I grew up hearing about how lazy unemployed people were – how they didn’t really want to work, and if they did, why, there were plenty of jobs out there for them. I knew this was bullshit for two reasons: (1) I read in the 80s about people with PHDs whose job fields had dried [...]
Class
I just found out a university has blocked this site from its students. They’re fine with Hathor, apparently – that one’s still available, but not this one. I have one response: Fuck you, pathetic assholes. I can’t even find a trigger word that would set off the most ham-fisted filter (that’s not on Hathor, anyway). [...]
I’ve been reading Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. It’s considered an essential work on the subject, and I’m getting a lot out of it. But after detailing the staggering hours children need to fit into honing a craft like sports or music (and he acknowledges you really do have [...]
I know many of you reading this are thrilled with the passage of the universal health care bill. There are several aspects of it I love, too. To name two, we should’ve been protected from that “pre-existing condition” bullshit thirty years ago, and anything that makes Medicare work better is going to help out some [...]
I sometimes think one of the strongest barriers to equality is that when you’re trying to join a group you weren’t born into, you have to either smile and nod while listening to the crap those people say about the group you were born into, or stand up for yourself and your people and alienate [...]
I generally avoid political topics, but once in a while, one of them is such a damn good example of privilege that I’m left thinking: what the fuck? All the universal health care plans being yapped about at length by various committees within Congress (I could’ve sworn the Constitution outlined a clear procedure for proposing [...]
As a child, I believed the US – and many other nations – really were intended to benefit every citizen who made an effort, and what caused them to privilege some groups over others were flaws in the system. Then around age eleven, I came to believe the systems themselves were really designed to create [...]
Every once in a while, one of my fellow Americans blows my mind with her assumption that customer service workers get insurance, paid sick days and paid vacation, and at least $10/hour. These assumptions are often of no consequence, but on some occasions they’re offered in justification of why no one should be trying to [...]
ETA: This post is US-centric, and I should have made that clear. How much or little it applies to other countries, I can’t say. As soon as employers made college a necessity for jobs of any significant income (and even some of shockingly low income, such as “receptionist”) back in the 80s or 90s, college [...]
