I think it’s part of the halo that actors and sports stars have. I’ve known excellent engineers in my field that are absolute basket cases outside the office. Yes, it usually catches up with their work at some point but they can hide problems for extended periods of time. With actors and athletes we only see them at their best and assume it carries over to the rest of their lives.
It appears that Mack is negotiating a plea deal.
But I can still think less of them, right? It seems the assumption that they’re brainwashed is less probable than the assumption that they knew what they were doing. And any motivational techniques that include branding someone in their pelvic area and referring to someone else as “master” are pretty clearly BS.
Enjoy,
Steven
She’s out on bail. $5 million. I think this is horseshit.
I’m not even going to link to them here, but if you have a really strong stomach, look up the names Cindy Hendy, Claralyn Balazs, and Karla Homolka.
Fully willing and enthusiastic accomplices to male serial torturers and rapists, they are now all free. Read about what they did. Read about the sentences their male counterparts got. Horseshit. PURE horseshit. This is an outrage.
Branding sex slaves and trafficking people doesn’t seem clean living.
To be clear, do you mean NXIVM is Scientology spinoff, i.e. actually originated within or from it, or just that it shares its cult-like aspects? Not to defend Scientology, but a sex cult wouldn’t seem to be their thing. If anything, by all I’ve heard from investigative reporters and former members, Scientology tends towards prudishness. Leah Remini recounted how, as a teen member she was once reprimanded because of her “sexy” underwear, which in fact was something like Hanes Her Way and really not at all risque by average cultural standards.
Agree 100%.
Nitpick: Lamar co-invented frequency-hopping spread spectrum. Spread spectrum is a communications protocol used in many cell phone systems.
You think she’s a flight risk?
You mentioned a couple of times how sickly she looked. Where did you see that? When she was released she looked pretty healthy to me.
Loved that show! But I won’t admit to being so old that my first tablet was made of stone.
My first thought when I saw this photo was that her face looked a little drawn and hollow and and maybe a little sallow overall but then I realized that it was probably just unflattering lighting and seeing a “normal” photo of an actress instead of a publicity-ready touched up shot.
In these photos she is a bit more thin than from *Smallville *days, but nothing that really leaps out as unhealthily so. I’d go further to say that I wouldn’t disturb her repose as a reaction to her consumption of crispy baked goods.
I saw her in this video,which is, admittedly, a year old. But she looks horribly thin. She looks a little better in DG’s photos, but I think she’s wearing baggier clothes and makeup that disguise a lot.
That other photo with the wrong hair she looks fine, but I suspect it’s quite old given the hair color and length. She seems to be back to blonde and with longer hair now, and her body is thinner than that.
OK, so she’s thin. That doesn’t excuse anything!
It’s not the thinness at issue. It’s whether or not she is actually in charge. If she’s required to be just as thin as all the other sex slaves, then she may just be head slave rather than actually having a position of power.
I think it’s important to figure out how much she is a victim, and how much she is a perpetrator. I apologize if I come off as overcompensating. I’ve just seen so much that seems to ignore this angle, and that bothers me.
I’m not saying she’s entirely innocent, either. What I do know is that this is a cult, and those are usually set up around a single strong personality who uses various forms of psychological warfare to get vulnerable people to do what they want. I know that they often use blackmail where that fails.
If it turns out she’s some evil mastermind herself, then fine. But, from what I see right now, she doesn’t seem to be. She seems to at least be as much victim as perpetrator.
I also don’t think that punishing someone who is a victim of a cult the same as the leader is a useful deterrent. In fact, it would make the blackmail much stronger. You can’t be the whistleblower, because not only will bad things you’ve done be leaked, but the law will punish you.
So you’re saying she was just following orders?
This attitude is exactly why women on average serve half the sentence that men do when convicted of a crime. If the perpetrator is a woman, society bends over to assume that she must be a victim, because heaven forbid we hold a woman responsible for her crimes. Apparently, even if she recruits women into a sex cult, gathers future blackmail materials from them to help control them, and holds them down while they get branded, there will still be someone who insists that somehow she’s a victim too.
I know what you’re saying, but the mastermind of the cult is often aided and abetted by other high-up people. If it came out that Tom Cruise personally participated in shit like this, I’m pretty sure nobody would be raising the possibility that he was an abused and manipulated victim. He may indeed be one, but because he’s a man, it’s unlikely he’d garner a level of sympathy comparable to Mack. I don’t mean to sound like an MRA guy, but I do think there’s some gender bias at work here.
I don’t know what Ms. Mack is or isn’t guilty of and neither does anybody else here. I do know that prosecutors tend to overcharge, especially when dealing with a witness they’d like to flip.
She plead guilty to a variety of charges, facing 20 to 40 years in prison.