The Lie That Sounds Like Truth: How Power Uses Half-Stories to Control the World

One of the most dangerous forms of misinformation today does not come from ignorance. It comes from articulate, confident individuals who speak fluently while omitting what matters most.

I was reminded of this recently when I saw a YouTube video claiming that Yann LeCun had left Meta. The claim sounded convincing. It was delivered with authority. Even Google’s AI summary echoed it.

And yet, it was false.

After reading LeCun’s own words, the truth was clear: he is founding a startup to continue his long-standing Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) research—focused on world models, physical reality, reasoning, planning, and persistent memory—while remaining affiliated with Meta as Chief AI Scientist.

The correct interpretation was never hidden. It was simply inconvenient.

This episode is a textbook example of how misinformation actually works today:

• not through outright lies,

• but through collapsed context, selective framing, and narrative shortcuts.

AI systems didn’t “hallucinate” in a vacuum. They reproduced a story people wanted to believe.

And that brings me to Elon Musk.

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The Richest Man, the Poorest Truth

Every time I open X, I watch the richest man in the world—who also appears to be the most emotionally bankrupt—spread misinformation with astonishing ease.

Elon Musk presents himself as a champion of truth, free speech, and altruism. But his lawsuit against OpenAI exposes something very different: a systematic pattern of cherry-picking facts to obscure his real objective—total power and control.

This is not speculation. It’s documented.

When Musk claims he wanted OpenAI to remain “essentially a philanthropic endeavor,” he lifts a single phrase from a longer record. What he leaves out is far more revealing.

The full record shows that Musk:

• pushed aggressively to move OpenAI from non-profit to a corporate structure,

• demanded majority equity,

• insisted on full control because he felt “burned” before,

• spoke of accumulating $80 billion,

• and even floated the idea of his children controlling AGI as a matter of succession.

These are not the words of an altruist.
They are the words of someone obsessed with ownership, legacy, and dominance.

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Cherry-Picking as a Power Strategy

What makes Musk particularly dangerous is not just misinformation, but how skillfully it is delivered.

He does not lie in crude ways.
He tells partial truths, framed as moral clarity.

This is far more effective.

By isolating fragments and stripping them of context, Musk creates confusion among people who are already emotionally overwhelmed, politically polarized, and information-saturated. Confusion breeds dependency. Dependency breeds obedience.

This is how power consolidates itself in the modern world—not by censoring truth outright, but by flooding the space with curated half-truths.

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Misinformation Thrives on Emotional Blindness

Why does this work?

Because many people have never learned to sit still with discomfort, uncertainty, or contradiction. They cling to confident narrators who promise clarity without self-examination.

This is exactly how emotionally blind systems operate:

• strong language replaces substance,

• moral posturing replaces accountability,

• certainty replaces inquiry.

People like Yann LeCun—careful, precise, and explicit with language—do not thrive in this ecosystem. Their words are too nuanced. Too honest. Too hard to compress into slogans.

So they get misrepresented.

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AI Didn’t Fail—Humans Did

When Google’s AI summarized LeCun’s move as a “departure,” it did not invent that narrative. It reflected a human bias toward simplification and drama.

AI over-summarization.
Narrative completion bias.
Ignoring primary-source language.

In contrast, LeCun was meticulous. He said exactly what he meant:

• a startup,

• a continuation of AMI research,

• ongoing affiliation with Meta,

• dissatisfaction with LLM-only approaches—nothing new.

The truth was there for anyone willing to read it.

That is the key difference: people who read sources versus people who consume narratives.

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Power Is Afraid of Clarity

Musk’s conflict with OpenAI is not about truth.
It is not about safety.
And it is certainly not about altruism.

It is about control.

The moment you restore full sentences, full records, and full context, the illusion collapses. That is why selective quoting is essential to power. That is why noise, outrage, and division are cultivated.

Truth does not need to shout.
It only needs to be complete.

And completeness is precisely what authoritarian personalities cannot tolerate—because it exposes them.

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Final Thought

This moment in history is not defined by AI intelligence.
It is defined by human emotional maturity—or the lack of it.

Those who cannot face their own inner chaos will always seek external control.
Those who cannot tolerate uncertainty will follow the loudest voice.
Those who confuse confidence with truth will be easy to manipulate.

Reading primary sources is no longer optional.
It is an act of resistance.

Truth does not belong to the most powerful.
It belongs to those who are willing to look—without shortcuts, without idols, and without fear.

Stalkers by Proxy: When Unhealed Childhoods Go Looking for a Victim

Stalking does not always look like repeated phone calls, following someone in the street, or unwanted messages. When direct access is blocked, stalkers often escalate rather than stop. They simply change tactics.

This is called stalking by proxy.

Instead of contacting their target directly, the stalker uses other people—friends, family members, co-workers, neighbors, service providers, institutions—to gather information, regain access, spread fear, and reassert control. The target becomes surrounded, not by the stalker alone, but by a network unwittingly pulled into the stalker’s compulsion.

This is not a coincidence. It is reenactment.

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When Boundaries Trigger Escalation

On Christmas Day, I was hoovered by someone who has no role in my life. I ignored it. I did not reply. That boundary should have ended the story.

Instead, the stalking escalated.

Because this person could not reach me directly, she went to my older brother, who will be 84 next month, and lives in assisted living in Portugal. She showed up unannounced. He only realized who she was near the end of the visit.

This man is one of the few people in Portugal who still has contact with me.

That is not accidental.

She wants to convince me of something she believes is “true.” But if something is true, persuasion is unnecessary. Truth does not need coercion. The need to convince is the giveaway: this is not about truth—it is about control.

If she were secure in her certainty, my doubts would be irrelevant. Instead, my autonomy triggers her fears. And fears, in unhealed people, turn into pursuit.

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Stalking Is a Childhood Language

Stalkers are not acting freely. They are speaking the only emotional language they know.

Stalking is not primarily about desire or love. It is about unfinished childhood terror, replayed compulsively with a new cast of characters who have nothing to do with the original trauma.

I know this pattern intimately.

As a young girl, I was stalked by my older sisters—emotionally monitored, intruded upon, controlled, watched, and punished for autonomy. Now, the daughter of one of those sisters is stalking me in the same way her mother stalked her.

This is repetition compulsion in its purest form.

If I had not left Portugal, I would now be stalked by my younger family members as well. I am alive, free, and safe today because there is an ocean and a continent between us.

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Proxy Stalking: How It Works

When direct access is denied, stalkers typically use the following methods:

Information Gathering

• Manipulating family or friends

• Contacting caregivers, service providers, or institutions

• Fishing for updates under false pretenses

Indirect Communication

• Sending messages through others

• Creating “concern” narratives to bypass boundaries

Enlisting Others

• Recruiting friends, relatives, or colleagues to pressure the target

• Turning third parties into messengers or monitors

False Accusations

• Smear campaigns to undermine credibility

• Framing the target as unstable, dangerous, or dishonest

Technology Abuse

• Fake accounts

• Three-way calls to mask numbers

• Surveillance disguised as “care.”

These are not misunderstandings. They are strategies of control.

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From Family to the State: Stalking on a Mass Scale

This dynamic does not stop at the personal level.

We are now watching it unfold at scale—most visibly through institutions like ICE, which stalks human beings across communities, workplaces, and even citizenship records.

Only people who were stalked, controlled, monitored, and terrorized in childhood are psychologically available to join systems whose function is stalking others.

This is not political rhetoric. It is developmental psychology.

People who were denied access to their own feelings early in life adapt by obeying power instead of questioning it. They do not experience the moral conflict that would stop someone else.

Alice Miller explained this mechanism with brutal clarity:

“If the child learns to view corporal punishment as a ‘necessary measure’ against ‘wrongdoers,’ then as an adult he will not hesitate to cooperate with the penal system… In a totalitarian state, which is a mirror of his upbringing, this citizen can also carry out any form of torture or persecution without having a guilty conscience.”

When feelings are eliminated, obedience fills the vacuum.

Such people do not lose autonomy—they never had it. Their values switch easily, depending on who holds authority. What is called “duty” replaces conscience. Morality becomes a prosthesis.

As Miller wrote:

“Blood does not flow in artificial limbs; they are for sale and can serve many masters.”

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Education and Status Do Not Break the Compulsion

There is a dangerous myth that intelligence, education, or professional success protects against violence.

They do not.

Recently, a vascular surgeon stalked his ex-wife after she remarried. He murdered her and her new husband. Prosperity did not save him. Status did not save him. A medical degree did not save him.

Repetition compulsion is indifferent to résumés.

This is proof, once again, that unexamined childhood trauma is more powerful than reason.

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Why Stalkers Do Not Heal

This entire pattern could stop—if the stalker were capable of self-reflection.

Healing would require:

• Recognizing the reenactment

• Feeling the terror, rage, and helplessness within the context of their own childhood

• Placing those emotions where they belong: in the past

But stalking exists precisely because this internal work has been refused.

So the emotions are exported.
The control is externalized.
The victim is recruited.

And the cycle continues.

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If You Are Being Stalked (or Supporting Someone Who Is)

Do not minimize it. Do not explain it away. Do not negotiate.

Tell everyone
Make the behavior visible. Stalkers rely on secrecy and confusion.

Document everything
Logs, screenshots, dates, witnesses. Facts protect you when narratives are weaponized.

Create a safety plan
This includes digital security, routine changes, and code words with trusted people.

Trust your instincts
Stalking is dangerous. If something feels wrong, it is.

Report when necessary
Not because systems always protect—but because records matter.

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The Uncomfortable Truth

Stalkers are not monsters. They are children in adult bodies who never developed into mature conscious adults.

But their pain does not excuse the damage they cause.

Those who have found their authentic selves have a different burden. They can feel. They can see. And because of that, they cannot comply with demands their whole being rejects.

As Alice Miller wrote:

“When they sense that something is being demanded of them to which their whole being says no, they cannot do it. They simply cannot.”

That refusal is not cruelty.

It's staying true to ourselves.

I Am Nobody’s Girl: On Identity, Power, and the Cost of Blind Loyalty

When I saw a young woman proudly calling herself “Trump Girl,” I didn’t feel anger. I felt sadness.

Not because she is young or wrong, but because she has fused her identity with power. She is not standing with someone; she is standing inside someone else’s shadow. And history shows that when young people turn themselves into extensions of authority, they lose access to their own perception.

It reminded me of my younger self—terrified, shaking, but clear. Clear enough to say no.

I once worked in an environment ruled by corrupt, nasty men—men who later went to jail for racketeering and extortion. At the time, I didn’t know that when I pleaded my case to Bob, the general managers were listening from the next room.

The older one burst into the office, got in my face, and spat:
“You are a Cheetah girl first, and you can only work here on Sundays.”

I answered him:
“I am not a Cheetah girl. I am not a Bourbon girl. I am nobody’s girl. If I can’t work here, I’m not working for you at all.”

I walked out to my car, trembling inside—but intact.

That moment lives at the heart of A Dance to Freedom. It is the difference between fear that silences and fear that tells the truth anyway.

What “Trump Girl” Represents

When a young woman calls herself “Trump Girl,” she is not expressing independence. She is surrendering it. She is borrowing certainty from someone else’s aggression.

This is not new. Power has always recruited youth by offering:

• Belonging instead of thinking

• Certainty instead of complexity

• A strong man instead of a conscience

In exchange, it asks for loyalty—not to truth, but to narrative.

That is why disagreement feels like treason, and why defending sovereignty gets twisted into “defending criminals.” Thinking becomes dangerous. Feeling becomes optional.

“A Country of Laws”—Until It Isn’t

Recently, a 37-year-old American citizen, a white woman, a mother of three, was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis after dropping her six-year-old child at school.

This is not abstraction. This is not “border chaos.” This is a dead woman. Children without a mother.

And it brings back something an old co-writer once told me during heated debates:
“America is a country of laws.”

I wonder what rationalizations he will manufacture now.

Because when loyalty to power replaces allegiance to law, people always invent explanations. They have to. The alternative—to admit they empowered lawlessness—is too painful.

Internal Freedom vs. External Force

This is why I have been insisting, again and again, that true liberation must come from within.

Maduro, whether one liked him or not, was a Venezuelan problem for Venezuelans to solve. Just as Trump is our problem to confront as Americans. Outsourcing justice to external force is how sovereignty dies—quietly, with applause.

The only exception in history is collective defense against aggression, as when nations united to stop Hitler. Venezuela did not attack the U.S. Greenland did not attack the U.S. Minneapolis was not a battlefield.

Calling everything “security” does not make it lawful.

The Human Cost of Sleeping Through Power

Being “woke” is mocked now, but being awake has always been dangerous to those who want obedience. What they really mean by “woke” is refusing to sleepwalk into submission.

The young woman calling herself “Trump Girl” is not evil. She is asleep inside someone else’s story. One day, reality may wake her up—often harshly.

I hope she survives that moment.

As for me, I learned long ago that fear does not excuse surrender. Even trembling, even alone, it is still possible to say:

I am nobody’s girl.

And no country, no technology mogul, no strongman gets to own my mind, my voice, or my conscience.

When Power Feels Entitled: From Venezuela to Greenland, the Same Old Story

What we are witnessing now is not chaos. It is consistency.

After the violent removal of Venezuela’s president under the familiar banners of “justice,” “security,” and “narco-terrorism,” the mask slipped almost immediately. Within hours, attention shifted elsewhere. This time, north—to Greenland.

Maps draped in U.S. flags. The word “SOON.”
A president declaring, “We do need Greenland, absolutely.”
Refusing to rule out military force. Minimizing an entire people as “a very small amount of people” who will be “taken care of.”

If this feels unsettling, it should. Not because it is unprecedented—but because it is painfully familiar.

Entitlement Is Not Strength

This behavior follows the logic of narcissistic power, not leadership.

If someone has something Trump wants—oil, minerals, strategic territory—he treats that desire as entitlement. Want becomes need. Need becomes justification. Resistance becomes hostility.

This is not diplomacy. It is predation with a press release.

Greenland’s strategic location and mineral wealth are the real issues. NATO agreements already exist. Denmark has increased defense spending. The U.S. already has military access. Security is not threatened.

What is threatened is access without limits.

“We’ll Take Care of Them”

That sentence alone tells the whole story.

Whenever powerful men speak this way—about nations, communities, or populations—they are revealing the same worldview:
You are small. I am necessary. You exist to be managed.

History has never rewarded populations who believed those promises.

Venezuela was framed as a criminal threat that needed neutralizing. Greenland is framed as a “necessity” for global security. Different costumes. Same script.

Why Allies Are Alarmed—and Why They Should Be

Denmark’s intelligence services now openly labeling the U.S. a security risk marks a historic rupture. This is not ideological drama; it is a response to observable behavior.

When a country demonstrates that it is willing to remove foreign leaders by force, seize assets, and speak casually about annexation, allies stop assuming restraint.

Threats, even “symbolic” ones, are never neutral. They are a form of pressure meant to normalize the unacceptable.

The Repetition Compulsion of Power

Human beings who have never faced their own inner limits do not respect external ones.

This is not a psychological metaphor; it is a political reality. Unprocessed entitlement reenacts itself on a larger and larger stage. What begins as bullying becomes policy. What begins as ego becomes empire.

Humanity, in 2025, should indeed be more enlightened than to elect men who confuse domination with leadership—especially in a country with global military reach.

And yet here we are.

Why Personal Lines Matter

This is also why some disagreements are not “just politics.”

After working with me on A Dance to Freedom, voting for Trump is not a neutral difference of opinion. It signals a refusal to see power clearly or to feel its consequences for others. Emotional blindness does not vanish when the subject becomes geopolitical—it scales.

Not meeting for coffee was not punishment. It was alignment with reality.

Final Thought

Greenland’s prime minister said it plainly: “Our country is not for sale.”
Neither was Venezuela. Neither is any nation.

Borders, sovereignty, and human dignity are not inconveniences to be brushed aside when powerful men feel hungry for more.

What connects Venezuela and Greenland is not geography.
It is a mindset that believes strength means taking, and restraint is weakness.

History shows where that mindset leads.
The question is not whether Trump will keep pushing.
It is how long humanity will keep mistaking force for leadership—before the cost becomes impossible to deny.

Author’s Note:

This essay continues the reflection begun in “The Narcoterrorism Illusion: Why the U.S. Needs Venezuela to Be the Enemy” and “After the Applause Fades: Why External ‘Liberation’ Is Just Another Trap.” Together, these posts examine how moral narratives are used to justify force, how relief is mistaken for freedom, and how entitlement-driven power repeats itself—from Venezuela to Greenland—under different pretexts but with the same underlying logic.

This essay was written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) as a tool for reflection, synthesis, and articulation. The responsibility for the ideas and interpretations expressed here remains my own.

After the Applause Fades: Why External “Liberation” Is Just Another Trap

In the immediate aftermath of Nicolás Maduro’s removal, I am seeing something painfully familiar: relief mistaken for clarity.

Some Venezuelans are celebrating. I understand why. Years of hardship, repression, shortages, and despair create a hunger for anything that looks like change. When suffering becomes unbearable, even a foreign bomb can look like hope.

But relief is not liberation. And Trump is not a savior.

He has already told us what he wants.

When a U.S. president openly says he expects America to be “very strongly involved” in another country’s oil industry after a military intervention, there is nothing left to interpret. That is not altruism. That is acquisition. That is exploitation, spoken without shame.

The Dangerous Illusion of External Rescue

History offers no shortage of warnings, yet humanity keeps repeating the same mistake: mistaking power for benevolence.

When an external force removes a leader for you, it does not restore your sovereignty—it confiscates it. The language may change (“justice,” “democracy,” “stability”), but the structure is always the same. Decisions move outward. Control moves upward. Resources move away.

People celebrate in the streets, unaware that the invoice has already been written.

The question is not whether Maduro was corrupt, authoritarian, or destructive. The question is who has the right to decide, and who pays the price afterward.

That decision belonged to Venezuelans. Period.

Why Change Cannot Be Imported

Real change is not something a nation can outsource. It is slow, painful, internal work. It requires reckoning, organization, responsibility, and—most importantly—ownership.

When change is imposed from outside, that process never happens.

The structures that produced the original suffering remain intact. The population never gets the chance to understand how power works inside their own society. Instead, power simply changes hands—from a domestic oppressor to a foreign one, often more sophisticated and far less accountable.

This is why externally engineered “liberation” so often collapses into chaos, dependency, or long-term instability. It is not a failure of the people. It is the predictable outcome of bypassing truth.

The Emotional Trap: Relief as Manipulation

Relief is one of the most exploitable emotional states. It silences critical thinking. It creates gratitude where caution is needed. It makes populations vulnerable to manipulation.

Those celebrating Maduro’s fall today may later realize—too late—that Trump did not remove a dictator to free Venezuela. He removed an obstacle.

And obstacles, once removed, are rarely replaced with dignity.

A Pattern Too Old to Ignore

This is not new. It is the same pattern the U.S. has repeated across Latin America, the Middle East, and beyond:

• Demonize a leader

• Moralize the intervention

• Use law and media to justify force

• Secure strategic resources

• Leave behind a fractured society

The names change. The language adapts. The outcome rarely does.

What makes this moment especially dangerous is not just the violence, but the normalization. The absence of pretense. The casual tone with which sovereignty is dismissed. The public admission that oil interests are central.

This is imperialism without embarrassment.

Final Thought

If Venezuela is to heal—truly heal—it will not be through American bombs, Trump’s ego, or corporate contracts.

It will come, if it comes at all, from Venezuelans reclaiming agency, truth, and responsibility for their own future. That process cannot be rushed, bought, or imposed.

Any “freedom” delivered by force from the outside is temporary.
Any “change” that bypasses truth is fragile.
And any leader who arrives as a rescuer with an eye on your resources is not there for you.

The applause will fade.
The consequences will remain.

Author’s Note:
This essay is a direct continuation of “The Narcoterrorism Illusion: Why the U.S. Needs Venezuela to Be the Enemy.” Readers arriving here first may wish to read that earlier post, which examines how the language of “narco-terrorism” is used to manufacture moral consent for intervention. Together, the two pieces expose the same pattern from different angles: how enemies are constructed, how relief is manipulated, and how external “liberation” often masks resource extraction and loss of sovereignty.

This essay was written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) as a tool for reflection, synthesis, and articulation. The responsibility for the ideas and interpretations expressed here remains my own.

It Is Safe to Defend Women Who Are Dead

After publishing my book A Dance to Freedom, I learned something that no theory alone can teach.

It is safe to defend women who lived long ago.
It is dangerous to defend women who are alive.

This is the real, lived version of the Matilda Effect.

Not the one neatly summarized in academic articles, but the one that plays out quietly in workplaces, communities, and social hierarchies—where courage has consequences and silence is rewarded.

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The Comfort of Defending the Past

A resident in the community where I once worked published a novel titled Shakespeare’s Conspirator, centered on a woman named Amelia, whom he argues may have authored many of Shakespeare’s works. It is a well-written and interesting book. Her story deserves to be told. Women erased from history deserve to be named.

But this is the part that matters:

Telling her story cost him nothing.

It earned him admiration.
It was intellectually safe.
It carried no personal risk.

Defending a woman who lived centuries ago does not threaten present power structures. It does not provoke retaliation. It does not invite isolation or punishment.

Standing up for a woman who is alive does.

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What Silence Looks Like When You’re Inside the Storm

When I published my book, I was not met with debate or disagreement.

I was met with something else.

I was emotionally harassed for months. Targeted. Pressured. Provoked. The goal was clear: destabilize me emotionally so I could be framed as “mentally unstable” and my work discredited. Put the little woman back in her place.

Others saw this happening.

They did not speak.

Not because they didn’t understand.
Not because they didn’t see injustice.
But because they calculated risk.

One resident—who happened to be a woman—helped me get another job and offered real support. For that, she was targeted too. Her life was made difficult as punishment. Solidarity was treated as betrayal.

That is how systems enforce obedience:
not only by attacking the truth-teller, but by punishing anyone who dares to help.

The author of Shakespeare’s Conspirator stayed silent. Not because he approved of what was happening, but because he was afraid. Afraid of being next. Afraid of losing his standing. Afraid of being targeted.

I understand fear.

But silence is never neutral.

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Intellectual Admiration Is Not the Same as Moral Courage

This is a distinction that matters deeply to me.

It is one thing to admire women rebels in history—women who challenged the status quo, broke molds, and paid the price. It is another thing entirely to stand next to a living woman while she is paying that price.

The first requires taste.
The second requires courage.

We live in a culture that rewards posthumous bravery and punishes present-day dissent. Truth is applauded once it is no longer dangerous. While it is alive, it is inconvenient—and often attacked.

This is why so many people praise women like Amelia today while remaining silent when living women speak truths that threaten comfort, hierarchy, or control.

 The pattern is old. The faces change.

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What Would Have Made the Difference

I did not need praise.
I did not need agreement.
I did not need rescuing.

I needed witnesses.

People willing to say: This is wrong.
People willing to absorb a little risk instead of none.
People willing to stand visibly, not silently.

That is the difference between intellectual ethics and lived ethics.

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Why I Keep Writing About This

Some might read this and say I am bitter.

I am not.

I am clear.

Clarity comes after illusion breaks. After you see how often fear—not ignorance—keeps injustice in place.

Women who speak while alive pay the price.
Women who are silent are forgotten.
Women who are dead are celebrated.

I was alive. I spoke. And I paid the price.

That does not make me exceptional.
It makes the pattern visible.

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The Real Question the Matilda Effect Asks

The Matilda Effect is not only about credit or recognition.

It asks a harder question:

Who are you willing to stand with when it costs you something?

History is full of brave admirers.
It is poor in contemporaneous allies.

I am still here.
Still writing.
Still seeing clearly.

And I will keep naming what silence tries to erase—because truth does not only belong to the past. It belongs to the present, whether people have the courage to face it or not.

What happened to me is not separate from what happened to Alice Miller—it is the same pattern, expressed in a smaller arena.  Men took from her work, reframed it, corrected her, and demanded from her a perfection they never required of themselves—an unmistakable example of the Matilda Effect in action. The same logic applies here: it is safer to praise wounded women once they are distant, historical, or dead than to defend them while they are present, vulnerable, and threatening to the status quo. The Matilda Effect is not just about lost credit; it is about the cost of telling the truth as a woman in real time. Alice Miller paid that cost. I paid it too. And until society learns to stand with living truth-tellers instead of posthumously admiring them, the pattern will continue—quietly, predictably, and devastatingly.

This essay was written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) as a tool for reflection, synthesis, and articulation. The responsibility for the ideas and interpretations expressed here remains my own.

A Night That Should Have Been Joy — and Became Catastrophe

The reports coming out of Crans-Montana are devastating.

A New Year’s Eve celebration in a Swiss ski resort basement bar ended in a rapid, deadly fire that killed dozens and injured many more—many of them young. Survivors describe panic, smoke, screams, bodies crushed near a single narrow staircase. Investigators now say the space may have been “a disaster waiting to happen.”

A basement venue.
One exit.
Highly flammable materials.
Crowds.
Alcohol.
Fire used as spectacle.

These are not unknown risks.

According to witnesses, sparklers placed in champagne bottles ignited ceiling material, triggering a flashover—one of the most dangerous fire phenomena in enclosed spaces, where flames spread explosively across all flammable surfaces almost at once. In such conditions, escape windows collapse within seconds. What follows is not choice, but instinct, fear, and deadly crowd dynamics.

This was not an unforeseeable tragedy.
It was a preventable one.

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Holding Grief Without Turning Away

First and foremost, my thoughts are with the victims and their families.

Nothing written here can soften their loss.
Nothing can justify what happened.
This is not the moment for outrage-as-entertainment or moral posturing.

People went out to celebrate the New Year.
They trusted a space to be safe.
Many never made it home.

That deserves silence, respect, and restraint.

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Responsibility Is Not the Same as Blame

Authorities will investigate whether safety regulations were violated, whether permits allowed the use of sparklers, whether materials met fire standards, whether the space should ever have been used as a crowded nightclub.

That process matters.

But something deeper also deserves reflection—without accusation, without hatred.

We live in a world that normalizes danger when it is wrapped in spectacle.

Fire is one of humanity’s oldest symbols of celebration.
It is also one of the most lethal forces when mixed with crowds, alcohol, and enclosed spaces.

Theatrical effects sell experiences.
Experiences sell tickets.
And risk quietly gets reframed as “atmosphere.”

Until it isn’t.

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What These Tragedies Strip Away

Events like this tear through our comfortable narratives.

That life is mostly safe.
That systems will protect us.
That joy is harmless.
That nothing truly terrible will happen here.

But reality does not negotiate with illusion.

What happened in Crans-Montana is part of a long, grim list: clubs, factories, theaters, boats, religious gatherings—spaces where known risks were tolerated until they converged catastrophically.

It forces a painful but necessary question:

What does it mean to create environments, lives, and celebrations without fully reckoning with vulnerability?

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Why I Chose Not to Have Children

I did not choose to be born.

Like all of us, I was brought into a world filled with beauty and brutality, care and cruelty, tenderness and terrifying indifference. I spent much of my life disentangling myself from illusions—about family, safety, authority, and meaning.

I chose not to bring children into this world.

Not out of bitterness.
Not out of despair.
But out of realism and responsibility.

I believe that creating life without a clear-eyed awareness of suffering is not automatically virtuous. I believe that consciousness is a responsibility, not a slogan. And I believe that once alive, what matters most is how honestly we live, not how loudly we celebrate existence.

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Living Consciously in an Unstable World

I am here now.

And because I am here, I choose to live consciously:

• to see reality as it is, not as I wish it were

• to speak truth without cruelty

• to refuse romanticized suffering

• to value responsibility over fantasy

That is how I try to make my life count.

Tragedies like this reinforce why consciousness matters—not just psychologically, but materially. Because denial does not only damages inner lives. It kills bodies.

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Let This Not Be Reduced to Spectacle

The people who died and the injured whose lives are changed forever in Crans-Montana are not symbols.
They are not statistics.
They are not fodder for outrage cycles.

They were human beings who trusted a space, a moment, a celebration.

If anything meaningful is to come from this, it should be a renewed respect for limits, safety, responsibility, and humility in the face of forces we do not control.

Joy should never require blindness.
Celebration should never require denial.
And life, when taken seriously, deserves far more care than we usually give it.

This essay was written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) as a tool for reflection, synthesis, and articulation. The responsibility for the ideas and interpretations expressed here remains my own.