I think the assumption that the gathering storm was not noticed by various intelligence agencies is a wrong one. You had to not want to notice some of chatter online and I am talking about publicly available stuff like FB, Imgur and so on; nothing fancy.
I think what I am saying is that it was allowed to happen, for one reason or another.
You’re right, it’s a bit much to say no-one came forward, but enough wasn’t done to catch what was going before it came crashing down. The comment I was replying to was implying people would notice discrepancies and we would be able to catch it.
It's not disngenous; they could have done more, but I don't think 1 then caused it and 2 had any material impact on it. It was a military/government run operation - did they need Facebook?
No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that maybe, dire things could have happened, and the only thing that prevented them from happening is the massive amount of attention that was given to the possibility of dire things happening. It is not "fake news" to talk about the practices that would have been allowed under these policies. The public outcry may have had a deterrent effect.
Nothing happened openly in that era. It couldn't; there was no "open" in any sense we'd recognize here today on HN. You, as a normal citizen, might here about the highlights of political actions a couple of days later, you certainly couldn't hear about the details, and you lacked any effective method of connecting with hundreds or thousands of other people in any reasonable period of time to do anything about it if you did. And media was hardly unbiased, with documented instances of wars all but created from whole cloth by media personalities.
All that has happened is that it turns out that merely shining a bit of light on these practices didn't make them go away. The constraint now is people's bandwidth rather than raw ability to get them information, but that didn't turn out to be so much larger than the info conduit was in the first place.
Even if you are inclined to call what Bush did a "coup" (which I am not, but I'll take it for a moment), consider the implications of the fact that not only did the word "coup" already exist, it is in fact centuries old, and still far newer than the phenomena is describes.
And as DanBC said multiple times, that was not the real reason why they were out there. You seem to be ignoring all context for why they were out there and who organized it in attempt to equate the two in a disingenuous manner. At this point it's obvious you're not here to argue in good faith.
Agreed. If I participated in that network of sympathy, I might have learned of the planned 'moment'. I would have participated.
I believe, since their ability to 'spread the word' was limited they resorted to recruiting folks to aid in hijacking unsuspecting folk into their emotional event.
Effectiveness: around zero I would think. The moment was over before I could figure out what was going on. Then: resentment.
I don't claim to be smarter than anyone, I'm just some guy. I just think the "no-one could have seen this coming" is obviously bogus when it was literally occurring at the time, just in different regions.
If I understand correctly this went on for some years. I still find it hard to comprehend how it went undetected for so long. But it did happen so it’s clearly possible
Sure, it's all speculation, not claiming otherwise. But this can be said about any historical event that was "prevented" - by definition, it didn't happen, so we can only assume that it could have happened if something didn't stop it.
Right. And I think it's often misunderstood that these parts don't actually need to have been under strict, detailed co-ordination to work, because the whole thing just needs to be set in motion when you have teams of people who can react on the ground.
But some people had advance plans to create pressure in the knowledge that it might lead to disorder, and then exploit the uncertainty in the moment. It could really all have happened, and it hinges on small moments of bravery that are well documented now but that many of those involved seem hesitant to admit to in public, which shows you that the landscape of threat still exists.
I think what I am saying is that it was allowed to happen, for one reason or another.
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