Korean Job Discussion Forums

[OneWayTraffic]

[Ya-ta Boy]

I agree with OWT on that. Underestimating the enemy played a big role. At that point in time the US was the acknowledged #1 military power and we'd always felt protected by the oceans, not viewed them as pathways for attack and invasion.

Were the military authorities in Hawaii and the Philippines negligent and irresponsible. Yeah, given the high tensions of the time. Criminally so? Probably not, but arguable. Involved in a conspiracy to get us into war? Absolutely not.

[mindmetoo]

[Gopher]

The American govt, including both military and naval intel services, expected a probable attack. They expected an attack within East Asia, possibly directly against American interests in the Philippines.

Anything else fell outside of all intel estimates and general expectations.

No conspiracy there. An "intel failure," yes. Conspiracy, no.

Other intel failures include: failure to predict the North Korean attacks that initiated the Korean War, the Tet Offensive, the Spring Offensive, the Saigon govt's rapid collapse in 1975, the collapse of Soviet Russia and its Eastern European clients between 1989 and 1991, and 9/11, to cite only a few.

Cases where the intel system functioned and sounded advance warning: the Cuban Missile Crisis and the so-called Six Day War.

Intel failures occur all the time. Intel successes occur with much less frequency. No conspiracies here. This is what happens in the world of reading the tea leaves.

As far as those other allegations go, I can offer this as a guide: Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and a Chilean businessman with connections to American business interests in Chile named Eduardo Augustin conferred and then conspired to block Salvador Allende's election/inauguration in fall 1970. This conspiracy lasted approximately two months, in September and October, and then it failed.

I can produce the handwritten notes CIA Director Richard Helms created when Nixon and Kissinger instructed him to launch the operation. They talked to him in the Oval Office. And I can name the date, time, and tell you how Nixon stood while Kissinger and Helms sat. I can produce each and every memoranda the CIA Director, the Deputy Director for Plans and the DDP's assistant for covert action composed as they acknowledged Nixon's instructions and formed a task force to further the conspiracy. I can name the people who staffed the task force, including David Atlee Phillips, who directed it at Langley, and the CIA and DIA personnel who worked on the task force in Washington and in Santiago. I can produce their after-action reports, their final budgets, as well as, later, their accounts in their memoirs and various Senate hearings and reports from the Church Committee's investigations to the Hinchey Report. I can describe what exactly went right and what exactly caused the failure.

People who want to allege "conspiracy" or "the official story is a lie" with respect to the Kennedy family assassinations, the Moon landing, 9/11, and all the other nonsense that intrigues and obsesses them, cannot do a fraction of this. They cannot even name names, not a single name.

Yet when "conspiracies" such as the one I outline above occur, they create a library of paper evidence in their wake. Where is any of this paper with respect to the Kennedys, the Moon landing, 9/11, or any of the other alleged cover-ups?

As I have said before, conspiracy-theorists live in a world of delusions and not in the world of evidence the rest of us live in. They resort, out of desperation, to repeating and repeating and repeating their allegations again and again and again. And the best they will likely take from this post, sadly, is an accusation that I have discussed and reified a conspiracy and that this somehow, in their minds, means that everything else must have been a conspiracy, too. See? There are conspiracies!

Certainly there are. But one needs to establish them through evidence, conclusive evidence. Yes, it remains as simple as that. Be specific and cite your evidence, please.

[Ya-ta Boy]

Here is an interesting little tidbit I came across:

Mean World Syndrome

Mean World Syndrome is a phenomenaon whereby violence-related content of mass media convinces viewers that the world is more dangerous than it actually is, and prompts a desire for more protection than is warranted by any actual threat.

[Gopher]

The Wikipedia entry on this cites only a few but nonetheless good introductory sources. In any case, recognizing that "syndromes" such as this one buttress the conspiracy-theory worldview is certainly moving in the right direction -- as it very much strikes me as a dysfunction.

I also understand that much of how we see the world, whether we are mostly inclined to trust those around us or to fear them, for example, emerges very early in life. What kinds of childhoods have conspiracy-theorists lived? Has anyone looked at them as a group and collated their backgrounds?

[bacasper]

[Ya-ta Boy]

In my view, engaging in a discussion/debate about the accuracy/truthfulness of any particular piece of 'evidence' skates all too close to a folie a deux. Just discussing it as if it could be plausible lends the view 'legitimacy'.

My experience in teaching high school lead me to believe the going rate for delusional wackos was about 1% in that small town high school in those two decades of the Twentieth Century. It is my belief that the rate here at Dave's is significantly higher. Who knows the reason?

Be that as it may, here is a possible explanation: Folie � deux and its more populous cousins are in many ways a psychiatric curiosity. The current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders states that a person cannot be diagnosed as being delusional if the belief in question is one "ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture" (see entry for delusion). It is not clear at what point a belief considered to be delusional escapes from the folie �... diagnostic category and becomes legitimate because of the number of people holding it. When a large number of people may come to believe obviously false and potentially distressing things based purely on hearsay, these beliefs are not considered to be clinical delusions by the psychiatric profession and are labelled instead as mass hysteria.

Folie a deux (etc) or mass hysteria? Hmmmm... I've also noted a remarkable overlap of conspiracy theorists and libertarians. Has anyone seen any academic work on that?

[ontheway]

Yata, given that you repeatedly confuse which candidates and personalities are members of which parties, and that you cannot correctly identify the political beliefs of well known public figures, it seems unlikely that you could analyze any posters on Dave's.

[Ya-ta Boy]

Keep right on insisting Stalin was a fascist if it helps you to idealize, romanticize and sentimentalize the 19th Century, ontheway. PS: Lincoln was a good guy and FDR saved the country.

The rain this weekend was the closest thing we've had to your tsunami all year.

[bacasper]