Posts by OneEyedJoe

10

Are JW's preaching God's Kingdom throuout the entire world?

by Big Derp in

just a quick question for anyone who can answer.

i know jw's are not preaching in certain middle east countries because of the "danger".

yet i know for a fact catholics are there despite the danger, and many are being slaughtered and raped.. i have also travelled to many arctic and sub arctic inuit and cree communities.

OneEyedJoe

JW's are just accepting everything they hear as 'truth,' because they are truthful...
And wouldn't the people who taught them to be truthful be truthful?

Very well put. This is exactly what prevented me from waking up for a very long time.

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

If we didn't have people up the chain leaking info, we would still hear about the announcement and still be able to suggest afterward to our Dub families that the reason is not for the sake of the "preaching" so close to the end but for dire financial reasons of a different sort.

I don't think that'd be nearly as effective, though. If we got the information only after the JWs, they'd already be working through all the excuses for why they've cut magazine production, etc and they'd have a defense built up by the time you mention it. If you mention it in advance, their default defense is "That'll never happen! Jehovah would never allow that!" and then when it happens they don't have that same level of defense built up. It also becomes more personal because the cult just made a liar out of them.

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

There are probably dozens if not hundreds at Bethel who were aware of the change by the time the leak happened so it doesn't have to be someone of high status who leaked the information.

While I'm sure you're correct that many at bethel would've known, is it true that this letter could've come from any one of them? The leak wasn't that the TMS was going away or that the magazines were getting downsized again, it was the entire letter, verbatim. I wouldn't think that everyone at bethel that's aware of the changes would have access to the letter necessarily. That said I'm privileged to have never worked at bethel so I could be completely wrong on this.

My theory is that the leak came from someone in the IT department. They've probably got folks in IT that haven't been in very long, and a background in computers is probably something that primes people for waking up (more likely to explore doubts anonymously online). It would make sense that they'd want to get the letter ready to post ahead of time (especially if it's been translated and is going to link to a video, etc) and this would be a much more likely (to me) candidate for the source of the leak than someone on the service committee or something like that. Another possibility is that it could've come from someone in translation, as they sometimes take people that haven't been in the cult long due to their qualifications, from what I understand.

I would consider a good 'leak' to be something that can potentially be damaging to them. Just leaking information ahead of the official scheduled release date or 'elders only' leaks can help 'if' they expose them for something illegal, unethical, or not biblical. Otherwise it's just getting information ahead of time.

IMO every leak is a valuable leak. Just proving time and again that their own elders and bethelites aren't as devoted as they'd like everyone to think is worth something in and of itself. Even if that only means that we get information a little early.

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?