Quis cancellat ipsos cancellores?

This post is almost entirely factually incorrect, but to go point-by-point

1. For the parties I throw - I assume the person is referring to some of the parties in 2017, as those were the ones that had "a lot of sex"? I agree consent wasn't very clearly set out, but I'm not sure I regret this. I've never had anybody express to me the concerns laid out in the post, this is the first time I'm becoming aware events I've thrown have had a negative impact on people. I do genuinely not want this to happen and am now thinking about what and how to change about my events in the future. But I haven't thrown events with sex in them for years, so I'm guessing I need to be more careful if I decide to do this again? Happy to have feedback from people who've attended my events, here. 

2. I've never played drug roulette or seen drug roulette played at one of my parties, this is a blatantly incorrect claim. I have joked about playing it numerous times, though; maybe someone heard me joking and misunderstood it as me saying I'd done it before? (edit: to be slightly more clear, I have speculated out loud about the specifics of how we could do this if we wanted to, for fun, but I've never claimed that I had actually done it before or made any actual plans for doing it)

3. "you are never allowed to talk about it with anyone." - also blatantly incorrect? Absolutely incorrect if it applies to drug roulette, cause I've never done it, but I also have never said this about any other activity to my recollection.

4. "Also, there is reason to believe that one of the things Aella enjoys doing is consensual non-consent torture, designed to break people." This is mostly true, but misleading! I'd just say "consensual torture" - there's no façade of nonconsent like you'd see in kink play. I just straightforwardly tie people up and hurt them, after very clearly explaining everything, and they're able to stop any time. Usually it lasts around 20-30 minutes, and I've never done it twice on one person. I've also had it done to me! It's mostly just a really interesting experience to be in a lot of pain and see what your mind does, and to meditate on the experience of coping with that intensity. The purpose is definitely not to 'break' people. I'm more than happy for all the people I've done this with to talk about their experiences. I've also been very upfront about doing this with everybody.

5. The mention of attempting to cancel Joscha Bach was not an attempt to cancel, it was more talking about gut feelings, and fails to mention that I made a followup post about this saying "I officially retract my very public yelling about bad JUJU, say while i do have strong bad juju it seems like this isnt really matching onto other people's experiences, and im considering it to be a false positive, and i want to make this public and say you should downgrade the extent to which you consider my juju guiding in this example and possibly others"
(sorry Joscha I didn't mean for you to see this, everybody said very nice things about you and I updated in that direction)

6. Idk if I've tried to "cancel" MAPLE/OAK? You can read the facebook posts in question here https://www.facebook.com/caroline.f.hubert/posts/10222751244317191 and decide for yourself if this seems like a 'cancellation' attempt. This had nothing to do with the director stepping down, I wasn't aware that happened.

7. Trying to cancel Leverage? Probably the closest to the truth. I do think Leverage seemed to get pretty bad by the end and people should take that very seriously. 

8. No, I was not mittenscautious. I did not gather the stories, set up the inbox, I did not make the medium account. The most I did was be the first one to share the post on my facebook page. I was roommates with Persephone at the time.

9.  "My intuitive read of this sequence of events, at the time as well as now, was: 1. Brent did something bad. 2. CFAR initiated an investigative process to determine what was to be done. That process reached a certain result. 3. Aella contested that result, and initiated an investigative process of dramatically lower fidelity, but higher memetic virulence. 4. Due to the strength of Aella’s frame, CFAR capitulated and ceded de facto control of the community to her."

Also untrue. I'd just moved to the bay at the time and barely knew anyone. I think the only substantial commentary I provided here was some comments on a facebook thread (edit: Duncan linked it here, you can find my comments by ctrl-f "Ok I am late to the party") where there were hundreds of other comments. I would be absolutely shocked if I had any impact whatsoever on CFAR making any decision. I doubt they even knew who I was. I think I probably was more against Brent's cancellation than the median here (edit: I was still for it, just the majority were 'very' for it; I was more tempered with the intensity of the boot); the author of this article and I had a conversation at the time where he asked me to donate money to Brent as iirc he had already done, and I seriously considered it (edit: but decided against, after talking to some people who knew Brent). Unfortunately I think the author blocked me on FB (or deleted it) so I can't find those messages.

10. "“Why is she doing this? This is undermining my frame. I’m trying to do something and she’s fucking it up.”"
I'm pretty sure I didn't say this, I think I said something more like the Lesswrong comments I made on the post itself, which you can read. 

"She said: “yeah, I don’t really mind being the evil thing. Seems okay to me.”" 
I wouldn't say this to most other people, because there's an association with 'being evil' that I don't mean, and I don't want them to assume. This association is the thing implied here when taken out of context. I assumed the author understood, but now I suspect there was a misunderstanding.
The thing I actually meant you can read in my blog post here, ctrl-f "evil"

11. "And that’s all I have for you. I don’t know how else to end; if this were a cancellation, it might include a bit of “frame control” to try to tell you how to receive all of this and what to do about it. (The end of “Brent: A Warning”"

I think he might be implying that I'm doing frame control in that article, except I didn't write the end of that article. edit: to clarify here in case it was unclear, I do support the banning of Brent from the community, given the level of harm I believe he did to young women. Also, this seems like a misunderstanding of what I meant by 'frame control', which might be my fault for being unclear.

Anyway; I'm not sure exactly why this post was written? If I have actually caused damage to people I do want to know, and if anyone feels comfortable telling me they were hurt by me I would value that information. But most of the claims here are concretely wrong, and I'm left mostly confused about what's going on and why.

I definitely see major falsehoods in this post, particularly with regards to cancellations (which happened online in places I read). Other parts of the post describe things I didn't witness, but which seem dubious when placed in the context of a hit piece with known falsehoods in it.

The accusations against Brent were not that he engaged in hardcore BDSM practices- many peple had known that for years. The new information was that he ignored safewords and pressured people into things they did not want to do, which transforms the acts from BDSM to assault.

ETA: I should say I appreciate all the specifics Joshin put in this post, because they make it so easy to determine cruxes. 

To contribute whatever information I can here:

1. 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".
2. 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.
3. 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).

I note that I was gently queried on whether or not I would be willing to crosspost this to LW, and demurred.

Which makes it seem a bit different from "Oh, here's a post that isn't on LW and maybe ought to be."  

(Like, it's possible ChristianKl simply saw it and wanted to share; I am not speculating on the actual history of it showing up here today.  Separate from whatever actually happened, it just seems worth noting that this is a post authored by someone who wanted it crossposted on LW but did not want (or was not able) to do so themselves.)

It's hard to state a fact like that without accidentally seeming to push an agenda.  I genuinely believe that there are both good and bad reasons for someone wanting something crossposted to LW but not wanting (or not being able) to do so themselves.  I don't know what to make of the fact that it was trying to be stealth crossposted.  I just think that the fact itself is worth making known, especially since this linkpost does not itself mention anything like "posted on request" or "posted with permission" (possibly because ChristianKl posted it unilaterally, out of their own initiative).