05-29-2018, 12:49 PM | #106 | |
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05-29-2018, 04:47 PM | #107 | |
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Erich Maria Remarque said in Der Schwarze Obelisk (The Black Obelisk): "It’s strange, I think, all of us have seen so many dead in the war and we know that over two million of us fell uselessly—why, then, are we so excited about a single man, when we have practically forgotten the two million already? But probably the reason is that one dead man is death—and two million are only a statistic." It becomes real when it's personal. I remember in 2015 there was considerable debate in Canada over the question of accepting Syrian refugees. After the publication of pictures of Alan Kurdi's body on a beach in Turkey, his aunt Tima Kurdi, living in Vancouver, was interviewed and her stories helped make him a real person to many people. It became an issue in the federal election that fall. I don't think that would have happened just on the abstract knowledge that millions of Syrians were refugees. For the same reason, many fundraising appeals try to tell a story about a named individual, describing the problems that person is facing. I also agree with you about the dangers of fictionalizing. |
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05-29-2018, 05:17 PM | #108 | |
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Seeing these women as individuals, not statistics, is an important step to understanding the cost and pain. But that didn't require the fictionalization, as I think we all agree. |
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05-29-2018, 05:42 PM | #109 |
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I don’t think that anyone has mentioned this so far, but Kate Moore did an extended 70 minute interview about The Radium Girls. It’s available on YouTube as Kate Moore: The Radium Girls.
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05-29-2018, 07:14 PM | #110 | |
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For example, with what we've just read the statistics were apparently 1-in-20, or thereabout. That's not all that helpful when it comes to understanding the true depth of suffering that the women who did get ill went through. So putting a sense of reality to those faces is a good thing (although going over top has, for me, the effect of making it seem like bad-fiction rather than reality). But dropping the statistic altogether, and writing in a way that gives the strong impression that all or most got ill, is simply wrong. The fact that it was only 1-in-20 (or even less at the start) is actually part of what these women went through, one of the difficulties they faced. I agree that the lengthy discussion looking for why it took so long to identify the problem (of which I am the particularly guilty party) did not give enough weight to what came later. Part of that was in reaction to the book, because I think Moore goes far too far the other way. But it's also an example of argument/discussion taking on a life of its own, and this is one of the realities that the women ran into. If you are prepared to accept that, at the start, the companies could not reasonably have predicted what would happen to the women, then you can begin to follow the path/logic for how they got further and further into such messy situations. This is not intended to excuse the outright lies and appalling behaviour that came later, but in understanding the progression it may become possible - in the future - to identify when this progression starts and to avoid it spiralling out of control as it did here (and in so many cases since, because no one has yet learned this lesson from history). What went particularly wrong for me in this book was that I lost trust in the author. By the time we got to the examples of the companies doing overtly appalling things, Moore had given me such a strong impression of bias that I no longer trusted that she was presenting the situation appropriately (and I am still not convinced she did). I wondered if I was reading "fake news" and so started to look for alternate explanations in everything she presented. |
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05-29-2018, 07:17 PM | #111 |
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Ah thank you issybird - that was the one I was trying to remember.
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05-29-2018, 07:40 PM | #112 |
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I certainly agree on the value of popular history. It has an important role in helping people understand events and people’s motivations. I do agree with gmw’s final paragraph on this book: there was so much fiction mixed in with fact, and a lack of balance in the way the story was told, that I mistrusted the author’s accuracy.
Overall though, I think the book is true, and I certainly feel enormous sympathy for the women and their families. |
05-29-2018, 08:08 PM | #113 | ||
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Last edited by issybird; 05-29-2018 at 08:11 PM. |
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05-29-2018, 08:14 PM | #114 | |
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To me, it's obvious where the progression starts--with the company willfully failing to provide any safeguards for the women who were dealing with a potentially dangerous substance. And you keep coming back and making excuses for them--they didn't know, it was something/ new, they thought it was safe in small quantities, etc. But they should have known there was at least a possibility of the radium-infused paint being dangerous to the women who were ingesting it. Did they know that it was going to affect these women as terribly as it did? No, most likely not. But it's the initial failure to take any steps to protect the women that led to the spiral of lies and denials and bad behavior. Here's the lesson I see--that a company has a responsibility to its workers to make the workplace as safe as possible, to inform workers of potential hazards, to provide compensation if the workers become sick or injured as a result of workplace conditions. They did none of these things, not at the beginning and not at the end. I'm baffled that you seem to think the companies had some valid, compelling justification that Moore fails to include. Perhaps she simply didn't see one; I know I don't. |
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05-29-2018, 08:30 PM | #115 | |
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There's also a YouTube video of a play called Radium Girls, and another called These Shining Lives. YouTube has other versions of these plays as well; they seem to be student productions. |
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05-29-2018, 08:46 PM | #116 | |
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What do you call this?
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Perhaps Roeder did say it coldly and perhaps he really did think the women were insignificant, but he might just as well have genuinely not recalled, because a number of years had passed. (If it was just this one example I'd let it pass, but there are a great many more.) This only proves that even a century on, people can still disagree on the subject - proving that there can indeed be more than one way to look at these things. I can only ask you to believe that I am not an evil, mean-spirited person. I do care, I just don't think that - back then especially - it was as simple as you would have it. ... But we've been through that. |
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05-30-2018, 06:26 AM | #117 | |
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05-30-2018, 08:07 AM | #118 |
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Fair enough. I didn't give any weight to the imagined scenarios as they irritated me; I didn't find Moore biased in her presentation of the facts. But bias is slippery; when does a reasoned POV slip into bias? By focusing on the girls rather than the legal case, for example, a tendency was established, but I didn't think that damning in itself. I still think that was the best way to approach the story.
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05-30-2018, 08:26 AM | #119 | ||
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05-30-2018, 09:12 AM | #120 | |
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Have you done additional research to verify that the facts were impartially presented? I have not done so yet, so my charge of bias must limit itself to the presentation style for the moment, but that Claudia Clark book mentioned by AnotherCat is tempting to try when I have more time. |
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