[conspire] OOP

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

> On Sep 27, 2020, at 11:52, Ivan Sergio Borgonovo <mail at webthatworks.it> wrote:
> 
> I got the point and I completely agree. I'm just saying it is not peculiar to inheritance vs. composition.
> 
> Many times things get pushed too far because people have to sell something: their consulting gig, build up a community...
> 
> People following a cult are easier to manage but they don't think.
> 
> Writing software requires managing and paying people.
> 
> It's no surprise that successful techniques are built into cults.

I haven’t talked about it much around cabal, but for those of you who don’t know: I joined Scientology when I was 18. I even worked there for years (regular staff, not Sea Org). I left when I was 30. I wound up being one of the people stalked by Scientology in the first Scientology vs. the Internet blowups in 1995. Wikipedia is wrong: it wasn’t Xenu that was posted (as that had previously been printed in the LA Times), it was the newer upper level “New Era Dianetics for Operating Thetans” levels. Not all of them because they’re huge and boring AF. But one of the issues was about how to “handle” a physical condition. (Something Scientology claimed they didn’t do.)

I backed down at the request of my then-partner (later husband), who was in the middle of a post-divorce custody wrinkling out and didn’t want it to mess that up. There were arrests. There were raids. There was a guy who showed up in my rural Vermont town claiming to be a relative. Scientology private eyes showed up to all my known associates (which was many, given that I’d been staff, including people I’d dated 15-20 years before).

The legal wrangling eventually led to the Communications Decency Act and shoring up § 230 provisions for internet providers, because Scientology argued that they weren’t applicable and various cases had gone various ways at the circuit level.

The downside is that we have crap like Facebook as a result. :P

The most interesting thing that happened while I was in Scientology was being one of two staff present late one Friday night when someone threw a Molotov cocktail at the building complex and set one of the five buildings on fire. Fortunately, not the one I was working in.

Anyhow, saw lots of messed up pressure tactics and see them all the time in the current political climate.

The thing is, I made a shitty Scientologist in a lot of ways because I wasn’t a True Believer™. I stayed because my boss was (and still is) a friend, and he shielded me from a lot of the messed up crap. So it was easy to get out of Scientology because socially, my network was almost exclusively non-Scientologists. I worked two jobs, the other one as a software engineer so I had that outside connection too. I was never “fully in."

Which brings me to this next thing: targeting of people specifically for conversion religiously specifically in order to convert them politically:

https://www.dw.com/en/us-religious-data-platform-targets-mentally-ill-vulnerable-people/a-55062013

> It turned out to be far-right-wing churches, conservative churches in the US. And they've built a platform that targets mentally ill or vulnerable people in order to draw them into church, to monetize them through donations. That's the short-term goal. To help them is the facade for it, but ultimately the aim is to convert them to the politics of the far right.


This is a meta Inception level I hadn’t known existed, but whoa. It makes sense, it truly does. That, along with Joe’s Daughters of the Confederacy YT link, is a truly horrifying combo.

That YT link again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOkFXPblLpU <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOkFXPblLpU>
Deirdre

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