Thursday, July 10, 2014

Concluding Unscientific Postscript

People have been asking why there was no liveblog of the last--and what turned out to be the final--bargaining session.

There was no liveblog because the admin team showed up unprepared to negotiate, which is an accurate description of their conduct for much of this bargaining cycle. So there was nothing to liveblog.

There was just silence.  So we are left to assume that they are either out of ideas or are tired of having their sophistries made public.

Or perhaps it is both.

Whatever the case, there will be no more bargaining, and therefore no more need for this chronicle.  Thanks for the readers, the linkers, the objectors, and the detractors.  We're in mediation now and a strike is a real possibility.

We didn't want this. They did.

We didn't refuse to bring actual figures to the table to discuss progressive proposals. They did.

We didn't declare the impasse. They did.

They didn't want people to hear what they said. We did.

"He jumped in through the window, and just as he was jumping out, the others, who had been looking at him, were standing nearby. 

Triumphantly holding some papers in his hands, he shouted, 'A manuscript by His Honor the Judge. If I have published his others, it is no more than my duty to publish this also. 

Who am I? I am not worth asking about, for I am the least of all, and people make me very bashful by asking this question. I am the pure being and thus almost less than nothing. I am the pure being that is everywhere present but not yet noticeable, for I am continually being annulled. I am like the line with the arithmetic problem above and the answer below-who cares about the line? 

By myself, I am capable of nothing at all, for even the idea of tricking Victor out of the manuscript was not my own notion, but the very notion according to which I borrowed the manuscript, as thieves put it, was in fact borrowed from Victor. Now in publishing the manuscript, I again am nothing at all, for the manuscript belongs to the Judge, and in my nothingness I as publisher am only like a nemesis upon Victor, who presumably thought he had the right to publish it.'"