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String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

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Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#211

This whole rabbit hole of rationalism, less wrong, and ziz feels like a fever dream to me. Roaming trans veganist tatical death squads shooting border officers and stabbing 80 year olds with swords. This is the kind of thing where it is warranted that the feds gets every single wiretap, interception, and surveillance possible on everyone involved in the zizian movement.

Split the beliefs from the crime. A bunch of murderers were caught. Given they are dangerous killers, one killing a witness and one faking their death yeah they should get warrants.

It appears the ven diagram of the beliefs and crimes overlap quite a bit. Sometimes the beliefs are that certain crimes should be committed.

This is a free country (disputably) and you should be able to think and say whatever you want, but I also think it is reasonable for law enforcement in the investigation of said crimes to also investigate links to other members in the movement.

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#214
post #183
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marginalized groups seem to be a target / susceptible to this kind of thing. I had a weird encounter on reddit with some users who expressed that "only X people understand how this character in the movie feels". Interestingly, there was no indication that the movie intended this interpenetration. But the idea wasn't unusual or all that out there so I didn't think much of it. But that group showed up again and again a…

This group formed in the SF Bay Area, which is known for being one of the most accepting places in the world for LGBT people. If marginalization were the main cause, it seems to me that the group would have been located somewhere else. I think it's more likely that these people had an underlying mental disorder that made them likely to engage in both violent behavior and trans identity. One big difference the Zizians…

Or more of them live there because it's one of the most accepting environments on the planet, but still not accepting enough to prevent them from being a marginalized outgroup that is quite easy to radicalize by those that would accept them?

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#215
post #2

> self-described “vegan Sith” ideology Had it not been in a serious article I would have believed it had to a parody or a joke of some sort. “We are just like Darth Maul, but we like salads and drink soy milk instead of regular milk… and then kill people while dressed in tactical black outfits”? What is even going on? Real life now sounds like some kinda of a broken LLM hallucination.

"Vegan Sith"? For just one thing, when you have a broken education system and omnipresent media franchises, you have a significant percentage of the population who know more about the Star Wars backstory structure and theories of diet than about history, civics or conventional morality.

I am not defending any of this fuckwits, but I don't know that it's much different than any organized religion. All of them are stories that get retold over and over until people accept them on faith. I can envision a world where our stories (movies, books) where history is lost of their creation, become facts. "Of course there was Jedi, we've just forgotten…"

Now, they're all fuckwits, but it's not outside the realm of thought.

(BRB, gonna go start a sci-fi story.)

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#216
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Trans vegan 'Siths' who kill people with katanas" is not a sentence I thought I'd ever read, let alone type, yet here we are, in the most ludicrous timeline.

It's an actual Zizian belief that you must always do the craziest thing you can possibly think of, in order to "collapse" the weight of your current timeline in some sort of totally counterfactual probability space... This is arguably the closest linkage they share to actual Rationalist-ish ideas. (Many Rationalists do genuinely advocate for some sort of improvement to animal welfare - but I don't know of any Rationa…

Yep. I'm not sure about the particulars because while the writing is clearly intelligent, it's also clearly insane. But it does seem that Ziz sincerely believes

1) Most people aren't vegan, therefore the average person is a moral monster barely worthy of consideration. What's one more murder when most people are already mass murderers of animals?

2) Some people in the rationalist community have a theory of transness which doesn't match what we know to be true from our internal experience. Therefore, you can't trust even smart people to get factual questions right. They will get them maliciously wrong. Trust our cult instead.

3) Due to [extremely convoluted game-theoretic reasons], it is imperative that you never back down in any disagreement about values. You must escalate, even if that means killing the other person. You must also take disproportionate revenge on those who have wronged you.

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#218
post #49

Most of the news coverage I've seen of this story is omitting what some might consider a relevant detail: almost all the members of this group are trans. This is a divisive topic, but failing to mention this makes me worry a story is pushing a particular agenda rather than trying to tell the facts. Here's what the story looks like if the trans activism is considered central to the story: https://thepostmillennial.com…

Thanks the pronouns were confusing me and making it hard for me to follow the complex story. I assumed I made a mistake when the article mentions a Jack and refers to them as Jack the whole way through but uses she at the end.

Unfortunately the gendered language we use is also the mechanism to provide clues and content as you read the story. So if I can rely on that they need to call it out to help the reader.

I'd rather the article mention it.

Why are they not? Is this a chilling effect?

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> almost all the members of this group are trans. The Zizians.info site (linked by one of the HN posts re: this story) mentions that the Zizians did target people who identified as transgender for indoctrination, so this is not really surprising. People who are undergoing this kind of stress and marginalization may well be more vulnerable to such tactics.

Yup. 100% a cult indoctrination technique. The vulnerability is the crowbar the cult uses

Yeah, all cults exploit vulnerabilities.

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#220
post #207

This whole rabbit hole of rationalism, less wrong, and ziz feels like a fever dream to me. Roaming trans veganist tatical death squads shooting border officers and stabbing 80 year olds with swords. This is the kind of thing where it is warranted that the feds gets every single wiretap, interception, and surveillance possible on everyone involved in the zizian movement.

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Got a source for that claim?
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