Welcome to “The System”

“You tricked me.”

“No. I didn’t trick you. Problem is, you still don’t get it. The system’s greater than both you and me.

It makes us save banks from going bust just so they don’t repossess our homes.

The system prescribes us antidepressant so we don’t miss a single day of work.

It tells us to travel by airplane, but we should go to work by bike.

To grow crops choked by pollution. Eat quinoa. Use botox. Do CrossFit. Be happy.

The system knows you’re tired, but it won’t let you stop. It won’t let you stop.

And if you get depressed, you can always look at kittycats online.

And you, you think you’re outside the system, but you’re a part of it.

That’s why you do what you do. That’s why you keep your mouth shut.”

“I don’t have a choice.”

“Precisely. I also do all this because they leave us no choice.

Because a police officer earns €1,400 a month in 15 instalments but they risk their life every day.

It’s not fair. We can’t defeat the system, but we can take advantage of it. Your choice.

Destroy it all. Our life. Our love. Our family.

Or get in the car and enjoy the vacation.”

Companies are looking for profiles, not for people.

“This employer may use an artificial intelligence algorithm to provide an initial comparison of an applicant’s education, experience, and skills against the education, experience and skill requirements in the job description.

This analysis produces a Profile Relevancy score, which is intended to be one of many factors that a potential employer will review in making its interview decisions; there are no cut off scores and all applications are visible to employers.

Read more about how these tools collect, store, and retain information and the results of the most recent impartial evaluations. The Profile Relevancy score for applicants who opt out will be listed as “Not Available.””

Fuck you too, my friend.

Social mercylessness

Strikingly, it is among the young in particular, among those most thoroughly inculcated with the ideology of anti-hate, that social mercilessness reigns supreme. The ‘cold-blooded grasping’ in certain youthful circles – ‘a hunger to take and take and take, but never give’, ‘a massive sense of entitlement’, ‘an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care, ‘an astonishing level of self-absorption, language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence, ‘a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter, but not in the intimate space of friendship’.
And, of course, ‘an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others’. They will ‘demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class’, says Adichie. They will tell you to ‘educate yourself’ while ‘not having actually read any books themselves’. They will ‘wield the words “violence” and “weaponise” like tarnished pitchforks’.

The end result? A new generation that is terrified of saying the wrong thing, of entertaining the wrong thought, lest they be ‘attacked by their own’.

The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.

When ideology meets reality

Helen Joyce, author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, has described it, homosexuality is suspect now, because in acknowledging the reality of same-sex attraction’ it also ‘indirectly (acknowledges] the reality and importance of biological sex as a driver of attraction. And this contradicts the ‘quasi-spiritual’ crusade to ‘replace biological sex with gender identity’, she says.”
The homosexual is offensive because in only feeling attracted to people of the same sex, he or she implicitly rejects the rules of gender identity, the modern commandment that says people are whatever gender they say they are. So the lesbian that feels no attraction to a man who identifies as a woman – on the basis that he is male – is a living, breathing affront to gender ideology. She is inherently transphobic. Her refusal to accept that this man who identifies as a woman really is a woman is sacrilege, a thoughtcrime against one of the key religious mantras of the identitarian era: ‘Trans women are women.’ Her sexual preference for women – not trans women, not men, but women – is an intolerable defiance of that mantra. Her homosexuality is bigotry. Her innate being is an outrage against the new dogmas of identitarian thought.

Same-sex attraction really is being redefined as bigotry. New slurs have emerged to brand and insult homosexuals. As a columnist for the National Post says, efforts have been made to ‘brand homosexuality as a “genital fetish”‘? Kathleen Stock, a philosopher and lesbian, describes an experience where she was pointing out that lesbianism is the love of women for women, not for men, even when men identify as women, when someone said to her: ‘What is this genital fetish?”®

A BBC investigation spoke to young lesbians who said they had been branded ‘genital fetishists’ for refusing to sleep with ‘trans women’ who have penises. One was told that she owes it to her ‘trans sisters’ to ‘unlearn my “genital confusion”. In short, learn to love penises, learn to take dick. This rehabilitates the old homophobic prejudice that lesbians just need a good ‘seeing to’, that that will sort them out.

Dr Veronica Ivy, a former competitive cyclist turned author on trans issues, has openly said that “”genital preferences” are transphobic’. In other words, sex-based attraction is transphobic. Homosexuality is bigotry. Lesbianism is hate. Homosexuals who reject people of the opposite sex genuinely run the risk of being thought prejudiced. As a writer for the Observer says, ‘We are in the extraordinary position where lesbians are now being told by some activists that it is bigoted for them to say they are not attracted to trans women who are biologically male’.

Even the UK’s largest LGBTQ charity, Stonewall, now seems to believe that same-sex attraction can sometimes be a borderline hate crime. Yes, ‘sexuality is personal’, it says (very gracious, ‘but if, when dating, you are writing off entire groups like people of colour or trans people, it’s worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attraction’.
Let’s leave aside the cynical inclusion of people of colour alongside trans people, the low aim of which is to liken homosexuals who dare to criticise gender ideology to racists. The more important point is that even Stonewall seems no longer to understand what homosexuality is. Of course lesbians and gay men ‘write off entire groups’ when they are dating. That’s because they are not attracted to people of the opposite sex. For a lesbian to refuse to date a ‘woman with a penis’ or a gay man to refuse to sleep with a ‘man with a vagina’ is not proof that they have been infected by ‘societal prejudices’ – it’s homosexuality.

Homosexuality risks being redefined out of existence. Stonewall was founded in 1989 to combat Section 28 of the Local Government Act of 1988, which forbade schools from ‘promoting homosexuality’ – that is, same-sex attraction. Yet now Stonewall avoids all talk of ‘same-sex’. Instead it defines a homosexual as ‘someone who has a romantic and / or sexual orientation towards someone of the same gender (my emphasis).” But then Stonewall describes as ‘transphobic’ any ‘denial [or] refusal to accept someone else’s gender identity’. So if homosexuality is attraction on the basis of gender, but it’s bigotry to question a person’s professed gender, that must mean homosexuals are expected to feel attracted to anyone who claims to be the same sex as they are, even if they aren’t really. As Joyce says, the ‘logical consequence of these distorted definitions is to define same-sex attraction as bigotry’. In the past, it was ‘conservative homophobes’ who claimed that ‘homosexuality was a dangerous, counterfeit identity’, says Joyce: now that’s done by the ‘progressives running organisations that claim to champion the interests of lesbians and gay men’.

Jail before crime, jail because of speech

In 1984, George Orwell coined the term thoughtcrime. In the short story “The Minority Report,” the science-fiction author Philip K. Dick gave us the concept of “precrime,” describing a society where would-be criminals were arrested before they could act. Now Canada is combining the concepts in a work of dystopian nonfiction: A bill making its way through Parliament would impose draconian criminal penalties on hate speech and curtail people’s liberty in order to stop future crimes they haven’t yet committed.

The Online Harms Act states that any person who advocates for or promotes genocide is “liable to imprisonment for life.” It defines lesser “hate crimes” as including online speech that is “likely to foment detestation or vilification” on the basis of race, religion, gender, or other protected categories. And if someone “fears” they may become a victim of a hate crime, they can go before a judge, who may summon the preemptively accused for a sort of precrime trial. If the judge finds “reasonable grounds” for the fear, the defendant must enter into “a recognizance.”

A recognizance is no mere promise to refrain from committing hate crimes. The judge may put the defendant under house arrest or electronic surveillance and order them to abstain from alcohol and drugs. Refusal to “enter the recognizance” for one year results in 12 months in prison.

Just countries do not punish mere speech with imprisonment, let alone life imprisonment. Just countries do not order people who have not committed and are not even accused of a crime to be confined to their home or tracked with an ankle bracelet. 

Transgender woman says she’s happy she kept her penis – ‘because she enjoys sex with women more’

Jolene Dawson says she’s had to come out to her parents for a third time after realising that she is a lesbian.

A transgender woman who spent thousands of pounds transforming her body has revealed the reason she’s kept her penis – because she prefers sex with women. Jolene Dawson says she’s had to come out to her parents for a third time after realising that she is a lesbian.

The first time she came out was as a teenager was as a gay man, the second as transgender. Her discovery comes after saying she dated one hundred men she met on Tinder and matching with more than a thousand potential partners.

But now she has said she “can’t wait” to start dating women. Australian Jolene says she spent more than £50,000 on four nose jobs, a boob job, jaw slimming and forehead fillers. The 21-year-old from the Gold Coast, told the Daily Mail: “I’m glad I’ve kept my penis now, that really helps.

“It all started four weeks ago when I started dating a couple and found myself enjoying the sex with the other woman more. “I realised I didn’t want to be a man, why would I want to be with one?” She’s updated her setting on the dating app, and says she can’t wait to find a woman. Jolene says she is also always “100% open” with people she meets.

So transgender ex-man with penis (so still man) likes women, like most men do? What’s wrong with the world?

Heresy

The constant churn of political correctness – or cancel culture or wokeness or intolerance or whatever we’re calling it – represents not just an over-the-top clampdown on speech, but a crisis of Enlightenment.

Every enlightened idea – science is real, race is not, women should have rights, freedom is good, reason is the best tool for making sense of our world – risks being crushed under the forever spinning wheel of correct thought.

Our curse is not just to bear witness to the intermittent silencing of controversial commentators, but to watch as liberty, objectivity, democracy, equality and the other great gains of the modern era are sacrificed one by one at the altar of new orthodoxies that pose, so falsely, as progressive thought.

We are living through a war on heresy. No stakes are being assembled for the burning of witches, sure. No pillories are being constructed so that we might throw tomatoes and insults at the eccentric and unorthodox. And yet, the atmosphere of the witch-hunt, the vibe of it, lives and breathes today as it did 500 years ago.
The new heretics are JK Rowling, gender-critical feminists, populists, climate-change ‘deniers’, people who bristle at the diktats issued by the learned as to how we should think and how we should speak. You won’t be set on fire, no, but your life will be, your career will be.

‘Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the perpetual New World, the unknown sea, toward which the brave all sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress. Heresy extends the hospitalities of the brain to a new thought. Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy, a coffin.’

Heresy is the perpetual New World. There it is. The invitation to daring that heresy issues to us all. Rarely has the need of heresy been as great as it is right now. In this book you will find not just analysis of the suffocating orthodoxies of our right-thinking era, but also the furious inspirations of heretical thought.
They can cancel our speeches, our jobs, our respectability, sometimes even our rights, but they cannot cancel this – the freedom of every person to think and believe as he sees fit. Heresy always finds a way.

This message does not exist

It can only be discarded

I received an intriguing notification in the Microsoft Outlook 365 web interface:

This message can’t be saved because it no longer exists. It can only be discarded. Make sure you copy the contents of the message before you discard if you want to use them later.

I have some ontological questions.

* * *

This message can’t be saved because it no longer exists.

Sensible enough. Only messages that exist can be saved; an inexistent message cannot be saved. But what about that indexical, this?  This message does not exist. Huh.

* * *

It can only be discarded.

We soon learn that we can do more than refer to a message that does not exist: we may also discard it. A message must exist to be saved; but it may be discarded without such a constraint. In fact this is the only thing we may do with it; it can only be discarded.

Perhaps this can be justified. Let’s treat discard as the action of making an object cease to exist. Applying that action to an object that already does not exist can be considered a no-op. By contrast, any other action (save, say) requires the object to exist.

* * *

Make sure you copy the contents of the message before you discard if you want to use them later.

We learn a final affordance, which complicates the story. An inexistent message has contents, which may be copied – but only if the message has not yet been discarded.

This is troubling for our hypothesis that discarding an inexistent message is a no-op. A no-op from the perspective of its existence, perhaps – the message does not exist either before or after – but not, apparently, from the perspective of its contents. Undiscarded inexistent messages have contents that may be copied, while discarded inexistent messages do not.

The act of discarding a message that does not exist must therefore do one of two things. It may cause the message contents to also cease to exist. Alternately, it might not affect the existence but only the accessibility of message contents. Perhaps they continue to exist, but discarding the message (which already did not exist) causes the copy operation to cease being invokable on the message contents (even though they do continue to exist). The story of existence has many mysteries.

When your most passionate employees become quiet

After eight months of working in her new role as a senior associate, Sarah begins to notice a change within the organization, and it’s making her very uncomfortable. Now, if you know Sarah, she loves her job; she is the spark and energy of the room, going the extra mile and dedicated to ensuring that the company fulfills its purpose and achieve its vision. But something was changing, the leadership made significant changes within the organization without any input from staff, and this affected Sarah immensely.

She tried to offer her feedback, but no one took her seriously. As a result, the organizational culture was slowly shifting from one that was very inspirational and motivational to one that breeds toxicity. Sarah, sensing that the organization did not value her work again, became very disengaged; she kept her head under the radar while she looked for a new job, losing all enthusiasm for the job.

When passionate employees become quiet, according to Tim McClure, it usually sends a signal that the work environment has become very dysfunctional. Suspicion and insecurity clouds the culture and employees retreat into self-protection behavior patterns to protect themselves from the forces within the company. According to Jonathan Mills, the growing unease disables focus, breaks trust in leadership, and a wave of negative energy ripples through the entire organization with the same force that their previous positive energy induced. 

What are the causes? According to Mills, it may be any one of the following.

Breach of trust

Leadership integrity is paramount to maintaining relationships and keeping people focused and energized. Not living the company values and leading by example inevitably leads to distrust. 

Lack of leadership consistency

Fairness, consistently applied, leads to growing confidence among staff. Employees feel insecure when there is favoritism, nepotism, or irregular behavior on the part of leadership.

Being overlooked

Not being listened to, being ignored, or contribution not being recognized all lead to apathy. Energy gets sucked out of the system, and people lose heart.

Dishonesty

Leadership untruths breed distrust. Employees easily perceive dishonesty and hate any attempts at being conned.

Insufficient information and communication

Where managers withhold pertinent pieces of information for power purposes or fail to communicate adequately with employees, staff feel neglected and worthless.

Leadership selfishness

Big leadership bonuses with small pay increases for employees, benefits, and values being ‘customized’ to suit leadership desires, etc.

Lack of vision and purpose

 When leadership operates out of a vague sense of direction with little or no communication of an expected future state, people within the organization will eventually become very disengaged. 

 To prevent your most passionate employee from becoming quite, you need to look at the leadership of the organization as the first order of business because the problems usually start from there. Ask yourself these question 

 Has the company moved away from its purpose and vision? Is there open and honest communication to reinforce the company’s purpose, vision, and values. Or to ensure that the entire company is informed about any changes taking place.Have the leadership stay true the values of the company and leading by example; What about empathy? Does the leadership value empathy and recognize this as a critical aspect of their leadership. 

 When your most passionate employees become quiet, it’s a signal that something is out of alignment, and as the leader, this is something you must observe and act on immediately. People don’t lose their motivation and inspiration overnight; it’s always a combination of small and big things that creeps into the organization slowly and consistently over time.

When you have a team passionate, inspired, and motivated to help the company achieve it’s vision while fulfilling its purpose, you must do everything in your power to ensure that this team keeps this vibe. Otherwise, you run the risk of pushing away great talent while settling for mediocrity.

——————————————-

The dominance game

Prestige and dominance behaviours are ‘underpinned by distinct psychological processes, behaviours and neurochemistry which were selected for distinct evolutionary pressures. We tend to hold ourselves differently when inhabited by each version of us: when in a dominant, second-self mode we take up more space, hold our arms away from our bodies, smile less often and maintain a downwards head tilt; when in a prestigious state we embody our status in subtler ways, expanding our chest, pushing our torso out, tilting our head upwards.
Studies show even children younger than 2 can differentiate between players using strategies of dominance and prestige.

Both work. Dominant and prestigious players alike have more influence over co-players. Dominant men, like prestigious men, have greater reproductive success. One meta-analysis of over thirty studies found dominance to be one of the most robust predictors of leader emergence, outperforming myriad others including conscientiousness and intelligence.

This is despite the fact that dominant-style leaders are usually less effective than the prestigious, being more likely to put their own interests before the group, less likely to seek advice and tending to respond to criticism with ego defensive aggression.
They’re also overbearing, like to publicly credit themselves with the success of the group, tease and humiliate subordinates and are manipulative, compared to prestigious leaders who are more likely to be self-deprecating, tell jokes and publicly attribute success to the team.

The critical difference between dominance and prestige is that we don’t give status freely to second-self players. Typically, dominant players take it from us. Psychologists describe dominance strategy as entailing the induction of fear, through intimidation and coercion, to attain or maintain rank and influence.

They rescinded my offer.

Sarah Brazier on LinkedIn

The story:

After Gong, I took some time to decide what I wanted to do. Sales transformed my life, and I knew I wanted to find an opportunity that would set me up for another 5+ year run selling at an amazing company.

I had a very specific check list of what I wanted, and finally, with some elbow grease, found that organization. It checked every box. I multi-threaded my way through their business, spent hours refining my final presentation, and, when I got the call immediately following my final round interview offering me a job, was ecstatic.

The hiring manager told me he was beyond impressed with what I’d presented. Said I was the best final round interview to date. Wanted to get me in next week, if possible. I said, “Great – sounds amazing, let’s figure out how to make this happen.”

Over the next few days, We agreed to a start date. We agreed to an OTE. We agreed to a signing bonus. We agreed to stock options.

One thing we did was schedule a call to speak with the recruiter around company benefits, and any additional questions I might have. And I did have questions. Because what I hadn’t mentioned to anyone for fear of jeopardizing the opportunity was that I was a lil’ bitty bit pregnant.

When I chatted with the recruiter next, I asked, casually, what their maternity leave policy was.

Two days later, I received a voicemail from the hiring manager. “The company is rescinding your offer,” followed by an email, “Hi Sarah, Just tried to get a hold of you live and left you a voicemail. I’m following up with an email to advise that the Company has decided to rescind its verbal offer of employment given on March 8th, 2024 and that offer is no longer open for acceptance. We wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors. Best,” and yes, that is a copy + paste of the email, and yes, they really did refer to their company as “the Company.” And no, I wasn’t applying to work for the CIA.

When I asked multiple people why, I was given the runaround. No one had a reason, just a, “Oh, sorry about that. I’ll get back to you.” When I shared with my inner circle what happened, they all came to the same conclusion: “It’s because you asked about maternity leave. They know.”

I talked to a lawyer. He thought I had a case, but the effort, the likelihood of winning, and the sheer hurt I was experiencing made me ultimately say, “no.” I was crushed. It was so unjust. So unfair. A whiff of pregnancy had made me “unfit” to sell.

Welcome, Sarah, to the world of corporate 2024, where employees are assets, not humans. Ah, and good luck with Dimmo! You did the right thing! Way to go, girl!!

The world has gone crazy

“All these things that are app based, it’s always, give your card details or give your address
give your phone number, give your this, they just get data, get data, get data from you.
So, you join and you have to set up a profile and you have to set up a password and I think this is in general, this is not related to Tesla, it’s just a general observation.

This is becoming really annoying with the modern world. I have 3 million profiles with 3 million different passwords for 3 million different things. Everything is a profile. I just want to charge my car. Why do you need my address? Why do you need my phone number?

And then people wonder why do we get so many of these stupid scam calls of people trying to fake sell me Bitcoin that I never bought. Had that the other day “oh you bought Bitcoin with us but you lost your….” Nonsense. I never bought anything. I just hung up. And then we wonder why we get that? Because we’re giving our phone number and our personal data everywhere, for everything.

I don’t see, I’m not being some sort of conspiracy theorist here, anti-establishmentarian whatever. This is just a normal human observation from a normal human. I’m not affiliated with anything, with any political movement, with any social. I stand for nothing. I just stand for the goodness between people. I stand for objectivity and rationality and I don’t stand for the fact that you need my data to charge a car. I want to buy some units of electricity, that’s all I want and for that I definitely prefer gas stations. You can come in, put a gun in, and you know it’s visible, where it is, the filling port of a car, you pay however you want to pay and you leave.

This is stupid.