Previous: Almost Human, but not Quite
In pt. 4 of this News on News special, we mused on how "the Zizians", as they appear in the news, are both scary & rag-tag. They are not convincing & well-fleshed-out characters, bc no one, so far, has really cared to understand who they are as people. As a result, they look cartoonish & uncanny. The news would rather we believe that their faux-"Zizians'" palpable lack of humanity is a characteristic of the "Zizians" themselves- rather than an artifact of their shoddy storytelling.
This led us to muse on how that famous Specter of the ~Traaans Villain~ (SOTTV) is another "unreal person": it is like a kind of haunted doll that's brought on at various points in a narrative to make us feel uncomfy. We thought abt how "unreal ppl" are used in fiction & the movies, & provisionally decided that, yes, the scariest part of the SOTTV is prob. its uncanny-valley dead-in-the-eyes lack of real humanity, & not- despite what the press will have you think- its transness. This inspired us to share a silver-bullet antidote for such fearsome "unreal ppl": make them real! Give them back their humanity! Ideally, the media would help us do this, but instead, they seem determined to go on pandering their boring, raggedy, & dead-eyed charades.
W/ that, back to Boston! Back to the Globe, the trio, &— we fear— back to shadow-puppet charades.
The trio so far appears to lack a real human narrative to explain these “Zizians”, but they do their best w/ a paragraph that evokes Genesis:
In the beginning, there was deep concern with the rise of artificial intelligence and a focus on logical, unemotional thought processes, in tandem with the grander rationalist movement. But over time, the Zizians’ dispatches became increasingly insular and centered on revenge.
🤣🤣🤣 We… have not seen this arc on the blogs.
Neither we nor you, dear readers, have the time to go & scroll back thru everybody’s blog, but we can confidently respond to the last assertion: Ziz & friends do not center on “REVENGE” so much as they reflect on how they have been wronged by the Rationalists. We cannot see their engagement stats; we dk if they grew “increasingly insular”, but if they did, this was likely bc they were in the process of a slow & painful exile from Rationalism!
Just in case you don’t believe us, let’s look at the first & last posts on Ziz’s blog— if we dare! The TLDR version is below these summaries 😉
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Post #1 is from Nov. 2016: Ziz’s first year in the Bay Area.
In it, Ziz muses on a paradox: can an omnipotent god create a rock so big he can’t lift it? If so, then he’s not omnipotent! If not, then he’s also not omnipotent!
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Post #2 is from Nov. 2019: either shortly before or after the girls’ protest.
Here Ziz explores the idea of "forbidden knowledge" & its conflict with systems of control. She focuses on social structures & institutions (SSAI) that limit access to information & personal freedom.
She contrasts these SSAI w/ the notion of hackers, who break through conventional boundaries, whether in technology, social interactions, or intellectual spaces, using “forbidden knowledge”.
She critiques systems— like academia, philanthropy, and the Rationalist community— which, she says, are complicit in reinforcing the status quo while pretending to pursue knowledge & ethical goals.
She also touches on ways that SSAI subtly manipulate ppl’s access to knowledge, often so that they can maintain power dynamics.
She laments that ppl often fail to see how their actions contribute to larger destructive systems, like economic inequality or warfare, & urges a radical shift in how people approach truth & agency.
In the end, she calls for rejecting the false morality of traditional systems (TS), & seeking autonomy— even at the cost of alienating those who remain complicit in these TS. She urges readers to break free from collective “epistemic blind spots”, & work towards an ethical framework untainted by systemic manipulation.
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TLDR: Ziz’s early writing shows her more focused on abstract intellectual concerns, like logical thought processes. That’s cool for her.
Her later writing shows that her focus has shifted to understanding how groups like the Rationalists restrict people’s freedom, manipulate information, reinforce biases and ‘phobias, & maintain the status quo despite pretending otherwise.
She has developed a clear sense of what she would like ppl to do instead: she would like ppl to step outside of established frameworks, reject false moral codes, free themselves from biases & ‘phobias, seek autonomy, & build ethical systems (ES) that are better than the ES of these no-good Rationalists!
This is cool for us 😊 This is a v. exciting personal evolution— & she does all that w/out once mentioning “REVENGE”!
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In this last post, she also includes lyrics from a song which seem, in hindsight, almost tragically prescient to how her message will, 6 years down the line, be so misconstrued for readers of the Globe:
I don’t know how
you were diverted
You were perverted too
I don’t know how
you were inverted
No one alerted you
🥲 Ziz, we dk how this trio diverted you so badly— but it scares us! We think it was unintentional— we think they reached your post after being scared by lots of shadows on the wall— but oh boy. We’re sorry those shadows were made to be so scary, & that their audience was primed to jump at the slightest hint of your autonomy.
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The trio appears not to have heard our 💅retort, bc they persist in saying the silliest things in the gravest tones that we have ever heard.
They call this “troubling transition” “visible to anyone who cared to notice”, & we soon put a provisional bingo dot on “The Unnamed Site”, for their mention of “a few” who “sounded a warning.” Why did this warning do nothing to stop the Zizster? Bc, says the trio, those Rationalists are just too open-minded! Rationalists are constantly saying wackadoo things— which we agree w/, but take that statement to different conclusions.
Or do we?
Next the trio says another true thing: “The resulting environment is one where extremist undercurrents tend to go unchecked.” Are we finally heading out of the paper bag?
The trio proceeds to bring in none other than… the courageous entity who wrote the mea culpa. We like this entity; we like its heart, & we sympathize deeply w/ what it’s gone thru. For these reasons, we are going to assume that the trio took this entity’s words way, waaay out of context. Quote the entity:
The rationalist community is not very good at de-escalating, or even noticing brewing radical extremism…. There’s this tendency to be dispassionate and divorce the emotional tone of a text from its actual philosophical content.
We might encourage this entity to go even further. Why not say that the Rationalists’ repeated enablement of “radical extremism” (RE)— we’re thinking, for ex., of Davis Kingsley & of Alice Monday— to say nothing of that alt-right group chat where they were fantasizing abt what they would do to trans ppl after the singularity— is a choice to notice RE, do nothing, & invite its escalation?
We have some thoughts as well on whether it’s truly possible to divorce the “emotional tone” (ET) of a text from its “actual” content— but we will bite our tongue: bc we like this entity, & bc we’re confused abt what, in this context, the “ET” would be.
We are confused bc the trio has stripped this quote (or maybe… two separate quotes?) from all context! Was the entity talking abt Ziz? Was it critiquing the Rationalists on a totally different point? Who knows! Only the entity knows, & we have yet to charm it into conversation w/ us… Tho if you, dear entity, are reading this now, you know where to find us 😉
A-ny-way, the trio ends on… rather a clunker:
In a post from 2019… Ziz gave insight into her approach to the law: She wrote: “The anarchist flag is the inversion of the surrender flag.”
🤷🏻♀️ What insight does this give us abt Ziz’s approach to the law (ZATTL)? What insight does ZATTL give us to life “Inside the Zizians”? We guess this is our cue to let our worst fears abt Ziz & anarchism run wild, bc the trio is out of here! They’re waggling their eyebrows but keeping mum. We can’t make heads or tails of this.
We stagger out of this News on News diverted, perverted, & inverted. We have lots of Globe scolding we would like to do, but the Globe, perhaps anticipating this, has given us no comments section. We will call it a night… & pray for a bingo win as thanks for all our— & your— brave efforts! 🙏
This is unbearable. We have been blocked from a 3-way bingo win only bc those Globesters shied away from the right-wing media’s most baroque indulgences. Jessica Taylor was not interviewed, so we missed “Death cult”. Andy Ngo was not consulted, so we missed “False names”. We had plenty of names as nicknames, but didn’t quite dip into “Names as criminal aliases”. Curse liberalism!
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