tell 12 to DM me i am so curious what exactly all this is about.

well uh....that pastebin seems exceptionally confused in addition to being written by notorious serial rapist and federal informant Lauralei Bailey? let's go through the claims here anyway though just for consistency

• it seems to be implying that i'm "the leader of the cult" or something to that effect? which is an absolutely hilarious claim.
• i have no idea who this "12" that is being referred to is.
• the pastebin seems to be implying that i/"the cult" am protecting/allied with "a cis man raping his way through the west coast trans community" which i am guessing is an extremely confused reference to JD? also a hilarious claim for anyone who actually knows the situation.
• The flowerbynoothername post linked where i confess to having worked with JD was written after i wrote my own callout of JD where i also declared myself a zizian before someone pulled me aside and was like 'it's not very anarchist to put that much weight in one person's perspective' which, fair enough.

LB seems extremely confused about the situation overall and i would not consider her a reliable source of information, which also makes it extremely sus that she seems to have used this extremely confused understanding of the situation to justify defacing that fediverse instance.

But it is our mistake that we didn't stand firmly against drugs, didn't pay more attention to the dangers of self-experimenting, and didn't kick out Ziz sooner.

Ziz is actually straight edge, she was super paranoid about drugs messing with her or leaving her in a less functional state. Also like, imo? kicking Ziz out sooner wouldn't have helped, if anything it would have exacerbated the issue and possibly just brought things to a head faster. you can't just inflict severe trauma on someone and wash your hands of them, eventually that will come back to bite you.

Founder effects? like, i don't exactly think it's anything "about the ideology" that makes it more appealing to trans/queer ppl, and there are non-trans zizians, so it seems to me more like it's just a consequence of who ziz is and where she was originally recruiting from (queer rationalist discord servers)

i think an important thing to remember is that i recorded this interview prior to Audere's arrest and the link between Jamie and Ziz and Ophelia being made public. At the time the situation was a lot more open ended and proposing that everything was linked in a conspiratorial manner seemed like somewhat of a stretch to justify without evidence. That said, a lot of new evidence has in fact come to light, which presents the events as being fairly interrelated, and so at this point to claim there's no connection between any of these things would be kinda dumb of me. How organized is this inner group? idk, but it seems pretty clear that people are at least talking to each other and coordinating on things in some way.

okay AMA i guess.

it's very easy to claim to be downstream of someone without them actually having much to do with them at all. this would be like me claiming that it was Eliezer's fault i stubbed my toe because the house i live in is downstream of reading the sequences. i agree that the woman in question claims to be a "vassarite", but it reads more like cargo culting than anything else.

Less predictive and more observational, but sorta yeah? Like, if someone is lying to themselves and playing all these weird internal denial/repression games internally, there are tells for that which you can learn to notice. After a while it gets pretty obvious what the behaviors you observe in someone actually mean (vs what they say those behaviors mean). Why I say "uncomfortably so" is that speaking from my own experiences, once you learn to read people this way, it's not really something you can turn off again. That can add a lot of friction to social interactions, where it seems like everyone is just constantly trying to bullshit you.

Just commenting since this is on the front page again, but this was and continues to be one of the most important concepts to share with people who are dealing with burnout, akrasia, and emotional issues I have ever come across. I link it to people all the time, so thank you again for writing this it extremely impactful for me and for others who I've helped with similar issues over the years.

it really really is.