Change of pace blog post on Scientology....

[Strelnikov]

....though much of what I wrote could be modified to deal with the WMF if the reader uses their imagination.

https://wikipedia-sucks-badly.blogspot. ... -from.html

[CrowsNest]

I don't get it. What are we saving? The tech?

Anyway, I at least thought about something I never had before, what happens to old Scientologists. On Wikipedia, you're expected to die in post.

In so many ways, Wikipedia is worse the Scientology. There is no forced disconnect, the activity of editing itself creates the disconnect. With far less funds and infrastructure, they have undoubtedly ruined way more lives, both of those inside and out. Their ideology is no less insane and easily debunked, yet it has wide acceptance. They are a Church and an Evil Corporation, yet are not regulated or even classified as either. The Wikipedians happily accept a life of pointless toil in service of the inner circle's goals, which are patently not about dissemination of knowledge, without even needing to be brainwashed.

You can't save Wikipedia from itself, being an evil cult is a feature, not a bug. Even as a thought experiment, there is literally not one thing you can do which would make any of the things I mentioned, better. You can't depose a leader who has already been deposed. You can't take Wikipedia back to its original doctrine, because it was an evil fraud from the very start. You can't roll it back to a collection of small local missions because they already largely have, as part of their fraudulent reimagining of their own sense of self. The useful parts of their technology has already been divorced from the cult. You can't decentralise what is largely already decentralised.

You can dissolve the WMF, release its funds and buildings back to society, but the impact on the effect the cult has in wider society, would be nil, not least since in the sudden absence of an evil Inner Circle, the Wikipedians are dumb enough to accept the recreation of one, even fund its recreation themselves, they're that stupid. They need to feel exploited and suppressed, they need to think the WMF is incompetent and bloated, because otherwise they'd have to admit the real truth - the WMF is an irrelevance, a convenient fiction they use to convince themselves they're not the real problem.

The sick truth of Wikipedia is that the fraud comes from within, that the control and mindfuckery comes from the mid-levels, without any need to issue them with uniforms, extract any fees, tell them any (really huge) lies, or extract anything from their lives other than their time and their brain cells. They are the bureaucracy. They are the secret police. They are the tyranny of evil men. They are the mechanics. They are the High Priests. They are the combat troops. They are the cult. Not an extension of, not a necessary adjunct, but the core essence.

While they may have spawned this evil on the world, the cult now exists in spite of the WMF, not because of them. Quite literally in many cases. There simply isn't going to be any rolling back to a time when it wasn't the case, because that would take Wikipedia back to a point in time when they were an irrelevant curiosity, a promising idea whose true potential to fuck this world right in the ass as an inevitable consequence of putting the theory into practice, had yet to be realised.

You can think of it like a beehive. The Queen performs certain functions no other hive member can, but she is a prisoner of circumstance, not an evil controlling mind. The means of construction, defence, production and general pestilence, comes from rest of the hive, the material significance of the Royal Chamber is virtually nil. Her vast resources and army of servants are not her own, to direct as she pleases. If the Queen dies, then the hive simply creates a new one through mutation of one of their own.

You cannot save the villagers from the scourge of a bee colony by deposing the Queen. And decentralizing that function could unleash something even worse on the world. Destruction of the hive doesn't necessarily require starting with the Queen first. It may be the most satisfying target, it may even be a sensible short term strategic goal. But it won't rid the world of bees. They're assholes like that.

As ever, this comparison is very unfair on the bees, because their benefit to society is proven and indeed critical. Wikipedia? Not so much.

[Strelnikov]

I don't get it. What are we saving? The tech?

No, the idea was to see if a despised "new religious movement" could at the very least get back to a point where they could start again, because Scientology is in terminal decline - David "Slappy" Miscavige is using it for his own gain. They are down to 20,000 people. The actual Scientology "technology" is being used by the various Independent Scientology outlets and they go all the way to the top, Operating Thetan VIII level.