Rocky

The advanced class was all bulls*it... of course it's easier to see 40 some years later.

Clearly this was the case, IMO.

I never took the WAP class (even though as a child in upstate NY, of Italian descent, I was called a WAP numerous times)... But he didn't need to drive that concept home. It was ingrained in the DNA of the cult from before I joined up in 1974.

AKA, why is that bozo's first thought any better than MY first thought?

As in "fake it till you make it?" But did they ever make it?

Hulu in the US already aired the final episode.

Hallelujah, Praise God, Amen!

To paraphrase Simon Sinek, start with WHY. Why should we care about any of that?

I took a road trip last month. On the trip, I saw Billions and Billions and BILLIONS of trees... for which I am very thankful. I bet there are lots of trees near where you live in the UK, Twinky. I hope so. When I think about trees, I don't think about twi.

Because you overgeneralize, exaggerate, and make easily debunked claims. YOU can alleviate that problem by being specific and linking to verifiable sources. YOU can count the number of members of such FB groups (they generally say how many members there are) and list the names of the groups. That was too easy of a question, Mike.

And has been so from the start.

Well... I'm of the understanding that there were never more than 100k who took the PFLAP class... and for YEARS (decades), twi strongly discouraged their minions from accessing the evil internet. I can't imagine there are... Especially so many who still give two hoots about the class. How many people go to twigs... er, home fellowships?

That's a figure of speech, right? Exaggerando?

"The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche."

Btw, since you seem to believe I have an ax to grind, what might that be, exactly?

What that sounds like to me is that you don't necessarily have any specific insight but you seem to expect me to read your mind. As you wish, but I pose questions seeking clarification, no other reason.

I just read a sentence in a book by Jon Ronson (among his writings is a book titled The Psychopath Test): "The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche."

Male cult leaders sometimes claim droit du seigneur over female followers or use physical violence to sexually exploit them. But, on the whole, they find it more efficient to dress up the exploitation as some sort of gift or therapy: an opportunity to serve God, an exorcism of “hangups,” a fast track to spiritual enlightenment. One stratagem favored by Keith Raniere, the leader of the New York-based self-help cult NXIVM, was to tell the female disciples in his inner circle that they had been high-ranking Nazis in their former lives, and that having yogic sex with him was a way to shift the residual bad energy lurking in their systems. According to Sarah Berman, whose book “Don’t Call It a Cult” (Steerforth) focusses on the experiences of NXIVM’s women members, Raniere was especially alert to the manipulative uses of shame and guilt.

Such as these questions...

How many individuals are there in the United States? How are individuals responsible for public health crises that they have no individual power to mitigate? Cop out? Did you cop out and not answer the salient questions I posted for you earlier in this thread that, if you had addressed them, might have given you some insight on what is or is not a societal cop out?

THAT is a demonstration that you lack self-awareness.

Quite a bit of that comment, Mike, is complete BS. Attempts to make an argument, but no way that can be construed as anywhere close to being a valid argument.

Too obvious to YOU perhaps.

Who is we? To what is money allocated? How do "we" (those who make such decisions) know that funding is being directed to actually address the root causes of the problem(s)?