Thanks to @plex for writing this, I was linked this post by someone on substack after a recent post on psychedelic exceptionalism and rationalist events.
I wanted to zero in on one thing plex mentioned: painting victims with some brush to take away their credibility is what abusers do. Courtney Love was the first woman to say anything about Harvey Weinstein and four words on the red carpet got her banned from the CAA, and very few people if anyone took her seriously.
These things keep happening because rationalism’s response to them is saying things like occasionally a thing pops up where someone who is mentally unstable, has an established reputation for being insane, makes a bunch of dramatic but kind of vague accusations that outsiders don’t know they shouldn’t take seriously.
They’ll keep happening as long as that attitude persists, and what Lily Kay Ross said about the exceptionalism inherent to the psychedelic movement is equally applicable to rationalist/adjacent circles:
Lily Kay Ross said she felt compelled to leave work in psychedelics after she spoke out about her rape by an ayahuasca shaman in the Amazon. “I was told explicitly that I might single-handedly re-instigate the war on drugs and undo all of the advancements in the field of psychedelic research since the 1960s,” she said. “There’s the idea that psychedelics are so important and so wonderful that the train has to keep going. We can’t slow down to get the rapists off the train.
this is exactly how prominent rationalists reacted to my coming forward about SA, and I feel bad for any woman coerced into letting her guard down in these communities