#cults tw /

[growing-yet-into-magic]

Your cards cannot think for you your teachers cannot think for you spirits cannot think for you your gods cannot think for you. YOU have to think for you. Do not outsource your thinking onto other figures, because there are and will be people looking to fill that void and tell you where to go and what to do and how to spend your money, and you will cede all control if someone speaks it cleverly enough.

[artisticdysfunction]

Intentional Trauma Based Psychological Conditioning (ITBPC)

yes, this is a post of us proposing a term we use personally be a community term.

so, what is this anyways?

psychology conditioning is a common thing to occur as a result of abuse, or other chronic traumas. pavlov introduced the concept of psychological conditioning with his testing on dogs. what most people know it as, is in relation to dog training. in terms of chronic trauma, it is a natural response to what happens to a person. it's why triggers exist, after all. and in terms of chronic trauma survivors, our system would personally call it trauma based psychological conditioning.

what would make it intentional, though?

for us, we define intentionality when a person is put through a series of related psychological conditionings, through traumatic means, for the purpose of making that person fit a particular goal.

one example that most people may be familiar with, is with cults. trauma inflicted onto people, on purpose by the cult, to make them good and willing cult members.

however, ITBPC can and does apply to more situations than that. it's more commonly seen in survivors of organized abuse, abuse done by an organized group. it can cause trauma disorders as any kind of abuse and trauma does.

why did we coin this for ourselves? and why are we making this post?

we have our issues with the term Mind Control. other than the fact that it is commonly thought of in terms of science fiction and hypnosis, we also don't believe it to be the most direct in what it is. mind control does refer to psychological conditioning, so we believe that referring to it as such would be more direct and lead to less confusion.

no one has to use this term if they don't want to, though. this is a term we made for us, and wanted to share in case anyone else felt right for them to use as well. anyone can interact with this post, just be civil.

[newsfromstolenland]

I've been thinking a lot about how cultural christianity primed white westerners for new age religious cults in the 70s and 80s- and how it's reflected today

you teach all these kids that there are strict rules and codes of conduct, then launch the vietnam and korean wars that go blatantly against what you've been preaching

people become disillusioned with your beliefs, but they still want that structure, that clear cut set of rules. someone swoops in and offers them that direction, but promises that they see the hypocrisy of their parents, that they will never do that. they're new, they seem progressive, they claim to meet you where you are.

it's appealing, because you're used to being told what your morals and beliefs are, rather than developing them for yourself. you're disillusioned, but not enough to recognize how privileged you are, so you accept what they tell you as fact, as what your morals and beliefs should be. why would they lie? they're not like your parents, so they must be right. it's either not christianity, or it's christianity done ~differently~

every western generation has that, that privileged, culturally christian, surface-level disillusionment.

those people who have never had to build their own communities forged through solidarity, so they simply want a new leader, a new prescribed set of beliefs, someone else to tell them what to believe

and they will take it wherever they can find it.

it's not the only demographic that's susceptible to cults, but it's certainly common.

to clarify something: I'm not blaming these people when I invoke their privilege. racialized people are also susceptible to cult influence. I'm describing one way that a privileged person can be inducted into a cult.

[proudfreakmetarusonikku]

no actually I can’t stop thinking about this. if canonically the world around the dsmp is like normal with civilisation and shit that basically means c!dream was getting random ass people to leave their life behind and live in this isolated obscure patch of wilderness so they could all be One Big Happy Family which like… is literally just a cult he was trying to form a cult. that’s amazing I love that. probably not intentional but fuck it that’s canon in my mind now. he's not even doing it on purpose but if you showed him the bite model he’d be like “oh this is cool I need to do all this 🥰”

[vulgrados-best]

To be honest the amount that Maple's family being a "cult" gets brought up so often is so fucking weird. Like sorry this is stream of consciousness but.

Can we stop calling the family that has explicitly been stated as no longer a cult not only by someone within the family but also by someone not within the family. Can we stop calling a family of Hoennian and Alolan descent (THAT HAS SPECIFICALLY GONE OUT OF THEIR WAY TO STOP BEING A CULT) a fucking cult.

Because I'm gonna be real with you. Esper's family is way fuckin weirder. She hasn't talked about it much but the vibes of that Wyrmwood manor according to her are WEIRD. They're fucking unsettling. So maybe we should be more worried about that.

[firestorm09890]

just some rambling about lcb’s canto v part 3 things vs the source book

It felt like they combined the personalities of Starbuck and Stubb, and then they replaced Stubb’s personality entirely with Flask’s (the third mate), who was always the one described as irritable while Stubb was the jovial one.

Book Stubb was also pretty uncool, despite being so casual. Pip had to be the replacement oarsman in both cases, but the reason Pip’s sanity snapped in the book was because he jumped overboard out of fear once, Stubb told him they’d just leave him behind if he did it again, and then when it happened again, Stubb did leave Pip behind, and those few hours out at sea before the Pequod rescued him were what broke him; here, Stubb saved Pip from a fate worse than death, and then what happened to Stubb after is what broke Pip.

Speaking of Pip, weird choice to make them want to be a landlord. That’sss all I’ll say about that

Also, RIP Tashtego. Constantly got the short end of the harpoon in Moby Dick (basically first to slay a whale on the voyage but Stubb got all the credit, fell into a whale and almost died, saw the White Whale at the same time as Ahab and should’ve been awarded the gold doubloon for it but Ahab insisted he was first) and the trend continues here by giving his incredibly homoerotic moment of being saved from drowning in the whale by Queequeg to Ishmael instead, with him just not showing up at all… actually maybe Tashtego won in this case lol

The flashback with Ishmael going into Ahab’s cabin made me think that they would give her the dilemma of “should I kill her right now in her sleep”, similar to what Starbuck had in the book, but nope.

There’s a huge difference in the way Starbuck butted heads with Ahab in the book vs in Limbus. Book Starbuck definitely had a lot less faith that the captain was steering them right- forget “after we kill the Pallid Whale it’ll all be okay” that Limbus Starbuck thought, no, book Starbuck repeatedly told Ahab to please, turn around, please stop trying to go kill the White Whale, your revenge quest is meaningless because it’s basically just a force of nature and you can’t get revenge on nature, we can just go home, we've had bad omen after bad omen, don’t you see you’re leading us to doom- and he did this from the very beginning all the way til the very end, when they literally saw the beast. However, despite his pleas and disagreements, he did still follow the authority of the captain (can’t have a mutiny when it’s just you who disagrees; can’t shoot a man while he’s sleeping when you have too much of a conscience and a fear of going to hell to justify becoming a murderer) and inevitably helped Ahab get what he wanted. That’s something both Starbucks share.

Overall… it’s probably because they had a different story to tell. They had to make Ahab worse™️ than in the book so everyone surrounding her had to be changed to facilitate the fact that she had such a hold over all of them

The thing with Ahab promising gold coins to the crew (with it being clear to the audience that they’d never get them) was the progression of the book’s singular gold doubloon, which was promised to whomever saw the White Whale first. In the book, it was merely a symbol, with a bunch of different characters attempting to analyze its symbolic meaning in-universe (mostly in an astrological sense) and not really wanting it for monetary reasons (Flask even says that it’s just worth $16 and could buy 960 cigars. of course, that was in 1851, and inflation is one hell of a problem…) Here, that promised money is worth a lot more, both monetarily and as something to keep the crew going.

And then! The cult-like aspects. Kromer had her inquisitors with artificial brainwashing and it’s very stereotypically cult-like, but Ahab’s crew was a lot more accurate to how real-modern-day cults work. The recruitment of Ishmael made that clear. Here, she was at a low point in life, with no idea where she should go, and then boom, Ahab steering her. In Moby Dick Ishmael already wanted to go on a boat, as did every other sailor there. None of them even knew who their captain was until after they’d been out at sea for weeks because Ahab is weird like that. He got all his sailors into a disturbingly powerful fervor one night about the White Whale but for the most part they seemed to be mostly in it for the whales they encountered along the way. Book Ahab even recognized that in order to keep his crew from mutinying, they had to pick up some other whales- and unlike the gold coins keeping the crew motivated in Pequod Town in Limbus, this was an actual, tangible thing. More of a compromise to keep the crew happy than a lie.

Limbus Ahab’s boat was completely Ahab, with desires completely Ahab, completely enrapturing her crew. Book Ahab’s boat was The Pequod, a whaling ship that just so happened to have a monomaniac at the helm. Limbus’s Pequod crew had faith in Ahab until they died by her hands; book Pequod crew eventually recognized how completely fucked up Ahab was and how screwed they were, but to quote the book itself, “their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate.”

that’s about all the braincells I have for this

[glitchgw2]

VERY messy/sketchy art for now, but!!!

Meet Paille (ze/hir), an asura mesmer who leads a cult disguised as a human named Salma.

Seeing an opportunity in Joko's demise, ze exploited vulnerable people and started a cult promising the god-king's return. But in actuality, ze's just studying the nature of bookah human brainwash and manipulation. How far can ze go and bend the minds of humans? Well... only cruel ways to find out. Ritualistic sacrifices and starvation deaths are daily occurrings in hir cult.

(The colors of hir clothes are WIP. Can't wait to make hir in gameeee. 😩)

[xp95]

random thoughts, just rambling here,

radqueer things i personally like to see

art!!

discourse, to some degree

activism

education

talk and discussion about transIDs and paraphilias

things i am a bit tired of seeing

excessive horny posts in the radqueer main tag. i get it, you (hypothetical hornyposter 'you' not reader 'you') "want to be abused sooo bad", but i really don't care? there are so many posts like that. just so many. and a lot of them arguably don't really have much relation to being radqueer

pro contact stuff

people who think pro contact stuff doesn't matter, or are like 'im complex contact cause i think you can act on kinks!!'

pro abuse (as in, people literally identifying as being "pro abuse" and such). i feel like this wasn't such a thing before.

phrases like "consensual abuse" and "consensual rape" and "nccnc / non consensual consensual non consent" becoming common-ish terms that people use even though we already have words like bdsm and rapeplay and cnc. it's needlessly oxymoronic and i find it annoying. personally "consensual rape" is the one i find the most annoying, "nccnc" is second, and "conabuse" is only slightly annoying (subjective opinion, just my immediate gut reaction).

mixed feelings:

hyperspecific mini-labels. on one hand i am not really interested in a lot of them... but when i see one i like, i am very happy. this one is more positive.

i feel like some radqueers see 'programming' (in a cult/RAMCOA context) to primarily be a kink thing when it was directly taken from cult survivors. i am not really sure how to feel about this. on one hand i think it's ok to be kinky about (and to have transIDs related to) dark topics, but it's also.. weird to see a bunch of posts like "uwu i want a sexy hot transharmful MAP to program me uwu im so abusable"

adding onto that, i think some people read "i'm a MAP" and think "they're looking to date an AAM! (like me!)" or see "I'm transharmful" and think "they're looking to harm a transharmed! (like me!)" when they might not be interested in that! i am not interested in e-dating, so a lot of peoples focus on it is weird to me. (this might also be a personal thing because i am a fictive and am generally uncomfortable with the idea of people sexualizing me because of my source, who was an evil stalker guy. like, i may be transstalker / transharmful / transcultprogrammer but that isn't an invitation for transstalked / transharmed / transcultvictim people to flirt with me.)

[samwisethewitch]

TW: This post contains explicit discussions of white supremacy and the alt-right, including mentions of racism and antisemitism.

One of my most impactful recent library reads was Sisters In Hate by Seyward Darby, and I want to take a moment to encourage other white Americans to check it out as we prepare for next years' presidential election and all the shit it's going to kick up.

Sisters In Hate is a book about the role of women in American white supremacist movements and specifically in the alt-right. Darby does a really excellent job of showing just how critical white women are to these hate movements. The book also gives us a detailed look at what radicalization looks like and how that process can be different for different genders.

The book is divided into three sections, each of which follows a real woman through her radicalization into the alt-right. I especially want to draw Tumblr's attention to the story of Ayla, a self-proclaimed "polyamorous, raw foodist-vegan, feminist, pagan" whose radicalization started in college with natural living and homebirth and ended with her running a popular tradwife blog and speaking at the Unite the Right rally.

I think a lot of leftists and liberals feel that we're too smart, or too educated, or too savvy to fall for white supremacist recruitment schemes. We are not. Intelligent, college-educated, left-leaning people are radicalized every day. Some of them are less overtly hateful, like your college friend who starts voting Republican in their 30s. Some of them are like Ayla, and their radicalization takes them all the way to the other end of the political spectrum until they're openly and genuinely calling for a white ethnostate with the same passion they once used to advocate for feminism, racial equity, and queer rights. And we need to remember that any one of us intelligent, college-educated, left-leaning white folks could be in her position, which is why it's so important to learn about radicalization tactics so we can recognize and resist them.

I'm not gonna lie -- this book is hard to read. The text contains racial slurs, white supremacist rhetoric, antisemitism, and anti-Black racism. All of this is condemned by the author, but Darby doesn't shy away from showing just how vile this movement is. I had to take a lot of breaks from this book and read it over several weeks, but I'm very glad I did because I feel like I needed this information.

White supremacist recruitment efforts are going to pick up in the next year, especially if Tr*mp is the Republican nominee for president. Stay informed and stay ready.

[pb36cyan]

Remember kids, cults BITE.

B- Behaviour control. What are you allowed to do? Wear? Eat? Are you banned from certain public spaces by the doctrine? How often must you pray or otherwise perform rites? Are you required to pay tithes or make tribute of your earnings in some way? Do you live on "holy ground" with other followers? Are possessions controlled?

I- Information control. What are you allowed to know? What questions can you ask? Are you allowed to poke at flaws in the doctrine? Are you allowed to consume media from outside of the group? Can you bring in outside knowledge, or is it deemed forbidden?

T- Thought control. Can you think critically of the doctrine? What are you shamed for believing? What are you encouraged in believing? Again, can you poke at flaws in the doctrine without being punished? How often do you use thought-stopping techniques like chants, songs, or group prayer?

E- Emotional Control. What do you feel about the doctrine/group? Are these feelings considered "correct"? Does going against the group in a harmless way fill you with crushing guilt and shame? Is moral weight placed on emotional responses?

[ink-asunder]

Furthermore, I think Dragon's Dogma's handling of the cult was actually really mature and ahead of its time. Yes, Elysian is a zealous man who wants power and destruction (you need at least one to form a cult). But it's repeated time and time again that most of Salvation's members are just regular people who sought out the cult in times of hardship, even when they didn't really believe in Elysian's teachings. For community, for comfort, for a purpose and a cause to dedicate yourself to because the world is so hard and so dangerous right now because of Grigori's coming.

It reflects the REAL nature of cults in the real world, which I wouldn't really expect from a low budget unfinished game, let alone media in general. Even movies and games today don't get it right 9 times out of 10.

[ex-cogtfi]

Depictions of female cult members in COG-TFI propaganda posters tended to be highly sexualized for the male gaze, reflecting the cult's teachings that girls and women should use their sexuality to attract male donors and converts. In this poster, a sexualized illustration of a female cult member being martyred captures the cult's model for "discipleship". Even in the afterlife, women’s spirits were depicted sexually and in continued service of patriarchal interests.

[metanarrates]

i don't talk about growing up in a cult too often on here because it IS quite personal but I will reiterate as I have done before that cults are usually an intensification of every other mechanism of societal control. misogyny + bioessentialism + patriarchy + everything that goes into rape culture is the most prevalent, but any form of financial control, wealth + housing inequality, familial control, ageism, community policing, ACTUAL fucking policing depending on cult, racism, xenophobia...

very little in a cult is unique to cults. even the more obvious cult aspects (cult leader worship, community pressure and groupthink, lovebombing, demonization of outsiders, ostracization/scapegoating) are not uncommon in lower levels in outside communities! a cult simply intensifies those aspects of how communities can work.

a cult leader, as far as I can tell, is simply someone who has figured out how to exploit and intensify systems of control that broader society already engages in, and who uses that to prey on those who society has left the most vulnerable. it is further systematization of already systemic issues. yes, of course there's more shit that goes into it, but I find it important to talk about how cults are not some external Other. to treat them as such further isolates victims, and sensationalizes the very real abuse we have faced.

a cult is frequently the strongest, most intense outgrowth of a controlling society. its victims are just like you. don't forget that.

[firapolemos05]

"At eighteen years of age, each new initiate into our Creed receives their sacred vestments, all emblazoned with the Carmine Rose.

The Fallen, whose celestic blood feeds our rituals, whom we have trained to vanquish the Dawn Herald's deceitful servants, has the high honor of having our rose etched directly into his flesh."

Whumptober 2023

No.5

Pinned down

OC: Cassius (he/it)

[binders-and-beanies]

Yeah sorry if me not being comfortable w christianity feels oppressive to my oppressors lol. This week a large group of christians, led by a widely supported writer for my city’s newspaper, organized a march where they loudly chanted prayers about lgbt people dying so they can reclaim the city that’s rightfully theirs. Bc there was supposed to be a drag story hour in the library. And then someone placed a “suspicious package” by the library, called in bomb threats serious enough to get multiple blocks shut down, doxxed several local lgbt folk and allies, posted their home addresses calling for their deaths and claimed to have placed bombs in their homes. All in the name of the lord. But yeah me being vocal abt wanting freedom from christianity is the real oppression

[ghostly-penumbra]

Ectoberhaunt/Ectober Week 2023. Day Twenty-six

"Cults"

Ao3

Warning: Cult mentality and behaviour. I especifically based this around the BITE Control techniques (Behaviour, Information, Thought and Emotional Control), and using my experience with Jehova Witness as a reference, so even though this is short, proceed with caution.

Paulina frowned as she analysed her notes and compared them to previous days. As president and founder of the Phantom Phan Club, it was her job- no, her duty, to make sure its members were worthy of their place in the Club.

Whilst it was open for anyone that proved themselves it wasn’t something you could just prove once and be over with it! Phantom deserved the best of the best at all times and Paulina was here to make sure he got it.

Sometimes there were complications, though, and obstacles that, if they could not be dealt with, they ought to be avoided! Like that moronic Amity Park Gazette, which had started publishing articles and interviews with the local ghost hunters as well as the G.i.W, whom Paulina had already barred the Club members from interacting with. If there was no choice, then she would ban the reading of this stupid newspaper too.

They had to understand! It was them and Phantom against everyone else! They had known from the beginning, once they were a member of the Club, there was no place for doubt, no place for hesitation, they had to be determined, for Phantom.

Wasn’t he their protector? Their saviour? Over and over, Phantom risked his soul, the only thing he had left, so that they were safe! They couldn’t let him down! They were together in this, they would have his back, no matter what, and be there to hold him up. The people –the ones that could still see the truth, that Phantom was good– had to be shown, they had to show them, and then they could join and help out too.

As long as they followed the rules, they would be welcome.