❀ the cult of: ➥motivational speakers ➥life coaches ➥personal growth gurus ➥new-age charlatans ➥AWESOMENESS FEST

There's also a great B story about a capella bros shitting in the dresser drawers, seriously, people, it's worth your time

otm
Bingamton Crosbys are the real heroes

^^ yes

gr80 have you tracked this one down yet:

Online you can see him posting repeatedly in another forum (HiIQ topic) and being chatty.

I felt like the final episode of Seduced was about 1000x more informative, powerful, and impactful than all 9 hours of the Vow. I know some people are poo-poohing India and think this is meant to rehab her image; certainly there's a part of that, but it seems evident to me that she's a victim. Cult shit is tricky, it's too easy to say she was 100% complicit. I really like all the women with whom she gave that presentation to the law school. Seemed like some fairly strong hints in it that everyone thinks Scientology needs to be tackled next.

they really said “no guatemalans, just vibes 🥰✨” pic.twitter.com/uv3L6FrZqW

— ratty tooey ☭ (@200mgedible) March 21, 2021

not going to say i hope someone there gets kidnapped and held for ransom but im not going to say the inverse

Just started in on this...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKtbJvL2xWI

If I didn't know the T3@l Sw@n cult was real, I'd assume it was fake. It's that far out.

Omg. Someone I have mutual friends with posted a long, weird thread defending this person. Something about how TS is an "energetic mirror" so if you think she's psycho it means YOU'RE psycho.

Wow look at the YouTube comments

she needs to make herself waaayyy less accessible, appearing only briefly in an upstairs window once a week

That's how you run a dangerous yet highly profitable cult

ok, I watched half an hour of that show over lunch and that lady crazy

having listened to podcasts/and having read about some incredibly weird utah-based "therapies" that kids were subjected to, I have no doubt some incredibly fucked up things happened to her as a kid, though

apparently she then consulted with the recovered memories/satanic cult therapist afterward? good lord

this is a zillion hours long but, oh boy
T3@l Sw@n childhood friend:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY04M9tNEq0

Turquoise Falcon
Fuschia Egret
Lavender Seahawk
Mauve Albatross
...man, I'm never gonna get my cult off the ground...

"If I didn't know the T3@l Sw@n cult was real, I'd assume it was fake. It's that far out."

My first thought was "what has Tilda Swinton done wrong, and why do we have to censor her name".

listening to that long interview with the friend. ummm holy shit!

highly recommend The Gateway podcast from 2018 (6 parts, produced by Gizmodo iirc) - it’s the original reporting that the hulu documentary series is based on, by the same reporter Jennings Brown

+1
but it's like i pay so little attention to some podcasts that i thought she was done for in the end. it was just like whatever?

i listen to fewer such things now

as weird & suspect & fuckin snake-oily as t3@l absolutely is, for me the interview w the husband of leslie, her first client who committed suicide, is still a HUGE red flag that haunts me

faux-affable hippies are like an entire category of red flag in and of themselves

highly recommend The Gateway podcast from 2018

+1 again on this - there's some minor talk about it upthread. The Conspirituality podcast (worth a listen, just not every episode) recently interviewed Jennings Brown about the aftermath of both the podcast and the new series.

not sure if I can watch much of this hulu series, because having known some people with, hypothetically, undiagnosed personality disorders, I’m just internally screaming “red flag! red flag!” every few minutes

Yeah when someone asks if there's anyone that can call you on your bullshit and you say no ... not being able to walk the talk is one thing. Not being able to talk the talk ...

the guy who has lived with her through her multiple marriages, kind of wondering (I’m not through the series) if he’s been thrown under the bus yet

“I don’t use my attractiveness or sexuality to manipulate people, just ask my house eunuch who has lived with me through my multiple marriages!”

Long, meandering post with recaps of The Deep End with much more background information, other videos, and reactions from the T3@l Tr1b3. Unsurprisingly, they don't like the documentary.
https://www.celestialhealing.com/2022/05/off-deep-end-with-teal-swan.html

Anyone who hasn't already had enough of NXIVM should really check out the (final?) season of the Vow. From a documentary and editing perspective, its leagues above the first season (only one of the two directors handled this one, for the better). It's also intense and incredibly depressing.

i will check it out eventually i think, it is hard to “want” to watch it

Do I need to watch the earlier ones or can I just watch this?

there's only one previous Vow season, and, while I think it is too long, it does give you a very in-depth view of what happened. But you may also be able to just watch Seduced, which was made by other people and focuses only on India Oxenberg's experience, and I think is a better documentary than the first season of the Vow.

Watching this last season was made bearable by knowing Raniere’s sentence in advance—I would have been too anxious wondering if there’s some way he’d squirm his way out.

The Nancy-centric parts of the final episode were very compelling. I often find the second-in-commands an interesting combination of true believer and pragmatic realist, since they’re often the ones who see how the sausage is made by having to implement the details of ripping people off, etc. (See: Sheela from Wild Wild Country). For much of the season, I went back and forth on how sincere she was; she'd condemn Raniere’s evil acts, but she kept backing away from the whole truth by claiming "oh but the rest of NXIVM was totally legit and helped thousands, he was tainting the good with his bad." It was really affecting to see her finally breaking down and wondering if she’d been lying to herself with that line all this time, that maybe the curriculum really was just another abusive method of control. That scene where the crew make her watch the clip of herself telling the study group that the real sexual abuse is when society tells minors they’ve been abused!

My girlfriend is quite interested in the Manson Family, or more specifically, the women of the Family. She hated the ending of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood because—unlike Charlie Says, also from that year—it made no acknowledgement that Atkins et al. were themselves victims, as much as they were perpetrators. I thought The Vow skillfully handled that dynamic in its treatment of the DOS women.

earlier in the season a lot of people online were reacting to Nancy's parts pretty negatively, which I understand; claiming she seemed to be trying to salvage her reputation, etc. But by the end of the series it's pretty clear that's not what she was trying to do; she was trying to understand how she'd wound up in this situation, and openly questioning why she turned a blind eye to abuse. Coercive control is something that's really hard to understand from the outside (look at the reactions to Sarma Melngailis and Bad Vegan), and I think this is the first time I've seen a documentary successfully portray what this is like.

Also loved Nancy's mom: "I never liked him" (leaves room)

I've only watched a few episodes of the second season and may return when I stop cringing. I was initially worried after seeing more of the interviews/footage of the people who still seem like true believers that it'd try too hard on the "gotta hear both sides" angle but that doesn't seem like the case

yeah, it does seem like that at first but trust me, the more you see of them the more you realized how deeply delusional they are.

i think it's necessary to hear directly from those still loyal though, because it does give you an understanding of WHY people got involved and believed in this stuff in the first place.

the devotees dancing outside the jail was possibly one of the most cringe-inducing things I've seen

It's amazing, the sort of programs and organizations that people will join rather than just going to therapy.

xp Absolutely, particularly because Rainiere is such an uninspiring guru. No style, nothing compelling about his manner of speaking, and certainly not sexy. I'm assuming he must have some charisma in person, but none of it comes across in the footage. In all the home movies, he just seems like a substandard dorm room slacker, rambling after a bong hit. (Much derisive laughter at him trying to explain Led Zeppelin to one of the victims, or Nancy's assessment that all he ever did was eat and lay on the couch instead of working.)

A friend was joking that they were hesitant to watch some of these shows because life has been very frustrating and unfulfilling and the cult might still seem reasonable even after hearing the downsides.

I get it. Therapy's kind of a mixed bag, and in a large enough group, even if you don't immediately fall for the omnipotent leader shtick, you might find people you can relate to and build a shared environment that's fulfilling in ways normal life isn't. It's easy to get blinders on about how ridiculous the shared goal truly is when it becomes a group mantra that just happens to underlie all of your fulfilling interactions.

re: nxivm, I still have no idea why that goofy manipulative huckster guy would ever be trustworthy, though. I feel like the majority of people who were really into it had absolutely no experience with people who played up the self-deprecation and humility angle to be manipulative

whoops, that was an xpost

and yeah, Raniere's angle was that he was doofy and faux-humble. nearly all the footage of him teaching something starts with his claims of humility or normality followed with rebukes whenever he's contradicted. and the people coaching others to yell at each other, stay in physically stressing positions, etc. are doing it when he's not there

nicki clyne's irl story arc from key battlestar galactica actor who could have perhaps used that as a springboard to more, to dancing outside a prison in support of a sex cult guru is really something. everyone has gone insane the last decade.

I haven't finished season 2 of The Vow but during the first few episodes I kept having this terrible idea: they should show the clip of her character's last scene from BSG because it'd be funny

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7vnb9/a-fest-review-vishen-lakhiani

oh hell yeah Vishen is back!

"It's about bliss, but it's also about the fist."

personal growth does not exist but people change over time. People are not trees.

What about Ents

https://i.imgur.com/ZfTiURT.png