R. Furters

shitpoasting in seattle

[R. Furters @humanisque]

🧵Table of Contents (Thread of Threads)🧵

[R. Furters @humanisque]

@bstract_thot "what's alive for you right now?"

NOTHING!!! paying my mortgage! My life is a SWARM of locusts and the only way I muddle through this endless parade of small problems is by beating my wife at Mario Kart 8 deluxe

[R. Furters @humanisque]

@tracewoodgrains you are truly queering the its-a-bit its-not-a-bit binary

[R. Furters @humanisque]

that being said, it does have some advantages. for example if someone is trying to adversarially influence me, it usually does not work. Wrong frequency

[R. Furters @humanisque]

i am somewhat intelligent but also have low processing speed --so thinking has a kind of buzzy / engulfy characteristic to it
https://t.co/uLIwzrv9vs

[R. Furters @humanisque]

it's hard to say whether I have low processing speed bc thoughts keep getting in the way of my OODA loop or whether thoughts keep getting in the way of my OODA loop bc they happen faster than my perception 🤔 but it's kind of annoying

[R. Furters @humanisque]

@MorlockP second picture is AI

[R. Furters @humanisque]

to occupy the liminal space between being the banana and being the banana peel

[R. Furters @humanisque]

the optimal number of scapegoats is the number where it ceases to make sense to call them scapegoats

[R. Furters @humanisque]

@allTheYud not sure whether to scream or laugh that this parody is a better world than our own

[R. Furters @humanisque]

this criticism may or may not be meta ethically legitimate but it does mean that going meta on social moves makes actual insight into social moves more difficult, by e promoting the degree to which ppl associate it with the kind of annoying dynamic above

[R. Furters @humanisque]

so one of the things ppl often do in these nerd communities is something I'd call "going meta on social moves." going meta on social moves produces a lot of interesting insights and some of my favorite articles have to do with this

however.

[R. Furters @humanisque]

imo the object level criticism of this kind of behavior is that it's "frame dragging." Ppl tend to work in the object level space where the games ppl play are constrained by a mutual standard of "good behavior" and not sharing or engaging with such a standard ends communication

[R. Furters @humanisque]

To quote the article "there is a clear conflict between the use of language to punish offenders, and the use of language to describe problems."

So, if you going meta on a social move serves a strategic purpose, you are in conflict with ppl trying to facially describe it

[George @georgejrjrjr]

ok here's most of it. the salience of the sex cult part is not clear without more context, so you're getting a lot of context. most of which is well documented, has been independently investigated, with details salient to the org team validated by the org team with the independent investigator.

From the beginning:

Center for New Culture is the sex cult. They placed a guy banned from their own sex dome for a years long pattern of sex pest antics, in charge of their clothing-optional children's program...which also lacked a two-adult rule.

So: a guy deemed unsafe for co-presence with naked adult women was left in charge of naked teenage girls, alone, in the woods. Not their only problem: I largely liked the org's stated norms, accountability mechanisms, and approach to consent education, but I was hearing many many complaints from women as part of my work on their emotional support team, and was working within local rules to try to improve the safety story + comfort of female participants. This was met with a lot of hostility, inclusive of an assault from their guru, and lots of lying (to which I objected in writing). None of the facts were in dispute.

They were not open to the feedback: the broken stairs were a feature not a bug evidently (guru owned the facilities, the guy in charge of the children's program was paying full price to be there and a friend of said guru), and so the guru didn't appreciate it -> worked very hard to try to discredit me. the basic move is make up enough false accusations, even demonstrably false accusations, and people will figure at least one of them is true --especially if the people telling you this gate access to their friends, limitless sexual novelty, and very powerful distributed love bombing techniques.

They teamed up with rationalist sex pests in DC in early 2020, whom i had (unwisely!) jovially informed about my prior conflict with the sex cult, joined the discrediting campaign and attempts at isolating the guy privately but stubbornly trying to build better norms. The prompt in DC: I advocated for saner informed consent norms around surprise kink at meetups (since there were people present who were deeply uncomfortable with that / didn't want to end up in a surprise sexy space), education around more skillful bids for courtship with local leadership (my partner and I ran a weekly event with some autist-savvy consent/sex educators to address the unskillful courtship bids, many of which were just awkward / unskillful and not SA-adjacent), and pushed back on various unacceptable behavior towards my then girlfriend (who woke up to being groped by one rat organizer at a party, among other things).

i was threatened with expulsion from rationality (in those terms) if i didn't invite one of the worst actors, Michael Tint, to a party my girlfriend / the guy threatening me's ex were planning. tl;dr they tried very hard to follow through, they looped scott alexander into it for a bit, until an independent investigation revealed (most of) what had actually gone down, at which point scott publicly recanted. Michael Tint has since been subject of several secret tribunals for related bad behavior. But not before his ally in that effort ran a literal workshop on banning me personally at an ssc meetup organizer conference (I suspect this might be where they recruited Brooke and the org team for the sex pest protection network, but I'm not sure). To this day these neurotic sex pest and aligned assholes are monitoring my twitter feed five+ years later; last notification i got about that was earlier this month. its not likely you'll get a DM assuring you that i am a lying asshole, perhaps with an offer to meet the other members of the de facto sex pest network to affirm that claim, since we're talking about this publicly.

why was the vc org team inclined to join this party? bb reported that she didn't appreciate feedback she had explicitly solicited from me vis a vis some actions she was considering taking, which involved claims she knew i knew for a fact were libelous (but groovy because they were against a guy who has truly done very bad things in the past, and had legitimately been inconsiderate with her). she reported to the aforementioned independent investigator that she also didn't appreciate a factual correction about an unsubstantiated / demonstrably wrong claim she made in an org team meeting.

So what did they do as part of the sex pest network? They joined forces with a tech bro in blacksburg i had just prevented from coercing my friend --a penniless woman in his care, under his roof, and in his employ-- into being his live-in concubine. The penniless woman in his care turned him down re the concubine offer, the guy fired and evicted her in retaliation. And she would have been on boundary dissolving drugs he was offering her for that proposition had i not pulled her aside and gently suggested she refrain from taking them unless she reciprocated his affections (which she did not). The guy who didn't get the concubine he wanted was big mad about this, and my attempted intervention, reached out to brooke (whom he did not previously know), and joined the de facto sex pest network Brooke was then spearheading.

So then the CFNC sex cult sex pests*, dc rat sex pests*, vc org team liars / enablers (definitely brooke with some others running cover, not totally clear on how many were involved), and the blacksburg guy who tried to strong-arm his penniless employee into sex work collaboratively (but see footnote) 'ugh fielded' (on pain of losing his job) the guy who had originally asked for my help in the blacksburg situation with the attempted coerced esx work. the ugh field took the form of, something like: 'everyone knows that everyone knows that while George seems like he cares about you, all the love and care is actually a diabolical trick / long con (to what end, one wonders)'.

Then a few mutual friends reached out to the guy who had just been persuaded into joining this ignominious character assassination effort, showed him his error. Eventually he apologized and we reconciled as best we could. But I "locked up my goat", held him at arms length, and supported him much less than I had prior. I sort-of endorse my boundaries, but regret that decision on net, because at the time he apologized, he was way in over his head with drugs, was effectively severed from his support network, lost his job (with the guy who tried to strong-arm himself a concubine), crashed his car, caught charges, and was in a 'dark night of the soul' following an arising and passing away precipitated by drugs+meditation. He gave up on self care, (I infer though am not positive) reasonable needle hygiene, and...died of sepsis.

Is the de facto sex pest protection network of which the vibecamp org team is a cornerstone solely responsible for that? Of course not. Homie made his own choices, made alliances he thought would serve him, and died presumably by his own actions mostly in his own filth, mostly alone. But if you summon a gang of sex pests to severe a guy known to be suicidal, with a well known drug problem, from his best friend and principle source of support and help...in my book they hold non-zero weight of responsibility. So, you know, I have some anger around that which compounds my disapproval of all the insane fuckery directed at me personally.

That's most of it. Or at least much of it.

Should your curiosity extends further than this tweet, the vast majority of the fuckery is well documented. And there's more. The lion's share has been independently investigated by a trusted community member / third party who read through the records, interviewed me, and looped back with Brooke to confirm. (She wrongly disputed one normatively-irrelevant detail that I've omitted from this tweet). I wasn't party to their call so I can't positively attest to what subset they talked about, but i gather he hit the high points. And ofc I have a record of this, like I have records of the whole >five year ordeal.

* or at least their narratives: I don't actually know how many of these groups were actually present on the call, vs. accounts delivered via the grapevine. I know the DC sex pests and the CFNC sex pests were directly in contact, I know the DC sex pests and vibecamp org team were directly in contact, I know the vibecamp org team and the blacksburg guys were directly in contact, and I know sex cult claims made their way to the blacksburg crew (ie, they made it all the way across the chain) --and a bunch of other people to whom Brooke has acted as a go between-- but I don't know about direct contact between the sex cult and the blacksburg crew or the vc org team (though i suspect the latter happened).

[R. Furters @humanisque]

@mimi10v3 are there any examples of him talking about ppls misdeeds in a useful way?

[R. Furters @humanisque]

@_Elvon_ @mesolude yeah -- actually I didnt even analyze the text myself. I just gave it to ChatGPT and this is one of the things it thought

[R. Furters @humanisque]

@qualitycarebear @liminal_warmth yeah you should understand at the object level that ppl who tell you you'd be more liked if you were more dangerous is not really what you'd want in your scene