A chill person who is motivated to get along with others so we can all live in peace. :) Yup a real scourge over here.
vaccinationviablowdart
joined 1 year ago
how does it go?
so what's wrong with floppy disks?
Here in Canada , fax is widely used in the medical field in the same way. One could not run a medical office or organization of any kind or size without a fax line. I have heard the legal sector is likewise reliant.
In a functional way I don't know it's wrong to say email is less secure. It's not that they don't want to buy computers. Everyone has freaking computers; gimme a break. Email (1980s tech) is almost as antiquated as fax machines (1970s) and has many vulnerabilities. There is no way in hell your dermatologist is getting to a PGP party anytime soon. They probably use the same password for every account and that password is probably their name or something and have been using the same one for 20 years. The password is known by perhaps dozens of current and former employees. The email is downloaded onto devices which may not use encryption for storage. They don't install windows patches but they do install random shit from the internet. And so on. OTOH, who is hacking fax machines?
The solution isn't to move to email, it's to hop past email to use a natively encrypted technology with security enforced by a service provider. If the public funders would step up to support a Free Software solution this could have been done already. But instead they fund this and that proprietary system that doesn't work out, then have to start from scratch in a few years. There hasn't been incentive to create interoperability. Just a bunch of privately-held companies frothing at the mouth to make all the $$$ they see in the health care industries competing with each other.
BTW I have heard that fax machines are still in wide use in the US medical field also, but it depends what system you are in. E.g "kaiser" system has it's own internal comms system they use and so on. But inter-system, fax will always be the lowest common denominator.
Should fund education with public money.
There is a lot of focus on whether this child should or even could have been vaccinated against measles. It is impossible to know based on the information. They were due for 0, 1 or 2 doses or MMR vaccine.
At any rate, I would suggest reading it in the other direction: no vaccinated child has died of the measles. Vaccination prevents this disaster. It is likely (but not certain) that many other children were in contact with the same situation which ultimately led to the death of this one. Many of them didn't die because their parents took responsible steps.
In another comment I posted the vaccine schedule for Ontatio. MMR is scheduled at 12 months of age, same as many other places. Your first dose (of the two children need) is only considered "valid" if given on or after the 1st birthday.
However the vaccine is approved as safe and has short-term efficacy when given as young as 6 months. The immunity just doesn't "last" as long when given earlier, which is why its scheduled for 12 months where risk is low. In those communities where anti-vax people congregate, diligent parents can consider giving their children an extra dose at 6 months to cut that risky time in half.
In Ontario, MMR is at 12 months and varicella (chickenpox) is separate at 15 months.
Other provinces, territories and states in Canada/US have variations and some include MMRV instead of MMR followed by Varicella.
MMRV is scheduled routinely at age 4-6.
An overview of the routine childhood schedule can be seen here.
The full ontario schedule can be found here, with the routine childhood schedule being on page 3.
By the way for anyone wondering why bother vaccinate against chickenpox, it's because chickenpox and shingles are the same thing. If you never get chickenpox you never get shingles. Shingles fucking sucks and causes blindness, untreatable pain and other miseries.
This was a comment on Vancouver librarians caught in the middle of the culture war by @zephyreks but I ended up writing so much I thought I'd make it a new post. Hope that is OK.
The term "culture war" is excessively very dismissive. The subjects that people take issue to here are matters of material well being.
People in the article and comments are using the word "ban" alot. I don't think there is any request to "ban" anything. It is just the one library. When something is "banned" it is prohibited from all sources. After actually taking a look at the list of books I don't think any of them should be removed from the collection on the basis of the complaints. I do think some of them could be re-shelved. But getting all worked up about a few random complaints that literally anyone can make because they are in a bad mood, and obliquely referring to nazis/holocaust is going way overboard.
I also don't see that anyone is "caught in the middle" of anything. Some people made complaints. People are always complaining about any large organization. They dismissed the complaints and as far as I can tell, that was the end of it? I got very bored reading off topic commentary so maybe I missed something.
about the books
I was curious so I did some looking at the actual titles since the person who wrote this article didn't have time I guess because they did so much interviewing ideologues instead. There are 3 themes in the target books.
theme 1: lgbt and sex positive books for young people
Looks like about 1/3 of the target works are pro-LGBT/sexpositive and seeking to explain this to some young audiences. I wasn't familiar with Cory Silverberg so I looked up the amazon page for You Know, Sex:
In a bright graphic format featuring four dynamic middle schoolers, You Know, Sex grounds sex education in social justice, covering not only the big three of puberty—hormones, reproduction, and development—but also power, pleasure, and how to be a decent human being.
I added emphasis because.... what a thing to complain about.
To me this book sounds perfectly nice. But whoever requests for it to be removed likely thinks it'll cause kids to come to harm. Who knows what kinds of delusional thinking motivated the specific complaint. But it isn't "culture war" because they are under the impression that this book will be dangerous physically and socially and spiritually.
theme 2: racist caricatures and other hate imagery in children's books
Another 1/3 of the complaints are about children's books depicting racist or hateful imagery. I think these complaints are legitimate. Books like this should be available for adults but not circulated to little kids! They are of historical interest, not entertainment.
I borrowed Asterix the Gladiator from the Internet Archive Library and flipped through it. Here is one of panels which is probably at issue. (I am not sure about the etiquette/politics of sharing this. I would consider feedback in the direction of not sharing racist material.) I have blurred out the actual caricature but described what is depicted in text. I put it in the spoiler. Summary: it's exactly what you think it'll be.
spoiler
This panel depicts a person with dark brown skin, a very small skull, eyes so close together that they touch and are crossed, a huge open mouth with giant red lips (larger than skull) and one tooth sticking out, wide nose, big ears, goofy body language.
I don't care to actually read this so I don't know what the plot is about. But I can say that flipping through it, the people with brown skin only come into view a few times in dozens of pages. They are not characters in the story, just devices the author occasionally employs. They are present 1-3 panels at a time.
They look to be in positions of servitude. They do not perform their jobs properly and are therefor deserving subjects of violence by the characters with pink skin. Many pages earlier, a masseurs with brown skin gives too deep a massage to a solider with pink skin. So the soldier beats him. The masseur's boss complains: "You have no right to beat up my masseurs! They're horribly expensive this season!" The most superficial joke being that the only reason not to beat the person with brown skin is the economic impact on some other person with pink skin. The person with brown skin has no lines and is depicted in a racist, caricatured way similar to the spoiler above. Except instead of being goofy he is big and strong. So strong he casually (and presumably accidentally) hurts the person with pink skin. Once he is punched so hard he flies across the room, he disappears from the story.
I remember when I was a kid, seeing this kind of thing. This series looks vaguely framiliar but there is a whole cannon of this shit. My parents did their best to raise me explicitly anti racist and I recognized the messaging as vile. I understood that it was communicating a generalized degradation and inhumanity related to perceived race. In both the presence (as objects) and their absence (as full characters). I remember being confused why people I thought of as "good" would have stuff like this lying around. But I am sure that it got into my head anyway. Sometimes really horrid stereotype illustrations I saw as a kid pop into my mind's eye. I wish I didn't have those in my brain because they are despicable. If an adult intentionally wishes to study hate lit it is different.
This is the kind of thing that teaches from a young age "black lives don't matter". Black people only involved as props, punchlines, animalistic, deserving subjects of violence etc.
There are a bazillion kids books that aren't trash like this. I vote to move these to whatever the dewey decimal is for historical hate literature, in the adult section. Possibly in the Reference library to convey the seriousness. I didn't investigate the other children's books but it seems that they are all on a similar theme and not appropriate for kids.
theme 3: right wing nutjobs
The remaining 1/3 of the books are more recent publications which appear to be regressive shitty books full of lies. I know the Shrier book has been thoroughly widely debunked criticized rebuked. It is full of medical falsehoods and her own weird fantasies misrepresented as scientific. It primarily advocates for denial of health care to trans people. This is not "culture war". She literally wants to seize control and manipulate the balance of chemicals in the bodies of other people. It is as material as you can get.
The other books by the likes of Beck, Ngo are certainly full of bullshit. Judging by the title and my understanding of the authors, they will probably be encouraging violence. I had never heard of Forbes before. The book is highly rated on amazon and the top rated review begins:
Fantastic book. As a supporter of those bands I found that the information in it is invaluable.
Emphasis added. Reviewer is a fan of white supremacist music and ideas. All the positive reviews are from people who are straight up white power jackasses.
I found this review on goodreads that I think is probably accurate:
This thing is f***ng nightmare. Read it for research on a project. It ended up being really valuable as a primary source, but if you're not literally writing a book about white nationalist skinheads, I can't imagine wanting to read the biased blathering of a bunch of racist boneheads reminiscing about their glory days.
This person also describes who there is value in the book even though the topic really sucks.
It seems like this book gives really shitty people good feelings about themselves. That sucks. When this kind of people feel good about themselves, they like to go around kicking the shit out of people who are just minding their own business. They form militias and murder. The reason someone was bothered by this book is likely because they know it can help stir the pot and encourage street violence. I know people who've been targeted by these douche bags. It's serious.
This book costs about $200-300 to purchase. It should be in the reference library with all the other expensive books, not in circulation.
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Where I live we don't have a hand gesture for that. I am curious what it entails?
So this guy was sitting there watching a video or whatever, probably not attending to his surroundings, when out of nowhere some other person is suddenly right in front of his face confronting him, waving his hands around. Since your description of the hand gesture is "what the fuck"--- a pretty hostile thing to communicate to a stranger by any method--- wouldn't you say there is a possibility that it was interpreted as menacing?
Even if you do know better than to start a fight on public transit, this guy doesn't know you. People start fights for less. He's not reading your mind, to know you are thinking like sun tzu, and would therefor not attack from a position of weakness like the seat in front. People get stabbed on busses and trains for minor insults. Don't you think he could have just been cautious?
Or conversely, he knew himself to be potentially violent. Maybe he was trying to hold himself back from starting a fight and thought backing down was just the best strategy to exit the situation. I've known people who have control to a point and they sometimes do weird things to keep themselves from that point.
Ah. I see.
So did the team mate then respond in a manner such as
And then carry such a grudge as to later recount it and their dissatisfaction with the person even having made the error? Or the team mates acknowledged it and everyone moved on? Even if there was more teasing afterwards, you have to understand the context is that everyone who was playing a video game made a choice to do that with each other specifically, whereas this guy did not make a choice to be in a confrontation with you. You were just happening at him. And by your telling of the story, you were so mad thinking about "the old days" BS by the time you said something there basically was nothing he could have done to make you feel better. Don't you think there is a possibility your body language was communicating more than you are even able to describe here? Even exactly as described it sounds menacing. But don't you think he could have somehow gotten the feeling that you were mad at him as an avatar for all the problems and degeneration of the modern times?
You were a stranger of unknown intention and capacities. This man likely wanted you to leave him alone and go away. Even if you are correct and he did feel shame at being noticed for his rudeness, felt bad for interrupting your thoughts, and intended to concede to you a moral victory, he was probably also aware at the potential threat. Which, in a video game, is a non issue. That's one of the things about video games: they are fake.
I don't think it's wrong to make requests of people around you. You wanna ask people to be quiet, that's fine. But you need to learn how to do it in a peaceable way. Think of it as modeling the behavior you want to see. You want others to be quiet, unobtrusive and considerate, then you should be quiet, unobtrusive and considerate. You can still assert your needs and desires. Sometimes you will be accommodated and other times you won't be. If, as you say, the guy was completely apologetic because he knew what he had done was wrong, then you could have been really pleasant about it, no "wtf" hand gestures, and you would still have gotten what you wanted. You could have even said "thank you, I appreciate your consideration" and smiled and been happy about it. Would have been a totally different story to tell here in the thread. All under your control.