[blagie]

My experience is different. These things are planned. There is a grand plan. The planners are incompetent nincompoots, though, and things rarely go according to plan.

I've been in enough power positions to see that grand plans and grant ambitions do exist, as do lots and lots of conspiracies. It's just that the external conspiracy theories rarely line up with actual conspiracies. What's going on inside is usually far, far stupider than even the conspiracy theory.

[smallerfish]

> far, far stupider than even the conspiracy theory

That was my big takeaway from reading a bunch of "insider" books after the 2008 crash. The banks thought they were getting away with an great scheme (not a conspiracy, per se), but had the common human inability to properly model out the logical chain of implications over the long term (and perhaps a touch of "emperor's clothes" preventing proper risk assessment within larger organizations). Meanwhile the market punters were caught up in a frothy bubble ("this time is truly different!") which clouded their perception of reality, which led to all kinds of bullshit hype in the media. There were outliers, of course (e.g. I rememeber an eye-opening article in Harper's in ~2006 which was extremely dire in its outlook, and of course there were various people who were fortunate with their shorts), but the folks bought into the alternate reality tended to ignore warnings, given that their money was invested in the fever dream (also perhaps trusting the authority of the banks to have put together a low risk product, without truly understanding it).

In short, there's no need to conjure up an illuminati when you have all of the various standard fallacies of human thinking to work with.

[giantrobot]

> In short, there's no need to conjure up an illuminati when you have all of the various standard fallacies of human thinking to work with.

You definitely don't need an Illuminati-esque mastermind when the participants in the system have similar goals, motivations, and capabilities. In retrospect an event might look coordinated but really it's just an aggregate of every participant acting entirely independently but according to similar constraints.

[jollybean]

a) Nobody not even POTUS is in a position to even have such a 'Grand Plan' in this regard.

b) Yes, some 'Grand Planners' exist, and fully agree that they are often a mess.

c) There is no plan to destabilize Africa. Totally the opposite. The plan is definitely to bring stability, because everyone wins there. It's in that endeavour 'they fail' in 1000 different 'unforeseen' ways. Those systems are arguably inherently chaotic and will be for some time.

[blagie]

There were plenty of well-documented plans, mostly by oil companies, to destabilize African countries. The idea is to keep a level of corruption high enough to where you can get lucrative profits through bribes, but not high enough to have an open war zone and where contracts you made are enforced.

This isn't a conspiracy; it's well-documented.

Good book: Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil

[jollybean]

Nobody wants chaos, especially not corrupt people.

Saudi Arabia is effectively 'fully institutionalized corruption backed by the US Army' and it's almost 'model'.

The Oil Flows, the Leader does whatever he wants with his cut, as long as there is stability and order.

Instability leads to failed contracts, downfall of leaders knocks over dominoes, attracts attention, people are arrested and go public, war etc..

This idea that somehow 'an Oil Company' could actively keep something a bit broken but not fully broken gives way, way too much agency to them. They are not that smart or powerful.

They would all be happy just to pay 'The Guy' his cut in perpetuity.

Arguably, Russia is such a country. Putin et. al. take their cut, the plebes get some scraps, everything is cool.

Everyone was willing to look the other way at his minor intransigence.

Until he crossed the line, and now he has to be dealt with.

All he had to do was take his billions and literally not invade anywhere. He could do anything he wanted in his borders.

As you can see all of Europe is roiling as the result of chaos, nobody wants it - not Putin, not Europe, not any Oil Company.

[blagie]

Saudi is ideal, but a Nigeria is better than a Norway. You can't always get to a Saudi.

[ganzuul]

I have been trying to take over the Illuminati brand, since discovering that actually no one is in control. Have survived enough psychological trauma to do a way better job than whoever is attempting it right now.

Not an ego thing. I just find it embarrassing that this is the best purported enlightened people can do.