version

Well-known member
Any of the older lot remember the Camelford incident and how it was viewed and treated at the time? I was reading about the history of water privitisation in the UK the other night and it was suggested Thatcher and the water companies covered up a bunch of people being poisoned because they were concerned it would scupper their plans to sell everything off.

 

craner

Beast of Burden
Any of the older lot remember the Camelford incident and how it was viewed and treated at the time? I was reading about the history of water privitisation in the UK the other night and it was suggested Thatcher and the water companies covered up a bunch of people being poisoned because they were concerned it would scupper their plans to sell everything off.


I was livid, I did a school project on it.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
You don't have to be aware that you're part of a conspiracy in order to perform whatever your role in it is. Someone dealing drugs on the street is part of a criminal network yet likely has no clue who's sat at the top or the overall shape of the organisation.
With thought experiments you can go much further than that I think.

Imagine one of those things where there are loads of double-triple whatever agents inside various clandestine organisations and networks battling each other. Consider a guy, Agent X let's call him, and say he works with utterly dedicated honesty to the one true cause he absolutely believes in for the entirety of his working life. But, unbeknowest to him, his boss, let's call him B, is actually a traitor or a spy or whatever, whose actions were in fact, ultimately targeted against the organisation he was supposed to be working for. Then, it's presumably the case that Agent X has in fact dedicated his whole life to fighting against the thing that he had thought he was fighting for. Arguably he has been a traitor without knowing it. Certainly he has been an unwitting conspirator.

Surely that sort of thing must happen. Quite a lot I reckon.

But let's go one step further, imagine if B had a boss in the organisation on the other side, the one where his real loyalties lay - let's call him Z - and many years later it turned out that Z was also a traitor. And suddenly it switches round... does that mean X is ok again? Does this double-betrayal cancel out? If you were X and found out that although you had been lied to and made a monkey of by your boss, you had in fact been doing the right thing (by your lights) all along, but only by an extraordinary slice of luck. How would you feel about that? Probably not as proud as you did before learning what had happened.

Does this kind of thing happen? I bet it does. And of course we could extend it further and further through as many twists as we like. It's fucking crazy right?
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
When you look at the history of US involvement in South America or the Middle East, there must be so many bits where it's just so fucking complicated.

Let's imagine we can simplify it down to just one, I dunno, theatre of combat let's say. Cut it down to "just" South and Central American gangs trying to smuggle drugs into the US. Just straight off you have (let's see) - dealer gangs (cartels) in the original countries, they probably have their own distribution in some parts of the US, but they also sell to large criminal networks based there. Also in the selling countries you have political gangs who are involved with selling drugs to finance their ideological battle*. Then you have law enforcement in the US such as the DEA and the police - and you also have secret services such as the CIA... and you probably have secret services from other countries getting involved and pissing around just for the sake of it.

So, if things were just, kinda you know, as it ought to be, then the dealers would be fighting the other dealers, and the buyers would be fighting the other buyers, and law enforcement would try and stop them and there would be no need for any secret service. But it's seems to be pretty much certain that the CIA was helping with the selling and we know that all the agencies and law enforcement groups would try and infiltrate the other groups, and of course the dealers and buyers and so on would all be spying on each other and trying to penetrate them.

So the DEA and the CIA would often be on opposite sides right? And if the groups were all infiltrating each other, then surely there would be times when you would be fighting people on the same side as you - both knowingly and unknowingly and... I just don't understand how they don't just throw up their hands and give up. How do you know what is the right thing? Who is on your side and is your side the right side and even if it is, is it doing what it is supposed to be, and even if it is how do you know individual agents aren't fucking it up and so on. It's just such a fucking mess, it's insane. Why do anything? I don't get it. Did US involvement anywhere gain them anything?


*the other day I found out that one of my friends spent six months in Columbia filming the FARC. I need to ask him a lot more about this but I've already heard some crazy stuff.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Big poster of her face in the middle of an air rifle target
Yet when Sarah Palin did that twenty-five years later there was hell to pay... once again the hypocrisy of the left is exposed, the mask of an innocent Welsh schoolboy momentarily slipped to expose the savage hatred beneath.
 
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