The comments from current members are a great testament to the accuracy and fairness of your article. Those are exactly the kind of comments I would have expected current members to write. I actually thought at first they were parodies.

Stories like this make me feel better about being a perpetually cynical, untrusting bastard.

Damaged people, desparate people, mentally ill people, all of whom have grown up in a culture that derides reason and critical thinking, and preaches emotionalism and blind acceptance. Catch someone like that in a vulnerable time, and it’s disturbing how easy it can be to control them. All it takes is the right words,…

Yeah, I’m having such a hard time figuring out how he got these women in his clutches for even a split second, but I’m sure he has some charming traits or something that just aren’t coming through in the article.

What about anal sex, a la pegging? Because... hey, that’s still anal sex and I have to admit, it *does* make me feel like a true, fierce, powerful woman. :P

You know who else went to Harvard? Many of the authors of the Salem Witch Trials! I feel safer already!

Right? He’s a white dude with crazy eyes. If I saw him on the street, I’d think “cult.”

1. They demand you give money, possessions, etc without asking questions.

100 people times $200-$600/month = $20,000-$60,000/month (call it $35k, maybe). Minus expenses to rent the room for weekly meetings, it probably leaves him with at least $15-$30k/month for himself. Small-time doesn’t imply unprofitable or non-predatory.

I think this is just coded language. She’s obviously trying to reach out to other Nickelback fans.

I got thrown out of a cult once, and it was BRILLIANT! These things are awful and just... I wish more people would speak their mind IN the meetings. I was invited to one (now that I think on it, I do wonder if it wasn’t mostly women), and they told everyone that the source of our problems stemmed from trauma inside…

“He said men asked too many questions,” Poppy says. “And interrupted what he was trying to do.”

I spent the summer before high school at an elite all-boys boarding school in CT. During the summer the program was geared for high-school students with “behavioral” problems that kept them from graduating.

It’s probably dozens more than that. Don’t be naive.

There’s a STRONG vein of “don’t narc on anybody” at our public school. Whether it’s the kids who hold a drunken party in the woods, or a school employee who may gain a student’s trust and abuse it, it’s considered a bigger shame to tell on them than the actual act.

They got so obsessed with mirroring the pilot that the entire episode didn’t make any sense. We barely saw Cary, they spent 7 years building Diane and Kurt to then destroy the couple in the last minutes with a story nobody cared about, Alicia is all of a sudden in love with Jason. I would have preferred for Alicia not…

And then to top everything, they don’t even show which of the main cast Jeffrey Dean Morgan beat to death with his baseball bat.

It's a baby... boomer. Sounds like a name chosen by stream of consciousness and free association.

Hiking can be fun, people tend to forget that if you hike 5 miles in, you have to hike 5 miles back out and that’s when the fun stops.

I worked with a woman and she brought her two kids to the company picnic, The boy was into everything more so than any kid his age I’ve ever seem. Her daughter literally just stood there. The mother smiled at her son’s antics and yelled at her daughter. There was no safe movement for the little girl.