Writing

I don’t overall have a particularly unstable worldview about people.

My last lab severely strained my rather black and white worldview past a threshold. I already have a nuanced worldview overall.

For instance if someone is well-meaning, non-creepy and kinda clunky and inept in human relations, hey we have all been there. The Tim Hunt example comes to mind. As far as I know all his students and postdocs backed him. He has never been accused of anything more than a joke that made my eyes roll.

That would be my dad (pretty much my sole datapoint for a conservative man who is still basically a decent person. He was a military conservative and very disciplined in his ways when he wouldn’t go on the occasional alcohol fueled bender due to work frustrations). He never even drove, so DUIs were not on the table.

Importantly he has never ever been disrespectful of women. It genuinely shocks him. He was very popular with his students and he has even had women come to him and tell him when other men have made them feel uncomfortable.

Having known my dad all my life, there is no conflict I see between being somewhat conservative and still recognizing women as equals.
My ex dad in law was similar. He says things that don’t offend me as I am not easily offended having grown up around my dad. I don’t associate a foul mouth with creepiness. It is more tricky with bawdy jokes without a human as it is all context.

It is why I have finally chosen to write over a cottage industry of lie detectors, emotion ai and other creepy and pointless stuff that is the type of junk that a Panopticon produces.

I say controversial things lately (in the last year) because I am annoyed by polite pseudo professionalism coexisting with this PMC hyper policing culture that exploits a type of internet discourse (Lucien Greaves slams it) to actually target and punish the more lefty women who are actual supporters of a genuinely clean workplace for women.

What do I mean by clean? Women’s private habits or lives are none of your damn business and a totally phony (we care about your health! It is totally not sleazy data mining! We are putting you on file as a crazy lady for your own health!) concern for mental health..I mean come on.

It isn’t actually a clean workplace to police jokes and stuff that in context offends no one. Context is everything. Creeps will game the shit out of inconsistent and hypocritical takes.
It is the most human of things.

It is why I looked at Hennessy and thought sardonically “clunker” and yes a threat to sanity, livelihoods and democracy sure. But not a creep.
It helps creepy men have this bogus narrative of witch-hunts and false allegations and poison everyone with paranoia to not be blunt about some of this.

I did find my last boss a bit of a strain because he was not a creep but he certainly was not intuitively sensitive. I did and do feel that he sacrifices important things for bulk processing and hyperscale. And that is Pennywise and pound foolish. And worst of all, unlike my main mentor with whom I have this sort of unbreakable bond even when I haven’t seen him for years. And where I do feel that people should not have attention drawn to the things that make them cool because then it can become self conscious. But it was such a core part of who he was. He mentored so many women and had such a cool relationship with all of us.
In this shitty world it is nice how many make mentor female mentee relationships exist in the best sense possible.

But then I finally looked at the Epstein trash last week and read about this like creepy creepy guy called V.S.Ramachandran. That guy, Deepak Chopra etc make my skin crawl.

It took meeting my nieces and other young girls I know to repair my self-image from that of this paranoid borderline crazy lady back to who I am.
Working at my last workplace creeped me out and I tried to leave immediately. And it changed me. Yes I watch “Sunny in Philadelphia” and hell I even read Robert Ruark’s “Uhuru” (not recommended for the faint of heart. I will never say “trigger warning” or other words I think of as “PMC speak”. But well it is offensive. As is George Orwell’s “Burmese Days”. As is the callous description of a horrific rape in “Down and Out in London and Paris”. As is a most of “Gone with the wind”.

But you should have the ability to read offensive things in their unedited form and not be so vapid and vacuous that you immediately go to a Klan rally.

In fact for all that you may be “on the right side” of various things that you have already learnt from crowds to take the right position, you are still often in the wrong on many things like people like Jay Kaspian Kang who is too stupid to not get that factory farming is a horror. And a huge grievance complex is not about civil rights. It is just your cultural chauvinism and entitlement versus someone else’s.

Isn’t that what critical thinking is? This helicopter parent and PMC worldview is actually worse than exposure to the world as it is without a constant anxious disclaimer.

Even as a child I knew when reading “Gone with the Wind” that an entertaining piece of writing as it is, it is full of shit. Children have more sense than the adults who have it beaten out of them.

I don’t disagree that a subset of people of all political persuasions may exist who need a world that is very walled off from anything aversive. If you have only seen the net of the last 20 years I can see how thought terminating cliches abound.

But for me that is the other side of the coin from this genuinely disgraceful person:

This guy is a disgrace. I am also not confrontational nor a moralist. But this guy and I mean different contexts.
I am a self-styled uhhh “sociologist”. So I have these categories-creep, sleazebag, dimwit, clunker. I think George Carlin had something similar.


This is not a joke. If I do have to write, I am going to write about what I have struggled with for 14 years and eight months by now. How creepy and ott I find this Panopticon and

When I met my psychiatrist in 2012, I thought he was cool. I was a bit wary that he might push sobriety on me sneakily. And music therapy or some other thing where “harm reduction” is as close as I will go with a cottage industry peddling fall monitoring (go away) and a series of privacy invasions for shit one does not want or need. You know I okay with mosquitoes or anti-mosquito spray over a privacy invasion that guarantees I won’t be bitten. No mosquito bites ever! Only a bunch of ai-fueled creepy surveillance! I will take the damn mosquito bites! Thank you!

My psychiatrist was cool and aside from a suspicion that this is another person who might try to sell me on clarity or some such foul thing I will never bother with suspecting that a straight edge agenda lurks, I really liked him. This is why I hate bulk stuff.
I was 33 years old and adept at pushing it but staying safe. I am not an ideal person. Don’t try this at home.

But he did say something that made me realize that the internet is skewing perceptions. He said something negative about feminism. And I thought he was kinda feminist. Like my dad is.
This rejection of the material world for what some asshole mobs online or now offline - the safety of crowds cowards - is bad for feminism, wokeness etc. And woke capitalism and Jamie Dimon etc are just a disgrace.

You have to leave room for human nature. It is just where you peg that should be not beating up on some powerless person or even a clunker, while silently being okay with this super creepy meninist crowd.

No one is going to force me into some foul drivel and flip the tables etc. it was and remains creepy. But well..

I was looking at those people sardonically
and going “Yeah these are the types who want a conversation. Fine. Then I will have one about creeps.”
And people with networks so large that they end up prioritizing creeps who are passing for elite (please do not tell me that Pentland and Ramachandran etc are elites. Yasha Levine and Christopher Ketcham are elite.
I am not elite and I need actual elites I do pay attention to who seem in tune with the reality we deal with).

My self-image was in tatters after my last job because for all that I kept trying to leave the fact that I couldn’t made me start seeing myself as this creepy or possibly crazy female. Crazy any day if those are the options.

But I am neither. And when I read about the Epstein children and women or the MeToo cases, unlike with girlbosses and their imaginary grievances, I genuinely felt for them. Especially for the “boy-girl” who bit Trump’s dick and doesn’t want to talk.

But as much as I respect a lot of the lefty writing I follow, the specific thing I mean - the sort of inquisition this is especially for honest women who…
This is a society out of balance. I like Evgenia Kovda and her piece on Camgirls because turning private things into a product is gross.

Were I not so disgusted by the drug war and the constant low grade strain of having to fend off male creeps and continue with a DIY mental health regimen in a grey area, I wouldn’t. The reason I am outspoken in my support for my med mj company and my doctor who is of a minority religion is that I have so many strong views I find I cannot change/
That’s the real limit of free will. You can even try. But your mind changes as it chooses to. It works both ways.
I find that I cannot have a negative view of my mentor’s wife even if I think “Okay this is too much of a headache. Screw all of them. They are all dead to me.” I may not agree with most people from that time, but she was an honest woman. As were the grad students.
I do disagree with them and have to make a case for what I do see as problems with a specific type of conservative left of centre that has some trad elements that I feel are suffocating women like me out between not wanting this exploitation of private lives politically as left. Otoh objecting to trad and sobriety sneaking in under the guise of community and health.
lol..
Meeting my nieces and seeing myself through their eyes restored me a lot.
Or actually it improved my self image. They are young girls without much nonsense about them and fairly assertive and left of centre and it repaired this diseased self-image I had started having as any proximity to those places does. I saw a female pi there who works at some small college who again seemed decent.

You can force and hector people and preach and so on. It will not change people’s minds and want does change minds is when people register something as genuinely convincing which given how this started and went on I see as less and less likely especially as I look at the state to the world and don’t feel that the people I was at odds with were right as opposed to me. And locally this is a lost cause re averting complaint filing.

Which brings me back to my last lab. It is one of the few instances in my life of people I have mixed feelings about and it is why the elite at a certain level are people it is kinda painful to meet.
Anyway I don’t think I can entirely avoid writing at the moment. But I am going to go work and start my life again.

But while I rarely get offended and seriously..My bars are not that high. It is zero tolerance on creepiness and corruption because that is not acceptable. No honest woman can work and live with creepiness or the level of disgraceful garbage I have seen locally.

But that aside, well you know..we are all random humans navigating this foul hellscape and we all need some grace. I certainly do. All the time and am grateful where I find it.

Thankfully I am no longer kicked out of my alumni email. I am grateful to people who tolerate me. I know I am unpopular, but maybe unpopular people have a function.
Who else could heckle creeps as openly? There is no shortage of group solidarity in politics and religion etc.
But I find it hard to join groups except temporarily followed by disbanding. And that may be a type of person who shouldn’t just be shoved into psychiatric hospitals or exploited.
While I can mend some fences from that time of my life, within reason, I will still be very critical overall. I am still finishing up my obligations to science and all I say is you have to be honest when you are a scientist or a doctor.