I tried to write a genuine ELI5 explanation but I'm not sure it's possible unless you can assume a five-year-old knows what "philosophy" means, lol.
You could say "a group of people think that being smart gives them magic powers, and that most people are evil zombies, but they think everyone in their own special group is good and can do whatever they want" but you lose a lot of nuance.
You lose a lot of nuance but that’s actually a pretty good explanation because it reveals the obvious parallels to nearly every mainstream religion throughout history.
Interesting challenge: put all of this crazy information into a LLM prompt and ask it to explain everything as if to a real five year old. Maybe the newer "Deep research" models could do it. (See also https://xkcd.com/547/ of course.)
A journalist wrote a long article about a weird, extreme group called the “Zizians.” They’re a mix of radical thinkers from the Rationalist movement—a community of people obsessed with using logic to solve big problems, like AI safety or moral philosophy. The Zizians, led by a person named Ziz, took these ideas to an extreme, combining them with unusual beliefs about morality, consciousness, and even Star Wars-like "Sith" philosophy.
This group has been connected to multiple violent incidents, including murders and standoffs with police. Some of its members have been arrested, gone into hiding, or mysteriously died. The author explains that Rationalist groups, while not inherently violent, often attract highly analytical but socially disconnected people, making them vulnerable to cult-like thinking.
The article also touches on how similar communities—like Effective Altruists and AI researchers—can sometimes create intense, insular environments that lead to extreme behavior. Basically, the Zizians are an example of how even smart, logical people can end up in very bizarre and dangerous places when they take ideas too far.
> following a traffic stop, United States Border Patrol agent David Maland was killed in a shootout with Teresa Youngblut, who was wounded, and German national Ophelia Bauckholt, who also died in the shootout. The pair were traveling south on Interstate 91 in Coventry, Vermont, when they were pulled over as part of a traffic stop.[1] The two were put under "periodic surveillance" nearly one week before the shooting after they were reported to be armed and wearing all-black tactical clothing when checking in to their hotel.
So these guys were being surveilled for being armed and decked out in tactical gear, so the authorities send in a lone traffic cop to pull them over? And predictably, the cop is killed.
This isn't the first time I've heard of this kind of thing happening. That agent was basically set up to die, sacrificed like a pawn by his superiors playing a sick game of chess. The same thing happened to Darian Jarott, who was directed by his boss to arrest an armed and dangerous meth smuggler without being briefed of the danger, despite the fact that the danger was clearly understood by his superiors (a tactical team with medics were stationed nearby, but Jarott was sent in alone without knowledge of this.) The meth smuggler stepped out of his truck with an AR-15, taking Jarott completely by surprise, and murdered him. The meth smuggler was then chased down and killed by the other officers and agents.
>So these guys were being surveilled for being armed and decked out in tactical gear, so the authorities send in a lone traffic cop to pull them over? And predictably, the cop is killed.
Was there any indication the police was "sent" to pull them over, rather than some sort of routine traffic stop? The article mentions the DHS surveillance was only "periodic", which implied they weren't really keeping tabs on them 24/7.
I appreciate the info, hadn't heard about the Jarott case, and I hadn't considered this possible angle. That said, I don't think Maland was alone when he was shot. Details haven't been released, but the initial reporting was clear that multiple officers were involved.
Here for example is the AP: "Youngblut got out and opened fire on Maland and other officers without warning, the FBI said. Bauckholt tried to draw a gun but was shot, according to the affidavit. At least one border agent fired on Youngblut and Bauckholt, but authorities haven’t specified whose bullets hit whom."
They? There is no they. No plan. No conspiracy . Just a guy who gets up in the morning to write speeding tickets to fill a counties chest, while also filter feeding for outstanding warrants running into two armed psychos.The observation team (aka sigint fat dude) has zero connection to the traffic cop.
At least in the case of Darian Jarott, he absolutely was directed by his boss to pull over the smuggler. "A State Police supervisor had asked Jarrott to pull over Cueva-Felix at the behest of federal agents"https://apnews.com/article/officer-killed-new-mexico-highway...
In the case of David Maland, the chance of it being a completely normal "traffic stop" by a federal border patrol agent (who's job is not to fill the counties chest by writing tickets, as you incorrectly state), completely unrelated to these people being under surveillance at the time for being armed and in tactical gear, is dubious to put it mildly.
How is this more plausible then any of the alternative explanations?
e.g. the decision makers could be incompetent, they might not care that much, they had some other contradicting information not publicly revealed, etc…
A possibly mentally ill trans woman with the moniker Ziz developed a following blogging and posting on philosophy groups. Ziz developed that following into a cult.
For anyone unfamiliar with Andy Ngo he has an extreme far right bias and associates with the proud boys. Worth taking anything he says we a heap of salt.
Idk about factually incorrect, but the piece repeatedly misgenders the cultists, puts their names in scare quotes and favors their old names (and calls those old names their “real names”) and leads with “trans terror” in the headline.
At every turn the purpose of the piece is demonize trans people, even if it got the facts right.
In my experience, biased authors are unintentionally reliable narrators. The reader can use that bias as an anchor for truth, to triangulate facts that might be less obvious in a neutral narrative. I would rather read two articles from biased opposing authors, than a single article from the middle. That’s why I read CNN and Fox instead of Reuters. And it’s the basis of sites like Ground News.
Of course, this only works as long as the reader is aware of the bias, so your comment is a valid warning in that respect.
>In my experience, biased authors are unintentionally reliable narrators. The reader can use that bias as an anchor for truth
This is absolutely nonsensical. No amount of watching InfoWars can help you understand global warming or the operations of FEMA.
Bad information isn't like the "picking stocks" problem where being reliably wrong can be mapped to being right. Enough bias just comprehensively ruins the data.
Reading InfoWars can give you information about upcoming narratives that will seep through the right-wing infosphere. If you see them talking about some mainstream story with a controversial angle not present in the other sources, then – despite being wildly exaggerated, cherry picked and out of context – there is probably some kernel of truth to it. And even if it’s a tiny kernel, it could be enough for a few influencers to latch onto it and promote the narrative.
For example, not every article about the Zizians mentions their gender identity. But the right wing articles do. If you only read some news sources, you would miss this bit of information. Is it relevant to the story? Maybe, maybe not – that’s up to the reader to decide. Is it relevant to the narrative that will take hold as it propagates throughout social media? Yes absolutely. And the fact that only one side mentions it means it’s even more likely to become a central point of contention, because each side will weaponize it against the other. The right will claim the left is hiding it and the left will claim the right is unnecessarily elevating it. In the end, it will become the most controversial (and therefore popular) part of the narrative, and the hook of engagement bait that keeps the story going.
You wouldn’t be able to anticipate this if you only read a few mainstream left-leaning articles about the story. And there is value to anticipating these narratives because if you catch them early, you know to ignore them as they expand into a larger waste of time.
Just because he has, um, interesting ideas about what's worth covering or what lens to view things through, does not change that he does in fact report things and is therefore a reporter.
