Wednesday, January 11, 2017

"The ultimate conspiracy: a conspiracy against Reddit’s conspiracy community?"

Over the years I've mentioned the CIA's James Jesus Angleton a few times, here's a 2009 example:
As a practitioner of The Grassy Knoll Theory of Investing (there is a 'They' and 'They know') I am dubious of most EVERYTHING.
Of course this can lead you into the "Wilderness of Mirrors" which term the CIA's counter-intelligence czar James Jesus Angleton coined* and which trap he fell into:
...Angleton came to suspect Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who commented wryly that even the most brilliant and loyal officers should not spend their entire career in such pressurized and paranoid fields. Angleton also privately accused numerous members of Congress and President Gerald Ford of treason. Angleton's notorious pursuit of the "5th Man," who he believed had penetrated a secret agency in Washington, was solved, he believed, when DCI William Colby fired him. No one was above suspicion, and even Angleton himself was accused by others of working for the Soviets. (Wikipedia)
Oh well, by the end of his time as a spy Angleton was pretty far gone, probably certifiable.

From The Verge:
The Trump dossier has r/conspiracy spinning out 
The r/conspiracy subreddit is the birthing ground of such feats of imagination as “Hillary Clinton has financial ties to ISIS” and “the Ft. Lauderdale shooting was a failed MKUltra experiment,” as well as the adopted home of Pizzagate theorists after Reddit shut down r/pizzagate. There are friendly weirdos who just want to talk about Stanley Kubrick, but there are also more sinister paranoids who feel the need to investigate the “influence” Jewish people have on various world powers.
But today, the subreddit is hooked on a new masterpiece of a conspiracy theory: a conspiracy against conspiracy theorists. The users are worried there’s a conspiracy to shut down r/conspiracy.
The presumed actor in this conspiracy is of course the broad “them,” and the alleged motives are no more specific:
“Theory: those in power have noticed they can’t destroy ‘conspiracy theories’ and that many people trust more ‘conspiracy theories’ than their scripted narratives. Thus, they are now trying to take control of the most active conspiracy forums like this one. What you can’t destroy, control.”
Why today of all days, for “them” to put an end to the conspiracy community?
Alongside the notoriously fetid troll swamp r/The_Donald, r/conspiracy is where you can find claims that BuzzFeed’s choice to publish a scandalous but unverifiable dossier of information about President-elect Trump’s alleged ties to the Russian government last night was actually orchestrated by someone on 4chan in a bizarre attempt to bolster Trump, torpedo BuzzFeed (presumably with far-fetched lawsuits), and destroy the country’s faith in the media. This theory is based on a screenshot of a 4chan user mentioning a “sex tape orgy” after another user claimed to have fed false information about Trump to vehemently anti-Trump GOP political consultant Rick Wilson. Theorists on 4chan and Reddit are praising this user for duping Wilson into passing the information off to either to the CIA, or to independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin, who then gave it to Senator John McCain. Wilson has spent the better part of the day fending off trolls convinced of his involvement, writing on Medium that the claims are “false and risible,” and the 4chan poster appears to have been banned from Twitter.

This fear seems to stem from what users are calling an unprecedented amount of activity in the subreddit over the last 20 hours or so — or ever since BuzzFeed dumped the Trump dossier and encouraged the public, basically, to play the part of journalists: “BuzzFeed News is publishing the full document so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.” ...MORE
*In 2012 we noted Angleton only coined the use of the term in relation to intelligence:
The term was developed into a theory by the CIA's James Jesus Angleton to describe a situation where nothing is as it seems. He lifted it from T.S. Elliot's 1920 poem Gerontion:
...These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations,