Leftists be like, "The Maoist uprising against the landlords," but then when a trans nonbinary vegan stabs their landlord with a katana suddenly they're all like "it's a death cult"
Here's a primer on the zizians, which you can read if you'd like your eyebrows to get stuck one tick higher for the rest of the day.
The tl;dr is that they're a cult orbiting around an offshoot of the SF Bay area "rationalist" scene. The SF Bay is a brutally alienating grifter hellscape. The rationalist scene is a disorganized counterculture highly concerned with morality*. This naturally attracts confused young adults who are in weird places in their life; that's just what a moral counterculture does. Ziz targeted particularly vulnerable people from this pool, particularly trans people, with a cluster of techniques out of the usual cult playbook, notably including a novel type of sleep deprivation.
Whether these ideas are right or wrong are irrelevant, but if you want my take: a stopped clock is right twice a day, but a clock that's spinning around really really fast is right way more often.
a stopped clock is right twice a day, but a clock that's spinning around really really fast is right way more often.
That's one hell of a take and a good one at that
The comments on this thread are unintelligible to me and that might be a good thing?
Same. Sounds like there's some news articles I missed or something? I have a journey to undergo in this thread.
That's why I unironically stopped following Rebecca Watson. Her recent video was just too much of a libout for me
I'm lost, what happened?
Long story short: an offshoot of the rationalists (the ones who are scared of a hypothetical future AI god torturing their metaverse avatar) got really extreme, insular, and cultlike. This has resulted in numerous deaths, including multiple of their own members, an ICE officer, and the landlord who owned the RV lot that they lived on. A few of the members are in jail, but I think the leader tried to fake their own death and is still on the lam. The story has Manson Family vibes, with a charismatic leader gathering a group of troubled people to their side and pushing them to do violent shit, and in this case that leader is a trans nonbinary vegan.
this and not the believing havana syndrome is credible in 2024?
It's been many factors, and generally this can be attributed to her general Western liberalism, but also one of the more jarring things was her responding to even mild criticism aggressively. I get where she's coming from (Elevatorgate and Western Atheism), but she's doing it even in the "comradely" spaces, eg. fediverse. Recently she popped off on VWestlife (a tech YouTuber) for daring to suggest that a game might have been able to run on her older machine (how dare he not know that she used to be running an Intel MacBook)
Certified Hexbear moment
Actually I unfollowed her because she popped off on VWestlife for daring to suggest that maybe her older computer would be able to run a newer game
She was always a turbolib.
I have a confession.
I actually agree with a fundamental principle behind rationalist/basilisk discourse: a simulation of you, if it's accurate enough, is essentially you. If Roko's Basilisk created a simulation of me then she is me, and if it tortured her it's indistinguishable from me being tortured. She'll be "me" in every way that matters. Continuity of consciousness is unimportant.
It's just that Roko's Basilisk is based on flawed priors so I'm not really worried about Skynet torturing my Metaverse avatar in the future. The basilisk wouldn't bother, there's literally no point. It wouldn't care about me at all. That's a waste of resources.
Instead, I'm hopeful!
I believe, if we don't kill ourselves, we will be able to simulate the dead and bring everyone back. There isn't going to be some dumbass Judgement Day where a basilisk determines if we were good, there's no point, but instead every person who has ever lived will be simulated and no one will ever have to say goodbye ever again. Some people will need some rehabilitation to get over their traumas from life, some people will need reeducation to get over their own bullshit, but everyone will be saved.
Rationalist psychos can't imagine this because the idea of saving everyone is antithetical to their world-view. They're still operating on essentially capitalist priors where only the righteous/productive will be saved while the wicked/unproductive will be damned. It's the same logic behind making the poor starve so they work harder for food, except their imaginations have run wild with it.
And they will build the basilisk themselves if we let them.
i fundamentally disagree on continuity. as soon as there's two of you there's divergence.
I understand that point of view, but have a slightly more radical view in that divergence isn't totalizing or instantaneous. Every time you sleep your brain changes, but we wouldn't say that the person who wakes up is a different person than the one that went to sleep. You just changed a little bit.
Or a more personal example: when I got hit by a car I lost about three weeks of memory, I no longer had aphantasia, and had an identity crisis that eventually lead to me accepting myself as trans. Did I die when I was hit by that car? Did someone else wake up in my body? I don't think so.
There's certainly some point at which the amount of changes are great enough that you become someone else, but if there were two of me we'd still be the same person for a while.
My simulation doesn't have to be perfect continuity, just whatever minimum is good enough.
Yeah, but if you don't know there is divergence you can't tell
I believe, if we don't kill ourselves, we will be able to simulate the dead and bring everyone back. There isn't going to be some dumbass Judgement Day where a basilisk determines if we were good, there's no point, but instead every person who has ever lived will be simulated and no one will ever have to say goodbye ever again. Some people will need some rehabilitation to get over their traumas from life, some people will need reeducation to get over their own bullshit, but everyone will be saved.
What would these recreations of dead people, most of them long since departed, be based on? How would this differ from those ghoulish AI services that offer to train a chatbot on a deceased loved one's chat history
There's a few assumptions at play here.
We have to assume that it is possible to create a simulation that is advanced enough to actually be intelligent (we aren't anywhere close and these chatbots are just investor scams). In this assumption the simulation is not just a chatbot, it is at the very least a person.
And then we have to assume that it's possible to actually accurately simulate history; you could simulate the exact events of JFK's assassination and actually get a picture of Poppy pulling the trigger, as it really happened in real life.
These are assumptions, of course. Maybe artificially constructed minds can't ever be intelligent, maybe simulating history to that level of accuracy isn't possible, but if they both are possible I think you could simulate the dead and bring them back to life.
I believe, if we don't kill ourselves, we will be able to simulate the dead and bring everyone back.
Hell yeah I love this premise. I've always imagined it in a sci fi far future context, like humanity solves the economy and spreads out to the solar system and somebody gets the idea to do this as the ultimate utopian project, running back the entire history of the Earth as a simulation in order to pluck out people's consciousnesses right before their death and resurrect them to live in the immortal space future.
"It's the same logic behind making the poor starve so they work harder for food, except their imaginations have run wild with it."
tangent, but it always bothers me that there are a lot of people out there who think the poor will only work if they're desperate, but the rich will only work if they're allowed to have their every whim fulfilled.
i think you meant to comment this to this post comrade
edit: i pulled a reddit folks sorry
You should watch the show Pantheon
It's funny, I searched "zizian cult" on google and first news article is claiming they're radical leftists.
It's so unbelievably untrue but whatever.
I mean, even a death cult is gonna get something right occasionally.
This was a dude living in a trailer on a lot where he rented out essentially storage units that weren't really intended for dwelling. Based in what I heard from the truannon episodes he didn't seem to be making any kind of real money off anyone and seemingly figured it was at least shelter for these weirdo wayward kids until they started being super fucking weird and hostile towards anyone else and taking over the lot. I think the unpaid rent thing was more of a reason to get rid of them than anything. If they didn't bring a bunch of trucks in and have people living in those and being weird and violent with other people renting etc, the rent seems like it would have been overlooked. This dude just barely qualified as a landlord.
"Join an org!", they all said.
I stab landlords with a katana constantly because I’m trapped in a Maoist cult where comrades (white terrorists) criticize me mercilessly for having a fascist credit card (VISA Silver Signature Rewards)
They won’t let me order vegan pizza anymore because the phone is fascist and “summoning my pizza slaves with a bourgeois app” is “bad vibes”
classic