Comment on First human brain implant malfunctioned, Neuralink says
4grams@awful.systems 5 months agoI feel like they belong in separate categories though. Lawnmower man was regular bad, like it started as something that had value but effects and writing just weren’t up to where they should have been resulting in a hilarious, guilty pleasure mess.
Battlefield earth never stood a chance, everything about it was cursed start to finish and was a complete vanity project by a religious weirdo. There’s just plain guilt with it, no pleasure.
orclev@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Calling him a religious weirdo gives too much credit to the cult/scam that scientology is. At best his a brainwashed cult member. I feel like 200 years from now people will be studying the rise and fall of scientology as it’s a fascinating case study of what happens when a scammer sets out to create a cult and actually succeeds. The fact he got away with it despite evidence that it was always intended as a scam is even more mind blowing.
AmidFuror@fedia.io 5 months ago
The only thing remarkable about Scientology and Mormonism are that they were recent creations. That means we have fairly decent information about the founders. The other religions probably started similar ways but that has been obscured by time and poor documentation. The more people that get involved in steering them through the years, the more blurred it gets.
4grams@awful.systems 5 months ago
Pretty much. At this point a religious weirdo is a religious weirdo no matter what flavor they prefer.
andros_rex@lemmy.world 5 months ago
They’re also remarkable to compare to similar cults that developed around the same time/were inspired by the same ideas. You can trace both Scientology and Mormonism to Millerism and the Great Disappointment with a little bit of work.
orclev@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I mean yeah, but it’s interesting that even with all that readily available evidence of how much of a scam it is people still sign up. At the end of the day the only real difference between a cult and a religion is how old it is. But while you can give followers of other religions the benefit of the doubt because that evidence has been lost to time, it’s very much still available for scientology. Hence calling him a religious weirdo is too much credit, followers of scientology have ample evidence that it’s a scam/cult, but they choose to ignore that evidence. There’s basically no excuse for believing in scientology much like there’s no excuse for believing the Earth is flat.
4grams@awful.systems 5 months ago
6 of one, half a dozen of the other.