Sunday, December 06, 2015

Silent Treatments: St Mikulas aka St Nick

"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."
~ Edmund Burke

Brave Eagles of Death Metal will return to Paris on Sunday, just weeks after the city's terrorist attacks which claimed the lives of 130 people.

THE Sydney school that inspired its school captain to deliver a defiant end-of-year speech criticising its elite image has hit back over the “unfortunate” media coverage. Shocking truthful speech on perfection


His will to bear witness, and record the hellish particularity of the Holocaust, helped save his life in Auschwitz. It also inspired the writing he will be remembered for. Why Primo Levi Survives

They say truth is the first casualty of war. And a variety of interests, from Viacom and CBS to Bush family loyalists and right-wing zealots, hope the same fate awaits the provocative new film, Truth.

It’s always best,’ Janosik said, trying to stifle a cough, ‘to kiss your killer’s hand.’

landing bird links
Silent treatment epidemic is part of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad news cycle as it tends to inflict bad apples in communist party, but in the west too one comes across corrupt politicians and spineless public servants ... Look around you and consider why corrupt people avoid looking you in the eye and acknowledging you ... 
~Useful Ways to Confront Someone Giving You the Silent Treatment 

Organizations are often run according to “the superchicken model,” where the value is placed on star employees who outperform others. And yet, this isn’t what drives the most high-achieving teams. Business leader Margaret Heffernan observes that it is social cohesion — built every coffee break, every time one team member asks another for help — that leads over time to great results. It's a radical rethink of what drives us to do our best work, and what it means to be a leader.
Pecking Order at Work via TED
 
You should run from these three crazy managers... Anyone who spends enough time in the workforce will end up with a crazy boss who makes life difficult for themselves and appear to want to drive everyone around them crazy as well I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me

Commbank boss awarded $300000 defamation payout after hellish stalking campaign


Turns out that leaving someone out of that social connection at work is more stressful to them than you may realize or intend. In fact, it can be a form of silent bullying, according to research out of the University of British Columbia, recently published in Organization Science.
"Most of us probably would think it would be better to be invisible than to be bullied or harassed at work," researcher Sandra Robinson told Huffington Post. "Yet when you talk to the people having experienced it, that's not the case, and our data shows that. Anecdotally, people say to be ignored and invisible at work is extremely painful."
How painful? Enough to make some employees dissatisfied with their jobs, suffer health problems, and even quit. Why Getting The Cold Shoulder At Work Is More Hurtful Than Bullying If you're cutting certain coworkers out of the social circle, you're doing more harm than good, studies suggest

One of the more frustrating passive-aggressive operational and strategic tactic to those on the receiving end is “the silent treatment”. The silent treatment is an abusive method of control, punishment, avoidance, or disempowerment (sometimes these four types overlap, sometimes not) that is a favorite tactic of narcissists, and especially those who have a hard time with impulse control, that is, those with more infantile tendencies Silent Treatment

"This goat was meant to be the tiger's lunch, but now it bosses the big cat http://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/0500-this-goat-was-meant-to-be-the-tigers-lunch-but-now-it-bosses-the-big-cat/ 

Silence of the Lions Kenya by outlaw father 2012
Here's a scenario: someone close to you has just stopped talking you, even looking at you, for no apparent reason. They’re clearly angry about something, but you're left mystified.
There are no words, but a whole lot of meaning in the act of giving the silent treatment.
Whether you've been on the receiving end or been the one stonewalling a friend, partner or colleague, we want to hear your experiences and how you coped ...

"I tasted once
The milk of a woman friend,
The milk of a sister—
Not to slake my thirst
But for the liberty of my soul."
—“Memory of a Strange Refreshment,” Elena Shvarts

The investigation had found "resounding evidence" that the HR manager had behaved aggressively towards her colleagues. This conduct was partially manifested in her giving co-workers the “silent treatment”, and making “competent employees appear incompetent in the hope they would resign”.
Making Competent Employees Appear Incompetent in the Hope they Would Resign

C a t h o l i c E d u c a t i o n O f f i c e W i l c a n n i a F o r b e s

"Free-floating hostility is the ether in which most writers cavort," says Joseph Epstein, who is quite familiar with literary  Malice ...



A federal appeals court in New York has thrown out the last remaining charge against a former New York Police Department officer accused and later cleared of plotting to kidnap and cannibalize women. The ruling in the case of Gilberto Valle, dubbed the “Cannibal Cop” by tabloids, mostly dealt with the question of whether his use of a police database program to search information about a woman violated a federal anti-hacking statute. A jury convicted Mr. Valle in March 2013 of conspiring to kidnap, rape, torture, cook alive and eat several women, including his wife. A federal judge later overturned the decision, concluding there was insufficient evidence to support the conviction. But one charge was left standing: an alleged violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Mr. Valle asked the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to vacate that conviction, and the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office asked the court to overturn his acquittal on the cannibal conspiracy charge. Mr. Valle was authorized to use the police computer program, but only for law-enforcement purposes. His attorneys conceded that his use of the NYPD computer program — to search for information about a woman he allegedly discussed kidnapping — wasn’t work-related. But they argued that such a violation of company policy shouldn’t be criminalized. Appeals Court Clears Accused ‘Cannibal Cop’ of All Charges
 


Marianne Moore didn't plumb the deeper meanings of her poetry. "I am governed by the pull of a sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity'


Why are so many kids with bright prospects killing themselves in Palo Alto? The Silicon Valley Suicides

Have you ever been in an argument with your partner where instead of talking through the issue, you decided to give him or her the silent treatment? Yeah, we probably all have. Sometimes just ignoring the person who is making you want to lose your mind is easier than hashing it out!
Don't Give Your Partner the Silent Treatment -- You're Only Making Things Worse

Governments are like dogs: they age quickly.  The sins of omission and commission accumulate, the passage of time accelerates, the arteries of opportunity narrow and the ambition to chase cars to Canberra diminishes.  Some governments stay in their flea-bitten beds and chew old toys.  Others strain at the enclosures of their yards, and become liable to bark or bite without warning.  Whatever the case, sooner or later all are put to sleep when the electorate takes a liking to a new puppy.  

Shouldn’t this push aside the malicious gossip? Why does the other crap matter at all? It matters because if art and the lower reaches of journalism and biography converge on a single point of  common purpose, it is in being truthful about human beings as they really are and not as we would have them be. History is what we have to struggle to remember even when legend is more pleasing. It would be nice if Sinatra had been a good guy with a few regrettable friendships rooted in Jersey simpatico —it was a lot worse than that. It would be nice if J.F.K. were a family man with a sometimes-wandering eye—the truth there, too, is more ravenous and complicated. None of this need diminish our admiration or even our love for them. Humanism is made from a faith in humans, as they actually are, flawed and real, screaming devilish threats at casino managers and then singing “Angel Eyes.” Silent Biographies of Leaders

This study, sponsored by BSI (the British Standards Institution), explores the gaps between intention and action in companies’ approach to promoting resilience. It also looks at how a sample of business executives perceives and prioritises resilience-promoting measures, what it takes to build and maintain a culture of resilience, and what best practices are being adopted to promote resilience.
Organisational resilience: Building an enduring enterprise

Risk Management: How do you feel when you are at work? Are you happy, sad or stressed out? Are you thinking about quitting, breaking a few rules or even committing fraud? Be careful: Companies are increasingly using sentiment analysis technology to monitor internal communications in order to better understand employees’ moods and assess any potential risks Sentiment Analysis: Are You Feeling Risky?


Micro-management can cause serious problems, such as erosion of trust, disengagement and high staff turnover, and most micro-managers are not even aware of what they are doing.
Internet: Are you a micro-manager? Do you realise the damage you are doing?



Researchers say the company’s automated management system, and that of its competitor Lyft, creates new dynamics between workers and their paymasters that should be scrutinized. A paper presented last week by Data & Society, a nonprofit research institute in New York City, recounts ways that Uber’s system steers its drivers’ behaviour and suggests that regulators may need to consider them.
When Your Boss Is an Uber Algorithm
*Paper - Uber's Drivers: Information Asymmetries and Control in Dynamic Work

Maria Katsonis in memoir, The Good Greek Girl, tracks her life as the daughter of Greek migrants who turned out to be gay, dropped out of a nine-tenths finished economics degree for the theatre, was accepted into the Harvard Kennedy School to study a master of public administration and ended up a senior Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet bureaucrat, before developing and eventually recovering from depression that left her in bed for weeks on end. As a writer, Katsonis is naturally passionate about words. Buzzwords like agile, user-centred design and transformation — typically found in the latest discussion papers on public sector reform from firms outside the public service — drive her wild. These “generic categorisations” too often miss the mark on the complexities of government and the drivers of bureaucratic behaviour, she thinks.
Her experience has also taught her the power of narratives and the importance of brevity. When writing a brief, “think about the audience”, she argues — will the minister be reading it in the back of a car between appointments? The best writing introduction she ever had was when she started out her public service career at Arts Victoria during the time Jeff Kennett was balancing the jobs of both arts minister and premier.
“We were told that every brief — and this was really strictly applied — had to be one page long, with two attachments, and every sentence had to have no more than 10 words. All of us went ‘oh my God, how dare they, I have this freedom and I am creative’