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Army Psy Ops Units Targeted American Senators
Weezul writes "The US Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in 'psychological operations' to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war. An officer who tried to stop the operation was railroaded by military investigators. (see also the Hatch Act of 1939)."
So basically the army used its soldiers as lobbyists?
The only morally correct way to convince someone of your position is to present the evidence (and the rationale).
Any manipulation beyond that is a deliberate attempt to derail the other person's rationality and force them into making a decision that might not be in properly alignment with their loyalties and interests, and hence is potentially harmful to the person and hence morally wrong.
PsyOps is a weapon, and has the same moral status as any weapon. Firing weapons at our own senators is also morally wrong.
We gave up any meaningful right when we signed the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, & any remaining freedoms with the PATRIOT Act of 2001, so what say you, puny civilians?
Holy cow are you people starting to sound like broken records. Is this the answer to all questions? The Federal Reserve Act?! What is wrong with our schools?
RTFA. This was more than looking up voting records. They were targeting their fellow Americans with techniques designed specifically for use against the enemy, which is prohibited by law for good reason. It's no different than if a soldier pointed his rifle at a visiting politician and said, "Senator, vote for the new defense appropriations bill or I'll blow your head off."
You may be right that it's the same thing any business or news organization would do. The difference is that We, the People, do not invest in Microsoft or the New York Times the authority to kill people in our name. The rules are different for the military, and they damn well should be. If you want to live in a country where the military runs like a business, there are plenty of places in the world for you to try. Most of them aren't very pleasant places to live. Why don't you give it a shot, so to speak -- the experience will be very educational for you, if you survive it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
So you do that and now there are less resources for some other commander and so his men die instead. Since you subverted the rational decision making process there were more total deaths since resources were not allocated optimally. Congratulations you killed bunch of Americans because you know best.
Actually why bother with the government at all? You're the commander the soldiers follow your orders - just a quick overthrow of the elected government and you can just allocate the resources as you see fit - this if clearly a good thing, since you know best.
That slope is very slippery.
As convinced as you are that your position is the correct one, it is always possible that you are simply mistaken. In that case, someone else's objective position might save a lot of people from the bad consequences of your mistake. That is one reason why brainwashing (or equivalent) is morally wrong....you might force someone to agree with you when you should have been disagreed with.
If you can't convince your audience via reason and evidence, then you don't deserve their agreement.
Of course......if our senetors are actully outright corrupt then they should be overthrown....though that is a different situation entirely.
Put on your tinfoil hats, cause this is how it works: The rich elite that control the central banks finance the politicians that run the military that invade the land of the sand people to take their oil to benefit the bankers that have conveniently invested in the most wasteful forms of energy because waste means profit through cyclical consumption & designed obsoletance which is the same reason you can't clean the fucking fan so it runs out of warrantee so you end up having to run to the store to buy another one because it's broken so open the door get on the floor everybody walk the dinosaur.
uhhh... i hear you on the patriot act, but you do realize that the fed was brought into existence not because of some retarded senator palpatine style freedom destroying plot, which seems to be the way you think, but because people were sick of banking panic after banking panic laying waste to the economy and people's lives and financial well being:
http://history1800s.about.com/od/thegildedage/a/financialpanics.htm
and although i'd really love to hear your john birch society conspiracy theories about the fed, i'm sorry, but i have an appointment with economic reality and psychological stability that i really must keep, adieu
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Pertinent: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/10/11/
Didn't work, did it? The panics of 1930-1933 were the worst yet.
Actually, it's more like conning than selling. Do you actually think that they are required to tell the truth when coercing them? Also, one of the biggest proponents of the 11 billion that the country has pissed away was influenced by the unit, so I'm assuming it may have had at least a little impact. What's also scummy about this is that he explicitly used a unit meant only for the enemy on US citizens (which is EXACTLY what the law says NOT to do). On top of that, in order to can his case, they ruined the career of a female major under him, saying she had inappropriate relationships with him.
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yes, so we got the FDIC added, along with the glass steagall act banking protections... which were underminded starting with reagan, legislated around further through clinton, and gutted under bush ii (hey SEC: stop doing your job, there's no guy pulling off a giant ponzi scheme, naaah). leading to, surprise! the crash of 2008
anything else i can help you with?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The Fed shares only a small part of the blame.
1. Dual mandate of price stability and employment--came from Congress, and pulled the Fed out of areas where it's equipped to act.
2. A more regressive tax structure, started under Reagan.
3. Massive, unnecessary wars started by GWB.
4. Well meaning, but in retrospect ill advised government efforts to encourage home ownership. Also not something the Fed did.
If you're blaming the Fed, it's like blaming the tail for wagging the dog. Some people even go so far as to argue that the ability to print money causes wars. If you look at history, you see that the war comes first, then they turn to money printing. The gold standard does NOT keep people honest, honestly! As soon as government has a reason, they immediately trash the gold standard. As one author put it, "the gold standard is as good as the paper it's written on".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
My point was, the evidence of the past 2 centuries does not bear out your argument. The advent of central banking in the United States has not significantly reduced the number of nor severity of economic "panics".
You linked to a list of bank panics of the 19th Century, but neglected to differentiate between the ones that occurred with and without central banks. You also didn't compare and contrast to a list of bank panics in the 20th Century, after the creation of the Fed.
You said "this was bad" and "here is the fix", but didn't actually look at any evidence of whether or not the fix WORKED. And in this last post you resort to ad hominem attacks.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
...and the S&L deregulation went so well...
Pssst...
All money was created out of thin air. (well, out of a cotton/paper pulp, ink, and some printing presses, but I digress)
All money is only worth what other people are willing to give you in exchange for it. All gold is only worth what other people are willing to give you in exchange for it. What's the difference? With gold-backed currency, people are trading pieces of paper that they believe might be able to get them some amount of gold to other people who value the piece of paper that may be worth some small amount of gold, for some good or service that they believe is worth less (to themselves) than that amount of gold.
With fiat currency, all you do is take the 'gold' out of the equation; functionally, there's no other difference.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal