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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25294 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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I don't find that report very convincing at all. They don't even know the mechanism of what's happening. They just present a bunch of Russians that exist around these events and then say there's classified intel they have that makes it clear that it's Russians but they can't reveal what that is. It's possible sure, but this report basically has people saying they have had Havana Syndrome, there were Russians around when they got it, and there's classified intel that makes them sure it's Russians. It all seems like highly motivated reasoning.

Tonight, we're reporting for the first time, an incident at last year's NATO summit in Lithuania—a meeting that focused largely on Russia's invasion of Ukraine and was attended by President Biden. Multiple sources tell us that a senior official of the Department of Defense was struck by the symptoms and sought medical treatment. We told Greg Edgreen what we'd learned.

Greg Edgreen: It tells me that there are no barriers on what Moscow will do, on who they will attack, and that if we don't face this head on, the problem is going to get worse.

I mean this was included, as near as I can tell it's nothing. It doesn't even say that they think it was actually Havana Syndrome it just says he had symptoms, then they turn to the talking head to confirm that Russia definitely did that. Why not target Ukrainians? I tried to ctrl-f looking Ukraine in the fairly long wikipedia article on it and got no results. What makes Americans and Canadians so special? I also don't know why the Office of National Intelligence would release a response saying that it's unlikely a foreign adversary is responsible after this report because, at least in my mind, it's favorable for the US to pretend its true even if it's not because bolstering Russia as a boogeyman is a valuable distraction against anything happening domestically. Especially when the FBI and the White House released statements that basically said nothing at all except acknowledging that Havana Syndrome exists. All that being said, I don't think it's super unlikely just that this isn't convincing.

She asked us to withhold her name for her safety. She's the wife of a Justice Department official who was with the embassy in Tbilisi. She's a nurse with a Ph.D. in anesthesiology. On Oct. 7, 2021, she says that she was in her laundry room when she was blindsided by a sound.

Anyway, this is actually what I wanted to post about about anyway. What, they couldn't list her height and weight and DOB?

Your point about Ukranians and other non-US nationalities is a good one, as is the fact that we still don't know exactly how this is being done. Likewise for the point about talking heads and extraneous details about graduate degrees.

On the other hand, mass psychosis seems unlikely. They don't cite much medical evidence in the article, I wish they had included more, but if peoples' pets have been affected I don't see how psychosis can be the cause. I also think that, if these russian agents were actually seen right around the time symptoms started for these people, that's quite a big point for the Russian ray gun theory. The movements of these people coinciding with hallucinated symptoms (not just the same city but within the same block) is possible but seems unlikely. Perhaps there are enough russian spooks travelling around that you can haruspex up a specious pattern from noise but I find that hard to believe in this case.

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