4 ms·

I get a vibe of manufacturing consensus I am an immigrant from China, I never trusted any intelligence community. In a title, it implies there has been a time

I get a vibe of manufacturing consensus I am an immigrant from China, I never trusted any intelligence community. In a title, it implies there has been a time when the intelligence community was trusted (by who?) I think this is mental manipulation from rand

ganzuul 3y ago
The individuals who make up the IC are trustworthy* so it comes as a shock to them that on aggregate they are not. *E.g. One group can be trusted with fair elections, another can be trusted to predictably obliterate a village without asking questions.
- thistletame 3y ago
  Who says that's true? I always thought the people who got hired were just easily controlled and had enough dirt on them that they'd never act outside of their interests.
  - ganzuul 3y ago
    They have the same problem finding good employees as everybody else. Adding too much on top of that means their org stalls. The lizard-people type you seem to reference is actually quite rare.
notavalleyman 3y ago
[flagged]
- vkou 3y ago
  > Why did your brain default to that - to inventing and spreading a fake conspiracy theory, that you invented without evidence? It probably defaulted to that because RAND is a government propaganda office whose reason for existence is influencing public opinion. ~60% of it's funding comes from the army and the alphabet agencies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Corporation https://www.rand.org/about/how-we-are-funded.html#industry https://www.rand.org/about/how-we-are-funded.html#industry It's roughly in the same bucket of trustworthiness as something like Pravda. I's good to keep up with it if you want to know what the government wants you to think, and for little else. Right now, between this and other similar statements about the intelligence community, the government seems to want you to think that the alphabet agencies need more money and/or power.
  - notavalleyman 3y ago
    Your determination of who funds the agency has no relevance to the fake invented conspiracy theory which the post above is spreading. It's a paper about a study which RAND did. You can click into read the paper and see if the headline fits. Your fake conspiracy theory so far says - that the government is paying rand to only pretend to do a study. When in fact, the study is just a smokescreen to justify writing a headline to influence people's opinions? What? Why not just read the study and then come back and suggest alternative headlines. If the headline was different, would we still think is a psyop? > the government seems to want you to think that the alphabet agencies need more money and/or power. Yeah maybe I guess, but also maybe someone just did a sensible study and titled it appropriately. I think my theory has far more evidence than yours (which is simply: how you felt after reading the page title)
    - vkou 3y ago
      > Your fake conspiracy theory so far says - that the government is paying rand to only pretend to do a study You don't seem to understand either me or the parent poster. What we're saying is that the government (or parts of it, or whatever hair-splitting you want to do) is currently interested in drumming up funding/influence/power for the intelligence community, so it asks RAND to publish something that will drum up support for it. This isn't some spontaneous born-from-Zeus' head revelation that the authors have stumbled into. They are given a target, and asked to write something to justify them. You don't need to 'fake' doing a study, to make your 'study' end up supporting whatever pre-conceived thesis you were shooting for. [1] This is everywhere in the media and the think-tank space. You write what your funders want you to write. Denying this blatant transactionality is the wild conspiratorial thinking. RAND is an especially egregious example of this, because it marches lock-step with the empire-building geo-political consensus in Washington. It's doing what it's paid to do, if it started drawing conclusions and advocacy its funders didn't like, they wouldn't keep writing cheques. [1] And if you can't find any way to torture the data into your pre-planned outcome, you can just not publish it. These aren't medical trials, they don't have to be pre-registered.
      - 3y ago
- cess11 3y ago
  OK, but did you know that US intelligence reignited heroin use in the US after WWII? As a way to pay off the european organised crime gangs US intelligence gave them heroin to sell. Why did the US need to pay crime gangs? Because they denied the europeans sovereignty and democracy, and used the mob as a tool to stop political organising. But the mafia doesn't work for free, and maybe you've wondered why Frank Sinatra spent so much time in pre-revolutionary Havana, and how Lucky Luciano came to be a global leader. And, why it was such a nuisance that the cubans shrugged off the informal occupation. This is why. The US hired the mafia, the mafia accepted, then met with the usian mafia in Cuba because you need to sell the heroin somewhere that's not home, when the US felt it had lost control and jailed some of the mafia leaders it was way, way too late. If this is new to you, read Alfred W. McCoy, plus Wikipedia.
  - notavalleyman 3y ago
    Okay but did you know there's a man in prison in Arizona named Jose, who's in for heroin smuggling? Heroin smuggling is bad, and I've imagined that someone paid for the OP article to have this headline. Putting the same logic together which you employed - it must have been Jose who forced rand to publish the study with such a provocative headline. This conspiracy garbage is so tiring. If this is new to you, read arizona court dockets. Trust me, Jose is guilty, the evidence was airtight, so he MUST have paid rand, according to your garbage conspiracy logic
    - cess11 3y ago
      What do you mean, "conspiracy garbage"? McCoy was a respected academic and scholar. Have you read his books about this?
      - notavalleyman 3y ago
        > What do you mean, "conspiracy garbage" "I've read about the US government doing bad things in the past, and so, I'm allowed to say that any article with a headline which I find provocative, is paid government propaganda" That's a garbage line of reasoning and I don't care for it. Did the "academic and scholar" you cited, write anything at all, to back up the claim that the op link is paid propaganda by the government? It's conspiracy garbage to cite "huh did you know a highly respected academic says that Jose in Arizona smuggled heroin? Because I read this scholar's work, which means I'm now qualified to read a RAND study headline and conclude that it's worded so provocatively that it must be government propaganda"
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ganzuul 3y ago

The individuals who make up the IC are trustworthy* so it comes as a shock to them that on aggregate they are not. *E.g. One group can be trusted with fair elections, another can be trusted to predictably obliterate a village without asking questions.

thistletame 3y ago
Who says that's true? I always thought the people who got hired were just easily controlled and had enough dirt on them that they'd never act outside of their interests.
- ganzuul 3y ago
  They have the same problem finding good employees as everybody else. Adding too much on top of that means their org stalls. The lizard-people type you seem to reference is actually quite rare.

notavalleyman 3y ago

[flagged]

vkou 3y ago
> Why did your brain default to that - to inventing and spreading a fake conspiracy theory, that you invented without evidence? It probably defaulted to that because RAND is a government propaganda office whose reason for existence is influencing public opinion. ~60% of it's funding comes from the army and the alphabet agencies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Corporation https://www.rand.org/about/how-we-are-funded.html#industry https://www.rand.org/about/how-we-are-funded.html#industry It's roughly in the same bucket of trustworthiness as something like Pravda. I's good to keep up with it if you want to know what the government wants you to think, and for little else. Right now, between this and other similar statements about the intelligence community, the government seems to want you to think that the alphabet agencies need more money and/or power.
- notavalleyman 3y ago
  Your determination of who funds the agency has no relevance to the fake invented conspiracy theory which the post above is spreading. It's a paper about a study which RAND did. You can click into read the paper and see if the headline fits. Your fake conspiracy theory so far says - that the government is paying rand to only pretend to do a study. When in fact, the study is just a smokescreen to justify writing a headline to influence people's opinions? What? Why not just read the study and then come back and suggest alternative headlines. If the headline was different, would we still think is a psyop? > the government seems to want you to think that the alphabet agencies need more money and/or power. Yeah maybe I guess, but also maybe someone just did a sensible study and titled it appropriately. I think my theory has far more evidence than yours (which is simply: how you felt after reading the page title)
  - vkou 3y ago
    > Your fake conspiracy theory so far says - that the government is paying rand to only pretend to do a study You don't seem to understand either me or the parent poster. What we're saying is that the government (or parts of it, or whatever hair-splitting you want to do) is currently interested in drumming up funding/influence/power for the intelligence community, so it asks RAND to publish something that will drum up support for it. This isn't some spontaneous born-from-Zeus' head revelation that the authors have stumbled into. They are given a target, and asked to write something to justify them. You don't need to 'fake' doing a study, to make your 'study' end up supporting whatever pre-conceived thesis you were shooting for. [1] This is everywhere in the media and the think-tank space. You write what your funders want you to write. Denying this blatant transactionality is the wild conspiratorial thinking. RAND is an especially egregious example of this, because it marches lock-step with the empire-building geo-political consensus in Washington. It's doing what it's paid to do, if it started drawing conclusions and advocacy its funders didn't like, they wouldn't keep writing cheques. [1] And if you can't find any way to torture the data into your pre-planned outcome, you can just not publish it. These aren't medical trials, they don't have to be pre-registered.
    - 3y ago
cess11 3y ago
OK, but did you know that US intelligence reignited heroin use in the US after WWII? As a way to pay off the european organised crime gangs US intelligence gave them heroin to sell. Why did the US need to pay crime gangs? Because they denied the europeans sovereignty and democracy, and used the mob as a tool to stop political organising. But the mafia doesn't work for free, and maybe you've wondered why Frank Sinatra spent so much time in pre-revolutionary Havana, and how Lucky Luciano came to be a global leader. And, why it was such a nuisance that the cubans shrugged off the informal occupation. This is why. The US hired the mafia, the mafia accepted, then met with the usian mafia in Cuba because you need to sell the heroin somewhere that's not home, when the US felt it had lost control and jailed some of the mafia leaders it was way, way too late. If this is new to you, read Alfred W. McCoy, plus Wikipedia.
- notavalleyman 3y ago
  Okay but did you know there's a man in prison in Arizona named Jose, who's in for heroin smuggling? Heroin smuggling is bad, and I've imagined that someone paid for the OP article to have this headline. Putting the same logic together which you employed - it must have been Jose who forced rand to publish the study with such a provocative headline. This conspiracy garbage is so tiring. If this is new to you, read arizona court dockets. Trust me, Jose is guilty, the evidence was airtight, so he MUST have paid rand, according to your garbage conspiracy logic
  - cess11 3y ago
    What do you mean, "conspiracy garbage"? McCoy was a respected academic and scholar. Have you read his books about this?
    - notavalleyman 3y ago
      > What do you mean, "conspiracy garbage" "I've read about the US government doing bad things in the past, and so, I'm allowed to say that any article with a headline which I find provocative, is paid government propaganda" That's a garbage line of reasoning and I don't care for it. Did the "academic and scholar" you cited, write anything at all, to back up the claim that the op link is paid propaganda by the government? It's conspiracy garbage to cite "huh did you know a highly respected academic says that Jose in Arizona smuggled heroin? Because I read this scholar's work, which means I'm now qualified to read a RAND study headline and conclude that it's worded so provocatively that it must be government propaganda"

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]