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In pt. 1 of this News on News special, we spun our random number generator &, w/ no small amount of sorrow, landed on our hometown paper's- The Boston Globe's- big Zizian exposé.
This took us on a Proustian meander back to childhood memories of our beloved Globe, from which we were rudely awakened by the Globe's trio of reporters pulling a sophisticated stage illusion on us, in order to blame the "Zizians" for their own irresponsible narrative framing.
W/ our trio, we traveled to a land where Ziz & friends are demented, & where the Rationalists have done nothing wrong. Rationalistic flim-flam was repeated verbatim; but, on the bright side, this trio seemed determined to use all of our favorite words: namely, "MESMERIC" to describe... who else?
We ended on a prayerful note, hoping that indeed this whole grim affair will result in lots & lots of "wider notoriety" raining down upon the heads of those incorrigable Rationalists!
The Globe trio persists in calling Ziz’s friends (ZF) her “associates”, & notes that they are “mostly trans women”, which is… again not wrong, but sthng about that makes our brow furrow. If ZF were mostly straight, cis men, would the trio note their gender & cisness in the opening line to a paragraph— a paragraph describing (however dubiously) their other qualities?
These qualities, as we read further down the paragraph, indeed become so dubious that we laugh & 🫢 wake up our napping gf. Oh no! It’s the trio’s fault! Ziz & friends’ “hardline” ideas (HI) are, in order of appearance:
1. “Veganism [approached] with religious fervor”
2. “Eating animals is genocide”
3. “Blackmail is a necessary tool to create a moral future”
4. “The brain has two hemispheres that belong to separate persons”
🤣🤣🤣 These HI are described as “deviat[ing] erratically from the Rationalist norm”, while in fact deviating extraordinarily from the “Zizian” norm!
#1 is the trio’s own opinion. We’re not sure what it would look like to approach veganism w/ religious fervor— maybe holding revivals over a pot of stew, or speaking in tongues thru mouthfuls of lentils? We think this group of friends are just some vegans who care strongly abt their ideals— which, no matter how much the press implies otherwise, does not by itself lead to violence!
#2 we can neither confirm nor deny. We’ve not come across this opinion yet— if we do, we will update this section! If they do: this belief may be unusual (or may not be! Goodness knows we don’t move in vegan circles)— but unusual beliefs are not a crime in America… we think! They are also not by themselves a slippery slope into violence 😊
#3 is, in AI lingo, a hallucination. It is also, delightfully, in total opposition to that other piece of hearsay we’ve grown so used to seeing in the media: that Ziz & friends were moved to action not by the alleged crime that MIRI was covering up— but by MIRI’s bad Timeless Decision Theory praxis in “yielding to blackmail”! This is a breath of fresh air.
#4. jolted our poor gf awake 😂 What would it BE to have half of your brain owned by another person? What would you dooooo?
***
Oh, silly, silly, silly. Yet these 4 tangled tenets are what the trio use to proudly introduce how much research went into their gobbledygook:
A Globe investigation into Ziz and her associates draws from a dozen interviews with people who in many cases know them or are part of the larger Rationalist movement, as well as a review of police reports, court records, and the essays of some Zizians. Reporters visited marinas on the outskirts of San Francisco and the woods of Vermont’s remote Northeast Kingdom to piece together a tale of paranoid and fragile young adults who embraced fringe ideas, isolated themselves from loved ones, and ultimately spiraled into violence.
How many times has the trio used “fringe” in this article to describe— what, leftism? Veganism? It reminds us again of how we used to run our fingers along the Globe’s “ragged fringe”, & bask in the warmth of its grown-up talk.
It also reminds us of how, as we grew up a little, we began to notice how deeply the Globe mistrusts a “fringe”: that is to say, how closed-off & suspicious the Globe— speaking generally— is to beliefs held by a minority (BHBAM).
If we could speak candidly to the Globe, we might tell it that this is an exhausting stance to take.
BHBAM will always be with us, so for the sake of your heart, why not aim for zen acceptance?
We’d also tell the Globe that, w/in their suspiciousness, they have overlooked some very good traits of BHBAM: BHBAM speak to our species’ rich diversity— & some of them herald fresh, exciting change on the horizon.
They may be mere BHBAM now, but in a matter of years or decades, could blossom into BHBAMajority— which the Globe, if it is still around, will have no issue adopting!
***
If the Globe had asked our advice, we might have edited the suspicious close to their paragraph as:
a tale of marginalized young adults, who were concerned about rising fascist tides, & of rising transphobia. Some of these young adults had, incidentally, gone no-contact w/ their families. Ultimately, there are 3 black boxes in this story, where we know what goes in— idealistic young ppl— & we know what comes out— violence. What goes on in the middle? We have no more idea than you.
—But, reading that back, we see why they didn’t hire us as a consultant!
***
Anyway, next the trio calls this “saga” “mystifying”— which we like— & “gothic”— which we really like!— & “violent” again for good measure.
They abruptly reverse their original use of Mz. Ziz’s name & pronouns— why? Do ~criminals~ not deserve affirmation? The Rationalists are again described in the blandest terms possible, until one former Rationalist (FR)— who remains anonymous for fear of Ziz!— pops up to say: “[The Rationalists are] a group that is aggressively worshipful of truth and clarity.”
“Aggressively” caught our eye— this is the most “aggressive” read we’ve seen, in a newspaper, of the Rationalists— but, on closer inspection, this phrasing just reifies the Rationalists’ own projected self-mythos. As does the rest of this FR’s description:
The idea is that the mind is full of software and hardware that can be improved, and you can eliminate the assumptions and cultural scripts that are not serving you.
That may be the idea, but it is far from the practice! 😂
Our FR continues the deadnaming of Ziz, w/ no correction on the Globe’s part, & brushes her off as “a wannabe Sith lord”.
Helpfully, the Globe chimes in to remind us that the Sith draw “strength from the dark side”— a dramatic phrasing which Ziz— unfortunately in hindsight!— did adopt to describe her journey of personal development, which was in no way dark-sided, & which you can read all about here. And here.
Our Rationalists are then said to “pride themselves on inclusivity” 🤣🤣🤣, & Ziz’s “quirks” are noted to have “raised few alarms”. Which “quirks”? Ziz’s famous Sith robes are the only “quirk” the Globe admits they mean ☺️
This strikes us as odd, since the trio swears they’ve read her blog, where— on page 1– her longest post by far is topped w/ the header:
& is filled with sorrow & heartbreak over the Rationalists’ crusade of transphobia against her! It was ofc her transness— not her “quirky robes”— which raised many alarms among the Rationalists, whose reactions, in turn, alarmed us so much that we made a whole site abt it!
Next she is described as “blogging under the name Ziz”, which we coulda sworn we had a bingo box for, but apparently not 🤷🏻♀️ We dumped this one under “NICKNAMES”, bc soon enough the Globe adds: “LaSota, as Ziz (LAZ)…”— just a v., v. strange way to refer to a person.
This LAZ is said to have “attracted a small yet fervent following (SYFF)”— we should have added the bingo category: “weird ways to describe friends”! Mz. Ziz’s blog appears in… an okay light: it’s said to have won her the SYFF (is this true? no clue), & her posts are elevated to “essays”— nice!— described as “otherworldly”— beautiful!— & “dense”: there’s no shame in that (TNSIT). We have been known to flirt w/ the dense side ourselves 😉
Op, but then this diplomatic trio outsources their harshest critique to another anonymous online Rationalist, who has written:
Ziz’s tendency towards inscrutable metaphors and loaded jargon (IMALJ) serve [sic] essentially the same purpose as typos in a spam email - it’s meant to filter you out. If the hypnotic language made more literal sense, it would bring in people who weren’t especially susceptible in particular to Ziz’s brand of rhetoric.
We could more charitably call the Zizster’s IMALJ her style— or more snootily call them her style as a STEM student who has never been offered a writing class (a peek at our transcripts will likewise reveal no writing classes— TNSIT!)
We dk if she has a “brand of rhetoric”, since that implies she is trying to convince you of something, rather than simply describing her life. We’d also let this Rationalist in on an embarrassing secret: we have many, many times taken Ziz’s thorniest IMALJ to Chat, who has been invaluable in translating her techie, sci-fi fan lingo into plain English & letting us see the light of how clever & perceptive this girl really is.
***
CFAR comes onscreen as 😇 “a nonprofit that leads workshops on cognitive bias”— & as being 👿 “Among Ziz’s favorite targets (AZFT) for online criticism”! Why was CFAR AZFT*, o Globe? 😊 We know you’ve read the blog!
*Also, was it rlly CFAR writ large that was AZFT, or was it Anna Salamon’s transphobery?
Never mind, bc next Ziz does one of the Globe’s least favorite things: she “up[s] the ante, taking her critique from cyberspace into the public square”! This ofc calls for the Globe to do two of our least fav things: deadnaming Somni, & glossing over the girls’ sexual assaults.
The trio then proceeds to gloss over… all the rest of 2019, 2020, 2021, & half of 2022? This we have to credit them for. This, if memory serves us, is called, in the world du cinéma, disjunctive editing (DE). It’s a daring technique w/ a fine pedigree among postmodern auteurs (PA). These PA, among whom we may tentatively include our trio, use DE to achieve a number of ends:
• Disrupting narrative continuity
• Undermining realism
• Creating a sense of fragmentation & emotional distance
It is thus in a disrupted, undermined, fragmented, & faraway state that we confront: the Vallejo incident! We hear the official narrative, hear of lye containers, hear of many more “attackers” than we have ever heard of before: is this New News or ¿Dubious News? Only time will tell.
***
One of our brave trio has gone to visit Jamie’s & Alice’s old apartment! 🫣
The pair were… roommates, in Globeland! Their curtains appear to be… stained w/ blood? 😰 The new tenant hasn’t taken them down for some reason? Alice is described as being “on the far fringes” (OTFF) of the Rationalist community— never mind that they are ensconced in the high & mighty Mr. Vassar’s circle!
“OTFF” links, by way of explanation, to Somni’s post describing Alice’s abuse of Jamie, of Emma— & of Somni. This is the same post which reminds us of Alice’s love for Nazi shit!
It’s nice of the trio to include this link— for curious readers online— but it would have been even nicer for them to include these invaluable details overtly, in their actual exposé— just as they have included the quotes of 2 separate Rationalists to make their most pointed & ominous characterizations of Mz. Ziz.
***
The trio has promised to take us “Inside the Zizians”. We dk if we’ve been taken anywhere yet, except maybe to the inside of a paper bag, thru which our guides seem determined to lead us.
At this point, mercifully, it is our gf who arrives to lead us— away from our phone, into the sunlight, & off to the farmers' market!
We say 👋 for now (FN) to the Globe, & 👋 FN to our courageous, kind, & oh-so-stylish readers. For you, we will eat many delicious fruits— if we can afford a single one!
*****
Next: Tales of Personal Drama