Category Archives: Sociology

All Bullies Great and Small

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“I don’t recall this happening here before, a picket outside the home of a political contributor,” reporter Stewart Ledbetter said on WPTZ.

protestBurlington’s Lenore Broughton is a wealthy Vermonter and the sole contributor to the new Vermonters First SuperPAC. Her group is running an anti-ShumlinCare TV ad campaign. A small group of political activists who favor the single-payer plan marched through the hill section of Burlington, ending up at Broughton’s home; she was out of town. Tayt Brooks, Vermonters First’s executive director, called the picketing a “bullying tactic.”

Erm. No.

It is only bullying when Repugs (the power structure) do it to Dems (the professional victims) so Mr. Brooks probably can’t claim bullying.

It is a popular tactic of the left. See, any disagreement with the one true path is not deserving of American protections because it would ruin their perfect hairdos.

Mayor Thomas Menino (D-Boston) and Rahm Emanuel (D-Chicago), for example, tried to bully the Chick-fil-A restaurant chain straight out of business because its president, Dan Cathy, supports “the biblical definition of the family unit.” Even the liberal Chicago Sun-Times and the Boston Globe strongly criticized that “anti-conservative bullying.”

Meanwhile, vandals spray painted some Romney signs in Greensboro, NC, last week. The red paint formed the well-known circle crossed by a diagonal line across the candidate’s name. Reports say Obama “community organizers” were in the neighborhood at the time. That kind of personal vandalism may be becoming more prevalent by Democrats.

I’m thinking that, particularly in the anti-Lenore Broughton case, there’s a fine line between free speech/right of assembly and attempt at suppression of same. The marchers were definitely trying to stop her from expressing herself.

That’s the story I’d take to the public and, since she has the bucks, I’d make sure the news video footage (or better, jerky cellphone video) makes it into an ad and over to the network news desks with the copy that this is how the left tries to quash democracy.

Federal, state, or locally, we will get exactly what we vote for in 22 days. Let’s be careful out there.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated that almost 70% of students believe it is not safe “to hold unpopular views on campus.” An example quoted merely to amplify the point about bullying turns out to have distracted us from that issue. The discussion centered on whether the numbers were accurate rather than who was the bully. It’s a good question which we will take up separately next week.

Two Nickles to Rub Together

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I picked up an empty Blueberry-Pomegranate Blast by Colt 45 can on walkies this morning.

I walk a couple of miles each morning at a reasonably brisk rate. I’m still not getting my heart rate up high enough but I do get my resps up. Sometimes I talk on the phone while walking which surprises the bridge fishermen I pass. Sometimes Jody Beauregard walks with me. Jody is a couple inches taller than I am, but he doesn’t like to walk as fast. “You ought to slow down and smell the roses,” he keeps telling me.

But this is about beer cans, not Rosaceae. Nor the original lime juice.

roadside emptiesVermont passed its Beverage Container Law to “reduce litter, increase recycling, reduce waste disposal costs, create local jobs and save energy.” Save energy? The legislature enacted the law in 1972 but delayed implementation until 1973.

I’m thinking that was to give our shopping cart people time to get bigger bags and carts.

The Act covers beer, malt, carbonated soft drinks, mixed wine drinks, and liquor in any glass, metal, paper, plastic or combination bottle, can, jar or carton. We pay 15¢ for liquor bottles and a nickle for everything else. The redemption rate overall is 85%. The Baptists should have such good statistics.

Michigan’s 10¢ bottle bill has a 96.9% recycle rate. Florida is studying the idea.

The Blueberry-Pomegranate <shudder> Blast comes 23.5 ounces to the can. 12% alcohol. Still only a nickle deposit back, though.

That doesn’t make up for inflation. Gas prices went up a nickle on Friday alone here in the protected pocket with the highest gas prices in New England. That price hike comes in the face of dropping prices everywhere else in the nation, and in spite of calls for a Congressional investigation.

I found a single 24-ish ounce empty can each morning last week and I figure this is a bad sign.

“We need to start a petition drive,” Jody said. “If people would just drink two 12-ounce cans in their cars instead of these 24-ounce monsters, their beer wouldn’t go flat as fast and we’d make more money.”

I picked up just a nickle each day. I could have been making a dime.

They. Just. Don’t. Listen.

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My old friend Lido “Lee” Bruhl is a retired newspaper editor who enjoys the wordplay that happens in social media today. He passed along this poster:

“The planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
–David Orr

Fredo “Two Fingers” Caronia was the first to respond.

“Amen!” he said.

18 more similar responses appeared, most posted from one or another flavor of Apple computer.

I counted six more knee-jerk agreements, two Make Love Not War bumper stickers, five bashing the one-percent, three people against Big Banks, one plea to kick the peace keepers out of Pakistan (?), and one that announced Ross Perot’s poodle had caused all of our country’s problems.

Hello? Somebody has to earn the gelt to pay for the peacemakers and healers and restorers and storytellers and lovers. If you want a world that is un-habitable and inhumane, try one where all the businesses are forced to fail and all the inventors and entrepreneurs are ostracized, wrote the one contrary voice in the Wilderness.

Apple computer was created and marketed by a remarkably successful kid who had been frustrated by his formal schooling and who dropped out of Reed College after six months.

“Words to live by! LOVED, ‘Liked,’ Shared. Thanks, Lee!!!” Fanny Guay wrote even after I had weighed in.

“To my perplexion,” Liz Arden said, “no one paid attention to the fact that the context they put Mr. Orr’s quote in dooms us to scrabble in the dirt eating bugs.”

The quote itself was lifted from environmental educator David Orr’s 1991 article, What Is Education For? in which he discusses six myths about the foundations of modern education, and six new principles to replace them. He repeated it in the 1994 polemic Earth in Mind, a book that examines not the problems in education but the problem of education. It is a topic he has emphasized since the 1980s.

He argues that much of what has gone wrong with the world is the result of “inadequate and misdirected education that alienates us from life in the name of human domination.” He also quotes Thomas Merton who called education the “mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade.” (Mr. Merton’s advice to students was to “be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.”)

Meanwhile entrepreneur, Chess Master, PayPal co-founder, and Stanford Law School grad, Peter Thiel is paying college students to drop out.

I agree with most of the points Dr. Orr made. After all, a college education has indeed ruined many a good garbage collector. (He said “our education up till now has in some ways created a monster.”)

He lost me by quoting the Trappist monk and mystic, Father Merton.

See, the problem isn’t that we ought not prepare our students to succeed. I don’t want to scrabble around in the dirt eating bugs, either. The way to assure that I don’t have to is to keep teaching the next generation and the next and the next. The problem is that so so many people here equate success with bad.

Success is good. But the bashers simply don’t hear us when we say so.

Dr. Orr, by the way, is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and Special Assistant to the President of Oberlin College and a James Marsh Professor at the University of Vermont. He holds a B.A. from Westminster College, an M.A. from Michigan State, and a Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania.

Interesting that we the loudest critics of education already have ours, innit.

Of course I want change our schools so kids do gain knowledge, some culture, and the critical thought skills necessary to interpret next year’s data.

Friday Foibles

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Anne and I both prefer very flat pillows. In fact, the high loft, fat bahstids popularized in motels and mattress commercials are exceedingly hard on our necks so “preference” might be understatement.

She is off to Burlington for the weekend to run the Summer Games. She plans to take her own pillow.

I’m off to Hoboken for the weekend to party down with the guys in my class. Stevens was all male undergrad when we were there, so this will be boyz’ weekend out.

I’m a guy. I cannot show up with my pillow and security blanket.

“Maybe if I fold it carefully, it will fit in your carryon,” she said.

<sigh>

Changes

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Humans rely on habit and muscle memory to accomplish every day tasks.

Ergonomists know every detail about how we interact with our tools. Frederick Winslow Taylor who earned a degree in mechanical engineering by correspondence at Stevens Institute of Technology, pioneered the “Scientific Management” method to find the optimum method for carrying out pretty much any job. During WWII, a young lieutenant named Alphonse Chapanis eliminated most “pilot error” by de-confusing airplane controls.

In about 1973, a fellow on my pit crew installed the shift linkage backwards on the race car. I went out and shifted from third gear to first when I thought I was grabbing fourth. Surprised pretty much everyone including the engine builder when that about stood the car on its nose.

“A good driver should be able to adjust,” he said.

No. A good driver should be able to concentrate on pointing the car, not on where the next gear might be this week.

Big consumer companies employ most of the (working) ergonomists in the universe. Heck, I’d bet a doughnut that two or three of them work for Microsoft. Why are these consumer companies so blind to the way we accomplish everyday tasks? Why do they want us to keep adjusting to different shift linkages?

Liz Arden mentioned this morning that Google™ has changed its Latitudinal Check In so she can’t just poke a button on her desktop any more.

Not a biggie in the grand scheme of things but it fits the age old question, why did they have to fix something that weren’t broke?

Google had trained us to use their service one way and now they want us to do it some other way for no reason other than that they can.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes wrote three years ago that Windows 7’s changes “suggest … that Microsoft is putting design ahead of usability.” Ya think? Apple afficionados say the same thing about the company Mr. Jobs built on the perfect User Interface. I Googled “Lion annoyances” and came up with about 297,000 results which is far fewer than the 1,540,000 results I found for “Windows 7 annoyances.” An entire industry has had to spring up to publish quick cures and workarounds for the two most “popular” computer operating systems.

Lion changed the three finger salute of Snow Leopard to two fingers, and reserved the three finger gesture for Mission Control. In Windows 7, you can’t tell which programs are actually running on the Taskbar and which are just links since some, like Internet Exploder, add an identical button for every open window and some, like WordPerfect and Dreamweaver, simply change the look of the one button so you know what to push. Microsoft also moved all the files around in Windows 7 so “My Documents” is now just another broken link and your IT department can’t find anything without retraining.

Microsoft and Apple had trained us to use our computers one way and now they want us to do it some other way for no reason other than that they can.

And who ever heard of pushing “START” to turn off the engine.

Oh. That’s how keyless cars work now, too.

Every time I thought I’d got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet

NPR jumped on that bandwagon last week when Science Friday changed its website. “Redesigned with you in mind” is its new banner.

You maybe, but not me. It is now totally buggered.

I don’t subscribe to many podcasts because I don’t necessarily listen to every show and have enough clutter on both my hard drive and my broadband connection to want it filled with stuff I don’t use. SciFri trained me to go to their site to download the segments I want to hear each week. It was fast. It was accurate. It was scientific.

SciFri had trained us to listen one way and now they want us to do it some other way for no reason other than that they can.

Like host Ira Flatow’s approach to Global Warming, the site is no longer fast, nor accurate, nor scientific. In fact, of the two segments I grabbed last week, one had pieces of three with one piece repeated and the other was screwy. [ed. note: see the update from NPR in the Comments section below.]

Airheads.

I can fix this by teaching the companies just one word but I don’t work cheap.