Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(December's finally arrived, and the run-up to Christmas has begun. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
The Rolling Stone article is a bit odd (it appears to tell the story of the ex-employee who created Miricult twice, the first time without names and the second naming the accuser) but I trust them that MIRI did pay the accuser. Rolling Stone are a serious news organization which can be sued.
Yeah, I think Rolling Stone was worried about getting sued and omitted Helm's name in the first draft (or something like that).
I know who the alleged victim was, and I think there probably was a crime and blackmail payments but the alleged victim didn't want to come forward for a number of reasons (among other things, he's still part of the rationalist community and has faced a lot of harassment from the public after an unrelated newspaper article outed him as being trans). I'd also point out that the only person that miricult directly accused of statutory rape was one of Yudkowsky's employees rather than Yudkowsky himself. That being said, the journalist who wrote the Rolling Stone article claims she got a copy of the police report Helm filed and only Yudkowsky was named.
Even if miricult was total bullshit I'm confident that the alleged victim was lying about not being exploited by other rationalists; a few years later he and a couple of other people posted accounts of being sexually abused by a rationalist (unrelated to miricult) and it led to the abuser being ostracized from the rationalist community.
Anyways I know a lot more about this but I'd rather not discuss the details on a publicly viewable forum to protect the privacy of the people involved.
I agree that its gross to discuss a lot of this in public, and that underage sex is often an ethical grey area. I had no idea that the person who accused BD of pushing him into substance use and extreme BDSM scenarios is also the person who allegedly had sex underage with a MIRI staffer while living in a Rationalist group home.
Ziz's blog had posts that revealed his identity and mentioned some of the BD stuff, once I found them it was just a matter of putting two and two together, so to speak