{"id":11305,"date":"2010-06-08T07:19:23","date_gmt":"2010-06-08T12:19:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=11305"},"modified":"2010-07-07T19:48:08","modified_gmt":"2010-07-08T00:48:08","slug":"this-explains-so-much","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=11305","title":{"rendered":"This Explains So Much"},"content":{"rendered":"

gIt’s\u00a0 a joke among people who work in applied sciences and technology; engineers are lousy at parties, and they don’t dress up well.<\/p>\n

It’s not part of their lives, of course; their job is to keep your plane from falling apart in mid-air, to keep your gusset plates from ripping apart, to make sure grandma’s pacemaker keeps running until grandma stops from other causes.<\/p>\n

Making small talk?\u00a0 Picking out shirts that match pants?\u00a0 It’s just not part of their lives.<\/p>\n

So if around age 45 an engineer were to switch careers to, say, wedding planning?<\/p>\n

That’d be kinda weird.<\/p>\n

Likewise, when someone who spends their entire career keeping their opinion out of their work as a matter of vocational ethics, who suddenly starts getting paid to have one?<\/p>\n

Matt Welch writes about Helen Thomas<\/a><\/p>\n

I am tempted to feel bad for an 89-year-old lady getting caught in what might be passed off as a senior moment, but there’s no reason to believe that her statement and tone don’t reflect her basic views.<\/p>\n

They also, I believe, reflect an interesting, under-appreciated, and ultimately impermanent media phenomenon: The longer someone is submerged in what they and their organizations regard as traditional “straight” reporting, the more gruesome the results are when the gloves come off. As Thomas herself reportedly said in a 2002 speech, “I censored myself for 50 years…. Now I wake up and ask myself, ‘Who do I hate today?'”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s a great start…<\/p>\n

Straight reporters have been taught for six decades to submerge or even smother their political and philosophical views in the workplace. Like all varieties of censorship, this process creates resentment and distortion. Whatever it is that you feel prevented from saying, you will be more likely to scream once given the chance. This is why, for example, some of the most politically opinionated people you’ll ever meet are newspaper reporters a couple drinks in out yakking with their colleagues.<\/p>\n

Degrading the quality of that discussion still further is the likelihood that the partisanship-averse journos haven’t bothered to construct their own self-conscious political philosophy…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This explains so much about Lori Sturdevant and Nick Coleman…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

gIt’s\u00a0 a joke among people who work in applied sciences and technology; engineers are lousy at parties, and they don’t dress up well. It’s not part of their lives, of course; their job is to keep your plane from falling apart in mid-air, to keep your gusset plates from ripping apart, to make sure grandma’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11305"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11312,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11305\/revisions\/11312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}