Anyone else getting a Corona pay "adjustment"?

(Note: My ruinous 15% pay cut was referenced in another post, but I'm still not done whining about it.)

I suppose it could be worse, and there have been rumblings so we weren't totally shocked, but me and my fellow associates assumed that if it didnt happen by June 1, we were safe.

Wrong!  So am I the only one? 

When Kafka met Kaufman

Of the many uncertainties facing this country in these tumultuous times, among the least pressing is, have we reached peak meta yet?

With a 3,000-word, Charlie Kaufman-esque account* of an awkward blackface moment at a staffer's Halloween party from two years ago, the Washington Post seems to be saying from within its own collective rectum that the answer is SHIDD, NUH.

Here are the key points:

• White liberal Nobody attended the Post's political cartoonist's personal Halloween bash in 2018 as "Megyn Kelly but in blackface," only to leave in tears after some unsophisticated people failed to appreciate the irony.
• Incident went unreported and was mostly forgotten for nearly two years. Until...
• Two people who, as of last week, still felt "harassed" by Nobody complained to the host, Post political cartoonist Tom Toles.
• Toles lied to them both about knowing that the incident happened and about knowing Nobody. He nonetheless apologized for the incident.
• Complainant 1 deemed the apology insufficient, deriding Toles's failure to offer up Nobody's identity for further public humiliation as "a deliberate act of white privilege and cowardice."
•  Nobody, seeking to get ahead of the story, discloses the imminent publication of the Post article to her employer, who summarily fires her.
• The Post publishes a 3,000-word Kaufman-esque account to serve as both didactic tale of the evils of white privilege and cynical CYA for one of its own.

The whole thing is a glorious trainwreck of media virtue-signalling, self-indulgence, and unintentional humor.

The actual news value is nil. I probably should have mentioned that at the top.

(It's worth noting for those unfamiliar that Toles is no stranger to self-referential humor: He carries on the proud hack-political-cartoonist tradition of drawing into the corner of each offering a tiny version of himself reacting to his own joke or providing an obvious punchline where none is otherwise available.)

Update: New York magazine dug into this mess and came up with some interesting inside details that, while not entirely responsive to the important questions raised by the debacle, shed light on how one of the pillars of the influence media views its role in today's environment. Among them:

• The Post story engendered the same confusion among its staff as it did its readership -- namely, why was this a matter of public interest? The Post's designated p.r. muppet claims the presence of newsroom employees at the incident "impelled" the paper to publish the piece: "The story is a microcosm of what the country is going through right now." Sure, it is. I mean, who among us doesn't work for one of the most influential media institutions in the country and hasn't thrown a Halloween party where people wear obnoxious Beltway-themed costumes like Brett Kavanaugh-with-a-beer-helmet and haven't had that blow up in our face when someone showed up in "ironic" blackface?
• The fact that even the two bylined reporters -- both 20-year Post veterans -- seem more than a little embarrassed by their own story suggests they were under direct or indirect orders by editors who are no more than one or two rungs under top editor Marty Baron. The New York follow-up doesn't name who it might have been, which doesn't speak well for them.
• Along those lines, it's clear the Post absolutely will NOT hold anyone accountable for this mess. If they weren't going to return the Pulitzer they got for their role in promoting the now-discredited Russiagate conspiracy theory, they sure as s___ aren't going to walk back this one.
• As the reporting for the Post story was unfolding, senior management were being subjected to intense pressure from within about the Post's own "racism and discrimination" problems. One former reporter quoted in the New York piece infers that "someone complained to the Post about this stupid incident[,] and rather than handling it as an HR matter, they decided the best thing for public relations would be to project transparency by reporting on it themselves." [Emphasis added.]
•  Finally -- and most deliciously -- New York interviewed Complainant 1 after the Post crapped the bed. She expressed "shock" that the reaction to the story she harangued the Post into reporting led to people wanting to cancel her. Where before she claimed the failure to publicly shame a private person to be "an act of white privilege and cowardice," she now preaches the gospel of can't-we-all-just-get-along:

  But truth is — we’re ALL racist, that’s the problem. And we all deserve the grace to learn and change. Let’s use these moments to change hearts and minds, not publicly shame. 

*For those paywalled or too lazy to read the whole goddamn thing, Reason's writeup provides more than sufficient excerpts and analysis.

Take a look, it's in a book: Summer reading

Summer is nigh, which, among other things, means many of us will be doing more leisure reading -- whether we're at the beach, at home in our makeshift "clean rooms," or while perched on our rooftops, rifles in hand, ready to pick off reckless quarantine-violators looters peaceful protesters if they try to touch our stuff.

So what are we planning to read this summer?

I recently finished the first installment of Frank Herbert's Dune series. It's interesting enough, but being more of a Philip K. Dick man (heh), I found it to not really be in my sci-fi wheelhouse.

I'm now reading:

- James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans. I understand that it's quite different from the (very excellent) Michael Mann film of the 1990s starring Daniel Day Lewis in that Hawk-eye fights Magua while dressed as a bear.

- An entry into the "self-proclaimed whistleblower tell-all"/intersectional score-settling-memoir genre called Noncompliant by Carmen Segarra, a one-time staffer at the New York Fed. Thus far, I can only recommend it if you're interested in banking compliance or are super into lengthy descriptions of conference-room meetings.

Up next: 

- Means of Ascent, Book Two of Robert Caro's Lyndon Johnson cycle.

- Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: The Dream Hunters.

- A book on game theory.

Going for Dee Nguyen

As I have mentioned before, some days, you just can't Nguyen. Today, MTV decided that it had to sack TV personality Dee Nguyen from one of its reality shows because the Word and Thought Police of the Internet were offended by her "inflammatory" social media posts. I have to admit I was initially unable to figure out what the problem was (so I will probably be sent to a reeducation camp by month's end), but fortunately, elements of the offended class soon furnished an explanation of the offensiveness of her Twitter posts.

It turns out that Ms. Nguyen is suspected of supporting Black Lives Matter "for clout." Although she agreed with the substantive position of the offended ones (i.e., that Black Lives Matter), the form of her expression was incorrect, and her motives (the "for clout" part) were thought to have been improper.

So, for the failure of form, and possible improper motive, she had to be sacked. There was no other way to appease the progressive forces of tolerance and reason. Her obeisance to the prevailing dogma was less than perfect, and so, unforgivable. The offended class was inconsolable. How could Ms. Nguyen so fail to conform her external stereotype on the very day of George Floyd's memorial service? It cast a Pol over the right of the offended class to not be saddened by words, thoughts or (possible) motives out of keeping with their Universal Scheme of Things.

We are so fortunate to have these wise and tolerant progressive people to protect us from wrongful thoughts. To paraphrase an older singer, "The answer, my friend, is showin' that Dee Nguyen, the answer is showin' that Dee Nguyen."

https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/mtvs-the-challenge-severs-ties-with-dee-nguyen-after-offensive-black-lives-matter-comments-1234629570/
 

Police should be abolished because of children's cartoons

This is KKRR levels of stupidity.

Presented for your enjoyment (or mental self-flagellation)

https://collider.com/abolish-the-police-steven-universe-she-ra/

How is your employer choosing to virtue signal?

And are they actually making any changes?

Why are you a bad ally?

Disqus. Extra points for how you plan to change that by joining riots.