Wikipedia Sucks!

http://wikipedia-sucks-badly.blogspot.c ... r-has.html

Niche topic with a smidge of Wikipedia, but the question has to be asked: what happens to US shortwave when October rolls around and the End of the World doesn't happen like Stair said it would? Does his cult compound fragment and scatter, or do they pick a new ranter from the unpaid staff and hope that guy has Ralph Gordon Stair's brain-bending willpower? Is World Wide Christian Radio up shit creek in 2022? They have Stair on for 12 hours a day on Transmitter 4. Will they lean on Alex Jones for airtime or just play hymns? Radio Miami International (WRMI) is in a similar situation with huge blocks of Stair clogging up the system.


https://www.hfunderground.com/wiki/Brot ... ir_Numbers <==== The pirates have been laughing at Stair for years.

Hah. Once again we must bring up William Miller and his idiotic followers......end-of-days crap will always be popular. Because the supply of suckers is infinite.

https://www.thoughtco.com/millerites-definition-1773334

If Stair is "lucky" his followers will start other churches. And they will put up their own SW stations and keep the "industry" going. So he won't be totally forgotten in 50 years, as most radio preachers were. Maybe.

But srsly tho.....i suspect shortwave radio broadcasting is like newspapers, the internet is slowly strangling it. Why spend hundreds of thousands on assembling and staffing a radio station when you can start a "social media" for pennies?

Responses:

Why spend hundreds of thousands on assembling and staffing a radio station when you can start a "social media" for pennies?

It lets anybody with the cash buy airtime and be as off-putting as they want. All major social media is shot through with rules which are chasing off the weirder people out there; meanwhile WWCR has let outright Nazis on the air (World Church of the Creator and Pete Peters of the Scriptures For America radio show) and that pill peddler/conspiracy hack Alex Jones is their daytime 25 meter band show. Stair used the model to his "advantage" because he would never get anywhere online by himself -- the notoriety of being on multiple shortwave/AM/FM stations gave his rambling-screaming "sermons" authenticity. YouTube is trying to kill off their smaller creators and become like TV. Shortwave is the Wild West of weird spoken word, the final hurrah of AM Gold.

If Stair is "lucky" his followers will start other churches. And they will put up their own SW stations and keep the "industry" going. So he won't be totally forgotten in 50 years, as most radio preachers were. Maybe.

Stair has a spinoff church a few miles away with its own pastor. The trick with the entire Overcomer Ministry is that like Harold Camping and his Family Radio shortwave station, everything hinges on these crazy prophecies and if Stair turns out to be a complete fraud, possibly most of the 70-or-so people on the compound will quit and Stair's hand-picked board now running the place will sell the land and get out of religion. Or they will soldier on without Stair and find a new Chief Ranter to replace him. We will know by December.

More responses (I hit the character limit!):

Hah. Once again we must bring up William Miller and his idiotic followers......end-of-days crap will always be popular. Because the supply of suckers is infinite.

We have this in America because we have a crap social safety net and dog-eat-dog economics. You don't see these weirdos in Finland. But since you brought him up, without Billy Miller there would be no Jehovah's Witnesses, a religion that is now falling apart in America because: a) only having a high school diploma* puts you in a hole if you live on either coast because the church wants a lower-educated lay body, even if it works against having the large families they like; b) they switched from that dull written material with the trippy end-of-the-world art to video presentations where the Governing Body of the religion gets to show just what sort of out-of-touch idiot grandparents they are, especially M. Stephen Lett (Mr. Talking to Audiences Like They are Children) and Anthony "Tight-Pants Tony"** Morris III (an obvious PTSD case from his time as a medic in Vietnam; he was filmed*** buying whiskey at a liquor market in Ramsey, New Jersey); c) the number of child sex abuse cases are getting to the point where they are selling off their churches ("Kingdom Halls") in lesser-populated areas; d) the blood transfusion thing is too well known now; e) they have similar shunning rituals like Scientology for ex-members, with all the similar hurt and drama. All of these points are now like nails in a coffin lid, and the JWs only have 8 million members worldwide. In comparison the Mormons (who are far more professional-oriented and run their own colleges) reached ZERO congregation growth in 2017 within the United States, and were only growing in West Africa. That's how bad it is for the newer religions in the US.


* Even having a semester of community college is seen as suspect. The JW with a BA or BS is fleetingly rare; the only people who have Juris Doctorates are the lawyers hired by the church in all those sex abuse cases. They have their own pseudo-educations for the Elders within each Kingdom Hall, done on their own time, but otherwise it's a religion perfect for America in 1940, when the average person had less than a high school diploma.

** He thinks any man in JW ministerial service (which could be anything from being a street pamphlet seller to working at "Bethel", aka JW headquarters) who wears suit pants that are "too close fitting" is somehow sexual, possibly gay. Lloyd Evans (formerly "John Cedars", an ex-JW YouTuber) came up with the term as a joke, but that sort of crap is deadly serious to Morris.

*** The raw-ish footage (cameraman's voice pitch-shifted): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4oBqrQ1UY
The new JW HQ is in Warwick, New York (they ditched NYC in 2016) so he is twenty miles away from anywhere he could be easily recognized, in another state, at a Bottle King, buying hundreds of dollars of whiskey, on a Sunday.

Strelnikov wrote: ↑

Tue Jun 01, 2021 5:37 pm

It lets anybody with the cash buy airtime and be as off-putting as they want. All major social media is shot through with rules which are chasing off the weirder people out there

Mostly because social sites been harassed or humiliated into dumping the really popular ones. Infowars used to be everywhere. King Alex's extreme crassness and money-grubbing didn't help his image after 20 years of ranting all manner of outlandish conspiracy stuff, on-air tantrums etc. Being tossed off YouTube, FB and Twitter probably cost him millions of followers. Even most of the joke videos made to mock him were removed. It's not the message; it's the access. Mass media is fickle because people are fickle. Most won't go looking for their "role model" if access is limited.

YouTube is trying to kill off their smaller creators and become like TV. Shortwave is the Wild West of weird spoken word, the final hurrah of AM Gold.

SW is the tail end of media. Like newsletters; a ghetto for extremists. The fools are repeating Father Coughlin, and John Brinkley and his goat testicles, over and over and over. The concentration of mass media in a few giant corporations only makes the extremists worse--more desperate.

...everything hinges on these crazy prophecies and if Stair turns out to be a complete fraud, possibly most of the 70-or-so people on the compound will quit and Stair's hand-picked board now running the place will sell the land and get out of religion. Or they will soldier on without Stair and find a new Chief Ranter to replace him. We will know by December.

The Branch Davidians are still in business, at that same worthless ranch. The "Family" is still going in LA long after David Berg's death, and endless sex scandals. The People's Temple was one of the few that completely self-destructed and left almost no traces or spinoffs. Did you know that Jim Jones's original church is near me in Redwood Valley? 7700 East Road. It has been an Assembly of God congregation since the Temple moved out in 1975. The AoG members DO NOT like to be reminded of their building's dark history. One of the most verboten discussion subjects in Redwood Valley today is still Jones; a good part of that being pure local redneck bigotry, since most of the People's Temple followers were black and RV is extremely white.

An amusing Flickr put up by a former Temple member
https://www.flickr.com/photos/peopleste ... 4174059137

All of these points are now like nails in a coffin lid, and the JWs only have 8 million members worldwide. In comparison the Mormons (who are far more professional-oriented and run their own colleges) reached ZERO congregation growth in 2017 within the United States, and were only growing in West Africa. That's how bad it is for the newer religions in the US.

Funny you mention that. One of the few places where proselytizing by JWs and Mormons has had any lasting success is on isolated Pacific islands. Those poor folks struggle to survive and barely have any education as it is. No wonder the missionaries have an easy time there. Use Google Earth to look at various islands, and often the only church on an isolated atoll will be either Mormon or JW.