Elsewhere (242)

They have convinced themselves that their Pleasurable Cruelty to people is justified because they act to vindicate the Righteousness of Strange Gods.
That.

‘Texas man shoots armadillo, bullet ricochets back into his face’.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/texas-man-shoots-armadillo-bullet-ricochets-back-into-his-face-1.3176390

How many times does she have to be caught lying before she feels shame?
I’m not convinced Ms Dunham’s mind works that way.
See also Laurie Penny.

Texas man shoots armadillo, bullet ricochets back into his face.
Cue Robert Earl Keen “The Armadillo Jackal”. I do wonder if the bullet actually bounced off the armadillo or if he missed and it bounced of a rock.

Dunham imagines herself the hero of her story;
And note the implication that the same thing should be done to anyone who can be overheard saying something deemed politically contentious or insufficiently flattering to a Designated Victim Group. In the name of compassion, of being woke, you should harass strangers and with self-satisfaction try to put their livelihoods in jeopardy.

My first thought when reading the latest chapter in the Dunham Chronicles, was that her publicist suggested she do something to get back into the public eye.

My elder son is a math major at a well-respected STEM university. The director of undergraduate studies in his department is a woman who’s taught university level math for 30 plus years. According to my son, she is simultaneously the toughest yet most beloved professor in the department, a department in which 70% of the students are male.

According to my son, she is simultaneously the toughest yet most beloved professor in the department, a department in which 70% of the students are male.
That is undoubtedly because she uses that unfair advantage of… merit. Which SJW types phrase as “privilege”.
Generally, math/engineer/STEM students tend to respect competence over politics, especially shrill politics.
Since the SJW crowd is heavy with credentials but light on competence, this is deemed “unfair”, in much the same way that Asian parents are finding that their children are systematically being blocked from various universities in favour of less-talented minorities. This is because their offspring have the “unfair” advantage of having stable family lives with two parents present, who teach them values like doing their homework, and so they get better grades. This is “white privilege”, because whiteness isn’t just for Caucasians anymore.

Motherboard spoke to one current [Google] employee who agrees with the document’s author, who wrote in the manifesto that “Google’s left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence.” “The fact that colleagues are calling for him to be fired — on very public forums — proves his point that there is an ideological silo and that dissenting opinions want to be silenced,” the second employee told Motherboard. “Why don’t they debate him on his argument? Because it’s easier to virtue signal by mentioning on a social network how angry and offended you are. Debate and discussion takes time.”

Today’s term is hive mind.

Related to the above.
I note the reference to “my spreadsheet” for blacklist purposes. Do you maintain such a thing, David? Asking for a friend.

Do you maintain such a thing, David? Asking for a friend.
Heh. Given the evident zeal for updating it, triumphantly, it sounds exhausting. In over a decade of doing this, I’ve blocked maybe six or seven people – for habitual, tedious trolling, usually.

The real shame is that those big evil corporations that are hated by the likes of LD are scared enough to do the bidding of LD and such.
As much as I may despise leftism, I have more empathy for leftists being and espousing leftism than I have for the hundreds of managers, middle managers, directors, vice presidents, senior vice presidents, CEO, CTO, CFO, board members, etc. that work for American Airlines who lack the cajones to tell LD to GFO.
LD is an idiot. She was raised by idiots. She was steeped in leftist idiocy from an early age. She gets rewarded financially and otherwise for being an idiot. I have very low expectations for such people. What is the excuse for the “leadership” of AA?

She’s not very bright, is she?
I think it’s more that her pronouncements aren’t constrained by realism, reciprocity, proportion or logic. Or by whether things actually happened. She also seems to suffer from a particular kind of neediness, one common among her type.

Re the ‘hive mind’ link upthread:

“Everyone is allowed to share their opinion. I just hope he gets fired for it.”

“Everyone is allowed to share their opinion. I just hope he gets fired for it.”
In fairness, Leftists love it when people express their own thoughts. Those gulags aren’t going to fill themselves up, you know.

The real shame is that those big evil corporations that are hated by the likes of LD are scared enough to do the bidding of LD and such.
No disrespect, but I think that is overstating it a bit. All AA did was basically pat her on her pointy head and tell her there was no there there.
The why is because any corporation is obligated to look into, however superficially, any complaint as a defense against (no disrespect to Mr. Sherman) the hordes of lawyers looking to pounce on a big wallet, and defense against things like, in this instance, a reinforced platoon of purple haired pierced SJWs showing up at every ticketing gate and disrupting operations.
The particular difficulty with Dunham is, though she appears to have made the whole thing up, that she has an unfortunately large megaphone for her mental purulence.

Have you seen her father’s “art?”
Yes, in that case I had done my research. Unfortunately. Thanks to David. No, really.
As for my thoughts on American Airlines, I hadn’t followed the specifics of the situation beyond what was initially reported. But at the time the story I had seen was that AA had apologized for their employees’ supposed behavior. In fact, IIRC AA was digging in trying to find out who these dastardly women were. If I have it right, they only called off their own dogs because it looked like LD made the whole thing up. Not because it was irrelevant to running an airline. But if I’m wrong on that, please let me know.

How many times does she have to be caught lying before she feels shame?
I’m not convinced Ms Dunham’s mind works that way.
See also Laurie Penny.
I’ll put on my amateur psychiatrist hat.
Dunham was abused as a child. No doubt in my mind.
Penny is just a sheltered slacker. She’s a Laci-Green-in-waiting.

“And so mathematics must be corrected with “intersectionality theory” and lots of fretting about “whiteness” and “identity.”
If you want a world lit only by candles and oil lamps, with an average life span of 40 years, this is how you get a world lit only by candles and oil lamps, with an average life span of 40 years.

Meanwhile, in Berkeley…

I’m sure the “men” who frequent that cafe will have no problem ponying up the extra 18%. More if it comes with a firm spanking.

Oops.

For several years now, the government in Beijing has expressed growing concern over embarrassing behavior by Chinese tourists traveling abroad and has tried to persuade travelers to respect local laws and customs.

Apparently, “whiteness” is a “collective social condition,” and it sucks.
So Laurie’s a racist now. The SJW/Stormfront convention should be a laugh.

“Everyone is allowed to share their opinion. I just hope he gets fired for it.”
The mob mentality about this on Twitter is fucking depressing.

The mob mentality about this on Twitter is fucking depressing.
As a snapshot of the human condition, or at least a snapshot of our expensively educated betters, it’s not exactly life-affirming.
To recap. A Google software developer with a PhD in biology writes a polite, researched and politically centrist memo suggesting there’s a leftist groupthink problem in the company, and that men and women on average have differing preferences and abilities, albeit with a large overlap, and that perhaps people should be treated as individuals rather than as mascots of allegedly oppressed identity groups.
This is immediately met with ludicrous and wilful mischaracterisations by “social justice” Twitter and the ‘progressive’ media, including deliberately deleting the memo’s links to supporting data, a general refusal to engage honestly with the author’s points, or in some cases even to read them, baseless accusations of every ‘ism’ going, personal doxxing, boasts of blacklisting, and demands that the author of the memo be fired for his heresy. On grounds that his arguments are “violently offensive” and in need of being “silenced.” He was, you see, “committing violence” with his statistics.
All of which rather proves the point about leftist groupthink and its reliance on hysteria and intimidation.
If anyone still imagines that the left’s choke-hold on academia isn’t a significant problem, an ongoing cultural rot, incidents like this suggest… otherwise.

In the same way a helicopter is described as ‘a collection if parts flying in close formation’ the misses Dunham, Penny and their ilk ( and never was the term ilk more appropriate) an be considered as a cluster of severe Personality Disorders traveling in a pack.

I’m not sure Laurie Penny believes half this crap she comes out with. She’s a run-of-the-mill upper-middle-class woman who’s stumbled on a formula for making some cash, i.e. by spouting unsupportable nonsense to a band of sycophantic followers while pretending to be a rebel. If she’d given the polyamory thing a miss – which marks her out as a weirdo that few men would want to get involved with – she’d be like, as Daniel Ream says upthread – Lacie Green, who was coming out with boilerplate feminist shite right up until she got laid properly by some shitlord on the alt-right.
I was hardly surprised she got on well with Milo’s supporters: I suspect deep down she’s a lot more like them culturally and socially than her followers.

Sun rises in East. SJWs lose their minds.

Speaking of the reborn Elfwick:

Everyday Lib Fem‏
@EverydayLibFem
If You’re Not Shaming Your Friends For Their Problematic Opinions, You’re Doing Feminism All Wrong

An actual empowered female — “he shouldnta brought his ass into my house.”

More Lena Dunham:
One of the hallmarks of totalitarianism is that the officially approved truth was capricious and unpredictable, and that was on purpose. They wanted the approved ideology to change so quickly that there was no way to comply with it by sincere personal conviction. The only way to comply with it was out of a habit of obedience.
Via Glenn Reynolds.

The #GoogleManifesto fracas is one of those things that would sounded like an absurd extrapolation a few years back: moderate skeptic politely questions the diversity party line while conceding half the game in the first sentence, totalitarian progressives have meltdowns about the FULMINATING ANTI-DIVERSITY SCREED and demand that the author be fired, nay, double fired, practically retroactively fired and then firing everyone who could have fired the author but didn’t. They must have been insufficiently zealous in the purging, you see. All while telling big fat lies about the content.

Brianna Wu
@Spacekatgal
Writing a memo that says, “Women and black people are physiologically unable to be engineers” is an utterly fair thing to get fired over.

A mostly orthogonal observation about the #GoogleManifesto that I saw on (a sensible part of) Tumblr is that there are some engineers expressing the opinion that they wouldn’t want to work at a company which would fire the author of the manifesto, other engineers saying they wouldn’t want to work at a company which wouldn’t fire the author of the manifesto, and some engineers saying they wouldn’t want to work at a company where the culture resulted in the manifesto being written in the first place.
Which suggests that if a company wants to sweep a wide net for engineering talent, their incentive structure is to make everyone shut the fuck up so such matters are never raised.
Hmmm. I wonder where this will lead.

Which suggests that if a company wants to sweep a wide net for engineering talent, their incentive structure is to make everyone shut the fuck up so such matters are never raised.
This is what happens when your base is in Mountain View, CA: ground zero for leftist authoritarianism.
Which makes it highly amusing that Silicon Valley’s Second City (aka Silicon Slopes), is in UTAH, the reddest red state in the union. Mostly people don’t talk politics in our Utah office. And yeah, our HQ is in Silicon Valley. Writing under pseudonyms is the better part of valor.

“[D]eadwood [S]quawking”
Country Western band name sorted.

Re: the (soon to be fired) Google chappy who wrote a well-reasoned, perfectly courteous and indeed highly pertinent ‘memo’ on the sinisterly rigid, monocultural environment now detrimentally pervading his employer:
In an exceedingly rare fit of masochism I had an ill-advised peruse of some of the responses his concerns had elicited across various, purported tech websites and as one might expect in 2017, they were rather sobering overall.
Though few will be in any doubt as to what the majority of these somewhat ’emotional’ responses comprised of the following conveniently summarises them:
(1) – ‘The heretical author demonstrably hates all women/never met an actual woman in his life.’
(2) – ‘He wants Google to be an exclusive haven for white male employees – no girlies or foreign types allowed.’
(3) – ‘Is likely a virgin (in a derogatory sense, obviously).’
(4) – ‘Deserves to be fired (that demand was particularly popular, unsurprisingly).’
(5) – ‘Is beyond doubt a generally a nasty/fascist/Nazi sort of chap by default.’
Only very occasionally did someone bother to contend something he actually said rather than what they’d simply decided he said….
Ah, the ‘enlightened’ times we live in.

The whole Google Manifesto thing seems slightly…off.
I’ve interviewed (unsuccessfully) with Google’s Mountain View campus, a number of friends and former colleagues work there – I cannot fathom that the author of the manifesto didn’t know exactly how it was going to be received.
I find myself wondering if he didn’t already have an escape plan set up and this is a masterful troll job designed to get Google to self-incriminate.

Daniel, the author may perhaps have had an escape plan, or been a deep cover operative, or one of various other funny imaginings.
But I think the more blunt take is that the author was simply naïve – as techies sometimes are, studying computers not people.
Partly from hearing so many promises about commitment to diversity and open debate and free expression, and taking them at face value.
Partly in misjudging just how far out the party line was being drawn, because if one READS THE GOD-DAMN MANIFESTO, one sees that it’s falling over itself to repeat progressive points throughout.
Some excerpts:

I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions. If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem.
I’m not saying that all men differ from women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
Below I’ll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women’s representation in tech
I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more.
I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn’t try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology. I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group

This was evidently insufficiently progressive.
Thus we get CNN’s take:

Google executives have responded to a 3,300-word manifesto written by one of its male engineers that argues women aren’t suited for tech jobs for “biological” reasons.

One is reminded of the old Soviet phenomenon “never be the first to stop applauding”.

The #GoogleManifesto reminds me of Larry Summers
We discussed that saga here many moons ago, when this place was still finding its feet. As with Summers, it seems possible that the author of the ‘manifesto’ simply didn’t comprehend the level of vindictiveness and dishonesty his suggestions would attract.

The situation with Larry Summers came up in a conversation I was having with a psychiatrist around that time. I was informed that it was badthink and that I should be ashamed for daring to suggest it was anything other than just straight-out discrimination. This had something to do with the psychiatrist having had two daughters.

such universities and programs still can’t hit more than a 60/40 male to female ratio of students. Whatever the answer is, it is not discrimination.
I know I’ve made this point before, but after twenty years of such pandering, the ratio of female students in engineering at my alma mater has gone down.
That said, twenty years ago there was a lot of casual crudity and misogyny in that engineering school, and I expect that having to sit through twenty years of pandering hasn’t done much to change those attitudes. If anything, it’s likely strengthened them.

That said, twenty years ago there was a lot of casual crudity and misogyny in that engineering school, and I expect that having to sit through twenty years of pandering hasn’t done much to change those attitudes.
As I mention upthread, my son’s favorite and most demanding maths professor is female. The students at his university respect competence. And they’re smart enough to avoid the crudity these days. Perhaps it is the respect for competence which is now defined as “misogyny” when criticism of incompetence is directed at the wrong class of people.

And…..he’s been fired.
God help us.

A polyamorous transmasc queer programmer weighs in on how engineers should be trained.

And…..he’s been fired.
Well, at least the brazen ubiquity of the misrepresentation may have opened a few eyes.
It’s possible, if baffling, that some people can be surrounded by colleagues mouthing ‘progressive’ pieties and being ostentatiously right-on, and come to assume that the guff about “diversity” and “dialogue” and “inclusion” is sincere. As opposed to, say, camouflage. Though when people loudly and competitively signal their leftist pieties, I’ve found it best to assume that something quite unpleasant may be rumbling underneath. There very often is.

Microbillionaire:
Brianna Wu
@Spacekatgal
Writing a memo that says, “Women and black people are physiologically unable to be engineers” is an utterly fair thing to get fired over.
Here’s another ‘hatefact’ for John Flynt (‘Brianna Wu’) ” Men are physiologically unable to become women”.

Australia’s LBQT… twits thank the rest of us for our support for same sex marriage http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/news-and-views/social/mia-freedman-panned-over-tonedeaf-attempt-to-support-marriage-equality-20170809-gxsapm.html