Interesting Links for 03-03-2025

[andrewducker]

1. You need governmental approval to run psychological tests on job applicants in Canada

(tags:Canada psychology jobs viaDewline )

2. Edinburgh are having a consultation on dogs on beaches and in green spaces, as well as buskers and green-space management.

(tags:Edinburgh consultation dogs )

3. New study says TikToks are bad for you! Thankfully it's complete nonsense!

(tags:science brain videos )

4. The Cuddled Little Vice - a fascinating, in-depth, dissection of Neil Gaiman's career.

(tags:neilgaiman rape history writing sandman comics )

5. German tourist held indefinitely in San Diego area immigrant detention facility

(tags:USA tourism prison OhForFucksSake )

6. The US Defense Department removes thousands of serving transgender people

(tags:LGBT transgender bigotry USA republicans )

7. Church of England: just 25% now have a favourable view - 49% unfavourable.

(tags:religion uk polls )

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

OMFG, what's going on...

[channelpenguin]

5 and 6 are horrible but I guess the cruelty is the point (as the overworked phrase goes).

[movingfinger]

4. Is this fiction? The first few paragraphs make it unclear whether this is actual reality or whether it is someone's imaginary take on real events.

[andrewducker]

The vast majority of it seems to be an accurate retelling of his career.

(A few bits indicate that the writer believes rather more in the power of magic than I do)

[channelpenguin]

I thought the "magic war" bits in this series were just a conceit. Hmm.

[foms]

#1 seems to be about the Public Service of Canada (federal government employees) and not about just any jobs. I am a member and might have some stuff to say, about which I should consult the policies about our communications on social media.

[liv]

The Gaiman article is really interesting. I was exactly the kind of Sandman fan the essayist talks about, I liked being edgy and alternative and wasn't otherwise into comics enough to fight the people who were keeping girls out of their clubhouse. So I absolutely did miss all the allusions and references and connections to the rest of DC and the genre. I also liked that she's not just taking the easy route of saying, oh well, we always knew he was bad because he wrote about sadists, rapists and killers. Or retroactively deciding he was a terrible writer anyway now we know he is a terrible human. It's a proper critical analysis in the best sense of the word, plenty of opinions which are all supported without claiming to be the objective truth.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, really well written and covered bits I didn't know about, despite having been a fan since the late 80s!

(Until recently, obvs)

[doug]

"You need governmental approval to run psychological tests on job applicants in Canada"

... if you are hiring people for jobs in public service in Canada. The public service is essentially the Canadian version of the UK civil service. This policy only applies to such hires, unless I've misunderstood.

So my understanding is that the situation is more that the Canadian civil service has a policy about psychological tests for job applications, and any part of the Canadian civil service doing hiring has to get approval from the Public Service Commission (the Canadian version of the UK's Civil Service Commission) for any psychological tests they plan to use in the process.

[foms]

The Public Service of Canada requirements are lengthy and Byzantine.

# 5 freaks me right out

[agoodwinsmith]

I grew up 65 miles from the USA/Canada border. Because my Grama and Mom are both American, we treated it like a provincial border. We would often go down on a Sunday for retail entertainment. Many of my first-day-back-in-school outfits came from Ben Prince, a teeny tiny department store in Oroville, a teeny tiny town at the foot of Osoyoos Lake. My grandparents lived in Osoyoos, about half a mile from the border on the Canadian side.

Actually, both grandmothers were American, and there are relatives scattered all over both countries.

My point is, weird and abnormal as the mail boxes were, it wasn't any weirder than visiting Alberta (okay, AB hadn't yet achieved full wako-banana status, but it was heading that way).

I stopped visiting the USA sometime in the late eighties.

Since about 2000 I have felt that there wasn't enough money in the whoooooole world to tempt me to visit the USA for any reason whatsoever.


As long as somebody makes a profit holding that person (and they do), there is no incentive to let her go.

Re: # 5 freaks me right out

[andrewducker]

It's just so awful.