Sometimes you have conversations that just stick with you. In 2006, I went to lunch with @EricFlint at the World Science Fiction Convention in Anaheim; we got to talking about Obama and whether he'd run for president.
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All I really knew about Obama then was his 2004 DNC speech, which was and is a remarkable rhetorical feat, full of inspiration and aspiration. I said as much to Eric, who told me, basically, that I wasn't from Chicago and so I couldn't understand.
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He explained that Chicago Democratic politics were Machine politics, a form of cynical, transactional politics that elevated power rather than ideology, and that Obama's success in the Machine meant that he would be a horse-trader, not a populist.
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If you meet someone who claims to have created a system for controlling other peoples' minds, you know that they are:
a) Delusional;
b) A fraudster; and
c) A sociopath.
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This goes for Rasputin, Mesmer, and self-satisfied Big Tech boasters who claim that machine learning deprives of us our free will.
And it DEFINITELY goes for the CIA, whose MK-Ultra plot to perfect mind control was a kind of ghastly running joke.
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Writing in @jacobinmag, Alex de Jong offers a great potted history of MK-Ultra and its architect, the US government chemist Sidney Gottlieb, who, with "rehabilitated" Nazi and Imperial Japanese scientists, performed secret brainwashing experiments.