BC SOCIETY
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

when I was a teenager, the dominant criticism my closest friends had of me was that I was too arrogant, and they were right. I was too caustic, abrasive, eager to nitpick, quick to criticize, and I was way too certain of myself. I spent my entire 20s trying to correct for this

 the social niceties stuff were relatively trivial for me to address. learning to be gracious, patient, I could manage all of that. But "too certain of oneself" goes order of magnitudes deeper. It goes into philosophical territory about risk, certainty, the nature of knowledge
I very seriously experimented with beliefs like "almost everything I know is wrong to a degree I do not understand", "my mental models are contaminated beyond repair", "I have been indoctrinated and need to be deradicalized", I subjected myself and my mind to radical rewrites
Over 8+ years I wrote over 800,000 words of introspective journaling, investigating my own mind, investigating the investigator. I read & talked to thousands of people from around the world to seek out different ways of thinking, seeing, being, believing, knowing, understanding
I tried to think of myself as a robot that needed debugging. I actually made substantial progress with that

I tried to think of myself as a garden that needed tending. I made substantial progress with that

I tried not to think of myself at all, and I transcended progress itself
I experimented with trying really hard, and I experimented with not trying at all

I experimented with scheduling and calendaring my life, and I experimented with throwing everything to the wind

I questioned everything several times over, and I questioned nothing
And... at the end of it all... in the middle of it all... I attained a level of calm clarity that, ironically, gave me even more of an aura of "certain of himself" than ever before

I know how it looks, I know how it sounds

but my priority is to live and speak honestly
it's not that I don't make mistakes
it's not that I don't get things wrong

I do

but I am like a musician who's skilled at improvising – I recover from my mistakes gracefully, I work them into my playing

what troubles some people is that I am insufficiently self-deprecating
and I am not a "natural" at this – this skill is something I've picked up from a 15+ years of practice and study, the way a skilled musician would

and I talk about it openly because when I was a kid I wished someone would tell me this stuff, and nobody did, not quite
I can return now to my friends' original criticism and discern what they were trying to say, that they couldn't quite articulate properly. there are many different latent messages encoded in a statement like "you are too certain of yourself"
1. your frames are too rigid → this is something you can fix by learning to be more flexible with your frames

2. you are too confident → this conflates bluster and bravado (bad) with the casual, sleepy ease of having deep knowledge

https://t.co/L3uYqiJzFA
I have rebuilt myself from scratch in the absolute wilderness, in total isolation, in the dark night of the soul

twice

having done it before, I know I can do it again

the result is a kind of fearlessness that attracts some people and repels others

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
recent meditation has made me realize that I have been trying to mask this, trying to suppress this, to be polite. to be civil. to not be arrogant. to not intimidate and scare people.

but this is dishonest of me, and I want to live an honest life

https://t.co/5H9H62Afwl
btw, here are some of the things that my friends were telling me I was cocky and arrogant about:

1. that I was going to marry my first girlfriend (I did)
2. that I was going to build an international audience (I did)
3. that I was going to make a decent living without going to university (I do)
4. that university professors would want to hang out with me, an autodidact (they do)
5. that I was going to be hired for somebody who respected my idiosyncrasies, without a resume (I was)
6. that I would have a successful business and be invited to speak/lecture at universities (done that)
7. that my band would play at the esplanade powerhouse stage, despite not being great musicians (we did)
8. that I would be the #1 search result for my first name (pretty much?)
9. that I would write and publish books that hundreds of people would want to buy and read (yep)

I could go on.

Looking back, I think the right frame is: they witnessed me disregard their internalized shared limiting beliefs, and saw this as a status violation on my part
looking back, I'm not sad that they were wrong about me

I'm sad that I allowed them being wrong about me to let me be wrong about myself

I definitely allowed their thinking to contaminate mine

hanging out with unambitious people definitely dimmed my own ambition

never again
also, they never admitted to being unambitious – a thing that I might've been angry/mad about a few years ago, but now kinda chuckle about. it's absolutely fine to be unambitious. you can live a good, simple, worthwhile life.

the worst thing here is the *pretense* of ambition.
people who *pretend* to be ambitious waste the valuable time and energy of actually-ambitious people, sucking them into their sitcoms and distracting them from the actual adventures they ought to be going on

https://t.co/JFXNGWhMez
but, yknow. people gonna people. there's no sense in getting mad about it. the thing is to focus on finding the people who get you. https://t.co/oKn7C21lVv
I am not looking for people to affirm me, tell me I am so great, agree with everything I say, etc. I don't want that. I don't want fanboys or haters (who are fans too). I'm looking for other creative, ambitious, playful people to play with, folks who prioritize doing cool things
I am here to find the others. Part of doing this means volunteering to be hyper-visible, which means being vulnerable to attack. I debated with myself internally, extensively, for years. I didn't feel worthy, and simultaneously, I was afraid

https://t.co/NMS7nWz07e
but when I see the friendships that people forge with each other in my mentions, I realize it is the right thing to do.

I would honestly kinda prefer it if there were someone else I trusted to take the lead... but nobody sees things quite the way I do.
a cheesy-yet-true answer is "I think of the children". I think of the curious kids who are miserable, stuck in shitty social graphs, who could do wonderful things if someone just showed them how. I was one of them; I am being who I wished I had in my life

https://t.co/mKj6ygOWVq

More from visa is damp and cold 🌧

visa is decluttering old drafts
visa is decluttering o...
@visakanv
motivating myself by reminding myself that I created my youtube account in 2005 so I can extend the graph all the way back and make it look really exciting


the less exciting but more useful graph


now I am going to make a plan for my next 200 youtube videos and then ignore them entirely. but first I have to reply to an email...

well that was quite a detour. now, to google sheets...


gettin' started

feel free to comment

https://t.co/DUpcQwA8kC
FOR LATER READ
Visakan Veerasamy
Visakan Veerasamy
@visakanv
The courage to be disliked, Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. Heard good things, let’s dig in


Youth tells philosopher, life is hard and complicated and full of struggle. Philosopher says life is simple. Debate ensues

They discuss the subjectivity of water temperature - 18deg is cool when weather is hot, warm when weather is cold. No escape from your own subjectivity

P: Instead of lamenting about the world’s darkness, you could just remove the dark glasses.

Y: people cannot change. I am suffering because of my inability to change

Narrator: why is Y like this, so determined to refute P? Feelings of inferiority, self-pity, self-consciousness

Y: people want to change precisely because they can’t

P: why are you so adamant about this

Y: I have an incel friend

P: why do you think he can’t go out?

Y: background?

P: so cause and effect? determinism?

Y: ya

P: if determinism were true, wouldn’t everyone be incel

🤔

Y: so u saying past doesn’t matter

P: aye

Y: so there’s no explanation why my friend can’t go out?

P: your friend is insecure so he can’t go out. Flip it: he doesn’t want to go out, so he’s creating the anxiety.

Y: ridiculous. You’re saying he’s pretending to be sick

P: no
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visa is decluttering old drafts
visa is decluttering o...
@visakanv
my adhd coping mechanism is I talk to tens of thousands of people so they'll follow me back, then I livetweet my daily activities and get that lil dopamine hit or whatever when they click the heart when I type "ok just sent that email I been procrastinating on"

I'm currently writing the event description for my feb 14 salon which is on romance and eroticism, so I absent-mindedly googled "eroticism salon", and, uh, I found this strange and magnificent photograph. I want a painting of this


wait, I have that app on my phone that's how I made my profile picture

progress on my email is not being made. but who cares about my email. (well, anna does... but never mind her for now, i'm sure she'll forgive me). ART is currently being made. art comes first

art takes time
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visakan veerasamy
visakan veerasamy
@visakanv
There is an art to replying and commenting, and probably like 60-70% of people I’ve seen on the internet fail at it. The important thing is not to speak your mind, but to “support” the OP. You can support them by disagreeing well & you can “mis-support” them by agreeing stupidly

Every “utterance” (status, tweet, whatever) is a bit of an invitation, a bit of a proposal. “Let’s play this game”. When strangers read the proposal accurately, and support the game, a shared understanding develops. You can make friends this way.

Some people deliberately choose to ignore, misread, disregard or denounce other people’s bids. Others are outright clueless and don’t know how to play, and sometimes cluelessness leads to worse bungling than deliberate malice (JJ’s razor)


I was a lot more belligerent and disagreeable when I was younger, in part because I simplistically thought playing other people’s games was a sheep-like way to live. Why should I support other people’s dumb games? Why not mock them instead? It’s easy, and intoxicating

I learned that you rarely build anything worthwhile that way. The “best” case scenario: you win over other disagreeable people. A few years of this & it becomes the world you live in – surrounded by other belligerent assholes who don’t know or care how to play nice. A cursed life
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Visa\u2019s Vexing Vacillations
Visa’s Vexing Vacillat...
@visakanv
Several conversations with several friends - and also the story of my entire life - is getting me to crystalize some thoughts

The most valuable thing I know is how to make friends

The most powerful + valuable thing I can do is teach it to other people

The most important person you have to be friends with is yourself

Possibly the most important thing in a friendship- including one with yourself, or your spouse, or your child - is attention. Deep, focused, undivided, non-judgemental attention.

To really see + hear the other person, in a world where people constantly feel unseen & unheard


So: the most important thing about the most important thing in life is attention,

and in schools, IMO, we often screw up how we teach it.

If you use threats and coercion to force kids to “pay” attention...

...you set people up for dysfunctional relationships their whole life


becoming friends with yourself:
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Warning: Some images contain violence and are disturbing.

Also warning: This thread is ridiculously long. 75 tweets is insane. I apologize. But this stuff is important. I hope you find it compelling anyway. If not, I understand.

2) So, what exactly do we mean by “eliminationism”? Here’s the academic definition:


3) It was largely coined by Holocaust scholar Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, about the role ordinary Germans played in the Holocaust, which he described as fueled by “eliminationist antisemitism.”


4) The book describes how in reality the largest numbers of Jews and other victims killed by Nazi directive were rounded up and gunned down or immolated en masse and buried in mass graves by ordinary Germans and non-Jewish residents of German-occupied territories.
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Coffee Sloth \u2615
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*Heads-up that this thread will feature some extreme examples of homophobia and transphobia.*

Hey folks, have you ever wondered why trans people face constant accusations of fetishism, sexual predation and child abuse/grooming? Well, today let's talk about stochastic terrorism.

So, first we have to talk about what stochastic terrorism actually is. Remember when there was a conspiracy that there was a pedophile ring operating out of a pizza parlour basement, and a crazed gunman showed up? It's that sort of incitement that stochastic terrorism describes.

It's the demonisation or incitement against a group of people or individuals with the intent that other, unaffiliated parties will act upon it; it's the releasing doctored footage and a shooter show up at Planned Parenthood as a direct result of what he's been led to believe.

So with that in mind, let's talk about Russia's extreme anti-LGBT laws that banned the "promotion" of LGBT lifestyles to children. A move that specifically marked LGBT people as a threat to children, and resulted in neo-nazis meting out vigilante "justice" against gay men.


Groups such as this would lure unsuspecting gay men via dating sites, and brutalise and humiliate them on camera. They did so under the guise of combating child abusers, one group calling themselves "Occupy
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@internetfreedom
THREAD: We filed RTIs on behalf of @no2uid asking the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare questions about how your personal data will be protected while you're using CO-WIN, the COVID-19 vaccination registration platform.

We got answers... kind of. Here's the new info.

1/n


Just like with Aarogya Setu, many Indians are worried that about the potential CO-WIN has to leak your data or threaten your privacy in the name of dealing with a pandemic. So, we asked the MOHFW some questions about data protection under the Right to Information Act.
2/n


In the responses we received, MOHFW said that it cannot provide us with a privacy policy on CO-WIN (?!).

Thankfully it was clarified that Aadhaar is not mandatory for registration on Aarogya Setu or CO-WIN, and that physical vaccine certificates will be provided to everyone.
3/n

The data it says it will collect will be your name, gender, date of birth, photo ID, and number.

National, State, and District level admins will have access to use the app, but there is not much further clarity on this point.

But most importantly...
4/n

The responses (or rather lack of them) related to your data privacy and protection are completely vague. We received no clear answers on which Ministries/Depts will have access to your personal data, the permissions provided, etc. This is a failure in terms of transparency.
5/n
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Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF)
Internet Freedom Found...
@internetfreedom
THREAD: Almost a year into the launch of Aarogya Setu, there is still little to no public data on its benefits. Yet, many of its flaws are well documented. Now it's going to be used for vaccine rollouts despite meager progress in public

Experts have been warning us about Aarogya Setu's capacity for surveillance. Post integration with COWIN, it will likely become a permanent part of our health data landscape. We've written to the NIC with key concerns, because here's what we've learnt in 1 year:
2/n

To justify violation of privacy, necessity and proportionality have to be proven. Aarogya Setu has disregarded these principles - we know because we analysed its Data Protocol, which MeitY released after public pressure. It fails to satisfy the basic threshold of legality.
3/n

A lack of transparency has pervaded the ecosystem. RTIs on Aarogya Setu failed to receive adequate answers. In fact, we had to send a legal notice because CIC refused to let RTI activist Saurav Das attend his own show cause hearing regarding critical info about Aarogya Setu.
4/n

Issues have been raised about the non open-source nature of the app. Even when the source code was released, it was the code for an earlier version of the app that was made available. The server-side code of the app was not available at all.
5/n
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Ezra Klein
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@ezraklein
This is a piece I've been thinking about for a long time. One of the most dominant policy ideas in Washington is that policy should, always and everywhere, move parents into paid labor. But what if that's wrong?

My reporting here convinced me that there's no large effect in either direction on labor force participation from child allowances. Canada has a bigger one than either Romney or Biden are considering, and more labor force participation among women.

But what if that wasn't true?

Forcing parents into low-wage, often exploitative, jobs by threatening them and their children with poverty may be counted as a success by some policymakers, but it’s a sign of a society that doesn’t value the most essential forms of labor.

The problem is in the very language we use. If I left my job as a New York Times columnist to care for my 2-year-old son, I’d be described as leaving the labor force. But as much as I adore him, there is no doubt I’d be working harder. I wouldn't have stopped working!

I tried to render conservative objections here fairly. I appreciate that @swinshi talked with me, and I'm sorry I couldn't include everything he said. I'll say I believe I used his strongest arguments, not more speculative ones, in the piece.
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