Previous: Field Trip to the Lake of Tea
Welcome to the New News cave. We have come here in search of the mythic lake of tea which lies beneath the Ziz blog: in the Ziz blog comments section. We have found the lake, & have drunk our first cup of appalling tea. This next cup will be a palate cleanser. We’re wading into the waves, we’re slipping on tannin-stained pebbles— we are summoning, at long last, Ziz’s take on the notorious John David Pressman (TNJDP).
TNJDP first came to our attention thru a comment on the tumblr post of @donttrythisathome. @DTTAH accuses John of many dastardly deeds, but refers to him throughout by his username, Namespace. Only in one comment by a 2nd individual is Namespace’s Christian name revealed.
Googling John’s full name led us to this post by tumblr user @aflowerbynoothername, whereby John’s rap-sheet of alleged villainry grew much longer & more disturbing. It also lead us to a few separate accounts which corroborated both @DTTAH’s & @AFBNON’s claims: chief among these, the claim that John is the author of The Unnamed Site.
We had toyed w/ the idea of withholding John’s name, as we repeated on zizians.co these somewhat-substantiated stories: glumly mindful that we were working w/ anonymous whispers thru the grapevine, & missing corroborating details from either Gwen, Ziz, Somni, or Emma. Yet sthng wicked w/in us whispered, “Fuck up this boy’s google results.” We have, for months, felt a strange combo of peace & angst over our wicked choice. Today, our angst decreases bc we have in front of us many Ziz comments, where she tells us her opinions on John.
***
She corroborates @DTTAH’s account, yet says it is “nothing like a complete description” of all John’s ne’erdowell. She corroborates @AFBNON’s claim of s*xual abuses— & abuses overall— by John. She directly names John as The Unnamed Site’s author, links to The Unnamed Site (TUS), &, like The Courageous Entity, describes TUS as containing simply “all the surprisingly unambitious evils [John] imagines he would be doing in [her] shoes.” Finally, in a link to a comment which is under another post, we saw a flash of Ziz saying John had threatened to “r*pe her to death”, which shook us to our core & made us suspect we will be taking several more field trips to our cave & to our lake.
We dk how cleansed our palate feels after sampling this second tea; but our soul feels lightened. We at the *named* site zizians.co do not want to unwarrantedly slander anyone. We want our smears to be precise, evidence-based— and ofc, highly googlable.
***
We are swimming out, out into the lake: headed for Rationalism Rock (RR). On RR, you will find demitasses of Michael Vassar tea— w/ a yummy Jessica Taylor tea biscuit on each of their saucers 😋
Following The Great Witch-Hunt of 2019, an unnamed person whom Ziz calls “An actual self-declared 'death knight'"*, announced their intention to kill Ziz, Gwen, Emma, & Somni.
*Alice Monday is a self-declared “death knight” (SDDK), but this tells us nothing: we are sure Ziz met many SDDKs chez the Rationalists.
They further announced that they would bomb a Rationalist meetup, & blame it on the girls— as we have seen whispered here before. Ziz says only: “Thank fuck mass gatherings have been postponed [due to COVID].”
In response, Ziz spent an arduous 7 months trying to get into this SDDK’s head: to understand their “death drive”, & to “out predict them like all [the girls’] lives… depended on it.” Finally, she sought the advice of Michael Vassar: that high Rationalist muckity-muck whom so many admire & draw their opinions from.
Michael sprung into action. He called up Jessica Taylor & 2 other former MIRI employees— Jack Gallagher & Benjamin Hoffman— & together they pulled off the wildest caper that we have ever heard of.
***
They “feigned” an unspecified “emergency” to “get [Ziz] sympathetic… and unprepared”, then video-called her w/ the following proposition:
They were, they said “doing something so important” that it could well end “the conflict between good and evil” 😮💨 At last! When would this good/evil truce be called? Within, they said, “the next two days”. Their only q. was: did Ziz "want to get in on this*" so-important initiative?
*What, exactly, would Ziz have been getting in on? Details are vague, but Ziz notes “They had just before talked about influencing the New York District Attorney elections, Vassar said he was able to decide how Harlem votes”. Related? Unrelated? We, for the sake of future good/evil trucery, would love to know, but alas.
If Ziz did want to get in on the trucery, this group said they would welcome her w/ open arms… as soooon as they settled a few “issues” w/ her. Did they “really [want] to do it now”? Ziz asked. “Yes, actually,” Michael replied.
Here Ziz pauses & writes: “Ugh I could spend all day dumping traumatized memories but I have other things to do…”
She wraps up this comment, but soon returns to her tale in another comment, where she says that Michael, Jessica, Jack, & Benjamin spent the next 8 hours “shouting” at & “gaslighting” her.
***
For his part, Jack told Ziz that “he hated trans women, especially hated [her] and [her] friends.” He said they “were the most cringe”, & that he “wanted [them] dead.” Michael responded to this by repeatedly telling Ziz that she “needed to compromise with Jack and like the good parts of him that weren't that.” He said he was heartened to hear Jack “screaming hate at [her]… because it showed that [she] was in bad faith”.
Emma had come along w/ Ziz to this rendezvous, & will later say w/ “regret” that she sat “there mostly mute in some kind of trauma trance as if her dad was beating her while Vassar and his crew were wailing on [them].” To this, Ziz generously beckons Emma towards her comments section, to “give her the second chance to let loose on” these four.
***
Emma focuses her comeback specifically on Jessica Taylor— critiquing Jessica on a number of points which, incidentally, appear simpatico w/ the way we have critiqued Jessica right here.
She says that Jessica said that we humans have achieved our marvelous technological capacity thanks to “predation”— that “it would be surprising if it could be gotten without predation or something similar”. On one level, this might be read as a grounded & sober evaluation of how our current systems rely on exploitation for both their existence & their ongoing development. Jessica, however, seems to have said this in order to imply that our systems, progress, or survival must necessarily be built on predation, & that we should accept this as inevitable or morally-neutral.
This troubles Emma, who says that Jessica seems to be treating others as “valuable” only so far as they can be used, while dancing around the larger point: that she is describing the domination, exploitation, & instrumentalization of others for personal or systemic gain.
She accuses Jessica of constructing morality in a vacuum: starting from an individualized, solipsistic perspective, & from there, projecting value onto the world. “Projecting value” may sound like a nice thing to do, but by this Emma means that Jessica is not acknowledging the existence or perspectives of other beings— she is simply running her eyes over them, & picking out those which may prove “valuable” to her. This unnerves Emma, as it seems to erase the subjectivity & suffering of those around Jessica.
For her part, Emma says that she “absolutely reject[s]” the idea that predation is the purpose or essence of existing. She does not, she says, “want to be something inherently bad at all.” After all this, she calls Jessica’s statement a mere “troll line”: one which dishonestly omits the real moral stakes of what she is talking abt. Jessica, she says, is speaking in bad faith: sometimes relying on abstract thought experiments to justify her dubious conclusions; sometimes, when it’s convenient, switching to a stance of “the ends justify the means”. She is doing all of this to avoid having to morally reckon w/ “predation”.
***
😮💨 Friends, there are still a few more drops of Michael Vassar tea in our cups.
Michael apparently urged Ziz to do something “possibly very terrible”, which she says she won’t mention publicly— & which, she says, may not have even been in earnest, “because [Michael’s] a fucking liar.” When Ziz refused, Michael told her that she “wouldn't do anything of importance if [she] didn't, wouldn't amount to anything without [Michael].” He said this while continuing to “loudly ostentatiously calling [her] 'he/him'”. Emma finally asked Michael why he was doing this, & Michael “made it clear that if [she] wanted 'she/her' pronouns [she’d] have to earn that personhood” by teaming up w/ Michael the way— for example— that Jessica had. He added magnanimously that Emma got “she/her” pronouns for free, bc he was attracted to her. Here Ziz cuts in:
Can you believe a patriarch who says he's bisexual is still defining women according to his own attraction? I mean I guess it makes narcissism-economics sense, if you're fucking evil…
Michael then did another strange thing: he worked “really really hard to convince [Ziz] free will wasn't a thing”, & said that he would “die if he believed he had absolute free will like [Ziz] believe[s].” He claimed he did not “have free will over his motor actions”, to which Ziz muses:
I hear a man who's been accused of rape saying he doesn't have free will over his motor actions and I've got to wonder.
This all leads Ziz on a trip down memory lane— back “A couple years ago”, when Michael had “angrily [accused her] of gaslighting him, by among other things, saying [she] was a woman”. He had followed this by “assert[ing] out of nowhere that [Ziz] led a kink polycule”— even tho Ziz, quite famously, is “celibate”.
Looking back on this, Ziz calls “That entire 'rationalist' edifice [which] Vassar threatens [her] for rejecting” nothing but “gaslighting... by people who know they chose evil.” As just one more example of this gaslighting, Ziz recalls how Michael once called Ziz & Zack M. Davis “near-identical”— despite the fact that Zack spent years harassing Ziz w/ the most shocking transphobery, which we have included here &, for good measure, here.
***
Be that as it may…
Ziz ends by lamenting that Michael & friends did not— in response, let’s remember, to death & bomb threats— do what “pretty much any authority or third party whose nominal job [is] to help” would have done.
Instead, Michael & friends chose to “attack the people who don't accept [their] civilizational troll line of evil.” &, to add insult to injury, Michael suggested that if Ziz didn’t accept “his help”, then she would be “a soul that left unchecked [would] destroy the world.”
***
To us, w/in the cozy confines of the New News cave, this may sound like the risible, final gambit of a desperate man who’s out of tricks. Alas, poor Ziz is not in the confines of our cave, & Michael’s gambit— coming as it does on the heels of death & bomb threats— “has [her] concerned for [her] physical safety (CFHPS).” She has, at this point, been CFHPS for 2 years: since the SWATting of 2019. Yet for now, in her comments section, she wraps up this cursèd episode w/ an apostrophe to Michael:
Did I not make myself undeniably clear last time? Leave me alone Vassar. I will never belong to you.
***
This concludes our tea party souterriain. We’re so happy you could join us, & ask that you pls return all cups & saucers to Rationalism Rock, not dropping a single one into the murky depths: we have a feeeeling we may require them again.
At the cave exit, you will find our New News gift shop, containing an array of Zizisms which are strangely, pointedly prescient to the mess Ziz finds herself in now. Peruse, muse, & re-use them at your pleasure. We have been given a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Zarts (Ziz arts), which has allowed us to drop the cost of these Zizisms down from our usual rates of highway robbery— to $0 a piece 🤑 Goodbye for now, friends— until next time, keep shooing away troll lines, & keep spreading counter-narratives
*****