+I said I would bite that bullet: yes! Yes, I was trying to figure out whether I was being fair to my abusers, and it was an important question to get right! "Other people's lack of standards harmed me, therefore I don't need to hold myself to standards in my response because I have [extenuating circumstances](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XYrcTJFJoYKX2DxNL/extenuating-circumstances)" would be a lame excuse.
+
+This seemed correlated with the recurring stalemated disagreement within our posse, where Michael/Ben/Jessica would say, "Fraud, if the word ever meant anything", and while I agreed that they were pointing to an important pattern of false representations optimized to move resources, I was still sympathetic to the Caliphate-defender's perspective that this usage of "fraud" was [motte-and-baileying](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) between different senses of the word. (Most people would say that the things we were alleging MIRI and CfAR had done wrong were qualitatively different from the things Enron and Bernie Madoff had done wrong.[^ftx]) I wanted to do more work to formulate a more precise theory of the psychology of deception to describe exactly how things were messed up a way that wouldn't be susceptible to the motte-and-bailey charge.
+
+[^ftx]: Trying to describe the Blight to me in April 2019, Ben wrote, "People are systematically conflating corruption, accumulation of dominance, and theft, with getting things done." I imagine a rank-and-file EA looking at this text and shaking their head at how hyperbolically uncharitable Ben was being. Dominance, corruption, theft? Where was his evidence for these sweeping attacks on these smart, hard-working people trying to make the world a better place?
+
+ In what may be a relevant case study, three and a half years later, the FTX cryptocurrency exchange founded by effective altruists as an earning-to-give scheme [turned out to be an enormous fraud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_of_FTX) à la Enron and Madoff. In _Going Infinite_, Michael Lewis's book on FTX mastermind Sam Bankman-Fried, Lewis describes Bankman-Fried's "access to a pool of willing effective altruists" as the "secret weapon" of FTX predecessor Alameda Research: Wall Street firms powered by ordinary greed would have trouble trusting employees with easily-stolen cryptocurrency, but ideologically-driven EAs could be counted on to be working for the cause. Lewis describes Alameda employees seeking to prevent Bankman-Fried from deploying a trading bot with access to $170 million for fear of losing all that money "that might otherwise go to effective altruism". [Zvi Mowshowitz's review of _Going Infinite_](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/10/24/book-review-going-infinite/) recounts Bankman-Fried in 2017 urging Mowshowitz to disassociate with Ben because Ben's criticisms of EA hurt the cause.
+
+ In light of FTX's actual outcomes, Ben's view of EA [as being characterized by influence-seeking tendencies](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/) is looking prescient in retrospect, and the comparison to Enron or Madoff less far-fetched than it would initially seem.
+
+-------
+
+On 12 and 13 November 2019, Ziz [published](https://archive.ph/GQOeg) [several](https://archive.ph/6HsvS) [blog](https://archive.ph/jChxP) [posts](https://archive.ph/TPei9) laying out [her](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/) grievances against MIRI and CfAR. On the fifteenth, Ziz and three collaborators staged a protest at the CfAR reunion being held at a retreat center in the North Bay near Camp Meeker. A call to the police falsely alleged that the protesters had a gun, [resulting in a](http://web.archive.org/web/20230316210946/https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/deputies-working-to-identify-suspects-in-camp-meeker-incident/) [dramatic police reaction](http://web.archive.org/web/20201112041007/https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/authorities-id-four-arrested-in-westminster-woods-protest/) (SWAT team called, highway closure, children's group a mile away being evacuated—the works).
+
+I was tempted to email links to the blog posts to the Santa Rosa _Press-Democrat_ reporter covering the incident (as part of my information-sharing-is-good virtue ethics), but decided to refrain because I predicted that Anna would prefer I didn't.
+
+The main relevance of this incident to my Whole Dumb Story is that Ziz's memoir–manifesto posts included [a 5500 word section about me](https://archive.ph/jChxP#selection-1325.0-1325.4). Ziz portrays me as a slave to social reality, throwing trans women under the bus to appease the forces of cissexism. I don't think that's what's going on with me, but I can see why the theory was appealing.
+
+--------
+
+On 12 December 2019 I had an interesting interaction with [Somni](https://somnilogical.tumblr.com/), one of the "Meeker Four"—presumably out on bail at this time?—on Discord.
+
+I told her it was surprising that she spent so much time complaining about CfAR, Anna Salamon, Kelsey Piper, _&c._, but _I_ seemed to get along fine with her—because naïvely, one would think that my views were so much worse. Was I getting a pity pass because she thought false consciousness was causing me to act against my own transfem class interests? Or what?
+
+In order to be absolutely clear about my terrible views, I said that I was privately modeling a lot of transmisogyny complaints as something like—a certain neurotype-cluster of non-dominant male is latching onto locally ascendant social-justice ideology in which claims to victimhood can be leveraged into claims to power. Traditionally, men are moral agents, but not patients; women are moral patients, but not agents. If weird non-dominant men aren't respected if identified as such (because low-ranking males aren't valuable allies, and don't have the intrinsic moral patiency of women), but _can_ get victimhood/moral-patiency points for identifying as oppressed transfems, that creates an incentive gradient for them to do so. No one was allowed to notice this except me, because everybody [who's anybody](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) prefers to stay on the good side of social-justice ideology unless they have Something to Protect that requires defying it.
+
+Somni said we got along because I was being victimized by the same forces of gaslighting and wasn't lying about my agenda. Maybe she _should_ be complaining about me?—but I seemed to be following a somewhat earnest epistemic process, whereas Kelsey, Scott, and Anna were not. If I were to start going, "Here's my rationality org; rule #1: no transfems (except me); rule #2, no telling people about rule #1", then she would talk about it.
+
+I would later remark to Anna that Somni and Ziz saw themselves as being oppressed by people's hypocritical and manipulative social perceptions and behavior. Merely using the appropriate language ("Somni ... she", _&c._) protected her against threats from the Political Correctness police, but it actually didn't protect against threats from the Zizians. The mere fact that I wasn't optimizing for PR (lying about my agenda, as Somni said) was what made me not a direct enemy (although still a collaborator) in their eyes.