New reporting by @CharlotteAlter on sexual harassment within the Effective Altruism community: https://t.co/cgBqkCMIrl

I’ve worked with EA bros before and there’s a belief that women who complain about sexual harassment from “important men” are hurting the greater good. pic.twitter.com/AQ0WbZbmIw

— ella dawson (@brosandprose) February 4, 2023

It’s about time these sluts realized that really being a good person is having sex with everyone – not just very handsome men.

Time:

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan once considered herself an effective altruist. As a college student in India, she immersed herself in the social movement, reading its canonical texts like Doing Good Better, listening to its podcasts, and devouring effective altruism (EA) blogs in an attempt to figure out how to create a life of maximum moral impact. When the world started opening up from the COVID-19 pandemic, she moved to San Francisco and went to EA meetups, made friends with other EAs, and volunteered at EA conferences where they talked about how to use evidence and reason to do the most good in the world.

But as Gopalakrishnan got further into the movement, she realized that “the advertised reality of EA is very different from the actual reality of EA,” she says. She noticed that EA members in the Bay Area seemed to work together, live together, and sleep together, often in polyamorous sexual relationships with complex professional dynamics. Three times in one year, she says, men at informal EA gatherings tried to convince her to join these so-called “polycules.” When Gopalakrishnan said she wasn’t interested, she recalls, they would “shame” her or try to pressure her, casting monogamy as a lifestyle governed by jealousy, and polyamory as a more enlightened and rational approach.

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan

After a particularly troubling incident of sexual harassment, Gopalakrishnan wrote a post on an online forum for EAs in Nov. 2022. While she declined to publicly describe details of the incident, she argued that EA’s culture was hostile toward women. “It puts your safety at risk,” she wrote, adding that most of the access to funding and opportunities within the movement was controlled by men. Gopalakrishnan was alarmed at some of the responses. One commenter wrote that her post was “bigoted” against polyamorous people. Another said it would “pollute the epistemic environment,” and argued it was “net-negative for solving the problem.”

Gopalakrishnan is one of seven women connected to effective altruism who tell TIME they experienced misconduct ranging from harassment and coercion to sexual assault within the community. The women allege EA itself is partly to blame. They say that effective altruism’s overwhelming maleness, its professional incestuousness, its subculture of polyamory and its overlap with tech-bro dominated “rationalist” groups have combined to create an environment in which sexual misconduct can be tolerated, excused, or rationalized away. Several described EA as having a “cult-like” dynamic.

Julia Wise, the longest-serving employee of the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), an Oxford, England-based charity responsible for growing and maintaining the EA community, acknowledges that there have been reports of sexual harassment within the community. But she questions whether the movement itself is responsible. Sexual misconduct is a problem throughout society, after all, and EA leaders cannot control the behavior of everyone moving in and around it. “Some of the concerns that have come up are maybe made by people in EA, but the perpetrator attended an event a couple years ago but they’re not that involved,” says Wise. “How do you figure out what is a community problem versus what is a Bay Area problem or sex problem or something else?”

This story is based on interviews with more than 30 current and former effective altruists and people who live among them. Many of the women spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid personal or professional reprisals, citing the small number of people and organizations within EA that control plum jobs and opportunities. Much of the alleged abuse they detailed was concentrated in the Bay Area, but the women also described incidents that took place in three other states as well as overseas. Many of them asked that their alleged abusers not be named and that TIME shield their identities to avoid retaliation. Their accounts were corroborated by other parties to the incidents, by people to whom the women spoke shortly afterward, and by contemporaneous documents and screenshots. While a few women have raised these issues on online forums, many spoke to TIME about their experiences with sexual misconduct in EA communities for the first time.

One recalled being “groomed” by a powerful man nearly twice her age who argued that “pedophilic relationships” were both perfectly natural and highly educational. Another told TIME a much older EA recruited her to join his polyamorous relationship while she was still in college. A third described an unsettling experience with an influential figure in EA whose role included picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs. After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview, she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel. When she arrived, she says, “he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me.”

Several women say that the way their allegations were received by the broader EA community was as upsetting as the original misconduct itself. “The playbook of these EAs is to discourage victims to seek any form of objective, third-party justice possible,” says Rochelle Shen, who ran an EA-adjacent event space in the Bay Area and says she has firsthand experience of the ways the movement dismisses allegations. “They want to keep it all in the family.”

In recent years, effective altruism morphed from a niche philanthropic community devoted to addressing worldwide poverty into a powerful global network of think tanks, nonprofit organizations and wealthy donors that dole out hundreds of millions of dollars in annual charitable donations. The movement has grown rapidly, with monthly active users on the EA forum growing fivefold since 2019, more than 6,000 attendees at EA global conferences in 2022, and at least 371 active EA chapters across more than 40 countries. Most of the movement’s members—who are overwhelmingly white, more than 70% male, and skew young, according to a recent survey of members of the community in 2020—are idealists drawn to the promise of building a better world by applying rigorous logic to moral decisions. Thousands have signed a pledge to tithe at least 10% of their income to high-impact charities. From college campuses to Silicon Valley startups, adherents are drawn to the moral clarity of a philosophy dedicated to using data and reason to shape a better future for humanity. Effective altruism has become something of a secular religion for the young and elite.

But the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, EA’s billionaire patron and most famous acolyte, who is now facing federal fraud charges tied to the collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has put effective altruism under increased scrutiny. Like other recent social movements spanning the political spectrum, EA is diffuse and deliberately amorphous; anybody who wants to can call themselves an EA. And even in a community of self-styled do-gooders, “there certainly have been cases where people were treated badly, including sexual harassment,” says Wise, of the Centre for Effective Altruism. “This is an essential problem that all social groups face.”

Wise, whose role at CEA involves overseeing community well-being, tells TIME she has fielded roughly 20 complaints per year in her seven years on the job, ranging from uncomfortable comments to more serious allegations of harassment and more. But with no official leadership structure, no roster of who is and isn’t in the movement, and no formal process for dealing with complaints, Wise argues, it’s hard to gauge how common such issues are within EA compared to broader society.

The women who spoke to TIME counter that the problem is particularly acute in EA. The movement’s high-minded goals can create a moral shield, they say, allowing members to present themselves as altruists committed to saving humanity regardless of how they treat the people around them. “It’s this white knight savior complex,” says Sonia Joseph, a former EA who has since moved away from the movement partially because of its treatment of women. “Like: we are better than others because we are more rational or more reasonable or more thoughtful.” The movement “has a veneer of very logical, rigorous do-gooderism,” she continues. “But it’s misogyny encoded into math.”

Women are so helpful.

Geeks are gross & were right to be harassed & suppressed out of civil society. If you read harry potter as an adult it doesn’t mean you’re some quirky attendee of a niche STEM overrepresented subculture, it means you are a sex pest that needs to be euthanized with a felony record

— ♡ Charlotte Fang ♱ 金光 World Prince (@CharlotteFang77) November 15, 2022

As most are aware, one of the main strategies of the Western intelligence establishment is causing social chaos in nations that are considered enemies of the Jews.

They use different techniques in every country. In the Middle East, they of course fund terrorist groups, like ISIS. On the other end of that, they will fund homosexual or atheist groups.

In Hong Kong, they recently backed Antifa. Obviously, Antifa is something they also use against populations in countries they control. Arguably, they also use Islamic terrorists against countries they control.

In mainland China, they fund cults. The most infamous is Falun Gong, a cult totally run by the CIA. Steve Bannon is now connected to these people for whatever reason, and it was on a Falun Gong website that he released the Hunter Biden sex videos, which muddied that whole issue (people who didn’t know about the Hunter Biden laptop when Trump talked about it then thought that Trump was lecturing Biden about his son getting footjobs, rather than about the emails showing pay-to-play scandals).

Also, you might have heard that “China oppresses Christians.” This is also a hoax. In China, you can go in a normal church in any city. You can do that now in China, while in America, they are closing churches because of the coronavirus hoax.

The “churches” that they claim are oppressed are so-called “home churches,” which are CIA-funded cults, who meet secretly in people’s homes to discuss resistance against the government. The fact that they are oppressed has zero to do with Christianity, and is entirely related to their anti-government positions. You can say what you like about China’s laws making it illegal to criticize the government, but to pretend that because evangelical cult groups are targeted for plotting against the government is an attack on Christianity specifically is simply dishonest. They are repressed for their politics, not their religion. Their politics are CIA anti-government policies.

Western intelligence as a matter of principle encourages cults to flourish in any enemy country, simply for the fact that cults degrade and harm the social order by breaking up families and creating generally anti-social behaviors.

In Russia, they go big with Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Reuters:

Masked law enforcement officers carried out mass raids on the Jehovah’s Witnesses across Russia on Tuesday and made a number of arrests as part of a new criminal case against the group, the Investigative Committee said.

The law enforcement agency said it had opened an investigation as it suspected the Christian denomination was organising the activity in Moscow of its national centre and affiliates.

Yaroslav Sivulskiy, a spokesman for the European Association of Jehovah’s Witnesses, denied the centre had resumed its activity and said the group was being targeted in a campaign of persecution.

Russia’s Supreme Court ordered the Jehovah’s Witnesses to disband in 2017 after labelling it extremist, and some of its adherents have since been jailed or hit with criminal charges in a crackdown.

On Tuesday, black-clad officers used a crowbar and an axe to break down a door to gain access to one property, footage released by the Investigative Committee showed.

The agency said it had identified a number of group organisers and followers and had taken them into custody as part of its investigation. It said in a statement that searches had been carried out in more than 20 regions.

Some adherents have met privately in a flat in northwest Moscow from June 2019 to discuss and study religious literature relating to their faith, and have converted some Moscow residents, it said .

Six Jehovah’s Witnesses were detained in the Russian capital during the searches, Sivulskiy said.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses have been under pressure for years in Russia where the Orthodox Church championed by President Vladimir Putin is dominant.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses are also active in China.

One time when I was at a Starbucks in Guangzhou, there was a Jehovah’s Witness from Canada harassing people, and I called the police. They didn’t do anything to him, so apparently they’re not especially worried about it. Or, more likely, they were already keeping track of him.

It was so funny when I called the Chinese police on this Canadian cult member in Starbucks though. That was one of the funniest things I’ve done.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are UFO cultists.

Watch this cartoon about it to get the facts.

That’s a normal face to make.

Don’t let anyone tell you that this man doesn’t look absolutely insane or possessed by an interdimensional pedo demon.

Jehovah’s Witnesses and all these other kooky Jesus-freak cults are infested with CIA agents and used to undermine nations opposed to the Jewish system by weakening their social order. This is the same situation with Falun Gong in China. It is known.

The Guardian:

A Russian court has found a Danish Jehovah’s Witness guilty of organising a banned extremist group and jailed him for six years in a case raising fears of a return to Soviet-era religious persecution.

Armed police detained Dennis Christensen, a 46-year-old builder, in May 2017 at a prayer meeting in Oryol, about 200 miles (320km) south of Moscow following the banning of the local Jehovah’s Witnesses by a court a year earlier.

Russia’s supreme court later ruled the group was “extremist” and ordered it to disband nationwide. Christensen’s detention, Russia’s first extremism-related arrest of a Jehovah’s Witness, foreshadowed dozens more.

The court, in the city of Oryol, found Christensen guilty on Wednesday after a long trial, his lawyer, his wife and a representative for the Jehovah’s Witnesses told Reuters.

Christensen had pleaded innocent, saying he was exercising freedom of religion guaranteed in Russia’s constitution.

The Danish foreign minister, Anders Samuelsen, called on Moscow to respect religious freedom and criticised it for classifying Jehovah’s Witnesses on a par with terrorist groups.

The US-headquartered Jehovah’s Witnesses have been under pressure for years in Russia, where the dominant Orthodox church is championed by the president, Vladimir Putin. Orthodox scholars have cast them as a dangerous foreign sect that erodes state institutions and traditional values, allegations they reject. 

There can be only one faith in Russia.

The Imperial Orthodox Truth. 

And the Cult of Righteous Hot Lead. 

These “Christian” cults should be forcibly kept the fuck away from Russia. For one, because too many Slavs are hopelessly naive and spiritually open-minded to be allowed to have contact with them. They get suckered in too easily. It’s fine to have these cults in Scandinavia because no Scandinavian actually retains the capacity to believe in God anymore. Don’t get me wrong, they will go to the meetings, do the mandatory volunteer work and give their money to the cult, but they’ll never actually believe in God, so it’s harder for these scam artists.

Furthermore, it is clear that Slavs and Scandinavians do not believe in the same God and therefore there can’t be any genuine religious interchange. I feel authorized to speak on this topic because as synchronicity would have it, I just finished watching The Seventh Seal which is a big deal Swedish film that talks about God and Death.

The premise of the film was about a knight having a chess match with death, which intrigued me.

But even though it was made in 1957, basically everyone in the film is an atheist and a shitlib.

The knight and his squire are the only two interesting characters, and they spend the film waxing poetically about how they don’t believe in God. The knight wishes that he did and that God would speak to him to assuage his doubts. In contrast, the squire adopts a more devil-may-care attitude, but secretly seethes all the same. Oh, and there’s plenty of scenes dedicated to the Crusades being evil, to the horrors of Priest-led witch burnings, the phenomenon of self-flagellation and the Bubonic Plague.

Basically, the whole film was just typical shitlib dreck about Christianity and thinly veiled atheist demoralization porn. It is also undeniable that the film represents the average Scandinavian’s view on matters of spirituality as well.

The very fact that the knight thinks that he can out-logik and out-debate and out-play Death in a chess match speaks volumes to the hubris of the character.

Whining that God doesn’t speak to them and that their rational mind can’t grasp that seems to be what passes for spirituality with these people. And the film captures this with the knight’s try-hard and ultimately shallow monologue, which can be summarized as follows:

“God, can’t you see how I suffer and struggle because you don’t speak to me? Now I’m going to be an atheist and tragically die because I’m a self-infatuated little narcissist!”

Which is why I don’t believe that the kooky-eyed Jehovah freak that got arrested actually even believed in God.

Like, I think he believed in his cult and in his CIA mission, sure, but on a deeper level, it’s clear that Russians and Scandinavians simply can’t believe in the same God because Scandinavians are only capable of worshipping their own over-inflated sense of reasonableness and rationality while the Slavic expression of faith is about worshipping the awesome power of God and focused on showing humility in the face of his unknowable plan.

Furthermore, most Scandinavians have a vicious hate-boner for Russians and Slavs in general, who they view as being an inferior race. This goes for both liberals and nationalists, mind you. On that issue, they’re both on the same page.

That’s why I can’t, in a thousand years, believe that this man went to Murmansk to work for the betterment of Russians.

He was probably running a scam on these people.

And frankly, even if he wasn’t running a scam, all of these Evangelist cults need to be banned anyway. They don’t belong where there is already an existing faith. Plus their teachings of pacifism and loyalty to the cult, as opposed to the project of the State, is heretical and ought to be severely punished by any serious country

INB4 Moslems.

Yeah, Russia should do something about them too.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses are not a normal group of people. They deserve to be banned like the Jews.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses were recently declared an extremist cult in Russia.

The group appealed this to Russia’s Supreme Court and lost their case. This means they have been officially banned in the country.

BBC:

Russia’s Supreme Court has ordered the disbanding of the Jehovah’s Witnesses on Russian territory.

The ban came into effect after the court rejected an appeal by the religious group against a ruling in April which declared it to be extremist.

The justice ministry had argued that the group distributed pamphlets which incited hatred against other groups.

The group described the ruling as the end of religious freedom in Russia.

The denomination says it has 175,000 members in Russia – a country where it was persecuted during the Stalin era.

An estimated eight million people worldwide are part of the Christian-based movement, best known for going door-to-door looking for new converts.

This is a good thing. These people are a bunch of kooks.

I remember when I was growing up seeing these fools ringing people’s doorbells trying to recruit people. They were never normal. They were always weird and creepy.

I’m assuming these people are just as weird in Russia as they are here in America. If they weren’t I doubt the government would have done this.

One final note. The Jehovah’s Witnesses originated from the teachings of a man named Charles Taze Russell.

Check out the memorial they built for him near his gravestone. Does anybody think this is normal? I do not.

Maybe after we deal with the Jews we can sort out what’s going on with these secret societies and cults. I think it is our duty to do so.