The IT Crowd: New emergency number: https://youtu.be/HWc3WY3fuZU?feature=shared

The IT Crowd: Fire! https://youtu.be/1EBfxjSFAxQ?feature=shared

No, I’m not bad at listening, you’re bad at being clear and honest about what you mean.

I read some of your comments elsewhere in this thread, and you feel that the word cult has been used negatively against Wiccans and Hellenists. You spend some time arguing that only big religions have the clout and money to be harmful, and you want the word cult to mean specifically just small rather than abusive.

The problem is that you lost the battle over the meaning of that word about 80 years ago from what I can tell from reading it up. You may as well try to stop people from using the word fantastic in a positive light and just use it to mean absurdly implausible. It’s too late. The meaning has changed. Rather than saying things like “Wicca is a cult, it’s just not harmful because it’s not a religion, stop using the word cult to mean harmful” instead, say things like “Hellenism isn’t a large, harmful religion, it’s a small harmless one”. You seem to identify with “cult” and you see that as positive and you dislike larger religions which you see as harmful. Instead of arguing over the meaning of the word cult, argue with people who criticise Hellenism.

You picked a big long argument over the meaning of the word cult because you can’t let go of a meaning from a century ago. Meanwhile your intent was lost because you didn’t make your perspective clear early on.

Here’s how society is: when it sees an abusive group using religious ideas led by someone with a big personality, it calls it a cult, meaning it loosely and negatively, and then you shoot into the argument saying “no, no, don’t call them a cult, they’re a religion”. To everyone else, you sound like you’re defending them, whereas what you mean is “don’t use the word cult for bad things”, but that’s not what you say! Not for a long time! It’s a different day and we’re tens of comments away from when you first tried to intervene! You obliquely say stull like “no, they’re not a cult they’re too big, and they’re too powerful” and then people say “but cults can be big and powerful” and you say “no, cults are only small. big powerful ones are called religions” and the whole argument isn’t explicitly about what you mean. Your point is lost.

It’s like saying “no I’m not a troll, I live in a 1980s semi” when you’d be far better off saying “no, I wasn’t being sarcastic at all - I meant it, we just disagree”. The word troll has changed its meaning, and trying to talk about height or whether someone lives in a house in an argument about whether someone is arguing in bad faith, without ever mentioning caves, which was your real point, because your great aunt lives in one of the ancient cliff homes of Matera in Italy, but inexplicably you never mention it.

Rebrand. Give up on the word cult. I know it has all kinds of positive connotations for you, but that ship has sailed for the rest of society. You’d get a lot more sympathy if you were just open and honest from the start, like “I’m a pagan and we always got called a cult pejoratively in the 1970s and I don’t like people using that word negatively. Could you use the word religion instead?” and then at least the people arguing with you know what they’re arguing about. You’ll still lose that argument, but at least you wouldn’t waste as much time being indirect. It’s simpler to give up on the word and rebrand. After all, “Wicca” and “White witch” are rebrands, avoiding the negative connotations of witchcraft (eg poisons and love potions aka date rate drugs). Rebranding works. The satanists regularly troll rightwingers/christofascists by asserting their religious freedom to oppose the abusive anti-minority practices of the alt-right in ways that are popular online. Not by saying “stop calling bad religions satanic”.

By the way, wikipedia thinks there are somewhere around 800,000 wiccans and less than 40,000 scientologists, so I think even that by your own definition, scientology is more of a cult than wicca. But in terms of using the legal system to silence opponents, it’s certainly much more powerful. Did you want me to stop calling things cults if they’re powerful now?

Earlier you insinuated that scientology was small, now you’re saying it’s big. You don’t like the usual meaning of the word cult because you prefer to make cult mean “small religion” (which I think is a pretty pointless definition and confusing for most people). You claim that this is because it’s bad to have a word for a secretive group whose members lose personal autonomy or is otherwise particularly abusive. I don’t see it as in any way bad to be able to make that distinction, and I’m suspicious of the motives for removing it.

Citing “satanic panic dogma”, you mysteriously conclude the mere existence of a word with connotations of abuse is bad. It smells like a cover up, but I have no idea what you’re trying to blur the lines between because you haven’t made it clear which group that we saw as abusive you want us to reinterpret as merely small, or which group that we saw as merely small (and not cultish) you want us to use the word cult for.

You claim that something is ahistorical, but it’s never really clear what, since you aren’t using many of the key words to mean the same as the rest of us and haven’t made explicit the context that you’re referring to. I’d guess it’s something to do with the 1970s, but that’s really just a guess, I have no idea.

Why not use the contemporary meaning so the rest of us don’t argue with you just because you’re using a definition that was only current about a century ago?

I never said all religions are cults

Actually, yes, you’re just the one that asserted that scientology isn’t one. There’s an inconsistency where you use the older, broader definition and then deny that it applies to scientology, and I’d like you to state for clarity what you mean by a cult and why you feel it doesn’t apply to the church of scientology.

You’re being disingenuous. I’ve pasted exactly what they wrote, twice, and it’s only yesterday they said it. I’ve noticed that the moderators delayed some of your comments, but you and I know I’m not lying about your response. You’re denying they said what they said because I didn’t give you your precious hyperlink. Everyone can see you’re not arguing in good faith.

They said:

You make it clear they’re not welcome in the community, by force if necessary, and you let them back in once they’ve shown they can be trusted to be a member of the community again. IF they show they’ve changed.

I’ve been on a committee of people making this decision more than once. Rarely do people change enough to be welcomed back. Community self policing is the only way to really protect yourself when the government shows they wont.

Again, what kind of a community has a meeting to exclude folks for anti LGBT views? I tell you this, it wasn’t a housing project or a city, certainly not a state, it was surely a support group or similar.

You posted your “where do you think they’ll go if they’re kicked out of where they live” straight under that quote. Like, directly under it. The previous time you read that as being kicked out of their state, again, directly underneath.

I don’t know, maybe when you hear people criticise conservatives it makes you so mad that you don’t read what they actually write. I find it hard to come up with other rational explanations for your statements.

You did misinterpret them. What kind of a community has a meeting to exclude folks for anti LGBT views? I tell you this, it wasn’t a housing project or a city, certainly not a state, it was surely a support group or similar. Your reading comprehension cannot be this bad.

deleted by creator

What do you think gaslighting means, and how far do you feel you’ve been gaslit?

Oh. Wikipedia says that the anti-cult movement in the 70s was secular? Did you mean the anti-cult movement of the 40s? I didn’t know anything about that stuff till you brought it up, sorry.

I’m not particularly wedded to a particular definition of the word, but you seem to be using the modern and more critical meaning when you claim all religions are cults, whilst criticising me for not using the more neutral meaning of the word from antiquity, which I find confusing.

You claim Democrats are the ones gaslighting and lying?!

I thought they were global and pretty large scale, but I haven’t got any numbers for you and I wouldn’t dream of comparing their size with major world religions.

My assertion, which I admit I didn’t express, is that the distinction between cult and religion is less about size and more about how much members lose personal autonomy and how secretive the organisation is about its beliefs and practices.

That’s the way I see it anyway, otherwise there’s not a lot of point having two different words for it. There are grey areas, sure, but that doesn’t mean that there is no distinction.

You make it clear they’re not welcome in the community, by force if necessary, and you let them back in once they’ve shown they can be trusted to be a member of the community again. IF they show they’ve changed.

I’ve been on a committee of people making this decision more than once. Rarely do people change enough to be welcomed back. Community self policing is the only way to really protect yourself when the government shows they wont.

Where do they go? Do you propose that America has red states where only conservatives should live & blue states where liberals can live? Do you want to put over half of voters in concentration camps?

This you?

Regarding your lack of awareness:

Oh no, the slipperiest of slopes attached to nothing but pure conjecture! I will never be hungry again with all of the words you just put into my mouth!

You don’t think this was an attempt to raise awareness of your deliberate misinterpretation?

Their point was that kicking someone out of a small club isn’t the same as kicking them out of the state.

Your exaggeration of their point is what made it bad, not the point itself. That’s what the slippery slope fallacy is.

You’re still unaware that you misinterpreted them online?!

Your double standards are striking (across multiple conversations here). In this case you’ve concluded that a girl who got death threats for bringing a case against Trump withdrew, not because of the death threats, but because she was lying, and you’ve equated smelling hair with rape.

I once said that I thought that a politician who is famous for some pretty racist policies was probably trying to do the right thing in an admittedly stupidly foolish way on a separate issue, and people got very cross with me online for defending her, but it never once made me inclined to vote for her, that would be idiotic, so I simply don’t believe for a minute you were thinking of voting for Biden. If you want to claim you were prepared to vote for Biden, go on, what was it that made you think he would be a better president than trump?

You would never stoop so low as to deliberately misinterpret someone online? Not even it it was funny?

Look into it. But not too hard or too publicly.

You were jerking them off for advocating violence? That is one weird kink you’ve got there.

If you put a paedophile in charge of the country, none of our children are safe.

The rest of the conversation is missing, but you seem to be looking for volunteers to be jerked off by you?

I like that. That’s a helpfully consistent way of framing it.