This is a direct consequence of Conway’s law. You create an organisation with the mission of deceiving and abusing, don’t be surprised if they produce deception and abuse.
Huh, well this is one of those things I’m going to see everywhere now
Melvin Conway and Hannah Arendt probably could have had a really fascinating with each other comparing ideas in computer and political sciences
Yup, and it makes perfectly intuitive sense once you know about it.
If you’ve ever used a software product with one of those left hand menus with a big list of capabilities from any “big” company, it’s almost assured that each item in that list is it’s own development team that’s only tangentially aware of what the others are doing, and the team in charge of maintaining the menu.I was on a team for a bit whose goal was to find places where we were shipping our org chart and make our tools play more nicely with each other.
End result: we found some really good areas to make them play better with each other, implemented them, and… They got their own entry in the left hand menu because maintaining a feature fully integrated with four disparate teams with different goals is really hard.
To our credit though, once you turn it on, our thing makes the lines between the products essentially disappear for our end users.TIL Foucault wasn’t the first person to have that idea, I’ve always heard it referred to as Foucault’s Boomerang
Unity of ends and means strikes again!
“Let’s put LSD in this small town’s drinking water and see what happens.”
“What scientific purpose would this have?”
“It would be funny.”
“Good point. Operation Midnight Climax approved.”
Don’t threaten me with a good time
Being unknowingly dosed with an unknown psychedelic is NOT a good time.
I can’t find the part about spiking a small town’s drinking water in that article.
Thanks. That sure is messed up.
It’s also kind of a fringe theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1951_Pont-Saint-Esprit_mass_poisoning
The attribution of the poisoning to the CIA in Albarelli’s book has been roundly criticized. Historian Steven Kaplan, author of an earlier book about the events, said that this would be “clinically incoherent: LSD takes effects in just a few hours, whereas the inhabitants showed symptoms only after 36 hours or more. Furthermore, LSD does not cause the digestive ailments or the vegetative effects described by the townspeople.”
To be clear: I have no reason to believe that the CIA circa 1951 wouldn’t or couldn’t pull this kind of stunt, just that the evidence that they in fact did is pretty shaky.
Thanks for the update.
I’m all for keeping the CIA accountable, but you’re conflating two things there.
I had to do some serious convincing to inform my mom about the CIA’s involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking.
That’s the best thing about the stuff that the CIA has done: they publicly admit to it in writing and people still refuse to believe it’s true
The ultimate conspiracy theory… The CIA is manufacturing conspiracy theories so that their actual, admitted, documented conspiracies are dismissed reflexively for sounding insane
And here I thought the whole Iran Contra thing would be the first one people would know
Right?? It was even in an episode of The Boys.
Not even their worst or most prolific drug running scam. For anyone interested “operation gladio.” The CIA ran the herion game out of Myanmar, with the mob, from about 1944 onwards. Myanmar used to be the worlds largest producer of herion, until Afghanistan overtook them sometime in the late 00s / early 10s…
Now, I’m not saying China are the good guys or anything here. However, if I wanted to stop a rouge security agency from selling herion to fund secret, illegal wars around the world, I’d flood their neighbours with fentanyl.
Thankfully, there’s a wiki page
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been the subject of a number of controversies…
God, what a fitting start/title.
Resignation of officials and agents who would not work for Donald Trump
I didn’t think I would come away with my opinion of the CIA improved.
For the rep they get, they actually do objectively more good than bad. It’s just that you’ll never hear about most the good and the bad sometimes tends to get extraordinarily bad. That’s just how it works, it’s why they were founded.
Most of the CIA is doing boring ass grunt work or important but secret shit that kinda could get everyone involved killed. For example sabotage of say Russian infrastructure or training of groups like the Kurds. And then on the otherhand you have some random agents drugging eachother and captured foreign spies.
I just didn’t expect that topic in a list of controversies.
Let’s be honest here. Which country’s secret paramilitary espionage service hasn’t been the subject of several controversies?
This isn’t an all sides bad thing.
Wikipedia Editing
Seeing this listed next to things like “Human Rights Concerns” made me chuckle.
It’s just like that TvTrope! https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArsonMurderAndJaywalking
Straight up just listening to Behind the Bastards/It Could Happen Here, the Dollop, or Knowledge Fight will make you sound like a crazy person if you talk about them to someone who has no interest in history or current events
No you don’t understand, they were turning seals into oil!!!
On a similar note, I get irate when people call the Business Plot a conspiracy theory. It’s just a conspiracy. We know it happened.
Meh not really that wild especially when FDR kinda opened the can of worms by disregarding the 150 year old precedent that president’s should only serve 2 terms. He also failed in his attempt to permanently stack the SC proposing to expand the number of justices to 15. Despite his failure he was still able to annoit 8 SC justices while in office. Let’s also not forget his refusal to support anti-lynching laws and the whole complete disregard to the constitutional policy and procedure.
Not meaning to down play it but for OP’s actual topic of discussion, The Business Plot doesn’t even skim the surface of the CIA’s depravity.
Edit: This is entirely my opinion of the matter and I didn’t mean it to be as discrediting to you point as it comes accross. The Business Plot was and still is completely fucked.
FDR’s threat to add a justice every year a justice failed to retire after the age of 70 was pretty well targeted though. It sent the intended message.
You are being watched. The government has a secret system, a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know because I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror, but it sees everything. Violent crimes involving ordinary people, people like you. Crimes the government considered irrelevant. They wouldn’t act, so I decided I would. But I needed a partner, someone with the skills to intervene. Hunted by the authorities, we work in secret. You’ll never find us. But victim or perpetrator, if your number’s up, we’ll find you.
You guys hiring?
You have to be mormon…they hire from BYU
Why is this plausible?
It’s fact. Submission to authority and being able to keep two versions of the truth in harmony without realizing you’re even doing it is highly marketable to them.
It was rhetorical, but thanks for explaining.
Which one are you?
Lol dat Person of Interest reference
You made it sound even creepier than usual
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Is this a creepypasta?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOnQ8CD3v4g
Crime drama
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It was fun to see Michael Emerson in Fallout with a dog that looks just like Bear. He’ll always be some variation of Finch to me.
Oh my God I didn’t know he was in fallout. I guess I’m definitely watching that now
The government has a secret system, a machine that spies on you every hour of every day.
That hasn’t been a secret for quite a while by now.
You shouldn’t have said that, you now have a target on your back. They will come after you.
I am not the first to say it or the one to reveal it. And since we didn’t do shit about it I doubt they care about me saying it.
CIA is everything Hollywood movies depict terrorists and evil organizations to be.
After learning about the experiment where a woman lived in a house with a dolphin to teach it, and by the end of the project she was instructed to jerk off the dolphin to calm him down, I cannot be surprised anymore
What?! You are remembering that story wrong. She was a dolphin trainer or some scientist and jerked of the dolphin because she thought the dolphin was depressed and lonely.
Edit: Found the source https://allthatsinteresting.com/margaret-howe-lovatt
She gave an interview on, I think Radiolab?
That experiment was proposed by Carl Sagan, though I’m reasonably certain he meant that we should inject the humans with LSD to learn dolphin languages, not the other way around.
Source? I don’t think Sagan suggested the LSD use either way, that was John Lilly’s thing.
Sagan was interested in Lilly’s dolphin experiments because he was interested in developing inter species communication techniques, because he was really interested in how we could communicate with aliens.
Lilly was the psychonaut. He invented the sensory deprivation tank during the dolphin experiments, would use it on LSD to try to telepathically communicate with them, and gave the dolphins LSD a few times. Years after the dolphin experiments he went kind of nuts taking high dose ketamine and trying to communicate with aliens.
Proposed is too strong a word here. The paper I read about it mentioned that he talked with Lilly about it while Lilly was designing the experiment
What do you mean later he went nuts? Maybe it worked.
Haha, read his book. He wrote about kholing himself and in that state would receive communications from the aliens that are in a higher dimension and would give him instructions to change the course of events in this world to save humanity… Or something like that.
Also at one point during that he fell into his pool and nearly drowned.
Yeah maybe it worked.
It turns out they do this too in places where they keep dolphins in captivity. Like with theme parks that do shows with them. Most likely to calm them down and so they can keep them in smaller places backstage when there are no shows going on.
The fun part is the shit you can’t talk about without disappearing.
Good times, good times.
It’s been 7 hours. You still here?
casual_turtle_stew_enjoyer is fine, he just can’t come to the Internet right now. 👍
Ah, must have been a simple internet outage, of course. Happens very often
MKULTRA was the result of Allen Dulles’s hypno kink.
Well, voyeurism kink too. When they ran brothels in the u.s. and dosed the clients, then filmed them. You know, normal stuff we all do, but usually don’t get paid for.
That codename is both amazing and absolutely shit
A show called Snowfall touches on a CIA agent working to bring in cocaine to the US to fund anti-communist militias in South America. Good show overall. Not the best, but interesting.
It’s weird how people honestly learn more history from drama nowadays than actual school or something. And this isn’t a diss of any sort, I do that all the time; watch an interesting drama “based on reality” or something and afterwards I fact-check what things were actually historical and what weren’t.
Iran-Contra affair used to be pretty well known, actually, but there’s a clear generational gap and I’m other side of the gap. But I know it used to be known better. How do I know that? Well, from an American Dad bit, obviously (“Wow, I just learned while I was being entertained!”)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Contra_affair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking
I love how completely bonkers the iran contra scheme was: we’re gonna use drug money to buy missiles and f14 parts for a country that imprisoned a bunch of our own people, because… reasons?
to be fair people doing what is essentially high-treason while having access to an unlimited supply of cocaine might lead some of them to do a bump or two for the stress, leading to a horrible negative feed-back loop.
while simultaneously writing new laws to persecute cheap cocaine (crack) users militantly. it’s all so fucking nuts…
honestly the only people I would except that sort of shit is from people who are chronically somewhat psychotic from having abused stimulants for a loooong time. or ones who’ve not necessarily abused them long, but have stayed up for three or four days straight with stims. starts getting freaky at that point.
either or explains most of Trumps verbal output imho
That whole fun idea was proposed by Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian/Israeli double agent
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Either the CIA is very good at it and no other countries can match them at toppling a regime, or they’re really sloppy and we only know about it because of it, plus other large nations are doing it better than them without raising suspicion.
Or - they want people to know. Fear is a powerful tool.
I’d go with all the above from both comments.
This… this is the ninja thing again. Was Japan famous for its ninjas because they were the best in the world, or did every other country have ninja and Japan was just so shit at it that we associate them with Japan?
Because our perception of ninja is based around kabuki theater and not historical accuracy. Kabuki theater stage hands were always dressed in black to blend into the background. When an ninja assassination would happen in a show, the “stage hand” would do the assassination because the audience knows to kinda ignore the stage hands during the production.
IRL ninja would just look like normal people, waiting for the right opportunity to strike at someone.
This is something that the CIA actively engages in. It’s not quite at the covfefe level of “we meant to get caught,” but they do occasionally put out the word that they like it when they’re perceived as ham-fisted bunglers as it makes it easier to get away with stuff.
I see it as they’re like master painters, just because you can see their brush strokes on the canvas, doesn’t mean it wasn’t masterfully done.
The CIA wants people to know what they’ve done but without giving away what they’re doing now and that’s what the CIA is really good at. It’s why things like Trump taking the classified documents with him to Mar a Lago was such a huge deal, because they contained secrets that are still in use today and has led to a number of our own agents getting captured or killed.
The reality is that the CIA can only go so far in actually manufacturing dissent. More often they merely amplify and enable opposition which already exists. That’s why the whole “CIA coup” meme is really a bit of a joke in the modern context. The CIA didn’t ship millions of protestors willing to eat bullets into Kyiv. The whining really does reduce to “how dare you convince people that your system is better and provide material support to people with real grievances?”. As if the CIA has a monopoly on agitprop
I’m sorry, but that’s fair game as far as I’m concerned. If you don’t like it then be less shitty.
Uhh the CIA has been working on promoting Banderaism since the 60s AT LEAST. Also, hardcore neonazis/banderists have died already during the battle for Bahkmut.
Everyone else is being sent to die for either MiC profits or it’s some type of depopulation plan.
It’s just high, high volume. You swing at every pitch and you’re statistically bound to eventually hit some home runs. The CIA is always up to some shit.
They have by far the largest budget. The US, Japan, and SK are our vassels. Their intelligence agencies don’t do shit without us okaying it. There’s a reason that Europe didn’t say shit after we blew up nordstream 2.
This is why nobody responds to my Grindr messages
Wasn’t there supposedly a recent coup attempt in Congo and they were a handful of Americans? Don’t know if CIA but more than likely CIA.
I have no proof but it was Def the CIA
