strypey

In the late 1990s, like a lot young and idealistic anarchist geeks, I was inspired by EFF founder John Perry Barlow declaring independence for the internet ("cyberspace", as some people were still calling it). I was fascinated by the potential of the net for democratically coordinating action among global citizens. These were the days of the "anti-globalization movement" (a meaningless buzzphrase coined by corporate media, see footnote). A series of huge, distributed protests, coordinated on a global scale, through online networks like People's Global Action. I joined and created a lot of email lists, and I saw a lot of this happening in real time.

It was on one of these email lists that I first encountered Rob Gilchrist. I didn't get on with him at first. Like many activists (well.. real activists... but we'll get to that), he could be abrasive to deal with online.

After I moved back to Ōtautahi at the end of 2000 I ended up meeting him in person. He was already involved in a few of the groups that pooled resources to create the InterActive activist centre, which we set up in 2001. At the time, a network of local groups was communicating on yet another email list about setting up Aotearoa Indymedia. I was part of the Ōtautahi Indymedia group, which helped find a space to rent for InterActive, organise a network connection, and source computers, inspired by examples like the original Independent Media Centre in Seattle. This pushed me into regular contact with Gilchrist, and I still remember him insisting I install PGP email encryption on the InterActive computers, and claiming to have found a "bug" (listening device) in the building.

I was suspicious of Gilchrist from day one. To this day, I couldn't tell you exactly why. Something just... smelled wrong about him and his origin story. I was so suspicious of him I contacted a few geeks friends, who I'd seen at public meetings against state surveillance, asking if they had any idea how to check his background without tipping him off, or his handlers.

But I was young and green, and my understanding of the ins and outs of anti-activist spying was pretty limited. I presumed that anyone spying on us would hang around a few weeks, a few months at most, whether they were informants for the cops, corporate-funded contractors (like Thompson & Clark), or more sinister alphabet agencies. By then, I figured, either we'd get wise to their game, or they'd finish their operation and vanish. My spidey-senses never stopped tingling when I had anything to do with Gilchrist, but when he was still around a couple of years later, I started to rationalise it away.

As a result of both my own activism, and my role as a roving reporter and ambassador for the Aotearoa Indymedia website, I spent the next few years going to all kinds of protests, picket lines, occupations, public meetings, conferences, and camps, all around Aotearoa. Gilchrist turned up at a surprising number of them. Often doing what seemed like really useful work.

I never fully trusted Gilchrist. But I freely admit to developing a grudging respect for his commitment, and asking myself some hard questions about the possible sources of my distrust. After all, I thought, paranoia is an occupational hazard for any long-term activist. Got to keep in check. After he gained the trust of a number of the older activists I respected, it started to seem crazy to think he was a spy, spidey-senses be damned.

How wrong those rationalisations were. Because my intuition, as it turned out, was right on the money.

In December of 2008, just a couple of months after the Operation 8 raids that unleashed shocked and awe on activist communities around the country, investigative journalist Nicky Hager exposed Gilchrist's real game in the Sunday Star Times newspaper. Hager's article revealed that for about a decade, the cops had been paying him $600 a week (on top of his social welfare benefit) as an informant. A comfortable salary at a time when benefits were about $2-300 a week.

There were a number of lessons in this experience for me. But the most important one was to trust my intuition. Because when I screen out any jumping at shadows that's coming from anxiety - and if I pay attention I can tell the difference - my intuition is always right. I don't know how this works, but it does.

I've read theories about deep pattern-matching abilities, which lurk beneath the rationalising surface of the mind, but who knows. My experience has consistently been that when I let my rationalisations shout down my spidey-senses, it always blinds me to an important truth.

For the last 15 years or so, I've walked a tightrope strung between the twin poles of tinfoil-hat paranoia and rose-tinted naivety. It's possible to over-correct in both directions. As Chomsky once pointed out, just because there are lots of crazy ideas out there labeled "conspiracy theories", that doesn't mean there are no real conspiracies. On the contrary, he says, history is full of them. The trick to staying out of the conspiracy rabbitholes people can tend to go down, I reckon, comes down to two things.

Firstly, I try to be clear about what I *know*, and how. Keep my focus on that. Speculation is useful to a limited degree, if it helps me come up with ways to test possibilities, and gain more useful information. But if I spend too much time speculating, and not enough time testing and discarding, the fantasy world of the speculation can take on a life of its own. As the Wizard of New Zealand used to say, "never believe your own bullshit".

Secondly, along similar lines, I'm very careful not to get lost in the things my spidey-senses are tingling about. Which ironically, seems to get easier the more I *listen* to them, and trust what my intuition is trying to tell me. It's important to unplug and go for a walk, hang out with friends, watch a funny movie, listen to music, juggle, sing, confuse the cat with silly dancing, anything fun that distracts me from the paranoia-inducing stuff I'm probing, and helps me to put it in perspective.

Can I prove any of this story about my personal history with Gilchrist? Can I prove I was suspicious of him from the start? Can I even prove I'm the same Strypey that spent years reporting for Indymedia? Don't know. Probably not, unless there's a Web of Trust that connects you, dear reader, to someone who knew me back then. You can choose to believe me, or assume I'm a raving nutter. That's entirely your business.

But although I can't prove I didn't read about it in the newspaper, or find it online, I can direct you to a range of sources that confirm the Gilchrist story. Turns out there's a few Rob Gilchrist's in the world. Or at least, people with names similar enough to his to come up when you web search it. For your convenience, dear reader, I've spent a bit of time sorting the wheat from the chaff.

In order of publication, here is everything a quick web search turned up on the subject of paid police informant Rob Gilchrist. Both corporate media articles and op eds, and blog pieces from a range of political alignments. It's notable that this is a rare case where activists, journalists, and bloggers - on both left and right - mostly agree with each other. That it's gross and unethical for the cops to be paying a guy a salary to spy on and sleep with activists.

Many of these links date back to a time when news and blog sites still had their own comment sections. Rather than outsourcing that to the datafarms, probably the first of their many mistakes that helped the datafarms eat their business.

Anyway, when you skim a few of these comment threads, it's also notable that many of the shorter comments are spouting the same handful of talking points. I presume this is because they're either being posted by sockpuppets doing PR arse-covering, or Useful Idiots echoing those sockpuppets when the talking points fit their biases.

Note, to create equal opportunities confusion for both local *and* overseas readers, when it comes to dates, I've used the ISO 8601 format that pretty much nobody else uses (year-month-day).

2008-12-14 - Crossing the line: the activist who turned police informer
https://web.archive.org/web/20090531212020/http://www.nickyhager.info/crossing-the-line-the-activist-who-turned-police-informer/

2008-12-14 - The activist who turned police informer
https://web.archive.org/web/20081217031940/http://www.stuff.co.nz/sundaystartimes/4792177a6619.html

2008-12-14 - Who the police were spying on
https://web.archive.org/web/20081217042627/http://www.stuff.co.nz/sundaystartimes/4792188a6619.html

2008-12-14 - How Gilchrist was found out
https://web.archive.org/web/20081216020616/http://www.stuff.co.nz/sundaystartimes/4792178a6005.html

2008-12-14 - Anti-terror squad spies on protest groups
https://web.archive.org/web/20081214131056/https://www.stuff.co.nz/4792627a11.html

2008-12-14 - Chief of police called in over spies
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/chief-of-police-called-in-over-spies/B4KJMTY7HSGGIDVQS5DE4EEJ7U/

2008-12-14 - Sunday Star Times
https://thestandard.org.nz/sunday-star-times/

2008-12-14 - Police state
https://norightturn.blogspot.com/2008/12/police-state.html

2008-12-14 Rob Gilchrist : Police Informant
https://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=1551

2008-12-14 - The SST Police spying story
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2008/12/the_sst_police_spying_story.html

2008-12-14 - How Gilchrist was found out
https://web.archive.org/web/20081216120311/http://indymedia.org.nz/newswire/display/76507/index.php

2008-12-14 - Police anti-terror squad spies on protest groups
https://web.archive.org/web/20090127054440/http://indymedia.org.nz/newswire/display/76508/index.php

2008-12-14 - Rob Gilchrist: I'm a Police Information (video clipped from TV3 news)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPTtG9x1hlo

2008-12-15 - Loose lips sink ships…
https://newmasses.wordpress.com/2008/12/15/loose-lips-sink-ships/

2008-12-15 - State snooping on activists
https://fightback.org.nz/2008/12/15/civil-rights-fast-disappearing/

2008-12-15 - Is the NZ left naive or paranoid?
https://liberation.typepad.com/liberation/2008/12/is-the-nz-left-naive-or-paranoid.html

2008-12-16 - Gordon Campbell On The Transition Package, And Paid Police Spies Within Protest Groups
https://web.archive.org/web/20090202062628/http://gordoncampbell.scoop.co.nz/gordon-campbell-on-the-transition-package-and-paid-police-spies-within-protest-groups/

2008-12-16 - Police using spies and lies to make case
https://web.archive.org/web/20081216120315/http://indymedia.org.nz/newswire/display/76514/index.php

2008-12-16 - Special Intelligence Group targetting political dissidents.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100514224310/http://indymedia.org.nz/article/76343/special-intelligence-group-targetting-po

2008-12-16 - Unsubstantiated accusations
https://web.archive.org/web/20100514083018/http://indymedia.org.nz/article/76345/unsubstantiated-accusations

2008-12-16 - The limits to tolerance of the police
https://thestandard.org.nz/the-limits-to-tolerance-of-the-police/

2008-12-16 - Capitalist state just doing its job
https://web.archive.org/web/20081228113024/https://workersparty.org.nz/2008/12/16/capitalist-state-just-doing-its-job/

2008-12-16 - Rochelle hits back
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2008/12/rochelle_hits_back.html

2008-12-17 - Rob Gilchrist - police informant for 'anti-terror' unit
https://web.archive.org/web/20081220142203/http://indymedia.org.nz/feature/display/72017/index.php

2008-12-17 - Who else are they spying on?
https://thestandard.org.nz/who-else-are-they-spying-on/

2008-12-17 - The Murky World of Rob Gilchrist
https://web.archive.org/web/20111124055808/https://nzagainstthecurrent.blogspot.com/2008/12/murky-world-of-rob-gilchrist.html

2008-12-17 - Greens say spy passed information to police on anti-Taser protest
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/greens-say-spy-passed-information-to-police-on-anti-taser-protest/QZH7FI7HGSP7C5ZVPVHXYE74V4/

2008-12-17 - Garth George: Greens' criticism of covert police surveillance a fair cop (doesn't mention Gilchrist by name but is a response to the preceding article)
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/igarth-georgei-greens-criticism-of-covert-police-surveillance-a-fair-cop/Z4I7NQNPYFYSWW2C6CAJKVIQEY/

2008-12-18 - Strange Bedfellows
https://web.archive.org/web/20090113224854/https://blog.greens.org.nz/2008/12/18/strange-bedfellows/

2008-12-18 - Police spied on unions
https://norightturn.blogspot.com/2008/12/police-spied-on-unions.html

2008-12-18 - The Gilchrist case gets murkier
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2008/12/the_gilchrist_case_gets_murkier.html

2008-12-18 - https://ludditejourno.wordpress.com/2008/12/18/police-and-terrorism/
Aotearoa – the most terrorist dense population in the world

2008-12-19 - State Of It: Police SIG Unit Wasted On Tag-Busting
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0812/S00364.htm

2008-12-19 - Mark Eden-Should The Police Be Monitoring This Man? (a rare exception, this blogger supports the spying, but check out the comments...)
https://web.archive.org/web/20110101143750/http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2008/12/mark-eden-should-police-be-monitoring.html

2008-12-20 - 'Nice little memento' for police spy
https://web.archive.org/web/20121107005757/http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10549050

2008-12-20 - Bill Ralston: No spying line a cop-out
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/ibill-ralstoni-no-spying-line-a-cop-out/PR7LGCGPVTHF4EOSO55MOGCLSE/

2008-12-20 - Matt McCarten: Spying on lawful organisations should set alarm bells ringing
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/imatt-mccarteni-spying-on-lawful-organisations-should-set-alarm-bells-ringing/M3U53JZ5KSSX6RMREKQZCPHSWM/

2008-12-21 - Activist to take police to court over informant
https://web.archive.org/web/20100518073112/http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/770658

2008-12-21 - Pepper sprayed activist to take police to court over provocateur
https://web.archive.org/web/20110610141333/http://indymedia.org.nz/article/76380/pepper-sprayed-activist-take-police-cour

2008-12-21 - Rob Gilchrist sent naked photos of teenage activist to police
https://web.archive.org/web/20090122211120/http://indymedia.org.nz/newswire/display/76545/index.php

2008-12-21 - The Gilchrist saga gets yucky
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2008/12/the_gilchrist_saga_gets_yucky.html

2008-12-21 - It’s not often that I agree with a Commie, but here’s an exception to the rule
https://kiwipolemicist.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/its-not-often-that-i-agree-with-a-commie-but-heres-an-exception/

2008-12-24 - NZ: The beauty of hindsight - police informant caught after 10 years - Indymedia UK
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/12/416010.html

2009-01-10 - What DeLillo can tell us about Gilchrist
https://books.scoop.co.nz/2009/01/10/what-delillo-tells-us-about-rob-gilchrist/

2009-04-25 - The activist who turned police informer
https://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-star-times/features/760466/The-activist-who-turned-police-informer

2009-07 - How Police Spy Rob Gilchrist Was Exposed By His Partner
https://web.archive.org/web/20170427040356/http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr38-180c.htm

2009-07 - Police Informer Caught After 10 Years of Spying on Activists
https://web.archive.org/web/20100712175956/http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr38-180b.htm

2010-07 - Aotearoa NZ Military Imposters - Robert Stephen Gilchrist – Christchurch New Zealand
https://web.archive.org/web/20100712141550/http://www.anzmi.net/gilchrist/gilchrist.html

2012-07-07 - How To Avoid Getting Robbed
https://web.archive.org/web/20170409064726/http://archive.indymedia.org.nz/article/82640/how-avoid-getting-robbed

2013-02-12 - Case for compensation, says police spy's ex
https://www.stuff.co.nz/editors-picks/8289572/Case-for-compensation-says-police-spys-ex

2013-02-13 - Police spy sues for mental pain
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/8285326/Police-spy-sues-for-mental-pain

2013-02-25 - Spy sues cops for pain of decade of deception
https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/8345622/Spy-sues-cops-for-pain-of-decade-of-deception

2013-11-7 - Better work stories?
https://boundmaus.wordpress.com/2013/11/07/better-work-stories/

2014-08-07 - Rob Gilchrist On Nicky Hager
https://thestandard.org.nz/rob-gilchrist-on-nicky-hager/

2015-08-30 - Former spy paid to infiltrate Greenpeace and unions
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/71357903/former-spy-paid-to-infiltrate-greenpeace-and-unions

2015-07-04 - Police spy's girlfriend: I want answers

2018 - Activists and the Surveillance State (this is a book, but the blurb references Gilchrist)
https://www.plutobooks.com/blog/activists-state-surveillance-political-policing/


Footnote: the "anti-globalization movement"

What exactly was this "movement of movements" against, and what it was for as an alternative? These are reasonable questions, but they're very hard to answer, simply because there's no one answer. Every political group that contributed - and perhaps every person involved - will have their own answers, and they'll all be different. For me it was a movement against the massive social and environmental harms caused by neoliberals, as they took over the state in many countries - both rich and poor - and used it to shift control of resources and regulatory powers from the public to corporations; deregulation, corporatisation, privatisation, etc.

BTW Anyone who declares me evil for holding the views expressed in this piece, and demands that they (or I) be scrubbed from this website for expressing them, is simply illustrating my point. Also, if you happen to think I'm not entitled to hold or express these opinions because I happen to be a "Cis-Het White Class-Analysis Man", I highly recommend 'Excommunicate Me from the Church of Social Justice' and 'No Justice Without Love: Why Activism Must Be Generous', two important essays on the same topic by Frances Lee, who is neither cisgendered, heterosexual, white, nor a man.

---

This is a response to a 2005 article, '10 things the left should see the back of right now ' by Isla Williams. I know this is now an old post, but the issues she responds to in points #5 and #8 have not gone away. In point #5, Williams says:

"Look there Mr Cis-Het White Class-Analysis Man! I’m gonna let you into a little secret: most of the working class people in the world are neither male nor white! A great number of them are neither cis nor straight! An intersectional analysis is, as it has always been, also an empirically and materially proper class analysis because this is the way the world is."

I agree with the comment made by Biffard Misqueegan, when the article was posted on LibCom by Joseph Kay, that this misses the point. There may still be the occasional old-school, workerist paper-seller who thinks that anything other than workplace-based labour struggle is a middle class issues. But the main criticism being raised against Safer Spaces Policing is not about it's content, but it's practice.

It's possible to show support for women's liberation, anti-racism, decolonizations, queer solidarity, animal rights, environmental defence, and so on, while building relationships and broad alliances. Doing this makes the left more diverse, and thus more resilient and effective, and many of us have been arguing tooth and nail for doing this since the 1990s. I would argue it was this kind of intersectional work that resulted in the massive movement of movements dismissed in Williams' piece as a "summit-hopping activist milleux" (thus buying into talking points, carefully cultivated via the corporate media, that focused attention on the summit-disrupting mushrooms so as to totally ignore and dismiss the mycelium of ongoing grassroots organizing that produced them, but I digress ...). Safer Spaces Policing, on the other hand, not only fails at building relationships and alliances, it valourizes destroying them as a political practice.

When one's family, friends, co-workers, or online correspondent makes a comment that shows a lack of solidarity, this can be seen as an opportunity for a teaching moment. A chance to clearly communicating one's objections to the comment, while also using a rigorous exchange of views to gain a deeper understanding of why people hold reactionary views, and maintaining a respectful tone to build a platform for further teaching moments in the future. Safer Spaces Policing, on the other hand, involves declaring to the person that they are not only wrong, but *evil* for holding such a view, and demanding that they immediately recant it. If they do not, they must be immediately de-friended, blocked, banished, declared a non-person, and an enemy of the left and humanity in general (note: I'm not saying that these response are never appropriate as a last resort, just that it's counterproductive for them to be the first response).

In point #8, Williams says:

"If you are saying things like 'stop splitting the left' because you are protecting your sexually-abusive and/or racist mates, then jog the fuck on. The left should feel glad to split from you.

If you are saying 'stop splitting the left' because you want the ideas of your groupsicle to be hegemonic, then get a grip. The left has always been diverse and has always had real internal disagreement – read some of the letters of the 19th century greats to work this out if you must. This has nothing to do with it being an effective force."

This kind of practice does split the left. Not by increasing its theoretical or social diversity, but by fragmenting it into ever-smaller shards that cannot work together, because that group still talks to so-and-so, despite their heretical views on whatever. It's high school snobbery as politics, with all its elitist in-group/ out-group melodrama. It's also a practice that, once normalized, is easily manipulated to break up groups, campaigns, and networks, and destroy activist infrastructure projects, on behalf of corporations and their PR companies, the cops, or the alphabet agencies (remember COINTELPRO?). I'm sure I'm not the only one who has seen this happen, yet our inability to have free, uncensored discussions about it without devolving into flame wars and excommunications (online *and* in-person) leaves us vulnerable to it.

Another result of this approach is that many working class people feel they are not welcome in the left because they don't have the correct views. Sadly, most working class people do not yet have progressive views on every aspect of gender, race, trans-/homosexuality, and so on (arguably *nobody* does). Indeed, given that the most progressive views on these issues (from an anarchist perspective) are not mainstream views, the only way anyone could end up holding any of them is to be regularly exposed to respectful debates with people who already hold them. If any and all discussion on these topics (especially online) boils down to "agree with me or fuck off fascist", this is both counter-productive and self-marginalizing.

Ironically, this elitist and vanguardist practice offers an explanation for why conservative nationalist movements have been able to attract increasingly large numbers of working class people who are left-leaning, but not "activists", into their orbit. Along with many others whose anti-authoritarian/ libertarian attitudes would normally make anarchist movements attractive to them. If a person knows they can go into conservative nationalist spaces and openly express dissenting views about discrimination, but that they can't go into liberal internationalist spaces and question our sacred cows without being shouted down or kicked out, guess which ones seem more attractive to them, let alone more democratic and libertarian?

The solution is not, of course, to jettison anti-discrimination politics, which have always been part of the left (although there's always been rigorous debate about the nitty-gritty details of them), but to jettison the vanguardist, scorched earth approach to them. There is an urgent need to rediscover the value of open-minded debate, tolerance of dissenting views, and the ability to continue trusting people even when we disagree with them about important things. More importantly, there is an urgent need to resist the capitalist tendency to dehumanize and instrumentalize each other, to ensure that we see each other as complete human being, whether friends, allies, or even enemies, but never tools to be used or discarded in service of "the cause". If we can achieve universal friendship among all oppressed people, revolution becomes just a matter of organizing with our friends.

Ok, so I want to spend a bit of time talking about social justice activism as it plays out in geek communities in the early 21st century. Now, if you're not a geek, or a social justice activist, or both, you're probably thinking, "well who cares?", and fair enough. This rant (I'd be flattering myself to call it an "essay") is not written primarily for family entertainment purposes, although I aim to make it entertaining so it's not a painful struggle to get through. My goal here is to provide myself with a firm place to stand next time I get drawn into yet another one of those awkward and seemingly irresolvable debates about what straight white guys (like me) should and shouldn't do, to make the geek communities we take part in more welcoming and "safe" for people who aren't straight white guys.

The first challenge whenever we talk about this stuff is just how many straw man arguments we have to wade through, from people on both sides of the aisle. I mean it, there is literally an army of scarecrows waiting to be slaughtered, both by those who think it's enough to just treat everyone as equals, and those who think groups needs "Safer Spaces Policies" to make sure that actually happens. This is a problem, because a lot of people get so tired of wading through this bunch of predictably beside-the-point arguments before a proper dialogue can even begin, they get into the habit of going straight for the rhetorical flamethrower any time the subject comes up, and that can be intense and scary. I suspect I might be one of those people, which is why I've been feeling for a long time that I need to write about this.

Oh, in case you're not familiar with the phrase "straw man argument", it's a way of describing an aggressive reply to something other than what you actually said. Like if you say, "I think that woman who drives the forklift at work has beautiful hair", and your friend says, "you know, it's really inappropriate to sexually objectify people you work with". Wait, what? You never said anything about asking her on a date, or even finding her sexually attractive, you just complimented her hair. That's something you're just as likely to do if you're gay, and not sexually interested in woman at all.

The point your friend is making is not unreasonable in itself, it's just that it doesn't necessarily follow from what you actually said. Your friend is jumping to conclusions about what else you might have been thinking, and then making an implicit accusation based on those assumptions, which is not just slaughtering straw man - as the saying goes - but is also passive aggressive (we'll get to that). They're assuming "bad faith". When a person is told - indirectly but unmistakably - that the person they're talking to is assuming bad things about them, then tend to return the favour. Cue the rhetorical flamethrowers, and the chances of having a discussion where both people learn something from each others' perspective gets smaller and smaller.

How many of you noticed that the example I gave assumed that you - the reader - are a man (or at least identify as a man). How many of you assumed I didn't notice that? If I gave that example in a face-to-face conversation, how many of you would have launched into a lecture about how the gender bias in my choice of example is symptomatic of an unconscious unwillingness to be gender inclusive? Hopefully you wouldn't, but there are definitely people who would, because whenever these topics come up, their default mindset is to assume bad faith.

As it happens, I did notice the gendered nature of my example immediately after I finished writing it, and I had a go at rewriting it to assume a female reader, then with neutral pronouns. But then I reminded myself it was intended to be a light-hearted anecdote based on the sort of well-meaning miscommunication that happens in real life, and that I'm essentially talking to myself here anyway. There's nothing wrong with picking my own gender for an anecdote, and anyone who picks on that is most likely doing so to give themselves an excuse to dismiss anything they feel uncomfortable about further on in the piece. In other words, it's a straw man. They're assuming bad faith, but at the same time, notice how I'm primed to expect a nitpicking response that fails to engage with the serious issues I want to take about. To some degree, I'm assuming bad faith too.

How did we get here?

This is an important question, which I can't answer for everyone, but since this is about giving myself a place to stand, I can say a bit about how I got here. Which is what the next piece in this series will be about. In part three, having given myself a place to stand while talking about finding a place to stand, I'll actually get to the point. I hope.