The anti-worker bias in the media

Currently we are are experiencing a rare period when employers are finding it hard to fill positions, especially in the lower-wage service sector. But it is telling how differently the media covers this to how they cover the times when unemployment levels are high. The common thread is that in each case, they present the point of view of the employers, not the workers.

Cartoonist Ted Rall accurately captures the differences in the way that the media and the pundit class cover a labor surplus versus a labor shortage.

When jobs are scarce, workers are told to make big changes in their lives to adjust to reality. Now that workers are scarce, however, whiny employers are offered sympathy rather than given advice to change their obsolete business models.

Animals in cartoons

I have noticed that a large number of comic strips feature non-human animals. Some of these animals behave as one expects them to do, in that they express themselves in the way that animals do by using their bodies, wagging their tails and so on. In the case of others, the animals are anthropomorphized to various degrees. At one end, the creators put in thought bubbles to indicate what they are thinking, though they cannot talk. This clearly appeals to pet caregivers who have often wished they could know what their pets are thinking. Other comic strips have animals and pets seemingly living and working together and able to converse with each other. And then there is the other extreme in strips where only animals appear and they live just like humans do.
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Euphemisms for death

It is a curious feature of people that many do not like to use the word ‘dead’ to describe the end of life of their loved ones and resort to various euphemisms, such as ‘passed away’. It may be something that will slowly go away as people get used to the idea of speaking about death more matter-of-factly and not as a taboo subject to be avoided.

People’s attitudes change. I remember an uncle of mine saying that he did not like people using the word ‘pregnant’ and preferred that they say that someone is ‘expecting’. And he was a doctor! Nowadays if you say someone is ‘expecting’ you are likely to get the puzzled query, “Expecting what?”

But the confusion that euphemisms can cause does lend itself to much humor as in this comic strip.

(Pickles)

Don’t unnecessarily kill off animals in dramas!

One of the nice things about the arrival of streaming services is that we now get to see many programs produced in countries where the language is other than English. I tend to watch a lot of police procedurals, a genre that seems to be very popular worldwide as can be seen from the many mini-series that are being shown in a variety of languages. (Spoiler alert: In what follows, there is a spoiler for a minor plot line in the Spanish (Galician) series Bitter Daisies that can be seen on Netflix.)

In these shows, there are of course human corpses galore but one expects them so their appearance does not really disturb unless the filmmakers go out of their way to show blood and gore and violence, which, fortunately few of them do. Most often, the dead bodies are just briefly seen in the crime scene or in the morgue or the autopsy room.
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Sex work is just another form of work

On his show Last Week Tonight John Oliver tackled the topic of sex work, a topic that is surrounded by a whole lot of misconceptions, ignorance, hypocrisy, and just plain old prudishness, and the people who suffer because of these things are the sex workers themselves, who are often at the receiving end of laws and other efforts to ‘save’ them that end up actually hurting them. One of the big problems is the conflating of sex work with sex trafficking, two very different things that require very different responses.
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