liskantope

[liskantope]

So apparently there's AI voiceover nowadays which sounds adult and female with a strong Valley Girl -like inflection. The first example I ran across today was from the same website, featuring a cat rescue in what I'm guessing was a developing country, and was a starker display of the Valley Girl thing (for lack of a better description) given that the narration was in incorrect broken English; this is what tipped me off to the artificiality of the voiceover. But I'm not sure I know where to find it; the content was a bit unpleasant; and I've heard that the dangerous events in those videos are orchestrated for clicks, so I probably shouldn't be spreading those videos around.

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I don't feel like checking how long it's been since I posted anything, but hi everyone, I'm still alive, just got hit with another brick wall of professional-combined-with-non-professional intensity. As usual with these forced Tumblr breaks, it's frustrating, because I had some momentum with some back-and-forth discussions and it's all completely dissipated now. In this case, it feels worse than usual, because some of that involved a sequence of rather adversarial asks that I do want to respect by making them public and responding but want to do so in a way that will bring that line of conversation to some kind of quick conclusion/truce, and that's delicate and requires my actually having some real time and energy on hand. (And once that's done with, there's all the other things stacked up in my mind to post about here.)

Today, for holiday-related reasons, has at least been quiet enough for me to get back on Tumblr and make a sufficiently low-effort post like this one.

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i do not think you would be as charitable to zach davis if he was arguing in favor of anti-racism or feminism rather than against trans activism. i think you would probably agree that he thinks people who disagree with him are idiots or liars. playing hitler's advocate is a very popular and well-regarded position in the post-SSC/ACX rationalist community

Well, you're entitled to think that, I guess? I would say your perception is definitely a caricature of me and possibly a caricature of the post-SSC/ACX rationalist community as well (although I can see where the "pro- Hitler's advocate" image of the earlier SSC community comes from, for sure). It's possible that we've been exposed to different ZMD content, of course.

I would point out that I also consider a ton of the most prevalent anti-trans-activist arguments issued by the loudest people on that side to be of pretty garbage quality and those people to often be very visibly flawed people (e.g. Jordan Peterson, Helen Joyce, Norman Finkelstein), and I haven't been afraid to lay into them on this blog from time to time when particularly egregious talking points come to my attention. But those posts are a lot harder to find in my archive, because they don't generate the ripple effect of dozens of responses and responses-to-responses that result from my making (even parenthetical or intended-to-be-mild) critical comments about my issues with the trans activist movement.

My exposure to Davis' writing is pretty limited. Anyone is welcome to quote me passages of his that make it clear he thinks other people are idiots (beyond combative rationalist-style "confused about their own rationalist principles in a frustrating way" complaints) or liars (and just using "gaslighting" doesn't count unless there's evidence in the text that he meant it in the original sense of the term, rather than misusing it as he himself has more or less admitted to doing).

[liskantope]

Here is a slight counterpoint: to some extent, if we're going to lampoon people like Elon Musk, it's going to be very hard to avoid being ableist in some way or other while imitating him. Mannerisms are part of personality, and it's hard to extricate mannerisms from the inner core of a personality that we want to make a statement about (especially, I would point out, when one of the messages being pushed by autism advocacy nowadays is that autism is an inextricable part of who an autistic person is as a person!).

For comparison, RFK Jr. is a currently very powerful person who is arguably a dangerous mix of clownish and evil and who should be satirized. He also has a vocal disorder that he himself is sensitive about. How is someone going to impersonate him without to some extent "doing the voice"? Like with Elon Musk, this has already been done on SNL, without much success at not drawing attention to the voice along with the unpleasant qualities of the person.

I'm not saying this should be made an issue of right now or anytime in the next few years as we all try to navigate this chaotic moment in history, but can we agree that the SNL depiction of Elon Musk is ableist, at least in the specific sense of "if our vigilance against anything that could be construed as mocking visibly autistic people were cranked up to anywhere near the notch of the progressive culture's vigilance against anything that could be construed as racist/sexist over the past decade and a half, then we would be horrified by those types of impersonations"? I'm just noting this for the record, along with a dozen other memes and talking points from the past year, mainly from both campaigns in the 2024 election (as I've noted elsewhere), in order to suggest that one of these decades perhaps fairly soon, when autism has its day in the forefront of progressive social awareness, this stuff might not look too good.

I'm definitely not saying it isn't worth it to deride Musk and his ilk in any way that sticks right now, given how dangerous a force he is, nor that I particularly look forward to when autism has its day in the public conscience, given how condescending and destructive many aspect of SJ feminism/anti-racism have been. But at least part of me wishes that we on a societal level had more self-awareness about this "making fun of social awkwardness" and "mocking autistic mannerisms" stuff, and how it would look being held to the standard of our current and recent social causes, now.

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I don't think a person whose conclusion about people disagreeing with him is that they are either idiots or deliberately lying to gaslight him sounds like a very good interlocutor regarding anything, gender politics or otherwise.

When I first read this, I was going to answer, "I feel the same way in principle, but I have no idea who you're referring to." It took me a few minutes to realize you were talking about Zach M. Davis.

And while I agree that he could probably be pretty difficult and possibly irritating to put up with in a debating context (when I commented about how he would be fun to get a beer with, I was picturing more discussing sexuality and autogynophilia and touching on gender politics without really getting into a debate about it), your "thinking those who disagree are idiots or deliberate liars" characterization feels wrong enough that I had trouble realizing that you meant it to characterize Davis.

Sure, in his writing he kinda-sorta makes it sound like those who disagree with him are being dumb, but that's par for the course AFAICT for very hard-core rationalist-y writers (see just about anything Eliezer Yudkowsky writes argumentatively) and less how he comes across on the podcast episode. He seems genuinely frustrated at the rationalists in his circles (who "aren't that good at being sane", as he put it in the podcast episode) and how confused he perceives them to be, and that frustration comes out in very sharp diatribes against their reasoning and mindset. He doesn't come across to me as actually believing they're stupid; he simply thinks they're confused and that he can expose it in debate. If he really thought that way, he wouldn't have kept trying so relentlessly to engage them in debate!

And his frequent use of "gaslighting", while annoying to me, doesn't imply in context that he thinks anyone is deliberately lying (I think he even refers to feeling "gaslighted" by Scott Alexander but also concedes that Scott isn't knowingly lying). The problem is that the meaning of "gaslighting" is supposed to involve a deliberate abuse/manipulation tactic, and as soon as it became a trendy term to hurl at people around the mid-2010's its meaning got ridiculously watered down, much to my frustration, and Davis is part of that problem (he even acknowledges, in the super-long essay previously linked, that people have criticized his used of the term!). But I've become kind of desensitized to it now, and my dislike of how people like Davis use "gaslighting" is quite decoupled from my recognition that when he uses it, he doesn't mean "deliberately lying" -- at worst, he means a sort of subconscious intellectual dishonesty or being dishonest with oneself.

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Oh yeah, in the previous few days I'd already gotten to know more about Zack Davis than I'd let on in the OP; for instance, by the time of writing the OP, I'd just seen him in his recent podcast appearance. My impressions from my (admittedly much shallower and briefer) exposure to him match what you say exactly. He seems altogether like a cool guy who I'd be happy to have a drink with (and leaving aside his clearly mentally healthy tendency to be obsessively argumentative, his only questionable but very minor visible social quirk is that he seems in the podcast to be trying to direct it rather too much for what is appropriate when you're the guest). I'm extremely interested in the phenomenon of autogynophilia, not least because I relate mildly to some aspects of it myself (not in a way that totally encompasses my sexuality as seems to be the case for Zack and a fair number of other people, and no, I don't think I'm comfortable delving much into my sexuality on this blog). Zack seems like, under the right circumstances, a good person for me to have a frank one-on-one talk about sexuality with. At the same time, I find a number of his object-level assertions -- particularly the assertion that most trans women are "just" autogynophiles -- quite suspect, and while I think he does put his finger on why Scott's "Categories Were Made For Man" arguments always felt a little fishy to me, I'm not at all prepared to endorse his much more restrictive notion of how "man/woman" should be defined.

(Side note: while I agree that "hard-core Bay area rationalist" is itself already a pretty rare category, my impression of the rationalist community is that within it, being of a liberal-libertarian bent is not at all unusual, and that it's maybe even the mode area of the political spectrum. Am I wrong?)

A talking point I see occasionally (Freddie deBoer has dabbled in a variant of it) goes something like, "Anti-trans people say that trans people are mentally disturbed, but have you ever seen how many people on that side react to any kind of trans stuff by getting absolutely obsessed and unhinged and insane?"

I dislike this talking point for reasons that I'm not going into in this post (which is definitely not to say that I'm okay with the notion it's trying to combat, that of "trans people should be dismissed because they're just mentally ill"). But I recently ran across a fascinating rationalist gender-blogging character who, it seem, clearly is an example of anti-trans person who kind of went actually insane over getting bothered by certain aspects of the trans movement. (To the extent that he deserves being tarred as "anti-trans", as he seems quite okay with gender medicine and mainly has a massive issue with the "definition of man/woman" stuff.)

(I ran across this person very indirectly as a result of reading up on Ziz stuff -- he apparently knew Ziz and briefly reports her being a nice person to him in this very long and very interesting post mostly about gender identity / language stuff; I can't remember which Ziz-related article linked me to that one.)

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Re: the DeBoer post on Israel, perhaps the only positive to come out of the current unpleasantness is the near-complete halt of "Listen up you stupid fucking goyim" appearing on my dash. Because it turns out playing Which Race Is Evil isn't FUN anymore when you're on the defense and not the prosecution.

I'm not sure I fully parse your description of the Tumblr discourse phenomenon you say completely halted, but I agree with the spirit of your ask.

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You know, I knew a lot of rationalists were vegan (some straight up have recommended I read Singer, which I'm profoundly uncomfortable doing because it's SO ableist)

But I didn't realize until I watched the podcast on the Zizians that the process is

All moral concerns ultimately reduce to consequentialism no matter what. If it's morally right to respect people's dignity (and/or to accord dignity to any other beings), this is only because larger numbers of people will thrive if respected

This means the ultimate moral concern is pain or pleasure, for the greatest number, and nothing else

Humans are only one species on earth and our numbers are small compared to creatures that reproduce en masse, such as insects

Therefore animal welfare outweighs human welfare, in terms of how much moral good you can do per act

Therefore, all humans capable of tolerating a vegan diet are morally obligated to begin establishing the habit immediately, even if they don't realize it yet

...

Dude, no WONDER the reaction to me going "Well, but the idea that animals experience pleasure and pain and plants don't is based on the idea that nervous systems are required to experience these things. What if we don't actually know enough about how plants work to be certain they can't experience pleasure or pain? What if we're looking for nerve endings because that's what we have? Would that make us obligated to starve, because we would be morally required to eat nothing?" was so intense.

My out-there question about whether even animal rights activists still have trouble not defaulting to "the more humanlike a living thing is, the more it has experiences" REALLY DID punch them in the worldview.

Heh.

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My condolences about your friends. I hang out a lot in New York makerspaces and have met a few people in a similar position to you. I’m not a rationalist or an Effective Altruist. However I do know what it’s like to be caught up in a cult-like friend group ruled by someone who has done everything in their power to eschew genuine human connection and suppress their sense of cognitive empathy. I also know what it is to be manipulated by a charismatic but fundamentally selfish and power hungry person into doing terrible things. From one stranger on the internet to another, I hope you’re taking care of yourself.

Thanks for your empathy and concern.

It's really not as severe of a situation for me as it might sound. I've always heavily compartmentalized my online-as-Liskantope life from my "real" life, and that includes my friendship with the former Tumblr user in question -- it was very much the closest thing I had to a true "Tumblr friendship" in the late 2010's (not as deep as some -- we didn't even go as far keeping up a DM conversation -- and at the time I was very leery of even labeling it as any sort of friendship because I was in my early 30's while he* was in high school, which felt weird), and a "Tumblr friendship" felt like a much less substantial thing than a real-life friendship. That said, I do have very warm memories of our Tumblr interactions some 6-8 years ago, which are warm in a sort of unique way (at least those are the best words I can come up with right now to express it?), and my every thought/realization of what wound up happening does make me feel gut-twisted on a daily basis. It's also hard to balance a compulsion to learn as much as I can about the broader story here with the importance of making sure I'm in the right mindspace to handle its very disturbing aspects (both regarding my old friend individually and the ideas that animate the whole Ziz group collectively).

And to be clear, I find it quite plausible (not going to make an actual judgment here, especially when even after weeks I still have some reading to do) that he really committed a serious crime, namely that of attempted murder (and legally speaking another crime of actual murder of Emma Borhanian, but I'm just going to go ahead and say that the CA law that puts this on paper as "murder" is bullshit). I have almost complete confidence in declaring that he fell in with, let's say, a very dangerous crowd, which is still not quite to say that Ziz ticks off all the necessary boxes for "cult leader" or was manipulating people with a very high level of deliberation. But at the same time, I knew him to be a thoughtful, earnest, and kind person at least as recently as 5-6 years ago, refuse to believe that he is a monster at least outside of very narrow areas of his psyche, and refuse to believe that it's morally fitting for even someone who is an actual monster to be subjected to the kind of torture that is my understanding of solitary prison confinement. *At the time and until recently, I was mainly using "they/them" for this Tumblr user, but recent news articles suggest that he was on hormones and asked to be housed in a male prison.

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I can relate to this as it was a recurring theme of my (generally idyllic) social life during graduate school, and the underlying math geek culture. It's not even really exaggerated.

why yes I would actually love to play a convoluted board game at this chill drinking party that wasn’t advertised as a game night. Hey would it be ok if you whip it out after we’re all in four drinks? Yeah, just so none of our attention spans are at 100% and none of us would be cleared to drive a car or obey traffic laws. and would you mind explaining the rules in a very surly manner and appear subtly irate whenever someone’s attention strays from the game? yeah yeah and would it be ok if we played it on an abrasive carpeted floor too? thanks

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Found the other day in a used book store that the main Star Wars movies have been turned into books in the Little Golden Books series. Here is the most interesting page among those I flipped to in The Empire Strikes Back.

Some observations here:

They choose to actually put in the constantly wrongly-quoted line of the movie ("Luke, I am your father!"). Aaarghpgffohgfgh

They really conveyed the memorable intensity of Luke's "Noooooo!", pulling out the red font there.

I never heard the name Bespin before and am still unclear on precisely which geographic location it refers to.

This book is for small children, so I guess they wanted to avoid mentioning that Luke's hand got cut off and just sort of tastefully imply it by not showing the end of his right arm in the left-hand illustration and show him cradling it in the right-hand illustration.

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an incredibly healing experience for me has been the following:

initiating a fight for a reason I genuinely thought was just/legitemate, (not intentionally) being in the wrong, genuinely apologizing, fight resolves without feeling demeaned/humiliated/disrespected, or even more than than, without feeling like you lost power and respect, you need to make it up somehow, you are now indebted to this person somehow

by fight I mean genuine conflict with heightened emotions and conflicts of interest (and yes it’s prolly better to have less fights and more conversations, but sometimes emotions emote)

And yes thinking about things in terms of power can be icky, but I think it’s okay to acknowledge some interactions make you feel demeaned somehow without making everything about power

I think it comes down to being able to make emotional mistakes? And not feeling like you can only initiate conflict if you’re as sure as you can be that you’re “right”

(Not all emotional conflicts have a right and wrong, but sometimes you’re just wrong and that’s okay)

And yes this can go too far!! This isn’t an endorsement to thoughtlessly fight with everyone all the time!

God there are so many nuances here ugh but there is a real thing beneath it all that I think it worth voicing

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So how do you think trans people should respond to being described as delusional/unbalanced/mentally ill/etc? You seem to believe that trans people will never be accepted by society, but if you think there's something they should be doing to avoid being genocided, it would be nice for you to at least say it.

I don't know what about my last post precipitated this, except (obviously) that I mentioned that I find the "it's anti-trans people who are actually obsessed and insane" to be a weak point, which wasn't even the main point of my brief post and I really don't have the time/energy to justify my briefly-mentioned opinion. (Here is a clue about why I really dislike "It's your side that's obsessed!" attacks in general, though.)

I don't know where I've ever suggested believing that trans people will never be accepted by society. (I think the closest I've ever come to suggesting it is in one reply to someone else's post a long time ago, where I said something like "I felt optimistic that the gay rights movement would prevail but don't feel optimistic about the trans rights movement as it stands right now.") What I have been insinuating is that I have fairly serious doubt that the rhetorical "culture" around the trans activist movement, as well as maybe some of its prevailing epistemological claims, are going to be broadly accepted by society. Which, hopefully, eventually the rhetoric and aspects of the cultural beliefs within the movement will shift and evolve (as happens in social movements over years) to something that will be accepted by society, and hopefully transness and associated health care rights and so on will be accepted along with it.

The fact that I'm critical (often, nowadays, in side-comments as in the post in question or in defenses of something I've said a while ago) of some particular activist rhetoric/culture is constantly misconstrued by people like you as a criticism of individual trans people's behavior or a marginalized group's collective actions or something, so that it's gotten to the point that every time I make the slightest comment about it I get asks like yours and it's a lot to keep up with. (I mean, maybe these anons are mostly the same one or two people, I don't know.)

And maybe I deserve it, because right now is an almost uniquely horrible moment when trans and a lot of other rights are just about locked in a chokehold, and I can understand why it pisses people off to hear "well activists shouldn't be / have been going around saying X and Y; well their culture is wrong about Z; etc.". And believe it or not, part of me does feel very gross about it. I'm going to try harder to quit doing it (although there's some other recent asks and so on I did resolve to acknowledge and respond to). But if/when I do receive stuff like this anyway, I'm going to have to resolve to ignore it. Because this kind of exchange is getting to be monotonous and not what probably like 95% of my followers enjoy or want to see filling up my blogging activity.

[liskantope]

A talking point I see occasionally (Freddie deBoer has dabbled in a variant of it) goes something like, "Anti-trans people say that trans people are mentally disturbed, but have you ever seen how many people on that side react to any kind of trans stuff by getting absolutely obsessed and unhinged and insane?"

I dislike this talking point for reasons that I'm not going into in this post (which is definitely not to say that I'm okay with the notion it's trying to combat, that of "trans people should be dismissed because they're just mentally ill"). But I recently ran across a fascinating rationalist gender-blogging character who, it seem, clearly is an example of anti-trans person who kind of went actually insane over getting bothered by certain aspects of the trans movement. (To the extent that he deserves being tarred as "anti-trans", as he seems quite okay with gender medicine and mainly has a massive issue with the "definition of man/woman" stuff.)

(I ran across this person very indirectly as a result of reading up on Ziz stuff -- he apparently knew Ziz and briefly reports her being a nice person to him in this very long and very interesting post mostly about gender identity / language stuff; I can't remember which Ziz-related article linked me to that one.)

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As if to drive home the point I was making in the OP the other day, later that same day I was listening to NPR again and heard part of another radio show, discussing the life and times of an American early-to-mid-20th-century reporter called Dorothy Thompson, who met Adolf Hitler in the early '30's, got kicked out of Nazi Germany for her open dissent, and became a major anti-Naziism voice on the radio over the following decade. The show was clearly trying to portray Thompson in glowing terms and ended the discussion by describing how she opposed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine by having the wisdom to see that it was a formula for perpetual conflict and oppression of the Palestinian people.

Later I looked up Dorothy Thompson because she seemed like a really interesting person and saw on her (surprisingly brief) Wikipedia page some, let's say very unsavory, quotes from her about the Jewish people (and to a lesser extent about black people). Applying a lot of charity, one could probably argue that in context her comments about Jews being "neurotic", wrapped in a "tragic psychosis", and "collectively the stupidest people on earth" aren't entirely horrible or coming from a perspective of malice. But that would have to be quite a bit of charity, more charity than progressive culture tends to apply to comments that can so easily be construed as racist.

And I thought I just might as well mention it, since NPR came up, and I've been kind of boiling for a while at how overtly politically biased it is all day long seven days a week while still being a major holdout from the older media landscape consumed by a large swath of the country, which seems to assume it's a totally objective media outlet of highest quality.

I notice Freddie deBoer turned off comments for this post, probably wisely, so I'll low-effort briefly express here rather than in his comments section that I agree with much of the gist of his post but do find it annoying that his measure of the lopsidedness of the power of the pro-Israel side over that of the pro-Palestine side is so absolute. It's like, just earlier today, for instance, the interview I was listening to on NPR (which has been covering the conflict very frequently since October 2023 and 100% from a pro-Palestine perspective) involved a guy who was severely denouncing Israel's behavior as "cultural cleansing" but choosing to stop just short of applying the term "genocide" while his interviewer gently hammered him about his refusal to do so. My point being that pro-Palestine sentiment has taken a quite firm hold of a sizable portion of American political culture, and has almost fully captured university cultures (I can attest as someone directly in that scene), even if its position is still pretty weak in actual national politics. FdB would describe SJ/wokeness of a decade ago in such terms and argued that it should be taken seriously instead of dismissed as "just a few university kids", just sayin'.

Like FdB, I will assert that this has no bearing either way on the rightness or wrongness of the pro-Palestine position, though.

[liskantope]

I notice Freddie deBoer turned off comments for this post, probably wisely, so I'll low-effort briefly express here rather than in his comments section that I agree with much of the gist of his post but do find it annoying that his measure of the lopsidedness of the power of the pro-Israel side over that of the pro-Palestine side is so absolute. It's like, just earlier today, for instance, the interview I was listening to on NPR (which has been covering the conflict very frequently since October 2023 and 100% from a pro-Palestine perspective) involved a guy who was severely denouncing Israel's behavior as "cultural cleansing" but choosing to stop just short of applying the term "genocide" while his interviewer gently hammered him about his refusal to do so. My point being that pro-Palestine sentiment has taken a quite firm hold of a sizable portion of American political culture, and has almost fully captured university cultures (I can attest as someone directly in that scene), even if its position is still pretty weak in actual national politics. FdB would describe SJ/wokeness of a decade ago in such terms and argued that it should be taken seriously instead of dismissed as "just a few university kids", just sayin'.

Like FdB, I will assert that this has no bearing either way on the rightness or wrongness of the pro-Palestine position, though.

[liskantope]

I found the personal account of the psychotic episode I was remembering from before (a key phrase that stuck best in my memory having been "might become a worse person than Adolf Hitler"), and indeed the writer was Jessi_Cata. I haven't reread the whole thing, but I should in light of my recent serious interest in the Ziz stuff and the fact that the essay includes a lot of commentary on that.

I think it's worthwhile to mention, as sort of a content warning, that in a very weak sense of the term, I'm slightly "triggered" by accounts like this, mainly because of the sleep deprivation aspect. The closest I've ever come to a mental breakdown (I'm not sure how to measure quite how close it was, but I can only say that considering it in hindsight it feels scarily close) was a few years back and primarily involved severe sleep deprivation. It's different from and certainly less severe and terrifying than Jessi_Cata's story, particularly because (1) I was not actually delusional in any concrete sense; my experience was just distorted in terms of emotions and sense of magnitude, and (2) I was unreservedly trying very hard to sleep and not dealing with having other people around me whose motives I had to question and so on, which seems to have been a complication to Jessi_Cata's ability to sleep or snap out of the episode. (I was feeling very unsafe by being alone, though, and seriously considering calling for transportation to the ER.)

Still, I find accounts of mental breakdowns, especially induced by rationalist-y trains of thought, morbidly fascinating if somewhat distressing to read.

Today's main listening on the Ziz-related fiasco is KenTheCowboy_'s interview with Jessi_Cata. (Actually, as I write, I'm most of the way through his interview with Adrusi as well, very worthwhile listening, especially on the Newcomb's Paradox / decision theory philosophical discourse, but I'm not sure I'll have as much to say about that.)

Jessi_Cata provides a sharp contrast to Octavia's take on most of this, in particular approaching everything with a foundation of social views that are far less radical and far more compatible with mine (e.g. her IMO quite sensible response to memes whose language frame parenting in terms of forcing children on pain of death to go to school). This doesn't mean she knows anything more about various contested incidents than Octavia did, of course -- she is equally just speculating about things she didn't witness. (She was also directly a part of the search for my old Tumblr mutual whose identity has turned out to be Suri Dao.)

KenTheCowboy_ displayed some fluidity in his nuanced convictions about things between this interview and the Octavia interview -- occasionally he expressed attitudes in one interview which came close to contradicting attitudes in the other. I would chalk this up to an evident tendency (which I also have, and is neither entirely good nor entirely bad) to be agreeable with whomever he's directly talking to.

Jessi_Cata also briefly describes a psychotic episode from 2017, and I'm strongly reminded of a firsthand description of a similar episode (which included, I think, refusing to eat/sleep and believing that certain pseudo-logical thought processes were putting her on a path to becoming worse than Hitler) that I read maybe around a year ago, also by a rationalist and I think in connection to a cultish abuser in the rat community (I think maybe Michael Vassar? I'm terrible with names among other things and could be completely confused). This personal story, if I remember right, also had the element of having dated someone who had an obsessive disdain and hatred (on an intellectual more than personal level) for the abusive previous person the writer had dated, which I was reminded of when I heard Octavia's story about being in a relationship with someone who had a "hate boner" (as she put it) for Ziz. Maybe someone can help me out here: am I remembering something coherent here, and is the writer of the narrative about the psychotic episode in fact Jessi_Cata?