This post is not a comment on Kathy Forth’s suicide, her suicide note, or on the vast majority of the conversation currently happening around it.

I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of the stuff these conversations are about.  At best I’m at a “knows someone who knows someone” level of connection to Kathy and the various other people being argued about, and the someones I know are generally floored by the Kathy thing and still trying to process it.  So I am not in a position to know anything worth saying about any of it.  This is obviously not the kind of situation where it’d be appropriate or helpful for me to generate some sort of Spicy Take for my blog, given my position of ignorance and the raw weight of the situation.

But I do want to state – “for the record,” so to speak – that I have very strong misgivings about the way David Gerard, AKA @reddragdiva, is inserting himself into that situation.  Most of my notable experiences involving David Gerard are of the form “David Gerard said this thing online, and someone mentally ill or otherwise vulnerable read it, and it put them in a bad place.”  He either really, really doesn’t know how to talk to such people in a way that won’t set them off and make their troubles worse, or he does know, but in the worst possible way.

Back when we were tumblr mutuals, my own interactions with the guy frequently involved a very low-key version of this.  He does this bizarre thing where he alternates between “interacting pleasantly with specific people” and “making generalizations in this Rorschach-esque edgelord tone about how everyone in group X or group Y is evil useless garbage,” and this meant there was always this uncertainty about what it meant that he was friendly with me and various others, and how much or how little it would take to slide us over into this “evil useless garbage” category – especially when he was also saying that kind of stuff about some specific people I knew and liked, and then sidling up to me and chatting about how much he liked my writing or whatever, and didn’t seem to have any problem with this.

Eventually I realized that this was inflaming my anxiety over and over, and I was semi-regularly having obsessive thought loops because this random acquaintance made a post, and I had this moment when I was in a subway station thinking about how to best explain my exact misgivings about some post he made, and then in the subway thinking about it, and I realized I’d been thinking about it for like 10 or 15 minutes straight, and not thinking about my actual life, and that I could just have a life where this didn’t happen.  So I unfollowed and blacklisted him, and that was that.

In other news, I first learned that he’d been posting his own Spicy Takes about someone’s suicide note because those takes were triggering the fuck out of my wife.

And like, maybe the first part there is “just my issues,” and then the second part is “just my wife’s issues.”  But the theme is weirdly persistent.  Like, he’s the guy who popularized Roko’s Basilisk across the wider internet – I mean, if he hadn’t done it, I’m sure someone else would have, but in fact he did – and he has said that he’s proud of his wiki page on Roko’s Basilisk because it’s a good resource for people suffering from “Basilisk anxiety.”  But as far as I can tell, the vast majority of people who know about Roko’s Basilisk have learned about it via that page, or via people who learned about it via that page, etc.

So the “I’m just helping people get out of bad mental states” explanation is, at best, a weird sort of concern trolling.  And a large fraction of the guy’s output has a similar quality: a self-proclaimed anti-cult, anti-abuse rationale attached to cut-and-dried textbook examples of How Not To Talk To People Who Aren’t Doing So Well At The Moment – leaving one with the creeping suspicion that the savior rationale is a fig leaf for an amoral fascination with vulnerable psyches and unhealthy thought patterns, and a penchant for poking these things with a stick and watching the fireworks.

This means that on any construal of the situation – especially the ones where he’s on to something, the ones where he’s inserting himself into a hotbed of abuse or cult behavior and trying to help – he is exactly the wrong person for the job.  I can confidently say, without passing judgment in any way on the situation, that David Gerard’s involvement is going to make things worse.