Profanity alert: “Quiet Quitting” is horseshit

So recently I came across the term “quiet quitting”. I assumed it meant someone discreetly taking their stuff from their workplace and one day sending an email or SMS that they’re not coming back. Instead, it’s a mendacious term for work to rule.

“Quiet quitting” is defined as going in to work every day, not going above or beyond, and pushing back against unreasonable demands by management.

Um, what the fuck?

That’s not “quitting”, not by any stretch of the imagination. That’s “work to rule”. And in this day and age, it’s sensible. I had to laugh at the commenter who claimed that “quiet quitters” were placing their advancement at risk. Deepthroat Capitalism’s cock as much as you want, you’re not becoming one of the exploiters.

I am a regular browser of several content aggregator websites like Bored Panda, Cheezburger, and Diply, among others. Over the past four years, I have read story after story after story of workers being exploited. Workers who were found guilty of bullshit charges right before they were due for an increase or promotion. Workers who were strung along with promises of bonuses, promotions and/or raises that never happened. Workers who put in massive overtime and got token rewards, or sometimes no rewards at all. Companies who announced massive profits and gave huge bonuses to management, only to turn around and tell the workers there wasn’t enough money for increases for them.

Like I said in my previous post:

Once upon a time, loyalty to a company was recognised and rewarded. If you stayed late when needed, took on tasks outside your job description, and made an extra effort, you could expect to be favoured for raises and promotions. Today, going above and beyond at work is more likely to get you exploited than rewarded. And now, workers have come to realise this.

Rephrasing work to rule as quiet quitting is just horseshit propaganda. It’s part of the exploiters’ pushback against workers’ new awareness of, and refusal to be, exploited.

Increasingly, I’m seeing stories of people quitting and their workplaces giving them laughable counter-offers, then calling the leaving workers “selfish” when they refuse. This is just more bullshit. The real selfish ones are the managers and employers who exploit workers any which way they can, and make token offers to get them to stay, usually unsuccessfully.

Don’t buy the lie. Quiet Quitting is not quitting. And today, going above and beyond more often leads to exploitation than to benefits.

Nobody wants to work any more? No, nobody wants to work for YOU any more!

Recently, there’s been plenty of bitching and moaning from employers that “nobody wants to work any more”. In response, and as mentioned in this Cracked article, someone put together a list of newspaper articles dating back to 1894 (1894!) about employers complaining that nobody wants to work any more. I daresay that had the creator searched back further in time, they would have found similar grumbles from even earlier.

The “Great Resignation” is a misnomer. As the Cracked article mentions, unemployment in the U.S. is at the lowest it has been for a very long time. Yes, huge numbers of people resigned. But they didn’t leave the workforce. They left to take up other jobs.

Why are people leaving their jobs? Because their workplaces have been treating them abysmally and paying badly. An article on the Business Insider website reveals that U.S. workers who switched jobs earned bigger raises than workers who stayed.

Once upon a time, loyalty to a company was recognised and rewarded. If you stayed late when needed, took on tasks outside your job description, and made an extra effort, you could expect to be favoured for raises and promotions. Today, going above and beyond at work is more likely to get you exploited than rewarded. And now, workers have come to realise this.

Modern business leadership doctrine is psychopathic, short-termist, and narrow. It views workers as an expense item, and people to be exploited, not as what earns income for the company. It tries to boost profits in the short term by any means possible, including overworking and underpaying employees. This is ultimately to the detriment of the employer.

Over the past few years, I have read numerous stories of companies lying to and exploiting their workers, only for the workers to quit and leave said employers in the lurch. The person who got loaded with ever increasing amounts of work as time went on and who was always refused raises leaving for a better paid job and a huge logjam resulting. The consultant who found out his company was earning more from his services each month than he was being paid in a year asking for a raise and being told there wasn’t enough money, only to receive the offer of a 50% increase when he gave notice. The driver who delivered to two of a company’s biggest clients being refused a raise and resigning, resulting in the company ultimately losing the contracts because the replacement drivers were not nearly as good as the driver who left. The companies that pay experienced workers lower wages than newbies and refuse to hike the wages, only to lose the experienced workers to companies that actually value the experience they bring.

I also read the story of a company who “promoted” a worker, then promptly fired him when he asked for a raise. A promotion without a raise is not a promotion. If I learnt that my workplace had done that, the first thing I would do is read my contract to find out my notice period. The second thing I would do is put out my CV.

It takes a worker 3 to 6 months to get up to speed, and around two years to get good. At the two year mark, a shrewd company would give the employee a handsome raise to encourage them to stay so they would continue to benefit from the employee’s experience. This is what happened to me at my first job. Nowadays, workplaces view workers as interchangeable objects, not as people with differing skillsets and experience.

The Truth about nobody wanting to work any more.

The bottom line is, nobody wants to work. We work to earn a living. As the joke goes “I would rather be on a yacht in the Mediterranean, being handfed grapes by a naked supermodel, but I’m here.” What has happened is that workers have realised that what they were told about loyalty was a pack of lies, and they are not afraid to leave a terrible workplace and get a better job at a better employer.

On polio, monkeypox, and COVID

Recently, a case of polio was discovered in New York State, in an unvaccinated man. This is the first case in the U.S. in nearly a decade.

Polio has been around since the dawn of humanity. Because people were constantly exposed to poliovirus, paralytic polio was rare. It is believed that the introduction of sewage systems, by reducing constant exposure, led to the rise of paralytic polio. By the 1950s, polio was killing thousands and disabling many times that number every year. Huge numbers of victims had to live out their lives in iron lungs. Outbreaks were checked by closing public swimming pools and other areas where polio was likely to spread.

In the 1950s Sabin and Salk, among others, developed effective polio vaccines. Parents, keenly aware of the harms of polio, literally lined up around the block to get their children vaccinated. Paralytic polio went into freefall, and is now history, in every sense of the word.

There has been an outbreak of monkeypox outside of Africa for the first time ever. So far, some 20,000 people have been infected. As deforestation continues, such outbreaks are likely to become more common. Vaccines for monkeypox are currently being developed.

The polio case, monkeypox, and COVID-19 reveal an inconvenient truth for antivaxxers. Before widespread mass vaccination programs, outbreaks of diseases killed many. One of the few methods to halt diseases were lockdowns. In fact, Isaac Newton developed Calculus during a lockdown for the plague. Once vaccines were introduced, lockdowns stopped being used. When COVID broke out, we had no protection, and lockdowns were brought back. Once vaccines were created and vaccination began, restrictions were loosened and eventually lifted altogether.

Antivaxxers see our modern World, free from previously terrible diseases and want to get rid of vaccination, not realising it is vaccination that keeps these diseases at bay. They would have us return to a World where outbreaks, and quarantines and lockdowns, are commonplace.

Vaccines did not cause Justin Bieber’s facial paralysis

Well, I was wrong about my last post being my last post.

Justin Bieber has announced that he has had to pause his World Tour due to facial paralysis caused by Ramsay-Hunt Syndrome. Unsurprisingly, antivaxxers have jumped on this and blamed COVID vaccines, because of course they would. Unfortunately, they have been abetted by a “satirical” news website which falsely claimed that Bieber had blamed things on the vaccines.

AFP’s Fact Checker website has this to say about the article that appeared on the Vancouver Times:

Social media users shared an article that claims Justin Bieber said his facial paralysis was due to the Covid-19 vaccine. This is false; there is no evidence that Bieber made such a public comment, and the article comes from a website that has previously published false claims under the guise of “satire.”

From the article linked above

Ramsay-Hunt Syndrome is caused by the varicella virus, responsible for Chicken Pox and Shingles. Bieber was born in 1994, and thus received the MMR triple jab, not the MMRV (introduced in 2005) that also protects against varicella. It is ironic that antivaxxers have tried to pin the blame on vaccination, as MMRV would likely have protected Bieber against Ramsay-Hunt. It’s par for the course for antivaxxers to blame vaccines, though. Even for things they couldn’t possibly cause.

Last thoughts on Identity and Advocacy

This is probably going to be my last ever blogpost, even though I’m not 100% certain of it.

I know, I know. I loudly announced an end to my blogging before, only to change my mind, but this time I suspect it will be.

As I’ve gone on, the intervals between me posting have got longer and longer. Originally, I posted weekly, then just a few times a month. Now it’s down to 3 or more weeks between posts, and lately more than a month. I’m running out of fresh things to blog about.

Recently, I’ve seen some neurotypicals mock autistics for using identity-first language, and accusing us of defining ourselves by our autism. This is a straw man argument, and a key reason why nonautistics shouldn’t lecture autistics on autism.

I am a white autistic South African male. Each of those labels describes me and none of them define me, but all of them make up who I am. If any of them were different, I would not be me. This is especially true in the case of my autism, as it affects how I perceive, interpret, and interact with the World around me.

One of the most pernicious falsities used against autistic self-advocates is that they are illegitimate as they can’t advocate for “true” autistics. Leaving aside the problems with functional labels, this is demonstrably wrong. Organisations like ASAN can and have advocated for and helped those severely affected by their autism.

When it comes to advocacy for marginalised groups, advocacy efforts must be led and driven by members of that group, otherwise it’s not genuine advocacy. Non-members of the group can be allies, but the main decisions must be taken by group members. Otherwise you get “advocacy” like the Communication Shutdown in support of autistics, that ignored that Information Technology has been a boon to us. Or organisations like Autism Speaks, which has engaged in “advocacy” that has harmed the very autistics it claims to be helping. Or films like Music, Sia’s supposed “love letter to autistics” that insulted, offended, patronised, infantilised and completely misrepresented us.

Me.

Maybe I’ll blog again, maybe I won’t. If I don’t, it’s been a great ride, and thank you dear readers for riding along with me.

Antivaxx Groundhog Day

The Harold Ramis comedy Groundhog Day is considered one of the greatest comedies of all time, and was one of the most successful films of 1993. In it, Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a self-absorbed weatherman sent to Punxsutawney to cover the Groundhog Day festivities there. He finds himself caught in a time loop, forced to live Groundhog Day over and over again, until he learns to become a better person. Some people have tried to estimate how long he was in the time loop. Estimates vary, but the best appear to be around 30 years.

We appear to be stuck in a antivaxx time loop, where things repeat over and over. I’ve mentioned Theresa Mulderij, who was dismissed for refusing to be vaccinated. Articled Clerk Dale Dryden was fired from Duncan Korabie Attorneys at the end of August 2021 after refusing to be vaccinated. Duncan Korabie, the firm’s owner, has various conditions and introduced a mandatory vaccination policy. Dryden protested, and used antivaccination propaganda in his response. Korabie then issued an ultimatum, and when Dryden refused to be vaccinated, dismissed him.

Dryden was awarded a settlement as Korabie failed to follow procedure, but his dismissal was upheld.

When Betty White and Bob Saget passed away earlier this year, antivaxxers tried to link their deaths to COVID vaccination. White had suffered a stroke six days prior to her death, and an autopsy has now revealed that Saget had fallen and banged his head, leading to a fatal brain bleed. Undeterred, antivaxxers are now trying to connect the death of Shane Warne from a heart attack to COVID vaccination.

Warne’s death is undeniably sad for his fans, friends and family. However, he was an overweight smoker in his fifties who lived a sedentary lifestyle and followed an unhealthy diet. He was thus a prime candidate for the heart attack that killed him.

Last year, I wrote about Schalk van der Merwe, an antivaxx lawyer who filed papers to get mask and vaccine mandates overturned. He’s now facing charges of conspiracy to commit murder.

Finally, and most Groundhog Dayish of all, Rolf Hazlehurst has lost another Court Case about vaccines causing his son’s autism.

Rolf Hazlehurst is an attorney and the father of Yates Hazlehurst, one of the test cases in the Omnibus Autism Proceedings in Vaccine Court. As a quick refresher, numerous families were seeking compensation before Vaccine Court, believing that the MMR had caused their children’s autism. Yates Hazlehurst, Michelle Cedillo, and Colten Snyder were the three children used in the first test cases. All lost. All three appealed the verdicts, and lost again. The Hazlehurst and Cedillo families appealed to Federal Circuit Court, and lost yet again. Recently, Rolf Hazlehurst reactivated his suit against the physician who vaccinated Yates, alleging that by giving him a vaccine, the physician was responsible for giving Yates autism, and was guilty of malpractice. The jury rejected the suit, and the case never even assessed the causation question.

I understand Rolf’s pain. And yet I want to grab him, shake until his teeth rattle, and tell him to stop. His crusade to prove that MMR is responsible for Yates’s autism is not only futile, it is now causing significant harm to his family. He needs to drop it.

Integrity and Hypocrisy

There is a huge fight going on at Spotify.

Joe Rogan is a successful podcaster with whom Spotify signed a lucrative contract. He is also an antivaxxer. And now, several other people who have deals with Spotify are saying either Rogan goes, or they go.

Neil Young and Joni Mitchell were the first. Both contracted polio as children and still have sequelae from their illnesses. They have been joined by, among others, David Crosby, Young’s bandmate in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

I hope that Spotify will listen, although I’m sceptical it will. Having said that, I have the greatest respect for the artists who are boycotting Spotify and potentially losing out on money.

And on a related note, despite myself, I have a lot of respect for Novak Djokovic.

But Jungle, I hear you say, you condemned him for being antivaxx. Yes I did, but Djokovic has decided he will not attend any tournament that requires him to be vaccinated. His ranking has dropped and he is potentially losing a lot of winnings.

One of the vices I can’t stand is hypocrisy. Djokovic has shown he’s prepared to live up to his values and pay the price, not just figuratively, but literally as well.

I respect anyone who lives their values, even if I know they’re wrong, and even if I find those values abhorrent, like here. Djokovic has shown integrity. And I respect that, no matter how idiotic I find his beliefs.

Profanity alert – antivaxxers fucked around and are now finding out

When some idiot suffers the consequences of their dumbfuck actions, the response can be sadness, or gleeful schadenfreude. I’m feeling a fair amount of the latter, and some of the former for antivaxx shitheads.

Czech Folk Singer Hana Horká didn’t want to get vaccinated but needed an immunity certificate, so she deliberately contracted COVID.

And died.

Jan Rek, her grieving son, is now urging people to learn from his mother’s mistake and get vaccinated. He is also furious with the antivaxxers whom he holds responsible for misleading her and causing her death.

Singer Meat Loaf (born Marvin Lee Aday) also doubted the vaccine and has also died of COVID complications.

On a local note, a woman who refused to get vaccinated had her lawsuit against her employer dismissed at the CCMA. According to the verdict, Theresa Mulderij “refused to participate in the creation of a safe working environment”.

The facts of the case are as follows: Theresa Mulderij was a business and training officer for the Goldrush Group, which implemented a mandatory vaccination policy. Mulderij did not want to get vaccinated, and initially approached her doctor to get a medical exemption, but was turned down. She then applied for an exemption (Goldrush’s vaccination policy had this provision) but this was also refused as she interacted with co-workers daily. She lodged an internal appeal and was denied again. She still refused to get vaccinated and was dismissed. She then went to the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) to either be reinstated or get a settlement.

At the CCMA, Mulderij advanced several typical spurious antivaxx claims. Commissioner Lungile Matshaka rejected them all as the bullshit they were. He ruled that Goldrush’s mandatory vaccination policy had followed all required steps and was sound. He also took into account a memo by Deputy Judge President Roland Sutherland to other Judges:

There has been, as yet, only mild protest that this (no vaccination no entry policy) violates freedom of choice … in my view, this is the wrong question. The proper question is whether or not an individual is sufficiently civic-minded to appreciate that a duty of care is owed to colleagues and others with whom contact is made to safeguard them from harm. If one wishes to be an active member of a community then the incontrovertible legitimate interest of the community must trump the preferences of an individual.

From Sutherland’s memo

Companies have a right to demand that their employees be vaccinated. Mulderij found out the hard way.
An article by Charles Webster sums up the selfishness of the antivaxx perfectly.

They’re not asking for choice. They’re fighting for special privilege on the basis of poor science. They want the privilege associated with the driver’s licence/vaccine without having to take the test/vaccinate.

Charles Webster’s article on the EWN website

Quite right.

On antivaxxer vileness, and consequences

The vileness of antivaxxers knows no boundaries.

They are claiming that the deaths of Betty White and Bob Saget were both due to the COVID vaccine. Betty White’s agent has now stated that White had a stroke six days before her death. Saget’s death is currently being investigated.

On a more positive note, Novak Djokovic lost his appeal against the cancellation of his visa and has been deported. He is also likely to be barred from entering Australia for the next three years. He had a report claiming he’d caught COVID and didn’t need to be vaccinated — a report that indicates both manipulation of the results and false statements concerning when the tests occurred. You should have just got vaccinated, No-Vax (his new nickname).

Another misbehaving sportsman is Antonio Brown, who lied about getting vaccinated, potentially exposed everyone around him to COVID, and was dismissed from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (but not for the COVID stuff). You would think that sportsmen would know that vaccines are essential to prevent disease and that their health is essential to perform at their peak.

It is good to see consequences for dishonesty.

Three more news stories from the planet Antivaxxia – updated

Firstly, an antivaccine dentist in Italy was busted trying to use a fake arm to get out of being vaccinated.
The nurse was suspicious as the arm didn’t match the skin tone of the rest of his body, and the fake arm felt cold and not like flesh to the touch. The dentist has apparently had a change of heart and now supports vaccination, but the fake arm was a ridiculous idea.

Secondly, and far more alarmingly, German Police report they thwarted an antivaxx plan to assassinate Michael Kretschmer, the state premier of Saxony.

Thirdly, an employee of O&M Pty Ltd, a construction and maintenance company based in Gippsland, Victoria, had his claim of being unlawfully stood down thrown out by the Fair Work Commission, after he sent the Commission “proof” of his vaccination status that included a link to a fake certificate website.

The Victorian worker had taken his fight to the workplace tribunal after he stopped getting shifts with O&M Pty Ltd, a construction and maintenance company based in Gippsland, Victoria, earlier this year.

But things went awry for the employee mid-conference as [the adjudicator] asked to see the proof he had sent to O&M, discovered the website, and declared his certificate may have been a fraud.

From the linked article