Thanks, Bill. It's as close as I can get, so far. There are a couple of questions I have about the "work stoppages" table.
It doesn't include stoppages inolving less than a thousand workers -- but does that mean per workplace or per stoppage? I mean, when the smaller hotels go on strike, there might be several with less a thousand workers, but the strike will involve more than a thousand workers. Or, for example, the strike at the UC campuses a couple of weeks ago. Bargaining units included some that were over a thousand and some that were over a thousand, but it was one strike. How was it dealt with?
Agricultural and governmental employees are included in the total work time, but governmental employees are usually forbidden to strike and generally resort to work-to-contract instead, which is sort of like a work stoppage but it lasts less than a day at a time so it wouldn't be counted -- I suppose it wouldn't anyway because the work time that is lost is work that wasn't overtly contracted for and wasn't paid for in the first place (work-to-contract can bring a school district to a standstill). And agricultural employees are often bunched up in groups of less than a thousand even if they are working for huge international agribusiness concerns. So it seems to me that the account is diluted by treating all these workers the same way.
Okay, that'sd one set of questions. My next question is: 2001 and 2002 are much lower than the other years. I know what happened in those years, but I can't figure out how it would affect strikes. So that's a question: why did people hold off so much in those years? I mean, I could guess, but I'd be uncomfortable with it.
And I still don't know about the year 2004, which is the one I'm really interested in. I did see a fall from a peak in 1970, which is not surprising. Among other things, 1970 was a year when unions were trying to leverage a demand to stop closures and exporting of jobs to low-wage areas and -- well -- they lost that battle. What I'm interested in is too recent to show up, though.
Nancy, the guarantee that union members get what they're paying for is to get off their duff and get involved with the union. Even the biggest unions are mostly run by the efforts of their members.
The American media have called working class people "middle class" for a long time -- at least for thirty-forty years now, and maybe longer. What I noticed when we were organizing our little small leather goods factory back in the midseventies was that a lot of people were reluctant to sign the cards because it interfered with their self-image as not really factory workers, but really small businessmen at the beginning of their careers: everybody, it seemed, was saving to buy a truck, start hauling and cutting wood, and work their way up to a little surfboard shop or something. And they all thought they were going to be like the owners of our little factory, striking it rich and having cocaine parties -- although, of course, they couldn't see that the owners were also going to be bought out and lose everything in a couple of years.
And now I have a question: can anybody think of the right search terms to find out if the number of labor actions (strikes and so on )is rising, falling, or staying steady by some comprehensible measure?
It's my impression that they're rising, especially in the public service area, but I don't know how to confirm this (I get google gibberish when I look). I do know I've been hearing about a lot of school and hospital strikes and work-to-contracts.
I've been a union worker and a non-union worker, and I'll tell you I know the difference, even with a sweetheart union.
It's not really that unusual to find extreme discipline advocates also spoiling their kids. There's a reason they think kids have to be beaten to listen -- it's because they don't know what it is to be merely firm.
Actually it was a mantra for me at a stage when I was teaching myself to yell less; "more firmness, less fierceness."
Randolph: We don't have much of those purer-than-thou guys any more. They've grown up, switched sides, learned tactics, or dropped out of public life, mainly, I guess.
Chuck, I'm glad to know what you're talking about. You're using the word "authoritarian" to mean "doctrinaire." You're not using it the way we usually mean it, except possibly in your allegations about Ralph Nader.
The thing I've been saying for the last several years is that the left has not been doctrinaire enough (don't anybody dare quote this sentence without what follows -- I will haunt your nightmares forever, singing off-key songs specially chosen to ruin your sleep). Not that I am asking for real single-minded, no-discussion, lockstep politics. But just to be willing to say, "yes, these are core values, yes we will stand for them, yes we will make alliance around them, yes we will return to these things and not be distracted by lies and diversions, yes we will exert some effort to act as unified people and not be afraid of being called a bloc." The left has been so shattered by the redbaiting and so humble in its response to attacks from the right that it has not had the courage of its convictions, and I would like to see more of what we've recently seen.
The thing is, whenever the left does anything with any kind of conviction, or any kind of semblance of unity, the right accuses them of being doctrinaire, or, as in this case, accuses them of being authoritarian, and then the left, historically, cringes and even crumbles.
We don't have to do that. We can understand that saying things with positive force, and agreeing to act together in coalition and have some discipline about it, are not the same thing as drowning out all discusion or forcing lock-step obedience.
-- and using the word "authoritarian" to mean "loud-mouthed and excessively sure of oneself" doesn't help to understand that.
Chuck, I'm just puzzled about the statement "It does seem to me that people on the right and left are more tolerant of authoritarians who claim to be on their side than used to be the case."
Because I'm sincerely trying to come up with a current left-wing authoritarian, and I can't. I can come up with some left-wing authoritarians, but the latest I can come up with them is the early eighties. Who am I missing?
Consistency is a dangerous concept. Its best use is as a measure, not a principle. I mean you shouldn't do things in order to be consistent. You should use a consistency check to see if you have figured out what you want to do about things. If you're inconsistent in what you do or think about doing, you should rethink the issue at hand. That's all. I do remember when my son was maybe twelve saying that yes, I was giving different answers to similar situations sometimes, because I was figuring it out.
Now that I understand Alan Bostock's references --I even went to the blog about the footballs once David had pointed the way -- I think he's even wronger than when he was merely being incoherent and confusing.
Detour. Couple days ago on the radio (or was it the newspaper?) somebody was saying the Republicans are making "the same mistakes" the Democrats had made -- overbearing use of power and corruption. But it's a lie. I'm not one of those who say the Democrats are angels. But the "corruption" of the Democrats is some minor skimming of money here and there, not even a general pattern beyond what capitalism generally fosters, and there was _no_ abuse of power -- the problem with the Democrats in recent years was they wouldn't even use the power they legitimately, ethically, legally, and morally were supposed to use.
And now, some people are saying that the Democrats are engaging in the same behaviors as the Republicans did when they were out of power. And this is a lie too. Republicans lied and bribed and blackmailed figuratively and literally up one side and down the other. When Democrats refuse to give in on important issues -- or even when they do give in and simply take the opportunity to speak the truth in the process -- when they try to behave with a modicum of unity and sanity and strategy, that's not the same thing.
Alan said he's aware of the danger of false equivalences, and he proceeded to indulge in them. I don't care about his bonafides right now: I care about the fact that he said things that aren't true in support, apparently, of a strategy of smiling and shutting up.
Alan Bostick: I think I left my decoder ring somewhere, because you're not making any sense at all.
You're deeply disturbed by the polarization of civic discourse . . . and this has something to do with Stalin, somehow.
You make some kind of demurrer about false equivalence, but somehow the Daily Kos is the same viciousness and hatred as (googling)oh, I see: this (quote follows)
Coming Events:
April 23-28: Hold Their Feet to the Fire -
or:Free Republic has been rallying in support of our President and the war effort since shortly after the terrorist attack on America on September 11, 2001. Later, as the inevitable war against Iraq drew closer, more and more of the "useful idiots" of the left began crawling out of the woodwork organizing so-called "anti-war" protests. FReepers are working to ensure that these communist organized (See: INTERNATIONAL A.N.S.W.E.R.) demonstrations do not go unanswered. Patriotic Americans are countering these misguided terrorist supporting leftist groups wherever and whenever they show up. Join or form a Free Republic Chapter, grab your signs, unfurl the flag, and prepare to support your country!
And -- what the hell are Little Green Footballs?
Well, Xopher, you've hit on something important too. The urge to do damage to a thing has its roots in respectable animal behaviors (watch a dog with a stuffy toy that has begun to come apart, or more respectably with a bone with lots of connective tissue on it). It's no business of ours not to feel those things. (though feeling them a lot, or easily, or with respect to things which shouldn't elicit them, might indicate something one would want to do something about) It's our business to learn when to put them away and when to channel them into some other activity which is useful, productive, and helpful, rather than damaging. Dobson's childrearing advice teaches people to channel those feelings into bullying the dependent and vanquishing one's family and neighbors.
Dave Luckett: the alternative to DObson isn't perfection. Dobson doesn't say "Good parents sometimes hit their children." He doesn't even say "Good parents ought to hit their children once in a while." He says that the backbone of childrearing is punishment and threat, including severe punishment as a routine element. He doesn't say it's okay to hit your children once in a while -- he says that it is necessary to hit your children regularly. And more.
Let me say this again: he says that to be good parents, good Christians, good people, you must threaten your children constantly and consistently, punish them regularly, and punish them inventively and severely.
He advocates the use of objects to make the beatings more painful.
There's nothing defensible here.
Personally, I read Patrick's opening remarks the way he seems to have intended them, and not the way Henry seems to have read them.
And I think the point is valid. It is a good thing to have some cross talk, and it is also a good thing for left-wing readers to not accept what they don't want to accept. It is a bad thing to expect us to always be nice and understanding when the other side will never ever be nice and understanding.
I want to say a thing about dogs too now that I've thought about it. I have a strapping fifty pound dog with a dominant personality, almost aggressive (she wants to play hard and the only times I've seen her in fights she seemed to think that the fights were just extreme forms of play -- a dangerous thing, I thought). When she was in her doggy adolescence, she wanted to have her way all the time -- runrunrun after the other dogs, nip their shoulders, roll them over, bark her fool head off, general obnoxiousness. We worked with her intensively for about a year. We used a lot of methods -- not one of the methods was strapping or beating. I don't mean she was obnoxious all the time for that year: I mean she needed to be watched, diverted, intervened with now and then.
Dogs want to do stuff that makes you proud of them, even when they have dominant personalities. It's not that hard to get their cooperation.
It's the same with children.
The thing that surprised me is that James Dobson is still alive. He's been doing this for a long, long time.
When I was a new mother, back in the ice ages, I got into reading the literature of parental advice as literature. It didn't take many books to get a picture of what might be helpful in raising my children (who are absolutely wonderful young adults now), but the genre became interesting for its own sake. There was a series of horrendous books by Dobson in the library -- I thought they were old then. He had seminars and things and he went on TV to promote his child beating industry.
The thing that set him off from the other books I read was the place where he quoted, with approval, a father who had successfully graduated one of Dobson's programs. The man said "to be a parent, you have to cultivate a little sadism" (not an exact quote -- I read this a long time ago) He was talking about ingenious punishments, thinking about ways to make little miscreants suffer effectively.
It's disgusting. And it's very, very political. It's not, by the way, effective childraising: it doesn't develop a conscience, or a sense of obligation to other people, or responsibility. It develops fear, submission, resentment, and ambitions to get on the other end of the whip.
Like I said, it's very, very political.
Dave, that doesn't ring true -- I mean the part about the dogs distinguishing between Russian and German tanks. I think a tank would be a tank to a dog, unless they exclusively ran under the exact same tank (not the same model) they had been trained on. Just extrapolating from the generalizations and extrapolations my own dog demonstrates . . .
So what do we even want to use a set of labelling terms for?
I think there's other things but mostly the most interesting one is to match readers with books. So fantasy is "the books that readers of fantasy books want to read." Which clearly changes over time, in the individual and in the mass case. Which makes the category hard to grasp and hold on to, because it's both squishy and motile. When I was a kid, I went looking for "magic books" -- but Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, while lightly amusing, did not qualify, and The Silver Sword which did not actually have magic but did have a harrowing escape from a concentration camp and a miraculous discovery of a lost family artifact, did qualify. And so did that completely realistic book about the peasant boy who wants to be a hawker. In retrospect, it was of course the sense of wonder I was looking for, and also, I think, a reflection of my own inchoate yearning.
It's thisness. What is the thisness of fantasy? I think there's something in it about air and light (and dark), and something in it about heroism, and something about a relationship to the land and the cosmos, and something about clarity and obfuscation -- and then there's something about colors, and certain kinds of noise, including bells and stringed instruments and the clash of steel and usually, horses and owls or eagles. Banners and ribbons, usually. Even when there's not. And something about otherness. And intelligence in unexpected places, which may be malevolent or not. And bad roads. Or I can possibly be a little delerious -- I fell off my bike going too fast down a steep hill this afternoon.
And by the way, I'm Sister Numchuku of Loving Kindness.
Didn't I already say Jon Carroll is the greatest?
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