Kirsten Gillibrand

[jfz9580m]

50. I mostly agree with you but not entirely

Last edited Sat Apr 11, 2026, 11:49 PM - Edit history (1)

Humans cannot afford to be robotic and it does harm women, blm, civil rights etc to take rigid positions beyond a threshold.

It is the hardest thing -what is absurd purity? What is sleazy, self serving trash trying to disgracefully pass for “nuance”. I saw an exceptionally shameful instance.

This guy - Dave Angus, a Darwin Awards candidate if I ever saw one:

https://www.science.org/content/article/meet-three-scientists-who-said-no-epstein

Why didn’t Agus just tell Epstein why he was unwilling to meet?

“I don’t want to upset a powerful person,” Agus says. “It wasn’t my job to judge him, and I’m not a confrontational individual. I’m also not a moralist, and I don’t pretend to know the whole story.”

“But at the same time, I’m not going to meet with a person with [the] history that I saw online,” Agus continues. “To me, it was very simple: Don’t associate with him.”

What does this guy want? A medal for a no-brainer? This is the type of “nuance” that pisses me off. That Angus guy is a disgrace. If I see one more of these martyrs who turned down Epstein and are trying to make a virtue of a shameful error. You should never ever be anywhere near Epstein.

Otoh even I thought the Tim Hunt thing was an ott response to a joke. A joke that didn’t even offend the women who were present. I have seen creepy jokes - the few human male sexual harassers I have met (a doctor at a clinic in 2010, a creepy defense contractor here in India in 2014, a creep at an Akshaya office in 2016? 2017?) try “jokes” and they were totally creepy.
But the Tim Hunt think just looked clunky.

It always makes one tense when one sees people who are not creeps or jerks and certainly cannot pull off being controversial with finesse fumble bad jokes and set off a firestorm of nontroversy distracting from very real creeps. Everything is finite, the more time that goes into this bullshit and the more it helps actually malicious misogynists use internet bs to go “look feminists are unreasonable”, the worse it gets for women’s rights as these whiny men’S rights types then go and peg “nuance” where rapists and creeps or best case that shameful Angus guy are:


https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/13/tim-hunt-hung-out-to-dry-interview-mary-collins

His treatment also demonstrates the innate cruelty of social media, and in particular the savage power of Twitter, which first revealed the scientist’s transgression. The tale also demonstrates how PR departments, in trying to protect the reputation of institutions, often do so at the expense of the individuals who work for or make up those bodies.

That one pissed me off at a time when I know how sleazy a lot of this social media mob type is bts in how “transactional” they themselves are not to mention craven. I never join groups. Well okay very disempowered ones - that is different.
That is not this bullying shit where the actual issue is less important than the joy of bullying.

As far as I know, Tim Hunt has never been accused of any misconduct and importantly his students and postdocs supported him.
I have a clunky mentor like that myself from 2011-2012. Decent guy and not like Angus, but certainly a clunker like Tim Hunt. A lot of the time I am irked at the guy for various things unconnected to misogyny, sexism or creepiness, but a different type of brain damage “You should totally limpidly trust Google!!!” with meninist side-effects..I’ll get right on that!!!! I heart Google!!!! But still I support the guy as he is a good scientist if a bit thickheaded on the managerial side. One of his students, who was decent if a bit of a pill, said as much. Maybe that place turned him into a pill.

We set these things at different places depending on our experiences, but in the end it is not that complicated. The vast majority of men even while insensitive and reflexively all “we men have the right to exist too! MenToo!”are not outright harassers out of a survival instinct if nothing else. In groups bad behavior escalates.

As for the whiny MenToo! types.
Nobody said you didn’t have the right to exist!!!! You still can’t take over everything and set creepiness and grey area standards at the meninist comfort zone level!!! Nice try though idiots!!!!

Totally disingenuous and thinking they can fool all the people all the time. I find it grimly amusing at times.

Lumping in every case and every offence into one broad category is what causes these dynamics of systemic sleaziness and unfairness followed by mob backlashes which the creeps exploit expertly.

I think about this stuff way too much as these grey areas in tech have poisoned my life. And that is so much more intangible than a straightforward grope.

I have a memory of 33 years of a fairly happy and pleasant life in science and education where the system of trust worked in academic science and education far from the types of creeps who take money from Epstein.

And close to 15 now in a loathesome grey area where so much of what I have to assess is mediated by clunky machinery and harassing dynamics, but with no clear human face.

The problem with succumbing to mob mentality and robotically rigid thought processes-hey we all have them - is that in the end it makes life worse for women.

Any robotic ways have been beaten out of me by this excruciating process I underwent.
And in the end policing jokes and language and mixing that up with everything from creepiness that makes women or people broadly uncomfortable (aside from the sort of moralizer who is not truly uncomfortable but wants to police ribald humor, drinking etc in contexts where it is not inappropriate, but a normal facet of human life , in context.) works out worse for all the worst off people.

I generally dislike The Atlantic and find it too conservative for my taste. But with a stopped clock conservative insight this is almost the only thing where they catch that. I like Lucien Greaves of the TST unlike Louis CK or that guy mentioned in that article (a total creep). It is always case by case with humans and we are a cooperative and social species (one of our least attractive qualities beyond a point imo), but we do in the end each have to think alone and not like a collective slime mold.
I can’t say I liked these pieces as I hate The Atlantic, but they did nail a few things:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/social-justice-rebellion-satanic-temple/675481/

It is so hard to communicate when that Angus guy also talks about nuance, context, grey areas, morality..when I talk about those things I mean Sunny in Philly or Sarah Silverman, not bloody Jeffrey Epstein.
Or one would have to return to the creepy sanitized morality of Pleasantville.

It is one of the most complicated human things and I resent having to soend so much time on it as someone who is not an HR professional and angry that clunkware is being forced along with gig work over have decent professionals with stable jobs mediate real oversight not the crass PMC style liability culture that is sensitive to mob mentality ot whatever that Angus guy represents, but never actual respect for the spirit of anything.

I actually usually try to avoid all this shit having no wish to annoy the body politic as a “free thinker”. But eventually the nuisance level gets to a point where one glumly wades in, satirically and hopelessly eying this pile of Idiocracy fueled sleaziness wondering how to communicate with a clearly mostly maniacally stupid world. It is just too damn time consuming to attempt Carlin’s “finding the universe in every moron’s eyes”. All one can attempt is use examples from the real world that capture most contexts and human personality types within reason to avoid more shitty ai and endless social engineering and dubious social experiments as hacklike as the FB emotion manipulation and similar fluff.

Carr gets it. Zuckerberg is an idiot:
https://www.roughtype.com/?p=8724

I am glad there people much brighter than me to parse these things so I can figure out what I think but found hard to articulate.

I found this piece profoundly helpful while gloomily brooding over this stuff daily:

https://thehumanist.com/magazine/september-october-2015/features/strange-bedfellows-misanthropy-humanism-the-many-faces-of-george-carlin