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5CAST #3 - The Zizian Cult, Happy News & The Spirit of Mac Dre (Featuring Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman)

🕑 Added 2025-03-31 23:16:09 +0000 UTC

Comments

blurelus

The beginning of this video about the political landscape really resonated. Does anybody have ideas how to share this free/non-partisan thing I made which kind of addresses some of these issues? I think it is important to ground things in fact and pay less attention to what people are talking about. It is just a web app right now: https://voteinformer.ca/

who, me

The interview with Hurwitz-Goodman was awesome, I will def check out his work. I really find it interesting hearing more about how people make documentaries nowadays.

joy0egg

Really appreciate the interview with Jacob here. He’s clearly dug real deep into the Zizians and is able to chat lucidly about some of the theories/ideology underpinning the actions of these folks - something hardly anyone who has been covering the story (including Andrew in the pre-amble to the interview) has been willing or able to do. I look forward to seeing the doc when it comes out. This story really hooked me when I first heard about it a little while ago and I’ve been reading through Ziz’s blog concurrently with some of the foundational rationalist stuff for a few months now in order to try to get to grips with it all and I feel like I have a fair bit of sympathy for their cause. I’ve even returned to veganism after being challenged to re-visit my values by some of the things I’ve read (a rationalist friend has told me I should be safe from total rat brain rot because I can’t to maths). That isn’t to say that there’s not some pretty whacky shit in there and that whatever has gone down isn’t the result of some pretty serious missteps in their thinking and actions, but there are a couple of things I think are important that are being missed in nearly all media coverage. First, I think that much of what has unfolded would not have happened if the rationalists and wider society were not so quick and willing to isolate and un-person difficult or inconvenient (+autistic) trans folk. Second, corporate greed has fully taken the reigns when it comes to deciding our future concerning the advancement of technology, in this case GAI, that’s fucking scary and I think that should be disrupted (unfortunately these folks seem to have misfired somewhere along the line). And third, I read somewhere in Ziz’s writing that she got into all this rationalist stuff via a teenage obsession with that Richard Dawkins cunt and it all sort of clicked into place for me, so many folks involved in this stuff, which is influencing our lives from the oligarchs, to the top decision makers in politics downwards, are obsessed, live for and are addicted to “winning the argument” at any cost to the point that they will warp their beliefs, thoughts and even their reality to get a sweet hit of debate club beatdown that they loved watching Daddy Dawkins dish out in their impressionable years. Sometimes that results in a cop, some abusive parents and a landlord (possibly “one of the good ones”) getting cheffed up but I fear sometimes the consequences are far worse. Debate me.