Cards Against Humanity Creator: Sexual Predator, Or Victim?

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the sexual assault charges against Cards Against Humanity co-creator Max Temkin (detailed at Jezebel) are entirely the product of a delusional and'or bitter woman; the first sign is that these accusations were made years after their interactions at college, and considerably after their target has become successful. Why come forward now?

Kathryn Finney, A Less Entertaining, Black Shanley Kane

I've previously bagged on Internet hysteric Shanley Kane for her raging paranoia and entitlement, her forays into self-parody, and her editorial rejection of the very notion of competence,  but a new customer recently arrived to add to the list of individuals who believe Everything Is Discrimination, to wit, Kathryn Finney. Finney penned her tale of woe at the aptly-named Medium, as in the Ernie Kovacs sense of neither rare nor well done. Normally, I would let such stuff pass, save for the fact that she lays a broadside at a libertarianism she neither understands nor has interest in; it apparently underpins all her failures, though, and so we are left to contend with her flabby self-absorption:

The idea of forced inclusion is one that goes against the very Libertarian foundations of tech. The freedom to run your life/company as you wish without outside interference is a sacred right in this community. There are venture capitalists, who pride themselves on being free range and not monitoring their investments.

The idea that an outside group, and for the most part women, Latinos, Blacks are outsiders in tech, would exert power, even force, technologists to be more inclusive, is an idea that sends tremors down the objectivist spines of the greater tech community.

The concept of Objectivism  — the focus on individual rights, laissez-faire capitalism, and “facts” — is one that is often hard for outsiders to understand. I didn’t fully understand the philosophy and it’s impact on tech, until I read folks like Ayn Rand and David Boaz.

(Duly noted: the whiny rel="nofollow" in the anchor tag to freaking Wikipedia articles about Objectivism and Ayn Rand, as if she couldn't stand having anyone even learn about these icky things because her linking to them might increase their Google ranking. I excised it in the quoted text above, but it was present in the original. SRSLY.)

Tech is being asked to use their resources to help the runner in back get to the starting line. To be honest, most people in tech are ok with helping as long as they’re allowed to choose when/how/who to help. I’m okay with this, as long as you didn’t use public resources (roads, fire departments, or the internet itself) or take money from a VC firm that has a pension fund as a limited partner, to build you [sic] company.

So, let's decode this nonsense.

• "Tech" = anyone with a company I feel like telling how it should be run, regardless of the fact that I have no investment of any kind whatsoever in it.
• "Runner" = anyone who claims to have certain skills, regardless of applicability or actual competence.

 She quickly pulls out the old MUH ROADS canard —

which is pretty much a validation of the "you didn't build that" nonsense that got Obama into so much trouble back in the 2012 election cycle (though mainly with people who weren't going to vote for him anyway). The thinking seems to go, if you live in a society with roads and police, I get to tell you how to run your company. This couldn't be funnier, more ironic, or more deeply indicative of how These People Think; after all, she confesses how she was "DONE. WITH. TECH." in March of this year, thus putting to an end her own entrepreneurial efforts. It's not at all clear what her company digitalundivided does. Aside from begging for money from like-minded busybodies, providing value to customers does not appear to be one of those things. It seems a common failing, one which hyperbolic firebrand Nero Yiannanopoulos recently bagged on:

4. There Is No Evidence That ‘Diversity’ Improves Company Performance
Seriously: I am calling for someone to do a large-scale study of the diversity efforts of companies who have fallen for this nonsense so that someone, somewhere can show me citable evidence that this does anything for a company other than provide good PR.

Maybe there are some serious figures out there. I’m sure someone with blue armpit hair is brandishing them as we speak. But until a serious, nationwide study emerges that has gone through the (look away now, feminists) peer review process, this fundamental assumption of the women in tech movement remains questionable at best.

Sorry to be blunt. But a company’s obligations are to its shareholders, not Jezebel bloggers’ feelings. So it’s worth finding out what difference a woman’s presence in the workplace actually makes.

Is there some value in having mascots? That's roughly the argument Finney and her cohorts make. Yet despite the fact that there are encouraging signs regarding getting more women involved in programming and STEM fields more broadly, for many of the hard sciences (physics, math and statistics) women asymptotically approach parity with men yet never quite reach it — which suggests women are not intrinsically drawn to these subjects. Until Finney can come up with some benefit for the companies she harangues, she's yowping into the wind.

Afterword: It's probably worth mentioning that Finney's company appears to be about flogging Social Justice and not actually writing code, i.e. there is no mention of appropriate skill sets, delivered applications or websites, etc. It's all about her ego.

Monsters Are Real, Connie St. Louis Edition

Is there anyone willing to chase slimeballs — and the epithet is decidedly appropriate — like Connie St. Louis out of the academy? St. Louis, with her out-of-context quote of a speech delivered by Nobelist Sir Tim Hunt at a conference in South Korea, almost single-handedly got him sacked from several university posts. Has she done anything, in her comparatively thin C.V., approaching the sorts of feats Hunt has accomplished? In answering this question, the Daily Mail published a surprisingly good and detailed piece on St. Louis and her vicious willingness to slander an innocent man; St. Louis has manufactured a number of posts and accomplishments that are utter falsehoods:

‘Connie St Louis . . . is an award-winning freelance broadcaster, journalist, writer and scientist.

‘She presents and produces a range of programmes for BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service . . . She writes for numerous outlets, including The Independent, Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, BBC On Air magazine and BBC Online.’

All very prestigious. Comforting, no doubt, for potential students considering whether to devote a year of their lives (and money) to completing an MA course under her stewardship. Except, that is for one small detail: almost all of these supposed ‘facts’ appear to be untrue.

For one thing, Connie St Louis does not ‘present and produce’ a range of programmes for Radio 4.

Her most recent work for the station, a documentary about pharmaceuticals called The Magic Bullet, was broadcast in October 2007.

For another, it’s demonstrably false to say she ‘writes’ for The Independent, Daily Mail and The Sunday Times.

Digital archives for all three newspapers, which stretch back at least 20 years, contain no by-lined articles that she has written for any of these titles, either in their print or online editions. The Mail’s accounts department has no record of ever paying her for a contribution.

Her work for The Guardian appears to consist of two online articles: one published in 2013; the other, about the Sir Tim Hunt affair, went live (online) this week.

Curiously, that 1,000-word piece, in which St Louis recalled the scandal, was heavily edited after publication. Around 30 changes, some of them significant, were made to it. In an apparent contradiction of usual Guardian policy, the version now running online contains no disclaimer detailing this fact.

Elsewhere on the City University web page, readers are led to believe that St Louis has either become, or is soon to become, a published author.

‘She is a recipient of the prestigious Joseph Rowntree Journalist Fellowship to write a book based on her acclaimed two-part Radio 4 documentary series, Raising Ham,’ it reads.

But that is not the full story. In 2005, St Louis did, indeed, receive the liberal organisation’s ‘fellowship’. She was given £50,000, which was supposed to support her while she wrote the book in question.

However, no book was ever published. Or, indeed, written. An entire decade later, the project remains a work in progress.

So what are the remedies? It seems like there's very limited action one could take against such a person, short of ruining her already horribly tarnished (I would hope) reputation following such a scandal. Yet in the main, it seems the press has moved on. Where are TechCrunch, The Verge, or Gizmodo? The former two have published nothing since their initial stories on the matter, and Giz only made mumbling noises about how awful Internet shamestorms are. Is there such a thing as black privilege that wards off other press criticism?

Update 7/22/2015: A great long-form piece at Unfashionista by Louise Mensch covers a simply huge amount of ground, but it captures the misdeeds and hackery of not just St. Louis, but her enablers in the mainstream press such as Popular Science, the supposedly more sober Scientific American, Ivan Oransky of Retraction Watch (supposedly dedicated to ethics in science, imagine), Pulitzer Prize winner Deborah Blum of MIT, Charles Seife of NYU, and Rose Mestel of Nature. Their principle sin was conspiring to make a story that fit their narrative, omitting inconvenient facts, but even worse, doing so when it contradicted their own reporting.

Jessica Valenti Turns The Trolling Dial To Eleven

Shot:

Chaser:

Slicing "Yes": The UCSD Case

It's probably way too early to claim the UCSD John Doe sexual assault case as an unalloyed victory for those seeking something recognizable as justice; presumably there will be appeals, because the machine behind Title IX has a vast army to call on, and if we have learned anything, a jobs program needs defending at all costs, by both its administration and beneficiaries. (You can read the full decision text here.) But now that a real adversarial proceeding has kicked in, and the sanitizing blaze of sunlight admitted to the room, the accuser's puerile and narcissistic accusations have received the sort of response they duly deserve, i.e. contempt.

"The Court determines that it is unfair to Petitioner that his questions were reviewed by the Panel Chair for her alone to determine whether or not the question would be asked and then answered by the witness," Pressman wrote. "While the Court understands the need to prevent additional trauma to potential victims of sexual abuse, this can be achieved in a less restrictive manner. The limiting of the questions in this case curtailed the right of confrontration [sic] crucial to any definition of a fair hearing."

Pressman noted that seven questions not asked by the panel chair dealt with text messages between John and Jane. The panel chair also paraphrased a question regarding John and Jane's relationship after the alleged sexual assault and allowed Jane to claim that their post-encounter relationship was not relevant. Further, Jane's questions were not given the same prior review as John's.

Pressman also decried the school disallowing John to cross-examine and question the only "evidence" at his hearing beside the accuser's story. Submitted to the hearing panel was an investigative report conducted by Elena Acevedo Dalcourt, the school's complaint resolution officer. But Dalcourt did not attend the hearing, which prevented John from questioning her account of the incident.

Most crucially,

John was also not provided all of the evidence against him that was found in Dalcourt's report. He was not given the names of the witnesses interviewed by Dalcourt or all of Jane's statements prior to the hearing.

Beyond the unfairness of John's hearing, Pressman lambasted the university for continuously increasing John's punishment without any explanation. Upon the finding of responsibility, John was first sanctioned to a one-month suspension and required to attend sexual harassment training and counseling. He was also told never to contact Jane again, "due to the potential for ongoing harm to the complaining witness."

After John appealed the ruling, his sanctions were increased to a one-year suspension (meaning he would have to reapply to the university), put on non-academic probation and required to attend ethics workshops – on top of the original sanctions.

When John appealed that decision, his sanctions were increased yet again to a one-year-and-one-quarter-suspension. None of the additional sanctions were given any explanation.

 Which is to say, this is sound of UCSD administrators saying, our phony baloney jobs are on the line if we find you not responsible, so STFU. The reality of this case is the absurdities and rank injustice that "yes means yes" laws inflict on college men who happen to have consensual sex with women who later withdraw that consent, in whole or in part. Scott Greenfield today posted an excellent review of the charges that show just how inane they were. Between two instances of consensual sex that neither party disputes came a session of heavy petting that Jane Doe claimed constituted sexual assault.

There were only two people present when this alleged assault occurred, the students.  This is hardly unusual, given the nature of the conduct, but what distinguishes the allegations is the undisputed surrounding circumstances.  Sex before, all good. Sex after, all good. Touching in the middle, unwanted.

There is no allegation that the female student said “no” to the touching.  Of course, under the “yes means yes” concept of rape and sexual assault, she is under no duty to say no, to protest, to take any action to communicate to the male student that his touching was unwanted.  Indeed, the female could otherwise enjoy the touching without it being subject to affirmative consent.

Notably, the male student admitted sex before. He admitted sex after. He denied, consistently, the digital penetration that was the subject of the disciplinary hearing.

There is no mechanism available that could have protected the male from the accusation, short of being provably far away.  No signed contract. No video tape of consent.  No realistic (yes, there are some theoretically crazily intrusive possibilities) safeguard that would have prevented the accusation.

And then there's the matter of exculpatory post-sex texts which the investigating panel discarded without any justification. The entire post, of course, is worth your time, but I part with his concluding graf:

Somebody at the college needs to be the grown-up and say, “no, this wasn’t a rape, this wasn’t a sexual assault; this was just the normal regret that occasionally follows a young person’s experimentation with sex as they mature.”  But nobody says that anymore.  No grown-up will tell a female student that they weren’t raped, just because they weren’t raped.

Ayup.

More Details On The Ellen Pao/Kleiner Perkins Case

I somehow missed this excellent Breitbart backgrounder on the Ellen Pao lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins from Milo Yiannopoulos, containing many details that the sycophantic tech industry press could be counted upon to omit. Some choice excerpts:

Kleiner maintained that Pao was let go not because she was a woman, but because she was an unpleasant person to work with. ... Kleiner’s attorneys didn’t have to look very far for evidence of Pao’s horrible personal failings. Emails from 2009 show Pao critcising her assistant for taking time off work to help her landlord, a non-English speaker, who had been in a serious car accident. Pao’s response to the domestic crisis was as follows:

“It’s great that you want to be helpful to your landlord. It would be better for me if you could come to work on time. Let me know if you think differently, but I think your job should be your priority.”

...[S]he kept a chart listing “resentments” that she held over her colleagues at Kleiner Perkins. She also admitted to sending negative e-mails about coworkers behind their backs, and acknowledged that she had once bullied a colleague to tears.

... Ellen Pao isn’t the only one who’s been involved in high-profile legal disputes recently. Her husband, Alphonse Fletcher, is in deep legal and financial trouble too. His asset management firm was declared bankrupt in 2012, and he is currently being sued by three Louisana public pension funds. They allege that Fletcher’s asset management defrauded them of up to $145 million, and are now seeking to recover the funds.

How much was Pao seeking from Kleiner Perkins in damages? Oh. $144 million.

Pao is a brittle, despicable character in a landscape rotten with them. She was not nearly as good a grifter as the con artists she attacked in court, or those in business.

Ellen Pao's "Glass Cliff"

Ellen Pao, whose fifteen minutes must surely soon come to an end (right? right?), is back with an account of how she claims the trolls chased her out of Reddit. Never mind that her proffered reason for exiting was in fact that she couldn't deliver on user growth (though we may infer that one is causal to the other, in some wise). Still it was with no small interest that I read this in Jezebel a few days back:

The chaos at Reddit continues: chief engineer Bethanye Blount quit Monday after less than two months on the job, saying she’s lost confidence in the direction of the company and believes ousted CEO Ellen Pao was set up to fail.

Blount says her departure was not “directly linked” to Pao’s resignation, but echoed recent comments made by former CEO Yishan Wong, who says Pao was set up to fail from the start.

Blount also said she believed Pao’s exit was an indirect consequence of gender discrimination, and that Pao had been placed on a “glass cliff.” It is a term used to describe women being set up for failure by being put in leadership roles during crises.

“Victoria wasn’t on a glass cliff. But it’s hard for me to see it any other way than Ellen was,” Blount said. However, she added that “I wouldn’t say my decision to leave was directly related to my gender.”

 So, wait, so putting a woman in a stressful, high-risk, high-reward situation is setting her up to fail? And this is, itself, presumably evidence of sexual discrimination? Isn't it really the other way around, that women demanding they only ever succeed (or should be put in situations where failure is not really possible) means they also don't get the rewards that come from navigating hazards? Isn't this reductive, infantilizing, and narcissistic? Doesn't this, in fact, serve the opposite end as anything recognizable as equality between the sexes?