Post by Bill on Feb 6, 2007 16:54:27 GMT -5
Sound familiar or like anyone we know
blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/02/mind_control_ma.html
Mind Control Madness
Bbman_la_1 The Washington Post Magazine is open minded to the possibility that thousands of people are victims of government mind control experiments. Too open minded.
I once had a cellmate in federal lockup who was convinced the government, with the help of university scientists, had planted a microchip in his brain. He also heard people talking about him in the heating vents -- he'd sometimes yell back at them -- and believed that everybody around him, including me, had secret radio receivers on which they were listening to a private 24-7 broadcast devoting to spreading scurrilous lies about his character.
In every other way he was perfectly normal, and a genuinely nice guy. He was in custody for serving as a lookout in a marijuana smuggling operation, and he had a full and intelligent comprehension of his legal situation, and the statutes and cases that affected him. (No, he was not offering an insanity defense). If you didn't get him on the subject of the microchip or the hidden radios, you'd have no idea there was anything wrong with him, and he'd beat you at chess.
So perhaps I should write a 7,000 word story "investigating" the possibility that there really was a microchip in his brain.
Some of his beliefs are demonstrably false -- I had no secret radio receiver, and there were no voices in the vents -- so I'll gloss over those, or bury them deep in the article. That'll leave more space to write about how common his belief is: lots of people think the government has planted microchips in their brains. Surely they can't all be wrong!
The nice thing about this line of journalism is that it offers limitless material. In the '50s and '60s, mental patients believed that Russians were conspiring against them. In the '70s, they tended to think that NASA had placed a machine on the moon that controlled their brains. In the 80s it was microchips, and in the '90s it was the internet. Who's to say the CIA can't control people's appendages through their web pages. After all, as my investigative reporting will reveal, the internet is a product of military research funding.
In 2007, the delusion de jour is that the government is beaming voices into victims' minds. At Wired News, we get e-mail from self-described victims of this attack from time to time. The Washington Post Magazine story by Sharon Weinberger raises the possibility that it's all true.
Weinberger's argument rests largely on the fact that the people she interviews don't seem mentally ill to her. Her article begins with that point. "If Harlan Girard is crazy, he doesn't act the part ... Girard is wearing pressed khaki pants, expensive-looking leather loafers and a crisp blue button-down. ... At 70, he appears robust and healthy -- not the slightest bit disheveled or unusual-looking."
The word "crazy" works well here because it's an all-or-nothing proposition. If you're crazy, you're incoherent, unkempt, odd-looking, and you can't dress yourself. Since none of the people she interviewed fit that description, there must be a germ of truth in their beliefs. Right?
Of course, as with my former celly, victims of mental illness aren't always the wild-eyed, straightjacket-wearing cartoon characters that Weinberger seems to think they are. I'm not a doctor, and I don't claim to have any knowledge of her interview subjects, but 5,000 words past her description of how normal Girard looks, she describe meeting him at a train station, where he suspects that "40 or 50 people" are there just to spy on him.
The other prong in her argument is the observation that the government really is conducting research into projecting sound using microwaves. There's even a patent. This is the meat of her article, and there's some fine reporting here. But with respect to her thesis, it is pure nonsense. The fact that there really were moon launches doesn't prove that the government was controlling people's thoughts from the lunar surface. Schizophrenics draw their delusions from a common paranoiac zeitgeist, distilled from real life events, news articles, books, and, these days, websites.
That's what disturbs me the most about the article. By pretending that these people might actually be the victim of a secret government conspiracy, Weinberger and the Washington Post Magazine are contributing to that zeitgeist. This does a disservice to the victims of mental illness and their families.
If Weinberger really think that somebody she interviewed is receiving microwave messages in their head from government spooks, she should nail that story down tight and collect her Pulitzer. (Why not bring a radio spectrum analyzer to their homes?) Instead, it looks a lot like she exploited her sources' delusions to add color to an entirely unrelated story on government mind control research. For shame.
blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/02/mind_control_ma.html
Mind Control Madness
Bbman_la_1 The Washington Post Magazine is open minded to the possibility that thousands of people are victims of government mind control experiments. Too open minded.
I once had a cellmate in federal lockup who was convinced the government, with the help of university scientists, had planted a microchip in his brain. He also heard people talking about him in the heating vents -- he'd sometimes yell back at them -- and believed that everybody around him, including me, had secret radio receivers on which they were listening to a private 24-7 broadcast devoting to spreading scurrilous lies about his character.
In every other way he was perfectly normal, and a genuinely nice guy. He was in custody for serving as a lookout in a marijuana smuggling operation, and he had a full and intelligent comprehension of his legal situation, and the statutes and cases that affected him. (No, he was not offering an insanity defense). If you didn't get him on the subject of the microchip or the hidden radios, you'd have no idea there was anything wrong with him, and he'd beat you at chess.
So perhaps I should write a 7,000 word story "investigating" the possibility that there really was a microchip in his brain.
Some of his beliefs are demonstrably false -- I had no secret radio receiver, and there were no voices in the vents -- so I'll gloss over those, or bury them deep in the article. That'll leave more space to write about how common his belief is: lots of people think the government has planted microchips in their brains. Surely they can't all be wrong!
The nice thing about this line of journalism is that it offers limitless material. In the '50s and '60s, mental patients believed that Russians were conspiring against them. In the '70s, they tended to think that NASA had placed a machine on the moon that controlled their brains. In the 80s it was microchips, and in the '90s it was the internet. Who's to say the CIA can't control people's appendages through their web pages. After all, as my investigative reporting will reveal, the internet is a product of military research funding.
In 2007, the delusion de jour is that the government is beaming voices into victims' minds. At Wired News, we get e-mail from self-described victims of this attack from time to time. The Washington Post Magazine story by Sharon Weinberger raises the possibility that it's all true.
Weinberger's argument rests largely on the fact that the people she interviews don't seem mentally ill to her. Her article begins with that point. "If Harlan Girard is crazy, he doesn't act the part ... Girard is wearing pressed khaki pants, expensive-looking leather loafers and a crisp blue button-down. ... At 70, he appears robust and healthy -- not the slightest bit disheveled or unusual-looking."
The word "crazy" works well here because it's an all-or-nothing proposition. If you're crazy, you're incoherent, unkempt, odd-looking, and you can't dress yourself. Since none of the people she interviewed fit that description, there must be a germ of truth in their beliefs. Right?
Of course, as with my former celly, victims of mental illness aren't always the wild-eyed, straightjacket-wearing cartoon characters that Weinberger seems to think they are. I'm not a doctor, and I don't claim to have any knowledge of her interview subjects, but 5,000 words past her description of how normal Girard looks, she describe meeting him at a train station, where he suspects that "40 or 50 people" are there just to spy on him.
The other prong in her argument is the observation that the government really is conducting research into projecting sound using microwaves. There's even a patent. This is the meat of her article, and there's some fine reporting here. But with respect to her thesis, it is pure nonsense. The fact that there really were moon launches doesn't prove that the government was controlling people's thoughts from the lunar surface. Schizophrenics draw their delusions from a common paranoiac zeitgeist, distilled from real life events, news articles, books, and, these days, websites.
That's what disturbs me the most about the article. By pretending that these people might actually be the victim of a secret government conspiracy, Weinberger and the Washington Post Magazine are contributing to that zeitgeist. This does a disservice to the victims of mental illness and their families.
If Weinberger really think that somebody she interviewed is receiving microwave messages in their head from government spooks, she should nail that story down tight and collect her Pulitzer. (Why not bring a radio spectrum analyzer to their homes?) Instead, it looks a lot like she exploited her sources' delusions to add color to an entirely unrelated story on government mind control research. For shame.