For the record, I do think that Linda and Ingrid and Janice and one of Bijan’s sisters and I should start speaking at schools.

PDF version paperback: download

Dat vat mijn leven in Engeland wel samen, denk ik. De terreur hier! Man, man, man. Je houdt het niet voor mogelijk. (Nee, ik zou het zelf ook niet geloven; het is dat ik er midden in zit. Het is volkomen van de pot gerukt.)

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DONE.

You can take your hate and relentless abuse, Portsmouth, and shove it where the sun don’t shine.

Water bottle back atcha.

There are no warning signs at the entrance ways to Portsea Island that strangers who dare to set foot on the island will be hunted down relentlessly and may be shot on sight. If there had been, you could have blamed me for having been stupid but you unleashed your vicious war against me all by yourselves without me having any idea of what I was in for when I moved from Southampton to Portsmouth back then, at the start of 2009.

13 years and counting of your stupid vicious warring.

You don’t allow me to support myself because that is not done for women in your stupid backward Portsea Island culture yet you don’t allow me to escape and build a new life elsewhere either.

I have had it with your stupid sadism. I am DONE with your abuse. DONE. Done with your hate. DONE. Done with your relentless sabotage. DONE. Done with your stupid incel shit, too. DONE.

DONE.

In 2003, a 13-year-old black kid playing with his friends was killed in Rotterdam. For a long time, it was thought that an enraged driver had shot him because of a snowball.

That assumption – perhaps thankfully – turns out to be incorrect. It is now believed that he was killed by a stray bullet from a rip deal taking place in the vicinity, a deal in which criminals were ripping off other criminals.

Rest in peace, Sedar.

There is 40,000 euro reward from the police for the breakthrough tip.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-police-extremism/

There was similar news some years ago, about the hold far-right extremism has in police forces…

It is important to understand that there is a lot of overlap between the development of (some) stalking behaviours, the act of abducting a young victim and hiding the victim in one’s home, sometimes for years, and the development of hate groups, whether it is white hate, misogynistic hate or something else. There is also overlap with conspiracy theory development. There seems to be an overwhelming sense of powerlessness and frustration as well as a sense of worthlessness and hopelessness on the part of the people who engage in such desperate acts.

At the same time, it is imperative to understand that these hate groups are often not organised but rather like a field in which hundreds of youngsters are standing around talking to one another in loose-knit groups. Then someone throws a ball into the field and some of the youngsters instantly run after it. Very little thought goes into this. Others then join in and more and more people start chasing the ball. That is how a lot of this stuff comes about.

Some questions crop up. Who are the people who throw the ball into the field and why are these white youngsters feeling so utterly miserable that they are highly susceptible to anything that they are told about what causes their state of misery? Is their young age the main factor? Is it typical teen angst? And why does this seem to impact mostly white young males?

After the Buffalo massacre in which white teenager Payton Gendron drove from Conklin to Buffalo and started shooting people for no other reason than their skin tone, CNN’s National Security Analyst Peter Bergen described the perpetrators of such violence as “zeros trying to be heroes”. This further alienates them and only reinforces their separation from mainstream society.

Instead, we should pay more attention to what Seth Godin advocates on page 64 in his book “This is marketing”.

“If we can accept that people have embraced who they have become, it gets a lot easier to dance with them. Not transform them, not get them to admit that they were wrong. Simply to dance with them, to have a chance to connect with them, to add our story to what they see and add our beliefs to what they hear.”

In the same book, Godin explains how conspiracy theorists come about, referring to Roland Imhoff’s research. They don’t necessarily believe what they say they believe. They want to feel that they are unique and they want the company and support of that exclusivity, from peers. This is a way for them to gain that sense of significance that they are after. Apparently, telling such people that the majority of people believe the same things as they do makes them lose interest.

So the more you point out that conspiracy theories are unfounded, the more you reinforce such people’s attachment to these theories. As soon as false beliefs go mainstream, they become less attractive to the fringes. This is obviously a very tricky area to navigate because it is also important to identify fake news and unfounded theories, but that is to ensure that the majority of people become aware of this and do not share these fallacies as truthful.

I see a lot of commercials that are based on this idea of exclusivity. “Doctors don’t want you to know about this, but…” “Funeral companies don’t want you to know about this, but…” “a little-known tool” “exclusive access to” and what not. We all want to feel that we are special in our own way and these youngsters feel united by their fringe beliefs. It makes them feel that they are wiser and therefore stronger and better than all the people who ignore or even reject them.

Scientists will surely recognise this. We dream of discovering something that nobody else has seen yet, just like others imagine stumbling upon the secret that makes them a cryptocurrency millionaire, the secret that only very few people have access to.

These conspiracy theory movements are not that different from the secret Skull and Bones society at Yale. It is also known as The Order, Order 322 or The Brotherhood of Death.

It has the same ring to it, doesn’t it?

This kind of society, too, offers exclusivity, including access to resources that nobody else has access to.

The main difference is power.

It appears that prior to the 2016 American elections, Donald Trump and Steve Bannon understood all of this very well, and used forums like 4chan to spread their own “truths” about how these young folks supposedly are getting shafted.

“Vote for me and you will finally have the power and recognition that you crave. Vote for me and I will help you combat the enemy that only we see but the others don’t yet.”

This is more or less the same as what Seth Godin advises, isn’t it?

So the point at which to intervene is before these youngsters get lost in forums like 4chan where they become fodder.

The way they lash out at others – perceived as less powerful humans – contains an element of displaced aggression. Displaced aggression is when you kick the dog at home or the waste-paper basket in the office because you fear repercussions when you lash out at who you are really angry and frustrated with. Neither the dog nor the basket have anything to do with it. Neither the dog nor the waste-paper basket will fight back.

(Does society tell these youngsters, to a degree, which people it is safest to lash out to?)

Perhaps Richard Spencer has illustrated the despair and powerlessness these folks succumb to best.

The day after the 2016 US elections he wrote:

“Before Trump, the Alt Right could be criticized for being a ‘head without a body’; it was engaged in meta-political and scientific discussion, but lacked a real connection with practical politics and the hopes and dreams of average Americans.”

“In turn, Trump’s populism – with its half-baked policy ideas and sketchy vision of the future – could be criticized as a ‘body without a head’. Now we are the whole man.”

On 22 April 2022, a little over a year after Trump lost the next election, he was found dead in an apartment in Washington DC. He had shot himself. On the basis of videos he had posted, he was identified as the person who had just shot at random victims from the upper floor of an apartment building near an elite prep school in Washington in an upscale neighbourhood. He was 23. He had gone after what he seems to have perceived as America’s elite. White people.

Payton Gendron was 18 when he started shooting black people in May 2022.

Jake Davison in the UK was 22 when he fatally shot 5 people and then killed himself, in August 2021. His anger was directed towards women, but he had also expressed homophobia.

On YouTube, he had said:

“I’m so beaten down and defeated by life … that drive that I once had is gone. I try … but I’m at the point now where it’s like, why do I even bother.”

Many of these folks seem to see themselves as so powerless and at the same time highly driven to prove the opposite. They not only developed a meme that turned into an actual US president and often launch harassment campaigns at fairly random people, but they also target the financial world.

Meme stocks are stocks of genuine companies. These stocks too get thrown into these crowds to make everyone run after it, for fun. But what these crowds do has real-life results. I don’t know what effect that has on them, how it makes them feel. There is a strange duality between them at the same time appearing to feel utterly powerless hence being driven to prove the opposite and then seeing the latter happen. Maybe psychologists can explore this and look at how this can help reach out to these young people.

One thing that must be done is to dedicate more resources to supporting older children and young adults, to enable them to fill their time in a meaningful manner that makes them feel that they matter and have a future that is more than something to be feared. That should help protect them against getting lost in those anonymous crowds and keep them from running after any ball that is thrown at them online.

These days, projects that are really worthwhile and empowering to volunteer in, well, you pay to be able to volunteer. I’ve also noticed that in England, fun jobs are often volunteer positions, whereas drudgery is paid work. If you turn that around, you create a totally different work ethic. Mention the word “work” in England and people tend to pull faces. It stands for something negative here.

The pandemic has surely been an aggravating factor in all of this. From the start of the lockdowns, various organisations have raised the alarm with regard to how this was damaging children and youths.

After the 2011 riots in England, participants in those acts of violence have said that boredom had been an important driver – school holiday boredom – and that even having access to sports facilities could make a major difference. Give them more skate rinks, for starters. Help them get good boards. Give them stuff to do that they can be good at and feel good about. Ask them, though. Ask them what they feel they need. Don’t treat them like 4-year-olds.

Gendron also ended up on 4chan out of pure boredom, at the start of the pandemic. He had just started college but in all likelihood, college had been suspended indefinitely at the time. This was happening all over the world at the time, to the frustration of many. In their minds, they saw their future go up in smoke and all their normal real-life socialisation was cut, too. They had no anchor.

References:

Godin, Seth (2018) This is marketing. You can’t be seen until you learn to see. Penguin.

Huffington Post (2012) England Riots: One In Four Young People Believe Last Summer’s Disorder Could Happen Again. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/08/02/england-riots-one-in-four-believe-london-riots-tottenham-summer-riots-happen-again-disorder_n_1733418.html

Kent, Lauren & Ritchie, Hannah (2021) Plymouth shooter made misogynist remarks echoing the ‘incel’ ideology. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/14/uk/plymouth-shooting-incel-jake-davison-profile-intl/index.html

Quinn, Ben (2022) Glorification of Plymouth shooter by ‘incels’ prompts calls for action. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/03/glorification-plymouth-shooter-incels-prompts-calls-for-action

Snider, Mike (2017) Steve Bannon learned to harness troll army from ‘World of Warcraft’. USA Today. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/steve-bannon-learned-harness-troll-army-world-warcraft/489713001/

Woolf, Nicky (2016) The ‘alt-right’ thrives in opposition. What happens now it’s the establishment?The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/15/alt-right-victory-donald-trump-mainstream-what-next

PS
After I moved to England in my mid-forties, I was essentially increasingly turned into a powerless 4-year-old as a result of persistent otherisation, constantly being dismissed as someone who didn’t even really exist. (This seems to have been done mostly on the basis of my gender, age, nationality and marital status.) It’s probably quite similar to what some of these young people are experiencing. That powerlessness, being made to feel that others think you are like a four-year-old, is a really rotten feeling. After a while, you no longer reach out and instead seek avenues where you can still accomplish something; these days, that’s mostly the online world. Something similar happened after everything I did began to be interfered with digitally. It pushed me away and towards doing things that either were not getting messed with or that could be messed with without it potentially harming anyone else. The relentless oppression becomes the main driving force in your life. It pushes you away and all you still really want is to be able to escape from it. But yes, perhaps the worst of all is the boredom it often results in. Brains need input. Brains need stuff to do. They do not exist and function in a vacuum.

But I am a little older than these youngsters…

Me, it just makes me wish that I were dead on far too many days, lol. There’s never anything else around the corner in England, never anything better, never anything good or nice. There is never anything here to look forward to here. Never. England is uninspiring, generally speaking. Everything that is fun, exciting, encouraging, empowering, positive tends to happen elsewhere and is often too quickly called “daft” in England. But it also depends on how you tick, I suppose.

CNN’s national security analyst Peter Bergen just wrote that attacks such as the one in Buffalo can be prevented. Yes, they can. Not always, but often. However, this requires a lot more than the six steps Peter Bergen offers. Bergen is not only CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America (a think tank) and a professor of practice at Arizona State University.

What is a professor of practice?

Having been a target of hate myself for a long time, I find it hard to write about these topics without getting consumed by anger and powerlessness and wanting to run away from it all. I’ll come back to that. I can’t even begin to talk about the heartbreak of all the victims and their loved ones in and around Buffalo.

Bergen begins by making a terrible mistake by calling this “a very American tale of domestic terrorism”, ignoring victims of similar attacks all over the world. A dreadful shooting in New Zealand, a horrible attack in Norway and a recent tragic incident in Plymouth in England come to mind as first examples. Also in Asia and Africa there have been many of these incidents, but they likely come about differently, though I can’t be sure of that.

First, “let’s stop naming the terrorists,” Peter Bergen writes. He continues “these misguided individuals are typically zeros trying to be heroes”. Not only is this a useless suggestion because even if journalists were to refrain from naming these people, many more others still do and they would do so even more to counter that silence. Crucially, however, Bergen completely misses that this – feeling like zeros – is often exactly what is at the root of these incidents. I find it hard to believe that he completely overlooks the significance of what he is saying.

A great deal of this violence stems from the fact that so many youngsters – and not just youngsters – feel that their lives have no significance and are overwhelmed by feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness, not to mention sheer boredom.

Second, Bergen mentions social media, and argues for the removal of content that encourages violence. This overlooks that this kind of content does not only pop up on regular social media, but still more often in the dark nooks and crannies of the internet. This also overlooks that if you ban content, you may merely be pushing it underground where it can’t be monitored. He does not even mention 4chan. That said, I agree that it is important to police fake news and fake science as any otherizing language lowers the threshold toward violence, neuroscience teaches us. (Guilty. It’s very hard not to otherize back when you become the target of prolonged extensive hate and malicious interference from one group and ridicule and dismissal from another.)

After the 2011 riots in England, some of the participants indicated that boredom had been an important driver and that merely providing access to sports facilities can help prevent such escalations.

Leaders who want to learn about how big a role boredom plays should watch the video about the “Philmarillion”, a person who for months documented every move and twitch of a particular online user based in England. This person created an entire world made up of the posts of said user, and even engaged in performance art to simulate that said user was living with him.

We should be grateful that the Philmarillion was artistically inclined. Can you see what boredom can do to others, who have nowhere else to be and to go and no outlet for whatever ails them?

As third step towards preventing shootings like the one in Buffalo, Peter Bergen mentions the discipline of threat management. He explains that suspects often follow a predictable path to violence, but that still does not identify them to us and does not enable us to interfere. The article does mention that the FBI has recently doubled the number of people who work on domestic terrorism and extremism, but that reflects the developments rather than predates them.

As a fourth step, he mentions that “officials” need a better understanding of the concept of “leakage,” that peers usually have “the most useful information about attack planning, but were the least likely to come forward with relevant information to law enforcement”.

He then makes the following nonsensical statement:

How do you investigate a “potential act of terrorism”? I think what he means is that if school officials etc are concerned about a student, law enforcement should talk with the student’s friends and take them seriously.

As fifth step, he mentions an American policy that sounds like the UK counterpart called “Prevent”. Logos of pro-cycling and pro-wildlife activists are examples of what UK school teachers need to be on the lookout for and report. If the US policy is anything like Prevent, all we end up with is more distrust in society instead of less.

As sixth and final step, Bergen kicks against an open door by stating that kids like this shooter should never have been able to purchase his weaponry. That is certainly true, but the Plymouth shooter – in England, where guns are not a birthright, unlike in the US – not only had a shotgun, it had been confiscated yet returned to him shortly before the incident.

There currently seems to be a large number of mostly young white males out there who feel indeed, as Peter Bergen puts it, like zeros. They often feel disenfranchised, whether it is about their perceived right to have sex with any woman or another issue, but something happens right before this starts to fester and they go online, looking for echo chambers in which they finally feel heard and understood.

Guys like Payton Gendron are not that different from guys like Jake Davison.

They need people to blame, to direct their powerlessness at, whether it is non-whites in general or a particular group of people in particular, or Jews or women or immigrants.

(Women too are sometimes part of these movements, though.)

The question to ask is:

How do these youngsters end up in these online and offline echo chambers filled with hate? What happens before they go there?

The problem is that they’re still too young to monitor themselves, recognize what is happening, stop themselves in time and turn away.

Having been the target of an immense shitload of misogynistic and other kinds of hate recently, particularly since I moved to Portsmouth at the start of 2009, often makes me feel that this is the only thing that I can still do with my life… study these phenomena and try to prevent them. (Also because almost anything else that I want to do gets interfered with, apparently, for the “lulz”, to make me look “senile” or to force me to admit how “flawed” females are, or “break” me as if I am a horse and this is the Wild West.)

But unlike these youngsters, I feel an immense resistance when I look at posts like the ones you see on forums like 4chans. I feel an immense resistance towards focusing on hate. This negativity is not what I want to be facing, this is not how I want to continue to feel. I don’t want to read that I am seen as a horrible monster, a roastie, a femoid, a succumbus who must be taught to behave like a meek doormat. It’s good for me to know that this movement exists. It is good for me to know what it is that I have been dealing with since I moved to first Southampton and then much more after I moved to Portsmouth.

I prefer to create a different kind of echo chamber around me, one with empowered healthy human beings because that makes me feel a heck of a lot better than all that hate. I too find those people online.

(I for example watch Petter Hornfeldt’s YouTube channel and particularly appreciate how he analyzes aviation incidents and takes human flaws such as confirmation bias into account. You see what you are looking for, what you believe or expect to be true. Hornfeldt focuses on how to make things better. You can’t make things better without first identifying and analyzing what is going wrong.)

I am fortunate that I have lived and worked in many places and that I, therefore, KNOW from my own experiences that the world does not need to be filled with hate and negativity, unlike what the echo chambers these youngsters end up in make them believe.

Also, apparently, it was particularly types like Bannon and Trump who have very deliberately been targeting these dark places on the internet, who whip up this hate, to make people feel that something has been taken from them that should be theirs and that it’s the Trumps of the world who will get it back for them. Divide people, promise to defend them against the “enemy” and get their votes.

Maybe it’s politicians and their close associates, then, who should all begin to be monitored to prevent potential acts of domestic terrorism. They may be the ones who sow the seeds for this hate.

Here in town, a lot of people can’t stand it when they see someone else do well or merely look happy. That strikes me as really odd. That strikes me as a sign that something in their own lives is not going well.

It’s related, isn’t it? These locals too, they whip each other into a frenzy of hate. Where does it come from? The same place, I reckon. What on earth drove these local youngsters to start targeting me when I moved here? Why do they lack that sense of overstepping important boundaries? Why am I just a “roastie” to them and why does that mean that anything can be done to me, without repercussions? It’s related.

So, where are things going wrong for these youngsters, people like Payton Gendron? At what age does this start? Around 10 or 12 or perhaps even earlier? They are often still as young as 14 when they end up on these forums where they become radicalized. What exactly is it that goes wrong in their lives?

(It certainly does not match Tony Blair’s old theories about “hooligans” and graffiti artists. Payton Gendron’s parents are two happy-looking civil engineers.)

WHY do these kids feel like fat zeros?

WHY?

Payton Gendron had just started college. The pandemic probably cut it short. He went to 4chan because he was bored. Could it really be only boredom that drives young people to these places of hate?? Boredom does make angry. Boredom does lead to a buildup of energy.

What was Payton Gendron like before he started hanging out on 4chan?

The first thing that got my attention this morning was the news about the Buffalo shooting, in the Dutcj NOS app. (English news is often too much screaming and mud-slinging and too much celeb-focused for me.)

Twitch, on which the Buffalo shooter live-streamed, is a live-streaming platform for gamers. A bit like YouTube for gamers.

I have in the past written about how gaming can help people develop better problem-solving skills, how it can help people solve the world’s problems, and how it helps scientists solve chemistry and water management problems in much less time than it normally takes.

I’ve done an interview with one of the world’s top scientists, now a provost, who used to be an avid gamer and whose colleagues were often into gaming. Mostly World of Warcraft. Her dad was Irish, her mother native American. (I may still have that video fragment sitting on YouTube; will take a look later. Yes, I do, but Skype was acting up badly at the time and this fragment is sound only. This second fragment, too, is sound only.)

But in recent years, I’ve also realised that when gamers lose the distinction between gaming and real life, they can do things like target people like me and see nothing wrong with it because I am not really an actual human being to them, merely a target in a game. (I’ve noticed that when I “fight” back in order to regain my autonomy, the autonomy I am supposed to have as an adult human being, I turn myself into a challenge for them, but when I don’t fight back and pretend that nothing is going on and all is well, they think that I haven’t cottoned on to what they are doing and that does not deter them either.)

This darker side of gaming needs more attention. I think this is up to the creators of games. They can build in playful check points, to check that the gamer in question isn’t losing the plot and adjust what happens next in the game accordingly.

If someone seems to be losing the plot, you could then turn the game slow and boring and/or insert very brief images of food and real life people to make them reconnect with the real world, make them get up and go into the kitchen for a sandwich or images that make the person want to stop gaming and go to bed. Mind manipulation? Yes. But in this case, the mind manipulation had already been happening and a corresponding remedy is needed. That makes it justifiable.

This is also in the interest of the game creators.

(By “game creators”, I don’t mean “people in Portsmouth” in this case but companies).

And, yes, you can bet your breakfast on this shooter having been on 4chan and/or 8chan.

https://nypost.com/2022/05/14/buffalo-shooter-payton-gendron-posted-white-supremacist-manifesto/

What you may also see here – as with the 2011 riots in England – is that boredom sometimes plays a role. If he hadn’t gone online during the pandemic…

Gaming can make a better world, but it can also turn the world into a nightmare for a while when gamers lose the plot and run amok.

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Neither have the right to break the law and violate other people’s rights.

When autistic people do hurtful things, that’s because they don’t understand that they’re hurting you. Perhaps they merely don’t care, that is, the thought never seems to enter their minds that they might be hurting you or violating your boundaries. They don’t seem to have a good idea of what boundaries are, what other people’s boundaries are and that other people have them. Maybe this is a bigger problem in the west, but less so in societies where property ownership is much less individual and where maybe even everyone can freely walk into other people’s homes and do whatever they want there.

When hateful people do hurtful things, that’s because they understand very well that they’re hurting you. They’re merely being despicable.

This is mostly for the people who are not part of the local hate groups but are merely extremely insular, always gossiping and jumping to hateful conclusions about strangers.

This is what your habit of otherisation does.

When people essentially declare other people non-humans, because they’re seen as people who don’t have the same right to live their lives. They are “not one of us, but one of them”. They are not seen as having the same needs, rights and wishes as them but as free to be messed with relentlessly.

If you think that this only happens in the United States, think again. It happens all over the world..

The people like Layla who are affected like this become otherised even more of because what it does to them. They are the ones who are being told to seek help for their temper or their personality disorder or what have you.

It’s the people who otherise them who need help… Those are the ones who have lost their equilibrium and are no longer acting in healthy balanced manner, who declare people like Layla – who had absolutely nothing to do with 9-11 and who was a nurse for crying out loud – prey.

Excessive otherisation is at the root of the tragedies that happened that caused this poor woman to be harassed this way. (Ask terrorism experts.) The west is arrogant and has a habit of treating people from other parts of the world like shit. There is only so much shit people can take.

And sometimes, otherisation can get very badly out of control as we’ve also seen happen with Nazi Germany.

The 9-11 attacks and the genocide that happened during WWII and similar targeting that is still happening all over the world today (Russian killing Ukrainians, China targeting Uyghurs, Canadians, Americans and Australians still often targeting their countries’ native populations, people like Keir Starmer suggesting that BLM is just a short-lived American fad that has no relevance in the UK and the UK refusing to return the Chagos Islands to the Chagossians, these things are all related, aren’t they?

Otherisation begets otherisation begets otherisation begets discrimination, distrust, stigmatisation, hate, cruelty, violence and ultimately genocide.

Is this cycle hard to break? Hell, yeah. Is that a reason for giving up? Hell, no.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-55848126

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-50511847

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/20/chagossian-exiles-celebrate-emotional-return-as-uk-tries-to-justify-control

https://theconversation.com/britains-ownership-of-the-chagos-islands-has-no-basis-mauritius-is-right-to-claim-them-177461

And yes, this is more or less what being based in Portsmouth is like for me. This is what it feels like, the way Layla sweeps all her messages across the hospital floor and the way she walks out of the bank. These angry outbursts don’t mean that she is “autistic” or “schizophrenic”. Wanting to stay away from utterly nonsensical abuse – by avoiding people – does not mean that a person is “autistic” or “schizophrenic” or “learning-disabled” either.

Everyone thinks they know exactly who she is, on the basis of assumptions and gossip and harmful stereotyping. This is exactly how it works, how “regular” Portsmouth works.

You all think you know me and have the right to abuse me endlessly. But none of you know me. Not one person in this town knows me! Not a single one!

The way Layla was treated may make you feel like a hunted deer at first – scared and unsafe and always on the run and having to watch your back, always needing to brace yourself for what is around the corner – but it also makes you feel like a lion or elephant that is being shot at – angry and hurt and annoyed and irritated.

And perhaps you even end up wanting to do something about this, somehow get people to get along with other people better. But then again, is that really the responsibility of the Laylas in the world? Shouldn’t people like Layla and me merely be allowed to live our lives?

If you talk about this stuff, you get targeted but if you keep quiet, you get targeted too. There are no safe places left after a while, no places where you can relax. That’s not good.

So…

I don’t have a nasty stalker but am surrounded – both in real life and in a digital sense – by on the one hand miserable people who are guided by blind hate and on the other hand people who are too gullible and believe everything that they are told or that they hear and only a handful of people to whom this doesn’t apply.

I don’t know any of the latter personally, but I do know that it includes a young woman who works at the navy, locally.

Okay, also a large group of people who don’t know what to make of it all. Of course!

What can I do with that?

The hate that the first group is driven by (to vilify and abuse and even sabotage me) reveals their personal insecurities. I can’t fix that. But maybe I can overcome it or go around it.

The geographical constraints of the tiny island that I am on limit me greatly.

I’ve been having bad headaches and yawning a lot for a few days and I am not going to rush into anything.

But I am done with being abused. These anonymous people who hate me, they will literally have to kill me in order to make me succumb to their hate. Maybe they can place bets on that this time, instead of on whether I will commit suicide. 🤪

Frankly, I am flabbergasted by the hate. Until a few days ago, I hadn’t even realised how much blind hate is behind my abuse. Nor had I realised how much of it is about age, not just about me being female and foreign and a feminist.

It’s certainly got nothing to do with someone out there perhaps being autistic. This isn’t humourous either, not in the slightest. This is mostly regular narrow-minded anonymous folks who let hate dictate everything that they do and who have zero respect for their fellow human beings.

They literally seem to think that everyone over 45 is brain-dead 😂 (and is better off dead?).

Cutting or restricting my internet access – or hiding all the UNIX books or going into my flat to steal my car club card or my bankcard so that I have to go to the bank instead of going to Southampton that day or blocking income opportunities or spreading these stupid rumours about me – doesn’t make me brain-dead either, folks. You can try from here till eternity. It’s not going to work.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/may/06/ukraine-photos-poland-border-refugees-rape-atrocities

This is why I avoid most men in Portsmouth.

Sorry. This story is not about me. I’m just angry.

Because women are not considered human beings in England… It’s seen as perfectly okay to abuse and kill them by far too many people here. That’s not right.

This is not about Sarah Everard. There are millions of Sarah Everards in England. Most of them are not white, pretty and young, but they are all Sarah Everard and she was all of them.

Killing women is okay because they are merely women so nobody will give a shit?

No, it’s not.

On my way back from Asda just now, I asked random guys how many Sarah Everards they killed today. Their response was more or less the same. Mellow. Sometimes mildly defiant. But mellow. (And, yes, I thanked them.)

This guy, however, had a very different response, perhaps as if he had something to hide. Could be just a stupid fight with his wife or a colleague at work, of course. I don’t know.

My Asda receipt was timed at 19:37, so this was 10 or 15 minutes later. In Portsmouth.

Reporters allegedly going by the names Esha Mitra and Rhea Mogul, allegedly working for a company allegedly going by the name CNN have reported that the alleged authorities of a state allegedly called Uttar Pradesh in a country allegedly called India allegedly confirmed on a day allegedly called Wednesday that someone alleged to be a police officer allegedly had been arrested in connection with the incident.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/05/india/india-rape-teenager-police-arrested-intl-hnk/index.html

Am taking three old mattresses apart at the moment and am suddenly reminded of my middle sister. The three of us grew up around DIY and have always tackled a lot of stuff, certainly my middle sister, who also knows a lot about furniture design and so on. In her previous house, my sister installed the entire marble bathroom herself. Saved her a ton, looked like a million bucks. I think she also did the entire kitchen. Looked just as slick. Blimey.

Am learning a lot about mattresses. The one that I thought had springs in it does not and the ones that I thought did not contain springs do. Am almost done with the latter. Been pulling out a million staples, developed a blister, had to take a break and refuel. 25% of the staples still to do. I can use my other hand if I have to. Would likely be much slower though. Less dexterity in my left hand.

UPDATE: All three have springs. One has individual springs. I’ll need a bucket! But the volume reduction may be awesome. I’ll tackle that this weekend. My hands need a rest.

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Anyone who knows me well enough knows that I’m not a fan of Anonymous, often called benevolent etc by the media.

Here’s a stark example of why – 4chan up to its usual stuff again – but I have other, much less dramatic reasons not to be a big fan of Anonymous.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/01/4chan-extremist-online-forum-raymond-spencer

In case you didn’t know that, Anonymous also is pretty misogynistic.

But I am also and perhaps much more concerned by the lack of insight in combination with a surplus of hacking skills within the context of this also being an organisation that does stuff like attack foreign governments when it feels like it. That’s potentially dangerous and it does not necessarily lead to less tension in the world. To the contrary.

Anonymous is not exactly known for its tolerance, compassion and depth of understanding of anything other than hacking, havoc and mischief.

They have this “shoot first, ask questions later” attitude and a bigger urge to demonstrate their hacking prowess than to do good, in spite of all the Robin Hood pretense.