Then again, the Jonestown Massacre was all members of the cult, while Ziz were apparently targeting outsiders. Yes, I know that the Jonestown cultists were all victims, too, but “these people might kill you, personally” is bound to get a lot more peoples’ attention than “these people might kill themselves”.
I get your point, but don’t forget that the mass suicide was preceded (and precipitated) by cult followers murdering Congressman Ryan and members of his entourage.
I mean it’s hard out there for a death cult. The bar is high for news coverage, if you’ve not just taken control of a major world nuclear arsenal your kinda in the also rans 
So, they’re vegan in respect for the sanctity of animal life, but they murder their fellow humans with impunity?! All righty then! 
I’m only becoming aware of the group this week via mainstream news outlets but have noticed several articles going out of their way to use the term ‘cult-like.’ I’m not sure if that’s the preferred use in general or a version of allegedly or accused for accurate journalism reasons.
Cults are generally religious in nature so it makes sense to equivocate when talking about an atheist group.
It was on Piney Mountain Road (not Pitney as reported) outside Frostburg, Maryland. In a small hollow in the side of the Allegheny Front itself, just a little down from the historical pass at Cumberland along the old National Road. If anybody digs American history, this was the most important westward route over the geographical barrier/watershed of Allegheny Mountain during the early republic. Before the railroad came, it was easier to ship goods from Pittsburgh downriver to New Orleans than overland to Philadelphia. The Whiskey Rebellion came about because western farmers could only afford to transport their corn crop over the mountain by reducing its bulk into whiskey.
According to charging documents obtained by Action News, the duo was observed trespassing a property on Pitney Mt. Road while dressed in all black. They allegedly asked a resident if they could camp in the area for about a month, but they were told to leave.
When officers arrived they observed two white box trucks parked at the end of the roadway. In one of the vehicles, police say two of the suspects were wearing gun belts with ammo in the belt. A further search led to the discovery of a long rifle in the back of the truck and a handgun on the floorboard, police noted.
I remembered the MOVE story, but I didn’t realize how many innocent people had their own lives destroyed until I saw the PBS documentary about it. I think it was on “American Experience.”
Several of the Zizian deaths also included people the cult members knew, even if only periphally. It’s when a serial killer, or a group, starts going after strangers that coverage ramps up.
Before Scientology bought the Cult Awareness Network and shut it down forever, CAN had a great web site. One section was a list of names of cults known to be operating in America. I was stunned at how many there were. If you clicked on the name, you got a page giving everything you could ever want to know about that cult. I had never heard of most of the groups on that page.
Cults have… evolved. I suppose “evolved” can be used here. In the old days, the Manson Family and the Symbionese Liberation Army were founded when a hardened ex-convict discovered that preaching Marxist theory would get him lots of college pussy. They formed the standard cult setup, in which the followers get lectures and the cult leader gets unlimited pussy. Unchecked sexual abuse and rape culture predominate. This is seen with too many nauseating examples to cite, including recently the likes of Nxivm and R. Kelly.
But the new generation? These kids today, they don’t even care about sex any more. To them, sex is just an unwelcome distraction from their computer games. So they get creative and think up entirely new ways to psychologically abuse one another. I guess this is what I meant by “evolved,” unless there’s a better name for it.
There are some CAN knockoffs, but most of them are Christian, and trend towards fundie. I remember that CAN was secular.
It seems nobody has figured out yet whether Lasota gets a capital S or not. There are apparently two different names distinguished only by case. Lasota with little s is Czech or Polish. LaSota with big S suggests a Romance language with the article La. La sota in Spanish means the jack or knave of cards, or it means ‘the beneath’. I keep seeing both versions in the news. Wikipedia has settled on the big S but with no discussion of how that decision was arrived at. The only possibly solid evidence is the fake obituary, with the big S, assuming it was placed by Ziz’s family or Ziz herself.
So far, Ziz’s only statements in court have been to deny doing anything and to demand vegan food in jail.
Meanwhile, the identity of one of the accused killers is a mystery. This story just keeps on growing.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/zizian-cult-suri-dao-20174370.php
“I started asking around, and what I got was a lot of confusing things about this group called the Zizians,” Metzger said. “I thought that they were responsible for the disappearance of my friend.”
That individual came up with a new twist on transgender: AFAB, aiming to be a feminine male crossdresser.
“That summer I did my nails and wore a skirt and a pretty white blouse, and I pretended to be a man cross-dressing for the first time,” Berns wrote. “I knew, then, that I needed to become this: someone who was. Someone who was beautiful, even if no one else understood.”
This bunch, they may be nucking futs, but you have to give them credit for originality.
The post-rationalist murder spree’s so-called “cult” leader has finally been arrested. What?
The Zizians, explained.
by Aja Romano
[Ziz] was obsessed with willpower, seemed to view psychopathy as liberational and aspirational, and claimed mind control. “Sometimes cops harass me for wearing my religious attire as a Sith,” she wrote, referring to wielders of the dark Force in Star Wars.
A serious, unironic adherent of a fictional religion. Life imitates art? This stuff isn’t even coming out of left field; it’s coming from outside the metaphorical ball park of consensus reality. They’re not trying for a “new ball game.” They’re trying to demolish the stadium.
Ziz labels herself “double good,” which makes me wonder if she’s read Orwell and is using Newspeak unironically, or what.
One of Ziz’s followers Maia Pasek, died by her own hand in 2018 while practicing Ziz’s self-destructive “uni-hemispheric sleep.” That wasn’t the only suicide among Ziz’s followers. The cult’s death toll now stands at six. Ziz was reported to be seen in the vicinity of both murders in California and Pennsylvania.
One major factor in the Zizian radicalization seems to be the way rationalism and post-rationalism encourage adherents to adopt ever more arcane, fantasy-infused worldviews which can easily turn dangerous. “At the time, my left hemisphere was a revenant and my right hemisphere a lich; and yeah my phylactery shattered, but what ended up happening was that part of me started fading towards zombiedom for many months, before rebuilding a phylactery and restoring lichdom,” goes a typical comment on Ziz’s blog
Don’t even try to make any sense of that.
The wider takeaway from all this is the dangerous brew of post-human tech culture brewing in the Silicon Valley area. Another dangerous side of that industry is currently carrying out a coup against the United States. I’ve never seen nihilism taking effect on such a scale, unless it was the Khmer Rouge’s “Year Zero.”
That actually made sense to me. Ziz is speaking of monsters in Dungeons & Dragons. A lich is an evil wizard or priest who has used powerful magic to become undead. A lich keeps their soul in a phylactery. Finding and destroying that item is the only sure way to kill one.
Revenants, in D&D terms, are extraordinary individuals who rise up through basically sheer willpower to find and strangle the people who killed them,
Describing one’s real self in terms of fiction instead of reality? And here I thought the whole point of fiction is that it’s understood to be not real. I may as well unironically say I went through “kemmer” by drawing a loose analogy with LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. But no, I did not go through kemmer. Kemmer is fiction. It isn’t real. To blur the line between fiction and reality would be a disservice to the novel and to the real me. They aren’t the same at all.
Strangely, what bothers me the most is that she is not using the terms correctly. A zombie is the second lowest form of undead. Only skeletons are lower. Zombies are slow, clumsy and mindless. In a fight, they always go last. They can only understand simple commands. A zombie can never become a lich. Without going into their given stats and powers- liches are highly intelligent, are powerful spellcasters, are surrounded by a warning aura of perpetual cold, and can steal your life just by touching you. Zombies are not actually evil. They are mindless tools. 99+% of liches are extremely evil and are always involved in a longterm elaborate plan of some sort.
Unless they changed things in later editions, destroying the phylactery permanently destroys the lich. It does not become a zombie. It ceases to be. There is no way to rebuild the phylactery and resurrect the lich.
Just like if I were to hijack Ursula K. LeGuin’s ideas for my own purposes while misusing them in ways she never meant. Like what Manson did with Beatles songs. Gross.
The folks at Wikipedia have brought together all the reliably-sourced information in one place and done a bang-up job of an article on the cult. It grew out of the article originally about the killing of Maland, which is what broke the whole saga in the first place, and discussion led to a comprehensive article on the cult. Here’s the article outline:
Contents
Section 1.8 mentions “dismantling of the group” in its heading, but the content says nothing about dismantling the group, only the latest arrests. To interpret that as “dismantling the group” is what Wikipedians call “original research synthesis” which is not allowed, so I expect that’ll get edited out soon if relevant content isn’t added.
Umm, I looked at the talk page and there’s a flurry of editorial controversy at the moment. Maybe it will settle down soon once they get everything wrangled out. Work in progress.