On the other hand, is being concerned about false flags intrinsically just being a nutter? Equally unlikely to be realistic. First, we do have historical evidence that it is a thing that has happened before, and second, it's not like it's that crazy an idea. Follow the money & benefits, and there's an awful lot of people today and historically that would have an awful lot of motivations to pull one off.
If you think everything is a false flag, you're too paranoid. If you think false flags never happen, or at least that it's impossible anyone would pull one on you, first, you're too trusting. Second, that very trust ironically increases the chances that someone will consider it a risk worth taking. False flags work best when the very idea that something would be a false flag is easily pooh-poohed and dismissed. Dismissing them out of hand is not a great strategy, IMHO.
The fact that there's an internet competition to be the first to declare something a false flag is simply meaningless. There's an internet competition to be the first to declare a movie a disaster, the first to declare that a game is a disaster, the first to declare that someone's Ask HN project is worthless... it's all just irrelevant noise, not evidence of anything in any direction.
False flag operations certainly happen[1]. It just takes a long amount of time for whistleblowers to leak information providing information to confirm such a fact.
[1]https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-ever-growing-list-of-admit...
What this _does_ prove is what the US is willing to even _consider_ doing to justify various things it wants to accomplish. So at some point you must at least consider that an event _could_ have been a false flag, don't you? Even if you come to the conclusion it wasn't, to write it off entirely without consideration is almost as irresponsible as claiming every major event is a false flag.
It doesn't even begin to prove that. It proves that the US military, which has plans and contingencies for nearly every imaginable scenario, has plans and contingencies for nearly every imaginable scenario.
And if you want to get pedantic, they most definitely don't have them for "nearly every imaginable scenario". The military would be overrun with simply coming up with plans and contingencies. They'd literally have to have infinite plans and contingencies to cover every imaginable scenario.
Really? While I knew that the papers had been released, I didn't know that they disclosed entry wounds in the front and rear of his head. I figured that would be much bigger news.
The recent NSA leaker was named "Reality Winner" FFS. Everything has turned upside down. The whole state of current US government and politics is something from a terrible pulp spy novel sold in the discount bin at and off-brand pharmacy whose brand of bandages just don't ever seem to be able to stick, but they're a third of the price of the name brand so you'll just put some medical tape over the bad side.
I follow the news somewhat regularly and most days I have a moment where I have a hard time really reconciling the events. If somebody pitched a story like the current North American reality, I'd probably politely decline to listen further out of respect for better taste and sense.
The Vegas shooter is the least strange incident to have occurred (at least this is from an outsider to the US)—following the news cycle for the past 20 years says it's not all that uncommon, or hard to understand. He was a disenfranchised person with a possible mental disorder and a growing disenchantment with the society of which he's increasingly growing apart with easy access to purchasing high-powered weaponry. To me it seems like 1 + 1. These kinds of stories are far less rare, even in Canada, than you think. It's just that most of them are far less successful in their savage response to their feelings or ruinously-broken logic.
And he was wealthy enough to buy proper machine guns. If he really wanted to go all out, why not use the right tools? Why buy a California legal gimped rifle?
"Crazy" is not an excuse for glaring plot holes.
That's not to say that there's anything to the 9/11 truthers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...
Remember the entire song and dance that surrounded the Iraq war? That was a conspiracy by the Bush administration to start a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people... On a pack of lies.
Any time a group of people gather, and, in secret, make a decision contrary to the public welfare... That's a conspiracy. This happens all the time in the world - and it's not crazy to believe that it does. It's arguably crazy to believe that it doesn't.
which is the bigger offense?
what is that, if not a fake attack for political purposes?
Did it happen? No.
Did you (initially) falsely imply it did? Yes.
This is the equivalent of shouting that a startup is proven to be on the brink of failing and lying about their finances because you've discovered a memo which notes that one of many advantages of contractors over employees is that you can get rid of them at short notice.
unsurprisingly, it doesn’t actually change my point in the slightest. maybe we can have a more interesting conversation now.
This is a "plan" to attack its own citizens in the same sense as a document noting "contractors are better from the point of view of flexibility, workforce mobility and the ability to downsize the work force" is a plan for mass firings.
I mean, the hypothetical considerations of the advantages of continuous offshore nuclear deterrents over land-based ICBMs are considerably more detailed and ugly in their implications, but I'd still consider a headline arguing "$NuclearPower planned to exterminate every man woman and child living in $RivalState after watching millions of its own citizens die" to be rather misrepresenting the intent of such documents.
The title is lurid clickbait.