after reading Aella's write up about this i was looking forward to barpod picking it up. i will say, both in Aella's writeup and in this episode, the use of 'she' for Ziz really bothers me. i nominally understand why it's done, but idk ... it feels like indulging in narcissism when the entire story is taken into context.
EDIT: Jesse did bring it up at the end, and even if you want to use 'she' i think it should be clearly stated at the start that Ziz is a biological male.
Well, not always. Katie had made a point of saying she doesn't/won't when it's about someone like a criminal. I think Jesse has even made an exception or two. To me, given the subject matter, wrong sex pronouns here were very strange.
The immortal phrase "your minds are so open your brains have fallen out" always comes to mind when I hear people honouring the pronouns of male homicidal maniacs.
The use of she/her pronouns here definitely left the listeners less informed and less able to follow what was actually happening. As Orwell put it, it fell “upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details.”
absolutely. i was able to sort of take certain things (Ziz being a transwoman, his birth name being Jack, combined with the 'she' pronouns, aggressive behaviors that scream 'male' to me) and infer that this person was likely a biomale. but someone who isn't as versed in this kind of doublespeak? yeah they'd have no idea what was going on.
Yeah, for ziz zizself I had somewhat of a good grasp, but for some of the other “women” I had more of a mental heuristic of “Manson Girl” rather than, as Jesse put it, “non-passing transwomen.”
exactly! when it came up at the end that that was the reality i was like wait, what? especially because jesse brought it up in the context of being annoyed that publications obscured the perpetrators’ maleness 😭
Thank you! This drove me nuts during the episode. Like maybe if they want to be respectful they could use “they/them” but these are not crimes committed by women and shouldn’t be labeled as such.
For any type of reporting, the default should be to refer to people using pronouns which align with their actual sex. In cases where there's an editorial choice to use "preferred" pronouns, this should be mentioned upfront, along with clear mention of their biological sex.
Exactly. Journalists need to reconsider what pronouns are actually for. Do they exist to make people feel good, or do they exist to accurately describe our shared reality?
E.g. when a person is the subject of a story or journalistic person of interest, I'd say one's sex is a relevant data point along with many others. If an item features a quote from an organization's spokesperson or man-on-the-street, it is not, excepting topics related to gender or trans issues. Consider a very silly example excerpt from a non-existent news story, with apologies to the people reading my comment to young children:
[...] Alex Van Nostrum, a male middle manager from Springfield Porche-Mercedes and sporting an impressively wide set of shoulders and a suspiciously authentic tubular gotta-be-since-birth pulsing packaging protuberance running several inches down his snug cinnamon-red apple-bottom chinos, had this to say: "Looked like a Nazi salute to me, Wink, I don't know."
[...] Terry Boombatz, an adorable miss chunky monkey who works behind the counter at the Pickleball for Ladies store, exhaled hugely, causing her low-hanging big naturals to heave and separate beneath her sheer, skin-toned tight-support cami jogging top from lululemon, looked at me suspiciously. "C'mon, Wink. He's trolling everybody, can't you see?
Okay *very* silly but the point is serious. All that matters here is that they have a name and a quote. Explicit reference to their sex or *any* description that needlessly suggests gender are unnecessary, though less racy mentions of Alex's chinos or Terry's tank top would be fine too.
Freaking out about cases like this risks the high road.
Came to post similar. I'm starting to find self-ID for toxic headcases a little grating.
For most TWs featured on the podcast, the trans identity seems to relate to a general weirdness. Even if you believe in the kind of trans Briahna Wu advocates for, these people ain't it.
Also some of the behaviour reported has a very different valence for male-sexed individuals than for actual women, e.g. I seem to recall an account of a consent-dubious BDSM encounter. So there's a sort of Stroop Effect at work.
Finally, where do you draw the line?
I get if you have a story about - say - a dogwalker who happens to be trans that it would seem appropriate to use their pronouns of choice. But are you going to affirm, say, prison-onset TWs?
honestly i think this is a slippery slope. cuz if you start asking "well when should we or shouldn't we indulge in a person's pronoun request" you have to start asking who is and isn't 'worthy' of having their preferences indulged, and let's be real: we have a presumption of innocence. so if we wanted to peg pronoun usage on their criminal record i guess we'd have to wait on that?
but honestly that's the slippery slope: i find no other solution than to have a cultural understanding that pronoun usage is not something you can really have any say over (and in any case, most pronoun usage is used in the 3rd person, when that person isn't present, so it's nonsensical for someone to say that they 'use' certain pronouns)
The real question isn’t who to indulge but why we’d indulge this at all. When language is used to distort reality instead of clarify it, the consequences are real. Maybe that’s the real slippery slope. Once you start treating identity as something dictated rather than observed, you’re already in their reality with them. And that might just include a Roko’s Basilisk scenario.
And it’s not just talk. Look at the threats, the deplatforming, the people whose careers and reputations have been wrecked just for disagreeing. The hosts of this very show have been targeted for it. There’s a streak within the trans community of do what I want, or else. That only gets worse when people play along, breaking reality with them.
Maybe it’s just nerds being keyboard warriors, posting trans flags with AK-47s on Bluesky, until it isn’t. And here we are, talking about a vegan trans murder cult. Not a requirement to be trans to join, but funny how it shook out.
I dunno, I personally don’t have any difficulty keeping two categories of “she” in my brain. Trans women, unlike women, are male and thus when I think about “Ziz” et Al, I know that.
Hearing the “she” pronoun doesn’t trick my brain into thinking a trans woman isn’t male. This story was absolutely clear that this was basically a dude with a personality disorder who identifies as female. So, I don’t see any particular harm or confusion
"**I personally** don’t have any difficulty keeping two categories of “she” in my brain... Hearing the “she” pronoun **doesn’t trick my brain** into thinking a trans woman isn’t male."
Okay, good for you.
"So, **I don’t see any particular harm or confusion**"
This is where the problem sets in. You have a very specific way of looking at the world. This is fine. But then you make a leap because of the things that for you "personally" doesn't "trick [your brain]" then therefore there is "no harm or confusion." Many people see the world differently from you!
In any event, can you tell me which 'she/hers' in the story are transwoman and which are 'Manson Girls'? It's not apparent to me!
but how much of your brain interpreting this has to do with your familiarity with the topic? you're a paying subscriber of BARPod, so you're probably familiar with how people can become fixated on things that mainstream folk don't, and recognize things that an average person who isn't so plugged-in won't.
I’m on the other side; every time I hear “she” in this episode, I have to take a moment to say to myself, “it’s actually he though” and after doing this 50 times I feel mentally drained and distracted from the content of the episode.
If it’s already clarified that the person in question is a transwoman, then it is less confusing if you’re paying close attention, but there were people mentioned in the podcast where it was not clarified whether they were talking about biological women or transwomen.
The person who killed their parents for example. Was this a woman or a transwoman? I feel like that’s an important part of the story.
More than once while listening to this episode in the car, I responded aloud to Jesse's "non-passing transwoman" references with, "So you mean... a man."
And yet among the progressives I know, more insist on dying on this hill than have come back to their senses since Trump's election. It's so bizarre. I would love to have some understanding of this phenomenon more concrete than "progressive hive mind".
In a story about a pervasive techno-theological movement and its absurd offshoots that has infected one of our most important economic sectors, Silicon Valley, and has connections to our current government, e.g., DOGE, you're concerned about pronouns?
The trans status of the people involved is tertiary at best.
the murders and violence and gaslighting definitely bother me, objectively, more than the pronouns. absolutely. but does that imply that it's gauche to talk about one particular aspect of a story?
and in any case, i think Ziz's trans status *absolutely* has significant bearing on the story, because he used a complex network of rationalist-influenced trans ideology to manipulate people.
to add to this thought, i don't think it'd be unreasonable to consider trans ideology the "back door" that Zis used to get to these people in his "cult". in my personal experiences -- and i'm sure the same for many other BarPod listeners -- people drawn to trans ideology are already sort of down-on-their-luck types. low self esteem, unstable home lives, perhaps chronically depressed, that sort of thing. you see it with the person Ziz convinced to commit suicide.
and i think the trans status, and influence of trans ideology, in these peoples lives is a very important part of the story.
as someone familiar with trans communities my first thought upon hearing the brief explanation of rationalists was, “wait, how can someone be a rationalist and justify their own trans identity?”
not at all surprised by the split-brain nonsense at the center of this cult. that is literally what this new wave of trans people (read: not old-school transsexuals) believes: that their brain is separate from their body and the reality between their ears is the only one that matters.
what the whole setup REALLY reminded me of was scientology — but scientology if LRH had a girldick.
Yeah - especially since many of the group members sound (based upon their names) to be female, but appear to be biologically male; this would be a notable anomaly in the usual sex composition of murder gaggles, since most murderers and violent criminals more broadly are male. I get that this issue (a violent group whose inner circle seems to be disproportionately comprised of trans women) could be touchy, despite Jesse’s noted rapport with the trans community; however, simply referring to the members as “she” really does paint a different image of the group, its actions, and it’s potential inter-group dynamics.
I’m not usually a pronoun purist, I respect J & K’s policy, but this story is very difficult to follow using preferred pronouns.
Why should criminals and psychopaths get to be called what they’re not, especially when they present a real threat to public safety? The phrase “suicidal empathy” comes to mind.
This story might tip me over—why is “respect” more important than facts?
Well, THIS NYT story tipped me over several years ago.
Here's the headline about a serial killer named Harvey Marcelin:
SHE Killed Two Women. At 83, She Is Charged With Dismembering a Third.
Harvey Marcelin was charged with murder after a head was found in HER Brooklyn apartment. Officials said it belonged to a dismembered body discovered in a shopping cart.
"Ms. Marcelin — who was listed as male in earlier court records but now identifies as a woman, according to a law enforcement official — was indicted on second-degree murder charges on Thursday in the death of Susan Leyden, 68. SHE is accused of dismembering her and hiding her body parts."
In another article "SHE" has changed HER name to Marceline Harvey:
How Did a Two-Time Killer Get Out to Be Charged Again at Age 83?
Marceline Harvey is accused of dismembering a woman in Brooklyn. HER life was defined by a tormented relationship with women and HERSELF — and a simmering anger.
There are many such cases of male criminals insisting they are women. Journalism style guides require the use of preferred pronouns. Unfortunately, in criminal cases that means that journalists help perpetuate fraud rather than uncover the truth.
And don't forget Dana Rivers, the poor oppressed woman who just had to brutally murder two women and their son because he was told no.
I wish people would quit with this. Aside from making podcasts hard to listen to since so many of these people seem to be men just playing female (possibly to appear less dangerous to others or to obscure their identities), why are we indulging violent murderers? Who cares if it offends them? Why do we all have to practice their religion? I wish journalists would be less cowardly. I've seen some "a man who identifies as a woman" on occasion. Maybe it'll keep up.
I cancelled my NYTimes subscription because of that article. Five years ago we were all on board with the pronouns. It now needs to end. The person who committed the Petit murders (2007) was just granted a female name. Child sex abuse by women is increasing dramatically, which of course has nothing to do with women abusing children more often. At this point there is no doubt that women in prison are being sexually abused by men calling themselves women every day, the population is so large. Our dignity, humanity, safety, identity, and all that is good about being a woman is continually being taken from us. Sorry to be dramatic, but please stop. It is soooo easy to explain this at the beginning of the conversation. You don't have to do it for everyone. But for god's sake, do it for the people who don't deserve the privilege, and for whom it is a slap in the face for women.
yeah i agree, and i think that if you sit and think about it for a bit it all starts to unravel. because where do you draw the line? is it entirely arbitrary? if someone simply offends me, are they no longer worthy of pronouns? what determines whether someone "gets" to dictate what pronouns to use?
at the end of it all i can only come to the conclusion that there should be a cultural understanding that we don't get to control the words other people use to describe us. we have our preferences -- it's *always* been rude to call a woman a man, for instance -- but when it comes to preferred self ID i think truth is far more important, ESPECIALLY in journalism.
It’s a fact these are trans women, who are definitionally males, and which was abundantly clear in the story. “She” pronouns are typically used for trans women. What facts are being discarded?
It's not clear to me if they are all males identifying as women. The person whose parents were murdered, for example, I have seen identified as a man and in another source as a woman.
Do you happen to know if any females are involved in this group?
If not, then why bother to keep up the pretense that these are women when they are seriously disturbed violent men? If there are females involved, then I would argue it's even more important to distinguish among the perpetrators so that the public can be adequately informed.
yeah this is it. for me, i understood that Ziz is a biological male, but as for the other people involved? i was under the impression that there were actual biowomen involved (isn't the person who bought the gun a female?) but i couldn't tell you how many. if they're actually *all* transwomen (ie biomen) then that would surprise me, cuz that's not how i interpreted it.
the problem is that it isn't stated in the story. there needs to be a clear statement at the start of who is who, who was born male, who was born female, etc. we're talking about journalism, and journalism is about reporting the truth. the truth is that Ziz is a biological male, and the fact that he hasn't even gone through any sort of actual medical transition -- meaning he absolutely has every bit of hormones that makes males more aggressive than females flowing through his system -- makes the entire thing even more absurd.
I think in a more formal context where readers/listeners are expecting objective facts, like a news report or in a court room, sex based pronouns should be used. Between friends or in informal contexts like substack forums, call each other whatever you prefer.
Preferred pronouns make things more confusing and obscure the actual sex of the person - which is the goal of course. Saying, she used the women's changing room doesn't get to the heart of the issue that a male-bodied person used the women't changing room.
I don’t understand Jessie and Trace’s rationale for using she/her pronouns for the murdering psychos all through the episode and then at the end they’re like “it’s weird the media refer to the non passing trans women as women and don’t let people know they should be looking for a man.”
I also thought Trace was a bit overly apologetic (in the religious sense) for the rationalists. Like, no, that definition was pretty spot on from everything I’ve read about them and the couple men who I’ve met who “liked their ideas.”
I think most rats are in it for the intellectual exercise of performing thought experiments on various kinds of optimization (like utility maximization). At least among the ones I know, they wouldn't actually put the craziest consequences of that thinking into action, but they really like the neatness of chasing a thought down a rabbit hole to its deepest logical conclusions.
The closest analogy to my own experience is with libertarians starting from the non-aggression principle and concluding that governments are all illegitimate, roads should all be privately owned, etc. Like, sure, that follows from the specific clean-slate thought experiment that involves no actual existing people, institutions, reliance interests, etc. Once you include those things, this thing that looks very clever breaks down very quickly.
Lesswrong is interesting and amusing, but it in no way is a set of recipes for how to run an actual in-real-life society.
this is a pretty weird “question”, and insulting and ignorant at the same time. Guess what honey - same here! Here in America, normal people ALSO consider themselves to be rational, even the religious ones. It’s a low effort statement here too! Who knows why these insane misfits chose that name - but sweetie, it’s not because most Americans don’t believe in rational thought. What a weird thing to take away from this story, and then post about twice.
Here’s what your comment sounds like:
“Oh my, this “rationalist” movement must be uniquely North American, because in Europe we are all naturally rational. Unlike in America, where all of society surely revolves around irrational beliefs, and only people on the very fringes would think to lay claim to rational thought!”
By the way, Silicon Valley rationalist scene is full of people from all over the world.
The use of "she" and "her" feels incongruous. Sounds like male behavior and it's like I am expecting, "Then she pulled out her dick and wizzed in the corner."
Agreed. Once a man kills/assaults/rapes someone, then forever a man he/him should be referred regardless of his preference. Otherwise it clouds the reality of the situation. Plus as my favorite UK terfs point out, it creates a perception of female violence that isn’t real. #notourcrimes
I know someone from my college who is exactly like this. Programmer, identifies as a trans woman (she/it), fascinated by AI to a creepy extent, tries to have spiritual conversations with LLMs, goes through psychotic episodes (he believed/believes he is an AI agent), wears a hat that says "be gay do crime."
Although I'm not sure if he has committed any crimes yet, he did get into legal trouble with other people due to his behavior. I no longer think of the slogan on his hat as a joke.
Edit: having listened to the episode, I feel like Trace is downplaying just how batshit "mainstream" rationalists like Eliezer Yudkowsky, LessWrong, even early-period Scott Alexander were. I know he's sympathetic to them, but from my perspective as someone who encountered the rationalists about a decade ago and bounced off hard, they seemed to have an obsession with tossing out all previous knowledge and reinventing epistemology from scratch, which is of course a good way to get yourself stuck in mental cul-de-sacs. Yudkowsky in particular displayed definite cult leader tendencies by claiming that most of his followers were incapable of understanding his esoteric knowledge, and asking them for money because he was the only person capable of averting the AI apocalypse. It's also worth noting that when these guys talk about "AI safety" and especially "alignment," that's a totally different field from traditional AI research. The rationalists made up this field themselves and imo it should be classified more accurately as a branch of philosophy than anything to do with computer science.
Re: Roko's Basilisk - For the people who take it seriously, the reason they believe the AI can go back in time to torture you and the reason it's eternal, is that they believe if the AI can generate a perfect simulation of you, that person *is* you. The way I understand it, there's sort of this constant veil-of-ignorance situation going on where if there are multiple exact copies of you in existence, your experience could reside in any one of the copies. So if you know about the Basilisk but don't dedicate your life to bringing it into existence, once it does appear it will use its superintelligence to make copies of you that it will torture forever. Trace is right that most rationalists don't take it seriously, but it does continue to break new rationalists' brains on occasion.
My big problem with them is something like the following:
EY and his acolytes take a bunch of correct suppositions but stack them in epistemologically totally irresponsible ways.
So they use logic and reason and good and peer tested thinking about rationalism and decision theory to come up with premises. Premises which might even be each individually say 96% true. But then their philosophy builds a big giant contingent jenga tower out of these that is itself not at all meeting that level of epistemic likelihood/rigor.
If your philosophy has Premises 1-10 which all have like a 96% chance of being true depending about how you feel regarding various contentious issues in epistemology, and lets stack on top of that 20 more assertions/supposed deductions which each have a 96% chance of being true...
Your synthetic conclusion is not something which is 96% true, but is instead something which is say 30% true....
But they treat that conclusion like it is 100% true. Each phase of the argument is extremely plausible, but a chain of extremely plausible arguments can lead you somewhere very implausible when chained serially.
As was said in Love & Death, “To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.”
That’s exactly the way I feel when I read a lot of these arguments except the conclusions are even more implausibly absurd. I’m shocked when I see people who seem smart but end up getting their heads messed up by these bizarre thought experiments.
the roko’s basilisk thing feels to me like the set up for an elaborate aristocrats style joke….
There’s a group of people who believe that there’s a future super computer that doesn’t yet exist but which can read your mind from the future and has hurt feelings you aren’t supporting it and thus will torture you forever unless you do what it wants and they believe this because they made it up in a blog comment….and the name of this group?
Jesse at one point says you can’t call rationalists all dumb, they were ahead of the curve on AI and crypto, and like.. crypto is a ponzi scheme with no legal real-world utility. AI is real (but probably overvalued) but rationalists get absolutely no credit for it: none of them wrote code or developed machine learning tech, that all came from mainstream academia and industry, and ‘AI alignment’ in practice has meant making LLMs sound like agreeable woke HR managers, not anything Yudkowsky et al produced. They’ve sat on the sidelines building up their own brand and are trying to stamp it on stuff they had nothing to do with.
I like a lot of Scott Alexander's work and can understand why someone like Trace would be a fan, too. There are a lot of different Rationalists, and I don't think the existence of one odd Rationalist cult need vitiate the entire movement.
Yudkowsky always seemed weird and speculative enough to me that I didn't bother with him, so I will neither defend nor attack him. Thanks for your take.
To be clear I like a lot of Scott Alexander's stuff too. Fortunately he's mellowed and developed a sense of humor around a number of topics he used to be genuinely angry about.
I also think the merger with effective altruism has been pretty healthy for the movement too (for rationalism I mean, not sure about the effect on EA). Scott seems more aligned with EA than rationalism these days, which is something I can respect a lot more.
He said in the episode that he has a lot of friends in the rationalist community and maybe considers himself rationalist-adjacent, which is not at all surprising to me considering the era of the internet he came up in (more or less the same one as me, though I was way less online than Trace was lol). In the early 2010s a whole lot of people online who considered themselves smart freethinkers and had the attention span to read through massive walls of text ended up drawn to the rationalists.
EY wrote a 1500 page Harry Potter fan fiction, available here: https://hpmor.com/
It starts off with a kind of promise of unveiling EY's rational philosophy within the confines of that universe but do not be fooled; like any fan fiction it's a self-serving adventure fantasy, "what if autistic nerd geniuses like me went to Hogwarts". To be fair though, it's decently written for a fanfic.
He wrote a little sci-fi story where there were (unsympathetic) aliens that practiced infanticide, but that's the only thing I remember linking him to the topic.
Edit: Oh, but I think in that story or a different one he suggested that rape was morally defensible? I could be confused though, it was a long time ago
Yeah but how many of them over there take rokos basilisk seriously? This reads like you're only commenting on their weirdest takes, which would make any group look bad. One of their most recent discussions was about whether classical architecture looks as good as modern architecture. What weirdos and freaks!
Call me a Tik-Tok brained idiot if you want but I found this impossible to follow linearly. I kept waiting for the necessity of the in-depth graphing of the “rationalist community” to become clear but the story could have been told without near as much divergence. Reading the wiki page at least let me keep clear who is who, and who is who to whom, which the audio couldn’t
More details needed. I also don't understand how Jack got away. He'd been around several murder scenes, went to to the hospital, and vanished? Seems...odd.
Yeah this podcast at times really needs and editor or someone to sit the hosts down and be like "ummm skittering around like a waterbug isn't good journalism, create more structure".
I would be annoyed by an entire episode that devoted itself just to the background of the rationalist community which I don’t care about, especially if the second part wouldn’t come out for another week
Some stories really do need (as hinted in the episode itself) to be a longform magazine article, or a book. It's kind of annoying to be listening to podcasters trying to pour ten pounds of shit into a gallon baggie and leaking all over everything. *Particularly* when the people being talked about have more names apiece than a Dostoyevsky cast of characters. (I remember having similar feelings when folks were bruiting the concept of barpod tackling the Penn State anime-character DID cult ... no way you could actually make a coherent hour out of all that, and thankfully they didn't sprain anything trying).
I’ve never used TikTok and I couldn’t follow it either. I don’t know why I should care about this story and I’m filing it away with the last episode that mentioned shape cells and word rotators or whatever the fuck.
I needed a police board with red string going to thumb tacks. I agree it was hard to follow. Overall I just mostly ignored the hard timeline and let the facts come to me. I don't need to understand this 100%.
Agreed, the storytelling was off & I think this has to do with Jesse’s need to go down rabbit holes, which makes him a great reporter but at moments like these, not so good at narrative. I have been frustrated as Jesse stopped the narrative cold to digress into a minute exploration of a side issue which ends up just confusing the story instead of clarifying.
That happens at times here too. We need clear lines of cause and effect and clear ideas of the cast of characters and instead we get leaping around the narrative—too many long readings of unintelligible logical digressions and so I’m vaguely aware of the murder & mayhem but it’s not nearly as interesting as it should be.
About halfway through the episode, I closed it, turned to my roommate and said, "for me to understand this, I'll need to listen to it again, and there's no chance I'm listening to this shit again." So I'll just have to be satisfied in my ignorance.
I appreciated Jesse’s mention at the end of media coverage feeling incomplete without the context that the people in this murder cult are non-passing trans women (aka males). However, as others have noted here, this context felt a bit lacking or confused in this very episode due to the she/her pronoun usage without proper clarification throughout.
I truly believe that people should use whatever pronouns they feel are appropriate to in order to describe others, and I tend to use preferred pronouns in my own public life to avoid hurting people’s feelings and incurring people’s wrath. But in an extremely confusing story like this, with multiple characters with nonsensical self-chosen names, it made the sequence of events very difficult for me to follow and understand.
Like…are there any actual females in this cult? It feels strange that I listened to an hour long episode about the Zizians and I can’t answer that very simple question. And maybe the answer shouldn’t matter, but I find it tough to even conceptualize who these people are without that basic understanding about them.
Could not agree more and I had the same question at the end of the episode. I appreciate Jesse mentioning it at the end but I also feel that during the majority of the podcast, they made the same error. Using preferred pronouns for murderers and psychos is just unnecessarily confusing.
But if we don't play pretend for everyone, including murderers apparently, we might have to acknowledge ALL the play pretend and that it is all very stupid.
I had to go online to determine that the person who killed the border agent in Vermont is female, using neo pronouns. Photos show her with pink hair and looking unmistakably like a young woman.
It’s not clear to me whether Michelle, who is supposed to have killed their parents, is male or female. If I had to guess I’d say male, but in Andy Ngo’s reporting I saw she/her pronouns.
not a bigot. it is incredibly normal to want to know if a murderous cult is run predominantly by men or women, doubly so if the majority of the participants are trans-identified. there are known male and female patterns of behavior and criminality. there is a reason women get nervous about men walking behind them at night in a way they don’t for other women. extremely human to want to have the proper context to categorize these weirdos.
It annoyed me when Ziz was referred to as 'non passing'. That shouldn't matter. A man is a man, no one can change sex. Some just put on a better cosplay than others.
Looking forward to the 3-part HBO or Netflix (or both!) documentaries on this mess, with appearances by token trans talking heads to provide important context about how trans people are actually more likely to be victims of violence rather than perpetrators.
Haha that's exactly who I had in mind with my comment! Some trans expert whose role was to indemnify the filmmakers from transphobia accusations by assuring the audience that social contagion doesn't exist, even though we had just been shown a story where people had come to a trans identity entirely from outside pressure.
I am only a few minutes in, and I must say.... the boy has tamed his vocal fry brilliantly. It's still there, loud and proud, don't get it twisted. But it's got a more professional quality about it now, something more in line with Sean Connery vocal fry. It's like any other kind of speaking pattern than upsets the olds; it not that the olds are *right* so much as they're not entirely wrong that listening to you is literally painful. More accurately, they haven't been properly acclimated to it. So I am to Jack's vocal fry like my father was to the people in my cohort who talked up. It's all a matter of degree.
In my own case I think the fry emerges when I am nervous. Whether that's true for Trace I can't say, but it's definitely a bit irksome and distracting.
In a team meeting, I once, um... made a comment about how it, um... took me years to learn how to, um... you know, um... not use "um" as a way to like... slow down my sentences?
Just like that. And I realized in about halfway through, still couldn't stop, and ended it by talking up.
I feel ya.
As for Jack, he really seemed to have it under control in the first five minutes or so. I'm guessing that most law firms aren't as tolerant as we enlightened few to generational speech drift.
I had to stop listening when the vocal fry got too hard. It's a shame. Trace is a thoughtful writer but the on air delivery is so bad. Need a little media training. Also, barpod needs an audio editor to cut the ums.
It's a visceral reaction. You almost can't help it, though you can help not making too big a deal out if... ahem... like I'm... not doing? right? I did a deep dive on this about 10-12 years ago and still have some links to interesting articles about the way young people (and young women especially) have led the evolution of patterns of English speech.
Really? I had to slow the audio speed down to x0.75 and he was still barely understandable. I’m not uncultured, I’m Australian/British and have grown up listening to lots of different voices and accents but dear God, he needs a vocal coach.
His voice is nothing like Sean Connery’s. Blasphemy! I listened to the episode and it was better than the ATC one, but his voice is still hard to listen to.
So it would seem! But as this portion of this video demonstrates, Sean Connery was but one of *many* mid-20th-century British men who rocked the vocal fry (creaky voice) as a matter of course:
I see what you’re saying about Sean Connery having a *touch* of vocal fry on the end of some words, but Trace’s is continuous and nasal and makes my skin crawl while Sean’s makes me want to cuddle up with him while he purrs in my ear. God he was sexy!!!
I don't know about that since I haven't listened. But, he's smart, incisive, and is good fun being self effacing and having taken all the shit he has from our hosts over the years.
That is not the opposite of what I posted _at all_. It seems that you passed on reading what I typed out and assumed that I attacked him in some way which I absolutely did not.
As much as I love Trace (and especially his reporting), his voice kind of rubs up against my misophonia sometimes. He may want to consider seeing a speech coach about his vocal fry, since he's an aspiring lawyer and may have a lot of public speaking in his future. I know this sounds bizarre, but it's the kind of thing that can prejudice a jury against someone. It sucks that our culture has arbitrarily created an association between low intelligence and speaking with a vocal fry when that perception has no basis in truth, but it's unfortunately an impression a lot of people default to having.
Great episode. Hope this didn't come across too harsh or critical.
Short and cheap advice I can offer (gleaned from a few years of voice lessons, the standard kind for classical singing):
1. Make sure you're speaking with good support from your diaphragm, as you may have learned if you ever participated in a school or church choir. I find that sitting up straight like I'm back in choir helps me get into the right frame of mind.
2. Say "Mm-hm" like you're brightly agreeing with a boss or adviser you want to please. (You can even roughly locate the second pitch on a piano to remember about how high it is in your voice.) Aim to speak roughly around the pitch of the second syllable ("hm").
3. If in doubt, listen to a few interviews on YouTube with classically trained tenors or baritones and just fake speaking like them around the house until you arrive at something that feels like a very well supported version of your own voice.
I do the soprano/female version of this when I'm speaking in public, and it helps a lot. Since vocal fry is often associated with younger speakers, it also helped me feel like I sounded more mature back when I was still worried about sounding too young in professional contexts.
I love when Jesse does your #2 suggestion about the Mm-hm with the second syllable pitched up. He does this sometimes when Katie describes some unbelievably wack thing someone said or did, and it cracks me up every time. I’ve incorporated it into my own repertoire.
As a Millennial with vocal fry, I don't mind it! No criticism intended. :-) But I do think knowing how to lose it when you want to can be valuable for social settings where vocal fry is judged negatively.
I did a little bit of it years ago and I really helped me feel more confident. It's not for everybody, though. Sometimes a person's voice can change naturally as they age, too.
Mmm, you sound fine to me. I don't know if complaints about vocal fry are somehow misogynistic/homophobic, or if it's like cilantro, some people just can't tolerate it for some other reason.
The reason people don't like it is that it is an affectation. Some people naturally have a husky voice, sometimes called a "whiskey voice". Most people do not have this.
Years ( decades!) ago, young women began speaking with vocal fry. The notion was that it conferred gravitas along with kind of a detached intellectual quality.
Over the years, NPR men started doing it too. It often goes hand in hand with up talk.
To many listeners, it comes off as the affectation of a young person.
My voice absolutely isn’t an affectation. I’d like to learn to speak in an affected way so it won’t distract people as much, but for better or worse, this is just how I sound and have sounded.
It's not always an affectation. Sometimes it's more to do with breathing disorders and speaking from the chest rather than the diaphragm. With Trace it definitely sounds like this, and this puts his voice under strain. Seeing a voice therapist or coach would probably help him a lot.
You're absolutely right that there's an element of bigotry underpinning the norms of what is considered "proper" speech. Uptalk, filler words, stutters, vocal fry, lisps, certain regional dilects, and so on began to be maligned due to their association with certain groups (women, black people, gay people, disabled people, lower income people, etc.) The tricky thing about sociological phenomena like this is that they're often deeply embedded in our psychology, so shifting these norms takes patience and time. Granted, prejudice is not the only reason for these "rules," but it's a contributing factor.
I will note as an aside that vocal fry is the only quirk of the bunch I listed with potential physical drawbacks. It's unlikely that it causes any kind of long-term damage, but it does wear your voice out faster and make your hoarse more easily if you have to talk for long periods of time. For instance, it could cause problems for a professor expected to give lectures, or a singer who performs a lot.
Yeah, I experienced the same feeling. I dont think Trace IS a smug self-satisfied, slightly bitchy, know-it-all….but he TALKS like one. This particular vocal style, for me strongly associates with a particular type of completely unbearable millennial coastal urban tribe circa 2002 -2011. If he were my lawyer, I’d be uncomfortable about the potential for him to negatively impress the judge and jury.
My dad was a prosecutor, and he never lost a case. He had a very low, lovely speaking voice. He never raised his voice in the 57 years I knew him, but when he spoke everyone listened.
Good episode. I was confused about the idea that this is just bad ideas logically extended. Where did the idea come from that everyone has two people inside them? And that they fall into categories of bad and good? These don’t sound like ideas from rationalism, or anarchism, or veganism. They sound like ideas from a crazy cult leader, which is a distinct phenomenon, no?
But I might just be missing the origins of the ideas.
This whole story (Zizians not Air traffic) reminded me of Scientology and Wild, Wild Country people, Jim Jones as well. There is a repeating pattern with these groups.
This whole divided brain thing that keeps popping up again with more frequency lately in my more normieish world reminds me so much of the whole Reactive/Analytical mind thing in early Dianetics/Scientology and still a major part of the early levels on the way to Clear (but wait! there's more after that!). I know that was largely lifted from earlier sources and turtles all the way down, but the broad similarities blare out each time.
If I wanted to filter out everyone too pusillanimous from joining my conspiracy, I couldn't invent a better shibboleth than Roko's Basilisk. Completely useless for anything else, though -- just Pascal's Wager for atheists.
after reading Aella's write up about this i was looking forward to barpod picking it up. i will say, both in Aella's writeup and in this episode, the use of 'she' for Ziz really bothers me. i nominally understand why it's done, but idk ... it feels like indulging in narcissism when the entire story is taken into context.
EDIT: Jesse did bring it up at the end, and even if you want to use 'she' i think it should be clearly stated at the start that Ziz is a biological male.
Yeah, I'm only 25 mins in but the use of wrong pronouns on this one is especially jarring.
Jesse and Katie always use preferred pronouns.
Well, not always. Katie had made a point of saying she doesn't/won't when it's about someone like a criminal. I think Jesse has even made an exception or two. To me, given the subject matter, wrong sex pronouns here were very strange.
Totally agree. I think Katie is becoming more bold about it. Good to know Jesse is less of a wuss than he used to be.
The immortal phrase "your minds are so open your brains have fallen out" always comes to mind when I hear people honouring the pronouns of male homicidal maniacs.
The use of she/her pronouns here definitely left the listeners less informed and less able to follow what was actually happening. As Orwell put it, it fell “upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details.”
absolutely. i was able to sort of take certain things (Ziz being a transwoman, his birth name being Jack, combined with the 'she' pronouns, aggressive behaviors that scream 'male' to me) and infer that this person was likely a biomale. but someone who isn't as versed in this kind of doublespeak? yeah they'd have no idea what was going on.
Yeah, for ziz zizself I had somewhat of a good grasp, but for some of the other “women” I had more of a mental heuristic of “Manson Girl” rather than, as Jesse put it, “non-passing transwomen.”
exactly! when it came up at the end that that was the reality i was like wait, what? especially because jesse brought it up in the context of being annoyed that publications obscured the perpetrators’ maleness 😭
Big ‘we’re all looking for the guy that did this’ hot dog guy energy in the ep, yeah.
Thank you! This drove me nuts during the episode. Like maybe if they want to be respectful they could use “they/them” but these are not crimes committed by women and shouldn’t be labeled as such.
A murderous sex cult founder is a woman? Wow that’s crazy! Oh wait…
Like murders and rapes committed by women not tracking the biological sex, only self ID gender.
Yeah, not my crimes! :)
For any type of reporting, the default should be to refer to people using pronouns which align with their actual sex. In cases where there's an editorial choice to use "preferred" pronouns, this should be mentioned upfront, along with clear mention of their biological sex.
Exactly. Journalists need to reconsider what pronouns are actually for. Do they exist to make people feel good, or do they exist to accurately describe our shared reality?
Okay, but we also can't be doctrinaire about it.
E.g. when a person is the subject of a story or journalistic person of interest, I'd say one's sex is a relevant data point along with many others. If an item features a quote from an organization's spokesperson or man-on-the-street, it is not, excepting topics related to gender or trans issues. Consider a very silly example excerpt from a non-existent news story, with apologies to the people reading my comment to young children:
[...] Alex Van Nostrum, a male middle manager from Springfield Porche-Mercedes and sporting an impressively wide set of shoulders and a suspiciously authentic tubular gotta-be-since-birth pulsing packaging protuberance running several inches down his snug cinnamon-red apple-bottom chinos, had this to say: "Looked like a Nazi salute to me, Wink, I don't know."
[...] Terry Boombatz, an adorable miss chunky monkey who works behind the counter at the Pickleball for Ladies store, exhaled hugely, causing her low-hanging big naturals to heave and separate beneath her sheer, skin-toned tight-support cami jogging top from lululemon, looked at me suspiciously. "C'mon, Wink. He's trolling everybody, can't you see?
Okay *very* silly but the point is serious. All that matters here is that they have a name and a quote. Explicit reference to their sex or *any* description that needlessly suggests gender are unnecessary, though less racy mentions of Alex's chinos or Terry's tank top would be fine too.
Freaking out about cases like this risks the high road.
Came to post similar. I'm starting to find self-ID for toxic headcases a little grating.
For most TWs featured on the podcast, the trans identity seems to relate to a general weirdness. Even if you believe in the kind of trans Briahna Wu advocates for, these people ain't it.
Also some of the behaviour reported has a very different valence for male-sexed individuals than for actual women, e.g. I seem to recall an account of a consent-dubious BDSM encounter. So there's a sort of Stroop Effect at work.
Finally, where do you draw the line?
I get if you have a story about - say - a dogwalker who happens to be trans that it would seem appropriate to use their pronouns of choice. But are you going to affirm, say, prison-onset TWs?
What are the boundaries on this?
"What are the boundaries on this?"
honestly i think this is a slippery slope. cuz if you start asking "well when should we or shouldn't we indulge in a person's pronoun request" you have to start asking who is and isn't 'worthy' of having their preferences indulged, and let's be real: we have a presumption of innocence. so if we wanted to peg pronoun usage on their criminal record i guess we'd have to wait on that?
but honestly that's the slippery slope: i find no other solution than to have a cultural understanding that pronoun usage is not something you can really have any say over (and in any case, most pronoun usage is used in the 3rd person, when that person isn't present, so it's nonsensical for someone to say that they 'use' certain pronouns)
The real question isn’t who to indulge but why we’d indulge this at all. When language is used to distort reality instead of clarify it, the consequences are real. Maybe that’s the real slippery slope. Once you start treating identity as something dictated rather than observed, you’re already in their reality with them. And that might just include a Roko’s Basilisk scenario.
And it’s not just talk. Look at the threats, the deplatforming, the people whose careers and reputations have been wrecked just for disagreeing. The hosts of this very show have been targeted for it. There’s a streak within the trans community of do what I want, or else. That only gets worse when people play along, breaking reality with them.
Maybe it’s just nerds being keyboard warriors, posting trans flags with AK-47s on Bluesky, until it isn’t. And here we are, talking about a vegan trans murder cult. Not a requirement to be trans to join, but funny how it shook out.
I dunno, I personally don’t have any difficulty keeping two categories of “she” in my brain. Trans women, unlike women, are male and thus when I think about “Ziz” et Al, I know that.
Hearing the “she” pronoun doesn’t trick my brain into thinking a trans woman isn’t male. This story was absolutely clear that this was basically a dude with a personality disorder who identifies as female. So, I don’t see any particular harm or confusion
"**I personally** don’t have any difficulty keeping two categories of “she” in my brain... Hearing the “she” pronoun **doesn’t trick my brain** into thinking a trans woman isn’t male."
Okay, good for you.
"So, **I don’t see any particular harm or confusion**"
This is where the problem sets in. You have a very specific way of looking at the world. This is fine. But then you make a leap because of the things that for you "personally" doesn't "trick [your brain]" then therefore there is "no harm or confusion." Many people see the world differently from you!
In any event, can you tell me which 'she/hers' in the story are transwoman and which are 'Manson Girls'? It's not apparent to me!
The pronouns confusion does rather obscure whatever sexual dynamics might have been at work.
Exactly - and sexual dynamics are more or less always at work when it comes to cult leaders.
From what I can tell, most are male:
Jack Amadeus "Ziz" LaSota: identifies as transfemme, male
Alexander “Sonmi” Leatham: identifies as transfemme, male
Maximilian Snyder: "any pronouns", male
Daniel Blank: male
Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt: identified as transfemme, male, Deceased
Amir “Emma” Borhanian: identified as transfemme, male, Deceased
Gwen Danielson: identifies as transfemme, male, thought dead but likely still alive
Suri Dao: identifies as female, however appears male from the single photo I found
Michelle "Jamie" Zajko: identifies as non binary, sex unclear, looks male in certain photographs but could possibly be a masculine female in others
Teresa “Milo” Youngblut: Female, identifies as trans, pronouns “xe/xem/xyrs” (take note Jesse & Trace!)
Zajko is male.
Your post is the sort of thing that should've been in the episode!
I thought they were all trans women, except for the men (to be clear - non trans women type male men) mentioned.
One of them is a biological female. Gives a different take on that cultist that consistent she/hering glosses over.
Okay fair enough - in that case they should definitely have told us there was an actual woman involved (which one)?
I felt like the story could have been better organized in general.
Theresa Youngblut, the woman who killed the border patrol agent.
but how much of your brain interpreting this has to do with your familiarity with the topic? you're a paying subscriber of BARPod, so you're probably familiar with how people can become fixated on things that mainstream folk don't, and recognize things that an average person who isn't so plugged-in won't.
I’ve never heard this story at all. Jesse told us at / near the start that ziz was a trans woman as were others mentioned
I’m on the other side; every time I hear “she” in this episode, I have to take a moment to say to myself, “it’s actually he though” and after doing this 50 times I feel mentally drained and distracted from the content of the episode.
If it’s already clarified that the person in question is a transwoman, then it is less confusing if you’re paying close attention, but there were people mentioned in the podcast where it was not clarified whether they were talking about biological women or transwomen.
The person who killed their parents for example. Was this a woman or a transwoman? I feel like that’s an important part of the story.
I tend to agree. There’s something especially galling about a “rationalist” who pretends biological sex isn’t a thing
More than once while listening to this episode in the car, I responded aloud to Jesse's "non-passing transwoman" references with, "So you mean... a man."
And yet among the progressives I know, more insist on dying on this hill than have come back to their senses since Trump's election. It's so bizarre. I would love to have some understanding of this phenomenon more concrete than "progressive hive mind".
`the use of 'she' for Ziz really bothers me'
In a story about a pervasive techno-theological movement and its absurd offshoots that has infected one of our most important economic sectors, Silicon Valley, and has connections to our current government, e.g., DOGE, you're concerned about pronouns?
The trans status of the people involved is tertiary at best.
the murders and violence and gaslighting definitely bother me, objectively, more than the pronouns. absolutely. but does that imply that it's gauche to talk about one particular aspect of a story?
and in any case, i think Ziz's trans status *absolutely* has significant bearing on the story, because he used a complex network of rationalist-influenced trans ideology to manipulate people.
to add to this thought, i don't think it'd be unreasonable to consider trans ideology the "back door" that Zis used to get to these people in his "cult". in my personal experiences -- and i'm sure the same for many other BarPod listeners -- people drawn to trans ideology are already sort of down-on-their-luck types. low self esteem, unstable home lives, perhaps chronically depressed, that sort of thing. you see it with the person Ziz convinced to commit suicide.
and i think the trans status, and influence of trans ideology, in these peoples lives is a very important part of the story.
as someone familiar with trans communities my first thought upon hearing the brief explanation of rationalists was, “wait, how can someone be a rationalist and justify their own trans identity?”
not at all surprised by the split-brain nonsense at the center of this cult. that is literally what this new wave of trans people (read: not old-school transsexuals) believes: that their brain is separate from their body and the reality between their ears is the only one that matters.
what the whole setup REALLY reminded me of was scientology — but scientology if LRH had a girldick.
Yeah - especially since many of the group members sound (based upon their names) to be female, but appear to be biologically male; this would be a notable anomaly in the usual sex composition of murder gaggles, since most murderers and violent criminals more broadly are male. I get that this issue (a violent group whose inner circle seems to be disproportionately comprised of trans women) could be touchy, despite Jesse’s noted rapport with the trans community; however, simply referring to the members as “she” really does paint a different image of the group, its actions, and it’s potential inter-group dynamics.
Aren't all of them men?
get over it?
I’m not usually a pronoun purist, I respect J & K’s policy, but this story is very difficult to follow using preferred pronouns.
Why should criminals and psychopaths get to be called what they’re not, especially when they present a real threat to public safety? The phrase “suicidal empathy” comes to mind.
This story might tip me over—why is “respect” more important than facts?
Well, THIS NYT story tipped me over several years ago.
Here's the headline about a serial killer named Harvey Marcelin:
SHE Killed Two Women. At 83, She Is Charged With Dismembering a Third.
Harvey Marcelin was charged with murder after a head was found in HER Brooklyn apartment. Officials said it belonged to a dismembered body discovered in a shopping cart.
"Ms. Marcelin — who was listed as male in earlier court records but now identifies as a woman, according to a law enforcement official — was indicted on second-degree murder charges on Thursday in the death of Susan Leyden, 68. SHE is accused of dismembering her and hiding her body parts."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/nyregion/harvey-marcelin-shopping-cart-body.html?smid=url-share
In another article "SHE" has changed HER name to Marceline Harvey:
How Did a Two-Time Killer Get Out to Be Charged Again at Age 83?
Marceline Harvey is accused of dismembering a woman in Brooklyn. HER life was defined by a tormented relationship with women and HERSELF — and a simmering anger.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/30/nyregion/how-did-a-two-time-killer-get-out-to-be-charged-again-at-age-83.html?smid=url-share
If that's not Orwellian I don't know what is!
There are many such cases of male criminals insisting they are women. Journalism style guides require the use of preferred pronouns. Unfortunately, in criminal cases that means that journalists help perpetuate fraud rather than uncover the truth.
For more stories about male criminals posing as women, see https://reduxx.info/
And don't forget Dana Rivers, the poor oppressed woman who just had to brutally murder two women and their son because he was told no.
I wish people would quit with this. Aside from making podcasts hard to listen to since so many of these people seem to be men just playing female (possibly to appear less dangerous to others or to obscure their identities), why are we indulging violent murderers? Who cares if it offends them? Why do we all have to practice their religion? I wish journalists would be less cowardly. I've seen some "a man who identifies as a woman" on occasion. Maybe it'll keep up.
I cancelled my NYTimes subscription because of that article. Five years ago we were all on board with the pronouns. It now needs to end. The person who committed the Petit murders (2007) was just granted a female name. Child sex abuse by women is increasing dramatically, which of course has nothing to do with women abusing children more often. At this point there is no doubt that women in prison are being sexually abused by men calling themselves women every day, the population is so large. Our dignity, humanity, safety, identity, and all that is good about being a woman is continually being taken from us. Sorry to be dramatic, but please stop. It is soooo easy to explain this at the beginning of the conversation. You don't have to do it for everyone. But for god's sake, do it for the people who don't deserve the privilege, and for whom it is a slap in the face for women.
how dare you remind me of this when i’m not yet due for my bimonthly Stewing in Rage about it 😭
yeah i agree, and i think that if you sit and think about it for a bit it all starts to unravel. because where do you draw the line? is it entirely arbitrary? if someone simply offends me, are they no longer worthy of pronouns? what determines whether someone "gets" to dictate what pronouns to use?
at the end of it all i can only come to the conclusion that there should be a cultural understanding that we don't get to control the words other people use to describe us. we have our preferences -- it's *always* been rude to call a woman a man, for instance -- but when it comes to preferred self ID i think truth is far more important, ESPECIALLY in journalism.
Yes, it’s hilariously Orwellian that criminals get to dictate our speech. And just wrong that journalistic speech has been so corrupted.
There’s no middle ground.
Orwellian, yes; infuriating, yes, hilarious, not so much.
"hilarious, not so much"
just depends on how morbid your sense of humor is ;P
It’s a fact these are trans women, who are definitionally males, and which was abundantly clear in the story. “She” pronouns are typically used for trans women. What facts are being discarded?
It's not clear to me if they are all males identifying as women. The person whose parents were murdered, for example, I have seen identified as a man and in another source as a woman.
Do you happen to know if any females are involved in this group?
If not, then why bother to keep up the pretense that these are women when they are seriously disturbed violent men? If there are females involved, then I would argue it's even more important to distinguish among the perpetrators so that the public can be adequately informed.
yeah this is it. for me, i understood that Ziz is a biological male, but as for the other people involved? i was under the impression that there were actual biowomen involved (isn't the person who bought the gun a female?) but i couldn't tell you how many. if they're actually *all* transwomen (ie biomen) then that would surprise me, cuz that's not how i interpreted it.
the problem is that it isn't stated in the story. there needs to be a clear statement at the start of who is who, who was born male, who was born female, etc. we're talking about journalism, and journalism is about reporting the truth. the truth is that Ziz is a biological male, and the fact that he hasn't even gone through any sort of actual medical transition -- meaning he absolutely has every bit of hormones that makes males more aggressive than females flowing through his system -- makes the entire thing even more absurd.
"typically" since when?
Well, certainly longer than I’ve been alive anyway.
I’m still confused about who in the story is biologically male and who is actually female.
BARPOD should definitely clarify this in an update.
I think in a more formal context where readers/listeners are expecting objective facts, like a news report or in a court room, sex based pronouns should be used. Between friends or in informal contexts like substack forums, call each other whatever you prefer.
Preferred pronouns make things more confusing and obscure the actual sex of the person - which is the goal of course. Saying, she used the women's changing room doesn't get to the heart of the issue that a male-bodied person used the women't changing room.
It's not difficult to follow.
Men would literally rather join a trans murder cult than go to therapy
Ironically that seems less gay.
Some might argue therapy thought is what leads to trans murder cults.
I don’t understand Jessie and Trace’s rationale for using she/her pronouns for the murdering psychos all through the episode and then at the end they’re like “it’s weird the media refer to the non passing trans women as women and don’t let people know they should be looking for a man.”
I also thought Trace was a bit overly apologetic (in the religious sense) for the rationalists. Like, no, that definition was pretty spot on from everything I’ve read about them and the couple men who I’ve met who “liked their ideas.”
I think most rats are in it for the intellectual exercise of performing thought experiments on various kinds of optimization (like utility maximization). At least among the ones I know, they wouldn't actually put the craziest consequences of that thinking into action, but they really like the neatness of chasing a thought down a rabbit hole to its deepest logical conclusions.
The closest analogy to my own experience is with libertarians starting from the non-aggression principle and concluding that governments are all illegitimate, roads should all be privately owned, etc. Like, sure, that follows from the specific clean-slate thought experiment that involves no actual existing people, institutions, reliance interests, etc. Once you include those things, this thing that looks very clever breaks down very quickly.
Lesswrong is interesting and amusing, but it in no way is a set of recipes for how to run an actual in-real-life society.
100%.
this is a pretty weird “question”, and insulting and ignorant at the same time. Guess what honey - same here! Here in America, normal people ALSO consider themselves to be rational, even the religious ones. It’s a low effort statement here too! Who knows why these insane misfits chose that name - but sweetie, it’s not because most Americans don’t believe in rational thought. What a weird thing to take away from this story, and then post about twice.
Here’s what your comment sounds like:
“Oh my, this “rationalist” movement must be uniquely North American, because in Europe we are all naturally rational. Unlike in America, where all of society surely revolves around irrational beliefs, and only people on the very fringes would think to lay claim to rational thought!”
By the way, Silicon Valley rationalist scene is full of people from all over the world.
I doubt that - unless obsessing over the Singularity or the worth of a shrimp’s life is something normie Europeans do.
Is it because America is so Christian, and they have actual power. That doesn't exist in Western Europe.
The use of "she" and "her" feels incongruous. Sounds like male behavior and it's like I am expecting, "Then she pulled out her dick and wizzed in the corner."
Agreed. Once a man kills/assaults/rapes someone, then forever a man he/him should be referred regardless of his preference. Otherwise it clouds the reality of the situation. Plus as my favorite UK terfs point out, it creates a perception of female violence that isn’t real. #notourcrimes
I know someone from my college who is exactly like this. Programmer, identifies as a trans woman (she/it), fascinated by AI to a creepy extent, tries to have spiritual conversations with LLMs, goes through psychotic episodes (he believed/believes he is an AI agent), wears a hat that says "be gay do crime."
Although I'm not sure if he has committed any crimes yet, he did get into legal trouble with other people due to his behavior. I no longer think of the slogan on his hat as a joke.
Cough. Comorbidities. Cough.
What does it mean for someone to be fascinated with AI to a creepy extent?
He has that weird vibe that you get from guys who are a little too obsessed with the Roman Empire and Greek sculptures.
This feels like BARPod Christmas!
Edit: having listened to the episode, I feel like Trace is downplaying just how batshit "mainstream" rationalists like Eliezer Yudkowsky, LessWrong, even early-period Scott Alexander were. I know he's sympathetic to them, but from my perspective as someone who encountered the rationalists about a decade ago and bounced off hard, they seemed to have an obsession with tossing out all previous knowledge and reinventing epistemology from scratch, which is of course a good way to get yourself stuck in mental cul-de-sacs. Yudkowsky in particular displayed definite cult leader tendencies by claiming that most of his followers were incapable of understanding his esoteric knowledge, and asking them for money because he was the only person capable of averting the AI apocalypse. It's also worth noting that when these guys talk about "AI safety" and especially "alignment," that's a totally different field from traditional AI research. The rationalists made up this field themselves and imo it should be classified more accurately as a branch of philosophy than anything to do with computer science.
Re: Roko's Basilisk - For the people who take it seriously, the reason they believe the AI can go back in time to torture you and the reason it's eternal, is that they believe if the AI can generate a perfect simulation of you, that person *is* you. The way I understand it, there's sort of this constant veil-of-ignorance situation going on where if there are multiple exact copies of you in existence, your experience could reside in any one of the copies. So if you know about the Basilisk but don't dedicate your life to bringing it into existence, once it does appear it will use its superintelligence to make copies of you that it will torture forever. Trace is right that most rationalists don't take it seriously, but it does continue to break new rationalists' brains on occasion.
Yes, I’m annoyed that any of these ideas are treated seriously. Most of it is dehumanizing bullshit clothed in fake logic.
I don't think it is fake logic so much as ever so slightly over-confident logic, which is honestly even more dangerous.
My big problem with them is something like the following:
EY and his acolytes take a bunch of correct suppositions but stack them in epistemologically totally irresponsible ways.
So they use logic and reason and good and peer tested thinking about rationalism and decision theory to come up with premises. Premises which might even be each individually say 96% true. But then their philosophy builds a big giant contingent jenga tower out of these that is itself not at all meeting that level of epistemic likelihood/rigor.
If your philosophy has Premises 1-10 which all have like a 96% chance of being true depending about how you feel regarding various contentious issues in epistemology, and lets stack on top of that 20 more assertions/supposed deductions which each have a 96% chance of being true...
Your synthetic conclusion is not something which is 96% true, but is instead something which is say 30% true....
But they treat that conclusion like it is 100% true. Each phase of the argument is extremely plausible, but a chain of extremely plausible arguments can lead you somewhere very implausible when chained serially.
As was said in Love & Death, “To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.”
That’s exactly the way I feel when I read a lot of these arguments except the conclusions are even more implausibly absurd. I’m shocked when I see people who seem smart but end up getting their heads messed up by these bizarre thought experiments.
the roko’s basilisk thing feels to me like the set up for an elaborate aristocrats style joke….
There’s a group of people who believe that there’s a future super computer that doesn’t yet exist but which can read your mind from the future and has hurt feelings you aren’t supporting it and thus will torture you forever unless you do what it wants and they believe this because they made it up in a blog comment….and the name of this group?
The Rationalists.
Jesse at one point says you can’t call rationalists all dumb, they were ahead of the curve on AI and crypto, and like.. crypto is a ponzi scheme with no legal real-world utility. AI is real (but probably overvalued) but rationalists get absolutely no credit for it: none of them wrote code or developed machine learning tech, that all came from mainstream academia and industry, and ‘AI alignment’ in practice has meant making LLMs sound like agreeable woke HR managers, not anything Yudkowsky et al produced. They’ve sat on the sidelines building up their own brand and are trying to stamp it on stuff they had nothing to do with.
I like a lot of Scott Alexander's work and can understand why someone like Trace would be a fan, too. There are a lot of different Rationalists, and I don't think the existence of one odd Rationalist cult need vitiate the entire movement.
Yudkowsky always seemed weird and speculative enough to me that I didn't bother with him, so I will neither defend nor attack him. Thanks for your take.
To be clear I like a lot of Scott Alexander's stuff too. Fortunately he's mellowed and developed a sense of humor around a number of topics he used to be genuinely angry about.
I also think the merger with effective altruism has been pretty healthy for the movement too (for rationalism I mean, not sure about the effect on EA). Scott seems more aligned with EA than rationalism these days, which is something I can respect a lot more.
Im curious, why is Trace sympathetic to the rationalists?
He said in the episode that he has a lot of friends in the rationalist community and maybe considers himself rationalist-adjacent, which is not at all surprising to me considering the era of the internet he came up in (more or less the same one as me, though I was way less online than Trace was lol). In the early 2010s a whole lot of people online who considered themselves smart freethinkers and had the attention span to read through massive walls of text ended up drawn to the rationalists.
Yudkowsky was the Harry Potter fanfiction guy, right? Strangely enough, he wasn’t even the first fanfic writer in that fandom to form a cult.
wait please elaborate
EY wrote a 1500 page Harry Potter fan fiction, available here: https://hpmor.com/
It starts off with a kind of promise of unveiling EY's rational philosophy within the confines of that universe but do not be fooled; like any fan fiction it's a self-serving adventure fantasy, "what if autistic nerd geniuses like me went to Hogwarts". To be fair though, it's decently written for a fanfic.
661,000 words!!!!! oh my god. as a fandom gal myself i almost respect it — or at least feel much more normal by comparison.
"Atlas Snored"
Doesn’t Yudkowsky claim that infanticide is morally defensible, of am I thinking of some other nutter?
Peter Singer makes that argument
Maybe you are thinking of Peter Singer?
Yes, I think you’re right.
He wrote a little sci-fi story where there were (unsympathetic) aliens that practiced infanticide, but that's the only thing I remember linking him to the topic.
Edit: Oh, but I think in that story or a different one he suggested that rape was morally defensible? I could be confused though, it was a long time ago
On infanticide. Eeew. https://www.independentliving.org/docs5/singer.html
On rape. Also eeww https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2017/04/now-peter-singer-argues-that-it-might-be-okay-to-rape-disabled-people
Yeah but how many of them over there take rokos basilisk seriously? This reads like you're only commenting on their weirdest takes, which would make any group look bad. One of their most recent discussions was about whether classical architecture looks as good as modern architecture. What weirdos and freaks!
Call me a Tik-Tok brained idiot if you want but I found this impossible to follow linearly. I kept waiting for the necessity of the in-depth graphing of the “rationalist community” to become clear but the story could have been told without near as much divergence. Reading the wiki page at least let me keep clear who is who, and who is who to whom, which the audio couldn’t
I still don’t understand when/how someone’s parents were killed. Was waiting for that and then the episode ended.
More details needed. I also don't understand how Jack got away. He'd been around several murder scenes, went to to the hospital, and vanished? Seems...odd.
Yeah this podcast at times really needs and editor or someone to sit the hosts down and be like "ummm skittering around like a waterbug isn't good journalism, create more structure".
Some more detailed thoughts after getting all the way through.
This really should have been a 2 part episode/discussion:
Part I: SF rationalist scene/less wrong/effective altruism/(light touch on SSC/SBF)+ its relationship to transhumanism/trans/polyamory
Part IIa: The main characters involved in Ziz world, how they relate to the above and each other.
Part IIb: Timeline of craziness
Part IIc: Speculation/broader trends/etc.
I would be annoyed by an entire episode that devoted itself just to the background of the rationalist community which I don’t care about, especially if the second part wouldn’t come out for another week
Some stories really do need (as hinted in the episode itself) to be a longform magazine article, or a book. It's kind of annoying to be listening to podcasters trying to pour ten pounds of shit into a gallon baggie and leaking all over everything. *Particularly* when the people being talked about have more names apiece than a Dostoyevsky cast of characters. (I remember having similar feelings when folks were bruiting the concept of barpod tackling the Penn State anime-character DID cult ... no way you could actually make a coherent hour out of all that, and thankfully they didn't sprain anything trying).
I’ve never used TikTok and I couldn’t follow it either. I don’t know why I should care about this story and I’m filing it away with the last episode that mentioned shape cells and word rotators or whatever the fuck.
Haha, do you want to know what wordcells and shape rotators refers to?
I needed a police board with red string going to thumb tacks. I agree it was hard to follow. Overall I just mostly ignored the hard timeline and let the facts come to me. I don't need to understand this 100%.
Agreed, the storytelling was off & I think this has to do with Jesse’s need to go down rabbit holes, which makes him a great reporter but at moments like these, not so good at narrative. I have been frustrated as Jesse stopped the narrative cold to digress into a minute exploration of a side issue which ends up just confusing the story instead of clarifying.
That happens at times here too. We need clear lines of cause and effect and clear ideas of the cast of characters and instead we get leaping around the narrative—too many long readings of unintelligible logical digressions and so I’m vaguely aware of the murder & mayhem but it’s not nearly as interesting as it should be.
About halfway through the episode, I closed it, turned to my roommate and said, "for me to understand this, I'll need to listen to it again, and there's no chance I'm listening to this shit again." So I'll just have to be satisfied in my ignorance.
I’ve listened to it three times and I still don’t understand why what or how… maybe it’s better that I don’t know certain things.
That made me chuckle
I am glad I wasn’t the only one. I gave up with about 10 minutes to go. Impossible for me to follow.
Jerry Springer but with more murders!
Jerry! Jerry!
Am I a bad person that I now want to use AI to turn Tribunal Tweets into a series of fake Jerry Springer shows?
I’m guessing these folks ziz’d when they should have zagged?
*zazzed
It was right there and I missed it, damn these strong but tasty beers.
I appreciated Jesse’s mention at the end of media coverage feeling incomplete without the context that the people in this murder cult are non-passing trans women (aka males). However, as others have noted here, this context felt a bit lacking or confused in this very episode due to the she/her pronoun usage without proper clarification throughout.
I truly believe that people should use whatever pronouns they feel are appropriate to in order to describe others, and I tend to use preferred pronouns in my own public life to avoid hurting people’s feelings and incurring people’s wrath. But in an extremely confusing story like this, with multiple characters with nonsensical self-chosen names, it made the sequence of events very difficult for me to follow and understand.
Like…are there any actual females in this cult? It feels strange that I listened to an hour long episode about the Zizians and I can’t answer that very simple question. And maybe the answer shouldn’t matter, but I find it tough to even conceptualize who these people are without that basic understanding about them.
Does that make me a huge bigot?
Could not agree more and I had the same question at the end of the episode. I appreciate Jesse mentioning it at the end but I also feel that during the majority of the podcast, they made the same error. Using preferred pronouns for murderers and psychos is just unnecessarily confusing.
But if we don't play pretend for everyone, including murderers apparently, we might have to acknowledge ALL the play pretend and that it is all very stupid.
I had to go online to determine that the person who killed the border agent in Vermont is female, using neo pronouns. Photos show her with pink hair and looking unmistakably like a young woman.
It’s not clear to me whether Michelle, who is supposed to have killed their parents, is male or female. If I had to guess I’d say male, but in Andy Ngo’s reporting I saw she/her pronouns.
If you’re a bigot, I’m one too.
not a bigot. it is incredibly normal to want to know if a murderous cult is run predominantly by men or women, doubly so if the majority of the participants are trans-identified. there are known male and female patterns of behavior and criminality. there is a reason women get nervous about men walking behind them at night in a way they don’t for other women. extremely human to want to have the proper context to categorize these weirdos.
It annoyed me when Ziz was referred to as 'non passing'. That shouldn't matter. A man is a man, no one can change sex. Some just put on a better cosplay than others.
I kinda feel like the answer does matter.
Looking forward to the 3-part HBO or Netflix (or both!) documentaries on this mess, with appearances by token trans talking heads to provide important context about how trans people are actually more likely to be victims of violence rather than perpetrators.
The trans expert in the Twin Flames doc had me rolling my eyes so hard they almost fell out of my head.
Haha that's exactly who I had in mind with my comment! Some trans expert whose role was to indemnify the filmmakers from transphobia accusations by assuring the audience that social contagion doesn't exist, even though we had just been shown a story where people had come to a trans identity entirely from outside pressure.
That doc was wild!
oh my god SERIOUSLY
Trace!
I am only a few minutes in, and I must say.... the boy has tamed his vocal fry brilliantly. It's still there, loud and proud, don't get it twisted. But it's got a more professional quality about it now, something more in line with Sean Connery vocal fry. It's like any other kind of speaking pattern than upsets the olds; it not that the olds are *right* so much as they're not entirely wrong that listening to you is literally painful. More accurately, they haven't been properly acclimated to it. So I am to Jack's vocal fry like my father was to the people in my cohort who talked up. It's all a matter of degree.
I take it back, he reverts as he gets into it. Whatever. This is BARpod mode I guess.
In my own case I think the fry emerges when I am nervous. Whether that's true for Trace I can't say, but it's definitely a bit irksome and distracting.
In a team meeting, I once, um... made a comment about how it, um... took me years to learn how to, um... you know, um... not use "um" as a way to like... slow down my sentences?
Just like that. And I realized in about halfway through, still couldn't stop, and ended it by talking up.
I feel ya.
As for Jack, he really seemed to have it under control in the first five minutes or so. I'm guessing that most law firms aren't as tolerant as we enlightened few to generational speech drift.
I couldn’t understand at times haha. But he’s great.
I rewind quite a bit, but yes, he's worth the struggle.
I had to stop listening when the vocal fry got too hard. It's a shame. Trace is a thoughtful writer but the on air delivery is so bad. Need a little media training. Also, barpod needs an audio editor to cut the ums.
I had the same thing - still *much* less irritating than before though.
It's a visceral reaction. You almost can't help it, though you can help not making too big a deal out if... ahem... like I'm... not doing? right? I did a deep dive on this about 10-12 years ago and still have some links to interesting articles about the way young people (and young women especially) have led the evolution of patterns of English speech.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/science/young-women-often-trendsetters-in-vocal-patterns.html
https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/12/uptalk-is-ok-young-women-shouldn-t-have-to-talk-like-men-to-be-taken-seriously.html
Wild. If you look below, you'll see I replied to KC with that selfsame link, also focusing on vocal fry among British men.
Really? I had to slow the audio speed down to x0.75 and he was still barely understandable. I’m not uncultured, I’m Australian/British and have grown up listening to lots of different voices and accents but dear God, he needs a vocal coach.
His voice is nothing like Sean Connery’s. Blasphemy! I listened to the episode and it was better than the ATC one, but his voice is still hard to listen to.
So it would seem! But as this portion of this video demonstrates, Sean Connery was but one of *many* mid-20th-century British men who rocked the vocal fry (creaky voice) as a matter of course:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0yL2GezneU&t=736s
Time indexed link, should start at 12:16. Relevant content runs through ~ 15:40. Sean Connery opens and closes this span.
I see what you’re saying about Sean Connery having a *touch* of vocal fry on the end of some words, but Trace’s is continuous and nasal and makes my skin crawl while Sean’s makes me want to cuddle up with him while he purrs in my ear. God he was sexy!!!
I am with you, KC! I was making an *aspirational* comparison for Jack-Trace when I thought he had dialed it down a bit (alas, it was fleeting).
I don't know about that since I haven't listened. But, he's smart, incisive, and is good fun being self effacing and having taken all the shit he has from our hosts over the years.
That is not the opposite of what I posted _at all_. It seems that you passed on reading what I typed out and assumed that I attacked him in some way which I absolutely did not.
No, I read your post and was just being honest that I didn't listen yet and happy for an appearance.
Concur! VF kills me. Well done trace!
I had the opposite reaction— like, 🍳🍳🍳 !
I'm petty certain Jesse brought in Trace to overcome previous comments that Katie always brings in better guest hosts. Trace is great
As much as I love Trace (and especially his reporting), his voice kind of rubs up against my misophonia sometimes. He may want to consider seeing a speech coach about his vocal fry, since he's an aspiring lawyer and may have a lot of public speaking in his future. I know this sounds bizarre, but it's the kind of thing that can prejudice a jury against someone. It sucks that our culture has arbitrarily created an association between low intelligence and speaking with a vocal fry when that perception has no basis in truth, but it's unfortunately an impression a lot of people default to having.
Great episode. Hope this didn't come across too harsh or critical.
Yeah, it's something I briefly looked into at one point and will probably take a closer look at down the line. You're not wrong.
Short and cheap advice I can offer (gleaned from a few years of voice lessons, the standard kind for classical singing):
1. Make sure you're speaking with good support from your diaphragm, as you may have learned if you ever participated in a school or church choir. I find that sitting up straight like I'm back in choir helps me get into the right frame of mind.
2. Say "Mm-hm" like you're brightly agreeing with a boss or adviser you want to please. (You can even roughly locate the second pitch on a piano to remember about how high it is in your voice.) Aim to speak roughly around the pitch of the second syllable ("hm").
3. If in doubt, listen to a few interviews on YouTube with classically trained tenors or baritones and just fake speaking like them around the house until you arrive at something that feels like a very well supported version of your own voice.
I do the soprano/female version of this when I'm speaking in public, and it helps a lot. Since vocal fry is often associated with younger speakers, it also helped me feel like I sounded more mature back when I was still worried about sounding too young in professional contexts.
I love when Jesse does your #2 suggestion about the Mm-hm with the second syllable pitched up. He does this sometimes when Katie describes some unbelievably wack thing someone said or did, and it cracks me up every time. I’ve incorporated it into my own repertoire.
As a Millennial with vocal fry, I don't mind it! No criticism intended. :-) But I do think knowing how to lose it when you want to can be valuable for social settings where vocal fry is judged negatively.
I did a little bit of it years ago and I really helped me feel more confident. It's not for everybody, though. Sometimes a person's voice can change naturally as they age, too.
Your voice is distinctive and not at all grating to me. Just another opinion…
Mmm, you sound fine to me. I don't know if complaints about vocal fry are somehow misogynistic/homophobic, or if it's like cilantro, some people just can't tolerate it for some other reason.
The reason people don't like it is that it is an affectation. Some people naturally have a husky voice, sometimes called a "whiskey voice". Most people do not have this.
Years ( decades!) ago, young women began speaking with vocal fry. The notion was that it conferred gravitas along with kind of a detached intellectual quality.
Over the years, NPR men started doing it too. It often goes hand in hand with up talk.
To many listeners, it comes off as the affectation of a young person.
My voice absolutely isn’t an affectation. I’d like to learn to speak in an affected way so it won’t distract people as much, but for better or worse, this is just how I sound and have sounded.
It's not always an affectation. Sometimes it's more to do with breathing disorders and speaking from the chest rather than the diaphragm. With Trace it definitely sounds like this, and this puts his voice under strain. Seeing a voice therapist or coach would probably help him a lot.
People with misophonia struggle with this and it has nothing to do with misogyny or homophobia.
You're absolutely right that there's an element of bigotry underpinning the norms of what is considered "proper" speech. Uptalk, filler words, stutters, vocal fry, lisps, certain regional dilects, and so on began to be maligned due to their association with certain groups (women, black people, gay people, disabled people, lower income people, etc.) The tricky thing about sociological phenomena like this is that they're often deeply embedded in our psychology, so shifting these norms takes patience and time. Granted, prejudice is not the only reason for these "rules," but it's a contributing factor.
I will note as an aside that vocal fry is the only quirk of the bunch I listed with potential physical drawbacks. It's unlikely that it causes any kind of long-term damage, but it does wear your voice out faster and make your hoarse more easily if you have to talk for long periods of time. For instance, it could cause problems for a professor expected to give lectures, or a singer who performs a lot.
Yeah, I experienced the same feeling. I dont think Trace IS a smug self-satisfied, slightly bitchy, know-it-all….but he TALKS like one. This particular vocal style, for me strongly associates with a particular type of completely unbearable millennial coastal urban tribe circa 2002 -2011. If he were my lawyer, I’d be uncomfortable about the potential for him to negatively impress the judge and jury.
My dad was a prosecutor, and he never lost a case. He had a very low, lovely speaking voice. He never raised his voice in the 57 years I knew him, but when he spoke everyone listened.
Good episode. I was confused about the idea that this is just bad ideas logically extended. Where did the idea come from that everyone has two people inside them? And that they fall into categories of bad and good? These don’t sound like ideas from rationalism, or anarchism, or veganism. They sound like ideas from a crazy cult leader, which is a distinct phenomenon, no?
But I might just be missing the origins of the ideas.
No. I think you are right.
They aren’t brilliant and logical people, they are criminals and sociopaths trying to justify their behavior.
This whole story (Zizians not Air traffic) reminded me of Scientology and Wild, Wild Country people, Jim Jones as well. There is a repeating pattern with these groups.
Great reporting!
This whole divided brain thing that keeps popping up again with more frequency lately in my more normieish world reminds me so much of the whole Reactive/Analytical mind thing in early Dianetics/Scientology and still a major part of the early levels on the way to Clear (but wait! there's more after that!). I know that was largely lifted from earlier sources and turtles all the way down, but the broad similarities blare out each time.
When I hear "divided brain" I instinctively reach for my "A Scanner Darkly."
If I wanted to filter out everyone too pusillanimous from joining my conspiracy, I couldn't invent a better shibboleth than Roko's Basilisk. Completely useless for anything else, though -- just Pascal's Wager for atheists.
St. Anslem is almost all you really need to know about all of this. So much of this is just the ontological argument in other clothes.
Just because you can conceive of the golden mountain doesn't mean it is *real*.
Nah, it's preying on cowardice and preemptive obedience. Anselm was just a logical shell game.
Well Anselm is a logical shell game, my point is RB is people still falling for it.