About the interpocula Substack
I am a philosopher who is just finishing a thesis that began in Berin. I am one of those lefty post-structuralist types, but I was initially trained in analytic philosophy. I wrote my Master thesis on Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. Foucault was also a major influence on my work. My thesis is on Nietzsche’s Project of the Incorporation of Truth. So that is my PhD, but what is this Substack about?
This Substack exposes a feminist network targeting men in a violent campaign. Thousands of people participate in the group chat and follow the instructions of the anonymous group chat administrators. If those participating knew the small group who initiate and control the campaign in Berlin, they would not follow their instructions. I rejected two of them for 1.5 years while working in the bar. They were trying to entrap me to prove I cheated. Their feeling of rejection fuelled a campaign of hatred, sexual harassment, and coercion. They created ever new reasons to disguise their hatred. They claimed British men hate German women. You might have been told this was part of the ruse, but most women in Berlin view this as a xenophobic campaign. They know German men are not any better than the rest. So, why only attack foreigners, why only British men?
I did not just reject their advances; I told them that I would not spike anyone’s drink for them while working in a bar. I also unwittingly criticized their feminism. They were boasting that ‘toxicity’ was a medical sickness. I reminded them of Foucault’s critique of ‘diagnosing’ people with a ‘moral sickness’ like laziness and putting them in confinement. “He gets it”, they said. I did not know how literally they have taken over these Victorian strategies. But that’s another story.
In Berlin my local workmates defended me because they thought the women had mental health problems. Not least because they would sometimes scream at them in the bar. They would often resign themselves to the craziness of Berlin saying, ‘das ist Berlin’. Even after one of my harassers was sacked, she came every shift for 4-8 hours to harass me in the quiet café/bar. My workmates reported this to the German proprietor, also a woman, who said I could bar her. But another woman only took her place. I lived and worked in Berlin for over 5 years, before I encountered the abusive campaign. These women are not the average Berliner, women, nor feminist. Do not presume that they are your better feminist, or better person.
A lot of this was built around scripted harassments that were based on research in the social sciences and psychology. Gas-lighting, shame, guilt, stereotype threat, sexual humiliation and emasculation were named as tactics by women in the bar. Much of this was designed to damage my mental health and change my behaviour. Other parts were attempts to illicit a desired response that could be recorded and used against me in a smear campaign online. It is impossible to recant that much abuse.
One simple example of harassment: The two women in the bar repeatedly challenged me on the British bombing of Berlin, and the consequences it had for the populace. Sometimes they would come in the next day and pick up the abuse where they had let off. I initially responded by saying how terrible it must have been. I tried to kill them with kindness. However, when I invited her to my house to dinner with another colleague, and my girlfriend, she suddenly started on about the bombing of Berlin again. I interrupted her, ‘so what?!’. Why was she attacking me in my own home with this. The next time we met she showed her voice recorder, she had been recording our conversations. More than that she also had access to my laptop that night and she stole my research and passed it on to someone who published my work in another language. This person was under the same Professor in Berlin. So, my supervisor was complicit and must have been turned against me with the help of the recording.
This form of harassment is used to shut down other career paths. This is one of the Stasi tactics that the two feminists in east Berlin boasted of. What the GDR called the “systematic organisation of professional and social failures”. These campaigns were designed to exhaust the “psychic power’” of the target to leave him with no time or energy to challenge the state. Informants gathered information that might help pinpoint the vulnerabilities of their target. In my case, two regulars in a bar, and two consecutive girlfriends were part of the network. To borrow the words of the Stasi, this feminist network organizes the “systematic discreditation of reputations”. That is, they spread “credible, untrue, irrefutable and thus also discrediting statements” about enemies. Spreading false rumours about affairs was a Stasi staple. Where the Stasi choreographed events to set the target up to be photographed in compromising situations, feminists today shared similarly choreographed videos in group chats.
The women also boasted of taking tactics from colonial uprisings that were used against the British army. Chief amongst them, is the psychological warfare of, first, making the enemy feel like they are always being watched, second, of depriving the enemy of sleep. This might sound like child’s play, but Toussaint Louverture, the ‘Black Spartacus’ who beat the British out of Haiti, ascribed the majority of his victories to these two forms of psychological warfare. He confided as much in his correspondence with Etienne Lavaux, the French Governor General, and one the most widely read experts on military strategy.
Days after I arrived back in Berlin from the funeral of the Grandmother who raised me, one of the women who had been harassing me for 1.5 years, sexually assaulted me in the bar. I left my job, but I cannot properly account for the two years after. While working in the bar I was encouraged to apply for social housing. I did not wait years like everyone else, I was offered a private viewing. I was drugged in this flat for years. Most people have been led to believe that the drugging only makes the man anxious, or it exhausts him so that he has heavy legs and even falls asleep. It says a lot about the power of gender stereotypes that even when women house a man to systematically drug him over years, the drugging is thought cute. It just makes him sleepy. The truth is much more sinister: Spiked by Gone Girl Feminists? - interpocula (substack.com)
I was not promiscuous in Berlin. Only 2 years after the sexual assault, did I try dating apps. I was met with the abuses awaiting British men- drugging, theft, sex footage, sexual assault. This phenomenon is pathological and not political. These women in Berlin suffer from projective displacement. They project what they do not accept in themselves onto men. They are promiscuous, and they are racist, they cannot accept rejection, and they are sexually violent. Despite putting up no resistance, quitting my job and moving flat, the abuse did not abate over 5 years. Even when I left Berlin the abuse did not stop.
I was warned that when the victim searches for a flat share in the UK he is sent on a wild goose hunt around fake offers. After this he is ready to grasp at an offer which is too good to be true. This flat share he is offered is in the catchment area of am NHS Mental Health practice where a medical student who is in on the campaign is ready and waiting. He gaslights the victim and signs his claims off as delusional. All this is done in accordance with plausible deniability. Henceforth, anyone can spike or abuse the victim because reports to the police can be written off as a product of the victim’s delusion. I was further warned that if the victim persists in complaining, a one-night stay in the mental health ward is usually enough to get their message over. They did say, he could be taken in for a longer stay if necessary.
Footage of the victim’s therapy sessions is shared to humiliate and stoke hatred. They even used my words to wound my mother and drive a wedge between us. They attacked my mother and hurt her, to get at me, and to isolate me. I took my complaint to the clinical director of that centre, I told him I had heard about every detail in Berlin from feminists, and he sounded concerned, but no investigation was undertaken.
When I persisted with complaints I was taken into a mental hospital on an emergency detainment order. To put this in context, I had had a decent full-time job for about a year and a half, and I had just been accepted into a PhD program. I had done nothing but insist that my complaint was taken seriously. This involved writing two polite emails. I was kept over night and the next day the clinical director at the hospital told me, in front of my father,
“I hope you do not need to see a psychiatrist again. You just need to remember that you think a bit differently than other people, a little bit more to the extreme and just remember, if you attack the system, the system will attack you.”
My father acknowledged the threat and said I should shut my mouth and get on with my life. My mother had been bullying him and threatening to leave him. He does what he is told to do because he is dependent on her, and he is going into retirement. I hesitated whether post the threat on my Substack. I did a week later, and a few days after that, I was taken back to the hospital against my will with another emergency detainment certificate. Nothing had happened in the interim period to warrant a second traumatic interruption in my life. The doctor in Scotland told me I had not been sexually assaulted in Berlin. How could he know? How your therapist might gas-light you, if asked to (substack.com) I was confined for a week and told I would not get out unless I took medication. I have since been threatened with permanent confinement if I do not keep my mouth shut: The modern confinement of 'difficult' men - interpocula (substack.com) To this day I am harassed by people think I am a cheat, or a racist, or a misogynist, or a transphobe, or a wondering hand. I am treated like an animal because of smear campaign online.
The network controls an online group chat with many young members working in bars and coffeeshops. Bartenders and baristas spike the victim’s drink, while bottles of water are tampered with in local shops, and his colleagues are instructed on how to spike his drinks at every opportunity. 9 Ways Bartenders Can Spike You, If They're Asked to (substack.com) Young bartenders and baristas announce on the group chat that the victim is in their bar. The group can then send people to the bar and give them instructions on what to say or do in some scripted harassment. The bar offers people free drinks, just in case the cause of social justice is not sufficient motivation. I have been told that the group chat is so popular that bars fear that there could be reprisals if they do not participate.
In the end, all these lies are circulated to enrol as many people as possible to protect a small group of women in Berlin that drug, abuse, rob and sexually assault British men. This group coordinate their harassments to compound the effects of abuse. The campaign will not be called off if the man rejects the women. It was not an honest mistake on their part to think I was cheating. After years of abuse and attempts to entrap me, the network inadvertently proved that I was not a cheat. However, to accept this, these women would need to accept rejection and the network would need to accept defeat. In truth, the victims are attacked because they reject these women. The victims are attacked for refusing to drug men for them.
Why this network is so damaging for all of us
I have concentrated on some private details of the abusive campaign because I wanted to have some input into my story. However, there is another way I could have approached this. I could simply have said how this campaign against men is wrong in principle.
So, for example, the accused should be allowed to know exactly what he is accused of, and he should be allowed to prepare and offer a defence to the accusations made. If this is not the case, women could accuse men of anything they wanted.
Women are not pure innocent helpless victims. This is sexists and it is unfair to hold women to this standard.
Group chat administrators are acting as judge, jury, and executioner. I cannot explain here why that is bad. It is worth pointing out though that our society allows for the selection and promotion of people who have demonstrated sound judgement in law and public service. However, even those people are not offered the position of judge, jury, and executioner. Compare this then to the group chat administrators online who are anonymous and totally unaccountable, and perhaps teenagers. Almost all the people who join the group chat online, all the people who execute their orders, do not even know the people acting as judge, jury and executioner online.
You might want to believe your wife or daughter when they promise you that they have seen recordings online that prove the rumours. However, once it has been pointed out to you how people use misinformation online to stoke shame, disgust and hatred, you have no excuses. Ultimately, you cannot pass the responsibility on to others. You must admit that they could be wrong. You could be wrong.
Spiking is always wrong. Sexual harassment is always wrong. Sexual assault is always wrong. Hacking the emails, laptop, and mobile of someone, and listening in to their conversations through their mobile phone is wrong.
Medical professionals should not use their privileges to punish patients for alleged moral misdemeanours/wrongs. Medical professionals should not be facilitating crimes, especially violent crimes, by writing the victim of as delusional to foreclose his access to the justice system.
To detain someone without evidence and without trial is contrary to human rights. Threatening to detain people indefinitely without a trial is a serious abuse of human rights and human dignity. Using the threat of detainment on medical grounds to silence a) political opponents, b) those seeking justice for crimes, is a serious structural threat to democracy and the rule of law, respectively.
Making an example of one person so that the spectacle of their pain and suffering acts as a deterrent to others is wrong. The problem here is the strategy will work as a deterrent to anyone from doing whatever you accuse the victim of, whether the victim is guilty or not. It is the demonstration of the power to cause pain, humiliation and dehumanization which is wrong, but punishing innocent individuals to deter others from any opposition is another wrong.
There is an argument that when men claim to be innocent, that only means that they are guilty, but they are too ashamed to admit it. So, these men should suffer more pain and violence. If they admit they were wrong, without believing they were wrong, only to escape the incessant pain and suffering, “that is not unusual or, for that matter, problematic… most people choose to avoid the pain” (p133). The activists are torturing innocent people with physical and sexual violence, and with shame, for things they have not done. In their view, the political end justifies the means.
The genealogy of retributive dehumanization
All this started when everyone had smart phones with cameras, around 2013. The murder of George Floyd sparked a campaign for racial justice because the police brutality was filmed by bystanders. It could not be ignored once it went viral and millions of people were witness to it. Neither would the protest of thousands that quickly followed go ignored. Protests peaked on June the 6th 2020 and by that point they were thought to be the largest movements in the country’s history. Over half a million people protested in nearly 550 places. This was a huge step forward for social justice.
Soon, other racist incidents were caught on camera as people were being called out for racism. Now it was not just male violence. Women were caught appealing to authorities and making false accusations to punish innocent black men. Most famously, a woman called the police when a black man asked her to put her dog on a leash in Central Park. The man filmed her on his mobile as she told the police that she was being attacked in the park by a black man. More videos went viral of other women appealing to an authority (police, manager, building control) to harass innocent black men. This phenomenon gave birth to the ‘the Karen meme’.
Soon, small groups of activists decide not to wait for wrongs to be caught on camera. Rather than wait for that unlikely event, they harass and abuse the target to provoke a reaction. Online harassment had now crossed over to meat space: Gamergate: the Dark Precursor to a Violent Feminism (substack.com) A mobile phone or voice recorder is always on the ready. The reactions can be posted online as the reason why the group started the abuse in the first place, when it is the effect of years of abuse. Thus reversing cause and effect: The metonymy in modern activism - interpocula (substack.com) This tactic may have begun haphazard at first, with people provoking any sort of violent outbursts, but it soon became guided by research and perfected in practice. Research in social psychology revealing how certain groups suffer from stereotypes and cognitive bias are being weaponized. The feminist analysis of psychological, physical, sexual abuses serves as a repertoire of abuses to turn against men: The Feminist Turn from Alienated Object to Retributive Subject (substack.com)Everything took a more sinister turn when social media platforms started to offer people complete anonymity online.
A Genealogy of Structureless Activism - interpocula (substack.com)
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The effects of social media and the myth of structureless networks
The idea that information, wealth, and power would be distributed equally across networks is false. Network science could have told as much. New nodes do not attach themselves randomly to the network, they want to attach themselves to well-connected nodes. So the well-connected make more connections, and the returns of connectedness get concentrated in ever few hands. Unsurprisingly then, the ownership of social media platforms is incredibly concentrated, creating billions for a small number of people in Silicon Valley. Networks have become an incredibly source of inequality and influence.
The idea of a pure communication society has been superseded with polarization and conflict. Algorithms are working to figure out what news the viewer will like and share because that is how Facebook gets advertisers, by showing that people are stuck to the content they go to on Facebook. This creates echo chambers of personalised news feeds, rather than forming an autonomous society of communication. People contend for likes and shares with ever more extreme content. As psychologists have pointed out, the moral emotions that garner most likes and shares- hatred, shame and disgust- act like a call to action. What emerges are small groups who know how to construct a disgusting Other with online content to provoke anger, hate, shame and disgust towards a scape goat. This call to action coincides with instructions on how to practice scripted abuses on the scape goat. This calls members to the hunt, to drug and otherwise harass the totemic creature and chase it out of sacred public spaces around a city. Somehow combining the enthusiasm of totemic cults with the frivolity of Pokomon. Pokémon Go and Social Justice Games: Online Hate Groups and Offline Violence (substack.com)
One of the central roles of activists is to keep people angry and engaged in their campaign. In the case of Gone Girl Feminism, their exploits are only validated to the extent that they are seen as political activists, and not as pathological abusers. Projective identification- is a pathology taking over the political? (part1/2) (substack.com) They know to present the reaction they provoke after months or years of abuse as the prior justification of the abuse. Meanwhile, the multitude that follows their instructions are happy to outsource their moral and political judgement to the network. The Tyranny of Leaderless Activism - interpocula (substack.com) The group chat offers members security in numbers, and allows them to hide their own lack of interest in feminism, post-colonialism and ethics. Are All Swarms Good? - interpocula (substack.com)
The Shame Machine
I recommend reading the shame The Shame Machine by Cathy O’Niell: The Shame Machine - interpocula (substack.com) The first section O’Neil deals with fat-shaming, addiction-shaming, and poverty-shaming and shows how shame is used to create a target market for cruel industries. In the central section, ‘Network Shaming’ she turns to men. Men, it is explained, think they are good and when the world informs them that they are not, they suffer from painful cognitive dissonance. Men say they are innocent because they are ashamed. So, the argument goes, when a man claims he is innocent, he does so because he is guilty of something that causes him shame. Society should cause men who claim to be innocent more pain and humiliation because they have done something that is not just wrong, but shameful. Equally the inverse is true for these activists. If the man admits he was in the wrong only to avoid more pain and suffering, “that is not unusual or, for that matter, problematic… most people choose to avoid the pain” (p133). Shame, in their words, “refers to another dimension of pain”. The activists are happy to torture innocent people with shame for things they have not done. The spectacle of suffering online intimidates and deters everyone from doing what the victim is accused of, whether the victim is guilty of doing what he is accused of or not. The ends justify the means, and after all, “there’s no greater power than shame to bring people in line” (p155). The rest of the book celebrates the campaigns of abuse by Gone Girl Feminists with thinly veiled parallels with the hikikomori in Japan. She thereby trolls the victims of online shaming and offline drugging and sexual assault: The Shame Machine trolls abused of victims - interpocula (substack.com)
The online shaming of the Karen’s in the world was an opportunity for women to reassess their moral superiority in the face of racism and sexism. Women were caught appealing to authorities and making false accusations to have innocent black men punished. It is impossible to acknowledge the subtle forms of institutional racism without also acknowledging that women wield these powers and privileges. Now the racist tropes of vulgar animality are transferred to male toxicity, while the stereotype of women as the innocent victim prevails. I do not believe most group chat members are cynically exploiting these stereotypes. Rather, I think they are being misled by a core radical group that controls the misinformation on the group chat. They know the vanilla feminists and normies will naively believe what they say because they are prey to these stereotypes. They appeal to authorities and the morally outraged multitudes online when they make their false accusations and post the reactions to scripted scenes of harassment online.
interpocula
The name of the Substack comes from a letter written by Nietzsche while in Basil in which he boasts of the friendship with Jacob Burckhardt. Nietzsche came to gain a whole new perspective on the Hellenic from their conversations. At the weekends they would walk 3 miles from Basil to small village in Badan and enjoy some glasses of wine in a local inn frequented by Burckhardt. As well as the glasses (pocula) of wine that passed between them were some of the most significant ideas that Nietzsche would never cease to work over. They learned to trust each other in intimate discussion in relation to the culture wars of their day. To the point that they could share their heretical allegiance of Schopenhauer over the culturally predominant Hegel. To challenge the Hegelian orthodoxy of the German Universities which were the most prestigious in the western world, would be to invite invectives and slander from all sides. Basil was an outpost for a different way of thinking that was, until Nietzsche published the Birth of Tragedy, kept private. Burckhardt chose to keep ‘their philosopher’ and their ‘brotherhood’ a secret interpocula, to avoid suffering the ignominy and abuse in his later years in Basil. Nietzsche would share their Dionysian wisdom with the world, but always remain indebted to those confidences interpocula.
Burckhardt emphasizes our vulnerability and neediness as animals. He warns us of egotism invested in grand narratives. He warns us that a historical force gaining too steep an ascendancy may transcend all bounds. If it dominates all other forces- religion, state, or culture- great destruction will likely attend its ascendence and its consequent downfall. Burckhardt did not believe in moral progress, loathed eschatologies and warned of ideologies that claim to know who will inherit the earth. He reminds us that these ideologies are claims to absolute power, power over others and othering desires. He perhaps knew that the rise of Prussian nationalism and the Hegelian interpretation of world history was ushering an age that would need a heuristic against barbarism, but he did not announce it publicly. For some, like Nietzsche and Benjamine, this was unforgivable.
What is interpocula? - interpocula (substack.com)
Some housekeeping
This Substack aims to raise awareness of the psychological, physical and sexual abuse practised by feminist networks. This is not a criticism of feminism, but a very small group that uses the broad trust and support for the movement for their own hidden ends. The abusive campaign has already lasted 10 years and is ongoing. It is hard to know how to present this on a Substack. I report the interpretation that the activists in Berlin give of themselves, and of the interpretation of women in Berlin of these activists. Admittedly, reports on the actual abuses the carry out, could be part of the abuse. For example, telling the victim in advance what happens when he is drugged, could be a ploy to have him think that such acts are committed while he was asleep or unconscious.
I share the lefty post-structuralist Marxist background with these activists and try to provide the theoretical sources of this development in feminism and activism. The article on Derrida is the only one that might be difficult if you have not studied philosophy: Derrida contra Gone Girl Feminism - interpocula (substack.com) More generally, the concepts I provide from philosophy and psychology are applicable to broader cultural movements, but I use my case to describe how they operate in practice.
