Of course he has.

Julian Assange has offered the Google employee who was fired for writing an anti-diversity memo a job at Wikileaks.

Assange, who is currently in the Ecuadorian embassy, tweeted multiple times in support of James Damore, the engineer who wrote the memo which went viral.

He said: “Censorship is for losers. @WikiLeaks is offering a job to fired Google engineer James Damore.

“Women & men deserve respect. That includes not firing them for politely expressing ideas but rather arguing back.”

Deffo. If somebody writes a “polite” ten page memo saying black people are just too different from white people to work at Google, that’s Respect.

In fact for even more Respect maybe Google should … Read the rest

Google did fire Mr Memo.

In a companywide email, Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, said portions of the memo had violated the company’s code of conduct and crossed the line “by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”

The memo put the company in a bind. On one hand, Google has long promoted a culture of openness, with employees allowed to question senior executives and even mock its strategy in internal forums. However, Google, like many other technology firms, is dealing with criticism that it has not done enough to hire and promote women and minorities.

Of course, questioning senior executives is one thing and announcing that women are inherently, as a matter of “biology,” not good enough to … Read the rest

To many people in tech, Mr Memo’s memo is no surprise at all.

Others were less surprised to hear what they called a pervasive attitude in an industry long dominated by men. The manifesto “is the Silicon Valley mindset in many ways,” said Vivek Wadhwa, a distinguished fellow at Carnegie Mellon University college of engineering and a frequent critic of the tech sector’s lack of diversity. “You could take this to a lot of people and you would hear: ‘Yup, we agree with this.’ People used to say things like this fearlessly.”

…

The manifesto claims that men have a higher drive for status, that women might not like coding because they have more interest than men in “people

Here’s a hateful little item of local news, which I would probably never have seen if I hadn’t been looking up how long we have to live with the smoke from forest fires mucking up the air:

Two members of the University of Washington men’s rowing team have been accused of sharing video and photos of themselves having sex with drunken female students, according to charging papers.

John C. Young and Tyler Minney, both 19, were each charged Wednesday with one count of disclosing intimate images for allegedly distributing to classmates a video of both men having sex with a “highly intoxicated” freshman student without her consent.

Wouldn’t it be nice if boys and men in general could manage … Read the rest

Yonatan Zunger recently left a senior position at Google (not in anger) so he is free to talk about Mr Memo.

So it seems that someone has seen fit to publish an internal manifesto about gender and our “ideological echo chamber.” I think it’s important that we make a couple of points clear.

(1) Despite speaking very authoritatively, the author does not appear to understand gender.

(2) Perhaps more interestingly, the author does not appear to understand engineering.

(3) And most seriously, the author does not appear to understand the consequences of what he wrote, either for others or himself.

It was striking how authoritatively Mr Memo spoke, especially since it was obvious that he was just recycling familiar … Read the rest

Andrew Prokop at Vox says that since the Trump administration has turned its beady eye on affirmative action programs at universities, this would be an excellent time to ask how the fuck Jared Kushner got into Harvard.

Of course few will be surprised that Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, a wealthy and connected developer and political donor, helped him get in. But the details of just how that happened, described in Daniel Golden’s thoroughly reported 2007 book The Price of Admission, remain remarkable to this day.

What Golden found, essentially, was that Jared’s father handed Harvard (a school he did not attend) a big pile of money just as Jared was starting to apply to colleges. Around the same time,

A male person at Google has had just about enough of their diversity policy, and wrote a ten page memo to explain about it. Surprise plot twist: it’s because women just aren’t as good.

In the memo, which is the personal opinion of a male Google employee and is titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” the author argues that women are underrepresented in tech not because they face bias and discrimination in the workplace, but because of inherent psychological differences between men and women. “We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism,” he writes, going on to argue that Google’s educational programs for young women may be misguided.

The post comes as Google battles a wage discrimination investigation

Guest post by Josh Spokes.

The gay community’s historical project of sexual liberation was something very different than what I thought it was when I was a young man coming into that world in the late 80s and early 90s. I see now, of course, that it was an almost entirely male “community.”

The pleas for acceptance for “radical sexualities” that seemed so innocent to me, so reasonable, then—-these were just the seeds that have bloomed into today’s lesbian-bashing, misogyny, pedophilic interest in children’s bodies, and much worse.

I struggle with this. Many of us chafed against the “respectable” gays that wanted us to tone it down so they could present in their sweaters and khakis as just another … Read the rest

Sarah Boseley at the Guardian today takes up the story of Mary Beard and the eruption of enraged goons.

She said the tone of the debate left her dispirited. “It feels very sad to me that we cannot have a reasonable discussion on such a topic as the cultural, ethnic composition of Roman Britain without resorting to unnecessary insult, abuse, misogyny and language of war, not debate.”

Beard, a classicist at Cambridge University, who is well known for her robust responses to Twitter trolls, was one of those who pointed to evidence that there was at least some ethnic diversity in Britain under Roman rule.

There followed, she said in her blog in the Times Literary Supplement,

In June there was Sarah Bond.

Earlier this month, Bond published an article in the online arts publication Hyperallergic saying that research shows ancient Western artifacts were painted in different colors but have, over time, faded to their base light marble color — giving the false impression that white skin was the classical ideal.

Uh oh. We know where this is going.

“Modern technology has revealed an irrefutable, if unpopular, truth: many of the statues, reliefs and sarcophagi created in the ancient Western world were in fact painted,” she wrote. “Marble was a precious material for Greco-Roman artisans, but it was considered a canvas, not the finished product for sculpture. It was carefully selected and then often painted in