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Where did the idea of the tin foil hat come from?

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Re: Where did the idea of the tin foil hat come from?

#41

Post by swader999 »

bee_rider wrote: post #9

These days, conspiracy theorists seem to be some of the most open to manipulation folks out there. > Even though “tin foil hat” is the expression, most people use aluminum foil these days. This is probably why, we’ve been duped! They replaced the tin with aluminum. Everyone knows aluminum has mind control enhancing, not reducing, powers.

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.

Re: Where did the idea of the tin foil hat come from?

#42

Post by blueflow »

spacebacon wrote: post #7

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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundaries_of_the_mind

These are called "Tropes" and their workings teached in literature classes.

As tropes are fiction and tradited, it is important to be able to differentiate between facts and tropes.

Re: Where did the idea of the tin foil hat come from?

#43

Post by bee_rider »

swader999 wrote: post #41
bee_rider wrote: post #9

These days, conspiracy theorists seem to be some of the most open to manipulation folks out there. > Even though “tin foil hat” is the expression, most people use aluminum foil these days. This is probably why, we’ve been duped! They replaced the tin with aluminum. Everyone knows aluminum has mind control enhancing, not reducing, powers.

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.

Re: Where did the idea of the tin foil hat come from?

#44

Post by bee_rider »

swader999 wrote: post #40
bee_rider wrote: post #9

These days, conspiracy theorists seem to be some of the most open to manipulation folks out there. > Even though “tin foil hat” is the expression, most people use aluminum foil these days. This is probably why, we’ve been duped! They replaced the tin with aluminum. Everyone knows aluminum has mind control enhancing, not reducing, powers.

Shout out to the Kozyrev mirror re the aluminum reference. Go see the why files YouTube episode on that for a fun hour.

I just happened across the aluminum bit on Wikipedia, I guess I’ll have to look up that YouTube.

Re: Where did the idea of the tin foil hat come from?

#46

Post by hooverd »

blue_dragon wrote: post #31

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 tenden…

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.

Re: Where did the idea of the tin foil hat come from?

#47

Post by mrguyorama »

illuminant wrote: post #13
animaomnium wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. That is all.

[flagged]

"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"

Re: Where did the idea of the tin foil hat come from?

#48

Post by ManuelKiessling »

moralestapia wrote: post #36
blue_dragon wrote: post #31

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 tenden…

??? Is this /s? ChatGPT? Both?

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.

Re: Where did the idea of the tin foil hat come from?

#49

Post by swader999 »

bee_rider wrote: post #43
swader999 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's the media complicity in this, them not questioning the escalation, that leans towards my conspiratorial angle.

Re: Where did the idea of the tin foil hat come from?

#50

Post by swader999 »

bee_rider wrote: post #44
swader999 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shout out to the Kozyrev mirror re the aluminum reference. Go see the why files YouTube episode on that for a fun hour.

I just happened across the aluminum bit on Wikipedia, I guess I’ll have to look up that YouTube.

Here you go: https://youtu.be/a9hwXoCrEUs?si=QuXoCOWQi_ifGcsr
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