Bullety Things

• File Under: Enough Rope Dep't: Clare McCaskill's Late Show appearance really must be seen to be believed; no competent politician tells, even in jest, one half of their audience to "shut up" unless they are a remarkable idiot.
• Obama, Destroyer Of Worlds: Ashe Schow reports on Obama's amazing carnage to the Democratic Party. "913 lost legislature seats. 11 lost governorships. And a partridge in a pear tree."
•  We Always Knew Who Was Rooting For Ellen Pao Anyway: Sure, the WaPo wants to ignore Ellen Pao's gross incompetence at Reddit, but their annual roundup of Internet hatefests is sure to raise a knowing eyebrow at who they might mean by "[m]ost mainstream commentators and Redditors".
• Okay, We Get It, Tina, You Hate Being Old: Remember Tina Fey and Amy Schumer's "Last Fuckable Day" sketch? Yeah, awkward, so Fey decided to hook up with a different Amy, Poehler, and make one just as stupid and obvious. Short course: yeah, sorry women in Hollywood have shorter careers; write, produce, or whatever, but don't expect you can make a living in front of the camera because of your fabulous good looks. You're fighting male mating preferences, which are locked and loaded for young women at the peak of their sexual maturity, liable to get pregnant and bring a child to term. Don't like it? Shall I mention how male on-the-job death rates outstrip women by a 13:1 ratio? Men's lives are less valuable than women's.

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?

Ellen Pao Out At Reddit: The Search For The Perfect Villain

I've been rather busy with a number of issues lately IRL, so I had little to say about Ellen Pao's resignation from Reddit. Pao, you may recall, lost a high-profile sex discrimination lawsuit against her former employer, the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, and was even obliged to pay part of their claimed legal expenses. Predictably, the gang at industry watering holes The Verge, Ars Technica, TechCrunch, and mainstream press like the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, eagerly painted a picture of the case somehow amounting to a blow against sex discrimination in Silicon Valley, even though it was in fact a resounding rejection of that premise. Pao came off as a conniving tool, looking to shiv her employer once the right moment presented itself; who keeps a running journal of slights, except someone determined to sue?

But lost amid the raucous and empty self-congratulation in the popped balloon of Pao's hopes was the fact that she ended up at Reddit after resigning from Kleiner Perkins, i.e. she had a real job at a troubled but sizable Internet company that needed turning around. Was she up to the job? One answer comes from the snarky #ChairmanPao hashtag around Twitter, which certainly reflects the high-handed attitude she took toward the users she was charged with serving and monetizing. Her resignation letter is both predictably politically biased and myopic, affecting a stiff upper lip while sniping at the user base. "'[S]everal users," she writes, "apologized for trolling me and for not giving me the benefit of the doubt when the troll hivemind moved against me" (emphasis mine).

So why am I leaving? Ultimately, the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining reddit’s core principles.

The "higher user growth" she complains of certainly wasn't helped when Reddit unceremoniously fired "Ask Me Anything" coordinator Victoria Taylor, who was apparently the glue keeping many disparate parts together. Many sub-Reddits went dark rather than continue operating without her, as much in protest as in recognition of Taylor's utility in keeping the freewheeling communities from derailing. Regardless of who pulled the trigger in Taylor's firing, it clearly touched a nerve with Redditors, 150,000 of whom signed an online petition to fire Pao.

It's important to recognize that because of Pao's symbolism, it's unlikely the press will view her as the incompetent, brittle hack her brief tenure at Reddit has exposed her to be; they need a villain to absolve her of anything like accountability. Gawker has framed it as a "misogynist tantrum". Hot Air hunted down a TechRaptor piece showing the New York Times almost completely rewrote their original, just-the-facts-ma'am story in favor of a spin cycle worthy of Maytag, changing the headline from "Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief" to "It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism Is Out at Reddit". And most predictably, outrage-meister and perpetual beta male Arthur Chu ran straight for the charge of "terrorist" claiming Taylor's firing was "a fig leaf". But once we get past the hubbub of culture wars, Chu has one point that survives unscathed:

The problem is that Reddit has been trying to sell a false bill of goods to investors all this time—something that Ohanian and Huffman and other true believers still cling to against all evidence.

This is the idea that you can build a functional community without having to spend any money or effort to manage it—that it just happens spontaneously through the “wisdom of crowds.” The Web 2.0 dream has always been to outsource all of the hard jobs to your users—that unpaid enthusiasts will do all the work of creating your content, curating your content, and promoting your content out of love, and all you have to do is pay some techies to keep the lights on.

Which is to say, the residue of Netscape — the notion that one can create value by giving away something for free — remains a deeply animating force in Silicon Valley. Pao had a difficult job no matter who ran Reddit, and it's far from clear anyone can fix that company. But pretending she had no role in her own downfall there only serves a dead narrative.

Update 7/13/2015: Here's a fascinating backgrounder from Vanity Fair on Ellen Pao and her husband, Buddy Fletcher. Fletcher's career eerily mimics Pao's: precocious youth, an Ivy League education with multiple degrees, and financial success that turned out to be a house of cards. Fletcher's hedge fund collapsed, with Louisiana public employee pension funds suing to liquidate their positions. But more interestingly, he sued his New York City coop on racial discrimination grounds when they refused to allow him to buy a fourth apartment. The backgrounder also contains a detail I had previously missed in the fracas: Kleiner Perkins testified in the suit that "despite her claims to the contrary, Pao had never, during the five years in which she alleged she had been harassed and discriminated against, complained to anyone at the firm."

Ellen Pao Must Pay $275,966 For Kleiner Perkins Legal Fees

Well, that was quick.

Bullety Stuff

• Anonymous blowhardery chilled by overzealous US prosecutor: Ken White has the story about Reason commenters making noises about wood chippers and stringing up the Federal judge in the Ross Ulbricht/Silk Road case, Katherine Forrest. Lots of other people have noticed this, including former Reason honcho Virginia Postrel in Bloomberg View and Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy. That these aren't anything like true threats is obvious; ditto the attorneys pursuing such charges having a purely political aim. Prosecutorial abuse isn't going away, and it's not getting better, either.
• Cartoonist has work repurposed with antisemitic messages, but retaining his name: A horrible circumstance. How do you recover your good name?
• So that's what that means: Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby asked for police to target the intersection where Freddie Gray was arrested two weeks before that happened.
• Ellen Pao doesn't like some subreddits, it appears, and so they have been shut down. Redditors are calling for Pao's head, while the list of condemned material apparently expands to non-abusive articles, such as one by Ashe Schow in the Washington Examiner about a non-rape that later became Title IX charges (stop me if you've heard this one before).
• Another case of retroactive 'rape' at Amherst: Here's Schow's article; the TL;DR version seems to be the guy was out of his mind blitzed, girl gave him head anyway, and twenty-one months later this became rape, whereupon he was expelled. The girl in question (the then-girlfriend of the John Doe complainant's roommate) sent friendly texts after the event, did not seek medical attention after the fact, and did not approach the police. Minding The Campus has a much longer piece with more detail.
• RICO charges against climate skeptics? Sen. Whitehouse hopes to pull off such a thing. The tobacco settlement appears to be (a terrible) precedent.

Ellen Pao To Appeal Kleiner Perkins Verdict

And she may have a bit of a case here, largely on the grounds that her suit was not "frivolous or malicious". (She is appealing to prevent Kleiner Perkins from recovering their considerable legal costs.) I will be interested to see Kleiner Perkins' response (and who knows what those terms of legal art might actually mean in practice).

Stockpiling Psycho: A Look At Callisto

Increasingly, it's obvious that Title IX means of combating sexual assault (and harassment) amount to a sort of jobs program for the otherwise unemployable, a point made most recently by Reason's Robby Soave in the context of Northwestern professor Laura Kipnis' tangle with that bureaucracy, something I wrote about earlier. The "man behind the curtain" is the huge army of mandarins needed to implement it:

The Title IX inquisition must be a cash-cow for the people tasked with handling such broad and outlandish claims. Northwestern flew a team of a lawyers out to meet with Kipnis; these men would have interviewed anyone she deemed relevant to her case. Their colleagues would have initiated retaliation investigations against anyone she accused (this calls to mind recent Game of Thrones episodes, in which characters levelling accusations against each other merely manage to get absolutely everyone, accusers and accused, confined to dungeon cells). Is it any wonder that tuition prices are skyrocketing so that universities can continue to pay all these Title IX lawyers, bureaucrats, and coordinators?

 Earlier this year, the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights asked for a 31% funding increase to deal with a huge and expected uptick in case load, of dubious (and likely self-serving) origins, amounting to an additional 200 attorneys and investigators. But such paycheck beneficiaries are by no means the end, something I discovered when I learned that the University of San Francisco is going to be the first school to use Callisto, an Orwellian system for stockpiling reports of sexual assault. Their description of the software's operation should give pause to anyone interested in justice — as opposite nursing retroactive vendettas:

1. Fill out an account of an incident online

Visit your school-specific Callisto website, record what happened in an online form, and get advice on what evidence to collect and save.

2. Save the report

Securely save the record, timestamped when it was stored, and decide later if you want to take any action.

3. Report now or later

Learn about your school-specific reporting options and directly submit your record to your chosen authority. Or you can opt into automatically reporting if someone else reports the same assailant.

The justifications for this stockpiling of timed-release "gotcha" charges we learn later:

Why survivors don’t report:

• Not knowing how to label their experience
• Considering their assault not “serious enough” to report
• Not wanting to get the assailant into trouble, especially if the assailant is a significant other, friend, teammate, or a family member
• Fearing retaliation from peers or the assilant for reporting
• Feeling like the assault was partially his or her fault
• Not knowing where or how to report
• Feeling that they do not have sufficient evidence
• Not wanting to go through the trauma of reliving the assault again, especially if they worry that they will not be believed 

Secret charges that can be unleashed at some future point (without investigation in the interim) sounds remarkably like an enabling tool for false accusers, in the same exact way that Ellen Pao warehoused her multitudinous grievances at Kleiner Perkins. And as with the expanding Title IX bureaucracy within the DoE, Callisto comes with an enormous board of directors, 25 by my count. That number includes Yale Law student Alexandra Broadsky, who penned a genuinely awful piece in Feministing about her totalitarian vision of "fair process" a while back. Callisto the software represents everything Title IX has become: parasitic, secretive, biased, expansionist for the bureaucracy it services, and paranoid. It is no surprise that Sexual Health Innovations, the misnamed 501(c)3 organization behind Callisto, spent 20% of their 2013 budget on lobbying; they have a lot of institutions to pitch yet.

Ellen Pao: No Salary Negotiations For You, Young Missy!

From The Libertarian Republic comes the hilarious news that Ellen Pao has banished all salary negotiations at Reddit on the grounds that women are more frequently likely to be lied to during such transactions, among other things. CNN/Money took it a step further with their headline asking whether negotiations are themselves a form of gender bias, which makes me wonder if they had ever seen True Grit, and particularly, this sequence:




That Pao here infantilizes women is bad enough, but she becomes a hypocrite at the juncture of her recently lost lawsuit, which is nothing if not salary negotiations by other means.

More On Gender Imbalances In STEM: The Hidden (And Real) Good News

I made the mistake of looking at (and actually commenting on) Megan Geuss' silly Ars Technica opinion piece of the Ellen Pao verdict; there's nothing you haven't already seen in TechCrunch or Verge, i.e. It's Important We Have A Conversation About Sexual Bias In Tech (Now Stop Looking At What An Obvious Grifter Our Poster Girl Was). But that got me thinking about a post I happened upon a few days ago at Randal S. Olson's data visualization blog, showing the actual percentage of women graduating with bachelor degrees in STEM fields over time:

With the exception of engineering and computer science, women increasingly near parity with men in mathematics and the hard science fields, and have surpassed them in biology and the social sciences. Further, the so-called "pipeline problem" appears to be mostly a myth, according to a large-scale research study from Cornell, U. Texas, and Northwestern. Women are no more likely to "leak" (i.e. exit) from the "PhD pipeline" than men, something that will no doubt come as a disappointment to TechCrunch and anyone else invested in the idea that brogrammers and other modern bridge trolls are somehow chasing women out of these fields.

"There’s been a lot of focus on this idea of women in particular leaving academic science at far higher rates than men," says Miller, an advanced doctoral student in psychology at Northwestern and lead author of the study. "But in some cases … there’s been scant evidence of some of those gender gaps in persistence, and evidence that those gaps in persistence don’t exist at other time points."

That's not to say, however, that women and men are equally represented in pSTEM academia. Men still outnumber women about 3 to 1, Miller says. But the differences are not explained by gender bias in the pipeline – the percentage of women earning pSTEM degrees is now higher at the doctoral level than at the bachelor's degree level, the researchers found.

"We need to start reframing the conversation from instead of just trying to plug leaks, we need to get more students interested in the first place," Miller says.

Which, basically, is what I've been saying all along. Math instruction, particularly, is almost uniformly horrible at the K-12 level, even in fairly well-off districts. This is personal experience talking; if not for one particularly good instructor in college, I would not have ended up taking the major I did. But that is not the kind of thing feminist advocates wish to emphasize, because it means women might have some responsibility for learning math and how to write solid code (e.g.) instead of mewling pitiously that they are owed a high-status job despite inexperience.

Ellen Pao's Lawsuit Ends In A Kleiner Perkins Clean Sweep

The news came out earlier today that Ellen Pao's lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins came out snake eyes for the plaintiff. I don't have a good handle on the particulars of the case yet, as I haven't read the trial brief, but this does not look, even from Verge's biased telling, as though Pao's would be anything but a weak case. She fought Kleiner Perkins, who has historically hired more women than is typical in Silicon Valley, and maybe more importantly, could call on partner Mary Meeker, an epic defender of frauds during the height of the first wave of dot-com collapses who subsequently failed up from Morgan Stanley to Kleiner Perkins. Perhaps knowing what she owed them, she was all too happy to provide a good story for Kleiner. If the feminist mob that "needs a win" in their legal and other campaigns against perceived sexism would seek her head for this, they'll first need to grapple with the fact that "ethical fluidity is not a liability in Silicon Valley". That is to say, at first glance, Pao's case appears to have been a weak one, and she had bad legal advice in pursuing it.

Update 3/28/2015: Upon rereading the Verge piece linked above, a couple passages popped out at me for what they actually said first about the story and second about Pao herself:

[T]here’s an expectation — a fantasy, even — of what putting Silicon Valley on trial for sexism should look like. But Meeker’s statements on the witness stand served as another reminder that this lawsuit is not Ellen Pao vs. Institutionalized Sexism. This is Ellen Pao invoking California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act and possibly coming up short.

This is Verge author Nitisha Tiku going off the deep end, willfully blinding herself to the reality that just happened. One does not sue under Fair Employment acts without it being a case of discrimination; the hope, I suppose, is that if we can call it something else, maybe our worldview won't have to be altered. Try again, Nitisha. And then, this (emboldening mine):

Where Pao had notebook after notebook of complaints, Meeker could not have seemed less bothered by the state of affairs. ...

 Who the hell keeps a journal of insults at work — except perhaps someone who always planned to sue in the first place? This is the action of a brittle, thin-skinned, and humorless individual.

Update 3/28/2015 11:49 PDT: Entitlement mentality kicks in, in particular, this:

7. Hopefully my case will inspire the venture capital industry to level the playing field for everyone, including women and minorities
— Ellen Pao (@ekp) March 28, 2015

"Level the playing field for everyone" = "make me partner or I'll sue you because I have a vagina/the right skin color/the right surname/etc." Yeah, no.

Update 3/29/2015: Pretty good summary of predictable media reaction from Joe Concha at Mediaite:

As you can imagine, it’s virtually impossible to find a column that actually supports the jury’s decision to dismiss all counts. That Mashable headline is almost correct, but should be modified to read: Ellen Pao trial loss sends shock waves through media establishment that really, really wanted her to win and never imagined a jury would actually dismiss every claim she entered

A bit cumbersome, but more accurate nonetheless.

And so it goes when it comes to a gang-rape that never happened at UVA…or a recklessly false narrative out of Ferguson… or Ellen Pao’s multiple claims of discrimination that a jury didn’t buy:

Facts mean little. It’s the conversation that comes afterward that matters.

Even if that conversation is built on a house of cards.