#so frustrating that the article is all about failures rather than the successes he has had and earned | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

creepingsharia · 4 years

Text

19 Years after 9/11, Muslim Brotherhood is testifying in the U.S. House of Representatives

How far they’ve come. They have infiltrated all aspects of U.S. government, law enforcement, education and media.

Here are the meeting details from the Congress website:

https://www.congress.gov/event/116th-congress/house-event/110989?s=1&r=13

Note the second “witness” Mohmaed Soltan:

As we’ve covered Soltan before, arrested and jailed in Egypt for his participation on the Muslim Brotherhood uprisings, he is pictured below with the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Soltan’s father was sentenced to death for his Muslim Brotherhood activities.

Fortunately, Rep. Joe Wilson was prepared and called him and the committee out for bringing a member of the Muslim Brotherhood to testify. Video below or clip on our twitter feed.

The article below omits Soltan but highlights other Brotherhood sympathisers at the hearing.

Misinterpreting Egypt in Congress

Saeed Okasha , Wednesday 9 Sep 2020

The Foreign Affairs Committee of the US House of Representatives held a hearing on Wednesday 9 September entitled “Egypt: Trends in politics, economics, and human rights,” with the notice of the time and website for the meeting being posted only a week ahead of time.

The four witnesses all have direct connections with Egypt, in most cases academic. They are researchers associated with US think tanks and have served with previous US administrations and/or have been consulted by US officials in order to devise US policies towards developments in the Middle East.

The first is Michele Dunne, director and a senior fellow in the Middle East Programme of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She was a Middle East specialist at the US State Department from 1986 to 2003 and has also served the US government in numerous capacities, including at the US Embassy in Cairo.

In her writings on Egypt, Dunne has been generally critical of the Egyptian government since the 30 June 2013 grassroots uprising that ousted Muslim Brotherhood rule in Egypt with support from the army. As a researcher and scholar, Dunne may perhaps feel a certain frustration at her inability to understand the society and culture of the region to which she has dedicated her career.

She freely projects general principles and maxims familiar to US society onto completely different sociocultural realities and contexts, while she fails to appreciate that democracy and human rights, as conceived in the West, are a culmination of a process of socioeconomic evolution and not mere slogans or policies that can be handed down from above through a certain system of government.

Another possible cause of Dunne’s frustration is her inability to grasp the fascist nature of the Muslim Brotherhood and its exclusivist ideology that is explicitly discriminatory against women and against other faiths.

Any responsible academic should be able to see that the Muslim Brotherhood is not a political party whose members may be open to new ideas, but is rather a closed religio-political cult whose members’ thinking cannot be induced to conform to the modern world at any level beyond lip service.

To believe otherwise would be both naive and impractical. But Dunne continues to ignore such facts, and in her writings she intermittently appeals for the assimilation of the terrorist group into political life despite its record of repression of freedom of opinion and expression, the burning of churches, the restrictions on women’s rights and the other crimes and human-rights abuses it perpetrated during its short period of rule in Egypt.

The second witness is Amy Hawthorne, a former colleague of Dunne’s at the Carnegie Endowment and is currently deputy director of research at the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED). She wrote an article that appeared in the US magazine Foreign Policy in February 2019 entitled “Worse than Mubarak”, in which she compared the eras of former president Gamal Abdel-Nasser and present President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi and concluded that the two men were cut from the same cloth.

Evidently, Hawthorne could not see past the fact that both presidents had military backgrounds and that they both clashed violently with the Muslim Brotherhood. She concluded that just as Nasser’s pan-Arab project had jeopardised US interests in the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s, so too did Al-Sisi’s project to impose “military-style control” in Egypt. This, she said, imperilled US interests at present with potentially graver consequences.

Hawthorne has apparently ignored the totally different historical contexts that gave rise to the Nasserist and Al-Sisi regimes.

The world order in the 1950s was leagues away from that in the 2010s, and the threats to international peace and stability then were of an entirely different order. But even setting such contextual disparities aside, Al-Sisi’s political outlook bears no resemblance to that of Nasser.

The latter built a regime around a nationalist and pan-Arab project that sought to undermine the interests of the US, the West, and the allied powers in the Gulf and to combat Israel. Al-Sisi seeks to augment Egypt’s interests through close relations with the US, Europe, and the Gulf countries, Saudi Arabia and the UAE above all. It is also clear that he is determined to uphold the peace treaty with Israel and that he supports the recent US-sponsored peace agreement between the UAE and Israel.

It should also be borne in mind that Egypt, under Al-Sisi, is a cornerstone of the international fight against terrorism, a role that has Washington’s full support. In sum, contrary to Hawthorne’s claim, there is no comparison between the Nasserist model and Al-Sisi’s government in terms of foreign policy.

If there are similarities between the two, they are to be found at the domestic level and, specifically, in their focus on alleviating the plight of the poor, urban development and eliminating informal housing areas, and in building a state on the basis of a concept of citizenship free of transnational identity ideologies.

FURTHER WITNESSES

The third witness at the House of Representatives meeting is Tamara Cofman Wittes, an American writer and public figure who is also a senior fellow specialising in the Middle East at the US Brookings Institution.

In her book Freedom’s Unsteady March (2008), Wittes advised the Bush administration, then in office in the US, to persist in promoting democratic transformation in the Arab region despite the failure of the US-led invasion to bring democracy to Iraq.

Like Dunne and Hawthorne, Wittes overlooks the level of socio-economic evolution in the region as a critical factor in the potential for successful democratic transition. Nor does she appear to be sorry for the drastic consequences of the US-led invasion of Iraq staged in the name of “fighting dictatorship and the sponsors of terrorism”. She says nothing about the civil war it precipitated, the collapse of the state and society, the empowerment of the fiercest terrorist trends seen in the region, such as the Islamic State (IS) group, and the deaths or displacement of millions of Iraqi civilians.

The fourth speaker is Samuel Tadros, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Centre for Religious Freedom, another US think tank. Tadros is an Egyptian who studied in the US, eventually settled there, and became involved in Middle Eastern studies. Although also critical of the Egyptian government, Tadros naturally does not share the other speakers’ positive views on political Islam.

His criticisms focus on religious freedoms, and if some aspects of his criticisms are warranted, especially with regard to the handling of extremist violence and hostility directed towards Egypt’s Copts, he ignores the immense efforts the government has been making under President Al-Sisi’s direction to rebuild churches burned by the Muslim Brothers and Salafis, and he underplays the immense socio-cultural obstacles that have stood in the way of the implementation of anti-discriminatory legislation.

President Al-Sisi is determined to steer Egypt towards religious moderation and tolerance, but he has had to tread carefully for fear that pushing the reform discourse too fast could boomerang and jeopardise social cohesion. Al-Sisi believes that raising living standards, especially in Upper Egypt and the countryside, will create the climate most conducive to the dissemination of the discourse of religious reform and offer brighter horizons for society in general.

From the foregoing overview of the four researchers scheduled to testify at the Congressional hearing on 9 September, it is not difficult to predict the discourse that will predominate: support for the Muslim Brotherhood, a demand for the release of Brotherhood prisoners who have been handed final verdicts for their involvement in terrorist acts and incitement to violence, sweeping condemnation of Egypt on human-rights issues based on the customary hand-me-down allegations, and uncorroborated estimates on numbers of detainees and other unsubstantiated claims we have heard over and over again since the beginning of Al-Sisi’s rule.

A certain amount of time will also be given to religious freedoms and the violations of the rights of Copts and other Christians.

The hearing would simultaneously serve as a channel to mobilise support in Washington for the Brotherhood organisation in the name of “fighting dictatorship in the Middle East”. Ultimately, the aim is to enable this terrorist organisation to regain its footing after the series of blows it sustained from the death of former Egyptian Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi, the infighting between its international branches in Turkey and Qatar, the death of Brotherhood leader Essam Al-Arian and, most recently, the arrest of Mahmoud Ezzat, the acting Brotherhood supreme guide who had remained in hiding for seven years until the Egyptian security services unearthed his whereabouts last month.

The House’s democratic majority is escalating the confrontation with US President Donald Trump by attacking his close allies in the Middle East, namely Egypt, and is using events such as Wednesday’s hearing session to embarrass the US administration in a bid to weaken Trump’s chances in November’s presidential elections.

youtube

#Islam #Muslim #Sharia #Jihad #Legal #Law #Politics #News #Media #Video #9/11

4 notes · View notes

blog-cosmosuniverse1 · 4 years

Text

Medical Ignorance and the Mass Murder of Coronavirus Patients

Commentary by W. Gifford-Jones, MD

(OMNS Oct 20, 2020) In treating the sick, Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine counselled, "First, do no harm." Unfortunately, this cherished principle has not been followed in caring for patients with coronavirus infection. Losing a loved one due to cancer and other diseases is always tragic. But losing one due to the coronavirus pandemic when it could be prevented is an unforgivable act resulting in the mass murder of innocent lives. It has happened due to ignorance about history, hypocrisy, a lack of training of doctors about alternative medicine, and closed minds about the life-saving medical benefits of high doses of intravenous vitamin C.

I would not have the knowledge to write this article if one event in my life had not happened. At 74 years of age I nearly died of a serious heart attack. Doctors said I'd be dead in a few years without the help of cholesterol-lowering drugs. Luckily, several years earlier I had interviewed Dr. Linus Pauling, two-time winner of the Nobel Prize. He advised me of the important role of vitamin C in decreasing the risk of coronary disease. This is when I made one of the most vital decisions of my life. I decided to take 10,000 milligrams (mg) of vitamin C daily, rather than believe Big Pharma. But I also worried because Pauling, although a brilliant chemist, was not a doctor. Was he right about vitamin C? It was only years later when Dr. Sidney Bush, a English researcher proved that vitamin C could reverse atherosclerosis (hardening of arteries) that I knew I had made the right decision. [1]

Now, 22 years later, the doctors who told me I'd be dead in a few years without cholesterol-lowering drugs are dead, and I'm in my 97th year, still alive. It's this experience with the cardiovascular effects of vitamin C that's triggered my interest in the anti-infective and other medical benefits of vitamin C, especially how it can decrease deaths from viral and bacterial diseases.

Klenner went on to show that large doses of vitamin C could also cure other viral diseases such as meningitis, hepatitis, measles, mumps, pneumonia, shingles and even the poisonous bite of a rattlesnake. [2-4] Since that time other researchers have reported that there is no viral disease that high-dose IVC cannot successfully treat.

But Klenner did not win a popularity contest with his colleagues. He wrote in frustration that "Some physicians would stand by and see their patient die rather than use ascorbic acid because in their finite minds it exists only as a vitamin."

Since that time closed medical minds have resulted in thousands of deaths from coronavirus and other diseases in Canada and worldwide. Because of a misconception that vitamin C is just another vitamin. But there is proof that vitamin C is a potent anti-infective nutrient that attacks both viral and bacterial diseases.

Infection triggers a severe inflammatory cellular reaction in the body which results in a decrease in vitamin C. It's like being caught in a snow storm on a lonely road and running out of gas. But in this case white blood cells need C to fight the infection. And if you have not been taking C on a regular basis, your white blood cells without C are like a gun without bullets.

Many people do not realize that nearly all animals make their own vitamin C. Humans lost this ability eons ago due to a genetic mutation. For instance, dogs produce 5,000 milligrams (mgs) daily. Health Canada maintains humans need only 90 mgs. But if a dog gets an infection, it will automatically produce up to 20,000 mgs daily!

During the coronavirus pandemic I've listened to Medical Officers of Health, TV anchors, politicians and medical experts all discuss the importance of distancing and frequent hand washing. But I have only heard one discuss the advantages of vitamin C and D in building up the body's immunity. [5] And I have not heard any explain how the use of high doses of IVC could save lives.

Dr. Lendon H. Smith outlined the clinical experiences of Frederick Klenner in "Clinical Guide to the Use of Vitamin C". It contains a wealth of information on how vitamin C treats many diverse diseases. And how prescribing insufficient amounts of vitamin C can lead to failure in therapy. This medical information is available for all to read. [6]

I've have written before that if a family member died due to coronavirus infection and doctors and hospital refused to use IVC, I would contest this situation in a court of law. I believe I would win because historical evidence is so overwhelming that large doses of C save lives.

The hypocrisy surrounding vitamin C is mind boggling. Dr, Linus Pauling complained, "The medical community requires rigorous evidence supporting vitamin C, but accepts flimsy evidence against it." Little has changed since I interviewed Pauling. This deficit is evidently caused by the minds of medical professionals refusing to accept scientific fact. And we will never know the number of needless deaths this has caused during the pandemic.

A year ago, as a journalist, I was invited to be a member of the Orthomolecular Medical News Service. It's international editorial board is composed of distinguished physicians, professors, and researchers. Several months ago I asked all members how they would treat several viral infections. The overwhelming response was "high dose intravenous vitamin C." OMNS has published twenty-two physician case reports of success with IVC. [7]

Since February, researchers in China have been conducting double-blind studies on IVC. This means one group will receive IVC and a control group will get a placebo. Some studies have already been completed, and the results show that IVC saves more lives than placebo. [8]

"Dr. Enqiang Mao, chief of emergency medicine at Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai, stated that his group treated ~50 moderate to severe cases of COVID-19 infection with high dose intravenous vitamin C. "The IVC dosing was for 7-10 days, with 10,000 mg for moderate cases and 20,000 mg for more severe cases. "All patients who received intravenous vitamin C improved, and there was no mortality." "There were no side effects reported from any of the cases treated with high dose IVC." (Richard Cheng, MD, PhD, reporting from Shanghai) http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v16n12.shtml

But even in one of these recent laudable studies, there was a flaw. According to the report, all patients received a certain dose for moderate infection while others a higher dose for a more severe one. But patients who died had not received the higher dose. [9]

This reflects everything that Dr. Linus Pauling and Dr. Frederick Klenner stressed. As Pauling told his critics, "It's the dosage!" Or, as Klenner claimed, "Some infections require a much larger dose." As we all know, half an aspirin will not cure a migraine headache.

But there is more disturbing news. Chinese researchers are experiencing trouble getting their findings published. Contacts also tell me that doctors who use IVC in North America are being harassed by authorities. In some case, being told that if they persist they will lose their license to practice medicine.

To get an update on what was happening in some parts of Canada and the U.S I contacted several infectious disease specialists, Medical Officers of Health (MOH), and university hospitals, asking a simple question. "Do you prescribe intravenous vitamin C or know of anyone who does to treat coronavirus infection? And if terminal patients are not receiving IVC, why is this the case"?

It proved to be a time-consuming assignment. Many replied they would get back to me but failed to do so. I could only conclude they were not using IVC and did not want anyone to know about it.

Or they responded, "We have checked with our infectious disease specialist and confirm that high dose C is not being used to treat coronavirus infection."

What was shocking is that not a single Medical Officer of Health replied that IVC was being prescribed to those dying from coronavirus infection.

Another surprise was the reaction of Johns Hopkins one of the great hospitals of the world. Its distinguished professors were the first to introduce the value of bedside teaching for students. During this pandemic they were considered the authority in reporting the number of coronavirus deaths. So, I was shocked to receive this response, "We are not conducting clinical trials or administering C as a treatment for COVID 19." And even Harvard Medical School where I spent so many years as a student and later training as a surgeon, never replied to me.

What is going to happen? It's that the Chinese study will likely fail to end the controversy and patients will continue to die needlessly of this virus. I was hoping that one infectious expert, or Medical Officer of Health, would possess the intellectual curiosity to ask, "I wonder if high does IVC could save lives?" It's tragic this has not occurred. Some would label this as medical ignorance, others as malpractice, or if a loved one has died as murder, and finally a court of law looking all the facts decide it's been mass murder.

So, we have a unique situation. It's been said that war is far too important to be left to generals. Due to the economic chaos caused by coronavirus this disaster may be much too important to be left to medical experts when so many North Americans have suffered.

It's time for the government to demand that our medical schools conduct a study of IVC. There is no shortage of patients. We have the scientific talent in our universities. Vitamin C is inexpensive and will virtually never cause complications. Vitamin C has never killed anyone. Besides, this study could be done in a short time and not require thousands of patients.

Who will grasp the moment and save countless lives?

(Syndicated columnist W. Gifford-Jones, MD, (also known as Kenneth Walker, MD) graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1950. He did surgical residencies at McGill University, the University of Rochester, and Harvard Medical School. Still an activist, his website is http://www.docgiff.com.)

To learn more: Several dozen articles related to vitamin therapy for COVID are posted for free access at http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/index.shtml . Many are available in French, Spanish, German, Arabic, Italian, Korean, Chinese, and Norwegian. Japanese translations may be found at https://isom-japan.org/top_after .

2 notes · View notes

yamasan519-blog · 4 years

Text

Understanding How Dogs Learn

Bewildered about training your dog? Don't know why your dog doesn't understand what you want it to do? This article will help you understand the basic principles as to why dogs do what they do.

The goal is to develop a conditioned response. You want your dog to sit every time you command "Sit" not occasionally, but all of the time. It is not a democracy; your commands are not subject to a vote. If a dog is chasing a cat, bird, or another dog that is running out into the road, we want the dog to respond to the "stop" command immediately. https://sites.google.com/view/girldognamess/unique-dog-names

Dogs Learn By Association:

Dogs learn by location association and repetitiveness. We learned how a dog associates through Pavlov's studies: By ringing a bell and then offering food repeatedly and doing this consistently Pavlov's dogs began to salivate upon hearing the bell alone, before the food was even offered. Because the food presentation always followed the sound of the bell, the dogs anticipated and expected that a snack was soon to come once they heard the ringing. In other words, the dogs developed an association between the ringing of the bell and the presentation of food. The ringing of the bell and the food presentation was consistent. Pavlov always offered the food immediately after ringing the bell. Consistent repetitions are the key elements to successful dog training.

In obedience training you want to create a conditioned response to a specific cue or command. This is where "low level stimulus" can play a big roll with electronic collars. In Pavlov's experiments, he was able to have dogs automatically salivate when he rang a bell. As a trainer you need to train a dog to respond to specific commands the first time you give them. Your electronic collar with low level stimulation becomes Pavlov's bell.

Training dog collars have been a controversial item with the impression that they cause discomfort to your dog. Discomfort is one thing you never want to cause. The proper low level stimulus will not cause discomfort. State of the art training dog collars have various levels of stimulation. By using the very lowest setting that your dog will be aware of is sufficient. If you are consistent in using low level stimulation every time your dog engages in a dangerous, or unacceptable action, your dog will soon associate the two and know what is acceptable.

You must provide your dog with immediate feedback; you do not want the dog to ignore a command because he would rather keep on chasing. We love our dogs and want to keep them out of harm's way. There is no better way to protect them than through training. The goal in training is to teach dogs to comply with commands as a conditioned response, a response that they don't think about each time they hear it. This means that with your tracking collars we must be consistent in using low level stimulation.

Dogs are Place Oriented:

Dogs associate negatives and positives with specific places. This means that as a trainer you must reward or correct your dog where the desired or undesired behavior occurred. This is an important concept for you to implement because if you command the dog to sit at point A and the dog instead moves to point B, 20 yards away, it is a mistake to reprimand the dog at point B. The dog will associate the correction with what he is doing at point B. As a result, the dog will not associate the correction with the failure to comply with the "sit" command at point A and will have no idea what is wrong with what he is doing at point B. This will lead to apprehension, confusion, and lack of trust. With an electronic collar immediate correction can easily be given at the appropriate time and place.

We can incorporate the dog's natural inclination to be place oriented throughout our training. Teaching a dog to stop and stay stopped, or stay out of the garbage all involves place orientation. As a trainer, you can take advantage of the dog's characteristics and make them work for us. It is important to understand that, in addition to rewarding or correcting the dog at the place where the behavior occurred, you must respond quickly. For example, if you command, "Here," and the dog runs away, or ignores you correcting the dog five minutes later or when we finally catch him at a different place will be counterproductive. The dog will not associate the correction with originally failing to obey the command. Rewarding or correcting the dog at the place where the act occurred as soon as it happens is important for the dog to make the desire association. This is much easier to do with today's tracking and training collars.

Dogs Are Pack Animals:

In every pack there is a leader and one leader only. Your dogs must perceive you as the leader of the pack or they will do whatever they want whenever they want to do it. This does not mean that you should be harsh with your dogs. It does mean that you must first show your dogs what you want them to do and incorporate consistent repetitions in all of your training efforts. Good trainers are patient mentors who do not have unrealistic expectations of their dogs. Training takes place a little at a time.

If you are consistent, give a command only once, reward for success, and correct for non-compliance, at the proper place, the dog will perceive you as a trusted leader. It is a dog's nature to test, so be patient because there will be much testing. If you are consistent, understand how a dog learns and what motivates him, you will be successful.

Dogs Do Not Understanding the English Language:

Unfortunately, many dog owners operate under the false impression that their dog innately understands what they are saying. The problem is that even really "smart dogs" need to be shown what a command means numerous times before they get it. Attributing too much intelligence to a dog may lead you to thinking your dog will know what behavior is expected in response to a particular command after being shown only a few times. The result is that the owner may correct the dog for non-compliance when the dog does not understand why he is being corrected. If this happens it can cause big problems in your training efforts. Your dog will become confused, frustrated and non complaint. It's in a dog's nature to associate the correction with something. However, the association the dog makes may not be the association you want. It is important to understand that a dog should never be corrected if he does not know why the correction is taking place.

When correcting a dog, it is imperative to show him what is expected numerous times. This is the first stage of learning. Your objective is to show the dog the response you are looking for when you give the command and if you think the dog has "got it," repeat the process some more.

If you are patient, consistent, take immediate corrective action and show respect for your dog your training efforts will be rewarded. When you start having success don't be disappointed if your dog tests you because he will. Again be consistent and you will build a special bond with your dog which will last a life time.

1 note · View note

trylonandperisphere · 4 years

Text

Article text:

How Much Do We Need The Police?

June 3, 20207:59 AM ET

LEAH DONNELLA

One effect of the widespread protests across U.S. cities this week has been to renew discussions of what role the police should play in society.

For many Americans, it goes without saying that the police are critical in maintaining public safety. Have an emergency? Call the police. But many others — especially black people and poor people — have long countered that the police pose more of a threat to their safety than a boon. See a police officer? Walk in the other direction.

So it seems like a good moment to talk to Alex S. Vitale. He's the author of the 2017 book The End of Policing. In it, he argues that rather than focus on police reform or officer retraining, the country needs to reconsider fundamentally what it is the police should be doing at all.

I spoke with Vitale about what roles police should and shouldn't play, what he makes of the current protests and what actual change in the way police in this country do their jobs might look like. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

One of the arguments you make in The End of Policing is that police are being asked to do too much. They're basically being tasked with addressing every social problem that we have. So what are police asked to do? And what should they be asked to do?

One of the problems that we're encountering here is this massive expansion in the scope of policing over the last 40 years or so. Policing is now happening in our schools. It's happening in relation to the problems of homelessness, untreated mental illness, youth violence and some things that we historically associate police with.

But the policing has become more intensive, more invasive, more aggressive. So what I'm calling for is a rethink on why we've turned all of these social problems over to the police to manage. And as we dial those things back, then we can think more concretely about what the rest of policing should look like and how that could be reformed.

You brought up homelessness. In many cities police are tasked with dealing with people experiencing homelessness — but they don't have many options besides basically moving people or arresting them.

Well, we've created this situation where our political leaders have basically abandoned the possibility of actually housing people. Which, of course, is the real solution, supportive housing for those who need extra support. But basically, we have a massive failure in housing markets that is unable to provide basic shelter for millions of Americans.

So instead of actually addressing that fundamental problem, we have relabeled it as a problem that is the fault of the disorderly people who we label as morally deficient. And then we use police to criminalize them, to control their behavior and to reduce their disorderly impact on the rest of us. And this is perverse and unjust. So then it places police in this completely untenable situation, because they completely lack the tools to make this problem any better. And yet we've told them it's their problem to manage.

Part of our misunderstanding about the nature of policing is we keep imagining that we can turn police into social workers. That we can make them nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence workers. That's what distinguishes them from all other government functions. ... They have the legal capacity to use violence in situations where the average citizen would be arrested.

So when we turn a problem over to the police to manage, there will be violence, because those are ultimately the tools that they are most equipped to utilize: handcuffs, threats, guns, arrests. That's what really is at the root of policing. So if we don't want violence, we should try to figure out how to not get the police involved.

There are obviously a lot of people who agree broadly with the notion that the way that policing happens in this country is a problem and that there needs to be some sort of change. But they're pretty invested in the idea that police are needed to maintain public safety. People ask the question, without police, what do you do when someone gets murdered? What do you do when someone's house gets robbed? What do you say to those people who have those concerns?

Well, I'm certainly not talking about any kind of scenario where tomorrow someone just flips a switch and there are no police. What I'm talking about is the systematic questioning of the specific roles that police currently undertake, and attempting to develop evidence-based alternatives so that we can dial back our reliance on them. And my feeling is that this encompasses actually the vast majority of what police do. We have better alternatives for them.

Even if you take something like burglary — a huge amount of burglary activity is driven by drug use. And we need to completely rethink our approach to drugs so that property crime isn't the primary way that people access drugs. We don't have any part of this country that has high-quality medical drug treatment on demand. But we have policing on demand everywhere. And it's not working.

Obviously, a big part of what is on people's minds right now is the role that police have in dealing with protesters, dealing with different types of political unrest. In your book, you talk a lot about the history of how police have been used to quell social unrest. Can you talk about that history a little bit?

Well, I think that one of the myths we have about policing is that it is politically neutral, and that it is always here to sort of create order in a way that benefits everyone. But the reality is that America's social order has never been entirely equitable. We have a long history of exploitation of the Indigenous population, of African Americans through slavery, Jim Crow and today.

And while we're not using police to manage slavery or colonialism today, we are using police to manage the problems that our very unequal system has produced. We're invested in this kind of austerity politics that says the government can't afford to really do anything to lift people up. We have to put all our resources into subsidizing the already most successful parts of the economy. But those parts of the economy are producing this huge group of people who are homeless, unemployed, have untreated mental health and substance abuse problems. And then we ask the police to put a lid on those problems — to manage them so they don't interfere with the "order" that we're supposedly all benefiting from.

But if you're one of those poor people, one of those folks with a mental health problem, someone who's involved in black market activities to survive, then you experience this as constant criminalization.

And would you say the same goes for people who are political protesters?

Political protest has always been a part of this dynamic, right? Political protests are a threat to the order of this system. And so policing has always been the primary tool for managing those threats to the public order. Just as we understand the use of police to deal with homelessness as a political failure, every time we turn a political order problem over to the police to manage, that's also a political failure. I think the mayor of Minneapolis, for instance: Jacob Frey. He has consistently tried to frame this as a problem of a few bad apples. And he says, "Why are you protesting? We fired them." But this completely misunderstands the nature of the grievances. And instead of actually addressing those grievances, he's throwing police at the problem.

Are the interactions that are happening right now between police and protesters something that you think is predictable? Or is this something new that we haven't seen before?

It's not completely new; it's just the intensity of it compared [with], let's say, five years ago during the Eric Garner and the Mike Brown protests. What we're seeing is really an immediate escalation to very high levels of force, a high degree of confrontation.

And I think part of it is driven by deep frustration within policing, which is that police feel under assault, and they have no answer. They trotted out all the possible solutions: police-community dialogue sessions, implicit bias training, community policing, body cameras. And it just didn't work. It didn't make any difference. And so they ran out of excuses.

So the protests today are a much more kind of existential threat to the police. And the police are overreacting as a result.

If we were to take serious steps toward moving in the direction of having police address fewer of our social problems and putting those problems in the hands of people who are actually more equipped to deal with them, what would be the next step? What is the next thing that we as a country have to push for?

I think this will look like a series of local budget battles. And that's really what's going on across the country, is when we have these divest campaigns in places like Los Angeles and Minneapolis and New York and Durham, N.C., and Nashville, Tenn., and Dallas, Texas. These are folks who are saying concretely: "We don't want police in our schools. We want that money spent in ways that help our children, not criminalize them. We don't want more money for overtime for narcotics officers. We want actual drug treatment programs, safe injection facilities, things that will help people." So that's what this looks like. It's about rallying city council members and mayors around a new vision of creating healthier communities.

When you're looking around at what's happening right now, what are the things that you think people need to understand to really process what is going on around the country?

Well, I think the police are making the argument for us, right? People started this conversation by saying policing is out of control; they're not making the situation better. They have not been reformed. Well, now all you have to do is turn on the nightly news and see how true that is.

The level of aggression and unnecessary escalation is stark evidence of how unreformed policing is, and I argue how unreformable it is. The question is whether or not people will take it to the next step and ask the tough political questions. Why are our mayors turning this over to the police to manage? Why are we using curfews instead of having conversations? Why are we throwing protesters in prison instead of trying to figure out what's driving all of this anger?

#policing #police #police brutality #police violence #protests #peaceful protest #activism #racism #alex s. vitale #police reform #abolish the police #u.s. culture #u.s. politics #law enforcement #interviews #code switch #npr #leah donnella

4 notes · View notes

itsblosseybitch · 5 years

Text

The Reel Dunne (Griffin Dunne interview from INTERVIEW magazine, October 1988

Hollywood Wunderkind Griffin Dunne eloped at 18, produced a movie at 23, and has been acting all along. Victoria Hamburg stopped by to catch up.

When Griffin Dunne was 23 and managing a concession stand at Radio City Music Hall, he followed the cultural cues of his native L.A. and, with a couple of close friends, optioned a story for a movie. Nothing terribly out of the ordinary for a Hollywood-wise L.A. youth. What was not ordinary, however, was that the story--Ann Beattie’s novel Chilly Scenes of Winter--was actually made into a film, starring John Heard, and released by United Artists.

Chilly Scenes of Winter marked the emergence of the young Griffin Dunne as an actor and leading producer of American films. Son of writer Dominick Dunne (and brother of the tragically murdered Dominique Dunne), Griffin moved to Manhattan after high school to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse. Over the years, his film credits have grown to include An American Werewolf in London, Johnny Dangerously, Almost You, After Hours, and Who’s That Girl, and in his role as a producer, he has been equally canny. Along with his longtime partner, Amy Robinson, he has produced John Sayles’ Baby It’s You and co-produced Martin Scorsese’s After Hours.

This season, Dunne’s dual career is in full swing. He produced Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty, which was released in September, and is currently producing Lasse Hallstrom’s (My Life As A Dog) first American film, Once Around. He stars in Dorris Dorrie’s controversial second film, Me and Him, playing the part of a middle-aged man with two problems--a midlife crisis and a penis that talks (distributors have decided the film is too controversial for America, and it is being released in Europe this month). Dunne will also appear in the HBO movie Lip Service alongside Paul Dooley.

Dunne is as funny and charming off-screen as he is on. Dark, intense, and boyishly handsome, he is a natural storyteller, whose enthusiasm is contagious. Victoria Hamburg found him at home, in his West Village penthouse overlooking the Hudson. The apartment is airy and sunlit, with oversize windows, a fireplace for the winter, and a terrace with real grass for the summer. It is the perfect refuge from the hustle of the city streets and the madness of the entertainment world on which Griffin Dunne clearly thrives.

VICTORIA HAMBURG: I’ve been having my own private Griffin Dunne Film Festival. I looked at After Hours, An American Werewolf in London, Almost You, and Who’s That Girl. The movies that you’ve produced have more social commentary and a greater basis in reality than the movies you star in. The ones you act in are more like myths or fables about the dilemmas of modern man.

GRIFFIN DUNNE: It’s funny--as a producer, you think about material for material’s sake. You look for really rich characters and movies that have something to say. It’s much easier for me to find movies to produce than to act in. You have more control over material, and there are wider choices.

VH: What’s this film you were doing in Boston?

GD: It’s called Lip Service. It was just a great piece of writing by a guy named Howard Porter. He wrote Boy’s Life. It was on Broadway a while ago. David Mamet executive-produced this film and asked me if I’d be in it with Paul Dooley. William H. Macy, who’s an actor, directed it. [OP NOTE: There’s a misprint in this article, where’s he’s referred to as W.C. Macy. Or maybe Griffin was trying to be funny and make a reference to W.C. Fields]. It’s his first film. He did an incredible job, and it was great to work with a director who was an actor. It’s about these two talk-show hosts on one of those morning shows like Hey, Wake Up, L.A. It’s called Sunny Side Up. It’s been run for ten years by a kind of boring, staid broadcaster who’s like a Walter Cronkite of the morning circuit. They want to spruce up the ratings, so they bring in a sort of Regis Philbin type, and that’s me. It’s Regis and Walter on this morning show, and they’re two very different people. I idolize him, but he hates me. I’m always trying to get him to be my friend. There’s something very touching about it. It’s also very sad, because the public taste being what it is, I blow him out of the water. I’m so filled with energy and kooky ideas. I’m always looking for the lowest common denominator in human behavior, and people love it. They just lap it up. Dooley’s character gets fired.

Anyway, in this movie, for the first time I play a guy who is completely happy. He has a vicious mean streak, and then it’s gone, and he’s the happiest person on earth. I had a great time, because I usually play people with a tremendous number of problems. This guy hasn’t a clue of the problems he has, because he never listens. He never hears a word he’s saying. Somebody will be talking to him and he’ll interrupt them to ask, “How’s my hair? Do you think I’m attractive?” or some terribly vain question.

VH: Do you think that it takes being oblivious like that to be a happy guy?

GD: Yeah, basically, I mean, to not have a clue about anybody else’s suffering or even what color shirt they’re wearing is a different version of happiness. I’ve seen people without any sort of self-doubt. They just amaze me.

VH: When you were talking earlier, I was thinking you sound like somebody who doesn’t suffer from self-doubt.

GD: Who doesn’t have self-doubt at some point?

VH: Well, I know, but it doesn’t seem to paralyze you in any way.

GD: No, it doesn’t paralyze me. It’s a fleeting thought, but it was nice to play somebody so completely confident and ebullient in everything that he’s doing. The guy I played just had no problem offending somebody, because he had no idea he was offending them. Terrible hurt would cross someone’s face and he would just go right on talking. It was endlessly interesting.

VH: It seems as if we’ve reached a point where there’s a new Hollywood. There are people who are our age, in their late twenties, mid-thirties, who are now in a position of making decisions in the studios. Are they doing it differently? Is something going to happen that’s different from the way that people have been making movies in the past?

GD: Probably not. Even though movies are making more money than ever, they are still based on the star system. And the star system is getting stronger and stronger. Having name value is becoming more and more important. People are taking fewer and fewer chances. What I’ve noticed is that it’s getting to be taken for granted that this is the way to go. Even the smaller outfits have now figured out ways to hire major stars with name value. I think part of the problem with film is that the good movies--with interesting stories and actors--are not huge weekend movies. They’re competing against star vehicles with rotten scripts and one charismatic star that make the big kill for two or three weekends and then gradually dwindle away. The movies that don’t fall into that category are racing quicker than ever for the video stores. All this means that they’ve yet to figure out long-run releases. And the attitude is getting to be more and more--even among my peers--”I’ll wait for it on cable.” People look at small or interesting or intimate movies as the kind they’d prefer to see at home on their television sets rather than at a theater. Movies are considered failures much sooner than ever before. The failure rate has really sped up, and the success rate is much further down the line because now you have to look at the videocassette sales and rentals.

VH: I think it’s incredibly frustrating for all the people who go out and kill themselves for six years to get a project to finally happen, who risk everything they’ve got and go out on a limb for it, and then, even if it’s reasonably successful, it’ll probably run for only two or three weeks and end up in the video store, and who’s ever going to look at it then?

GD: It’s extremely frustrating. It’s like they spend six years to make the videocassette.

VH: Right. Whereas if you’re writing a book, even if nobody buys it, it will still be there somehow in a more lasting way.

GD: You notice how books and videocassettes are almost the same size...

VH: How did you feel when you were making Who’s That Girl and people kept calling it “the Madonna movie”?

GD: I assumed they would. She is an extraordinarily huge star, and a great deal of commotion happens around her when she’s out in public.

VH: How did the filming go?

GD: It was pretty wild. I guess I didn’t really expect it to be. I remember there was a marathon race on a Sunday. We were shooting in Manhattan. Here are these people who are nearing the end of a twenty-six-mile run. They could have placed respectably, but they pulled over to the side to watch the shooting and let the other runners go on. By the time they got to where we were shooting on Fifth Avenue, they had been running twenty miles. They took a breather to watch the shooting, to watch Madonna getting in and out of a cab. They just threw it all away to watch this. Everybody had a camera when we were working on that picture. Cabs would drive by, and little old ladies would pull out lenses longer than their entire frames and just whack off a few pictures. It was a bit of a carnival atmosphere.

VH: Which do you prefer, acting or producing?

GD: I don’t know. Acting is what I originally wanted to do. That’s really what I’m supposed to be doing. Unfortunately, the business of being an actor is a lot more disheartening than the business of being a producer. As an actor, you’re beholden to the material and the taste of other people who are developing projects that you may or may not get in. As a producer, you come up with the idea. Everything that my partner, Amy Robinson, and I have done, we’ve thought of and developed. The script for After Hours came from a student at Columbia University.

VH: You get offered a lot of roles that you turn down--if you kept getting parts that you wanted to do, would you end up acting instead of producing?

GD: It depends how far along I am in the producing. I’ve lately had a painful decision to make. I’ve turned down work because I’ve been too far into producing a picture. It wasn’t easy to do.

VH: Do you feel you naturally lean toward acting?

GD: I’ve always leaned toward acting. I’m very good at working on stories, casting, and crewing up, but when the movie’s being shot, there’s always the frustration I feel watching other actors working. That goes away once the film’s finished shooting. It’s almost the reverse of what I feel as an actor. There’s a certain relief that, once I’ve finished shooting, I can be in the editing room or in the screening room, watching the rough cuts develop and watching the picture just get better and better.

VH: Have you ever wanted to direct?

GD: Yeah, I think about that more and more.

VH: The relationships between an actor and a director and between a producer and a director are very different.

GD: The relationship between an actor and a producer is, in fact, one of total opposites. As producer--particularly during shooting--your job is to worry and to predict what horrible things will happen. You worry about time, scheduling, and logistics. You have to fall into a certain logic that does not come to me naturally.

VH: I always think it’s a combination of being the baby sitter, the whip-cracker, and the pacifier. In a way, all the things that you do make you feel like you have no control. On the other hand, you realize that ultimately you do have the control.

GD: What you’re doing is watching other people create and have a fantastic time. Amy and I have always worked with directors who have respected our opinion and relied on us heavily for story development, casting, and the creative part. But once the movie is going, it’s just this big monster rolling along that you have to keep in check. It’s much less creative. I mean, you can look at dailies and say, “Gee, it looks a little dark in that scene” and “Why does she have that expression on her face?” but it’s pretty much out of your control, with the exception of the ultimate ability to slow down or speed up the process. And sometimes even that’s questionable. But as an actor, your entire job is not to worry. Your job is to help others, create an atmosphere where you can be totally spontaneous, get lost in the part, and develop intense relationships with people. When I’m acting and things are going well, I have an extremely good time.

VH: It sounds like the acting and producing provide a perfect balance for you.

GD: Yes. Absolutely. I remember when I produced my first movie, Chilly Scenes of Winter. I was a desperately hungry actor who lived and died by my last audition and what people thought of me as I walked out of an office. That’s what most people think when they’re starting out. It’s an unnatural environment when you go in and read and show your personality to someone and they say yes or no. It takes awhile to get the hang of that. I was not good at it. I would clam up and freeze at auditions. I could not be free. So producing a movie was entirely liberating. There I was, in a casting room, auditioning actors whom I not only admired but envied, wishing I was in their position. I was 23 at the time, and I remember being in this office in Los Angeles, in Culver City, pre-screening the actors before the director, Joan Micklin Silver, met them. Bringing in all these actors I’ve admired my whole life and interviewing them, I thought, This is crazy. They thought it was pretty crazy, too. They thought, How old is he? But I did see how the audition process worked, and I thought, This is not so threatening.

VH: I’ve always thought of you as the boy wonder. I mean, there you were, producing a feature film. That’s not easy, but you were at the point where you and Amy could convince somebody to give you the money to do it. How did you manage that?

GD: We also had a third partner, Mark Metcalf. All three of us were actors. Mark was probably the most successful of the three of us, because he had produced Animal House [He also played Niedermeyer in the film]. We had a really good book by Ann Beattie, and people wanted it.

VH: How did you convince Joan that she should let you guys do it?

GD: She came to us. She wanted to make the movie.

VH: But you didn’t know anything about line-producing, right?

GD: No. For a year before we actually got it off the ground, we interviewed everyone. We called people right up out of the DGA [Directors’ Guild of America] book and said, “We’re doing this movie. Would you talk to us? Will you tell us about line-producing? Will you tell us what this means? Will you tell us what gross and net are?” We knew nothing, but we found that complete strangers were willing to share their knowledge and expertise with us. So we learned a certain amount the year before we actually met Joan. All we knew was that we wanted to make this movie, and we had the material. Several times, people said, “We’ll make this movie, but you three have to go.” And we said, “No, we come with it and you’ll have to go.” We pulled it off, and they let us do it. We had a production manager, a man named Paul Helmick, who was close to 70 years old [laughs]; he was Howard Hawks’ first assistant director, and he had incredible stories about the movie business. We learned a lot from him. We were the producers, but he knew the nuts and bolts--who to get on the crew and what the hourly wages were and all that.

VH: What would you say was the most important thing that you learned from doing the movie?

GD: Well, because I was so young, I sort of learned how the world works. I learned how decisions were made and business was run. The business section of the newspaper became interesting to me: why people were fired and hired. Just the decision-making process, and people taking responsibility for their decisions.

VH: You grew up in Los Angeles, didn’t you?

GD: Yes.

VH: So you must have had some sense of how it all worked. Your father was in the business.

GD: Yeah. I knew my movies. I loved movies. But I didn’t know anything about the details of making a movie. Casting was an instinctual process to me. Amy and Mark weren’t from the movie business. They grew up loving movies, and that’s what the three of us had in common. Being from Los Angeles and having parents in the business was not really helpful. I could talk to my father about what I was doing and the problems I was having, and he would understand what I was saying, but he wasn’t in production then. He was extremely supportive of me, just as Amy’s and Mark’s parents were supportive of them.

VH: Did you ever have moments where you were totally terrified because you didn’t know what you were doing?

GD: You know, I really didn’t. I was having such a good time. Nobody ever once said, “You’re a fraud. You’re 23 years old. Who are you to tell me this?” I knew the material. I knew I had a tremendous love and conviction for this book and for the script that Joan wrote and for Joan as a director. I didn’t really have any doubt in my ability.

VH: You and Amy have been producing together for such a long time. How does that work? Is there a role that she plays and a role that you play?

GD: I guess so. We bounce off each other very well. Whoever calls us knows they’re going to get both of us on the phone, and we’ve figured out how to talk without talking at the same time, so that we build on each other’s thoughts. We finish each other’s sentences.

VH: Do you do good cop/bad cop?

GD: Yeah. It depends who the person is. There are certain people she gets along better with and others I get along better with. People get treated well, so there hasn’t been any real tension on our sets coming from the production. Basically we’re both good cops. But we use that good cop/bad cop routine.

VH: How does she feel when you go off to be in a movie? Does she produce things without you?

GD: The day-to-day stuff is a lot of phone work, you know. Producing is all about talking on the phone. When I’m off acting, Amy is doing the day-to-day work in the office. We talk every day. It’s like I’m in foreign land, acting with complete strangers. I’ll call her, and she’ll fill me in on what’s going on. Then, if I have a few hours left in me, I’ll knock off about eight or nine phone calls. So I’m still doing my work. I never fall out of contact.

VH: You sound driven.

GD: Well, it is a driven thing. Amy is a very driven person, and sometimes I have to work hard to catch up with her if I’m doing two jobs. It’s a lot of work. I’m getting tired just talking about it. [laughs]

VH: I’m always interested in people who are able to make movies in New York. Do you and Amy feel pressure to do something in L.A.? Sometimes L.A. seems like a private club to me: you have to do time there or you have to have been a member.

GD: No, I don’t think so. I mean, the reason we’re doing well is because of the material. We choose to live in New York. We have to go to Los Angeles an awful lot for any number of reasons--to meet writers or talk to the studio about financing--but there’s been no pressure on us to move to Los Angeles. In fact, I think it would be a little stifling, because we could fall into that club atmosphere you’re talking about. A good deal of the time there is spent talking about “Have you read this script that was just submitted that all the agencies are reading? Did you get on top of this? Did you get on top of that?” And it’s a cyclical effect. You start buying something based on word of mouth and who’s attached to it--basically for all the wrong reasons. I think this distance gives us a little perspective on what the story is.

VH: How did you find the script for Running on Empty?

GD: Amy and I had been interested in radicals--the real hardened ones, the ones who had been living underground and thought that they were still fighting a revolution, who surfaced only to kill a bunch of people for a political idea that grew out of the ‘60s and had somehow gone terribly wrong. I had absolutely no sympathy for them. I understood where their politics originated, but I felt that they were in a complete dream world. They were the same criminals that sell drugs, or blow away cops to rob a bank, for no political reason. The idea that they thought there would be some kind of public uprising over killing a couple of security guards was delusion at its highest. We talked about making a movie on this subject, and then we came across an article about the custody procedure involving kids whose parents were radicals--two boys, 11 and 9. They were younger than the characters in our movie. Their parents were found with a cache of weapons, fighting to overthrow the government so that we would all be free. They were a lot harder than the characters in our film, but we were struck by the family aspect of the story. We went to Naomi Phoner [author of Running on Empty] with the article and talked about the origins of the parents and their political beliefs. We concentrated on the case of blowing up a napalm plant in the early ‘70s. Their pictures were plastered in every post office in the United States and they were on the Ten Most Wanted list. What effect would that have on their children?

VH: When I read articles about these people, there’s always something about them that makes you feel as if they could have been friends of yours in college. There’s something very ordinary about the people who did those things.

GD: Yes, but living on the run for so long, living underground where there’s a network of people that can help you--that’s got to warp your idea of society, because you have ostensibly left society to lead this kind of life. The society you’re trying to overthrow is very different from the one you have in mind once you’ve been underground for a few years.

VH: Did you actually try to contact people who were underground?

GD: Yeah, we spoke to a few people--they were hardly on anyone’s Ten Most Wanted list, but they had a lot to hide from. Naomi had some friends from college, in fact--former SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] higher-ups who were no longer wanted by the law.

VH: How did Sidney Lumet become the director?

GD: He read the script. We were at Lorimar, and Sidney had a contract at Lorimar. We had thought of Sidney quite a bit before we seriously approached directors. He read it and contacted us and told us how much he loved it.

VH: It seems like a good time to make a movie like Running On Empty. Here we are, with the Presidential elections before us...[laughs]

GD: When we were testing Running on Empty, we would show it to college kids. Researchers would ask them about their knowledge of ‘60s radicals, and they would talk about Jane Fonda. I guess they thought she was an SDS student or something and that she lived in the underground. There was very little awareness about the people who were trying to end the Vietnam War.

VH: How much does giving people something to think about have to do with your decisions about what movies you produce?

GD: We assume that other people will be interested in thinking about what we think about. What initially attracted us to Running On Empty was not so much making a political statement. What really drew us to the story were the family and the conflicts in the family. The movie is a sort of extreme exaggeration of what happens to boys or girls when they hit a certain age, when they look at their parents and they’re not parents anymore. They’re human beings with a lot of problems, and they become aware of what it took to raise them. It’s the first feeling that a kid might have of compassion toward his parents, of a sense of even feeling wiser somehow. That’s what attracted me to Running On Empty. It’s that story of looking at your parents and feeling in a funny way stronger than them. You suddenly have this knowledge that the decisions you make can hurt them. If you don’t want to hurt them, you make the proper adjustments. The alternative is to grow up and hurt them because you’ve got to live your own life. This movie is about all the complexities that go on in a family. Maybe there will be disappointment for a lot of politically minded people who think they might find an answer in this movie. It comes out in a much more family-oriented way.

VH: Your parents are remarkable people. I remember reading the story that your father wrote about your sister’s death and the murder trial that followed it. I particularly remember the description of your mother. I’ve always thought that she was unbelievably courageous.

GD: My mother’s an extraordinary person. She’s the strongest person I know.

[Ellen Griffin Dunne founded Justice for Homicide Victims in 1984 to support victims of homicide with legal and financial assistance, as well as counseling and referrals. In 1989, a year after this interview was conducted, Ellen was recognized for her advocacy work by then-President George H.W. Bush. Ellen also suffered from multiple sclerosis starting in the early ‘80s. She passed away in 1997. Justice for Homicide Victims is still operating today.]

VH: Do you think being raised by people like that allows you to try things that other people wouldn’t ordinarily try?

GD: It sure helps. I grew up in a very supportive environment. My parents were not easily shocked by the decisions I made. I was sort of a handful; I got into a lot of trouble when I was growing up. They never succumbed to total despair when I fucked up. I think that’s an important lesson for parents. I grew up with the confidence of knowing that my parents always thought I was going to come out O.K. They always thought I was going to make it, whatever I did.

VH: Did you have any heroes?

GD: I grew up idolizing people all the time. It’s harder and harder to find idols, but for as long as I can remember, I was always a worshiper of other people.

VH: Who?

GD: I was only 9 years old, but I had this obsession with John F. Kennedy. I was convinced I would someday know this guy and we’d become really good friends. [laughs] I called his wife Mrs. Kennedy, and I’d call him Mr. Kennedy whenever I talked about him. I used to write him letters--nothing very political, just to tell him that it was my birthday last week, and my brother did this, and that things kind of stank around the house but that I’d work it out. I would get letters back from his secretary saying that Mr. Kennedy had received my letter, and that was perfectly fine. I remember we used to go to church every Sunday, one day I just put my foot down and refused to go. I just said “I’m not going.” Big fights. They went to church and left me locked in my room. When they came back, my brother and sister and the whole family were glowing. John F. Kennedy and his wife had gone to church that day, and they sat right behind my parents!

VH: Don’t you think they made it up?

GD: Well, even as I’m telling you, I find it just incredible.

VH: Were you a gullible child?

GD: I was always gullible. But I can’t believe they’d be that cruel. I used to lie for years afterward--with the conviction of a total liar who believed it--about the time I went to church and John and Jackie were sitting behind me. Even telling you this, the lie seems true. I turned around, saying, “Hi, Mr. Kennedy, I’m Griffin Dunne. I wrote you these letters.” “Oh yes, Griffin. Oh yes, I got your letters. Just wait until after the service. We’ll talk.” And then as soon as the service was over, he tapped me on the shoulder, and I climbed over the pew. I’m between him and Jackie, and he says, “Have you met my wife?” “Oh, hi, Mrs. Kennedy. Nice to meet you.” He says, “Go on, about those letters.” And we were talking as we were walking outside, and we became friends in that moment. Anyway, he was my major hero. It’s been downhill ever since.

VH: Were you raised a Catholic?

GD: Yes.

VH: Has that had any lasting effect on you?

GD: Well, I think there’s something very Catholic about that fantasy. I was raised a Catholic, and it helped me in being an actor in plenty of ways. I hated church. I always thought those priests gave rather weak performances. I think that’s sort of how I became an actor--an early fantasy was if I were a priest, I’d do a much better job. When I became an altar boy, I became the church-clown altar boy and would bring the priest the wrong vestments.

VH: On purpose?

GD: No, it just worked out that way, but I got laughs.

VH: I’m half Catholic and half Jewish. I think that what I get from being Catholic is that I’m always guilty about something I did that I shouldn’t have done. And what I get from being Jewish is that I’m always guilty about something I should have done that I didn’t do. I heard the other day that the movie you were in that Doris Dorrie directed was banned in this country. I have a feeling this isn’t true, but this movie has a controversial reputation. What’s going on here?

GD: Well, I think it’s probably a “European” movie in that it’s going to open in Europe.

VH: What’s this movie about?

GD: It’s a sensitive tale. It’s about this guy whose penis starts talking to him and it just totally freaks him out. You never see it, so I don’t know why it’s banned. It’s based on a book called Two by Alberto Moravia. It’s a very typical tale, about this guy who’s an architect. He’s at the brink of having some kind of boredom breakdown--he’s married and he has a kid and feels trapped. His penis starts talking to him, screaming at him to wake up and enjoy life. You never see it. It’s all in his mind. It’s basically me talking to myself the whole movie and talking to women and the people in my office. I’m a very ambitious guy in the movie who starts to get ahead through the power of the seduction. He’s a philanderer, very Italian, both cocky and confused at the same time. He has all these desires of getting ahead and finding the perfect woman. I thought the part had a certain kind of charm to it. It might be banned because the movie turns out to look like one of those Ralph Steadman drawings with the back of people’s heads blown out, you know, like a shotgun went off in their mouth. Everybody’s totally distorted, and weird shit is coming out of their mouths. Everybody is very unattractive in a funny way. It’s not as funny as people thought it would be. It’s a much harder movie.

[This last part is interesting to read, because as someone who has watched Me and Him, there’s no animation in the movie whatsoever. I wonder if that was the original plan for the film but it got scrapped for the final product for whatever reason, probably due to budget constraints. I know there’s a ‘70s film based on Moravia’s book as well. My friends over at The Projection Booth did a podcast on this movie, and Doris Dorrie was interviewed and I don’t remember a word being breathed about any animation sequences, so this is the first I’ve heard about this. Griffin is not a big fan of this movie (neither am I) so he hasn’t talked much about it since, and he said he didn’t want to be interviewed about it for the podcast.]

VH: Her other movie, Men, seemed to be about how people of the opposite sex don’t really like each other.

GD: Yeah. I hadn’t thought that at the time, but I definitely think that now. It’s a battle of the sexes, but it’s a battle over which is the uglier sex. There’s nothing terribly crude about it, sexually. Emotionally, it’s very crude. But being directed by a woman on something as intimate as this is a little like playing the part of a dog and being directed by a cat about how you’d feel about being a fire hydrant. You know, the dog’s going to look at this cat and go, “What the fuck do you know about a fire hydrant?” How would you know how I’d feel about sex? Both of us sort of drew a blank. We had no idea what the other was talking about. It was a totally non-communicative experience. I did my job and she did her job. There really weren’t many ways we could help each other out.

VH: Do you think that people genuinely believe that the sexes basically don’t like each other?

GD: No, I think they do like each other, and I think that was what we disagreed on. As much as we would verbalize it and have many discussions, it always boiled down to the point that cruelty between the sexes was different. We disagreed on that. The movie is about how the two sexes dislike each other intensely, which was not, I felt, in the script.

VH: What are you doing next?

GD: Starting a movie with Lasse Hallstrom, who did My Life As A Dog. Amy and I are going to produce a movie. I’m going to be in it. Small part. Nice part. It’s a story, set in Massachusetts, about an Italian-American from a big, close family, whose sisters have all been married. She’s the eldest and the last one to get married. Everybody’s encouraging her to finally get married to this guy she’s been with for six years, and this guy turns out to be a real wimp. He finally admits to her, “I’m never going to marry you.” She’s devastated, and she goes off.

VH: That’s not you, is it?

GD: Hell, no. That is a wimp. So she goes off, and she meets a man who’s close to her father’s age. He’s a very outgoing, tough businessman, who is rich. He sort of tries to buy his way into the family emotionally and financially. While they’re happy for the daughter, the family doesn’t like the man. It’s a battle of the patriarchs and how the man gets caught in the middle. The family never can quite let the husband into their hearts. It’s very painful and it’s very funny. It’s a brilliant script. It’s written from the heart by a woman named Malia Scotch Marmont [This is a misprint. Her name is Malia Scotch Marmo, and she’s also been credited as a writer for Hook and Madeline], who was at a Columbia student. We found the script through the Sundance Institute.

VH: What do you play?

GD: I play the brother-in-law. He’s a guy who is heavily influenced by this very outgoing businessman and starts to take on his mannerisms, much to the discomfort of his wife, who dislikes him. I’m the only one who thinks he’s a pretty good guy. It’s going to be a great movie. I’ve been in Boston with Lasse. He’s from Sweden. I’m showing him the difference between Italian-Americans from Massachusetts and Italian-Americans from New York.

[The movie that Dunne is talking about would be released as Once Around in 1991, starring Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfuss as the leads. Interestingly enough, Dunne would end up playing that very wimp boyfriend in the movie. The brother-in-law would be played by Tim Guinee].

VH: What’s the difference?

GD: Well, as far as I can tell, the Italian-Americans from Massachusetts are more Yankee at heart. They really are closer to the family, the Mayflower, and they sort of cling to that. They feel a little more American than the New York Italians, like they got there first. The dialects are obviously very different. But we’re trying to make those differences clear to Lasse.

VH: This is his first movie in English?

GD: Yeah. It’s set in a very particular region of the United States. We can help him with the research and the regional differences, but when it comes to the matter of the heart, that’s his job and that’s where he will shine.

VH: If you could do anything you want, what would you do?

GD: I would have the kind of life where I could bury myself in work for an intense period of a year and then leave work for six months and travel somewhere, maybe live in a completely different area of the world and soak up whatever differences and experiences I might gather there and revitalize myself, then do it all over again. I’d have the kind of control of being able to walk away from something I’ve created that will be there when I get back.

VH: When we were talking about family and relationships, I wondered how come you’ve never been married.

GD: Oh, I have been. I have been. I’ve never mentioned it. Everybody who knows me knows that I’ve been married, but I’ve never talked about it before. It hardly deserves this sort of melancholy face I have on right now.

VH: You’re smiling. [laughs]

GD: Yeah. That kind of melancholy. I was married, when I was 18, to a girl who was maybe 19, whom I had met in high school. She was the daughter of the--at the time--head of a film studio. She was very, very beautiful and probably still is. I have no idea. I haven’t seen her since.

VH: Since you married her?

GD: Yeah, I married her and then I never saw her again. [laughs] Didn’t work out. We got married in Tijuana sort of on a dare. When I was 17 we crossed the border to go to Tijuana, and the highway patrol pulled us over, and they knew for some reason we were going to get married. They brought us into the office and tried to talk us out of it. It was a humiliating experience because she was older and the highway patrol cop was sort of hitting on her. I mean, she was really gorgeous--there was just something about her; she exuded a real intense sexuality. I was madly in love with her, as anyone who ever laid eyes on her was. So the highway patrolman is hitting on my wife-to-be, and the other guy has got me in a room, telling me that I should hold off and not marry that piece in the other room for a couple of years, until I know what I’m doing. I was in such a rage that when I turned 18--on my birthday--we got in a car and went right back to Tijuana and got married.

VH: And how long were you married?

GD: A whopping one year. I came back to--we were going to keep it a secret--the apartment we had gotten. I carried her across the threshold of this apartment that had no furniture in it and the phone was ringing, so I dropped her on the wood floor and got the phone--

VH: What a guy.

GD: Well, you see, she was voluptuous, so she weighed a ton. I got the phone, and it was my father, and he was saying “So, how are you?” I said, “Fine.” “Anything new?” I went, “No, no.” He said, “I just came back from the most beautiful wedding I think I’ve ever been in my whole life. This boy--Oh, God, he must have been your age, maybe a little older. But he and that bride, my God. You know the parents--very dear old friends. Your mother and I, when you get married, that’s how we want to do it. Everything was done just right.” And I thought, Why is he telling me this? Why did he happen to go to this beautiful wedding of a peer of mine, and why is he telling me about it? He must know. This is a sign. So I just murmured, “Well, it’s a little late for that.” He said, “What?” I said, “We just married this afternoon in Tijuana.” He roared with laughter. And I was silent. And he said, “Now wait a minute.” He had this kind of chilly tone. “I can’t tell if you’re joking with me now or what.” I said, “No, no. We really did.” And he said, in the coolest voice I have ever heard, “I think you had better come over here right now.” We went over, and both he and my mother were freaked out. I finally got a divorce--not because of that but because it didn’t work out.

VH: Did she get remarried to an aluminum-siding salesman and have six kids and end up living in Kansas?

GD: No, actually she is married to Fabian. I haven’t been married since then. It will happen. But when it does, the highway patrol won’t be involved. It will be a simple, private family affair.

[All evidence indicates that Griffin’s first wife was Kate Netter Forte. I actually read about this on the website whodatedwho but since that website is a dubious source, I mentally filed that under the ‘Unsubstantiated’ category and didn’t look into it any further. Kate’s father was producer Douglas Netter, and it’s reported that she met the former teen idol Fabian on the set of the film Disco Fever, where she played a character named Jill. She’s in about the halfway point of the film. Forte was married to Fabian from 1980 to 1990. She was the president of Harpo films for 18 years before being let go in 2013. Some of the films she helped produce include Tuesdays with Morrie and The Great Debaters.]

[Victoria Hamburg is a producer who helped produce the Keanu Reeves film Johnny Mnemonic (1995), directed by Robert Longo]

#griffin dunne #long read #long reads #interview magazine #1980s #vintage magazine #victoria hamburg #an american werewolf in london #after hours 1985 #this is us #chilly scenes of winter #baby it's you #running on empty

3 notes · View notes

theyuniversity · 6 years

Text

My Relationship with Writing (And how my passion has sometimes done me more harm than good)

This year has been rather challenging for me — socially, emotionally, and perhaps spiritually. I have gone through adversities that firmly instilled in me the understanding of the value and significance of healthy relationships. I was experiencing, first-hand, what it meant to be in a toxic friendship, which caused me to bitterly reflect on my past for a month or so.

Gradually, I realized that the majority of my past friendships have been unhealthy — they caused me unnecessary emotional exhaustion that I was, stupidly enough, willing to put up with, for the mere sake of the few moments of joy I sometimes shared with these individuals.

With even deeper and broader reflection, I realized something else which was rather difficult to swallow: my relationship with writing has been no different.

Writing, the one thing I’ve always done diligently and tirelessly, the one thing I was known by everybody for admiring, and encouraged by friends to pursue as a future career, to be one of the causes of distress and agony in my life?

No way, but yes.

Because I handled it the wrong way, my passion has been weighing me down in ways I did not think possible.

Time for Myself

I had gone on a break from writing to take some time to develop the ‘observant’ part of the writer in me, as well as for my mental health. It was a slow process that my writing ‘hiatus’ was taking the form of quitting altogether. In fact, I was eventually growing delusional about it being a hiatus as the days passed by. And, oh, the Q-word! Deep down, the Q-word frightened me, but never to the point of reality, because I was simply certain that my passion was incontestably too invincible to ever be vanquished.

Yet, one day, I had to stop denying the manifest practical application of the Q-word onto my writing life. As I wandered alone and wistful one morning in the narrow underground tunnels for hours and hours, I broke the deathly 4 am silence by unfeelingly uttering the defeated phrase: I quit writing.

It almost hurts to say, but it was a truly liberating moment, albeit fleetingly. I felt immensely happy, unbound, and weightless enough to jump from rooftop to rooftop. I did not feel that I had lost a part of myself, but rather discovered another latent, budding part in me I did not even know I’d possessed.

I had gone from writing often to seldom, not because I had too little to say, but rather because of a lot of fear and a bit of apathy. On the contrary, I in fact have so much on my mind nowadays which, with even a modicum of inspiration and willpower, I could easily make use of to create poetic masterpieces.

What Caused This Toxicity?

My attitude towards writing, my love for it, and sometimes lack of it, poisoned my passion like a drip of ink in water. I had the tendency to look at writing as both an enemy and a friend that sometimes made me laugh and sometimes cry, made me feel worthy as an artist one minute and worthless the next. I oscillated from believing it to be my main source of hope for a blossoming future to fearing it to be the path to a lifetime of imminent failure and rejection.

Like my relationships with people, there are blissful days in my writing life which imbue me with temporary euphoria, such as the day I finally finish writing an article or a poem, or the one lucky day out of a week or two when I’m able to articulate my thoughts with seemingly impeccable eloquence, or the day my deeply thought-out ideas for my story seem to finally fall together, like stars that align in the darkness of my indecisiveness. These are comparable to the days my toxic friends (remember to) invite me when they go watch a movie, or spend an evening in the cafè, or simply the days they check up on me to inquire about my quietness with concern.

It would be a lie, however, to say that those euphoric days make up for the nightmarish ones, when writing behaves like a malicious enemy by reminding me daily that my efforts are not enough, and have never truly been.

Oftentimes I feel that my writer’s block is the equivalent of an amazing friend who deals with conflicts by giving me the silent treatment. This reminds me of another friend I once had who ignored me for so long that I’d now forgotten how his voice sounded like, just as I had forgotten how writing felt like.

Writing Culture

Unfortunately, if you familiarize yourself with the world of writing, you will notice some kind of palpable negativity embedded into the advice and tips that some writers give to amateurs and professionals alike.

There is always the belief that writers are essentially miserable, frustrated, and may go eons without producing meaningful work, or any work at all.

And there is the belief that writers are never satisfied with their work, and that they are, for every 60 minutes of an hour, banging their heads on their keyboards to reprimand themselves for their ineptitude and inability to live up to average expectations.

And then there is the belief that writers, every so often, seriously regret their past career decisions and question their future career plans in that field, and have this heated, full-on mental debate as to whether writing was ever created for them.

Positivity from Stephen King

I often felt the very same way, but my outlook changed drastically after I came across this interview with Stephen King and George RR Martin, where King shuts down these self-doubting thoughts with force and vehemence.

And I couldn’t help but think, What a Legend!

The unequivocal confidence he has on his place as a writer, and his choice to write, and his healthy attitude towards that choice, left me in awe.

So, after watching that, here are some of the thoughts I had to continually remind myself of in order to keep myself from falling off the ledge of sanity and into the abyss of despair:

Writing is not supposed to make you feel negative about yourself. Your passion has to be a door for your creativity and productivity. Your passion must serve as a main source of inspiration, catharsis, and a big part of your self-identity. Yes, it has to be difficult and challenging every once in a while. No, it is impossible for such a hobby to come free of hardships. But what we should not be doing is normalizing and romanticizing the constant mental/nervous/emotional breakdowns and feelings of self-doubt and self-loathing that many writers experience along with these challenges. This is not normal. This is not healthy. These experiences can, and should, inevitably happen every now and then; however, with regularity, they can weigh you down till your breaking point. They can mercilessly exhaust your passion and turn it into pure apathy or, better yet, resentment. And with an attitude that deems them as typical and welcomes their steady occurrence, you will end up either writing yourself stupid, or crumpling your empty papers into your fists with rage before calling it quits.

It took me a while to realize that while writing requires sacrifices, these sacrifices should never limit your overall quality of life and throw you into a zombie-like state of mind. I mean, at some point, I was missing classes, cancelling social plans, and skipping meals for the mere sake of productivity, because I was still unfamiliar with the heaven-sent concept known as balance.

Moreover, I believe that the main reason I agreed with these negative ideas about writers was because I was adamant about not changing my detrimental writing techniques (they felt … just right) and generally sought ways to justify them and regard them as the normal benchmark for artists.

The knowledge that I was not the only ‘writer’ who was unskillful with words, forever stuck in the void of writer’s block, brought me immense temporary reassurance, but in the long run made me feel that it was absolutely typical to feel listless, yet pensive, and frustrated at reconciling the two.

Writing the Pain Away

It is funny, because it took me a considerably long time to deduce why and how writing was causing me so much agony. It was not until two weeks ago when I decided to do some 3 am writing on my recent loss of friendship and unfathomable decision to quit writing (the irony) that I realized and accepted that the fault was on me and my poor coping mechanisms all along.

I’ve always said that writing was a revelation: it reveals feelings and thoughts in your heart and mind which you don’t even know are there. The more you write, the more you know who you are.

It might had been writing that caused me pain, but it was also writing that revealed to me why this was happening, and it’s also writing that I am, right now, using as an outlet to release the waves of ambivalent feelings flooding from my tightening chest.

So, depending on how you deal with it, your passion can leave you confused for months or it can decipher your most heavily complex feelings in an hour. And perhaps I should do less writing on the corner of my unmade bed and more on that bench outside in the grass and beneath the light of the sun.

Treat your passion like a benevolent friend who desires your success as much as you do, and you’ll be met with much more productivity and much less toxicity in return.

✍🏻 Written by Sanbella, writing intern at The YUNiversity

Website | Twitter | Instagram | Medium | Pinterest

#YUNiversity Interns #writing #Stephen King #G.R.R. Martin

129 notes · View notes

preemploymenttest · 2 years

Text

Providing Constructive Criticism

How often should you provide constructive criticism? There are two types of feedback: positive and negative. Positive feedback helps us improve our performance, whereas negative feedback motivates us to change our behavior. The problem is, that sometimes we don’t realize when we’re providing negative feedback. This leads to resentment, frustration, and even anger. Learn more: https://blog.hirenest.com/providing-constructive-criticism-to-employees/

When giving feedback, focus on the positives. If you want to motivate someone, give them only positive feedback. In this case, I was trying to help him understand why he wasn't getting any responses from his audience. He had already tried to figure out what was wrong by himself, but it didn't work. So I pointed out the obvious mistake (he forgot to include the "?") and told him not to worry about it because people will forget things like that. It's just part of being human.

What are Examples of Constructive Criticism?

The first step in any writing project is to write down what you want to say. Then edit it so it makes sense. If you don’t know where to start, try brainstorming ideas. Once you have some ideas, narrow them down into a list of topics. You can find out more in our article: https://blog.hirenest.com/providing-constructive-criticism-to-employees/

How do I avoid being too critical? When giving feedback, focus on the positive aspects of someone's work rather than criticizing mistakes. Instead of saying "You're wrong," say something like "I think this could be improved by..."

How do I give constructive criticism? The best way to give constructive criticism is to ask yourself if you would benefit from the information. For example, if you notice that a colleague has a habit of leaving his desk at lunchtime without telling anyone, then you might consider asking him why he does this. It may not seem like a big deal but it could help him improve his productivity.

In order to achieve success, we must take responsibility for our actions. This means taking ownership of our decisions, instead of blaming others. It also means accepting accountability for our failures.

Why is Constructive Criticism in the Workplace Important?

It helps us improve our performance. If we don’t hear feedback from others, we may not know what we’re doing well or where we could improve. This means we might miss out on opportunities to grow and develop. I think it’s important to give honest feedback. But if someone criticises me too harshly, they risk making me feel defensive and resentful. That will lead to them losing respect for me, which will affect our working relationship.

Benefits of Constructive Criticism in the Workplace

The most important thing I learned from this experience was to never give up. If you want something badly enough, you will find a way to achieve it. A lot of people think they don't know anything about business management, but if you're willing to study, you'll quickly realize that you do know quite a bit. In order to succeed at work, you must first understand what motivates you. What makes you tick? Why do you wake up every morning? What keeps you going through all the stress and pressure of life? Once you figure out why you do what you do, then you can start working towards making those things better.

It's not just about the money. There are many reasons why someone would choose to become self employed. For some, it's because they enjoy being their own boss. Others may prefer to work independently so they can set their own hours. Some like the flexibility of having their own schedule. Whatever the case may be, becoming self employed means taking control of your future.

Providing Constructive Criticism to Employees

The first step in providing constructive criticism is to identify what needs improvement. This may seem like a simple task but it’s often difficult because people don’t want to hear negative feedback. They might feel they’ve done something wrong or that the person giving them the feedback doesn’t know anything about their work. If you do decide to provide constructive criticism, try not to focus too much on the negatives. Instead, focus on the positives. For example, if you notice that someone has made mistakes in the past, ask them how they plan to improve next time. Or, if you see that a particular area of weakness is causing problems for others, explain why this is important so that they understand the impact of their actions.

Provide Feedback to Your Team Members. Once you’ve identified areas where improvements could be made, give your team members specific examples of what you noticed. Don’t just say “you did a bad job”; instead, describe exactly what went wrong and offer suggestions for how they can fix it. Be sure to include any positive aspects of their performance.

Tips on How to Give Constructive Criticism

The first step is to identify what you like about the person. This will help you avoid criticizing something they don't care about. For example, if you're talking about their appearance, it's better to say "You look great today" than "Your face looks terrible." If you want to criticize them, focus on one thing at a time. It's easier to give constructive criticism if you keep things simple.

Next, think about why you feel this way. Is it because they did something wrong? Did they do something right but not enough? Was it just bad luck? Or maybe you dislike them because they remind you of someone else who was mean to you. Whatever the reason, try to understand where it comes from before deciding whether or not to share your thoughts. The first step in giving constructive criticism is to identify what needs improvement. This means being specific and clear about what it is you want to see changed. For example, if you notice that someone has trouble following through on assignments, say so directly rather than saying something like “I don’t think you did enough work this week.”

If you find yourself getting frustrated by a colleague’s lack of progress, try not to take things personally. Instead, focus on the task at hand. Ask yourself whether you could do better, then ask yourself why you might not be able to. It may help to write down your thoughts.

Conclusion

If you want your employees to improve, then constructive criticism is one of the best ways to go about doing so. This article provides some great tips on how to provide effective feedback to your team members. When providing feedback to your employees, make sure you are being as specific as possible. It's easy to give vague feedback, but when you're trying to help someone improve, you need to be more direct with what needs to change. Don't just say "you should work harder" or "I think you should try something new." Instead, tell them exactly what you mean by those statements. Be clear about what you expect from them and why.

Feedback is not always positive. Sometimes it may feel like you're criticizing your employee, which could lead to defensiveness or resentment. Try to avoid this situation by making sure you're giving honest feedback. While you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, you do want to encourage growth and improvement. Make sure you're focusing on areas where they can grow rather than things that aren't working well. If you want to know more about Defining Recruitment Skills + 10 Top Skills to Have in 2022, read this article: https://blog.hirenest.com/providing-constructive-criticism-to-employees/

#hirenest #bloghirenest #hirenestblog #pre employment assessments #pre-employment screening tests #pre-employment assessments #hirenest blog #pre-employment screening assessments #blog hirenest #recruiting #pre employment tests #pre employment screening #pre employment screening tests #Constructive Criticism

0 notes

youngster-monster · 6 years

Text

Die every day

The twin have been at war for as long as they can remember.

(That’s a lie. They remember better times as clear as if they happened yesterday; they simply can’t comprehend how they could ever act like friends when the thought of it now brings them more disgust than nostalgia.)

Of course their personalities are drastically different, and they are only similar in how selfish they will be in the pursuit of their personal goals, but such things have failed to turn siblings against each other many times before. Maybe the Klersfields never knew how to do things in moderation, not even sibling rivalry, or maybe it’s the magic in their veins that won’t let them be anything but bitter enemies. It doesn’t matter.

The escalation of hate has been going on for years, the feud reaching new heights of petty revenge every week, if not faster. As children, Aloïs stole the last slice of cake; a decade later, then-law student Samaëlle swindled him out of their late parents’ estate, forcing him to join the war just to support himself on a soldier’s paycheck. Today — almost another decade later, short by a few months — he had her lover poisoned, a personal attack whereas most before were targeted at her business empire.

He has had enough of corporate espionage and sabotage. He had pirates pillage her shipments, set fire to her warehouses, killed her employees, divulged her involvement with organized crime syndicates and generous use of corruption, and yet she still walks free, persists to survive through his plan. Assassinations didn’t work either — they were soldiers on opposite sides of the war and are both intimately aware of the other’s abilities.

Maybe that is why her numerous attempts at sending assassins after him are such an insult, more than anything else she ever did. She ruined his reputation, killed the people she couldn’t lie and blackmail into publicly rejecting him, had his own lovers sent across the globe — ever out of his reach — and still she persists to believe a single man with a knife could get rid of him.

In the end, there is no single last straw — only a million drops of blood slowly filling up the cup until it overflows.

They fight, they argue, they undermine each other, ruin every plan the other tries to bring to fruition, and at some point along the way Aloïs decides, enough. Enough with the lies, the constant scheming to bring the other down without risking their own neck in the process. They were soldiers. Let them solve this like soldiers: with a duel.

One of them will die. Let marksman abilities decide of who.

He doesn’t act on it right away, of course. You do not engage in a war against your own twin without being ready to learn something from them along the way, and one such thing the conflict taught him is patience — a difficult lesson, preceded by numerous failures. It ought to be a virtue, if only he didn’t use it to such nefarious means.

Cunning is another. War takes strategy, but nothing like the underhanded tactics required in an open conflict against Samaëlle Klersfield — he hates her, but even he has to admit she is as brilliant as she is devoid of any kind of morals.

Which is why he has her lover poisoned rather than sending her an official dueling notice. She’d just laugh and send it back coated in cyanide like all the previous times he tried the same tactic. The best way to get her to agree to such a stupid plan is to make her angry. And Sam, always the opposite of her twin, is not easily moved to anger: everything she does, she does it coldly, methodically, with a kind of detached mercilessness, like she doesn’t care about the matter but the success of her endeavor is a matter of pride.

The only exception to that rule is her lover. She loves the woman the way only the criminally insane can: single-mindedly, obsessively, possessively, using a massive amount of her wealth to spoil the woman with riches and exotic components for her harebrained experiments. And she oh so does hate it when Aloïs touches her things — even more so in a way that she could have easily avoided, if only she’d been more attentive.

Doing it with poisons, now that’s just adding insult to injury.

She is furious.

Her lover survives, if only just, but the fact is the same: Aloïs harmed what is hers by right, harmed the only thing that was supposed to be out of his reach — in the same way she only ran his favorite bedwarmers out of the country rather than killing them, out of basic decency. He has to pay. He will pay.

So when, in the middle of her rampage, a letter comes to her, another off-hand insult in the form of an offer to duel… she is just angry enough to accept.

He smiles at the terse letter he receives in response, written in a neat hand on a paper too big for the three words written upon it: Tomorrow. Mortlake. Dawn.

The cemetery, then. He chuckles. That’s that much less distance he’ll have to walk to bury her.

The ski is still dark when they meet, the sun barely a red glow at the horizon.

Aloïs takes a moment to watch her. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other in life in— oh, seven years, maybe? Ever since she’s moved from the ancestral Klersfield estate in the countryside to better manage her business from London, they have made a great deal of effort to never meet in public, for the sake of the people of London. Even before that he used to only see her in newspapers, beside articles about her sprawling empire, and the sight of her disgusted him to the point that he hired someone only to cut such articles from his daily paper before it makes his way to his desk. The holes, of course, were a constant source of frustration as they reminded him of her continued presence in the world, but it was a lesser evil.

She’s changed since then. Matured, of course, in a way only discernible to him, who has kept a clear image of her in his mind as motivation to go on just to spite her. She doesn’t have a single wrinkle — they are only thirty and have been blessed with excellent looks in the face of time — but her golden eyes are harder, fury raging in her eyes but unseen in her impassive expression.

He always has envied her this inscrutability. He knows himself to be an open book, and although he has turned it into an advantage — he is a much better liar than her, capable of great, completely fictitious yet believable tales whereas she can only offer falsehoods deadpan or not at all — he still sometimes wishes people wouldn’t be able to read his every emotions, feigned or not, on his face.

He’s tried, but it only makes him look constipated.

Apart from that, of course, they are perfectly alike. Same pitch-black hair and golden eyes, although her pupils are slit like a snake’s; same porcelain skin; same bone structure, delicate and almost other worldly — an enduring trait from a distant fae heritage. It’s infuriating.

She watches him similarly from the other side of the small burial ground, her second standing nervously a step behind her. He’s taller than her by a good foot, a lanky, awkward giant of a man with cruel looks but none of the attitude. Jason, her lieutenant and enforcer. Aloïs knows him; he’s responsible for the loss of his eye, the wound now hidden under an eyepatch the man keeps fidgeting with.

Vampires can heal anything, but they can’t regrow limbs. The eye sits in a mason jar filled with formaldehyde on Aloïs’ shelf, a gruesome but eternally entertaining display.

Oddly, there is a third person present: her lover, Tahlia, stands beside the two of them. She looks pale and sickly still, but resolute as she refuses to hold onto anyone else. She must have insisted to come with despite her state.

His own second is his secretary, Alaude. She’s smart, and he’s pretty sure she can at least be trusted to hand him his pistol. It’s not like they’re expecting the seconds to settle this dispute: it’s only a matter of appearances. There are two letters in her breast pocket, perfect copies in his own penmanship to be sent to his lovers at the unlikely event of his death. If they are ever sent, he’ll be glad to no longer be on this earth to live through the consequences.

He expect a similar letter to be sitting on Sam’s desk, waiting to be found by her mistress if she doesn’t come back to burn it herself.

They both know and trust the doctor. Iris has patched them up countless times before, and is painfully aware of their feud. He believes the death of one of them might scar her forever, but that’s hardly his problem.

Jason and Alaude meet and talk in tense whispers before exchanging a long look Aloïs can’t quite describe. Right. They too never expected any resolution to happen here without a bloodshed.

They are barely a foot away, closer than they’ve been in decades, but not a word is exchanged between the twins as they each take hold of their pistol, provided by a third party as neither could be trusted to not cheat. This is not the time for words — apologies or insults, taunts or goodbyes.

They walk ten steps away from each other, facing opposite directions. Then, they turn around, weapon drawn.

Their seconds intone the countdown in uncanny unison.

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine-”

Aloïs’ finger doesn’t so much as twitch in anticipation, or his arm quiver in strain. You can take the soldier out of the war but you can’t take the war out of the soldier; he will never unlearn how to wield a pistol with deadly precision.

“Ten, fire!”

Two shots ring out at once. Lightning strikes Aloïs in the shoulder, throwing his arm back as he bites back a cry of pain.

He’s surprised she only hit his shoulder. She’s always been an excellent shot.

Twenty foot away, Sam blinks in quiet shock and lifts a hand to her stomach. Blood seeps through her white shirt like a blooming flower, just a little off from her heart.

Of the two of them, he always was the better marksman.

Her brows furrow together in perplexity, then she looks at him with resignation. Her pistol slips from her fingers; her legs give out from under her and she collapses on the ground, barely kept from hitting the ground by her second’s quick reflexes.

He and Tahlia lay her on the ground and the doctor jogs up to them, but Aloïs walks calmly toward his sister. He stops next to her as she feebly waves away the doctor’s care, mumbling about how pointless it would be to try to save her. She glances up toward him and, in a look, both her companions reluctantly step away too.

Aloïs hands his pistol to Alaude and kneels down next to his twin.

“Good shot,” he offers. “Shame you only nicked my shoulder. It would have been- poetic, if we had killed each other in a duel.”

Nicked, ha. It will be a miracle if his arm ever works like it used to, with a wound like that.

Her lips twist into a mocking sneer and she lifts a trembling hand to his face. He moves to hold it — her first, last and only act of forgiveness in her life, maybe — but she avoids it with more dexterity than a woman at death’s door has any right to have.

Her fingers touch his forehead, right at his hairline, and he feels her draw something there in a few quick movements, grinning as she does. There’s blood on her teeth, he notices distantly, before his common sense makes him lurches back.

“With my blood I bind thee,” she gasps in a painful-sounding wheeze. “to the ground that saw you into this world and will see you out of it. May you- may you not shift for as long as I cannot-” she coughs, spitting blood over her chin. “-and may you never fly again.”

He jumps back but it’s too late, and she drags a chuckle out of her bleeding out body. The weight of her magic bears down on him like chains, blood burning into his skin. The comforting warmth of his own magic twists and contorts into something strange and unfamiliar, fire turning dim and cold as all whispers of his shape shifting falls into the darkness of his consciousness, forever in sight and out of reach. Suddenly his wings feel their weight, heavier even; he misses his landing and collapses to the ground, tripped by his own feathers.

She is still laughing.

Of the two of them, she has always been the more powerful witch.

He stumbles to his feet, half-running from her in pure, wild panic. He catches a glimpse of Tahlia putting Sam’s head in her lap and carding her fingers in her hair before Alaude takes his arm and guides him away, and once she does he doesn’t look back, not even when he hears her weak voice asking Tahlia, “Will you stay with me while I die?”

#writing #my ocs #death tw #i've been listening to a lot of hamilton lately #it put me in the mood for duelling #i love twins who hate each other apparently? it's a Thing

1 note · View note

so-i-did-this-thing · 7 years

Text

Emotional abuse in platonic relationships (long)

My tumblr is usually my escapism fun zone, but it’s time for a quick serious talk.

I've been in a few emotionally abusive platonic relationships and was always frustrated that nearly every help article I read online was written primarily for cis women in a hetero, romantic relationship. Most guides talked about physical violence, sex, and a whole slew of other circumstances I did not experience.

Unfortunately, emotional abusive is not limited just to romantic relationships. Platonic relationships, especially long-term or otherwise intense ones (for example, those that spawn in fandom and minority spaces), can be just as difficult to recognize, confront, and escape.

I thought it might be helpful to outline patterns of abuse I have experienced in a platonic relationship with someone of the same gender. These abuse tactics are forms of control and most are intended to isolate and break down the victim. While it’s easy to write off behaviors individually, together, they form destructive and very deliberate patterns.

More below the cut. I’ve sat on this article for about 3 years to help distance myself from these bad friendships and make sure it wasn’t just me lashing out in the moment. Some of this content may be triggering for emotional and sexual abuse and transphobia.

Note: I'm writing this from the perspective of a trans man. These examples and quotes (some paraphrased) are real things told to me by various abusers. While the examples are very specific to me in some cases, the overall behavior is not.

1. Abusers carefully monitor and audit their victim's activity. Abusers constantly inject themselves into their victim's life and interrogate their victim when they're not included in something.

Examples:

· "I saw you check-in at the movies last night, why didn't you invite me?"

· "I can't believe you took your mom to the new restaurant I've been wanting to go to."

· "You never invite me to events with your grade school friends when they are in town."

2. Abusers follow their victims into places they'd otherwise not have an interest, in order to stalk and exert control. Example:

· Be wary of abusers who only start using social media when you do, especially if they only follow you and primarily vague-blog criticism and threats

3. Abusers criticize their victim for not being supportive enough, even when the victim is actively supporting them. Example:

· ::while hanging out together:: "You never hang out with me."

4. Abusers constantly keep score... but only when it's in their favor. Example:

· When I was unemployed and he was taking home more in a week than I could scrape together in a few months: “You should buy me this more expensive birthday present because you owe for me gas to the movies from a few months ago."

5. Abusers use personal information to engage in social currency pissing matches and even blackmail. Examples:

· "Oh, you're X's friend, too? [Let me tell you some in-jokes that embarrass my victim friend or establish I’m the superior friend due to having a long history.]”

· "You wouldn't be where you are today if I wasn't the first person you came out to."

· “You wouldn’t be so successful if I hadn’t introduced you to Y.”

6. Abusers isolate their victims from work, friends, and family. Abusers consistently criticize their victim's family and friends. They focus on demonizing people/entities, rather than behaviors. Examples:

· "I hate your job." vs "I hate when your work schedule interferes with our plans."

· "I hate your friends." vs "I hate when your friends are pessimistic about this game."

7. Abusers are quick to demonize former relationships as a way of confirming their friendship is the superior one. Examples:

· "Your ex was such a stupid bitch."

· "I'm glad you don't hang out with those moochers anymore."

8. When abusers can't isolate their victim from their friends/family, they use friends/family as leverage. Examples:

· “Are you sure you can’t go to this event with me? Let me ask your partner.”

· “Don’t tell me I can’t afford this, your mom can just loan me some money.”

9. Abusers consider everything an immutable promise to set you up for failure. Examples

· "You promised we'd see a movie at 7pm, I don't care that there's an emergency at your office, you’re a terrible friend for not hanging out with me."

10. Abusers are hypocrites, especially when it comes to standards of friendship. Example:

· "Respect is the most important thing to me..." :: consistently uses sexist language when asked not to::

11. Abusers reduce every conflict to being about them and put their needs first. Example:

· "I can't believe you'd spring on me that your partner is bigender."

12. Abusers treat your ability to care about something/one as a finite resource to be competed over. Example:

"You care more about [online trans friend who has been feeling suicidal] than you care about me."

12. Abusers claim their victim's passions for their own as another stalking/control tactic and way to ignore seeing their victim as an actualized person with diverse interests/needs. Examples:

· "That's really great fan art you drew, is it for me?

· "Your cosplay is awesome, where's my costume?"

· I've had a few abusers write really awkward self-insert fanfics that played out like fandom bingo in an attempt to garner my favor.

13. Abusers will often try to mimic their victim's successes, but only in a superficial way and will blame the victim for their failures. Examples:

· "I started a blog, but no one is following me because you're not promoting my posts enough."

· "You told me to keep drawing, but still no one likes my art. It's all your fault."

14. Abusers turn their victim's passions against them. Abusers ridicule their victim's interests, beliefs, etc. Examples:

· "It isn't fair you're so talented. I'm totally worthless compared to you."

· "I've lost you and everything I cared about to a mediocre movie (that you love so much)."

· "SJWs and trans-trenders stole you away from me."

· "You're always so angry about trans stuff, I want the old (depressed, submissive) you back."

15. Abusers interfere with their victim’s work/school/sleep to keep them off-guard. Examples:

· :: numerous texts demanding an immediate reply during a busy work day or on a commute::

· :: threats at 3am ::

16. Abusers forcefully involve victims in their plans and control their schedule without warning. Examples:

· There was a period of time in which I didn't drive much do to being poor, and an abuser took advantage of that to force me into going to places to watch him buy things for an hour or more before dropping me off at home.

· Another abuser would just start following me at conventions, into panels, vendor rooms, sit down at lunch, etc.

17. Abusers pressure victims to make decisions that are financially and/or otherwise harmful to their victim. Example:

· “Buy this $300 wargaming army so we can finally do fun stuff together.”

(I was spending hundreds of dollars a month I couldn't afford trying to keep up with my abuser's frequently changing interests, all of which were framed as critical to maintaining our friendship.)

18. Abusers minimize or ridicule their victim’s problems, especially when compared to their own.

Examples:

· "Moving my birthday party to tomorrow is just as bad as when someone misgenders you."

· “I can’t believe you’re skipping out on hanging with me this weekend.”

(Said when I was finally confronting my hoarding problem and had been up for 24+ hours doing an aggressive cleanout.)

19. Abusers make their victims doubt their self-worth. Example:

· "Your blog is just whoring for attention. You're such a narcissist." (said while I was finally starting to like my body as a trans person)

20. Abusers gaslight and misrepresent events in order to cast doubt on your memory & concerns. Example:

· "That never happened that way. Once again, I'm always right."

21. Abusers are unpredictable with their praise and criticism, which makes the victim further question themselves.

22. Abusers constantly demand positive reinforcement, often publicly. Example:

· "Tell me why you're still friends with me."

· "Name one good thing about me."

· “You didn’t credit that I took that photo you posted on Tumblr, don’t you care about me? Go edit your post now.”

23. Abusers make their victim feel they are responsible for the abuser's well-being. Abusers turn their victim into a commodity. Examples:

· "My life would fall apart without you." · ”I need my BFF time!”

· "You don’t care about me. I'm going to kill myself."

(Note: I take suicide threats seriously and it’s outside the scope of this article to discuss self-harm threats as abuse tactics vs mental illness.)

24. Abusers publicly (and often threateningly) communicate in a way that is obscure to everyone... but sends a very clear message to you. Examples:

· "I hate birds. Especially crows." (My partner's goes by the name Crow.)

· ::flood of memes on Facebook about “real friends” after a fight::

25. Abusers only apologize to make themselves feel better. Example:

· "If I apologize, will you stop being mad at me?" vs "I'm sorry I hurt your feelings."

26. Abusers rationalize specific instances of abuse to deflect from overall abusive patterns. Examples:

· "I'm just really stressed right now, you know that work is killing me."

· :: various co-opting the language of social justice & concern-trolling ::

27. Abusers blame their victims for their abuse. Examples:

· "I wouldn't have screamed at you in public if you hadn't made me so angry!"

· "I was just joking, you're too sensitive."

28. Abusers place their relationship above all others. Examples:

· "I can't believe you extended your (first) date instead of hanging out with me."

· “Why did you go out to dinner with your mom instead of hanging out with me?”

29. Abusers set unrealistic expectations of how much you should interact. Example:

· One of mine would get demanding if we didn't text every few hours, hang out virtually several hours each evening, and in-person every weekend.

30. Abusers state they'll do anything for their victim, but never deliver on this promise, often berating their victim for even asking for help. Example:

· "I'd do anything for you...", followed by, "... I can't believe you asked me to help you move"

31. Abusers often make an effort to be charming and even caring in public. This makes the victim feel like they're the only ones suffering abuse, and thus, it must be their fault.

32. Abusers pretend to reform, but it's mainly a tactic to shut down further criticism. Example:

· "You're right, I'm a terrible person. I promise I'll change. Can we talk about something else now?"

33. Abusers demand their victims be complicit in their abuse by redefining the nature of friendship and pressuring their victim to not question the abuse. Examples:

· "A real friend would never criticize me." · "A real friend would agree with everything I do.”

34. Abusers spend more and more of their time with their victim discussing their failings as a friend. Example:

· “I told [mutual friend] about what you’ve been doing and she agrees with me that you’re a horrible friend.”

35. Abusers want you to swear allegiance to them, especially very early in a relationship. Example: · “Let’s get matching BFF tattoos.”

36. Abusers frame conversations they haven’t been invited to as talking/plotting behind their backs. Example:

· In response to a side chat in which my grade school friends & I talked about family updates, etc: “I can’t believe you set up your own private chat without me. Traitor.”

37. Abusers constantly define and redefine their victim’s identity. Examples: · ”Trans men who want [x] shouldn’t consider themselves men.” · ”You are the ‘best of both worlds’” (A gross allusion to my transness and a prelude to later telling me he wanted to fuck me.)

38. Abusers police their victim’s appearance, even if it is harmful. Example: · “I don’t want you starting hormones. I want you to stay the way you are.”

39. Abusers use call-outs as excuses for even more abuse and blame victims for feeling victimized. Examples:

· “When you talk about this with other people, it makes me feel bad, I can’t believe you’re doing this to me.”

· Abusers I’ve left instantly reacted with rage that made me feel unsafe.

40. Abusers feign concern as segues into making demands. Example: · “Are you OK after the hurricane? Btw, I saw your latest cosplay photos, how about we coordinate a new cosplay for me?”

Not all abusers use all of these tactics, and a behavior in and of itself does not necessarily mean someone is an abuser. It’s especially difficult to identify abuse if you and/or your abuser is disadvantaged, have a mental illness, etc. The key is to recognize a consistent pattern of abuse.

Platonic abuse has serious consequences: Stress, depression, anxiety… it can cause physical health problems, financial disaster, and destroy healthy relationships.

Even when you escape, you may spend years recovering and unlearning coping behaviors originally developed to minimize/deflect abuse. In my case, I got into the habit of lying about my plans because I didn't want to be read the riot act that I hadn't invited my abuser to something intimate, like a mother's day dinner or a date. So now, my current gut reaction when asked where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing, what I’ve bought is to *lie* or shut down, and I HATE IT.

But, I'm happy that I've been learning how to identify and distance myself from toxic people. Unpacking my personal abuse is a slow, often painful process, but I hope it helps folks who have found themselves in similar relationships.

Platonic abuse is real and we shouldn’t be afraid to talk about it.

#serious talk #emotional abuse #abuse #suicide mention #mental illness #platonic abuse #abusive friendship #abusive friend #I am in a good place these days don't worry about me friends #but still that is 40 fucking behaviors I was able to list on the fly without researching this topic #there's probably a good deal more I could unpack

2K notes · View notes

aion-rsa · 4 years

Text

Soul Ending Explained: What Happens Next to Joe?

https://ift.tt/2JpxsRu

This article contains Soul spoilers. You can find our spoiler-free review here.

What are you going to do with your life? It’s a looming question, and one that a few days ago Jamie Foxx’s Joe Gardner thought he knew the answer to. He was going to play jazz, professionally, and break into the music industry—specifically as the pianist for Dorothea Williams’ jazz quartet. But standing there on the ramp toward the Great Beyond, and staring at his second chance back on Earth, he’s posed the question again by a well-meaning Jerry.

So just what are you going to do with the rest of your life? For the first time, perhaps since he was a child, Joe didn’t have a firm answer. He simply says, “I don’t know but I’m going to live every moment of it.” And with that we see Joe, resurrected from the dead, step out of his home and actually look at the world around him. So what does he do next?

To answer that, it’s worth considering the journey he’s just been on throughout Pixar’s Soul and why it ended the way it did.

After Joe fell down a manhole in Lower Manhattan, he was catapulted into a cosmic adventure that took his soul from the end of the line to back where it all began in the Great Before. It was in the latter location that he bought himself at least a little more time by becoming a mentor to 22 (Tina Fey), an unruly soul who refused to embrace the concept of life. On paper, he simply taught her life is worth experiencing by putting 22 inside of his own body, where she discovered flowers smell wonderful, the sun is warm, and pizza really is delicious.

However, that’s the surface level version of events, and one writer-directors Pete Docter and Kemp Powers are refreshingly uninterested in settling for. While Soul savors the hijinks of putting Joe in the body of a cat, and 22 accidentally learning to talk smack at Joe’s neighborhood barbershop, those experiences are not why 22 decides to experience life. At least not entirely.

Joe thinks they are when he admonishes 22, saying she never found her purpose, and the only spark of life she felt was his. But it’s a fallacy to think his “spark,” a sense of inspiration felt by playing music and jazz, was his purpose or reason to live. While the inspiration is what makes Joe’s life worth living, it is not the whole of what his existence should be about—which might explain his greater frustration with his life, his mother, and his job as a part-time (soon to be full-time?) elementary school teacher.

One of the Jerrys helpfully spells this out for both Joe and the audience: a spark is not a purpose. It’s a naïve rabbit hole many a soul falls down to think they exist for one reason. And indeed, by reinforcing this narrow view of the world onto 22, Joe fails her; and he brings her lower than she’d ever been with her other mentors.

Joe realizes this after he finally gets to play with Dorothea Williams. The rest of his life appears to have arrived; he’s played jazz with his idol and she recognizes his talent. He might’ve just broken into the very narrow (and shrinking) world of professional jazz. Yet it doesn’t feel like a victory because there is very little in his life to celebrate it with. He might reach “the Zone” when he takes the Blue Note stage, but he can’t live there. If he tried he might become a zombie like other soulless automatons who wind up there, like the Wall Street hedge fund manager we saw earlier in the film.

He does return to the Zone though…. by joining Moonwind (Graham Norton) on a magical hippie pirate ship ride to the Zen place between the physical and metaphysical realms. Yet he does this simply to find 22 and learn the hard lesson he taught her.

By insisting that life is about one thing, one purpose, and that 22 can’t find her own, he offered her exceedingly negative reinforcement. This is not to say that Joe intentionally harmed her; he’d grown to like 22 as a teacher might celebrate a prized pupil. But as with many teachers and parents before him, Joe is forced to become aware of the dangers of negative reinforcement, and essentially demeaning a young mind’s spirit and unintentionally pushing them toward apathy, or worse, resignation.

And 22 is certainly resigned by the climax, giving into the cynicism of every harsh word she’s heard over the centuries and millennia from mentors. When Joe enters the dark void she’s created, like the other zombies who lost their souls to their obsessions, he sees all the cruel things 22’s other mentors have said to her, but none is quite so monstrous as her vision of Joe: an enormous figure she imagines is screaming down at her, insisting she has no reason to live or exist.

By seeing his own mania through the eyes of another soul, Joe sees his failures clearly, both toward 22 and himself. It is only then he is able to break through to 22 and give her the inspiration she needs to embrace life… and in the process he saves his own.

This occurs literally at first, with the Jerrys so impressed with how Joe’s mentored 22 that they allow him to continue on this mortal coil without fear of the calculating Terry. However, it also means he’s saved himself from becoming obsessed and robbed of his inspiration, even if it is with a career on the stage.

Movies

Soul: How Nine Inch Nails Scored the New Pixar Movie

By Don Kaye

Movies

Inside Pixar’s Soul and the Secrets of Life Before Death

By Don Kaye

So what does Joe do next with his life? Well, to be honest it is left entirely up to the viewer. As a personal bit of speculation, I wonder if there was a rewrite or internal debate at Pixar about this, because many of the story elements of Soul seem to point to Joe realizing his life is fuller as a teacher than as just a pianist. In a brief early sequence, we see him at the elementary school, and he looks more enthusiastic talking about jazz and explaining why students should celebrate “getting in the zone” than he did on the night he played with Dorothea.

And at the barbershop, he discovered his barber once dreamed of being a veterinarian but then life got in the way, and he wound up as a barber—yet Joe’s buddy remains happy with his ability to “save lives,” just as he saved Joe’s hairstyle. I personally wonder if an early draft of the screenplay had Joe decide he would rather be a full-time teacher at an elementary school than join Williams’ quartet.

In an interview with Den of Geek‘s Don Kaye, director Pete Docter certainly seems to suggest as much. When we ask about how the Soul ending evolved, Docter revealed an original vision for the ending had Joe running into 22 again… at school.

“We storyboarded a bunch of stuff where [Joe and 22] met,” Docter says. “One of them was in New York. 22 was like a student that Joe later recognizes. In another one, she actually ended up in India as a kid living there.” However, Pixar embraced an ambiguity toward 22’s destiny that seems to lend itself just as much to Joe.

Says Docter, “In the end, it’s kind of one of those things where I feel like if the audience falls in love with these characters, I would rather that they have their own answer to where they ended up than trying to provide all those answers for them. For me it’s really a great joy when you can create these things that have a life of their own, that sparks a whole story for someone else.”

Which is why I prefer a different road for Joe’s second chance at life. Ever since he was a child, he dreamed of making a career out of his love for jazz. And for more than 30 (or 40?) years, he struggled with jazz not loving him back. That he finally got his foot in the door is an achievement of sacrifice and perseverance that I imagine many a Pixar artist, creator, and filmmaker can relate to. Should he really throw that away because he learned success isn’t the end-all be-all of existence?

I’d argue no. But he did learn he needs to fill his life with more than jazz and more than his passions. Life is an experience unto itself to be passionate about. It’s the lesson he imparted to 22, and that she in turn imparted to him. At the end of the movie, he has many choices to make, and the viewer can decide in their own heads what direction he goes. But what is not up for debate is that Joe has learned not to take life for granted. Now he can seize the whole day, as opposed to just the fleeting moments where his spark soars.

As Docter also reveals about the ending, “That last last line… used to be, ‘I’m going to enjoy every moment of it.’ And one of the animators, Dave DeVan, said, ‘You know, that line bumps me because it just doesn’t seem real that I could enjoy every moment of my life.’ And so to ‘live it’ does seem more truthful–I might be suffering, I might be said, I might be disappointed, but I’m going to be connected to it. That’s a more realistic goal, I think, for us.”

It’s also more realistic for Joe, how ever you choose to imagine he ends up.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The post Soul Ending Explained: What Happens Next to Joe? appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3rnSNMd

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

1 note · View note

thinkingcraft-dianne · 4 years

Text

Literature Reflection (Bridle & AI bias)

I found the podcasts by James Bridle in combination with the literature review on gender, race and power in AI give more in-depth information on topics that I have theoretically (as well as in person) touched the surface on before. Both works illustrate why it is important we mindfully use and design technology.Something that stuck with me is how less visible important institutions have become; my local bank has closed and is now almost fully operating digitally and many municipality cases can I handle online. What does this mean for societies' grip and understanding of them? Visibility and transparency are ground principles for and of our liberal and democratic system, so why not here? Visibility = responsibility: this ranges from the power relations visible in the internet cables that run under the oceans to tech companies making diversity reports publicly available.

I never realized how John Berger's theories on seeing art can be applied to modern day technology. Especially the radio analogy I find interesting; the same can be said for social media nowadays, where only a small percentage of its users produces content that is viewed by millions. it is often a one-way conversation which leaves its participants feeling isolated instead of conencted. This has become even more apparent during covid-19, where online friday drinks have not felt the same as in real life. Also, the power of tech companies have increased even more now more and more people are dependent on them. I have a feeling that the increase of living in this digital period will have a huge impact on the mental health of people. On the other hand, the digital realm has democratized information and discussions on this information, as there is a variety of free webinars, festivals and conferences available online, from the comfort of people's homes. This will in the end also democratize new tools and how we perceive the world around us. The way James Bridle described our relation to technology was in line with Donna Haraway's idea about living in the terrestrial. If we would see and care for technology as how we do certain animals, we would be able to re-evaluate what we can get from it. Bridle mentions that artificial intelligence can help us escape the Anthropocene and to reconnect ourselves to nature. Though he does not mention how. However, I thought of how our living world is progressively supplied with sensors and with the resulting data, and how we can gain insights into the complexity of the interdependencies between living organisms. For instance, sensors and the datafication of forests have laid bare the complex web of communications between trees. When researching I came across this TED Talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvBlSFVmoaw.

This mention of changing the way we connect to our technologies reminded me of the term automation bias; the urge of humans to favour suggestions from automated systems and to ignore contradictory information made without automation, even if it is correct. Especially in covid times, people have this idea of a 'technofix', which is based on a combination of trust in technology and limited trust in the ability, and the willingness, of humans to adapt their behaviour. We are looking for the fastest solution which will cause us to make the least amount of sacrifices; technology will fix our problem and we do not have to think about it any longer. A “quick fix” for the corona crisis, in the form of a vaccine, would quickly silence the debate on the structural causes of the pandemic and allow us to revert to our pre-corona practices in a heartbeat. Comparable to the way medication often takes away the necessity of aspiring to a healthier lifestyle. Because of this apparent lack of any human sacrifice, the idea of the techno-fix goes hand in hand with a feeling of guilt, as if, like in the myth of Prometheus, we really don’t deserve to use technology.

The crisis is slowly taking away our illusion of the tech fix. The essence of these (false) solutions is the illusion they create that we can “save” the climate without having to change our lifestyle. The underlying belief is that we’re not willing to make a sacrifice such as travelling less, for example, or reducing our total energy use. In fact, the main notion seems to be that human beings are not or barely able to adjust their behavior at all without the clear prospect of a reward. It would be interesting to make the climate crisis sensed evenly as immediately as current pandemic. This circles back to the notion that visibility calls for understanding, thus responsibility. As it is talked about in the Bridle podcasts: technological agency and climate change are both visual problems, or rather the lack of visibility. An artwork that succeeds in visually raising awareness for this is terra0, a forest that can autonomously sell its trees and eventually, using the accumulated capital, buy itself and become a self-owned economic unit. For now, it remains an artistic experiment designed to raise awareness, but in theory you could build such a program on the blockchain to make a forest represent itself.

For me, as a woman enrolled in a technologically-focused minor in a class in which the majority of the people identify as male, the text on gender, race and power in AI was really interesting and had contained some familiar frustrations. By connecting the unequal representation of women in the tech industry to and bias systems in AI, the author suggests two versions of the same problem. I find data violence, which enacts forms of administrative power which affects some of us more than others, a relevant modern day problem. In a world in which data and facts reign and where systems are trained upon existing data sets, representation is of uttermost importance. The authors stresses that, because AI systems play a important role in our political institutions (like healthcare), we need to re-asses the relationship between workplace diversity crisis and the problems with bias and discrimination in AI. In a future and ideal world, a supervising board would examine the politics of the design of such a system. It would check how a system was constructed and whose interests shaped the metrics for success or failure.

Understanding 'bias' in data requires accounting of the social context through which the data was produced: how humans make data in context. It is also interesting to note that companies also use data violence to shape reports on diversity to their wishes. Only accounting the 80% of the full-time workforce is data manipulations with major implications and should in my eyes therefore be considered a crime or at least punished. Again, transparency is the only way for people to know what is going on inside a company and enables the to hold them accountable and to make knowledgeable (consumer) decisions. To say that women are inherently less confident in their computing skills, is to totally ignore the male-dominated and therefore male-designed social institutions in which many obstacles have to be overcome. This week, I found a poc female on youtube talking about her career in coding and who recommended many resourced while talking about it in a transparent and non-elite way. This made me much more interested in it, and most importantly made me feel as if I could also find my place in male-dominated sectors. Also, talking two girls who participated in a summer residency of V2_Lab for Unstable Media and seeing their work made me feel more comfortable in that area already. Seeing yourself being represented certainly boosts your confidence in your own abilities. As stated in the article, "the inclusion of women becomes the solution for all gender problems, not just those of exclusion or absence. .. their mere presence builds the table they sit at in the first place." The ultimate goal is cognitive diversity, and cognitive diversity is correlated with identity diversity. That means it's not just about women in tech. It is about broad voices, broad representation.

I have been thinking about my internship lately, which was unpaid and in a male-led studio. I worked really hard and participated in many interesting projects. But by giving me the feeling I should already feel rewarded and appreciated by this mere participation felt empty in the end. I have been thinking about students who might not have done the internship because they could not pay their rent that way and how this influences the diversity within a studio. I believe that if you appreciate an intern, care for quality of work and giving everyone an equal chance to grow as a designer, you would pay them. This would in the end contribute greatly of cognitive diversity in the field of design, which is also has been male-dominated in the recent past.Biological determinism, as mention by the authors, is also something that is interesting during these times inn which the political landscape is under pressure. There is more unrest and focus on the pandemic, both reasons for governments to 'silently' change important laws within a country. Example of this is the current situation in Poland, were abortion rights have been almost entirely taken away from women. Former Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk also criticised the judgement. "Throwing the topic of abortion and a ruling by a pseudo-court into the middle of a raging pandemic is more than cynical". The coronavirus crisis will be global and long-lasting, economic as well as medical. However, it also offers an opportunity. This could be the first outbreak where gender and sex differences are recorded, and taken into account by researchers and policy makers. Also for too long, politicians have assumed that child care and elderly care can be “soaked up” by private citizens—mostly women—effectively providing a huge subsidy to the paid economy. This pandemic should remind us of the true scale of that distortion and how balancing unpaid work out between all genders can lead to more diversity in fields such as tech and design as well.

0 notes

shirlleycoyle · 4 years

Text

The High Price of ‘Making the Numbers’ at the USPS

This article was sent on Tuesday to subscribers of The Mail, Motherboard’s pop-up newsletter about the USPS, election security, and democracy. It is the second in a multi-part series about working conditions at the USPS. Subscribe to get the next edition before it is published here, as well as exclusive articles and the paid zine.

This is Part II of a multi-part series looking at working conditions at the post office. If you missed Part I, click here.

For a brief period, it looked like the post office would finally be changing. On Valentine's Day in 1992, eight union leaders and USPS management signed the Joint Statement on Violence and Behavior in the Workplace (JSOV). Spurred by the Royal Oak shooting we covered last week, the one-page document was much more than the "thoughts and prayers" style platitudes we have since become accustomed to after a mass shooting. Instead, the JSOV declared that "grief and sympathy are not enough. Neither are ritualistic expressions of grave concern or the initiation of investigations, studies, or research projects."

The statement went on: "This is a time for a candid appraisal of our flaws and not a time for scapegoating, fingerpointing, or procrastination." It affirmed that "every employee at every level of the Postal Service should be treated at all times with dignity, respect, and fairness…'Making the numbers' is not an excuse for the abuse of anyone."

But among the missing signatories was the American Postal Workers Union, one of the biggest and most influential unions representing postal workers.

Years later, APWU Eastern Region Coordinator Mike Gallagher wrote a position paper to stewards about the continuous problem of workplace violence at the post office. He explained that his union chose not to sign because "quite frankly, we knew that the USPS would apply the principles of the Joint Statement against bargaining unit employees and not against managers." The APWU's position was this statement wouldn't change much, because the causes of workplace violence at the post office were fundamental to how it operated. Even a blanket zero-tolerance policy wouldn't change that.

Over the last few months, I have been interviewing postal workers about what it is like to work for the post office. They express a range of sentiments, from pride to gratitude to frustration and exhaustion. As I have said before, the post office is an impossibly vast and diverse organization that defies simplicity.

The most common sentiment I hear is postal workers are proud to work for the post office because it is inherently meaningful work. But they also wish it was a more humane place to work, that problems actually got fixed instead of ignored or passed along. Most of all, they wish the USPS was a place where being a good boss or being a good worker actually mattered. There is a maxim at the post office that doing your work well only gets you more work. It was a maxim 30 years ago, and it's still a maxim today.

I found the most revealing part of this reporting process came when I asked a few of the postal workers I interviewed what they thought of a 1994 Government Accountability Office study, its results succinctly summarized by the title: "U.S. Postal Service: Labor-Management Problems Persist on the Workroom Floor."

The seven postal workers from around the country who volunteered to read the study unanimously agreed the basic characterization of the postal service from 1994 is still accurate. It is an authoritarian, top-down organization in which policy is set by higher-ups who have often never done the work of sorting and delivering mail. The people actually doing the work—or even the people managing the people doing the work—have little to no say in how the work is done. There is a widespread perception that supervisors are not selected based on their management skills. As a result of the basic metrics and incentives upper management creates for both supervisors and workers, an "us vs. them" mentality between labor and management dominates daily routines.

To the question of "have things gotten better since the 'going postal' era?" I received a resounding "no."

"I cannot even begin to tell you how incredulous I was reading this," a 27-year-old mail handler at a processing and distribution facility in Oklahoma wrote in an email. "To know that my same daily complaints and laments were a problem back nearly as far as when I was born—and that they haven’t been resolved in the slightest!!—is so disheartening to me."

Another processing and distribution facility worker from the Pacific Northwest echoed similar sentiments. "That was 10 years before I started, and I have to say overall, No. It has not changed much."

Today's edition of The Mail is going to be about why so little has changed even after the rash of shootings that resulted in dozens of dead and wounded and permanently tarnished the post office's reputation. But it's important to acknowledge this is not just about the post office. Violence—both verbal and physical—in the American workplace was not a new phenomenon when Patrick Sherrill killed 14 coworkers in Edmond, Oklahoma in 1986. The U.S. workplace too often treats workers as little more than extensions of the machines they operate, measuring success and failure by "hitting the numbers," callous to what that sort of treatment does to human minds and bodies. We often think of the post office as a quintessential American institution. Unfortunately, when it comes to how it treats its workers, it is.

In 1994, two different letter carriers filed grievances against supervisors who were allegedly harassing them. The cases were consolidated into one national-level arbitration hearing in 1996. The national-level arbitration was not about the specific harassment allegations, but whether the JSOV, by then four years old, was an enforceable agreement. In other words, could a carrier file a grievance against an abusive manager for violating the JSOV and have that supervisor disciplined, transferred, or even fired? Or was the JSOV just another empty promise from management?

The JSOV itself appears to be quite clear on this question. "Let there be no mistake," the statement concluded, "that we mean what we say and we will enforce our commitment to a workplace where dignity, respect, and fairness are basic human rights, and where those who do not respect those rights are not tolerated."

But by 1996, USPS management didn't see it that way. They argued the JSOV was merely a "pledge" and did not override its right to manage the workforce as they see fit. They said the JSOV was nothing more than an effort to "send a message to stop the violence."

Just as the APWU predicted, management was using the JSOV to punish rank-and-file employees for offenses like cursing at managers while simultaneously arguing the JSOV was nothing more than a toothless document when wielded against abusive supervisors.

The arbitrator sided with labor. "The Joint Statement marked a departure from the past and pointed the way to organizational change," the arbitrator found. "This was a document that evidenced an intent to take action rather than a mere statement of opinions and predictions."

It's difficult to objectively evaluate the JSOV's effectiveness in curbing workplace violence at the post office. But the broad consensus among postal workers and union stewards I've spoken to is the JSOV is better than nothing but hasn't done much in practice.

On the one hand, there is some evidence that working conditions at the USPS have gotten better. In 2000, there were 10,553 Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) complaints filed against the USPS by employees out of a workforce of 786,516, or a rate of 1.34 percent. By 2018, the latest year for which these statistics were available, there were just 4,081 complaints out of 633,641 workers, or a rate of .64 percent, less than half what it was in 2000. But factors besides working conditions at the USPS—such as the perceived worthiness of filing complaints with the EEOC—can also impact those rates.

Likewise, grievances that went to arbitration show some tentative signs of progress. Since 1996, when the JSOV became contractually enforceable, there have been 1,195 grievances involving the National Association of Letter Carriers with a JSOV-related complaint, or about 50 per year on average, according to a copy of the grievance database reviewed by Motherboard. Of those, 611 of the complaints were denied by an arbitrator, leaving 584 cases ruled at least in part a violation of the JSOV.

But, again, this data is not capturing the whole picture. These numbers are not the total JSOV-related grievances, just those that reached arbitration for this one union. And although the years with more grievances came prior to 2000—the most was 145 rulings in JSOV cases in 1997—this is probably because workers had this new avenue to file grievances they didn't previously have, so it captures events dating back several years and conflicts that have been stewing for a while. Rulings per year gradually declined until 2008 with a low 14, before rising again to about 35 per year in recent years.

Source: NALC arbitration database obtained by Motherboard

Moreover, some of the rulings detail that postal management continues to look the other way on problem supervisors, a key issue highlighted by the Congressional investigation into the Royal Oak shooting.

For example, in 2008, an arbitrator found a supervisor in Oakland, CA had "a history of cease and desist orders…at stations throughout the Bay-View Postal District." Management was aware of these previous violations of the JSOV and the history of worker complaints against this one supervisor, but management "failed to take appropriate action." The arbitrator said the supervisor's actions of calling his employees "muthafuckers" and "bitches" was "exactly the type of work place behavior that the JSOV was intended to prevent." The arbitrator ruled the supervisor could no longer be anyone's boss, but only in the Pacific Area region.

Sometimes, the arbitrators themselves do little more than shuffle off problem supervisors to other locations. In 2009, a supervisor in Gaithersburg, MD repeatedly threatened and harassed workers, which the arbitrator found to be "abusive behavior which holds open the potential for violence." Nevertheless, the arbitrator's ruling was to reassign the supervisor to another nearby post office and receive sensitivity training.

Also in 2009, a union steward and postal supervisor in Stockton, CA got into a physical altercation when, after an increasingly escalating shouting match, the steward accused the manager of sleeping with the postmaster in order to get her job. The manager then slapped the steward, who restrained the supervisor and left. Despite the police being called and a statement taken, the supervisor received only a written warning while the steward was suspended for 21 days without pay. The arbitrator discovered this was not the first time local management had looked the other way on complaints of this particular supervisor violating the JSOV.

And these are just a few of the examples that have been documented. More often, postal workers and union officials say, violence and harassment in the workplace goes unreported as an accepted part of the job. In 2018, NALC Branch 343's newsletter succinctly summarized just how little has changed since the "Going Postal" era:

It has been my experience that seasoned carriers often times will ignore or shrug off this type of behavior because they have been exposed to it for such a long time. This speaks volumes. Many of these carriers have seen worse and nothing happened.

Why is the post office such an enduring hotbed of workplace conflict? This is a question I've asked postal workers around the country over the past few months. And the most surprising element of reporting this story, at least to me, is there is absolutely no mystery about it. Everyone knows exactly why the post office is rife with workplace conflict. It's even right there in the JSOV: "making the numbers."

Until recently, Josh Sponsler was a letter carrier in Ohio. He decided to quit the post office despite being a "career" employee with solid pay, good benefits, and a decent pension waiting for him at the end of the road. But he quit because the mounting stress and tension in the workplace took a toll on his mental health. When I asked what it was about the workplace that made it so stressful, Sponsler brought up "the 96."

The 96, officially known as Form 3996, is the form carriers have to fill out if they expect they will have to work overtime to deliver the mail that day. In the morning, when carriers show up for work, they will look over the various types of mail they have to deliver: the pre-sorted mail, the magazines and other "flats," and the packages. If they think work that day will take longer than eight hours and therefore trigger overtime, they reach for the 96.

But supervisors also have their own opinion about how many hours each route should take. The machines that pre-sort the mail automatically generate statistics about how much mail is going to each route. Those stats are then sent to supervisors each morning. Then, supervisors literally measure each route's unsorted mail with a yardstick. After plugging that number into the same software, the computer generates a final estimate for how long the mail should take to deliver.

Often, Sponsler says, the carrier's estimate will be very different from the computer's. For one, neither the computer programs nor measuring mail by the yard captures the most important factors about how long it takes to deliver mail. For example, what's the weather like? Are there mailers going to every business along the route? Every residential address? Is there road construction along the route?

And the computer's estimate is based on the regular inspection every route gets, where a postal supervisor will literally time with a stopwatch every move the carrier makes to determine how long that route "should" take. This estimate then becomes the baseline for that carrier's route estimates until the next inspection is done. But, for various reasons, that inspection may not be representative of the route year-round.

These two estimates for how long the day's mail will take to deliver is, as Sponsler put it, "the first thing that would cause tension" every day.

The tension is heightened because these estimates, multiplied by the thousands upon thousands of mail routes around the country are, in many ways, the main metric for how the modern post office functions. Supervisors are not given budgets in terms of dollars but in terms of work-hours. The more hours carriers say they'll need to finish their routes, the harder it gets for supervisors to meet their work-hour budgets, which will get them in trouble with their bosses.

The same goes for supervisors overseeing workers who don't deliver mail, such as mail handlers and other workers in processing facilities. In fact, for them it can be even worse, because they never leave the facility and are therefore constantly watched by their bosses. Throughout the JSOV grievances reviewed by Motherboard, workers report supervisors timing their bathroom breaks with stopwatches, looming over them so the workers can "feel their presence" while they work, or filing official warnings if they're too slow on a machine by a matter of seconds.

When carriers, union stewards, and post office managers talk about "making the numbers," they're talking about these numbers, the work-hour budgets. And they're also talking about the increasingly unreasonable requirements postal management puts on supervisors and postal workers alike, bringing mail to more and more delivery points every year with fewer and fewer workers, relying more and more on overtime that management consistently wants to slash. Talking to postal workers, an analogy that often comes up is that working for the post office feels like working in a pressure cooker. Everyone is being squeezed.

Reaching for the 96 has become an increasingly common occurrence. In August, the USPS Inspector General reported on the agency's soaring overtime costs which it largely attributed to "staffing challenges." Because the post office has consistently cut the number of people it employs even as it delivers to more locations, it relies on overtime to deliver all the mail every day. But, in many ways, keeping employees from filing their 96's is the most important thing a supervisor does from USPS management's perspective, because it saves the post office money.

Source: USPS OIG

There are, of course, good ways and bad ways for managers to handle this dynamic. Most postal workers I've spoken to said they've had at least one good boss who was reasonable and treated workers with respect. But, they are the exception, not the rule, because doing so requires actively ignoring or competing with the incentives put forward by their bosses.

For the not so great bosses, they have every incentive to bully workers that take longer to do the job, have routes with the greatest discrepancy between the computerized stats and the carrier's own work pace, or, as is all too often the case, just pick on someone they don't like for whatever reason. And they often do it under the guise of achieving operational efficiency, of hitting the numbers.

Day after day, week after week, month after month, this conflict by design can easily devolve into being about anything other than delivering mail. Mail carriers get frustrated and feel like they're being gaslit into doing a job that cannot be done. They get frustrated being told to do a job in a way they think will be slower while also being told to work faster. Their bosses think they're a liar for saying the work can't be done in eight hours. Supervisors tag carriers who they perceive as constantly asking for unjustified overtime as problem workers who need discipline.

This dynamic was represented in an extreme but not anomalous way in the Gaithersburg case. The supervisor testified to the arbitrator on the record that he "thinks that Carriers that apply for overtime are 'thieves.'" This view, he added, was the reason he felt empowered to harass carriers who said they would need overtime to finish their rounds. It was also backed up by his postmaster, who expressed similar sentiments.

"You just know there's a very good chance that, by filling this sheet out, you're getting into an argument about time," Sponsler said. And sometimes those arguments get out of hand.

If things haven't gotten any better at the post office, it's fair to wonder: why don't we hear about "going postal" anymore?

I put this question to Northeastern University Professor James Alan Fox, who has studied mass shootings and workplace violence since the early 1980s. He said shooting trends are more like a "general contagion," in that once they get publicized, a small group of people identify with the shooters and replicate their actions. For example, once the Edmond shooting was covered by the media in 1986, other postal workers started to think that might be a way for them to address their grievances, too. In a situation where these shooters likely saw no way out of their problems, they now had one.

But these trends pass just like any other. "There are fads in crime as there are in other aspects of life," Fox said. "Back in the 80s, the way that postal workers expressed their anger and grievance was with a gun…but that is not part of the culture now."

There is, however, a cohort of postal workers who report regularly higher job satisfaction than everyone else. They're called rural mail carriers. They do the same job as the so-called "city" carriers, even many times out of the same offices with the same supervisors, but for complex historical reasons, they fall under different salary structures. Whereas city carriers are hourly employees that get overtime for working more than eight hours in a day, rural carriers are given an annual salary to deliver the mail however long it takes. As a 1994 Government Accountability Office report put it:

"Rural carriers do not have to negotiate daily with supervisors regarding the time it will take to complete mail sorting or delivery, and their performance is not closely supervised. Rural carriers generally control their own workdays as long as all the mail is delivered on time each day."

I asked Sponsler if he thought putting everyone under the rural carrier structure would solve the workplace issue. He said he had never thought about it before, but he doubted it could ever happen because the entire organization, workers and management alike, have become too addicted to overtime. Many of the workers like the extra money and management won't hire enough people to avoid it.

Instead, he proposed different solutions, ones I had heard many times before. Abandon the autocratic management structure. Get rid of the computer metrics, or at least drastically curtail how they're used. Empower supervisors to run their post office the best way they see fit, not just follow orders from on high that apply to all the post offices in the area. They're big ideas, but not impossible ones.

Sponsler ended our interview by saying he didn't really want to quit the post office, but he had to. He liked most of the people he worked with. The carriers really do care about delivering the mail in that cheesy way you always hoped was true but never wanted to ask. It really is true, he said.

"Even with my experience, it can be a very good place to work," he assured me. But it's a far cry from making sure that experience applies to more than just a select few lucky ones with a good supervisor. "The service needs to work on a lot of stuff to get there."

The High Price of ‘Making the Numbers’ at the USPS syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

0 notes