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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.
15-20 years ago, during the great internet atheism wars, it was popular to argue that morality is 'obvious' and that any rational person could easily determine its rough outlines. Is anyone still arguing this?
I was an atheist then and people kept referring me to Harris's The Moral Landscape. So I read that. His argument seemed to be roughly the same: we all sort of just know what's right and don't need reference to any kind of overarching moral framework. He intrigued me by granting that some people clearly just don't see things the way the rest of us do, e.g. psychopaths, but that he'll address this problem later in the book. AFAICT he never actually does, though.
Found it disturbing then and I find it disturbing now. Ran into a guy on reddit quite a while ago who suggested that atheism is best classified as a 'moral parasite'; that it relies upon existing metaphysical systems to generate a socially-agreed upon moral framework, at which point of course an atheist can conform to that and 'be a good person' according to whatever their society thinks that means -- but that atheists also tend to work to undermine the roots of that system itself, resulting in moral collapse.
No real point here; just musing.
ETA:
Is /r/bandnames still a thing?
The thing with existing metaphysical systems is that they, too, evolved from something at some point - unless you are one of their proponents who believe that moral knowledge was literally passed down to [First Human] from [Divine Authority]. What is the source? All I know points to "animal intuition", which I expect to only differ from person to person as much as other animal aspects of us do: not that much.
Society? Going backwards modern western morality is basically reformation, germanic conversion to christianity, roman conversion, greek + judaic philophy, fertile crescent society, etc. Thousands of years of iteration that animals don't have?
Animals do iterate, they are just slower about it because their memory is strictly genetic as opposed to civilizational.
Also, what was the first society then and where did it come from?
Well I think the most advanced societies that we know about that existed the earliest were in the fertile crescent, presumably they have some kind of lineage going back. I agree animals iterate but the question is whether they have some kind of upper bound which our lineage surpassed, which I'd argue we did, probably around when we learned to make fire and passed that knowledge on to our descendants
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