The border patrol shooter was a zizian rationalist. Let's read ziz.

I love edgy philosophy. My general hunch is that the forbidden stuff contains truths that the nomos longhouse doesn't want you to know. Those truths give you important leverage against the established control structures, so it's a key move in the martial art of ideology to study them. Furthermore, the kind of people who come up with such radicalizations often have unique virtues, or an excess of a certain kind of virtue that turns them into these tyrants of the will, so they are important to study as a human type which we ourselves may wish to become and improve upon. (Read Dr. Alamariu's "Birth of Philosophy" thesis)

The normoids want to warn you against this kind of curiosity. "oh no anon don't read that you might be radicalized and go crazy". There is probably a certain danger in this specifically the first time. I got radicalized hard by the rationalists. It blew up my life (in retrospect for the better but it hurt at the time). But then I got radicalized by many other cults and each time was less life-disrupting than the last, but just as insightful. My thesis is that you get good at philosophy, or the martial art of ideology, not by dissecting these things with clinical cynicism but in serial radicalization. So this is another way that studying these things is a good move in the Art; it builds you up to a state of enlightened post-radicalization. After this you know a lot of secrets, can reliably think across and outside of systems, are no longer so pwned by words, and are capable of actually breaking out of the matrix and thinking independent thoughts. Therefore you should read edgy philosophy *with intent to be radicalized by its truth*.

So enough preamble, the latest edgy philosophy drama is that the zizians are killing people again. Details not that interesting. The reason they kill people is they have a rather exacting ethics derived from a radicalization of AI singleton doomerism, rationalist decision theory ideas around blackmail and counterfactual punishment, utilitarianism taken actually seriously, some kind of leftist hysteria against nazis, veganism, and trans-adjacent depersonalization. Their target selection sucks though (mostly petty fights with personal associates like parents and landlords). Let's dig in and get ziz-pilled. What's in here that we might actually want to believe?

Almost all of their premises are wrong, but one thing I can't help but admire is the dangerous levels of will-to-consistency that correctly derives insane actions from their insane premises. Many people "believe" what the zizians believe, but mostly sit around optimizing for normalcy instead of taking consistency seriously. I share the strong intuition that you should actually take your beliefs seriously. I can't really give them more than 2/10 here though because again the actual result is underwhelming even by their own goals. This isn't coordinated effective action to steer the world, just insane flailing. Likely just high-IQ rationalization of catastrophic lack of social judgement.

The other piece that jumps out at me is the decision theory stuff around blackmail, moral strategy, counterfactual punishment, etc. I haven't figured out their core set of insights here, but actually taking the subject seriously, thinking up a lot of concepts, and taking them as absolute is interesting at least.

So far in all I haven't found anything really good here and I'm disappointed. I'm not really in the target audience (I don't take the premises seriously nor do they come to any compelling conclusions). But I can see how leftist vegan rationalist types might go for it. Here's some of the links people sent me when I asked for the good stuff:

https://voidgoddess.org/ziz/punching-evil/
https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/net-negative
https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/false-faces/
https://zizians.info/
https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/aliveness/
https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/social-reality/

The thing that stands out about 'Punching Evil' is that it's a form of liberal extremism. The justification for violence is the standard 'intolerance of intolerance'. Pretty much the whole of liberalism is present. The state seems be neural but can fall into the hands of Nazis/vampires. We're under a social contract but not when it comes to anti-liberals. Etc. Liberalism has always been able to justify arbitrary amounts of repression and violence for the purpose of defending liberalism.

Even liberal terrorism isn't new, but conservatives, being liberals themselves, usually attribute it to leftism, socialism, communism, etc, so it doesn't hurt the brand. Most environmentalist and animal rights violence conforms more strongly to liberal ideology than, e.g., revolutionary communism. The same is true of much anarchist violence. They're not part of a revolution but rather take themselves to be justified in using violence against those 'beyond the pale' within the context of liberal society.

The decision theory, etc, just seems to be lowering the threshold for violence.

A bit more context about this story via
https://x.com/DrTechlash/status/1883996064648421500

(Re Punching Evil) I don't get the point of these people acting like they're anodyne liberals who just don't like nazis. Why lie to yourself like that? He's acting like he's some Popperist but he clearly believes in something deeply revolutionary. Nothing about his reasoning is conceptually unavailable to nazis. Indeed nazis (I'm just rolling with the terminology here) often extoll the virtues of liberty and free speech within ordered white societies.

It's always a bit of a shame seeing smart people use basically campaign trail language — it's like they've truly "bought in" and aren't really dealing in substance. "The fundamental problem with Nazis is not that they conduct their politics in a way that crosses an abstract line. It’s that they fight for evil, however they can get away with it." This is self-deluding rhetoric befitting a peasant revolt. I can't trust the analysis of people who actually talk like this, but that's just me