The Star Dispatch 2025

The Dark Ledger Of Asher Wolfstein (part 3) (finale)

2025-09-23T13:13:35-06:00

The Conclusion

You will discover that what I say has always been there since the beginning. Asher speaks of it freely, sometimes a little too freely. But, under the enchantment of a highly validating mask, I've realized Asher cannot be believed.

A highlight of this situation was the idea that I somehow fight Asher's battles, and that his loved ones fix the problems he creates. This is also a narrative that doesn't hold up, but in the interest of demonstration, I have refrained from jumping in at every turn as my own person so that people can see that Asher does handle his own problems. He doesn't handle them in a way that appeals to everyone, and that is another, frankly, unfair element in people's disbelief.

And so, it'll have to be up to me.

The Third Stage of Erasure: Consensus

Erasure begins with the undermining of credibility, and then it works through mistranslation. Words are taken, reframed, explained away. But soon after comes the third stage: consensus.

It is not enough for one interpreter to rewrite a person. Others must agree. Agreement does not come through fact-checking, but through the repetition of storylines until they become rote. The more times a mask is described, the more real it becomes. Every repetition calcifies it and the fiction becomes structure.

Consensus is intoxicating. It relieves the burden of thinking. It relieves the discomfort of uncertainty. When a group agrees on what the “real Asher” must be, the relief feels like truth. But it is only convenience.

The Double Standard

Here is the paradox: Asher is accused of being both too powerful and too incapable. Too intimidating, yet too incompetent. Too articulate, yet too incomprehensible. Too calculating, yet too impulsive.

These contradictions don’t survive scrutiny, but consensus thrives on contradiction. Each claim, though mutually exclusive, serves to reinforce the same point: Asher cannot be trusted to speak for himself.

Meanwhile, those making the claims remain above suspicion. Their inconsistencies are overlooked because the frame already paints them as reasonable. Reasonable people don’t need to be examined. Unreasonable people do — endlessly, and never to satisfaction.

What reinforces these mechanisms is the idea that if you were to do your own research, seek to verify claims, pore over the evidence, then you would be violating the privacy and well-being of the aggrieved individual by challenging them and their account. The effective siloing of information creates a structure where having the intention to look into the truth becomes tantamount with hurting.

When other people do things, Asher hurts, too.

The Cost of Believability

When someone cannot be believed on their own terms, they are trapped. No amount of proof, no demonstration of consistency, no evidence will suffice. If he argues, it proves hostility. If he ignores, it proves guilt. If he apologizes, it proves manipulation. If he refuses to apologize, it proves arrogance.

The game has no winning condition. That is its design. The only winning condition baked in is to not play at all- it's the reason why, if you've been paying attention at all, Asher has been making references to the 1983 movie "War Games"- it wasn't boasting or threatening anyone, he was describing the situation. This no-win condition is also why narrators often make a big deal about how being the better person means walking away and offer that as the only viable alternative when they talk indirectly to their targets through their public sphere proxy. The question nobody seems to ask, though, is whose standards are being used when forming the rubric of what a better person is?

Responsibility Misassigned

The myth that I, or others close to him, must fix what Asher “breaks” is not a description of reality. It is a description of bias. The interpreter cannot allow Asher to be the one who manages consequences, because that would threaten the consensus. It would reveal the mask as false.

And yet, Asher continues to play openly. He refuses to mask. He refuses to hide. That refusal is costly — because belief is not distributed according to truth, but according to the comfort of those listening.

So the fiction persists: he does not handle things; others do it for him. Every time he navigates conflict without intervention, it is either ignored or reframed.

The evidence that disproves this narrative is right there, but evidence doesn’t matter when consensus has already declared him unreliable.

And so the stages converge:

Words are disqualified.

Interpreters take over.

Consensus is manufactured.

Responsibility is reassigned.

The result is a cycle that sustains itself indefinitely, each stage feeding the next. Once installed, it becomes almost impossible to break, because even resistance becomes interpreted as compliance with the mask.

This is the sordid history of Asher Wolfstein's bad crazy, finally told by the person closest to him. It is the story of a man couched in the mundane who looks for meaning beyond it: a disturbingly deep thinker- a believer in justice yet somehow also an alleged abuser, frighteningly intimidating in resolve, highly reliable by foregoing empty apologies- yet also somehow completely unreliable, a gentle beast yet also somehow an asshole beyond reproach. an outsider like me, like you, like so many others, and the raging disorder set to tear him apart.

And the people and machinery in place that seek to exploit and exacerbate that disorder, to drive it into dysfunction as the spectacle that fuels the constant grind that crushes outsiders who are too inconvenient, who don't fit in and aren't neurodivergent in photogenic, sexy, stream-friendly, marketable ways- all for the benefit of those who have better lighting.

Remember my earlier points? Don't forget to ask yourself-
Who is being explained?
Who is doing the explanation?
What's being explained?
And, most importantly: Who benefits?

The Dark Ledger Of Asher Wolfstein (part 2)

2025-09-21T16:12:00-06:00

The Awful Truth

Sometimes to his benefit, but often to his detriment, Asher doesn't hide. I've lived in his hometown. I've met his lifelong friends, family, and neighbors. It may sound unbelievable, and it's up to you whether you believe it or not, but from experience, he's always been some form of what you see today with no obscurities.

This is why the dysfunction multiplies: everyone is relating to a phantom mask they believe exists, rather than to the reality that is right in front of them. The containers don't keep cracking under the weight of Asher's deranged force of will, but because people are relating to what is not there.

They act on assumptions, then suffer the consequences of their own invention. It's a cycle that, by design, feeds itself.

What I'm describing isn't new to us. However, what I've been uniquely appalled at now is how unwilling people are to believe him the first time, even though they all admit it's exactly what they should do. Instead, they cling to the mask idea because it validates their worldviews and comforts their biases. It may be possible that someone's inability to believe such an honest portrayal may have some direct relation with how much they themselves may mask, since a good amount of the assumptions going around seem to follow the reasoning that 'that's not how people work... because it's not how the questioner in question works, and generalizes that condition to the entirety of human experience.

So now we've moved onto the the Disqualification of Direct Speech

This is the second stage of erasure: the point at which words stop being heard as words.

When Asher speaks, his language is treated as a clue to be decoded, as a symptom. The act of speaking is instead transformed into proof of something hidden: volatility, compulsion, illness, take your pick.

A desire for precision becomes obsession. Accurate recall is tinged with the suspicion of pathology and painted as 'holding on' to things. If he's consistent, then it must be fixation.

The very attributes that make him reliable in one sense are flipped into proof of unreliability in another. What would normally be strengths like attention to detail, honesty, clarity - are treated as signals of instability.

This is how erasure accelerates.

Once you declare someone’s words unreliable, someone else steps into the vacuum. That is the interpreter.

The interpreter doesn't need evidence at this point, only the authority to say: “What he really means is…”

Every perceived contradiction, spiral and act of blunt sincerity becomes theirs to explain. It's a stripping of authorship that eventually leaves the person as inconsequential- their presence isn't needed anymore, because their fictitious counterpart is now planted firmly in his place. Contrary to what many people believe, Asher is hyper aware. Regarding this, he's said to me "it's like I don't even need to exist, like I don't even need to be there anymore." That sentiment is profoundly disturbing to someone with a borderline personality disorder who was given reason to believe they were in a close friendship for five years- talk about abandonment.

What happens afterwards, in this situation, it is even more disquieting:

Because the narrator now controls this fictitious version of the person, like a marionette, the narrator doesn't only have the power to explain the present, but also has the power to re-write the past. Since no-one is actually listening to the individual, but instead paying attention to the image the narrator is painting, the narrator can recast all past relationship with the person, including their own, in a vastly different light. Actions that the narrator may have a cause to regret can become influenced by the erased individual in some recent or distant past. Past demands and coercion can be alluded to while withholding proof for the sake of privacy.

The erased individual now, and for the foreseeable future, can be a font of new revelations that can be created whole cloth for many different purposes- exculpating the past, explaining the present, or justifying the future.

People often quote that you should believe people when they tell you who they are. In practice, when it comes to people like Asher, this principle is discarded. Their statements are reclassified as camouflage, their accounts are rejected in favor of someone else’s narrative overlay.

In fact, the same individuals who scold others online for ignoring marginalized voices will, in the next moment, argue that their targets' own words cannot be trusted. The dysfunction is not born from someone hiding behind obscurity. It is born of people refusing to accept that someone could mean what they say about themselves.

The sequence looks something like this:

A says X.
Listeners decide X is a “mask.”
Interpreters declare X means Y.
Audience believes Y, dismisses X.
A insists, again, X is X.
Audience grows hostile at the “insistence.” If A persists, and most people in this situation will persist when there is a matter of truth involved, the audience may brandish mental health stigma by pointing out he is being obsessive or deranged, or dismiss his complaints altogether.

The system sustains itself. The insistence on clarity is taken as proof of deception. Attempting to reclaim authorship can be rebranded as proof of unreliability and an attempt, ironically, at stifling the narrator's freedom of speech.

The only way out of this loop is for people to do the very thing they resist: take someone's words as they are, not as someone else’s performance piece.

Why is this so hard? Because the mask is comforting.

The mask allows people to fit the erased individual into their worldview. It validates the belief that everyone must ultimately conform to a familiar pattern: either broken and in need of fixing, or wicked and in need of punishing. You can try to deny this, but that's very much the implicit framework behind terms such as "good crazy" and "bad crazy."

If the individual refuses to be categorized as either, the cognitive dissonance becomes unbearable. It is easier to insist that he must secretly be one of those categories, and that his refusal is just denial.

That is projection. And it is projection weaponized:

He cannot mean what he says.
He must mean something else.
And I, the interpreter, know what that is.
The interpreter now becomes a full-time ventriloquist.

The first symptom of erasure is not silence. It is mistranslation.

The Silence

Once words are stolen, nothing else can survive intact. Actions are reinterpreted and identity itself becomes pliable clay in someone else’s hands. Erasure is not accomplished by gagging a person, it's accomplished by trapping them into such a situation that no matter what they might say, their words are the only ones that aren't heeded.

So where does that leave us? With the same triad as before: Witness, Weigh, Judge.

Asher does not hide. He never has. The phantom mask is what others bring to him, not what he wears. And until that is recognized, the cycle will repeat: words dismissed, masks imposed, stories stolen.

That is the second step of the awful truth.

The question that follows is simple, and far more uncomfortable than most will admit:

If his words are not permitted to mean what they say, then whose words are? And is that subject to change? And who decides that?

The Dark Ledger Of Asher Wolfstein (part 1)

2025-09-21T08:55:22-06:00

Necessary Actions

A few nights ago, I confiscated Asher's phone and restricted his Internet access. With the situation proving resistant to de-escalation, these are the measures I've determined are necessary. Patterns have become an increasing challenge to manage, and without intervention, the risks to stability only grow. My current role involves establishing clear boundaries that previously failed due to a lack of accountability.

This is not an action I take lightly, but one I regard as unavoidable. The conditions surrounding Asher's behavior persist despite repeated attempts at dialogue and I am left with little choice but to step in directly.

I don't share this to sensationalize, attack, or procure sympathy. It's difficult to attack something when what's being dealt with isn't clear, and the sensationalizing is part of that problem. It's been made very clear that sympathy won't be forthcoming.

Many who encounter Asher, especially online, see only fragments, moments, or impressions: some revealing, some distorted, all nevertheless are incomplete. This is true of everyone. However, when the individual in question is strange, memorable, or difficult, the effect becomes exaggerated.

I'd like to set out, with honesty, what I have witnessed and lived alongside. An accounting, if you will.

Far from drafting a convenient caricature of someone who suffers from extremes, I'm speaking of a complicated life, Asher's life, as I have observed for the last twenty years. From early struggles that shaped his way of moving through the world for the better, to the intensity that makes him both magnetic and difficult.

It has a rhythm many of you will recognize, the telltale signs of something not readily visible. A genuinely frightening disorder that shapes his perception and conduct, a condition that has too often dictated the course of his relationships and decisions. It is not an overshadowing he chooses to reside under. It is a dynamic he chooses not to indulge in. He is not always successful, but after 24 years of working on it, he tends to fare better than most.

He is not alone in this; he is not unique in carrying the weight of an unruly mind. He is like many of you, living with a disability that can distort perception and exacerbate conflict.

I do not share in that disorder; I do not share in any disorder. The mental health system has only been part of my life by proxy. But I have lived close enough, and long enough, to see how such a grandiose disorder works, how it spreads, and how it can easily turn any spark into a raging fire for better or for worse. Twenty years with a severely Borderline individual is a rarity, and one that I treasure.

More crucially, I have seen how this present crisis was not born in a vacuum. It continues to be accelerated, inflamed, and amplified by one person who set it in motion, deliberately or not. The same person benefits from its chaos in ways that are not immediately obvious. But they will be, in the fullness of time.

Without the setup of a volatile situation and the repercussions of its complete abandonment, Asher's inevitable difficulties at the relationship's end would have remained survivable. In the majority of his relationships, of which I've seen a fair share, that has been the case.

But rather than aim towards even the most remote forms of a fair resolution, people involved in the situation steer it directly towards ridiculous and dangerous heights, which is where it rests today. That external spark and influence, all of which were unnecessary, cannot be ignored. Asher has borne the weight of its fallout as it rages into a bonfire with more and more being added to the pile.

The Passion Players

Before continuing, I need to address something that has made this entire ordeal worse: the endless moralizing.

It's around everyone involved, as if we were all characters trapped beneath the enchantment of a narrator, to be cast as villain, victim, or savior in some heavy-handed morality play. So much is drenched in tones of good and bad and is described, literally, as good or bad.

Despite the temptation, dysfunction cannot be understood in the same way as one might speak of sin or virtue without risking discrimination. Stigma.

With subtle and consistent framing, this over-moralization has insidiously ensnared everyone in an enduring psychological grasp far more influential than the actual, mundane events.

This is not helpful.

What is helpful is to aim for an elaboration on simply what is real, what is not, and what's the difference.

Before morality can offer accurate judgment, one has to know what has happened and who is responsible.

So what matters first are the mechanics: actions and their consequences within their frames. Every choice lives inside a frame made up of roles, contexts, and responsibilities. If you try to separate the act from the frame, you end up with nothing to hold accountable, and there can't be a disconnect without some part suffering for it. Trust exists at the intersection where all these elements meet, and that is where responsibility resides.

The crux of the question is whether people took responsibility for what followed their choices. Asher is responsible for his actions and their consequences just as each of us is responsible for ours.

But to determine responsibility, we must establish who did what, why, and what happened: A does B, B produces C, and C leads to D. Each action and corresponding container are bound together, with each consequence flowing into the next. That is the only ground firm enough to stand on. Who's right and who's wrong can come later.

What I know is that, when it comes to Asher, people talk about Asher as though he hides behind a façade, as if the surface is false and the absolute truth lies deeper, darker, elsewhere.

But that is a mistake. If Asher says something, he means it, which is a way of saying he doesn't lie.

The intensity, the thought, the almost-too-good consistency, the intimidating memory, the spirals… they are not disguises; they are Asher himself. It's not a performance.

Unfortunately, I know it's easier for people to imagine they 'really know better.'

It seems like they think that behind the outbursts, brilliance, volatility, and abrasiveness lies a secret persona waiting to be uncovered, mollified or conquered so that he may rejoin the pack. He can't really mean some of the things he says, because who says that, right? But that's a projection that falls relatively short and does not reflect reality. Not everyone is the same. People are different, and to assume your experiences are a universal constant by which everyone has to be measured is incredibly short-sighted and self-involved.

And that's the point that this, the first installment, is meant to discuss- the first step in the erasure of another individual.

How Do You Erase A Person?

The Sting of Stigma

The most common case of individual erasure happens when a person's narrative has been co-opted by third parties, often ones with greater social or media reach. The methods by which this is accomplished can vary in execution, but it boils down to one very important motivation: the subversion of the focal point of one person's narrative. By one way or another, the person's own account of their own motives, thoughts and feelings needs to be regarded as an unreliable secondary source.

This can be done by layering arguments that question the person's sanity or their ability to form coherent thought. Whether the person is to be portrayed as unhinged or a buzzsaw of lunacy, for example, or incomprehensible, the important thing that the message needs to carry is: This person is not lucid. This person is not reliable.

If done consistently enough, this form of third-party gaslighting can leverage mental health stigma against a target rather effectively if the person does live with a diagnosis. Our society is already prone to see individuals with mental health issues as untrustworthy, dangerous, deluded and incapable of relating to reality in varying degrees. Sensationalized and inaccurate portrayals in storytelling media and literature have already laid a good amount of the groundwork for this approach to be particularly effective. It figuratively provides a ready-made arsenal to be used at one's discretion.

In fact, one of Asher's early experiences with erasure came at the hands of his roommate in college. A child of privilege who had flown in late for the semester in his own private jet, he was also selling drugs out of his dorm room, which Asher knew. When he found out that Asher knew, he immediately worked towards weaponizing Asher's mental health difficulties by painting him as a threat when no threat existed, resulting in Asher having to drop out of college due to a mental health crisis where the only person he tried to harm was himself. The wealthy kid, though, was given a 'rehabilitation' dorm. Narrative.

This sort of erasure hinges upon one party positing themselves as a narrative authority via several methods. The first and most effective one is by creating a narrative of apparent reasonableness. So, let's pretend that that's your goal. How do you do this? I'll tell you.

To accomplish this, you have to set up a structure by which the things you say and do are seen through a lens that presupposes all your actions stem from a rational or reasonable process, even if they do not.

Secondary Authorship

Narrative overlay is incredibly powerful. Humans have a tendency to think in story- something that philosophers from Slavoj Žižek to writers like Terry Pratchett have centered in their works. Pratchett calls us Pans Narrans- the storytelling ape, because that is how we establish causal links between events in our minds and how we package meaning. Whosoever finds a way to control the story, therefore, controls everything, and the best way for one party to wrest a third party's stories away from them is to convince the listeners that the individual should not be entrusted with their own story.

This relies upon vagueness. The human mind is very good at detecting patterns, it's one of the things that not only have primed our survival, but also allowed us to categorize knowledge via taxonomies. We start from concrete examples and, through a process of abstraction, we eventually categorize things by associating them with a wide network of abstracted concepts. So, for example, if I say "Mario" to you and you are a gamer, the abstractions that will shape the concept in your mind are formed by 'video games' and all the knowledge you have in those sub-categories, such as 'platformer', but you'll also think of 'Plumber', 'Mushrooms', 'Princess', etcetera. But these are all higher abstractions at which you have arrived after your own personal frame of reference helped form them.

So, for example, if I tell you that Bloodstained: Ritual Of the Night is a 'Metroidvania' game, as a gamer you probably know all of the major features that you can expect from it. And, say, if I were to call Stardew Valley a 'Metroidvania' game, if you have any knowledge about that title, you will give me a very long look and wonder what on earth is wrong with me.

So, how does this all fit in with vagueness? Well, because there is a way to sort of take advantage of this process that our brains do to integrate information, in order to commandeer it, while establishing the appearance of credibility, which is the scaffolding upon which this effort will depend.

If you cultivate and weaponize a highly polarized environment, for example, you can easily wield some common narratives that you can insert in order to create asymmetry. If the person you intend to erase is prone to lengthy exchanges in social media, as an example, it can be useful to you. Within the context of capsule-sized social media, any actual meaningful conversations or statements will spill over into several posts. It's in the nature of most western languages to do so. But the design of the environment creates a false sense of excess by its very interface. A series of posts trying to string a cogent argument that would have only made a very moderately-sized forum response can seem positively enormous on X or Bluesky.

By borrowing the classic troll narrative that equates any exchange of any length with a psychological imbalance, you can exaggerate the impression that these soundbite-shaped platforms create by claiming that someone's posting is 'unhinged', 'deranged', or 'incomprehensible' because of their length and that, therefore, they must be posting while emotional, and therefore 'exploding' or 'blowing up.' If you've done your job right and have also consistently told people observing you that you are the reasonable one, the narrative will stick. Even if you, as well, have fired off your own considerable share of lengthy posts. With the first narrative lens in place, your audience will see your posts as reasoned argumentation and your targets' as deranged ramblings despite the fact that whatever its length- the length of someone's message alone does not have a correct correlation to their mental state or their stability.

The second lens that needs to be in place is the expectation of public privacy. This is a narrative double standard by which you posit that only the things that you bring up in public are appropriate to discuss, and that any further reveal of details by other parties constitutes a violation of your privacy. If this person has already been afflicted by the 'derangement' lens, any evidence they put forth to counteract your claims will then be seen as nothing more than a pathological response of their own ailment *and* a violation of your boundaries, which is a leveraging of moralistic condemnation. You being the 'reasonable one' is the scaffolding that makes this narrative stick.

The Stolen Voice

Now comes the pre-emption of the full narrative. If you've carefully and successfully leveraged the mental health stigma against your target, the next step is easy, and one that you've already probably practiced. You only share what details are necessary for your purpose, in the most vague terms possible. This is a deliberate stripping of context and history and relies upon your audience knowing you more than they know the other individual. By this point, however, you're ensuring that your audience doesn't want to know the individual because of the preceding steps. Not only that, but if they react with any public outrage, anger or similar reactions, you can wield that as evidence that reinforces your points about them, even if you were the inciting party to the incident that caused them to react.

Once you have that framework in place and you've created an environment where vagueness is regarded as ethical, your audience won't question the missing elements of any one account or another. They will attribute the vagueness to things such as discretion, scruples or similar attributes because the lens of reasonableness is in place- and if the other party counteracts with data, you can claim it doesn't have the full context while also not providing what is supposedly missing, because you've set that up as the ethical position. With this, the asymmetry begins to take full effect because you are an authoritative source now, and the other party is suspect. Now comes the point where you commandeer the process for other people. If this third party can't be considered as reliable even about themselves because they're so 'unhinged', then you can use the bolster of reasonableness you've cultivated to do something very important.

You become the interpreter.

By that, I mean that every action that this other person takes is not seen as within the container of that person's agency, it's seen through yours. The lenses that are put in place create a narrative about this person that effectively creates a figurative moat around them. Nobody wants to be close enough to understand, and any friction with them is seen through a distortion. The individual can't, for example, be mad about someone's actions because of what that person did. They are mad b because they are- insert your favorite tag-term here: Unhinged, incomprehensible, etcetera. So obviously people won't look at that person's actions and words by themselves, there's already a narrative in process that tells them DANGER, DANGER, WILL ROBINSON, they can't and shouldn't.

So, who can explain why they do things?

Well, of course, you can. Because, you see, the framework in place has now cut out the part of abstraction forming where someone gathers data from personal experience and firsthand knowledge. The subject now becomes a removed party, unknowable because they don't know themselves- which is ultimately one of the cornerstones basic assumptions of mental health stigma. It requires a wise mentor figure to untangle the dark and twisty passages of that mind- so a therapist, or someone who appears well-versed in similar subjects can take over.

And then, you explain this person's motives, mental state and causes for them, to the audience. They will not look to this person for confirmation because, after all, if they're not in touch with reality- why bother? The abstraction process is broken in the minds of the audience, and now you can patch in associated concepts to supplement the missing links, which is ideal to avoid close examination or questioning. You can claim that someone's angry reactions, rhetoric and public speech are actually driven by self-loathing, for example, or jealousy, or the fact that they pine after your attention in some form or another, or that they hate you, or that they're struggling with their own dark demons and have cast you as the unfair embodied fulcrum of that torvid maelstrom because then they don't have to deal with it. All of those things then become associated with that person in the minds of the audience. You've removed all important details that might contradict that through vagueness, and have rendered the target unreliable and untrustworthy, so whatever it is that you say will be what your audience thinks of when the subject's name comes up. Commandeered abstraction complete. That person's story is no longer theirs to tell, and you now control their narrative.

See how that works?

There's a reason professional therapists don't do this without permission, because it's unethical. The greater therapeutic body goes against those who do it for third parties they're not treating, hence the disclaimers.

Breaking Up The Narrative

So, then, what do you do? How can you notice if this is the kind of messaging you're getting? How do you know if you've participated in the erasure of an individual without realizing it?

Well, Mister Roger's mother would say, if she ever tackled this subject, "Look to the explainers." Look to people who actively practice the things I pointed out. Is the entire suite of actions by one person or a group of people explained away by reductive explanations that come from people who aren't the persons in question? Perhaps you should pause and consider whether it is it a very convenient explanation- perhaps too convenient. Perhaps you should also pause and look at what those people are actually saying.

Is mental health stigma being cast to paint someone as impenetrable and incomprehensible? You should, at least, be informed enough to know that outside of the most extreme cases of schizoaffective disorder manifestations, schizophrenic episodes, psychotic breaks, Aphasia, Verbigeration, Echolalia and dementia, the majority of mental health ad neuropsychiatric conditions do not, in fact, render someone incomprehensible. And by accepting the simplistic explanation that "She's crazy, so of course she doesn't make any sense," you're participating in mental health stigma.

How do you fight it? How do you stop being part of that?

Well, that requires a potential level of discomfort in our current society. You have to actually listen to what someone is saying. Not listening to what you think that person is saying, not listening to what someone else tells you about what they're *actually* saying. Once you've listened to their actual words, read their *actual* words, not reductions or summaries by other people, then you can turn your attention to their actions and compare them to their words. Listen, and observe- Witness.

Are they talking about kindness while being cruel? Are they talking about enforcing their boundaries and walking away, but turn around and come right back into the conversation? Are they decrying breaches of confidentiality while revealing people's personal details? Do they preach forgiveness while holding on to grudges like an Olympic sport? Do they make claims of truth or falsehood while providing no evidence? That is the first point of forming your abstraction about someone accurately: does word match deed?

If it does, then you can assume you can take that person as reliable- in that instance. You should never abstract that a person is *always* going to be this or that, only that they are *generally* this way or another until your knowledge of that person is absolutely thorough. And that will take years if you know them personally- and never if you only know them online. This is so you don't fall into the same mistake I have fallen into in the past and end up adopting blind spots.

If word and deed don't match, then comes examination. Why would someone say what they said if their actions show otherwise? That's where you try to gather more information to see if there's something you're missing. Always try to observe your primary source- that person. The "why" can be tricky and you may never actually know it, all you can know is that they haven't been straight with you. And you should be especially suspicious of people who verbally tout their virtues, people who will mention how honest they are, how much integrity and consistency they have -- out of danger that you may have already made abstractions about them that grant them trust they may not deserve and cause you to not look at their actions too closely.

This is the part where you're weighing the evidence you have witnessed. Once you've ascertained the consistency of claims, you can then get to the moral part. It's at that point where you can actually pass a judgement on what the evidence tells you about a person or the situation- not before. And judgement is necessary to survive- you can't not decide whether something is good or bad for your health, mental or otherwise, because then the repercussions of not judging will eventually affect you.

Also, be prepared to adjust your judgement when new evidence comes to light, or if something is pointed out that you may have missed before and the logic actually checks out. At those times, you can review the evidence, the knowledge, your abstractions, and render a new judgement based on it.

The Three Pillars

So, the way to break narrative erasure is pretty straight forward:

Witness, Weight and Judge.
Judgement without Witnessing is prejudice at worst, and ignorance at best.
Witnessing without Judgement is being complicit.

Asher is not concealing himself. He is not playing at being someone else. If this rings hollow due to a pervasive dissonance, then I am here to tell everyone that the dissonance people are experiencing stems from believing others when they layer stories over him, rather than from his hiding.

It's fine to believe that someone is an asshole, but what's not fine is presenting that as fact- just because you believe something, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's true.

But that's as far as we'll go today. I want you to listen to the words I've said and ponder them. Perhaps even put them into action and look around you. You may find that there are stories in place the likes of which you weren't even aware you bought into.

Until next time, I'll talk to you on our next installment.

Star Dispatch: National Cat Day!

2025-08-08T18:12:49-06:00

Not news, exactly, but it IS National Cat Day in the United States.

As such, I felt contractually obligated to perform something to commemorate the day. Even if I am not actually getting paid to do it. Nor did I sign a contract.

But enough of those technicalities. Here you have my cover of The Stray Cat Strut by the Stray Cats.

(Depending on where you are, you may have to watch it directly on youtube- in which case, the link is here)

Star Dispatch #1: The Crumbling Lighthouse

2025-08-04T00:57:00-06:00

I have to admit that this wasn't exactly how I wanted to start the Star Dispatch, but times being what they are... here we are.

As reported in breaking news by the SL Newser, on July 25th, Janire Coba shared an exchange with the landowner of the sim where her store had been, until recently, located for over ten years. This is one of those things for which there really isn't any suitable editorial preamble, so I am just going to show you the screen capture of the exchange without any further ado.

One Foot In Sea, And One On Shore

Following up on the SL Newser's report, I noticed that Ansar had not responded to a request for a statement. I decided to drop by Ansar's real estate company, Lighthouse Real Estate, in the off chance that he might be present in the premises. Ansar, Bixyl's article noted, had not responded to requests for comment by the time of publication, so I decided to pursue the lead.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, Ansar happened to be present. What followed was an interesting exchange, to say the least. I do not think he noticed the hoodie I was wearing, which made the following exchange all the more delectable.

I introduced myself and inquired as to whether he had received SLNewser's request for a quote. He claimed he had not, at which point I proceeded to catch him up to speed:

[15:26] Merryjest StarchIId-Fairelander (merryjeststarchild): It's not an issue, I can give you a brief summary. Mr. Shuftan sent you a request for a quote regarding a news Item but received no reply. It was reported that you evicted a store from one of your properties, accompanied by a slur. Are these reports accurate?
[15:27] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): sorry i have limited time
[15:27] Lighthouse (landland.ansar): Ok..
[15:27] Lighthouse (landlandansar): and i dont host anti simet people
[15:28] Lighthouse (Iandlandansar): and racisit
[15:28] Lighthouse (Iandlandansar): so please time for this bla bla
[15:28] Lighthouse (Iandlandansar): Nuuuuuuuuuuu!
[15:28] Lighthouse (landlandansar): so if you excuse me
[15:28] Merryjest Starchild-Fairelander (merryjeststarchild): Mhm. So your qualification of 'gang of homos' was... against anti-semitic individuals?
[15:28] Merryjest Starchild-Fairelander (merryjeststarchild): As per your Facebook profile, you are pro-Palestine, and the owner of Belle Epoque is also pro-Palestine. How is that anti-semitic?
[15:29] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): yes
[15:29] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): Nuuuuuuuuuuu!
[15:29] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): but ant semit
[15:29] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): so please not anti semit
[15:29] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): not the same

At this point, it seemed obvious to me that Ansar was refusing to justify his accusations with proof of anti-semitic sentiment. I pressed him on this issue again, asking for the specific form that this alleged anti-semitism took:

[15:29] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): Ok..
[15:29] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): im dont answer to u
[15:29] Merryjest Starchild—Fairelander (merryjest.starchild): It isn't a difficult question, Mr. Ansar.
[15:29] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): or any one
[15:29] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): its my land
[15:30] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): my sim
[15:30] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): so you can leave now
[15:30] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): thx
[15:30] Merryjest Starchild-Fairelander (merryjest.starchild): So your answer therefore is that... your justifications aren't actually the reasons for which you took those actions?
[15:30] Merryjest Starchild-Fairelander (merryjest.starchild): So your actions were targeted towards the individual's sexual orientation?
[15:30] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): LL is handliung this as we speak
[15:30] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): dont care
[15:30] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): about sex
[15:30] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): or this bs
[15:30] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): not my biz

This is where I need to break the log in order to point out that Ansar, indeed, does care a great deal about sex, sexuality and gender identity, as can be seen in his profile:

Ansar's profile features the following image as one of his picks, with the title "Men vs Women 2024", with an added commentary: "Sad but fact" (sic.) I immediately confronted him on the statement that he did not 'care about sex' and that it was not 'his biz' by pointing out his profile says otherwise- he is clearly extremely preoccupied with the notion of stereotypical masculinity and, as is often the case, most likely also prejudiced against individuals whose orientation is not defined as 'traditional' by such a system. He avoided that line of inquiry, opting instead to say:

[15:31] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): bbut when come
[15:31] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): using UN name
[15:31] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): and UNRWa
[15:31] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): as donation
[15:31] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): without authorzation
[15:31] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): to do
[15:31] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): is this inloga;
[15:31] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): and use antisemit
[15:31] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): not accept
[15:32] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): Ok..
[15:32] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): now
[15:32] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): talk end
[15:32] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): 3so
[15:32] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): leave

Doubling down on the anti-semitic accusations, Ansar also accused the event runners of being 'without authorization.' For what, precisely, is nebulous, since the UNRWA's FAQ and documentation do not require authorisation to donate to the fund. As an independent 501c3 nonprofit organisation, anyone may donate to it. Furthermore, Coba's posters for the event, and the publicity for the event did not include any material that implied that the event was in any shape or form sponsored or ran by the UNRWA.

Having been asked to depart, I took my leave of Ansar's office, but no before asking a question, which he refused to answer:

[15:33] Merryjest Starchild-Fairelander (merryjest.starchi|d): Oh, one last question, for accuracy-how many properties does Lighthouse currently hold in its rentals?
[15:33] Merryjest Starchild-Fairelander (merryjest.starchi|d): I did not find anything mentioned here in the store.
[15:33] Lighthouse (Iandland.ansar): none of ur boz

You will recall that Ansar's profile boasts the ownership and management of 190 sims. The reasons for why I asked him about his rental properties will become evident fairly soon. Seeing that there was nothing further to be gleaned at Lighthouse Real Estate, I took my leave. By this point, Ansar had ensured I would take an interest in him through his actions, claims, and his evasion. A successful land baron who was shy about his holdings? A DJ with a following of thousands who is desperate to be noticed? A victim of anti-semitic prejudice? You can be assured, I was very interested.

Probably not for the reasons he would prefer.

Ansar did, eventually, respond to SL Newser's request for a response, which is quoted here verbatim from Bixyl. As can be expected, it is utterly baffling:

"This is my answer you even i dont care what she said, she is a pure bitch and slut as well like to do a lot of photoshop"

He also left this response verbatim in Coba's original Flickr post, as witnessed by others. The comment was later removed- either by Ansar or by moderation.

To One Thing Constant, Never

For those unfamiliar with Second Life's fashion world, Janire Coba is the owner of Belle Epoque, one of the most beloved and well-regarded design houses for virtual fashion. Coba is a renowned purveyor of exquisite couture and a regular presence and sponsor for Second Life's Fantasy Faire, which to date has raised a million dollars for the fight against cancer throughout its lifetime. Coba's store, Belle Epoque, had occupied one of Ansar's rental spaces for approximately ten years, though the two had ever seldom spoken as per Coba's recollection.

Ansar's confrontation with Coba came about during another charitable event that she was heading along with several vendors: Stand for Palestine, which was to feature shopping, auctions and performances, the proceeds to be donated to UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency to support urgent relief efforts.

The sequence of events that ended with Belle Epoque's eviction is as follows, according to co-event runner Veronika Nightfire:

Ansar agreed to donate land for the charity event to take place for a little over a month. He also expressed a desire to DJ at the event (another source who was consulted for this article informed me that Ansar performs infrequently as a DJ, but often boasts of having a following of more than a thousand). As soon as event prep and construction had gotten underway, Ansar adopted a very particular attitude: "He acted like he was running the event and making things uncomfortable for us in the discord," said Nightfire.

This was a feeling that was shared by multiple vendors, who started seeing red flags in Ansar's general behavior. Things came to a head when Ansar decided to rez his DJ booth at the sim's landing point in the middle of vendor setup. After being notified of this by one of the vendors, Nightfire and her wife asked him to remove the booth so as not to obstruct the vendors. Ansar responded with the trademark mixture of arrogance and condescension that appears to be his signature style.

Once the event opened on the 19th of July, Ansar's behavior would become even more uncomfortable. During his DJ set, he would reportedly make jokes about stealing the donations, and he would continue to act like an event runner in the Discord chat, often addressing internal affairs in the public chat. To rein this in, Nightfire opened a private chat between Ansar and the rest of the admin staff and requested that all discussion of event private affairs be kept to the confines of the private chat. Ansar did not take kindly to this.

(Note: All Discord timestamps are relative to Nightfire's local time zone.)

"First I know that all of you don't know me and to make it as short and Sweet as possible I‘m a person who has issues with attitude, of course each
person is free to hate or like or dislike or be feminist or anything they want, but when it comes to interactions with me respect and down to earth
And this message is general not for here
Just to give you an idea who im
And something you might not know the land you're using now is mine and the cost I'm assuming is 209US $ for the period is used and I accepted
due to the cause means to me and for Jarine
I hope it's clear enough
No more to say and please moving toward please put in mind my statement about me because my tolerance is zero when come to attitude
Wish you a good day for now"

-LandLand Ansar, 7/21/2025 10:22 AM (Discord)

Coba assured Ansar that there had been no disrespect directed at him, and that she was puzzled about feminism being brought up out of the blue, when the main focus should be the cause. Coba reminded Ansar that, while they appreciated his donation of the land, he was not part of event administration, and to please be kind to the other event organisers. Ansar replied:

"Well I have been kind to them however their attitude comes wrong let's put it this way, when. They speak to others and they use their sweet tongue and talk to me too much attitude simple as that
I hope it's clear
And so far if I recall I spoke to them in a polite manner
And I never said it's for me or anything else and as I told you I even backup this event with LL after many Zionist filed abuse report from the event
land with pictures and some asses sent NC to few of my clients that I support such events
So all is doing his share during this event
Voila
Anyway I guess I shared my point of view and what I feel with them
To know"

-LandLand Ansar, 7/21/2025 10:31 AM (Discord)

Coba thanked Ansar and then expressed the desire that all should work towards making a good event. Clearly failing to find the level of acquiescence that he was expecting, Ansar departed the event:

"And will leave the group when I log in
Simple I can't take ur friends attitude
Allé best I'm out
Nor this feminist attitude full of it"

-LandLand Ansar, 7/21/2025 12:13 PM (Discord)

A few minutes later, Ansar sent Coba the following message:

"Please you have a week guys to find a new place"

-LandLand Ansar, 7/21/2025 12:18 PM (Discord)

Nightfire, her wife Juliana Rhys, and Teagan Cerulean were banned from the sim by Ansar. A few days later, Coba was banned from her store, which was on rental land managed by Ansar. It is then that the message Coba shared was sent, with Ansar branding Coba, openly bisexual, and her associates as a 'gang of homo.'

That is the current state of affairs as of the time of writing this. Ansar has been reported for abuse to Linden Labs, and his actions regarding a charity event should come under scrutiny. However, these events are not an outlier where it comes to this this individual, I have come to find.

Since Summer First Was Leafy

At this juncture, I am obligated to inform those readers who are unfamiliar with the platform that the birth-date and age marker (17) in Ansar's profile indicate how long this user has existed within Second Life. I must point this out for the sake of clarity, as it is altogether too believable that readers might honestly assume that we are dealing with someone for whom the words 'detention' and 'hall pass violation' are still familiar nomenclature thanks to the braggadocios and adolescent tone of his profile. Evidently, this man wishes you to believe that he is somebody. "Anybody," is most likely present in the subtext there, as well.

I am not unfamiliar with individuals who evidence Ansar's behavior. They seem to have emerged from every conceivable crevice in the crumbling edifice of our society over the last two decades. Admittedly, they have always been here, but presently they are more emboldened thanks to the likes of hucksters such as Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson and Stefan Aarnio, whose endeavors seek to normalize the most infantilized version of masculinity possible while branding it as the behavior of a Real Man(tm, probably). There is a sizable and very profitable industry in the selling of new upholstery for old egos. All it seems to produce, however, is the same tired throng of insecure men who anxiously expect to become by virtue of endlessly declaring who and what they are to the world instead of embarking on the arduous and time-consuming task of being.

Faced with those men who wish to bend reality by virtue of words, I coined a rule of thumb for myself which has served me well to remember:

The lion has no need to tell others that he's a lion. All animals know him for what he is.

When someone frequently tells you how great they are, you have wandered into the demesne of someone whose fragility is so off-the-charts that the much-underappreciated Laura Branigan might have had them in mind when writing 'Shattered Glass.' It's the make-believe model that men like Elon Musk, the consummate Count Lustigs of today, must follow in the hopes of superseding reality with their own layer of fabricated identity. For a while, they may be successful, but mirages always shatter in the end. The emperor's indecency is always, inevitably, revealed. A perfect example is how Musk The Genius is now revealed to be Musk the canny, hype-building con-man who failed upward to the eyes of all. Well, except to those who still delude themselves in the rabid desire to believe in the mono-myth of the Great Exceptional Man.

Please note that I am not saying that there is no such thing as exceptional people, but only that there is a particular piece of narrativium that gets tightly wound around individuals as a rhetorical device and moral exculpation. It is woven to closely identify an individual with a historical counterpart. Musk, for example, deliberately leaned into the comparisons with Nikola Tesla, even encouraging the false story that it was he who named the company after the Serbian inventor instead of the company's original co-founder, Martin Eberhard. This autopanegyric mossycoat is woven out of the echoes of someone else's past great deeds. Its promise is that, should its wearer's outward actions tread along the same mythic path in sufficient degree, then future greatness is guaranteed. Whatever horrendous actions and collateral damage that are perpetrated along the way need not concern anyone, for they will be softened under the warm glow of future glory.

Or so the story goes.

However, stories have a tendency to punish people who turn them into lies, because stories want to ring true. For every Etana who ascends to the heavens on the wings of an eagle, we have an Icarus who falls for trying to live a reality other than his own. The mini-Musks, or musk-glands if you will, who follow the trodden path of their much larger and resource-laden counterpart, are likewise destined for a similar conclusion. And any seasoned connoisseur of narrative knows how to identify the origin point, the fatal action that invokes inevitable consequences and ruination.

And it always, or almost always, starts with a lie.

Landland Ansar's entire public persona is a barely-cohesive collection of lies thrown at the wall like cheap pasta and, like cheap pasta, little manages to actually stick.

The Fraud Of Men Was Ever So

These slippery strands of gluten sliding down the wall bring up many questions to bear. Ansar variably claims he is the owner of somewhere between 190 to 250 sims (depending on which profile/listing you check.) Such a considerable land-mass would place him among the top 15 largest Real Estate companies in Second Life, Candy Azure's empire of approximately 3100 regions firmly dominating first place on that list.

Given these numbers, an inquiring or particularly nosy person might ask how can a company claiming to manage an inventory load comparable to approximately one third to one half (accounts vary) of the land inventory of Luxory Estates (approx. 650 region) afford to have a main office that looks deader than Heaven on a Saturday night?

Walking into one of the main stores belonging to Luxory Estates, the fifth-largest virtual real estate company in Second Life (est. 650 regions), is an experience in efficiency. Warehouse-chic buildings with large footprints and high-vaulted ceilings house row upon row of parcel indicators neatly separated by regions.

In these stores, users are able to window shop for available parcels across many themed regions such as the ever-popular Second Norway (where I myself was a tenant for over a year and a half in 2020.) Agents are also regularly available to answer questions and give tours for prospective tenants, often easily reachable through their boards if they are not present at the store.

By comparison, walking into the Lighthouse Real Estate company's office is almost an exposure therapy exercise in Sartrean solitude.

The visitor is greeted by vast empty spaces with little advertisement, no agents and a single staff member listed on the online indicator board: Ansar. The lack of any visible staff, or mention of any staff at all is puzzling for an allegedly large company. Likewise, its Marketplace presence is no less unusual, with the same store listed three times under three different usernames, all being obviously Ansar alternate accounts. One of the posters in the office lists imLon Galicia (an alt account of imLon Renfew) as a point of contact regarding potential rental inquiries. When I reached out, Renfew informed me he was no longer associated with Ansar or Lighthouse Real Estate. When I informed him that I was working on this article, his response was "Why, what did he do now?" and he indicated that he wasn't surprised, but merely curious. When I explained the reason for the article, imLon said "I see, yeah. Sounds definitely (like) him."

The company's timeline is also muddled, with Lighthouse's Marketplace presence claiming an establishment date of 2007, while other profiles state that the company has been in operation since 2017.

It is decidedly difficult to pin down details regarding Ansar and his business endeavors, which is most likely by design: the hazier the details, the more leeway there is for creative interpretation, which can be an asset for those who seek to leverage vagueness in the service of exaggeration. Ansar likes to play up the image of the busy businessman, and seems to enjoy being able to leverage his land ownership as threat and bargaining chip, such as in the exchanges in the Discord where he attempted to paint himself sympathetically for having donated his land for the charity event- where the reader can see how easily and vindictively quick he was to eject both event and his long-time tenant from it. One of Ansar's predilect insults, after all, seems to be the insinuation that his tier prices are out of the reach of most people, which is an indirect relishing of power over others.

Even if it were fantasy, projecting the image of having a vast number of resources that exist outside of the reach of a good amount of the population is the ultimate ego scaffolding for someone who subscribes to Andrew Tate's school of -for lack of a better word- thought: elitism and the kind of brittle self-worth that is granted by external factors.

What makes the man's portrait even more grotesquely tragic is how much of what he considers his crowning glories simply aren't true. How do know that Ansar doesn't have 190-250 regions in his docket? Can I prove that Landland Ansar's company assets aren't as he advertises, if he will not publish the data?

And Be You Blythe And Bonny

An answer to the question suggests itself through the use of the controversial army of identical sisters who, like Stepford Cuckoos, quietly roam about while maintaining telepathic communication with a central nexus. Or, putting it less poetically, they're bots.

Meta-verse journalist and writer James Au wrote about them in 2023, along with the controversy that followed in their wake. The controversial project employs bots that roam the grid and collect and publish publicly available data from Second Life users. Opinions about the project are divided, some argue that the project's data collection violates their privacy and Linden Labs' terms of service, while others argued that as long as only publicly-available information is gathered, no such leak of privacy is taking place. A somewhat similar surveying of the Second Life grid has been carried out for over ten years by Tyche Shepherd through her Second Life Grid Survey bots, the results of each survey being eagerly awaited by the SL forum community. However, while Tyche's survey bots limit themselves to gathering information on the size of the grid and the sampling process only occurred a few times per year, the Bonnie bots' surveying is a constant 24-hour cycle and is perceived as more invasive.

In 2023, in response to concerns raised by users and following a meeting with Linden Labs, the survey site would add an opt-out of Marketplace top merchant listings, and remove the avatar search feature. What remains available of the site lists the most active regions, the most popular avatar attachments, user activity statistics along with the most common last names... and the land list.

The land list is of particular interest, as it shows land auction history, lands used as sandboxes (areas where users can build and rez items), abandoned land, and the top land rental companies. The Bonniebots top land list, as you can imagine, lists the top land rental companies. Lighthouse Real Estate is a subsidiary of the Lighthouse Group, and its presence in the marketplace exists under three different entries, all under different alts belonging to Ansar, but one company name.

By Bonniebot's ranking, the smallest Real Estate Company belongs to Lyndsay Carson with a count of approximately 36 regions. The mid-range is made up of companies that oscillate between 40+ and 60+ before jumping into the 100+ category at number 16 in the listing of 33 real estate companies. The minimum number of sims to enter the list stands at 32, as I understand it, and neither Ansar nor any accounts linked to the company have made the list.

Of course, there is the faint possility that Ansar banned bots... but if his holdings are the size that he claims, the bots would have still gathered data from his properties before the ability for land-owners to ban bots was implemented by the Lindens at the end of March of 2023. By that point, the Bonnies had been gathering data on a constant 24-hour cycle for months, enough to gather a sizable snapshot. Luxory Estates was one of the companies that was quick to ban access to bots as soon as the feature became available, but the data had already been archived by that point. Luxory's totaly sim count could be higher or lower than the current estimate, but as one of the most successful real estate companies, it's not likely to vary by much. If Ansar's company is as successful as he claims, and has been around for as long as he claims (8 or 18 years), the Bonnies would have registered a footprint. 190+ sims do not appear, nor vanish, overnight.

Whatever the region count for Lighthouse Real Estate is in reality, it has actually gone down by one region, as Belle Epoque's owner found that the entire region where her store had been for the past ten years no longer exists. This puts Ansar's region count at one at this moment, as far as regions whose existence I could actually verify.

Left with a smattering of rentals on his main land, including a furry club with a very amicable owner whose fate I fear under Ansar's now famously erratic vindictiveness, there is more barren land than Land Baron in Ansar's future.

But I am afraid that this is not where the story ends for him.

Of Dumps So Dull And Heavy

We can now turn our attention to Ansar's bizarre behavior during his interaction with Coba and the rest of the event's management team. You will recall that his biggest sticking point, according to him, was 'attitude'- which he then, bizarrely, qualified as 'feminist.' Having seen the logs of the exchange, what I saw was firm but polite resistance to Ansar's attempts to take the helm of an event in which he was neither an organizer nor an admin. Ansar bristled inordinately in a way that very much suggests that he expected no resistance to his commandeering as the only acceptable status quo.

Ansar appears to have a contentious relationship with women. One specific tab in his profile is labeled "For Ladies :)", which lists the following heptalogue:

For someone who claims to have a problem with 'attitude', he clearly dispenses it liberally himself.

He also seems to have a very specific set of default insults for the women with whom he has disagreements. You will remember that his response to the SL Newser, Ansar said that Coba was a 'pure bitch and a slut.' Despite his earlier claims that he doesn't 'care about sex', once again, he appears to be extremely preoccupied with the subject when we look at his social media interactions:

Ansar's world seems to be divided neatly into women he likes (women who express admiration for him or reciprocate his interests) and 'whores/sluts' (women who rebuke him or show no interest in him) and their 'pimps' (anyone attached to said women in one fashion or another.) Speaking to some of the women Ansar has come up against reveals a man desperate for external validation from women, but also one who believes that he is entitled to it.

"He was just a really entitled douche. I wasn't the only woman in the (...) scene that dealt with him flirting constantly with us, no matter how much we dropped hints or tried politely to say no to stay civil and keep the peace."
- Anonymous Source

One interviewee recalls Ansar attempting to involve her in one of his business endeavors, a new venue he wanted to start, but she extricated herself from the situation- earning his ire. A cursory glance at his social media shows Ansar tagging women in several facebook posts where he hurled his now-familiar sexual invective against them for some slight. All across, the sentiment seems to be similar: women approached by Ansar were often made uneasy by his unsettling attention, but tolerated him because they thought he was lonely.

"He was the walking, living, breathing textbook definition of an incel. "
-A.S.

The women consulted who had these encounters with Ansar have been left as anonymous sources, to prevent further attacks from him. Of the few who were approached for some form of business collaboration, not a single one saw any hint of Ansar's allegedly large tracts of land- only his Real Estate office region.

All Your Sounds Of Woe

Ansar's claims that Coba and company were anti-semitic alternate with his charges that Coba comitted fraud regarding the charity. As I have explained, the only fraud possible here would be if the donations did not make their way to their intended fund, as there is no pre-authorization requirement to hold an independent fundraising event, therefore that accusation is toothless.

As is the anti-semitic claim. Reading the Discord logs, it becomes easy to see that the pushback he received from Coba and others was due entirely to his actions. Nevertheless, Ansar would have us believe that it was motivated because he is, by his own admission in his profile, a man of Egyptian ancestry currently residing in Montreal, Canada, but the tenor of the exchange with Coba doesn't match his claims.

Observing Ansar's reactions not just in this exchange but across the board, every time he is criticized, there are behavioral red flags that are very consistent. The notion of a 'moral wound' is a behavior that is frequently observed in individuals with fragile egos or similar tendencies when they experience rejection. Often grounded in fear and experiences of abandonment, it is a reaction that often engages a defense mechanism to safeguard the individual's self-image and reverse offender and offended in order to make their critics back off.

What appears to be the most common incarnation of this mechanism nowadays is using one's identity as a shield. It's certainly most likely to be the most direct self-soothe for the compromised individual, as they are free to sustain an internal and external narrative that any criticism directed at them isn't due to their actions, but because of who they are. With this mechanism, criticism can be dismissed and minimized because the person doesn't have to come to terms with their actions, because identity is then turned into a floating abstraction that is treated as far more important than character, so the stated identity is far more important than deeds.

This is a very common tactic, especially in crybully circles on the internet- you find people who advertise themselves as kind immediately pivot to an identity defense when accused of moments of shocking cruelty, for example, because they have declared their identity is one of someone incapable of being deliberately cruel (despite the fact that all humans are capable of cruelty), any accusations of cruelty are immediately diverted into some immutable (and therefore unassailable) quality, such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, etc, and therefore the incident never needs to be seriously examined... ensuring that no change or uncomfortable growth is needed.

Meanwhile, the target of the reversal is now faced with an accusation of one form or bigotry or another, the seriousness of what they have to deal with depending entirely on the size of the audience the aggrieved individual can leverage, often accompanied with performative victimization to drum up sympathy.

Ansar is particularly transparent in this instance, since his behavior as the target of criticism was documented and attested to by vendors and organizers alike, and there was nothing indicating it was due to his ethnicity. However, his accusations of being discriminated against were also coupled with... sexist insults directed at women. His constant framing of women as 'sluts' and 'whores' does, in fact, show a level of sexist bigotry, as does his epiteth of 'gang of homos.' Ansar sent a screenshot to Bixyl claiming the screenshot Coba had posted was photoshopped and that he, in fact, had said 'gang of loosers' (sic).

Ansar, however, forgot to notice that the time-stamp of that exchange is different from the time-stamp Coba posted on Flickr.

The original image Coba posted was edited to show the two important moments in the conversation one on top of the other: the eviction, and the homophobic slur. But she has also posted the unedited version of the conversation. Here we can see the timestamp at which Ansar's slur ocurred:

The chat Ansar sent to Bixyl cuts off right before 20:01. I think it is fair to suggest that he was hoping this detail would not be noticed to claim double victimhood- only being discriminated against for his ethnicity, but also being falsely accused of using homophobic slurs.

However, Ansar's own interactions are tainted with the very things he has been accusing others of. On a public Facebook post, he posted logs between him and one of the women with whom he's had disagreements. Nestled within the exchange, and which Ansar didn't see fit to censor (editing is mine), is an offhand remark Ansar made about the owner of a nightclub that included a racist slur aimed at people of Japanese descent:

Coba's sharing of her conflict with Ansar on social media elicited multiple comments of support between Flickr and Facebook. Several commenters revealed their own past experiences with Ansar, such as the following:

"Had to deal with him as a director of a music venue. Out of a sudden he did homophobic rants on one of the directors. Also he bans everyone he has issues with on all his sims. I remember I have been banned by him on Belle Epoque together with some other friends without Janire knowing it until she found out cos a friend wrote it to her. He also rented land for a club to someone and when he had a fall out with this person for no reason, he banned ALL staff on the sim which was paid for weeks..."
- Simone Lietz (Facebook)

It should be noted that Ansar also kept the advance tier money that Coba had paid for Belle Epoque, even after evicting her store, banning her from the region, and then taking the region offline. What I could verify of his pattern stretches back to 2019, but it has likely been around for much longer. This review on one of his Marketplace stores reveals an event that follows a similar pattern to the others:

At the end of the day, the portrait that Ansar's own words and deeds paint is not a flattering one. We are dealing with a deeply insecure man who goes around the grid trying to impress women and flirt with them, using the image of himself as a successful businessman as a scaffolding for his persona. He is thoroughly convinced of his own importance until the moment in which it gets a reality check. Thereupon he will turn vindictive and verbally abusive, resorting to sexism and homophobia, even casual racism, and will renege on business and charity agreements, engaging in what could potentially be classified as fraud by withholding funds paid in advance for services not rendered.

In his wake, he leaves more burned bridges than General Sherman behind him, and he steps into one shrinking sphere after another as he sheds associates and clients in periodic bursts. Ansar, whatever else he may be going through, is clearly not in a place where he should be doing what he is doing nor rendering the services he wants to render. Like the very men he is consciously or unconsciously emulating, his approach leaves him unable to form fulfilling emotional relationships and everything becomes purely transactional. Finally, tragically, he must inevitably react with anger and hurt at the sense of abandonment that takes over when such a mercenary approach is rejected.

And here is where the overall enablers of these abusive cycles exert their strongest influence, as the grifters of the Manosphere will assure men like Ansar that there is nothing that needs introspection or reconsideration in their approach- they are just being hated for being a real men, ones who are not 'losers' and who have reasons to be arrogant. They just, these grifters will tell them, might benefit from purchasing another book or attending another online seminar ready to be delivered to them. Their tactics are not too different from grifters in the mental health influencer spaces whose misapplication of the concept of boundaries have created people with senses of entitlement not too unlike Ansar's, who expect to wield boundaries as methods of controlling other people's actions, instead of prioritizing their own needs.

Ansar's trajectory speaks of contradictions. His former business associate told me that he believes Ansar suffers from some kind of anger management issue. "When he is not angry or not paranoid he is kind of a good, but to be honest, I don't know. We haven't talked for so long after I left the estate to him." Whatever the issue may be with Ansar, we cannot diagnose it- only a qualified therapist treating him can, but the history of events speaks strongly to issues with identity, self-image, and emotionally explosive reactions towards having that self-image challenged.

It must be said that we all in Second Life are free to live the lives we desire and present the images and identities we wish we could have. I am, after all, and despite assumptions to the contrary, not an actual Cheshire cat. Ansar is free to try to embody the life of a jet-set land mogul as much as he wishes. However, there is a line in the sand that needs to be drawn when the integrity of your fantasy must be maintained at the expense of others, and results in the harming of others in one way or another. It is at that point that the story becomes a lie that must devour the truth and maintain its own existence.

And that's the point at which the Huntsman must enter the house and extract the truth from the bowels of the beast. Ansar could choose to come to terms with the long history of his actions and these explosive events and take stock, and a long and careful look. Both the Taoists and the Stoa teach that, as all things are in flux and change is the nature of the universe, every failure and difficulty can be repurposed into an opportunity If Ansar takes a moment to honestly, and without clinging to the false narratives and ego-serving imagery, ask "why does this keep happening?" he might come upon a breakthrough. One that may - or may not - need the assistance of a therapist to parse, perhaps, which is not something about which to be ashamed. Unfortunately, mental health stigma is on the rise, which is often a factor that makes it less likely for men to seek out mental health and thus contribute to the perpetuation of vicious cycles. However compassionate one's approach has to be, however, it must be done with the understanding that honesty is not only a virtue but also a cardinal element of a compassionate approach: if you don't tell people what they're doing, how are they always expected to know what to change?

Consider this article, therefore, a detailed enumeration to Ansar of what he is doing.

As a parting note- those who wish to show support for Belle Epoque but use male avatars and therefore can't use her 'Gang of Homos' shirts, I've added a gift to my store, Merry/Bright, for you to wear!