How this innocent painting hides a dangerous reality
Interesting discussion of Pieter Bruegel‘s painting, “The Hunters in the Snow”.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Last edited Wed Dec 10, 2025, 10:23 PM - Edit history (4)
I saw this thread last week and was reminded of it when I saw Kirsten Dunst in another DUer’s profile photo.
It was one of those wacky visual illusions where zoomed out it looks like the image of an older woman, but at high mag it’s Kirsten Dunst. I saw another such profile photo which looked like a mirror image recently. I think it was flvegan.
Usually DU profile photos are very generic so I noticed those two since they are atypical.
The internet has become a bit dicey with bots and malicious actors all over the place. I have to use a VPN to even get on DU. Which is probably for the best anyway.
I noticed a few DU posts that seemed a bit odd too.
Mine are plenty odd - it’s a whole thing 
and we all have our own problems here..
It’s not a mental health issue but I have been a crusade anonymously against a type of rollout of technology I find very offensive and parasitic.
I am usually preoccupied with a type of internet experiment that’s more along the lines of that Facebook emotion contagion rubbish or whatever the hell that is:
https://www.academia.edu/40689213/_LOL_you_go_to_gulag_The_Role_of_Sassy_Socialist_Memes_in_Leftbook
It isn’t the Internet of 2006. More overtly spooky or filled with corporate research of low quality. I never liked the lightweight stuff: ocean big five, power poses, pop psychologists like Ramani Durvasulu, bschool research, bs like the crap Dan Ariely and Gino sold even before it turned out to be fraudulent as well as fluffy.
But that stuff really sells. It’s like self help or TED tech talks or psychology today..Really popular for unclear reasons. I have seen one article I liked on psychology today called “looped linear thinking”. It was like a lot of writing by people like Nicholas Carr. Interesting even if not scholarly. But most of that stuff is a nightmare.
But that’s distinct from outright malicious stuff. I am pretty pissed off at how hard it is to tell one from the other sometimes.
Sometimes I see a post that looks odd and wonder if a malicious hacker is in between. I am outside the US. Whether you guys over there are seeing what I see over here. Or it could just be that someone misread a post. So I don’t like to say anything.
These days with Paragon, Pegasus and threats multiplying online along with ill-conceived experimentation by for profits or worse spooks..even without AI it’s annoying and that stuff is bleeding into real life which is very angering and forcing me back online.
Anyway I am logging off for a long time to focus on work if, but i am leaving my journal up because for these same issues I am planning on filing some serious misconduct, malpractice and harassment charges locally and against a former employer in bed with that shitty Google.
Locally I am worried about local versions of creepy little men like these:
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/ottawa-man-ai-bot-maga
I have been repeating myself a lot but only because there are so many real world and online issues I want to file one consolidated complaint about eventually.
I live in the global south.
But unfortunately there are some really creepy nonwhite Trumpers from all over the world with businesses back south and if such people bring their Trumpy values over here, the local govt can expect an escalation.
I remember reading about this crazy Jan 6:
https://www.thequint.com/news/world/us-capitol-hill-siege-indian-tricolour-vincent-xavier-palathingal-donald-trump
He claims that he was protesting peacefully against what he believes was a “fraudulent” election
And that creep has an AI company. He is not the type of person who should be anywhere near anyone’s data or life.
This is an era that will spawn huge legal conflicts. Or we can all just accept a world where creeps like this have access to more and more stuff and get away with it. People need more RTI and control over data and the legal right to if not sue file harassment complaints about the last 15 years severe enough to deter a backdoor attack on women’s rights and democracy and environmental laws.
I will be filing every applicable complaint to ensure this never happens again.
Palathingal even looks a bit like a creepy defense contractor locally who sexually harassed me back in 2014. Now I think the work people like Michael Kosinski of Stanford do is junk (David Golumbia-a Prof I respected who passed away called it disturbing. I call it junk)-he has a “facedar”. So I don’t think Palathingals face is the issue sans theJan 6 crap. Shalabh Kumar, Kash Patel..Trump has some really creepy and stupid fans. Very fitting for a creepy and stupid man.
There’s nothing I dislike more than lightweight sleazy science for profit.
This now I can back
Citizen science and cute the decent way:
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/10/994262792/cats-take-if-i-fits-i-sits-seriously-even-if-the-space-is-just-an-illusion
MAY 10, 202111:46 AM ET
HEARD ON ALL THINGS CONSIDERED
I really sort of wandered off topic there but it isn’t tangentiality or mental illness. I myself feel trapped in an internet research style project without liking it. So I have been treating DU as a data dump for any researchers I would consider legitimate like maybe The Citizen Lab in Toronto or the Dair Institute. There aren’t many I trust, but those are two that I would trust to be honestly anti-bad science.
The Stanford Internet Observatory isn’t as bad as one would expect anything Stanford to be.
But whether it is Markos Moulitsas or Rene DiResta, unless a creep like Michael Shellenberger is attacking them, I am a bit dubious about anyone with military intelligence ties.
The SIO has covered these Russian bot farms and troll farms etc. And while they do a decent job, at the end of the day Stanford is pretty squarely US national security which means they shill a very specific worldview that shutdowns any serious counter argument. I dislike PRC or Russia in this regard took. They perfected dictatorship whereas your country or mine is still trying and not succeeding that well except in terms of depriving us of all our resources
Stamos is an interesting guy. He jumped ship from Facebook just before the scandals a bit Like Giridhardas did with the MIT Media Lab avoiding the worst .
Of all Facebook whistleblowers he has seemed the least sleazy. He isn’t as obviously part of that cottage industry of sleazy former Facebook employees who grift this way first and that way next. So his social science experiments may suck less. it’s still Stanford and I hate those guys.
Anyway I am glad I had DU to do this data dump on. MeToo first broke on Twitter but I have always disliked those for profit platforms
My relationship with the net would be closer to this than to “change the world!” That was just a funny girl I used to follow online:
https://plork.blogspot.com/2005/09/i-am-become-famous.html?m=1
Not monetization centric ..an NPC as the creeps refer to it.
This is way more time than I ever had to spend on thinking about the net and stuff like this.
And while I think internet addiction etc are junk (all pathology all the time so Stanford etc’s sleazy shrinks can label everyone insane).
But I agree with Yasha Levine, one of the few people I genuinely trust on most things, especially this stuff that it can be very parasitic.
I am only using it at this point for complaints but as an academic would not the sensationalism and clickbait of Twitter etc.
It looks like they killed the SIO. It was almost the only thing at Stanford that didn’t outright suck.