• McSweeney’s J.K. Appleseed discusses corporate self-evaluations. The game is rigged. Give yourself all 5s (or whatever the highest, bestest possible number is). Always. On everything. Even if they include a category labeled “Ability to Feign Humility by Maybe Mixing in a Few 4s so I Don’t Come Across as Conceited” — give yourself a 5 on that too.
The purpose of the game is to create a paper trail to defend against legal liability when they decide to fire us or deny us raises. We shouldn’t be cooperating in that. All 5s. Always. For everything.
• Bryce Covert on “How Unpredictable Hours Are Screwing Up People’s Lives.” Beyond the nuisance factor — having to keep the other 130 or so hours of your week in flux because the boss keeps changing the 30 or so that you’re working — Covert also notes how this can help employers get away with wage theft. Without a set, reliable schedule, keeping track of hours worked gets complicated for both employer and employee, and at some places, that complication is a feature, not a bug. Sure, they may, eventually, correct underpayments — but only if workers notice and are able to document them.
• Friend of the Blog James McGrath is not acquainted with the Winchester boys, but Supernatural caught his attention recently because of a Mandaean amulet and some Syriac writing — which he found time to track down to its source. His post concludes:
But it does sound like Supernatural is a show I would be interested in. Are there any blog readers who watch or have watched Supernatural? Do you recommend it?
Feel free to click on over and respond.
Here’s an image McGrath shared recently, which I also enjoyed:
• Everett, Pennsylvania, is out near … well, Shippensburg, I guess, but it’s not really near anything, actually. Everett made the news this week, though, because a teenage boy in the town faces up to two years in prison after being charged for allegedly “desecrating” a statue of Jesus “by standing in front of it and mimicking a sex act, then posting pictures of it on the Internet.”
Race Hochdorf cites the Pennsylvania statute under which the boy has been charged, which forbids “Desecration of a Venerated Object,” defined as “Defacing, damaging, polluting or otherwise, physically mistreating in a way that the actor knows will outrage the sensibilities of persons likely to observe or discover the action.”
I’m happy to learn this is a law here in the Keystone State. I’d like to see it enforced more often. After all, aren’t streams and groundwater near fracking sites “venerated objects”? How about children in the Philadelphia public schools now being deliberately sabotaged by Gov. Tom Corbett? And I can’t imagine any situation in which a person charged with domestic violence shouldn’t also face an additional charge for desecration of a venerated object.
• Pacific Standard recently ran an article on “What Your Workout Says About Your Social Class.” And it’s accurate, I guess, provided your social class is some fine gradient of upper-middle class that’s oh-so-slightly different from another fine gradient of upper-middle class.
The article is about what you do at the gym after work and doesn’t address — or imagine the possibility of — people whose jobs are physically challenging and physically tiring. None of the guys I work with belongs to a gym. I’m not sure it would be wise to suggest to any of them that after work they should spend another hour lifting things and not even get paid for it.
We have this problem in our discourse around the most important challenges we face where we feel we have to be “fair to both sides.” But sometimes, one of those sides is subjugation and oppression. If you’re OK with legitimizing that side in the interest of “fairness,” you’re essentially saying you’re OK with oppression as a part of the human condition. That’s some hateful s–t.
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