Disquiet
My existence has been wretchedly chaotic in the last 14 years. I am wrapping up a research article I started 17 years ago. In this period, I got (amicably) divorced, moved back to my home country India from the US and lost my mother to cancer, which I have only recently gotten over. I am an only child and my mom and I were very close. It was a shock when we lost her.
As a result of the circumstances under which all this happened my mind has not been at rest. Anything I write is less about catharsis than explicitly political. Therefore, rather than to a therapist (an American concept I never quite took to), I thought I would start writing in this rather quiet forum on DU.
Political to me does not connote noisily spectacular. If anything, quite the reverse.
But writing out my side of things like Frankenstein’s monster (I saw the new movie recently - it was not too bad as such things go), in a measured way seems like a better plan at this point than attempting (and unsuccessfully) to repress all thoughts of the period from Sept 2011-the present.
I shall try that..
= new reply since forum marked as read
I have been experimenting with my writing lately. Around Feb 26, 2026, I stopped worrying about trivial embarassments. That was the date I found out from a cousin I trust that a sleazy local hospital is indeed as sleazy as I suspected. Good doctors, well run on the surface, totally creepy admins. It is owned by Blackstone now:
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In separate cases in 2018 and 2019, the hotel chain Motel 6, owned by Blackstone, agreed to settle for $19.6 million for giving guest lists to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) without a warrant.[210][211]
Ancestry acquisition and data leaks
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In 2020, Blackstone acquired a majority stake in Ancestry.com, which controls access to millions of people's genetic data, heightening concern about Blackstone's data privacy practices.[212] This data was disclosed to Blackstone, and it has aggressively defended itself against class action litigation relating to misuse of the data of people who did not consent to genetic testing but were affected through direct biological relations or other means of identification.[213]
Illegal child labor
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An investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor showed that more than 100 American children had been working illegally for Packers Sanitation Services Inc. (PSSI), a slaughterhouse cleaning firm owned by Blackstone. The investigation began after a Walnut Middle School teacher in Grand Island, Nebraska, reported a student with hydrochloric acid burns on his hands and knees to the Department of Labor.[214] Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Labor Department fined PSSI $15,138 for each minor who was employed in breach of the law, totaling $1.5 million in civil money penalties.[215][216]
Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest
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Blackstone has invested in companies with links to the commercialization and deforestation of the Amazon rainforest.[217][218][219][220]
These are the last people I would share medical or webuse etc data with.
Writing is one way to monitor influences on your thoughts. Nothing can really influence my spending or voting or other serious decisions, but it is the day to day war of economic attrition via attacks on one’s mood, temper, confidence etc which are the troublesome were it stuff below the threshold of active perception..Some of that is probably bullshit and the real roots as you mentioned being different. I thought the Facebook emotion contagion experiment was overhyped bs and the pearl clutching deflection from the real problem, which is an Idiocracy where Facebook, Kim Kardashian etc are taken seriously at all, just because they make money exploiting the lowest common denominator in human taste.
I always thought Facebook was garbage. I read trashy celebrity magazines as a teen but outgrew them by the time I was in my twenties and moved on to other slightly less trashy garbage online (I am a woman of taste and culture 🧐 )..actually not that trashy. Mostly personal blogs, which aren’t quite as bad. But still in no way part of any academic or activist portfolio. But I always found it grating how industry managed to label middlebrow trash from Oprah to Facebook somehow more refined if it is profitable enough. Give me Jerry Springer and something honestly without any redeeming value any day over this bs of claiming Facebook has a point followed by some kind of phony sense of betrayal.
Of course Zuckerberg will be sleazy if you let him..absent a lobotomy I would not trust any of those creeps. I trust EarlG and elad though.
But yeah it is hard to balance work, complaints and monitoring these things, but I must start.
I am sorry to hear about your wife Patrick? How is she? I remember your post in the thread about that old ad where the little girl is playing and it was about nuclear warfare?
Would you know which one I mean? This is one of the few places where I am one of the younger people
..He has perfected the schoolyard art of : “why are you hitting yourself?”
There is clearly only one response:
This was originally posted in Mental Health Support on August 14, 2025 and the last edit was made on August 18, 2025.
I started these (characteristically lazily sketched) caricatures last July when road closures diverted extra heavy duty traffic onto my street at a time when this street should be closed off to all non-essential traffic.
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This was a fun exercise I started mid July, going by the time stamps on my images. I started posting these on DU July 21, 2025 if not earlier. And I completed the series with the last image I posted yesterday (August 18, 2025).
I am very proud of my scrawls though, because I had fun drawing them. A final post wrapping up something I was experimenting with. The text is a bit disjointed, but I have to go work, after a long hiatus for all sorts of hideous and complicated reasons.
I have never suffered from mental illness. Why would there be any stigma in it?
What a dark ages or resume/reputation curating Type-A pov. Just a hoary chestnut to insistently force coercive psychiatry imo.
If you aren’t ill, you aren’t.
Existential angst perhaps and chronic stress worsened by sexual harassment and intrusions on seclusion. Ruth Cain had a good piece in The Conversation about it.
Usually you end up like this guy or worse if you don’t have the slightest intention of pacifying the technolibertarian crew running most places.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr46npx1e73o
I found some relief in viciously caricaturing the types of men I encountered/lousy tech I was plagued by during a 13 year period from 2012-the present. That’s behind me now.
These are not anti-psychiatry. They are anti-stupidity and anti-corruption though. I liked most of my shrinks even if I didn’t agree that I needed much shrinkage (especially unsolicited shrinkage).
Anyway I made these as a tribute to all the creeps i met or read about over the years. I suppose they generally mock meninists; a specific type of Yimby; incompetence; contemporary tech; influencers; advertising etc.
Influencing is a particularly bizarre concept-the movie Tusk comes to mind as a cautionary tale. The walrus body horror one..
How Creeps and Opportunists Affect Free Will:
Parody Paper on Creeps Figures:
Proportionality
Crazy Catlady vs Creeps
Advanced Crazy Catlady vs Creeps
(Explanatory Footnote: Advanced schizophrenia! Not the basic kind! )
This looks a bit like a creepy man I met in a state office where I had gone for something related to digital id. He picked his nose, which is not depicted to keep things tasteful.
Musical Pervert
This is not Sundar Pichai (less fugly - Artistic license! I have a fake illness and he is a mediocre, parasitic, snoopy billionaire!)
Advanced Musical Pervert
Him
It's a Bird... It's a Plane... No, It's a Creep!
20 years ago The Male Creep was considered an endangered species (mostly by male creeps). But by 2025 we can rejoice in the fact that the Creep Population is no longer in decline..
I had originally named this next one “The Saint” till I remembered that it’s in the name of a viciously racist book. I changed it to The Martyr and to be inclusive (focused as I usually am on our creeps here in the Global South), I threw in a couple of Nazis.
It ended up looking a bit like a holographer/defence contractor (Lockheed Martin) who sexually harassed me in 2014. My dad is a military vet and disapproves of defence contracting.
The Martyr
The Martyred
I went to school in the US. But I moved back to Podunk, Global South (which I view with an affectionately satirical eye).
Most men I meet irl here are nice-my doctors, the delivery men who come here etc. Podunk, GS has an oblivious charm as long as it doesn’t start going the way of SP’s “Cancelled”.
BTS creepy defence contractors, creepy technocrats and corrupt officials are a concern. But hopefully, that’s in the past.
Govts classify stuff and have classified projects. For that to work it has to be limited hangout and not about the enrichment of corrupt oligarchs and kleptocrats.
I’ll give you an example of how things work in some parts of the Global South I have visited (culture!). A type of industrialist exploits a specific type of bullshit framing (which I think is overused even on any semi-legit left; e.g.: “Colonialism and Western Imperialism” ) to justify his own encroaching and corrupt ways.
Example: a crass billionaire whose son’s wedding cost 170,000 times the average annual salary of a local, talked about “colonialism” when Zuckerberg wanted to pile on with some sort of icky “Internet for poor people” scam.
Two professors then wrote a decent enough editorial to the telecom regulatory authorities urging them to stop that and Zuck was bounced out.
Two years later Zuckerberg comes back, but now he is in bed with this creepy billionaire and no one has any problems with it. They are all fine with colonialism as long as they can participate in the colonizing I guess. Anyone who is straightforward loses. That’s just not right.
This really captures it. I call it
Creep Rights are Human Rights!
(I would attribute those first two images if I could find them. The second one especially is really awesome. I downloaded that around 2015 and can’t find it anymore).
And it’s the same in most places. Humans like to exploit humans and of course the planet/non-human life. In US with Trump/Musk etc. The US is pretty much like any corrupt developing country now.
Now take this Indian ecologist Madhav Gadgil who is the rare type of human even I respect.
Gadgil wrote an extensive scientific report urging against exploitation of the Western Ghats, an ecologically sensitive region under immense strain. (IMO due to the effects of overpopulation, overconsumption and overdevelopment). The communist CM of a state called Kerala tossed it aside. The resulting natural disasters caused significant loss of life. So much for man versus nature and the benefits of corrupt overexploitation of natural resources.
I live in another one of the few communist states in the world. Though I am well to the left, I have no illusions about our communist govt unlike people who have never lived in a communist state. Even Nathan Robinson whom I respect has these blinders about China for instance. He had this Indian version of Steven Pinker (Kishore Mahbubani) on recently. Life is getting better! People are living longer!
That Pinker stuff is so blind to the effects of population explosion, deregulation, roiling tensions between some 1000 different microcultures.
I have no illusions about any politicians/industrialists here. They are all okay with destroying the planet for profit.
You gotta have a consistent worldview to withstand corruption and alarming levels of industrial encroachment and deregulation.
There are no good guys when it comes to oligarchs, industrialists, most politicians and those in their pockets. Conspiracy theorists -the natural endpoint of an Idiocracy make it worse.
Scientists and doctors are pretty much the only people I trust (any shills aside). A caveat though -I do not consider behavioral economics (nudge theory, Bschool fluff), what the MIT Media lab does, most AI, the Facebook emotion contagion study, behaviorism etc. science.
The hard sciences and anything conducted using strict and rigorous scientific methods. Ai seems to allow for a lot of lightweight stuff as well. Yan LeCun is the sole prominent AI researcher I have seen out there who seems completely honest.
I suppose to be fair, one feels a bit resentful. I was shocked to read how much money people like Gino, Ariely etc. made prior to scandals. That stuff is such junk!
In the hard sciences you toil and spin (after a fashion if like me you are half assed) and then die a lonely horrible death..ha ha.
I am working on a research paper trying to tune out endless nuisances to get it right. Science and medicine do take a lot of dedication..I had good mentors, so I was lucky there. My main postdoc mentor especially, though all 3 of my mentors were cool. I had 3 between 2001-2012. Now I mentor meself!
I do have to go work on that ..feel a bit weary at times..Like The Martyr!
This one was a tribute to the specific type of socialist you see in The Jacobin-very Yimby and “pro-development” (Ben Wray, Freddie DeBoer, Casey Phillips etc.). Ben Wray said that “abortion rights are still broadly popular”. Good to know man.
I was just being funny. There’s a bit of artistic license in there. Technically the rape advocates I saw online were Rooshv and Andrew Tate. I hope I am not sued by NaziReputationManagementInc.com…
These cartoons skew Global South centric since I am not American and left the United States over a decade ago. So they focus on our creeps here rather than your creeps over there. (It is also why the creep parade doesn’t cover anti-vaxxers. Thankfully, that bit of lunacy is less common here than it apparently is in the US. People were pretty good about social distancing, masking and vaccinating during the pandemic. So my creep parade doesn’t not focus on that. An unvaccinated creep parade would be the limit.)
I made these for private use and only posted them here out of exasperation over deregulation and corruption.
Tech criticism is a joke. That’s part of what I was mocking. How every tumor of a non-industry launches more reactionary tumors like faux critics and insincere tell-alls-Tristan Harris, Tegmark, Eff, Wynn Williams.
Yasha Levine is the exception not the rule. But he is too honest a journalist to get a job these days.
Lina Khan on the other hand, much like Gadgil, is the rare person even I am enthusiastic about. She got so much accomplished it scared the tech creeps into destroying society.
My first “Images of Creep” series featured her prominently and even had MTG! Don’t remember where I pulled that image from except somewhere online so can’t credit it.
(Can’t remember where I got the sobriety, Khan and MTG images from. And in fairness this intense obsession by sleuths over 0.3-3.5% fraud in academic research and plagiarism etc seem a bit overdone when Google/Meta/OpenAi etc make a joke of such concepts.)
I see places like those pompous schools with ties to the tech industry/industry broadly- MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard get all tingly about OpenCourseWare, RetractionWatch and Wikipedia etc…it’s so…douchey. I can see so easily that it gives them a chance to make life hell for the average struggling scientist while letting the Google/Palantir/Hoover creep types force snoopy and broken AI agents on people. For open science of course. Who can object to that? Puppy murderers that’s who.
Democratizing science-one WWE style disgraceful reality show at a time! Jokes aside, another way for opaque and corrupt tech companies to subvert notions like open science, health etc
I am all for good science and within reason even health. I try not to die. That counts I think. But honestly, not in this blatantly bogus way. It’s not good for old-fashioned and more honest NIH science of the best kinds. Shrug.
Now to wrap up..someone who unscrambled my brains a little was that Rick Rude Calves guy. The couch joke did some damage and the typical douchebag would have tried to capitalise on that. He was the first person I ever read about online who seemed like an actual non-retiree with a real offline life. He got that “going viral” is a bad thing not a good thing.
I felt a twinge of recognition when I read about him last year. He is from your Global North Podunk and I am from Podunk, Global South! I suddenly got why, left as I am, I could never quite mesh my worldview with that of the left liberal Americans whom I genuinely like …communication gets complicated.
I am trying to acquire some communication skills these days..but it’s a work in progress..was never very sociable. Was able to pull it off superficially and now I will be able to again.
I am not wildly original (which is why this is not my day job), so homage to (a mix of tech critics, political writers and comedians): Rex Huppke, Lyta Gold, Cara Smith (mostly Cara Smith), Andrew O’Hehir, Chauncey DeVega, Herman Wouk, Rick Rude’s Calves (a personal role model-a rare anon/non-retiree with an offline existence), Plork Blogspot, Candyboots WW Cards, Georgette Heyer, Jane Austen, R K Laxman, my beloved childhood authors Lewis Carroll and Richmal Crompton, ‘How Love came to Prof. Guildea’, my mom/dad/best friend/ex-husband, an unknown human user or two of Rollo Carpenter’s Cleverbot, Hatersaurusrex (Reddit), Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, South Park, Nandita Bajaj, Samuel Miller MacDonald, Nathan Robinson, Yasha Levine, Evgenia Kovda, Evgeny Morozow, Nicholas Carr, Tim Wu, John Naughton, Ed Zitron, Chuck Pahlaniuk, Amanda Marcotte, Jill Filipovic.
No Ai-that stuff is nails on chalkboard
Finally, most importantly, all my muses mostly here in Podunk, Global South. I have left out any women (though there were quite a few women I was displeased with) . But I avoid attacks on other women. You see I try to bite down and tolerate most things that stop short of outright creepiness. I have even left out mere jackasses where male.
An exception to that is these assholes who ride their bikes down my street with their silencers off. They were such a source of stress that my dentist said she could see signs of strain in my mouth from grinding my teeth. That’s why I have included them.
Sexual Harassers: All the sexual harassers/creeps I met in Podunk, Global South between 2014 and the present and one sexual harasser from this part of the world I met at a clinic in 2010, while in the US. These cap wearing creeps who used to ruin my morning jog in 2023 when I was still recovering from losing my mom.
Inept Shrinks: Two boorish male shrinks here in Podunk in the Dec of 2012. They are the primary inspirations for the cartoon shrinks. But the worst shrinks were at the hospital at my last place of employment in the US. They even harassed the only shrink I ever went to voluntarily and who was of use. Thankfully, the psychiatrist/therapist they had me see outside were cool, as was the counsellor.
Assorted morons: All the frauds and morons I met between May 2010 and the present. The (unknown) creeps exploiting my street and neighborhood.
I definitely think the local tech companies, defence contractors etc would be wise to stay away from my residence, street etc for all illicit experimentation. That’s what it is-completely non-consensual and illicit. Between 2012 and the present, my doctors or routine oblivious people aside, I never saw anything at all unusual locally that was not outright creepy, completely exploitative and mind numbingly incompetent. This stuff is an embarrassment and reminded of similar garbage I saw elsewhere.
These (indifferent) cartoons wouldn’t have been possible without them or the various annoying public figures/hucksters who diligently dedicate their lives to destroying planet earth and human society every day of their lives.
One final anecdote to wrap up this post:
I was trying to improve my memory a few weeks back and also fish in my head to see how I think so a greasy data miner doesn’t understand one’s mind better than one does..I have seen conspiracy theorists do this, but I was only trying to see any links I make. It was a useful exercise some.
This graphic is lightly edited to give Planned Parenthood a shoutout, but it’s mostly the original concept stream of a Saturday weeks ago when I was trying to escape the ghastly reality show feel of modern life where real science and medicine are displaced by marketing, junk like AI border security lie detection, emotion AI, behavioral economics, sublimnal messaging, sleuthing by dimwits, nudge theory and other worthless trash that should not exist:
It was somewhat useful, but at one point when I was going over this, my eyes hopelessly scanning from the icon on “GOP podcasts” to Matt Walsh asking if he is a racist, to MTG, with pompous exhortations from The Atlantic about good taste on the side, it struck me that this must be what hell looks like:
This society is hopeless. But you are looking at the wrong things! Crispr! Heart transplants! We have shoes now!
Possibly a slightly jaded take.
Last edit: There was a very funny article in the NYT about ChatGPT induced delusions with the standard issue Stanford Reefer Madness type weighing in. That piece was everything I satirized in this post. Stanford is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s such a ridiculous institution. Like Trump, they are beyond parody. Well at least they took down their “Women’s Bodies and Alcohol” piece. That institution is everything I have ever mocked in concentrated form.
