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Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 15, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Yes, and perhaps.

The point of several decades of data isn't that the group definitely isn't going to be an ongoing disaster, it's that there's been time for the disasters to be ongoing rather than sudden. If you joined Scientology in 1960 and couldn't stay on their good side, you might have been quite unpleasantly surprised by what was to follow. I'm told the Readers' Digest exposes in the 1980s were quite brave. But by 1995 or so, if you weren't a kid dragged in by parents, joining Scientology was kinda on you.

Whereas, these guys? They might be perfectly fine. But even if they're not showing the classic "cult warning signs" now, who knows what might be going on after a couple decades of social churn and personal change? Cult leaders have gone downhill on that time scale even if they weren't using psychoactive drugs from the start. Lots of people thought Jim Jones seemed like a decent guy for a long time before the eventual paranoid spiral and the mass murder-suicide.