Hi Ax,
thanks for that. We were watching the live stream (see my comment on the Pickets and Protests thread and Sharone's reply - maybe someone could merge them here?) but it was a bit frustrating that our comments on Ustream didn't get picked up, we were desperate to get more hard-hitting reports about CofS abuses and Ron's lies, I was even trying your phone to try to ask some questions about what happened on the ship etc!
We missed the beginning while trying to get the streaming to work, so I will have another look at it later. We may have missed the most hard-hitting stuff? There was an awful lot of discussion by the Indies about their views on the tech, in my opinion. It's beyond me how anyone can still think "it all went wrong in 1982" and that the tech works, and think it's all Miscavige's fault. Hello! Hubbard committed far worse abuses!
John and Peter were spot on, we were cheering!
Solo
Hi Solo.
Sorry, I did get your text message, but I had my phone in my bag and was concentrating on trying to get the best image possible for the video, so I wasn’t able to respond.
I suppose it is fair to say that we had more of the FZ / Indy point of view from the speakers, but John McGhee made the ‘anti-Scn’ point very forcefully. He let everyone know in no uncertain terms just how much he despised anything Scientological.
I’m sorry, but there wasn’t anyone monitoring comments during the event, so we missed them. Our bad. This was obviously an oversight and we will have to look at this in the future. In our defence, I can only say that this was very rushed as we wanted to coincide with the IAS event weekend and only had about 2-3 weeks notice of when that was. Also, we had already had a very busy 2 days before this, and the tiredness was beginning to show.
As for the general content, well we are still experimenting as to the best format. In Dublin we had everyone get up and say their bit and field some questions. This was great, but I think we ran for something like 6 hours or so. Due to booking constraints we didn’t have anything like as much time, so the organisers felt that we should have a short(ish) session and just take questions from the audience and also allow time for interaction on an individual basis at the end. I filmed virtually 2 hours of video, which gave us a good range of views on the subject. Personally, I like to see a balance with some views that I hadn’t heard before. For example, it was great to have Vicky there as I hadn’t spoken to her before. I certainly didn’t agree with everything she said but she came across very well and had some interesting things to say.
I agree with you that it didn’t all go wrong in 1982, the rot had set in long before that, by all accounts.
But, we can only hear from those who turn up. If anyone else would like to appear at one of these events in the future, please let me know and we can put you down ‘on the list’. It would be especially good to hear from some of the ‘old timers’ who were around before the Miscavige era and even more so, those who had direct experience of Hubbard.
Also, please give us feedback on what you would like to see at these events in the future.
When I get time, I’ll try and produce a complete write-up of the events of the past few days, but I also have a ton of video to edit and ‘Tube.
You definitely haven’t heard the end of this, a major national newspaper are producing a story, hopefully to come out in the next few days. Several speakers were interviewed and photographed and a part of the story will cause some consternation for the cult.
Axiom142