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So a border patrol agent was killed by a trans vegan-extremist terror cult that came out of Bay Area rationalist culture. they seem to be responsible for at least 3 other deaths (including family members and a former landlord who was going to testify against one of their members on a felony murder charge), but have taken 40% casualties in the process.
Here is an archive link to the leader's blog
As usual Andy ngo is the only person talking about the case at all, although his summary seems to miss a lot of important details.
This is the same group that got arrested in Sonoma a few years ago while raiding a CFAR camp. I predicted at the time that this group would make the news again, so you can imagine that I am Steve's Complete Lack Of Surprise.
So, thoughts. San Francisco continues to generate weird murder suicide cults just as it has for the past... 80 years? This really needs to be investigated because the effect has persisted over numerous different ideological movements. My running theory outside of "something in the water" is that selective migration brings a lot of that sort of person to SF (with flowers in their hair); you'll notice the men in this group were from all over the country (and one from Germany), but were all the sorts of people who were looking for some militant cult to give them a sense of belonging.
Second, and this might be beating a dead horse here, consider the reaction of the "rationalist community" to this group over the years. Even after the murders started, the "horrible dangers of moldbug and why reactionaries must be purged from the community" got oceans of ink spilled compared to one or two blog posts about this group. Meanwhile rationalist groups were still awarding these guys grants. Here is another trans-vegan-r/sneerclub-LW activist who still supports them because murdering landlords is good.
The ability to selectively "problematize" and craft narratives continues to be the main source of leftist power, and seems to be almost completely impervious to evidence-based arguments.
Lastly, it seems like literally every member of this group was a transexual (it's hard to be sure when the news steadfastly refuses to notice "Emma's" Adam's apple) Considering this case alongside the now-infamous "trans-alpaca ranch holocaust", it really does seem like sexual ideologies act as a social technology that allows disturbed and dysfunctional men to overcome social atomization and organize into warbands. "Cut off your family but keep demanding money from them to fund the group" seems to be the main way the cult leaders both control people and fund their lifestyles, when they're not getting grants or NPR fundraisers organized for them.
One of these cultists described as an "Oxford trained computer scientist" recently (17th of january) killed the 82 year old landlord who previously fought off an attack by Zizians and survived a sword through his chest. He had a gun, of course.
https://openvallejo.org/2025/01/28/man-accused-of-killing-witness-in-vallejo-could-face-death-penalty-da-says/
It's a seemingly pretty irrational cult as these guys first attacked a guy with knives and then stabbed him to death. Quietly poisoning him with something that'd look like a natural death seems far more rational and within the abilities of computer scientists, yet..
One of their beliefs is that unrelenting violence against oppressors such as BBQers, landlords, and elderly parents who keep calling you their son is justified even if it's not effective, because it can improve your ideology's bargaining position averaged across every other reality in the multiverse.
It's sort of like dying in a game of chicken and saying "yeah but committing to that head-on collision helped me win in other worldlines"
It worked for Islam. Because Islam has a lot of people behind it. Some of which kill detractors. Make a documentary criticizing Islam at your own risk.
Violence from minorities also works because progressivism has paralyzed the threat response mechanisms. As long as one party can accumulate points in the progressive stack, it is forbidden to actually address invalidities of the presented positions. So long as progressives hold levers of power, especially mindspace discourse via the universities and its agents of transmission in the media, there will be no way to communicate objections to stack abusers. Note that as we can see with Big Techs shift that many modern 'conservatives', and I dare say a fair few on this board, are ex-progressives who paused too long at the line for the koolaid and realized something eas going wrong. This means that antiprogressives who are proximate to the levers of power progressives are in charge of are naturally a subset of progressives, and in a time weighted distribution will never have enough numbers to stop the insanity.
It always worked. Sectarian revolts predate Christianity, let alone the Enlightenment. The Romans lost cities to chariot racers.
Edit: my mistake—the Nika riots were in 532 AD. I think they still support the general point, but I guess another example would be better. Maybe Rome’s Social War?
The Social War was core vs. periphery, not sectarian - socii is the Latin word for ally, and in context referred to citizens of what were de jure independent Roman client states in Italy, who rebelled because they wanted equal rights with Roman citizens.
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There was a major Jewish revolt against the Seleucids- it's an interesting set of books in the (Catholic and Orthodox)bible in which Judas Maccabeus kills an elephant single-handedly.
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This is literally as old as Reconstruction, or older. It comes and goes in cycles.
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I guess this social equilibrium works as long as there do not arise minorities sworn to unrelenting violence against each other?
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