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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   686 thread views

Transnational Thursday for March 13, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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In particular, I used to have the naive anti-conspiracy view that it's almost impossible to keep an important one going due to a single defection blowing everything up, even if smaller and/or more specific ones may happen.

And that was all done with just some light media slander and unspecified negative future career outcomes. Imagine what they can keep secret if the potential leakers all know that they could end up in prison for 40 years or mysteriously shot dead in their own driveway....

To play devils advocate, it was only a secret for a year or two. I think even the strongest generalized opponent of conspiracy theories would argue that it’s not a big deviation from their priors.

In particular, I used to have the naive anti-conspiracy view that it's almost impossible to keep an important one going due to a single defection blowing everything up, even if smaller and/or more specific ones may happen.

As spook world "standard candle" we can always use one well proven evil conspiracy, the infamous MKULTRA (and adjacent projects).

For 20+ years, in peace time, thousands, possibly tens of thousands of professionals engaged in Nazi/Imperial Japan style extremely unethical human experimentation. And it was all successfully kept secret (until handful of files who escaped destruction were discovered by accident).

All commonly proposed mechanisms to uncover and stop such nefarious activity failed.

No one talked (or if someone talked, no one listened to him)

No investigative journalists uncovered this scandal.

No elected representative of the people did anything.

No conspiracy theorist found what is going on, when MKULTRA was revving up, tinfoil hat crowd debated whether Eisenhower is willing Communist agent or naive Communist dupe.

One exception was this book from 1967, describes mind conditioning methods similar used by MKULTRA

If course, in the book the perpetrators are nasty South American Nahzees who want to manipulate stock market and get rich, not American patriots bravely fighting communism (and the book was, anyway, just drop that vanished in ocean of conspiracy/parapolitic writing at the time).

I think unspecified threats to your career and your social circle suddenly treating you like you were a kiddie-diddler is far more effective. Your monkeybrain can grok direct threats and you might go "fuck you" depending on your situation, even if your demise is 100% guaranteed, but it has far more trouble processing the kind of social ostracism that was deployed during covid. Most people can't handle it, and come up with ways to not ask too many questions even in the privacy of their own brain.

That’s just because you can picture social ostracization better, because it’s something we all risk every day. It’s more real to you. You’ve (hopefully) never had someone sit you down and put a briefcase full of money on one side of the table, and a list of the names and addresses of your entire family on the other side. Years of field data in places like Mexico show that such techniques can compel an otherwise good person to keep quiet, or even participate in, just about anything.

and a list of the names and addresses of your entire family on the other side.

Yeah, fair, that would be quite effective.

Such a standard policy for dealing with the Latin American judicial systems that it has a specific name- Plato o plomo. Literally ‘silver or lead’ but really ‘money or gunfire’.

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