I’m Now a Certified and Legally Responsible Non-Harasser of Women

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Hey, look what I got. That’s right: I’ve completed MoJo’s required course on sexual harassment, no longer limited just to supervisors.

This doesn’t have much practical value, since I work at home and have no one to harass even if I wanted to. Nonetheless, I was eager to take the course. You see, I’m immersed in opinions about PC culture and diversity and the idiocy of it all etc. etc. But I have no personal experience of it. If you’re talking about schools, I graduated 40 years ago and I have no kids. If you’re talking about Silicon Valley or Wall Street, I have no clue about either. If you’re talking about workplace harassment, it never really came up at any of my previous jobs, and I haven’t participated in an actual workplace since 2001.

So how was it? Pretty boring, really. If someone rejects your advances repeatedly, back off. Don’t fire someone for rejecting you. Don’t go into a woman’s cubicle a dozen times a day to take a deep sniff. (Yes, that was a real example.) Don’t spend three hours a day watching hardcore porn in your office. Don’t go around telling black people they’re “articulate” or Asian people that “of course” they’re good at math. Don’t lose your temper. Talk out your problems. Don’t be an asshole.

Of course I, along with almost everyone who reads this blog, is an overeducated know-it-all who finds all of this trivially obvious. That’s not true of everyone by a long way, and stuff like this is probably useful for them. This was also a pretty breezy course, not like the 8-hour sessions that are apparently required at some places. (I guess. How would I know?)

Bottom line: I didn’t learn much, but I suppose plenty of people would. And it really wasn’t very onerous. Mostly just common sense, not lefty indoctrination. So what’s everyone complaining about?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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