General Discussion

Last edited Tue Apr 21, 2026, 05:45 PM - Edit history (1)

The most rage inducing thing I ever saw was an infuriating profile of Wayne Hsiung, the Direct Action guy by this lame New Yorker columnist whose profile I have no wish to raise.

Wayne is a little too high energy for me. I don’t trust people who think attention is the way to change. If anything it is the other way around. You cannot do or hell even think anything worth doing/worth thinking about under surveillance.

And by the time you figure out how to think again your captors unfortunately are probably quite a bit ahead. Except the perverts who wasted your time, but at least their own as well.

It is these damn non-pervert saboteurs, especially the most “expert” who are sabotaging one without even being aware of it like my asshole mentor. I hate that guy.
He offers one unusable advantages that aren’t going to work in a society this brainless.

This society cannot distinguish between sad web comedy performances and genuine shock at everything being a joke in these societies to a level that is baffling to the merely honestly mediocre.

I don’t really hate my mentor. Or at least not how people classically think of hate. I still consider him my mentor and a colleague.

But he is some kind of insane Type A. I mean most pis are and that’s cool to the extent that a small subset of these guys (high profile scientists) of whom one might ask questions like “Okay how crazy are you?” are people who are crazy in ways I genuinely would respect. I understand that type of crazy and were I not committed to marijuana which pays its dues in this horrible world in less terrifying ways and these people are all unfit to draft sexual harassment norms because they are male and insane in generic ways or female and non-existent or not allowed to weigh in.

Well and there is my category. Not insane but for all common sense purposes labeled that.

It is all about balance. I am not context unaware. I am trying my best with the hand I have been dealt. But I am on the left and Gen X.

And the one thing I liked about Gen X was feb facade of ironic detachment. I do care about stuff, but purely aesthetically very nice people who are very demonstrative re protests etc tend to attract a lot pf attention which is counterintuitive.

I often can’t very clearly remember how I ended up here that isn’t totally pathetic .

It is really lame. The only types of people “inside fhe system” I would mesh with would be similar people who ideology wise are always about to get the boot from corporate jobs or national security jobs, but not like someone really daft who doesn’t use whistleblower protections and leaks stuff in ways thT.

Like it is not sane people who want to be photographed and cannonized.

But there should at this point exist a pool of web data - especially at a time like this - that is shared between national security (U.S. and India), honest journalists (i.e. Yasha Levine or Christopher Ketcham), honest activists (e.g.: Apar Gupta of the Internet Freedom Foundation) and of course the scientific and medical community (with Prof Hennessy’s tendencies to hog kept under control by someone senior enough to explain to him why it is bad even for him to have no Yasha Levine/Lina Khan/Current Affairs types around.

The thing I like about EarlG, Yasha Levine etc is that they have the ability to be discreet while being on the left and not paranoid.

Like to me, people who want to go viral or be influencers, that is not a bright person. If you go sharing some link because you found something obscure online at least to the extent of being something as lame as the purloined letter meeting Candide’s Garden conceptually.

I am confused sometimes to ponder something where it is unclear whether something is a sign of the Idiocracy or well..something I can roll with once the shock settles down.

With one exception (a creepy Indian male doctor in his mid to late forties whose first name starts with an R whom I met in one of the following states- KY, TX, TN, OR, CA*), I didn’t meet any not serious people prior to Jan-Feb.


My horrible mentor should totally appreciate honest support from a card carrying “MeToo Type” as someone who is less sophisticated than I assumed initially. Maybe not unsophisticated exactly so much as common sense failing when there are some cultural differences.

That was the thing about my main mentor. It didn’t matter that he was white, male or American, we were always completely in sync in how we think about science I can now see.

He had gotten past that hump that is the test of every scientist - talented or piddly but aspiring to a bounded level of limited but perfectly respectable and attainable competence.

He will be fine. His managerial skills were far superior to even the average pi’s. My last mentor was decent. But it would be impossible to establish communication (I can see in retrospect) fast enough then, but not going forward as much.