Previous: Seductive Ciphers, Monstrous Creatures
New News, everyone: J. has found Suri’s tumblr!
After misgendering & deadnaming them for all the world to see, J. then tears into this tumblr, saying that it “contains dense discussions of leftwing political ethics”— and that it “expresses anger at parents… schooling and psychiatry”!
Imagine that!
We will have to read it immediately 🙏 Thank you, J., for this much-needed glimpse into the heart & mind of Suri.
“Like the other Zizians”, J. says that Suri “welled with an anger at the world that seemed to braid genuine, visceral despair at moral injustice with adolescent self-absorption.” We might, for the sake of convenience, call this “Angerwashing”: this is J. washing away the substance of Suri’s feelings & arguments by framing them as merely childish emotional outbursts.
J. then brings in the long-awaited “exclusive chatroom logs that chart the Zizians’ radicalization and ultimate acceleration into violence” 😮 We, needless to say, were frightfully impressed by these on our first read-through. Now, on our 2nd read-through, we are… a bit more dubious.
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J.’s logs appear to show a series of Discord comments made by Suri, Somni, & Emma— some of which are innocuous (tho, as he says disapprovingly, “A common theme… [is] resentment of authority – the government, the AI establishment, and especially parents and schooling.”)
Some are less innocuous: Suri mentions “dramatic fantasies about becoming a knife murderer”; Emma enthuses: “like imagine getting tons and tons of revenge for JUSTICE!! isn’t that cool?”
This, in light of future events, doesn’t look good for the gang.
Yet we— at the mention of Discord— are unpleasantly reminded of the phony Discord logs allegedly created by John David Pressman & collaborators. If these phony logs (PLs) are the ones mentioned elsewhere as having been “shared… among… Rationalists… paired w/ transphobic memes!!”, then we dk how many Rationalists, at this point, could have PLs ready to launder to journalists as “exclusive content”. 🤷🏻♀️
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Again we read the official version of the Lind lot tragedy— as for the unofficial version, J. indicates he’s aware of it— “that the Zizians, not Lind, were the ones acting in self-defense”— but he declines to describe the exact circumstances, & says only: “The authorities did not agree.”
This seems, on the one hand, reasonable: journalists are not supposed to give space to every rumor & conjecture (R&C) they encounter.
On the other hand, J.’s article so far has been nothing but R&C— punctuated by his own editorial opinions.
Why would he have chosen to include the R&Cs of this friend-group’s opponents, but not those of their allies? This, w/ a nod to our epistemics-obsessed Rationalists, we might dub Epistemic Gatekeeping: controlling what counts as credible knowledge based on who is speaking.
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For what it’s worth, next we learn from J. that Jamie & Ziz— “for unclear reasons”— did forge an alliance following Ziz’s recommendation that Jamie kill Alice. Fast-forwarding to 2023, we find J. dead-naming Ophelia— & Milo, who is introduced as “Youngblut, who sometimes went as ‘Milo’”.
Miss Jessica Taylor pops back around to describe Ophelia as “kind of a nonconformist”, & “extremely interested in political ethics”— once again, we wish we could have met her 😭
Jessica also recalls a convo where Ophelia “seemed to defend the Zizians’ alleged attack on Lind”, which would have been a golden opportunity for J. to ask Jessica: “In what terms did she defend it? How did she describe events differently?”— & then to regale us w/ Jessica’s response.
Alas, bc he does not, Ophelia’s defense is reduced to something ghoulish & hard-hearted: Lind has already been described at length as a sweet & gentle octogenarian, senselessly jumped by those ruthless Zizians. What kind of person must Ophelia be to defend something like that? 💀
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Skipping ahead to 2025, we obtain a v. small piece of New News: Milo’s journal had not only logs of xier acid trips— it also had pages of “apparent cipher text”!
This is treated, ofc, as deeply sinister, but we bother to include it a) bc we think it’s cool; b) as a s/o to our gf (hi honey 👋), whose own notebooks have been known to contain many, many pages of cipher text!
Annnd thank goodness, we get yet another moment of sanity from the Zizster’s lawyer, who states that Ziz “has been vilified mercilessly”!
Then we get more New News: “The exact whereabouts of Alice Monday… are unknown” 😮
Then we dip back down into J.’s editorial opinions:
“It goes without saying that the AI-risk and rationalist communities are not morally responsible for the Zizians any more than any movement is accountable for a deranged fringe. Yet there is a sense that Ziz acted, well, not unlike a runaway AI – taking ideas and applying them with zealous literality, pushing her mission to its most bizarre, final extremes.
Although self-serving and grandiose, Ziz is probably to some extent sincere – “a true believer”, one person told me. It is unclear, however, what the Zizians’ long-term objectives were, if any. The murders they allegedly committed were less calculated acts of political violence than the flailing of a paranoid clique plunging out of society with no plan for how to get back.
All they had left, in the end, was Oedipal rage, certainty in their conclusions and guns. Their alleged victims were an elderly landlord who liked ducks, two suburbanite parents, a cop doing his job and themselves.”
😮💨 There is, as we find ourselves repeating frequently, much to unpack here.
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Why does it go w/out saying that the Rationalists bear no moral responsible for the fates of Ziz & friends?
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Why was it necessary to paint Ziz as a “runaway AI”— both dehumanizing her & framing her as the Rationalists’ worst nightmare?
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Remind us again, J., what were the “ideas” that Ziz applied? What was “her mission”?
By this we do not mean that you should do what you do in your next paragraph— we do not mean that you should describe their actions as “the flailing of a paranoid clique plunging out of society with no plan for how to get back.” Partly bc this assumes that they wanted to “get back” to “society” (by which we assume you mean the confines of our grim status-quo). We dk if J. knows what Ziz’s ideas & “mission” are— we have ourselves struggled to summarize them, but curious readers can read the fruits of our struggles here, here, here, here, & here.
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Why, J., do we find ourselves suddenly on our backs on the Freudian couch w/ this talk of “Oedipal rage” (OR)? We don’t mind admitting, we had to google OR extensively for J.’s diagnosis to make any sense to us.
OR describes “irrational or intense emotional responses rooted in familial dynamics, particularly conflicts related to parental authority”. As he did w/ poor Suri, J. seems to be angerwashing: implying that Ziz & friends are “overemotional” in a way that’s both immature & pathological.
As he did w/ poor Suri, he is short-circuiting our engagement w/ their legitimate political stances,— & denying their oh-so-many legitimate beefs w/ the Rationalists.
He’s saying that they’re just acting out complexes from their childhood— which is esp. weird, since he’s said almost nothing abt these friends’ childhoods!
Putting that aside, there’s another element to OR which left us in a somber mood, & which made us wonder: what is J. really getting at?
OR’s “irrational or intense emotional responses” may also be motivated by “the child’s perceived inability to reconcile their desires with societal or familial expectations.”
This brought to mind a quote from the dread Jordan Peterson, which Mz. Ziz critiques on her blog. The quote reads:
“You could make a case that your mere existence is a threat to categorical order and so I can say that your duty as a consequence, despite the potential violation of your own sense of self would be to, what, to deny your own inner impulses and conform. […] I think you could make the case that it’s… the social obligation of someone who doesn’t fit into a fundamental category too (tricky one, man) to fit in regardless because it’s so threatening not to”.
Ziz responds to Jordan:
“A rare obvious crack in the facade of his stance against trans people being about free speech, the values of debate, etc. Peterson says he’s not trying to minimize the cost to us, but he does. And he’s so knowingly complicit in creating social reality that hides the extent of it that he is having sophisticated discussions about the nature and purpose of concepts to say it. This sort of erasure is algorithmically warp.”
J., incidentally, has read this blog post; he quotes from it. Nonetheless, we fear that he, w/ his OR aside, is making a Jordanesque argument: that the trouble w/ Ziz & friends is that they couldn’t or wouldn’t reconcile their “desires”— what Jordan might call their “inner impulses”— & “conform” to the “expectations” of the Rationalist establishment. Unfortunately, J. has failed to mention that chief among these expectations is: no trans! 🤷🏻♀️
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Anyway, after calling Ziz & co. a “deranged fringe”— & “bizarre”, “self-serving”, & “grandiose”— J. movingly humanizes their alleged victims— ofc omitting to mention Emma or Ophelia, who, being “Zizians”, deserve no eulogies.
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Annnnd w/ that, we learn that a new Rationalist trend called “Post-Rationalism” is emerging— emphasizing the “self-help aspects of the scene”, w/ a “new age-y spirituality” twist— hooray for them 😭
No, HOORAY for us: this article is finally ove— w- wait: what abt that Jinsinuation aaaall the way back in pt. 1— that he will be telling our “strange saga” as “perhaps a harbinger of more uncanny tidings to come” ?
WHAT ARE THE UNCANNY TIDINGS TO COME, J.????
What could they possibly be? 🫣
A sudden influx of obscure “cults”? A trans dragon revolution? Ziz starting to eat meat? We can’t handle the suspense, we’ll have to write him & demand a sequel ASAP.