Slog: News & Arts

RSS icon Comments on Re: Unconfirmed Reports

1
Sgt. Lou Eagle (Seattle Police) has been called and confirmed the right to protest without permit as long as we (a) stay on the sidewalks and (b) don't block traffic. Masks are LEGAL.

Good work, Lou.

Posted by Chief Wiggum | February 10, 2008 11:19 PM
2

How exactly could one ever elicit sympathy for this "church"? They are pure evil.

Posted by bma | February 10, 2008 11:22 PM
3

@2: Easy. Harass them, act like idiots, get on the news, but have no way to get real information to regular people. Regular people assume YOU'RE the nut, and sympathize with the Scientologists, who they still have no particular reason to think ill of.

Posted by Anthony Hecht | February 10, 2008 11:33 PM
4

Just an interesting FYI -- I'm over in the Netherlands right now and yesterday, February 10th, we rode by a massive protest against Scientology as well. There were people in death costumes and carrying on about Xenu. Is this a worldwide, coordinated protest?

Posted by CondimentGrrl | February 11, 2008 12:49 AM
5

So, I don't understand. Was this a reaction to something that happened, or did everybody all of a sudden get fed up with Scientology and decide to picket?

Posted by Chris in Tampa | February 11, 2008 12:58 AM
6

I'd heard that something was planned for a while--even a friend from Australia told me about it. But it didn't get much publicity, obviously. Too bad. Meanwhile, I'd love to hear Anthony's hilarious story!

Posted by Kristen | February 11, 2008 2:47 AM
7

Little of both #5. The nerds have hated Scientology for a while now because of it's litigiousness against internet media, especially it's overuse of the DMCA and copyright claims. A lot of people remember when they tried to shutdown Usenet forums when the net was just coming into being. It kind of came to a head when they tried to censor that YouTube clip of Tom Cruise going batshit using a copyright claim a couple of weeks ago. So a bunch of nerds banded together and started a group coordinated and planed on the internet (which explains how they could launch successfully protests worldwide on the same day) called Anonymous with the intention of resisting scientiology, starting out by doing a DDOS attack on the church's web servers in an attempt to take them offline (semi-successfully). They are now in their next phase of public protesting on the birthday of Lisa McPhearson, a woman who died under the churches care. I hear another protest is scheduled for March 15th (not sure the specifics).

There are other reason of course for protesting, but this was the catalyst.

Posted by brandon h | February 11, 2008 3:37 AM
8

This is not really a "group" with the official name of "Anonymous," rather a collection of image board users from sites like 4chan, 7chan, etc where the default user name is Anonymous. There's this whole little half-serious mythology about "Anonymous" there. (Some "newfags" take it completely seriously)

Posted by The CHZA | February 11, 2008 5:30 AM
9

High schoolers were talking about this all last week, apparently.

Posted by Will in Seattle | February 11, 2008 12:32 PM
10

Oh, I had already forgotten about those Anonymous videos.

Posted by Chris in Tampa | February 12, 2008 12:57 AM

Comments Closed

In order to combat spam, we are no longer accepting comments on this post (or any post more than 45 days old).