+The outpatient program has a few social-pressure sales tactics meant to persuade you that you have some underlying condition that requires their "care". They were unpersuaded by my cause-and-effect reasoning that I had gone crazy due to stress-induced sleep deprivation, and was now fine after having gotten sleep. Getting sleep _fixed the problem_.
+
+But the doors aren't locked; they don't actually have any power over you that you don't give them.
+
+The intake assessment describes me as "retreat[ing] into highly intellectualized, incomprehensible philosophy as a defense against disorganization/psychotic thought process". (Well, all philosophy looks incomprehensible when you, personally, don't comprehend it.) Another note describes me as "hostile, belligerent, and condescending throughout the program" on the morning of 24 February. (They deserved it.)
+
+-----
+
+I started talking more with Michael Vassar. I don't think I've ever really understood Michael well enough to summarize him. Everyone else writes blog posts. If you want to know what someone's intellectual agenda is about, you can point to the blog posts. Michael never writes anything. He just has these free-wheeling conversations where he makes all sorts of crazy-sounding assertions ... which were suddenly starting to make sense to me now.
+
+On 22 February 2017 (two days after my release from the psych ward), he asked for my phone number (Subject: "Can I have your phone number?"). "I'd really like to talk soon," he wrote. "Thinking much more about how you can help me to meet my needs than about how I can help you though, and feel guilty about it given the situation, so feel free to tell me 'no, not now'."
+
+I replied, "I like helping people meet their needs! It's prosocial!"
+
+When I asked how I could help him meet his needs. He said that he thought my fight was ground zero in a war against words. If I had the mental composure to hold up, knowing that I had allies, he really thought that full documentation of my experiences would be the maximum leverage of my time. Otherwise, he was all but unable to ask for money for himself, even if he honestly thought he was the best use of it, but he was able to ask for nonprofit funding. What about starting a nonprofit, with me as executive director and him as fundraiser?—the Society for the Preservation of Generative Grammar and for Defense Against Structural Violence, providing legal defense for people whose rights or livelihood are threatened by political correctness. (Subject: "Re: You're really bad at communicating!")
+
+Regarding the suggestion to document my experiences, I replied, "Too narcissistic!" This is incredibly ironic in hindsight, given the absurd amount of effort I've ended up spending since 2019 writing up this Whole Dumb Story. But you see, I had to try making object-level arguments _first_. It was only after that conclusively failed, that I've gone to the narcissistic extreme of full documentation of my experiences as a last resort. (Or as therapy.)
+
+I didn't want to start a nonprofit, either. I thought our kind of people were smart enough to function without the taboo against giving money to individuals instead of faceless institutions. I had $97,000 saved up from being a San Francisco software engineer who doesn't live in San Francisco. Besides keeping most of it as savings, and spending some of it to take a sabbatical from my career, I was thinking it made sense to spend some of it just giving unconditional gifts to Michael and others who had helped me as a kind of credit-assignment ritual, although I wanted to think carefully about the details before doing anything rash.
+
+On a separate email thread, I ended up mentioning something to Michael that I shouldn't have, due to a previous confidentiality promise I had made. (I can tell you _that_ I screwed up on a secrecy obligation, without revealing what it was.) I felt particularly bad about this given that I had been told that Michael was notoriously bad at keeping secrets, and asked him to keep this one secret as a favor to me.
+
+Michael replied:
+
+> Happy to not talk about it. Just freaking ask. I can easily honor commitments, just not optimize for general secrecy. The latter thing is always wrong. I'm not being sloppy and accidentally defecting against the generalized optimization for secrecy, I'm actively at war with it. We need to discuss this soon.
+
+------