Stilgherrian » Religion

Vale Scott Young

Stilgherrian — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:16:53 +0000

I’ve just had the most amazing conversation about the man in the photograph. C Scott Young was, according to Mark Pesce, “the very, very first VRML designer. What he did — with no tools and for (literally) no money — changed the world.” And Mark should know, because he invented VRML.

Alas, Scott died a few days ago after a long, long battle with diabetes-related illnesses. He doesn’t have his own Wikipedia entry yet, but you can get hints of his life in Mark’s personal blog post and the memorial site.

Tonight’s conversation was remarkable because it led me to re-read a somewhat influential Wired article from 1995, Technopagans: May the astral plane be reborn in cyberspace. When that article hit the streets I’d just moved to Sydney in the first dot.com boom. Mark Pesce was a minor superstar in the Internet firmament for inventing leading-edge virtual reality technology — he was, almost literally, creating the world of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

That article combined what I knew of Mark’s technical work with religious and spiritual ideas which were at least somewhat related to my own. I remember thinking, “I’d very much like to meet this man one day.” That’s why I was so well pleased when I finally did meet him last December.

Mark, I am truly sad that you’ve lost a good friend — especially since there was so much complex news for you this week. As you say, “Remembering is the only gift we living can give those gone before us.”

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Common Ground run by a dangerous cult?

Stilgherrian — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:36:39 +0000

I always used to enjoy the wholesome food from the Common Ground Café at Sydney’s Royal Easter Show, the Newtown Festival and other events. There’s now a bad taste in my mouth now that I’ve discovered they’re owned by an isolationist cult with abusive child-discipline practices. A former members says workers aren’t paid and there’s no workers compensation or insurance.

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Chocolate bunny revisited

Stilgherrian — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 14:00:11 +0000

Since it’s Easter Sunday, I’ll point you to a previous post showing what happens to unpopular bunnies. Enjoy!

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Quote of the Day, 22 March 2007

Stilgherrian — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 02:08:27 +0000

Overheard in a pub recently, someone asking their friend, “Are you an atheist?” The reply was, “What does that mean? You’re so intelligent!”

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The New 7 Deadly Sins

Stilgherrian — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 09:58:22 +0000

One of the Pope’s groupies came up with a new version of the 7 deadly sins. I haven’t bothered chasing this story ‘cos it seems like such a wank, but there’s some interesting commentary from friend and colleague Zern Liew and Murdochland blogger Tim Dunlop [waves].

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Australia 2020 News, 13 March 2008

Stilgherrian — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 09:23:40 +0000

I wonder if Australia’s Jewish communities will be suitably placated by having their own kosher pre-summit summit on 14 April, since the main Australia 2020 Summit on 19-20 April clashed with Passover?

Meanwhile, the process of selecting the 1000 “best and brightest” (minus the politically-handy pre-selections) started yesterday. There’s “more than 10,000 applications” to deal with — though previously the figure was 7000+ so who knows who to believe.

[Summit vice-chairman] Professor [Glyn] Davis met Mr Rudd on Tuesday to review progress for the huge gathering. A team, including Victorian public servants and some of Professor Davis’ staff, is working on the agenda, while a Queensland bureaucrat is helping with background material for the summiteers.

Mind you:

The committee also has lists of possible summiteers sent in by the public and CVs that are not accompanied by formal applications.

I’d have thought that being unable to follow the published nomination process would automatically exclude you from being Australia’s “best and brightest”.

It’s sounding like we’ll know the list of 1000 early next week.

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Jason Calacanis and the Evil Cult of the Internet Start-up

Stilgherrian — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:27:09 +0000

I’m still chuckling at the seriousness with which some people treat getting onto Techmeme. It’s true, I keep stopping typing to giggle. It’s embarrassing.

I’d never visited Techmeme until this weekend. Even then it was only because someone told me I’d blipped up there. It’s just another feed of what someone thinks is “important” in infotech, yeah? Who cares. It’s not as if it’s Reuters or BBC News.

It’s just more geeks telling geeks what geeks think other geeks should think about stuff that geeks think about.

But Jason Calacanis cares.

Jason Calacanis must care very deeply because he “joked” about it on this website, and over at TechCrunch he “joked” about getting pageviews. His fan club speculates that Duncan Riley and me and others are only attacking him to generate our own web traffic. Well, I can’t speak for Duncan, but no, I couldn’t care less about website traffic — especially the low-grade drive-by flamers that usually wash up here after being mentioned on high-traffic fan sites. That’s not why I’m here.

I’m attacking Calacanis because I reckon the business style he describes, the one championed by his defenders, is rotten to the very core.

But first, let’s talk about religion…

The Cult of the Internet Start-up

Attracting attention and scoring pageviews is very, very important to these guys — and for good reason. They’re fully indoctrinated into the Cult of the Internet Start-up. They must generate The Buzz.

Let us now read from their gospel…

… 19 Soon, our Labours will have produced The Beta. We shall ready ourselves to supplicate Our Great Saviour the Venture Capitalist. 20 He shall ask, “Doth thy Beta have The Buzz?” 21 If it does have The Buzz, He will see that It is Good, and He shall writeth The Cheque. 22 And there shall be much rejoicing.

23 And then cometh the Second Phase wherein — praise be to The Great Saviour! — we shall write the IPO. 24 If we still have The Buzz, the Shares shall Rise, and the land will overfloweth with milk and honey. 25 And there shall be much rejoicing…

Internet Start-upers are fundamentalists. Anyone who doesn’t follow their pathway of monomaniacal self-sacrifice (read: high-risk workaholism) in pursuit of the Nirvana of the successful IPO is branded a Slacker, even by The Prophet.

The Cultists truly believe that the faster-faster-VC-to-IPO chase to these glorious riches is the right and proper thing to do — and like all zealots, they think the ends justify the means.

Note also Bill Moore’s comment. “A few million (or 10s of millions, max) dollars a year” and being “very comfortable” isn’t enough for him. He talks a bit about “industry changing”, but soon gets back to the money, complaining if he’d get “only” 15% of $100M.

That’s 15 million dollars, Bill!

There’s a word to describe that.

Greed.

If you’re on an average US, Australian or European wage, you’re already richer than 99% of the planet. But forget the top 1%. Even being in the top 0.01% isn’t enough, it seems. And anyone who isn’t this filthy greedy, anyone who isn’t prepared to treat people as disposable, exploitable objects along the way, is a “wimp” or a “wannabe”.

“There’s a Pig Loose in the Mosque! Sooooooooooooeeeeee!”

This discussion is heated because we’re not talking about subtly different ways of doing business here. We’re challenging the Cult’s core tenets. That greed is good. That the ideal is to grow fast and cash out, not build something of lasting value. That it’s just fine to burn people out along the way — collateral damage, I guess. That it doesn’t matter if your life is totally out of balance now because it’ll all sort itself out later.

Magically.

Somehow.

A few years ago I was discussing a couple of Internet start-up concepts with a well-respected VC-savvy adviser who paused and said:

You do realise you’ll be doing business with evil people? They don’t care about anything other than the return on their investment. As long as you deliver that, it’s fine. Just remember, though, they are evil.

The Cult of the Internet Start-up is evil. It’s selfish. It’s inhuman It’s amoral. Using the term “work ethic” to describe driving (or seducing) people into appallingly long work hours to the neglect of family and community and even self is disgusting.

This “grow now, worry about the consequences later” attitude is precisely the greedy, short-term thinking which has driven the world to the edge of an environmental disaster. But who cares, eh? You got your $100M — all of it! Leave someone else to clear up that mess, and plough on to the next “world-changing idea”.

Assuming you don’t die of a heart attack first.

Assuming you have a heart.

Calacanis’ original post exhibited the language of exploitation. Petty bean-counting to suck every last productive hour out of the meat-assets. He changed that wording quick smart, eh? But did he change his attitude?

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington did a beautifully-written follow-up — though really the message was standard advice for any business: (1) hire the right people, and (2) don’t waste money, but avoid being penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Some of Calacanis’ points were probably written in haste, like his statement “Fire people who are not workaholics” (he later changed it to “Fire people who don’t love their work”). Others were not controversial, like his advice to “Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs.” Overall, I get the impression that if he had spent just a few minutes editing his post, he would have had a 100% different reaction from readers.
Agreed. The reaction wouldn’t have been as sharp. But changing the surface PR spin is just spraying perfume to cover the underlying stench.

Arrington exhibits the same exploitative signs in a later comment.

“And I totally agree with you that for x duration you can work someone to death but the person needs to understand what happens once x duration is completed. There has to be downtime.”

No, they don’t need to understand that. Think of them as a goldfish. Goldfish will eat everything you give them until their little stomachs explode (or so I hear). The key isn’t to find a goldfish that knows when to stop eating. They key is to know when to stop feeding the goldfish, for their own good.

Once again, it’s about treating your staff as objects to be manipulated at your whim. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

“If you’re not like us, you’re a loser”

This is not the only way of starting a new business. It’s just one specific model — about fast growth and high risk. Without a doubt, it can sometimes produce astounding results. It can also crash spectacularly, leaving no survivors.

You can also build a business calmly, rationally, with solid foundations — and with respect for the people and world around you. A business which can weather the storms because the captain has a clear view from the bridge, accurate maps and a firm hand on the wheel — as well as a dedicated crew, of course.

Calacanis has been more measured since he encountered the criticism of his original post, but he’s still condescending when comparing the fundamentalist Cult approach to the truly enlightened 37signals.

You haven’t raised tons of money and you’re building a “lifestyle” business from what I gather (correct?) You’re not trying to displace Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. You’re not trying to build a service that gets to 100M monthly users, and you’re not on some aggressive timeline. You’re trying to build something that you enjoy working on and that helps people… correct?

When you take VC money and try to compete in a really aggressive space like search/research you’re faced with folks like Google, Wikipedia, about.com, Yahoo, eHow, DMOZ , etc. These are big companies with lots of resources… the way you beat them is to zig where they zag and/or out hustle them. So, if you want to compete in that space you’re gonna need to really work hard — you’re not going to do it working a four hour work week that’s for sure!

I’ll gloss over the fact that one of his differentiators is that 37signals is trying to build something “that helps people”, compared to his megalomaniacal goal of “displace Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc”. 37signals’ David Heinemeier Hansson quite rightly takes exception to all this.

[W]e’re not building a “lifestyle” business. We’re just building a business. To take the sound bytes [sic] from the recent Wired article, a multimillion dollar one that doubled in revenues last year…

So please don’t make the choices we’ve made about treating our employees one of a “lifestyle” (aka “small timer”, “toy”) vs “real” business. That somehow only those happy hippies who are not going for the gold can afford to hire whole people with a life outside of work. That’s bullcrap.

I very much do believe, though, that taking VC money with loads of strings attached will put hard pressures and increased stress on the decision making. And that in turn can lead to a culture where long hours and no walking outside for coffee can be seen as good, patriotic practices.

What I take the most offence to, though, is the dichotomist split between the workaholic go-getters who gets the quick cash and the lame waiting-in-line nine-to-fivers who get a gold watch after 30 years. What a crock.

We launched Basecamp four years ago. We built it off a 10 hour/week technical time budget. It’s very possible to build a “real”, multimillion dollar business that has high growth without resorting to the workaholic path.

Mr Calacanis, failing to comprehend that there are paths other than your own is fundamentalism. Even when you pretend to accept that there are alternatives — but still wrap your words in condescension.

Cult Myth #1: “It’s OK, I choose to work this way”

No it’s not OK. If you’re immersed in one specific highly-focussed environment for almost your entire waking life, then your decisions will not be made with a sense of perspective. You are not what DHH calls “a whole person”.

Vast slabs of the social fabric which informs good long-term, ethical decisions simply won’t be on your radar.

And then there’s the guys who say, “Well, I can work 16 hours a day for 7 days a week and it doesn’t do me any harm.” Well bully for you. I bet your dick’s bigger than mine too, eh? This isn’t a contest to see who’s the biggest martyr. It’s about who can achieve the most, not suffer the most.

Remember, Patty Hearst was there “voluntarily” too.

Cult Myth #2: “This is what makes America great”

This is the most toxic myth of all — wrapping your obsession in the flag.

No, this attitude is what makes America look like it’s populated by arseholes. Ignorant, arrogant, self-righteous, self-centred arseholes who consume everything in sight and dump their crap on the rest of the world under the delusion that their way is the best and only way. A nation that only now is starting to realise the mess it’s in.

What actually made America great — past tense — was the visionary foresight of its founders, the political geniuses who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. At the time they knew they were creating some special — not just for the moment, but for all time.

God Bless America.

She’d better, because a clear-headed America will be needed to help face the challenges of the future — the very near future. And an America retreating into medievalism and stubborn arrogance is not what the world needs.

Fighting the Good Fight

So, this is why I refer to Jason Calacanis as a prick. His ill-thought-out wording in an essay intended to convey good advice — and some of it is good advice, let’s not forget! — exposed this smelly underlying attitude of winner-take-all exploitation and devil take the hindmost.

I strongly believe this to be a dangerous, toxic, anti-human attitude and it’s infecting others. It must be fought vigorously and with passion.

Calacanis and his defenders reckon that workaholic exploitation is the only way to “change the world”. It’s not. There’s also clarity of vision, a really good idea, and well-planned execution. It’s the difference between beating one’s opponent with serried ranks of massed foot-soldiers, or using snipers.

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Thursday Reading, 6 March 2008

Stilgherrian — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:18:47 +0000

Three quickies for you: The 40 Most Inappropriate Children’s Book Covers (I like Sharing is for Losers: an Ayn Rand Primer and Pop! Goes The Hamster And Other Fun Microwave Games). A nice rant about Sydney’s Fireworks Display Exhaustion Syndrome. And the story of the Bluetooth Burqa (hat-tip to 3 Quarks Daily).

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Fiction is not reality

Stilgherrian — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:09:26 +0000

“Heath Ledger is notable for being two things at the moment. They are: 1. Not gay. 2. Dead,” notes Eric TF Bat. “This hasn’t stopped our good friends at the Westboro Baptist ‘Church’ announcing plans to picket his memorial because he played a gay cowboy in some movie a while back.” Eric’s rant says what needs to be said.

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Is it really so wrong to mix business and politics (and religion)?

Stilgherrian — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:00:24 +0000

So last week Apple announced new products. Yawn. The Cult of Apple worshipped their God, and millions of words were written praising His Wisdom. However the most interesting comment I’ve read so far was about the political content of Steve Jobs’ presentation.

Alastair Rankine writes that the Macworld Keynote has moved from slick-but-reality-distorted marketing into the realms of straight-out entertainment, and then criticises Randy Newman’s performance. Not because it was crap (which, being Randy Newman, is inevitable), but because it was political.

Criticism of the Bush administration is something I obviously have a lot of time for. But is it suitable for a consumer product launch? …

Mix politics with business and you take a risk with a relatively small upside but a big downside. If your politics match mine, we are no more likely to do business together than before we knew each other’s positions. But if our politics disagree, this difference becomes a barrier that we each have to overcome in order to do business together.

I’m not arguing for censorship or anything. I’m just saying that the separation of politics and business is crucial for the success of both.

I disagree.

Business is about making money, yes, but sometimes I think it’s wrong to “leave politics at the door”. In fact, is it even possible?

Here’s how I responded on Alastair’s website:

Deciding to continue doing business with someone even though you disagree with their political aims is a political decision: a decision to wimp out and fail to pursue your own political goals. A decision to support your political enemy because money is more important to you than your principles.

Mind you, I fail to live up to my own high-sounding rhetoric.

I faced an ethical dilemma. I discovered that one of my clients is run by members of Hillsong Church — an organisation which worries me. Did I stop working for them? No. Or at least I haven’t yet. However I have turned down a project which would have been working directly with the Church’s own business interests.

On the other hand, can I be accused of religious discrimination? Perhaps. How would it have sounded if I said “I don’t work for Jews”?

It’s presumably OK to say “I don’t work for the baby-sacrificing Turnip Cult”, though, so where does one draw the line?

Was Apple wrong to include political commentary in a product launch? (Did that happen because Al Gore is an Apple board member?) Where does one draw the line between business and politics (and religion)?

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Petitions to parliament drove ALP’s Internet filtering policy

Stilgherrian — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 22:38:37 +0000

Here’s a nice twist linking this week’s discussion threads. It turns out that Labor’s Internet filtering policy was largely driven by petitions to parliament — the very petitions which Chairman Rudd plans to make more effective.

Irene Graham (pictured), who commented here as “rene”, has been following censorship issues for years at libertus.net. In a post to Link she reminds us that back in October 2006, Senator Stephen Conroy was presenting a petition to parliament:

In March, Kim Beazley announced that a Labor Government would require all Internet Service Providers to offer a ‘clean feed’ internet service to all households, schools and public libraries that would block access to websites identified as containing child pornography, acts of extreme violence and x-rated material.

In the Senate today, I tabled a petition signed by more than 20,000 Australians endorsing Labor’s policy… [which] clearly shows that this view is widely shared in the Australian community.

However those 20,646 signatures were gathered through churches, hardly “representative”.

Ms Graham writes:

Since Nov 2004, there have been at least 35 petitions tabled calling for mandatory ISP-level filtering (APH parlinfo site seach). 24 of them are a petition form published by the Australian Family Association (which is actually a religious right organisation), a copy of which can be found [in the Internet Archive].

Those petitions also want ISPs to be subject to “liability for harm caused to children by inadequate efforts to protect minors from exposure.”

The other 11 are copies of the ‘clean feed’ petition, as tabled by Conroy. While Conroy’s had 20K signatures, the others about ‘clean feed’ had from 18 to 145.

If Labor believes 20k signatures collected through churches justifies their policy, I’d be very worried about them paying even more attention to petitions than they already do.

The new petition regime will be overseen by a parliamentary committee including six government members and four non-government members.

I for one hope that committee, in deciding whether or not to treat a petition with Great Seriousness, will analyse the source so that petitions which obviously represent a narrow slice of the Australian demographic are given less weight than those which have garnered signatures from a broad cross-section.

How do you do that, though, if you don’t have a demographic database of voters to look up? And how do you interpret the actual content of the petition in the context of how it might have been sold to the signers?

I can imagine a petition being written in a dozen paragraphs of parliamentary legal jargon. The signature-collectors are encouraged with a cry of “Fight crime on our streets, sign the petition!” And yet buried in the text is a proposal which, when translated out of that jargon, is about rounding up immigrants and jailing them without charge.

As always, the devil will be in the details. And in the personal attitudes and skills of the committee members.

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Merry Christmas from George W Bush

Stilgherrian — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 01:41:16 +0000

A Christmas message in song from George W Bush, Leader of the Free World.

Hat tip to Peter Black.

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St Kevin’s thoughts on religion in politics

Stilgherrian — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 01:01:34 +0000

Lots of Australian politicians claim to be Christians, but somehow the “What would Jesus do?” bit gets lost in the everyday business of arresting Indian doctors and sending refugees to concentration camps. Our new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says he’s a Christian too. What sort?

Two years ago, Chairman Rudd gave a lecture at the University of NSW’s New College on Religion, The State and Politics. Written in the days of WorkChoices and well before Rudd became ALP leader, it begins with the observation that “Christianity began its life as an oppressed minority,” and argues that one of the church’s important roles is to speak out against injustice.

Rudd also describes the five models of political behaviour he sees being adopted by Christian politicians.

Model Number One is what I call the “Vote for Me Because I’m a Christian” model. This is the model I find to be most repugnant. It’s the model that simply says on the basis of my external profession of Christian faith, that those of similar persuasion should vote for me.

This is about as persuasive as saying that because I’m a Sydney Swans supporter (which I am not, and never will be, for reasons which you could well understand), that because I’m a Sydney Swans supporter that all other Sydney Swans supporters should vote for me as well, because we ostensibly adhere to the same belief system.

Unfortunately, this model is alive and well in the politics of contemporary America. Thankfully, it is much less alive and well here in Australia, although there are some dangerous signs that for certain Christian constituencies within our country, this represents an increasingly appealing message. It is a model for which I can find no underpinning scriptural, doctrinal, or theological justification or authority.

I won’t go through the other four, but he’s equally dismissive of them.

What’s interesting for people who might worry about how Rudd’s conservative social views might affect policy, he says this:

Sometimes you [...] encounter in the broader Christian community the view that a Christian view should always prevail, no matter what. My response to that is that’s terrific, but we don’t live in a theocracy, we live in a democracy, which is secular.

If you look at the census data, the number of people who profess an active belief in God has gone down over time, the most recent census data saying that about 69% of Australians have such a belief. So the secularity of the views reflected in the political process in my argument, directly express what’s happening in mainstream society, and therein lies the challenge for the church.

But whereas a Christian perspective on contemporary policy debates may not therefore prevail, it should be considered by those in authority, and it must be heard by those in authority. It cannot be rejected contemptuously by those in authority, particularly by secular politicians who simply belief that any view from a Christian or broader religious perspective or theological perspective is inherently invalid.

Such a proposition in my argument, is wrong.

And it’s rather nice to see him quoting the Pope in support of the role of trade unions. Tony Abbott would have been rolling in his grave. Oh, hang on, he’s not dead yet. Ah well.

The whole speech is well worth a read. You can get the full text as a PDF, or listen to an MP3. Thanks to Crispin Harris for the pointer.

[Update: Fairfax journo Andrew West has explored Kevin Rudd's religion in today's article More than just a light on the hill.]

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Weekly Poll: Merry Bloody Christmas!

Stilgherrian — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 11:58:28 +0000

Yes, it’s that time of year again, when a celebration of the birth of social radical Joshua bar Joseph is turned into a retail extravaganza.

How do you feel about Christmas? Personally, I get annoyed with the “compulsory cheerfulness” and the pointless mob behaviour. As the old saying goes, you can’t pick your families, and Christmas forces them together regardless — though reports that the suicide rate peaks at Christmas is an urban legend.

Yes, how do you feel about Christmas? Go to the website to vote, or add your comments here.

[Yes, that is me in the photograph. I made the antlers for the Snarky Platypus, who should be wearing them on Friday, and ’Pong took the photo using my Nokia N80.]

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Portraits of photographers in the Puritan church

Stilgherrian — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 01:23:46 +0000

Last night ’Pong (pictured) and I went to the opening of In Your Face, an exhibition of photographs of photographers taken by other photographers showing until 4 November at Paddington Uniting Church.

This photo is not one of them, and ’Pong wasn’t one of the photographers. I just reckon this was a curious painting to hang in a church, and ’Pong liked it. So I took a photo with my pimple-cam.

Paddington Uniting Church intrigued me. Their motto is “Faith Inclusiveness Justice Creativity”, and out the front there’s a sign explaining their “progressive” mission.

We are a community of people who gather to worship God and explore our Christian faith in a critical manner relevant to our context. Conscious of the particular challenges involved in witnessing to the life of Jesus Christ in the inner city of Sydney we seek to shape our lives in the following ways.

We seek to be an open and welcoming community of al people, especially those marginalized in our society due to their sexual orientation, gender, race, age, poverty and mental or emotional well being. We look for the full participation of all people in the life of the Church.

We are committed to working for justice, particularly with those who are marginalized in the inner city, such as people without homes of those left in poverty, aboriginal people and those who suffer racial prejudice.

We seek to actively explore the resources offered through all forms of human creativity, particularly as expressed in the arts, in support of our faith and mission.

I love the fact that they’re ripped out the rows of wooden pews, and the church interior is just this big open space which they can use however they want — like to show a documentary film about their current photographic exhibition. And growing up in the Methodist tradition, I appreciated the stark simplicity of their altar — just a white cloth, and two simple candles — and the preacher’s pulpit towering dead centre over that altar, as if he’s standing in judgement over we poor sinners.

I reckon the term “neo-Protestant” might suit them, no?

Here are the photographers’ names so the search engines can find them: Kate Andrews, Any Barker, Rob Barker, Morgan Carpenter, Meredith James, Billy Law, James McManus, Tim O’Mahoney, Wing Poon, Danielle Wood

Stilgherrian » Religion

Vale Scott Young

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Jason Calacanis and the Evil Cult of the Internet Start-up

The Cult of the Internet Start-up

“There’s a Pig Loose in the Mosque! Sooooooooooooeeeeee!”

“If you’re not like us, you’re a loser”

Cult Myth #1: “It’s OK, I choose to work this way”

Cult Myth #2: “This is what makes America great”

Fighting the Good Fight

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