What’s up today? (Part 1)

Certainly a lot of this going on now … almost like they want it to be the next ongoing crisis. To have one attack after another in this way, it seems would be likely that there is some major funding behind some of these hackers.

Of course the NSA developing and then “releasing” (accidentally of course) it’s hacking tools a few years back, probably has not helped either.

What do I know though right … just a crazy conspiracy theorist who thinks the State is organized crime.

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So I mean its pretty big it seems over there.

Many hospital appointments are being cancelled (e.g. radiology etc) - almost a total shutdown of a lot of operations.

Wow

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Sure there is major funding going into this and many other forms of online crime that are easy to perpetrate, low risk and high reward. No reason to see this as a conspiracy. It’s exactly what we should expect to happen without a need for anything but criminal individuals and organisations. It’s a trend that has been visible and building for years.

I was one of a few thousand targeted in the eighties by ransomware sent by post on 5.25" floppy disk to addresses throughout the UK - possibly the first case of this kind, and it has evolved and grown remarkably steadily since then.

Seeing things as conspiracies without evidence they are is I expect the definition of a conspiracy theorist.

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Really wanna hear the full story to this! Always the pioneer!

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I do tend to assume conspiracy first in most of these sorts of things - but I don’t formulate a theory about it, instead I just wait and see what comes out - often the truth reveals itself in time.

Happened to write this earlier on my minds.com account:

Conspiracy is in the very nature of man. As a man can’t do nearly as much on his own, many men will chose to partake and profit in conspiracies.

The weakest of men pack up like dogs into simple gangs … The more middle of the road IQ ones join mafia groups. The slightly above average IQ ones become cult leaders (politicians). And even the smartest of people group up and conspire - for good or for evil - for example private company boardrooms plan and keep secrets to protect their intellectual property or to hide their crimes.

The fool however, fearing this power beyond his own, disavows it’s existence … until the day it knocks on his door.

Of course the masses will believe whatever they like and often there are dozens of experts who are very persistent in their efforts to inform them of the correct “facts”.

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December 1989: Several thousand floppy disks containing the AIDS Trojan, the first known ransomware, are mailed to subscribers of PC Business World magazine and a WHO AIDS conference mailing list. This DOS Trojan lies dormant for 90 boot cycles, then encrypts all filenames on the system, displaying a notice asking for $189 to be sent to a post office box in Panama in order to receive a decryption program. (link)

Not much more to tell personally. I received the disk, was sufficiently suspicious of it not to run the program, and now wish I hadn’t thrown it away as it is part of malware history.

The full story I’ve only just read myself and I recommend it because it is a scream.

You simply would not believe it if you heard it from some guy in the pub, and I’m a bit skeptical now. Check it out (scroll down to “AIDS Trojan”): Episode 5 | Malicious Life

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You did put forward a conspiracy theory. Not very elaborate, but that’s not needed because you referenced one of the perennial conspiracies. You don’t need to write a book about lizards in human skin in my view, spreading the ideas without any basis is enough.

The cartoon is an example of the unreasonable logic which operates here. Someone puts forward an idea without basis, and later when evidence emerges to substantiate it they make a thing of having been right while conveniently disregarding any times they’ve been wrong, with the implication we should believe other evidence free ideas they have.

That’s very common in the people who like and propagate baseless ideas and conspiracies. Someone was right on one thing so believe them on others. It’s a skill to spot those who put forward ideas which sound plausible while including errors, inconsistencies etc. Some are very good at spotting people who do this because they have learned to spot the same errors in their own thinking. But I don’t think the majority are good at this, and that’s why most people prefer to find trusted sources and rely on those instead. This can of course leave them open to being deceived and manipulated by those sources.

So it’s good to not believe everything from any source and to spot cases where things are fishy, and where it is worth the effort to question or do you own research, check with others etc.

This ability is a natural and useful human trait. We can’t go about checking the basis for everything we hear, so we take most things on trust. We might trust individuals we believe know what they are talking about on a specific topic. Or be convinced when we hear things from multiple individuals etc.

This is a skill which like many other human traits can go wrong, is open to manipulation, people not having developed sufficient analytical and cognitive skills etc.

Nobody can get everything right, but many people think they are right when they are clearly wrong, or clearly don’t have sufficient evidence to make a claim of such significance credible etc. Humans don’t like uncertainty, so find it hard to hold a position of “I believe X but I also know I might be wrong”. People who can hold that no matter how convinced they are have developed a very important skill IMO.

This makes it amazingly hard to show someone how they are wrong when they themselves are convinced. Not least if they’ve not actually developed the idea themselves, perhaps because they lack the ability to develop and validate ideas based on evidence, weighing sources, spotting fallacies etc.

And such people, rejected for their obvious mistakes by those they want to convince, can now congregate together easily online, reinforcing their flawed thinking. This in turn lays them open to new ideas which appeal to their misconceptions, seeded by shock jocks, social media influencers, charismatic politicians, podcasters, chat rooms etc all of which are places where manipulation is to be expected. Much more serious manipulation is going on too, and ironically finds its way into the conspiracies, not least because there is some truth in it.

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?? Did I? What was that?

Edit: I’m assuming you mean my belief that the State is organized crime.

Yeah, so if that was what you were referring too, I didn’t formulate that theory either, but after reviewing the evidence of the last several hundred years of history I do feel pretty confident about it.

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Any luck this will lead him to the Safe Network eventually.

It’s proof of work. It isn’t going to be both popular and energy efficient.

I agree with your take on conspiracies @happybeing but would add that this can work on many different levels which we all can get unwittingly caught up in. The “people, rejected for their obvious mistakes” can be truly massive groups rubbing shoulders with some of the most highly regarded people in society, their status quo serving conspiracy not only going mostly unchallenged decade after decade but held up as the highest form of accomplishment and congratulated unanimously by “respected” mainstream media.
You posted about just such a conspiracy as if it were fact that can be learned from by a person who is/was part of a cohort that have a very long dismal track record when we analyse the hard data. (I gave references to a whole university series detailing the hard discrediting data here). Unfortunately this particular conspiracy has very real world consequences and has led/continues to lead to large scale human suffering… but at least it is now being addressed on the researcher fringe (episode 71 introduces an excellent UK researcher for example). This recent piece addresses some of the falsehoods that were talked about in that original link you posted, “bad spreadsheet error in a study of the fiscal limit”, indeed. Conspiracies easily falsified by hard data yet accepted as truth by very large groups, serving the interests of a very few.

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I agree with that, but not with the rest of your point (below). I may not have been clear but I’m suggesting those who I described as seeking out / being drawn towards, and propagating “obvious mistakes” in their arguments will tend to be drawn together because they find themselves in a minority (“rejected”). They may then feel validated by others with similar ways of thinking.

Occasionally a majority can form around something which seems to become orthodoxy (e.g. Nazi fascism), but that can also be false with many keeping silent because they have to rather than because they agree. I don’t know if that’s consistent with what you say above but it doesn’t look like it to me.

I don’t see the following as conspiracy but haven’t time to re-read it all carefully in order to see why you might call it that, and I didn’t present it as fact.

I said, “Best, and most balanced explanation I’ve read about how money works, particularly in relation to government borrowing and money printing” so I’m not sure why you think I’m saying this is fact. A fact is not the same as an explanation, but something beyond reasonable dispute. The words “best” and “most balanced” show openness to ideas from a range of perspectives, and also that there are likely better explanations out there because I don’t profess to know enough about the topic myself.

The language I used is very different to that of the kind of people I try to characterise in my reply to Tyler.

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I agree you did not try to hard sell that conspiracy, but do note that all conspiracies are sold as reasonable balanced positions to take by their proponents. We are all susceptible on some level.

If interested I have referenced 73 educational videos (so far) which will try to undo a lifetime of conspiracy laden propaganda, with a heavy dose of hard data, analysis and links to further data. It impacts nearly everything in our society including this cryptocurrency space. Maybe at some future date if your interested you may wish to discuss it further.

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I’m going to step away now, which doesn’t mean I accept the above.

I’ll note that one of the ways to avoid being drawn into conspiracy theories is to seek out information independently and from a wide variety of sources rather than consume a stream of information collated by an individual or group who have a view they wish you to accept. You could liken this approach to the random selection and churn used to secure Safe Network.

That’s not the only reason I’m not going to sample your videos, but its an important one.

I find that I get a good enough understanding of most issues through my own curiosity and understanding, and am not impressed by the strength of someone’s conviction as much as I am how they present their argument and any evidence they feel is relevant. Conviction doesn’t mean somebody is wrong, but I do find it is often present in people with what I characterised as poor thinking earlier.

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Censoring is a curious way to be curious, but as you wish. There are other sources (See the publications by that independent UK researcher for example), and in the future If your interested I can provide them or you will stumble on them yourself if you pull on this thread. I just started with the most palatable/readable to a general audience ones.

I understand your position, as you yourself said:

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The language you used there is an example of poor argumentation. It’s incorrect and off the point.

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You were taking @TylerAbeoJordan to task for his distrust of big government, but just like you he also was not stating it as a fact but as a personal opinion backed up with a reasonable self-guide to wait and see:

Then you wrote a pretty good argument about how conspiracies are perpetuated and defended. I pointed out that we are all susceptible to it, and used an example of one that you yourself posted by an ex central banker, that in your personal opinion found “best”:

The data if you do ever dig into it, is definitive. This is a particularly insidious conspiracy almost everything that ex central banker is writing about is backwards from a current and historical basis… but does serve a certain slither of society quite nicely. A true monetary policy conspiracy and one that has brought untold amounts of suffering/death to populations around the world and enriched a very small cohort. Don’t take my word for it though…

Yes, that describes most monetary policy pretty well, more than occasionally. The good thing about this particular monetary policy conspiracy is that there is a load of evidence and hard economic stats to show it for what it is, and a small but growing list of professionals calling it out.

Well here is the rub. Unless you actually work in or near this field (and even then) you most likely will have a hard job just stumbling randomly on the other side of the monetary policy conspiracy. Almost the entirety of the financial press is omits to examine it**, as do the central bankers most of the time, or most economists who want to be published in high impact journals or come/go to a “good” economic universities. Economists do not learn monetary history as part of the course, concepts like “banks” and “money” are in no econometric model used today to set central bank policy. Why is that? You almost never see “rebel” economists like Steve Keen and the few others like him invited to mainstream financial media to give the other side of the story (despite them quoting from him often enough, usually in a negative light).

Out of massive frustration there is a worldwide economist student protest movement trying to bring the sort of data I am referencing into the light and change the whole profession from the inside, with little effect so far because the economics profession sometimes advances one funeral at a time***. Mostly its plain falsehoods just continue to serve elites well, no need to ask questions.

No, all these groups are all not self censoring in some weird coordinated conspiracy like you see in a movie. As Noam Chomsky succinctly points out, to get to a position of influence and power: If they believed something different, they wouldn’t been sitting where they are sitting. There are public cracks in the ranks all the time, dozens to cite and explore. Quickly papered over… and the large conspiracy at societies expense marches on another decade.

So no like most laypersons you are unlikely to stumble upon it casually.

I did take the time to post it to inform and help though…

I don’t care much for the flowery concepts like how someone “presents their argument”, or whether or not the “strength of someone’s conviction” sways me to even consider it. Personally I prefer: Show Me The Data. It keeps things simpler and easier to navigate. Less emotion.

There are words for the style of argument your presenting directly above: Ad hominem. You label me a poor thinker so any idea or data I present is not even worth considering (“I’m not going to sample your videos”/links). If that does not fit the pure definition of censoring of ideas from your personal consideration, I do not know what will. I know you can be better than that. If your still not interested in the worldwide student movement behind this, or the assortment of places I curated for you that make the case with oodles of data to back it up… because you don’t like how I dress my messages (or not), is no skin off my nose. Someone else may find it useful so it is still worth making the effort.

The links I have presented are very relevant to the Safe Network. I wrote some years ago touching on it here and @oetyng found some value in it. IIRC he is now in charge of SN economic policy… no easy nut to crack as at its heart the problem is us humans: hoarding ever more desperately in times of stress when free flowing medium of exchange is required the most, and vice versa. With a limited view of the overall economy how can you hit the breaks, or step on the gas, and in what proportion. Tying into this there is a lot of misconception about “hard money” in the cryptocurrency sphere like it can only be a good thing, yet many historical examples going back centuries have shown that hard fixed supply money will eventually grind a relatively closed economic system like the SN to a halt for the majority without countermeasures. Absolutely nothing like a central bank does however (who surprisingly do not actually do money - hence our 12 odd years of worldwide but uneven economic stagnation, coined “The silent depression”). Bitcoin does not have the problem as it is not a whole monetary system to serve itself like the SN will be. There is a lot of insight, knowledge and historic examples buried in the links I have posted in the last few posts if anyone is interested in digging further and learning. You will not be disappointed.

** Except for a few small oasis here and and there like a minority of FT Alphaville contributors. UK editor interviewed in episodes 58a/b/c
*** Notice where that video was published… hard to get any mainstream financial press airtime here.

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You can tell your language has been subverted when the only term to describe someone who has thoughts or theories about a crime committed by two or more people is thought to mean essentially the opposite, and disregarded.

Am I missing another obvious one? What is the non-disparaging, non-negating, term for someone who has theories about a crime committed by two or more people?

I’m sure for many it has to do with something “official”. I assume this is not coincidence.

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Just a quick note: I’m not in charge of anything really. I just come up with ideas and bring in other ideas and combine into solutions.

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