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I think we overestimate the power of 'mysterious technique' brainwashing. The gold-standard, world-class, top-tier brainwashing methods are all known: State education, media propaganda, social media to catalyze it all together. Some schmucks in the CIA are no match for that. Mass media >>>>> MKUltra.
And remember that many people are weak-willed. Think of the people who spend thousands on gacha or online gambling. There are going to be people who are extra-vulnerable to this stuff, fall into communities where this is normalized and valorized... bang bang bang!
Not to diss either of the methods you mentioned, but weren't the MKULTRA sensory depravation experiments pretty promising when it comes to brainwashing? Mass media is better in that it's more cost effective, but I don't think it can manipulate people all that far.
Their remote viewing was pretty promising too, per various documents. Nobody can fault the Cold War CIA with closedmindedness.
But if remote viewing is so great, why did they spend so much on the U2, satellites, SIGINT? If the US has unconventional propulsion, flying saucers, why would they need the F-35?
If MKUltra worked practically, there'd be more signs of its use. The CIA and associated goons wouldn't need to torture people at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, they could just brainwash them!
Western citizens aren't volunteering to die in Ukraine because the CIA did some trickery, they're doing this because their attitudes and beliefs have been shaped by the media and those around them, they think it's the right thing to do. Some people are easily suggestible and follower-type personalities. I think this website is full of contrarians and individualists who are highly resistant to consensus and passive manipulation, we naturally struggle to model the mindsets of the other end of the spectrum.
(One exception might be the chemicals and hormones we encounter all around in the modern world, which might act as epigenetic triggers making people more cowardly and less rebellious, though it's not clear that this is anyone's plan, per se. You can see the physiognomy of our fathers and grandfathers was totally different to today, some young men are growing breasts because of some chemical, presumably.)
It’s dietary changes. Not just seed oils- people have a lower vitamin higher calorie diet, lots of PUFAs and sugars that wouldn’t have been common before the very late 20th century. The fifties kid diet was mostly milk+adult food. Today it’s radically different. Kids hit puberty earlier because they get more calories so they grow faster. Male breast growth seems mostly downstream of obesity. Gynecomastia is a known phenomenon that sometimes happens, it’s not a new occurrence.
As for the decrease in facial hair quality, might I suggest that the increase in acceptance of crappier beards is behind it?
I’m willing to believe endocrine disrupters explanations. I just want to point out that a lot of the usual symptoms are just… body fat, or have other obvious explanations.
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You mean they’re generally sedentary and eat ultra processed junk food? It’s not much of a mystery that the generation of my parents in 1960 were healthier and lacked man-boobs — they went outside and played sports in real life using their real muscles. Mom cooked at home using such exotic ingredients as chicken, beef, pork, flour, milk, eggs, and fresh vegetables. Amazing how eating real food and playing sports outside with real people made them healthy.
Definitely the spooks.
Yeah but within the ultra-processed junk food is chemicals and hormones that they didn't have in the 1950s and 1960s. Nutrition 'experts' have clearly let us down on the obesity front, they don't know what all these chemicals do in the long-term or in combination. And not just in food but the plastic wrappings on everything, the particles in the air, in sunscreen, in clothes...
I agree that eating healthy food is good. I do this myself and remain fairly healthy, no weight problems at least. I can eat as much as I like. But there's more to it than just surface-level health/obesity/malnutrition. The body is very complicated and poorly understood.
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Uh, you know what fifties food was actually like? Lots of canned junk, white bread, only the most basic fruits and vegetables, no seasonings, make a jello for special occasions.
It was generally at far smaller portion sizes than today, and it did genuinely have less sugar and PUFAs. It was probably less processed than the default American diet in this day and age- soda was a rare treat, they didn’t have hungry man dinners, etc- but it wasn’t some wonderland of organic health food.
I have occasionally wondered if CO2, or something like it, is actually obesogenic somehow. It'd be really hard to test (nutrition experiments in controlled atmospheres sound expensive, even with rats), but it is a potential factor that is drastically different.
But "cheap, maximally-addictive, nutrient-lacking calories" sounds pretty reasonable too.
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My mom was eating frozen Swanson TV dinners all the time in the 50s
The point is they were the regular size ones rather than Hungry Man.
And that most people ate them proportionally less often, you had a balogna sandwich if you couldn't cook a meal for whatever reason. That's not to say their home cooking was very good- it often wasn't- but there was a lot less of the other kind of any description. 50's purchasing power was just too low, and technology too backwards, to sustain any alternative to cooking.
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How do you know they didn't?
But more seriously, I never said they could go as far as programming people like computers, just that they could change some of people's beliefs and/or personality, beyond what mass media and the education system allows.
I think it's possible to re-program people, but also that it's difficult. Look at actual programmers - the competent ones can do a lot of amazing things, but those who lack the skills can barely make a working application. So these techniques "don't work" in the sense that they aren't recipes that any idiot can use to get the results that they want. In order to reproduce the results of the findings, you need competent people to try them out.
I wonder if modern studies even factor in competence. If you were to study whether or not therapy worked, your results would depend more on the competence of the therapists than on the method you were testing. In fact, a lot of things which are considered "impossible" by "experts" are completely possible and merely gatekept by competence
My impression about the original MKULTRA experiments, is that people got so spooked by them that the "tee hee, it didn't even work" argument was deployed to calm them down about it being tried again. Modern studies on the subject officially don't exist as far as I'm aware, you need a tonne people to sign off on anything that even smells like experimenting on humans. Whether they're being done in underground bunkers, and never opened to the public, is another story.
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True, the MKUltra brainwashing experiments did change Kaczynski's beliefs but not in a controllable or desirable way, from the point of view of the manipulators.
I don't recall which subproject he was a part of, but regarding the one I brought up, I disagree with "not controllable". They may have unacceptable side effects, the results may be too generic for practical use by intelleigence agencies, the procedures themselves may be impossible to apply without detection, and again too convoluted to be practical compared to more standard methods, but I'm not sure where the "they don't work" idea is coming from.
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The vast majority of the MK ULTRA program files were destroyed and never released or leaked, so it’s hard to say. There were probably multiple types of techniques tested, and any that were successful were probably spun off into their own programs. In tinfoil hat circles I’ve heard of successor programs called MK NAOMI and MK MONARCH. I suspect some of the techniques of MK ULTRA or other similar programs ended up in mass media. In a democracy, being able to manipulate a huge number of people a small degree could be very useful.
The short list of the programs is here.
What the professionals were looking for were not better marketing, advertising and PR technologies, not better interrogation and torture methods. By "mind control" they meant actual mind control from pulp science fiction of the time - methods of deleting and rewriting human memory like one deletes magnetic tape, reprogramming human mind like one programs electronic computer, marvel of this age. For some reason, they felt this is the thing Free World(TM) needs to defend freedom and fight communism.
So far, there is no sign it is possible, no sign that anyone in the world has such capability. It would be truly nightmarish world if it was real, world where killing is obsolete, world where they (for value of "they" you fear and hate the most) instead of cutting your head just stick you into machine, and it will turn you into one of "them".
Being able to create real life Manchurian Candidates would be extremely valuable. If you could transform captured communists into sleeper agents. If it were real it would be a great weapon to use against our enemies.
But also yes, a nightmare if it existed and inevitably wound up being used on regular people.
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It's because the Soviets had the same kind of programs, and they were worried they'd get BTFO'd if the commies have working mind control, but the US does not. At least officially.
Personally I think the whole capitlism vs. communism spat was just a laboratory experiment to find out which form of managing an industrial society is more effective, but both sides would love mind control, and any other technique of reducing humans to cogs.
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My understanding is that the Montreal experiments consistently damaged people, but did not result in useful brainwashing.
I've seen a documentary where they said, seemingly reading from a report / study / something written by Donald Hebbs, that the subjects became long-term suggestible. The example they gave was inducing the fear of the paranornal, that would still be present weeks after the experiment.
Would be cool to have the original study, I don't have the original source (don't even know what they were quoting), though.
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