Hi. My main background is in the earth & life sciences, but I now predominantly explore topics in the broad area of bioethics. That's about equality, fairness, justice, diversity and inclusivity. It's also about people's biases, the associated otherization and everything that this can result in. That includes poverty, homelessness, poor health, shabby looks, shrinking personal bubbles, exposure to chemical and noise pollution and lots more. It's also about law, philosophy, speciesism, science & technology, forensic psychology, politics and public policy (governance). Diversity and inclusivity are much bigger challenges than I used to believe. I for example now think that society's lack of genuine acceptance and support for people whose brains work very differently can among other things result in destructive behaviours for which the forensic psychology term is sadistic stalking or resentful stalking.
This is exactly what I was thinking about when the above popped up on my screen. The way older single female adults in the UK are demonized and often subsequently criminalized, I find that quite shocking.
So here is a book by Victoria Smith and it’s been reviewed in The Guardian, under the subtitle “A compelling account of ageism and misogyny that overemphasises feminism’s generational divide”. Turns out that I got that wrong… I’ll come back to that.
My first thought was that it’s British (or English?) thinking that causes this sharp generational divide. The demonisation of older adults in the UK is well documented.
But no, this is not a book review, but a review of an American film and the review is by Victoria Smith.
A little bit later… No, it IS about a book. WTF? The book is by Victoria Smith and the review is by Fiona Sturges, who must be English because only English folks are able to confuse me this much. Maybe the review has been rewritten and maybe someone else chose a movie scene instead of a book cover to start it with, though. Who’s to say?
So who is Victoria Smith? “a feminist writer, with a particular interest in motherhood and intersections of misogyny and ageism” At least that bit adds up.
I disagree with Sturges’ conclusion, namely that men are women’s biggest and most powerful oppressors. Women oppressing other women versus women empowering each other is a major measure of how balanced a society is in that respect. After I moved to England, from Amsterdam, an Englishman who has not lived here for decades told me that the UK couldn’t be sexist, let alone misogynist, because Mary Beard was also being attacked by women.
Self-hatred is a common symptom of oppression, isn’t? Ask any “battered wife”. Taught contempt for one’s own kind may be another.
If anything, it sounds as if the emphasis in this book is too much on sexual activities and on being considered “fuckable”. Maybe that emphasis was added by Sturges. If so, it is pretty… sexist. There is more to women than their genitalia. Isn’t that the battle we are fighting? To move beyond the emphasis on genitalia and on how different people use them differently?
I sometimes encounter (very) young women who underline over and over again that they’re pregnant, but they are not making me feel “old” or “past my sell-by date”. If the bizarre emphasis on their pregnancy makes me feel anything at all, it’s sad regrets for them, in view of the sacrifices they are making. I usually keep that to myself because we do not all want the exact same things from life, nor should we want to. Sometimes, I even want to say “that’s pretty damn stupid of you, then” if they also get shouted at a lot because in that case, that pregnancy is keeping them trapped in an abusive relationship. That’s tragic. It becomes even less of a cause for celebration or gloating or glee when I next ask myself what is going to happen to that child.
I never say to them what I am thinking for the simple reason that I don’t know their story and because it’s not true that only older women have wisdom at their beck and call. I’m not having a conversation with them. I may actually just want them to go away, nothing more.
Young women are not the problem, though, and neither are men. Misogyny is the problem.
Schools with 30% or more pupils from low-income families can now apply for free meals.
The Dutch government has allocated 100 million euros for 300,000 children in primary and secondary education.
“Op is op”, for the schools. First come, first served.
They can then for example, for 9 euros per child:
Offer breakfast or lunch
Fill a fridge with healthy food.
Hire a catering firm
They can also opt for only supporting the poorest families by offering them Red Cross vouchers of 11 euro per child, which can be spent at any supermarket.
Red Cross and Youth Education Foundation school liaison officers are supporting the schools, so that organizing the food won’t burden teachers too much.
This is otherisation. It is caused by over ten years of Tory rhetoric, which probably started at the time when Theresa May was Home Secretary and launched a policy called “the hostile environment”.
Wasn’t she also the one who suggested that refugees only came here to kill Britain’s beautiful swans? Do you remember cat-gate, too, Theresa May spreading the falsehood that human rights mean that if a terrorist has a cat he cannot be deported?
Shit. While I was watching a 1993 film about a guy who became obsessed with his colleague Laura Black and shot up the California computer firm where they both worked, apparently leading to the first stalking legislation in the US, someone in Tennessee shot up a primary school. The 129th mass shooting in the US this year and March isn’t even over.
Houston, we have a problem. And it needs fixing. Urgently.
This just popped up in my YouTube stream and I subscribed (unsubbed shortly after, lol). This former CIA dude, or “CI-officer” like he says it, has a tip that can get you out of a lot of trouble should you ever get robbed or held up.
Carry a dummy wallet, with a few bucks, a bunch of expired bank cards (or rather the cardboard credit cards that these companies send you when they want you to apply) and so on. You can literally toss it at the person if you ever encounter someone who demands your money. Great idea! Can buy you enough time to get away safely before they realize that the wallet you threw at them is a decoy.
Does not work in all situations. I was robbed in Florida once where someone took off with my handbag with passport, driving license, bank cards and the lot, so it won’t work for that.
(That said, I instinctively instantly started negotiating and I got all my stuff back minus the 5 dollars or so that I had still left in my wallet. Because I had just shopped at my local Winn-Dixie and was walking home with two grocery bags which made me an easy target.)
There have been many themes in my abuse and one of them seems to have been about a watch. It’s included all sorts of people (well, one sort, mostly) in town constantly asking me for the time. That stopped at some point, but if anyone can tell me what that was about, then please tell me. Thank you.
Is it a warning?
“Watch out!” or “Watch it” or “I’m watching you.” ?
There’ve often been threats over the years and they were always veiled but also almost always followed up on and pretty vicious. I’m thinking of the animal cruelty, specifically.
(I can’t access this site so I can’t see what else it says.)
Someone just entered the flat below. No talking. It’s been quiet all evening. (Besides the earlier quick in and out.)
08:46: Still in the flat, I think, though I can’t be sure. If so, one person. (I heard a clunk sound though it could perhaps be coming from the ground-floor flat.)
The IP addresses I get (presumably on the network that I am forced onto) are ALWAYS blocked – banned – on Wikipedia. Those are usually located in places like Glasgow or Devon or Manchester or Edinburgh. Also, London, but that is not too strange.
I can only edit a page, carry out even the smallest change such as correct a typo, on Wikipedia if I log in with my Wikipedia account.
Someone came up the stairs, went into the flat and left again almost instantly. I suspect that all he did was close the kitchen window. The windows in the flat below are often wide open, in any kind of weather, and there was a lot of rain this evening.
One of the problems with fighting crime and crap in Portsmouth is that everyone here never knows anything about anything or anyone. That makes it hard to tell whether you’re dealing with the usual abusive crap or with intimidation from a drugs gang. It’s impossible to tell.
The behaviors and effects are the same. The best response, however, may be different.
Police forces in England and Wales have been accused of trying to “evade public scrutiny” after an Observer investigation found that the outcomes of dozens of officer misconduct cases have been deleted from their websites.
They include some of the most serious cases of criminality, including that of the serial rapist David Carrick.
This is what a corrupt, authoritarian nation looks like. David Carrick was more than a serial rapist. He was a sadistic, intimidating, abusive, manipulative and coercive monster.
I am a Dutch citizen who has been the target of relentless anonymous and sometimes not so anonymous abuse since I moved from Southampton to Portsmouth. This has included physical attacks, a slogan on the wall, hacking, vandalism as well as lock-picking at two addresses in Portsmouth and animal cruelty. I used to report most of this, but that only made matters worse.
I have made four escape attempts from my abuse situation in recent years.
On my first attempt, I was intercepted by a police officer called Nikki. She took me back to my flat. As I have not been able (allowed) to support myself since I moved to Portsmouth, I had zero money and she found me walking along a highway near Portsmouth, with two suitcases.
I am a scientist. In 2019, after I came home to another incidence of vandalism inside my flat, a professor in the Netherlands contacted Gerald Vernon-Jackson on my behalf. I met with Vernon-Jackson who merely shrugged so nothing has changed.
I am currently being targeted from the flat under mine again (which currently has four or five different tenants). This has happened before over the years, but I have also witnessed before that someone else went into that flat when the tenant was not at home, so it is quite possible that someone else is going into the flat when nobody is home. For the record, I have also noticed a few ongoings that may indicate that there is drugs trafficking going on and that a pregnant woman is being used as a “front” of innocence. She gets shouted at a lot at times and something is certainly not right.
I just told them that if they kept harassing me, they were going to learn, and also not to dismiss me and terrorise me. That was followed by them targeting me again.
They seemed dirt-poor so I previously bought a doormat for them as the doormat that was there had disappeared. Because they and their visitors were constantly ringing the doorbells, I also had an extra set of keys made for them, but the ringing of the doorbells only stopped for a week or so. I thought that they were dirt-poor but I no longer believe that. There is something weird going on. They also seem to be targeting me particularly when the groundfloor neighbors are out. A coincidence?
This morning, I contacted a number of professional connections all over the world and asked them to start whipping up noise for me. I have been terrorised and far too many aspects of my life in Portsmouth sadistically controlled for nearly 15 years. I want my life back.
Added only here:
For the record, when I witnessed that someone else went into the flat, the tenant in question was not aware of that. (I mentioned it to him later; his name was Fancey.) He had just left; I was doing the dishes, saw him walk to his car and drive away. This was Easter Monday. (I think it was 2016, at around 1pm.) Shortly after, the doorbell rang and someone let himself or herself into the flat.
Previous tenants on the groundfloor were burgled shortly after they moved in, apparently by someone who picked the locks or who let themselves in with a key. Those tenants moved out the same day. The present tenants moved in next.
I have witnessed drug sales taking place outside, although this may have become less frequent in recent years. My curiosity was simply triggered by strange behaviors of people and cars so I ended up watching what exactly was going on. I have also seen people shoot up outside.
There has been drugs trafficking in the other building at this address; the people in that flat also harassed one of the other tenants (Croucher). Police intervened at some point.
There have been similar problems with tenants on the ground floor there (in the other building), but that seems to have stopped after a while. Loads of different people walking in and out and some harassment. I don’t know if there was drugs trafficking going on in that situation too. (I did report something to the council but they said that it was a matter for the police.)
The police, a we all know are worse than utterly useless, but what else can I do other than once again contact the police?
We have an equally useless landlord who could not care less and whose offices moved to a different location without telling us. It has no doorbell and no option for leaving postal mail.
The current folks in the flat under me may be Albanian. I have read that a lot of Albanian people are in terribly abusive situations here in the UK.
I am now starting to suspect that their abuse is not linked to the usual vile shit here in Portsmouth but is intended to protect themselves (in view of criminal activities, why else) and intimidate me.
I don’t know if the folks in the flat under me are aware of this website. (Next day: no, they are not. Something the woman said to me yesterday.)
They said that they were going to call the police about me and a guy who I had never seen before until today turned out to be standing behind the door to record me. (Different young guys, in different but similar-looking small grey and silver cars.) Except, there was nothing to call the police about. They opened the door when I came up the stairs. They attacked me verbally, but it first sounded as if she was going to apologize to me.
(The previous tenant used to do shit like that too – and other shit – because he thought that I was afraid of his dog.)
17:20: Have also now contacted a charity that helps Albanians in trouble.
20:42: They must be so pissed off that I installed an alarm on the front door because their visitors were constantly leaving it open. The alarm going off was getting them noticed by the motorcycle shop folks, I bet, the fact that there are different young guys walking in and out. That may be why they ramped up their crap against me? They now keep switching the alarm off. It’s not the folks on the ground-floor who are doing it.
When I was living in Amsterdam, there was drugs activity right next to me. I had no idea. I was clueless. Even though neighbors had told me that there had been drugs activity before (which is why they barged into my attic one day, when I was looking after a rescued stray cat who was still much too feral at that point and they’d clearly become suspicious), when the cops showed up, I still was clueless. I said something to one of the cops and he realized how clueless I was, gave me an indulgent (I suppose) smile but said nothing. It did not match what I had said.
There too, there were lots of comings and goings, but we didn’t have a wooden staircase (very common in England). That young woman, too, had been pregnant, apparently. That young woman too rang my doorbell once, claiming to have lost or forgotten her keys and I got a weird vibe at the time, that I couldn’t place. She said that she’d been to the hospital, had had a miscarriage. Perhaps. But knowing what I know now, had she been beaten or something, perhaps? She wore a kind of robe that had some blood on it. We called the fire brigade who helped her onto her balcony, wearing my old teal-green Cool Cat jogging pants, which she never returned. I laundered the robe, and left it at her door, but she then hung it on my door handle.
Is this similar to what is going on in the flat below? The vibe I get from the woman is similar. Hard to say why. Hard to describe, too. Aggressive? Defiant? Pliable and merely doing as told? She comes across as a puppet, somehow. I can’t put my finger on it what exactly it is, but the different young men and the different but similar cars and the shouting, the comings and goings without a pattern… it does not seem normal.
But it’s hard to tell.
I took the doormat away, by the way. Instead of confronting these young folks about various issues, I had decided to support them quietly, that is, in a way that made things easier for me as it would remedy the issues that way. Portsmouth is often like a war zone and it becomes exhausting and is also at times quite scary always having to confront people here. The fact that they are now harassing me more sort of caused the doormat to mock me every time I walked past it. Childish, yes.
In the meantime, they’ve purchased a vacuum cleaner anyway so there is no longer all the debris in front of their door anyway. That is why I got the doormat: to catch that debris. It looked like plant matter, by the way. Dried plant matter.
She is in America, in a sundown town, but her experiences were highlighted by The Guardian a few days ago. I am so fucking angry for her.
She is still relatively young, thankfully.
Me, I have set up similar crowdfunding campaigns for myself a few times, but I never got beyond £350, which was not enough to enable me to leave and the worst of the nightmare started happening after 2013 when I briefly had the funds that would have enabled me to escape. But no animals had been attacked yet and I didn’t know yet that my locks were already getting picked for years. I’ve tried four times since in spite of that.
I actually more or less started wrapping up my life a while ago and started making (small) donations all over the place because if my life was over anyway, if I couldn’t get away anyway, then I would do whatever the hell I still could to help others or just generally help make the world a slightly better place. My health has declined horribly after I moved to Portsmouth; things are only getting worse (and I have no access to medical care).
Below is what I would like to say to Angel Pittman.
Angel, I am so fucking angry for you. Below I explain why.
I am pleased to see that you’ve already surpassed your goal. That gives me hope, too. It shows that there are plenty of good people.
Here in the UK, there is a lot of this too. A family in Bristol, with their own hostel, suffered a double arson attack, for example. Racism. They are of Asian heritage.
I’m from the Netherlands. I’ve lived in the States (Florida) and am now in England. My dad was his own boss, my sisters are their own bosses and I have been my own boss for a long time, but my life turned into a nightmare when I relocated within England. The hate for me was not racist as I am white, but rather misogynistic, instead, it seems. Slogan on wall, bucket of liquid emptied over me, locks picked, at two addresses, vandalism in my apartment, animal cruelty, lots of hacking etc etc. I don’t want to bore you with more of my story because it is bizarrely similar to yours and you know what that is like. You don’t need me to tell you that. In the previous town here in England, I had actually been attacked, physically. The police here don’t care either, just like in Rowan County. I’ve tried to escape four times already and one day I will succeed.
Stay strong. Keep fighting. Don’t give up. I found your story just now. Me, this morning, I sent a plea for help to various relatively powerful people around the world, folks who know me, because due to England’s bizarre archaic class system, I have zero power here. I’m a migrant, I’m a female, I am not married, am a feminist, am over 45 (in my 60s now) and have been stuck in poverty for so long. That’s SIX reasons for anonymous folks to hate me.
The fear is the hardest to deal with, isn’t it? The fear and the erosion of trust in people. Just like you, I never expected anything like this. I didn’t know how to explain it to folks in my home country either. It was too fucking bizarre for words.
You did something right. You will succeed. I can tell. You have something that I seem to lack or maybe it’s also because I am simply in the wrong country.
You will succeed, I am telling you.
Best,
Angelina
PS For anyone who does not understand where the fear comes from… this level of hate, and to be personally targeted by it, is really scary. Certainly if it’s persistent. It hollows you out, eats away at you, corrodes you inside because you’re surrounded by it all the time. There is almost no getting away from it.
Me, I found a local Starbucks last year to which I secretly escaped from time to time. A little oasis. Then one day, a blond young woman, who I had not met before, greeted me from behind the counter with sheer hate, the Pompey flavor hate, and that place then soon turned into hell too. I often genuinely feel that Portsmouth does not deserve to exist and should be bombed off the map; it is thatevil. It’s really scary, the level and extent of the local hate. It’s really really really scary, the Pompey-flavor hate. It makes you wish you were dead because there is no getting away from it and it’s so ut-ter-ly vile.
I’ve found myself agreeing with Mary Portas before, or rather, the other way around.
Since I moved from Amsterdam to England, I was very disappointed by two things:
That just about everyone here was lying all the time and saw nothing wrong with it
That many products I bought here were of horribly bad quality
John Lewis is a marked exception. I bought something there in 2005 that has weathered exceptionally well and is still going strong, and I had asked the advice of employees there but they refused to make me any promises whatsoever. They weren’t even willing to lie a little bit.
I think the British have seen so many valuable things collapse in the past decade or so that it is important for them to leave them something that they can still count on, and it sounds like leaving the structure of John Lewis has to be part of that.
I am not familiar with the company’s struggles but energy and real estate are bound to be a major factor. Its problems are likely similar to Debenhams which I have so hated to see go. What else is left?
We don’t need more Primarks.
John Lewis will likely need to make compromises, yes, but those have to be compromises that do not undermine what the company stands for.
John Lewis might learn a few things from TK Maxx, which does not seek prime real estate unlike John Lewis. John Lewis probably needs to relocate (some of) its stores and requires a good real estate scout who understands the company and its customers.
But I’m just guessing. I haven’t looked into the matter. It’s just that I would hate to see John Lewis succumb too.
For Dutch folks: in terms of shopping experience, Debenhams was and John Lewis is a bit like the Dutch De Bijenkorf stores (and also a little like Dutch V&D, which collapsed in 2015), but John Lewis is fully owned by its staff.
“The moment you antagonise your employees or sales people, your company is doomed to collapse. So, no matter how difficult it may be, always make sure that your employees remain protected and motivated.”
De Bijenkorf, too, used to look after its staff well and was a trendsetter in that area when I temped at its holding offices (while wrapping up my Master’s). I presume that they’ve managed to retain those company values over the years, but it’s currently owned by the Selfridges Group.
Simple. Offer them a better alternative next to a railway embankment, one that they find much more attractive for building a sett in.
Use the intelligence of animals. Rely on it to find ways to coexist peacefully with them in the habitats that we share with them.
Because we must learn how to do that.
I’ve only seen a badger ONCE in my life, on a Sunday morning near Loftahammar in Sweden, in 1989, more or less at the center of the image below, near the water.
I sent an e-mail to 11 addresses all over the world this morning, with a bcc to 5 more addresses (two of which are local), asking for help. The stupid English class system means that I have no access to anyone in England on my own and get dismissed as a lying migrant or a delusional old cow or because I am a woman.
I’ve had enough of the abuse. I want my life back. In England, with its bonkers class system, that means that I need to ask powerful people for help because individuals like me have zero power here and can be abused relentlessly without any fear of repercussion for the abusers.
My phone is no longer on vibrate but now very loud instead.
All but one of the phones that I have pawned to Cash Converters to survive in recent years and then retrieved again mysteriously stopped working for a short while after I retrieved them.
The URL in my Twitter bio has changed from a URL shortlink to the full URL this morning. That strikes me as odd because I can’t explain it from an IT view other than that someone has high-jacked my internet access again.
Someone came upstairs after having rung my doorbell. That’s the 3rd time this week someone from that flat woke me up in the middle of the night. It’s the same person who was rummaging around last evening. Same voice.
04:30 night of 21 and 22 March
00:30 last night (night of 23 and 24 March)
02:34 tonight (night of 24 and 25 March)
03:04 the vibration symbol on my phone has disappeared again; see earlier post
There was also the Friday evening (7 February) when someone rang my doorbell at 10:00 pm for a long time and tried to break the front door down. That lasted for about half an hour, I reckon.
These are the folks who I had already given a set of extra keys because they kept ringing the doorbell as they didn’t have the money to have keys made for all the people who are using that flat. It helped only for about a week, but overall, it has kept the doorbell ringing down.
The veritable army of folks who go into the flat under mine and target me seem to be doing this when they know that the downstairs neighbors are away.
It’s been quiet on my screens and equipment the rest of the day. One e-mail came in twice this morning – no, not on gmail – and that was likely “him” trying to alert me to something, after the fact, by way of explanation for something that had happened in the world, something that I had missed because I was too busy figuring out what the fuck was being done on yet another fucking phone.
(Yes, he does that sometimes, get the same mail to me 2 to 10 times.)
I’m a wreck and all I did today was watch videos, basically, and cry a tiny little bit.
(Wasn’t much else I could do anyway, though.)
This anonymous abuse, this immense control of so many aspects of my life, it’s killing me. It’s been going on for nearly 15 years. That’s fucking unbelievable. Started slow, increasingly geared up.
18:35: I wish I were dead. I wish this fucking sadistic hell were over, this vile sadistic control of my life, and the vile hostility of Portsmouth. The stupid relentless hate. All of it.
18:56: I did get yet another email about the covid volunteering today and I got two from the Cooperative Bank, and just now one about writing my will but nothing at all today that had much relevance. I also just got this again after I decided to reboot my computer:
I had rebooted because the computer was suddenly sluggish and after the (warm) reboot I got this for Twitter, which I also had gotten two or three days ago, also after a reboot. Four minutes later, at 19:00, I heard the hdd rattle, I couldn’t type here any longer, and I had to flip the power switch again, but I could not see any actual evidence of someone doing stuff. After the second reboot, Twitter gave no errors; I ascribe the will-writing ad that I got in my Twitter stream then to sheer coincidence.
1 April 2023: I think that these Twitter errors are actually caused by a browser shortlink error. Good.
About ten minutes ago, I discovered that Bluetooth had been switched on (without the symbol for it showing) and my phone had been put on vibrate, sound off. I noticed a symbol with three squiggly lines that I didn’t recognize, so I started exploring. (The symbol reminded me a little of the symbol for the Dutch police, btw.) I can’t switch it off because then apparently, I will not get sound notification either. I could and did switch bluetooth off.
That’s the old one, the phone that I use for wifi tethering these days because the two modern ones stopped doing internet access around Christmas.
I know that “bluetooth” has an urban slang meaning. I bet “vibrate” does too. A lot of the stuff that is done to me in Portsmouth later turns out to have had some urban slang meaning (usually for genitals or sex acts).
On the two phones that I had before the current four, I also often found bluetooth switched on.
I’ve also found the torch switched on as I was walking around town when the bluetooth had also been activated and the phone was in my pocket.
This is why I almost never have a phone on me.
This may be a good time to remind folks that there is someone out there who has a valid copy of my driving licence and several bank cards for me of which one or two will still look valid (expiry date in 2026). The driving licence can only be identified by its issue number but that is not printed on it…
I added and wrote this post on my computer, which is behaving normally right now.
09:44: I just tested; the vibration is loud enough to alert me, so I am going to leave things like this.
09:48: is this (login into something on my computer) a coincidence? Probably… (09:50: yes, looks like a mere coincidence)
