Harassment: (re)normalizing expectations

Sat, Sep 13, 2025 ❝"Mental health"-pointers for reasonable people in toxic and/or abusive situations.❞

Contents

When in a prolonged period of continuous attacks, it might be important to (re)normalize expectations of reasonable, normal, acceptable behavior and interaction. These memes and quotes helped me along the way, as concise nuggets of truth, wisdom or clarity of thought. Note that I do not claiming that all of them apply all the time, but they do help to set a reasonable base-line to compare one’s current situation against.

Before continuing, might I remind anyone unsure of the nature of their circumstances, of the “razors”:

• Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
• Occam’s razor: […], Occam’s razor (also spelled Ockham’s razor or Ocham’s razor; Latin: novacula Occami) is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements. That is, the simplest solution.
• Hitchens’ razor: What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

Irrespective of the situation you’re in, having a few memes or quotes point out what would or should have been obvious or reasonable expectations, may help to (re)normalize or (re)contextualize your expectations against manipulation and false and/or biased and/or deceptive and/or abusive circumstances.

Quotes

There are many quotes. Learning them by heart makes little sense. Given your situation or most prevalent issue, one might stand out to offer a different perspective. Furthermore, I am not going to tell you how to interpret these quotes. Even if there is, preferably, a singular unambiguous explanation, I would still not be able to map that explanation onto your current situation. You might discover an unexpected analogy of circumstances through the wisdom in these quotes.

• It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society – Jiddu Krishnamurti
  

• I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are.
  

• If you can get someone fired for expressing their opinion, you’re not the oppressed. You’re the oppressor.
  

• If a businessman makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences. If a bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences. – Ayn Rand
  

• To be clear … the “experts” weren’t wrong. They lied. There’s a difference.
  

• Here’s a little song I wrote called “all governments are lying cock suckers.”
  

• You should not honor men more than truth. – Plato
  

• Are you mad at what I said or are you mad because it’s true?
  

• “You pissed off a lot of people. What did you do?”

  “Told ’em the fucking truth.”
  

• THEM: Aren’t you afraid of losing friends over your posts on controversial topics?
  ME: No. I’m afraid of remaining silent and watching evil advance. I’m afraid of seeing friends and their loved ones suffer because they lack knowledge.
  

• Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world … would do this, it would change the earth. – William Faulkner
  

• In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. – George Orwell
  

• It was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with. – Anais Nin
  

• When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it. – Frederic Bastiat
  

• You are being conditioned to think that people who stand up for their freedoms are selfish, extreme, irresponsible, hateful, irrational and lawless.
  

• Nothing threatens a corrupt system more than a free mind.
  

• Every tyrant fears a thinker more than an army.
  

• When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. – Thomas Jefferson
  

• Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. – C.S. Lewis
  

• There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice. – Baron de Montesquieu
  

• All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force. – George Orwell
  

• It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. – Voltaire
  

• It’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. – Voltaire
  

• There’s nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact. – Arthur Conan Doyle
  

• The constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rules of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want. – Hannah Arendt
  

• Propaganda is persuading people to make up their minds while withholding some of the facts from them.
  

• How do you tell who’s telling the truth?

  The ones trying to silence other people are the ones lying.
  

• Follow the science silenced.
  

• Censorship is the tool used when the lie loses its power.
  

• The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. – Aldous Huxley
  

• Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. – Aldous Huxley
  

• Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it. – Leo Tolstoy
  

• Nothing brings a group of assholes together faster than something that’s none of their fucking business.
  

• Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. – James Baldwin
  

• First, they fascinate the fools. Then, they muzzle the intelligent. – Bertrand Russell
  

• Fascism is the rejection of the very principle of rational debate. You cannot have a fair and constructive debate with a nazi. – David Graeber
  

• It didn’t start with gas chambers. It started with one party controlling the media. One party controlling the message. One party deciding what is truth. One party censoring speech and controlling the opposition. One party dividing citizens into “us” vs “them” and calling their supporters to harass “them”. It started when good people turned a blind eye and let it happen.
  

• Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. […] – Howard Zinn
  

• Now might be a good time to remind everyone that “I was just following orders” was rejected as a defense at the Nuremburg trials. Just saying.
  

• Every great atrocity is the result of people just following orders.
  

• Satire is meant to ridicule power. If you are laughing at people who are hurting, it’s not satire, it’s bullying. – Terry Pratchett
  

• As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome. – Noam Chomsky
  

• The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism. – Hannah Arendt
  

• Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society. – Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
  

• The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. – Edmund Burke
  

• Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominate, then it tries to silence good. – Archbishop Charles J. Chaput
  

• The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis. – Dante Alighieri
  

• “It’s the people that aren’t bothered by any of this, that both bother and enormously disappoint me.”
  

• Anyone trying to disarm you is the enemy.
  

• Stay away from people who act like a victim in a problem they created.
  

• Abusive people misquote your words, misinterpret your silence, and misrepresent your absence.
  

• Stop explaining yourself to demons.
  

• Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority, but to their inhumanity. – James Baldwin
  

• The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject. – Marcus Aurelius
  

• Remember, the only people who will refuse to hear the truth about you or a situation involving you, are those with a vested interest in believing the lies…
  

• What can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. – Christopher Hitchens
  

• Jesus watching the worst people on the planet claiming to be his followers.
  

• Religious freedom ends when it becomes an excuse to harm other people. – Pete Buttigieg
  

• The most dangerous people in the world are the ones who believe they are doing god’s work.
  

• “Jesus died for our sins.” Ok, but he didn’t STAY dead, right? So what exactly did he sacrifice?

  Jesus gave up a weekend for your sins.
  

• If there was power in the name of Jesus, slaves would not have been introduced to the bible. – James Baldwin
  

• If you need the threat of hell to be a good person, then you’re just a bad person on a leash.
  

• With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion. – Steven Weinberg
  

• The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without god, what’s to stop me from raping all I want?

  And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. – Penn Jilette
  

• Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it. – Christopher Hitchens
  

• “Oh no! Once again you have destroyed my scientific facts with your knowledge of the bible!” said nobody ever.
  

• Science is different to all other systems of thought, because you don’t need to have faith in it. You can check that it works. – Brian Cox
  

• I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.
  

• Some people will never forgive you for what they did to you. … (Read that again.)
  

• They weren’t sorry when you didn’t know. Remember that.
  

• In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.
  

• Real is rare.
  

• The problem is people are being hated when they are real, and are being loved when they are fake. – Bob Marley
  

• When people travel to the past, they worry about radically changing the present by doing something small. Few people think that they can radically change the future by doing something small in the present.
  

• Some days you feel like you’re surrounded by fucking idiots. Other days you realize it’s not just some days.
  

• Remember: when something goes wrong in the circus, they send in the clowns to distract the audience. Well, something has gone very wrong with this circus, and the clowns are everywhere.
  

• “Your success was lucky.” (hard work, long nights, tears, rejection, ghosted, empty gyms, haters)
  

• If I do a job in 30 minutes, it’s because I spent 10 years learning how to do that in 30 minutes. You owe me for the years, not the minutes.
  

• Notice the people who make an effort to stay in your life.
  

• All birds find shelter during a rain, but eagle avoids rain by flying above the clouds. Problems are common, but attitude makes the difference. – APJ Abdul Kalam
  

• You didn’t break. That’s why they don’t like you.
  

• They hate me because they know they can neither corrupt me nor rule me.
  

• You’re crazy to everyone who can’t manipulate you.
  

• I was looked at, but I wasn’t seen.
  

• Personality vs character
  

• A time is coming when men will go mad. And when they see someone who isn’t mad, they will attack him, saying, “you are mad, you are not like us.”
  

• You are NOT crazy. You are awake in an insane world.
  

• And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. – Friedrich Nietzsche
  

• Beware of artists. They mix with all classes of society and are therefore the most dangerous.
  

• Do you actually have imposter syndrome, or is it just that you’ve spent much of your life having your knowledge and skills subtly dismissed and devalued? (Tweet by @LaurenHallion)
  

• They broke the wrong parts of me. They broke my wings and forgot I had claws.
  

• The strongest steel is forged in the fire of a dumpster.
  

• Maybe your final stage of healing is telling them to fuck off.
  

• People who say it cannot be done, should not interrupt those who are doing it. – Bernard Shaw
  

• Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. – Eleanor Roosevelt
  

• I am not interested in competing with anyone. I hope we all make it.
  

Unfortunately, although these quotes may help to contextualize circumstances, they do not by themselves solve problems. Some quotes help to establish a sensible, reasonable expectations or foundation for counter-argument, others may provide hints.

Manipulative practices

I am far from an expert on these matters. I provide the terms primarily, and encourage you to look up their exact meaning. I would explain these terms, but I do not trust myself to be sufficiently precise and thorough. I would encourage you to look into them, but to do so with care for proper understanding, a proper definition.

• Gaslighting
• Victimhood
• Guilt-tripping
• Pretend ignorance
• Negative humor
• Projection
• Constant criticism
• Framing

This list is not exhaustive. There might be other flavors of manipulative behavior. Also, be sure to pay attention to what your attackers claim to be doing vs what they actually do. In my case, stealing things was attempted to be “conveniently” “explained” as “gaslighting” as to make it sound innocent. That is not what gaslighting is about.

Another example is with victimhood and framing, where someone takes on a clear abusive attitude and as soon as you counter in any way, they’ll attempt to twist the story into a malicious or offensive attempt that supposedly started/originated from you, by leaving out details such as the start of a conversation, their own malicious attitude or actions, or by misrepresenting your words or actions.

In another instance, (deliberately) choosing to look for some negative aspect in anything, meaning that any and every good deed, however grand, goes unrecognized or unseen or misattributed. One can transform virtually any good deed into an attack, if they (maliciously) look for any even just insigificant detail to attack over and in the process forgetting, rejecting or dismissing the good deed. This is a prejudiced or biased approach that is manipulative because it is framed such to focus solely on the “bad thing”, also called propaganda, but only if they don’t go as far as to blatantly lie about matters.

Logical fallacies

Apart from deliberate (psychological) manipulation, there are also types of structural “thinking errors”, i.e. logical fallacies, that can unintentionally derail a thought process. Regardless of applicability, these are interesting matters to learn about, to avoid making such mistakes. Interestingly, logical fallacies are not necessarily malicious in nature, but may instead happen accidentally. This makes their understanding valuable for every-day life too.

source: “thou shalt not commit logical fallacies”, content published under ‘creative commons attribution and noncommercial license 2025’, as per website.

Targeted

In my case, some memes were posted that were clearly targeted. Many of the above were appropriately timed, but those are nevertheless generally applicable. These quotes have their own particular backstory.

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Sometimes when things are falling apart, they may actually be falling into place. – Person on your team who refuses to admit their code introduced a bug.

This is, with very high likelihood, targeted and refers to the project with the 2nd team at ASML. I have been attacked for something like the 6+ years since, about an issue with an intermediate evaluation testing some specific functionality. I got attacked for years about having to admit my “incompetence” for something I did not do.

I have not even had time to look into it in sufficient detail to know exactly what the nature of the bug was and where it occurred. The best I can tell, is what I heard at the time as someone threw in a stray explanation, while I was in conversation with the scrum master: the code-path for writing a metrology recipe (YieldStar XML-document with selected highly specific parameters) had somewhere along the path faulty exception handling, causing a failure while writing content to file, to be silenced. So, when functionality broke, it was left undetected and got silently ignored.

That’s all I know, because when I heard about it, the bug was already discovered and fixed or about to be fixed, so it was no longer of immediate concern. As described, I was swamped in just-in-time architecture and design concerns to prepare for and stay ahead of teams doing implementation. I have since gotten attacked for several years over this.

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We infiltrated the dark side. We brought the light to them.

This meme was very much targeted. It got posted immediately after I posted the partial, general licensing information. This happened after 6+ years of continuous, persistent harassment. I had warned them many times. I posted short messages about misconduct and over-all mess that had happened and how I was under constant attack for matters where I was not at fault. Nothing worked to reduce the ongoing harassment and abuse. When I finally decided that enough is enough, I posted the first elaborate story. Someone was kind enough to follow up with a meme.

Note, the most idiotic part of this whole situation, is that after 6+ years of continuous harassment, the X/Twitter posts with small hints as to the shitshow going on at ASML that referenced ASML for transparency, which then got censored by means of “technical failure”, the many counters and finally posting several stories one on the licensing and several on the toxic, political shitshow, and still the harassment and abuse continued.

I finally published another harassment-post and a warning that I had scheduled the detailed licensing information for later that week. They ignored it. Not a single bit of humanity, not a single care for all the harassment and abuse that was going on. And at the scheduled time, as publicly stated, the missing details on the licensing mechanism appeared on-line, as the then latest blog post. None of it was necessary.

Closing thoughts

These kinds of wisdom can help a lot in difficult situations. It is also important to realize that they are subject to interpretation when it comes to how someone envisions or experiences a situation. Partly for this reason, it can be valuable to see which one jumps out at you in terms of applicability to your current circumstances.

Note: I tried to verify the origin of the images, where indicators are present, for proper use within their license. Let me know in case of violations so they can be replaced.