Re:Why $cientology E-Meter's yanked from E-bay? (Score 1)

positive re-enforcement is one of the mainstays of behavioral conditioning (brainwashing for the laymen)

Do you really feel that people are that subject to influence outside themselves? I seem to recall that of the soldiers brutally brainwashed during the Korean war only perhaps one or maybe two did not renounce the statements they had been coerced to make. I think people are far far tougher than you give them credit for.

If the electrical charge does produce a feeling of wellbeing while you are participating in the practice of belief it is much the same as giving a dog a treat whenever it performs a trick correctly.

Yes but there is no such feeling. Go grab a set of cans, and connect a whatever-the-miniscule-charge is to them - probably take a battery, maybe AAA? AA?... Now do you really feel anything? Anything at all? How the hell do you prove a negative anyway?

We humans are just as conditionable as any other creature.

I disagree. See above. People have dreams and hopes that a basic animal existence doesn't allow. That's what makes them people.

After all the militaries of the world are conditioned to lay down their lives for the idologies preached to them since their youth (ours included).

Sometimes this is a good thing. Sometimes it is bad. But this is NOT brainwashing, these are ideals and concepts of honor and truth, the idea that one's society and within that one's family is worth laying down one's life for. I doubt anyone dies for an idea willingly, but a man will die for a dream. I think one of the things that is most admirable in man is that holding of a higher ideal, of the mother rescuing her child, despite that rescue causing her own death, of Galileo having seen what he had seen and observed what he observed, refusing to disown it despite the real threats brought against him.

You lead by placing dreams in front of people and asking them to follow them. Good leaders do anyway. From this taken all the way out you see all of existence as "brainwashing" and I thoroughly disagree.

As far as Anonomous - do you listen at all to the scorn and hate expressed through the threads here? I'll most likely be discarding mail for weeks.