Apologia

Episode Ninety-Six: Apologia.
In which all reel.


1 comment:

  1. This week marked by a despondency around the conflict of being responsible for shepherding union membership through layoff options, and no one in my team being able to agree upon how those options actually work. My insistence that the details really do matter is met with shrugs and further confusion.

    I work with data and data sorting machines. Order of operations is crucial. Details of the function of each step is crucial. The output of each step affects the dataset. Changing the order, or the details of each individual step, while the sorting mechanism is underway (which was the case weeks before we even realized it) significantly affects the result.

    First Frame: a weak justification for our confusion. Second frame: something that appeared on my twitter feed, Hannah Arendt, who coined 'the banality of evil.' Third frame: something one of the committee members had cited in response to my concern about process - Arrow's Impossibility Theorem (the text in the frame from the Wiki page of same). Resolution: a quote that stood out from Richard Herring's podcast interview with Alex Horne (2018), a throwaway joke that stuck.

    Something about the leg and the foot. Peon: with the latin stemming from 'foot' - my serving the foot soldiers in the union. The foot serving the leg, which, in turn, serves the body. The foot the part of the body in closest contact with the ground. The foot more dependent on the leg than the leg is dependent on the foot. My having to do work that is emotionally present - counseling brothers and sisters in crisis - as opposed to the usual, abstraction - i.e., being grounded. Just thought Herring's joke seemed to work in that frame.

    Guy is holding an adjustable wrench which, when in a clenched fist, is one of many graphic logos representing worker's unions.

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