[pjscott]

I remember, from the earliest days, the rationalist movement talking about how cults prey on people and how to recognize it and walk the other way. The Ziz cult checks so many of the boxes that they were warning against back then, years ago—

—And years later, once the Ziz cult started preying on vulnerable people, the response from the mainstream rationalist movement was… to post warnings about avoiding this messed-up cult, to explain exactly how it was manipulating its victims, and how the best thing to do (in the absence of legal remedy) was to stay the hell away from that diseased social scene.

I’m not sure how they could have done better. Any sufficiently large movement attracts crazy people. No matter how well or poorly they may deal with that fact, anybody can do guilt-by-association forever after.