> Similarly, magician and paranormal debunker James Randi commented, “If Houdini had been a spy that would have gotten out. He never would have been able to sit on it.”
If Josephine Baker was a spy, why not Houdini?
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A bit of flim-flam but I would argue he was better placed for his skills. Not an escapologist but in the room next door on stage doing misdirection.
His war record is a bit mixed. I think he may have been a human version of "carrots help night vision"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra says:
> Project MKUltra[a] was a human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used during interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.[1] The term MKUltra is a CIA cryptonym: "MK" is an arbitrary prefix standing for the Office of Technical Service and "Ultra" is an arbitrary word out of a dictionary used to name this project. The program has been widely condemned as a violation of individual rights and an example of the CIA's abuse of power, with critics highlighting its disregard for consent and its corrosive impact on democratic principles.[2]
I would guess the goal of this fluffy article is to promote positive domestic perceptions of the CIA.
But did they really have to shout out some keyword that's associated with some of the craziest publicly-known things that the CIA did, without acknowledging, oh yeah, some bad stuff happened?
And is now the time to be clouding past lessons learned by the US, about the dangers of insane rogue elements in government, sabotaging our ideals from within?
Or someone is just writing? Not everyone has an agenda.
Are you playing devil's advocate? Or do you think the meat of the comment is invalid? Or do you want to derail thought and discussion on the topic?
To me it reads as, "MKULTRA had elements that were universally recognized as being ethically unsound, so we can't talk about it in a neutral light at all".
I think this is a terrible dichomatic way of thinking that supplants neutral interpretation.
Furthermore, I think an appeal to the reputation of the source of information equates to an ad hominem attack and presents no substantive argument against said information.
[1] https://archive.org/details/cia-manual-trickery-deception-20...
When the publisher of the article was also the actor in that scandal, I don't think it's ad hominem to wonder whether they're trying to whitewash the term.
Are you saying that MKUltra was actually so much more than the scandalous parts, to the extent that the CIA can just throw the term as innocuous into fluff pieces, as if there weren't overwhelmingly negative associations?