From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Tue Aug 12 2003 - 04:40:45 MDT
At 08:42 PM 11/08/03 -0700, you wrote:
>A successful meme in a pool for the wealthy.
>
>Bill Roh
>
>metahuman wrote:
>
>>Topic.
They certainly take money away from their richer members in gobs. The FBI
has classed them both as a paramilitary group and as organized
crime. According to Bureau of Prisons and surveys of how many there are,
almost one in 250 of them are locked up, mostly for fraud.
I know way more about them than is reasonable. Much of what I know can be
found if you put "sex drugs cults" (without quotes) in Google and take the
first link.
Few snips from that article:
A number of people including Paulette Cooper (author of one of the first
books about Scientology, and a victim of the cult's attacks for 30 years)
have said that as a group former Scientologists (and I presume this would
hold for other cults) were not distinguishable except for being more easily
deceived or duped than average people. Scientology members have been
subjected to an unusual number of scams, including a $500 million Ponzi
scheme that you can read about in a number of magazine articles and at
http://www.slatkinfraud.com/. A long term Toronto Scientologist in a
thoughtful moment commented to me that the local Scientologists he knew had
been defrauded dozens of times, much more often than any other group he
could think of. As the NYT article mentioned above put it "Some people seem
to be born with vulnerable dopamine systems that get hijacked by social
rewards." Scientologists seem to be selected out of the population to be
particularly vulnerable to attention rewards.
************
Nazism/communism caused more deaths this century than the plague did in the
14th century. We understand what caused plague, even our leaders
understand. But the world's leadership has no clue as to what are the root
causes of Aum Shinrikyo or Bin Laden's cult. Mind control is a label to
hang on it, but without understanding why "mind control" works it may be
like trying to advocate hand washing before Koch and Pasteur explained
microbes as the reason behind why hand washing reduced death rates.
The upcoming trial of John Walker Lindh could be used to educate people on
the subjects of memes and the evolutionary psychology bases reasons we are
vulnerable to them. But more likely it will be an example of primates
continuing to play social games without the least insight into what is
killing them.
Models, we need models! Predictive models, evolutionary psychology based
social dynamics models. And we need to do experiments on those models
before we take steps that seem right but only cause more problems later.
The Scientology connection--applied memetics--how it happened
Scientology has a deep connection to this article. Back in the 1950s, pulp
writer L. Ron Hubbard published the first article in Astounding Science
Fiction on Dianetics, an amateur psychological practice that eventually
became incorporated into the Scientology cult. Scientology is, of course, a
meme of the cult class. It is distinguished by such sub-memes as "fair
game," the practice of suing and otherwise abusing those to speak out
against its excesses. (See http://www.lermanet.com/) Scientology allegedly
spends between $20 and $30 million a year pursuing its critics through the
courts. (They admitted in Federal court to spending at least $2 million
suing me for exposing one of their allegedly illegal medical practices and
it may be as high as $5 million if funds for all the private investigators
they have used on my friends, my relatives and me are included.)
I had mentioned Scientology a time or two in my memetics articles, but had
taken no serious interest in it before January 1995. At that time a lawyer
for Scientology issued a command (rmgroup) to remove the Usenet news group
alt.religion.scientology from the Internet, apparently thinking that this
"denial of service" attack on the Internet would end critical discussion
about Scientology.
This attack on free speech backfired, having somewhat the effect of a gang
of thugs riding into town and burning down the newspaper. This attempted
censorship drew in dozens of Internet free speech advocates, me among them.
"A.r.s.," as it is known, became one of the most popular groups on the net,
with a readership estimated as high as 100,000. Surveys place it in the top
ten and sometimes in the top 5 news groups.
This news group is a real-life soap opera, with dramatic subplots on a
regular basis. Popular topics include accounts of people exiting
Scientology, and a stream of reports on the cult's abuses (up to and
including the "treatment" of a woman who died of dehydration--see
http://www.lisamcpherson.org/). See http://www.lisatrust.net/ media section
for claims of how the government and police of Clearwater, Florida have
allegedly been corrupted, or put "Scientology booger" into Google.
The a.r.s. newsgroup has survived everything done to get rid of it. After
the rmgroup, it was attacked by cancelling articles. Then it was hit with a
denial of service storm of over four million forged nonsense postings in
1998 and 1999. The forged postings were eventually said to have been traced
to group of cult operatives led by Italian Scientologist Gavino Idda, as
publicly reported by former Scientologist Tory Christman.
http://www.lermanet.com/cos/toryonosa.htm - Part5 (Tory's story of leaving
Scientology and being attacked is a saga in itself.) In between Scientology
has had a rotating group of agents posting anti-psychiatry articles and
attacking people on the group. (Identifying some of these people is a major
topic. Are they really agents of Scientology? Or are they critics trying to
make Scientology look bad?)
The long running battle on the net has the horrid attraction of a train
wreck in slow motion. Several hundred of the spectators have stepped out of
the audience and taken a place on the stage creating Web sites
(http://www.xenu.net/ is a prominent site), picketing Scientology
locations, and being involved in many other activities open and covert. My
personal involvement reached the state where I became a political refugee
in Canada. (See http://www.operatingthetan.com/ for the latest update.)
The discovery of the deep connection between drugs and cults, like many
discoveries, started as a set of chance observations . . . .
********
(I was convicted for picketing scientology's desert paramilitary compound
over the two women they killed there in the spring of 2000. I took
warnings by local officials that my conviction was political and public
threats by scientologists on the net that I would be killed in jail
seriously enough to become a refugee.)
Keith Henson
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