Venting is important. When you don't, tension builds and then explodes. It's necessary to give people a way to air complaints and be heard. And if your team has people with some organizational and social skills, you can channel that into action.
Sure, but if people are using the retro as a vent session, maybe it's because they need an outlet. Perhaps a separate meeting titled "vent session" is what you want. Although it's important to have action come out of that meeting as well, don't want to just channels peoples' real concerns into a meeting that is intended to hear them out and then do nothing. Manipulating peoples' concerns into a channel where they are made unobstructive and ineffective, so they can be easier ignored is a pattern of bad-faith bosses. Conflict avoidance is toxic. You and the team building skills in conflict resolution can help.
All the people that say "I disapprove of violence" come across as incredibly naive. This entire society is based on violence.
In the US, You live in the most militarized society in history. More than 80 countries with US military bases, many of which have experienced the unaccountable violence of the US military. More than $1 trillion every year, the most on the planet, and half of the discretionary federal budget. That is a huge amount of normalized violence.
The US police are full of military weaponry (1033 program) and veterans. Similarly many municipalities spend half of their general fund on the police. There is an incomprehensibly huge amount of violence done by the police on a daily basis that is necessary to maintain this society. That is a huge amount of normalized violence.
The US also has the largest system of incarceration on the planet. Prisons and jails house over 2M people, per capita far larger than any other country on the planet. That is a huge amount of normalized violence. [1]
Then there is the structural violence and social murder of our current economic and legal system. People are put through preventable, lethal living and working conditions. Contaminated water, unhealthy foods, increased rates of disease, bad healthcare, lack of public health infrastructure. No public bathrooms! People are abandoned on the streets next to houses and apartments that sit vacant. People who steal food are jailed instead of fed. That is a huge amount of normalized violence.
Then, an attempted molotov is thrown at a metal gate, and all of a sudden people are condemning violence? Give me a break.
When you only condemn that type of violence, you are reifying the dogma of the status quo which is to imply that violence by powerful people and instutitions is acceptable and not to be condemned.
Yeah and the employee who generated an AI response to the AI-generated bug report, is Jared Sumner who is the founder of Bun which was acquired by Anthropic. Pretty sad state of affairs all around.
Reminds me of Elon Musk. Grifting off of techno-futuro-optimism. Hyperloop, Boring tunnel, going to mars, self-driving cars, etc. Perhaps it's common to CEOs, lying/manipulating to people to create hype in order to convince them to give you money.
Sure, but Elon Musk had known engineering roles at various companies, and built a space company nobody, not even himself thought would succeed, into the most viable and affordable way to get things into space.
Idk if I had to be stranded on an island with either Elon or Sam, I think I'd rather be stuck with Elon.
People often prioritize "reputation" over other things, as if it is politically actionable or tangible.
It's not, and it's a projection of peoples' personal feelings onto the actions of a nation-state.
Honestly, it's odd behavior. To identify with a nation-state so strongly to care about it's "reputation" over actual material measures. It's parasocial and indicitave of people treating politics as a consumer form of entertainment, and not something they engage in in their daily lives. As if you were a foreign diplomat, might be the only time "reputation" mattered in the way that people talk about it.
Internationally, reputation is, essentially, your country's track record projected forward in other nations' thinking. It's their expectation value for how you will behave in the future.
People prioritize reputation because that's pretty much all there is to go on. Treaties? Sure, but how likely is the country to keep the terms of it? Agreements? Same question. Place for investments? How good is the rule of law there, and how likely is that to continue? Those are reputation questions; that is, they are questions about future behavior as predicted by past behavior.
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