> The tin foil hat is a cultural symbol for crazy people, but where does it come from and why do some think it works?
Tin foil hats don't work, though not because those who wish they do were "crazy."
The entangled minds and disembodied voices are real and taboo to speak of (only one critizable as "crazy" or "crackpot" would try.)
Throughout all human history there have been a small minority of humanity who have developed the "power" to travel among and manipulate minds. In this modern age this capability has grown (on an "industrial" scale.)
This secret is regulated by extortion and ostracization (this comment will invariably be down voted because of those among you who "refuse to believe."
Read my comment history. I am a renegade of thought control and I tell all.
It is a waste of time to continue to try to develop a power one does not have.
Manipulating (e.g. "people who down vote [sic] refuse to believe"), spreading fear (e.g. "[mind manipulation occurs on] an 'industrial' scale"), and inflating one's own ego (e.g. "I am a renegade of thought control") contribute little to the discussion of this article.
Rational comments can't change a mind driven primarily by emotions, especially negative ones like fear. We humans are not rational beings at the bottom of the things, and our school system does little to fight that.
Thats why elections look like they look, that's why internet is not anymore a beacon of freedom and truth, but rather swamp of lies, manipulation and half-truths that one has to have a dedicated skill to navigate through. A skill many older folks (but not only them) simply don't have and probably never will, this covers ie my parents too.
Folks that will listen to those sweet little and big lies about how everything will be great without great changes and sacrifices, when reality is way more complex.
Accurate and useful information for anyone that has ever overestimated their individual ability to discern all of reality with a mere folklore sense of it.
Every sitting president since George W has had an "introductory" level of awareness with thought control, America's grand extortionist. George W had been indoctrinated since college, during his xxx initiation. Before that, like you they only had a Man's ignorance in themselves.
I think it is time to stop denying the exogenous of thought control. For the sake of world peace and all (your weaponized denial.)
I know you'll call me crazy, that doesn't make it untrue.
"First hand knowledge" is worthless. 350 people saw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587#N... fall out of the sky. 50% of those people "saw an explosion" despite that plane falling out of the sky because the vertical stabilizer sheared off. At no point was there even a fire or hell, even a part of the plane being hotter than it should be.
The same thing happened when a 747 blew up after leaving JFK, with many witnesses saying "it was hit by a missile" despite radar evidence proving otherwise.
Anything you "know to be true" is simply whatever your brain cooked up to retroactively explain whatever sensory input it gets. People joke about "Will you believe me or your lying eyes" but YOUR EYES ARE LYING TO YOU 24/7! Pretty much nothing you perceive in your vision accurately represents reality. It is trivial to demonstrate optical illusions, which are merely simple examples of your brain lying to you about reality because it is lazy and incredibly stupid, and doesn't really care about consistency.
Our brains lie to us constantly, and paper over those lies with more lies, and lots of people seem to be utterly unwilling to examine that fact in earnest, and would rather reality fit some obscene TV plot than think that they might not know something that they "know"
We are all vulnerable to abstractions. Those with thinner boundaries of the mind are easier to penetrate with folklore. Often these disinformation efforts are emotionally powerful enough to transcend science and reason.
That is getting in to citation needed territory. The state in most countries controls between 30 and 60% of the GDP. It is a prime target for corruption and anyone who likes money or abusing power will be drawn to it like a magnet. Pretty much all of the major powers are spying on almost literally everything that happens on the internet and we know that reasonably stable societies can go full Nazi in less than 20 years which is a legitimately terrifying combination.
An entity with that level of power and reach deserves extreme scepticism. As we discovered through the noble sacrifice of a lot of Chinese and Russians the people in bureaucracies are quite comfortable with accidentally causing millions of needless deaths through sheer administrative efficiency in implementing bad policies.
The problem with deep state conspiracies isn't the level of scepticism, it is that the theories don't protect the people who hold them. Knowing that a bureaucrat is willing to disarm you then starve you to death ... does not help that much when the army or secret police gets involved.
> the theories don't protect the people who hold them. Knowing that a bureaucrat is willing to disarm you then starve you to death ... does not help that much when the army or secret police gets involved.
the unelected bureaucrat branch of the US government, referred to as the "deep state" by some, is so large and powerful due to funding.
The people who use the term "deep state" unironically are engaged in political activism where they are arguing for dismantling, drawing down, and defunding bureaus that they feel are out of control.
it's ironic that these activists are dismissed by you as being mere "conspiracy theories". it's like calling BLM a conspiracy theory. people who are fighting the power of unelected bureaucrats are political activists. They're just defamed by the same machine that they're opposed to. What a shock! The people in power defame and attempt to discredit those who seek to remove them from power.
Truly, if you do not understand the complaints of those who decry the undeserved and overgrown power of the deep state, you are not thinking about the position of those who hold those views long enough to understand them. You don't have to AGREE with them, but they aren't touting a conspiracy theory. The administrative state exists, is large, has power, and these are activists who want to change that.
They want to stop it before there are secret police or the army is corrupted. Of course, the CIA is secret police, and they coined the epithet "conspiracy theory" that you repeat in order to discredit these activists. Coincidence?
Corruption, as in individuals working in their own interest in a way that best provides them power and/or lines their pockets, is different than a grand conspiracy that a large percentage of that state is working together on a secret project that they have guarded from the public.
The government is not "an entity", it is layers and levels of elected and unelected officials working towards their own personal goals.
The idea that many of them do things that they shouldn't for personal gain is fairly obvious.
Ideas that huge numbers of them are working together in secret across both public and private sector to execute a singular master plan, fake a moon landing, mess with the population via brain wave broadcasts, spread chemtrails via commercial aircraft, etc. with zero hard evidence are on an entirely different level.
> a grand conspiracy that a large percentage of that state is working together on a secret project that they have guarded from the public.
But this is a straw man. Do you know any conspiracy theorists that believe that a large percentage of the state is working together on a secret project that they have guarded from the public, or is that just the easiest thing to discount? The conspiracy theories I hear about are about small groups of people that "control things from behind the scenes."
> The government is not "an entity", it is layers and levels of elected and unelected officials working towards their own personal goals.
This is a false dichotomy. The non-existence of government as an entity is a conspiracy theory so wild that very few people believe it. It's like saying Apple doesn't exist, just some people who happen to be sitting at desks near each other that conspiracy theorists decided to make a big deal about.
> But this is a straw man. Do you know any conspiracy theorists that believe that a large percentage of the state is working together on a secret project that they have guarded from the public, or is that just the easiest thing to discount?
The moon landing conspiracy theory is a good example. It would involve hundreds of thousands of people across public and private sector all keeping such a secret. It would even involve the governments of other countries (namely Russia, or Australia who received and relayed many of the lunar broadcasts on the US's behalf) who had their own tracking and radio equipment and could have at least attempted to discredit the mission, but did not.
Chemtrails is a common conspiracy theory as well that again would require cooperation and secret keeping among thousands across both public and private sectors.
Part of my point is that a small number of people keeping a secret for a short time is plausible, but as the number of people and length of time scale up it becomes less plausible due to human nature.
In countries with extreme state corruption, secret police, rigged elections, people being "disappeared", etc. those things are not secrets, and the problem is not a lack of evidence of the corruption.
The citizens know that the secret police exist and that you are at risk of being detained by the secret police for publicly stating forbidden positions. The citizens know the autocrat will always win each election. They are just powerless to change it.
Unless you're talking about any of America's current enemies list, where not seeing state conspiracies everywhere is not healthy skepticism.
The real question is when will they start treating skepticism as a medical condition, and how can I invest now in the drugs that will be advertised to treat it?
Deep distrust in this context is more like "lizard people are running the government as a tool to control us" where the entity secretly exists for a nefarious purpose rather than the stated one and there can be no level of trust with anything from it as a result. It's not the same as general distrust which would be more like "I don't trust all politicians inherently have our best interests at heart or that they will never abuse their power" where you don't blindly take everything at face value but you also don't blindly dismiss everything as outright untrustworthy either.
Neither example is meant to be implied as the only possible way of for forming that kind of distrust rather examples of logic used and types of conclusions reached. I could just have easily said "people who think lizard people want to hold us back from discovering advanced math" as a reason some deeply distrust all formal math and your response would be focusing on how there are other ways (besides lizard people) to deeply distrust all existing math - completely sidestepping the actual point point around the absurdity and unfalsifiability of the type of conclusion about deep distrust of all of math itself vs the types of conclusions normal distrust reaches (e.g. "I know not everything in a maths textbook will always be right but I can try to think about each consideration independent of a central conspiracy on all of math".
Put another way without specific example or analogy: if there is some organization as large as a nation's government (thousands upon thousands of organizations, possibly millions of people) and you can't weigh things done by said government without always invoking a single nefarious/secretive plot or group being behind it every time then you've left the realm of standard or reasonable distrust and entered the realm of unfalsifiable, unhinged thinking the article is meaning by deep distrust. Even the worst governments in our world's history aren't reasonably measured that way. The alternative to this is not blind trust, it's normal distrust GP was arguing for.
With due respect, I reused your own example to highlight its absurdity.
That being said, you still haven’t convinced me. I claim I t’s very possible to hold deep distrust without attributing intentions/motivations to conspiratorial actions.
The act of distrusting does not require an assumption of motivations (or a nefarious/secretive plot, as you put it).
I'm still not sure I follow on what you mean about its absurdity. If the point is deep distrust is supposed to result from some absurd reasoning then of course the example is an instance of absurdity. Highlighting that does not bring a new point of view or show how non-absurd reasoning is also supposed to lead to deep distrust in context of the article. It's one thing to say you're unconvinced, nobody can really respond take away anything from that, but it's another to explain why people should agree with your different take instead.
I think we both agree distrust doesn't require a universal underlying motivation but you're continuing to use "distrust" and "deep distrust" interchangeably without explaining why people should consider them interchangeable in context of the article.
There really isn’t much to be explained. I’m using the terms somewhat interchangeably because they are essentially the same thing - deep distrust is just high magnitude distrust.
One may distrust their state, but in some regards can still trust. One with deep distrust will likely never trust, their level of distrust is much higher. This does not require a conspiratorial mindset.
I think that has always been the case. Dale Gribble predates the latest round of conspiracy madness by a few years and he was just as gullible. He’s the archetypal conspiracy theorist of the 90s.
But nowadays with TikTok and YouTube, Dale Gribble can become an influencer, and at home video editing is so good that he can have his own green-screened newsroom with all the accoutrements of respectability. Or he could just start a podcast.
Very tangential, but the voice actor of Dale (Johnny Hardwick, RIP) actually had YouTube videos playing Dale as Rust Shackleford in The Rusty Report. My head canon says that this is where Dale ended up.
I am both amused and in horror about this, it really shows the decline of what passes as a conspiracy theory but I am deeply amused how it does follow the canon of the show faithfully and if King of the Hill was to be made in todays time, I can see this and just having this difference in times really is amusing -
It makes it much clear what is healthy paraonia and what is unhealthy paranoia. Granted what is healthy paraonia and how can there be a spectrum but - geez.
I just can't tell anymore. Maybe I could never tell.
Yeah, that’s the default assumption. But nowadays media is so fragmented, bubbled, and algorithmic; you can have a whole YouTube or TikTok ecosystem around building an alternative narrative.
A popular theory a few years ago is that people who believe in extremely unlikely and sometimes nonsensical explanations of current events are actually too shrewd. They understand better than most that all of the information they receive is compromised for the benefit of powerful others, but in the desperation for information that isn't mercenary, they turn to random gurus who aren't connected to or knowledgeable about anything.
You see that impulse a lot on HN and other forums, when they decry some study as "biased" because the author of the study is well-known to believe that what the study shows is true. For them, the people who initiate studies would ideally be people with no knowledge about or interest in the subject that they are studying. Anything less than that is obviously an intentional manipulation.
I still mask (and wear a flo mask to boot!) -- now I wonder if people think I'm a conspiracy theorist?
I have a soft spot for conspiracy theorists: they have such a charitable view of humanity that they believe a large number of people can keep a secret.
I'll echo the other comment: if you're wearing a serious looking mask I'm just going to assume you've got a serious medical problem until I get other reason to suspect otherwise.
The biggest conspiracy theory I would be accused of holding at the moment is that the politicians in power and the main media are sleepwalking us into nuclear war. There's zero awareness, protest or discussion atm. Arguably we are closer to the brink than in the sixties with no diplomatic way out, just escalation.
Conspiracy theories often posit grand organizations that control things behind the scenes. The idea that we’re sleepwalking towards disaster seems more like the opposite of a conspiracy theory to me.
I suspect there’s something a little like a conspiracy to not blow ourselves up. But it is just, like, a system of official treaties and organizations, as well as a bunch of back-channels and informal give-and-takes. It probably isn’t anywhere near as robust as we’d like it to be.
> But the truth is, there’s really no evidence that a centralized power is trying to control your brain through electromagnetic waves entering your brain stem.
Ha! As if it required an entire system to control you, I could do it with a TV or the hypnotic trigger of "tell me more about yourself." -Edward Teach M.D.
The CIA popularized the "tinfoil hat conspiracy nut" as a reverse-psychology trick back in the '60s as part of Operation Mockingbird.
The government had seen promising results in its experiments to control human emotions via radio-wave emissions, and they wanted to deploy this technology on a national scale. However, one recurring problem was that thin films of conductive material, such as aluminum foil, had a tendency to scramble the control waves and render them useless. In response, the CIA launched a massive press campaign intended to smear and delegitimize the wearing of tinfoil hats, with the ultimate goal of preemptively convincing the public not to wear them via threat of social ostracization.
Considering the widespread mockery levied at the tinfoil community today, I'd say their efforts have worked quite well.
This is common, conspiracy theorists never read the links they forward, it is sufficient to have something that passes first muster, a scientific article, a report, something with the right sounding title, they'll never read the contents.
I suspect a „flood the channel with shit“ background.
I’m starting to see this pattern more regularly lately: on a social media site, mix some nonsense into some real context “Foo”, and add a link to the Wikipedia for “Foo”.
Enough readers will be too lazy to actually read the Wikipedia article to find out that “Foo” didn’t contain the crazy parts, but will vaguely remember “there was this Foo thing with this really crazy stuff, but it wasn’t made up — it’s all official, it’s on Wikipedia!“
The gp is a prime example — even in the well educated HN crowd, there are now probably a handful of people that will vaguely have in the back of their minds: „there was a CIA media influencing campaign in the sixties, they even used radio waves for mind control.“
Only the first part is true, but both information now live rent-free in their mind, intermingled, and have the same „truthiness value“.
Edit: could aim at machines as well as humans. It’s just a tiny signal, but one more signal for Google Search, Bing, GPT etc. that „CIA“ and „mind-control radio-waves“ are somehow related to each other.
I appreciate you putting this into words. The very idea (that people who skim articles will form skewed concepts in absence of full comprehension) is fairly significant in our society where information competes for your limited headspace.
That sounds completely made up. I simply do not believe that nobody in the CIA conceived of a layer of tinfoil inside of a normal hat, which would not be visible to anyone.
It isn't necessarily true but the origin of the meme is a supposed CIA mind control defense. It was current in 80s meat space before internet conspiracy culture flourished.
wouldn't the tinfoil hat act as an antenna? clever play by the CIA, delegitimize the tinfoil hat and thus convincing the people most likely to be effected their brainular wave manipulation to don one.
> The tin-foil hat can be traced back to 1927, first spotted by Business Insider roughly a decade ago, in a short story titled “The Tissue-Culture King.” It’s a strange short story written by Julian Huxley, whose brother Alduous was a prolific writer and author of Brave New World. It was Julian, however, who was possibly the first to mention wrapping your cranium in foil.
I absolutely guarantee that this isn't the origin of the term "tinfoil hat" or of people accusing people that they want to discount as "wearing a tinfoil hat." What happened was a writer came across an early mention in fiction of somebody using a metal shield to fend off mind control rays that no one read and that inspired no one, and they thought they might be able to build an article around it. Using a metal shield to fend off a charge is obvious, although when it comes to a Faraday cage around your head, your neck is a problem.
"Tinfoil hat" is an accusation. Find the first person recorded accusing someone else of wearing a tinfoil hat. Find out of the reference confused people, or if it seemed familiar to people. If it confused people, try to find whether he/she was asked to explain it. If it was familiar to people, look for other contemporaneous mentions and try again.
I worked with a fellow who was adamant that molybdenum was a better choice for head protection, and that tin or al-foil was just a cheap government trick to convince people into ineffective protection. He was a funny guy who could say things like this with a convincing straight face.
From one the great web 2.0 site "Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie" (Created in 1997) [1] [2]:
[...] There is a long history of using aluminum to both deflect mind control signals and to control them. Evidence suggests that the ancient Atlanteans used aluminum armor and psychotrons in their wars with the Phoenician Old Dynasty. [...] The first truly modern instance of anti-psychotronic aluminum use was in the late 18th century by the American statesman, philosopher, and inventor Benjamin Franklin. His discoveries were built upon in the beginning of the 20th century by Yugoslavian born electrical genius Nikola Tesla. Of course, the US military has been researching aluminum for use in psychotronic weapons and armor as long as it has been involved in mind control, which is to say since it's inception.
[2] Please treat all info on the site as a joke. It is a very well done website, but I would take all info provide there with a grain of salt as it is a humorous website. Neverless a brilliant website that makes me laugh.
Tin foil hats don't work, though not because those who wish they do were "crazy."
The entangled minds and disembodied voices are real and taboo to speak of (only one critizable as "crazy" or "crackpot" would try.)
Throughout all human history there have been a small minority of humanity who have developed the "power" to travel among and manipulate minds. In this modern age this capability has grown (on an "industrial" scale.)
This secret is regulated by extortion and ostracization (this comment will invariably be down voted because of those among you who "refuse to believe."
Read my comment history. I am a renegade of thought control and I tell all.
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