• Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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    2 months 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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      2 months 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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        2 months 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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        2 months 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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    2 months ago

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

    • ivanafterall@kbin.social
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      2 months ago

      The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been the subject of a number of controversies…

      God, what a fitting start/title.

      • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        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.

        • casual_turtle_stew_enjoyer@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          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.

          • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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            2 months ago

            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.

      • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        Let’s be honest here. Which country’s secret paramilitary espionage service hasn’t been the subject of several controversies?

  • cmbabul@lemmy.world
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    2 months 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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    2 months 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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    2 months 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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      2 months 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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        2 months 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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          2 months 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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            2 months 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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      2 months 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.

  • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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    2 months 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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      2 months 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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        2 months 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.

  • Old_Dude@lemmy.world
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    2 months 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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      2 months 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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        2 months 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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          2 months 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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            2 months 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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              2 months 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

    • yogurtwrong@lemmy.world
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      2 months 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