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I can understand. I am also sick of endless scapegoating, alienation and penalties.
I lost my mom a few years ago to greed and hubris.
And I have finally realized how dangerous this is and while I can’t be sure that my few friends (I don’t have a zillion shallow personal or professional relationships for a reason)/family/my physicians/any actual or distant (strictly duty 
-presumably duties you don’t feel anythjng positive about have some evolutionary purpose) colleagues or I will be okay, I will definitely do whatever I can.
I blamed myself for my mom’s death, but in retrospect I did everything I could. But after she improved in health I got preoccupied and failed to notice the greed and hubris piling on.
I will leave a well-documented trail - I don’t take democracy lightly. I have had nothing but losses in the past 14 years. And I am sick of it.
My first instance of sexual harassment (bus groping in my country aside) occurred in 2010 at a clinic in the US run by a doctor from my part of the world. I had gone for a routine visa checkup and he was inappropriate.
Then I worked at a pretty sexist institution in 2011-2012. My mentor and lab were pretty cool and his wife was a thoroughly decent human being. The other scientists I met were okay or at least..well generic randos. I didn’t like the hospital. They were total assholes peddling sobriety and Reefer Madness. After that and after a second experience in 2021 when I was distrait trying to get a legitimate prescription for Modafinil which helps me and instead tried to give Prozac a shot against my misgivings, I have stopped bothering with rubber stamps.
I am lucky in knowing a small family run business my family has known for years. The pharmacist is sweet but pretty savvy and would not dispense any unsafe medications. I am basically relying on his charity wrt my Modafinil purchases.
I am sick of the appearance of propriety and rectitude and safety with no concept of what the real thing is. If we are breaking so many rules as disgusting, parasitic ..sorry..like Julia in 1984 I can’t talk about Google without swearing. I really hate those fuckers. And they are in everything so if they retaliate then this time let there be a clear trail. They are the most hateful company ever and really I would avoid anyone who ever worked there. I never bought that shit. Tech is for the greater good! Go fuck yourselves you ugly Google parasites..
Sorry..where was I..man I hate Google. My own cynical take is that we are divvied up by the tech creeps (the “democratic” tech creeps and the nazis/billionaires/politicians/oligarchs/entertainment industry/admins) and for us rabble (me) and more civilized/respectable people (scientists, bureaucrats, doctors, journalists, blue collar workers etc) the best one can hope is to watch these various types of awful battle it out like a free for all between King Kong, Godzilla and that thing from Nope and hope that they take each other out and we the people anywhere survive.
It’s sad that that’s honestly my worldview.
I liked it back when we had real democracy. I don’t really meet too many people who dislike me (minor friction aside) since I don’t live in a reality show where conflict is the driver. So it’s coming from somewhere up top - all that is registered as malice and hostility is actually really just completely self serving indifference and callousness. They cannot understand the concept of not using other humans like pieces in a chess game. It’s pathetic and frightening and lame. Just lame.
Norbert Weiner was right in calling it “The Human use of Humans”. He sounded cool from the way he was described in Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley.
You mentioned Pokemon..the other instance of serious harassment I came across locally was when I was still coping with my mom’s passing in 2023 and I used to run outside. And this creep wearing a cap used to ruin my morning run. I have stopped running outside. It was not even regular harassment. It was like kayfabe. The creepiest harassment I have come across every single time since 2010 had this weird kayfabe element as if this is someone who is aware of the surveillance state and instead of doing something sane they seem to be leaning into the spectacle.
I hope that type of creep, influencers etc who try to exploit the spectacle go the way of Jupe from Nope. That thing from Nope will end Pokemon. One way or another things come a full circle when you are a jerk on a long enough timeline. In the meantime you cause a lot of misery.
That was a good allegory for our increasingly ai mediated surveillance state. Influencing, Streisand Effect etc are so passe. If you try to exploit the average person trying to live their life quietly while navigating all sorts of real and unfortunately virtual stresses you don’t understand, you will go the way of Jupe if you don’t get it ever.
One can’t seem to get that through to the thick headed of any type who use force and have no self awareness around their own internal contradictions and flaws.
For me it has been too real to ever be a spectacle. Like Angel in Buffy, any relaxation turns you into a help vampire rather than someone struggling with this mess on their own terms. This is bullshit actually, this whole thing seems run by trashy and corrupt industrialists and religious theocrats and fascists and they can all go fuck themselves.
I can only warn against greed, hubris, sanctimony, creepiness, fascism etc. It’s up to other people to take the warning at least now. No I endorse all those things for them. And it’s not as easily left-right as is forced on me - a real green. The right is hopeless but I am sick of this culture wars and triviality obsessed bogus left that never gave animal rights or environmental issues their due and tries to hijack science, medicine and democracy for an equally muscularly brainless anthropocentric Soylent Green vision of “humanism”. I am free. I am not wearing sackcloth and ashes and placating these creeps. I hope my mentors and physicians forgive me. But I doubt there is any real issue. This was so stupid. No one should have to endure this much worthless stupid trash with no positives whatsoever.
I have never had any kayfabe..gallows humor I use to cope with. I am starting to get the hang of it. Nothing is certain, but one has to try to survive.
Anyway the second creep I met was a guy I rented a room from at that hideous job. I was as I still am, in the middle of a follow up paper to a paper I had written. I had a really cool mentor prior to that job who used to give us room to grow by not micromanaging us. Sadly I was out of my depth and had a feeling that the analysis I used in the paper was sloppy and so I started working on a model of the whole problem and now I have to run my data through the new model and I am pretty sure one of my results doesn’t hold up. The others remain to be seen. One of them may hold up. The others remain to be seen. The first graph in the paper was a result I was entirely comfortable with so I am not bothering with it. The other two graphs I am reworking and adding some other stuff to make a complete paper. I don’t care what anyone says or thinks. I have lost all faith in any but some working systemic parts. The other parts are full of these guys and they are business people and politicians etc and they can go fuck themselves. Except for one small vegan business, one small clean food business and my medical marijuana company I avoid industry and in those cases it’s just old school goodwill (not the homelessness nonprofit, the concept) and not whatever an influencer is. Ghastly concept. That thing from Nope was cool. I hope it eats any real influencers who want to go viral etc that ever cross my path. I have no idea why Levine calls himself that. He is more like Kaluuye’s OJ.
Anyway, I need to get back to that. But after my mom’s death, covid, Trump and waning democracy, with my self medication regimen, which i did try to change, I have paid my damn dues to these foul things and won’t stand to be treated like shit anymore. I really gave Prozac a shot and my mom died while I was distrait. I have a medical marijuana presc through Ayurvedic channels I am very grateful for and this modafinil and I am trying to complete this paper, remain anonymous and stay far away from prison over narcotics and not get harassed or exploited nor have anyone connected with me disrupted).
I’ll finish this post as it’s important. It’s all a scrambled mess..it’s an authentic chore!
Authentic..I so don’t get these people. They must have very dull lives to see spectacle as anything but a horror. This is why I always avoided people. Austerity or spectacle is such a broken and false dichotomy. These are stupid people.
But I am grateful to EarlG, Elad and Skinner for permitting me on this forum with these long rambling posts that look like a cry for help. In a way they are. But it’s not a mental health issue so much as sounding alarm bells the non-influencer way about technocracy destroying real democracy and women’s rights for worthless products, theatre and insecurity.
I have been engaged in a massive task of making a journal on DU so if the shit hits the fan, since there is nothing like any sort of sane HR I have one place to have semi-coherent narrative. I tried making it more professional looking but somehow I can’t stand reading this stuff after I have vomited it out.
I really should try to make it more structured I guess. Then I thought maybe this is more “authentic” and then I thought “No. This is what is driving me nuts”. I am no Karen or super orderly. Quite the reverse. But I never celebrated my chaotic ways. If I wasn’t ashamed of them it was because no one else could see them. I am not a princess. But I am appalled at the thought of anyone like a student thinking that this nightmarish way I go about life is the opposite of being the obnoxious well curated austere ugly sober douchebag.
That’s what makes people think that any attention is good while the austere and hateful think that mistakes mean endless hell.
The reality is that people who are human whether they are scientists, doctors or other professionals do make mistakes, lead imperfect and flawed lives filled with contradictions, petty vanities, petty frivolity. It’s neither something to celebrate nor demonize.
But it is not a reason to go into a tech creep mediated gated community or law of the jungle chaos. The whole point of civil rights and democracy and education is to not use people’s flaws, deficiencies and errors against them in clearly sleazy and unsympathetic ways where finally a person has to resort to being overtly calculating that “well I may not be anything much but at least I am honest and non Malian and if it machinic malice or human mobs, hopefully they go for those data-as-oil fuckers and not me”. I was never very calculating. If I am forced to I will spell it out.
I was not down with conflict for 14 years but as I watched this indignantly and got that I will just keep getting swept this way and that way and any exploitative or other asinine types will just ruin the last resources I have left and no.
Not to go all Straw Dogs and all but I have had enough.
I had this job and I actually really liked my mentor and I didn’t want him blamed for the complete lack of sympathy between his institution and me. He wasn’t like a greasy and icky Pentland or MIT Creep Lab type. He was more like Yan LeCun/Norbert Weiner where it isn’t self serving or about money or power but you get to do good science. It’s ridiculous that Zuckerberg is Prof LeCun’s boss but that’s the world we live in. And I have never had problems with authority like Fauci or most scientists or doctors. But come on. This is like frat boys controlling machines with this layer of civilized humans in between and angry rabble like me outside. When I got that job, I expected it to be like my main job and I was a mediocre and shitty scientist in my job. I wasn’t lazy or stupid but I had an education from the Global South which as my mom used to point out has kept deteriorating over time. It’s why I think more students per classroom sounds stupid. Overpopulation doesn’t produce the best results as people who actually live in overpopulated countries know.
You won’t find too many people outside the UN or corporate funded think tanks who say Betsy Hartmann or Syeda Hameeda(this woman I saw on tv saying this atrocious crap about how overpopulation is just super cool) are awesome. The kind of people I avoid from the left as people who hog all the space on the left while those of us who generally like to stay silent are left with the appalling left right options that these shitty turdy systems inflict. They want to turn you into a statistic one way or another and they succeeded with my mom. They wont succeed with me. I am well to the left but I am sick of stale stereotypes and till Trump 2.0 I sucked up leftist conventions on many things. But as I was yet again tiredly trying to conceal all traces of having existed I read a column by Andrew O Hehir and thought no. I will stay anonymous and try to get back to whatever the closest approximation of a democratic life without any kayfabe for a marijuana using person.
Anyway the work was hard in my job and I was trying to finish this paper and then I got a shitload of new info to grapple with about the direction of tech I guess. Initially, I was in so much shock at this vision of the world that most people have had 15 years to acclimate to and I had 8 months. I was as horrified as most of you would have been if in 2011 you were given a vision of this world.
And so I adroitly moved back to the Global South abandoning a green card I had never wanted anyway. And haven’t regretted it once. But I can’t keep dealing with fascistic shit here as well. This is my home. It’s the one place where what I say goes. Then I was not a professor and I am a loner and not a cultist. Postdocs are unstable and I am not joining some damn herd and get told what to do.
I already follow all reasonable rules. I get my work upto spec on the bloody system of trust. I harm reduce and try not to die which I feel is health adjacent. So ridiculous: dumping a bunch of info that would require me to an up to spec princess or some sort of horrific notion of society and community or this total dirtbag who thrives on some sort of ghastly quid pro quo. I had a very clean life wrt creeps before. I wouldn’t say my mentors were like parents but that’s a sacrosanct relationship.
And usually in those jobs the institution is remote. Here I trusted my mentor but I didn’t feel like some opaque institution filled with those corporate creep types is going to be feminist or civilized or anything. They are feminist in “okay will you do a tampon ad for us” way but I don’t want to do tampon ads. This has been so ridiculous politically.
As a woman’s right to work gets chipped away and sexual harassment laws die, this trivial shit “oh discuss your periods in public girls”. This is the world social media and google built and it’s an insult to honest garbage to call it garbage.
I have been seeing the stealth right wingification of culture for so long. You can’t walk if you are chewing that much gum and barely putting any effort into walking. So I thought desperately that I would stopping overthinking stuff and just take a sledgehammer and beat this to death
That’s Google feminism..proud tampon and yeast infection ads? Yeah no. These are ghastly notions-influence..
They are destroying non profit and govt jobs and dignity entirely from the bogus left and the right. This is a paranoid and industrialized vision of the world that I cannot quietly endorse as a scientist or a human female. YMMV apparently varies when you are male. Yeah well good luck with that.
Unfortunately tone doesn’t come through in text and I don’t believe in audio, so it probably doesn’t come through how serious what I am saying is.
I have had to fight down my natural shame at any kind of conspicuity to rant like this. I always hated being conspicuous even as a kid. My parents are fairly silent but I used to tell even them to keep it down so people don’t notice. So a notion as nightmarish as influence..
And I think people who talk about themselves are bores. The reason I am doing this is that I have felt lately that things go worse if you never speak out and it’s easy to speak out about tangible stuff. With this it’s some human creeps and so much that you have to make inferences about.
I tried role playing this genuinely thick headed scientist who tries to understand the math and science for half a second before I got that there is no way you can make sense of anything but people in this.
Any worthwhile tech will be too complicated to understand -especially at any nascent stage and any garbage tech is an outright safety hazard. These are guys who have historically shown total disregard of safety.
I am not letting them Shepard me duplicitously into a Bukele run hell quietly any time it suits them. At least now I don’t feel histrionic for saying these things and I can say them as I would without trying to pick one of a slim bench of left archetypes to force myself into.
That was why I found some relief in Yasha Levine, Nathan Robinson, Nandita Bajaj, Maria Bolotnikova etc. Finally some relatable lefties.
At my last institution before they kicked me out after basically hinting that I was one or all of the following: insane, fraudulent a loose cannon etc, they made me cringe my reading out various emails I had sent. Well this time I will put my fugly rants out there myself as much as these things make me cringe.
Hopefully it would be not just mean but pointless and not in anyone’s interest to not let various insignificant randos bumbling their way through the present technohellscapes.
I wish DU had a private journal option.
I am going to get over the cringe this invariably produces when I go back to my actual job, vaguely remembering having left some long and incomprehensible or lunatic and solipsistic screeds 
.
Why can’t we go back to normal regulations and democracy instead of this clearly hedge betting ploy by states to cut a deal with technofascists to basically have an understated underclass whom to now force into clearly bogus alliances with strangers to catch process. No. Thats not cooperation or vaccination etc. And there is no easy politics. It’s industry and mercenary shit.
It’s probably like the thing in Nope. The human herd mind now with machines in between is not something anyone can easily game. Had that been the case you would already be the emperors of your individual crappy universes and you aren’t.
But as for future complaints I was thinking..as I said, my lab was cool but it was all too much.
The first place I stayed at was cool but not really that good a fit. The people were nice but I think they were Bible bangers and probably Republican. Unlike many other DU posters, I have rarely disliked Republicans or people with opposite politics irl.
I usually find that nice enough people are okay for casual stuff. But it starts to become trickier when you get more entangled and drastically different views on things like industrial regulation and religion in shared or protected spaces comes up. I don’t want intelligent design or creationism or mysticism in my backyard. Only evolutionary biology sans ads and without bogus sociology over jobs. My home is not meant to be for industrial growth and bullshit jobs. The only app on my phone is birdnet not honey badger influencer guy net or a pokemon like bird game.
So they were cool but it wasn’t the best fit. The second place was a room I rented from this creepy guy from my own country. The third place was a good fit. They seemed nice enough and I never saw them which is what you want in a landlord provided you can be sure they don’t buy into creationism or intelligent design. I liked them so much I barely remember them. They just faded into the background which is what I have been trying to do all my life ffs. Instead of making a nightmarish production of hideous crap.
I am reminded often of a story my mom told me of an encroaching industrial development and all the small animals it displaces.
I was very close to my mom and that’s not something one normally shares. But lately I feel that she should have been with me still and I worry that the wrong way of doing stuff ..with hostile or pushy and exploitative crap ..
After I came back here I was sexually harassed again by a holographer with a defense contract from Lockheed Martin in July 2014. I abandoned my greencard that August and decided to work on my paper at home.
Then I came across another suggestive and creepy guy who picked his nose (tmi?) at the office where I went to get my digital ID in 2016 or 2017.
This mostly wraps up the whole. I tried Amanita mushrooms in 2023 after coming across a reference to psychedelics in Big Mouth and seeing a mushroom sprout up after the rains in my garden in the June of 2023. I tried it thrice between June 2023 and the end of 2023. It’s also not outright illegal where I live. And that was intense and scary but I didn’t do much damage to myself.
I am pretty sober now marijuana and modafinil aside. I harm reduce and know that you don’t mess with some combinations (e.g. sleep meds and alcohol). I have tried sleep meds a few times between 2018-2025 and never liked them. They are nasty and addictive.
I used to drink fairly heavily sometimes between 2014 and 2024. I went dry for a period sometime in 2017 with no effort, but then watched this show called Mom and was so annoyed by that 12 step sobriety crap I started drinking again just out of spite. I can be very mature .
I am entirely sober now thanks to this combination of Modafinil and marijuana I am on. Normally I don’t like documenting technically incorrect behavior. I am not an influencer or anti psychiatry.
But it’s not like I am “yay Apple cider vinegar” but everything is too insecure and open in some ways and opaque and non transparent in others. It’s okay where there is a legit reason. I don’t say that govts shouldn’t have any classified work etc. That would be impractical. No country can unilaterally disarm. But that’s different from tumor like growth in all directions with no legitimate reason beyond greed and lack of any regulatory oversight and structure.
And well when I deal with the unknown, I try to minimize needless run ins with law enforcement who have more important things to worry about than my weed or modafinil use and the fact that I am very pro Me Too and against any harnessing of my resources without my investment or involvement.
I am not the best person to sexually harass to exploit in a nutshell ;-/. I try to pay my dues in society as a flawed human with many contradictions and expect other people to so the same. But the shrink who helped me most prescribed ADD meds to me in 2009. They were really useful and that shitty institution I worked at last was so lousy in every way. They tried to take me off it and put me on Abilify/Seroquel etc. That’s the worst psychiatry I have ever seen. They had me see a decent shrink and therapist.
But I am okay with medications that help one over all natural and exercise and diet etc. I put in some efforts into my health, but I don’t pretend to buy into this notion that everyone should be sober and exercise all the time etc. Even having kids shortens telomeres and causes chronic stress and so on.
The biggest source of chronic stress in my life has been sexist disregard for women’s discomfort. I am not super by the book. I don’t mind bad jokes. But it’s a human thing not an algorithmic or cultish, pro male creep when they are powerful enough thing.
I am not Karen but no sexist institution or creep is going to bend me nor turn me into a cliche. I seriously am not the best person to pull this shit with. Maybe I don’t come off that well. That’s because I don’t expend effort in image curation because I had and have actual stuff to do not endless fucking sobriety and creep theatre.
Ffs.
A hideous rant. Whatever. I’ll MeToo any creeps that harass me and that aside I will be left alone. There were 2 incidents of kayfabe -this old white guy who asked to take me to dinner and this white trucker. But it just looked drivelly and not creepy or ..just Kayfabe.
The one creepy old white guy I met was at a meeting in 2010 in my field. He seemed okay but then told me his wife left him and was gay and I shrugged it off then as ..old people say stuff. But since I am zealous when it comes to cleaning out creepiness. Then there was a guy locally who came by and claimed to be my classmate in 2023 and asked about my mom and then left making a reference to bikes on the street-apologizing for driving his bike down my street. He wasn’t creepy. My take then and now is candidate for Jackass, the Podunk Version celebrating poor data hygiene 🙄.
That was not offensive/ but after that I started noticing these idiots who drive their bikes with the silencers off on my street starting from 2023. It angered me so much my dentist said she could see signs of strain in my mouth and asked me if I had been grinding my teeth which I had. I have no mental illness but all this has made my brain more prone to apophenia and type 1 errors. The road traffic was unbearable in Aug and July when a side street was closed off elsewhere.
They better not widen the street and take an inch of my land after all this. I don’t allow illegal constructions on my land and I have three pieces none of which are for sale and will not be for sale. I don’t have any kids and won’t have any and will be turning my property into a green space after my time looked over by my nieces.
No encroachment.
I only look for non profit science work and don’t muck with anytime private sector ever. And military and classified research etc has to have meaning and be respectable not defense contracting and mercenary crap
No intelligent design, creationism, mysticism, animism..clean hard science and that’s it. I don’t trust your social sciences, art, other bs.
My hospital was annoyingly pushy with ads and mri offers etc. Around the time my mom died this greed and hubris seemed to be picking up. I’ll have to look into that some day.
I blocked all businesses on WhatsApp in July 2025 and early in 2025 shut down all AI on my devices except for AI assistant in adobe and llama which I can’t turn off.
I keep duck.ai disabled. Though DuckDuckGo is far superior to Google.
I didn’t mind the one shrink I met here in between Aug 2021 and mid 2022, but she was not a good fit at the end of the day since I am looking for ADD meds or at least Modafinil. I found Prozac useless. I liked the shrink and therapist I met in the US at my last lab. But I liked my shrink from Oct 2009 to 2013 the best since I went to him voluntarily and found his prescription of ADD meds actually useful and helpful.
That’s about it.
Well I am leaving this data dump. I wasn’t a very good scientist but in the end society has net taken more from me both in the US and in India than I ever got back.
EECS at my first school will take some 25-35k from a grad student from the Global South but provide no mentoring whatsoever.
And I had good labs but my last institution destroyed any learning or benefits from that.
But I am not American and so I am not very insecure since I have never really had that high school crap dinned into me. It was all an annoying drag but I am moving on.
I don’t like being messed with and I will file complaints as I see fit based on all the stuff I wrote about here including the traffic on my street outside etc. It is my home and my assets and my life.
I am logging off to go back to science and work. No one better mess with me ever again..lol ..;-/.