As far as I know, there was a protest here in the Denver area, as well as maybe one in Boulder. I don’t know about the Boulder one, but the Denver protest may’ve had sixty people.
I wonder if that had anything to do with someone deciding they only wanted ‘anons’ and not ‘internet fags who saw it on youtube’.
Personally, I haven’t seen their little youtube thing. Through a series of [not so] serendipitous events, I began a Scientology reading binge about a week before the stupid Tom Cruise Video and the Denial of Service fiasco.
Allow me to explain through the magic of vague minustime [ – time ]. It went something like this:
– 3 weeks: Business as usual.
– 2 weeks: I can’t get away from talk of Scientology. Even if I put the entire chatroom on ignore, someone finds me through IM and asks me if I’ve heard about it. Halfway through the week, I get seriously annoyed and finally go to xenu.net. I figure I’ll watch that Southpark thing again, and be done with it.
– 1 week: The magic and spiffiness of Scientology is that it forces so many people to turn to the internet to release their information. Xenu.net has books. WHOLE BOOKS! I have found a new home. After much rummaging through various metaphorical boxes, I settle here and start reading.
The Attack: I already know so much about Scientology that I decide the initial attack is just them being terribly confused by all the hits they’re getting, and deciding to blame ‘some anonymous party’, which, in turn, leads to Anon dropping in to gay up the place.
I still don’t know if I was wrong about that. I really don’t know that I care, either, because it sounds like the sort of thing they’d do — also, at this point, I have much more reading to do.
Since then, I’ve been through The Scandal of Scientology, A Piece of Blue Sky, Bare-Faced Messiah – The True Story of L Ron Hubbard, and am now working my way through the available parts of the potentially-longer-and-denser-than-Battlefield Earth Clearwater Hearing transcript [both here and here].
In my wanderings, I ended up at scientology-lies.com through a rather old [nothing newer than the 90s] page that seemed to be nothing more than a collected list of reports of harassment from the newsgroup.
Also, you can’t forget the ever-popular http://www.whyaretheydead.net/ and http://www.lisamcpherson.org/, because everyone knows about Lisa. And that boiled guy [there are pictures].
I think that, once I’m done with the transcripts, I’ll be moving back to xenu.net. There are still more free-to-read-online books there, and I do enjoy that.
Anyway, no. I didn’t attend the protest, so there will be no pictures of it here. But I do suddenly feel that I know way more about Scientology than I do about some other religions. Because of this, I feel qualified to have an opinion on the subject.
Hubbard makes me look sane. And kind. And coherent. And alive, since he’s really, most sincerely dead.
Scientology is a potentially dangerous cult and a moneymaking scheme. The people involved aren’t always bad people, but…well, neither are people in other religions, until they blow up a Planned Parenthood clinic. It’s kinda the same thing. The crazies in Scientology probably would’ve joined the Army of God if they’d gotten there first [and, say, gotten the parents of this person, because they were probably raised in the cult].
I’m not actually interested in ‘destroying’ Scientology – I know better than that. You can’t destroy something that’s already been spread on the internet [like that Tom Cruise video]. I would like to see them lose their tax exempt status, though. And maybe get labelled as vexatious litigants.
…ha! Someone put this at the bottom of the Vexatious Litigation page. I guess I’m not the only one….
Shit. Why are the croutons always gone?