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9th September 2019, 01:19 PM | #81 |
Penultimate Amazing
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That too.
I seem to remember an article written about Du-Wop by a guy named Ed Ward. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Ward_(writer) In his essay, he stated that singing with his Italian friends on the street was the only time he could use the word "wop" without having to run like hell afterwards. |
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9th September 2019, 01:22 PM | #82 |
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Music is what feelings sound like "Dulce bellum inexpertīs." - Erasmus |
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9th September 2019, 01:36 PM | #83 |
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Is he claiming that he wasn't told what the rules were and/or he wasn't given a handbook when he signed on? If not, then he was bound by the same rules as everyone else, and he knew it when he signed on.
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9th September 2019, 04:55 PM | #84 |
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9th September 2019, 05:03 PM | #85 |
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I can't fault Mosley in any way. He was the n-word in the room, and sometimes you just gotta walk away.
Good for him. That's what I'd do. |
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9th September 2019, 05:49 PM | #86 |
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9th September 2019, 07:07 PM | #87 |
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Just to clarify: the complaint to HR wasn't that he was referring to himself. That was just a joke he told after the fact to HR.
The original use of the nword that triggered the complaint was his telling of an anecdote where a white police officer had pulled over his car because he was a black man in a white neighbourhood. The officer used the nword, and Mosley quoted the officer's racist rant verbatim instead of editing for politeness. The outcome was that one of the coworkers anonymously reported him to HR as making her 'uncomfortable'. The policy in the workplace is very general, there's no list of offensive words, just that you can't offend coworkers, which is only discovered after the fact when they narc anonymously. As far as he knew at the time, everybody was fine with hearing an accurate accounting of the police incident. Mosley found the outcome intolerable for various reasons that he outlines in the opinion piece. ETA: just to elaborate on that last bit, what depressed him was that these are writers writers who theoretically value language, speaking profanely all day, and suddenly deciding that one guy has to watch what he says. |
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9th September 2019, 07:13 PM | #88 |
Penultimate Amazing
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I'm not 100% sure I'd do the same thing but yeah i get it.
What depresses me about this is that I was really excited when he was brought on board. I'm an aspiring detective story writer (4 years counting down to career transition!) and Mosley's Easy Rawlins series has been personally inspirational. I was looking forward to seeing what he could do with SF screenwriting. |
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9th September 2019, 08:33 PM | #89 |
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I found this interview on The Foundation for Individual Rights In Educations YouTube channel about the book 'The Coddling of the American Mind' and one of the things that comes up is that there is increasing anecdotal evidence (Such as the item that started this thread.) that the Millenials (& Post-millenials) are increasingly turning to using Human Resources to mediate interpersonal disputes as the first resort rather than as the last resort. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rZiNM8wdns |
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10th September 2019, 04:54 AM | #90 |
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That must be terribly upsetting for professional Human Resources, being expected to fulfill some of the functions they're supposed to. I guess they'd better educate younger employees on how HR exists solely to spread gossip and protect the higher ups from legal liability for crimes they commit.
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10th September 2019, 06:14 AM | #91 |
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Kevin Hart and Walter Mosley should talk.
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10th September 2019, 07:05 AM | #92 |
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10th September 2019, 08:45 PM | #93 |
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11th September 2019, 02:03 PM | #94 |
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At the moment I don't think we know the age of the complainant, as the complaint was anonymous.
The trend is possible, but I'd like to see more data. HR departments are also more prevalent, so people raised with one would be more likely to understand its function. Older employees maybe don't use it because "what's an HR department?" - not necessarily an indictment about morals. It's not my generation but I have observed there's a cottage industry called "We economically ****** over the Millennials, let's add insult to injury and **** on their character as well, so we feel justified after the fact." |
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11th September 2019, 02:07 PM | #95 |
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My expectation is that before HR was willing to take on these responsibilities (I've been in the workforce since the mid-80s... HR powers have expanded like a plague over the years)... before people fled to HR, they would kvetch to the Shop Steward.
With the cratering of unions, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that these babysitting activities have simply been transferred to HR's desk. |
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11th September 2019, 02:33 PM | #96 |
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11th September 2019, 03:30 PM | #97 |
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11th September 2019, 04:09 PM | #98 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Did you read the title of the book? The word the publisher went with was 'coddled'. Pretty much a blatant insult, because that's how to sell books, this is an established audience. Lukianoff explains his frustration with how the title choice was deliberate on the publisher's part, in the interview.
Specifically, I remember that anecdote from the book. No mention of how there's more women in corporations than in earlier generations (this could be a gender difference, not a generational difference) and no mention of how in the past, the Shop Steward filled this role, but increasingly in the workplaces involved, this option has been eliminated. This could just be an artefact of union decline. And, I'm not sure if you noticed, but go back and listen to that HR example discussed in the interview, Lukianoff says the HR thing is based on unstructured anecdotes and he is hoping they could do a study someday to see if it's true. I say this as somebody who has read pretty much everything Haidt has published and generally enjoyed them... this is not a strongly supported claim. It's a drag, but not everybody has the same technical skills. The guy who can't change a tire is probably maintaining his parents' WiFi because they can't do that. There *is* a scoring rubric for technical competence, which the OECD maintains based on annual national surveys. Their interest is understandable: if consumers can't operate the machines they want to buy, it's a problem. Peak technical competence seems to be the latter slice of Gen X born 1975ish. If anybody has bragging rights for 'being able to fix it,' it's this demographic. This makes sense, as they're the last cohort of what's referred to as the Digital Immigrant demographic - born with analog, learned digital before becoming adults. They had to learn both families of skillsets. I'm a bit older, but I have the same Venn diagram: able to use a film SLR and develop the film in a darkroom, but also able to use a DSLR and correct in photoshop. Here's something else that's interesting... in terms of individual competence, generational cohorts are less predictive than birth order. Firstborns are more different than Lastborns than Boomers are different from Millennials. |
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11th September 2019, 04:19 PM | #99 |
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As a millennial, yes, it absolutely does. Pretty much any op-ed or "think-piece" I've seen in the media talking about millenials classifies us as a generation of entitled whiners that make stupid life decisions, have no planning skills, and rely on tech for everything. A particularly popular genre a few years ago was talking about how millenials were "killing" certain industries because we don't know what fabric softener is and such. It's incredibly tiresome, and has led to a lot of internet activity criticizing boomers in retaliation. Maybe you haven't run into it (after all, it doesn't affect you), but everyone my age is used to regularly being insulted by the older generations.
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11th September 2019, 04:23 PM | #100 |
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11th September 2019, 04:30 PM | #101 |
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I think I know what you're trying to do: yes, I'm aware that every generation generally tends to demean the next generation. Hell, there are examples of ancient Greeks talking about how young people are destroying society.
I'm not saying it's a new thing. or even that millenials have it particularly bad (although there might be an argument that due to the pervasiveness of certain of media, we're exposed to it more frequently); I don't know if we do, and I don't particularly care, no one was talking about that. Someone asked if demeaning the character of millenials as a generation was a common trope, and I was replying in the affirmative as someone that sees it frequently. |
11th September 2019, 04:33 PM | #102 |
Penultimate Amazing
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It's also possibly not so much that he hasn't run into it, but it's hard to see the ocean when you're swimming in it. My dad's like this... they tell sexist jokes at his golf club all day, and at this point he just thinks they're funny, can't see the sexism in them. It's his baseline normal.
I roll my eyes at these, but the harm comes with the misinformation. It's *not* demonstrated that millennials go to HR more than other generations (all things being equal, controlling for the confounding factors I threw out above) - it's just a rumour the author heard hanging out with his investment buddies who work in HR and seem to like to complain. And we don't know from this Mosley scenario since the identity of the complainant is withheld. What we do know is that Mosley (b 1952, smack in the middle of Boomer gen) was so upset about being asked to watch his language that he quit. It feels like the decision about who's the bigger snowflake depends on the age of the person making the claim rather than the objective facts of the scenario. Another classic misinformation is the avocado toast crisis. Apparently, Millennials aren't struggling to get into the housing market NOT because previous generations allowed their educational costs to explode ten times faster than inflation, and NOT because of protective housing bylaws crunched the housing inventory supply, but rather, because they buy a snack a few times a week. The math doesn't work out and it's a silly claim, but that never stopped a publisher. |
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11th September 2019, 04:40 PM | #103 |
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I can change a tire and setup a network. In fact now that we have Youtube there's little excuse not to fix a lot of things yourself. I even learned how to clean cobwebs from my BBQ burners so they'd work again. LOL at parents "WiFi" - it's his/her network too because he still lives at home! |
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Why bother? |
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11th September 2019, 04:56 PM | #104 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Meh, some things you can't learn on youtube, you gotta get your hands dirty and make mistakes. I say this as somebody who has done construction and boat repair/maintenance in my youth, and built my recreational cabin more or less myself. The first thousand hours are pretty iffy. Practice is a thing.
Like I said, this is not a demographic phenomenon, it's an individual thing. Generations are *slightly* different than each other. Within a generation, there's much more variation. Within a family, there's much more variation. The decision to select one demographic factor specifically may reveal a prejudice. That was my exact point, yes. Their $3.5M home that they bought for $7500, and then voted to restrict development in the neighbourhood because it was a great way to make the houses skyrocket in price. Then for some reason they punch down on their son who was too young to even vote, for not being able to afford it. |
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