I’ve been to three of Aella’s parties—without remembering exact dates, something like 2018, 2019, and 2021. While they were pretty wild, and while I might not have been paying close attention, I didn’t see personally see anything that seemed consent-violating or even a gray area, and I definitely didn’t hear anything about “drug roulette”.
I had originally been confused by the author’s claim that “Aella was mittenscautious”. Aella was definitely not either of the two women who blogged on that account describing abusive relationships with Brent. After rereading the post, it sounds like the author is saying Aella set up the Medium page for them, which I have no evidence on either way. If true, I would be grateful to her for that—there had been widespread rumors Brent was abusing people before that, but in the absence of common knowledge nothing was being done.
There was widespread discontent with CFAR’s original decision not to come down harder on Brent. I knew several people who were angry, none of whom were Aella or seemed especially connected to her. It’s possible Aella was manipulating all of them behind the scenes, but it seems more possible that a lot of rationalists were just naturally concerned that we seemed to be tolerating a person with multiple credible rape/abuse allegations.
Moving from evidence to vague thoughts: there’s a tough balance between not doing “cancel culture” in the bad sense, and also not being tolerant/complacent in the face of bad things. I’m pretty allergic to the bad kind of “cancel culture” but I’ve always felt like Aella strikes this balance correctly. If she in fact helped with mittenscautious I am even more impressed with this.
(I did worry Aella’s “Frame Control” post would make it too easy to try to cancel people for vague hard-to-describe infractions, but I didn’t get the sense Aella herself was trying to do that).
To contribute whatever information I can here:
I’ve been to three of Aella’s parties—without remembering exact dates, something like 2018, 2019, and 2021. While they were pretty wild, and while I might not have been paying close attention, I didn’t see personally see anything that seemed consent-violating or even a gray area, and I definitely didn’t hear anything about “drug roulette”.
I had originally been confused by the author’s claim that “Aella was mittenscautious”. Aella was definitely not either of the two women who blogged on that account describing abusive relationships with Brent. After rereading the post, it sounds like the author is saying Aella set up the Medium page for them, which I have no evidence on either way. If true, I would be grateful to her for that—there had been widespread rumors Brent was abusing people before that, but in the absence of common knowledge nothing was being done.
There was widespread discontent with CFAR’s original decision not to come down harder on Brent. I knew several people who were angry, none of whom were Aella or seemed especially connected to her. It’s possible Aella was manipulating all of them behind the scenes, but it seems more possible that a lot of rationalists were just naturally concerned that we seemed to be tolerating a person with multiple credible rape/abuse allegations.
Moving from evidence to vague thoughts: there’s a tough balance between not doing “cancel culture” in the bad sense, and also not being tolerant/complacent in the face of bad things. I’m pretty allergic to the bad kind of “cancel culture” but I’ve always felt like Aella strikes this balance correctly. If she in fact helped with mittenscautious I am even more impressed with this.
(I did worry Aella’s “Frame Control” post would make it too easy to try to cancel people for vague hard-to-describe infractions, but I didn’t get the sense Aella herself was trying to do that).