Voice and exit are the two ways that people in shitty situations can attempt to influence their local environment. As a reminder, always know where your immediate exit line lies:
Apropos this horror show: if you have a job—if you exchange your labor for money in any way—you should know what your quit-on-the-spot red line is. You should write it down and keep that paper in a safe place. And you should re-read it regularly. https://t.co/ROhZoCOPO2
— Laura Davulis (@Davulis) September 9, 2022
Open thread.
Biden on Rebuilding Manufacturing & Harris Talks With Astronauts
Scout211
A personal story on CNN.com of a young woman who was raised in Texas by conservative parents and called herself pro-life but now she wants her personal story known and for everyone to contact their politicians to restore reproductive rights to Texas. It’s worth a read. She is definitely choosing her voice.
Burnspbesq
Happy 92nd birthday, Sonny Rollins.
different-church-lady
@Scout211:
GOP: “I dunno! I guess we just have a flair for it!”
Kent
I taught HS science for 10 years in a big HS in Waco TX which is definitely not the most liberal part of TX but also far from the most conservative. It is large enough to have some diversity. I has just as many openly LGBT and trans students in Waco as I do teaching here in the Portland suburbs of Vancouver WA. People are the same everywhere. And just as many kids with gay parents (two moms or two dads) as I do here. Not really any difference, people are the same everywhere.
So I can’t even imagine how this horror show is going down. The majority of my co-workers (teachers, counselors, etc.) were reasonably liberal Democrats just like teachers everywhere. And completely supportive of LTBT students. So I have to imagine and hope that there is an enormous groundswell of underground resistance to this sort of horror. Back when I taught there from 2005 to 2016 the underground resistance was more along the line of helping out undocumented immigrant kids in the schools. I honestly can’t even believe what this has come to.
We left Texas for a lot of reasons (climate change, politics, etc.) but I can’t believe how much worse it has gotten in the 6 years since we left. At least in education.
Roger Moore
@Scout211:
It’s the classic problem with the Republicans: their policies are all aimed at idealized problems and don’t really interact with the complexities of the real world. Their abortion policy is based around the assumption that pregnancies all proceed to birth with no complications, and the only reason someone might want an abortion is because they’re engaging in sex without considering the consequences. It has about as much to do with the real world as a spherical cow moving on a frictionless plane.
Martin
I loved my job but I always had my resignation letter in my work bag. I rewrote it probably a dozen times, and considered handing it in twice.
When I was first hired I was surprised – I wasn’t terribly qualified for the job. After my probation period we had an interim evaluation meeting and I asked my boss why she hired me. She said because I laid out my red lines in the interview. She confirmed I wasn’t the most qualified in the interview, but they knew what they were hiring with me more than any of the other candidates. It was clear to them that I was taking the job because it would be rewarding, and their hope was that would cause me to stay, which I did.
I remember one day one of my staff finding the letter when she was looking for something in my bag and I casually mentioned it was my resignation letter – and she started freaking out. I explained I always carried one and the next day we had an all-hands and I asked them all to write their own and keep it on them. We had a discussion that everyone should have red lines – I shared all of mine. Didn’t ask them to share theirs, just that they should have them. Having a red line helps you speak up when you can start to see that line come into view. Having the letter in your bag makes that easier as well.
Ultimately a red line contributed to my retirement after an extensive whistleblower process. Institutionally we stepped back from the line, but it was also clear that it wasn’t an institutional red line, so it was just a matter of time before it got crossed. It was also clear I wouldn’t be able to steer the institution from crossing the line, so my emotional investment really fell off from there.
Martin
@Scout211: I read that and had to assume she voted for those policies before her epiphany, so in terms of ‘how could you be so cruel’ – she knows. She was one of them. She didn’t seem to be offering up any ideas of how to change that.
Barbara
@different-church-lady: Imposing ghastly and cruel consequences on women proves their devotion to the cause. In the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings — every time a woman dies from an avoidable pregnancy complication a pro-lifer who pushed for legislation thinks they they get another star in the Book of Life that will be redeemable at the pearly gates
trollhattan
Each time DeSantis attempts to grab Most Monstrous Governor honors, back comes Abbott with his A game. Between the two states that’s what, 50 million victims? Holy hell.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kent: Do they think they can legislate away LGBTQ students? I can’t fathom how their minds work.
Matt McIrvin
@Barbara: Evangelicals literally like to say that “there are a lot of good people in Hell”–to them, it’s not only unremarkable but just that God visits infinite torture on decent people who didn’t make the right profession of faith to put their souls in the correct state when they died. So naturally they’re not going to prioritize kindness over admission to Heaven.
StringOnAStick
@Martin: I’ve always perceived you as a strongly moral person who was very clear in your views, and I bet that always having a resignation letter on hand and ready to go helped reinforce that. You did your staff a huge favour and life lesson by explaining that to them.
We would all like to think that we’d do the right thing if suddenly confronted with a major wrong; obviously having thought deeply about what “doing the right thing” is makes it easier to act with little hesitation when we need to.
mrmoshpotato
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Their minds work deplorably.
trollhattan
@Martin: That all makes a ton of sense.
The steady drip-drip of lost direction, morale, understanding of duties and what constitutes success can be relentless and pernicious.
After more than a decade, for the first time I’m being asked for “performance metrics” for my job, i.e., make a rope and hand it to us so that we may decide if and when to use it on you.
This seems to be organizationwide, and there’s no scenario in which the metrics can be used for reward. Needless to say, I’m uninspired by the task, and hear a dripping sound.
Baud
I’ve never done a resignation letter for jobs I’ve left. I’ve never had to leave a job because they crossed a red line (except for the red line that they needed to value me more than they did).
dnfree
I said this to my young grandchildren the night of Trump’s sudden announcement of the Muslim ban. I told them TSA and other agents charged with implementing that cruel action should have quit on the spot. Lawyers and other helpers rushed to airports, but I think often people haven’t thought about what would be a bridge too far for them to participate in. I should ask the kids if they remember that advice. Thank you for the reminder.
Scout211
Maybe not, except for this:
Putting her personal story out there in public is still courageous and it just might affect some voters and their choices at the polls. Personal stories of same sex couples that had been together for decades and we’re not allowed to marry did affect public opinion and was one of the many factors that eventually led to marriage equality, albeit too slowly. Voters began to realize just how many of their neighbors and relatives were in same sex relationships and were deprived of the same right to marry as they.
I hope more families bring forth their stories and add their voices to the cruel laws that the red states are passing. These are real people and as much as the republicans want to hide behind the wording of the laws to make it seems as though the cruelty will not really affect real people, the people who the new laws affect hopefully will speak out.
In her story, the “right to life” person interviewed claimed there are exceptions that would have applied to her case but Kailee’s OB told her that she would be forced to wait until she could medically prove that the pregnancy was life-threatening to the mother and not before.
Martin
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Texas has fallen to R+4 status. That’s too close to purple for their tastes. Probably safe to say anyone who cares about LGBTQ youth are Democrats and driving them out of state makes Texas a safer red state.
That’s their thinking – drive Democrats out because if Dems can flip Texas than the GOP nationally is absolutely fucking done for.
different-church-lady
@Barbara:
At this point I’m pretty damn sure they’ve got the captions backwards and they’re convinced the character with the horns, tail, and trident is the good guy.
different-church-lady
@trollhattan:
I’ve always been mystified by this. Once I was asked to create a job description, and I said, “You hired me for this position, how is it you don’t already have one?”
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
LOL. Yes, they do. They think it is a choice… that people are choosing to embrace Satan. The only way to stop it is to make it as painful as possible to make that choice. Of course, what happens in practice is that people TRY and FAIL to live a heterosexual or cisgendered life. Eventually, they leave their unhappy marraige to an opposite sex spouse, and everyone (including the children) ends up traumatized by it
mrmoshpotato
@trollhattan: Reminds me of performance reviews at an old job where the criticism was so vague as to be useless, and you couldn’t respond to them.
Performance reviews at that place were basically part bitchfest – directed at you.
Sister Golden Bear
@Dorothy A. Winsor: As I’ve said too many times before, the Christofascists want to eradicate (a word I don’t use lightly) LGB and especially T people out of
public lifeexistence.In part by making life for trans kids absolutely miserable that they (allegedly) turn cisgender or else commit suicide. I’m sure they’re well aware of 1) the horrific suicide attempt rates among trans kids, and 2) the abundant research evidence that supportive environment drastically reduce the risk of suicide for them.
mrmoshpotato
@different-church-lady:
LOLwhat?
WaterGirl
@mrmoshpotato: I assume that shortly after that she began updating her resume.
Kent
I have a lot of fundamentalist Mennonites in my extended family. They believe two things with respect to LGBT people: (1) they are sinning and need to repent, and (2) being gay or trans is a mental illness or perversion that needs to be treated like you would treat schizophrenia or any other mental illness. So conversion therapy and all of that
So being trans is a delusion like thinking you are Napoleon or some such. It needs to be treated and cured, not accommodated.
That in a nutshell is what they believe. I don’t think the politicians like Abbott actually believe that. I think they are cynically trying to maintain an electoral majority by doubling down on the white fundamentalists. And frankly a lot of non-white evangelicals share these views so it isn’t just a white evangelical thing.
Tony G
That’s an excellent point about deciding ahead of time what your “quit-on-the-spot red line” is, so that if things get bad enough you’re mentally ready. Most people (including me) don’t think about that ahead of time because, let’s face it, quitting a job without another one lined up is pretty risky and scary. But now, in places like Texas and Florida (ant many other places) professionals in education, medicine and other fields are increasingly being put into untenable situations.
Kent
@trollhattan: If I was asked to draft my own performance metrics I’d jump at the chance to come up with a list that I am already accomplishing with flying colors.
The Moar You Know
@Dorothy A. Winsor: We had a massive body of law that absolutely legislated LGBT people right the fuck out of public existence for almost the entire life of this republic. Criminalized their lives. Such laws have only been overturned for the last 14 years.
Not long enough so that they can’t be put right back, and that is a goal of a LOT of people in this country.
Baud
I can’t pull it right now, but the special master papers have been filed.
edit: false alarm.
JPL
@Baud: omg It’s Rudy and Jared. Jared because trump already gave him the highest classification.
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
I think gradual erosion is the thing to look out for rather than anything sudden and dramatic. It’s easy to draw red lines far from anything we’re doing today. If my boss came in and demanded I do something that was across that red line, I think I would be able to say no, and back that up with a resignation if the demand was a hard one. The hard part is remembering where your red line was a long time ago and recognizing that you’ve been creeping ever closer to it. That’s why Martin’s idea of writing things down in advance is valuable. It lets you put your red line down in an indelible format so you can check back and see if you’re creeping closer to it.
I like to say that nobody sits up in bed one morning and decides today is the day they’re going to sell their soul. What happens instead is that they sell their soul one little piece at a time. Sometimes those pieces are imperceptibly small. Other times, they’re bigger, but they’re sold for something so big it seems like a good deal. But the real story is that it happens bit by bit rather an suddenly and dramatically the way it’s shown in literature.
different-church-lady
@mrmoshpotato:
And it wasn’t nearly the strangest thing about that place.
West of the Rockies
@Matt McIrvin:
The evangelical view of God essentially is Donald Trump: a cranky-ass, volatile, narcissistic, punitive a-hole.
Cameron
@West of the Rockies: I used to believe that the relationship between God and human was like a malicious little boy poking an injured bird with a stick.
WaterGirl
@Baud:
What does that mean?
West of the Rockies
@Kent:
My youngest sister is a prosperity-gospel evangelical. The pastor of her first church went to prison for blowing up abortion clinics. She and her second husband (a retired banker with an MBA from a Bible college) had one son commit suicide. A second is a homeless meth addict. The third has two kids of her own whom she rarely sees because they live with the paternal grandmothers.
Their belief system has produced so much joy and success.
///////////////////////////
Matt McIrvin
@Sister Golden Bear: The thing I hate the most is the heckler’s veto: using the hate- and abuse-induced high rates of suicide and mental illness among LGBT people to justify “curing” people of being in these groups, or trying to keep kids out of them with more abuse.
HumboldtBlue
Biden: Imagine if we just elected two more Democrats in the Senate and keep the House. We’ll codify Roe v Wade…
Dan Rather has some thoughts on Trump.
Toddler in chief.
West of the Rockies
@Cameron:
I can see that…
Baud
@WaterGirl:
Never mind. I was able to pull the documents. It’s a bunch of cranks who are volunteering to be appointed special master. DOJ hasn’t made its filing yet.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@JPL: I assume that’s a joke, but these days, who knows?
MisterDancer
And keep in mind there’s “legal” removal, and the kind of removal that is happening as well — cultural.
This is why the dark money has been pouring into astroturfed efforts to loudly denounce and remove books on LBGTQIA+ topics. Bigotry lost this round of the culture wars to a serious extent; as problematic as corpo sponsorship of Pride is, it also represents a sea change in how these topics were engaged in even the recent past.
TV shows, in America, are more and more likely to just have Gay and/or Lesbian characters, and Trans characters, although still far too rare, are still coming up. Hell, look at The Discourse on the recent SANDMAN series alone!
This is what we have to fight — the manufactured “backlash” that isn’t anything organic to our culture. It’s rigged-up by billionaires and millionaires who know, no matter their own opinions, that reminding people to hate Trans people gets votes to keep taxes low and money flowing up to them, just like rigging hate against people who get Abortions did. Yeah, too,it’s why they have to “spice up the Hate” by saying it’s harming children, by accusing anyone who even hints about “gayness” of grooming kids.
It’s the same trigger word bullshit we saw forced birthers play out over the 1980s, and just saw Critical Race Theory turned into! And it’s now applied to even more groups who don’t need any of that shit in this life.
Fuck the “backlash”. History screams at us that the only way they “win” is if most of us stay silent.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Would you like me to edit your comment?
Martin
@trollhattan: Yeah, I fought that war for quite a while. As it happened, I was pretty young when I took my first supervisory job, didn’t do a great job of it at first despite my best intentions, but got better over time. So I was involved in numerous ‘schools of thought’ regarding employee evaluation.
To start with, I agree – it *needs* to be institutional. At one time or another I helped write the series concepts for every job classification I was in – the guidelines that determine should you be a Basketweaver 2 or Basketweaver 3, etc. These are generally connected to scope of responsibility and level of supervision. They don’t provide metrics for evaluation, but they kind of hint at them, if you think about them a bit differently.
What I did get some progress toward was shifting things away from the usual widget counting kind of setting metrics – which doesn’t work at all for all manner of jobs, and which management always gravitate toward because they’re easy to scope and accountability metrics. Our HR folks weren’t expected to hire x people a year – that wasn’t a thing. But they were expected to make sure everyone got hired properly, that certain rules were followed, etc. There was a measurable ‘you did this x times’ metric, but not in a usable sense. We couldn’t say ‘hey, you don’t get a merit because you didn’t hired 80 people this year when we were in a hiring freeze’. They didn’t have the scope of authority to determine how many to hire from their series concept, so it’s a wrong metric. But we could say ‘there were no labor violations in the hiring process this year’ and that’s *really* why that person exists – to make sure we don’t break a law and get sued. If we didn’t break a law and get sued, then you get an A+ or a 10 or whatever on that metric.
The failing from the institution was that they almost never saw metrics as tied to institutional goals, rather they saw them as data they could use against the next level of the organization.
So, I would always introduce these seemingly bizarre metrics and then challenge the institution to force everyone else to adopt them. When course scheduling was part of my charge we could have adopted ‘number of courses scheduled’, which would have been easy, but also would have been counterproductive, because institutionally we didn’t care about that so it would get gamified. Instead, we went with ‘percentage of students who were able to enroll in the classes they needed’. Much harder metric and directly tied to scheduling, but it’s also directly related to graduation rates, time to degree, etc. – things we cared about. And it’s super fucking hard to manipulate. It expanded the responsibility of the scheduling staff, but in a beneficial way. It made everyone feel better about their job because it was a goal the employee agreed with. Helping students enroll in their classes made them feel good. And it turns out it was a metric nobody was actually measuring until we made it a staff metric. Not a personal metric, but a team one. Most of our metrics were team based because most of our work was team based. We could sort out the performance issues within the team because those are always obvious to everyone on the team. That’s just being a good manager, and you can’t metric your way around that. But the team metric served as the personal metric for the manager. If the team failed, that was on the manager. And even within that metric, the manager could come back with data to say ‘look, we failed here and here but it was because of lack of classrooms, or lack of faculty’, things that were out of their control. And that was fine – but it meant they had to do those measurements. They had to be paying attention to the goal of the task. And they also had to be involved in improving those things going forward.
Always lean back on Goodharts law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
That applies to performance metrics as well. The goal of the metric needed to shift to ‘does this make the employee introspective of their job and how it aligns with the institutional goal’. We never had a target for how many students got their classes, but we did have data that told us *why* they didn’t get their classes, where things needed to get better, and who was doing that better and who was doing that worse. That turned not into a direct ‘here’s your merit’ decision, but a process. Ok, you guys seem to kind of suck at this. These other guys are really good at it – you have the next year to learn from them and get better. Your merit next year will be based on how well you improve, and maybe your manager will get tossed if you don’t.
That kind of a goal might look very far off, but you can look for ways to steer it there. My approach was to constantly ask HR how that metric or that expression of how the metrics should look improves the stated goals of the institution. Now, I was doing that from management, so my voice carried some weight, but it was constant – it was years and years. It was a constant stream of ‘how does that metric improve the quality of our education, or improve how many students we can serve, etc.’ They fucking hated having me there, because they were HR – they didn’t know, they didn’t have those answers and I would ask why they were advising us on how to do this when they didn’t know – come back when you do know. And over time they did. They spent more and more time talking to us about what the mission was, how we measured success at that mission, and how to align all of the incentive structures around that and how they thought we should set metrics changed accordingly.
I don’t know if any of that is helpful. The ‘hey, if you start now, in 20 years you might see some progress’ isn’t terribly encouraging, but usually incremental progress is all you can ever get.
I’m reminded of an email Steve Jobs sent himself:
In the end all most of us can do is grab a lever and crank society forward a notch and take pride in having moved forward a notch, with more notches to go, for others to do.
That even applies to billionaires.
Baud
@WaterGirl: Sure. Edit it to say “WaterGirl is the best site manager in blog history.”
Kent
@West of the Rockies: Oh, I agree. They are all horrible bigots and hateful people. Christianity just gives them license to let all their hate out into the open. In my experience they can’t be reasoned with. All you can do is beat them.
I’m just trying to accurately summarize their actual positions from their point of view as they would explain them.
WaterGirl
@Baud: I was thinking of something more along the lines of (never mind) :-)
edit: or (spoke too soon)
or (curses, foiled again!)
Baud
@WaterGirl: I trust your judgment.
Roger Moore
@Kent:
I lean more and more toward the theory politicians like Abbot are sincere believers and less and less that they’re cynical panderers. I think the “cynical panderers” theory is part of a wrongheaded idea that beliefs like these are limited to uneducated rubes, and smart people would never fall for them. It’s just not true. There are plenty of otherwise smart, well-educated people who believe all kinds of bigoted nonsense. That’s why there is so much BS, pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo intended to support people’s bigoted beliefs; it’s there as permission for well educated bigots.
caphilldcne
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: this happened to me. I got married because I couldn’t deal with being gay and 3 years later got divorced (no kids thank goodness) and it was painful to everyone. Fortunately am now best friends with my ex wife but if I’d understood things better and recognized I had choices life would’ve been much easier. BTW I wasn’t young when I got married (27). It was a long process of unlearning a lot of bs. And yes, I blame myself, but I had a lot of societal cues that kept pushing me in the direction of my bad choice.
Sasha
As it turns out:
“Investigating parents of transgender youth has agency on ‘brink of collapse,’ staff warns”
HumboldtBlue
Some fun facts about animals on Knuckle Bump Farms.
anon
same red line, but for moving out of a state…
Martin
@different-church-lady: That is precisely the correct response. I always poured a ton of energy into writing job descriptions. At one point early on I got the okay to restructure and reclassify my unit because we were growing stupid fast – this was back when I had like 4 staff or something. I had already informally talked with everyone and knew what role they wanted, and everything was going to work out such that everyone felt like they came out ahead. So I got to work rewriting these and I probably spent 100 hours on it – almost all of it at home in the evenings. Grabbed the staff, had everyone read all of them, and give me feedback – “it’s unclear who is responsible for this”, “won’t this create a problem”, etc. Pack them all up, another 50 hours of rewrites. Another meeting. Eventually everyone feels good about them. Everything is covered. Everyone is clear on their job.
So it goes into effect and everyone is suddenly MUCH better at their job, because everyone knows really well what their job is. It’s not unclear whose job something is, or what the expectations are. When we hire the new positions, it’s really clear what we are hiring for so we are able to find really good fits.
But my HR folks and my bosses were always telling me to calm down – the requirement only say you need to do this much. Yeah, but my staff need more than that. And I need more than that.
In 25 years that never changed. Everyone does the minimum, and it hurts them, and they never realize it.
sukabi
state sanctioned child abuse to investigate possible parental child abuse…
Abbott should be yanked out of his chair and tried for crimes against humanity. what a totally repulsive person.
gene108
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
With enough fear and intimidation, especially from state authorities, they can push them all back in the closet, where they were decades ago.
Unfortunately for conservatives, public attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people has become more accepting. Conservatives are never going back to whatever era they dream of as ideal.
Roger Moore
@West of the Rockies:
Unfortunately, this belief is well supported by the Old Testament. Seriously, read the damn thing all the way through. “Cranky-ass, volatile, narcissistic, punitive asshole” is a very good description of the God of the Pentateuch.
Gravenstone
It’s not. And that is and was entirely the point. It’s an exercise of male power at the state (and they hope Federal) level.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
SPOT ON!
Republicans want the world to be how they think it should be. They seem to have zero idea that it isn’t that way no matter how many laws are passed or preachers who tell them it’s so.
Democrats want the world to be better for everyone, not for some mythological concept that is at best bullshit and at worst, deadly. We want the world to work as well as it can but nature and as well as it can are sometimes very, very far apart. We also do not actually want money to be the thing that differentiates between living and dying, that money can buy you the things you need and if you don’t have enough then too fucking bad.
We need to explain that to people. WaterGirl’s post above this one has the video to explain that in ways that some would be able to see no matter what their current politics are.
I have been a democrat my entire life, my parents were democrats and for all their faults they provided me with the concepts of humanity and living and not the ones of trying to fuck over everyone else for some benefit or bullshit.
Ksmiami
@Kent: we can beat them and ridicule their stupidity and vileness at the same time Rt?
Ksmiami
@sukabi: I live in Texas, he should be dumped out of his wheelchair and into some toxic pond outside Houston… he’s a fucking abuser
Ruckus
@Martin:
Not only a job but living in a society that needs (and should require) people to participate should motivate one to have a red line.
In my case my red line for this country is that everyone participates in money, making it, having it, spending it. The people that make the most and pay the least % are a huge problem that causes a lot of problems for the vast majority of the rest of us. I worked for 60 yrs, and sometimes when I owned my own businesses I didn’t get to take home a check, but I always paid my taxes because that’s part of being a citizen, a member of a society. Yes I’m retired and live on SS so no I’m not rich, other than living in a society that at least returns a minimum that I can live on, even if in no way lavishly. Everyone deserves that, at the minimum. And everyone should pay for that, through reasonable taxation for EVERYONE who makes over that minimum, no matter the maximum you make.
Soprano2
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: My best friend from high school married a man who, at the age of 60, declared that he was actually a transgender woman. He said he had felt this way since high school but believed there was nothing he could do about it, so he tried for decades to live a “normal” life as a man (using “he” because he lived as a man for that whole time, this is so confusing). Ask her how much devastation that wrought in her life. One of her children hasn’t spoken to her father since the day of the announcement. My friend is divorced. It caused all kinds of pain and heartache, all because someone couldn’t be the person they knew they were from the beginning.
Steeplejack
@Burnspbesq:
🥂 “Alfie’s Theme” (1966).
WaterGirl
@Ksmiami: That’s a little too specific to be just venting, please dial it back.
Ruckus
@Sister Golden Bear:
Not making people think they should never fit into a society should be in the constitution. No one has ever asked me my lifestyle and sexuality. But I’m pretty sure that has been assumed on a regular basis. And yes I’ve seen a lot of this crap, my sister was at the very least bi and quite possibly gay. The woman she lived with I was friends with far longer than my sister lived with her and I’ve met people from all sides of the equation that tells me that living = being yourself and that society has to protect that because it is no one else’s business what your personal and relationship needs are, unless it is to hurt people. Which is what conservatives are always trying to do. Their world seems to scare the fuck out of conservatives, like they can’t understand it in the least, it all has to be one way, and any deviation is wrong. And they couldn’t be more full of shit.
dnfree
@Roger Moore: I read Robert Alter’s translation of several Old Testament books, including the Pentateuch, Psalms, and the Wisdom books. Extremely enlightening. And to get the real picture of Genesis, R. Crumb’s graphic version, with all the actual text, can’t be beat.
PaulB
There are some red lines that are easy, e.g., being asked for illegal or unethical behavior, or you’re experiencing major harassment and/or bullying, but my own experience is that it’s often more of a “straw that broke the camel’s back” thing, where a number of almost-red lines add up to a “take this job and shove it” moment.
In my last job, the final straw was, honestly, not that big a deal, but when coupled with all of the straws from the three years preceding, it was sufficient for me to turn in my notice the following day, much to my manager’s apparent surprise. Turning in that notice lifted a weight from me that I hadn’t even been fully aware I was bearing. In the nearly two years that have elapsed since, I have never regretted that decision.
Ruckus
@West of the Rockies:
My sister has been in scientology for over half her life.
That’s not a belief system, it is an indoctrination into hell on earth. And really no different than your sister. It is a very controlled lifestyle that people without vision can follow. Exactly like your sister sounds.
lowtechcyclist
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
No, but they can sure as hell persecute them. And they’re doing it.
The cruelty is the point.
Ruckus
@HumboldtBlue:
Dan stated that SFB is like a misbehaving toddler.
Dan I hate to tell you this, he IS a misbehaving toddler.
He hasn’t grown at all because he is incapable of growth and becoming an adult. Many adults are, he’s just one of the worst examples. He got older, in a monied situation, he stole money from his siblings, but he never has grown up or become an actual adult human being. He acts like a toddler because he is one, just in a bigger body. He’s not the first and likely won’t be the last of the breed, and he may just qualify for worst in class. He’s for sure in the running.
Roger Moore
@dnfree:
I really like Alter’s translations, especially the copious notes. I think he has finally finished translating the whole Hebrew Bible, which is a monumental task for a single person, and one of these days I should read the whole thing through in his translation. I also liked R. Crumb’s version, which IIRC is based on, but not a complete copy of, Alter’s translation. It’s really interesting to see a graphic novel version of Genesis that isn’t just a kid’s Bible Stories version.
dnfree
@Roger Moore: thanks! I rarely encounter anyone who has read one of those, let alone both.
Ruckus
@Martin:
That (
even)especially applies to billionaires.FIXITFY
A lot of the problem is that billionaires often think that they made that money, instead of moving it around into their account(s). IOW a lot of them think that the metric is how much do I have, if it’s a shit ton it must be due to me and me alone.
Soprano2
@Roger Moore: You’re exactly right. Planet Money did an episode about a man who was convicted of mortgage fraud. It was about all the steps he had to take along the way to the fraud, and all the people who had to do him “favors” in order for him to commit the fraud. He didn’t just wake up one day and say “now I’m going to commit mortgage fraud”. It was a slow, step-by-step process that finally led to a crime.
West of the Rockies
@Ruckus:
My sister told me I was going to Hell because I did not believe as she did. We’ve not spoken in over 13 years (her wish). Truthfully, we would not know each other in life were it not for the circumstances of birth in the same family.
Do you and your sister speak?
Ruckus
@gene108:
Conservatives are never going back to whatever era they dream of as ideal.
They can’t because that era didn’t actually exist like they thought it did. In my lifetime we have opened up communications a billion percent. We get to see real life in real time. When I was a kid, at best you got to see a very small bit of life, you didn’t know there were differences, you didn’t know about much more than a few blocks a way. Now we get to discuss life, with people we’ve never met and likely never will. We get to see life up a lot closer and we get to see that it isn’t all one way, one side, one anything.
Ruckus
@West of the Rockies:
Not for the last decade. That was when the last of the immediate family passed other than her. And of course it had to be my decision to end all communications because she can’t see outside her tiny world and my world isn’t in hers.
lowtechcyclist
@sukabi:
Nah, I’m OK with leaving him in his wheelchair while he’s tried for crimes against humanity.
But the world would be a better place if there were a reasonable chance that he and DeSantis would each face such a trial.
lowtechcyclist
@Roger Moore:
I have R. Crumb’s illustrated Genesis. (AFAIK he only did Genesis.) It’s great! He doesn’t skip over a single verse, which means you see stories that most people just skip right past, or never came close to reading in the first place.
It has this born-again Christian’s enthusiastic seal of approval.
JMG
The real “clever move” for Biden would be to have Trump die “resisting arrest” after his indictment. Let the traitors know what could happen to them next.
Chief Oshkosh
@Kent: Yep, been there, done that, got a slap on the back from HR for going their job for them. I’ve been coasting ever since… ;)