Posts by Vidiot

1665 the first recorded successful blood transfusion occurs in england: physician richard lower keeps dogs alive by transfusion of blood from other dogs.. 1818 james blundell performs the first successful blood transfusion of human blood to treat postpartum hemorrhage.. 1840 the first whole blood transfusion to treat hemophilia is successfully completed.. 1900 karl landsteiner discovers the first three human blood groups, a, b and o.. 1902 landsteiner’s colleagues, alfred decastello and adriano sturli, add a fourth blood type, ab.. 1907 blood typing and cross matching between donors and patients is attempted to improve the safety of transfusions.

the universality of the o blood group is identified.. 1914 adolf hustin discovers that sodium citrate can anticoagulate blood for transfusion, allowing it to be stored and later transfused safely to patients on the battlefield.. 1932 the first blood bank is established at leningrad hospital.. 1939-1940 the rh blood group is discovered and recognized as the cause behind most transfusion reactions.. 1940 the us government establishes a nationwide blood collection program.. so from the beginning of the watchtower being printed in 1879, they were ok with blood transfusions until 1945. what caused this?

Vidiot

The more they could portray themselves as more “Biblical” and holy (whilst really just being contrarian), the easier it was to poach disgruntled ex-Protestants and -Catholics who’d grown tired of the “liberalizing” (really, just adapting with the times) of their original churches.

It actually reminds me a little of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”.

18

Know it’s not true but stay anyway

by Elena in

how many of the millions of jws know it’s not true but stay anyway?.

my guess is most jws know it’s not true on a subconscious level to an extent but they don’t want to think about it too much and would never ever voice it out loud.. but this is probably true with all religions around the world?.

Vidiot

The GB knows it’s wrong…

…but believes it’s True…

…at the same time.

Why would life-long loyalists with no other prospects view things any differently?

30

Education video this midweeks meeting

by jehovaxx in

there is an item this week all about yang ones leaving school.. the two brothers go to a career advisor seminar.

one brother thinks it’s good to work hard full time while you are young and tries to encourage his friend to as well.. his friend (who is the good jw trust the gb no matter what they say)) he wants a part time job.. the video shows him dreaming about investing his money on his phone and the chart goes up, he drives a nice car and seems to be doing well financially.. then he reads the scripture in proverbs and next you see that investment chart go down in the red and he is so pleased he just got a low paid part time job.. this infuriates me.

how many of us are now struggling because we were told to get menial part time jobs and we were told the end would have been here by now.. i will never tell a young person to listen to the gb advice on this.

Vidiot

no-zombie - “…Thus the only reasonable, conclusion a person can make, is that the Governing Body wants control over the lives of young people, to limit their options and to make them mentally dependent upon the Organization.”

It’s nothing new.

“Keep them ignorant and dependent” was pretty much every feudal lord’s modus operandi back in Medieval times.

30

Education video this midweeks meeting

by jehovaxx in

there is an item this week all about yang ones leaving school.. the two brothers go to a career advisor seminar.

one brother thinks it’s good to work hard full time while you are young and tries to encourage his friend to as well.. his friend (who is the good jw trust the gb no matter what they say)) he wants a part time job.. the video shows him dreaming about investing his money on his phone and the chart goes up, he drives a nice car and seems to be doing well financially.. then he reads the scripture in proverbs and next you see that investment chart go down in the red and he is so pleased he just got a low paid part time job.. this infuriates me.

how many of us are now struggling because we were told to get menial part time jobs and we were told the end would have been here by now.. i will never tell a young person to listen to the gb advice on this.

Vidiot

To a contemporary ultraconservative, all the things they valued and “defended” are being flushed down the toilet, and when the inherent shittiness of people in general is an integral component of your worldview, those values and defenses are held up as the only thing keeping civilization from descending overnight into the world of Mad Max.

EDIT: Ultraconservative religionists feel this way all the time.

31

First video from the convention is all about FEAR

by raymond frantz in

https://youtu.be/cdzydtuoblw?si=tyr8hgdgaiyn7c4h.

this was leaked only few days ago and it's a small segment of the video from the 2024 convention that has already started.

the video shows a jw logo down while worried jws are watching it as a news item on their tv screens, others are seen hiding from the police, others driving is the countryside to escape the authorities.

Vidiot

Rattigan - “Why do they keep talking about the government persecution?”

The short answer is that they know their katamari ball of misdeeds is gonna come back to bite them on the ass sooner or later, potentially resulting in loss of tax-exemption and insolvency.

A long answer is that playing the victim card been an integral component in their End-Times narrative for half a century, Fred Franz never left any kind of protege, and Ted Jaracz used 9-11 as a pretext to purge Bethel of the majority of moderates and liberals, leaving almost no creatives left with the narrative chops to give their End-Times narrative the necessary rewrite.

For the old version to work at this point, there’d have to be a complete radical political shift, constitutional suspension, and large-scale martial law initiated (all on ridiculously short notice) for it to actually work…

…it was a lot more plausible way back in the day, as much of the UN charter had been drafted by Europeans with socialist (i.e. communist) leanings, McCarthyism was rampant, and the cultural shifts of the era were scaring the shit out of ultraconservative religionists.

Probably why they’re reportedly trying to overhaul the Org’s eschatology to (presumably) look not so 20th Century Cold War -centric (not to mention that if the WTS was sunk, it’d fly in the face of the old version, which had “Babylon the Great” very specifically attacked and destroyed first rather than “God’s Exclusive Earthly Organization”).

17

How has 3 years of inflation affected WTC?

by ThomasMore in

the current u.s. administration and the fed says inflation is hard to tame.

it was over 9% at it's peak.

one of the greatest increases is price of food, something that everyone feels to some extent.

Vidiot

Kinda makes we wonder if the higher-ups deliberately select Bethel candidates based on how desperate their straits might be if they were dismissed…

…i.e. the more dependent on the Org for a livelihood they are, more loyal and obedient they’d be, simply out of fear of being cut off.

Which is, needless to say, highly unethical.

17

How has 3 years of inflation affected WTC?

by ThomasMore in

the current u.s. administration and the fed says inflation is hard to tame.

it was over 9% at it's peak.

one of the greatest increases is price of food, something that everyone feels to some extent.

Vidiot

Yeah, we need to be reminded that Bethelites who get kicked to the curb are not sitting pretty.

Same reason PIMO “apostates” at WTHQ gotta be super-careful…

…if they’re outed and shown the door, they’re also DFed, so there’s no safety-net back home unless they got “worldy” relatives they’re on good terms with.

They’re basically homeless on the street.

22

Do JWs Get Excited About WT Publications Any More?

by NotFormer in

memory from long ago: my old mate from high school lived next door to a jw and was often "treated" to the latest jw literature.

when the "you can live forever in paradise on earth"* book came out, this neighbour waxed lyrical about how good this book was and how powerful the message was.

he acted really keen about it, like it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Vidiot

Not to mention that older folks who are anxiously awaiting The End do so because they feel so disenfranchised from the present-day “system of things” (sorry)…

…it’s increasingly strange and unfamiliar to them, constantly changing at a rate they can’t keep pace with, and the media seems to go out of its way to report bad news at an unparalleled rate (sometimes, I think, to deliberately and constantly scare the shit out of as many people as possible).

However, more recent generations are, for the most part, perfectly comfortable with the modern world and how it works, their bullshit detectors function better, and they don’t find the prospect of everything being swept away in a Biblical apocalypse all that positive…

…along with religious ideologies that subscribe to that.