Posted by beckett2 on September 23, 2017, at 15:28:04
In reply to Re: politics, posted by alexandra_k on September 17, 2017, at 18:46:51
>They are getting rid of all the books here. They are being removed from libraries. Put into storage where you are not allowed to browse the shelves. The physical record of the books is gone. You need to do an electronic search for an electronic record. Which is so easily altered... Books are so easily vanished... Then you have computer problems and you can't read that book online anymore. Maybe you need to spend 30 minutes giving some program all your passwords and face and fingerprint recognition ID for the promise of being able to access your course information (HD AV online streamable only)... Or maybe something else will go wrong... Universities don't provide devices so much anymore it is all 'bring your own device' and then if things don't work you are expected to, what, give the university IT staff all your password permissions and everything so they can spend half a day messing about with your system to try and figure what might be wrong...
I worked at a Uni library in which they were doing just that. Some were pleased, but maybe a third of use were mournful. Through the years those paper cards had marginalia written by students and professors. Personally, I still prefer pencil and paper, and the digital age is difficult for me sometimes. Other times it's brilliant. I'm able to talk with you for example. I can research drugs and health and not depend on just one doctor's opinion. And the news! Sometimes it's a boon, and then just as harmful. You probably have heard about the Russian interference the US, on Facebook and other places. Then it's a crazy, 'fact' distorting echo chamber.
>My old supervisor used to say 'you could spend your life arguing with idiots about rubbish if it makes you happy'. It doesn't make me happy. It doesn't.
Maybe the word 'happy' obscures the truth in that statement. As in 'you can make yourself crazy arguing with idiots'.Medicine sounds like a place to do some good, not in as a do-gooder, but as a sometimes satisfying connection and also a position of enough power to effect some minor good within people's lives.
We're in this togther, which is incredibly scary! Silly as the following illustration may be, we saw It, that Stephen King movie. He's incredibly popular, and his best stories are about the tenderness and immediacy of friendship and it's joys that goes hand in hand with alien horror, over which, for awhile at least, these friends exert a modicum of control.
Do you think of yourself as having dealt with trauma? Sometimes that gives an unwelcome sense of the dark side of us.
Hang in there. You're a good person.
poster:beckett2
thread:1094248
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20140225/msgs/1095109.html