Wouldn't it be better to just stop doing the thing that's making the existing reefs die?

I'm a Satanist and affiliated with neither CoS or TST. The leadership of TST are not good people. One of them tried to make himself the god of a cargo cult and the other has a history of making racist, antisemitic and ablist statements. He also owned a website about eugenics until 2018.

That video I linked to is long but it is very well sourced and I hope might give you a bit more insight into who you're supporting if you choose to join or donate to them. There's a lot of comments under the video from ex-TST members, including Ministers and Chapter Heads who've been badly burnt by TST.

Do ISP's monitor or sell or pass on your data? Yes.

Do VPN's? Depends on the VPN. Find one that doesn't and can back that up with 3rd party audits and legal encounters.

So can a good VPN protect your privacy? No, not by themselves. A VPN is part of an overall toolkit to be as private as you personally would like to be. It can help protect your privacy, that's all.

It's really that simple.

Ah, the old "it was just one or two bad apples" gambit.

Whilst I completely understand why you, as private individuals with limited income and not a huge org that has high priced legal teams on call, have made this decision (I think people forget that it costs money just to defend yourself in court, irrespective of how accurate or legal the charges might be), this is about the 3rd or 4th time that the Admin team have communicated and taken action very, very poorly.

It's really not a difficult thing to do. A post such as this either before or immediately after taking such important actions. I realise you're all busy people with real life stuff to do too but surely you tell new Admin's when they're onboarded that momentous decisions that affect a lot of people must be communicated to the members immediately?

You've already got for-profit prisons in the US where inmates (slaves) are hired out.

What do we know about how a for-profit system works? That's right - profit must always keep growing, or to put it another way, incentivising the process of creating criminals in order to increase the potential for a growing slave labour market is a growth industry.

Just because something doesn't have the literal name 'slavery' attached to it, doesn't mean it isn't actually slavery in every respect that matters.

If you consider Andrew Tate a meaningful source on any subject I really don't care what generation you're a part of - you're a fucking idiot and you need to sort yourself out. All you are to him is a gullible mark to extract money from.

Everyone already knew that, yes, but in order to get these who control the purse strings to yield cash to address it, it needs formalising.

Gonna take friendly umbrage with you putting Shyamalan on that list but not mentioning John Carpenter or Wes Craven :)

Not really. Disagreement, even angry disagreement, but only hexbear did I find truly toxic.

Conversely, I had to use reddit recently (to find an old post) and I don't know if its because I haven't been there for months and I'd forgotten how bad it is or if it is actually worse but fucking hell it was like a war zone.

Ask them when you can install the bug on their phoneline, open their mail and remove their bathroom door.

Going by rate of blog posts by year they don't seem any noisier than usual. The opposite if anything. 18 this year and there's only 3 and a bit months left of the year whereas in 2018 they made 60.