Ancient catboys

Or, nyanderthals if you will,

they were unkind to you. don’t let that make you unkind. 

also!  i am fairly sure that a lot of people do not realize how bad things in general still are from a gender dynamics perspective

I did not!  I dated a girl and I did not believe her about how systematically she was targeted for abuse and harassment.  It did not seem remotely plausible or reasonable or possible.  I didn’t think she was lying, but I thought she was interpreting much more into things than warranted.  

… and then I walked around a corner and saw someone harassing her, he stopped when I arrived

…. and then someone stopped their convertible next to say a bro-compliment to me which treated her like she was a cow 

both of these happened in a short period of time.  in a very liberal area.  I’ll absolutely agree that living in a left-wing voting zone is by no means any sort of protection.  

there is a class of people who experience absolutely horrific amounts of harassment.  there is a shockingly high number of men who participate in this harassment.  they tend to be quite good at not doing it while people who would object are around.  

I think a lot of men read things written by women and think they mean “i’ll destroy your life for being slightly socially awkward” when they actually mean “I wish that dude would stop trying to force or coerce me to fuck him” or “I don’t like it when people proposition me on the street and start escalating when I reject them” 

Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit—and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive. And there shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy from which shall blossom dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain and herald the passing of an age. That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains.

Since I’m handing out life advice: “Appear as competent as possible” and “Be honest” make a very good heuristic for achieving actual competence. Maybe this only works for me because I have good instincts for how to signal particular attributes, but I suspect other people will find the reframing useful.

(And no you can’t drop the honesty constraint. This might lead to people thinking you’re more competent in the short run but it won’t force you to actually acquire competence, and in most fields that will come out sooner or later. I guess if you’re in the arts you can ignore it.)