It’s not anything near as evil as ASD and other illegal schemes, just the nature of office politics…but it tends to feather the nests of those who play the game and grant themselves “authority”.

GlimDropper: I don’t think it’s fair to judge [Surf's Up] by it’s most vocal members, perhaps it’s my optimistic nature but I bet most former members of that forum are far less likely to fall for scams today than they were a year ago. And while there seems to be a little larger gap for light to enter there recently, no credit for that fact belongs to the promoters and moderators.

I agree. Lots and lots of people have emerged from the fog — in no small measure, I believe, owing to the behavior of some of the principal strategic cheerleaders on Surf’s Up.

During the summer, a poster here described herself as a former delusional in a thread that discussed AVGs’s whopping, 250-percent matching bonus. First it made me laugh, and later, as I reflected, it made my day.

“When I was still delusional, I would have been doing cartwheels about now,” the poster said.

Patrick

Tony H: It’s easy to say the cheering was “Stepford” but I don’t think it was.

Not all of the cheering was Stepfordian, I believe. Like you, I believe a lot of the cheerleading was strategic — designed to rope in the people who refuse for some reason to do their own thinking. (The Stepfords.)

Perhaps what I find oddest about the case is that some of the early Stepfords now appear to recognize they’d been doubly scammed — first by Bowdoin, and later by the strategic cheerleaders.

Regardless, some of the Stepfords still appear to be inclined to join in the antigovernment rants for the sake of being accepted at some level by the people who scammed them, thus refusing to break away altogether.

Example: Acknowledging they’d been ripped off by Bowdoin, but nevertheless complaining that they hadn’t received their ASD/Golden Panda restitution and blaming it on the government — perhaps even complaining about the slow-to-materialize refunds while simultaneously pushing other autosurf Ponzis.

That’s Stepfordian to me: acknowledging you’re a victim of fraud in one case, and then joining the people who defrauded you in a new fraud so it can happen all over again — all while reserving your right to jeer the government.

The Stepfords are the best friends the strategic cheerleaders can have.

Patrick

admin: One thing about Stepfords: They’ll cheer without looking, accept without verifying, even condemn by rote.Patrick

I think Will Rogers had it right when he said “There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves”. Please note the relative proportions of the three groups.

The “Surfs Up” forum is almost a classic example of an echo chamber, anything potentially negative about Andy or ASD gets deleted and the government is the source of all the problems (with us trolls lending it a helping hand). If anything it’s impressive that more “tag along scams” like Bob Guenther, Curtis Richmond and AVG didn’t happen. I don’t think it’s fair to judge the place by it’s most vocal members, perhaps it’s my optimistic nature but I bet most former members of that forum are far less likely to fall for scams today than they were a year ago. And while there seems to be a little larger gap for light to enter there recently, no credit for that fact belongs to the promoters and moderators.

Tony H: It’s easy to say the cheering was “Stepford” but I don’t think it was. It is a trick that has been used before and will be used again. The knee-jerk cheering is done in the hope that it will placate the “true” ponzi victims, and hopefully line them up for the next scam. eg. AVG, Noobing, etc.The “true” victims need to be placated because they are the most dangerous to the ponzi scam. They are the ones most likely to report scammers to the law, most likely to file a claim. So any dissent must quashed, any one who speaks out or question is a negative naysayer, or a troll. The illusion of “success” is engineered.Or maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps one of the ponzi supporters will give a different explanation?

Very good points Tony. Not only are the true victims more likely to complain, they’re less likely to have a reason not to. The “players” have the big “downlines” and have a (slightly) better chance of being in profit so the less disclosure the better. They need to stage manage the victims, not only to route them into the next scam but to keep them from cooperating with the prosecution.

I ~almost~ feel bad for Barb McIntyre, she was one of the few Surfs Up mods not to get involved in AVG and is now treading on the brink of allowing a discussion of the program. She clearly has some level of sympathy for AVG’s victims but there’s no way she can permit an honest discussion because any complaint against AVG is also true of ASD, only this time the government isn’t there to play the bogeyman.

The “true” victims need to be placated because they are the most dangerous to the ponzi scam. They are the ones most likely to report scammers to the law, most likely to file a claim. So any dissent must quashed, any one who speaks out or question is a negative naysayer, or a troll. The illusion of “success” is engineered.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps one of the ponzi supporters will give a different explanation?

GlimDropper: What state of denial do you need to be in to find SC legal theories credible enough to try and file them in court?

Good question — and one that begs a second question: What state of mind do you have to be in to champion filings you perhaps didn’t even read or made no effort to understand?

To me, that’s what brought out the Stepfordian nature of some of the ASD advocates. They were cheering from the rooftops, agreeing with the ASD/AVG forums operated by the Surf’s Up Mods that Richmond was a “hero” — but I got the sense that few of the posters actually read the filings or, if they did, understood what they were championing.

Much of the cheering seemed reflexive to me; it was almost as though they’d cheer an event simply because it was described as something to cheer. So what if what they were cheering later proved to be a fatal traffic accident? The Stepfords didn’t even bother to look. They just cheered and cheered, as the coroner was arriving out of their view to make the death pronouncement.

The cheering didn’t strike me as uniformly reflexive, though. Some of the cheerleaders knew that the case against Bowdoin was solid. Those cheers were based on a desire to poison the well against the prosecutors. The Stepfords were used by the people who knew the case was solid to create the appearance that ASD had widespread support.

One thing about Stepfords: They’ll cheer without looking, accept without verifying, even condemn by rote.

Patrick

I use the internet nearly every day, but outside there most superficial generalities I can’t explain how it all works. All the routers, switches, hubs and packets provide their function without my being able to understand exactly how they work. But when I login, they do all work. However we see people buying into a speculative, alternative theory of legal justice which has a source they understand less than I do the internet. But unlike the internet, sovereign citizen legal theories can not be proven to work.

In their original context the Sovereign Citizen (SC) ideas, while reprehensible do sort of make sense. Any government that blatantly violates their pathological hatred by treating black people as equal to whites can’t be said to be speaking for them (thank God). So to the SC crowd the social contract has been broken, they are free to exercise their ingenuity in creating theories which manipulate the justice system of the government they feel betrayed them, to their own (illusory) advantage.

What interests me is what justification non-racists use for employing SC legal ideas. The ASD raid signaled a break in the social contract to some ASD members and rabid opportunists like Curtis Richmond and “professor” Moriarty rushed in to sell their worthless “legal advice.” I’d like to think the majority of ASD members who saw Curtis Richmond’s ideas dismissed them after the first reading, but some percentage of them didn’t. What state of denial do you need to be in to find SC legal theories credible enough to try and file them in court?

Basically all these movements are/were a bunch of ’sovereign citizens’, racists and malcontents who need to blame others for their problems and felt they could twist the constitution and laws to fit their purposes.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2008/0805.carey.html

William Potter Gale, was one of the founders and main ideologues of the Posse Comitatus movement. From the link above:

“Gale’s racist beliefs were hardly unique. His singular innovation was to devise a “legal” philosophy that was enormously appealing to disaffected, alienated citizens. It was a promise of power, a means of asserting that they were the true inheritors of the founding fathers’ ideal, a dream they believed had been corrupted by a vast conspiracy that only they could see. Gale’s ideas gave people on the paranoid edge of society a collective identity. It told them what they desperately wanted to hear: that the federal government was illegitimate, and that the legal weapons the state used to oppress them could be turned against the state.”

More on Posse Comitatus:

http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/people/ftp.py?people//g/gale.william.potter/adl-posse-comitatus

Gale not only spewed vile hatred against black and Jewish people, he was half Jewish himself:

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=73

Hatred and hypocrisy are a potent combination and it has been said that hypocrisy is the only art form that all people display a talent for, but that still falls short of explaining why the “sovereign citizen” system of beliefs adopts it’s self so well among some of the very people most despised by the people who originated the twisted ideology.

Reed’s group, the sovereign nuts, are based in North Dakota.
Speaking of which, a serious conviction was recently won in Florida against Audie Watson, who was running a tribal membership scam to bring illegal aliens into the States. Guess which tribe he was inducting them into? Same one.