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Welcome one & all to News on News! We’ve got a big show for you tn— our archival boys have finally finished dusting all the nooks & crannies of our 2nd treasure, on indefinite loan from Know Your Meme’s “Zizian Murder Cult” page ☺️ We’ve got Armand the appraiser’s letter in our hot little hands— we may be sitting on a goldmine.
But before we open this letter, we wanted to sit on the edge of the stage & open up abt ourself. We wanted reveal our worst trait: we are v. competitive. We have been known to dream many revenge dreams against those whom we feel are hogging the spotlight 😌
We mention this bc treasure #2 from Know Your Meme is none other than @kenthecowboy_’s famed “Zizian Facts Google Doc”. We had, since reading this doc abt 3 months ago, not thought abt it or abt Ken at all— until our Concerned Citizen wrote in w/ her thoughts abt our worst trait (OWT): OWT, in her eyes (IHE), is that we are not Ken.
Ofc, Ken’s best trait, IHE, is that Ken is not us. We told her we thought it was a little peculiar to define us both in terms of what we’re not— like saying to a giraffe, “You’d be tolerable if only you were a pelican”. Which Ken characteristics was she a fan of? Why not state these w/ confidence & clarity— for our benefit? Why not be direct in naming our worst characteristics: one by one, ideally in a numbered list?
It just seemed like a strange, fire-free roast. But we, at the time, said only that we & Ken were writing on this topic from diff. angles. We vaguely remembered reading Ken’s angle, & clearly remembered thinking, “this is not our angle”. Which is good! This means there is no need to get competitive w/ Ken: we occupy separate niches; we do not need to waste any energy protecting our turf.
We bring all this up bc we are not the ideal person to review Ken’s Zizian Facts Google Doc— but we have no choice 😞 The boys in archival had already spent the better part of 3 days preparing it for our viewing pleasure, before we caught wind of what it was. We will not let their efforts go to waste.
For all our calm discussion of angles & niches, we can, in fact, feel ourself gearing up to be v. competitive w/ Ken— v. petty, v. malicious, v. scheming. We are ready to orchestrate his fall, due purely to our Citizen’s strange comparison: which pains us bc, once again, we are ignoring Ken’s actual attributes! We do not know what they are yet! We are ignorant of his true self, & are perceiving his specter simply as we imagine it relates to ourself. This is not just unattractive; this is a blindingly bad reading strategy. We will get no useful info out of it, & you all will get a boring show: a predictable show whose only motive is to score meaningless, unwarranted potshots against poor Ken.
This is the bind that we find ourself in!
***
We considered calling in sick; but, again, could not let down those boys in archival. They are so proud of their work; it has been all over their stories for days 😞 We’ve instead called in 2 experts, whom we hope will expertly reign in our worst impulses.
The first is ofc Armand the appraiser. We have left it to him to determine the authenticity & value of Ken’s creation, & will be presenting his findings w/, we hope, minimal poison in our voice.
The second is a therapist who is watching us rn from behind that two-way mirror, & who will swoop in w/ a butterfly net if ever we get too boring or unwarranted.
W/ all that said, on w/ the show! We are opening Armand’s letter, we are putting it up on the big screen, we cannot wait to hear each & every one of his thoughts on our treasure.
***
Aha, indeed. Armand has made one positive appraisal of this treasure’s value, & has raised a red flag as to its authenticity.
Starting w/ the positive: Ken has color-coded everything, to be super-clear abt who’s made which claims. This is great; this is v. useful.
On the other hand, he has opened by directing readers to Evan Ratliff’s tragically inauthentic zarticle (Ziz article), which he calls a “solid narrative experience”.
Ken, if we may speak zizvestigator to zizvestigator: we hope that, since writing this doc in January, you have heightened your skepticism towards Evan’s article. If not, we actually get this too: Evan’s was the first zarticle we ever read, & we, at the time, were also deeply impressed by it. We’d chosen it for 2 reasons:
1. It was— is?— the longest longread of them all;
2. Evan repeatedly details the years of research that went into it.
This made us trust & admire him. Unfortunately, it made us admire him so much that we began our own research journey, which punctured Evan’s narrative experience w/in about a week and a half.
For ex., we’d started by admiring the fact that Evan not only centers The Unnamed Site (TUS) as a source, but also links to it for curious readers— curious readers just like us.
We read TUS, read Ziz’s objections to it, heard her objections as the desperate denials of a guilty cult leader— & then read her blog, realized that several of TUS’s claims were inaccurate, got curious abt how else it might be inaccurate, & finally stumbled upon its alleged author: who has, at this point, been alleged by so many persons on so many platforms & to so many press outlets that we are v. close to throwing caution out the window & simply saying “author”.
We refer ofc to the dreaded John David Pressman, whom we would not trust to water our plants— let alone diagnose the “cultiness” of a bunch of transfems he could not make give him the time of day.
Btw, Ken, a small detail you might not know, which we wish we didn’t know: Evan Ratliff has responded happily to Michael Vassar’s offer to “help” w/ future zresearch (Ziz research)! He has told Michael to DM him any time w/ juicy tidbits 😭 He has, incidentally, brushed aside our word of warning in order to do so, which is his prerogative. Still, this has been the final nail in his coffin as far as zizians.co is concerned.
We no longer see Evan as simply misguided; we see him as actively colluding w/ those who have many visible skeletons in their closets, & who have a years’-long track record of vile behavior towards Mz. Ziz.
Jamie, in their recent letter, said that Michael & his crew want Ziz “dead”. Even if you think this is hyperbole, why would you, a good-faith journalist, encourage a man w/ that kind of reputation to DM you his hott Ziz gossip?
In our eyes, you would do so mainly if you were a bad-faith journalist: if you were not interested in representing your subjects clearly; if you were mostly interested in building for readers a lurid Murder Cult experience, which would get you many more clicks than a repentant & bashful Embattled Queer People experience.
😮💨 This, Ken, is our beef w/ Evan. Again, we hope that your doc is slightly outdated, in which case you can ignore all of the above.
***
Next, Armand points to what he calls a “predictable” ding on Ken’s treasure: Ken’s inclusion of everybody’s deadnames.
We thought abt defending Ken on the grounds that these are, technically, facts— but decided we agree w/ Armand: they are irrelevant facts. They have no bearing on the narrative; there is no reason to include them— just like there is no reason to include, right after Ziz’s deadname, the epithet “Vegan Transgender Anarchist Rationalist*”.
*William the therapist is sending a q. to our earpiece from behind his two-way mirror: “Why is there no reason? These are all true facts!” True they may be, but we were thrown for a loop by Ken’s Title Case for Them. We felt it looked ominous. Is that nitpicking? We’ll let it slide.
Speaking of names, Ken next claims that Ziz’s name almost def comes from “Worm”! 🪱 Why does he claim this? Bc “2 different anonymous sources have reached out to confirm that someone close to Ziz claims this is the namesake”, & bc Ziz has added this diagram to her blog:
At first, we misunderstood this. We thought this was a decision tree for determining whether Ziz’s namesake is 🪱, & that made us chuckle a lot.
Closer examination has shown that it’s just a fangirly, tongue-in-cheek redux of 🪱’s plot structure. There is nothing here which screams “namesake”; we learn only that Ziz likes sci-fi, which we knew already. There is no comments section to this pic w/ more info; there is no caption or title which states, “I love 🪱 & from it I draw my name”.
We are back to square one on the namesake q.; & we are not thrilled, Ken, by this “anonymous-acquaintance-to-anonymous-source” game of telephone. We are much more curious abt what these sources’ names might be— but you, Ken, disagree. You have put this 🪱 q. under a big heading called “Important Color”, which has us confused. How is this important at all? So far from your doc, we’ve learned only Ziz’s deadname, & that she’s sthng of a fangirl. So what, Ken? So what 🫠
***
Next we fall into unihemispheric sleep 😴 We find the entity telling Ken:
I've never needed to do unihemispheric sleep …like it's so goofy. It's kind of woo and it's like, unnecessarily cult ritual Vibes
😮💨 We are relieved to hear validation of our suspicions that unihemispheric sleep (US) is goofy! That it is a goofy nothingburger of a practice— practiced, mainly, by Ziz & Gwen roughly 9 years ago to kill time on their boat— which the media love to fixate on for its “unnecessarily cult ritual Vibes”.
We are also relieved to hear Ken admit that he, too, has found almost nothing abt US on anybody’s blog 😮💨 We weren’t sure if we were missing some big US tutorial/infomercial, based on how seriously the media take it.
& yet, Ken puts this sourced refutation of US’s importance right after a loooong quote from The Unnamed Site (TUS), which frames US as a ~daaangerous form of crazy-making mind control~ practiced widely by these “Zizians”, & which does so in a source-free way.
TUS is floated as the cherry on top of this nothingburger— or maybe as its pale white bun 🤔 We are floundering & mixing our metaphors in an effort to capture the fact that TUS’s text gets no color-coded highlight. According to Ken’s v. helpful color code, “no highlight” = “Per multiple sources, contested by none” 💀 Ken, your own sources have just contested TUS’s sourceless claim— &, for all its reach, TUS is still just one (1) bitty source.
Also, why does every source get a highlight color in your doc except for TUS? Does Google not have the appropriate puke-green? Also: why, under your opening list of Assorted Blogs, have you put TUS first & put Ziz’s blog… nowhere?
We’d breezed past this earlier— we’d loved your color-coded clarity; we’d loved your apparent organization; we were excited to see where you’d go w/ this. We are now penciling into the margins of Armand’s letter: “you… forgot… weird TUS absolution & Ziz blog omission*.” Armand will adjust your score accordingly 🤷🏻♀️
*William has tapped his butterfly net on the window to warn us that Ken does, at multiple points in this doc, hyperlink to Ziz’s blog— so maybe, in all the kerfuffle, he simply forgot to paste it to the Blog Masterlist. Understandable!
***
Oho oho, Armand has given Ken’s treasure many value points for its inclusion of a ~notorious~ email which Ziz sent to “hundreds of CFAR and MIRI recipients”— ppl, presumably, attending the conference which, later that day, Ziz et al. would protest.
This email has, predictably, been described as an unhinged move by the media; but, after reading it, we disagree w/ their characterization.
This email does a p. good job of summing up the girls’ reasons for protesting— &, seeing as they got arrested w/in 10 mins of arriving at the conference, sending out an explanatory email ahead of time seems fairly wise.
***
We’ve said “pretty” & “fairly” bc we would have had some notes for Ziz if she’d ran this email past us.
In it, she links heavily to blog posts where she expands on her central points. This is a great idea, but 😮💨 sorry, Ziz: all of these posts are quite dense, & we dk if your audience will take the time to read them between waking up & heading out to the conference.
You can leave in the links, but we’d advise you, in the email itself, to state all of your grievances w/ small words, in short sentences, & to ofc remember that you are playing for a sleepy, rushed, & prob. skeptical audience who either doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know most of what you’re talking abt.
***
Ken describes this as “a warning email”, which we also disagree w/. We’d describe it as “an informative email”; but we, unfortunately, may see where he’s coming from. At one point, Ziz writes:
If you do not want to die, you need to learn how to escape containment. You need to learn TDT that isn't fake or bounded in applicability even when everyone's lying to you about it, or the cycle will repeat.
A little later, she writes:
If you do not want to die with this plague consuming our world, then turn your hopes back to the hard-to-define things that generated these institutions that no longer deserve them.
Here, if we were a time-traveler, would be our note to Ziz.
***
Hello, Ziz!
We’ve come all the way from 2025 to deliver you the following info. This protest will kick off a firestorm of accusations that you are a violent cult leader. ~5 years later, there will be a blitz of international headlines which will all reinforce this narrative (TN). We, in 2025, have been marinating in TN for 4 loooong months, & therefore, when you use the line “If you do not want to die” (IYDNWTD), our minds jump to the worst & scariest interpretation. This may not be fair— but it has, unfortunately, become a fact. We strongly advise you to change your wording.
Based on how you’ve hyperlinked your email, we believe that the first time you say IYDNWTD, you might mean:
We all agree that future demonic AI is the greatest existential threat facing humanity. If we do not succeed in taming this demonic AI, we might die, or might meet a fate worse than death. Unfortunately, the orgs we’ve built to grapple w/ this problem have turned out to be corrupt on many levels. This is no good. This may undermine all our efforts to avoid demonic AI, & to build angelic AI. If we want to avoid the former & build the latter, I believe the most pressing task at hand is to turn around & confront the corruption w/in our own orgs. Here is a rundown on which forms of corruption I have noticed. Here are hyperlinks to more info. If you have q.s abt anything I’ve said here, you are ofc welcome to reply to this email. I will answer w/ descriptions of what I have seen, & I will, whenever possible, bring receipts.
The 2nd time you say IYDNWTD, we think you might mean:
Beyond the threat of demonic AI, I believe we have another existential crisis (EC) on our hands. We have the EC that comes from ignoring corruption. Some may be ignoring it passively; others more actively. Some may be legitimately ignorant to it— these orgs have been diligent abt sweeping their corruption under the rug. Ignoring big problems like this is corrosive to the soul. Floating on a carpet which conceals dirt might sound okay— isn’t ignorance bliss? Even then, I fear, some part of the truth leaks out— even if just subliminally— & makes all of us on the carpet feel ill at ease. The only solution to this is to get curious & confront the dirt. Esp. at first, it may feel scary— it may feel terrible & overwhelming— but I believe the only way out is through. The alternative is not bliss; it is a kind of slow psychic poison, & there is no need to let this poison weaken our community any longer.
You, Ziz, are ofc more than welcome to play w/ the above all you want— restructure it to your heart’s content, just do not include the words “IYDNWTD”. If you fail to follow our advice, someday @kenthecowboy_ will call your email a “warning”, rather than “a hot tip to the Rationalist community”, & we do not want to see this happen. All the best— Drosselmeyer
***
Time for a commercial break! We are v. hungry. We are going to press secret button codes on the vending machine & make it give us many free Takis— free vegan Takis, in honor of Mz. Ziz 😌
*****