Happy Thanksgiving, to everyone who celebrates it! And a very merry Thursday to everyone who doesn’t.
Because I haven’t provided a health update in a while (outside of the comments) I just wanted to reassure everyone that I am still here, and still trying to sort through a bunch of medical issues with the help of assorted doctors, some very competent and others not so much.
The issues I’m facing aren’t lifethreatening, but they are still debilitating enough to keep me from regular posting here. Sorry to be so vague; I’ll offer more details once some of these issues are sorted out a bit more. I’ll return to posting as soon as I am able but I cannot predict when that will be.
I appreciate everyone’s patience and continued support. Thanks!
@_Dali
@ Dali
Hugs if wanted. I went/am going through the same thing. My partner and I split after 38 years, after they had an emotional breakdown. I’ve learned to take it one step, one day, one thing at a time to avoid becoming overwhelmed. I hope you have a support network (from what I’ve seen here, you definitely seem to have one here), if so, lean on them.
E.T.A. @ Sheila *snerk*
Dalillama – internet hugs if you want them. That is hard. Echoing/seconding Shadowplay.
@Jenora
Yeah, the Army thing was definitely a punchline, but I hardly blame the city for making the call. This city is simply not designed for snow, particularly not in the cramped downtown core.
Oh and don’t get me started on Mel Lastman. I think in our charming naiveté, we saw him as just this bumbling showman, like we had elected Russell Oliver (a Toronto jewelry buyer who’s always on TV with the same “Oh yeah!” catchphrase) to run a city the size of Chicago. But whatever he did for North York, the guy was clearly not up to the job of running the new megacity and it showed, especially in the new education system where my mother and stepfather worked. Petty politics and backstabbing ran amok, and I’m willing to bet that if that happened in the Toronto District School Board, it was everywhere in the municipal government too.
My WTFMoment of the Day:
In Germany normal workplace:
One worker is pregnant from another worker.
Boss: It would be best if you do away with it.
To give back a bit of faith in humanity. The boss has been fired since then, but hello that is to private for a boss to engeage in.
Re: Snow
It snowed here in Cornwall about 8 years ago and the county ground to a halt. We didn’t have any ploughs or gritters. Turns out the local authority had decided it wasn’t worth buying any and if it did snow they planned to borrow some from other councils. Unfortunately they hadn’t considered that if it was cold enough to snow in a county with a sub tropical climate it might also be cold enough to snow elsewhere in the country.
@Alan:
Heh. In 1996 there was a massive snowstorm that hit Victoria, B.C. 65cm in a day on December 29th, as part of 124cm total for December. Biggest single-day snowfall in 80 years. Completely shut the city down.
https://globalnews.ca/news/3146344/a-look-back-1996-snow-storm-of-the-century-hits-vancouver-and-victoria/
Victoria usually has green Christmases, and had in fact sold off the last of the municipally-owned snow removal equipment the previous year because it was costing them more in maintenance than the use they had been getting out of it the previous few years.
(My family’s area in Central Saanich just to the north of the city proper was fine, because one of our neighbours ran a dairy farm and got paid by the city to start up his tractor with front-end loader and help plow the streets.)
Though if you want snow in places that don’t normally expect it, in 1997 I remember seeing reports of snow in Guadalajara of all places. (Google search shows it’s happened once since then, a year and a half ago?) People staring up at the sky because they had never seen this happen before.
On the same day the ice roads in northern Manitoba were thawing out.
After his own speech, for “breech of peace”, having attacked a member of the audience who took his speech off the podium.
His plans now include, according to twitter:
Ah, the perusal of justice…
Wonkette had an interesting article that I think had some food for thought on the matter of “trial by court of public opinion” from the perspective of somebody who had felt that kind of scrutiny regarding their poverty status: https://wonkette.com/626259/we-actually-do-need-to-talk-about-witch-hunts
While I’m definitely on board with demanding accountability via the public forum, the article does make a compelling case for confronting hidden side-effects of social media dogpiles. I’m just curious what the Mammotheers think of it.
There’s a reason we use juries and not mobs.
I was in Eugene, Or. in 1977, flew back to Ks. for xmas… on the return trip, when we landed in Portland, it was eight degrees!!! The normal dreary winter rainfall in Eugene-Springfield had fallen as 1/2″ of ice. The metro area had one snowplow, which Springfield used to plow the McKenzie Hiway on the occasions it needed it. The entire metro area was at a complete standstill until the ice melted. Our house had 50 feet of above-ground water pipe under it, which was a 50 foot x 3/4 in. rod of solid ice.
@Shadowplay
Yes. But institutions like the justice system do fail (look no further than George Zimmerman or Jian Ghomeshi). I think there’s fertile ground for a broader conversation about what happens when they do and our collective culpability in the social media sphere for any fallout.
JS: he’s an idiot. There was a cop right next to him. What are these guys always bleating about taking the law into their own hands?
Fucking little twerp.
@Katamount
Yes – the justice system is sometimes misnamed. It should be called the law system, as justice is quite often locked out of the courtroom, far as I can see.
It fails often – and it fails both ways. For every Zimmerman, you’ve got people on death row as shouldn’t be there. How many executions of innocent people have happened isn’t known – once the person is dead the courts in the USA will not re-open the case, no matter what evidence shows up.
However – public pressure on the justice system and trial by social media are completely different beasts.
The first lets the system work first, then audits it. The second – Zoe Quinn ring a bell? That was trial by mob. Social media first and foremost enables mob behaviour:
– the regular inhibitions are reduced thanks to it being “words on a screen,”
– the echo chamber effect is amplified, since very few people associate on social media with people they disagree with.
That’s plenty of straw and plenty of petrol laying around right there – all you need is one person in a group to light a match. And there is always one. That’s a universal.
Fascists believe the law IS in their hands. They go beyond “I’m always right”, they believe “I’m what right IS” Nothing they do could possibly be in violation of the law, and if it is, then the law is wrong
@Shadowplay
All good points, particularly about those wrongfully convincted, but I was using the two cases more as obvious examples of institutional failure that go beyond merely the justice system. I actually left a comment on the article that if the institutions we depended on did their job properly, these situations wouldn’t arise. In the case of Ghomeshi, the CBC could have terminated him far earlier. The judge in his criminal case could have been more aware of the rape myths that underpinned his verdict. But since he’s free today, you can bet that the minute he tries to raise his public profile or get a job with another radio station, that organization is going to get a letter from me. Because he was a known abuser in the industry for years. Hell, he wrote a book about it.
Perhaps I’m wrong to doing so, but in light of the failure of the CBC and the Canadian justice system, I do consider it my duty to ensure Ghomeshi doesn’t rehabilitate his reputation.
Am I wrong to think that way? Is this the same rationale that the Gamergaters used when they mobbed Quinn? Is it a matter of profile (Ghomeshi was a public figure with considerable power)? The article argues we lose sight of the broader implications, including those around somebody like Ghomeshi (family, friends) and the unintended turmoil that such public shaming can cause. I just wanted to get a sense of what the folks here thought about it.
@Katamount
Making me think after dinner – very cruel! 🙂
Can’t say if you’re wrong to think that way or not – I’m not you. My mind don’t work like most people’s anyway, so I’m told. 😛
I would ask you though if you’d do the same thing if, instead of Ghomeshi, it was one of the local homeless guys had had the same result. Would you write to anyone who employed him? I’m guessing that you wouldn’t. So yes, it’s a matter of profile.
It’s also a matter of trust. No matter how cynical a person is, they do still have some expectation that a person with power will, at the very, very least attempt to miss the little guy when they wield it. Pleas enote the singular – a PERSON is accountable. A group is not. When it comes down to it, we’re still the same apes that failed at climbing so hard they had to learn to walk upright. 😛
My take, anyways. I’m now rather curious to see what the wise ones here say 🙂
Matt Lauer! And now . . . Garrison Keillor! (For those who don’t listen to National Public Radio from the USA, Keillor’s show is folksy and family-friendly with some sarcastic humor for the grown-ups.)
I wasn’t there when the Keillor incident occurred, but I just want to say, Of course that’s what happened, Garrison. Of course.
http://enews.earthlink.net/article/us?guid=20171129/a9fa334b-db15-4f70-9238-0a617872feb6
Garrison Keillor fired, says he put hand on woman’s back
Garrison Keillor, the former host of “A Prairie Home Companion,” said Wednesday he has been fired by Minnesota Public Radio over allegations of what the network called improper behavior.
Keillor told The Associated Press of his firing in an email. In a follow-up statement, he said he was fired over “a story that I think is more interesting and more complicated than the version MPR heard.”
Keillor didn’t detail the allegation to AP, but in an email to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, he said the incident involved putting his hand on a woman’s bare back in an attempt to console her.
“I meant to pat her back after she told me about her unhappiness, and her shirt was open and my hand went up it about six inches. She recoiled. I apologized. I sent her an email of apology later and she replied that she had forgiven me and not to think about it,” Keillor told the newspaper. “We were friends. We continued to be friendly right up until her lawyer called.”*
Keillor didn’t say when the incident occurred.
*Women!
@Shadowplay
Again, excellent points! 🙂
I have questions. Like, what kind of shirt is open in the back, so one’s hand goes up it six inches?
I’m unaware of any shirts that open at the back.
Seriously, this dude’s an author and that‘s the best lie he could come up with?
EDIT: NINJA’D BY PEEVEE!
And he sounds so puzzled, there. *sigh*
@katamount
Re Linda Tirado’s article:
She states in re to Al Franken groping,
Uhh, what? Since when is facing professional censure equivalent to chemical castration?? She’s implying that the people who want to see Franken face consequences are actually asserting grievous violence? Miss me with that take.
Yeah, I get that what she went through is shitty and I have every sympathy for her. But she did nothing WRONG. What happened to her was an injustice. These men HAVE done something wrong! And up until 5 minutes ago, they acted with complete impunity.
She also states about men accused of harassment,
Many of their victims have already gone through exactly this. Ruined careers, PTSD, estrangement from friends and family, expensive therapy and treatment, shame, fear, panic. YEAH IT SUCKS DOESNT IT?
The guy who Harvey Weinstein’ed me out of my career in science is still working, still getting grants, still mentoring graduate students, still has his lovely little family… and I am sick with no insurance, no career, with PTSD, ruined dreams. Where’s the justice for me here? That I’m supposed to feel sorry that a very select few of these guys are finally facing a similar consequence?
I respect Linda a lot, but this whole column is a false equivalency.
SFHC: GMTA!
@Katamount
Thanks for posting that. We seem to feel similarly.
That article is relevant to one of my issues. What I would defend as justifiable group criticism that functionally deals with social problems will feel a certain way.
The problem lies in the fact that it’s a general human social tool that is related to both the reasonable social criticism and the behavior of bigots of all kinds swarming the way they swarm on the internet. I don’t like it, I wish we had best collective rules about these social tools, but if gamergaters and similar tolerate the abuse of their peers I’ll not consider the public criticism of even the most unconscious and implicit bigots a problem (many other relevant categories exist like public criticism of TERFs via TERF behavior).
My Tourette’s Syndrome related version might be my ability to exhaust other people exhibiting troll behavior. Sure, I can bury them in text and insult while I exhaust through sheer volume as well creativity, but I feel that place where I’m using the same weapons. I think can make myself feel more positive about how I exert social aggression and dominance as a social justice advocate. But that’s got to be under my control, and done for the right reasons as much as I can with my political needs.
My other ethical thoughts are similar. One of the lighter ones is how severely I should work on things like the idea of “emotional arguments” and related ideas of what emotion is in the public consciousness. That one is largely independent of things like political party and I have many friends that might find SJW a tempting word.