I don’t have a lot of patience for academic navel gazing about toxic workplaces and “publish or perish pressure” bc many have never worked elsewhere and are unfamiliar with “publish AND perish publishing” or worse—shift work, retail, office jobs, manual labor
We should all have better working conditions in al jobs. But academic jobs are that: jobs. They're not a personality, a lifestyle, a religious or secular mission. They're a job. A confusion abt this comes from ppl in them who never leave school after kindergarten.
Agreed. I’ve been a union worker in journalism and in academia, as a grad student. Unions are the way to make life better in any workplace. (Sadly I’m not unionized now.) What also gets me is the idealizing of work they’ve never dine, which is hard in its own way, too!
It’s not that at all. Unionize your workplace. And don’t pretend like racism and sexism are unique to unis. I was a minwage worker more yrs than I was a prof. I’ve been Black my whole life. I don’t idealize what life is like for Black min wage workers. I try to form solidarity.
This entire thread by @snackowska is great but I espeicslly appreciate this below bc I hear academic make this assumption a lot. Academics generally have a lot more flexibility w time than 9-5ers, min wage workers trying to get enough hours between multiple jobs.
I think academics should unionize their shops & fight for better conditions. But not by idealizing the “simple life of the simple working man” based in condescension & untruth. I’ve met many academics who have never had to clock in anywhere, be at a job for hours, days, yrs…
People generally complain about what they know, so it’s fine academics complain about their work even if they’ve never done any other kind of work. But there’s nothing special about their/our workplace—it’s difficult bc it’s WORK & work is hard and often annoying.
I also find a lot of the complaints about isms in academia to be classist. Yes, we deal w racism and sexism. But to allege (which I’ve heard often) that we suffer more from this as professors than minimum wage workers suffer from racism + who deal with poverty is not true.
If your response is “But I shouldn’t HAVE to deal with isms on MY job bc I am smart” well, you’re missing out on the chance at forming solidarity BETWEEN FIELDS AS WORKERS, which can figure isms in society more broadly.
Right? Zoom is awful & uni Covid work expectations are awful. We should fight for more human remote work. But to pretend like others aren’t working in ways that are more lethal precludes us understanding our privileges & their deadly realities. Progress can’t flourish in untruth.
I don’t think profs know how micromanaged your thoughts are in retail. Don’t know what it’s like to wear a headset and having a manager scream into your ear while you’re on the floor, barking at you while your every moves is watching from a camera. To have no rest in your mind.
Do I want more mgmt in academia? No. But if we don’t recognize the relative freedom of time and the mind we have in our work & pretend it’s paradise on the retail floor, we can’t form solidarity. The illusion that our work is rarefied above other work stops solidarity!
Janitors, cooks, cab drivers are a class of jobs that are a lifelong vocation for many and the people who do them have a deep commitment to the good of society. Society would collapse without them. Academic jobs aren’t better than them. They’re all jobs. Unionize them all.
The last thing I’ll say abt this for awhile: I don’t have a problem w academics complaining abt work but with *navel gazing*, as if our struggles as workers are worse than others’ and disconnected from simple working folk who just work 9-5 & are on holiday 16 hrs a day
nbcnews.com/news/us-news/r… Look at this photo and framing here & compare it to depictions of how poor ppl, college student, migrants, Black folks, gay men, disabled ppl are accused of bug chasing or causing their illness though sloppiness and selfishness (h/t @kamilumin)
“Some with recent Covid diagnoses are finding that contracting the illness they worked so hard to dodge for so long has brought them an unexpected reprieve from anxiety — instead of compounding it further,” @NBCNews frames this story, along with a smiling white family.
It’s not bad to explore and report on how ppl feel relief after contracting a virus after avoiding it. There is a whole field of HIV literature on this phenomenon. But press has historically blamed gay men for bug chasing while conservatives have actively done it w Covid…
I have been beside myself with puzzlement that Democrats, so aligned with Hollywood, have not been running PSAs non stop throughout the last year w celebrities (who’d surely do them for free) abt vaccines, masks, how to get & use home tests etc. Truly bizzare.
Dolly Parton did her own vaccine video. Why isn’t the US govt asking “unifying” figures everyone loves like Dolly or Tom Hanks or Garth Brooks to do PSAs? Why aren’t they asking George W. Bush and Bill Clinton , a member of the Yankees and of the Red Sox to do them together?
I guess it is an example, as some writer put it, of the Dems “deferring to private industry in matters of state responsibility” in their pandemic response. They’ve outsourced producing PSAs to social media crowdsourcing @familyunequal! theguardian.com/us-news/2022/j…
1. The Golden Palace coming to Hulu might be a good time to finally pitch my "Dorothy Zbornak is the Anakin Skywalker of the Golden Girls" essay.
Think about. From the pilot, Dorothy is cast like an evil, prone-to-chokeholds-villain—like Darth Vader.
2. Dorothy is repeatedly cast as the mean, loser, ugly monster. They hide her in dark, dour clothes. The make fun of her height and her brute strength.
Back home in the Guardian for the first time 3 yrs, to read Biden to filth for home tests, masks & leaving the US "worse off than we were under Trump in the most lethal metric: more deaths are taking place under the Democrat than under his predecessor." theguardian.com/us-news/2022/j…
In the essay, I explore why so many ppl are angry with the Biden administration—at times because the administration has pursued a vaccine only approach which, ironically, undermines what vaccines actually do best. I use a "rain jacket analogy"
I also do a close reading of & examine "Google it": Just why DO Biden and Harris keep telling ppl to "Google" their way to getting tests, when there weren't any to be found near millions over Christmas & nearly 1 in 5 Americans in poverty have no internet?
This is STRAIGHT UP COPAGANDA! And remember, this is being reported by @abc3340, the ABC affiliate in Tuscaloosa...and ABC news started the "Covid parties" moral panic in 2020 out of...Tuscaloosa! cc @ajbauer@RottenInDenmark
I like feeling accomplished abt something I can consistently do in 2 minutes
Wordle 210 4/6
⬜🟩⬜⬜⬜
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My strategy is choose a word w 2 vowels, check for a match, do another word w any matching letters plus 2 different vowels (or y), then I pretty much can guess the word in the third line. There were only 2 choices when I was at the third, I chose the wrong one, so 4 lines.
I don't try to guess in one or even two; I like sorting out the vowels, then it's a nice zen understanding how combinations are possible with the remaining consonants once the vowels are excluded or included.