Such is not the case in my organization. We've seen, and handled without discrimination, complaints that were male-on-female, female-on-male, male-on-male, female-on-female, and, in my personal experience, male-on-"I'm-transgender/transsexual-between-procedures-and-it's-unfair-to-call-me-either-male-or-female".
Having a written, enforced process to follow in the wake of allegations is incredibly important. Without it, the whole system would fail. I realize that in non-government and/or non-union shops, the process may be faulty or non-existent. If you're in such a situation, my heart goes out to you.
Joking aside, this has actually been tried. It didn't survive the initial stages of investigation. IOW, no person who has ever been told to take down a poster or change their computer wallpaper has felt sufficiently damaged that they were willing to make a formal complaint. If they're not willing to press the issue (especially when doing so is *so* easy), the issue doesn't exist.
Excellent point. Abuse occurs. People cry "Wolf!" when they shouldn't.
However, I work in an environment that respects everyone's rights. No one is going to get fired based on an accusation alone.
An accusation starts a process of investigation and resolution. There will be several opportunities for both sides to understand what went on from the others perspective. There will be opportunites for everyone to reach an accomodation and go back to work.
If the situation is pushed, eventually an employee may find themselves on paid leave pending completion of an investigation. At the conclusion of that investigation, the person may be fired. The firing process is lengthy and may wind up in front of an administrative law judge. When that happens, some semblance of "reasonable person" criteria will be re-injected into the process. An accusation of harrassment that is both unsubstantiated and unreasonable will not be upheld as a cause for firing. At that point, management may promote or transfer people just to get them separated. Lots of additional training will happen. And the situation will not be allowed to arise again.
In short, I work in a unionized, government shop and we have policies and procedures in place that protect both the victim of harrassment as well as *anyone* from unwarranted punishment.
It's a long, balanced process but things usually work out.
I shudder to think how things are handled where there is no union and no process. In such environments, a victim who's lying could cause all kinds of damage. My heart goes out to any party whose difficulties are exacerbated by such an environment.
The "overall oppressive environment" where everybody has to watch their P's and Q's isn't that bad. It's really just enforced courtesy and respect. Sometimes it doesn't feel genuine and I miss the days when it was easier to tell who was a gentleman towards the ladies and who was just a crude ruffian. Nowadays, they all act about the same.
While the "enforced respect" grates on my nerves, I do see the practical aspect. A few people feel oppressed; they can't be as big a jerk as they once were and get away with it. I don't feel too bad about that. I've seen too much ass-grabbing by executives and I've seen how it stresses out the kid who gets grabbed. (And I've seen a lot of *kids* who came to the workplace as a part of a high-school program be on the heartbreaking receiving end of this crap.) I don't really mourn, too much, the oppression currently being imposed on the ass-grabbers.
In a more general sense, the workplace loses some of the color, humanity, vivaciousness, and joviality it once had. 30 years ago, the workplace felt more like family, including all the foibles that entails. Sometimes I miss that.
On balance, however, the new way of doing things creates a more stable, productive environment. Ultimately, it works out better in practice.
From a principled point of view, I continue to find the whole "let the victim define the crime" idea repulsive. But for addressing sexual harrassment in the workplace (and we're only talking about that specific case in this thread), it works better than the old way.
There's plenty of confusion about the basic definition of sexual harrassment. I've been a POSH (Prevention of Sexual Harrassment) trainer at my employer and I can tell you from hard experience - most people have no idea.
In broad strokes, then, here's what you need to know.
Most people think in terms of a "reasonable person" criteria. That's a relic of the past. When sexual harrassment first got major corp attention, the people in charge tended to apply common sense. They'd ask "Would a reasonable person consider this case to be sexual harrassment?" This seemed like a good approach and it did cover the basics. No reasonable person would disagree that "Sleep with me if you want this promotion" is harrassment.
The "reasonable person" standard, however, did not address the very wide middle ground. Are dirty jokes harrassing? If not occasionally, then how often? How many per day should be allowed? Should you be held responsible for being unintentially overheard? The "reasonable person" criteria failed to address all these at first blush.
Now, in my organization, we expected people to speak up for themselves. If someone felt harrassed and said "That makes me uncomfortable", then the person doing the harrassing action no longer had an excuse. Even if the harrasser felt that a "reasonble person" would not be harrassed by the situation, the harrasser now knew that their criteria was misused in re the person who made the complaint.
In practice, this meant that anyone could get away with anything (except the obvious aforementioned "sex for a job" situation I previously mentioned) until they were put on warning. Since it was up to the victim to issue the warning and since the victims frequently felt they were rendered powerless by the situation, warnings weren't issued. Bad manners continued to be displayed. Major harrassment incidents stopped but more subtle things that really do impact the bottom line (things like "a pervasive atmosphere of harrassment" or however you want to phrase it) continued unabated.
The "reasonable person" criteria had to be abandoned.
The new criteria is pretty simple. The victim defines the crime. If someone says something is sexual harrassment, it is.
The current situation, where *anything* is sexual harrassment if someone wants to feel they're being harrassed, results in lots of counter-intuitive weirdness. It seems crazy that if I stick up a calendar from a local sports team that has a picture of the cheerleaders on it, it's harrassment. That harrassment may not be in full flower but you better believe I'm going to be told to take it down before some super-sensitive idiot sees it and gets their feelings hurt.
As stupid as this seems, it actually works out better in practice. By "over-specifying" the defintion of sexual harrassment, the oppressive environments that were able to continue to exist under the "reasonable person" criteria are resolved. Yes, us old white men feel a bit put upon because we can't make dirty blonde jokes. But the upside is that the whole place works better and everyone can better contribute up to their potential.
Bottom line for people who don't work in big-corp type environments: the definition of "sexual harrassment" is much broader than seems reasonable. For practical reasons, learned the hard way over decades, the situation must be this way.
I don't like it. It offends my sense of justice. But I've seen it done both ways and in practice, the unreasonable, nanny-state version of sexual harrassment remediation just works better for everyone involved.
Seems like the perfect response, especially if you could get one of the newer types that just fires a bunch of.22LRs. "Newer" is relative, of course. I don't think anyone has actually made volley guns for general sale in at least 50 years, probably much longer.
The last time I knew that I was bugged was years ago, at a US Treasury office. The device was built into a wall AC socket multiplier. There was simply no reason for the device to have appeared at that particular location. There was no desk nearby. There was no need for more power plugs.
I pulled it out of the wall and immediately knew it was a bug because it was too heavy. I took off the backplate and, sure enough, there were enough electronics in there to walk the dog.
I then walked into the office of my boss 3 levels up (the secretary was a bit upset that I didn't knock; I just barged in), tossed it on her desk, and said "The next time we're going to be bugged, you might tell the Inspectors to use something a little less obvious." (Those of you in the know can roughly figure out the age of this story from the use of the title "Inspector." They've been "Special Agents" for a very long time, now.)
The look on her face was priceless.
The thing about it, though, is that they couldn't touch me. If they disciplined me, they'd have to admit they were bugging employees.
So if you find a bug, just find something creative to do with it. Sell it to a web site that will turn it into hits. Put it in a motor freight package to Albania. Something fun.
Religion aside, Bush was incredibly incompetent...
Actually, Bush was incredibly incompetent AT religion.
As a christian, one of the things I had faith in was that Bush, as a professed christian, would know enough of the history of his religion to understand that the Middle East is incredibly screwed up all by itself and needs no help from us. I actually remember saying, back in the day, "There's no way Bush would lead us to war in Iraq. No christian with even the slightest understanding of his religious history would dare to get involved in that way in the Middle East. There's just no way. No christian could be that stupid."
OK, so *I* was pretty stupid.
No one who is truly a christian would touch a middle east conflict with a 10,000 foot pole, much less start such a conflict. This is a basic litmus test of Christian competence.
In retrospect, it's no big surprise that Bush failed that test so spectacularly. But I sure was shocked at the time.
The mods are idiots. Your post was modded informative even though it's just about as perfectly wrong as it's possible to be.
If the photo was legal then what he does with it could be viewed as irrelevant. In that case it'd be no more a legal problem than if they were "enjoying" the kids section of the latest JC Penny flyer.
You've got that exactly backwards. All pictures of children are illegal child porn if the person in possession uses them for sexual gratification. It's not the content of the pictures that determines their porn-ness; it's the attitude of the buyers, sellers, and possessors.
Google "Dost decision" or any of the on-point cases. Check out the Pierson conviction, a case where the feds admitted that Pierson had never taken a nude or sexually explicit picture *ever*. Yet he still would up convicted of producing child porn because of the way the photos were marketed to borderline pedos.
Or, maybe, you just need to talk to someone who's out on parole after being convicted of child porn possession. Ask them (or, better yet, ask their parole officer) what would happen if they got caught with lubricant, tissues, and the kids section of a J.C. Penny flyer.
You bet your ass they'd be back in prison in a heartbeat, facing new child porn possession charges.
At least, this is how it works in the U.S. Other places in the world, things vary widely. Child porn is more or less legal in most countries. But in the U.S., this is not something you want to fool around with, especially if you're as ill-informed about the law as you appear to be.
It's incredibly insightful is what it is. Personally, I'm not much of a book-browser. I've always found books to be too expensive for impulse buying. But the thing that I'm really going to miss about bookstores is the magazine rack. Magazines pretty much *must* be browsed because they rotate out every month.
I actually subscribed to Photo District News last week because the bookstore where I used to drop by and pick up a copy 2 or 3 times a year has recently closed. Now I'll get the next 24 issues which is more than an ex-photographer like me needs. Still, no place to browse means no place to pick up random goodness.
Criminy, I would have never discovered things like Utne Reader and a bunch of other weird little magazines if I hadn't had a bookstore to browse.
And just to head off the obvious, yes, I know there are such things as newsstands. In my part of the world, as real bookstores become quite rare, bookstores still outnumber reasonably sizable newsstands by 25-to-1.
Before ubiquitous computers, there was the University of the State of New York. It had a huge correspondence degree program that was originally built around and catered to the needs of armed forces veterans. There was quality instruction and real learning available. When you got a degree from them, it was a real degree.
Of course, there was an overwhelming emphasis on writing skills since it was a *correspondence* school. Still, it wasn't a diploma mill like most or all of the online colleges I've been able to find out about.
I don't know if the USNY program still exists or has changed names or something, but the last time I tried to Google for info, I got nothing that seemed related to the old correspondence degree program.
Are they still around?
Does *any* HIGH quality distance learning program still exist?
In doing a bit of research before my post, I read quite a bit about the political components of how things get into or out of the DSM. Really fascinating stuff.
When I asked those questions, my Sunday school teacher (lesbian ministers wife who later left the church to marry her lover but who, in the meantime, understood that kids ask hard questions and actually prepared for them), my father (son of an evangelical revival preacher), and my mom (all-around smart lady) all answered in roughly the same way.
To wit, and aggregating all my memories of those conversations, they said something like: "Genesis speaks of days. We have no idea how God measures time; our brains are incapable of looking at anything the same way as God. From our perspecitve, those days may have been millions of years. Dinosaurs probably lived and died long before Adam and Eve came along. That's not a question we handle here in any depth. Genesis gives us a broad outline that we accept on faith. We study it to learn the lessons it teaches about the majesty of God and how to better serve him, not as a literal natural history. While we believe it is literally true, we also accept that it was written by people with even less knowledge of geologic history than us and, therefore, is insufficiently detailed as to make a direct comparison to scientific texts impossible. If you want specifics, if you want to know how the Earth has changed over great spans of time and what species originated and went extinct over that timeline, then read your Earth Science textbook at school."
Somehow, I managed to get Slashdot to display the "[narth.com]" without a working link. Weird, but pretty obvious from looking at the source. That's what I get for trying to display a link as a blockquote.
I'm in your corner on this, but I do note that sometimes naked aggression and disruption (threatened or actual) by true believers is sometimes an effective way to get science (or, at minimum, standard scientific references) changed.
To wit:
The removal of homosexuality from the DSM* was in response to a majority vote of the APA**. The original APA vote was called at a time of significant social change and was taken with unconventional speed that circumvented normal channels for consideration of the issues because of explicit threats from gay rights groups to disrupt APA conventions and research.
* - DSM == Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, essentially, the trade bible that defines what is and isn't a mental disorder.
** - APA == American Psychiatric Association, the publishers of and folks responsible for the content of the DSM.
So, the Jungians may not see any point in bullying the Freudians, but the homosexuals certainly profited from bullying the psychiatrists. Sometimes, aggression works. I'd call the actions of this particular Louisiana school board pretty aggressive. Whether or not they work, we won't know for a long time.
At the university I attended, the most notorious freshman mixer had a standard dress code that was universally observed. Boys wore one tube sock, usually tied on with a discarded pair of shoelaces. Girls wore Saran Wrap; multiple layers and colored wraps were considered cheating. Both genders were allowed to wear shoes.
The organizers hauled in mattresses (some) and old sofas (lots) from all over to meet the demand of hundreds of essentially naked 18-year-olds, all crammed into one old gymnasium complex and consuming heroic quantities of alcohol.
The 94-page report (Yes, I read it; feel free to hound me off slashdot.) repeatedly refers to alleged subscriptions (via PayPal!) to "predicated child pornography websites".
What does "predicated" mean in this use? Does it mean that the question of whether the Home Collection sites were child porn or not had not yet been settled by a court?
Or to put it in terms more applicable today: "your grandmother when she was 15 and he was 20, minus the fear of being labelled a pedophile."
It amazes me sometimes how many things we've given up over the years. Nowadays we tolerate interference in our private lives that would have sent our grandparents reaching for a shotgun.
And that's not all. Your grandfather, as a kid, knew silence. At least, he knew something akin to silence where only the quiet sounds of nature could be heard. Nowadays? You can't escape the ring of cell phones, even hiking in a national forest.
Your grandfather, as a kid, might have experienced the sort of hand craftsmanship that made the U.S. the envy of the world. There was a time when a Stanley hammer, carefully crafted (though still mass-produced) by Americans, would be an object of outright lust for, say, a Japanese woodworker. Nowadays, if you want good tools you pay ridiculous money for German or Japanese (or whatever) semi-custom, semi-art objects or you make do with some barely usable, almost disposable Chinese mass-produced junk.
Since the topic was photography-related, I'll throw this one out: as a kid, I experienced mass-market cameras that were a joy to use because they had simple, easily understandable, mechanical controls directly coupled to the thing they controlled. Nowadays, even cheap cameras have idiotically bad user interfaces that only frustrate people who understand photography. What's the use of knowing the definition of "f-stop" if you have no way to set it? (I may take up large-format photography when I retire, just so I'll have some semblance of control over the capture process.)
I'd rather live today. Today, taken as a whole, things are better than they've ever been. But no progress is purely positive. There are plenty of things we've lost and for which we might reasonably envy previous generations.
I know a man who downs a 12-pack of beer every night, minimum. Often, it's twice that. He consumes a minimum of 2 24-packs every weekend.
In between the beer, he consumes a minimum of 2 gallons of whiskey each week.
At the end of every night he's (in the words of one of his former girlfriends, my sister) "knee-walking drunk".
Yet, he can carry on a lucid conversation almost to the end. And every weekday, he gets up and goes to work where he does a fine job related to the construction industry. His work attendance record is nearly perfect and his job performance is excellent. The guy is entrusted with million-dollar decisions on an almost daily basis and he's never let down his employer.
Physically, he's lean and strong. Much of his work is in the field around major concrete placements and he runs rings around guys 20 years his junior.
I don't know how he does it, either, but this has been his pattern for the last 30 years or so.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting and insightful stuff, there.
Will you take a check? :-)
Such is not the case in my organization. We've seen, and handled without discrimination, complaints that were male-on-female, female-on-male, male-on-male, female-on-female, and, in my personal experience, male-on-"I'm-transgender/transsexual-between-procedures-and-it's-unfair-to-call-me-either-male-or-female".
No. See my other comment on the process of enforcement.
Having a written, enforced process to follow in the wake of allegations is incredibly important. Without it, the whole system would fail. I realize that in non-government and/or non-union shops, the process may be faulty or non-existent. If you're in such a situation, my heart goes out to you.
I've seen that case more than once. Realy, really messy. And definitely not OK.
I tried that. It didn't work. :-)
Joking aside, this has actually been tried. It didn't survive the initial stages of investigation. IOW, no person who has ever been told to take down a poster or change their computer wallpaper has felt sufficiently damaged that they were willing to make a formal complaint. If they're not willing to press the issue (especially when doing so is *so* easy), the issue doesn't exist.
Excellent point. Abuse occurs. People cry "Wolf!" when they shouldn't.
However, I work in an environment that respects everyone's rights. No one is going to get fired based on an accusation alone.
An accusation starts a process of investigation and resolution. There will be several opportunities for both sides to understand what went on from the others perspective. There will be opportunites for everyone to reach an accomodation and go back to work.
If the situation is pushed, eventually an employee may find themselves on paid leave pending completion of an investigation. At the conclusion of that investigation, the person may be fired. The firing process is lengthy and may wind up in front of an administrative law judge. When that happens, some semblance of "reasonable person" criteria will be re-injected into the process. An accusation of harrassment that is both unsubstantiated and unreasonable will not be upheld as a cause for firing. At that point, management may promote or transfer people just to get them separated. Lots of additional training will happen. And the situation will not be allowed to arise again.
In short, I work in a unionized, government shop and we have policies and procedures in place that protect both the victim of harrassment as well as *anyone* from unwarranted punishment.
It's a long, balanced process but things usually work out.
I shudder to think how things are handled where there is no union and no process. In such environments, a victim who's lying could cause all kinds of damage. My heart goes out to any party whose difficulties are exacerbated by such an environment.
In principle, I agree with you. In practice, no.
The "overall oppressive environment" where everybody has to watch their P's and Q's isn't that bad. It's really just enforced courtesy and respect. Sometimes it doesn't feel genuine and I miss the days when it was easier to tell who was a gentleman towards the ladies and who was just a crude ruffian. Nowadays, they all act about the same.
While the "enforced respect" grates on my nerves, I do see the practical aspect. A few people feel oppressed; they can't be as big a jerk as they once were and get away with it. I don't feel too bad about that. I've seen too much ass-grabbing by executives and I've seen how it stresses out the kid who gets grabbed. (And I've seen a lot of *kids* who came to the workplace as a part of a high-school program be on the heartbreaking receiving end of this crap.) I don't really mourn, too much, the oppression currently being imposed on the ass-grabbers.
In a more general sense, the workplace loses some of the color, humanity, vivaciousness, and joviality it once had. 30 years ago, the workplace felt more like family, including all the foibles that entails. Sometimes I miss that.
On balance, however, the new way of doing things creates a more stable, productive environment. Ultimately, it works out better in practice.
From a principled point of view, I continue to find the whole "let the victim define the crime" idea repulsive. But for addressing sexual harrassment in the workplace (and we're only talking about that specific case in this thread), it works better than the old way.
There's plenty of confusion about the basic definition of sexual harrassment. I've been a POSH (Prevention of Sexual Harrassment) trainer at my employer and I can tell you from hard experience - most people have no idea.
In broad strokes, then, here's what you need to know.
Most people think in terms of a "reasonable person" criteria. That's a relic of the past. When sexual harrassment first got major corp attention, the people in charge tended to apply common sense. They'd ask "Would a reasonable person consider this case to be sexual harrassment?" This seemed like a good approach and it did cover the basics. No reasonable person would disagree that "Sleep with me if you want this promotion" is harrassment.
The "reasonable person" standard, however, did not address the very wide middle ground. Are dirty jokes harrassing? If not occasionally, then how often? How many per day should be allowed? Should you be held responsible for being unintentially overheard? The "reasonable person" criteria failed to address all these at first blush.
Now, in my organization, we expected people to speak up for themselves. If someone felt harrassed and said "That makes me uncomfortable", then the person doing the harrassing action no longer had an excuse. Even if the harrasser felt that a "reasonble person" would not be harrassed by the situation, the harrasser now knew that their criteria was misused in re the person who made the complaint.
In practice, this meant that anyone could get away with anything (except the obvious aforementioned "sex for a job" situation I previously mentioned) until they were put on warning. Since it was up to the victim to issue the warning and since the victims frequently felt they were rendered powerless by the situation, warnings weren't issued. Bad manners continued to be displayed. Major harrassment incidents stopped but more subtle things that really do impact the bottom line (things like "a pervasive atmosphere of harrassment" or however you want to phrase it) continued unabated.
The "reasonable person" criteria had to be abandoned.
The new criteria is pretty simple. The victim defines the crime. If someone says something is sexual harrassment, it is.
The current situation, where *anything* is sexual harrassment if someone wants to feel they're being harrassed, results in lots of counter-intuitive weirdness. It seems crazy that if I stick up a calendar from a local sports team that has a picture of the cheerleaders on it, it's harrassment. That harrassment may not be in full flower but you better believe I'm going to be told to take it down before some super-sensitive idiot sees it and gets their feelings hurt.
As stupid as this seems, it actually works out better in practice. By "over-specifying" the defintion of sexual harrassment, the oppressive environments that were able to continue to exist under the "reasonable person" criteria are resolved. Yes, us old white men feel a bit put upon because we can't make dirty blonde jokes. But the upside is that the whole place works better and everyone can better contribute up to their potential.
Bottom line for people who don't work in big-corp type environments: the definition of "sexual harrassment" is much broader than seems reasonable. For practical reasons, learned the hard way over decades, the situation must be this way.
I don't like it. It offends my sense of justice. But I've seen it done both ways and in practice, the unreasonable, nanny-state version of sexual harrassment remediation just works better for everyone involved.
I think this premise is demonstrably true. Ask anyone who's ever been to a high school reunion.
Seems like the perfect response, especially if you could get one of the newer types that just fires a bunch of .22LRs. "Newer" is relative, of course. I don't think anyone has actually made volley guns for general sale in at least 50 years, probably much longer.
The last time I knew that I was bugged was years ago, at a US Treasury office. The device was built into a wall AC socket multiplier. There was simply no reason for the device to have appeared at that particular location. There was no desk nearby. There was no need for more power plugs.
I pulled it out of the wall and immediately knew it was a bug because it was too heavy. I took off the backplate and, sure enough, there were enough electronics in there to walk the dog.
I then walked into the office of my boss 3 levels up (the secretary was a bit upset that I didn't knock; I just barged in), tossed it on her desk, and said "The next time we're going to be bugged, you might tell the Inspectors to use something a little less obvious." (Those of you in the know can roughly figure out the age of this story from the use of the title "Inspector." They've been "Special Agents" for a very long time, now.)
The look on her face was priceless.
The thing about it, though, is that they couldn't touch me. If they disciplined me, they'd have to admit they were bugging employees.
So if you find a bug, just find something creative to do with it. Sell it to a web site that will turn it into hits. Put it in a motor freight package to Albania. Something fun.
Actually, Bush was incredibly incompetent AT religion.
As a christian, one of the things I had faith in was that Bush, as a professed christian, would know enough of the history of his religion to understand that the Middle East is incredibly screwed up all by itself and needs no help from us. I actually remember saying, back in the day, "There's no way Bush would lead us to war in Iraq. No christian with even the slightest understanding of his religious history would dare to get involved in that way in the Middle East. There's just no way. No christian could be that stupid."
OK, so *I* was pretty stupid.
No one who is truly a christian would touch a middle east conflict with a 10,000 foot pole, much less start such a conflict. This is a basic litmus test of Christian competence.
In retrospect, it's no big surprise that Bush failed that test so spectacularly. But I sure was shocked at the time.
The mods are idiots. Your post was modded informative even though it's just about as perfectly wrong as it's possible to be.
You've got that exactly backwards. All pictures of children are illegal child porn if the person in possession uses them for sexual gratification. It's not the content of the pictures that determines their porn-ness; it's the attitude of the buyers, sellers, and possessors.
Google "Dost decision" or any of the on-point cases. Check out the Pierson conviction, a case where the feds admitted that Pierson had never taken a nude or sexually explicit picture *ever*. Yet he still would up convicted of producing child porn because of the way the photos were marketed to borderline pedos.
Or, maybe, you just need to talk to someone who's out on parole after being convicted of child porn possession. Ask them (or, better yet, ask their parole officer) what would happen if they got caught with lubricant, tissues, and the kids section of a J.C. Penny flyer.
You bet your ass they'd be back in prison in a heartbeat, facing new child porn possession charges.
At least, this is how it works in the U.S. Other places in the world, things vary widely. Child porn is more or less legal in most countries. But in the U.S., this is not something you want to fool around with, especially if you're as ill-informed about the law as you appear to be.
Parent was modded "Funny"?
WTF?
It's incredibly insightful is what it is. Personally, I'm not much of a book-browser. I've always found books to be too expensive for impulse buying. But the thing that I'm really going to miss about bookstores is the magazine rack. Magazines pretty much *must* be browsed because they rotate out every month.
I actually subscribed to Photo District News last week because the bookstore where I used to drop by and pick up a copy 2 or 3 times a year has recently closed. Now I'll get the next 24 issues which is more than an ex-photographer like me needs. Still, no place to browse means no place to pick up random goodness.
Criminy, I would have never discovered things like Utne Reader and a bunch of other weird little magazines if I hadn't had a bookstore to browse.
And just to head off the obvious, yes, I know there are such things as newsstands. In my part of the world, as real bookstores become quite rare, bookstores still outnumber reasonably sizable newsstands by 25-to-1.
MSRP is *suggested*. It's pretty much always inflated. It's a meaningless joke and an often-cruel one, too, in nearly every industry.
These days, charging MSRP for anything is almost always a way to drive away customers.
So, yes, I blame bookstores if they're stupid enough to charge MSRP.
Before ubiquitous computers, there was the University of the State of New York. It had a huge correspondence degree program that was originally built around and catered to the needs of armed forces veterans. There was quality instruction and real learning available. When you got a degree from them, it was a real degree.
Of course, there was an overwhelming emphasis on writing skills since it was a *correspondence* school. Still, it wasn't a diploma mill like most or all of the online colleges I've been able to find out about.
I don't know if the USNY program still exists or has changed names or something, but the last time I tried to Google for info, I got nothing that seemed related to the old correspondence degree program.
Are they still around?
Does *any* HIGH quality distance learning program still exist?
In doing a bit of research before my post, I read quite a bit about the political components of how things get into or out of the DSM. Really fascinating stuff.
Lousy teacher.
When I asked those questions, my Sunday school teacher (lesbian ministers wife who later left the church to marry her lover but who, in the meantime, understood that kids ask hard questions and actually prepared for them), my father (son of an evangelical revival preacher), and my mom (all-around smart lady) all answered in roughly the same way.
To wit, and aggregating all my memories of those conversations, they said something like: "Genesis speaks of days. We have no idea how God measures time; our brains are incapable of looking at anything the same way as God. From our perspecitve, those days may have been millions of years. Dinosaurs probably lived and died long before Adam and Eve came along. That's not a question we handle here in any depth. Genesis gives us a broad outline that we accept on faith. We study it to learn the lessons it teaches about the majesty of God and how to better serve him, not as a literal natural history. While we believe it is literally true, we also accept that it was written by people with even less knowledge of geologic history than us and, therefore, is insufficiently detailed as to make a direct comparison to scientific texts impossible. If you want specifics, if you want to know how the Earth has changed over great spans of time and what species originated and went extinct over that timeline, then read your Earth Science textbook at school."
Somehow, I managed to get Slashdot to display the "[narth.com]" without a working link. Weird, but pretty obvious from looking at the source. That's what I get for trying to display a link as a blockquote.
Actual link is here.
I'm in your corner on this, but I do note that sometimes naked aggression and disruption (threatened or actual) by true believers is sometimes an effective way to get science (or, at minimum, standard scientific references) changed.
To wit:
* - DSM == Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, essentially, the trade bible that defines what is and isn't a mental disorder.
** - APA == American Psychiatric Association, the publishers of and folks responsible for the content of the DSM.
So, the Jungians may not see any point in bullying the Freudians, but the homosexuals certainly profited from bullying the psychiatrists. Sometimes, aggression works. I'd call the actions of this particular Louisiana school board pretty aggressive. Whether or not they work, we won't know for a long time.
God, I miss the 1970s.
At the university I attended, the most notorious freshman mixer had a standard dress code that was universally observed. Boys wore one tube sock, usually tied on with a discarded pair of shoelaces. Girls wore Saran Wrap; multiple layers and colored wraps were considered cheating. Both genders were allowed to wear shoes.
The organizers hauled in mattresses (some) and old sofas (lots) from all over to meet the demand of hundreds of essentially naked 18-year-olds, all crammed into one old gymnasium complex and consuming heroic quantities of alcohol.
Special, special were those days.
The 94-page report (Yes, I read it; feel free to hound me off slashdot.) repeatedly refers to alleged subscriptions (via PayPal!) to "predicated child pornography websites".
What does "predicated" mean in this use? Does it mean that the question of whether the Home Collection sites were child porn or not had not yet been settled by a court?
Or is there some more obscure meaning?
Or to put it in terms more applicable today: "your grandmother when she was 15 and he was 20, minus the fear of being labelled a pedophile."
It amazes me sometimes how many things we've given up over the years. Nowadays we tolerate interference in our private lives that would have sent our grandparents reaching for a shotgun.
And that's not all. Your grandfather, as a kid, knew silence. At least, he knew something akin to silence where only the quiet sounds of nature could be heard. Nowadays? You can't escape the ring of cell phones, even hiking in a national forest.
Your grandfather, as a kid, might have experienced the sort of hand craftsmanship that made the U.S. the envy of the world. There was a time when a Stanley hammer, carefully crafted (though still mass-produced) by Americans, would be an object of outright lust for, say, a Japanese woodworker. Nowadays, if you want good tools you pay ridiculous money for German or Japanese (or whatever) semi-custom, semi-art objects or you make do with some barely usable, almost disposable Chinese mass-produced junk.
Since the topic was photography-related, I'll throw this one out: as a kid, I experienced mass-market cameras that were a joy to use because they had simple, easily understandable, mechanical controls directly coupled to the thing they controlled. Nowadays, even cheap cameras have idiotically bad user interfaces that only frustrate people who understand photography. What's the use of knowing the definition of "f-stop" if you have no way to set it? (I may take up large-format photography when I retire, just so I'll have some semblance of control over the capture process.)
I'd rather live today. Today, taken as a whole, things are better than they've ever been. But no progress is purely positive. There are plenty of things we've lost and for which we might reasonably envy previous generations.
Now, get off my lawn.
I know a man who downs a 12-pack of beer every night, minimum. Often, it's twice that. He consumes a minimum of 2 24-packs every weekend.
In between the beer, he consumes a minimum of 2 gallons of whiskey each week.
At the end of every night he's (in the words of one of his former girlfriends, my sister) "knee-walking drunk".
Yet, he can carry on a lucid conversation almost to the end. And every weekday, he gets up and goes to work where he does a fine job related to the construction industry. His work attendance record is nearly perfect and his job performance is excellent. The guy is entrusted with million-dollar decisions on an almost daily basis and he's never let down his employer.
Physically, he's lean and strong. Much of his work is in the field around major concrete placements and he runs rings around guys 20 years his junior.
I don't know how he does it, either, but this has been his pattern for the last 30 years or so.