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.
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?