Iβm a PhD in #Cryptography and am currently looking for a job (in the Netherlands or Remote).
I am a very outspoken supporter and past user of #OpenHRT!
Boosts are pretty much always welcome.
Beware of hot takes.
Luigi is the hero that we need and deserve!
Please donβt read too much into my follows, non-follows and unfollows.
I sometimes post images from my phone, but prefer to post alt-texts on a keyboard. If one is missing on a picture, give it a few minutes, it will be there soon.
Still denying any notion that Iβm a cat girl, ignore the purring when I get to cuddle with someone!
Unsolicited advice given in good faith is unironically welcome, Iβd rather have correct information and receiving it doesnβt hurt my ego. That doesnβt necessarily mean that Iβll follow it, but that Iβll take it into account.
If I make you uncomfortable or overstep your boundaries, please tell me directly and right away, I promise to by nice about it, but I have some genuine blind spots when it comes to what the average person considers nice. (See e.g. the previous paragraph!) In turn you can trust me to do the same and that I wonβt hold grudges about genuine mistakes.
Notes
1097
Following
0
Followers
0
Birthday
1992-02-08
Location
Eindhoven, the Netherlands
Pronouns
She (EN), Sie (DE), Ze/Zij (NL)
Languages
German (Native), English (Near-Native), Dutch (barely conversational)
1. The way most police forces are currently set up is bad and (varying degrees of) improvement is needed!
2. I want a want there to be a police!
This is Fedi, so unlike in many other places I probably need to justify point 2 instead of point 1 here. Donβt mistake that for me not feeling at least as strongly about point 1 and the two only go together.
Crime will always be a thing, no amount of revolution (short of literally eradicating mankind) will change that. (We can discuss whether it will change things on a quantitative level and I believe there is a lot of room for improvement there, but it wonβt fall to zero!) At that point we have a choice to make:
Just letting it happen and do nothing about it, or do something about it. The former will however normalize crime and establish that there are no consequences for it, so it is essentially guaranteed to increase crime. I therefore firmly reject that approach from the start.
But in order to prevent crime there has to be someone who is willing to not just verbally say itβs bad, but in the end to physically stand in the way and pose some form of counter-threat that can deter that crime. And in order for deterrence to work it has to credible! And that implies a need for violence to be on the table at least in principle.
And once we are at that point, Iβd much rather have the people whose job it is to enact that violence be under the control of the public and bound by rules (we might even say βlawsβπ) that were decided upon by society as a whole, not by the personal opinions of the person in question.
And at that point, we might as well call them police officers, because this is really all they are: People under control/employment/direction of whoever is representing society as a whole (the government) whose job it is to protect society from crime and who are allowed (and to an extend required) to use physical force if necessary to enforce the reduction of crime.
When I read pamphlets like What about the Rapists and there only solution with those that cannot be easily rehabilitated is vigilantism and physical violence, then thatβs not a solution but a problem for SO many reasons! For starters you turned yourself into an ad-hoc might-makes-right police force that doesnβt care about evidence, presumption of innocence, accountability, or due process. You essentially became brown-shirts, the worst possible version of the very thing that you claim that you wanted to destroy.
We need police to actually be accountable, we need them to actually follow the law, we need their members to be a representation of the general public, and yes that means that we need communists and anarchists in the police(!), we need them to be trained well in how they can avoid violence as much as possible and to only use as little as possible when it is actually needed.
We can debate whether they need to be armed, and if so with what: The cops in the fucking UK donβt normally carry firearms, and they donβt seem to be much worse of because of that. (And obviously: There have to be police units that have access to serious weapons, someone has to be able to respond to a hostage situation, Iβm talking about the regular cop on the street for whom a stick might be plenty.)
We can debate to what extend riot police should be a standing unit made up of people who donβt normally spend time in their communities and are only called in to respond to riots on an as-needed basis.
We can debate how police oversight should work, whether there is any hope that this can be anything other than an external agency whose primary job is police oversight and how that would be better for the police officers themselves too, both so they donβt get intimidated out of holding each other accountable (which needs to be a crime!) but also to deal with things like bullying and discrimination within the force.
We can talk about how it is a problem that police officers nowadays often donβt know their communities. Ideally people should personally know the officer that is assigned to their city block and be able to trust them. This used to be a thing in a lot of places! And once you have that, that cop can also go around and ask questions, because he has a network in the community, so even the investigative potential of the police increases.
We can talk to what extend police should be trained to in a pinch be able to act as a kind of low-level social worker even, and how to deal with mentally ill people.
Those are all exciting and interesting discussions to be had with plenty room for disagreements, but after all is said and done if I get attacked by a nazi, I want for there to be someone I can call who will come over at any time of the day on any day of the year and step in!
As of this evening I am now #unemployed. (Contract ran out.)
There is a small chance that I might come back to TU/e, but that depends on funding and that doesnβt look great right now. In other words: If you are looking for a cryptographer (with Dutch PhD-equivalent) specialized in post-quantum key-exchange protocols in the Netherlands or fully remote (I am currently somewhat tied to staying in the Dutch healthcare system), feel free to contact me.
Without any reference to a current event (which makes this a good time to post this): If you think I fucked up in an interaction with you and my apology comes across as insincere: The latter is probably not the case, I just have a very strong instinct that I should explain myself, which can sadly come across as me trying to justify actions (especially if the explanation is very long and the βsorryβ is only at the start or ending), when that is rarely how it is meant. What I actually mean to do there is to show my line of thinking that led to the fuck up to demonstrate the lack of ill intent.
There is a good chance that this is an autism thing, but please believe me when I say, that I only say sorry for things that Iβm actually sorry about.
Because as a general rule, Iβm not someone backing down to social pressure if I believe that I am in the right and will make that clear when communicating: I will still reach out to attempt to see if there may have been misunderstandings and to see if whatever relationship I have with the person in question can be saved, but I wonβt give in on points that I deem to be true. That is what being principled means to me, and what I want people to be able to expect from me.
A big reason why I may still reach out in those cases is that in my experiences most conflicts result from communication fuckups and it always saddens me when that causes friendships or similar to break, even when just looking at it as an outsider, let alone when Iβm an involved party.
Now, on the rare occasion that I actually DO have ill intent towards someone (almost exclusively public figures, but there may be exceptions to this rule): You WILL be able to tell! If you have doubts, itβs probably not that!
So: If you are wondering whether I fucked up communicating or tried to avoid blame: Itβs probably the former. I know Iβm bad at it.
I guess with my new server an #introduction that I never explicitly wrote on tech.lgbt might be in order.
Iβm a cryptographer currently working at TU Eindhoven on cryptographic protocol design and decided during my PhD that what I had experienced for most of my life was gender dysphoria after all and transitioned. Iβm out and proud and finally even officially on HRT!
Politically Iβm pretty far to the left, but very much reserve (and make use of!) my right to hold opinions that diverge from the general consensus if I deem the consensus bad.
I believe in firm moral principles and that a personβs way of arriving at a conclusion is often much more interesting than the conclusion itself. People who reasoned themselves into a wrong position are often much more interesting than people who arrived at a correct position without reasoning.
I believe that the value of understanding people who are different is commonly overestimated. You shouldnβt need to understand someone to be supportive of them. It is seeing you support someone whom you donβt understand, that will earn you my trust!
I believe that most people are acting in good faith and that most interpersonal conflicts are the result of miscommunication and non-malicious fuck-ups. I therefore believe that it should be possible to talk through most issues that arise between honest actors and really value communication in case of disagreements.
I consider the state of transgender-healthcare in most countries a direct violation of various human-rights and therefore consider DIY-HRT (better term: OpenHRT) and similar DIY treatments a moral imperative and any laws counteracting it unjustifiable in the situation and thus void.
I have some degree of hobbyist interest in law and justice systems (primarily German) and will occasionally post about this. Some of these posts will be in German only. Sorry, but not sorry for that.
I remark that this is a clear-name account and that I am fully aware that I am unambiguously identifiable and fine with that, it is a conscious decision after all.
1. The way most police forces are currently set up is bad and (varying degrees of) improvement is needed!
2. I want a want there to be a police!
This is Fedi, so unlike in many other places I probably need to justify point 2 instead of point 1 here. Donβt mistake that for me not feeling at least as strongly about point 1 and the two only go together.
Crime will always be a thing, no amount of revolution (short of literally eradicating mankind) will change that. (We can discuss whether it will change things on a quantitative level and I believe there is a lot of room for improvement there, but it wonβt fall to zero!) At that point we have a choice to make:
Just letting it happen and do nothing about it, or do something about it. The former will however normalize crime and establish that there are no consequences for it, so it is essentially guaranteed to increase crime. I therefore firmly reject that approach from the start.
But in order to prevent crime there has to be someone who is willing to not just verbally say itβs bad, but in the end to physically stand in the way and pose some form of counter-threat that can deter that crime. And in order for deterrence to work it has to credible! And that implies a need for violence to be on the table at least in principle.
And once we are at that point, Iβd much rather have the people whose job it is to enact that violence be under the control of the public and bound by rules (we might even say βlawsβπ) that were decided upon by society as a whole, not by the personal opinions of the person in question.
And at that point, we might as well call them police officers, because this is really all they are: People under control/employment/direction of whoever is representing society as a whole (the government) whose job it is to protect society from crime and who are allowed (and to an extend required) to use physical force if necessary to enforce the reduction of crime.
When I read pamphlets like What about the Rapists and there only solution with those that cannot be easily rehabilitated is vigilantism and physical violence, then thatβs not a solution but a problem for SO many reasons! For starters you turned yourself into an ad-hoc might-makes-right police force that doesnβt care about evidence, presumption of innocence, accountability, or due process. You essentially became brown-shirts, the worst possible version of the very thing that you claim that you wanted to destroy.
We need police to actually be accountable, we need them to actually follow the law, we need their members to be a representation of the general public, and yes that means that we need communists and anarchists in the police(!), we need them to be trained well in how they can avoid violence as much as possible and to only use as little as possible when it is actually needed.
We can debate whether they need to be armed, and if so with what: The cops in the fucking UK donβt normally carry firearms, and they donβt seem to be much worse of because of that. (And obviously: There have to be police units that have access to serious weapons, someone has to be able to respond to a hostage situation, Iβm talking about the regular cop on the street for whom a stick might be plenty.)
We can debate to what extend riot police should be a standing unit made up of people who donβt normally spend time in their communities and are only called in to respond to riots on an as-needed basis.
We can debate how police oversight should work, whether there is any hope that this can be anything other than an external agency whose primary job is police oversight and how that would be better for the police officers themselves too, both so they donβt get intimidated out of holding each other accountable (which needs to be a crime!) but also to deal with things like bullying and discrimination within the force.
We can talk about how it is a problem that police officers nowadays often donβt know their communities. Ideally people should personally know the officer that is assigned to their city block and be able to trust them. This used to be a thing in a lot of places! And once you have that, that cop can also go around and ask questions, because he has a network in the community, so even the investigative potential of the police increases.
We can talk to what extend police should be trained to in a pinch be able to act as a kind of low-level social worker even, and how to deal with mentally ill people.
Those are all exciting and interesting discussions to be had with plenty room for disagreements, but after all is said and done if I get attacked by a nazi, I want for there to be someone I can call who will come over at any time of the day on any day of the year and step in!
Looka like we will arive at my place in Eindhoven at around 15:00 from #why2025. I'll then REALLY have to work on a paper of mine, then deal with sone unterpersonal issues that I would have liked to have gotten tooo by now, but there were just too many other fires tgat needed dealing with during the camp, and then maybe I'll get a little bit of rest... π΅βπ«
There were many things I really enjoyed about #WHY2025, though it was still a lot more stressful than I would have liked for reasons that mostly had little to do with the event itself and more with things that require(d) my attention ending up coinciding with it. Iβll definitely have few more stressful days in front of meβ¦ π
Still, thanks to all the organizers and people who helped, it was really nice!
One of the many reasons I like SVG is that you can attach and alt-text to pretty much every element using the <title>-tag. You can thereby describe all the details in the graphic in a way that is even displayed on hover to viewers in case anything isnβt as intuitively clear for them.
#AltText is for Everyone! And super useful, not just for blind people!
Important reminder to not let anyone change the narrative or play things down:
What Israel does is a genocide!
What Israel does is best and most accurately compared to the holocaust! Israel does all the things that supposedly made the holocaust a uniquely bad genocide!
There is no meaningful difference between the Gaza strip and concentration camps like Dachau!
There is no meaningful difference between the IDF, the Wehrmacht, and the Waffen SS. All three are/were genocidal military forces.
There is no meaningful moral difference between Netanjahu and Hitler!
Anyone who rejects the comparison of the genocide in Gaza with the holocaust is a Nazi of the Zionist variety.
Anyone who associates condemnations of the genocidal regime in Israel with antisemitism, is an anti-semite, specifically of the variety that spreads the dual-loyalty bullshit, by indirectly suggesting the horrific lie that genocide is somehow related to being Jewish!
Anyone who pretends to care about the so called Isreali βhostagesβ, many of who are IDF-terrorists, without being a friend or family member of them and thus directly affected, is at this point in time a complete and utter hypocrite, or, more likely, a dishonest genocidal manic, comparable only to those who justified the German Holocaust with the Reichstags-fire and kept talking about the Reichstags building!
Anyone who supports Israel at this point is pro fascism and would likely have supported Hitler and the historic Nazis if they happened to be geopolitically aligned.
People who take pleasure in shooting unarmed kids in the head for fun are subhuman! Whether they are German Nazis in Dachau, or Zionist Nazis in Gaza!
Fiona :transbian: :autism:
) that were decided upon by society as a whole, not by the personal opinions of the person in question.
