[reducesuffering]

Nonsense. Aella grew up in an extremely fundamentalist Christian household. We're talking 'non-Christians lead to the devil, don't be friends with them"-type. It is absolutely seriously uncomfortable breaking up your entire programmed worldview from that.

"I grew up in an isolated, homeschooled environment. I’d moved up to northern Idaho in an attempt to go to college, but my parents were very “use your bootstraps” people and wouldn’t help me financially or cosign on any loans. They also made too much money for me to qualify for financial aid, so I was screwed; a few months into college I got an ominous letter and had to drop out shortly afterwards.

I’d been brought up with the expectation of being a submissive housewife – but here I was, 19 years old, no support system, education, or future, and with an unsettling cultural disconnect from everyone around me. Everyone used words I didn’t know, references to movies I hadn’t seen, attitudes drawn from music I hadn’t heard.

So I worked whatever I could. I occasionally went hungry, unable to afford food. I slept on a mattress on the floor in a large group house. I ended up working very long hours at a factory with no windows where I wore a uniform and stood on my feet all day and saw the sun only on weekends."

https://knowingless.com/2020/05/25/readjusting-to-porn/

Luckily, her intellect allowed her to figure a way out of what would usually be a tough upbringing to bounce back from. But "absurdly comfortable"??

[AA-BA-94-2A-56]

She's a really good writer, and has obviously been through quite a lot. My background is amusingly probably her closest male analogue. I grew up homeschooled, had a similar experience in which I was flung into a world of alien pop-culture. I struggled with homelessness part way through university, and stayed in a house that was dilapidated. I can sympathise quite a bit with her background. I found myself struggling with atheism vs christianity, determinism (God has a plan for me) vs nihilism (there is no plan).

But she openly encourages conversations that seem extremely fascistic to me. One good example I have is this tweet:

https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1229230411760324609

Her Twitter is a gold mine of well-written, but ultimately half-baked ideas that lend themselves to seriously considering Nazi ideals. And I find that many of the rationalist crowd secretly encourage or at least allow discussions about Neo-Nazi ideas. This is not cool at all.

It's amazing to me to see Aella as perhaps who I could have been, had I not wholly challenged my beliefs.

[reducesuffering]

Imo, Aella's taboo-breaking questions comes from breaking out of the orthodoxy of her background. "If what previous authorities told me X,Y,Z was a lie, what lies are the new authorities telling me?" I can't condone people conflating everything a terrible group did with what you're not allowed to even ask questions about. It feels like it leads to people screaming "Commie!" if you ever advocate for social safety nets in support of a more egalitarian society. While rationalists do discuss from first principles and question a variety of orthodoxies, they in no way advocate Nazism or superiority or anything like that. From a superficial glance, rationalists often get conflated with a different similar-sphere (they debate them on blogs) group called "neoreactionaries", who do advocate for far right monarchy and fascism. Maybe that's where some confusion lies.