Okay, but when a loosely affiliated group takes any coordinated action, it has to start somewhere. Someone has to choose a target, and enough of the others have to agree that it’s a worthy target.
I suppose it’s a thrill, but you don’t take on Scientology for giggles. A lot of people don’t know the first thing about Scientology, and don’t really care about it one way or another. Unless you’re a former Scientologist, the only reason you have to take on such an organization is out of some kind of moral sense.
Or maybe they just realized that the only way someone can effectively challenge Scientology is by being anonymous and ubiquitous. Kind of like the Lone Ranger. It will certainly be interesting to see how far they get.
I often find immature pranks the most hilarious for some reason. The fact that Anonymous continues to RickRoll the Church of Scientology is one of those things that is so absurd that it always gets a chuckle out of me. Sure, it’s juvenile and stupid. But so is Scientology.
The live rickroll was great, but I gotta say that I find the Guy Fawkes masks to be stupid. I assosciate it with people who thought V for Vendetta was ‘so awesome - anarchy wooo!’
I’ve wondered about the whole idea of organizing through a Wiki and online forums. I would think that by this time, half the info on there would actually be written by Scientologists. If they wanted to, they could really mess with them and send them on wild goose chases, or even set them up to be caught committing crimes.
All I’ve heard about are the protests. Did they eve go forward with things like spamming Scientology’s lawyers, breaking into their computers or anything?
It’s useful to be masked when protesting a group that has large numbers of lawyers and private detectives on their payroll. Remember, this is a group that has pursued and jailed a man who jokingly said on a newsgroup about “…sending a Tom Cruise missile” towards the Celebrity Center.
I can see why you’d want to avoid a civil suit by the CoS, but the guy who posted the “Tom Cruise missile” thing was prosecuted by a California DA–it wasn’t Scientologists who jailed him. If I show up at one of the Anonymous protests and just stand around watching without a mask, what kind of charge will the DA bring against me? I think the better kind of mask is the Zapatista kind–it sends the message better to onlookers that you need to mask your identity for very real and practical reasons. The Halloween masks make it seem like the protesters are just having fun.
And they if they’re really serious, they should be protesting at Scientology “recruiting” sites and work centers, rather than the “Celebrity Centers.” Anyone who is able to go into a Celebrity Center is already firmly entrenched in Scientology. Anonymous needs to reach the struggling actors in Hollywood and the vulnerable college students elsewhere who might take Scientology seriously. Otherwise, Scientology can just ignore them, until they get tired of this and move on to their next thing.
It was Scientologists who pressed charges. For a joking post on a Usenet message board. Imagine if someone combed through every post a particular person made on this board looking for material to use against them. For instance, there’s a running joke that a particular situation “makes me kind of stabby”. Innocent joking and harmless fun. But the Co$ could take that and build a case that the poster has made repeated threats of physical violence against people and should have their children taken away by Protective Services.
Cops and prosecutors don’t normally want to press charges - it adds to their workload. Hell, I was once punched in the mouth by a drunk cab driver in front of witnesses and wasn’t able to get the cops to run a breathalyser on the SOB. But when I called the cops to shut down a Co$ sidewalk operation in an area where they had no business license (on the sidewalk on the Kansas City Country Club Plaza). They lied to the police (see “Fair Game” policy) and claimed I had been abusive. I wound up spending the night in the city lock-up (the only time in my 47 years I have ever been).
But the “Church” employs a large number of lawyers and private detectives (most of whom are retired cops). That is two groups of people who know how to get police and prosecutors to pursue a case.
See above. Standard Co$ policy is to photograph everyone protesting against them.
No, you’re incorrect. The “Celebrity Center” exists to recruit “opinion leaders” - movie and sport stars. Most of the aspiring stars visiting are there doing what aspiring stars do - try to meet people who could be good for their career. By the Co$'s own admission, the majority of the visitors are not members. If they are successfully recruited (like Mimi Roger’s recruitment of Tom Cruise), they are supposed to influence their fans to become Scientologists as well. Celebrity Center protests are a great place to protest. The protesters will generally be able to recognize the established and aspiring stars, and they will hopefully find other places to drink and schmooze.
See above. Anonymous may be a bunch of punk kids, but it appears they are being advised by experienced anti-Scientologists.
Because they enjoy harassing and tormenting people, and seek out groups which are already disliked and stigmatized by the mainstream of society. That’s supposed to keep the majority off their case and even make them look like good guys. The thought process involved is something like “It’s* fun *to fuck with people! Hey, look at that crowd of [racists, zoophiliacs or other people with uncommon sexual practices, druggies, weird religionists, smokers, PETA types etc etc etc] – let’s fuck with them! After all, they’re freaks and deves and criminals who shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing, and nobody likes them anyway, so we can harass them as much as we please! Hey, after all we’re in the right and not those losers!”
It’s not only obnoxious and mean-spirited, it’s downright cowardly – attacking targets they’re sure don’t have protection and support coming their way from decent square citizens. That way they not only get to enjoy the taste of successful bullying, they can even come off looking like heroes or well-intentioned activists of some kind to a certain portion of the majority culture.
You would have a valid point if the target were not Scientology. Imagine if NAMBLA had:
[ul]
[li]A gigantic pile of money[/li][li]Hollywood stars as spokesmen[/li][li]A large number of lawyers[/li][li]An even larger number of private detectives[/li][li]A criminal record[/li][li]A history of attacking it’s perceived “enemies”[/li][li]It’s own prison system[/li][li]A history of mistreating, endangering and even killing it’s own members[/li][/ul]
…and all of the above is dictated by policy that carried the weight of religious doctrine.
I have a difficult time imagining that mass mind of Anonymous can think of anything to do to Scientology worse than the things Scientology has already done. Let me know when Anonymous has a body count, ok?
Look, I know all about what a reprehensible organization Ron’s Ranting Rangers are. Hell, I’m a big fan of Jack Parsons, and in my opinion the way he was served by Hubbard damns the latter and all his works forever, in and of itself.
However, my point wrt the Anon mob would be valid whether they targeted Scientology, Spiritualist churches (now there’s a true and undiluted rip-off religion if there ever was one), or street-living drug addicts: they find a group nobody likes or wants to defend, for whatever reasons, and use it to vent their aggression and meanness, fully confident that there’ll always be people who support them for attacking those targets without naming them for what they are, and that their victims will have no sympathy or support from outside. I have sufficient experence with that mindset to recognize it when I see it.
Please don’t put words in my mouth. I implied nothing of the sort; I only pointed out that the Anonys have done what they usually do, namely picking a target with almost no public support or sympathy, because they want to harass people without the usual consequences.
It’s pretty insulting to be assumed to defend or sympathize with an organization I have no more use for than you do, simply for pointing out that the quondam heroes in this scenario are themselves less than admirable.
Well, feel free to ride the insult train all you want, but you’re simply wrong that Scientology has “almost no public support or sympathy”. They’re protected by various laws (as is any religion) and have many active and energetic followers (as do most religions). That they have active and energetic opponents means little at this early stage - call us when we witness the Scientology equivalent of Krystalnacht.
Yeah, they’re protected by laws that deal with religious groups (which are a damned good thing actually – those same laws protect Satanists, JWs, the OTO, loudmouth atheist organizations, and a host of other religious minorities that would probably be ground beneath the public bootheel otherwise); if other laws are being broken by the organization as such, then let them be prosecuted for that – but vigilantism by smug little masqueraders acting from a high-school jock’s “git them weirdos!” mentality stinks on ice no matter who is targeted. And while you mention their “active and energetic membership”, I really don’t think the Scients have any support base amongst outsiders; if Joe Lunchbox has even heard of them, he probably dismisses them as “a cult”, something which we are all told over and over again is Not A Good Thing to be involved with or sympathetic to, on pain of perhaps being targeted as a weirdo in your turn. Then there are rest of us outside the group who might have done some independent study and thus have an idea of how heinous the CofSc is; however, that knowledge doesn’t necessitate that we shut off our understanding of the dynamics of outgroup harassment or give approbation to its perpetrators – some of whom have admitted they’re just fucking with the freaks to get their jollies.
You must think that’s a neat dismissal of the point I’ve been trying and trying to get across in this thread, but just blowing me off doesn’t change the actual dynamic. If something like you casually invoke with the phrase “the Scientology equivalent of Krystalnacht” was to happen (and given the history of Western culture’s dealings with dissidents and deviants, especially in the USA, it is a real possibility), it would be in large part due to an atmosphere of toleration/approbation of just the kind of bullshit the Anonys are so gleeful about perpetrating and that you so glibly defend Ratpacking the deviants is ratpacking the deviants, period; it’s monkey-troop politics laid over onto human social behaviour and it leads to people like me getting hauled to the gallows or the stake. Anonymous can kiss my weird ass.
And? Facile insertion of trivializing, silly Internetisms doesn’t invalidate the fact that the Anonymouses are basically ganging up on an already stigmatized outgroup for their own amusement, and chose a target they know to be widely enough disliked so they wouldn’t be called out for the chickenshit bullies their behaviour has shown them to be.
If there was anything to them beyond that high-school jock mindset, they’d grow some real balls and start fucking with Russian mobsters or reactionary Christian activists or some other group with serious retaliative juice. But where’s the lulz in that, right?
I’m fully aware of how the CoS works, thank you, and I despise them more than anybody. But just because they press charges doesn’t mean you automatically get convicted. Hensen made the mistake of giving them fodder. While I agree with his sentiments, I wouldn’t go about expressing them as he did. Simply standing on a street corner watching a protest isn’t enough to get you convicted of that particular law. No judge would uphold that. The implication here is that the police are in the pocket of the “Church,” which I find highly unlikely.
I’ve already read that New Yorker article, thank you. Apparently, you’ve never been to the Celebrity Centre on Franklin Avenue. I live on Franklin. I go by the place every day. For one thing, almost nobody enters through the front door. They drive in through the garage entrances on Tamarind and Bronson, in cars, probably provided by the “Church.” These people are not going to be persuaded by Anonymous protesters on the sidewalk. They’ve already decided they want to reap the toe-licking of the Church. Anonymous should focus on the average saps who make up the majority of funds sucked up by the “Church,” and they don’t find Scientology by randomly walking by the Celebrity Centre on Franklin. They find it on the tourist strip of Hollywood Boulevard, where Scientologist offer their bogus “personality quiz” to all the unsuspecting passers-by. And for another thing, as that New Yorker article quoted one of the Scientology drones:
That “special public” is not going to be persuaded by Anonymous while being pandered to by the CoS. However, the curious passer-by on Hollywood Boulevard will think twice before taking that “personality quiz.” That’s where they should protest.
As I understand it, Scientology isn’t a juice-free group. If anything, Anonymous is pretty late to the party since Time went after Scientology in 1991 (I read the issue when it came out; my previous knowledge of Scientology was mostly derived from a chapter in Martin Gardner’s 1957 Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science).
Just out of curiosity, would it make any difference if there was no stated or implied yuk-yuk value in it; if all Anony statements were sombre and along the lines of “We are seeking to limit the influence of this dangerous organization through various means and we take this mission very seriously and will not encourage or support horesplay in its execution” ?