You annoy the hell out of me, Checkmite, and mainly because you don't even make an effort!
You come up with the example of the Pont-Saint-Esprit bread poisoning tragedy without even remembering what it was all about, and when I provide you with links, you don't even spend a little time considering what you could learn from the case if you studied it just a little. Instead, you stick to your false memory (or is it a case of the Mandela effect, maybe?) and insist that it might still have been a case of mass psychogenic illness even though it never was. And the worst thing is that you don't even consider why the hell nobody else seems to have come to the same conclusion, ever!
I did, you simply missed it (the first time; you appear to have found it later).
Let me begin with a couple of the quotations that you didn't waste your time finding and reading when you came up with the harebrained explanation for the Pont-Saint-Esprit case as mass psychogenic illness:
Your highlighted quote is the chosen words of the newspaper article's author, who is in turn quoting no one when he states that there is "no other explanation". Alas, he was a year too early to hear about and opine on the credibility of the secret-CIA-experiment theory.
However, further down you give two different sources giving a total of five deaths, whilst this newspaper article seems to double the death count by a factor of 2. This is another problem with this incident, where much like an instance of woo, subsequent tellings have exaggerated the facts. I've seen articles on websites describing "the entire town" as having gone insane and trying to kill themselves, which clearly isn't the case.
Why do you think that every hypothesis except yours (and maybe the CIA one) has bread (cursed, poisoned, molded or otherwise contaminated) in it?
Because bread was the only (or the first) link between the victims that the investigators were willing to consider?
How do you think that they ruled out pollution of air or water, for instance?
I'll let you think about that for a while and give you a chance to come up with the correct answer before I return.
I'm not so sure they did formally
rule those things out; at least, I haven't seen an article describing any research being done in that area. In fact, while you're making a great big deal out of the fact that the possibility mass hysteria in specific was never apparently invoked by the investigators, I'm coming up empty when it comes to finding any solid information that they ever actually investigated
literally ANYthing else besides the "contaminated bread" angle. They may have
dismissed those other things, but I don't see any actually enumerated reasons why, which is the reason we have to sit here and speculate under the assumption they actually did their due diligence when it came to these other possibilities, an assumption which I'm not sure is supported.
Nevertheless, fine, let's speculate. They didn't consider air or water pollution because there were people in the area who were not affected, that must've been breathing the same air and drinking the same water. But this reason unfortunately also makes the ergot poisoning conclusion problematic - I can't find a nailed-down statement that
everybody who ate that baker's bread that night actually got sick. Further, it's established that the baker got his "contaminated" batch of flour from a government distribution silo, which many bakers in the area also got flour from, and yet
nobody else, anywhere else, ever got sick from contaminated bread in this manner around that time, an eventuality that is
excruciatingly unlikely even from a purely statistical standpoint. The mechanical process of producing flour would seem to make it quite impossible for ergot mold in quantities toxic enough to drive people suicidally insane could go through the flour-making process and yet every single trace make it into a single bag of flour.
None of the sources I've found describing this incident even bother to try and explain that glaring problem; they blip right over it.
No, I refuse to believe that stubborn
revanchism and
chauvinism is the reason in your case.
Well admittedly, those weren't the reasons I was thinking of. Foremost on my mind is the fact that nobody likes to "admit" being the victim of mass hysteria, particularly when the results are so dramatic. And I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss chauvinism in that case either, because authorities and investigators might be just as prejudiced against even considering such an explanation for something that afflicted their countrymen.
They weren't psychogenic in nature. You confuse psychogenic with hallucinogenic.
Perhaps you're right; but in the context of this discussion, it occurs to me that asserting the symptoms were hallucinogenic rather than psychogenic, or vice-versa, is question-begging. Hallucinations must be self-reported, just like all psychosomatic symptoms must be. Claims of amnesia suffer the same problems for the same reason.
And you confuse
mass poisoning with mass psychogenic illness,
This on the other hand is quite explicit question-begging.
No, there probably isn't. But there's also literally nothing that exists to connect the allegedly damaged health of the U.S. diplomats in Havana and Guangzhou with
attacks of any kind - except the people who insist that it's caused by attacks - you being one of them.
I'm entertaining the notion; and pointing out things I find interesting which might
at face value support that notion. Yes, clearly this is irritating to you; for that I apologize. However, I've been far from insistent, even from the very beginning, and my position has changed more than once in this thread. In your frustration you're starting to treat me increasingly unfairly with statements like this.
And now that you're convinced of the plausibility of a microwave attack instead
Don't be absurd. I've never said anything remotely like this; the only person who's invoked "microwave attacks" in this thread is you just a few posts ago, with justified ridicule.
There may be nothing to suggest that the CIA considered poisoning French bread, but we all know that it's a very clandestine agency, so I really don't see why you dismiss this conspiracy theory when you are so fond of the other one.
And we all know that certain countries (or, well, one certain country) have attacked the health and well-being, and in some cases the actual lives, of individuals it sees as problematic or hostile (including American diplomatic staff) in the past using varied methods and there is ample evidence that they continue to do so, as recently this year in the UK. It is not the notion of "an attack against diplomats" itself which makes the Cuba allegations less-than-credible.
In the case of the contaminated bread in France, vasoconstriction appears to have been at an extremely unhealthy level - beyond the usual level off coffee-drinking Frenchmen or athletes. Otherwise, it would hardly have been reported in the context.
That's an assumption you're willing to make that I am not, necessarily. I'd like to hear more about what specifically was observed in the afflicted patients that is being characterized as signs of "an extremely unhealthy level of vasoconstriction". For instance, I would certainly hope they're not creatively re-interpreting things being shouted by patients in a psychotic hallucinatory state as if they were symptoms being reported by a calm and lucid person.
However, that a couple of people kill themselves in an
outbreak of severe hallucinations caused by food poisoning is to be expected.
Obviously not, since this is the only reported case of it ever happening, so far as I'm aware. I've been reading that page a couple of times now presuming there was another given instance of suicide in connection with ergotism in it but I must be missing it.
