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Showing posts from February, 2013

Cheerfulness at Shit Jobs

Tim Noah went on a tirade against a place called Pret a Manger the other day : Pret doesn't merely want its employees to lend their minds and bodies; it wants their souls, too. It will not employ anyone who is "here just for the money." Noting that one Pret worker in London got fired soon after he tried to start a union—the company maintained it was for making homophobic comments—Myerscough suggested the worker's true offense was being unhappy enough to want to start a union, since "Pret workers aren't supposed to be unhappy." The sin commenceth with the thought, not the deed. He uses what I thought was a bit of an extreme analogy: Pret keeps its sales clerks in a state of enforced rapture through policies vaguely reminiscent of the old East German Stasi. A "mystery shopper" visits every Pret outlet once a week. If the employee who rings up the sale is appropriately ebullient, then everyone in the shop gets a bonus. If not, nobody does. Th

The Gatekeepers

Caught this flick the other day. It reminded me very strongly of Fog of War , one of my favorite films of all time. It's probably the most impressive interview "get" I've ever heard of—all six of the former heads of the Israeli intelligence service talk with astonishing bluntness about their careers and the state of Israel vis-a-vis the Palestinians and Arab neighbors. Imagine David Petraeus and his five predecessors talking like Nation  columnists and you'll have some idea. It's a bit slow, especially at first, and also entirely in Hebrew, but incredibly interesting. Very highly recommended.

The Pistorius Case and Corruption in South Africa

I was talking about this over in the comments at Ta-Nehisi Coates' place, and I thought I should bring it out in full. Coates asked this question: I'd love here how it is that the prosecutor on a case like this, doesn't know that the lead investigator is facing seven charges of attempted murder. The answer I have is basically a special case of my Grand Theory of Why South Africa is Such a Fucking Basketcase. In brief: South Africa has a horrible case of corruption. It has this problem because it is for the moment a one-party state with all the associated problems that brings in a brutalized country: a crap education system, rampant cronyist promotion of incompetents, graft, etc . It is a one-party state because the ANC (through the personage of Nelson Mandela) is credited with ending Apartheid, and the largest competitor party is fatally associated with whites. Without real political competition, there is no consequence for corruption. This is quite similar to what ha

Wowwww

I'm just a sucker for these adverts: A bit too much eye candy, though. Need more ladies busting sweet tricks.

Scale

Whoa:

Middlemarch

The other day I learned quite to my shame that "George Eliot" was the pen name of a woman named Mary Anne Evans. I had been resolving for quite some time to get back into the audiobook routine for walking to work, and on brief research her books seemed well-suited to being read aloud, so I picked up a copy of Middlemarch . I'm not too far in, but so far (while it is rather plodding at times) it's about the most penetrating and insightful book from a psychological standpoint that I've read in years. It's like what Freedom  could have been if it had the full human experience, and not just the shitty, awkward parts. Eliot's work seem to be of that type which a patriarchal society deems (still does, to some extent) "women's issues," things like love, romance, family, emotions, etc. It sounds dumb stated outright, but those stereotypes still hold true today, to some extent, and I think they do serious damage to males in our society. Because

Gallows Humor

I was talking to a friend on gchat the other day and noticing my jokes, which normally trend towards subjects like debtor's prison and being flogged at the mast, were getting rather alarmingly gruesome (it was the point where I said something involving a slurpee made of human kidneys, I think). It was hard to avoid this kind of talk, even when actively trying to rein it in. Gallows humor has a long and storied history, of course, for the simple reason that it's an easy way for a person to relieve psychological pressure and reassert some control over a situation, however hopeless. Lincoln was famous for his inappropriate stories and dark jokes—those that knew him said it was a critical stress-relief tactic. Internally, the hyper-violent imagery I keep producing feels like something that needs to be vented. I've got a fairly bottomless well of bitterness and hatred, but normally it's not the artesian kind. But serious emotional turmoil can change that, and I think

Comedy Gold

I previously recommended Allie Brosh's blog Hyperbole and a Half using this title (who has stopped updating her blog for nearly two years now, apparently she is struggling with depression ), and I've found another I like nearly as much. It's called Bitches Gotta Eat , and it's damned funny . The author is a black woman named Samantha Irby. It's particularly interesting because her humor seems very much my style. I recognize that Ellen DeGeneres and Sarah Silverman know the craft of comedy well, but I don't enjoy them quite as much as Bill Hicks, say, because I don't feel like they're speaking quite as much to my personal experience. Maybe that's dumb, but it's a reminder that we're all just human beings deep down. In any case, definitely check this one out. I was guffawing in between the sobs.

Why the Drone Strike Legal Memo Is Secret

The big news in civil liberties circles today is the leak of a white paper laying out some of the legal reasoning behind the administration’s drone strike program. It’s not the actual memo itself , but it does appear to track the reasoning as it was described to Charlie Savage . Glenn Greenwald lays out all the legal implications in detail here , something I won’t bother to reproduce. I’d just like to focus on this already-infamous section on an “imminent threat:” Certain aspects of this legal framework require additional explication. First, the condition that an operational leader present an “imminent” threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons will take place in the immediate future. Here we have it, ladies and gentlemen, the reason why the actual drone memo is secret. Not (entirely) because of knee jerk secrecy instinct, and definitely not because it would harm national securi

Better than the Original

This is going to sound strange, but I've been reading some damned fine Harry Potter fan fiction recently. It's a work in progress called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality . I picked it up on the recommendation of the recently-deceased hacker genius Aaron Swartz, who had this to say : This is a book whose title still makes me laugh and yet it may just turn out to be one of the greatest books ever written. The writing is shockingly good, the plotting is some of the best in all of literature, and the stories are simply pure genius. I fear this book may never get the accolades it deserves, because it’s too hard to look past the silly name and publishing model, but I hope you, dear reader, are wiser than that! A must-read. As it says at the beginning, you really need to give it a couple chapters to get started before passing judgment — the first bunch are quite silly and it doesn’t seem worth sticking with until you’ve gotten past them. It's really funny and reall