• Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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    26 days ago

    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.

    • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
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      26 days ago

      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

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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        26 days ago

        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.

      • bl_r@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        25 days ago

        TIL Foucault wasn’t the first person to have that idea, I’ve always heard it referred to as Foucault’s Boomerang

  • Ibaudia@lemmy.world
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    26 days ago

    I had to do some serious convincing to inform my mom about the CIA’s involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking.

    • eldavi@lemmy.world
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      25 days ago

      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

      • theneverfox@pawb.social
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        24 days ago

        The ultimate conspiracy theory… The CIA is manufacturing conspiracy theories so that their actual, admitted, documented conspiracies are dismissed reflexively for sounding insane

    • undergroundoverground@lemmy.world
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      25 days ago

      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.

  • cmbabul@lemmy.world
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    26 days ago

    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

  • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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    25 days ago

    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.

    • 11111one11111@lemmy.world
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      25 days ago

      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.

      • ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works
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        25 days ago

        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.

  • YAMAPIKARIYA@lemmyfi.com
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    26 days ago

    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.

  • istanbullu@lemmy.ml
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    25 days ago

    CIA is everything Hollywood movies depict terrorists and evil organizations to be.

  • slaacaa@lemmy.world
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    25 days ago

    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

    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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      25 days ago

      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.

      • Wav_function@lemmy.world
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        25 days ago

        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.

        • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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          25 days ago

          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

          • Wav_function@lemmy.world
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            25 days ago

            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.

    • NaoPb@eviltoast.org
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      25 days ago

      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.

  • Old_Dude@lemmy.world
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    25 days ago

    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.

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
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      25 days ago

      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

      • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
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        25 days ago

        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?

        • Dasus@lemmy.world
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          25 days ago

          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.

          • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
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            25 days ago

            while simultaneously writing new laws to persecute cheap cocaine (crack) users militantly. it’s all so fucking nuts…

            • Dasus@lemmy.world
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              25 days ago

              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

  • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
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    26 days ago

    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.

    • chuckleslord@lemmy.world
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      26 days ago

      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?

      • blackbelt352@lemmy.world
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        26 days ago

        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.

    • PrinceWith999Enemies@lemmy.world
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      26 days ago

      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.

    • blackbelt352@lemmy.world
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      26 days ago

      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.

    • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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      25 days ago

      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.

      • coolusername@lemmy.ml
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        25 days ago

        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.

    • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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      26 days ago

      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.

    • coolusername@lemmy.ml
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      25 days ago

      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.

  • StaySquared@lemmy.world
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    24 days ago

    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.