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Comment by lithocarpus | Hacker News Reader

Really?

All this time the chemtrail people I know have been talking about weather control, I hadn't heard of mind control being part of it.

My take has been yeah I know cloud seeding and solar geoenhineering is real, ergo some amount of chemtrails are "real" in that they are deliberate particulate being sprayed and not just water. While the thing the chemtrail people claim that seems dubious is the scale and other nuances - claiming that all contrails are chemtrails. It's the scale that we don't know and that I assume it's pretty small because it seems expensive and pointless to do it constantly. But I don't know how I could ascertain the scale at which it's done either.

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The chemtrail conspiracies have always been a catch all for any idea except "it's a contrail or non-hidden spraying of some sort". To quote the 20 year old snapshot of the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chemtrail_conspir...:

> The term "chemtrail" should not be confused with other forms of aerial dumping (e.g. crop dusting, cloud seeding, aerial firefighting, although the principle is much the same. It specifically refers to covert, systematic, high-altitude dumping of unknown substances generally for some illicit purpose, be it that of Governments, terrorists, private corporations, or all of the above.

> Among the theories proposed for the purpose of the alleged "chemtrails": atmospheric and weather modification, biological warfare, mind control, occult purposes, or other functions associated with a New World Order.

So sprayed metal particles from airplanes for weather modification are only "chemtrails" if it's done covertly.

Language sure is interesting.

I guess there's also a spectrum of what covert means. If a government does this but only announces it in places where only a few people hear about it from the official source, I guess that still counts as public and so not chemtrails.

I'd say not quite, but closer. The original

> Any idea except "it's a contrail or non-hidden spraying of some sort"

Meaning the chemtrail conspiracy is "contrails are actually cover ups for chemical spraying that isn't otherwise known", not just "if chemical spraying is covert, then people made a language rule saying it should be referred to as a chemtrail instead".

I.e. chemtrails refers specifically to the conspiracy about a contrail based cover up for covert chemical spraying by world powers, not just a term for a claim that someone somewhere has sprayed chemicals covertly.

Ok. All of the handful of folks I've heard talk about chemtrails used the word to refer to the contrail that they thought had something added to it.

Exactly! That's spot on. Conspiracy of covert chemical spraying via contrail cover up.

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