• Semi-Hemi-Demigod
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    6110 months ago

    But isn’t their whole operation snake oil? Aliens crashing into a volcano and possessing humans is pretty dumb.

    • @DaCookeyMonsta@lemmy.world
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      4510 months ago

      That wasn’t always public knowledge. It was a thing you only learned about later on when you were more indoctrinated. Then undercover reporters found out and South Park made it very public.

      • @fubo@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        It was mostly publicized via Usenet by Arnaldo Lerma, Dennis Erlich, Karin Spaink, David Touretzky, and other activists and ex-Scientologists starting in the early 1990s. The South Park episode didn’t come out until over ten years later in 2005.

    • @gowan@reddthat.com
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      2110 months ago

      They don’t lead with that and only reveal it when you are in deep enough to not recognize the sunk cost fallacy.

    • MelodiousFunk
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      1310 months ago

      Gotta give them points for snake oil creativity though. Their nonsense is much more entertaining than hearing “invisible sky wizard did it” as the answer to every question for millennia.

        • Rose Thorne
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          1110 months ago

          I’ve always wondered if the “THIS IS REAL SCIENTOLOGIST BELIEF” ticker was something planned early on, or if there was a moment of taking the whole thing in and someone went “This is fuckin’ South Park. Everyone is going to think we’re being extreme. We need to clarify.”

    • vlad
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      410 months ago

      Correct, but they want to keep plausible deniability.

    • @corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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      310 months ago

      Yeah. But in a world where JFK is coming back or something, a volcano cult isn’t like stand-out crazy anymore.