Electronic Moose

Two types of dogs

Actually they're not all cults and you're doing the work of making sure actual cults can slip under the radar when you say stuff like that

Cult leaders LOVE that trend, because they can point to it and say, "people will call anything a cult, it's basically meaningless"

However, scientifically the words "Religion" and "Cult" can't really be meaningfully separated. Any definition of religion narrow enough to exclude all cults also excludes things that are very much seen as legitimate religions and any definition broad enough to include all religions will include things that most agree are definitely cults.

Behavior - control member behavior via reward, punishment, manipulation, etc

Information - control information coming in and going out via isolation and propaganda

Thought - discourage critical thinking for oneself to shape attitude

Emotion - guilt, shame, terrorize, create a sense of community and family, etc

She's the only cult expert to have grown up in a cult. Specifically the Children of God pedophile sex cult. She was also in the army in intelligence. She has a perspective on cults that absolutely cannot be matched.

According to her, religions CAN'T be cults. But religious GROUPS can.

A religion is a concept and it's too big to ever create the kind of coercive control. Christianity isn't a cult, but Mormons and Catholics are. A Cult requires a shared sacred assumption or charismatic personality to center around.

Cults of personality only last as long as the leader does, and so MAGA is on its way out. Someone may take over the mantle when 47 dies, but MAGA will never be powerful again. Because a cult of personality is specifically about the cult leader. The leader is divine or something like it.

Cults of ideals are built around something that transcends a single person's lifetime. The Army uses the Constitution. Mormons have their weirdly specific rituals and commandments. The Catholic Church has the papacy. Scientology has aliens. The sacred idea is taught and maintained through a bureaucracy of some kind. The leader here is not divine, but a high priest of the divine, so to speak.

A religion is a set of beliefs and values that can be used for good or evil, depending on who has the reins. A small Christian congregation who splits preaching up among the members isn't a cult. A Sikh gurudwara that feeds the locals with volunteers and doesn't require anything from the people eating isn't a cult. A Norse pagan group that meets on the solstices to dance and feast isn't a cult.

A church that tells you to cut off non Christian family members? Cult. A boyfriend who controls who you can see and what you eat and demands domestic labor? That's called a two person cult. A social group that demands all of your free time and punishes you for raising questions? Probably a cult.

A religion is just... it's a D&D rulebook. It tells you what's possible but you make choices within it. A cult is when people use the rule book to extract labor and respurces from people. A cult actively and intentionally exploits people.

Including the fact that they literally use cult experts to design basic training.

I spent more than half of my life in cults and that doesn't make me an expert, but it does mean I recognized what she wrote about in her books as a mirror to what I grew up around. And she breaks it down in those books in a way I wouldn't care to on Tumblr.

For years after 9/11 we were constantly told “NEVER FORGET” and the idea was basically “keep feeling sad and afraid and especially ANGRY forever; don’t let time dull your emotional response like it’s naturally supposed to; continue to justify the injustices by feeling this way all the time.” And the 3000 deaths were constantly pointed to as this huge deal that justified any lengths to go to.

And then Covid hit. And there were several points during the height of the pandemic (because fun fact, according to the actual definitions of a pandemic, *it’s not technically over yet!* ) where we were having a 9/11’s worth of deaths every week or so. And suddenly 3000 deaths were not a big deal at all. Instead of being enough reason to go to war far away and strip us at home of many rights too, they weren’t even enough justification to make people wear a damn piece of fabric over their face.

3000 people died once and now the government can legally wiretap anyone without a warrant, and hold people at Gitmo under suspicion of terrorism (no need for due process)… 3000 people dying every week but we should all still be going out to brunch and concerts and who cares about the disabled and immunocompromised?

Many, many people celebrated Pulse. We were told we deserved it. That it was God’s punishment for our sin of loving the same sex. We are sent messages like these I received in 2018:

We in the community often call the victim count 49+ to include the survivors who couldn’t live with the pain.

The event was never officially declared a hate crime or targeted homophobic attack and is rarely listed as one in databases.

At our vigils for those slaughtered, Extremist Christian groups showed up to protest, holding signs like this:

ID: Me kissing a woman I was casually seeing in front of an angry looking man with a “Sodomy is Sin” sign.

Please understand how much more than just a mass shooting this was. We are still to this day harassed and told we deserved it by some.

But it also reminds me that low and high are really terrible adjectives for languages.

Absolutes when it is in fact a relative property we are trying to describe.

How high abstraction level is the language.

(

For none nerds:

I care about every detail = Low abstraction level.

I do not care about most of the details = high level abstraction.

Most normal user interacting is normally thought of as high abstraction level, because you do not have to worry about memory management or how the electronics works.

)

Because it is arbitrary what low or high means. That makes it a bad absolute to use.

C is a HIGHER abstraction level than assembly. Not high, higher

Higher implies a "Than ____" and instead of debating semantics, we can ask the question "than what?" and be told "than python" And agree that "yes, C++ is a lower abstraction level language than Python"

Per the CachyOS subreddit:

"As the title states, the Arch AUR has been hit by a huge malware infection campaign over the last couple of days. There's an earlier post referring to alvr. That's not the only package it's hundreds of them, many of them Aur packages average people would install like apple-music-desktop.

I don't have the full details of the scope of the malware campaign. I know it's a credential stealer so it steals ssh keys and browser login info and apparently has rootkit potential.

This was widespread and targeted orphaned packages. Aur for some reason allows other people to take over existing projects.

The bottom line is if you used the aur over the last couple of days you may have been infected and the problem with taking over orphaned packages I believe remains. I personally would not use the Aur for the foreseeable future, and ideally not at all. It's a security risk."

There is a script that you can run on your machine to detect if you have a package that is known to have been infected which you can view here. I have also linked the subreddit post here.

Just download it, make it executable and run the script with sudo and let it run, it will tell you what it found once it's complete.

https://www.sonatype.com/blog/atomic-arch-npm-campaign-adds-malicious-dependency

https://ioctl.fail/preliminary-analysis-of-aur-malware/

Users can also run the following to check for malicious packages:

You do not understand

Most modern Ag operations don’t even have a proper A-Horizon. They’re too busy turning the earth every time they replant. The A-horizon is the Black Gold that makes Soil Soil. It’s a structurally complex soil horizon that must be built in place by the interactions of Plants and Fungi and Insects. It is The Thing that soaks up rain and holds onto it for plants. The A-Horizon is The Thing that builds up when you let a field sit fallow. The act of tilling creates fecundity by breaking up the A-horizon. On a really good Organic no-till farm you might find an A-horizon between 3-6 inches.

His A-horizon was 4 feet deep. 50 inches.

I-

I have no context. His farm was covered in a living skin thick enough for a child to stand in.

Gives me hope for what we could accomplish if we got our collective heads on straight, you know? Like. This was one guy. A brilliant man, who knew what he was up to, but. The thing about brilliant ideas is they can be shared.

Humus, or Humic Compounds, are a cryptic and poorly understood set of organic substances. As the final metabolic result of once-living things being digested first by macroscopic organisms, and then by microorganisms, they resist most forms of analysis, and have cryptic structures. A few that we have managed to isolate and study are the Humic & Fulvic Acids.

Humus has a number of remarkable tendencies. It is capable of retaining water far better than any raw mineral clay; it also retains electrically charged clay granules, which themselves retain mineral ions, all of which is essential to make a soil a high-quality resource for Plants to grow in.

A composter is a box that contains an environment that is conducive to the production of Humus, but the best way to produce it is in-place, by laying layers of organic material down over an unbroken earth and growing things out of that. The interaction of the plants rooting, the fungus weaving itself through everything, the bacteria and archaea metabolizing as they do, and inorganic weathering forces all combine to gradually build up the microscopic equivalent of a complex megastructure capable of retaining far more water, and containing far more nutrients, than any inorganic substrate.

This stuff is black gold. This is the stuff that determines whether or not a plot of land is going to be “productive.” The knowledge of how to make it, how to care for it, is an essential piece of wisdom that our civilization needs to remember.

Fortunately, folks seem to have the right response:

Farmers are more important to the continuity of civilization than administrators, no matter what the elitists say. This knowledge is important.

You said it was okay but I shoyld think about hrt. My url was GwentheLumberJane

Im 27 now. Im on hrt for 9 months and im dressing like a girl and loving my life. Good days and bad days but getting better

Thanks for being there all those years ago. And all the wisdom you shared throughout the years

I want you to know you are important in the story of my life

I have cute dresses now

omg I vaguely recognize that url! I don't remember the interaction, but your old url i do!!!!

it would be so awesome