Darling dear

Aug 10th, 2017 5:15 pm | By

I posted on Facebook earlier today:

Argument on a thread. A man replies to a woman, beginning with “My dear lady”; in her reply she tells him not to call her that.

I, out of my profound generosity and kindness, seek to help him by telling him that “my dear lady” is patronizing at best. He informs me that “patronizing” is in the eye of the beholder.

Sigh.

Now I read Athene Donald’s blog.

It is perhaps the case that I am on a short fuse at the moment. I realised this when, a day or two later I had an altercation with a taxi driver. I had cycled back to my home – the Master’s Lodge at Churchill College – sadly pondering on the shocking way the trolls were after my friend and colleague Mary Beard again. Trying to stick up for some academic rigour she has been attacked by a posse of internet trolls for holding firm to the idea – and giving chapter and verse of evidence – that there were men of colour in Roman Britain.

Whilst constantly challenging Mary to produce her credentials they, the opposition, seem content to argue along the lines of, fairly literally, ‘my citation count is bigger than yours’, as if citations proved much. Or that remark didn’t smack of the school playground bully. As scientists know only too well, you can get plenty of citations for being wrong. Being wrong, is after all, sometimes more interesting than being right. But it doesn’t mean that you’re either an expert or correct after all. I’m not going to jab my finger at the twitterstorm’s main protagonist Nicholas Taleb. I admit I’d never heard of him before though I was vaguely aware of his best-selling book Black Swan. Interesting topic, made a great deal of; academic worth – no idea personally. I’m not interested in his citation count. I am interested in, or rather I am utterly appalled by, his ability to be totally vicious and simultaneously vacuous within 140 characters on Twitter. I am concerned by why he thinks this is the mark of a good academic. Why he thinks it advances the debate on whether or not the Roman army was anything other than pure white. Mary on her own blog has provided some concrete evidence, but I haven’t seen a sensible response from her detractors. But then I might have missed something.

It makes me very angry to watch her being attacked by many – although supported I suspect by many more – in ways that seem quite gratuitously unpleasant and misogynistic. No one calls a man an old bat, or tw@ or much much worse; the insults all seemed strongly gendered.

Don’t they though? Day in and day out, don’t they though?

Then she tried to help a taxi driver who was lost at Churchill College – her college – and his response was to shout at her and call her “darling.”

 Red rag to a bull, I’m afraid. On that particular day, having been pondering Mary’s plight, I threw back at him (not politely I admit) ‘don’t call me darling’. Things escalated from there with choice phrases from him along the lines of ‘you’re certainly not my darling’ (so why did he call me one in the first place?) and further abuse. It ended up with another shout of ‘darling’ as he drove off. I have complained to his employer.

It is utterly trivial yet also symptomatic of the way some men seem to think there is no need to treat women with respect. Darling in itself is merely demeaning. It’s not threatening so perhaps I shouldn’t care. But if he treats me like that, how might he treat a young female student who flagged his taxi down late at night? What respect does he show others? Tolerating such contempt strikes me as too close to giving him permission to attack the more vulnerable to a greater degree than his mere inappropriate language to me. (Was I supposed to be flattered to be called darling in the first place? What does go through their heads when they say things like that?)

The same thing that goes through Trump’s head when he vomits out his bullying namecalling garbage. Entitlement, contempt, hostility, rage.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 2 comments


Easier to vote in Republican areas, harder in Democratic ones

Aug 10th, 2017 4:02 pm | By

Voter suppression in Indiana:

State and local Republicans have expanded early voting in GOP-dominated areas and restricted it in Democratic areas, an IndyStar investigation has found, prompting a significant change in Central Indiana voting patterns.

From 2008 to 2016, GOP officials expanded early voting stations in Republican dominated Hamilton County, IndyStar’s analysis found, and decreased them in the state’s biggest Democratic hotbed, Marion County.

That made voting more convenient in GOP areas for people with transportation issues or busy schedules. And the results were immediate.

And correspondingly less convenient in Democratic Party areas.

Most telling, Hamilton County saw a 63 percent increase in absentee voting from 2008 to 2016, while Marion County saw a 26 percent decline. Absentee ballots are used at early voting stations.

Population growth and other factors may have played a role, but Hamilton County Clerk Kathy Richardson, a Republican, told IndyStar the rise in absentee voting in Hamilton County was largely a result of the addition of two early voting stations, which brought the total to three.

“It was a great concept to open those (voting stations),” Richardson said, adding that the turnout might have increased with the addition of even more voting machines.

Other Central Indiana Republican strongholds, including Boone, Johnson and Hendricks counties, also have added early voting sites — and enjoyed corresponding increases in absentee voter turnout.

But not Marion County, which tends to vote Democratic, and has a large African-American population.

During that same 2008-16 period, the number of early voting stations declined from three to one in Marion County, as Republican officials blocked expansion.

Blatant enough?

Democrats have tried four times to expand early voting in Marion County, but they’ve been blocked every time by one Republican representative on the elections board.

When asked about IndyStar’s analysis, legislative leaders including Indiana Senate President Pro Tempore David Long, R-Fort Wayne, and House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, did not return numerous requests for comment, or respond to questions submitted in writing. Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb and Secretary of State Connie Lawson deferred to county officials for comment.

Julia Vaughn, executive director of Common Cause Indiana, which is party to the suit, said in-person early voting is important because people are increasingly voting early — especially the poor and people of color who cannot take time off of work.

Well but the poor and people of color vote for the wrong candidates. We can’t have that.

H/t Ari Berman

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 2 comments


Because now we have a smaller payroll

Aug 10th, 2017 3:42 pm | By

Oh no. Come on.

The Post is reporting it too.

BEDMINSTER, N.J. — President Trump said here Thursday that he is “very thankful” to Russian President Vladimir Putin for expelling hundreds of U.S. diplomats from Russia, because he said it helps him cut the U.S. government’s payroll.

Addressing for the first time Putin’s decision late last month that the U.S. Embassy and consulates in Russia would have to cut 775 diplomatic and technical staffers, Trump told reporters that he sees no reason for them to continue working in Russia.

“I want to thank him because we’re trying to cut down our payroll, and as far as I’m concerned I’m very thankful that he let go a large number of people because now we have a smaller payroll,” Trump said. “There’s no real reason for them to go back. I greatly appreciate the fact that we’ve been able to cut our payroll of the United States. We’re going to save a lot of money.”

I can’t stand it. I can’t take it. I can’t stand the smug stupidity that will get us all wiped out.

Politico says the state department people are not amused.

Trump’s remarks did not go down well among the rank-and-file at the State Department, some of whom noted that the people who would be most affected are locally hired staff crucial to American diplomats’ work overseas.

A senior U.S. diplomat serving overseas called Trump’s remarks “outrageous” and said it could lead more State Department staffers to head for the exits.

“This is so incredibly demoralizing and disrespectful to people serving their country in harm’s way,” the diplomat said.

“I kid you not, I have heard from three different people in the last five minutes,” one State Department official told POLITICO shortly after Trump’s comments. “Everyone seems pretty amazed. This statement is naive and shortsighted. It sends a terrible signal to local employees everywhere.”

“THANK Putin?” another bewildered State Department official responded. “I don’t have words that are printable to describe my reaction.”

Not to mention the whole idiotic “we’re trying to cut down on our payroll” bullshit, as if the US were a god damn grocery store.

We lurch from toilet overflow to toilet overflow.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 6 comments


Newcastle’s turn

Aug 10th, 2017 11:13 am | By

Another sex grooming case concludes with multiple convictions.

Seventeen men and one woman have been found guilty of involvement in a sex grooming network in Newcastle upon Tyne that plied vulnerable women and girls with drink and drugs before assaulting them.

In a series of four trials at Newcastle crown court, juries found the men guilty of a catalogue of nearly 100 offences – including rape, human trafficking, conspiracy to incite prostitution and drug supply – between 2011 and 2014.

The men befriended more than 20 victims and invited them to “sessions” at properties, mostly in the west end of the city. The girls were lured by the offer of alcohol and drugs, in particular mephedrone (“Mkat”) and cannabis, and were expected to offer sexual services in return for the substances.

The victims, all females between 13 and 25, were targeted because they were vulnerable and because they were less likely to complain because of their circumstances, the prosecution argued. The court heard accounts of young women who were drugged before waking up to find themselves undressed, having been sexually assaulted.

The police investigation that led to the trials was called Operation Shelter.

Operation Shelter has clear similarities to grooming scandals in Rotherham and Rochdale, which featured gangs of British Asian men abusing white girls. The men in operation Shelter are from a wider range of backgrounds, including Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian, Iraqi, Iranian and Turkish.

Geographically wider, but ideologically just as narrow.

The jury was told that the men had no respect for their victims and that they chose them because they were “easy targets”. The court heard that in April 2014, Badrul Hussain – who was found guilty of providing premises for drug supply – was caught traveling on public transport without a ticket. The female ticket inspector claimed that he shouted at her: “All white women are only good for one thing. For men like me to fuck and use like trash. That’s all women like you are worth.”

That ideology. It’s quite widespread.

In a parliamentary report published in November 2014 into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, MPs said they had reached “the alarming conclusion” that Rotherham was not an outlier and that there was a widespread problem of organised child sexual exploitation in England.

A spokesperson for the child exploitation charity Pace said: “Sadly we know that child sexual exploitation has been widespread throughout the country and it can affect any child or family. It is good that the perpetrators have finally been brought to justice. There has been immense trauma inflicted on those young people and their families. There will be lessons to be learned.”

Most women have no idea how much men hate them.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 10 comments


The slights that come with that question

Aug 10th, 2017 9:07 am | By

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has thoughts on Damore’s memo. She starts with her daughter asking her if it’s true that there are biological reasons why there are fewer women in tech and leadership. Thanks, James Damore, for re-planting that seed of doubt in millions of girls and women. Nice job, 28-year-old dude – no doubt you eliminated a lot of competition with your memo.

That question, whether it’s been asked outright, whispered quietly, or simply lingered in the back of someone’s mind, has weighed heavily on me throughout my career in technology. Though I’ve been lucky to work at a company where I’ve received a lot of support—from leaders like Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, and Jonathan Rosenberg to mentors like Bill Campbell—my experience in the tech industry has shown me just how pervasive that question is.

Time and again, I’ve faced the slights that come with that question. I’ve had my abilities and commitment to my job questioned. I’ve been left out of key industry events and social gatherings. I’ve had meetings with external leaders where they primarily addressed the more junior male colleagues. I’ve had my comments frequently interrupted and my ideas ignored until they were rephrased by men. No matter how often this all happened, it still hurt.

And here’s the thing. That itself is a huge part of the reason there are fewer women in tech. Women don’t feel welcome or respected because of that kind of thing, and many of them just decide it’s not worth it. People do that you know. We all have our lives to live, and yes we’d love to help make things better but we’d also love to be reasonably happy at work, so not all of us are willing to put up with a lifetime of sexist bullshit as the penalty for working in a field full of James Damores.

That’s the first thing we should be looking about when talking about the percentages. Not the last, the first. There’s plenty of time to talk about small differences in averages and whether they exist, but first we should make damn sure there are no stupid spiteful block-headed barriers like the entrenched belief that Women Just Happen To Be Better At Baking Cakes.

So when I saw the memo that circulated last week, I once again felt that pain, and empathized with the pain it must have caused others. I thought about the women at Google who are now facing a very public discussion about their abilities, sparked by one of their own co-workers. I thought about the women throughout the tech field who are already dealing with the implicit biases that haunt our industry (which I’ve written about before), now confronting them explicitly. I thought about how the gender gap persists in tech despite declining in other STEM fields, how hard we’ve been working as an industry to reverse that trend, and how this was yet another discouraging signal to young women who aspire to study computer science. And as my child asked me the question I’d long sought to overcome in my own life, I thought about how tragic it was that this unfounded bias was now being exposed to a new generation.

Yet another discouraging signal – that’s what we object to. I’ve seen men (mostly men) agonizing about free speech, no one should be fired for expressing an opinion, free speech, free speech, free speech – but their “free speech” is our yet another discouraging signal. Discouraging signals do their work, all the more so when they’re pervasive and endlessly repeated and defended by free speech publicists.

Wojcicki gets to that.

Some of those responding to the memo are trying to defend its authorship as an issue of free speech. As a company that has long supported free expression, Google obviously stands by the right that employees have to voice, publish or tweet their opinions. But while people may have a right to express their beliefs in public, that does not mean companies cannot take action when women are subjected to comments that perpetuate negative stereotypes about them based on their gender. Every day, companies take action against employees who make unlawful statements about co-workers, or create hostile work environments.

It is an issue of free speech, as well as other things, but it’s far from a slam dunk free speech violation. Damore’s memo is not a disinterested general opinion on an abstract subject – say, free will, or free trade, or gun control. It’s a highly political “opinion” about the abilities of women in tech, and thus of the small percentage of women who work at Google. The freedom to say women are too stupid to work in tech is not absolute.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 6 comments
Tags: ,


The structural differences that create inequality

Aug 9th, 2017 5:42 pm | By

Lara Williams at New Scientist points out James Damore’s neglect of the social aspect of perceived differences between women and men.

One truth though is that biological determinism has a history of being trotted out to justify sexism and it is problematic for a number of reasons. Damore’s manifesto portrays women as a product of inherited traits; understanding womanhood as an expressly anatomical concept without social and cultural influence. He needs to heed French intellectual and feminist Simone de Beauvoir’s famous line, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”.

Feminist identity politics are, broadly speaking, concerned with the ways female identity and prescriptive modes of femininity are shaped and constructed. Damore’s assertions presume gender identity happens in a cultural vacuum.

That was my chief frustration with it. “This stuff is drilled into us, you can’t just ignore that!”

“We ask why we don’t see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs,” Damore states. “These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life.”

But we absolutely do ask. Men do not have biological predisposition towards stressful hours any more than women do; likewise, a “balanced and fulfilling life” comes with different expectations if it is likely you are the half of a partnership required to pick up the majority of the domestic labour and child-rearing duties. The structural differences that create inequality are more nuanced than genitals and genetics.

Damore probably thinks women “biologically” want to do all the domestic labor.

Damore outlines Google’s diversity strategies, such as mentoring and classes for marginalised candidates, as harmful, stating they actually “increase race and gender tensions”. Such strategies increase tensions only for those with a sense of privilege and entitlement, threatened by the usurping of a status quo they benefit from.

What he does not address is the widely discussed prevalence of an aggressively masculine “bro-culture”, making those long office hours even less palatable for women. A 2016 survey found that 60 per cent of female employees in tech roles reported unwanted sexual advances and 87 per cent reported demeaning comments from male colleagues.

Like James Damore’s, for instance. Funny how that works.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: ,


James Damore: the celebrity years

Aug 9th, 2017 4:54 pm | By

Ah, of course he did. James Damore turned down interview requests from professional journalists and instead shared his wisdom with two right-wing anti-feminist YouTubers, Stefan Molyneux and Jordan Peterson.

The videos posted Tuesday, which quickly racked up hundreds of thousands of views, come as Damore has threatened to take legal action against Google over his termination, making him an overnight celebrity amongst the “alt-right” and other conservatives in Silicon Valley.

The podcasters provided a sympathetic audience for Damore, who also argued that Google is intolerant of rightwing viewpoints and that companies discriminate against white men with diversity and inclusion initiatives. (Google remains overwhelmingly white and male, with women occupying just 20% of the technical workforce and African Americans at 1%, according to company statistics).

So where’s the discrimination exactly? Damore thinks Google should be 100% white and male, and anything less is discrimination?

I guess that’s one of the ways women are different from men.

Damore told Molyneux in his 45-minute long interview that he was inspired to write his manifesto after attending a Google diversity program that he found offensive.

“It was totally secretive. And I heard things that I definitely disagreed with,” he said. “There was a lot of just shaming and, ‘No you can’t say that, that’s sexist, you can’t do this.’ There’s just so much hypocrisy.”

It’s such an outrage to tell people they can’t say sexist shit in the workplace.

Damore has faced widespread scrutiny this week, with journalists investigating his time at Harvard where he reportedly was involved in a sexist skit in the systems biology program. His LinkedIn profile had also said that he obtained a PhD, but a Harvard spokeswoman confirmed that he only completed a master’s degree in 2013 before starting at Google.

One former Harvard student, who was in the systems biology program at the same time as Damore, told the Guardian that it was not surprising to find out he was the author of the controversial manifesto, which was widely criticized for relying on shoddy science.

“His comments do not reflect the ability to read literature critically that a typical Harvard student develops over the course of actually completing a PhD,” the former classmate said.

Damore’s views, the source said, made him an outlier in the department, which values diversity.

“It’s pretty unusual someone would have those opinions and be stupid enough to voice them,” the former classmate said. “Part of me worries that he got into some dark corner of the internet.”

Well that’s the thing: it’s not so much a dark corner as a dark large segment.

It’s amusing that Damore accuses Google of being an ideological echo-chamber. Molyneux and Peterson aren’t?

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 2 comments
Tags: ,


Prejudice masquerading as fact

Aug 9th, 2017 4:44 pm | By

Angela Saini, author of Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, on that memo.

A portion of his argument is indeed based on published science. In particular, there is a school of neuroscience that tries to popularise the notion that male and female brains are distinct. It claims that female brains are typically hardwired for empathy, while male brains are built to analyse systems, such as computers and cars. This all hinges on the idea that autism represents an extreme form of the male brain, caused by exposure to higher than usual testosterone levels in the womb. Yet recent experiments have repeatedly failed to find a direct link between foetal testosterone levels alone and autism.

Indeed, psychological studies show that there are only the tiniest gaps, if any, between the sexes, including areas such as mathematical ability and verbal fluency. Navigating this complicated field for my latest book, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, I was told by a prominent American researcher into sex difference that he no longer refers to brains as sexually dimorphic, because the science simply doesn’t support this. There isn’t a neuroscientist alive who can say with confidence which sex any given brain belongs to.

In short the science in the memo is “flawed,” but the memo is getting lots of support anyway.

What they fail to understand is that there are published scientific papers out there to support every possible opinion, even that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Getting published doesn’t make an idea true, it only means that someone has managed to get it into print. In evolutionary psychology, theories are sometimes little more than speculation strung together with scant evidence.

There was a time, she points out, when eugenics was considered good science.

Weak scientific evidence and empty theories are still being used to support troubling ideologies. Women are making enormous strides in science and engineering – yet, with some half-cocked hypotheses in their back pockets, male software engineers feel they have the right to tell them they are somehow biologically unsuited to this kind of work.

They forget, perhaps, that many of the world’s original computer programmers were women, including the first: Ada Lovelace. Women began to be marginalised in technology around the time that personal computing took off and become a lucrative industry. Male software engineers forget that discrimination and sexual harassment have driven women out of Silicon Valley, and kept countless more out in the first place.

The myriad historical, cultural and social factors that create inequality are all too easily glossed over when someone reaches for the closest, most convenient biological explanation for what they see. This isn’t just intellectual laziness; this is prejudice masquerading as fact.

It’s also men being assholes.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 25 comments
Tags: ,


Less concerned with oxidization

Aug 9th, 2017 4:16 pm | By

Ben Kronengold at McSweeney’s:

I, a manufacturing robot at Google Factory C4.7, value diversity and inclusion. I also do not deny that machines are sometimes given preference to humans in the workplace. All I’m suggesting in this document is that humans’ underrepresentation in tech is not due to discrimination. Rather, it is a result of biological differences. Specifically, humans have a biology.

Humans and robots are different, and that’s not socially constructed, it’s the real deal.

Humans, on average are:

  • More concerned with relationships
  • Less concerned with oxidization
  • More likely to “pee”

Humans are also far more likely to “literally cannot right now.”

Robots never cannot right now.

Suggestions

I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that diversity is bad. I realize the value of having humans on our team at Google and in society at large. But we should not be manufacturing (computed: pun) diversity as we are right now.

My concrete suggestions are to:

  • De-moralize humanity: As soon as we start to moralize a group, we stop thinking about them in terms of efficiency.
  • Stop alienating never-human-ers: It’s important to give a voice to even the most zealot robots, whether that voice is Male (US), Woman (US), or Male (UK) if we’re feeling fun.
  • Eliminate buzzwords: Like synergy, disruption and 10010110 (this one is in binary, but it’s all any machine on my assembly line says).

    Finally

    If you still think humanity is so valuable, check out that memo from the software engineer on Floor 8. Even we machines literally could not.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 1 Comment »
Tags:


Morning and afternoon

Aug 9th, 2017 11:45 am | By

Dear god.

Trump gets a Big Special Treat twice a day, prepared for him by his handlers.

Twice a day since the beginning of the Trump administration, a special folder is prepared for the president. The first document is prepared around 9:30 a.m. and the follow-up, around 4:30 p.m. Former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and former Press Secretary Sean Spicer both wanted the privilege of delivering the 20-to-25-page packet to President Trump personally, White House sources say.

These sensitive papers, described to VICE News by three current and former White House officials, don’t contain top-secret intelligence or updates on legislative initiatives. Instead, the folders are filled with screenshots of positive cable news chyrons (those lower-third headlines and crawls), admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful.

Tweets. It’s somebody’s job to find and screenshot tweets so that Trump will feel puffed up and conceited and happy.

Can you imagine Obama doing that?

One White House official said the only feedback the White House communications shop, which prepares the folder, has ever gotten in all these months is: “It needs to be more fucking positive.” That’s why some in the White House ruefully refer to the packet as “the propaganda document.”

Thus we learn that there is no one both intelligent enough and brave enough to say no, this is the opposite of what we should be doing. Nobody to say: “Look, conceit he’s already got, what he needs is to grasp that he has faults, and what they are, and what most people think of them.”

The process of assembling the folder begins at the Republican National Committee’s “war room,” which has expanded from 4 to 10 people since the GOP won the White House. A war room — both parties have one regardless of who’s in the White House — is often tasked with monitoring local and national news, cable television, social media, digital media, and print media to see how the party, its candidates or their opponents are being perceived.

How Trump is being perceived is, for the most part, not as a good or clever man.

“Maybe it’s good for the country that the president is in a good mood in the morning,” one former RNC official said.

Maybe it’s bad for the country that the president is being systematically shielded from how hard most people hate him and what a terrible job they think he’s doing.

Of course, every White House monitors media coverage to see how they’re being covered, and the RNC may have decided more staff was needed after the party won the White House. As the political media environment has become faster-moving and more frenzied, the efforts to follow it have also become more robust. The Obama White House usually had at least one very caffeinated point person and two others dedicated to watching Twitter, online publications, print media, and cable news, and then compile relevant clips and send them around to White House aides.

But the production of a folder with just positive news — and the use of the RNC to help produce it — seemed abnormal to former White House officials. “If we had prepared such a digest for Obama, he would have roared with laughter,” said David Axelrod, the senior adviser to Barack Obama during his first two years in the White House. “His was a reality-based presidency.”

I miss that.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 12 comments
Tags:


Entirely improvised

Aug 9th, 2017 11:24 am | By

So Trump’s idiot outburst at North Korea wasn’t even planned. It was his very own Awesome Idea on the spur of the moment.

President Trump delivered his “fire and fury” threat to North Korea on Tuesday with arms folded, jaw set and eyes flitting on what appeared to be a single page of talking points set before him on the conference table at his New Jersey golf resort.

The piece of paper, as it turned out, was a fact sheet on the opioid crisis he had come to talk about, and his ominous warning to Pyongyang was entirely improvised, according to several people with direct knowledge of what unfolded. In discussions with advisers beforehand, he had not run the specific language by them.

The inflammatory words quickly escalated the confrontation with North Korea to a new, alarming level and were followed shortly by a new threat from North Korea to obliterate an American air base on Guam.

Ain’t that great? We’ve got a soft-headed conceited bully in charge of the nukes, and he feels entitled to vomit out rabid threats whenever the mood takes him. This will not go well.

The president had been told about a Washington Post story on North Korea’s progress in miniaturizing nuclear warheads so that they could fit on top of a ballistic missile, and was in a bellicose mood, according to a person who spoke with him before he made the statement.

Note that he was told about it. He didn’t read it. He doesn’t read things, because he’s too stupid and lazy and shallow. People have to “tell him about” important news.

And he was “in a bellicose mood” so he increased the risk of a nuclear war. That’s what we’re dealing with here.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 4 comments
Tags:


Sleep well

Aug 9th, 2017 10:26 am | By

Will Trump’s idiot bombast get us all killed? Who knows.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson played down the threat. “I think Americans should sleep well at night, have no concerns about this particular rhetoric of the last few days,” he said.

Oh well, if Rex Tillerson says it, there’s nothing to worry about.

Kidding.

Mr. Trump’s stark comments went well beyond the firm but measured language typically preferred by American presidents in confronting North Korea, and indeed seemed almost to echo the bellicose words used by Mr. Kim. Whether that message was mainly a bluff or an authentic expression of intent, it instantly scrambled the diplomatic equation in one of the world’s most perilous regions.

Supporters suggested that Mr. Trump was trying to get Mr. Kim’s attention in a way that the North Korean leader would understand, while critics expressed concern that the American president could stumble into a war with devastating consequences.

Especially since he is authorized to launch the fucking nukes at any time on his own say-so.

They really need to invoke the 25th Amendment. But they won’t.

“This is a more dangerous moment than faced by Trump’s predecessors,” said Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonprofit group in Washington. “The normal nuanced diplomatic rhetoric coming out of Washington hasn’t worked in persuading the Kim regime of American resolve. This language underscores that the most powerful country in the world has its own escalatory and retaliatory options.”

Oh shut up. “Resolve” is worthless. “Resolve” just means everybody dies. This isn’t a god damn pissing contest, it’s a blow up the whole world fight. Nobody wins. Being mas macho doesn’t help.

But Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said it would be counterproductive. “President Trump is not helping the situation with his bombastic comments,” she said in a statement. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, also took exception. “All it’s going to do is bring us closer to some kind of serious confrontation,” he told KTAR News radio.

And that’s not the good outcome, ok?

Jesus. One stupid tv show, and this is where it gets us.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 5 comments
Tags:


A certain strand of Rational Internet Thinker

Aug 9th, 2017 9:56 am | By

Helen Lewis has more sympathy than I do for the fired James Damore.

But the conversation around this is heading in such an unproductive direction (do women suck at maths?) that I can’t resist wading in.

I agree with the writer that these issues are hard to talk about, but that pushback comes from both directions. Look at the crap Mary Beard is wading through for trying to inject some facts into a discussion about the racial composition of Roman Britain. Nicholas Nassim Taleb keeps honking about “diversity genes” and refusing to listen to evidence that contradicts him. But in his mind, he’s Mr Science – sorry, Professor Science – and she’s Madam Arts-Subject.

We kind of want these issues to be hard to talk about. We kind of want it to be not all that easy for dudes to say women just aren’t right for this particular job, unless the job is, say, modeling male bikinis.

This matters, because when it comes to diversity, there are fact-based positions on both sides. Yet there is a certain strand of Rational Internet Thinker (let’s be honest, mostly men) who solemnly tells everyone that we Must Stick To The Facts while advancing deeply ideological stances, which only happen to look “natural” because they are so embedded in our culture.

And that very much describes Damore’s ridiculous memo.

Here’s the recap: the memo was headlined  “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” and its writer’s firing will be taken as confirmation that his thesis was true. Ironically, this will be done by the same section of the right which usually has no problem with firing at will and normally thinks that HR should be a brutally Darwinian process. (Looked at from that perspective, of course Google would fire someone who brought such criticism on the company.) But now there are Principles involved. Probably Free Speech is under attack. Political Correctness may even have Gone Mad. Social Justice Warriors are on the march.

It’s amusing/exasperating that Damore doesn’t think his own very stale views do not issue from an Ideological Echo Chamber.

Also, while we’re on the subject – what’s the thinking here? That all ideas should be unique, personal, incommunicable? That any idea held by more than one person is an Ideological Echo Chamber and a Bad Thing? I trust it’s obvious how impossible it would be to have any kind of civilization and culture at all if we’re forbidden to hold ideas in common.

Lewis cites several of Damore’s Grand Generalizations about women.

Well, SOMEONE has been reading their Simon Baron Cohen. The first point is a distillation of Baron Cohen’s argument about “male brains” being better at understanding systems, and “female brains” being better at feelings – which he extends to say that autistic traits might be an “extreme male brain”. Unsurprisingly, there are other scientists in the field, such as Cordelia Fine and Rebecca Jordan-Young, who find a lot of the neuroscience of sex difference quite flaky.

I’m not a neuroscientist, but from a lay perspective, my take is that yes, there are some biological differences between the average male and female brain, but that these pale beside a) the way our brain architecture is shaped by stimuli (like years of being told you’re rubbish at maths) and b) the overall effect of culture (eg companies which value presenteeism, or make it hard for women to return after having children, or cover up for senior men who are repeated sexual harassers etc etc).

Our brain architecture is shaped by stimuli like people like James Damore telling us what our brain architcture is (and how it’s not suited to work at tech companies).

The “higher agreeableness” point was dealt with by Sheryl Sandberg in Lean In. Women aren’t stupidly not asking for raises or being assertive in the office because they are delicate little flowers. One of the reasons they are more agreeable at work is because they face heavier penalties if they are not. As Sandberg formulates it: “Success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively for women. When a man is successful, he is liked by both men and women. When a woman is successful, people of both genders like her less.” Women are nicer because there are more negative consequences for them if they are not nice.

And we can’t even do anything about that. We can up to a point do something about perceptions that women are stupid, women can’t do math, and the like. But other people’s attitudes to our being assertive? Out of our god damn control, innit.

She quotes Yonatan Zunger admiringly, concluding with

 It’s true that women are socialised to be better at paying attention to people’s emotional needs and so on — this is something that makes them better engineers, not worse ones.”

As I said on Twitter, this is a pattern we see again and again – a high status job is coded as “male”, requiring “male” traits, to justify men’s dominance of it. The same thing happens in politics: we are assured that politicians need to be “strong” and “decisive”, when many of the most successful male politicians today have incredible people skills. Jeremy Corbyn makes time for everyone he meets, hugging them and posing for endless selfies. Sadiq Khan has that Queen Mum ability to remember your name and a key fact about you. What’s the real difference between the Clintons? Bill demonstrated huge empathy and made people he was talking to feel special; Hillary didn’t. But still, maybe men dominate politics because they are just more aggressive and ambitious. Yeah, OK.

Tech suffers from a similar silent rewriting of core competencies to flatter its mostly male leaders.

We have all these conversations about how hard it is for Mark Zuckerberg to make the leap to being a frontman CEO because he’s a maths guy, not a people guy. We treat this like he’s doing an amazing project of personal growth. We don’t go, “wow, they really lowered the bar for CEOs to let someone without some of the key skills have a go at it”. Or, “his poor colleagues, having to make up for the stuff he’s not naturally gifted at”.

…

So this, for me, is the most interesting takeaway from the Google memo. “Do women suck at maths” is a complicated question, and I’m not sure how far answering it will move the conversation forwards. “Have we structured society so that those competitions between the sexes that men can win are deemed to be the most important competitions?” is a better one.

Easier to answer, too.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 30 comments
Tags:


He used a Google mailing list

Aug 8th, 2017 5:03 pm | By

Business Insider says nah, James Damore isn’t the new free speech hero the world has been looking for.

James Damore, the Google employee fired Monday for publishing a 10-page anti-diversity manifesto, almost certainly has not had his First Amendment free-speech rights infringed. If he sues Google — which Reuters reports he is considering — he will lose, unless he can find a court willing to create a new free-speech right for American workers.

Tuesday morning, the alt-right corners of the internet are rallying to Damore’s cause. He is a shining example of how the left bans certain conservative ideas and punishes people for trying to discuss them openly, they say. It is outrageous that someone can lose his job simply for disagreeing with the politics of his liberal employer, they wail.

But what about for circulating his own opinion that women aren’t good enough to work at Google? What about the effects that will have on Google as a workplace, Google’s potential for being sued by the government, Google’s reputation? Is all that a good enough reason for someone to lose his job?

“I have a legal right to express my concerns about the terms and conditions of my working environment and to bring up potentially illegal behavior, which is what my document does,” Damore told The New York Times.

The problem is that US labor law is well settled in this area: In the vast majority of US states, employees have almost no rights to free speech at work.

The First Amendment constrains the government, BI goes on, not employers.

Another catch for Damore is the fact that he did his speechifying in and at Google, using Google resources. That’s not the same as expressing an opinion elsewhere in the world using his own resources.

Damore’s problem is that he used an internal Google mailing list owned by Google to disseminate his manifesto. People do not have the right to use their employer’s resources to pay for their freedom of speech.

As illustrated by Volokh years ago in The Washington Post, the California test is whether Damore’s speech disrupted the legit business of his employer. As CEO Sundar Pichai’s memo makes clear, his manifesto became so internally disruptive that Pichai had to cancel part of his vacation to deal with the fallout. Pichai’s memo describes a “very difficult few days” at the company that forced him to fly back to California, from a trip to Africa and Europe, to fix the Damore problem. That would indicate that Damore’s speech was so disruptive it was handicapping Google’s work of building software. Indeed, the reports coming out of Google suggest that the internal reaction was so extreme that plenty of work hours were lost as employees clashed over the manifesto.

Gee, dudebros can’t even have any fun any more.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 19 comments
Tags:


Aw, he’s shy

Aug 8th, 2017 4:26 pm | By

Trump is trying to get a nuclear war going, but meanwhile it’s interesting to learn that he’s been sending little mash notes to Mueller.

President Trump has publicly called the widening federal investigation into Russia’s election meddling a “witch hunt.” But through his lawyer, Trump has sent private messages of “appreciation” to special counsel Robert Mueller.

“He appreciates what Bob Mueller is doing,” Trump’s chief counsel John Dowd told USA TODAY in an interview Tuesday. “He asked me to share that with him and that’s what I’ve done.”

Trump’s legal team has been in contact with Mueller’s office, and Dowd says he has passed along the president’s messages expressing “appreciation and greetings’’ to the special counsel.

“The president has sent messages back and forth,’’ Dowd said, declining to elaborate further.

Dear Bob –

I really like you.

Love, Don. xxxxxx000000

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 4 comments
Tags:


Guest post: Damore v Google

Aug 8th, 2017 11:57 am | By

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on A culture of openness.

First, it’s definitely not a First Amendment issue, for reasons I think have been well-discussed, i.e. the 1st Amendment applies only to “state action,” and Google is a private employer.

There is, however, a federal statute — the National Labor Relations Act — which is the labor law issue A Masked Avenger references @3. Although people generally think of the NLRA as having to do with unions, and specifically protecting speech related to union organization, it is in fact broader than that. Here is a good explanation:

Section 7 of the NLRA grants the following protected right to all private-sector, non-supervisory employees:

“…to engage in… concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid and protection.”

Employers may not “interfere with, restrain or coerce employees in the exercise of” the employee’s section 7 protected rights. The breadth of section 7 is truly astounding, as “mutual aid and protection” is generally read to include any employee-interested motivation, such as concerns on compensation, hours, working conditions, supervisors, and workplace policies.

If you read the entire article at that link, you’ll see a discussion of some recent cases, including one from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals (which isn’t binding authority in the Ninth Circuit, where this Google lawsuit would presumably be filed) where an employee’s post on Facebook that Bob, his supervisor “is such a NASTY M***** F***** don’t know how to talk to people!!!!!! F*** his mother and his entire f****** family!!!! What a LOSER!!!!” was held to be protected speech under the NLRA.

This is a still-developing area of law — even though the Act has been around for a long time, I think lawyers have only recently been pushing the boundaries of what speech falls within its protection, and courts are still sorting it out. Also, the National Labor Relations Board plays a large role in interpreting the NLRB, and who knows how its position will change under the Trump Administration. I’m not very familiar with where the boundaries are.

But I’m pretty confident in saying that AMA’s suggestion @4 that California’s at-will employment presumption, and/or the employee signing off on Google’s policies, would bar this action, is incorrect. The NLRA is federal law, and assuming it covers Google (which it almost certainly does), it supersedes any state law that may apply — just as federal anti-discrimination law provides a remedy even in “at-will” states. Nor can you generally bargain away those statutory protections, except in some instances as part of a valid collective bargaining agreement. Again, if an employer got its employees to sign contracts that say “you agree that we may discriminate against you based on race, gender . . .” that would not be a valid waiver of or defense to a claim.

Last, the significance of anti-discrimination laws as a possible defense to Google strikes me as plausible but a little tricky. I don’t know offhand if there’s any precedent that says that speech that an employer fears may create a hostile work environment is exempt from NLRA protection, though it stands to reason that one should exist: an employer should not be stuck in a situation where it is liable under anti-discrimination laws if it doesn’t punish speech but liable under the NLRA if it does. I’d be interested in finding out more from labor law practitioners.

Especially as to how the analysis would shake out in the case of this memo. It was, at least in part, a discussion of what Google’s personnel policies should be, and that suggests that it may be eligible for NLRA protection. On the other hand, I think the former Google exec explained very well how this memo creates an obvious problem for an employer. If the law requires an employer to sit on its hands when an employee says “minority group X are all [insert negative stereotypes”] as long as he or she tacks on a “and therefore we shouldn’t hire or promote any,” then the law is an ass — and courts usually try pretty hard to avoid interpreting the law in such a way.

Overall, my gut take is that Google probably has the better side of this case, but I wouldn’t say that the employee’s suit is frivolous or “lost before it begins.”

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments
Tags:


Meanwhile Google pays women less than men across the board

Aug 8th, 2017 11:39 am | By

On the one hand, shock-horror, Google has fired that nice James Damore simply for expressing his opinion, no one should ever be fired just for expressing an opinion.

On the other hand, just a couple of weeks ago the Labor Department was saying Google’s confidentiality policy was making it difficult to gather information on their demographics.

So is Google political correctness run amok or is it self-protective capitalism as usual?

The US Department of Labor has raised concerns that Google’s strict confidentiality agreements have discouraged employees from speaking to the government about discrimination as part of a high-profile wage inequality investigation.

Following a judge’s ruling that Google must hand over salary records and employee contact information to federal regulators investigating possible systemic pay disparities, a labor department official said the agency was worried that the technology corporation’s restrictive employee communication policies could impede the next phase of the inquiry.

“We have had employees during the course of the investigation express concerns about whether they are permitted by Google to talk to the government, because the company policy commits them to confidentiality,” Janet Herold, labor department regional solicitor, told the Guardian in an interview after the judge’s order.

“When even a single employee expresses that, that means many more people are too concerned to make the call or have the conversation. The chilling effect is quite extreme.”

Google said Nuh-UH, not true, not true not true not true.

But Herold’s comments and the DoL’s recent filings – along with interviews with former Google workers and a separate federal complaint against the company – paint a picture of a workplace where employees have allegedly been subject to overly broad and illegal confidentiality policies and threatening messages from managers that have intimidated them into staying silent about wrongdoing.

These kinds of confidentiality clauses are commonplace in Silicon Valley, ostensibly to protect trade secrets. But critics say the rules are sometimes so extreme they prevent employees from engaging in their legally protected rights to raise concerns about discrimination, sexual harassment and other labor violations.

“It is built into the culture that it’s shameful to leak,” said one former senior manager at Google, who requested anonymity for fear of repercussions. “It builds a sense of paranoia … There is just such a sense that leakers will be found and terminated.”

Ironies abound here. James Damore would seem to be an example of that except that he wouldn’t, because his memo didn’t discuss concerns about discrimination, sexual harassment and other labor violations, it discussed concerns about too much concern about discrimination and sexual harassment. It was itself discrimination and sexual harassment. (Yeah it was. I know it was dressed up as a dispassionate and “scholarly” treatise on How Women Are Different From Us, but that was indeed just dressing up. Under the frilly gown it was just a bog-standard MRA rant about stupid emo women.)

The concerns of Herold and other government attorneys stem from the labor department’s continuing audit of Google, which is a federal contractor and must comply with equal opportunity laws. In January, the labor department sued Google for compensation data it refused to disclose after the government’s preliminary inquiry found that the company pays women less than men across the board.

Google – which argued that the data requests were too expansive and violated employees’ privacy – has vehemently denied the discrimination allegations, saying its own analyses have found there is no gender pay gap.

A judge ruled last week that Google must provide the labor department with 2014 salary records and contact information for up to 8,000 employees for possible interviews. Herold said the department was concerned that the next phase of the investigation could face obstacles as a result of Google confidentiality rules.

“The entire enforcement mechanism of federal law is dependent on employees feeling free and able to talk,” she said. “In a case like Google, where our preliminary analysis reveals systemic and sweeping discrimination in pay against women for nearly all job titles … something is going on and we need to find out what that is. Employees are the eyes and ears on the ground.”

Wheels within wheels, eh?

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 1 Comment »
Tags:


Trump boosts Fox’s report on what spy satellites have seen

Aug 8th, 2017 10:43 am | By

Trump is fine with Fox and Friends sharing classified information, and by “classified information” I mean classified information about North Korea’s missile activity.

President Trump on Tuesday used Twitter to amplify a Fox News report, based on anonymous sources, that U.S. spy satellites had detected North Korea loading two cruise missiles on a patrol boat on the country’s coast in recent days.

Without adding any comment of his own, Trump, who regularly decries leaks to the media, retweeted to his more than 35 million followers a link to the day-old story, which was featured Tuesday morning on “Fox & Friends,” a program on the Fox News network.

Erm…doesn’t that seem like the kind of classified information that you really would want to keep secret? For reasons genuinely to do with national security as opposed to outraged vanity or ruthless self-interest?

A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to a question about whether Trump’s retweet amounted to a confirmation of Fox’s story, which was attributed to unnamed “U.S. officials with knowledge of the latest intelligence in the region.”

Who are sharing it with Fox because…why?

One intelligence official said that the report itself was insignificant and not a sign that North Korea was preparing to test a missile or make any other provocation. They are different than the long-range missiles, known as ICBMs, that have been central to escalating tensions in the region.

However, the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, was chagrined that Trump would retweet a report about “something unimportant” that nonetheless “reveals something about our surveillance capabilities.”

Isn’t this scary enough yet? It seems plenty scary enough to me.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments
Tags:


One door closes, another opens

Aug 8th, 2017 10:20 am | By

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 be actively recruiting people who can write 10 page memos saying how different and not-as-good women and Other Races are. There’s not enough of that kind of thing already, true Respect requires lots and lots more of it.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog


A culture of openness

Aug 8th, 2017 10:00 am | By

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 work at Google is another.

In an email titled “Our Words Matter,” Mr. Pichai said that he supported the right of employees to express themselves but that the memo had gone too far.

“The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender,” Mr. Pichai wrote. “Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being ‘agreeable’ rather than ‘assertive,’ showing a ‘lower stress tolerance,’ or being ‘neurotic.’”

Especially since having to worry about that uses up brain space that they could be using for work.

James Damore, the software engineer who wrote the original memo, confirmed in an email to The New York Times that he had been fired. Mr. Damore had worked at Google since 2013. He said in his memo that he had written it in the hope of having an “honest discussion” about how the company had an intolerance for ideologies that do not fit into what he believed were its left-leaning biases.

What ideologies are those? The ones that hold that “group X is ON AVERAGE [emphasis theirs] bad at the skills this job requires” and that therefore “the fact that fewer Xs work here is not something that needs to be corrected.”

In other words, the same old shit, dressed up in pseudo-intellectual language. There are more men in this company because men are better. There are more white people in this company because white people are better. We are better than you. Go away.

In other words, as Yonatan Zunger put it, a textbook hostile work environment.

Sure, Google could say we think a hostile work environment is worth it for the sake of open discussion. There’s certainly a lot of value in open discussion, and a work environment that encourages it. But…there’s also a lot of value in a work environment comparatively free of that particular brand of contempt.

Mr. Damore, who worked on infrastructure for Google’s search product, said he believed that the company’s actions were illegal and that he would “likely be pursuing legal action.”

“I have a legal right to express my concerns about the terms and conditions of my working environment and to bring up potentially illegal behavior, which is what my document does,” Mr. Damore said.

Hmm. I’m not a lawyer, to put it mildly, but I doubt that. It sounds far too sweeping to be true. I doubt that anyone has a “legal right” to circulate, for instance, a bluntly racist or sexist memo full of epithets and memes and Pepe the frogs. Mr. Damore didn’t do that, but he didn’t just circulate a memo about his oncerns about the terms and conditions of his working environment, either. He circulated a memo that expatiated at great length on what is is about women that makes Google fail to hire them. Does he have a legal right to do that? I don’t know, but I have my doubts.

Before being fired, Mr. Damore said, he had submitted a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board claiming that Google’s upper management was “misrepresenting and shaming me in order to silence my complaints.” He added that it was “illegal to retaliate” against an N.L.R.B. charge.

And another martyr for men’s rights takes the stage.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 8 comments