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Jim Jones Quotes

Browse 9 quotes about Jim Jones.

Jim Jones Quotes

“Oh, sure, one can overdo it, and our history is darkly stained with abortive religious movements inspired by messianic crackpots. But it appears to be a continuum: too much and you end up in the realm of a Jim Jones, David Koresh, or Charles Manson, all of whom were able to lead others into a maelstrom of paranoid delusion. In the cases of Jones and Koresh, one can only do armchair forensic psychiatry to try to guess their afflictions, but Manson, alive and well, is a diagnosed schizophrenic. However, if you get the metamagical thoughts and behaviors to the right extent and at the right time and place, then people might just get the day off from work on your birthday for a long time to come.”

JesusChristMadnessMental IllnessMessiahHolidaysPsychopathologyShamanJim JonesDavid Koresh
Book:The Trouble with Testosterone and Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament
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“It’s time to introduce a new fallacy that we have coined the Kool-Aid Fallacy. It goes like this: “You disagree with me and I’m in the majority while you’re in the minority. Therefore you’re a cult. Jim Jones led a cult and all of his followers drank poisoned Kool-Aid. Therefore, you’re a suicide cult and I am entitled to say, ‘Keep drinking the Kool-Aid.’” It’s unbelievable how many times this fallacy appears on social media. It is now so common that we can validly refer to a Kool-Aid version of Godwin’s Law. Any strong-minded minority with ideas that challenge the common herd will automatically be called a cult and then it is inevitable that Kool-Aid will be mentioned. Whenever any troll refers to “drinking the Kool-Aid”, they should immediately be labeled as having committed the Kool-Aid fallacy.”

TruthMajorityConformityCultHereticOutsiderMinorityGroup ThinkKool AidJim Jones
Book:Extra Scientiam Nulla Salus: How Science Undermines Reason
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“Here is the short version of the Kool-Aid Fallacy: Cult … therefore Jim Jones … therefore mass suicide … therefore Kool-Aid. It’s astonishing how much of social media now revolves around simple word association sequences. Absolutely no thought goes into anything. No one ever delivers an actual argument. If they ever do attempt an argument, their punctuation, spelling, grammar, logic and general education are not up to the task, and soon dissolve into meaningless mush. But usually they just hurry on to the insults and ad hominem attacks, which is the part they love. Before long, the Kool-Aid fallacy is eagerly applied. Every argument should have a Dunning-Kruger quotient associated with it. Most people are 100% on the Dunning-Kruger scale. They imagine themselves geniuses, and geniuses dunces. As ever, they have inverted reality.”

TruthMajorityConformitySkepticismCultTrollsMinorityKool AidDunning KrugerJim Jones
Book:Extra Scientiam Nulla Salus: How Science Undermines Reason
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“The Trojan Horse Sterling had referred to reflected his belief that the truth about Jonestown had never been revealed to the American people. A belief shared by his fellow co-founders. They were certain that while there were undoubtedly suicides at Jonestown, the event could more accurately be described as a mass murder that resulted from an experiment of sorts carried out by various US agencies.”

Jim JonesJonestownJonestown Massacre
Book:The Orphan Factory
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“Why such a massacre had occurred, the Omegans could only speculate. Some thought it may have been to stop a large-scale emigration out of America to a fabled Utopian society; others wondered if it was intended to create fear in the populace – fear of cults, fear of Communism, fear of anything foreign; and still others believed it was to create a precedence whereby any groups labelled a cult would be vilified without due diligence by the public.”

Jim JonesJonestownPeoples Temple
Book:The Orphan Factory
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“Cults tend to follow similar patterns. First, there's financial exploitation where members hand over money and assets to increase the cult's power over them and make them dependent on it. Then the sexual exploitation begins. Finally, there's physical exploitation involving confinement, punishment, and isolation from family members. If the cult's leader has become delusional enough to think they have the God-like power of life and death over their followers, they may demand the ultimate sacrifice - mass suicide.”

ExploitationCultIndoctrinationBrainwashingCultsCult Of PersonalitySectJim JonesJonestownJonestown Massacre
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“I am not the first person to point out the similarities between Jones and Trump, but I highlight their overlapping oratories more as an invitation to consider the precise language forms that contributed to Trump's deceptive and violent charisma. Not to drum up fear that the man is capable of orchestrating a mass poisoning in Guiana. I doubt Trump could even name which continent Guiana is on.”

LanguageTrumpCultsJim Jones
Book:Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
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