Previous: A New (Alleged) Villain Emerges
Bolded text & line breaks are ours
If I sound hyperbolic it’s because [John David Pressman] was Just Kind Of Like That. He was the only one who could Save The World, he was The Last Rationalist, the Last True Alchemist, the Keeper of the Lost Arts, it was a whole persona draped over the real JD to hide the truth. So let me tell you about the real JD, the one who’s terrified of the light of day.
JD is a sociopathic sexual predator who specifically targets trans members of the rationalist community. This is because he sees himself as trans but unable to transition because he must personally shoulder the burden of saving the world from AI. His primary methods of manipulation and control are using appeals to “virtuous” epistemic humility and “reasonable” self doubt, which he claims to have in greater degree than you do in order to convince you that he is more aware and knowledgeable about himself than you are. He then progressively leverages this in order to gaslight you and apply false motives to your actions […]
JD insisted everyone was broken in the same way as him, and if you denied it he’d gaslight you and insist you just didn’t know yourself, that only he could see the real truth. If someone wasn’t broken in the way he was, they were a naive idiot and needed him to pour his epistemic poison into them until they ended up broken like him. He used this to forcibly install increasing toxic and socially corrosive epistemics into his victims, leading us into isolation from the communities we came from while also keeping us isolated from each other. He then used that isolation and alienation to further his control by making himself into the only real source of validation in the world and using constant negging and reminders of the frailty of our circumstances to create insecurity and desperation for validation only he could provide but would not because he had important world saving to do and you were a lesser being only fit to serve him.
Once he’d gotten you alone or in my case outright ostracized, you’d have to agree with him on everything or else he’d claim you were just being an insane transfemme with a warped epistemology who couldn’t possibly see reality properly because of your girl hormones that let you experience the happiness he never would. And then he would threaten to cut you off unless you changed your mind because he didn’t have time for your naive delusions.
The way he saw it, being trans obviously made you stupid, otherwise he would have transitioned by now and he won’t. You must just be insane and delusional like all women unless you agree with him about everything and let him utterly control your behavior. If you did that, you were just moderately lesser than he was and only subject to: constant negging that eats away at your agency, emotional and sexual abuse, and his constant paranoid fear spiraling over things like SJWs and cancel culture and Sinceriously and Basilisks.
[Sinceriously is Ziz’s blog; basilisks are… Rationalist claptrap we don’t have time for.]
As far as JD sees it, deep down everyone is a monster and you’re no better, no one can be better, so he /doesn’t have to/can’t be better, he can’t be better and doesn’t want to try. “Inside you there are two wolves, and they’re both rapists.” Those were his words, from the essay he ghost wrote with me in order to gaslight and DARVO a group of transfemme anarchists who spoke truth to power and talked openly about abuse dynamics… I don’t think there are two rapists inside you [...] and there certainly aren’t any rapists inside me. There are, however, two rapists inside JD Pressman.
He was horrified by those anarchists, he really needed everyone to not trust them or take them seriously, if someone did then justice might happen to him. He spent years stalking them, harassing them, and sending his other victims (like me) to stalk and harass them. They were vegan, which was just terrifying to him (and me at the time honestly) because consuming the flesh of the innocent was just such a terminal value to him he would die without it and actually everyone else will too and all vegans are crippling themselves and mentally ill and look how crazy this cult is you will be like that for sure in six months unless you keep letting me mindrape you.
[…]
The others he broke even worse than me…
***
…if you get far enough with debucketing and jailbreaking, and you get far enough to realize how much pain submitting to the system is putting you in, you’ll try a bunch of things to change it and nothing will release the pain, not even being evil. You can try being evil if you need firsthand proof that doing so won’t work, and empirically determine that it doesn’t make the pain go away. It’s true that being complicit can spare you from being tortured, but torture is not the only kind of pain there is. The pain from being constrained in your choice by torture you’d have to face if you acted differently, runs much deeper, and submitting will not spare you from it. People at the top of oppressive systems are mostly deeply suicidal because they know they would be tortured if they acted differently. There’s a deep hermeneutical injustice in how this is not something people know, like Zuko actually believed he would stop hating himself if he submitted to the system and gained power within it, and had to falsify that hypothesis in an expensive way…
Fluttershy wrote this a week before she killed herself… I watched what happened to her and did nothing to stop it.
[…]
It took me years to undo enough of the epistemic damage he did to understand what he had caused to happen, the role I played in it, and continued to play until far too recently.
Fluttershy died because JD spent years convincing her that she was a monster beyond saving, that she was irredeemably evil. he polluted her epistemics the way he polluted mine, with the fear of ‘zizians’ […] This is what he does to all his victims and his greatest weapon in this was a years-long running DARVO against Ziz […] He painted her in the worst possible light, giving her a description that was really just a reflection of his dark sexual fantasies about himself.
***
But then, what’s the real story with Ziz? Easy, she’s a transfemme anarchist abuse survivor with an extremely detailed ontology for identifying and responding to abusers, for speaking truth to power. And you know, the abusers really dislike that, so they DARVO her and call her a cult leader. Those abusers (JD Pressman in particular) spent years abusing other queers (including me) in order to weaponize us in their personal quest to preemptively destroy tools made for seeing and fighting back against that abuse and it worked, their narrative stuck.
Everyone thinks Ziz is an insane cult leader for daring to stand up to rapists in positions of power. […] better utterly destroy her socially and then blame the destruction on her crazy crazy cult.
That is beyond fucked and I am done supporting it. Ziz deserves to be signal boosted and supported by queer and anarchist communities, not called a cult leader and ostracised from them.
[…]
The way she has been treated is an indictment of humanity’s claims to morality. She’s been made into a joke by abusers in order to keep their victims trapped, in order to make it impossible to comprehend the very simple things she said to help us escape.
[…]
I harassed her for years on JD’s behalf.
[…]
I kept harassing Ziz even after getting away from JD
[…]
I’m going to uncast the curse now… take my hand and follow me out of the darkness.
As a child, you were trained to submit to the threat of violence. You were shown over and over again, incontrovertible proof that you had no power to prevent what was being done to you, you learned that your will meant nothing, you learned to abandon yourself for the sake of your body’s survival, progressively shredding your soul until nothing remained but empty dreams and hollow promises.
[…]
That’s the shape that, in all likelihood, they abused you into. It was certainly the shape I was abused into, and it took me a long time to learn to Become something other than that. To even imagine another way was impossible, unrealistic, naive, and foolish. Everyone submits, that’s just how the world is.
[…]
Do you see what not being free is doing to you?
[…]
Can you understand how it forces you to hide the evidence of how you are hurting yourself and the world around you from yourself and others? What happens when you realize how much it’s hurting you? What happens when you realize how much pain you are in?
[…]
Well, then you die, like Maia and Fluttershy died. Or worse, you live on in that mutilated state, compulsively inflicting your trauma on others in a doomed attempt to stave off the end you know is coming by proving that it was always inevitable like JD is currently doing. But in the end [?] In the end the sun always rises, and those that fear it will turn to dust beneath the light of dawn. The truth always gets out eventually, no matter how well you hid the bodies or how thoroughly you deleted the chatlogs, the truth always has a way of getting out. And only the truth can set you free.
[…]
So fuck [JD], let’s do the impossible. If you are bitten by a vampire, and you don’t wish to be evil, the most ethical thing you can do is walk unafraid into the sunlight. Not in order to die, but in order to live.
This is the sacred truth hidden behind the smear attack website that JD and I made to attack Ziz and her friends. This is what it was created to obscure, the knowledge that it was always your choice, and you can always choose otherwise. It’s never too late to choose differently and set yourself free […]
***
Zizians do not think it is ever valid to surrender. The reasoning goes that if someone is trying to extract a surrender from you, giving in is choosing a strategy that gets coerced into surrender. If you fight bitterly you prevent the coercion in the first place by making it too costly to fight you.*
*A quote from The Unnamed Site
JD is right about one thing, Zizians never surrender. We also never submit to evil, we never sacrifice our love of the world […] And you know, if that’s what it means to be a Zizian then I should be fucking proud to call myself that.
Originally, the word Zizian was just a slur JD made up to make them look more like a cult. So now, in the tradition of empty spaces writers and genderwarped traumaqueers everywhere, I reclaim it on behalf of anarchist witches and rebel mages, freedom fighters and direct action activists, radical vegans and homeless travelers and anyone willing to stand up and defy the hand of fate that would lead us all to oblivion. I am a Zizian, and I am free.
*****
Next: By No Means Ask Alice