Tales from the jar side: Reality and Ethics, but Mostly Awesome YouTube Channels
I promise not to make a "Hindsight is 2020" joke until at least January 20, 2021
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of December 27, 2020 - January 3, 2021. This week I had no classes, webinars, conference talks, or anything else. I made progress on my Managing Your Manager book, but that’s about it. I took some vacation time, though it was hard to really relax with everything going on.
Reality, What A Concept
It was never my intention to wrestle with deep, philosophical issues in this newsletter, but unfortunately such issues came up in my life. While I have a pretty good education around a fairly wide variety of topics, I’ve gone out of my way not to learn much about philosophy or ethics, mostly because I really don’t enjoy unscrewing the inscrutable. I much prefer fields where there are actual “right” answers, so I can learn them and then explain them to others, both for the rewards of helping them and the reflected glory.
When I do get involved in philosophy, I often turn to one of the YouTube channels I favor, and for whom I’m a Patreon supporter, PhilosophyTube. Olly is an actor with an excellent background in philosophy, and his videos are great. One recent one I (re)watched this week was on Amy Coney Barrett and the idea of Originalism in interpreting the Constitution:
As a guest, he included an appearance by Devin Stone, whose YouTube channel LegalEagle is fascinating. I always enjoy his videos, partly for their content, and partly because the whole time my wife (the lawyer) keeps bursting out with “Yes!” and “Exactly!” and nodding as he defines terms she just defined a few minutes earlier. One of his most viewed videos is called Real Lawyer Reacts to South Park Chewbacca Defense and it’s a riot:
See also his Laws Broken: Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory video. It’s great.
Why have I been thinking about philosophy? I’ll keep this brief, because I don’t want to discuss politics in my newsletter —
Seriously. I don’t want to talk about politics here. I doubt that’s why anyone reads this newsletter, and it’s a bottomless pit anyway. I really, really, don’t want to go there.
That said, part of the reason I’ve had a difficult week is the ongoing attempt to destroy democracy in the US, and it’s hard not to talk about it. All I’ll say is that the latest escalation is being led by Ted Cruz (R-Spider Family), following Josh Hawley (R-Who?), mostly because Cruz doesn’t want to be passed on the right when he runs for President in 2024. (Ugh. I can’t believe we’re dealing with that already.) What gives me hope is that Cruz is so staggeringly unpopular — even among Republicans — that even a weasel like Lindsey Graham once said, “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.”
I would buy tickets to see that. But only on video, at least until I get vaccinated.
When I mentioned subverting democracy, you probably thought I was referring to the awful phone call where the President tried to bully the George secretary of state into throwing the election his way. No, I expect that sort of abuse by Trump, and I expect his party to let him get away with it.
On the other hand, there’s this:
The whole mess reminded me again that nearly 47% of the country voted for those monsters, and I often wonder why. My only explanation has to do with the nature of reality. Barack Obama in his book A Promised Land blamed a lot of our current polarization on the fact that we no longer have any uncontested facts. Back when I was growing up, there were three major networks, and while the 6pm news varied between them, they all presented similar — or at least compatible — views of the world. That’s simply not true any more, and we’re paying the price.
I have no idea how to overcome this, so I get depressed. Fortunately I have a support network to rely on, so don’t worry about me. It just made for a down week.
Ethics and the Manager
Another issue I’ve been dealing with this week has been an awful email I received from the owner of a company I’m somewhat involved in that is struggling to survive the pandemic shutdown. I’m going to be vague about it, because the situation is still evolving. The email was sent to a list, by the way, not only to me, so it wasn’t personal.
All I’ll say is that it reminded me of a principle I formulated during the crash after the e-commerce bubble burst:
Financial pressures will make otherwise ethical people do unethical things. And if their ethics were already dicey, watch out.
I’m going to add a section to my Managing Your Manager book on truly unethical managers. I think truly unethical managers are rare, because they tend to be identified quickly and then nobody wants to work with them. The exception, and the real problem, comes when the lack of ethics flows down from the top. Then as a matter of self-preservation everybody starts looking out for themselves, and life becomes increasingly unpleasant as you wait for the whole structure to collapse. Think Enron scandal in the early 2000s.
Sadly, my advice for anyone in a position like that is to get out as quickly as you can. When it happens, the explosion is going to be very ugly, and anyone in range will be covered in mud.
I hate giving advice like that, because not everybody has the freedom to just leave. I understand the ability to pick up and go somewhere else is a matter of some privilege, though I would suggest it’s going to happen in that case anyway sooner or later. There’s not much you can do about it.
I’m adding that to the “miscellaneous” chapter of the book, which currently has the title Special Cases. At the moment, those topics include:
The Flat Organization
Dealing with Micromanagers
Working Remotely
The Tragedy of Human Resources
That last part is another sad discussion, reminding everyone that the Human Resources department doesn’t work for you. The job of HR is to keep the company out of trouble, both legally in the case of employment issues, and publicly when controversies arise. That means HR will normally do whatever it has to in order to make problems go away, whether the resulting decisions seem fair to individual employees or not.
Blech. Another depressing topic. No wonder I struggled this week.
Happier YouTube Channels
Let me lighten the mood by recommending a few YouTube channels I really like that are both informative and entertaining. First, I’m a fan of Jessie Gender, who discusses LGBTQ issues and Star Trek in roughly equal measure. Her holiday special this year was about How Star Trek Failed Religious Inclusion and was fascinating:
Another channel I’ve been enjoying lately goes by the odd name Overly Sarcastic Productions. It involves videos by a man (Blue) and a woman (Red). His videos are all about history:
And hers are about writing fiction, especially her series on tropes:
Both series are a lot of fun.
The women from The Take are great at film criticism, too, and they also like to explain various tropes:
This is starting to get long, so I’ll finish with just a couple more. Jared Halley is excellent at making multipart acapella videos:
Finally, Dr. Becky is an astrophysicist who makes lots of videos, but her monthly Night Sky News is always informative:
Oh, I also have to mention good old Power Play Chess, featuring commentary on chess matches by GM Daniel King. I also really enjoy Patrick Willems, who does film criticism and created the infamous Charl.
I could go on and on, but I think that’s enough. I hope we all get vaccinated soon, because some people aren’t handling all this very well.
Given that I’ve already gotten political in this newsletter, I might as well include this one:
My book is in good enough shape that I hope to arrange for a beta release very soon. More about that when it happens.
As a reminder, you can see all my upcoming courses on the O’Reilly Learning Platform on this web page, which includes links to my books and selected videos.
Thanks again for being here. I hope 2021 is better for all of us.
Last week:
Writing and editing Managing Your Manager
This week:
Spring and Spring Boot, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Functional Java, ditto
No doubt more MYM stuff