Key phrases: Inequality, poverty, violence, cruelty, povertyism, misogyny, diversity, bias, othering, discrimination, sadism, ageism, decision-making, otherisation, marginalisation, ableism, inclusivity, gerontophobia, stranger-stalking, aggression, sadistic stalking, zen approach, misogyny, governance, hate groups, fairness, racism, justice, philosophy, law, hacking, homophobia, contempt, bioethics, health inequalities, cruelty, ELSI, homelessness, politics, public policy, policing, science and biotechnology, conspiracy beliefs, speciesism, light pollution, callousness, security, mechanical pollution, hate, violence, safety, chemical pollution, conspiracy thinking, social security, forensic psychology… and 20+ years of experience in earth and life sciences as well as nearly two decades with what appears to be "sadistic stalking" or whatever. Some of those crazy nihilistic extremist sadistic networks involved, possibly? (This website is currently paid for by an anonymous sponsor who has full access to the site, without my consent.)
Human rights – diversity – neurodiversity – equality – inclusivity – discrimination – otherisation – speciesism – planet – consumerism – bioethics sensu lato
I am very pleasantly surprised with the quality of Amazon’s hardcovers. 👍 I am not having this book printed on premium white paper (and it’s in black and white only). No need for premium white paper for this book. My flash fiction, that is printed on premium white, of course.
Once upon a time, the oceans were believed to be devoid of fungi. Only a handful of people, such as the Kohlmeyers in the US and a few researchers at what was then probably still called Portsmouth Polytechnic in England, new better.
“That just breaks your heart” wrote one of the latter, emailing with me, about this persistent myth.
In 1998, I organized a conference session on the topic. In Boston.
Available as a really cool hardcover too. See video below.
Can anyone let me know whether it’s actually available from Amazon? In the UK too? Am getting some strange errors about the ASIN codes not being valid. And he often plays these silly Jekyll and Hyde games where I put in a lot of effort and he then makes sure that it isn’t going anywhere.
Dude, the matte black cover for the paperback doesn’t work; it is very easy to get very ugly smudges on it. The grey cover works better for the paperback. I can unpublish it. But you are currently apparently blocking that… ?
The hardcover looks great. Also, customers, I’m happy with plain white paper versus premium. It’s probably more environmentally friendly.
Such potato head politicians include Rishi Sunak, Geert Wilders, Robert Gerald van Cortlandt Vernon-Jackson, Priti Patel, Donald Trump, Boris Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson and Suella Braverman
It was the Met Office’s decision. Storms are named by the Irish, British and Dutch meteorological services. For those of you who don’t know that it may be fun to learn that meteorology is one of the earth sciences. A fellow student called Diana, a pleasant woman who I did field work and field trips with, went on to become a weather woman after graduation. (Me, I wanted my own research group.)
It’s probably a really strange experience for English people to hear about, but when I walk around in the country that I am currently in, I see so much English that I was considering making a video about it.
This, however, takes the cake.
“Be surprised by every season” it says.
I continue reading and instantly experience a profound level of cognitive disconnect because it then talks about rust, privacy and comfort.
Eh, what?!!
They might as well have put “Jeu de boules, pizza, nasi, sushi” at the top of the 📃. It would have prepared me for the DNA in the sand, too. (The Dutch sucks too, btw. Say I but right outspokenlijk-like. It’s a partly lovely attempt at poetic language that possibly got messed up by the site editor.)
Photo by Miguel u00c1. Padriu00f1u00e1n on Pexels.com
The kicker? You can stay at one of “de beachlodges”.
Like I said, I see a lot of English all around me. (Most buttons and so on, too, have English words on them.) Most of it is perfectly fine. The only negative thing that stood out before I ran into this was the misuse (disadvantageous ambiguity) of “little” in a business name. It may have been “little sunshine”.
Why do the Dutch do this?
Dutch has a much smaller vocabulary (but most Dutch folks make little use of the greater English vocabulary).
English is far more succinct. English takes up a lot less space, so you can get to the point and get it across much more easily.
It’s a tiny country.
Did you too expect that this “Sand” might be near Amsterdam or Rotterdam, perhaps and hoping to attract tourists? I was surprised to learn that it’s in the north east, closer to Germany than to the UK.
Oh. It’s not even cottages and such that are available for a stay. It’s an investment opportunity. Real estate. Property. So it’s case of Trumpianism.
(YouTube popped it up for me a few times. An ad. I got curious and clicked.)
As someone who recently became the target of three people (and relentless abuse from their entourage) who are more or less like this and (because I was stuck in that little enclave where it came from and which also enabled it all in the first place) hence had to start studying and contemplating what it may be like to be like this, and realized that diversity is much greater and more multifaceted than we tend to be aware of, I recognize many things in this interview. It surprised me, I should add, and it’s also reassuring because it makes me realize that my assessments tend to be right. (It’s part of why you get targeted. You understand.)
It also makes me feel very weary (exhausted) as well as wary. These people have a tendency to gobble you up, consume you. Everything is a game to them, on some level. It’s like they are in a James Bond film. They’re relentless. Or, can be.
A year or so ago, I spotted this on Quora and made a screenshot
Yes, the amount of chaos that they can add to other people’s lives is huge. When you interact with people like him, you also have to really watch yourself to make sure you are not becoming callous and manipulative yourself but remain true to yourself. It’s probably a sliding scale, a slippery slope. They can affect you before you know it.
Me, I’m done with it. I’m out of energy, out of life, now. I mean, kerrist, I would like to be able to support myself again, for starters, but when I do, it becomes so much more difficult to manipulate me, for example because then I can do things like purchase new computers and possibly finally be hacking-free again. The amount of manipulation I’ve been subjected to since 9 June 2008 has been staggering and sometimes pretty extreme (sometimes intended to manipulate other people with regard to me in order to be able to manipulate me but also sometimes intended to see if I could for example be manipulated into suicide). The cost has been tremendous. It can get really complicated.
For anyone who wonders, I’m a little under the weather. Probably fighting off a virus. Something like that. Am taking it easy for a few days. Kicked in yesterday or day before.
After the above, which had been on my watch later list for a long time, I ran into this one…
Her problems – except the autism as a challenge in society – stem from far too many people having looked away far too often, allowing her to be abused over and over and over again
I’m starting to get the sense that addressing the focusing illusion could be the solution to so much. I only heard about it, read about it, a week ago. I need to start reading up on it and explore it in myself as well to get a better feel for what it is. Is it tied to the altruism – psychopathy variation, for example? No idea. I don’t think that I do it much myself, but I probably won’t even know until I read up. I need to read up. It may not bring me any answers at all. It may be a disappointment. We’ll see.
The synopsis has him saying that maybe the world needs a major disaster to be able to appreciate the concept of democracy again.
I thought that the pandemic would bring people and countries closer. Even Portsmouth became tolerable during the pandemic and UK government politicians even stopped ranting and raving about migrants like me for a while.
Then that fucking lunatic Putin attacked Ukraine before the pandemic was over and all hope was lost. Next, the fucking CEOs of a few major enterprises saw an opportunity to make more dough for themselves because they’re so empty inside that this is all they had and started overcharging people big time to make everyone else suffer a bit more and now just about everybody in the goddamn world hates just about everybody else again.
Another major factor? No women. Marin is gone, Ardern is gone, Merkel is gone. I really miss the influence of Merkel.
The human species is doomed.
Now I’ll go read the interview to see if it contains any hope at all.
(Bottom line, more or less: if we get another Trump presidency we’re all screwed and yes, Putin was the one who started fucking things up again. If Trump disappears from the scene, we might have a chance. That reminds me. Yikes. Back then, I thought that there was a real chance that Trump might end up getting assassinated. I think it’s fair to say that this probability is likely far greater now. That wouldn’t be good. It’s a pity that SCOTUS won’t expedite the immunity decision. People have lost their compass. They need good leadership and we don’t seem to have it anywhere at the moment. That’s dangerous. I can see in myself how easily bad shit can start corroding a person’s soul and one’s trust in others. That I was hunted and obstructed so relentlessly for 15 years, as if I was a rat with a Hollywood exterminator on my tail, and got subjected to so much sadism, so much contempt, it’s changed me. I see all the knife crime that didn’t used to be there and have to ask myself where it all comes from. The whole greenwashing bullshit concerns me too. The new sales slogan is “buy more cool, hip, green stuff”, isn’t it. Even fake meat is becoming a toxic cocktail.)
I talk about some of this stuff too, in my book. The difference between what I was surrounded by in England and what I see in the Netherlands is so surreal that I had to avoid thinking about England for a little while. Why? My mind had trouble reconciling the two. It’s too surreal, how different it is.
When I read that there’s a Dutch woman who organizes a Dickens festival each year in which people dress up as if they are in Dickensian times, I felt a lot of anger well up. Dickensian times were times of great poverty, such that the term “Dickensian” refers to great deprivation. Nothing romantic about it. (Dickens was born in Portsmouth, by the way.)
I let go of the anger because the woman means well, but I still find it very sad. I think Dickens refers to this poverty in his work, too, though I am not at all familiar with it.
I’ve just uploaded the third and final edition of this. Maybe I should have let some form of AI edit it but I have a feeling that it wouldn’t have gone well. 😎 I may write a more forward looking book next, a how to.
I’ve previously talked about ChatGPT referring to non-existing articles in The Guardian and accusing a professor in Canada of sexual harassment during a group trip that never even took place.
A few days ago, Microsoft offered to use AI to translate the Dutch word “bonestaak” for me. It’s suggestion was “bone stake”. Instead of “bean stalk”.
Let the dumbing down begin. I’m not worried about people’s employment yet.
The UK has already approved one of them. The matching FDA decision is coming up this Friday. There will be another one by 20 December. Both treatments are for sickle cell disease but they can come at the expense of the person’s fertility and certainly the first one requires a long period of hospitalization.
Read it. Then decide if you really want to keep voting for the politicians that want as much money as possible to flow from your pockets into those of their pals.
The conference will showcase ERC-funded frontier research projects that both study diversity in society and that exemplify the importance of taking diversity into account in research design.
Programme
8.30 – 9.00 | Registration
9.00 – 9.15 | Opening address by European Commissioner for Equality, Helena Dalli
9.15 – 9.25 | Introduction by Maria Leptin, ERC President
9.25 – 10.20 | Keynote: The Female Turn: How Evolutionary Science Shifted Perceptions About Females
Social inequalities in health: an intersectional approach, Pierre-Yves Geoffard, CNRS, FR
Molecular insights in “real-life” immunology, Maria Yazdanbakhsh, Leiden University, NL
Hypertension in African migrants: Lessons learnt from the RODAM study, Charles Agyemang, Amsterdam University Medical Centers, NL
ECAP: Genetic/epigenetic basis of ethnic differences in cancer predisposition, Gian-Paolo Dotto, University of Lausanne (UNIL) ,CH, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV), CH, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, US
12.10 – 13.10 | Lunch
13.10 – 14.40 | Session 2: Diversity from a Technological and Legal Perspective
Emilia Gómez, Joint Research Centre (European Commission) & Pompeu Fabra University, ES
Gian-Paolo Dotto, University of Lausanne (UNIL), CH, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV), CH, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, US
Professor in cellular immunology, Leiden University Medical Center, NL
I was very disappointed to learn from Malin Ah-King (Stockholm University) that we are still struggling with this issue of male bias and heteronormativity in science (that is, biology). I was a Master’s student in the 1980s and I carried out a study into gender bias in sociobiology research as part of my degree requirements. Relatively little has changed since then. Not only is a lot of research biased, but there is also a bias in favor of biased research.
Partiality supposedly has no place in science – science is “objective” (non-biased) – but all science is partial by definition because we all bring our personal backgrounds to the table.
In the west, “objective” has always implicitly meant “as seen from a well-to-do white male’s perspective”, except perhaps in times when society was matriarchal or was matriarchal behind the scenes, such as possibly in ancient Greece, as one member in the audience brought to our attention.
That same person, however, appeared to assume that only men produce testosterone and that only produce estrogen and that hormones direct behavior. Behavior and various other factors can impact hormone production and estrogen and testosterone aren’t the only hormones that interact with behavior.
This interaction alone already pointed out how important diversity in research is.
My main question for all presenters/discussion
How would you have attempted to prevent what happened with the Spectrum 10K study in the UK?
The Wellcome Trust, which is funding the study, halted it after a massive backlash from the autism community. A second ethics review took place, followed by a two-year consultation with the autistic community. I believe that this is what people call an ass-backward approach? In my view, the Wellcome Trust and the researchers could have seen this backlash coming, because of the way in which the researchers handled matters.
I also asked how we can address ageism in the scientific community. For example, grants often have age limits. Some leeway is occasionally available for for example parenthood but not for researchers who went to university at a later age. This seems to be much less the case in the US and this limitation in diversity too puts restrictions on research output.
I later decided to drop Kristien Hens a note and I downloaded two books that she wrote. I hadn’t looked into the program and the presenters in great detail before attending. I preferred to wait and see if I would be pleasantly surprised. I was.
How people become cold and cruel. This is one of many reasons why we shouldn’t have wars any longer.
(From the article in the Atlantic)
I also have a theory about the endocrine system having something to do with it. A constant high level of stress hormones is very unhealthy, so when that happens, the endocrine system starts changing some of its responses. (There’s research that supports this idea, yes.) That’s how cruelty can become associated with feelings of excitement and perhaps even of joy, except that it’s just the effect of a protective response from the endocrine system. Children have no way of knowing and controlling that.
It’s different for adults who become exposed to a lot of cruelty, but even for them, it’s hard.
So a guy who in the past was even banned from visiting the UK, which has now already been pretty hostile to all foreigners for at least one or two decades, as many people in England were already pretty hostile toward foreigners in 2004 and Theresa May introduced her hostile environment in 2010 or thereabouts, gets to rule this country. The Netherlands.
That’s like saying that the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy exist. Except that the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny are positive characters.
In 2011, an Englishman who hadn’t lived in England for around three decades kept telling me that I was so wrong, so mistaken, about various things that I told him about my experiences there. He too has had several harsh wake-up calls since.
We’ve had Trump, we’ve had Bolsonaro, we have Argentina and now the Netherlands.
The Netherlands has historically always welcomed those who were persecuted abroad, whether it was in Spain and Portugal (Sephardic Jews) or England (Mayflower). Suddenly that’s changed. That’s major.
And that’s scary.
The Dutch were always the voice of reason and of fairness, the ones who stood up for everyone’s rights. Even if this often made them perceived as dull or annoying, we need some country to play this role in the world.
Which country can we count on now? The voices of Merkel, Marin and Ardern have already disappeared too.
Who will add the badly needed dash of moderation to the global stew?
Maya Kowalski. But things aren’t going to be okay again any time soon. Not for a long time. Not for her brother either. What a nightmare.
The money will feel like, finally, validation, like a strange, uneasy form of comfort because it spells “finally, justice”, but it doesn’t replace her mother’s hug, for example.
Jeez. This really reminds you that things can always be worse. So if you’re going through a rough spot, remember that.
Somehow, this whole story passed me by until today. Then YouTube dished this up because it’s noticed my interest in certain court cases. I did a quick web search and was startled to discover that this was in St Petersburg, where I used to live. There is another hospital along the same street; I did some training there. One is at 501, the other at 701.
