This whole rabbit hole of rationalism, less wrong, and ziz feels like a fever dream to me. Roaming trans veganist tatical death squads shooting border officers and stabbing 80 year olds with swords.
This is the kind of thing where it is warranted that the feds gets every single wiretap, interception, and surveillance possible on everyone involved in the zizian movement.
Calling them a roaming band or "tactical death squad" is giving far too much credit. It is a handful of crazy people who convinced themselves that a couple murders would solve their problems.
In particular the attack on border patrol was obviously random and illogical. And the fact that no one was convicted of the Pennsylvania murders seems to reflect more on the police and prosecutors than the intelligence of the perpetrators.
Speaking of random and illogical, what prompted the Border Patrol to stop their car in the first place, I wonder? None of the news stories have elaborated on that.
On January 20, 2025, at approximately 3:00 pm, an on-duty, uniformed United
States Border Patrol (USBP) Agent initiated a stop of a blue 2015 Toyota Prius Hatchback with
North Carolina license plate number KLA2040 to conduct an immigration inspection as it was
driving southbound on Interstate 91 in Coventry, Vermont. The registered owner of the vehicle,
Felix Baukholt, a citizen of Germany, appeared to have an expired visa in a Department of
Homeland Security database. YOUNGBLUT was driving the Prius, and Baukholt was the lone
passenger in the Prius. Multiple uniformed Border Patrol Agents were present at the stop in three
USBP vehicles with emergency lights illuminated.
(later in the same document)
Investigators had been performing periodic surveillance of Baukholt and YOUNGBLUT since on or about Tuesday, January 14, 2025. A concerned citizen-an employee of a hotel in Lyndonville, Vermont--contacted law enforcement after a male and a female had checked into the hotel to report concerns about them, including that they appeared to be dressed
in all-black tactical style clothing with protective equipment, with the woman, later identified as
YOUNGBLUT, carrying an apparent firearm in an exposed-carry holster. Investigators with VSP and Homeland Security Investigations attempted to initiate a consensual conversation with Baukholt and YOUNGBLUT, but they declined to have an extended conversation, claiming that
they were in the vicinity to look at purchasing property. After the contact with law enforcement, the pair checked out of the Lyndonville hotel on the afternoon of January 14, 2025. Investigators later observed the pair in similar tactical dress on Sunday, January 19, 2025, walking in
downtown Newport; YOUNGBLUT was observed carrying a handgun at that time.
>The registered owner of the vehicle, Felix Baukholt, a citizen of Germany, appeared to have an expired visa in a Department of Homeland Security database.
Presumably the BP had a license plate scanner and this triggered.
Sounds like police were already on to them and they just used the excuse of an immigration stop in order to run their ID and search the car. Border patrol can pull you over and search you for any reason within a certain distance from the border — even if you did not cross the border.
Reading through zizan stuff they have this idea of “collapse the timeline” which justifies extreme violence in response to subjugation. The idea is if you are being subjugated you should act with extreme violence to deter people from subjugating you, and since you will not be subjugated the path always leads to violence, hence you should “collapse the timeline” and just go straight to violence.
The thing is, the US border patrol is not going to back down from your extreme threats of violence so if you want to collapse the timeline you mine as well put a bullet in yourself because that is how things are going to end — and did end — for them.
Right, a traffic stop, but by the Border Patrol? For an "immigration inspection?"
Not to put too fine a point on it, these people don't look like the sort who might get "randomly" stopped by the Border Patrol for an "immigration inspection."
Have you ever driven near the border? You'll be flagged for doing anything out of the ordinary with your car. If you have to pull over for a moment to find your passport for example, or if you made a wrong turn and try to turn around, or really anything that looks "suspicious", you risk getting additional searches or being pulled over.
Split the beliefs from the crime. A bunch of murderers were caught. Given they are dangerous killers, one killing a witness and one faking their death yeah they should get warrants.
Pretty hard to do that when the beliefs explicitly endorse murder. Ziz used to run a blog on which she made thinly veiled death threats, argued for a personal philosophy of hair-trigger escalation and massive retribution, raged at the rationalist community for not agreeing with her on that philosophy and on theories of transness, and considered most people on Earth to be irredeemably evil for eating meat.
It appears the ven diagram of the beliefs and crimes overlap quite a bit. Sometimes the beliefs are that certain crimes should be committed.
This is a free country (disputably) and you should be able to think and say whatever you want, but I also think it is reasonable for law enforcement in the investigation of said crimes to also investigate links to other members in the movement.
> but I also think it is reasonable for law enforcement in the investigation of said crimes to also investigate links to other members in the movement.
It doesn't work. Every single time a radicalized member of the marginalized community does this kind of crime, the numbered-letter-agency dutifully reports, that they knew the person to be radicalized, but had nothing to act on, because a lot of people have weird violence-approving beliefs, talk about them openly or with friends and very few actually hijack a Boeing or two. Those who plan to do things also happen to learn about op-sec mistakes of those caught before them.
Israel knew about Hamas, and the russian empire of 19th century knew about anarchists. Pouring a lot of resources into suppressing all of that didn't do jack shit in the long term.
Yes, thank you for saying so- reading about all this, but especially all the people chiming in who already knew about a lot of it? The fact that the founder of LessWrong coined the term “alignment,” a subject I’ve read about many times… it feels like learning lizard people always walked among us
Honestly it feels like this is the first time people are realizing that six degrees of separation means that crazy people can usually be connected to influential people. In this case they're just realizing it with the rationalists.
Rest assured, I'm pretty sure among the easiest ways to make yourself the target of surveillance is to do anything interesting at all involving technology. All serious AI researchers, for example, should assume that they are the victims of this.
>This whole rabbit hole of rationalism, less wrong, and ziz feels like a fever dream to me. Roaming trans veganist tatical death squads shooting border officers and stabbing 80 year olds with swords.
I don't exactly see how it's different from a group of habitual alcoholics discussing politics and having a fatal disagreement, which is a normal day of the week in any police department with enough demographics to have this sort of low-effort low-gain crime. It's more scandalous because of details and people involved are more interesting, but everyone will forget about it after a week, as they don't matter.
This is the kind of thing where it is warranted that the feds gets every single wiretap, interception, and surveillance possible on everyone involved in the zizian movement.