My Childhood Is a Lie

Someone just did a quantitative analysis of Captain James T. Kirk, going through all the episodes of the original Star Trek, and rather than being the promiscuous and reckless character parodied in Futurama's Zapp Branigan, he turns out to be a lower key and far more cautious figure:

………

We reach the point of no return when the omnijerk (really I suspect there’s just one vast eldritch horror sitting in another dimension that extrudes its thousand tentacles into our own, and that each one of This Guy is merely an insignificant manifestation of the beast: they couldn’t all be so boring in precisely the same way by chance, surely) decides to voice some Dinner Party Opinions on original-series Star Trek. God knows why. It’s not five seconds before he’s on ‘Kirk and the green women’. He’s mocking the retrosexist trope, but smiling a little weirdly while doing it. His own insufficiently private enjoyment is peeking out, like a semi-erection on his face. A sort of Mad Men effect: saying, “isn’t it awful” and going for the low-hanging critical fruit while simultaneously rolling around in that aesthetic and idea of masculinity. Camp, but no homo!

“You’re thinking of Pike,” I say. “The captain in the unaired pilot. Some of that footage got reused for a later story, which made Pike into a previous captain of the Enterprise. And it never actually happened—it was a hallucination sequence designed by aliens who didn’t know what they were doing in order to tempt Pike. He rejected it.”
………

His [the loudmouthed boyfriend of a girl invited to the party] was a common enough error, and he can claim neither the credit nor the blame for the invention. The pop culture idea of Kirk, Captain of the Enterprise for the first Star Trek series (ST:TOS) and the original run of films, has become almost synonymous with Zapp Brannigan from Futurama. To quote Wikipedia,

[t]hough famed for his bravery and strategic genius, it soon becomes very apparent that [Brannigan] is sexist, vain, and often very cowardly and inept. […] Brannigan is also completely indifferent to military casualties. […] He is arrogant, completely incompetent, chauvinistic, and stupid.

Brannigan is supposed to be part comic exaggeration of the “real” Kirk, part reflective take-down of the source character ^[1] . Per wiki, in some ways the ultimate aggregator of the vox populi, “Kirk has been noted for ‘his sexual exploits with gorgeous females of every size, shape and type’ ^[11]; he has been called ‘promiscuous’ ^[66] and labeled a ‘womanizer’ ^{[67] [68]}.” (Note all those still-working footnotes for fan-publications and major papers and entertainment news sites.) The article “Captain Kirk’s 8 Most Impressive Love Conquests” gives us such bon mots as these:

For three glorious seasons, Star Trek‘s Captain James T. Kirk boldly seduced and explored women no Earth-man had been with before. Well, okay, some of them were from Earth, but Starfleet’s greatest discovery was that no women anywhere in the cosmos could resist the intense gaze and oft-exposed, tanned pecs of the Enterprise’s head honcho. Who can blame them, really? Of the many, many seduction [sic] committed by James T. Kirk, here are the 8 most impressive (not most exotic, which would totally include the green Orion Slave Girl, but this doesn’t, because Kirk had no problems getting under her Orion’s belt), which deserve to be recorded in the Captain’s Log for all eternity.

What follows is an inventory of Kirk's actual behavior, which is far milder, particularly by the standard of 1960's television, than I recall:

Let’s start, as people so often do, with those infamous Green Women.

Yes: one existed in ST:TOS. Sort of. It was a vision. On a planet Kirk wasn’t even on. A captain was there: it wasn’t Kirk. Captain Pike and this green, Orion woman ^[2] could literally never have done the deed ^[3].

(ADDENDUM: I should also mention here the first and only actual Orion woman we see in TOS, Marta: an inmate of an asylum who attempts to seduce a suspicious, wounded Kirk, who is himself interested in escaping dangerous captivity. She then immediately tries to murder him. Ah, l'amour.)

Over the course of three seasons and six films (though I hesitate to mention the films in the same breath as the series, because even the initial run of films represents a significant, reflexive re-working of the original material), we do meet some women Kirk has had romantic relations with. These previous relationships mostly seem of a type.

• Ruth (“Shore Leave”) was a college girlfriend of Kirk’s while he was at Starfleet Academy. The script implies she was also in Starfleet. We see only a facsimile of her.
• Dr. Janet Wallace (“The Deadly Years”) was a biologist, and she and Kirk broke up in favour of their respective careers.
• Janice Lester (“Turnabout Intruder”) was a Starfleet-trained scientist. Their relationship lasted at least a year, and was strained and broken by Janice’s violent resentment of Kirk’s ability to benefit from institutional sexism (check the tapes, I’m not exaggerating, that’s what she says).
• Areel Shaw (“Court Martial”) was a dedicated JAG attorney.
• Carol Marcus (The Wrath of Khan), retconned into the history of Kirk’s life by the films, was a brilliant, ground-breaking scientist. In one draft of the script, this character literally was the aforementioned Janet Wallace ^[4]

At some point during his time at the Academy, Kirk “almost married” a blonde lab technician (“Where No Man Has Gone Before”). It seems probable that she was one of the aforementioned women (all of whom but Lester were blonde, though dye exists, and all of whom but Shaw were scientists, though majors can change—I know an attorney with a biology degree myself).

With the exception of Lester, all Kirk’s relationships that we’re aware of seem to have ended amicably. He and the women involved have often kept up communication to some extent, despite the impediments caused by interstellar travel (Wallace, Marcus). The relationships all seem to have been of some duration, and characterised by fairly serious involvement on both parts. They were distinctly emotional affairs, and no one accuses Kirk of having “womanised” during them. They all involved competent people drawn to demanding, intellectually stimulating fields—usually science—and the service of something greater than themselves—almost universally Starfleet.

Kirk’s storied history of womanising seemingly consists of his having seriously dated a fairly small number of clever women in Uni. We’re even told Kirk had to be manipulated into paying attention to matters of the heart and/or loins during that period (and that Kirk’s into “longhair stuff” like 17th-century philosophy):

………

A tumblr fan essay [6] puts it well:

Nearly every instance of Captain James T. Kirk seducing an alien woman was not because he’s some randy alien shagger extraordinaire, but because he needed to distract the enemy of the given episode in order to save the Enterprise. In the same way we wouldn’t say a woman who uses her sexuality as a weapon (flirting with the villains to distract them and ultimately defeat them) is just some intergalactic bed hopper, neither is Kirk.

………

Masculinity is not a fixed construction: it evolves over time. When we view Kirk as Zapp Brannigan, actually we’re retconning a more current understanding of the male action hero and superimposing it over an era where it doesn’t have all that much business being.

So, Kirk is not the compulsive womanizer that we recall him to be.

You should read the rest, it is a long and well worth the read essay, but it makes clear, with extensive citations, that our image of Kirk is not a reflection of the character in the original series, but rather a reflection of the overtones that we have assigned, and his risk taking occurs only when there is no alternative.

Read it, and expect to lose a bit of your childhood in the process.

It's worth it.

The DCCC Supports Enslavement of Women

If you oppose women having control over their own bodies, you support their enslavement, and Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) has said that he is fine with supporting candidates who want to strip women of control over their own bodies:

Democrats will not withhold financial support for candidates who oppose abortion rights, the chairman of the party’s campaign arm in the House said in an interview with The Hill.

Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) said there will be no litmus tests for candidates as Democrats seek to find a winning roster to regain the House majority in 2018.

“There is not a litmus test for Democratic candidates,” said Luján, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman. “As we look at candidates across the country, you need to make sure you have candidates that fit the district, that can win in these districts across America.”

So, you are going to support segregationist candidates in predominantly white districts in Alabama then?

Of course not, but women are expendable to Luján and his ilk.

Dpo not give to the DCCC.

Yeah, "Possible" Arson

Tina Johnson, who accused Roy Moore of molesting her as a teen, has had her home burnt down, which authorities are investigating at as arson:

Roy Moore accuser Tina Johnson lost her home Wednesday in a fire that is now under investigation by the Etowah County Arson Task Force.

Tina Johnson, who first came to public notice for accusing Senate candidate Roy Moore of grabbing her in his office in the early 1990s, said her home on Lake Mary Louise Road in Gadsden caught fire Tuesday morning.

After neighbors and some utility workers called 911 shortly after 8 a.m. Tuesday, the Lookout Mountain Fire Department responded to the scene. By the time the flames were extinguished, Johnson and her family had lost everything they owned.

"I am devastated, just devastated," said Johnson on Friday morning. "We have just the clothes on our backs."

………

"That fire is still under investigation by the Etowah County Arson Task Force," said Natalie Barton, public information officer with the Etowah County Sheriff's Department. "A suspect of interest is being spoken to. But there have been no charges, to my knowledge, related to the fire at this time."

Barton later released a statement, saying, "The ongoing investigation does not lead us to believe that the fire is in any way related to Roy Moore or allegations made against him. More details will be released when warrants are obtained."

Yeah, right.  Nothing to do with Roy Moore allegations, because random arson is a common thing.

FWIW, there is a GoFundMe for her.

Hashtag Metoo

This time, it's Andrea Ramsey, Democrat, woman, and Emily's List endorsee, who has been forced out of the race in Kandas' 3^rd district:

Andrea Ramsey, a Democratic candidate for Congress, will drop out of the race after the Kansas City Star asked her about accusations in a 2005 lawsuit that she sexually harassed and retaliated against a male subordinate who said he had rejected her advances.

Multiple sources with knowledge of the case told The Star that the man reached a settlement with LabOne, the company where Ramsey was executive vice president of human resources. Court documents show that the man, Gary Funkhouser, and LabOne agreed to dismiss the case permanently after mediation in 2006.

Ramsey, a 56-year-old retired business executive from Leawood, was one of the Democratic candidates vying to challenge Republican Rep. Kevin Yoder in 2018 in Kansas’ 3rd District.

She was running with the endorsement of Emily’s List, a liberal women’s group that has raised more than a half-million dollars to help female candidates who support abortion rights.

Ramsey will drop out on Friday, her campaign said.

“In its rush to claim the high ground in our roiling national conversation about harassment, the Democratic Party has implemented a zero tolerance standard,” Ramsey said in a statement Friday. “For me, that means a vindictive, terminated employee’s false allegations are enough for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) to decide not to support our promising campaign. We are in a national moment where rough justice stands in place of careful analysis, nuance and due process.”

I understand her frustration, but this is how things are going to be for the next few months. (Just Al Franken).

There are a number of other candidates running in the primary in that district, which appears to be competitive.

I'm inclined to support Brent Welder, who worked for the Sanders campaign, and is a labor attorney, and has explicitly supported a $15 minimum wage and an end to "Right to Work" laws, but I do not have a dog in this hunt.

Snark of the Day

A Second Chance: This Amazing Organization Helps Disgraced Pedophiles Rebuild Their Lives By Getting Them Elected To Political Office

—ClickHole

We have finally found a positive social value to the Republican Party, they keep perverts off the streets.

This is Some Weird Sh%$

It's clear that the sexual harassment situation in Congress is a bipartisan phenomenon, but the Republicans have really nailed the skeevy side of things.

Case in point, Trent Franks (R-AZ) will be resigning because he tried to coerce his women staff members into renting out their uteruses (uteri?) to him:

Rep. Trent Franks, an Arizona Republican who is among the most conservative members of the House, said he would resign his seat after House officials learned that he had asked two female employees to bear his child as a surrogate.

Franks’s announcement came as the House Ethics Committee said it would create a special subcommittee to investigate Franks for conduct “that constitutes sexual harassment and/or retaliation for opposing sexual harassment.”

His resignation, which Franks said is effective Jan. 31, will end the ethics investigation.

Franks said in his statement that the investigation concerns his “discussion of surrogacy with two previous female subordinates, making each feel uncomfortable.”

While Franks’s statement left the circumstances of the “discussion” murky, three Republicans familiar with the allegations said that he had asked the staffers, who worked for him at the time but have since left his office, if they would serve as a surrogate mother for his child. A spokesman for Franks did not respond to a request for comment on that claim.

Seriously, this is just f%$#ing creepy.

One would have thought that natural selection should have made them extinct by now, because it appears that the required preparation for coitus would require some seriously sick, and hard to find, sh%$.

I Hate Feet of Clay

Sentor Al Franken will be resigning from the Senate following sexual harassment allegations:

Sen. Al Franken announced Thursday that he will resign from the Senate amid a growing number of women accusing the Democrat of kissing, groping and touching them without their consent.

Franken, who said some of the allegations were not true and others he “remembered differently,” was considered by many to be a “rising star” in the Democratic party that might have run for president in 2020.

“In the coming weeks, I will be resigning as a member of the United States Senate,” he said on the Senate floor.

“I of all people am aware that there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls campaigns for the Senate with the full support of his party,” Franken said in reference to President Donald Trump and Republican Senate hopeful Roy Moore.

Why couldn't this have been Joe Manchin?

John Conyers Has Left the House

He has announced that Conyers will be living the House of Representatives immediately:

Representative John Conyers Jr., under intense pressure to resign amid multiplying allegations that he sexually harassed former employees, announced Tuesday that he would leave Congress immediately, and he endorsed his son John Conyers III to succeed him.

Mr. Conyers, 88, the “dean” of the House and the longest-serving African-American representative in history, acquiesced to weeks of pressure from fellow Democrats. But by trying to keep his Detroit-area seat in the family, he touched off a family feud between his 27-year-old son and his great-nephew Ian Conyers, a state senator from Michigan who also plans to run in a special House election.

In a phone interview, Ian Conyers said that his great-uncle encouraged him to run for the seat days before deciding to step down. Now the two younger Conyerses will most likely face off in what may become a battle over the legacy of Mr. Conyers, considered an icon to many black people.

“I said, ‘Sir, if you decide that you’re going to retire, give me a heads-up because I’m going to run for your seat and keep doing the work that you have been up to,’” Ian Conyers said. “He said, ‘Absolutely. You go for it. Run.’”

I will note that this sh%$ HAD to have become common knowledge in the Congress at some point in the past 52 years he has served.

Who were his enablers?

Because Franken Isn't Accused of Abusing His Public Office?

Over at Politico, they have s story headlined, "Black lawmakers wonder why Conyers has to go — but not Franken."

This really is pretty simple: Conyers is accused of doing something much worse.

Al Franken is accused of engaging in inappropriate conduct in ways that are not through the direct exercise of his authority as a member of Congress.

Specifically, he is accused of:

• Engaging in inappropriate behavior on a USO tour as a private citizen.
• Grabbing the asses of some constituents at photo ops.

These are both bad things, and they might justify his removal from the Senate, (That's up to that particular band of narcissistic psychopaths) or his loss in the primary or general election.

John Conyers is accused of:

• Making sexual advances to multiple employees.
• Allegedly firing one for refusing his advances.
• Used office resources for private trysts.
• Using his office accounts to pay a settlement to one alleged victim.

I don't mean to make light of the Franken allegations, nor do I wish to dismiss the issues of race here, honey traps have historically been used against black politicians, but the allegations are qualitatively very different.

Conyers allegations go straight to his official behavior as a Congressman, and Franken does not.

It's not exactly apples and oranges, but it is at least apples and pears, and from a purely political perspective, and it is politics, not due process that drives calls for resignation, they are different.

Neither one of them is going to serve another term, but Blake Farenthold (pictured in ducky PJ's) probably will, because IOKIYAR.

Tweet of the Day

This tweet is making the rounds:

To all the women sharing stories of sexual assault and sexual harassment, thank you for your bravery to speak up. You are not alone. #MeToo

— Women's March (@womensmarch) October 15, 2017

This is my favorite response:

#MeToo https://t.co/VWssdltU3n

— Monica Lewinsky (@MonicaLewinsky) October 16, 2017

Many of the responses to Lewinsky's tweet are respectful and considerate.

There are a fair number, however, are beyond contempt.

My guess is that there is a high correlation with these tweets and, "I'm with her," bumper stickers.

H/t naked capitalism.

A Well Deserved Repudiation of Cultural Relativism

A court in Ontario sentenced an Iranian immigrant for beating and raping his wife repeatedly for 18 months, well below the recommended sentence, with the justification that he was operating under the cultural norms of Iran.

The appellate court overruled this sentence and gave the offender a 4 year sentence, saying that Canadians need to behave according to Canadian standards:

The woman, a recent immigrant from Iran, suffered brutal spousal abuse but didn’t even realize it was against the law.

After moving to Canada in 2009 her husband forced the woman, whose identity is protected by the court, to have sex with him by hitting her, pulling her hair, pinching her and forcefully removing her clothes. “She cried out quietly so the children would not hear,” court was told.

He also slapped, kicked and punched their two sons and hit them with a belt. Once he locked them outside the house on a snowy winter day wearing nothing but shorts and T-shirts until their mother came home and rescued them.

When the husband was convicted of sexual assault and assault, Justice William Gorewich of Ontario court sentenced him to 18 months, citing mitigating factors that included the lack of a criminal record. The judge also noted a “significant cultural gap” between behaviour that is accepted in Canada and in Iran, and the “cultural impact” of changing countries.

That didn’t cut much muster with the Ontario Court of Appeal, nor should it have.

On appeal by the Crown, Justices Mary Lou Benotto, Alexandra Hoy and David Doherty found the 18-month sentence to be “manifestly unfit”and they imposed a far tougher, and entirely appropriate, four-year sentence.

They also went out of their way to send a powerful, timely message to the lower courts and the public in general that “cultural norms that condone or tolerate conduct contrary to Canadian criminal law” must not be a mitigating factor in sentencing. “Cultural differences do not excuse or mitigate criminal conduct,” the appeals court held.

If that were the case “some women in Canadian society would be afforded less protection than others.” In effect “it would … create a second class of person in our society — those who fall victim to offenders who import such practices.”

I wholeheartedly approve of this ruling.

I don't care if you come from WifeBeatIstan, there is no excuse for domestic abuse.  Ever.

Meanwhile, Back in Silicon Valley

We now find rampant sexual harassment and discrimination at Tesla Motors, wunderkind Elon Musk's most high profile project:

The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day was “be bold for change” in the fight for a “more gender inclusive world” – but some at Tesla had a different plan for the day.

It was an opportunity for women to discover essential oils. A “health and wellness group” at the electric car company invited female staff members to an 8 March “lunch ‘n learn” about oils and how they can help improve people’s “health and happiness”, according to emails seen by the Guardian, which reveal that the proposed event was quickly met with vocal criticism. It was particularly offensive to some given that a week earlier, AJ Vandermeyden, a female engineer, had publicly accused Elon Musk’s company of sexual harassment and discrimination.

Tesla postponed the oils session. The company organized a town hall meeting on diversity for that day, which included six male executives and one woman, according to multiple attendees. At the crowded meeting at the Fremont factory, women took the microphone one-by-one and shared stories of sexual harassment, mistreatment by male managers, unfair promotion decisions and more, sources said.

Vandermeyden, who attended the meeting, thought the outpouring of comments validated her own story. But soon after, Tesla fired her, accusing her of pursuing a “miscarriage of justice” by filing a lawsuit that alleged “pervasive harassment” and pay discrimination. Testimony from the town hall – along with internal emails from Musk, and Vandermeyden’s first interview since her termination – paint a picture of a company that has struggled to respond to mounting complaints about gender discrimination and has aggressively attempted to discredit a woman who publicly criticized it .

………

Musk also appeared to reference Vandermeyden in a company-wide email sent two days after her termination. In the email – with the subject “Doing the right thing”, sent at 2.29am – Musk lamented the scrutiny that his company faces, saying, “The list of companies that want to kill Tesla is so long, I’ve lost track.”

As as a result, he continued, employees must work harder and faster than competitors, adding they can’t be a “jerk” in the process.

Musk did not name Vandermeyden, but went on to offer what seemed to be a thinly veiled attack on her lawsuit: “If you are part of a less represented group, you don’t get a free pass on being a jerk yourself. We have had a few cases at Tesla where someone in a less represented group was actually given a job or promoted over more qualified highly represented candidates and then decided to sue Tesla for millions of dollars because they felt they weren’t promoted enough. That is obviously not cool.”

(emphasis mine)

What a classic example of a narcissistic self entitled tech bro, and Elon Musk is supposed one of the "good" guys in Silicon Valley, someone who is out to save the world.

If this is their best, there is something seriously rotten in the immediate vicinity of San Jose.

More Tech Bros

In this case, venture capitalist Justin Caldbeck who taking an indeterminate leave of absence following multiple allegations of sexual harassment:

In light of allegations of sexual harassment and unwanted sexual advances, Binary Capital co-founder and managing partner Justin Caldbeck is taking an indefinite leave of absence, he said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.

In his apology statement, Caldbeck did not outright admit nor deny the allegations of the female founders who came forward. Instead, he directed his apology “first to those women who I’ve made feel uncomfortable in any way, at any time – but also to the greater tech ecosystem, a community that I have utterly failed.”

As Leslie Miley noted on Twitter, the way Caldbeck kicked off his apology letter with words are how hard the last 24 hours have been on him. That’s because women in tech and in the workplace at larger have been dealing with this type of nonsense since forever.

I don't mean to minimize the sexual harassment, but I think that this is symptomatic of a more general culture of impunity, and I think that if a prosecutor with a background in white collar crime went to town with some forensic accountants, no small number of these "masters of the universe" would find themselves in jail.

Silicon Valley Bro Culture in a Nutshell

Apple's New $5 Billion Apple Park Campus Has a 100,000-Square-Foot Gym and No Daycare

Considering that this building was designed with input from the late Steve Jobs, this is not particularly surprising.

Job's relationship to parenting was (at best) problematic, so this development is rather unsurprising.

There Are Two People Who Make Donald Trump Look Good, Hillary Clinton, and ………

Mark Zuckerberg:

Facebook is disputing a former employee’s analysis that female engineers have their code rejected 35% more than male engineers, telling employees internally that leaking such information damages its “recruiting brand” and makes it harder for the company to hire women.

The original analysis, first reported by the Wall Street Journal and independently confirmed by the Guardian, was conducted by a longtime Facebook software engineer last year. The engineer studied the company’s code review process, looking at the number of times code was rejected, commented upon, or updated; how long it took for code to be accepted; and demographic data about the coder, such as gender and length of employment.

Female coders received 35% more “rejects” and 8.2% more comments on their code, the engineer found. The engineer also found that the disparity in rejections for male and female coders was “consistent across time at company”.

(emphasis mine)

We don't care, we don't have to … we're Facebook.

"Damages its recruiting brand?" Seriously?

If Facebook thinks that this is the worst part of their being another outpost of "Bro Culture," is that it damages their brand, then their moral compass is spinning fast enough to power all of Bayonne, New Jersey.

It's no wonder that another publication described Facebook's response as, "Incredibly tone-deaf."

They are Facebook, they don't care, they don't have to.

So Not a Surprise

It appears that while teaching law school courses, Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch made much over how women "abused" their employers over maternity benefits:

A former law student of Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Trump's nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, alleges that in a course she took from Gorsuch at the University of Colorado Law School last year, the judge told his class that employers, specifically law firms, should ask women seeking jobs about their plans for having children and implied that women manipulate companies starting in the interview stage to extract maternity benefits.

The concerns were shared in a letter, posted Sunday evening by the National Employment Lawyers Association and the National Women's Law Center, written by Jennifer Sisk, a 2016 graduate of the University of Colorado Law School. It was sent on Friday to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ranking Member Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

………

On April 19, 2016, Sisk wrote, Judge Gorsuch used a hypothetical from the prepared material for the class, in which a female law student applies for jobs at law firms because the student has a large debt to pay off. The student also intends to have a family with her husband.

"He interrupted our class discussion to ask students how many of us knew women who used their companies for maternity benefits, who used their companies to — in order to have a baby and then leave right away," Sisk said.

She recalled that few students raised their hands and Gorsuch became animated. "He said, 'Come on, guys. All of your hands should be up. Many women do this,'" Sisk said.

Sisk offered overall praise of Gorsuch as a teacher and legal mind, outside of this incident.

Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

This whole Handmaidens Tale thing is a feature, not a bug of conservative jurists.

Democrats will roll over on his nomination anyway.

Silicon Valley in All of Its Glory

We had revelations about a hostile work place at Uber last week, and this week it's Tesla where the "Brogrammer" culture is alleged:

A female engineer at Tesla has accused Elon Musk’s car company of ignoring her complaints of “pervasive harassment”, paying her a lower salary than men doing the same work, promoting less qualified men over her and retaliating against her for raising concerns.

The allegations of AJ Vandermeyden, who still works at the celebrated electric car manufacturer, paint a picture of a hostile work environment dominated by men where inappropriate sexual behavior is tolerated and women face numerous barriers to advance their careers.
………

Vandermeyden began at Tesla in 2013 and was eventually promoted to a manufacturing engineering position in the general assembly department, which consisted mostly of men and where she was paid less than male engineers whose work she directly took over, according to her complaint.

I think that we need to reconsider the adulation that we throw Silicon Valley's way.

There seems to be a surfeit of narcissism in around San Jose that rivals that around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Psychopathic Is as Psychopathic Does

I'm sure that you have heard some of the stories about Uber, such as their simply refusing to pay taxes in the UK, and their relationship with the city of Pittsburgh, where after defending them against state regulators, ignoring the fact that they were pillaging the Carnegie-Mellon robotics lab, and allowing the ride service to roll out robotic cars on city streets, told the "City of Bridges" to pound sand when they requested help competing in the 2016 Smart City Challenge, Uber responded with a list of new demands.

And now, we have the case of Susan Fowler, and employee (full time programmer, not a driver) how documented the toxic and hostile workplace environment for women.

• Her manager propositioned her on her first day of work.
• HR said it was the first time that this had happened, and that he would get a stern talking to ……… The kicker is that they said this to her and at least a half dozen other complainants.
• She transferred to a rather dysfunctional and chaotic division, and then was not allowed to transfer again because her performance review was downgraded because, "Performance problems aren't always something that has to do with work, but sometimes can be about things outside of work or your personal life." (Translation, "Women are to be seen, not heard.")
• It is then revealed that her performance review was retroactively downgraded because, it prevented her transfer, "It turned out that keeping me on the team made my manager look good, and I overheard him boasting to the rest of the team that even though the rest of the teams were losing their women engineers left and right, he still had some on his team." (Women in the division went from 25% to 6%[!] while she was there)
• HR asked if, "I had noticed that *I* was the common theme in all of the reports I had been making, and that if I had ever considered that I might be the problem."
• She was threatened with firing for making complaints by her boss.

Note that she is no slouch, she has written what has been described as the de-facto standard on designing standard microservices, but she still got treated like crap, because treating employees, drivers, and customers like crap is what Uber does.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is a big fan of Ayn Rand and Objectivism, and I've said before, "That Ayn Rand Is to Business What Ebola Is to the Exchange of Bodily Fluids."

#DeleteUber.

What is Wrong with the Clinton Wing of the Democratic Party Succinctly Stated

I am not at all surprised that it is a Brit who notes that aggressive identity politics has pushed economic justice out of the political spotlight.

I would argue that some political factions, most notably the Clinton political machine, have done so deliberately, because it allows them to check the "right" boxes while still aligning themselves with what Theodore Roosevelt called the "Malefactors of Wealth".

People like Wal-Mart (Hillary was a member of its board for years) and Goldman Sachs (Hillary's speeches, and they funded her son-in-law's hedge fund) are Hillary's peeps, because they all agree that focusing on identity politics, as opposed to the the increasingly ferocious war on the average American worker or the financialization of our economy, is a good thing:

The rise of identity politics means that the personal is commonly understood to be political. Being a radical today relates as much to who you are as to what you think. Class struggle, at one time the raison d’être of the socialist movement, has been usurped on the left by the personal grievances of women, gays and ethnic minorities.

Identity politics was an understandable response to some of the injustices of the twentieth century. Despite the loftiness of much left-wing rhetoric, sexism, racism and homophobia have never successfully been eliminated from socialist politics for the simple reason that these movements reflect the societies in which they were conceived. It was often made apparent to women in particular that the priorities for leftists lay strictly within the class framework.

It would be wrong to imply that today this dynamic has been turned on its head. One can still find sexism, racism and homophobia on the left as easily as one can find it in wider society. In an article for Slate about the US Democratic primaries, Michelle Goldberg wrote in late 2015 about a cultural phenomenon of so-called 'Bernie Bros' – male supporters of US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders who 'seem to believe that their class politics exempt them from taking sexism seriously'.

………

Ultimately, though, the left should seek to move beyond identity politics for the simple reason that it is compatible with neo-liberal economics. Identity politics can co-exist with the corporate boss who makes more money in a week than his cleaner takes home in a year – as long as the chances of being the boss are assigned proportionally among different ethnic groups, sexualities and genders. Individual winners and losers remain as remote from each other as ever; they are simply sorted in direct proportion to their numbers in society. The ultimate aim of identity politics is to 'tune up' the elite rather than to abolish it.

………

Class politics must certainly evolve with the times – at the very least it should take account of the legitimate grievances of people who feel marginalised for reasons other than their class. However, liberal identity politics is increasingly a zero-sum game in which white men must invariably lose out so that women, ethnic minorities and LGBT individuals can prosper. With no account for the impact of class, this will simply give rise to another injustice, or at the very least, compound an existing one.

(emphasis mine)

I think that the author, James Bloodworth, undersells the deliberate nature of this transformation.

When one looks at the professional class, doctors, lawyers, and (most significantly) college professors, the top 2-5%, this focus on identity politics benefits them.

While they have not benefited to the degree of the top 1% of 1%, they have benefited, and now it's easier to for them to find inexpensive domestic help.

Gloria Steinem, How about a Nice Glass of Shut the F%$# Up?

Feminist icon Gloria Steinem has just suggested that young women are supporting Bernie Sanders because they are looking to impress boys:

Feminist activist Gloria Steinem on Friday suggested that young women support Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders over rival Hillary Clinton because they want to meet boys.

On HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Maher asked Steinem why Clinton, who has campaigned on the historic nature of her candidacy, was losing the young female vote.

“I don’t mean to over-generalize … but men tend to get more conservative because they gain power as they age, and women get more radical because they lose power as they age,” Steinem responded.

“So it’s kind of not fair to measure most women by the standard of most men, because they’re going to get more activist as they get older,” she added.

“And when you’re young, you’re thinking, ‘Where are the boys?’ The boys are with Bernie.”

Maher joked that if he had chalked up Bernie’s support among young women to their desire to meet boys, Steinem would have slapped him.

Seriously?

After a lifetime of supporting equality, you blithely dismiss the attitudes of women as some sort of attempt at catching the right man?

She is saying that young women have no agency of their all.

I understand how some people are excited about the possibility of Hillary Clinton being the first woman President, but this is nuts.

The bigger picture is that identity politics is morally bankrupt, but I'm not a big picture kind of guy.

I'll just call lame beyond belief.