What the hell? I just learned about the Zizian death cult from Rebecca Watson. Why? What did I do to deserve this knowledge?
Short version: Zizians are trans vegan tech nerds who splintered away from the Less Wrong rationalist cult. Now they’re murdering people, and especially each other, to further some weird vision of a beautiful rational future where no one kills animals, putting Effective Altruism to work. I trace the problem not to veganism or trans or tech nerdiness, but to getting tangled up in the twisted arcane “philosophies” that are flourishing in Silicon Valley…and also generally to any obsessive extremism.
You’ll have to let Rebecca explain it all to you, because I don’t want to think about them anymore.
I like and respect Rebecca Watson and her posts. And, the Zizian death cult sounds quite ominous. However, I’m more worried that the MUMP death cult is after almost all of us right now.
Can you hear it? Martha and the Vandellas: ‘Nowhere to run to, baby. Nowhere to hide’
** MUsk+truMP – professor Snyder’s new term. I like it.
@shermanj:
The problem is that they’re not entirely disconnected. Remember that J.D. Vance is one of Peter Thiel’s boys; the Musk and Vance side of the cult is already connected to these people.
Oh, great, jenorafeuer is trying to cheer us up. (can the vancehole spell sarcasm?)
trans people do not need this kind of representation right now, pretty fuckin annoyed with these assholes. pretty fuckin annoyed.
“Effective altruism” is not really about effectiveness or altruism, it’s about contorting utilitarianism ad absurdum to give a veneer of moral justification to utterly selfish actions. Poor old Peter Singer. I believe his heart has mostly been in the right place, but he’s turned out to be a real trainwreck of a philosopher, hasn’t he?
@4– yup
@1– yes, the Trumpian ascendancy is a much greater threat to almost everyone than this one weird cult, but they’re actually related. MAGAs are building pyres for minorities right now and these Zizian fools are handing them tinder.
Vegans? Tech nerds?
(ah, right)
So, I was looking at this (in Wikipedia mostly) and saw something about LessWrong which led me to the Neo-reactionary movement or the Dark Enlightenment (NRx). I didn’t read in detail but I smelled the strong stench of certain people wielding a lot of power right now due their wealth.
Huh. Trivial but the Zizians reminded me of this – ZZzzzz! from the much more fun if also silly 5th Element movie. Dunno if there’s any connection and rather doubt it. A-n-y–w-a-y.