Enjoy, women!
Stalking and the police
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-63745857
Going to the police because you’re being stalked usually aggravates the situation.
I have been warning against reporting stalking to the police for years. I have also written a white paper describing a solution. Cases of stalking and harassment need to be dealt with very differently, not just in England but also in the rest of the world, and there needs to be exchange of information on stalkers.
Currently, a stalking victim can go to the police and not be believed only to find out later that the police were completely unaware that there already was a string of complaints from others against the same stalker.
However, the public at large also bears a responsibility. The otherization of victims that makes it possible for stalking to continue not only often comes from police officers but also from people in the surroundings of the victims. There is a tremendous amount of hate for stalking victims. Many people pounce on them like a proverbial pack of hyenas.
This is because stalking victims upset people’s beliefs, for example, beliefs about their own safety. This can make stalking victims be perceived as a threat. (This is neuroscience.) It is why the only empathy for stalking victims usually comes from women who have been stalked themselves.
(Here in Portsmouth, however, there even seem to be gangs of vicious people who collectively engage in stalking and harassment activities. They often target female business owners and business owners who aren’t local or who aren’t ethnic white English. If you’re based in Portsmouth and have a stalker, you should be aware of this because these other folks can complicate the picture, making it hard to figure out who is doing what to you and why. These local folks may even latch on to you because they notice that something isn’t right in your life, then perceive you as “vulnerable” and easy to target.)
A Scottish business owner in Portsmouth was targeted in 2018 in what the Sunday Times called it a “xenophobic campaign”. It has clear echoes of Pizzagate. The perpetrator was living within a stone’s throw from me. (Cross the street, then go left.)
“Businessman falsely branded a paedophile by online bully forced to close vape shop after losing £75,000 in trade | The News” https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/businessman-ruined-after-false-online-claims-of-paedophilia-dnkddg93x
Time : “What to Know About Pizzagate, the Fake News Story With Real Consequences”
Wikipedia : Pizzagate conspiracy theory
If you have an anonymous stalker and something like this gets added to the mix, certainly if that too is anonymous or starts at around the same time, how can you still tell who is doing what? Chances are that you will quickly lose credibility among those who are not targeting you.
The following was also in the news this morning: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-63669711
I suspect that some with me in it recently started being circulated locally.
Something I want stalking victims to keep in mind is that homelessness can make it much harder for some stalkers to target you remotely. It can even force a stalker to come out of the woodwork if you do not know yet who your stalker is.
(I learned that the hard way. Hindsight, however, is 20/20. I had no idea what I was dealing with at the time, let alone who.)
There are no more locks to be picked, there is no more postal mail to be stolen and there are much fewer hacking opportunities. Get yourself a clean phone and do not communicate via your usual communication channels (use new email addresses etc). Your contacts’ phones may get hacked, though; keep that in mind. Stalkers can be immensely persistent.
If you’re of a certain age, choosing homelessness as an effective solution that helps you get out of the claws of a stalker is not an easy thing to do, though. It’s easier if you’re in your twenties or thirties or perfectly healthy and in great shape. The season also plays a role. It’s not nice to be out there when you’re cold and soaking wet from the rain.
I wrote this in 2011:
Mean-spirited
That was also the term that UN rapporteur Philip Alston used with regard to the UK government.
Author and patron for torture-survivor charity criticises politicians for encouraging ‘mean-spiritedness’
Hilarious? I think not.
Inequality is killing the UK economy | Armando Iannucci | New Statesman
“It’s okay for them to be hungry. Because they’re poor.”
(I’m hearing a lot here that I have been saying for 10, 15 years too.)
“bad gateway” says my hacker
Yeah, you can say that again.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-63680822
These women were “unlawfully killed”? When did the UK reinstate the death penalty?
Women’s health is like poverty
A political choice
I’ve recently read several times that women’s health issues are just as important as tackling poverty and inequality in the UK (for the government).
Very clever Boris putting his foot in it again
Boorish Boris at work again. So infuriating. He has pulled this kind of shit many times before. He’s like a drunken bull in a China shop, pardon the pun.
Sophisticated? Only if you consider mooning sophisticated, but hey, that is our Boris, always putting his foot in it (and oddly enough, perhaps describing England).
After nearly 20 years of this, I have stopped keeping my mouth shut so as not to offend the tender insular English souls. So I put my foot in it very deliberately.
Boris, so I understand, declined to run for PM again this time because giving speeches was much more lucrative. That’s going very well, then.
Boris, go have a chat with Seth Godin. He could teach you a few things. Also about growing up and behaving like an adult.
This is NOT dignity, this is NOT care
This is abuse.
I suspect that the mere therapeutic use of colors, the provision of warm SOFT cuddly materials to decorate the rooms with and the application of nature sounds and music could already make a huge difference.
These kids and adults are locked away the same way wild animals like tigers are kept on concrete or grid floors in bare cages at the facilities where so many people from all over the world are trying to free them from. This is also almost like Yulin, isn’t it?
Nicolas Joncour. He doesn’t speak but he uses a keyboard to communicate, writes and plays the piano. He wrote this article and the above quote in 2016: https://hennyk.com/2016/09/26/the-right-to-an-education-article-typed-by-non-verbal-autistic-piano-student-with-dyspraxia/
This is a wonderful 2018 video about him. He was a university student by that time.
This is him now:
By the way, something similar goes for children with Down syndrome. While countries like Iceland have eradicated Down syndrome from the population (via abortion etc), in the US, more and more people with Down syndrome are graduating from colleges and universities. (So you see, there is another side to almost very story.) Where there is a will to empower people, there is a way.
Surprised? Well, remember that women too were kept out of universities for a long time. Studying would damage their reproductive systems was one of the claims made to accomplish that. Even the length of women’s thigh bones has been thrown in as a measure to prove that women were not suitable for education.
People with Down syndrome used to have short lives because of the medical challenges they are born with, but nowadays, medicine having advanced over time, once they’ve made it into their twenties, they can put that behind them and lead relatively long and happy and even fairly conventionally “productive” lives.
Non-Down people, by contrast, tend to require increasingly expensive medical care the older they get. This goes particularly for women. Because women live longer than men. You don’t eradicate women for that reason, do you? And you don’t talk about the financial cost of constructing highways and homes and office buildings and factories – or of IVF and midwives and caesarians – as a reason for limiting population growth either. So why talk about the financial costs of helping non-mainstream people thrive?
(I addressed such issues in an online course that I made a few years ago after I wrote the first version of my book about the new eugenics.)
PS Henny K also is autistic.
Another judgement coming up
Next week, we’ll have the judgement in the case of the Scottish Independence Referendum. That too was initially expected today, I think; the judges had warned at the start of that case that the judgement might take some time.
Just like with the MH17 case, the judges have had to read through a huge number of pages of documentation in this case (more than 8,000, even).
That decision will be delivered on Wednesday 23 November.
Today is the day the court will rule about four MH17 suspects
Update: One suspect has been acquitted. The three remaining suspects each have received a life sentence (life in prison). The 2-hour court hearing could be watched live online, but it was all in Dutch.
In English:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-63637625
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/17/three-men-found-guilty-of-murdering-298-people-in-flight-mh17-bombing (Is “firing a missile” or “shooting down” the same as “bombing”? That’s the writer in me asking that.)
UK foreign secretary statement: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/flight-mh17-trial-verdict-foreign-secretarys-statement
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/17/europe/mh17-trial-verdict-intl/index.html
Although Canada had one victim on board too, a 24-year-old medical student called Andrei Anghel (pictured in the second video below), CBC (still) has nothing on its front page either, btw, but if you search on MH17, you will find this Reuters item: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/netherlands-mh17-trial-1.6654577
—
Eight years ago, a Russian Buk missile system was smuggled from Russia into Ukraine and shot down flight MH17, which was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Then it was smuggled out of Ukraine again. According to the prosecutors, the launcher belonged to Russia’s 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade.
A large number of Dutch people (196) lost their lives but people in 16 other countries lost loved ones too. In total, 298 people were killed.
The Dutch responded with great dignity to the tragedy, honoring the dead with very impressive sober and respectful ceremonies upon the arrival of the bodies in their home country.
Today, it is a court in the Netherlands that will have its say about Igor Girkin (aliases Strelkov and Pervi), Sergej Doebinski, Oleg Poelatov and Leonid Chartsjenko, three Russians and one Ukrainian (Dutch spelling of names).
The prosecution has asked for four life sentences.
More cases may follow against others who were involved in this tragedy.
The current war in Ukraine is directly related to what happened to MH17. It’s an escalation of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
A large group of Australians arrived yesterday, to be present during the sentencing. The suspects aren’t there. Yes, it’s a trial in absentia, but you cannot just give in, sigh and say “oh well”.*
The CNN website lists the news about the pending verdict on its front page. The sites of the BBC and the Guardian don’t seem to mention it at all. The Guardian has written about it extensively in the past: https://www.google.co.uk/search?as_q=mh17&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=&cr=&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=www.theguardian.com&as_occt=any&safe=images&as_filetype=&tbs=#mmc=1 The BBC does have an item about the pending verdict on its site but you have to search on “MH17” to find it: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-63637625
*I find myself wondering once again whether many English people understand the Dutch drive for justice for the sake of justice. There was no oil or gas to be gained from this trial, and not even any wheat. As some people that the BBC spoke with have said, if the response back then – 8 years ago – had been stronger, we might not have the war in Ukraine now. Atrocities often happen because it is too convenient for people to look the other way and do little or nothing.
Yes, I was highly moved by the way the Dutch honored the victims at the time; I watched some of it live, online. I didn’t know any of them as far as I know but the Dutch response was in such stark contrast to that of the British (who lost 10 people on board that plane). It made me really proud of my home country back then and I know that nothing in Britain England will ever come close to the sentiment those Dutch ceremonies radiated.
They contained a lot of silence.
The hearses were also greeted by the Dutch along the roads when the bodies were driven from Eindhoven to Hilversum.
This first video below is LOUD (but you’ll get the idea of what I mean, if you pay attention) and this was only the first ceremony, concerning the first 40 bodies (of any nationality, I should add).
Dignity for the dead is not something the English do well.
(Neither is sophistication, I should add. Nor hospitality.)
At the same time, they have continued to look down their ridiculous neo-colonial noses at all those “savages” that live beyond Dover and sometimes even dare dirty the English soil and air. Isn’t it weird and so desperately sad that the war in Ukraine served to help get the English to abandon at least some of that barbaric insular nonsense?
No, not literally all of the English did that (look down their noses and so on). I know that. I am not a proverbial savage, am not blind. My country has many faults and it has made many mistakes. I am not necessarily fond of it but unlike England, it has a spine when it counts and it seems to know a lot better what really matters in life when it comes to the crunch. And it has guts. Violence does not equate to having guts.
Does noise often wake you?
Put the sound of the surf on repeat. You’ll sleep better. Maybe you’ll even dream that you’re a California surfer or a South Carolina van-lifer or camping on the Isle of Wight or Skye or the Outer Hebrides.
You can use an old phone with decent sound quality as your MP3 player. You can plug the phone into these and then these into this or that, and then this or that into that.
Sound complicated? Sound expensive? Nah. I am am just messin’ with ya. Kinda. But not really.
I’ll give you a download of one hour of surf. Below is the mp3 file (75 MB). You can get the 635 MB wav file from my Google Drive.
This sound file below may help you relax and fall asleep. Use it with headphones or earbuds; it won’t work if you put it on your speakers. (Binaural beats, delta.)
Need a giggle?
Check this out. So that you can giggle along. It’s good for lowering your stress level.
They thought he was single and living alone
He was married. A so-called family man. An electrician.
Watch this video until the very last frame. What you will see then may shock you.
Not a good look for the police, this
“Police pay woman £40,000 after using unlawful force.”
She says she is still living in fear. I can believe that, yes. The incident happened in 2017 and thoroughly shook up her belief that a person can feel safe in one’s home.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-63177303
What happened here is abuse of power. Sgt Jonathan Flint’s actions have also harmed his colleagues. Behaviors such as his erode confidence in the police among the public and that makes it much harder for police officers to do their jobs.
The force’s chief constable was very unhappy with this too, by the way. To the BBC, Chief Constable Craig Guildford stated: “We will always take these matters extremely seriously and I was very disappointed with the outcome of the appeal.”
He did more. He sought a judicial review.
My middle sister once had a boyfriend who was a cop. This was decades ago. The first time they visited me in Amsterdam, my jaw dropped when he opened the closed door to my bedroom and went inside, just like that, as if he owned the place. (Thankfully, my bedroom was tidy. No dirty underwear or anything of that kind in sight. Even the bed was made.)
It made me aware that many police officers, also in their personal lives, may have no good sense left of other people’s boundaries (and rights).
In this Nottinghamshire case, the bailiff crossed the line when he (apparently) reported a theft from his car that had not taken place, in order to get the cops to show up. As it was his body cam footage that later supported the woman, it appears that he is very aware of it.
Sgt Flint sounds dangerous. He is a risk factor for the police, also because he described the woman as a “fucking loony”. That expresses hate. That’s very worrisome (in view of his public role and his powers).
It was the police officers that breached the peace here.
There should be much more careful vetting of police officers and there also should be much better mental health care for police officers (but I doubt that the latter was a factor here).
Need proof that poverty is imposed?
Here is an excellent example of how the despicable English class system bullshit works out in real life.
In a cranky or dark mood?
Do this.
“he was seen making the ‘I’m watching you’ gesture”
“A bully described by his own daughter as ‘a bad man’ subjected his ex-girlfriend to months of harassment, leaving her isolated, terrified and too scared to go to work, a court heard.”
This is the kind of stalking many people seem to expect when you mention the word “stalking”.
Not romantic, and nothing hilarious about it.
For this type of stalking, I have no answers or insights to contribute other than that fear of abandonment seems to feature among those with borderline personality disorder, but I have no idea whether that has anything to do with this sort of situation. Probably not, actually.
(I ran into this when I did an internet search on something else.)
Violence prevention and policing
On 11 October 2022, in a two-hour webinar, Devon and Cornwall’s Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner and Crest Advisory provided an overview of what Devon and Cornwall’s Serious Violence Prevention Programme has achieved since its launch. They also looked at how this approach could be adopted in other areas that don’t have a Violence Reduction Unit.
Continue readingArrested for resisting arrest without violence?
That’s like being arrested for jaywalking for thinking about the time your cousin got arrested for jaywalking…
As neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett will tell you, the fact that they mistook his walking stick for a gun can be explained.
Once he had shown that it was a walking stick, they should have apologized and left the man in peace.
Is it the adrenaline high that causes police officers to do such daft things? That too would be understandable, but then they should develop the habit of going for a jog around the block after each such instance.
“There must be a reason”
Braverman’s language, says Zosseder, “is what’s causing people to think it’s OK to do what they’re doing, to spray swastikas on bus stops.”
What Braverman and other politicians do, that’s otherization, a term apparently first used by Oxford neuroscientist Kathleen Taylor, for example in her 2009 book “Cruelty. Human evil and the human brain.” People also often call it “othering”.
“…even mild otherization primes people for aggression”
– Kathleen Taylor
“Talking about cruelty makes it easier to be cruel – unless one’s talk incurs swift punishment. Acting out the otherizing ideas, especially in a group whose members compete for status and egg each other on, can push people into extreme otherization with remarkable speed.”
– Kathleen Taylor
“the difference between someone hurling verbal abuse at an immigrant and someone beating an immigrant to death is a difference of degree, not a difference in kind”
– Kathleen Taylor
Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett also talks about this topic in her book “Seven and a half lessons about the brain”.
A“reason why people sometimes fail to to empathize with those who look different or believe different things than they do”
may be that “it’s metabolically costly for the brain to deal with things that are hard to predict”
– Lisa Feldman Barrett
The less familiar we are with a group of people, the harder it can be to feel empathy for them. That’s why inclusivity is so important.
Why do people do something like this?
Challenges for autistic people in the professional realm
How hard it must often be for autistic people to run their own businesses!
(Unless perhaps if it’s focused on working with autistic people.)
From what I have learned, I know that it can be challenging for them to navigate the professional world as employees, too. They often have trouble understanding how the world works, particularly how one approaches and communicates with other people, such as potential new clients. They also tend to be so narrowly focused that this too surely must hamper them at times.
I understand that “Le Petit Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is a rich resource for them, but while certainly useful, it was intended as a children’s book, not as a guideline for how one for example behaves in a marriage. Besides, it was written a long time ago.
If we could make the world a kinder (more empathic) and more inclusive place, the motivation for the kind of stalking behaviors that I have been exposed to in the past 14, 15 years would start to disappear. There is often a lot of anger, powerlessness and frustration – and yes, resentment – behind it, as well as a dogged determination.
Would you have guessed this?
Likely not.
I am pointing this out to show how off-base otherisation is.
Olivier De Schutter (UN poverty envoy) tells Britain this is ‘worst time’ for more austerity
Olivier De Schutter is a human rights law professor at Leuven University in Belgium and, at the UN, the successor to NYU human rights law professor Philip Alston (who’s Australian). The latter has lambasted the UK government before because it pushes so many people into poverty and then keeps them there. (Why? I would say because the poorer people are, the less powerful they are and the more it enables certain very rich people to become even richer. The UK government has a tendency to use the population to balance its books. It sells off the poor and sends them to slaughter, like cattle, when it needs to free up cash. The poor, that’s currently about one third of the British population.)
De Schutter has a human rights law course on EDX, for anyone who’s interested. It’s free. (There is a paid version, which is part of a MicroMasters in International Law. EdX offers financial assistance to motivated learners in need. Leuven University students take this course too, by the way.)
https://www.edx.org/course/international-human-rights-law
(I think a new session actually starts TODAY.)
Aldi gives workers third pay rise in 12 months as cost of living crisis bites
“Aldi (stylised as ALDI) is the common company brand name of two German multinational family-owned discount supermarket chains operating over 10,000 stores in 20 countries.”
How Basingstoke and Worcester are coping
We must be careful with language on immigration, minister says
Yes, indeed. “Even the mildest otherization primes people for aggression” wrote Oxford neuroscientist Kathleen Taylor in her book “Cruelty. Human evil and the human brain.“
The difference between otherizing language and violence against otherized people, she added, is a difference in degree, not a difference in kind. Otherizing language can escalate into cruelty and violence at an astonishing speed, she qualified further.
See also: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63466532
Home Office head honcho Suella Braverman’s use of the word “invasion” suggests that Britain is at war with war refugees and other migrants. Isn’t that as ugly as Russia suggesting that Britain sabotaged those Nordstream pipelines?
Is this, too, what you get when a council’s response to Travellers showing up within the city limits is instant, paranoid, over the top (and blatant otherisation and criminalisation on the basis of ethnicity or lifestyle)?
“Now the part-time worker is calling for more community compassion, after both he and his mother were berated over his parking, despite Tony having a Blue Badge and parking permits for his camper van, his work van, and his personal cars.”
Does he have too many cars? Yes, that may well be the case, but it also sounds like only the camper van is parked in Middlesex Road.
So I then googled his name. Looks like he is the owner of “All About Classics vintage vehicle hire”. (Same face in the newspaper photo and in the Twitter account profile photo. Same face in the photos on the business website.) That explains it!
But his business address (according to the website and Facebook) is indeed Middlesex Road… So the problem may be of a different nature than what it looks like at first sight. Cost of living crisis, anyone? His business would already have been hit hard by the pandemic. But there is also the fact that his parents don’t get the practical support that they need. Council cuts, anyone?
I found myself becoming interested in the full story. “I don’t know, of course, but it could be that what he needs to do is register a limited company,” I thought, so I looked at Companies House records. It seems that he had a limited company earlier, but for less than a year, perhaps because the admin side of it was too frustrating. It was registered at a different Southsea address. It appears that the current business is a Limited that he started in April of this year, but it is registered at a Copnor Road address.
Could be that he has posted the address where is currently staying most of the time on his website so that people can find him more easily.
Whatever the background, a little bit of compassion can go a long way. One day, you might need someone else to be compassionate towards you and if that happens, you likely never saw it coming.
