same things over and over again.Live, Die, Repeat.
And some point everybody has enough.
They found no evidence for a fake moon landing, no evidence for 9/11 being an inside job, but they found evidence the US lied about WMD.
Time, attention, domain expertise, intelligence: these are all finite resources.
Most worthwhile questions require, at a minimum, a certain level of expert domain knowledge to resolve.
If someone wants to question whether the US
arrived to the Moon or not, let them, dont
discredit them Let them look for evidence and
present their case. What are we afraid of?
Let competing ideas battle it out in the marketplace of ideas, right?
This actually works really well in a lot of instances.
The catch is that it requires the "consumers" in the "marketplace" to have the domain expertise to correctly judge which idea is best.
And this is very often not the case. Particularly when we are talking about the general public. When the public can't accurately judge the merits of competing ideas on merit alone they will (of course) naturally gravitate to the ideas that are more slickly presented, the ideas that simply make them feel better, the ideas that don't challenge their existing beliefs, etc.
There is also the issue of asymmetric information warfare. If you are slick enough you can wage a lopsided war of attrition against your opponents. It takes little effort to spread falsehoods, and it typically takes multiple times as much effort to debunk them.
Same happened with the WMD story... society has
to learn to be more skeptic, and to value those
that question and look for answers.
This is an example of what I'm saying. The public initially largely supported the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan because they were not educated consumers: the public had no way of independently verifying the WMD claims. There was no marketplace of ideas, just a monopoly.
Most CTs aren't about asking questions but about providing often bullshit answers with no evidence.
Being suspicious if things happened exactly the same official way is reasonable.
CT "people" believe that some doubt about one thing or the other is solid evidence that the world trade center was demolished with a sledgehammer (or some other far fetched theory that would require a mountain of evidence)
My objection to conspiracy theories is the saliency bias. Conspiracy theorists ignore entirely plausible if not outright proven conspiracies because that makes them boring. And at the same time, they continue to pursue conspiracies that have mountains of opposing evidence because they're interesting, or because it makes a group of people they hate look bad.
Like, let's take the moon landings as an example. Those are some of the most well-documented events to question, so there's lots of evidence for them that's kind of difficult to fake[0]. Hell, if they did film actors in a studio, how did they keep the Soviets from immediately noticing and embarrassing America over it? Faking the moon landings would be a pure ideological win for Soviet Communism.
I think the most instructive example is Jeffrey Epstein. There is more conspiracy theorist interest in whether or not his prison suicide was a murder than the actual child sex ring he was running! The moment a conspiracy theory is proven, conspiracy theorists move on to something more farfetched, as if explanation destroys their power. So now that "a good chunk of US and UK politicians were organized pedos" isn't salient enough, now we have to invent rogue endocrinologists overprescribing HRT in the name of Satanists getting high off adrenochrome in the nonexistent basement of a third-rate DC pizza parlor.
There is literally nothing scientific about this. Conspiracy theorists will never uncover a single actual conspiracy. The thing about conspiracies is that they tend to be frustratingly mundane: like, "Intuit pays off Senators to make tax filing difficult" levels of boring. If you want to keep that from getting out, what you can do is invent a more salient theory and deliberately leak that instead. How many actual conspiracies are being covered up by conspiracy theorists only chasing after the interesting ones?
[0] Take the Apollo Guidance Computer, a luggage-sized electronic computer that actually did most of the mission calculations for spaceflight. There's about fifty of them, and they are fully working computers that collectors have even managed to restore to fully working order. Why waste the billions it took to develop such a thing if you're just going to film a few actors in a studio?
There’s also a wide class of conspiracy theories that are the favorites of the mentally ill (mostly paranoid schizophrenics and those with delusions of grandeur) and the dimwitted (mostly about the government being all powerful and wanting to kill us with no rational motive, ie FEMA camp stuff, which then gets mixed into their personal politics).
The government doesn't need to do anything to discredit legitimate conspiracy theorists, these types of people exist independent of the government.
There are absolutely smart, open minded, intelligent “conspiracy theorists” but because they’re not obsessive whack jobs they are unrecognizable by that term.
It may have been a factor in a few cases, but I think people are being called out there for blaming a CIA program for school shootings rather than the woeful lack of mental health care and easy access to guns.
>rather than the woeful lack of mental health care and easy access to guns
Easy access to guns and lack of mental health care has been a thing in the US for over a century, but curiously mass shootings only started happening a few decades ago, so maybe something else is the cause? Interestingly mass shootings started happening around the time that certain psychiatric medications came into widespread usage, medications for which homicidal ideation is a know but very rare side effect. It makes sense that even if a side effect is super rare, when millions of people start taking the drug you'd expect the rare effect to happen on a regular basis.
Well, California leads the pack on mass school shootings with the toughest gun laws around, and it is the 28th lowest in rank in mental health ranking in 2022 per this reference which weighs 15 factors:
Interestingly, a small percentage of violent crime is directly attributed to mental health issues. Most self harm.
The definition of "mass shooting" leads to discrepancies like 20 vs. 600 for 2020 depending on which agencies definition is used. By number it looks bad for the US even if per capita compared to other countries. But more than half of all gun deaths in the US are suicides, and mass shootings are less than 0.5 or 0.2 percent of all homicides depending on which span of years you use.
I am a less of a gun control advocate than one for mental health access and prophylactic measures. Gun control is a red herring. The genie is out of the bottle. Bad people will procure guns or make them from parts or scratch. Not that hard really given the demand and money available to do it by drug cartels and other criminal organizations. Politicians keep saying "Guns are the number one killer of kids in the US". Based on a NEJM study that defines "kids" as 1 to 19 years of age. 18 and 19-year-olds are adults. Most deaths involving guns occur in the 17 to 19-year-old span are typically gang related. It also includes suicides ("In 2021, 54% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (26,328), while 43% were murders (20,958), according to the CDC.") and citizens defending themselves with guns and being successful at it along with the police shootings in self defense.
Suicides still occur in relatively large numbers in countries with few guns in the hands of their citizens. They just use another method.
You underestimate the amount of guns that would be made to meet the demand once all free and legal means are shutdown. Have you ever heard of a zip gun? Kids were making these from door bolts decades ago when they couldn't get their hands on a gun.
I just can’t understand the US’ rationalisation of the current state of gun regulation being ok. So only 21,000 of the year’s gun deaths were murders… here in the UK where we cracked down on firearms after the first instance of a school shooting there 35 murders with a firearm in 2021.
And I just can't understand how people use one cause for an effect: London is in the top 10 surveilled cities in the world after China, and UK laws like Section 60 allows stop and search without suspicion. Yeah, it's gun control that lowered the murders in the UK, and I am sure you are good with the UK turning into a real version of Orwell's 1984.
Statistics need context. The term "mass shooting" is defined differently by different agencies/organizations in the US as well as all over the world.
England also has the highest rate of tornadoes per land area in the world, but nobody would think they were at risk for being harmed by a tornado in England vs. the US.
That the definition changes only affects arguments about the type of gun. Low-count definitions correlate assault-style rifles that California has tried to ban. High-count definitions correlate with handguns.
You started with school shootings, singling out California. Texas is by far more prone to mass shootings and I wager statistically equal to California per-capita.
Hawaii has nearly-as-strict gun laws as California but incomparably lower violence by any measure. It’s a better example of your argument. The linked mental health web site ranks it at 7.
On the other hand, the death toll in undisputed mass shootings has skyrocketed since the defeat of the assault weapons ban.
the Hawaii example imo just shows that gun laws work better when they are broadly implimented. to get a gun to Hawaii you need to fly somewhere to buy it. to get one to California, you can just drive to Nevada
More causes than an assault weapons ban. The harm of the COVID lockdowns, Zooming classes, social unrest and division over some real and some social media-induced idiocy, decline of the family, mental health issues, lax criminal prosecution, riots called 'peaceful demonstration', etc. I met a 24-year-old the other day and told them I was in Saudi Arabia and they asked me, "What's that? I never heard of that." I am raising a second set of children. My older children did great, even through some of this idiocy. I am very vigilent with my younger children. I have had a gun since I was eleven years old, and I grew up in Brooklyn, NY. I learned to shoot and handle firearms with respect and safety and shot competitively against the likes of West Point and other military schools and organizations. If you want strict gun control, highest camera surveillance, and police stop and search without suspicion, move to China or England (in the top 10 after China). I'll keep my right to bear arms. I don't keep a gun ready for home protection. I could get it ready in a relatively short time in case of societal upheaval or disorder, if needed, to protect my family. Better to have it than to not have it in those circumstances. 54% of all gun violence deaths are suicides. Another portion are police shooting criminals for self-defense or citizens protecting themselves against criminals. And most younger homicides occur in the 17 to 19-year-old age group due to gang violence. Mass shootings are horrific by their very nature, but not the norm. Stabbing deaths and injuries are more common in Europe than in the Americas[1]. And this is rising. China has no right to have firearms, but they do not share stabbings data. It is estimated to be high based on some news and data released, but cannot be verified.
> Well, California leads the pack on mass school shootings with the toughest gun laws around
If it's not a per-capita statistic, then it's basically just a population map as CA is the most populous state by far. A quick google search shows the top 3 states are CA, TX and FL - ie, the 3 most populous states in the US.
As an ex-Californian, I observed the state transition from high trust, high social cohesion to low trust low social cohesion. Myriad factors involved, over a long time frame.
I’m about as liberal and “woke” as can be, and I agree. If we somehow managed to remove most guns from the US, we would still kill ourselves and each other with bombs, knives, poison, and our enormous vehicles. Driving into crowds seems to be getting more popular, for instance.
Sure Americans would still kill each other without guns, but would they do so to the same degree? Even if the exact same intent exists, if things are harder to do, they won't get done as much. After all, many people have cars in Japan, England, and any other country with strict gun controls, and they don't see the same levels of violence.
If ice cream is 100 paces away from you, you're less likely to eat it than if it's right in front of you. It's basic psychology that the greater the friction to satisfy our impulses, the less likely we are driven by them. It's maddeningly obvious. Similarly if everyone else was eating ice cream. We're social creatures, we emulate what we see others do.
This is the frustrating thing about this topic: it's a discussion about harm reduction, but people don't treat it that way and just throw up their hands and say 'oh it'd be the same without' when the data and logic don't support that.
In decision making parlance, it's a classic perfect is the enemy of the good response. In HN parlance, this is a question of floats not ints. In gamer parlance, this is a question of DPS and AOE, and how much nerfing guns lowers it. I don't know how many more ways we can say it to get through to folks.
But the point is it wouldn't be as easy for an untrained person to kill as many people at once as it is now, and cops wouldn't be as terrified to go up against the killer as they are now when they know an AR is in play.
Mass shootings did not only start happening a few decades ago. The Texas University shooting occurred in '66. That seems to line up with a timeline of surplus cheap, military grade firearms trickling into society.
when my my mom went to the same high school I did, 30 years earlier (70s), kids would leave hunting rifles and shotguns in racks in their unlocked pickup trucks in the school parking lot and nobody gave a shit or felt threatened at all whatsoever. nobody stole these guns and used them to commit crimes, at the school or elsewhere.
> Easy access to guns and lack of mental health care has been a thing in the US for over a century, but curiously mass shootings only started happening a few decades ago, so maybe something else is the cause? Interestingly mass shootings started happening around the time that certain psychiatric medications came into widespread usage, medications for which homicidal ideation is a know but very rare side effect. It makes sense that even if a side effect is super rare, when millions of people start taking the drug you'd expect the rare effect to happen on a regular basis.
Except that these drugs are likely used in lots of places in the world, and that large school shootings often is a uniquely American concept.
Not to the same degree. The United States is a major outlier on this. Psychiatric medication, in general, are prescribed at much higher rates than in most other wealthy countries. And not by like 50% more, but like two times or even ten times more, depending on the drug class. In particular, putting children on antidepressants, benzodiazepines, antipsychotics, or stimulants is much less common in most places.
Similarly, among the general population, Americans use some 3x as much benzodiazepines per capita as Canadians. And the Canadians are drug crazed compared to the Australians, who use about half what the Canadians do.
I'm referencing times that I wasn't a part of, but my impression was that mass shootings weren't so popularized until Columbine. Previously, mass shootings were simply not something that crossed people's minds as something they could do. I suspect that now it's "trendy" for mentally deranged people to shoot up a building, but it will eventually pass, just like how there used to be a lot of serial killers in the 80s.
Vegas shooting was done by a(presumably fired) contractor who ran a CIA funded safe house on American soil. They used special munitions only government agencies can buy.
Before the shooting it was accounted (and reported in papers) a homeless woman was shouting (paraphrased) “they’re going to shoot you, you’re all going to die!” The man who did the shooting was a white terrorist and these run government contracted “safe houses” all over America.
The armor piercing rounds. Haig said he sold them personally, though Arizona is the home of America’s most elite thought control programs (also a nest of white terror, gestating in the cul de sac of sheriff Joe’s prisons.)
the populous wants to hold hands and sings together these days. Even cp and lgbt goes to country and western concerts.
White hate has an erotic desire for the mayhem. These don’t mind collateral damage. Particularly where this true motive will not be suspected.
If you’ve ever wondered how does this whole terror thing work if everyone thinks the assailants are such degenerates?
The devastation is for you. The “purpose” is for someone else. Someone disgruntled, someone proving anyone can be gotten to at any time, someone proving to their like minded that they will go as far as it takes (where others will not go “far enough”), someone sending a coercive message (think the govs will tell you they’re being extorted?)
Terror is a ploy, not a reasonable dialogue. They’re not trying to tell “you” anything, other than the futility that “nothing you can do about it”. That is how submission works.
And I am describing Power here, those of the voices in our heads. Not some actions of a lone gunman.
The woman and the munitions (and the white guy) were all described in various news sources.
The “civilian” run CIA contracted safe houses you may take with grains of salt, yet this is how things have been done for a long while. The CIA actually lost some of their best operatives, assassinated on US soil by this thought control power coup.
Also their navy seals, marine super soldiers, and countless others (who will go on uncounted.)
Whitemanistan America has been the most dangerous place in the world for lawful military assets over the last 6 years.
> mass shootings only started happening a few decades ago
There are instances of people running amok with firearms in the early 20th and 19th centuries:
> On August 13, 1903 [in Winfield, Kansas], 30-year-old Gilbert Twigg, armed with a 12-gauge double-barrelled shotgun, opened fire at a concert, killing six people and wounding at least 25, before killing himself. Three others died in hospitals afterward.
If we allow for clubs and knives alongside firearms, I'm fairly sure the phenomenon has happened since the beginning of time.
It was certainly rarer in the past. High-powered firearms were less common. And I think the very idea was simply less common. I suspect it's a mimetic virus, basically, a type of social contagion. They need to be an angry sociopath to begin with. And then they need the idea planted in their head. And it needs to be re-enforced repeatedly, a chain of thought that becomes inhabited in their minds, until it becomes realized.
The pattern of media coverage, outrage, and social modification in response (metal detectors in schools, etc.) is doing that re-enforcement. A shooter's face will be in the media, they will be the most hated person in their immediate community for the rest of living memory, and they will be the most hated figure nationally for about 15 minutes. The victim community might even be so terrified as to modify the law and policies at schools because of it. If there's any emotion that could sum up the motivation for the average spree killing, it's a generalized revenge on society. Those reactions are rewarding to someone who is seeking revenge; they made their impact.
You mean to say they started a few decades ago, around the time actual high quality guns began hitting mass adoption in the US? Sure, we've always had guns, but it wasn't until after WW2 that actually decent quality guns began filtering down to the masses. Within a couple decades most gun owners had significantly higher quality arms than would have been available just a couple decades before.
WW2 ended 77 years ago. Surplus guns like the M1 carbine (“assault rifle” equivalent) were available mail order, no background check, for $20.
A lot of time and other things changed in culture before mass shootings and crime took off. Television for one, deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, drug culture, immigration reform, Vietnam war. If you believe that latent school shooting desire was always present, and just lacked a tool, you’d probably see it manifest in some way.
Mental health care, well I’d use a different word than “care”, but the institution system took a lot of crazies off the street. It had a lot of other issues too but it may be time to revisit it instead of just passing out pills to everyone.
As for why we see more mass shootings today I think you need to consider that until the late 90s a shooter wouldn’t get publicity outside of their locale. So copycat shootings didn’t occur. On top of that the insane amount of psychoactive pills we prescribe. And no way to get people off the street early via institutions.
Lastly a general decay in our society, family structures, and communities.
There are lots of countries with easy access to guns and virtually no public access to healthcare. The US is just the only rich country that meets that description. But the US is the only country, rich or not, that regularly experiences school mass shootings. So there must be some other factors at play (no I don’t think it’s MKULTRA).
> the US is the only country, rich or not, that regularly experiences school mass shootings. So there must be some other factors at play
A few other sociological factors to consider given that the phenomenon of school shootings in the US has established itself in the past 50 years.[1]
The US population has doubled since 1950[2]; this means an increase in the (unaddressed) need for adequate health care and especially mental health care.
Domestic US gun business has grown its profits in this period of population growth. And, of course, the US is one of the few countries with a constitutional guarantee to protect its gun business, which results in political gamesmanship in a time of profits, instead of real social policy.
Did you really just write "It's plausible that some three letter agency is operating programs to compel citizens to commit mass killings, but let's talking about My Thing because it's more important"?
The problem with the typical CT isn't that they call out bad things. The problem is that they tend to use the rumours of bad stuff and build complex narratives around it that ends up much further than the original events would ever warrant.
It starts off with something like "CIA was behind the coup in country X". Which might have been true, but lacking concrete evidence it opens the door for other things without concrete evidence. Next claim will be something like media is intentionally not reporting about this. Then this is explained by "globalists" controlling the media and working with the CIA. Then it's "the Jews" are actually the ones working with the globalists here. Or it's the globalists trying to push vaccines even though they are apparently unsafe. Why, because they make mind control easier? Or maybe it's a way to reduce population.
This kind path into insanity is sadly not that rare. And while there's certainly people at the top of the funnel that has some reasonable skepticism while reporting somewhat unsubstantiated facts. There are also plenty who will start off relatively reasonable, but then take their followers through a journey down into conspiracy land.
A notable harm this had was indeed the covid vaccines. Some influencers in the health space, used to light weight CT content like, "the sugar industry is behind todays health recommendations" and "big pharma tries to push dangerous blood pressure medicine even though it doesn't help". So when vaccines came, they were primed towards looking for stuff like that and decided that vaccines were bad and presented this idea using biased statistics and CT ideas.
A lot of people are dead or were unnecessary Covid complications due to this movement. And arguably, the CT culture was a big contributor to this.
It's important to call out the actual bad stuff that's being done in various contexts, wether it's in the name of national security, medicine or even just industry causing pollution. It's also natural that people build up a sense of distrust and skepticism against unsubstantiated claims in this area given the potentially severe consequences downstream.
Wonderful summary, if smarter part of cranks realized this then we as society could have a serious conversation.
As things stand thought, there is no point, who has the time to defute lies within half truths within other lies, based maybe on some truth. While other side thinks you are a manipulated idiot anyway.
How many hours over how many years have you spent in which conspiracy communities to establish how the "typical" conspiracy theorist thinks?
And, how many hours have you devoted to performing a similar analysis of Normies? Did you know, they also have some "interesting" thinking styles, though perhaps these attract less attention because they're normal.
I would argue that there is a significant difference between Ted Kaczynski and the numerous conspiracy theorists out there. A quick read through his works, most notably his latest piece, "Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How," will quickly reveal the careful, rational approach he applies to his arguments.
Conspiracy theorists often fail to comprehend that secret agencies can naturally emerge in modern societies. A society without such agencies would be at the mercy of those societies that do have them.
What if, for instance, China successfully develops a mind control program and your country does not?
Asserting that the CIA is "bad", without considering larger societal trends and developments, is overly simplistic.
As long as it is the mainstream media doing the talking, not independents, there was never any issue. They can put the final spin on things in ways which benefit the government/finance anyway. (which independents might not) Some stuff will also never reach the mainstream media, take something like the Comet Pizzeria for example.
I really haven't followed it, but from what I've seen of it peripherally it seems like hard coping for people who want to believe that Trump is better than he actually is, and has more control than he actually has.
Maybe? That's definitely not the case here. He is talking about controlling context rather than content.
A good example is the Pulse club shooter. His motives had nothing to do with LGBT people and everything to do with the US bombing the middle east. This information if publicly available, he makes it really clear in the 911 calls, but by controlling the context of the situation, the public perception is manipulated.
Yikes; I know there have been a couple of high profile psychological experiments that have gone wrong, e.g. Stanford prison experiment etc, but even with that context these CIA based studies on students seem like huge ethical red flags; even from a 1970s perspective. But I would like to point out that the eyeroll vilification of LSD just for fun in this article is not ideal; many drugs can induce an individual to be more suggestible and many drugs can hurt individuals that are already prone to schizophrenia and other psychotic breakdowns
That's the safe view, that the studies caused mental pathologies in some subjects to bubble up to the surface, leading to their commission of notable violent crimes or susceptibility to political causes that turned violent.
I personally don't believe, since I haven't seen evidence of it, that the CIA ran those studies to create sleeper agents that they could command to do things for nefarious purposes. However, it's possible that's what it turned into once the principal experimenters realized they had a group of people they'd made highly suggestible. Parts of the CIA, at least up through the Reagan era, were extremely shady.
> I personally don't believe, since I haven't seen evidence of it, that the CIA ran those studies to create sleeper agents that they could command to do things for nefarious purposes.
Well then you haven't looked.
"The primary goal of Project Artichoke was to determine whether a person could be involuntarily made to perform an act of attempted assassination. ... Project Artichoke was succeeded by Project MKUltra, which began in 1953. ... the scope of the project was outlined in a memo dated January 1952 that asked, "Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?"" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Artichoke
The primary source documents for these programs are declassified and available on the CIA's official website.
Then what? They grew a conscience when Bush Sr became president? What was their "come to Jesus" moment that led to reform in how they conduct themselves?
Improved record keeping and legal discoverability is my guess. So shady things moved to places where they could control it better. Like foreigners detained without due process.
They wouldn't want to be avoiding only prosecution, but also whatever embarrassing details might come out. Iran-Contra, for example, was personally embarrassing for very high-level people. Lots of documents mentioning, quoting, signed by, etc, high level folks[1]. Abu Ghraib, on the other hand, was mostly pawned off on the lowest level people, as if it weren't sanctioned by the Executive Office and the CIA. Related embarrassing documents were mostly signed by lawyers without direct quotes from high-level leaders. Partially because the top-down instructions took a form that was much less discoverable/accountable.
From what I can tell, the reactions to Iran-Contra and the end of the Cold War put an end to some of the more, umm, creative approaches within the CIA.
I think it's good to be skeptical, as there is indeed a lot of misinformation and speculation that has been more or less codified as fact regarding the CIA and other departments during these eras. I also don't think necessarily that they had the goal of making sleeper agents with the study.
However, I don't doubt that the CIA was interested in such an idea; the CIA was grossly overpowered, over confident, and overly ambitious during its formative decades. Reading about their own internal review of Bay of Pigs, it's pretty clear the CIA imagined themselves to have far more control over populations and manipulations than they really did.
So I think your sentence here:
>However, it's possible that's what it turned into once the principal experimenters realized they had a group of people they'd made highly suggestible.
Probably does have some ring of truth to it. I think it's supported by the idea that more or less this is what is done with the US military but with a much more controlled way now during the initial trainings. The numbers for actual landed shots in law enforcement and wars are pretty telling, since most persons even in direct line of danger still can't seem to land a shot on another human being intentionally. Having the ability to get past this blocker for killing probably was quite attractive to governments in general, and I carry an unsubstantiated belief that probably Ted Kaczynski becoming the Unabomber was an undesired effect, but a carefully studied one.
But to be clear, this thought lives in the same part of my mind as fantasies in the literal sense of the definition. (i.e., not desirable like we ascribe to the word commonly, just a thought in the realm of pure imagination)
> I also don't think necessarily that they had the goal of making sleeper agents with the study.
Respectfully, what are you talking about? MKULTRA was the continuation of Project Artichoke, whose explicit goal was to create sleeper agents. And the sleeper agent was one admitted continued focus through decades of these programs.
People really have to read more about the deep history of this stuff before they comment with the intention of adding context.
> I personally don't believe, since I haven't seen evidence of it, that the CIA ran those studies to create sleeper agents that they could command to do things for nefarious purposes
You don't have to decide whether or not to believe. It's public information and not up for debate.
MK Ultra ended by 1973. Most of the mass shootings recently were done by people who were born after 1973. So either the shootings are caused by something else wrong in American society (for which there are lots of candidates), or the CIA quit MK-Ultra-the-program, but continued MK-Ultra-the-type-of-experiment.
This becomes a kind of Rorschach Test - people see different things, and what they see tells you more about them than it does about the available data.
Agreed. Drugs can mess you up. This is not new, but this is also a reason to approach them with reasonable care; not completely unlike alcohol or other vices. Dosage could change your perspective in unexpected ways and, as you said, individual psychological profile may make you more vulnerable to its effects. It is a hard subject.
LSD was introduced by the CIA into American culture. This is public information, not conjecture.
CIA programs like MKULTRA are either malevolent or LSD is fine. It can't be both. Choose one if you wish to be truthful with yourself.
MKULTRA that started in prior interrogation and Manchurian Candidate programs like Project Artichoke, and continued through efforts like the Phoenix Program in Southeast Asia and Project Condor.
Your guess is as good as mine what has transpired since.
I really recommend everyone listen to the 4 part series on MK Ultra from Behind The Bastards[1]. Its absolutely insane that the government did this and BTB really delves deep on how it all came about.
I tried to listen BTB a couple of times, and while the topic and overall worldview they try to project is very interesting to me, the hosts of the podcast and the style of it makes it really hard and unpleasant to listen, and when after finishing a 4-hour long series on some person I ask myself: "So, what have I learned?" I often find that I really don't have anything to say in response. Except for 5-minute worth of basic biography facts from wikipedia (which I usually have to check anyways, to get a clearer picture) the rest mostly is hosts exchanging remarks like "geez, man, get a life! haha… what an asshole!" while the hosts being in fact the most disgusting assholes I ever heard, distastefully trying to make fun of most mundane, sensible life facts and decisions.
I really wish there was something like BTB, but from… you know, better people.
You put into words what I could not articulate. Having tried to get into it several times as well, I concluded they were going for a fast-paced conversation well-suited for a bar, not for substance.
What's interesting is that I've had the opposite experience! A lot of Behind The Bastards episodes are well cited and well researched. Robert often reads multiple books on a topic before presenting something, and often quotes researchers/historians whole paragraphs at a time. It's something that I've learned a lot from.
The joking banter and tone helps it go down for me. I wouldn't be able to listen to these things otherwise. It's depressing to know the some totality of what we've done to each other.
Age of Napoleon isn't the same topic at all, but it's exactly the opposite tone. I've been glued to it lately. If you don't already know about Napoleon, this will probably scratch an itch for you.
Thx for the analysis. This 'dudebro friends casual talk'-style makes a lot of podcasts hard to listen to – even when the topics are interesting.
I get it. A well moderated podcast is hard work. Throwing random Wikipedia facts at each other is easy to do and long term listeners love all the in-jokes and the atmosphere of 'friends having fun'.
Thankfully there are lots of well researched podcasts with a more 'professional' style.
Why should anyone assume the CIA or other agencies aren’t doing similar things now?
They do these terrible things, completely get away with it without any repercussions or even remorse, and we assume that they aren’t doing similarly bad things anymore.
If you observe people arguing about conspiracy theories, you may notice a pattern whereby it isn't only the conspiracy theorists that have the same rehashed talking points and thinking styles among them in the argument.
Why is assuming that they are doing similar things now any better than assuming that they are not?
Most people run with an open mind to the possibility, but wait for evidence before drawing a conclusion. And since it’s not possible to prove this kind of negative, I suspect there are very few people indeed who even bother to make negative assumptions in this space.
Because they are guilty of doing these things for decades is the precise and only extremely solid reason that anyone needs to assume. Anything less is the behavior of the type of person who frequently gets victimized by sociopaths, and likes it for some reason. The pattern means that it isn't an assumption at all.
If you need an ever so slightly deeper history of it, here's a brief history of the Spartan equivalent engaging in parallel behavior:
The CIA quite possibly/probably still do terrible things, but they probably don't do quite so many batshit insane things any more, just because somebody probably checks the expense reports these days.
Geeze, taking a heavy karma hit for this one, let me explain that the CIA are a bunch of men who are employees.
Thought control must be developed over years, or decades. One cannot be “hired” into this role and expect to be anything more than an instrument of another for at least ten years.
The CIA unwittingly destroyed the lives of those among themselves with substantial experience. Now, minds hobbled, themselves thought controlled, they are men plied by this power with little means themselves for “getting out of their own heads.” For our minds are traps that most humans never escape.
The government is not thought control. The government is thought controlled.
Nice catch, I say “men” when saying something hostile and “humans”, “people”, and “her” as a soft form.
Thought control is a white American men conspiracy. These have waged a genocidal secret war on humanity, wiping out entire generations of “other kinds of people” who are aware of and could even perceive their presence.
So who's in charge of thought control. You say thought control is a "white American men conspiracy" but you don't say who's in charge. You must know, right? Or know how to spot them, perhaps?
I cringe for the negative karma this one is going to give me …
A simple truth may not be acceptable here (how graphically can I describe rape murder and extortion before you will refuse to hear more?)
So a soft core answer that illustrates this point, with a mind fcuk for you to process.
At the very top of the food chain, those who “nothing can be done about”, are condemned men. Hardened by a life of corruption and treachery in power. These may well be in prisons (even secret prisons), or holed up in personal “safe houses”, protected from the populous. These like to insulate themselves with “hostages” which doesn’t require keeping someone tied up. Ordinary people can be hostages in their own life.
When prisons and the blackest of black ops secret military state has a bastard child, these are their prodigy.
Their captains, lieutenants, and foot soldiers are indistinguishable from ordinary persons. Anyone who wants to keep their secrets, anyone who would be paid by power, anyone who would do “anything” to have access to this godlike power over you.
There were many lines of power, and this secret war has spent the last decade purging honest “lawful” types and replacing them with those corruptible treacherous.
And pit slaves.
Ever wonder what the deal is with the “children under the stairs”, or “gimp” in pulp fiction? Or from time to time news finds out someone was kept tied up in a basement… for years?
Remember in Florida, the two crazy guys where one bit off the face of the other? Bath salts? Escaped pit slaves.
Pit slaves.
As power does not run on silicon, it runs on human brain tissue, our gelatinous lumps may be conditioned to maintain networks and perform “special effects” even outside the control / awareness of the subject.
Keeping a pit slave is a massive asset and sign of power among controls.
In charge?
Power heads don’t like other power heads telling them what to do. They may work together for some ends, and they will communicate like intimate chums who want to play together, yet they hate each other and can only count on each other in so far as they will “cover” or may be coerced by one and other.
And some have networks in the tens of thousands. They can sweep through your mind and that of everyone associated with you in days. Turning yours inside out, and into play things.
And these love their games.
Most of you (yes, you) know them by their games. When not outright extorting or “sacrificing” someone, they’re your buddy mini-me who wants you to play games.
I'm honestly not convinced that this was part of MK-ULTRA, there's no hard evidence and what I think people don't really appreciate is that Psychologists (especially around this time) were performing "studies" where they basically just tortured people. For example, the Stanford Prison "Experiment"
"Anyone who is a conspiracy theorist has clearly never been a project manager. It's impossible to get a dozen people to do the right thing, much less keep it a secret."
If the CIAs most secret illicit experiment came to light, what makes you think they are meaningfully hiding more?
IIRC it came to light when documents that were supposed to be shredded were declassified by mistake. The government has shown that it's actually really good at keeping secrets, or at least keeping things quiet. Elsewhere in this thread there's the discussion of a possible FBI program to get people to commit mass shootings that's widely considered to be a crazy conspiracy theory despite there being individual documented examples ie https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/29/politics/aby-rayyan-fbi-terro...
My whole thing with MK-ULTRA and Ted is that researchers were happy to do stuff as damaging and way less (potentially) useful than his experiment.
It came to light because some financial records were sent to the CIA's Retired Records Center for some reason and escaped destruction. See page 5 of [1].
Let's say I work on a project where we keep Elvis alive in a super secret bunker in antarctica. What can I do? Call the cnn and tell them? Make a post on 4chan? Make such a claim here? Look, I'm leaking top secret info, and nothing will happen. Until CIA officially admits keeping Elvis there, noone will believe me... (except a few conspiracy theorists, branded as nutjobs by the general public).
I know some other people that have been radicalized and they too actually claim that they were mind control test subjects and that the CIA is conducting such experiments. They also are 911 truthers and see bogeymen behind every bush. There isn't a conspiracy theory that they aren't promoters of and believer in. Before jumping to conclusions here it would be prudent to assume that the link here is tenuous at best given the evidence available. Besides the title the article then goes out of its way to downplay the effect this may have had, noteworthy passages:
> questions remain over whether — or to what extent — he was affected by the experiment
> There has not been evidence to suggest LSD or similar substances were used at Harvard on Kaczynski.
> the “effect of Murray’s dubious, unethical experiment on Kaczynski is unknown.”
At best this is informed speculation, at worst the strong suggestion that Kaczynski was 'made by the CIA' has no support.
My own reading of this is that there are individuals who are prone to flipping out, even though they may well be very intelligent. In fact, intelligence may well be a net negative: you're going to see a lot of stuff in society that is extremely frustrating and you probably can't do a thing about it. Blessed are those that do not know.
Putting a lot of pressure on such an individual is definitely not going to help, but to make a 1:1 isn't helping either: chances are that your average individual exposed to these techniques isn't going to turn into the Unabomber, and that Kaczynski would have gone down that route anyway sooner or later. Just like my friends, who definitely were not part of a CIA mind control program. Fortunately they are not yet radicalized to take action beyond 'prepping' and moving away from society into a little hut in the bush but that may only be a matter of time. As long as the internet is feeding their beliefs I'm not very hopeful they will get better.
> even though they may well be very intelligent. In fact, intelligence may well be a net negative: you're going to see a lot of stuff in society that is extremely frustrating
Further than frustration: the rational individual will be overburdened in the attempt of digesting the unbelievable load of "irrational" that this world presents - personalities leaning on rationality will "desperately" try and make the instances of the irrational fit into some organic framework which would make them manageable. The intelligent will be under a staggering amount of internal fatigue, if somehow incapable of "leaving puzzling absurdities aside".
(Edited to better explain what is meant with "digestion".)
>My own reading of this is that there are individuals who are prone to flipping out, even though they may well be very intelligent.
The converse is also true, the vast majority of people will not react even when heinous atrocities are imposed on them, in a gradual manner. Most 'leaders' i.e politicians and high up executives in large corporation know this and use this fact to their benefit.
Given that it is mostly unsubstantiated bullshit it is not surprising that you have not heard of it before. The claims made are tenuous at best. While an undergrad Kaczynski participated in a psych experiment run by someone who worked for the OSS in WWII, that is literally the extent of the known truth here. It seemed to have not impacted his undergrad years, his graduate studies, his postgrad work, or getting one of the youngest professorships at Berkeley. The same people who claim Kaczynski's transition to the Unabomber was caused by the, otherwise hidden, trauma of this participation in an undergrad psych experiment will also gush effusively about Ted's manifesto and how profound it is; you are likely seeing people taking a person and set of events and pouring into it their own hopes/fears/expectations rather than anything of greater significance.
Either way, check the evidence before believing the claims remains useful advice.
It certainly is convenient most of the documents were destroyed at CIA director's orders and those surviving were due to a categorization error, and all involved had very little to recall about it also. Involvement, whether confirmed or not, should not be a justification—by any means—but the extent of psychological damage caused to the subjects involved I don't think has been properly evaluated over time. To be fair, this wasn't the first nor the last human experimentation project the US committed on their own ground or in other countries, so it might not have been considered as important as other, more "physical" programs. It still remains abhorrent.
[Gottlieb, project head] came to me and said that he was retiring and that I was retiring and he thought it would be a good idea if these files were destroyed. And I also believe part of the reason for our thinking this was advisable was there had been relationships with outsiders in government agencies and other organizations and that these would be sensitive in this kind of a thing but that since the program was over and finished and done with, we thought we would just get rid of the files as well, so that anybody who assisted us in the past would not be subject to follow-up or questions, embarrassment, if you will.
(former CIA director Richard Helms testimony, 9/11/75)
Kaczynski didn't feel that the sessions were abusive in any way. Whether he is telling the truth can be debated, but he himself doesn't claim he went through anything more than simple written tests. There's a quote on this topic in this article: https://www.deadlinedetroit.com/articles/19050/retired_fbi_a...
I wouldn't call it "unsubtantiated bullshit" or "tenuous at best" claims. They put Kaczynski in the ballpark of being a participant of the MK Ultra program. Do you think they have shared and took away all redacted bits of information?
"Conspiracy Theory" with Mel Gibson and Julia Robers looks less like a comedy the older I get, and the more I find out. Don't be the government puppet in the techno spy thriller who stares wide-eyed in horror with disbelief while tied to a chair as the CIA goons put the needle in your arm ;)
I think it is possible to say a guy that got jacked up on drugs and experimented on, and was traumatized, would later act out violently, without also treating him as some eco-messiah.
The Occom's razer is, the experimenting just pushed someone borderline over the edge. Not that he was a sleeper agent.
I guess you are saying that because he seemed to have several 'normal' years, that is proof that the experiments did nothing. But that seems to go against how others with trauma live normally for years before it manifests. It seems to be a common curve through life.
Because Ted went so extreme and got famous for it, we forget that it probably wouldn't have taken much to go another direction. Like "hey Ted you seem to be acting out lately, here, have some help", and then he gets help, goes back to a normal but troubled life, he has thoughts of the past trauma, has some violent thoughts, but learns to deal with it.
I have not seen the link between talking about the Mk Ultra connection and endorsing the manifesto at all. In this very Washington Post article there is no such connection.
If the program at Harvard was innocent, why does Harvard refuse to comment (again, according to the WP)?
That we have to turn 180 degree south, meaning in this context abolish industrialisation, let some bilions starve and go back working the land with stone tools, or hunting and gathering?
Speaking for myself, I don't share the beliefs of the author about which he wrote elsewhere, and reading that "Ship" story separated from these beliefs, and assuming a different context, I see the story "functioning" better than his other published writings.
There doesn't have to be all black and white solutions. If he had some good points on industrialization, that doesn't mean people are saying we should go back and live in caves. Maybe recycle some, or get an EV, or something. You can make small differences to improve without abolishing all industry.
Just as you say the only response is 180 degrees and abolish industry. Then what is your current 0 degrees heading, dumping waste right in the rivers, abolish the EPA to let industry profit more? Cut all safeguards on industry?
Ted Kaczynski would have been appalled that someone who thought we should “recycle some, or get an EV, or something” felt inspired by his writing. He really did think humanity should revert to primitive agriculturalism, and was an extremist who was not willing to compromise on this point.
Also, environmentalism is at most a distant secondary theme in the manifesto. The primary reasons he gives for being anti-industrialization have nothing to do with preserving the environment.
Recycling is still polluting a lot (from transports, energy, resources, emissions) and it's not handling that much material, and only a couple cycles between different plastics classes. EV also is also polluting on the same order of magnitude than fossil fuel cars. You can avoid plastic wrappings, and use more you legs (walk, bike) without going full primitive. That's really the problem, how did industry managed to make people think recycling and EV is ecology? The power of ads and communication, because it's not
"That's really the problem, how did industry managed to make people think recycling and EV is ecology? "
Because it can be ecology, if done right.
Garbage has to be moved anyway. So if you move all the cans (alluminium) to one place and resmelt it, than this is definitely less ressource intense, than mining new alluminium and shipping it.
It has to be reduced drastically first (buying local, avoiding plastic packaging, composting food wastes separately (what a shame to send that to an incinerator)
Aluminium cans (their paints however is toxic), or glass bottles is the best case, but most of the time it's plastic bottles (for water, which is nonsensical, people should use tap water, or soft drinks, or juices, both unhealthy products)
"composting food wastes separately (what a shame to send that to an incinerator)"
We in germany don't.
Otherwise sure. Reuse, reduce, recycle.
And I think it is ok, if in the process of transitioning from not caring and throwing all in the bin - towards sustainability, that there will be also lots of stupid things done in the name of ecology. (I have seen so much waste and inefficency, by people who think they do good) But it is all experimenting, on what works and what doesn't. Socially and economically. I am actually optimistic, that we get towards a sustainable society eventually, but I don't think, I will live that long.
When you revert to pure agriculturalism, where does that happen exactly, it is in the environment. Fighting industry, is a return to nature, which happens to be, the environment. To imply that Kaczynski wasn't concerned with the environment is pretty large stretch, especially considering all the people that consider him an eco-fascist fighting for the environment.
To all the other replies about "this or that solution" is not really helping the environment. So what. Do something. Calling out how some things have failed as a seeming argument to give up and just pollute is a failure mind set. "Oh well, recycling didn't work as well as we thought, guess I'll just dump my hamburger wrapper in the ditch", is BS. Do people really not remember how polluted the highways used to be with trash, or rivers catching on fire from chemical dumping. We have made progress, and we should try to make more progress. Not be like "well EV's still create a lot of waste, guess I'll just go de-tune my Mustang and do some dragging this weekend". I can't believe how many people split hairs on some technology-X and use it as excuse to do nothing.
> When you revert to pure agriculturalism, where does that happen exactly, it is in the environment.
Everything happens “in the environment”, of course.
What I meant was that Ted Kaczynski’s main motivation for wanting to return to primitive agriculturalism was not a concern about industrialization damaging the environment. So he would not have cared about EVs or recycling as they are still happening in a technological society.
Your are correct. Guess it is more subtle reading. He was against industry, so many people would call him an environmentalist. But EV's are pretty bad example on my part, because of course they would require industry.
It's not binary, there are many values between 0 and 1, but the current state of the society is too nonsensical and not durable, so every level need to act, to respect the environment, you can't do that from inside a 2 tonnes car or flying to another country
> They’re keeping you occupied with your trivial grievances... so that you won’t think about what is really wrong with this ship ... In comparison to our real problem... your grievances are petty
The depicted perspective - determined insistence in "normal planning" in situations which are far from the conditions for "normal administration" - is one of the marks of these times in some areas... An Era of Myopia, of early stopping. Regardless of the nature of "going North or South" beyond the metaphor.
"Ship of Fools" should be considered an obligatory reading. (The paradox of recommending a text reiterating that "people are refractory on getting the point" is quite old and already has its answers.)
I had to find it online. The point of the story appears to justify murder as a legitimate means to enact change. Hard disagree here.
I think a movement that turns to murder as a means of gaining power will continue using murder even should it achieve its goals.
Someone in the past pointed out to me that the American Revolution is an exception to that. I don't disagree but so many other examples in history would seem to support my view.
Yeah it’s sort of the foundation of NRx/Dark Enlightenment in that the Enlightenment and it’s progressivism (the dominant force in Western government the last few hundred years) has resulted in the most violent and destructive governments the world has ever seen. Even when not violent it’s incredibly coercive through its system of creating dependent states and of course justifying it because a
democracy happened.
Going back to the American revolution it was in essence a battle between the Tories and the Whigs with the rebels and a great deal of the British leadership being Whigs and making “the progress” of Americas founding inevitable.
Yeah, it's sort of the foundation of NRx/Dark Enlightenment to take historical events broadly agreed in all credible quarters to have taken place, and then spin the goddamnedest nonsense anyone ever heard out of them. Not that you'd know it by Moldbug or his imitators, but is possible to criticize American hegemony without playacting Jane Fonda at the Reichskanzlei.
There are entire fields dedicated to this question. Do violent revolutions ever work? But then, have any peaceful ones worked? History is full of violent revolutions that continued to be violent as you say, but even less peaceful revolutions that worked.
Of course, you can also argue that all government is a form of violence, the police are the only ones allowed by society to enact violence to protect property. If the state actions diverge from the population ideals enough, then to some extent the population is already at war with the state.
French revolution 1789 maybe too? (Even if currency democracies start to be too disconnected to people again, I'd prefer direct democracy like in Switzerland)
Arab spring protests too 2011
There are many examples actually, and there will be more and more with the current rate of environmental destruction. I can already forecast people blocking airports in the future if the governments don't anticipate and regulate drastically civil aviation
Huh? The Arab Spring movement was mostly coopted by Jihadists. The French Revolution was followed by decades of Terror which led to more dictatorship and death, and even after that the death and dictatorship merely moved over to the colonies.
French revolution happened for a reason, not saying it's necessarily better after, but it's an example where the pressure on people was too high, and they used violence to change things
----------
The professor elevated his nose and said sternly, “I don’t believe in violence. It’s immoral.”
“It’s unethical ever to use violence,” said the bosun.
“I’m terrified of violence,” said the lady passenger.
--------------
They are literally talking about people like you in the story lmao. The ship is further going north and they know they are gonna drown if they don't have a violent revolution against the captain and throw him out of the ship(killing him) so that they can turn the ship around.
> "The point of the story appears to justify murder as a legitimate means to enact change."
Well what the hell do you do in this scenario(in the story) ?? Have a non-violence protest and risk losing lives ?? Or throw the captain off the ship and steer it south ?? Violence/Murder is 1000% justified and is the answer in this story's scenario.
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
- John F. Kennedy
The people fantasizing about violence are usually the first to run when the war breaks out. If someone uses violence to further their goals, they are a terrorist and case closed.
The problem is that every one has different views of what the ship going north means. If you permit violence, then many groups will use it…don’t be surprised when some religious extremists use it because “they’re killing babies!”
That some goals are 'easier' accomplished by violence, is nothing you need to point for religious (and other) extremists.
They are well aware of that tool in their box.
It's also something politicians are well aware of (or at least have been reminded about recently).
We don't have to fantasize about violence. But even in our relatively safe, civil societies, we should be aware of it, and not categorically discard it as aboherent in all case.
I, on the other hand, consider the story to be too simplistic. It reads like an abstract concept hammered out by a smart person far from any actual life-threatening situation, which is what it actually is.
The captain and his mates don't necessarily need killing, even though a revolt might be desirable. Even in plenty of actual ship mutinies, the rebels didn't outright kill the overthrown officers, only imprisoned or marooned them. And that was in the context of the death penalty hanging over them if they failed.
Violent revolutions in general have the small problem of bringing other violent psychopaths to power. Kaczynski might not mind, but I do. It was a well-known problem in actual pirate crews as well, and pirates actually had some interesting rules (including a fairly modern division of powers on board) to prevent the most violent psychos from taking over their ships and introduce some measure of consensus into their internal politics.
His caricature of "weaklings abhorring violence" does not address the succession problem at all, and even if the original officer crew was bad, another officer crew self-selected of willing murderers could conceivably be worse by being both professionally incompetent and ready to torture their opponents etc.
The story was written by Ted, who due to his shitty brain by "going North" he meant NOT rejecting technology and switching to being "hunter and gatherers" (which I practice would mean hunting only other humans and living on canibalism)
So was Whitey Bulger! He went through the actual MK Ultra program when he was in prison, which sounds quite a bit rougher. (Oddly this is no longer in his Wiki page, it used to be)
> In 1956, Bulger served his first term in federal prison at Atlanta Penitentiary for armed robbery and truck hijacking. He later told mobster Kevin Weeks that while there, he was used as a human subject in the CIA-sponsored MK-ULTRA program.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_Bulger#Prison
Is there really a need? Consider the on again, off again "the reality" of the lab leak hypothesis for COVID.
Colloquial reality is what matters, and colloquial reality is what's printed in the newspaper, and then repeated on social media as factual reality, closing the loop.
Provided the public is never provided the tools needed to think their way out of this trick, you can fool them indefinitely.
Conspiratorial thinking? Consider how frequently you hear "We need more critical thinking!!!", And then consider what initiatives have been floated to solve the problem.
The United States had been interested in unconventional warfare before the CIA was established in 1947.
The Japanese Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that engaged in lethal human experimentation and biological weapons manufacturing during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II.
While Unit 731 researchers arrested by Soviet forces were tried at the December 1949 Khabarovsk war crime trials, those captured by the United States were secretly given immunity in exchange for the data gathered during their human experiments. The United States covered up the human experimentations and handed stipends to the perpetrators. The Americans co-opted the researchers' bioweapons information and experience for use in their own biological warfare program, much like what had been done with Nazi German researchers in Operation Paperclip. [1]
Whenever this subject comes up, I struggle internally a little. On the one hand, the sacrifice made to obtain this knowledge was already high in terms of human life; not taking that knowledge is saying all that pain was for nothing. On the other, taking and absorbing that knowledge almost invariably means that it is acceptable, which means it will be done again and as humans we have an incentive to make it undesirable.
This struggle is entirely reasonable. I think it comes down to how we, as world citizens, should regulate this technology, including research, dissemination, and use (if it should be used at all).
What I find abhorrent is the immunity given to those Japanese war criminals who conducted those experiments on Chinese civilians (and ultimately killed them) by the United States at the time.
Yeah, if the deal would be along: we dont execute you if you cooperate, but your crimes are too horrible to ignore, so we will give you humane decent prison time for X decades/life while you cooperate.
But if they were actually pardoned, then it means human suffering and killings were reduced to just numbers on spreadsheet by somebody very high in decision chain. Which means same people without morals get to decide on hundreds if not thousands other situations, without any morality.
Maybe the correct conclusion is that morality is very thin and disposable for those 3 letter agencies, so one should never ever trust just their words, since they mean less than fart in the wind. Also expect bad things happening by default. Nah, I am sure those on HN who posted previously about their 3-letter employer how they pick only very moral, driven and hardworking individuals and how absolutely great it all is were for sure telling truth and onpy truth.
The point of that knowledge was to further biowarfare programs. By pardoning them and then continuing their research, you use that suffering to an end even worse than nothing.
There was no useful fundamental research from Unit 731. Most of the work was on weaponizing existing pathogens as effectively as possible.
He did. I read his works/letters extensively in the past, IIRC he said he wasn’t affected/traumatized by the experiment. Yet my memory is foggy on that, I give it %85 chance that I remember correctly.
One of the thing that bothers me about such explanations is the inherent bias "post hoc, ego propter hoc" (afterwards, therefore caused by).
People who like such explanations tend to ignore myriads of counterexamples set by people who survived worse, while not becoming serial murderers. I can't even begin imagining what was it like to be in Nazi concentration camps, almost surely worse than whatever young Ted Kaczynski went through. And yet there wasn't a wave of brutal crime unleashed by the survivors once they got out. Instead, there was a lot of art, literature etc.
It is possible that Kaczynski's mind was uniquely predisposed towards terrorism and the experiments he underwent at 17 were the final nudge that slowly pushed him to start distributing bombs 20 years later. Yet he himself maintained that they didn't. AFAIK it was mostly his lawyers who tried to arguing so during his trial - not he himself.
Edit: this is obviously a controversial comment, as I saw it falling from +5 to +1 in a matter of minutes. I would recommend reading up some works by Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychologist who survived four concentration camps. He studied the crushing effects of the camps on human minds in detail; after reading his work, I am almost certain that a two-hour-weekly experiment done on a Harvard campus cannot compare.
The survivors of Holocaust had actually huge amount of serious mental health issues impacting every one around and in general, groups of traumatized people of all kinds in fact have higher violence rates.
I mean, I agree with your larger point about Kaczynski specifically. We do not use a single traumatic experience as excuse/explanation for mass murder after - unless we like the perpetrator for some reason.
Just that, violence has ugly consequences on its survivors and that included Holocaust. It is just that those are not all that often shown in popular media.
I don't see how events like the Holocaust and a mind control experiment are related. The first one is a universally acknowledged shared experience, i.e. no substitution of reality takes place.
The latter is literally designed to make the victims doubt their own sanity.
Being kept as a prisoner in a mass murder factory for years, IMHO, is a much stronger negative influence than undergoing whatever psychological experiment for two hours a week.
While I agree that the experiments run by Murray were nasty, the students were volunteers and spent vast majority of their personal time on their own activities, not in any kind of closed brainwashing facility where you just can't escape.
Throwing together in a broad set, labelled "«negative influence»", conditions that in a form probably did and in other forms you are claiming should have triggered a specific class of effects, and having taken such untenable assumption further reasoning quantitatively to prove points, makes your comment controversial.
We cannot just suppose that the (resulting) class of behaviours in question would be necessary consequence of "intense general «negative influence»" - proposal which you yourself deny through observation, but that was not theorized in the first place.
Maybe you're talking about PTSD, soldiers or prisoners or anyone in a war often have, but this is just one range of mental disorders among many others. Even stress, anxiety, drug dependence/addiction are also mental illnesses, food or other overconsumption. In the end the normality is not sanity nowadays in rich countries
We're living in the midst of one of the greatest mind control experiments in history. Why would we think these agencies have cleaned up their act? What do you think all the BS of the last several years have been about? The corruption of the FBI, CIA, and DOJ are visible daily. The sad thing is how well it's working.
I have heard that the LSD experiments were stopped when they realized that it did not work well for mind control. Contrary to the propaganda that LSD makes you hallucinate, it actually breaks down the hallucinations and see some things clearly. I suspect Ted saw the reality before he then opened page 20 of this magazine and knew what he needed to do. https://www.environmentandsociety.org/sites/default/files/ke...
One criticism I read of meditation, and mindfulness is that it can make you more passive and accepting of your circumstances. Kind of like people taming with age. Which is not always desirable.
Here's what Ted Kaczynski wrote in February 2018 about the experiments in a letter[1] to journalist Andrew Kaczynski (no relation):
> ... media reports about me have generally been loaded with bull manure. In particular, reports about the Murray study have been wildly, wildly exaggerated. People write to tell me how sorry for me they feel because I was "tortured" again and again by the Murray group as part of an "MK Ultra experiment allegedly carried out by the CIA. Actually, there was only one unpleasant experience in the Murray study; it lasted about half an hour and could not reasonably have been described as "traumatic." Mostly the study consisted of interviews and filling out pencil-and-paper personality tests. The CIA was not involved.
> About 15 or 20 years ago a TV journalist named Chris Vlasto (if I remember the name correctly) looked up some of the other participants in the study and found that nothing had happened that was worth reporting in the media. My brief correspondence with Vlasto should be available in the University of Michigan's Special Collections library at Ann Arbor.
You can actually hear one minute of the recording of that half hour session with Ted Kaczynski on a series "A History of Persuasion" produced by WNYC, that was on their podcasts On the Media and The Stakes. It starts about 9:50 into the episode 2[2].
> AMANDA: But I wanted to find out what actually happened that day in that room. And I managed to track down a recording of this actual interview with Kaczysnki.
> MALE VOICE: This is Monday evening, March 14th, 1960. Dyad #12 is about to begin between Mr Sh- and Mr Kaczynski. K-A-C….
> AMANDA: ... Only a handful of people have ever heard this before. This is the law student:
> INTERROGATOR: I ought to warn you before I start this, I do not have a very favorable impression of you as a result of reading your philosophy but let me just tick off a few preliminaries and then we will get to what I really didn’t like. First...
> AMANDA: And this... is Kaczynski
> TED KACZYNSKI: Yeah well all through this thing, uh, you’ve been saying well this and that, but you haven’t given me any arguments or reasons, you say that…
> INTERROGATOR: Well, Mr Kaczynski I have just formed an opinion of you and it’s not particularly favorable...
> AMANDA: You can hear, Kaczynski sounds annoyed.
> KACZYNSKI: I think the reason, one of the reasons you attack my philosophy so vigorously is because you don’t want to believe it.
> INTERROGATOR: (laughs)
> KACZYNSKI: And, in your, you uh… I think the way you laugh is an indication of that too.
> INTERROGATOR: Do you really?
> KACZYNSKI 1960: Yeah I do. But of course I’m no psychologist.
> INTERROGATOR: I’m trying to keep this -- hold on, I’m no psychologist Mr Kaczynski …
> AMANDA: To me, it sounds like a very uncomfortable college debate class.
> KAI: Right, I mean it’s hard to imagine that would break somebody.
> AMANDA: Right. I also managed to find someone who was there. Another undergrad who took part in the experiment at Harvard. Philip Bradley says yes, this was a pretty uncomfortable. But the idea it was damaging...?
> PHILIP BRADLEY: Bullshit. Or I should say, that's ridiculous.
> AMANDA: And you're sure because... you were, you were there, it sounds like....
> BRADLEY: Yeah. I mean how, how could you think that something like that would be permanently psychologically damaging to someone that would push somebody into becoming a psychopath. I mean I just... that idea is just to me so far fetched and I don't know how it's become part of popular lore.
> AMANDA: It’s clear that this theory just isn’t true. This is not what broke Ted Kaczysnki. It’s not the reason he tried to kill James McConnell. And yet it’s totally taken off. It’s been in all of these books, there’s these articles, it was in the TV show “Manhunt,” about the Unabomber.
Diagnosis of a mental illness would be an explanation, not explaining it away. You have used your brain to form the hypothesis that you are experiencing mind control by the government; but if that brain has a chemical imbalance (or some other difficulty), then all your thoughts are affected by it, including your self assessment. It's a bit like using a broken computer to diagnose itself - if the computer has a problem then you can't be sure that it's diagnosis is correct because the problem might prevent an accurate diagnosis.
How about this - you could have a chat with a doctor anyway, and maybe they can help you. If they can't, well, then you're no worse off than you were before.
While your description is clear and linear, it fails some critical practical point.
An explanation - which in this case would count as corroboration, not as causal link - requires trustworthiness instead of provisionality.
Similarly, you seem to come from Eutopia, where Professionals are easily available: people from Dartonmapia do not have that advantage, and all that seems available are «broken computer[s for] diagnos[tics]», with different degrees.
This, unfortunately, makes the hypothesis of remaining «no worse off» an "uninformed" idea.
I would rather encourage our friend to:
-- find some individual with strong background and intellectual abilities for consultancy (exchange, etc.), and
-- be prepared to face a long journey before achieving the identification of said valid Specialists.
Not me friend, the government is not “behind it” only instruments as ordinary men.
Your arm chair explanation is insightful, in its own way. How easily played off such things are by convention.
This phenomena has long since existed, and has only become more sophisticated in recent decades (you know how Americans are at pushing the envelope.)
Test this for yourself, can you sit quietly in a silent room and still your thoughts for fifteen minutes? If you are not alone in your own mind, you will soon distinguish your “noise” from those of an exogenous within you.
Ordinary humans are no doubt corruptible, treacherous, ignorant, and confused.
Additionally, there is a secret war waged upon us, by a secret society, with a secret governance of thought controls.
Besieged through a technology of power imperceptible and incomprehensible in ordinary minds; indistinguishable from God in the minds of thought controlled Americans.
This secret was revealed to me later in life, after living a full life, so my mind was already well developed before this infestation set upon me.
Have none of you heard of creeper culture? Where people report being “gang stalked?” Where mysterious mobs of apparently random strangers appear to stalk and harass individuals?
These are signs of controls messing with you.
of course anything that can be said has a perfectly easy to blow off response, that does not make it untrue.
As an aficionado of internal voices I would love to hear more on this subject. Especially the exact method by which the internal voices might be generated or influenced. Do you have something I could read?
Our minds may be entangled as our consciousness is a quantum phenomenon (I know, I know, something else you may refuse until “science” explains it to you.)
History does have fascinating accounts, though spread out and easily dismissed as occult nonsense.
Heck, just google the snail telegraph and consider humans through decades of specialized training can fully navigate entangled networks of our minds.
This is not “telemetry”, it is entanglement which persists at a distance and may be navigated.
That's an interesting idea. That we could access the space where these voices roam. (Via sensory deprivation or whatever)
It's funny, thought (this mass of internal voices) is popularly considered to be the firm logical bedrock of reality. Realer than sights and sounds even.
But what if it's something more physical and arbitrary? Blobs of oil drifting in a puddle. Brownian motion.
Reread “surely you must be joking Mr Feynman”, considering the American thought control program was well underway, and messing with people’s minds, particularly prominent peoples.
- discussion of his adventures in the sensory deprivation tank, where he “crashed into” someone else’s experiences
- when going to sleep one night, a mob of others in his head were interacting with him. They offered to let him experience fully aware sleep, which he “tried” then refused as it didn’t seem natural to him (waking dreams is a skill the mind may master).
- talking to a recruiter, it is subtle, yet the recruiter asks the question about voices not because it means your crazy, rather the voices make people paranoid and unstable, and only a crazy fool would reveal this. Feynman mentions hypnagogia. The government did now want the great scientific mind of Feynman enlisting, no matter how enthusiasm for the noble intention.
