It’s a myth that “anyone” can get wrapped up in a cult. Their are many “filters” to joining a cult. Such as unusual dress, complicated social hierarchies, and tons of jargon. And they hit you with this stuff right up front; it’s not gradual. People who are not looking for community and meaning will be repelled.

So they’re filtering people who are not in a particularly credulous mental state. People who are not in a “joining” mentality. I’m not saying that educated, sophisticated, and intelligent people are immune. This all has to do with adjustment, maturity, and emotional stability.

So anyway, to mitigate the reach of cults, society should be organized to minimize alienation and isolation, while a multitude of sources of community and meaning should be encouraged. Check on the people you care about and make sure they’re getting on. Crush capitalism.

Public misogynists posing as ‘self help’ have been around forever and the only thing that changes is the nomenclature.

The movie “Magnolia” (1999) features a character that does the whole manosphere shtick back when those grifters had to sell their merch on stage at conference centers because Youtube wouldn’t even be a thing for 5-6 more years.

Love it that this chart’s purpose is to convince people to breakup with Reddit.

Just want to add a couple of things

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There were no extra-Biblical references to Pontius Pilate until 1961. Now imagine how much documentation must have surrounded the Roman prefect of Judea. All of it gone, except for a bit of limestone.

Also an argument (I think I heard it from Hitchens, but not sure): We know that the Nativity story is bogus because the Census that was supposed to bring Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem is anachronistic. And we know that it’s important that Jesus be from Bethlehem (City of David) because the Messiah was prophesized to be from there.

So the question is: if were making up Jesus from whole cloth, why not just make him Jesus of Bethlehem? Why go to the trouble unless Jesus of Nazareth was something people were already familiar with?

Any platform that’s advertising based is a propaganda outlet. Reddit’s function is to manipulate pubic opinion.

Why not both?

No different than Windows. Kids will use what you put in front of them.

When I was fist getting interested in computers I didn’t want to run DOS, I wanted to play Doom.

Just want to add my own conspiracy theory: Junior is not reacting to the lack of evidence, but push-back from the antivaxers.

Anti immigration politics cannot be understood without racism.

Ideals like immigration is going to change the national character is just another way to say some people are better than others.

Opposition to immigration is incoherent unless racism is true.

What you describe is individualism. And while I agree that individualism has poisoned the Western mind, it comes from enlightenment philosophy, industrial capitalism, and economics, not faith. Viewing the whole world as the sum of individual choices is way younger than any major religion.

I would argue that the atomization of Western society has harmed religion as much as anything since religion is a cultural relic that still relies on communal activities.

The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power by Jared Ball

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-030-42355-1.pdf

It’s thesis is that “buying power” as a proxy for political power is incoherent because the methodology is bad, the conclusions don’t follow, and the institutions that propagate the myth have conflicts of interests.

I’m interested in how capitalism has captured revolutionary and ethical action with “consumer choice”. That how we choose to shop is civic action to replace community and political organization.

The oldest praying automaton we know of is from the 16th Century. This is basically that but with more capitalism.

I can’t help but notice how captured the Christian mind is, when even the return of the Savior is a business opportunity; a revenue stream. These people are already robots who can’t worship without a prospectus and a spread sheet.

Is 2021 a good year to study? Not only is this during the pandemic, but it was early when people were still taking the pandemic seriously.

Democrats will always do the right thing, after having exhausted every other option.

There is nothing more totalitarian in existence than government regulating people’s reproduction. It’s for people who see abortion bans and think: this is great, but how can we extend the same principals and logic to men?

Purdue pharma followed strict manufacturing and purity standards to produce a drug that killed more Americans than the Viet Cong and Al Qaeda combined.

Can we say that the American healthcare industry really protects it’s customers from harm any better than the cartels?

Cheap plastic bowl scrapers. Like these:

I use these every time I cook. I use them every time I clean the kitchen.

What the Skyler? We supposed to hate Rose too?

The ironic part is that they’re working with a government in bed with narco-cartels, something they ostensibly hate. And they can’t say they didn’t know, because it was central to the deal.

Yea, religion is made up and should be ignored. Just like currency, boarders, sovereignty, human rights, the concept of law, literature, art, and language itself. Brilliant.