Yeah- suuurrree….

Did any of you see that Duke was in Charlottesville during what was basically a NeoNazi rally a few summers ago? He was there spewing the same hate he and the Klan have always spewed.

Sorry – I seriously doubt that COS could ever change its stripes.

Ms. B., I think it also just came along at a time ripe for sort of an echo boom of Scientology’s 1960s explostion, when hippies turned yuppies as well as post-boomer young adults and professionals were looking for personal and business tools. It was also for instance the era when NLP and Tony Robbins took off, and on the more religious side, fundamentalist and prosperity gospel Christian ministries flourished.

One thing that I think is telling, is that a lot of Scientology’s success then was through WISE, promoting use of the “tech” in companies and capitalizing on a general trend towards being more performance-oriented and profit-focused. They particularly made inroads in to healthcare and pseudo-medical practices that had been backwaters of old-fashioned management – capturing a demographic of dentists, chiropractors, etc., that make up an important membership component to this day.

Peridot, hopefully, our work in exposing scientology for what it is and helping good folks escape the trap will make it unlikely that any will be fooled by the glitz that the enterprise wraps itself up in.

The whole “management by stats” was set to make everyone fail. No matter how fantastic you did this week, it’s not enough. NEXT week, you have to do better or you’re in ‘ethics’ trouble, working out of some grave condition instead of getting restful, restorative sleep, so you can comfortably do at least as well. AND add in a couple of off-purpose special projects to do that ALSO have to be ‘upstat’ every week or else. It’s possible at the start of any new post, but once you’ve learned the ropes and hit your stride, it soon becomes impossible to honestly increase that number. Hence the multitude of ways that staff find to falsify their stats lest they perish.

Rip, I doubt they would ever be honest enough to say “financial contribution” even though it’s what is generally understood to be the case. GAT or any other “GA” is an attempt to further obfuscate Dwarfenführer’s® true goals, not reveal anything truthful. He’s certainly not improved anything other than the hooch he guzzles.

And their “friends” are all transactional, only their friends while they can and do contribute to their cause-of-the-day.

Walk-in, “deprogramming” has a bad connotation even to us who didn’t experience it. De- something-or-other seems right. “Decompress” is the best I can come up with at the moment. “disentangle” is a part of it. It’s like that damnable “study tech” which didn’t make me a better student — I’d been a good student all my life. It made me less certain that I understood the poorly-printed words on those pages, since any experienced (in scientology) examiner could trip me up by requiring me to give a dictionary-clear definition of words which had NOTHING to do with the subject of the word salad on that page. We weren’t *allowed* to dismiss what we were reading as drivel but had to somehow elevate it to the level of peer-reviewed science, which it by no means resembled.
scientology: making the able less able since 1950.
40 years later, it’s still screwing me up despite my mindful recognizing the poison for what it is, and throwing it on the trash heap of failed, never-workable ideas.