Interesting, no?
The things that made my stomach buckle were a) that the people who're mainly having this..uh..difficulty, are apparently lefties, which i sympathise with, and b) that the nature of the trap is that there's no way for anyone to convince people experiencing this that they might be wrong, without looking like you're just "part of the conspiracy". It's a fucking nasty tick to get in your brain. Especially because, from the websites i looked at on the topic, one of the worst things for the people suffering from this is that anyone they try to tell about it naturally assumes they're crazy.
from gangstalkingworld.wordpress.com - "after being severely mobbed at work and “community stalked” for 15 years. I lost my job. I have been unemployed for 2.75 years. I found these web sites and it also brought tears to my eyes. I knew I was not the only one and it confirmed that I was not crazy, in spite of 15 years almost everyone I knew attempting to gaslight me."
There have been conflicting ideas on whether the internet forums for people being "gangstalked" are exacerbating the problem, or helpful in that they're providing a support network for people who otherwise wouldn't have one. I'm undecided, but lean towards it being healthy-ish. It does raise some interesting points around the idea of consensus reality - if a large enough percentage of people *knew* that they were being constantly stalked by the government, how would you differentiate their point of view from something objective? If, for instance, you were involved in these groups but then suddenly stopped feeling stalked by people, would that make you realise that maybe you were just imagining it in the first place? Or would you start to think that maybe the Persecuting Agents are just trying to lull you into a false sense of security, in order to undermine the anti-gangstalking community?
The parallels between the gang-stalking ideas and religion are enormous, which is why I'm not surprised that these GS groups seem (relatively) popular - as a good Moslem, you're taught that there's this Persecuting Agent (Shaitan) who is trying to lure you away from the 'right path', and therefore no matter how strong the evidence might seem that your religion is bunk, it's always possible it's just a trick by the Adversary to undermine your religious belief.
Making it worse is that countries *do* engage in a lot of distressing activities in order to keep an eye on themselves - I've got politically-involved friends who've received semi-regular phone calls from Yon Porcine People "Hi I'm Cuntstable Barry White...just phoning up to have a chat. How're you doing? Not planning anything subversive are you?" (i paraphrase, but barely). And agent provocatuers happen - another chick in one of these groups was dating a dude she'd met through their organisation, they dated and eventually got engaged. And then had her beloved fiance tell her "Actually...uh..funny thing, i've actually been an undercover police officer the whole time. My real name is X, i was just trying to check if the local socialist groups were actually planning terrorist activities. Turns out you weren't, so lucky you! You still wanna get married?".
And after that experience, fuck, *i'd* be seeing 'gang stalkers' everywhere too @_@
To make it worse, the whole MK-Ultra thing is quoted extensively by these websites. Which is something the US Goverment admitted to doing, and drove a number of randomly selected citizens through schitzophrenia to suicide. It also raises at least the flickering of a possibility that maybe a handful of the people on these gang-stalking sites aren't entirely imagining it.
The fact is, we can only make guesstimates of what reality *is* via our nueral system, which only simulates a tiny amount of the universe at a time, and is full of a number of quirks that mean our perceptions never match anyone else's perceptions 100% of the time. And there *are* brain-bugs like above which are nigh impossible to disprove once you've caught them. To me, it just seems worthwhile remembering that your perceptions can *always* be wrong, no matter how compelling they seem, and with that in mind you may as well choose to perceive the world in a way which is going to make your brief time on the planet as bright and exciting and fun as you can. Sure, there's plenty of evidence that the world is going to shit and we're heading towards an increasingly trapped and fearful future...however, if you look for it, there's at least as much evidence that humans are stepping towards something fucking Great.
Nothing within the universe can contain perfect knowledge of the universe - and if i can only see a small portion of it at a time, i'm going to be focussing on the shit that makes it fun.
