Last week, my piece “How I May Have Solved a Murder” detailed how my draft about a suspect in a recent Vermont shooting led me to identify Maximilian Snyder as a likely person of interest in a California stabbing just before he was arrested and charged with the murder. Although I’ve never directly communicated with Max, the limited information about him online was sufficient to see that he ideologically overlapped with the “Zizians,” a trans-vegan-anarchist cult led by “Ziz” that is known for its associations to violence and strong interest in artificial intelligence. Now, we know a bit more about Max because he dictated an open letter from Solano County Jail to the media with the aim of reaching Eliezer Yudkowsky, an artificial-intelligence researcher and thought leader in rationalist philosophy. (You might also know Yudkowsky from his lengthy book Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, described by the New Yorker as “an attempt to explain Harry’s wizardry through the scientific method” and dubbed the “number 1 fan fiction series of all time” by The Guardian.)
Max opens his statement with the following: “I am not one of Ziz’s friends, and neither she nor her friends endorse me or my words so far as I know. I speak only for myself, as myself, for the sake of everyone. This I swear on my Laws.” It is worth noting that Ziz is actually a man. But aside from the reverence to gender identity, Max’s careful wording doesn’t actually dismiss the allegations of Zizian cult ties: He need not be a “friend” of Ziz to be a violent accomplice.
In fact, Max’s lengthy letter suggests that he’s at least a victim of Ziz’s disturbed ideology, insofar as he similarly advocates for uncompromising veganism. (Ziz, the alias of Jack LaSota, had described non-vegans as “flesh-eating monsters.”) Max urges Yudkowsky to have a “crisis of faith about whether animals are people.” Max apparently thinks that animals are people, or at least have some notion of personhood, since he describes them as “my little brothers and sisters and siblings.” Instead of “eating flesh and animal products,” Max provides the instruction to “eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or Clif bars or something.” It seems that the statement won’t achieve Max’s desired effect of converting Yudkoswky into a vegan, since Yudkowsky told the SF Chronicle that he will not read the letter because “audience should not be a reward for crime.”
Generally, I don’t consider “eating meat is murder” a convincing argument. And it is certainly not compelling when set forth by a guy who was charged with murdering an elderly landlord. Perhaps vegans should hire a PR specialist and do some damage control.