The Contradictory Feelings Thread

[Linguoboy]

Shit just got real at work: We let go of all our temporary and student workers. That is literally half the people who work for us (though far less in terms of FTEs or total hours worked). It's not particularly surprising, but that only makes it more upsetting how the whole thing was handled: After weeks of limbo, they were let know yesterday that today would be their last day.

The good part is the response when this was announced on the student supervisors' listserv. One of my most-respected coworkers responded immediately to register his outrage. Within short order, me and two other supervisors had responded to amplify his comments. As of today, three more supervisors--representing a broad spectrum within our institution--have done the same. It's that kind of solidarity that's going to carry me through this if things start getting much worse.

[chris_notts]

The good part is the response when this was announced on the student supervisors' listserv. One of my most-respected coworkers responded immediately to register his outrage. Within short order, me and two other supervisors had responded to amplify his comments. As of today, three more supervisors--representing a broad spectrum within our institution--have done the same. It's that kind of solidarity that's going to carry me through this if things start getting much worse.

My work hasn't responded too aggressively so far. They cancelled some contracts with external consultancies, but these were big, high-end companies so hopefully their employees won't be laid off right away. On the other hand, some employees who got caught visiting family when everything locked down got temporarily suspended, because of the apparently complex tax implications of them working for months from another country. Luckily, apart from that there's been no reduction in actual employees so far.

I feel sorry for anyone in the precariat right now. I really doubt we're going to see a V shaped recovery, so that means that either our respective governments (Republican and Conservative) learn the meaning of compassion and how to not blame the victim quickly or things are going to be bad. And they'll be bad for everybody: even if you're one of the lucky ones and have no empathy whatsoever, living in a society with one third of people desperate for money just to live doesn't sound like my idea of fun. You might get a cleaner or domestic servant cheap, Victorian style, but that won't help you much when someone breaks into your house and shoots you in the face before nicking all your stuff. Recent rumblings from the chancellor about starting to cut support for furloughed workers in a month because lazy people are getting used to not working are not promising in that regard.

[Linguoboy]

Follow-up: Monday they announced that 250 employees would be furloughed for three-and-a-half months. One of fifth of these--a quarter of our workforce--was in the library. I still don't know who all has been affected, even in my own workgroup, but so far every case I've heard about is a library assistant. It looks like what they did is keep all the professional librarians and furlough the majority of the support staff. So just like everyone else, they're protecting the most secure at the expense of the most vulnerable.

I just can't concentrate on my work right now. I know I should be thinking about applying for work elsewhere, but I'm not ready to face the prospect of that yet.

[chris_notts]

I just can't concentrate on my work right now. I know I should be thinking about applying for work elsewhere, but I'm not ready to face the prospect of that yet.

Really sorry to hear that. I hope you're not affected, and if you are that things work out.

[chris_notts]

I read a lot of David Eddings as a child, and while I'm not so much of a fan now I enjoyed them a lot at a certain point in time. So I was a bit shocked to find out yesterday that David Eddings and his wife were imprisoned in the 70s for abuse of their adopted children. I thought it might be malicious wiki editing at first, but copies of old newspaper articles can be found if you do a bit of googling. It brings up the old question about whether the crimes of artists matter or not to the appreciation of their art.

[zyxw59]

I'm about to start DMing a D&D game on Tuesday. On the one hand, I'm really excited, but on the other hand, this is basically the first time ever that I've DM'd (apart from a couple sessions when I was in middle school), so I'm afraid I'll do a bad job of running the game. In college, I spent some time in student government, and had to run a few meetings, and I hated it — being expected to be the one to make things move along was really stressful, and I'm worried I might have the same reaction to DMing.

Also, I'm going to be doing this campaign in two groups, since 8 people were interested; the group that's starting on Tuesday is the group of people I'm less excited to hang out with (the other group has someone whose computer is broken right now, so the (all-remote, due to coronavirus and also the fact that I'm the only one of my friends on my side of the country right now) campaign can't start until he gets it fixed)

[Travis B.]

I read a lot of David Eddings as a child, and while I'm not so much of a fan now I enjoyed them a lot at a certain point in time. So I was a bit shocked to find out yesterday that David Eddings and his wife were imprisoned in the 70s for abuse of their adopted children. I thought it might be malicious wiki editing at first, but copies of old newspaper articles can be found if you do a bit of googling. It brings up the old question about whether the crimes of artists matter or not to the appreciation of their art.

One example that I mentioned in a discussion with someone I know somewhere else is Borges - is his literature at all diminished by the fact that he supported a military regime noted for its use of state terror?

[chris_notts]

One example that I mentioned in a discussion with someone I know somewhere else is Borges - is his literature at all diminished by the fact that he supported a military regime noted for its use of state terror?

I think what shocked me about it is the nature of the crime. It's easy to support evil at a distance, or even up close against the other, that's unfortunately just human nature. A lot can be done to "them" and supported by people who are otherwise saints.

But to confine and cage and beat your own children, children you're responsible for (which is what the Eddings apparently did)... a person's children is almost the definition of 'us', the very centre of the in-group, the ones we have the biggest moral obligation to. Maybe in an era when everyone was indoctrinated to believe that's acceptable it'd be a bit more understandable, but we're talking about the 60s and 70s here, not Victorian England.

[Linguoboy]

But to confine and cage and beat your own children, children you're responsible for (which is what the Eddings apparently did)... a person's children is almost the definition of 'us', the very centre of the in-group, the ones we have the biggest moral obligation to. Maybe in an era when everyone was indoctrinated to believe that's acceptable it'd be a big more understandable, but we're talking about the 60s and 70s here, not Victorian England.

Not excusing what he did, but whenever I read about something like that, I always think, "What kind of fucked up background did they have?" You don't get the idea to do something like that from growing up in a well-adjusted household.

(And, FWIW, Spokane today often feels like the 70s, so when he was growing up, it might practically have been the Victorian era.)

[chris_notts]

Not excusing what he did, but whenever I read about something like that, I always think, "What kind of fucked up background did they have?" You don't get the idea to do something like that from growing up in a well-adjusted household.

You could be right of course, it's hard to know now since both he and his wife have passed away.

[Linguoboy]

Not excusing what he did, but whenever I read about something like that, I always think, "What kind of fucked up background did they have?" You don't get the idea to do something like that from growing up in a well-adjusted household.

You could be right of course, it's hard to know now since both he and his wife have passed away.

And even if they were alive, it's not necessarily something they would want to talk about.

Honestly, I'm appalled how many educated people my own age are willing to state publicly that they think striking a child should be an acceptable form of parental discipline. My parents thought that and I did, too, when I was younger. (All I can figure is that I was subject to some sort of association fallacy: My parents are good people. My parents spanked me. Therefore, good people spank their children.) But the evidence for serious negative consequences and a lack of positive outcomes is overwhelming at this point. It's like clinging to some sort of dangerous folk remedy your grandmother taught you.

[Frislander]

I'm kinda having a massive problem placing the US in my head right now. On the one hand I utterly despise the regime in place there and the sheer amount and dominance of hind-bound conservatism in its political system, completely skewing comparative political discourse in the western world (like the UK in particular is in many ways a shithole relative to the rest of Western Europe, but because America does so much worse than even we do it's hard to make that out). I also resent its cultural hegemony over the rest of the world, something I think feels particularly insidious in the UK because the common Anglophone cultural makes the boundaries more fuzzy and thus more susceptible to interference (like the incorporation of American traditions like Prom plus many of the frankly vulgar add-ons to Halloween and to a lesser extent Christmas).

On the other hand, I must acknowledge the revolutionary ideals of the founders (e.g. when Americans talk about the founding fathers creating a country promoting liberty for white people, I can't help but note that relative to the UK at the time promising freedom for all white people rather than just the aristocracy was a fairly radical concept). I also understand that relative to the other global superpower of our modern age, China, the US is practically liberated, and I'm not gonna pretend that the US and China are somehow equally bad when it comes to things like basic human rights such as freedom of political thought or religion for their citizens, and when it comes to attempted cultural genocide at least America is willing to admit that it happened, while China fervently denies that it's doing it at all. Frankly in the context of two world powers fighting for control I kinda have to at least consent to being on the same side at the US. At least US side does nominally allow for dislike of itself.

I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this. My preferred solution would be a strong EU to count as a superpower in its own right, but that's not where we're at, so really I'm just kinda stuck.

[Travis B.]

zeptoforth has reached the stage where it is getting more complete, even though some desirable features such as a proper assembler are missing and even if i implement one it probably will never get into the official binaries (due to being too large). However, someone I know (who maintains a different Forth implementation for a different platform) suggested implementing continuous integration starting from now. The problems with that is that there is a manual aspect of working with zeptoforth, in that I must manually connect each board being used for building or testing to my machine, and furthermore there are things that I don't foresee being easy to test by any mean, because they involve things like multitasking, event scheduling, and interrupts. Yet it still is a good idea, even though I do not know just how I would achieve it. At the same time, it is not the kind of development that I like doing; rather to me it is mostly grunt work - of course it would be simpler had I implemented tests from the start.

[Travis B.]

I received my new Numworks calculator a week ago, and it is a very nice piece of hardware, and the hardware design is awfully open (the software that comes with it is not FOSS per se, because it has restrictions on commercial usage, but as a whole it is open for me to read and understand, which is very helpful to me). The downsides are that there were some substantial design changes in the version I have vis-a-vis the version that the Mecrisp-Stellaris port was written for, so I cannot simply run it on the calculator, and furthermore, these design changes make it so that it is difficult for me to simply copy the changes in the Mecrisp-Stellaris port and apply them to zeptoforth; in particular these design changes make it so that significant work may be necessary before zeptoforth runs on the calculator, because I will have to wrap my brain around the memory controller and how to interface it with the flash. Additionally, these changes make it so that I probably will not be able to flash the board in one go, but rather a two stage operation will be necessary to load code onto the calculator, by first flashing the kernel onto the internal flash of the board, and then, using a HEX parser, uploading the rest of any prebuilt binary in HEX format into external flash. Still, with hardware like this, I just cannot give up on getting zeptoforth to run on it, as it would be really nice to have a calculator that can run Forth, kinda like those storied HP calculators of yore.

(I thought that I needed to integrate the HEX parser into the kernel - i.e write it in assembly - but then I realized I could upload and compile it to RAM instead.)

[sasasha]

Frislander's comments on China and the US call to mind a dilemma affecting my life at the moment.

My partner lived in China for 9 months and loved every minute, aware that he was enjoying a charmed life as a white person earning far above the normal wage, but also observing a kind of happiness in his Chinese colleagues that he was unused to as a cynical Brit.

We seem to be uncritically happy in the West to maintain this idea of Chinese people as brainwashed beings at the mercy of the thought police, but I think this does a disservice to the actual people, who are able to think critically even if they do not shout it from the rooftops, and find ways to be themselves despite and because of their environment just as we do. When asked about their one-party government and its restrictions, his friends would say things like "I realise that to you it appears that we have fewer liberties than you do at home. But at least we don't have to go through a ridiculous charade every four or five years where potential leaders lie through their teeth to try to manipulate people to vote for them, a process which renders the entire political process little more than a popularity contest, and elects trigger-happy madmen to the highest offices in the world."

If you are a Uighur, one the other hand, it seems that China is objectively not a good place to be right now. I would not disagree with that and concede that China has its share of human rights abuses and atrocities to answer for. But sometimes I do disagree with the blanket statements we produce that ignore the plank sticking out of our own eye.

The dilemma is slowly coming to a head: my partner increasingly wants to return to China. I broached the subject with my dad. He produced exactly the script I have grown used to about brainwashing. I couldn't help but feel that that in itself is an example of brainwashing.

[Linguoboy]

One of the first books I read that at least somewhat represented the view of ordinary PRC citizens was Mark Salzman's Iron & silk, which was about teaching English there at a time (1986) when this was somewhat unusual for a Westerner. At one point, he relates a debates with his students that ends with one of them saying, "How can you believe what you read in your newspapers? They're all owned by corporations. Our newspapers are owned by the people!"

At the time, I thought it was a laughable line. A decade later, Murdoch launched the Fox News Channel. I'm not laughing any more.

[sasasha]

One of the first books I read that at least somewhat represented the view of ordinary PRC citizens was Mark Salzman's Iron & silk, which was about teaching English there at a time (1986) when this was somewhat unusual for a Westerner. At one point, he relates a debates with his students that ends with one of them saying, "How can you believe what you read in your newspapers? They're all owned by corporations. Our newspapers are owned by the people!"

At the time, I thought it was a laughable line. A decade later, Murdoch launched the Fox News Channel. I'm not laughing any more.

That sounds interesting, I am taking that as a recommendation.

[Raphael]

"How can you believe what you read in your newspapers? They're all owned by corporations. Our newspapers are owned by the people!"

At the time, I thought it was a laughable line. A decade later, Murdoch launched the Fox News Channel. I'm not laughing any more.

Oh, I am still laughing at that line. I'm laughing at what seems to be a near-universal human tendency to switch back and forth between cynicism and naivety in split seconds depending on what's "required"; a tendency to mercilessly dissect the self-serving lies and delusions of people one doesn't like while swallowing whole the equivalent self-serving lies and delusions of people one does like.

Oh, and "You can't believe what you read in (most) newspapers" is precisely the message sent by Fox News, and the attitude that makes people watch them in the first place.

[Linguoboy]

One of the first books I read that at least somewhat represented the view of ordinary PRC citizens was Mark Salzman's Iron & silk, which was about teaching English there at a time (1986) when this was somewhat unusual for a Westerner. At one point, he relates a debates with his students that ends with one of them saying, "How can you believe what you read in your newspapers? They're all owned by corporations. Our newspapers are owned by the people!"

At the time, I thought it was a laughable line. A decade later, Murdoch launched the Fox News Channel. I'm not laughing any more.

That sounds interesting, I am taking that as a recommendation.

Eh, I wonder how well the book really holds up. It was groundbreaking in its time, but so much more has been written in English about the PRC since then and the work of contemporary Chinese authors like Gu Hua, Mo Yan, Su Tong, Wang Anyi, Wang Gang, Wang Ruowang, Yan Lianke, and others is now much more accessible than it was in 1986. A few years ago, I tried reading Salzman's attempt at writing a novel based in China (The Laughing Sutra) and it was straight-up terrible.

[Man in Space]

1. My results came back. Some improvement was noted (yay), but not as much as we’d hoped for this medicine (boo). A confounding factor is that I recently had a fairly severe flare-up which may have impacted the presentation of my condition. The meds do bring some relief, but apparently not as much as they could be. I also was recently started on a more frequent dose which may not have had time to amplify its effects (apparently I metabolize this medicine like a mofo).

2. So the Norman Music Festival was cancelled this year (boo), but I had already made plans to meet up with some friends (yay). I bought the plane tickets and got the time off approved a while ago so I figure I might as well go anyway.