Anonymous

Anonymous is back: https://twitter.com/ASB_Breaking/status/1266939977709084672

As far as I can tell, though, it's mostly just a dramatic video; I see no evidence they've actually *done* very much. And we all know that "genuine" isn't really something you can apply to Anonymous. They have no organizational structure; just a bunch of people in IRC channels some of whom get together and do stuff. It really is just a name and an imagery that people can pick up and put down as they choose. It carries some weight because of past things that have happened under its umbrella, but at its core it's true anarchism.

This is *evidenced* by the fact that so far they've... DDoSed the Minneapolis police department. CloudFlare's protection is already kicking in there; it loaded extremely slowly when I tried it, and I saw the CloudFlare protection screen, but it is up and I was able to access it-- and not just the CloudFlare snapshot; a second try ten minutes later got me the actual page and no more slowness. Besides which, DDoSing something shows you can get access to a botnet, which I gather isn't hard if you're the sort of person who knows how to visit darknet sites. It's not a terribly impressive feat of hacktivism. Certainly it doesn't merit the kind of drama and "YAY ANONYMOUS" that's starting to be all over Twitter, and it's definitely not the kind of "We will expose all your secrets" promised by that video.

Though I do agree with the people on Twitter going "Good job on accessibility for including captions."

Anonymous, Part II

I'm seeing a list, attributed to Anonymous, of settlements of child rape cases associated with Trump.

It's not from Anonymous; it's from Legal Schnauzer. It was posted there publicly in January 2019 and it still is. It is probably not real. Not because I find Trump getting away with such things for a long time beyond the bounds of possibility (just look at Epstein), but because of who has this news and who doesn't. I know it's fashionable to blame mainstream media for ignoring things these days, but Roger Shuler, who runs Legal Schnauzer, is not a trustworthy independent source. Pretty much every time he's wound up in court on a defamation charge he's lost (which is really hard to do when you're writing about public figures), and while there are a *lot* of questions about whether that time he was arrested was an overstep on First Amendment grounds, pretty much all the First Amendment people being concerned about him were like "yes he's an inflammatory liar about everything; you just can't jail him for that" (which is true), so this is not an argument for his truthfulness. In general he doesn't source anything he's saying and going looking for any other hint of anyone else saying it produces nothing.

But sometimes he does give a source. In the post we're discussing, he sources something called the Wayne Madsen Report.

Y'all. Wayne Madsen has also said the that the USS Cole was bombed by Israel and that Obama was secretly gay, and The Guardian once had to pull a story based on information from him because it was found out to be flagrantly untrue. He's a conspiracy theorist. You can't trust anything he says. (If you're about to go "But even a stopped clock is right twice a day!" I will point out you still need evidence. If he's the only person saying a thing and there's no evidence, it's probably not true.)

While we're talking about this, if it were to be true, it would be including the names of child rape victims. That right there is a warning sign that whoever you're talking to at the very least doesn't care about collateral damage, especially in a situation like Trump, and that's a warning sign that you should be doing a more thorough check on their facts.

And while there are plenty of problems with the way mainstream media is covering the protests, sometimes the reason the media is ignoring a thing is because it isn't true. Do you *really* think someone like Ronan Farrow would be ignoring this if there was *any* evidence for it?

There's plenty of awful stuff Trump has done that we have real, good evidence for. There's no need to invent more.

(If you're someone who saw right off that this is a conspiracy theory and want to know why I'm bothering to spend time debunking it... well, two reasons. One, the name Anonymous carries a lot of weight with people who don't realize they're not like a journalistic organization-- that this is probably completely different people and "it came from Anonymous" is not in itself a reason to trust it the way "It came from The Guardian" might be. Two, people making up child rape to make a political point pisses me off.)

MK ULTRA

I've been listening to Endless Thread's special five-part Madness series, which is about Ewen Cameron, widely accepted as the author of the most horrific of the MK ULTRA experiments.

Apparently psychic driving is *not* a procedure invented by Hannibal. Apparently it is a real thing that Cameron was actually doing. The podcast takes pains to note in the beginning that things bear resemblance to Brave New World and implies that he was pulling more of his psychological theory from science fiction than actual science. While I can believe that to a point, I've read enough about the early history of psychiatric institutes to know that that didn't make him particularly unusual, even in the fifties and sixties-- he was not doing any of this *that* much later than lobotomies were the highest of psychiatric fashion.

Similarly, while the podcast implies he invented insulin shock therapy, that well predated him and was quite widespread. I can *kinda* see how you get from that to sleep comas as a therapeutic agent, but as with a lot of psychiatry at the time it didn't work. Also he very quickly moved from treating schizophrenia to mind control. Which he was still claiming was therapeutic.

This podcast seems much more shocked by Cameron's behavior than I would be-- while his behavior is undeniably *awful* it's more a matter of degree than kind in terms of abuses going on at the time, and I think it's important to remember that, not to excuse him, but to make it clear that the whole profession was doing some bad stuff. There's a deep trek into the moral vicissitudes of "How does someone who was actually a fairly competent and accomplished psychiatrist in many respects wind up doing this awful stuff to people and keep doing it even when it's clearly not helping them" that I think bears some comparison to the "Stop using 'inhuman monster' to describe rapists" movement: ordinary people are capable of great diversity within themselves which includes being quite capable of monstrous acts, and it has more to do with a strong sense of your own importance coupled with never coming up against anyone willing to set boundaries or enforce consequences than it does with some innate sort of monstrousness.

But the very fact that I don't find it shocking in the context of what I already know about psychiatric practice at the time that wasn't an experiment makes me wonder just how much cross-pollination and bleedthrough there was-- Cameron, after all, was presenting at least some of his results at psychiatric conferences, and I can only assume others were as well, especially since most of them didn't know they were being funded by the CIA. Given the sheer scale of it, it wouldn't be surprising if that affected psychiatric practice more generally. The reverse could also be true, since Cameron got recruited on the strength of experiments he was already doing on things that hadn't occurred to the CIA on their own, that they saw him presenting at conferences--and this explicitly calls out Cameron as the author of some of the most awful MK ULTRA things. Hospital personnel telling the journalist that broke it that they were afraid of Cameron but didn't approve reminds me of the lobotomy craze; there were plenty of people who disapproved of that but weren't willing to risk professional opprobium from people who were at the top of the field.

(So I realized that part of the problem I was having with "consuming engaging and thought-provoking media" was having no one to discuss it with afterwards. So guess what y'all get to read about now!)