[HN Gopher] Before he was the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski was a min...
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Before he was the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski was a mind-control test
subject
Author : whitepaint
Score : 358 points
Date : 2023-06-11 09:22 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| dangitnotagain wrote:
| [flagged]
| danparsonson wrote:
| What you're describing sounds more like schizophrenia and I
| would encourage you to speak to a doctor about it.
| dangitnotagain wrote:
| Dude, of course it's explained away.
|
| People who have chemical imbalances are more sensitive, and
| obviously crazy enough to talk about it.
|
| We are not alone in our own minds.
| danparsonson wrote:
| 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.
| dangitnotagain wrote:
| 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.
| danparsonson wrote:
| There's only me in here; most of us have an inner voice
| but it comes from our own thoughts not from any external
| source.
| dangitnotagain wrote:
| If you truly are the only one in there, good for you,
| enjoy that while it lasts.
|
| As for others, it seems you are a denier of the exogenous
| of thought control!
| mdp2021 wrote:
| 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.
| schnuri wrote:
| Have you considered consulting a psychiatrist?
| dangitnotagain wrote:
| So these can "help?
|
| 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.
| swayvil wrote:
| 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?
| dangitnotagain wrote:
| 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.
| dangitnotagain wrote:
| Consider those people who hang out in sensory deprivation
| chambers. What do you think they're up to exactly?
|
| Does nobody remember what Richard Feynman mentioned in
| "surely you must be joking..."?
|
| Small clue, though there are many such "small clues."
| swayvil wrote:
| 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.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _Does nobody remember what Richard Feynman mentioned in
| "surely you must be joking..."?_
|
| Please expand?
| dangitnotagain wrote:
| 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.
| swayvil wrote:
| Mr Feynman was obviously crazy. All of his opinions
| should be disregarded as nonsense.
|
| But wait, he's a famous smart guy. so we have to take him
| seriously.
|
| Oh it's tearing my science-loving brain right in half I
| tell you.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Don't you think that other factors may boost the phenomenon
| beside intentional direct attempt? Forms of pollution, of
| unhealthy lifestyle?
|
| "Calming down thoughts" was a tough endeavour millennia ago -
| you figure today, when many polluting factors are increased.
| dangitnotagain wrote:
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
| hjrtl wrote:
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _controversial comment_
|
| > _negative influence_
|
| 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.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| 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
| watwut wrote:
| 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.
| blumomo wrote:
| 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?
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| 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.
| valdiorn wrote:
| People still claim Prism is a conspiracy theory TODAY,
| despite Edward Snowden, it's incredible.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
|
| 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 :)
| JasserInicide wrote:
| 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.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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.
| jon-wood wrote:
| 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.
| detrites wrote:
| > It may have been a factor in a few cases
|
| This is not something to casually dismiss.
| logicchains wrote:
| >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.
| Geezus_42 wrote:
| 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.
| jibe wrote:
| 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.
| Aunche wrote:
| 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.
| nemo44x wrote:
| 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.
| _kbh_ wrote:
| > 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.
| retrac wrote:
| 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.
|
| For example, of children under 19 in 2012, about 0.5% of
| Dutch or German children were prescribed antidepressants,
| while it's 1.6% of American children: https://www.researc
| hgate.net/publication/293642487_Trends_an...
|
| 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.
| retrac wrote:
| > 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.
| eggy wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://mhanational.org/issues/2022/ranking-states
|
| 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.
|
| As the PSA from the 70s stated, "Matches don't start forest
| fires. People do."
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNEW4Ha040w)
|
| And I would add "Guns don't kill people. People do."
| ttyprintk wrote:
| 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.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| 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
| jibe wrote:
| 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.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| 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.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| 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.
| jon-wood wrote:
| 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.
| Joeri wrote:
| _Bad people will procure guns or make them from parts or
| scratch._
|
| How many of the people who perpetrate school shootings
| had the skill to build their own gun, or the criminal
| connections to procure one illegally?
| dangitnotagain wrote:
| 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.
| tru3_power wrote:
| Do you have any sources to back this up?
| dangitnotagain wrote:
| 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.
| brookst wrote:
| So that's a "no" on sources, then?
| giardini wrote:
| What "special munitions"?
|
| Stephen Paddock used a "bump stock" on otherwise stock
| off-the-shelf rifles. The same could be done with almost
| any semiautomatic rifle:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCFQhh0Q1Ws
| dangitnotagain wrote:
| 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.)
| bart_spoon wrote:
| 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.
| some_random wrote:
| 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"?
| umanwizard wrote:
| 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).
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [1][a] _ https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Number-of-
| mass-school-sh...
|
| [1][b] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shoot
| ings_in_th...
|
| [1][c] _ https://www.chds.us/sssc/data-map/
|
| [2] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_
| the_Uni...
| rosmax_1337 wrote:
| 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.
| Geezus_42 wrote:
| [flagged]
| aaomidi wrote:
| Attack the idea and not the person
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| Sometimes there isn't an idea, just outright lies and
| propaganda, and how is one supposed to engage when it's
| either bad faith or not even wrong?
| [deleted]
| Levitz wrote:
| 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.
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| rosmax_1337 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| formerly_proven wrote:
| [flagged]
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| 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.
|
| Ted Kaczynski would not engage in such emotional judgments.
| Here's an example of his reasoning concerning the evolution of
| modern societies: https://en.wikialpha.org/wiki/Self-
| propagating_system
| jonex wrote:
| 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.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| 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_.
| xtracto wrote:
| 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.
| brookst wrote:
| 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.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
| 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.
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| Summary of what you said: A lie gets halfway around the
| world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on...
| kmeisthax wrote:
| 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?
| pawelmurias wrote:
| 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)
| croes wrote:
| 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.
|
| Guess which of the former CTs still believe?
| codr7 wrote:
| Who are "they"? The government?
| croes wrote:
| CTs.
|
| How often must someone explain why there are no stars
| visible in the moon photos or why the flag moves?
| beardyw wrote:
| https://archive.ph/pIFm7
| ivxvm wrote:
| 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."
| alan-crowe wrote:
| 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.
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| Reminds me of people here who will passionately argue which
| some js framework is next best thing after sliced bread.
| elif wrote:
| 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.
| ivxvm wrote:
| 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.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| 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.
| slim wrote:
| I wonder if all those MK-ULTRA experiments failed in finding ways
| to make human beings violent and politically disruptive
| tupolef wrote:
| 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].
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-10996838
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Plenty of more recent events which are pretty universally
| despised, like the invasion of Iraq, and the prison at
| Guantanamo, for instance.
| mistermann wrote:
| 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.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| 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.
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| 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.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Lol, nice illustration of GP's point, thanks.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| "Although you make a good point, a 'bad person' made it
| too"
|
| Incredibly embarrassing post
| itsoktocry wrote:
| This comment is evidence that you can now cover up any
| misdeeds as nothing but "Russian propaganda" and people
| will buy it.
| nasmorn wrote:
| 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.
| cma wrote:
| Idiotic/blunder is a very blameless language.
| oilchange wrote:
| > blood
|
| Iraqis lost a lot of blood, not americans. 99% of the
| people killed were innocent iraqis.
| mrangle wrote:
| Enough Americans were maimed and killed to deeply care.
| mrangle wrote:
| Until one might come to the conclusion that the Iraq
| invasion wasn't about security.
| swayvil wrote:
| What's up with these weird typos?
|
| And is it just me or is there a consistency in the tone,
| among those who make these weird typos?
|
| It's just weird. Also it's early in the morning and I'm a
| little addled.
| meiraleal wrote:
| 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.
| swayvil wrote:
| 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.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > What's up with these weird typos?
|
| 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.
| jessepasley wrote:
| Proofs please.
| shakow wrote:
| Soviet undermining for things that happened... after the
| fall of the USSR? What?
| [deleted]
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| 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.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| There seems to be some who disagree with this, but the CIA
| did a lot of research into very similar things as MK-Ultra
| that they used to justify "enhanced interrogation." See htt
| ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Elmer_Mitchell#Work_as_a..
| .
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| Unfortunately torture, both physical and psychological,
| long predates MK-Ultra.
| fit2rule wrote:
| [dead]
| sph wrote:
| 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.
| mrangle wrote:
| MK-ULTRA was only one such program.
|
| It had predecessors and parallel programs. Beginning at least
| as early as the post WWII 1940's.
| zaroth wrote:
| 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.
| mrangle wrote:
| > but let's hope no one ever catches up to what China did
| in Wuhan.
|
| You have to look into the history of these programs,
| further, to gain some perspective.
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| >I'd say we can confidently add global pandemic to this
| list
|
| A quote come to mind: It's easier to fool a man than to
| convince him he's been fooled.
|
| In this case the general population including the
| scientific establishments were fooled, most will never come
| to terms with the fact that they were fooled. ( if you say
| this, there is some idiot who invariably take the moral
| high tone and insist that you are a covid 'denier', and
| that you are complicit in mass murder)
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > 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.
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| >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.
|
| Very astute observations.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > if most cultures and nations have committed heinous acts in
| their past, one should assume they are still doing terrible
| things to this day.
|
| Yeah, here's a list, plenty still ongoing: https://github.com
| /dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrociti...
| xtracto wrote:
| 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.
| NLPaep wrote:
| Having such a list on two American sites is noteworthy.
| On pikabu.ru, there is no war going on. Mass censorship.
| xtracto wrote:
| 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.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I understand how it could be seen as whataboutism, but
| think it's extremely relevant in a discussion about
| American imperialism.
|
| If nothing else, it's certainly interesting and unique.
|
| America is the first (and maybe only, ever?) major
| imperial power that allows such open discussion of its
| atrocities.
|
| I say this not from the standpoint of defending _or_
| attacking America. I just find it fascinating.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > America is the first (and maybe only, ever?) major
| imperial power
|
| Swift's "A Modest Proposal" was from 1729.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I'll attempt to clarify. 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.)
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| 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].
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato%27s_Letters
|
| [2] -
| https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/england.asp
|
| > That it is the right of the subjects to petition the
| king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such
| petitioning are illegal;
|
| > That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings
| in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in
| any court or place out of Parliament;
|
| [3] - https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/critics-of-
| empire-978085771177...
|
| [4] -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Reform_Association
|
| > 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]
| civilitty wrote:
| 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._
|
| List of atrocities, indeed...
| bsnnkv wrote:
| 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.
| fwungy wrote:
| Thank God the good guys won all the wars.
|
| -Norm McDonald
| layer8 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/ksVuF/
| tyingq wrote:
| 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).
|
| [1]
| https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2000/jun/22/features...
| great_psy wrote:
| What is the reason to do this in military training in the first
| place?
|
| Does this train you to handle ptsd better ? Makes you more
| obedient ? What's going on there ?
| 23B1 wrote:
| Stress inoculation.
| tyingq wrote:
| The rationale I've heard is "weed out people that can't
| handle high stress and separate them from service very
| early".
| 23B1 wrote:
| 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.
| tyingq wrote:
| 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.
| gabereiser wrote:
| 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.
| mrangle wrote:
| The recipients sometimes transfer the treatment to home
| as well. Which is something that I feel that the
| government should be able to be sued for.
| zaroth wrote:
| 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.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Unfortunately the aphorism is created by victims of
| trauma in order to justify their experience. "Hurt people
| hurt people" is accurately based in reality.
| philothrow wrote:
| [flagged]
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| 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.
| philothrow wrote:
| 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.
| dbingham wrote:
| This is empirically not true.
|
| 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| > This is empirically not true. To pick just a handful of
| obvious counter examples...
|
| Do you believe "Donald Trump is a liar" to be empirically
| true?
| mdp2021 wrote:
| It just means, "Grit boosts rates of success. Indulgence
| wakens grit".
| c-hendricks wrote:
| > Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good
| times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard
| times.
|
| I love that it's mostly chuds sharing this quote,
| oblivious to the fact that they are the weak men creating
| the hard times (often unnecessarily too)
| sordina wrote:
| Pithy but useless sentiment.
| gabereiser wrote:
| 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.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| 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
| gabereiser wrote:
| 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.
| enterprise_cog wrote:
| Not to be too glib, but what freedom are you talking
| about here? Iraq and Afghanistan were both invasions on
| the other side of the globe.
| gabereiser wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Unironically brings a tear to my eye.
| cjcenizal wrote:
| 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?
|
| [0] https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-
| sparta-p...
| not_a_shill wrote:
| Surely there was a better example in the book than
| expecting hard times to lead to good times without regime
| change?
|
| If there wasn't, the book isn't worth reading.
| zaroth wrote:
| I think the problem lies in the fact that this is a
| necessary but not sufficient component of the cycle.
|
| There's also an interesting micro vs macro level
| distinction.
| jxramos wrote:
| 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.
| gabereiser wrote:
| 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.
| nostrademons wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| 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.
| 23B1 wrote:
| 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.
| hash872 wrote:
| 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)
|
| https://apnews.com/article/us-news-ap-top-news-whitey-bulger...
| swayvil wrote:
| It there was a vast and organized attempt to eradicate all
| public knowledge on this subject, what would it look like?
|
| EDIT
|
| I really am asking a question here. No premise implied.
| mistermann wrote:
| 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.
|
| _Pure_ incompetence?
| timeon wrote:
| Maybe next time you should check the actual Wiki page before
| posting since it is _still_ there.
| sbarre wrote:
| It probably wouldn't look like editing the most popular
| public wiki in the world that records and reviews historical
| edits and changes?
| swayvil wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| You can't post like this to HN and we ban accounts that
| do. No more of this, please.
|
| If you'd please review
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and
| stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
| swayvil wrote:
| Will do. Guidelines/rules it is.
| sbarre wrote:
| Geez, calm down with the insults.
|
| I have no positive proposal because I think the
| underlying premise is ridiculous.
|
| That is my opinion, and I'm entitled to it. I respect
| yours even if I don't agree with it, give me the same
| courtesy?
| gregjw wrote:
| Put the tinfoil hat away. They publically display
| anonymous edits.
| tuukkah wrote:
| It is there on his Wikipedia page:
|
| > _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
| hash872 wrote:
| I control-F'ed 'MK Ultra' and did not consider that they
| would use a dash. Shame on me....
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| 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.
| ErikAugust wrote:
| No ads: https://trimread.org/articles/38917
| WiSaGaN wrote:
| 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]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| WiSaGaN wrote:
| 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.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| 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.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| 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.
| User23 wrote:
| He was also an autogynephile[1], something today's prestige media
| won't touch with a ten foot pole, but that was well documented at
| the time.
|
| [1]
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/09/12/g...
| jrflowers wrote:
| I haven't heard that term in a long time! It's a shame that
| prestige media no longer discusses his unbalanced humors or
| shallow brainpan.
|
| Perhaps his vapors brought about by poor constitution could
| have been alleviated with some trepanning.
| j-bos wrote:
| Given how often people online write to praise or condemn him, I'm
| surpised today is the first time I read about this.
| bombcar wrote:
| Even if it was very well known, you could be one of the 10,000
| - https://xkcd.com/1053/
| evgen wrote:
| 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.
| hjrtl wrote:
| 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)?
|
| Why was there such a program in the first place?
| eggy wrote:
| 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 ;)
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| 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.
| whitepaint wrote:
| > Given that it is mostly unsubstantiated bullshit
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
| gilleain wrote:
| I have no particular bias (I think!) either way, and
| certainly no background ...
|
| However. That wiki page has Kaczynski under 'Alleged
| subjects' not under 'Documented subjects'.
| 0x_rs wrote:
| >it is mostly unsubstantiated bullshit
|
| 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)
| venusenvy47 wrote:
| 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/ret
| ired_fbi_a...
| tommypalm wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-mkultra-
| when-...
| nonethewiser wrote:
| 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.
| dangitnotagain wrote:
| CIA is a joke. This stuff isn't done by 9 to 5'ers.
|
| Thought control is a full on secret society among us. They
| influence the government as the voices in the backs of their
| minds.
| dangitnotagain wrote:
| 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.
| mtVessel wrote:
| You may wish to get in the habit of saying "people"
| instead of "men", unless you meant males, specifically.
| dangitnotagain wrote:
| 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| Probably not the angle you were looking for, but because like
| marketing, propaganda works.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
|
| 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.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| 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.
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| brookst wrote:
| 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.
| mrangle wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypteia
| krick wrote:
| 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.
| Yemeth wrote:
| 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.
| boppo1 wrote:
| 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.
| thunfischbrot wrote:
| 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.
| nicbou wrote:
| You would like The Rest Is History more then. Two pleasant
| chaps talk about history with only light banter, and they're
| both historians.
|
| If you want banter, but not the mean and forced kind, The
| Dollop is a much better Behind The Bastards.
| gloryjulio wrote:
| Yes. That's why I avoid podcast. It's such a waste of time,
| and for what. Hope we have a good summary service. Maybe the
| new LLMs could help with that
| pitaj wrote:
| Simply based on the people on Reddit and such that recommend
| this podcast, I knew that it was not for me.
| areoform wrote:
| 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.
| wslh wrote:
| Isn't weird that Ted hasn't written about this?
|
| I mean, based on his writing style and ideas skipping talking
| about this experience as a lab rat seems like a missing piece of
| a puzzle.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| 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.
| wslh wrote:
| Could you please locate that and give here the URL? It would
| be insightful for this thread.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| I tried but couldn't.
| jbm wrote:
| On a semi-related note, his short story, "Ship of Fools" is still
| depressingly accurate.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| What do you think is accurate?
|
| 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?
| acqq wrote:
| 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.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Sounds good to me. No more Jira, leet code interviews, and
| traffic.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Have you tried living in the wilderness then?
|
| I did actually and I miss it.
|
| But there is a reason, I am not raising my kids there.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Yeah I've done multi week backpacking and hunting/fishing
| trips. Hopefully you're afforded time to take those kids
| out in the woods!
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Everyday, if I can manage and we live as close to
| wilderness, as we can get.
|
| But a fridge, hot showers, supermarket and if needed a
| hospital, are kind of useful.
|
| If all that would be suddenly missing, things would get
| very bloddy, as hunting cannot sustain 7+ bio people.
|
| So I am not wishing for a collaps, even though I do
| understand (and sometimes feel) the hate of the savage
| towards the concrete people.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| 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?
| umanwizard wrote:
| 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.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| 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.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > 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.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| 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
| umanwizard wrote:
| This is all true, but what does it have to do with my
| comment?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "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.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| > Garbage has to be moved anyway
|
| 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)
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "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.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| Me too, I'm optimistic, things will self-balance
| naturally, in a more or less brutal way, I'm not afraid
| or anxious at all, living day by day.
|
| For polluting less, what sure works is to buy less,
| possess less things
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| 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
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| Link: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-
| ship-o...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| 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.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| 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
| sudosysgen wrote:
| 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.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| 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
| shmde wrote:
| From the story
|
| ---------- 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
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Murderer writes story justifying murder, belittles those
| who will not.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| 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!"
| fisf wrote:
| 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.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| > But even in our relatively safe, civil societies, we
| should be aware of it, and not categorically discard it
| as aboherent in all case.
|
| My opinion is that violence is abhorrent in all cases
| except in self-defense when the recipient is a _directly
| active_ threat to your life.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _far from any actual life-threatening situation, which
| is what it actually is_
|
| Not clear. Several legitimate interpretations of "going
| North" into current situations are factually <<life-
| threatening>>.
| pawelmurias wrote:
| 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)
| throwanem wrote:
| It is a very interesting reading of American history in which
| murder as a tool of statecraft ended with the American
| Revolution, or indeed at all.
| nemo44x wrote:
| 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.
| throwanem wrote:
| 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.
| ElFitz wrote:
| Didn't know of it. It reminded me of Plato's.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| > _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.)
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _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".)
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| >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.
| some_random wrote:
| 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"
| aaomidi wrote:
| How many more Mk-ultras were there that we just never found out
| about?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| "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?
| __ryan__ wrote:
| If I know that an entity goes to great lengths to conceal
| secrets, why would I ever believe I know of their most
| secret secret?
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| 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).
| roge7331 wrote:
| Let's just say... You are not that far off.
|
| 36 272
| some_random wrote:
| 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.
| abarker wrote:
| 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].
|
| [1] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/fil
| es/hear...
| [deleted]
| aaomidi wrote:
| How do you know it was their most secret experiment?
| [deleted]
| daedlanth wrote:
| [dead]
| kahirsch wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://i.imgur.com/VP4Qpag.jpg
|
| [2] https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-media-history-
| persu...
| [deleted]
| ninesnines wrote:
| 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
| mrangle wrote:
| You have no idea.
|
| 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.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| 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.
| harshreality wrote:
| 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.
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| > 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.
| mrangle wrote:
| > 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| 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?
| harshreality wrote:
| 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.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| How would you tell?
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I think Iran-Contra put a damper for awhile, but not
| permanently. Like "they caught us, we have to be good for
| awhile".
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Or "we have to be more careful next time not to get
| caught"?
| tyingq wrote:
| > Then what?
|
| 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.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Is that your guess? Can you name any high profile cases
| that were prosecuted as a result of enhanced
| discoverability?
| tyingq wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.brown.edu/Research/Understanding_the_Iran
| _Contra...
| hutzlibu wrote:
| 911 and the patriot act maybe?
|
| More (unchecked) power always leads to more idealism /s
| csydas wrote:
| 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)
| mrangle wrote:
| > 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.
| jwilk wrote:
| Related:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36272409 ("Ted Kaczynski has
| died", >600 comments)
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