The Social Trap and The Social Terrorists

Of all the things worth saying, or writing, now or tomorrows, it’s often the case someone’s said it better before.

Level 3: The Trap

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However, some acquaintances don’t share your desire to avoid awkward encounters. In fact, they often seek your company despite your complete inability to relate to each other. This person is seemingly immune to awkwardness and once they latch onto you, you are not allowed to leave until they are done with you.

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For example, you might be sitting by yourself in a café, enjoying a cup of coffee.  And then you see her squinting up at the drink menu.

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She’s trapped you at social gatherings a few times,  backing you into a corner and then standing at just the right angle so that you’d have to physically push her out of your path to escape.  She’s extremely passionate about a variety of things that you have no real interest in, like veganism and the healing properties of soy.  She can talk about these things for hours without pause.  While you don’t mind that she feels that way, you don’t particularly want to hear about it in such great detail.  But she tells you anyway.  Over and over and over.  You might make a feeble attempt at steering the conversation to a topic of more mutual interest, but she doesn’t want to talk about what you want to talk about.

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The first time you escaped her conversational death-grip, you thought that she had probably said all she needed to say and that the next time you saw her, you could maybe talk about something else.  But no.  She checks up on you.  She wants to know if you’ve tried any of the things she suggested.  When you tell her that you “haven’t gotten around to it yet,” the cycle starts over again.

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You want to avoid this kind of interaction, so you turn your chair away, hoping that she won’t see you when she turns around.

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But it’s too late.  She’s spotted you.

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She’s not quite sure if it’s you yet, but you can feel her eyes focusing on you.  You risk a glance to see if she’s still there, even though you know that she is.

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And then you accidentally lock eyes with her.

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Once eye contact is established, she begins to lurch toward you in slow motion, like a zombie in a bad horror movie.  You are consumed by a desire to bolt, but you don’t.  Your obligation to adhere to social decencies outweighs your sense of self-preservation. You stay right where you are, unable to look away.

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You are going to have to talk about soybeans.  A lot.  And you are going to have to pretend that you like it.  To protect your dignity.

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Level 4: Well-intentioned social terrorism

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The well-intentioned social terrorist does not alert you before they invade your safety bubble.  It’s always a surprise.  You’ll come home, exhausted and eager to finally feel safe from unwanted interaction.

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But then…

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You’re cornered like an animal. There’s nowhere to go.

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You’d always assumed that your own home was a safe place – a place where you were not in danger

of sudden, undesired social interaction.

But your pathetic delusions of safety implode into the realization that nowhere is safe anymore.  

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You could tell them no, but you aren’t busy and you don’t have any immediate plans, so you don’t really have an acceptable reason to decline their company.

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You could try to lie and say that you’re just coming home to drop some stuff off before you have go somewhere.  But if you do that, you’ll have to spend the rest of the night in total darkness, because if your friend walks by and notices that your lights are on, they’re going to know you were lying.

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But if you allow this person into your house, you are no longer in control of when the interaction ends.  This is not as simple as finding the right opportunity to walk away.  No.  This is some next-level shit.  You can’t just walk out of your own house and leave the person there.  Where would you go?

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If you want to be left alone, you’re going to have to wait it out until you can convince the other person to leave.

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But even then, it isn’t over.

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Now that you are aware that your home is not the impenetrable fortress of protection you once thought it was, you are forced to live in a constant state of slight uneasiness. Someone could surprise you at any time.

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What if your friend decides to surprise you with a visit every day?  Now you have to worry about keeping your place picked up, “just in case.”

You’re scared to play music or watch movies because then you can’t pretend to not be home if someone knocks on your door.  

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You are no longer in control of your life.  

That’s life…

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Dudes Strike Out Every Day

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Karen DeCrow, a 1970s leader of the National Organization for Women, died last Friday. She helped a little girl overcome the prejudice of a jerk:

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Ms. DeCrow was a writer, a lawyer and a tireless campaigner for women’s rights. Her causes were national but also local. In the early 1970s, she represented a 7-year-old girl who wanted to play Little League baseball but was being denied.

“Over my dead body will girls ever play Little League baseball,” a coach told her at the time. “If one of them ever struck out a boy, he would be psychologically scarred for life.”

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If she can play, why not just let her play? I remember when (one-handed) Jim Abbott threw a no-hitter for the New York Yankees.

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Their batting order included 6 All-Stars, just saying:

1   Kenny Lofton (CF)*

2   Felix Fermin (SS)

3   Carlos Baerga (2B)*

4   Albert Belle (LF)*

5   Randy Milligan (1B)

6   Manny Ramirez (DH)*

7   Candy Maldonado (RF)

8   Jim Thome (3B)*

9   Junior Ortiz (C)

10  Sandy Alomar (PH-C)*

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So, in keeping with the spirit of Karen DeCrow’s work, a NY Times writer asks, Is Softball Sexist?

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The conventional wisdom is that baseball is for boys and men, and softball is for girls and women. But women have been playing baseball since long before they had the right to vote. As the national pastime went professional, women were forced out of it — and into softball. Title IX, the 1972 federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education, also protects equal access to and funding of sports for boys and girls at the school level, and girls have been fighting to play baseball — with lawsuits, if necessary — since the 1970s. But equal access is often interpreted to mean not baseball, but softball.

Both men and women swim, ski, snowboard and run marathons and sprints. Both play tennis and soccer and basketball. Softball, though, is a completely distinct sport, with different pitching — underhand — and different equipment, including a larger ball. It also has shorter distances from pitcher to home plate and between bases, fewer innings and a smaller outfield. Yes, Division I softball is demanding, far from the beery fun of middle-aged weekend leagues. But the women’s version of baseball is not softball. It’s baseball.

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George Carlin might disagree about that baseball manliness factor:

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STOP BULLYING NOW – LIVE AND LET LIVE

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Extrajudicial punishment is often a feature of politically repressive regimes, but even self-proclaimed or internationally recognized democracies have been known to use extrajudicial punishment under certain circumstances.

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Okay, extrajudicial punishment, in any form, is understood as undemocratic and illiberal… I would agree, as would most freedom loving people (so long as they’re not of the freedom for MEEEE BUT NOT FOR THEEEE persuasion).

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Mobbing in the context of human beings means bullying of an individual by a group in any context, such as a family, friends, peers, school, workplace, neighborhood, community, or online.

When it occurs as emotional abuse in the workplace, such as “ganging up” by co-workers, subordinates or superiors, to force someone out of the workplace through rumor, innuendo, intimidation, humiliation, discrediting, and isolation, it is also referred to as malicious, nonsexual, nonracial, general harassment.^[1]

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Okay, mobbing anywhere is understood as a means of bullying behavior–abusive, gangsterish and harassing in nature. How much more so would six or seven years of it be? At work, and at school? It’s the kind of conduct that has led to many, many suicides. The galling thing is how the cowardly perpetrators of this behavior hide behind computer screens, hackers, resources and the fear of people who would intervene but for the threat that they too would become targets of such behavior. That’s the shame.

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Riding the rail (also called running out of town on a rail) was a punishment in Colonial America in which a man (rarely a woman) was made to straddle a fence rail (usually the triangular split-rail rather than the modern machine-milled) held on the shoulders of at least two men, with other men on either side to keep him upright. The victim was then paraded around town or taken to the city limits and dumped by the roadside.^{[citation needed]} Intense pain came from the weight of the body resting on the sharp, narrow edge and injuries from the ride could, if the victim were stripped, cut the crotch and make walking painful. Alternatively, the term also refers to tying a person’s hands and feet around a rail so the person dangles under the rail.^{[citation needed]}

The punishment was usually a form of mob extrajudicial punishment, sometimes imposed in connection with tarring and feathering.^[1] It was intended to show community displeasure with the victim so he either conformed his behavior to the mob’s demands or left the community.

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Riding the rail is just ghastly. Any wonder it faded away in oh so civilized America many decades ago? Unfortunately there are those who’d revive the practice. I’d suggest that before anyone celebrates these forms of mob behavior for any reason, they stop and consider that people all around the world today are being subjected to mob rule of this sort just for being born the way they are.

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Live and Let Live

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Don’t be the one to revive and perpetuate the type of behaviors that keep non-conformists, misfits, outcasts, minorities–ethnic, religious, sexual–fearing the consequences of living an open life, free to live, free to love, and free to do right by those around them.

Don’t create the conditions that constrain the truths people can tell.

Live and Let Live.

Stop Bullying Now.

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CanILive?

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To Space By Trampoline?

That’s a sanctioned Russian official’s retort to the USA and the EU:

How much spring and surface area and above ground clearance would such a trampoline need to have to achieve this objective?

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It sounds like something Marvin the Martian would come up with…

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Elon Musk Made $1 Last Year

It must be nice to have achieved a level of success that enables one’s ability to just play for the love of the game:

(Reuters) – Tesla Motors Inc (TSLA.O) Chief Executive Elon Musk was paid about $70,000 in 2013 in salary and stock options, only a fragment of what he stands to eventually receive in company stock, Tesla said in a filing on Thursday with U.S. securities regulators.

Musk’s total cash compensation in 2013 officially was $33,280, which is aligned with the minimum wage in California, but he only takes $1 per year in pay.

The co-founder of the electric carmaker in 2012 was granted the option to buy 5.27 million Tesla shares at $31.17 over a 10-year period if he meets a series of performance goals.

Tesla shares on Friday were trading down 4 percent at

$199.50.

Musk, 42, has been the CEO since October 2008 and chairman since April 2004.

Tesla’s annual meeting will be held on June 3 in Mountain View, California. At that meeting, a non-binding vote will be held on executive compensation.

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Tech Firms Settle High-Tech Workers’ Lawsuit

They could’ve paid $9 Billion:

The 3-year-old case revolves around a “gentlemen’s agreement” that the companies forged to retain employees. Internal emails excavated during the pre-trial proceedings showed Google, Apple and other major technology employers agreed not to recruit each other’s workers to help protect their own interests.

The companies maintained that the “no-poaching” cartel wasn’t illegal because they still could hire employees from their partners in the arrangement, as long as the workers initiated the inquiries about vacant positions.

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At one point in 2006, Google sought Jobs’ permission to hire a respected programmer, Jean-Marie Hullot, to run a new engineering office in Paris even though Hullot had already resigned from Apple, according to emails turned over in the case. Google also wanted to hire some other former Apple engineers that formerly worked with Hullot. After some email negotiations about what Hullot and his colleague would be working on at Google, Jobs wrote, “We’d strongly prefer that you not hire these guys.” Google then backed off its Paris plans, according to emails.

In another instance, Schmidt fired a Google recruiter who riled Jobs by contacting an Apple employee about a job opening. After being informed of the firing, Jobs responded with a smiley face in an email.

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Zanderdamus

The longtime publisher/editor of the “Complete Handbook” sports stats and data compilations series, Zander Hollander, has died:

In addition to his wife of 62 years, the former Phyllis Rosen, Mr. Hollander is survived by his daughter, Susan Whitman, and two granddaughters. His son, Peter, died in 2009.

One of the most popular features in his yearbooks were the predictions of how seasons would end. Mr. Hollander tended to throw out wild ideas. One, from the early 1980s, concerned 1989: “An earthquake had left Candlestick Park unplayable,” he wrote.

That would turn out to be the year an earthquake, on Oct. 17, caused a 10-day delay in the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics.

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New Month

Rabbit, rabbit.

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Crimea Is to Russia…

As Ukraine is to the EU?…

Thinking about it, it seems that the sanctions being placed on Russia for the annexation and consolidation of Crimea will increase the costs, but probably not beyond the price Russia’s willing to pay. I can’t really vouch for the reliability of these graphics, but I like maps, so here goes:

It seems that Crimea may end up being a net drain on Russia in the short-to-medium term. They’ll need to overhaul the infrastructure to decouple Crimea from the Ukraine. The Russians may actually have more luck with Crimea than Ukrainians will have with the country they’ll have left, but with the Eastern wing being clipped by the Russians, Ukraine will tilt more towards the EU. What does the EU want with Ukraine?

If Russia is allowed to assert tighter influence or control over the Ukraine, a great deal of the supply lines for the gas Europe needs will be subjected to this Russian influence. The EU would rather have more leverage over the situation. Imagine… Russia controls the raw materials and the main mechanisms of delivery…

Ukraine also has some of the best quality land that side of Iowa. That “arch” of lush green land in the central/north-east central part of the map, a big chunk of that is in the Ukraine:

That land’s enough to make a gaucho mad, it’s not the Great Plains, but it’s much closer to the EU, and full of gas fields to boot. I figured all of this haggling had to be about something worthwhile.

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The New Digital Age

Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen: The New Digital Age

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