Posts by OneEyedJoe

37

It must be a concern of all the information that is now been leaked

by joe134cd in

i have put up previous posts about this in the past, but i just thought that it was worth mentioning again.

it has to be of concern to them with how quickly information is getting leaked.

hell it even surprises at just how slowly information spreads by offical means.

OneEyedJoe

As for the notion of their deliberately preparing false information to see who leaks it, how would that work? Leaking by definition is difficult to pinpoint. If they cannot pinpoint who's leaking official letters, they won't have any greater luck with "false" letters.

I've got a family member that works for Apple - they do (or at least have in the past) something along these lines in order to identify leaks, but not quite to this extreme. Basically everyone gets a slightly different version of the product - no major differences, but there might be a slight difference in an icon or in layout, etc - if something gets leaked they're able to tell what the source was based on the identifying differences.

They could easily use a method like this to try to suss out the source of the leaks, but if they did and it became known the leakers could just resort to re-wording things to convey the gist of the letter without giving the content verbatum. The only way for them to find the leak then would be to distribute various false letters to different people/departments and see which ones get out, and then withdraw the letters. That's when the leaks really start to hurt their internal operation - when people start getting jerked around like that it will really hurt morale and their ability to have an effective flow of information.

37

It must be a concern of all the information that is now been leaked

by joe134cd in

i have put up previous posts about this in the past, but i just thought that it was worth mentioning again.

it has to be of concern to them with how quickly information is getting leaked.

hell it even surprises at just how slowly information spreads by offical means.

OneEyedJoe

Leaking information is actually a very effective way of bringing down authoritarian regimes. By their very nature, they hate to be shown not to have complete control which typically causes them to try to put a stop to the leaks by various means. They may leak false data, compartmentalize information even more strictly, or merely up the penalties for leaking something and stress the importance of secrecy. All of these undermine them long-term, either by making it difficult for them to effectively communicate to their own people or by revealing them as the paranoid control freaks that they are. So even a leak of insignificant information is a step towards the cult's regression.

22

are there really 8 million jw's?

by wannaexit in

jw
friends

last circuit assembly there was 700+ present and 1 baptized.. recently there was a foreign language assemble of over 500 and 1 baptized.. in the last 5-10 years i haven't been to one assembly where there has been more than a handful baptized.

at the memorial all i see are the same old faces that have been coming since the flood.. the hall complex i attend has 6 congregation and several groups-there is negative growth.

when you factor in the demographically aging folk and the many who have already passed away, i don't know where they get the 8 million.. i know that most of the growth is from the developing countries, but still i think they are fudging their numbers.

OneEyedJoe

The numbers are fudged to be sure - especially if you're counting "peak publishers" where they double/triple count publishers (usually in august) who are hounded into turning in time for past months that they "forgot" to turn in. Probably a lot of these are 1-hour slips that are either fabricated by the publisher or by the elders to avoid getting the 3rd degree from the CO.

There are lots of folks here who talk about turning in fake time, or their group overseer turning in fake time on their behalf. I'm sure it's not an isolated occurrence. Plus when you consider that they can count time for working construction or for "studying" with children (which is often just saying "look at this pretty bug that jehovah made" a few times a day) or counting 15 minutes for people in a nursing home because their kid put a magazine on their lap and wheeled them around. They're definitely below 8 million active JWs.

If you want to exclude active JWs that no longer believe but are stuck in the cult, there's another group that's probably not an insignificant size.

312

Mass disassociation pact...

by freemindfade in

any takers?

we can pick a date and pull the plug?

lol .

OneEyedJoe

I'd love to but for the time being I'm not going to DA for my still-in wife's sake.

42

Why are GMO's bad?

by cappytan in

jw
friends

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh4bi60alzu.

first person to say, "this scishow episode is a monsanto conspiracy," is a rotten egg..

OneEyedJoe

Giving away GMO seeds was not my point it is an issue of making farmers dependent on monopolized seeds.

This is a very different argument - now it seems that you're suggesting that Monsanto should fall under some sort of anti-trust action. From what little I know, this seems reasonable. Your original statement, however, was an argument essentially stating that GMO R&D was an endeavor that did not deserve to be profitable in and of itself.

42

Why are GMO's bad?

by cappytan in

jw
friends

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh4bi60alzu.

first person to say, "this scishow episode is a monsanto conspiracy," is a rotten egg..

OneEyedJoe

Monsanto would not go bankrupt because it already had a steady stream of income from other products such as selling non-GMO hybrid seeds to farmers.

That's not a valid argument. That's like saying Honda should have to give away motorcycles for free and then arguing that this is fair because they still make plenty of money off their car sales.

9

Old is Becoming New Again?

by Tazemanian-devil in

is it just me, or does it seem like jw.org is returning to some very old methods from rutherford's era?.

- their carts / booths is very reminiscent of the sandwich board system, including the fact that they no longer personally engage.

- showing videos via the tablet / smartphone is almost exactly like the phonograph method they used.

OneEyedJoe

At the 2014 convention, Loesch got up there and was talking about playing videos for people at the door and said something about people asking if we were going back to old methods - like playing recorded sermons on a record player at the door - just with modernized technology. His retort was a blind assertion that this was totally different and just the standard reply of something like: "aren't we thankful for how quickly Jehovah's organization is moving and keeping pace with modern technology?" and of course an applause break follows and no one realizes that he completely failed to make a distinction between playing videos and the old days of playing sermons.

Another thing they've gone back to, but I'm not sure how much it's being used, is the modern day equivalent of the old testimony cards. Now they have the business cards with a QR code that'll take you to jw.borg.

I wonder when we'll be seeing waves of sound cars driving through the neighborhoods again?

2

Does the Annual Meeting take place at the Kingdom Hall, or Assembly Hall?

by Faithful Witness in

i was never a jw, so i never was invited to one of their annual meetings in october.

are they held at assembly halls or at the local kingdom halls?

what day and time is the annual meeting this year?

OneEyedJoe

When they handed out bibles was the only time they've had it at assembly halls or kingdom halls (in most places it was a combination of both). That was 2 years ago. I haven't heard anything about them making arrangements to watch it live again this year so I'm guessing it'll just be something online for the uber-dubs to brag about having watched and feel superior to the rest.

135

Latest Leaked BOE letter to Elders Oct. 4th

by Watchtower-Free in

october 4, 2015. to all congregations.

re: new provisions announced atannual meeting.

dear brothers:.

OneEyedJoe

Wow, the elimination of the school is likely going to make many JWs happy. Of course, those presentations will still need to be handled and you know they aren't going to be done by elders. I wonder if they will have a procedure for determining who can do the presentations? Of course they will, they micromanage everything. Very interesting to see how that plays out.

I think someone else said it - but the change to the TMS is probably due to the lack of qualified men.

I think the Pew survey last time around showed that JWs in the US jumped to being 2/3rds women - now they can use women for "demonstrations" but they're not "teaching" like when men give a talk from a podium. Now all the parts can be handled by women if needed, but they don't look like they're capitulating to people complaining about the misogynist system they have and they hide the real problem - the lack of qualified men.

135

Latest Leaked BOE letter to Elders Oct. 4th

by Watchtower-Free in

october 4, 2015. to all congregations.

re: new provisions announced atannual meeting.

dear brothers:.

OneEyedJoe

Another thought on the bi-monthly literature:

Many have long speculated that they would drop the public watchtower since the name carries so much baggage from all their failed predictions over the years that they want to separate themselves from it. Theories have ranged from things like a new jw.borg magazine or just to using only the Awake! moniker for the public. Well they're one step closer to that now. They get the R/F used to offering only one magazine at a time, and every other month they'll be using only the Awake magazine by itself. They're one step away from eliminating the watchtower completely and just using the Awake magazine, and all done at a slow enough rate that no one will notice.

When they downsized the awake, they said it was because they were going to focus more on bible topics instead of current events and this created an overlap with the public watchtower. Well now they've got one hell of an overlap - there's essentially no difference between the two magazines now. The road is paved for them to announce in a year or two that they're either discontinuing the WT altogether or replacing both magazines with something by a new name.

This puts them in a much better position for the future. JWs are conditioned to expect to find "apostate lies" all over the internet, and if they stop using WT and awake names for the magazines, it'll require one more step of explanation before people will be able to see that sites like jwfacts are presenting accurate information from the cult's old literature. Instead I suspect there will be many that perhaps stumble upon it and then only have their preconceived notions confirmed when they see that most of the references are from magazines they don't even recognize the name of. They'll assume it's made up by apostates who can't even get their facts straight.