Jon Ronson's book Men Who Stare at Goats is a terrifying exploration of what these programs were really about.
Make no mistake, these programs were prototypes for still-ongoing attacks on the American public.
However there is still a healthy segment of society that are critical of these criminal agencies. There is still a lot more to be revealed.
Needs evidence.
They are apparently common enough that HBGary proposed a collaboration with Palantir to use them against Glenn Greenwald [2].
[1] https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
[2] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110209/22340513034/leake...
Saying "the intelligence community is horrible" isn't the same as "these programs were prototypes for still-ongoing [mind control] attacks on the American public."
One plausible interpretation is that these were mainly efforts in coercive control, rather than Hollywood style "mind control". We have extensive records of comparable efforts in East Germany [2], and it is reasonable to suspect that the American programs followed a similar thread of "research". Why wouldn't they? The tactics were apparently very successful.
If you buy that argument, then the cited examples are logical successors. It is very easy to dismiss "mind control" programs as a weird vestige of a bygone era, but I think it is unlikely that institutions drew no durable lessons from them.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...
Saying there are other ways to try to get people to do what they want - especially at a population level as the OP claimed - is a completely different proposition.
I've linked elsewhere to IARPA SHARP which is the closest thing to actual mind control.
Do I think intelligence agencies try to manipulate public opinion by methods similar to advertising agencies? Yes absolutely! Do I think this this is mind control or anything resembling that? No, and I think it's important to note that despite all the leaks (Snowden, Wikileaks, etc etc) there is no hints that I'm wrong about this.
If you think the guess is bad, that's fair. It's another thing to get hung up on the semantics of "mind control".
Propaganda is not the same as the mind control they are talking about or the OP claimed is being used at the population level.
The Big Lie is that the program ended. Most people believe it, although not for any defensible reason.
Have you not been paying attention?
Apparently I'm paying more attention to what this is specifically about than you are!
I think you're being intentionally disingenuous. No sane person can look at those social control programs and think "well this is innocuous" or "compatible with the free and open society"...
Project Bluebird was in the 1950s which the article is about.
You seem to be just pulling in all kinds of bad intelligence products. I'm not arguing that at all.
The purpose is the justification of endless war and as we have seen, are quite effective at swaying American public opinion. cf., ISIS, et al,.
So an enormous waste of money that achieved nothing?
> Make no mistake, these programs were prototypes for still-ongoing attacks on the American public.
Take your conspiracy theories elsewhere.
Never mind that we already knew this since COINTELPRO.
Specifically to the mind control, since that is what this is about.
Psychological manipulation includes things like advertising and PR, so that isn't the same thing at all.
This is a great example: take something that did happen (experiments 40+ years ago), combine it with something more recent people know about in passing ("Men who state at goats" - which I'd note was exactly about how it didn't work at all), and then use it to project into the idea that it must be more advanced today and mysterious forces are using it.
Indeed, the idea of taking something that did happen, and then weaving it into lots of other random things to hide it in the noise (like this comment does) is a tactic often used by intelligence operatives. There's a conspiracy theory for you to think about!
I'd note that there is no evidence given at all.
The OP could have spoken about the recent IARPA SHARP brain stimulation program[1] which is probably the most advanced research in this area. But clearly they didn't know about that or they'd also know how hard it is to make work and how far away from mind control it is!
The fact that you think what they were doing didn't work demonstrates, itself, that in fact what they really were doing did work: they misled you about what they were doing, with complete success.
Quite the opposite.