Where did the idea of the tin foil hat come from?
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
At least, that what they want you to believe since this kind of low technology is so accessible and effective.
[...] There is a long history of using aluminum to both deflect mind control signals and to control them. Evidence suggests that the ancient Atlanteans used aluminum armor and psychotrons in their wars with the Phoenician Old Dynasty. [...] The first truly modern instance of anti-psychotronic aluminum use was in the late 18th century by the American statesman, philosopher, and inventor Benjamin Franklin. His discoveries were built upon in the beginning of the 20th century by Yugoslavian born electrical genius Nikola Tesla. Of course, the US military has been researching aluminum for use in psychotronic weapons and armor as long as it has been involved in mind control, which is to say since it's inception.
[1] https://zapatopi.net/afdb/history.html
[2] Please treat all info on the site as a joke. It is a very well done website, but I would take all info provide there with a grain of salt as it is a humorous website. Neverless a brilliant website that makes me laugh.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a...
> But the truth is...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/
Relevant:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychology-normative-cogn...
I absolutely guarantee that this isn't the origin of the term "tinfoil hat" or of people accusing people that they want to discount as "wearing a tinfoil hat." What happened was a writer came across an early mention in fiction of somebody using a metal shield to fend off mind control rays that no one read and that inspired no one, and they thought they might be able to build an article around it. Using a metal shield to fend off a charge is obvious, although when it comes to a Faraday cage around your head, your neck is a problem.
"Tinfoil hat" is an accusation. Find the first person recorded accusing someone else of wearing a tinfoil hat. Find out of the reference confused people, or if it seemed familiar to people. If it confused people, try to find whether he/she was asked to explain it. If it was familiar to people, look for other contemporaneous mentions and try again.
Feel invited to click around that site. It is a useful thing to be aware what "Tropes" are as they are fiction.
As tropes are fiction and tradited, it is important to be able to differentiate between facts and tropes.
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 tendency to scramble the control waves and render them useless. In response, the CIA launched a massive press campaign intended to smear and delegitimize the wearing of tinfoil hats, with the ultimate goal of preemptively convincing the public not to wear them via threat of social ostracization.
Considering the widespread mockery levied at the tinfoil community today, I'd say their efforts have worked quite well.
You can read more about Operation Mockingbird here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
There's no mention of this in the Wikipedia article.
Is this /s? ChatGPT? Both?
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.
>have a deep distrust of the government
sure Gizmodo, being distrustful of a massive power entity is a lunacy /s
An entity with that level of power and reach deserves extreme scepticism. As we discovered through the noble sacrifice of a lot of Chinese and Russians the people in bureaucracies are quite comfortable with accidentally causing millions of needless deaths through sheer administrative efficiency in implementing bad policies.
The problem with deep state conspiracies isn't the level of scepticism, it is that the theories don't protect the people who hold them. Knowing that a bureaucrat is willing to disarm you then starve you to death ... does not help that much when the army or secret police gets involved.
the unelected bureaucrat branch of the US government, referred to as the "deep state" by some, is so large and powerful due to funding.
The people who use the term "deep state" unironically are engaged in political activism where they are arguing for dismantling, drawing down, and defunding bureaus that they feel are out of control.
it's ironic that these activists are dismissed by you as being mere "conspiracy theories". it's like calling BLM a conspiracy theory. people who are fighting the power of unelected bureaucrats are political activists. They're just defamed by the same machine that they're opposed to. What a shock! The people in power defame and attempt to discredit those who seek to remove them from power.
Truly, if you do not understand the complaints of those who decry the undeserved and overgrown power of the deep state, you are not thinking about the position of those who hold those views long enough to understand them. You don't have to AGREE with them, but they aren't touting a conspiracy theory. The administrative state exists, is large, has power, and these are activists who want to change that.
They want to stop it before there are secret police or the army is corrupted. Of course, the CIA is secret police, and they coined the epithet "conspiracy theory" that you repeat in order to discredit these activists. Coincidence?
The government is not "an entity", it is layers and levels of elected and unelected officials working towards their own personal goals.
The idea that many of them do things that they shouldn't for personal gain is fairly obvious.
Ideas that huge numbers of them are working together in secret across both public and private sector to execute a singular master plan, fake a moon landing, mess with the population via brain wave broadcasts, spread chemtrails via commercial aircraft, etc. with zero hard evidence are on an entirely different level.
But this is a straw man. Do you know any conspiracy theorists that believe that a large percentage of the state is working together on a secret project that they have guarded from the public, or is that just the easiest thing to discount? The conspiracy theories I hear about are about small groups of people that "control things from behind the scenes."
> The government is not "an entity", it is layers and levels of elected and unelected officials working towards their own personal goals.
This is a false dichotomy. The non-existence of government as an entity is a conspiracy theory so wild that very few people believe it. It's like saying Apple doesn't exist, just some people who happen to be sitting at desks near each other that conspiracy theorists decided to make a big deal about.
The moon landing conspiracy theory is a good example. It would involve hundreds of thousands of people across public and private sector all keeping such a secret. It would even involve the governments of other countries (namely Russia, or Australia who received and relayed many of the lunar broadcasts on the US's behalf) who had their own tracking and radio equipment and could have at least attempted to discredit the mission, but did not.
Chemtrails is a common conspiracy theory as well that again would require cooperation and secret keeping among thousands across both public and private sectors.
Part of my point is that a small number of people keeping a secret for a short time is plausible, but as the number of people and length of time scale up it becomes less plausible due to human nature.
In countries with extreme state corruption, secret police, rigged elections, people being "disappeared", etc. those things are not secrets, and the problem is not a lack of evidence of the corruption.
The citizens know that the secret police exist and that you are at risk of being detained by the secret police for publicly stating forbidden positions. The citizens know the autocrat will always win each election. They are just powerless to change it.
The real question is when will they start treating skepticism as a medical condition, and how can I invest now in the drugs that will be advertised to treat it?
Of course one can have a deep distrust of the government without believing it’s run by lizard people from another planet.
Put another way without specific example or analogy: if there is some organization as large as a nation's government (thousands upon thousands of organizations, possibly millions of people) and you can't weigh things done by said government without always invoking a single nefarious/secretive plot or group being behind it every time then you've left the realm of standard or reasonable distrust and entered the realm of unfalsifiable, unhinged thinking the article is meaning by deep distrust. Even the worst governments in our world's history aren't reasonably measured that way. The alternative to this is not blind trust, it's normal distrust GP was arguing for.
That being said, you still haven’t convinced me. I claim I t’s very possible to hold deep distrust without attributing intentions/motivations to conspiratorial actions.
The act of distrusting does not require an assumption of motivations (or a nefarious/secretive plot, as you put it).
I think we both agree distrust doesn't require a universal underlying motivation but you're continuing to use "distrust" and "deep distrust" interchangeably without explaining why people should consider them interchangeable in context of the article.
One may distrust their state, but in some regards can still trust. One with deep distrust will likely never trust, their level of distrust is much higher. This does not require a conspiratorial mindset.
> 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.
It makes it much clear what is healthy paraonia and what is unhealthy paranoia. Granted what is healthy paraonia and how can there be a spectrum but - geez.
I just can't tell anymore. Maybe I could never tell.
"Conspiracy theories" are narratives counter to the status quo.
Arguably more people are "manipulated" into following the status quo.
Thus, I would argue that "conspiracy theorists" may be the least likely folks to be "manipulated."
You see that impulse a lot on HN and other forums, when they decry some study as "biased" because the author of the study is well-known to believe that what the study shows is true. For them, the people who initiate studies would ideally be people with no knowledge about or interest in the subject that they are studying. Anything less than that is obviously an intentional manipulation.
I have a soft spot for conspiracy theorists: they have such a charitable view of humanity that they believe a large number of people can keep a secret.
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.