Skip to main content

She was a World Bank Employee. That Figures

Image result for wmata metro map

 That woman who tried to get another woman fired for eating on the train was a World Bank employee.

 You may have heard of this. It was one of those 15 minute social media sensations. 

 A World Bank employee who is also an author (not just a hobbyist -- she had a book deal pending when this scandal broke) tweeted angrily about an employee of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) whom she had seen eating on the train. Apparently that is verboten. 

 The WB employee tweeted about this and mentioned the employee's obnoxious response to a question on the subject, right at 9 AM on a workday. So I would imagine she had just gotten to work when she did so. 

 So far, no biggie. What makes it something of a biggie is that the commuter sent a complaint to the WMATA. It replied. "Thank you for catching this and helping us to make sure all Metro employees are held accountable. Can you confirm the time you were on the train, the direction you were headed and what line you were on?”

 She complied, with the time, direction and line. And line.  

Let us contemplate the significance of this for a moment.

 Though it is understandable that she was ticked off at the working stiff -- tweets expressing workday ticked-offedness are a staple of the medium -- it seems wildly excessive that she should actually provide information likely to get this working stiff identified and disciplined, perhaps fired. She played the ignoble part of a 'snitch.' 

 I don't know what her job at the WB entails, but it seems fitting to be that this snitch has such a position as her "day job." That she was a writer as well I find personally embarrassing, so I'll focus on the WB angle. 

 She presumably isn't part of the top tier of WB leadership (or she wouldn't be taking the subway to the office). But she does work at an organization of global reach and aspirations, a citadel of the "central planning" of other people's lives, the lives of the masses conceived of AS the masses.

 A single working stiff having a bite out of turn ... THAT she couldn't handle.  Not because it was against some barely-enforced rule, but because these people can't  be allowed to show even so much individual initiative as that involved. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
7 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers
Post a Comment
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak
13 comments
Read more