I read This is Not a Werewolf Story

[conuly]

The shapechanging took so long to show up that, despite the title and enormous hint-dropping, I started to wonder if it really wasn't a book about that.

(And it isn't, despite the truly high stakes of the predator vs. predator subplot. But the main character does transform into a wolf and back again, repeatedly.)

*********

The Startling Colors and Abstract Shapes of Salt Ponds

The Return of Multigenerational Households

How Cirque Du Soleil Turns Gymnasts Into Artists

The girls who took over a town in rural India

The Guy Who Named Himself Meow But Failed to Turn Himself Into a Cyborg

Robotic Arm History: The Industrial Era's Defining Innovation

Machine Learning’s ‘Amazing’ Ability to Predict Chaos

Cory Booker’s new big idea: guaranteeing jobs for everyone who wants one

When Disadvantaged Students Overlook Elite Colleges

Crossing Divides: The benefits of having friends who aren't 'just like us'

A real-life Lord of the Flies: the troubling legacy of the Robbers Cave experiment

A Farewell to Dairy Queens

Trump's travel ban faces U.S. Supreme Court showdown

These Volunteers Are Battling Idaho’s Government To Expand Medicaid

This is what life in #MeToo jail looks like

Storytelling plays a vital role in addressing sexual assault, but what of the safety and well-being of survivors—both those who speak out and those who don't?

A joyful reunion with birth parents leads to incest, murder

Chicago’s Gang Database Is Full of Errors — And Records We Have Prove It

By Stifling Migration, Sudan’s Feared Secret Police Aid Europe

Instead of peace, indigenous Filipinos get the Duterte treatment

Comments

Re: Me Who Jail

[nodrog]

The mistake made by those whose stock in trade is “words, not deeds,” is taking the rhetoric, or the matter itself, seriously.  It’s not just every one who’s famous for 15 minutes here in the future, Herr Warhol - it’s every thing.

#Time’s Up indeed.  What’s the latest Zuckerberg / Facebook news?

(frozen) A Republic, If You Can Keep It or, “There oughtta be a law!”

[nodrog]

        Until we start to rely on regulators, the legal system, and even employers to see
        the issue of sexual harassment as a serious, deeply rooted, and structural problem
        that requires significant change…


If you don't see the nightmare that sentence invokes… 

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” - G Santayana

Re: Me Who Jail

[conuly]

A diversity of opinion is a good thing, but if you don't think that harassment and assault are important things to care about then you can have that opinion elsewhere.

[siderea]

Machine Learning’s ‘Amazing’ Ability to Predict Chaos

OMG. This is... this is stunning.

Re: Indeed

[nodrog]

Touché.  I apologize for my remarks.


However, please do excuse me, but if I may in fairness be allowed one statement in my own defense, I wish to mention an extreme right-wing friend of mine who recalled Justice Holmes’ famous dictum that freedom of speech does not extend to shouting “Fire” in a crowded theatre, and who found that convenient:  He merely stretched the definition of ‘shouting “fire”’ to include the expression of any opinion he did not like.  And as you know, First Amendment rights do not extend to this, &c., &c.  Voilá!

Just so:  Any instructor or counselor on sexual harassment law will tell you how dangerously subjective that “law” is.  The threshold of offense can vary from person to person, or from day to day, and there is no objective standard:  The plaintiff alone decides if an offense has been committed.  As I know from personal example, the accused need not have intended harm, or even been aware of harm being done.  This does not matter.  “I feel harassed, so he harassed me.  Because I say so, that’s why.”

This is not law.  This is malicious caprice given the force of law.  This is tyranny, at the hands of a New Aristocracy.

[As a commentator pointed out, “We've done 1984 one better.  Now you're punished not for your thoughts, but for someone else's thoughts.”  Cathy Young said, “If traffic laws operated like sexual harassment laws, there would be no stop signs.  You would be ticketed and fined for not stopping when someone thought you should.”]


Further, what Daphne Patai among others has justly called “the Sexual Harassment Industry” was created specifically as a weapon against men.  (“To bring men to heel,” was the phrase I heard.)  Camille Paglia has written of the outrage expressed by feminists when women were first charged with sexual harassment in the workplace:  That’s NOT what those laws are FOR, and they said so openly!

Taking “Because I say so, that’s why” to the level that article speaks of, will produce only the Gulag.  And never mind ‘assault,” try gynocide.  Or guillotine - that was how it was done the last time.




*  I was called into the manager’s office at work and told that a female coworker had complained that I “stood too close to her” and “violated her space.”  I was not permitted to know who had said this; my take on the matter was not consulted:  Accusation equals guilt.  What was “her space”? Whatever she said it was.  Did I intend to cause discomfort, was I even aware of the problem?  Irrelevant.

Because every accusation must be provably acted upon, however ridiculous, I was instructed to maintain a two-foot distance from any and all female co-woerkers from now on, and sternly warned that any further complaint of…  anything, by anyone, would likely result in my termination.  That's all; go back to work.

Yes, harassment is serious.  I know - I was subject to it.

[greghousesgf]

I'd frankly rather walk on broken glass than still live with my parents.
I haven't eaten at a Dairy Queen since I was in high school.

[stardreamer]

You see all those magazine articles about "miraculous reunions" between adopted children and their birth parents. What you don't see -- or at least, haven't seen until just recently with stories like this one -- is all the ways such a meeting can go drastically wrong. I wrote an essay about it some 20-odd years ago; it's one of the things which has kept me from looking for my biological family. Every time I think about it, I get cold feet.

Re: Indeed

[conuly]

You were told to maintain a personal space bubble and sent back to work? No offense, but that sounds like a non-event. In the US, the usual personal space threshold for acquaintances and coworkers is about three feet. Stay in that range and you should be golden.

Why should your take on the matter be consulted? Is it really a burden to stand a few inches further away from people? Your intent isn't really important. What is important is that, for whatever reason, you were making your coworker uncomfortable - maybe you've got bad BO or something, I don't know - and now you won't be doing that anymore. I'm not even sure what argument you'd make that matters. "I think you're standing too close" "Well, I don't" "Great, but either GTFO or I'm going to start swinging my arms randomly for no reason and I hope you don't get punched"? Why would you even argue about this?

Edit: BTW, just got back from the ER with my mom a little while ago, and am super on edge like omg. I'm going to need a breather before engaging in any arguments with anybody, so if you want to argue, hold that thought for a couple of days - I don't want to dread my inbox either. I just didn't want to leave you hanging.

[conuly]

Well, I think even the bad reunions don't usually end quite this badly or we would have heard about it.

[conuly]

Some of us have closer relationships to our parents. I'm sorry yours is so unpleasant, but I hope you have other people to rely on.

[greghousesgf]

oh, I love my parents, I'd just MUCH rather visit them than live with them.

[greghousesgf]

I remember reading several years ago in the New Yorker about a woman who met her birth parents as an adult and they turned out to be horrible, psychologically abusive people who CONSTANTLY demanded $$$ from her, etc. and she was clearly sorry she'd ever made any attempt to get ahold of them.

[conuly]

How awful!

[conuly]

Well, that's a relief and it's good you don't have to.

[conuly]

Isn't it just?

Re: Indeed

[nodrog]

That's quite all right - this is NOT important at all.  It's merely a casual discussion of a topic of interest.


- I outlived the problem:  The flagrant sociopath who had used the weapon ‘feminist jurisprudence’ has given to “the malignant, the neurotic, the thin-skinned and the insane,” who had told me that she liked nothing better than to “stick it to men,” and enjoyed being mistaken for a Dumb Blonde so she could “slip them a nasty surprise” (verbatim quotes), and who had herself come up on one occasion and hugged me (!) and invited me to come by her department to visit (so much for “violating her space”) I last saw in tears.  I'd like to think she got her comeuppance, but either way, shortly afterward she was gone.  I'm still there.  “Neener neener!”

[She fooled me; we were on such friendly terms, she confiding such things to me, that I thought this “behind the scenes” view meant I was not in the play, so to speak.  Wrong:  By definition, being friends with a sociopath will not save you.]


I wish good luck to you, in sympathy.