[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.