• Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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    1 month 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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      1 month 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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        1 month 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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        1 month 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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    1 month ago

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

  • cmbabul@lemmy.world
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    1 month 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

  • YAMAPIKARIYA@lemmyfi.com
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    1 month 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.

  • slaacaa@lemmy.world
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    1 month 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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      1 month 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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        1 month 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.

  • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
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    1 month 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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      1 month 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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        1 month 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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      1 month 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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      1 month 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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      1 month 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.

    • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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      1 month 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.

  • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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    1 month 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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      1 month 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.

  • Old_Dude@lemmy.world
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    1 month 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.

    • yogurtwrong@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      At this point I don’t even look at what community posts are posted to. I’m just convinced that lemmy is just a big subreddit with no categorization whatsoever.

      I think the community names on posts being too small and moderators not caring community subjects is a massive contributor to that.

      I still love it tho