Permanently Deleted

  • Coincy [they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    The kernel of truth that we all are being spied on in some way is what makes the delusion so hard to deal with

  • grillpilled [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    I knew someone who thought that they were being gangstalked. They they thought that everyone around them was putting gay thoughts into their head.

    • crime [she/her, any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      everyone around me is putting gay thoughts into my head 👁👄👁

      does this count as hornyposting

        • determinism [he/him]
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          edit-2
          4 years ago

          I'll admit that I laughed when he mentioned that his ex-girlfriend only had a left arm so he couldn't figure out if she was in on the conspiracy.

      • SerLava [he/him]
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        4 years ago

        Yeah and the proof of gang stalking is just.. seeing various people? Being briefly followed by various people? Once that brain worm is there, every public place is gang stalking.

      • notthenameiwant [he/him]
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        4 years ago

        I think most victims won't initially think you're in on it unless you're making a stink about it on spaces dedicated to gangstalking. As long as you don't try to invalidate someone's existence they won't dislike you which is also a general rule in life.

        Mental health services are beyond most TIs budgets anyway.

        Most TIs that I've met have been fairly nice people, albeit a bit withdrawn.

          • notthenameiwant [he/him]
            ·
            4 years ago

            Mkultra and related projects mostly targeted random people. There were one or two diplomats, but it was mostly random people. There's precedent for this. There are a good chunk of people who fall into the general conspiracy trap. Think about what's available in the conspiracy world, it's all right wing shit. You'd have to actively look for Communist shit to fall into that.

              • notthenameiwant [he/him]
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                4 years ago

                That's your right. I used to know someone who swore he got abducted. I still don't believe him. YouTube is a terrible way to try to learn about TIs. Just talking to people is much easier. I would say maybe listen to Myron May's testimony though.

  • ProCephalopodAktion [any]
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    4 years ago

    I have a soft spot for the gang stalking people. Before I learned more about programs like MKUltra I was much quicker to just dismiss all of their claims. I'm hesitant to label all of it a side effect of mental illness, because if I was legitimately being fucked with and no one believed me I'm sure my mental health would rapidly deteriorate.

    The whole thing is very sad and it breaks my heart to see people suffering like that regardless of whether it's a delusion or not.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
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      edit-2
      4 years ago

      I’m hesitant to label all of it a side effect of mental illness, because if I was legitimately being fucked with and no one believed me I’m sure my mental health would rapidly deteriorate.

      It's hardly mutually exclusive.

      People living in high stress situations tend to develop cooping mechanisms. And if you've been assaulted by the police before, that's bound to create some lingering PTSD. How many times do you need to be Rodney King'd before you start jumping at shadows?

      On the flip side, if you express symptoms of a mental health crisis, then it's possible you're attracting attention from law enforcement. Police see your paranoia as suspicious activity and end up reinforcing it. Particularly true in neighborhoods that already employ Broken Windows policing and Stop And Frisk police harassment.

    • regul [any]
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      edit-2
      4 years ago

      If you're a communist organizer and think you're being gangstalked, whatever, less unbelievable.

      If you're a sales rep at the Ski-doo dealership in suburban Dayton, Ohio, then no, I don't think it's anything but psychosis.

  • Grownbravy [they/them]
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    4 years ago

    I believe that the government has a line to watch me. That much is true. But to think anyone is actively listening in?

    Going through every text message? Every post? Divining some intent from the last time I posted “post hog” or a dumb bit about a trump speech? I feel like since PRISM was made public, the one saving grace has been the deluge of data they collect basically obfuscates points they’re trying to find. And if they’re randomly dredging to look for something, they are wasting their time.

    Instead they would be better served having these terabytes of information to work backwards from once they have you, or design some stupid racist AI to flag potential targets but still pull up a million false positives because of how detached they are from the reality of who could be a threat in this day and age.

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
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      4 years ago

      That's pretty much what I've heard about their mass data collection projects: they're absolutely worthless at actually detecting an active threat like some little neo-nazi shit psyching himself up to go do a terrorism, but they're an invaluable database when it comes to creepy psychopaths in the DoD wanting to tailor search queries to find vulnerable women to stalk or the feds wanting to identify activists and decide which ones they want to persecute extra-hard instead of the usual "lmao just let local cops beat them senseless" level of repression.

    • culdrought [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      It's not US exclusive. I'm in NZ and I spoke to a guy once who claimed to be a victim of gang-stalking. He didn't call it gang-stalking explicitly, but the things he was describing pretty much lined up with the gang-stalking conspiracy.

    • notthenameiwant [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      There's a good chunk of victims worldwide. I just had one from Vietnam email me yesterday. It is mostly the first world countries though.

  • Vayeate [they/them]
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    4 years ago

    The FBI and CIA and others have a long history of playing mind games with targets. But they've typically associated with organizations with some notoriety.

    • blobjim [he/him]
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      edit-2
      4 years ago

      Except that's still delusional. Nobody is watching you (especially not through a camera) but online interactions are definitely recorded in an NSA database occasionally. I think their main avenue for spying is just serving warrants to tech companies to scrape data from their servers or hook into them and actively spy on video conferences or chat sessions or whatever. That being said they are definitely watching left-wing activist spaces like this one and collecting everything they can.

        • blobjim [he/him]
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          edit-2
          4 years ago

          It would be kind of unnecessary since they can just view most info publicly. The only private thing one might want would be email addresses and IP addresses and they probably shouldn't be logging IP addresses anyways.

          • Vayeate [they/them]
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            4 years ago

            They would absolutely NSL the website owner to get PMs and emails and IPs associated to your account.

      • sysgen [none/use name,they/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        What is the difference between an AI system doing the watching then delegating to a human and a human doing the whole thing? It's pretty much the same.

  • SimAnt [any]
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    4 years ago

    I don't have any sense of being stalked, but I do worry constantly about how many lists I'm on.

    Not because I've done anything cool, but because I was a military brat, born on a military base—and later worked as a government contractor, dealing with stuff which required me to have a security clearance (albeit the lowest one).

  • happybadger [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Ever since Coast to Coast AM, I've been fascinated by conspiracy theorists and have followed them for over two decades. The psychology of it, how they parasitically attach to the gaps in knowledge about an event and inject those gaps with fear or hatred, is fascinating. Like the neurovirus from Snow Crash but for boomers. The communities they form are a mecca for the most confused and ill people on the internet and had an interesting ideological metagame way before reddit did. But prior to gangstalking, they were always in some way hierarchical. UFO shit would come from civilian sources but be filtered through the military or media or specific conspiracy theorists selling books. 9/11 shit came through a federal commission, engineering panels, and specific conspiracy theorists selling books. Antisemitism is always selling a specific ideology regardless of the fuck-fuck games they play to obfuscate the antisemitism.

    Gangstalking is the first big shift for me. There is no coherent narrative to the gangstalking conspiracy, only that the participants feel stalked and observe a pattern. Other participants confirm their delusions because there is a myspace pc4pc relationship where they'll get confirmation for their own delusions by the same group. For someone facing a lot of psychological persecution, the trauma and loneliness that causes makes that a much more powerful version of the relationships you build on forums. They're confirming the antagonist only you are aware of. There are grifters who try to centralise it or collect a bunch of them into a specific conspiracy theory, but gangstalking is the first truly democratic conspiracy theory I've seen. Everything is crowdsourced and the crowd is the doing a Paris Commune thing. That shift means that anything a mentally ill person believes will be confirmed by the group that confirms everything to sustain itself. Other conspiracies might have elements that turn you off- I think the Nimitz and Roosevelt UFO videos are evidence of something but UFO conspiracies immediately become bullshit- but gangstalking is a purely positive feedback loop. Even challenges to the personal conspiracies being contributed are just asking them to define their antagonist better.

    Q Anon is the synthesis of the two kinds of conspiracy theory. It has that whole probably-Jim Watkins hierarchical element which keeps the conspiracy useful to power, but both early on and increasingly now it's becoming this indecipherable mishmash of every conspiracy theory or woo belief that can be absorbed. Everybody can contribute something and the conspiracy is built out of those contributions as much if not more than the Q posts. When I was on their discord servers early on, what kept those boomers motivated was that they were insufferable people chainsmoking in front of a computer while spitting and saying "yep" on an open mic every minute. All they wanted was a community which believed the things that they read on facebook. Their kids wouldn't reply to them about those things even though they're evidence of the big happening. It was the same gangstalking dynamic where they say anything and it becomes true to everyone.

      • happybadger [he/him]
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        4 years ago

        Conspiracy theories appeal to people because the complexity of the world and lack of coherent narrative to it make them react with fear and anger. There are totally conspiracies that exist and we should be fearful and angry about them, but for some people that becomes their dominant modality. Illnesses like paranoid schizophrenia are completely unchecked versions of it which is why they're so prevalent in gangstalking.

        There isn't really crossover in content apart from the generic conspiracies that explain who is gangstalking you. Gangstalkers might think it's the government or gangs or a cult, Qanon is a more structured understanding of those things. That structure reverts to the same democratic centralism of most conspiracy theories. Gangstalkers fold in and it's a buffet of content that rewards original research into its canon, but a lot of their gangstalking stories are like "I saw a red car three times in one hour" or thinking the bus drivers have it out for them. It doesn't have the same legitimacy as the other conspiracy theories which make up Q.

  • DonCheadleInTheWH [any]
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    4 years ago

    Nah, this shit's real. I'll refer you to another comment I've made previously here.

    I'm not above others having experienced some sort of mental health trauma or psychosis, but my "gang stalking" has mirrored the kind of shit you hear about with Scientology. It all started with organized crime and has filtered to reveal they have members in all positions of power. I'm reticent to give more details because I don't want to doxx myself, but they target young kids and adults at underground raves and festivals. And they've been doing it since the dawn of the psychedelic revolution.

  • wantonviolins [they/them]
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    4 years ago

    My gut feeling on gangstalking is that the community is 50% paranoid schizophrenia, 30% PTSD-style hypervigilance in response to past trauma, 10% some kind of Munchausen syndrome, 5% absolutely fucking real and terrifying shit, and 5% an op to discredit, smear, and monitor the small sliver of real cases.

    These percentages are probably wrong (real cases could be as low as 1-2%, even), but that’s my impression.

  • notthenameiwant [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    There's more too it than the paranoia aspect believe it or not. There's a good chunk of people who receive piercing or burning pain and other phantom sensations through directed energy weapons. I've personally received a proto-seizure because of the program (having never experienced one before or since).