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Left Alive And Unchanged: The Heaven’s Gate Website

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Re: Left Alive And Unchanged: The Heaven’s Gate Website

#51

Post by ianai »

jmwilson wrote: post #6

Title should be clarified to match the article. Not everyone associated with the cult has perished. Several ex-members are alive and some remained close to the cult in a way that's hard to describe, and took on the maintenance of the website. HBO's series, Heaven's Gate: The Cult of Cults, is highly recommended. It is a fascinating, tragic, and ultimately humanizing look at the cult, through the eyes of observers and…

Right. I didn’t realize they were tech trailblazers back in the day until that documentary.

Re: Left Alive And Unchanged: The Heaven’s Gate Website

#52

Post by Hnrobert42 »

jhugo wrote: post #44
nindalf wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll join the same cult and tell the others it doesn’t require that much effort. Just put it up on cloudflare free plan after renewing the domain for 30 years. Then hopefully I’ll dip out of the cult without anyone noticing.

Want to place a bet that CloudFlare is still around in 30 years? I'd gladly take the other side of that.

I suppose you could offer a contract to short Cloudflare’s stock.

Re: Left Alive And Unchanged: The Heaven’s Gate Website

#53

Post by Hnrobert42 »

blitzar wrote: post #21
nindalf wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll join the same cult and tell the others it doesn’t require that much effort. Just put it up on cloudflare free plan after renewing the domain for 30 years. Then hopefully I’ll dip out of the cult without anyone noticing.

Dont forget to use code suicidecult for an extra 20% off at checkout.

I tried it. It had been used successfully 14 times today, but it didn’t work for me.

Re: Left Alive And Unchanged: The Heaven’s Gate Website

#54

Post by sekh60 »

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #48
grishka wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? Again, I'm non-US.

You may have heard the expression “drank the koolaid” to mean someone has fully embraced an outlandish ideology, or even just fully committed to a cause. At Jonestown, many cult members committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced koolaid. Koolaid is a sugary, flavored drink powder that is mixed with water. It was a staple for many kids in the 80’s and 90’s.

It apparently was flavoraid.

Re: Left Alive And Unchanged: The Heaven’s Gate Website

#55

Post by pessimizer »

codewithcheese wrote: post #9

If I ever fall under the influence of a suicide cult. I hope I can convince them that I should be the one to stay behind and "maintain the website" ^_^

Heaven's Gate wasn't that kind of cult. People were free to come and go. They didn't even do shunning/disconnection.

Re: Left Alive And Unchanged: The Heaven’s Gate Website

#56

Post by np_tedious »

jmwilson wrote: post #6

Title should be clarified to match the article. Not everyone associated with the cult has perished. Several ex-members are alive and some remained close to the cult in a way that's hard to describe, and took on the maintenance of the website. HBO's series, Heaven's Gate: The Cult of Cults, is highly recommended. It is a fascinating, tragic, and ultimately humanizing look at the cult, through the eyes of observers and…

Thanks for this comment. I was initially impressed that the site stated up that long with no human maintenance.

Also, now I want to watch that documentary

Re: Left Alive And Unchanged: The Heaven’s Gate Website

#57

Post by dbspin »

genewitch wrote: post #27

You can be wrong and charismatic. I'm sure sociology and anthropology and psychology all can reconcile that.

This is the secondary theme of 1984, that gets lost because of the cultural relevance of the primary theme (govt surveillance, authoritarianism etc).

O'Brien, Winston Smith's foil, is presented as charismatic, rebellious seeming and importantly both smarter and better educated than the protagonist. The lesson I drew from this as a high schooler, was that someone can be all those things and still wrong, malicious, nefarious. That our values can be better guides than what seems like incontrovertible logic. And that following rationality blindly without empathy or heuristics (common sense), can lead to utter horror (the Stalinist purges that Orwell was explicitly referencing, and of course Nazism).

Re: Left Alive And Unchanged: The Heaven’s Gate Website

#58

Post by pessimizer »

TexanFeller wrote: post #42

The Heaven’s Gate cultists have been spreading dangerous misinformation for 20 years? They MUST be deplatformed! Why on earth do Google, Facebook, Hacker News, their web hosting and DNS providers allow their dangerous messages to be spread? /s

The US constitution guarantees special protection for purely irrational beliefs. Once a belief starts to vaguely makes sense or to make an honest attempt to make sense, it loses its protection.

Re: Left Alive And Unchanged: The Heaven’s Gate Website

#59

Post by INTPenis »

jimmygrapes wrote: post #17
tomcam wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did… did you email them? Why? What did they say back?

On a semi related note, Ted Kaczynski is still alive and was responding to letters as of November. He got moved to a medical prison last month so I'm not sure how well he's doing, but it is utterly fascinating to be able to correspond with people who are both intelligent and insane.

>but it is utterly fascinating to be able to correspond with people who are both intelligent and insane

tbf sort of sums up most of the internet where I hang out.

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