Laurie Penny's Spiteful, Censorious Take On Milo

As I hope I made clear Wednesday, Milo Yiannopoulos has earned the social opprobrium that has resulted in rather severe commercial consequences for his career, i.e. it appears extinct. Yet whenever I read anything by Laurie Penny and agree with large parts of it, my immediate reflex is to ask whether I've missed something. I can answer that now with a "no" with respect to Milo's behavior, but in nearly every other aspect, Penny's analysis is plainly wrong.

First, it's important to lay out the areas of agreement. They are two:

•  Yiannopoulos is a bomb-thrower who will say anything for attention, as we saw when Twitter finally (but without explanation) decided to kick him off the service.
• He largely brought this on himself, and there is no sympathy for his public humiliation.

But that is the end of it. The serial misandrist employs the worst epithet in her arsenal against his camp followers, labeling them "sweaty teenage trolls". Men are bad enough, but in their protean form, intolerable, something she emphasizes with a snide, cheap shot at Dungeons & Dragons players. She imagines a deeply, obviously wrong reason why an openly gay man might find acceptance among religious conservatives — "for all that the American right likes to show off pet homosexuals to prove its modernity, it turns out that it still hates gays" — which fails to consider how it is that such a flamboyantly open homosexual could have gotten where he is in the first place. (Walter Olson's explanation makes the most sense of any: briefly, Yiannopoulos confesses his sin but embraces the mother church, which plays better with certain religious conservatives than culturally-conservative-but-not-sinning Log Cabin Republicans.) She looks deep into the soul of a Milo fan, and sees only bigotry (emboldening mine, as usual):

It is horribly ironic that of all the disgusting nonsense Yiannopoulos has said — about women, about Muslims, about transgender people, about immigrants — it is only now that the moderate right appears to have reached the limits of what it will tolerate in the name of free speech. The hypocrisy is clarion-clear: This was never, in fact, about free speech at all. It was about making it OK to say racist, sexist, transphobic, and xenophobic things, about tolerating the public expression of those views right up to the point where it becomes financially unwise to do so.

How is it that the "moderate right" was responsible for expelling him from a CPAC address? Were they the same ones who threatened to resign from Breitbart if he didn't?  In the end, it's just another label for her to feel superior to, just as she declares "Milo Yiannopolous [sic], possibly alone of all the smug white people in the world, is not a racist", as though the rest of them are. (Presumably, Penny feels guilty about her racism, and of course we need not ask her about sexism.) Too, she fails at understanding what it is that finally felled Milo. She chalks it all up to moral conservatism, rather than Milo's ambiguity and indifference to appearance. Even in apology, he failed to understand what he appeared to defend.

But what is most puzzling about that passage is her claim that Milo was never about free speech. We see this directly here:

Rewind two weeks. It’s a wet night in Berkeley, California, and Yiannopoulos is running away from the left. He was scheduled to speak at the University of California–Berkeley, but the event has been shut down. It was shut down because thousands of anti-racist and anti-fascist protesters decided that there should be no platform for what they called white supremacy. They are marching to say that free speech does not extend to hate speech, that the First Amendment should not oblige institutions to invite professional trolls to spout an auto-generated word-salad of Internet bigotry just for fun, and that, if the institutions disagree, students and allies are entitled to throw fireworks and smash things until the trolls run away. Which is exactly what has happened.

 People actually smashing things, exercising the heckler's veto, silencing the "trolls" — these people receive not a word of vituperation or contempt from her, unlike everyone else in this essay. Does her conception of "free speech" include "hate speech", whatever that is? For all she claims she opposes "no platforming", she clearly granted herself some wiggle room when she wrote, "I think no-platforming is a bad tactic in almost all circumstances." Almost all. We do not know the precise dimensions of that space, but we can guess them, and they fill a void near the size of Milo Yiannopoulos. Why does she think she should be able to demand, at some website where the user base clearly opposes her opinions (viciously and crudely), she should be able to moderate comments out of existence she finds offensive? Hers is the voice of an expansionist and totalitarian view of speech that uses "safe spaces" as a sword; it is not the voice of tolerance. As with Anita Sarkeesian, whose censorious tendencies only became explicit censorship advocacy through her work with the ITU, the answer may come eventually, whenever an opportunity arises.

Update 2017-02-27: this is good:

So why are conservatives cozying up to such hideousness? The best explanation they offer is that inviting someone so beyond the pale will shatter the tight boundaries drawn by political correctness and open the space for a wider airing of ideas. But the problem is that by using a stink bomb like Yiannopoulos they'll make their own ideas malodorous. Who will take conservative praise of civility, tradition, family values, manners, honor, moderation, and dignity seriously if a 31-year-old, out-of-control adolescent is their champion?

The End Of Milo Yiannopoulos

I probably shouldn't even bother with this one; Milo Yiannopoulos has finally supplied the rope for his own hanging, which in the end was unsurprising. It's unlikely I will get everything right about this story, filled as it is with lurid but stupid details, ones that in the end are deeply boring, precisely because Milo is at heart a troll. Whatever it is, he's throwing bombs for public attention, never more so than with his "daddy Trump" nonsense during the late election cycle. It was inevitable that one of those bombs would detonate on the maker.

Yiannopoulos, who was recently credentialed for a White House presidential briefing, once penned a Breitbart column to blame the left for defending pedophilia. Now, this newly released audio reveals him endorsing the practice (and praising priests who molest underage boys). In the clip, he describes a disturbing scenario, which prompts an unnamed person to remark, “It sounds like Catholic priest molestation to me.”

He receives this response from Yiannopoulos: “But you know what? I’m grateful for Father Michael. I wouldn’t give nearly such good head if it wasn’t for him.” Here’s more of what he said about pedophilia:

“We get hung up on this sort of child abuse stuff to the point where we are heavily policing consensual adults … In the homosexual world, particularly, some of those relationships between younger boys and older men — the sort of ‘coming of age’ relationship — those relationships in which those older men help those young boys discover who they are and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable, sort of rock, where they can’t speak to their parents.”

 His response to this own goal error was at first to declare it a "witch hunt", adding an unhelpful non-clarification addressing anyone who found his earlier remarks distressing as "A note to idiots". This raised a lot of irrelevancies, did nothing to dispel his earlier remarks, and smeared anyone who might reasonably find in his comments support for pederasty. It's a poor workman who blames his tools, and Yiannopoulos' refusal to acknowledge his own failings was a huge missed opportunity. It might be his last. Having lost his book deal with Simon & Schuster, he's also had to resign from Breitbart amid stories circulating that other staffers would resign en masse if he didn't.

There are kinder takes on Yiannoupoulos, for instance this unsigned piece on Rare ("The Internet bully is himself a victim; perhaps the two are related"), or this essay from Current Affairs which treats his remarks about sexual contact with an older man in the context of historical gay man/young teen sex:

Yiannopoulos may not have made his point very well. But there’s something nuanced and defensible here. First, he’s saying that the relationships between gay men and teenage boys (according to their own accounts) have historically been messier than simple categories allow for. And second, it’s absurd to say that he can’t make dark or crass jokes about his priest if it’s his way of dealing with what happened to him.

One might agree with that if he were a better communicator. To accept that, you have to excuse his lack of clarity: which is it? Was his giving head to a priest at 13 a terrible thing? Or was it good in hindsight? We still don't know, and we have Milo the bomb-thrower's imprecision to thank for it. Ultimately, the problem with Yiannopoulos is he stands for nothing, only in opposition, i.e. he is largely if not entirely a reactionary.

If you fuck goats because it upsets people you hate, you're still a goatfucker. Nobody cares that you're an insincere goatfucker.

— Enemy of the Popehat (@Popehat) February 20, 2017

Lindy West Resigns From Twitter

In my pantheon of online annoybots, Lindy West is fairly far down the list. Unlike, say, Anita Sarkeesian, she hadn't proposed a centralized censorship regime for the Internet. However, she has endorsed the unprovable standard of "affirmative consent" in rape cases, has a history as a victimhood miner, and I suspect a bunch of other fairly middle-of-the-road (for modern feminists) policy nostrums. For a number of reasons, West has largely flown beneath my radar. So when I found a Vox piece on her voluntary exit from Twitter, I was not terribly surprised, given what I had read of hers. What interested me about that Vox piece was this passage (emboldening mine):

Rather, her breaking point — what made her feel she could no longer participate in the platform’s “profoundly broken culture” — was that Twitter has failed to acknowledge and deal with the alt-right’s use of the social network to spread its racist ideology, leading to severe, real-world repercussions:

The white supremacist, anti-feminist, isolationist, transphobic “alt-right” movement has been beta-testing its propaganda and intimidation machine on marginalised Twitter communities for years now — how much hate speech will bystanders ignore? When will Twitter intervene and start protecting its users? — and discovered, to its leering delight, that the limit did not exist. No one cared. Twitter abuse was a grand-scale normalisation project, disseminating libel and disinformation, muddying long-held cultural givens such as “racism is bad” and “sexual assault is bad” and “lying is bad” and “authoritarianism is bad,” and ultimately greasing the wheels for Donald Trump’s ascendance to the US presidency. Twitter executives did nothing.

Which is to say, she very expressly wished Twitter would have shut up those mean people over there with the temerity to disagree with her, in public, even.  This is not a surprise, and in fact there was at least one significant "tell" previous that she very much wanted her own echo chamber: her response to the Washington Post investigations showing the Rolling Stone story about a gang rape at U. Virginia was a hoax:

Turns out that the real #UVA rape "truthers" are @AmandaMarcotte, @JessicaValenti, @thelindywest and their hivemind pic.twitter.com/fPykKBZbVJ

— Yeyo (@YeyoZa) December 6, 2014

Or, you could just take her word for it:

Whenever I advocate for the safety of marginalized groups on the Internet, some genius always pipes up to say, “Oh, so you just want to live in your echo chamber?” And YES. OF COURSE I JUST WANT MY ECHO CHAMBER, DINGUS. If by “echo chamber” you mean “a space online where I can communicate in good faith with informed people who don’t derail every conversation with false equivalencies and rape threats,” then yes, I’m dying for a fucking echo chamber.

In fact, maybe that’s what we’ll call it: Echo Chamber, the first feminist social network.

Given that presumptive bestie (or at least sister-in-arms) Marcotte is on Twitter's Orwellian "Trust & Safety Council", her kvetching here takes an interesting color. The subtext is a bitter complaint that, if they can make Milo Yiannopoulos go away, why can't they get rid of all these other people she doesn't like, too? In that, it amounts to a positive sign for the beleaguered Twitter, which continues to struggle to find profitability. Chasing those eyeballs out en masse makes no sense. Bon voyage, Lindy, and don't let the door hit you on the way out.

The Dickish Milo Yiannopoulos Finally Gets Kicked Off Twitter

So, Internet exploder extraordinaire Milo Yiannopoulos finally got kicked off Twitter permanently as a result of a squabble with Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones. Despite the New York Times' claim that Yiannopoulos was "one of the most egregious and consistent offenders of its terms of service", the truth is that Twitter has yet to point to specific violations of those terms by the man known as @Nero. Unfortunately, the case against him is much more tangled than the Times story lets on, something Cathy Young details in a long Allthink piece.

There are two different questions here. One, does Milo deserve sympathy and support? And two, is Twitter's enforcement of anti-harassment rules politically biased, rife with favoritism, and generally inconsistent?

(The TL;DR answers are: not so much in this case, and yes.) Young observes that "his online conflicts tended to escalate into nasty personal attacks", viz. this one about former Breitbart colleague Ben Shapiro on the occasion of his son's birth:

Young continues:

 Milo is a very smart, talented, charismatic man. I still believe he was on the right side when he joined the fight against the crypto-totalitarian "social justice" cult. But I've always thought that, unfortunately, any backlash against "progressive" cultural politics was likely to be a magnet for actual racism, misogyny, and other bigotries. Today, Milo is actively boosting these malignant forces. As his "Daddy" Donald Trump would say: Sad!

Even though Twitter hasn't commented on the matter more extensively, it seems almost certain that the problem stemmed, in part, from faked tweets he posted, purported to be from Jones, which in turn "was both impersonation, a severe violation of Twitter rules, and a pretty clear move to pour more fuel on the fire."

If Yiannopoulos took up arms against political correctness, he didn't much care about the identity and behavior of his allies, something Brendan O'Neill recently wrote about (via Reason's Robby Soave):

These attacks on Ms Jones speak to something more than the raucousness of Twitter, which can often be a good thing, certainly to the extent that it allows unheard, eccentric and potty voices to be heard. It speaks, more importantly, to the derailment of the important task of challenging PC. Tragically, for those of us who want to prick PC from a genuinely liberal and pro-autonomy perspective, the anti-PC mantle has in recent months been co-opted by the new right, or the alt-right, as some call them. These lovers of Trump (they call him ‘daddy’) and conspiracy theorists about feminism (whose wicked influence they spy everywhere) have turned being anti-PC from a decent, progressive position into an infantile, pathological, Tourette’s-style desire to scream offensive words out loud, like the seven-year-old who’s just discovered the thrill that comes with saying ‘f**k’.

Yet simultaneously, as Freddy DeBoer points out, it's pretty obvious that Yiannopoulos got the boot at least in part because he's not in the club (emboldening mine):

When Emmet Rensin was suspended from Vox for following liberal logic on Trump to its obvious conclusions, it was trivially easy to find Vox employees who had said far worse things on Twitter, while Vox employees, with absolutely no consequences. The #WeAreTheLeft debacle was made extra funny/sad by the fact that so many of the signatories of that letter were objectively guilty of the kinds of behaviors the letter indicted. People who gleefully trashed Justine Sacco complain about pile-ons; people who say doxing is wrong get others fired from their real-life jobs. There are no principles; there’s only who you’re cool with and who you aren’t. I’ve been for saying this for years, 8 in fact, and the response has always been a kind of muttered shiftiness, a desire to change the subject. Because most people know I’m right. They always have. But for some reason, there’s this dedication to maintaining the pretense, this addiction to plausible deniability. Nobody really thinks this stuff is about principle, but to be a member in good standing, you have to go through the motions. That hasn’t changed.

Which is what makes this so frustrating, and why all defenses of free speech ultimately grow tiresome, because they tend to involve the defense of sometimes terrible behavior. As Ken White recently wrote at Popehat, "nobody needs free speech rights to protect admirable speech by people we like." Anita Sarkeesian, Yiannopoulos' longtime #Gamergate foe, appears to have finally won the game started when she landed on Twitter's "Trust & Safety" board. But let us assume that she and her like-minded cohorts indeed turn Twitter into a mammoth echo chamber, a place where orthodoxy and adorable cat pictures are the only permissible tweets. Where will she go to gin up the death threats so central to her shtick?

How Not To Handle Failure

Firebrand attention whore Milo Yiannopoulos has hit on some pretty interesting work at interviewing.io, in which the company attempted to counter interviewer sex bias by using voice masking technology. The results (emboldening, for once, is original equipment):

interviewing.io is a platform where people can practice technical interviewing anonymously and, in the process, find jobs based on their interview performance rather than their resumes. Since we started, we’ve amassed data from thousands of technical interviews, and in this blog, we routinely share some of the surprising stuff we’ve learned. In this post, I’ll talk about what happened when we built real-time voice masking to investigate the magnitude of bias against women in technical interviews. In short, we made men sound like women and women sound like men and looked at how that affected their interview performance. We also looked at what happened when women did poorly in interviews, how drastically that differed from men’s behavior, and why that difference matters for the thorny issue of the gender gap in tech.

One of the big motivators to think about voice masking was the increasingly uncomfortable disparity in interview performance on the platform between men and women¹. At that time, we had amassed over a thousand interviews with enough data to do some comparisons and were surprised to discover that women really were doing worse. Specifically, men were getting advanced to the next round 1.4 times more often than women. Interviewee technical score wasn’t faring that well either — men on the platform had an average technical score of 3 out of 4, as compared to a 2.5 out of 4 for women.

Despite these numbers, it was really difficult for me to believe that women were just somehow worse at computers, so when some of our customers asked us to build voice masking to see if that would make a difference in the conversion rates of female candidates, we didn’t need much convincing.

They ran this experiment on 234 interviews, of which roughly two-thirds were male. Et voilà:

After running the experiment, we ended up with some rather surprising results. Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability). If anything, we started to notice some trends in the opposite direction of what we expected: for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected and definitely something to watch for as we collect more data. 

Women were leaving interviewing.io at a rate seven times that of men after a poor performance, and an overall retention curve that looks like this (blue is male, red is female):

 Which is to say, women get frustrated easier and quit earlier. What does this mean overall for women in STEM fields?

Now, as I said, this is pretty speculative, but it really got me thinking about what these curves might mean in the broader context of women in computer science. How many “attrition events” does one encounter between primary and secondary education and entering a collegiate program in CS and then starting to embark on a career? So, I don’t know, let’s say there are 8 of these events between getting into programming and looking around for a job. If that’s true, then we need 3 times as many women studying computer science than men to get to the same number in our pipelines. Note that that’s 3 times more than men, not 3 times more than there are now. If we think about how many there are now, which, depending on your source, is between 1/3 and a 1/4 of the number of men, to get to pipeline parity, we actually have to increase the number of women studying computer science by an entire order of magnitude.

That's... kind of daunting. So, recapping, not only do women not interview as well as men, they also give up quicker, and thus to make up for the lack of women capable of these feats,  we need ten times as many women as men at the front of the STEM pipeline to meet parity. "When I told the interviewing.io team about the disparity in attrition between genders," she continues, "the resounding response was along the lines of, 'Well, yeah. Just think about dating from a man’s perspective.'" The ideas that women should never have to perform under stress, should be hired for jobs regardless of qualification or experience, idiotic theories that Star Wars posters keep girls away from STEM fields — all these and many more amount to so much post hoc-ery evading the unfortunate reality that, as a population, women lack male resilience. It does appear there are steps available for those wishing to improve this state of affairs, e.g. girls engaged in team sports develop more confidence in themselves subsequently. But even there, the confidence gap cuts off a lot of girls at the knees (emboldening this time mine):

Studies evaluating the impact of the 1972 Title IX legislation, which made it illegal for public schools to spend more on boys’ athletics than on girls’, have found that girls who play team sports are more likely to graduate from college, find a job, and be employed in male-dominated industries. There’s even a direct link between playing sports in high school and earning a bigger salary as an adult. Learning to own victory and survive defeat in sports is apparently good training for owning triumphs and surviving setbacks at work. And yet, despite Title IX, fewer girls than boys participate in athletics, and many who do quit early. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, girls are still six times as likely as boys to drop off sports teams, with the steepest decline in participation coming during adolescence. This is probably because girls suffer a larger decrease in self-esteem during that time than do boys.

 All of which is to say, I don't see a potential solution at the scale needed to move the needle significantly overall, successes at Harvey Mudd notwithstanding; these results suggest women will just move from one institution to another, rather than expanding the overall pool.

The Censor, Anita Sarkeesian

I recently had cause to discuss whether Anita Sarkeesian's "Feminist Frequency" videos amounted to censorship or not. By a strict definition, no they are not, because she had not at that point demanded state action, i.e. prior restraint on video game publishers. Criticism, of course, is not the same thing as censorship, but with Sarkeesian, there have been a number of "tells" that she has a strong itch in that direction, the principle one being that she demands the right to direct the course of video game production — of which she is not, by her own admission, much of a customer. It would be one thing to play video games and want something better. (For a parallel example in the related world of comics, see my brief remarks about Barbara Randall Kesel.) It's quite another to see content she is only peripherally interested in (or worse, demands others pay for) and then expects producers thereof will hew to her cloistered thinking. She has also been unwilling to take the stage with any opponent (most notably the firebrand journalist Milo Yiannopoulos) to debate her ideas; she appears to want a megaphone, not exchange, which again suggests she has a totalitarian's indifference to anyone else's opinion.

But charitably, the question remained at least until recently an open one, when she somehow got a report published through the United Nations on "cyber violence". (The full report can be found here (PDF), because the link from the title page appears to be broken.) This includes

Cyber VAWG includes hate speech (publishing a blasphemous libel), hacking (intercepting private communications), identity theft, online stalking (criminal harassment) and uttering threats.

 Sarkeesian expanded on those goals considerably:

According to feminist culture critic Anita Sarkeesian, who spoke at the event, online “harassment” doesn’t simply consist of what is “legal and illegal,” but “also the day-to-day grind of ‘you’re a liar’ and ‘you suck,’ including all of these hate videos that attack us on a regular basis.”

Unable to prove that they are the victims of a wave of “misogynistic hate” – no bomb threat against a feminist critic of video games has ever been deemed credible and there are serious doubts about threats supposedly levelled at transsexual activist Brianna Wu – feminists are trying to redefine violence and harassment to include disobliging tweets and criticisms of their work.

In other words: someone said “you suck” to Anita Sarkeesian and now we have to censor the internet. Who could have predicted such a thing? It’s worth noting, by the way, that if Sarkeesian’s definition is correct, Donald Trump is the world’s greatest victim of “cyber-violence.” Someone should let him know.

As a bonus points follow-on, Yiannopoulos found a Redditor willing to slog through all 120 of the report's footnotes, concluding that 30% are broken, blank, duplicated, or nonexistent in some other way, with another 15% self-referentially linking back to UN documents. (Also, yikes, for Popehat phoning it in, though at least he recognized it at the time.) The benefit of the doubt no longer applies; schoolyard taunts provide sufficient cause for Sarkeesian to demand governments silence others, and that the mechanisms for doing this be built into the technical infrastructure of the Internet. Sarkeesian is nothing more than a schoolmarm with an overgrown ego.

Shanley Kane, The Backstory

My fascination with Shanley Kane as a manifestation of feminist psychosis got a doubling or tripling down today in the wake of a tweet from Milo Yiannopoulos, who resurrected three old columns of his. There's a lot of linked material therein, but I wanted to hit the highlights.

• In which Andrew Auernheimer makes the mistake of sleeping with the former racist, which probably amounts to birds of a feather. Auernheimer, in case you forgot, is "a convicted hacker, a prolific internet troll, a self-confessed anti-semite and, as we reported in October, a white nationalist—though he prefers the term 'pan-European supremacist.'" So he has his reasons to misrepresent Kane's positions, now or then. But her untethered loathing for men — "She does, however, legitimately hate men with an undying rage" — is by now incontestable. Must-read: Meredith L. Patterson's Medium essay outlining her own experiences, and rejection of Kane's entitled self-absorption:
  

  I have since been made painfully aware that my experience is atypical. Every time, it has been a woman who has done so. Every time, it has been a lesson in how the woman I am talking with expects the tech world to relate to her and other people like her.

  After proposing and implementing a feature to an open-source project, she subsequently learned that the developer's list had a brief discussion of her proposal.
  

  There had been interest, but one of the committers had dismissed the idea out of hand because a woman had proposed it. It was the funniest thing I’d heard in months — I literally doubled over laughing at how nonplussed he must have been to see it not only implemented, but implemented to rousing success.

  Whether he intended this as a snub or not, she didn't take it as one at the time. This, from Kane's perspective, turned out to be a huge mistake, because "talking about my overwhelmingly positive relationship with the tech community is nothing more than a callous announcement of 'fuck you, got mine.'" That is, she was too busy doing to worry about the possible social implications of some guy's offhand comment.
• If there's a one-piece takedown of Kane that warrants deep reading, "The Madness of Queen Shanley" appears to be it, providing as it does a significant backgrounder in Kane's dysfunctional, psychopathic behavior. I could spend an entire afternoon reading the links there. Must-read: Elizabeth Spears' Medium interview with Kane, in which Kane even takes softball questions as raging insults, and her editor Bobbie Johnson's followup outlining Kane's lunatic, paranoid response ("harassment", "coerced" among other things) to interview requests from what should have been a friendly reporter.
• Kane confesses racism and mental illness; the obvious must-read is Amelia Greenhall's essay on what it was like to be in close quarters with someone so obviously insane. I don't think she's learned much — the end of the piece appears to be an affirmation of the sorts of things that are explicitly problematic about Kane's totalitarian brand of feminism — but it's interesting to see how very brittle the supposed sisterhood is once there's bragging rights to be established.

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.

Thanks, @Nero: A Review Of Emma Sulkowicz's Sex Tape

Twitter firebrand @Nero (aka Milo Yiannopoulos) does us all the favor of reviewing Emma Sulkowicz's strange porn video:

It’s telling, I think, that in Sulkowicz’s purported college dorm room there are no books. She has the same lack of interest in aesthetics as she does in intellectual enrichment: both in her choice of sexual partner (apparently satisfactory member notwithstanding) and the grim, bare walls with which she surrounds herself. Though I expect the austerity of her room reflects her barren emotional interior really rather well.

You can tell “dad bods” are in fashion because both of the people in this video have one. But you do at least have to give an actress credit for doing nude scenes with a man who has larger breasts than she does. Sulkowicz’s size queendom apparently extends to love handles and leave the viewer sympathetic to the travails of her infamous mattress.

It’s revealing of her vanity that she insists on being filmed from four angles. Every crevasse of her unappealing naked body must be considered. Her congressional interlocutor is a gruesome sight in three dimensions, chosen, probably, to make young Emma look thinner. Which doesn’t work, I’m sorry to say.

All in all, it’s a tawdry, miserable encounter that tells us nothing about sexual assault or sex itself but quite a bit about the quasi-demonic inner workings of one Emma Sulkowicz.

Ouch. Hilarious, but ouch.

Bomb Threats And Harassing Phone Calls Attend Gamer Meetup In D.C.

Arthur Chu, Twitter's male answer to the question, "what would a Kardashian be without looks?", lost his shit about Cathy Young, Christine Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos and other pro-#GamerGate individuals having a meetup at the Washington, D.C. bar Local 16:

Hey @localsixteen just so you know there's an Internet hate speech movement meeting up at your place tonight http://t.co/MRcw2mqqqy

— Arthur Chu (@arthur_affect) May 1, 2015

This sparked a flood of angry calls to the bar, and eventually a bomb threat:

What makes this serious threat of violence even more disturbing is that the GGinDC event was packed. Yiannopoulos told us on Sunday that there were at "least 250" people in attendance at the time of the incident. He added that he "shook at least 150 hands" during the course of the evening: "I run a lot of events and normally you can expect 40-60 per cent of RSVPs to show up. But there were even more people there on Friday night than the 220 who had RSVPed," he told us.

My suspicion is that it was one raging idiot intending to scare rather than an actual bomb, but whatevs. I'm not especially interested in label-based argumentation, which is 95% bullshit, nor in establishing victimhood cred; that's a game for losers. Chu has since blocked me on Twitter, which probably says more about his limited cognitive abilities and intolerance than what I tweeted at him (the only thing to my recollection I ever said was hardly abusive). No one is allowed to have wrongthink, and especially, to do so over frosty adult beverages, apparently.