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Comment by cat199 | Hacker News Reader

> NVIXM wasn't as salacious of an organization as it has been portrayed in the media. It was a self-help organization. The leader was a loon, a non-monogamist, and built himself up as a pseudo-spiritual leader/guru. Not that it makes it right but the branding and the 'slavery' only occurred to a handful of women at the top of the organization.

And how exactly do you think a loon can pull off a sex slavery operation without having all of this tiered and staged brainwashing? Just go up to random people on the street and ask 'hey, I'd like to brand you and make you my sex slave, interested?'

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You completely missed the point. Almost all of the NVIXM followers had no clue this stuff was going on at the very top of the organization. Yes, specific individuals were groomed to move up in the organization, but the leader wasn't grooming them for 'sex slavery'. The high-ups knew that the leader was non-monogamous and slept with women from the organization, but even the woman from the podcast who talks about being branded hadn't ever been approached by the leader.

The media just loved to jump on the 'sex cult' idea and then portrayed it as that's what it was. The branding had nothing to do with anything sexual - it was done as a 'sorority'-type initiation for the higher-up women. The slavery was also part of the 'sorority' and didn't really have anything to do with the leader.

Listen to the podcast and you'll understand.

And almost all scientologists don't/didn't know the volcano nukes story. Rather they were getting fed bullshit about self-improvement and hero-worship of their fraud 'guru'. That's how cults typically work, NVIXM was no different.

NVIXM was in fact a rum of the mill sex-cult and plenty of people were pointing it out 15+ years ago.

You're the one who is not understanding here. All of this "nothing to do with anything sexual" grooming had one specific, simple goal: Make these women feel both powerful and powerless: That they had been chosen and been given gifts, and that their life would fall apart without the approval of their benefactors. These grooming behaviors can be leveraged into the salacious story that was NVIXM's downfall.

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