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4chan validated in their protests against Scientology was not in my bingo card.
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For people like me who had no idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chanology
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That was amazing. I once witnessed a protest like that, in Hannover Germany I think. The idea of 4chan people actually going up the stairs and out of the house into the open air and talking to people, like with molecules and sound waves and all that stuff, it still blows my mind.
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They do that all the time. They're not redditors.
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That article has no mentioning of the tiktok speedruns?
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Those are not tied directly to this. This was in 2008, any modern protests against Scientology today have just spawned into their own thing.
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At this point I'm waiting for the aliens appearance in the Epstein files.
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Such a low level of expectation of ethical level for non human beings is not fair.
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At this point I'm waiting for the aliens appearance in the Epstein files.

There was an front page article about aliens and American pedophile leaders in the most recent issue of The Onion.

I don't see it online. Maybe it takes a while for the dead tree stories to appear there.

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Scientologists being involved with intelligence agencies doesn't surprise me even a bit, it makes a lot of sense as a CIA cutout.
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Infiltration of government institutions has been doctrine for the group since the 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White
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Those weirdos followed me around Ybor near Tampa when I said something negative about them online in public. IT WAS WEIRD! But I gave no Fs
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Man, I wish something like this would have happened to me when I was younger and spunkier. For years, I've had so many scenarios planned in my head for how something like that would play out! Even today, I might not just ignore it even though my propensity to give fucks has waned over the years.
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It seems likely that every tightly clique is trying to infiltrate every other such clique - it's endless battle between mafias, political parties, cults (Tulsi Gabard's connections to Krishna cult), intelligence agencies and so-forth, each trying to use the other.

But naturally, there significant limits on how much and how long each of infiltration be effective. A infiltrator from X sent to gain control of Y and gaining complete control there of will often identify with Y since leading it give them more power (Stalin was likely a agent of the Czarist secret police before the revolution but he probably wasn't taking orders from them in 1935 etc).

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Now I want to play Steve Jackson's Illuminati...

https://www.sjgames.com/illuminati/

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Any belief system or club that validates sociopathy as a "higher" state of evolution or enlightenment will worm it's way into intelligence agencies.
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the mormons are big in feddy gov agencies, for example
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Scientology is essentially a scheme to get private/incriminating information from very important people. Why the surprise?
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Scientology is what happens when a science fiction writer acts out a dystopian plot in real life instead of writing a novel.

Read Stranger in a Strange Land, read about Hubbard and Heinlein's friendship, and look at the timeline of when Scientology started and Stranger in a Strange Land was published.

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From reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons yesterday after someone posted a link to it in the comments for another thread, I came away with the impression that Hubbard seemed to be into some pretty weird stuff long before scientology.
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That may be true however today it is 2026 not 1961, LRH fell off the earth in 1980, and it is feasible that after the raids in 1977 and/or upon gaining tax-exempt status in 1993, some sort of deal was cut with the US state/intel apparatus to co-opt the church for another purpose
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No, shady deals and intel capture fits perfectly fine with the original dystopian novel in the real world.
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damn I wonder how many scientology believers in intel actually believe in scientology...

I mean, it shows how much intel agencies can "screen for high intelligence individuals" ?

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people believe in scientology as much as they believe in a literature club. If you listen to someone like Tom Cruise's statements he says "I have gotten to where I am today because of Scientology". He doesn't name off specific procedures, treatments, practices, etc. Partially because they are barred from naming them.

But if you're looking for a club you can advance it, I highly suspect Scientology is as quid pro quo as anything else out there. In other words, it's more of a social function than a religion.

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You get or used to get true believers working in hellish conditions[1] on the boats, paid ~nothing. It might be a quid pro quo convenience for the Tom Cruises, but there are also some suckers.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Org#Lawsuits

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Having a few famous Tom Cruises claiming it helped them is almost certainly part of the strategy for hooking in the dubious.
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Cruise's contribution is influence due to his status and likely money given his income. Other's contribution is going to be much simpler, as you pointed out.
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I'm saying, Cruise gets more out of it. Others get nothing. They're in it as believers, not a "literature club."
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This is an interesting way of putting it, but matches my thoughts. I think most such organizations (political parties, religions, businesses, large organizations of many types) consist of true believers at the bottom of the pyramid, and moving up the ranks are folks who recognize that they can advance by understanding the game and utilizing the group mind to maintain credibility among the true believers, while displaying ambition to elites to advance the groups goals. At some point in the hierarchy are folks whose primary or only function is to advance the groups goals using middle ranks to maintain legitimacy with the believers.
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This is sometimes referred to as Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

>Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":

>First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

>Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

>The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

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Religion is all about social function, at least from social science perceptives I guess.
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sure, but that is reductive. From a theological perspective it's entirely about salvation if you're Christian. Judaism, isn't so clear.
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