Strangers are following you. Teams of them, coordinating their surveillance. Recording you. Attacking you with sonic devices. Maybe burning you with lasers. Maybe implanting grain-sized trackers inside your body. You can feel the hard bumps under your skin.
You are alarmed, naturally, and turn for help to those you trust: your family and friends. Maybe law enforcement. Only they don’t believe, you. They might even act like you’re the problem. Like you’re crazy.
Welcome to the world of Targeted Individuals, a loose confederation of those, in their words, subject to the “growing crimes of organized stalking, surveillance, abuse and electronic harassment.”
I first met Targeted Individuals last August, passing a protest in the Loop marking “International Targeted Individual Day.” I took a flyer, showing the fearful blue eyes of a weeping woman.
"INFORM YOURSELF," it declares. "SHARE. DEMAND CHANGE."
Calling spokeswoman, “Ella Free,” started with a surprise.
“A good portion of people who claim to be Targeted Individuals are actually mentally ill,” she said. Straight to the elephant in the room. “So many of them, people have the same story: it’s interesting that a person isolated is having a very similar scenario.”
She meant “interesting” as in “persuasive” — these people are describing the same thing, therefore it must have basis in reality. That logic doesn’t hold up.
“People who are paranoid start to latch onto the same kind of delusion,” said David LaPorte, a professor of psychology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. “This is not uncommon. When airplanes first started, people started having delusions they were being followed by airplanes. The computer has been a huge issue that leaked into paranoid delusions. Every technological advance becomes fodder for paranoid individuals.”
To continue reading, click here.
"Then you look at these folks and ask, ‘Why would the government, if it had this sophisticated satellite technology, pick these people?’ They’re not particularly special.”
ReplyDeleteProbably for the same "reason" that space aliens, with technology sophisticated enough to travel billions of miles across the galaxy--and, presumably, sophisticated enough to discern where the big cities of Earth are located--always choose to reveal themselves to Bubba and Butthead of Bumblefuck, Arkansas, when there's no one else around.
I'll go one step further & ask why this so-called god so many believe hasn't done any miracles lately where we could see & hear them?
DeleteI'll see that and raise you this...
DeleteOl' JC says to his disciples: In 2016 the Cubs will win the World Series. Don't worry about what it means, just write it down and make sure it survives.
(Or any possible variation on a verifiable foresight, if you're not a baseball fan.)
In the same vein, there's an interesting article in this week's New Yorker about conspiracy theories. There is actually something called "Conspiracy Theories in American History", a 2-volume encyclopedia of these theories going back 100 years. Apparently, this is nothing new. Amazon only has volume 2 available.
ReplyDeleteWhat don't they want us to see in volume 1?
DeleteI don't know. It's a conspiracy to keep us uninformed!
DeleteVolume 1 covers how Amazon is plotting to take over the world. They won't let us see it until the plot is complete. That should be by Thursday.
Delete