7mo ago

Overthrow a Government and Install a Puppet Dictator? The CIA will do it for Bananas!

118 comments

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.
- 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
  
  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.
  
  TIL Foucault wasn’t the first person to have that idea, I’ve always heard it referred to as Foucault’s Boomerang
- Unity of ends and means strikes again!

"Let's put LSD in this small town's drinking water and see what happens."
"What scientific purpose would this have?"
"It would be funny."
"Good point. Operation Midnight Climax approved."
- Don't threaten me with a good time
  
  Being unknowingly dosed with an unknown psychedelic is NOT a good time.
- I can't find the part about spiking a small town's drinking water in that article.
  
  Point Saint-Esprit
- I'm all for keeping the CIA accountable, but you're conflating two things there.

I had to do some serious convincing to inform my mom about the CIA's involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking.
- And here I thought the whole Iran Contra thing would be the first one people would know
  
  Right?? It was even in an episode of The Boys.
- 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.

Thankfully, there's a wiki page
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CIA_controversies
- The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been the subject of a number of controversies...
  God, what a fitting start/title.
  
  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.
  
  Let's be honest here. Which country's secret paramilitary espionage service hasn't been the subject of several controversies?
- Wikipedia Editing
  Seeing this listed next to things like “Human Rights Concerns” made me chuckle.
  
  It's just like that TvTrope! https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArsonMurderAndJaywalking

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
- No you don't understand, they were turning seals into oil!!!

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.
- 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.
  
  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.

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.
- You guys hiring?
  
  You have to be mormon...they hire from BYU
- Which one are you?
- Lol dat Person of Interest reference
- You made it sound even creepier than usual
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOnQ8CD3v4g
- Is this a creepypasta?
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOnQ8CD3v4g
  Crime drama
- It was fun to see Michael Emerson in Fallout with a dog that looks just like Bear. He'll always be some variation of Finch to me.
  
  Oh my God I didn't know he was in fallout. I guess I'm definitely watching that now
- The government has a secret system, a machine that spies on you every hour of every day.
  That hasn't been a secret for quite a while by now.
  
  You shouldn't have said that, you now have a target on your back. They will come after you.

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

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
- What?! You are remembering that story wrong. She was a dolphin trainer or some scientist and jerked of the dolphin because she thought the dolphin was depressed and lonely.
  Edit: Found the source https://allthatsinteresting.com/margaret-howe-lovatt
  
  She gave an interview on, I think Radiolab?
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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.

The fun part is the shit you can't talk about without disappearing.
Good times, good times.
- It’s been 7 hours. You still here?
  
  casual_turtle_stew_enjoyer is fine, he just can't come to the Internet right now. 👍

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.
- 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%E2%80%93Contra_affair
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking
  
  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?
  
  That whole fun idea was proposed by Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian/Israeli double agent
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  an American Dad bit, obviously
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

MKULTRA was the result of Allen Dulles's hypno kink.
- Well, voyeurism kink too. When they ran brothels in the u.s. and dosed the clients, then filmed them. You know, normal stuff we all do, but usually don't get paid for.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Midnight_Climax
  
  That codename is both amazing and absolutely shit

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.
- Or - they want people to know. Fear is a powerful tool.
  
  I'd go with all the above from both comments.
- 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?
  
  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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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.
- 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.

This is why nobody responds to my Grindr messages

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.
- I have no proof but it was Def the CIA

That's excentric. Soviet Union would never admit such things.

Why is this a shitpost..?
- 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 about community subjects is a massive contributor to that.
  I still love it tho