Everyone who looked at Havana Syndrome when it came out with a critical eye realized immediately it was a BS story. Sonic weapons? Oh please.
Thing is, this sort of thing happens all the time. A prominent and current example is cops and fentanyl. If you listen to cops, they will tell you that just being in the rom with fentanyl can be deadly, breathing it in can be deadly. I'm not sure where this started but it's become a problem because cmany people believe it, leading to cops having psychosomatic panic attacks at the prospect of fentanyl exposure [1]. This story has become so effective that many people disbelieve that it's BS or are surprised to learn it.
So the intersting question is: what purpose do these sorts of stories serve?
With fentanyl, it squarely fits into "copaganda", spreading the idea that being a police officer is super dangerous. Not-so-fun fact: it's more dangerous being married to a cop than it is being a cop (eg [2]).
Another example of this is inflating the numbers of line-of-duty police officer deaths with Covid deaths, particularly because it includes officers who refused to get vaccinated [3].
Fear of crime serves a political purpose. Crime is lower on pretty much every metric than it was 20-30 years ago where the last big panic set in the mandatory minimum mania and the carceral state exploded.
So the obvious conclusion to draw from what purpose Havana Syndrome serves is either selling the story of how bad and dangerous Cuba is and/or how dangerous it is to be a foreign official (which is really a proxy for CIA).
>Crime is lower on pretty much every metric than it was 20-30 years ago where the last big panic set in the mandatory minimum mania and the carceral state exploded.
Crime was very high in the 1990s though and it's regulation wasn't from a sudden "panic" but a steady growth from 1950 as it climbed from 5 deaths by homicide per 100,000 in 1950 to 10.4 in 1980 and 9.4 in 1990.[0] If anything there is more "mania" about semiautomatic weapons which have contributed a minuscule amount to these deaths. But I don't think discussing either issue in terms of who has more mania is helpful in any event.
Homicides in the US today are 7.8/100k, which is still above the 1950 number. I wonder what accounts for the difference. Globally, the US has a higher rate than other countries likely due to guns, but it’s not like guns were illegal in 1950.
true but even a murder rate of 5 is high compared to Europe and this is likely due in large part to guns largely being illegal there (except for Switzerland and seemingly also Finland)
Lack of community, the break up of the nuclear family (i.e. more single parents=less child supervision), loneliness, mental illness and drug induced mental illness, inadequate access to mental and/or health care, and lack of any unified/mass culture that would set standards for behavior. Go checkout other countries that have a few of those things and you really will not find the rates of gun violence we have. Also, most of the gun crime seems to be black on black crimes, but it's taboo to even bring up racial differences without someone accusing you of being some Charles Murray-esque racist (even if you're just citing publicly available data).
>I wonder what accounts for the difference. Globally, the US has a higher rate than other countries likely due to guns, but it’s not like guns were illegal in 1950.
The FBI'S Uniform Crime Statistics (last published for 2022, 1) break down homicide rates and numbers by demographics. Some reasons for the higher murder rates are right there in easily discernible patterns that have little to do with guns specifically. A majority of homicide is black on black crime among younger men, (though there'es no shortage of white offenders in the same age and gender group, bear in mind the population differential for the country) and it occurs across many states regardless of those states specific gun laws, or those of the municipalities in which these homicides occur.
The above is considered by many to be extremely politically incorrect, even racist, but it is what the numbers clearly show based on minutely collected data. We can argue about socioeconomic and other social or political factors causing such homicide numbers in that demographic, but since the focus here is on guns as a possible cause of murder (a rather absurd idea since guns are inert objects unless made to cause harm by a human), that's a different argument.
Also, if you look at a breakdown of U.S. states with the most guns per capita, and another one of U.S. states with the highest homicide rates. They don't match, indicating that it's not simply "the guns".
> Homicides in the US today are 7.8/100k, which is still above the 1950 number. I wonder what accounts for the difference. Globally, the US has a higher rate than other countries likely due to guns, but it’s not like guns were illegal in 1950.
Could it be an urban/rural thing? I'm sure the US population was proportionally far more rural/small town in 1950 than today (on clear display from so many small towns depopulating).
That is a really profound point. I also bet people are a lot less likely to try something when every male over 18 has basically been trained in combat AND is healthy and fit...
I agree with pretty much everything except for this:
>Crime is lower on pretty much every metric than it was 20-30 years ago where the last big panic set in the mandatory minimum mania and the carceral state exploded.
I see 'crime' all over now... it just isn't considered a crime now that it's been decriminalized. 20-30 years ago, I never ever saw open drug sales and drug use, open prostitution, mass looting/shoplifting, deaths from overdoses are exponentially worse, car break ins constantly, etc. And I do agree with the copaganda arguments in general, but I just can't align how much visible crime is all over the West Coast and this vague notion that crime isn't getting worse. Yeah, maybe if you're only tracking murders... but everything else is so much worse and our kids will be exposed to things we never saw until we were well past adulthood.
This is anecdotal. The data just doesn't back it up (eg [1]). You've brought up a number of issues As for retail theft, even the Walgreens CEO had to admit the problem was overstated [2]. There are a bunch of reasons for it. One is the crime narrative. Another is its easier for companies to blame theft rather than poor inventory management and retail operations.
When you say you "see" crime everywhere, I suspect you mean it's all over your [social media of choice]. Today everyone has a camera.
Another example is kidnapping. It wasn't that long ago we had the generation with TV ads asking parents if they knew where their kids were and telling them to come home when the street lights came on. Now? There's a completely overblown fear of kidnappings. We hear figures of >800K children being reported missing a year. Almost all of them are custody issues. Stranger kidnappings are more like ~8/year [3].
Fomenting fear of a crime epidemic is an intentional and well-funded political objective.
No, I mean I see it with my own eyes when I walk/drive the same streets of California I have my entire life. When I was a kid, I would go to the skatepark at 10 years old and be there all day and basically have zero parent supervision and it was 'safe'. There was only one homeless person who was basically an older guy who pushed around a TV and plugged it in at various public outlets. Now, I go to the same public places and they are literally infested with fentanyl zombies who are stripping the copper wire out of the street lights... I see prostitutes walking the streets in public half naked in LA. If you have lived in SF, LA, Sacramento, or any of the other major metro areas--you can see it with your own eyes. It simply wasn't like this when I was a teenager in the early 2000s.
>Fomenting fear of a crime epidemic is an intentional and well-funded political objective.
Sure, but I just want to be able to walk in public and feel safe. That has all rapidly changed since Prop 47 passed in 2014. The entire west coast of America is in rapid decline and it's incredibly apparent--just look at any underpass or freeway offramp. Go to east Oakland and check out the Mad Max style homeless camps--it's not something that was there in 2001. I had a bullet come through my bathroom wall in SF and SFPD threw it in a sandwich baggie and never called me or did any investigation. I had multiple trespassers at my apartment building but SFPD never did anything until I finally got a restraining order... but they'd only remove them and then they'd come right back. When my grandpa died a few years ago, within a few days squatters somehow found out and moved in. Things are pretty objectively worse than they were 20 years ago. And all the stats are juked and tweaked because cops won't arrest, juries won't convict, and judges won't sentence criminals in California. The statistics are just fake at that point.
I blame it on the rise of fentanyl and meth. Drugs are cheaper than ever and more widely available due to decriminalization.
This is all correct. Stats lie. Crime is an extremely localized issue, so it's easy for people to handwave away if they are in an area that doesn't experience it.
Using the 30 year statistic as proof there’s no crime is extreme dishonesty. You’re taking about the tail end of the crack epidemic which saw some of the worst crime in our nations history. Further, this is true on average but people in major cities have seen a rise in crime with a city like Seattle having its highest rates in a generation. Even cities like SF have not recovered to pre-Covid levels.
> Everyone who looked at Havana Syndrome when it came out with a critical eye realized immediately it was a BS story.
There is a lot of bullshit around it, sure, but no one seem to dispute the reality of the symptoms. It may be psychosomatic, and I honestly think it is the most likely explanation, but it doesn't solve the problem. If diplomats in Cuba went crazy, then why did they go crazy? Diplomats are people and I prefer when people don't get crazy.
Somebody here suggested a form of burnout, fine, then why did people in Cuba burn out? Burnout is not BS, and maybe something has to be done about the work conditions. And maybe, with that knowledge, if similar symptoms appear elsewhere, it would be a good occasion to send an work inspector.
How is this any different than a placebo effect? You could give everyone a sugar pill and then if a few people started complaining about the side effects, another 30-40% would quickly follow. The human brain is incredibly susceptible to group think. I can't remember the exact psychological experiment, but I remember learning about how they did an experiment where they'd have a group look at pictures of things to define a color (i.e. the apple is red or green, the milk is white) and there would be person involved who was a collaborator with the study and would be loud and vocal, but every now and then make an obvious mistake (the dot would be orange, they'd say it was yellow) and other people would just agree with them since the other times they were right so the non-collaborators would actually change their answer from what they saw with their own eyes, to something they didn't but was just suggested by the defacto loudmouth in the group.
But the prospect you raise is maybe one of the scariest and lends itself well to conspiracies. It can mean someone, maybe deliberately, caused some mysterious illness among diplomats, through suggestion alone, causing international tension. Not my hypothesis of choice, but it may actually be a more plausible conspiracy theory than sonic weapons.
Something happened, and something caused it. Just saying "it is a placebo effect" is dismissive. If it is a placebo effect, then where are the sugar pills? Who is the "loud and vocal collaborator"?
It made more than a thousand people sick, I think it shouldn't be dismissed, so that these people can get better, and to prevent others from suffering the same problems. Knowing the cause, be it psychological or physical, would certainly help.
the fact that it affected 1000 people doesn't really matter. all you really have to do is explain the first 2, which can be something as benign as a social hypochondriac woke up with a headache.
It matters to those 1000. And explaining the first 2 is indeed all we need to do, but it hasn't been done yet. If it is just a social hypochondriac with a headache, fine, it is perfectly good explanation that will help treat these 1000 people and maybe take steps to limit damage caused by social hypochondriacs in embassies.
I bet it had to do with the 'Trump is a Russian agent propaganda' we were all fed for the last 8 years. Probably made people who were actually working for the government in risky positions abroad (i.e. Cuba vs Netherlands) super paranoid and vulnerable. I mean, wasn't it also Rachel Maddow who covered all this Havana Syndrome the most? I truly wonder how many people who had Havana Syndrome were watching MSNBC for hours a day.
This sort of thing isn't unheard of. It's not like the USA wouldn't do the same to diplomats from other countries if it wanted to. It's not like every pair of nearby embassies and the host country don't have various radio beams pointed at each other all the time. You can easily imagine at least one simple possibility: Cuba replicated The Thing and is using a microwave beam to power it which is too strong.
Probably this nonsense:
>It's not like the USA wouldn't do the same to diplomats from other countries if it wanted to. It's not like every pair of nearby embassies and the host country don't have various radio beams pointed at each other all the time.
Thing is, this sort of thing happens all the time. A prominent and current example is cops and fentanyl. If you listen to cops, they will tell you that just being in the rom with fentanyl can be deadly, breathing it in can be deadly. I'm not sure where this started but it's become a problem because cmany people believe it, leading to cops having psychosomatic panic attacks at the prospect of fentanyl exposure [1]. This story has become so effective that many people disbelieve that it's BS or are surprised to learn it.
So the intersting question is: what purpose do these sorts of stories serve?
With fentanyl, it squarely fits into "copaganda", spreading the idea that being a police officer is super dangerous. Not-so-fun fact: it's more dangerous being married to a cop than it is being a cop (eg [2]).
Another example of this is inflating the numbers of line-of-duty police officer deaths with Covid deaths, particularly because it includes officers who refused to get vaccinated [3].
Fear of crime serves a political purpose. Crime is lower on pretty much every metric than it was 20-30 years ago where the last big panic set in the mandatory minimum mania and the carceral state exploded.
So the obvious conclusion to draw from what purpose Havana Syndrome serves is either selling the story of how bad and dangerous Cuba is and/or how dangerous it is to be a foreign official (which is really a proxy for CIA).
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7492952/
[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-...
[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/03/covid-police...