… Earth doesn’t even shrug once and continues to be not flat.

Yet scores of people call the earth flat…

Be like the earth. It doesn’t really matter what people call you.

Entertaining. A good reminder that when the world changes in a way we don’t like, we all have the power to counter it and go against the flow.

https://www.statnews.com/2024/12/20/gene-therapy-trials-safety-secrecy-patient-deaths/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/22/she-should-have-a-bit-of-me-the-dutch-mothers-fighting-for-their-children-to-carry-their-surname

Big loud bang two minutes ago. Sounded like an explosion. Over 1100 explosions in the country this year. Revenge, intimidation, often personal, sometimes related to crime.

I am not literally all of it. 😁

And I am talking about my role in society.

Continue reading →

One of the things that I have learned in the past twenty years is that people rarely help others to help them.

• They want to control them
• They want to feed their own ego
• They believe that it will turn their own lives into some kind of Cinderella fairytale
• They want to look good to others (and be praised)
• They think it (finally) gives them the right to lecture them or verbally abuse them
• They aim to demand something back
• They crave power

The woman at the supermarket who quickly hands you or the cashier a fiver when you are short, she’s genuine. When someone in a similar situation (or who has been there) helps you, that too is usually genuine. Most others aren’t.

This seems so appropriate right here and now. Someone thought that I was just like him, I suspect, thinking back to a few conversations. I’m not.

Leah Harris

February 7, 201

Go It Alone

Lyrics Written by Leah Harris

https://www.leahharrismusic.com/stories/goitalone

I will sort out the text below later.

Remember when you said to me”It’s time to wake up and take your life more seriously,Things they change once you’re full-grownIt’s time to wake up f you don’t settle down, you’re going to spend your whole life alone”But we’re not the sameAnd I don’t see it that wayAnd I don’t want to changeAll I can say is that I’m sorry that I am not just like youThat I won’t let you to tell me what I’m meant to doI ain’t trying to burn no bridges, noBut I ain’t afraid to go it aloneRemember when you cried that daySaid your life had no meaning, but the clock kept ticking awayHow you wish you could go backAnd make a few changes so that your life wasn’t so empty like that Well remember thisThink of where you’ve beenFor the rest of the advice that you giveAll I can say is that I’m sorry that I am not just like youThat I won’t let you to tell me what I’m meant to doI ain’t trying to burn no bridges, noBut I ain’t afraid to go it aloneAll I can say is that I’m sorry that I am not just like youThat I won’t let you to tell me what I’m meant to doAnd I’m no fool, I know that I’ll be in it aloneA life of passion, it can be a lonely roadI got to do the things that feel good to meI ain’t trying to burn no bridges, no

But I ain’t afraid to go it alone

3 Jan: No, I was not imagining things. The pheromones were really oozing off him that evening.

He also had told me that I could sleep in his wife’s bed – I’d hate that if I were her – and that I could sleep in his bed during the day, but this may be the (nonjudgmental) autism speaking.

21 December 2024, noon: He just apologised for having hurt me. He’s also kicking me out, though. For two weeks now, he has been going on about a place that I can go to. Keeps going on about it. Insisted it was local. Turns out to be in Utrecht! (Not free. I can’t afford it but he was willing to lend me money for it.) He’s undoubtedly been telling people that I have been refusing to go to it. Yes, but that’s because it doesn’t actually exist!

Afterthought a day later: What I find really shocking is how convincingly he pretends that nothing happened and hasn’t even asked whether he hurt me. (I think I get that, actually.) It’s not that easy for me. My tailbone is hurting so I’m constantly reminded of how hard he threw me to the floor, and only over someone else having moved his iMac a few inches… While think I get what this is about, I am also a little shocked.

It’s an eye opener. About how mild autism works. I had underestimated how complicated this is. I saw it too much as mere diversity. It’s a lot more complicated than that. Now I understand that letter that a woman with a husband with Asperger’s addressed to autism experts that popped up on my screen in England one day. (Yes, I think that I was dealing with an autistic person there too. He shares interests with me. It may make a big difference.)

I’m learning that you don’t help mildly autistic people by trying to confront them with their challenges. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible not to start criticizing and accusing them if you are around them, but it makes things a lot worse. You can support them relatively unobtrusively by accepting their idiosyncrasies and also accepting that what is paramount for them one day can change the next.

I’m also starting to suspect that particularly if mildly autistic people are living on their own, they may need someone to help them manage their household. They aren’t necessarily highly organised (even if they may appear to). It just so happens that I stopped by at the home of another mildly autistic and highly educated person the other day. (I didn’t dare mention the autism to others. Thing is, this person has an entire house and rarely seems to spend time at it. I had to see if I might be able to stay.) Both the garden and the house were a mess. Bottles of water in two open packages behind the front door, boxes with junk and other junk on all the chairs and seating in the front part of the living room, not as if she was moving out, but as if she couldn’t care less. I remember having helped her clean up, clear out and organise a cupboard decades ago. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. I decided to help. Just having someone else there who quietly/gently takes the lead apparently can help a lot.)

---

After civil servants and a few others essentially bullied me out of my not very pleasant but in some ways certainly tolerable temporary home in the Netherlands, which also cut me off from income (but I’d figured I’d have income or a job soon enough and in fact, had recently already worked a shift) and I was also still due 400 to 500 more euros in benefits than I eventually received, someone has been letting me sleep on his couch off and on, and now for a few weeks already.

But without income, I’m probably even more trapped and more isolated and more powerless there than on the streets, aren’t I. I currently can’t even wash my hair and I’ve been wearing the same clothes for two weeks. I do have plenty of socks and underwear with me, thankfully.

Yesterday, he threw me to the floor. He grabbed my arm and pulled hard. I fell hard.

I’m pretty sure that he wanted to start kicking me then. But he didn’t. He just walked away.

My right arm hurt for a while and my tailbone is probably going to be hurting for quite a while. He’d grabbed my left upper arm and left a bruise (as I discovered the following morning) and my right wrist and yanked hard. (The right arm later also developed bruises.) I’m not sure how exactly I fell backward, whether he pushed me or let go or whatever.

But that was a lot of anger and it’s scary.

He’s mildly autistic. He’s a former colleague. I’ve known him for forty years but in a professional capacity, until about 18 months ago. That’s when I learned that he’s autistic. He masks incredibly well, comes across as very convincing and as far more together than I.

He is in the middle of a divorce, but he’s probably – mostly to himself? – woven an intricate web of lies around that marriage, to a woman who’s about forty years younger. Hard to tell.

He has a first ex. I’ve noticed that he speaks with a slightly different, more posh accent, when he talks with her over the phone.

He recently told me that his current wife had taken his iMac without his consent and shipped it off as a donation to a developing country. She often finds stuff on the streets and she had found another iMac in the streets that she had taken home. (She takes home a lot of things, granted. But an iMac?) Could I help him set it up?

“Oh, look, there’s all sorts of stuff on it.” Files. Folders. It was his own iMac, of course. I said nothing.

That was so unhinged. I became really worried. If he says shit like that about his wife, then what’s he saying about me? I now find myself doubting other things he’s said about her. According to him, she is pretty paranoid. Is she really?

About me, one of the stories he made up was that I had a pioneering business that failed. That’s hogwash. I wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary. Did he only say that to try to flatter me or has he also been saying that to others? I have no idea.

He’d recently suddenly given me what looked like a pretty trashy novel to read and on the same day, he’d plopped down next to me suddenly much too eagerly and much too close on one occasion. That told me that I probably had to be careful.

He has been really tense. He vocalises just about nonstop, also through his breathing sounds, and his breathing was pretty crazy. He sounded so so so tense. Like a bull that is about to charge, scraping its leg across the ground impatiently, steam emanating from its mouth.

So I’ve been pretty tense, too. He had thought that I wouldn’t just be sleeping on his couch (which he denies of course, but I am absolutely right about this), and ever since that became crystal clear, I’ve been on edge. He began to sulk, basically like a big child and also trying to get my attention. Years ago, he said something like that he liked the tension of chasing a woman (figuratively speaking), I remembered. I don’t. I didn’t consider it reassuring even though I can’t be sure what he meant by it.

I suspect that he had told himself that my shitty situation was just a ploy to get into his life and home, but I can’t know for sure. I suspect that he was expecting another fairytale, like a woman forty years younger falling for him. One evening, he really scared the crap out of me. Nobody else was in the house. Nothing happened but his behaviour initially was so weird that it really worried me. When I decided to ignore it, then he became deliberately intrusive. (I think he mistook my lack of response as encouragement.) Sitting closer to me on the sofa, leaning forward toward me. I got up. He also pretended not to hear me and deliberately stood much too close to me to be able to hear me. I kept backing off but I also got scared. He did seem to notice that.

I felt so betrayed.

He’d also referred to me using his bed during the day or his wife’s bed instead of the couch. I didn’t think that either would be a good idea.

He can be really controlling, I’ve noticed. Not good. He also has memory problems but they are partly an expression of pathological demand avoidance, I suspect.

He’s often ignoring me when I speak, he’s ignoring emails and when he asked me to use WhatsApp, he apparently blocked me after he mentioned The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a film that I don’t know but doesn’t sound like my kind of thing. I emailed him that WhatsApp did not seem to be working well on my phone and that I had uninstalled it, to avoid a discussion. (He’d been doing other things in the run-up to this, btw, and it now looks like it was about, I don’t know, domination? Control? Hard to tell.)

Part of the childish behaviour is also that he sometimes seems to be doing things to try to annoy me to voice his displeasure. Splashing my clothes, for example.

I kept my mouth shut for days, trying to say as little as possible, trying to avoid what would largely nonsensical discussions or even an explosion. But I am in a shitty situation and I am not well. My right lung was clogging up again (another reason why I really want out of the Netherlands as its weather is not good for me). I’ve upped my dosage of N-acetyl cysteine and the junk seems to be really coming out now.

(He’ll say things like it’s just a nervous cough. He likes twisting my truths into stories he makes up all by himself, I’ve noticed. Stories that are more palatable to him, but it may also be stories that paint me a certain way at the same time.)

Yesterday, I brought it up. The iMac. I was at the end of my tether, couldn’t keep it in any longer. He got furious and stormed at me.

(He takes a lot of effort masking like crazy. What’s behind it is supposed to be a secret.)

He did admit that the iMac thing was just because his wife had moved it a little on the table. Later I thought that it may just be because you now get to see that the keyboard is broken. He doesn’t use the iMac but it looks impressive, of course. I suspect that that’s why it’s on the table. He’s into what things look like, I’ve noticed, at least to a degree. Appearances.

After the incident, his breathing was changed markedly. Normal. But he tried to get my attention again, the way he’d been doing for days, and when that didn’t work, he grew tense again. I feel like I’m around a ticking time bomb.

He’s said nothing.

I need to get the hell out of here. I do not feel safe here. There are others around, but this situation is not helping me in any way, isn’t moving my life forward.

To help defuse the situation, I decided to thank him for the cucumbers, tomatoes and tofu he bought for me, but the fact that he’s willing to purchase a package of coffee for me but not a small bottle of olive oil which costs less than the coffee and is adamant, forceful, that he will not buy olive oil was worrisome. My digestion was seized up for days. Coffee helps. Olive oil helps too and it protects the heart. He now uses sunflower oil for everything. He shops at the most expensive supermarket. Appearances. At least I have gotten him to install the app so that he can activate their weekly special offers. They offer a choice of 10. You can pick 5.

I also texted him that I know that this is the autism speaking. Maybe I should not have. Maybe it sounded too much like condonence. (He turns out not to have read it, may have blocked me on his phone too. Who knows.)

I need to get out of here.

I know he can’t help it, but I can’t have this on my plate in my current situation, can I.

(For a while, since the incident, he has been muttering under his breath off and on. I don’t know what he was and is saying to himself.)

I have known someone else who’s highly educated and mildly autistic for about two years longer. Since 1982 or thereabouts. Some months ago, when I called her, she instantly started shouting at me angrily. She said that me and my sweet little voice shouldn’t be pretending that I didn’t know what this was about, why she was angry. I had no idea. Next, I discovered that only five days earlier, she had sent me an email in which nothing sounded amiss. She’d sent it to a new email address that I was only accessing at a public library. I set it up to circumvent the stupid hacking. (The hacking alone is enough to be dealing with.)

Continue reading →

This formerly oh so egalitarian country has become heavily polarised and it’s increasing homelessness in the Netherlands at a rapid pace. One or two homeless families in Amsterdam in 2023 asked for help in one month. Now it’s 32 parents and 54 kids.

Bijvoorbeeld: in 2023 klopten maandelijks één of twee dakloze gezinnen bij de gemeente Amsterdam aan. In 2024 waren dat in één maand al 32 ouders met 54 kinderen. (Source: Linda article by Marissa Klaver.)

In 1996, when I returned from the United States after our research funding had collapsed which created an immensely stressful situation for me, getting basic benefits in the Netherlands was a piece of cake. It enabled me to get back on my feet, though it took me 18 months to find a home, in spite of having continued to pay my housing association dues.

It’s different now. Getting basic benefits is a nightmare that takes months. Most people can no longer borrow a friend’s car either, for example, to move some stuff into or out of storage or leave their things in a family member’s garage or basement.

If you’re poor, you are no longer seen as human. People want you to go away. They feel free to abuse you. They feel that you have no rights.

It’s not just polarization that causes this, specifically povertyism. The country has always been overregulated, but is now completely being strangled by a myriad of regulations that cause gridlocks, for example because they can be in contradiction. It’s one big mess of seized-up gears.

It’s no longer the case that if you lose your job, the government will step up and support you if you ask.

It appears that going to court is often the only way to break out of these strangleholds.

There’s one person who is very aware of it all. Her name is Michelle van Tongerloo. She’s a GP. She’s written a book about the patient called the Netherlands and two days ago, Dutch magazine Linda published an article about her and about the book.

Vengeful civil servants are a reality in the Netherlands. They have the power to make or break people and unlike in the past, no longer rigidly apply the rules. They actually actively torment people they are supposed to serve.

This is more or less what John Tasioulas referred to in a recent tweet, I realise now. On 8 December, he wrote ”One of the most poisonous developments in recent years has been the open contempt shown for democratic citizens without higher education” (while commenting on Tuck’s book “Active and Passive Citizens”).

Another problem in the Netherlands is that all sorts of solutions that are open to citizens in countries like the US and the UK if they want to save money or make money aren’t allowed. You can forget about doing anything like “DoorDashing” in the Netherlands. You are also supposed to put as much money as possible into other people’s pockets in all sorts of ways, particularly through renting a home. It’s illegal to sleep in a van or any other vehicle in the Netherlands unless it’s at a campsite. Most campsites are pretty expensive.

https://www.linda.nl/lifestyle/gezondheid/straatarts-michelle-van-tongerloo-boek-dakloos-nederland/

The Dutch, once probably the coolest cucumbers on the planet, taking everything in stride, fazed by nothing, are becoming a nation of spoiled brats and fear mongerers.

• On the one hand, there is something really weird going on in the Netherlands that no other western nation has. (That’s with the exception of the gun violence and particularly the mass shootings in the US.) There apparently already have been over a thousand explosions in the tiny country this year, intended to scare people. This bizarre cult of intimidation and retaliation started some years ago and is really getting out of hand. Though they probably aren’t behind the explosions, particularly civil servants appear to be whipping up a climate of fear. 😥😟☹️ “Shut up or else.” It’s connected to racism and povertyism, perhaps also to sexism, definitely to ageism, and also to ableism.

• On the other hand, every molehill is being blown up into Mt. Everest. There for example is an unhealthy drive to collect each and every leaf that falls from a tree, lest anyone might slip on it in wet weather. Pretty bonkers if you ask me. The Netherlands doesn’t even have the kind of legal recourse for people who slip on leaves and the like that you see in the States. The leaf-collecting efforts consume a lot of fuel and electricity, too. The really worrisome idea of allowing euthanasia for the over-75s just because they are over 75 seems to tie into this too. Thankfully, that proposal didn’t make it into law. Is real life about to become outlawed in the Netherlands because it’s not close enough to a sweet Hollywood movie or what?

• Now they’re putting the fear of god into people about Russia attacking the country. People are being told to prepare for war, and have emergency supplies at home. This is not because of flooding risks or hurricane risks, the risk that hacking poses for the country’s inadequately protected utility companies and banking systems or the strain on the over-extended power grids or because of the insane housing shortage that puts almost everyone at risk of instant homelessness, but because Russia may attack? The Netherlands has not even an inch of border that it shares with Russia. Now any time anything out of the ordinary happens, kids in the Netherlands have a tendency to think that Russia is attacking. Its former long-running prime minister Rutte who currently heads NATO sounds like he is losing the plot and turning into his very own version of Trump. Then again, there’s also the threat of Trump. (I still can’t believe that he got re-elected.) Does Rutte believe that Trump and Putin are plotting to take over the EU? I don’t find that a credible explanation.

How do I connect these two developments? This too, it’s got such an eerie feel of Orwellianism to it.

Sorry, England, about all my moaning about you. Things are now much crazier in the Netherlands. It was never my favourite country, but its gears are seizing up, I think. It’s always emphasized being average and mediocre over the joy of excelling and doing the best you can, the way America used to tick, but it was a nation in which down-to-earth people worked hard. That’s no longer the case, it seems. I don’t know how much of this is due to the imbalance created by social media and TV between the reality propelled by media versus what is happening in society away from media or what the size of this discrepancy is.

Driving people to prepare for emergencies does boost the economy, I suppose, if everyone stocks up. Is that the main reason why this idea that Russia might attack soon is being pushed?

I probably don’t even want to try to make sense of it all. It’s giving me a headache. 😂 The Netherlands is such a tiny country, but it always used to set good examples. It used to be so egalitarian. What went wrong here?

Did you know that using artificial intelligence can help you fight insurance companies who reject your claims? New startups in the States are moving into this area. They not only carry out analyses, they also help draw up letters.

In places like Amsterdam – as opposed to for example the Sittard-Geleen area where the housing shortage is much lower or Schouwen-Duivenland where it’s negligible – it takes about TWO DECADES to find affordable housing.

Twenty years.

This housing shortage in Holland’s central area results in a great deal of homelessness, by definition. People may find alternative ways to house themselves but they still need the blasted “inschrijving” (registration) to be allowed to exist here officially. Rules have been loosened in recent years, by which I mean that municipalities can now allow you to use their office address, but in order to register without having an official residence you have to have ties.

(I have worked and lived in Amsterdam for most of my adult life in the Netherlands, with the exception of a mere few months elsewhere, but I don’t qualify. I have much stronger ties to England than to the Netherlands. I don’t quite qualify as a Dutch citizen any longer in all sorts of ways; I’m not sure how to explain, qualify or phrase it. And that’s apart from things such as that the Dutch are sometimes offended by for example my English understatements because they don’t want to know about my Englishness as I speak Dutch.)

Support for homeless people generally is not free in the Netherlands and often very limited. Just like for women who flee from domestic violence, it usually requires being registered as living locally (having local ties), which requires having a local home address.

(This latter mechanism also often pushes homeless people out of the mandatory Dutch healthcare system because it has the same address requirement. Are you surprised to learn that there’s a Dutch concept called “address fraud”?)

People are frequently forced to run all over town all day long, to several different locations to apply for access for 1 night, to be sent to a specific location for the night, to be sent to a different location in the morning, then back to the other location if they want to apply for another night and then perhaps back to the other location or to a different location if they want a meal.

Typing this is exhausting enough. Doing it is on another level.

All the while, it may be freezing cold and pouring and while these tired souls walk all over town, they get soaked and so do their belongings. Remember: They have no place where they can dry their things.

Support websites sometimes use language in which the organizations seek to distance themselves from the people they are supposed to serve. They speak of “these people” and create invisible walls between us and them.

Utterly deplorable.

It makes some people write or decide that it’s better to die under a bridge than to rest in a temporary bed. Not because they want to be miserable and die but because they want to live and be seen as human.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-024-01831-z#citeas

Explainer, in Dutch:

https://www.trouw.nl/wetenschap/studie-zet-theorie-over-geheugen-op-zijn-kop~bd116ce9/

Dutch minority opinions no longer welcome in politics in the Netherlands. A newspaper screenshot below, in Dutch.

Poverty and homelessness can happen to anyone. It’s not unheard of after a divorce and it also happens to people returning from abroad to densely populated home countries with housing shortages and an abundance of regulatory restrictions. Those are just two examples.

Yet I reckon that common responses when a well-educated person claims to have no income are the following.

• Has a drugs or alcohol problem or shopping addiction.

• May be developing dementia and doesn’t know where her money is or how much comes in when.

• Is trying to scam the system and is hiding income or savings.

The simple reality is that more often than not, yes, they have almost no income.

Increasingly often, people fall victim to a costly scam. Don’t judge them. It even happens to savvy investors!

Don’t use suspicion or negative expectations as your standard approach. Assume that people are telling the truth. The adage “Trust but verify” is a very good guideline for all sorts of situations.

8 December 2024

10 November 2024

This varies wildly… I know that, so I decided to risk erring on the cautious side in my new environment.

I’ve been overdoing it a little bit, I’m learning from observation of people using laptops around me, but I would rather overdo it a little bit than really piss people off who are usually working pretty hard and on their feet all day.

I do set myself a limit. On days when I don’t use public transport, I can afford to be slightly more generous if I want to.

I am so glad that I am where I am now. A much healthier environment. I definitely made the right decision. I feel so much more… human? The opposite of otherized. Singled out. That’s really what I needed.

I’m basically just like everyone else now. I’ve always liked having a nice mix of people around me. I don’t like being surrounded by people who are all poor or all rich or all miserable or all of the same nationality and ethnicity. Particularly being surrounded by misery affects me. You somehow end up absorbing that misery. That’s possibly or partly because I want to solve it. And I rarely can.

The weather is supposed to be miserable tomorrow. I may stay in. I have plans for Wednesday and I am so looking forward to that!

Well, okay, I didn’t dwell on what it means to be human, but I did address everything else. I’ve noticed before that she and I seem to think similarly. A warm homecoming for me. 🙏🏻

Changing Life as We Know It

Event will explore the role of genetic modification and our understanding of humanity.

Hastings Center President Vardit Ravitsky will be a keynote speaker for the FASPE (Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics) Symposium, a public event on November 16 in Manhattan. What are the ethical issues surrounding genetic modification? How do we define – and regulate – the line between benefit and harm? In what ways do these possibilities force us to make decisions about the value of life and impose judgments about what makes a life worth living – or even what is considered “normal”?

Learn more and register: https://thehastingscenter.us15.list-manage.com/track/click?u=040b74da78731d913e883748f&id=63f4e21622&e=4a8ce9611a