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This page is largely copied from a medium article about LaSota.
J. LaSota published numerous blog posts and comments between 2019 and 2022 discussing violence, revenge, and conflict. These writings gained renewed attention following their involvement in various criminal investigations.
In November 2019, LaSota published several blog posts describing potential violent confrontations. In one post dated November 13, they described considering violence during an argument with Gwen Danielson:
Well, they were essentially asserting ownership of me... I said if they were going to defend a right to be attacking me on some level, and treat fighting back as new aggression and cause to escalate, I would not at any point back down, and if our conflicting definitions of the ground state where no further retaliation was necessary meant we were consigned to a runaway positive feedback loop of revenge, so be it. And if that was true, we might as well try to kill each other right then and there. In the darkness of Caleb’s bridge at night, where we were both sort of sitting/lying under things in a cramped space, I became intensely worried they could stand up faster. (Consider the idea from WWI: “mobilization is tantamount to a declaration of war”). I stood up, still, silent, waiting.
That same day, in a separate post about sexual assault, LaSota wrote about considering retaliatory violence from a game theory perspective:
A part of me said to retaliate for timeless reasons. I knew he had more muscles. But with a surprise attack, I could very quickly have more eyes, or more functional windpipes. With determination, I could probably kill him and evade the law.
Prior to the CFAR alumni reunion protest, LaSota sent an email to a MIRI staffer stating:
There is one crime in my religion thought to be punishable by hell. And that is lifting an evil god to heaven, feeding your fellow sentient beings to it in order to reach heaven yourself... Having absorbed the emotion into psychopathic compute and decided not to back down, I do not fear hell. I will burn down all evil gods on their thrones; see them in hell if I must... If you want to make it out of this universe alive, I suggest you do the same.
In a mass email to CFAR alumni, they wrote: "If you do not want to die, you need to learn how to escape containment" and "If you do not want to die with this plague consuming our world, then turn your hopes back to the hard-to-define things that generated these institutions that no longer deserve them."
After the 2019 alumni reunion, Anna Salamon wrote in a Facebook group:
Shortly before the protest, Ziz made remarks on Discord stating that “If MIRI attempts to silence me using governmental force. That would be physical violence.” and “If they escalate to physical violence, we are prepared to perform self-defense.” (Someone then asked Ziz “by self-defense, do you mean going to court?”, but she did not answer.) (The context of her remarks was that someone on Discord had suggested that MIRI could sue her for libel. Ziz’s remarks unnerved me and some other CFAR staff partly because we had banned her from the reunion, and we thought she might take our enforced “please leave our reunion” request as “attempting to silence me using governmental force”. She had previously made similar remarks in the final paragraphs of her blog post “punching evil”.)
More than one person showed me the quote or told me about the quote. I shared it with some friends to get their interpretive help. More than one person, upon seeing the quote (or the combination of the quote with the email that Ziz sent out around the same time to ~500 people), expressed fear for our physical safety.
The final two paragraphs from the "punching evil" blogpost:
And if the state has been seized by vampires such that we are afraid to warn each other about vampires, the state has betrayed an obligation to us and is illegitimate. If a vampire escalated to physical violence by hijacking the state in that way, there would be no moral obligation not to perform self defense.
A government and its laws are a Schelling point people can agree on for what peace will look like. Maliciously bringing a defamation lawsuit against someone for saying something true is not a peaceful act. If that Schelling point is not adhered to, vampires can’t fight everyone. And tend to flee at the first sign of anything like resistance.
In June 2020, LaSota wrote approvingly of Nakam, a historical attempt to poison German water supplies in revenge for the Holocaust:
I think the world would be better if Nakam had succeeded... I consider it particularly well targeted for an operation of that importance conducted by so few people. Almost the entire adult population was willfully contributing to the war economy, and was algorithmically-knowingly complicit.
...The last time I talked about this with “rationalists”, iirc one of them said they read about vengeance, and it just lead to cycles of infinite destruction. I asked them if their reading consisted of Romeo and Juliet. It had. Actually. From what I’ve heard, cycles of vengeance tended to be iteratively de-escalating.
In August 2021, LaSota published a series of comments using the metaphor of "airlocking" (a reference to spacing people in science fiction) to describe responses to various arguments. These comments frequently ended with the refrain "Airlocked" in response to different positions or statements.
In an August 22 comment, they wrote: "I get so many people lining up to commit 'suicide by Ziz'" with a link to the Wikipedia article on "suicide by cop."
In late 2022, LaSota's statements became increasingly confrontational. In July, they wrote:
To which the only correct answer is absolute violence... If you're double evil, I'm not gonna bother to finish explaining, just die.
They also claimed to have "survived 7 assassination attempts" and warned that "Whoever's in a cooperative relationship, transitively, with that mob, is at war with me. And perhaps you should really think about how it is I'm still alive and growing more hateful if you think numbers will keep you safe for long."
Their final recorded online statement, posted on July 27, 2022, shortly before their reported drowning, read: "I hate that I did a goddamn nonviolent protest."