Who Hired This Prat?
Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me (Matthew 18:2-5)
I’m probably not the best person in the world to comment about someone’s maturity, or lack thereof. I’ve always tried to maintain a kind of childlike sense of wonder and excitement at the world. The problem, for me, is that I’ve also not been the best at distinguishing the childlike from the childish.
There is a way the world kind of grinds you down - we’ve all heard the phrase world weary - but I think it’s probably best not to let it. Shit happens, and we still need to deal with it, but perhaps it’s better to (at least try to, if we can) deal with it in a more positive and childlike manner (open, receptive, opportunistic etc) rather than a childish manner (tantrums, tears, and sulks etc).
Obviously there are going to be some events and tragedies in a life that can’t be overlooked or wished away with “positive thinking” but, as a general rule, I think we’d all subject ourselves to a lot less stress if we tried to be a bit more childlike in our outlook, at times.
When I first saw the recent Project Veritas video (you don’t need me to tell you which one I’m talking about) I thought it was a fake, or some kind of hoax. There was no way, I thought, the childish prat I was watching was a ‘senior’ bod in a Pharma company. I doubted he was even employed by Pfizer.
But it does seem to be true. Pfizer hired this pillock.
It’s not clear what his role was, but I very strongly suspect he was a long way from having a ‘senior’ role.
Even me, with my slightly off kilter ability to distinguish the childlike from the childish, can see that this guy has negative professional effectiveness (a bit like certain products produced by his employers perhaps?)
He was, I think, trying to impress a date. Who the fuck was he trying to date? Mengele?
There is a rather interesting, and pertinent, quote of Mengele’s
Food for thought that one.
But someone actually hired this buffoon? I suppose he could have hidden his character and passed all the various interviews and psychometric testing etc, but within a month or two of his appointment it would have become abundantly clear that someone in HR had made a disastrous mistake.
Maybe I’m just old-fashioned and have old-fashioned ideas about things like “professionalism” and hiring processes. I’ve been involved in a fair few hiring panels over the years and maybe this guy wouldn’t have set my alarm bells ringing. My interview technique was fairly simple - be nice and friendly and non-threatening and just have a chat and nod encouragingly to everything that was said. 99% of the time, nutters would have been given enough rope to hang themselves with several times over.
There was one guy who, at one point in an interview, made a potentially prejudicial remark against a certain ethnic demographic. Without ever explicitly agreeing with him I managed to steer the conversation along those lines, still being friendly and non-challenging. He turned out to be quite viciously prejudiced - and he offered all of that up himself as the discussion unfolded.
I suppose I was doing my own version of the Veritas technique.
The ‘non-confrontational’ approach to interviewing works like a charm
Oh, you managed to co-author a paper whilst still a Master’s student? That’s really impressive. Could you tell me a bit more about your contribution?
The paper is quite technical. There’s a lot of work gone into it. Could you summarize a bit what’s important about the paper, for me as a non-expert in the field, and why you chose to work on that specific problem? I’d love to understand a bit more about it - it looks really good.
Asking questions like these very quickly exposes those people who have only a slim grasp of things.
It’s not fool proof - and Pfizer’s interview process was clearly not fool proof. After all, they did end up hiring this fool.
I think it’s abundantly clear that Pharma companies indulge in, shall we say, ‘shady’ practices. It’s also abundantly clear that many/most of the people employed will genuinely believe they are trying to make the world a better, healthier, place - and will do their work diligently and ethically. I don’t for one instant believe that Pfizer only employs people with the Mengele gene.
But the eye of Sauron has a long reach and an even longer influence. What was truly disturbing was the almost immediate difficulty of doing an adequate Google search about the incident and the person involved. Who made this decision and why was it made? Google, of course, pretended that it was a rapidly-changing story and so they couldn’t process the results, or sumfin1.
The Pfungal inPfiltration of Pharma throughout government, media and Big Tech has been suspected for a long time - but it has been made very clear and in your Pface in the covid era.
What’s more curious is the extent to which the ‘left’ have basically acted as an unpaid propaganda arm of these large (and historically nefarious) mega corporations. Did they forget that ‘left’ basically implies a mistrust and cynicism towards the actions of large corporate entities - or if you’re even more ‘left’, a rejection of the entire capitalist system?
It shows how effective the influence of the eye of Sauron really is. The Sauron analogy breaks down a bit because Pfizer doesn’t in general, except in this instance it seems, employ goblins.
Of course, other breaking stories that are MUCH bigger in terms of searches etc (such as George Floyd) do not seem to suffer from the Google sumfin glitch
Ok, I will say what you didn’t: this muppet’s hire was little more than a “diversity” exercise, conveniently checking two boxes with one hire, thus his “senior” position (had he also worn a dress and too much lipstick, he would have been a “VP” of something or other). He was allowed to sit in on meetings in which they smiled and nodded at his jejune “contributions” while laughing at him behind his back, but other than that, he likely did little more than write emails that nobody read.
The irony is that he was almost certainly very well paid, and probably would have continued to receive his bonuses even if he didn’t attend any meetings, had he managed to keep his mouth shut -- he was onto a good thing, but his immaturity bested him and now he’s going to be pushing his few belongings around SF in a shopping cart within a few years.
It's morbidly fascinating to see the way big corporations and the political Left have embraced each other. Both find something valuable in the ghastly relationship. Corporations get feel-good public relations cover and the Left gets a degree of power that an effort in the electoral system would never, ever provide. To get that power, the Left abandoned everything that matters to the working class. Given that the vast majority of them come from the ranks of the resentful petty bourgeoisie—surplus elites, wannabes—that doesn't trouble their consciences. The big corporations, in contrast, didn't have to abandon anything that matters to them, whether notionally or in reality. They subsist primarily on rent-seeking and have for quite some time. It's easy for them to absorb hysterical mediocrities like the Pfizer Pfool. There does not appear to be a good way out of this. The political economy itself is geared towards the survival of these parasites.