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#cults

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Home to a "sorry we missed you" note shoved through the letterbox.

A missed delivery? No, the smegging Jehovah's!

Add this to the teams of Mormons wandering around town stopping people, it tempts me to ask them if they've seen that recent Hugh Grant film (no, I know they won't have, but would amuse me) then give them a very broad smile.

Anyway, I am a devout Seventh Day Cartoonist. Blessings of Saint Mel of Blanc be upon you.

Poking fun at "Perfectionism," as in "Loool those religious nuts are sure not perfect!" is not the easy win you think it is.

I've gotten this type of flippant comment a few times recently when I've been trying to address serious topics to help religiously conditioned folks unpack bigotry (which requires some level of safety).

First off, victims of mind control are abuse victims who have been traumatized. Fine to criticize the harmful ways cult victims act, but our programming runs deep and hurts us too.

Perfectionism is a long-standing school of religious philosophy embedded in American culture, even in secular and corporate American culture.

Outside of very specific situations (engineering, concert piano, competition), "perfection" cannot really be defined, so it is an insidiously high standard that can never be achieved. It is a high-demand religious (and corporate) manipulation tool, and also one used by domestic abusers, to justify punishment and to continually move the goalposts, creating a sense of "perpetual inadequacy" in its targets.

Very not fun.

There are studies on how toxic and damaging perfectionism, as a lifestyle, can be. For those of us recovering from toxic perfectionism, it has caused us serious emotional, mental, and physical health issues, and is incredibly difficult to overcome.

For those of us who were programmed with this pressure as guide to the very way of living life, for which the consequences of failure were rejection for eternity by our families and God, the "lol lol they sure aren't perfect" line is punching down. Honestly, in a triggering way.

Instead, punch up at the bastards who made us believe in this crap. They're the true benefactors, and the true cause of this kind of thinking on such a large and deep scale.

The jouissance of the new far right

This was a crucial point in an excellent New Yorker profile on Curtis Yarvin:

On his travels, he often hosted “office hours”—informal, freewheeling discussions with readers, many of them thoughtful young men, alienated by liberal guilt and groupthink. What wins Yarvin converts is less the soundness of his arguments than the transgressive energy they exude: he makes his listeners feel that he is granting them access to forbidden knowledge—about racial hierarchy, historical conspiracies, and the perfidy of democratic rule—that progressive culture is at pains to suppress. His approach seizes on the reality that most Americans have never learned how to defend democracy; they were simply brought up to believe in it.

This ‘transgressive energy’ which comes from ‘forbidden knowledge’: the sense of having penetrated to a deeper layer of reality, through the intervention of the master. It’s a classically esoteric experience but characterised by worldliness, rather than worldlessness. It venerates knowledge and gives the aspirants towards it a path forward without leaving them caught and immobilised in the painful distance between the world that is and the world that could be:

Yarvin advises his followers to avoid culture-war battles over issues like D.E.I. and abortion. It is wiser, he argues, to let the democratic system collapse on its own. In the meantime, dissidents should focus on becoming “fashionable” by building a reactionary subculture—a counter-Cathedral. Sam Kriss, a left-wing writer who has debated Yarvin, said of his work, “It flatters people who believe they can change the world simply by having weird ideas on the Internet and decadent parties in Manhattan.”

Recently, Yarvin has taken to describing himself as a “dark elf” whose role is to seduce “high elves”—blue-state élites—by planting “acorns of dark doubt in their high golden minds.” (In this Tolkien-inspired metaphor, red-state conservatives are “hobbits” who should submit to the “absolute power” of a new ruling class made up, unsurprisingly, of dark elves.)

He offers the libidinal satisfaction of ‘burning it all down’ filtered through the safe pleasures of remaining behind a screen:

Yarvin is calling for something simpler and more libidinally satisfying: to burn it all down and start again from scratch

The New Yorker · Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against AmericaBy Ava Kofman

'Manson family' cult member Krenwinkel recommended for parole
By Andrew Thorpe

Ms Krenwinkel, who was originally sent to death row in 1971 for her role in the 1969 Manson killings, is California's longest-serving female inmate, and was previously recommended for parole in 2022 before Governor Gavin Newsom reversed the decision.

abc.net.au/news/2025-06-01/pat

ABC News · Former 'Manson family' member Patricia Krenwinkel, 77, recommended for parole over 1969 Tate-LaBianca murdersBy Andrew Thorpe