I know, you're going to say, why are you surprised? It's the New York Times. Why do you even read it? But put the usual reflexive retorts aside for a moment and take a look at how bad this example is. It's a news report, not an opinion piece, and it assumes, over and over, that Pao is the victim of sexism (even though her downfall had to do with her involvement in the firing of another woman):
Ellen Pao became a hero to many when she took on the entrenched male-dominated culture of Silicon Valley...The comments at the NYT are extremely critical. Here's the highest rated one:
Ms. Pao’s abrupt downfall in the face of a torrent of sexist and racist comments, many of them on Reddit itself, is quite likely to renew charges that bullying, harassment and cruel behavior are out of control on the web — and that Silicon Valley’s well-publicized problem with gender and ethnic diversity in its work force persists....
Her gender discrimination case, years in the making, failed to sway a jury, but did reveal a community that casually tolerated an atmosphere where machismo was prized and women often seemed to be relegated to secondary roles....
“The attacks were worse on Ellen because she is a woman,” said Sam Altman, a member of the Reddit board. “And that’s just a shame against humanity.”...
“In my view, her job was made more difficult because as a woman, she was particularly subject to the abuse stemming from the pockets of toxic misogyny in the Reddit ecosystem,” said Mr. Kapor, now a partner at Kapor Capital....
I can't believe I'm reading this paragraph in the NYT: "Ms. Pao’s abrupt downfall in the face of a torrent of sexist and racist attacks, many of them on Reddit itself, is likely to renew charges that bullying, harrassment and ugly behavior are out of control on the web — and that Silicon Valley’s well-publicized lack of interest in hiring anyone who is not male and white is contributing to the problem."
The criticism of Ellen Pao was based on her competence, not because she was a woman working as CEO of Reddit. No one cared about her gender before or after she started making terrible, disruptive changes, and this was communicated very clearly by the moderators who acted in protest of her actions. I don't know how this could be misunderstood.
The idea that 'bullying, harrassment and ugly behavior are out of control on the web' is not a fact and some classic self-righteous moral panic. This is an article, not an Op-Ed.
"That Silicon Valley’s well-publicized lack of interest in hiring anyone who is not male and white is contributing to the problem" Again, for not being an Op-Ed, this is an opinion that is stated as a fact, and ignores an entire movement (you quoted Mr. Kapor!) within Silicon Valley that is trying to solve this problem.
The New York Times should learn from Reddit -- quality of content matters, and people on the internet can tell when they're being fed something of low quality this is written from an out-of-touch, sensationalist point of view.
पोस्ट्स
८० टिप्पण्या:
"Ridiculously opinionated article at the NYT" is a given.
Expecting competence and management talent from a female is sexist ! You should be ashamed.
The two authors of that piece are obvious metrosexual. I wonder if they are trannies ?
Reflex retort reexamined, discovered to be based on reality even though it is reflexive, convenient reflex left in place.
Read "many" as "me" and these articles usually make more sense.
The New York Times should learn from Reddit -- quality of content matters, and people on the internet can tell when they're being fed something of low quality this is written from an out-of-touch, sensationalist point of view.
Does anyone here think anyone at the Times is capable of parsing that sentence?
And, wasn't it only 14 months ago that the Times itself ousted Jill Abramson for cause? Why yes it was! But of course that was different.
Michael sort of beat me to it.
So the Reddit board, presumably part of that sexist SV Cabal, hires a minority woman with no executive experience, perhaps to get some press and appear "not like the other macho nerds".
The inexperienced female minority CEO fires a well liked, very competent subordinate for not controlling the users from you know, actually asking JJJ tough questions at an "Ask Me Anything" event. One of the premier features of Reddit.
The Board pretty much sticks by her. The customer based rebels, and Pao allegedly quits, but is not fired.
So instead of gaining SJW creds for hiring her, the board has likely lost half the value of the firm in a matter of weeks and gotten a black eye from the SJW's (e.g. NYT), its users, and the press.
Ellen, "You're doin a heck of a job"
Professor Althouse; I put aside my loathing for the Times long enough to read your post with an open mind. I liked it; it is a good post. And now I am going to go back to loathing the Times.
And I'll be waiting for the Times to expose "the entrenched male culture" in organized labor. Or of course "the entrenched male culture" in the Islamic world. I think that there's an "entrenched male culture" in the National Football League, but right before the Times manages to destroy the league, they might be able to break down its "entrenched male culture."
Welcome to the club Althouse. For years, many of us have seen librul opinion bleed into just about every NYT news story. [of course, I am repeating myself ad nauseum]
Your posts linking to the NYT are generally ones I don't bother following. Their stories seem to be written by either strident partisans or clinically insane/ incredibly dense people [or both].
Birkel said...
Read "many" as "me" and these articles usually make more sense.
From the Journolese glossary:
Some: me and a friend.
Many: me and two friends.
The New York Times should learn from Reddit -- quality of content matters, and people on the internet can tell when they're being fed something of low quality this is written from an out-of-touch, sensationalist point of view.
The commenter makes the mistake of expecting actual journalism.
The mainstream media is simply a powerful advocacy group supporting political correctness in whatever is the flavor of the day.
For a large segment of our body politic, actual facts are now faint pinpoints in the cosmic distance. The conclusive story is front and center - it is all that exists in their consciousness, wholly fictionalized though it has become.
I see this as a sign of the last stages of advanced pride: having gone from a competition with and motivation to excel - to ascend - above "the others", to a complete demotion of the others to the roll of cypher, to be moved about in the story at their own will.
(Ah, but the competition and motivated-to-ascend engine doesn't shut off easily, which is why they are starting to turn on each other.)
I know, you're going to say, why are you surprised? It's the New York Times. Why do you even read it? But put the usual reflex retorts aside for a moment and take a look at how bad this example is
If you find this one to be particularly egregious and it makes you sit up and take notice, then good for you and welcome to the club. But actually what it is is just yet another example to go on a humongous pile of similar or worse examples of why the NYT is no longer relevant and a credible source for anything except progressive fantasy. And, since they seem so obtuse and impervious to self-correction to these criticisms of bias when it has repeatedly been pointed out to them, I've come to the conclusion that the NYT was never really a credible source, and their reputation was always built on smoke and mirrors.
What surprises me about this story is that Reddit would hire a litigious under-talented candidate for a CEO job.
There was a mini-scandal years ago when it was learned that somebody set up a small firm that tracked lawsuits against doctors and sold that database to other doctors who could check and see the risk of seeing new patients. Too bad there was no similar firm in Silicon Valley,
Sometimes I wonder if these pieces come from somebody feeding a reporter talking points that end up as an article. It certainly saves on the costs of actually doing journalism, and if it happens to be blatantly mistaken, it's just something for the public editor to uselessly criticize in an article.
The NYT does narrative, not opinion. It needs readers, and that's the audience.
As to sexism, there are two levels, the NYT version being that women are men but not treated as men.
The other version is that women can't do what men do and it's no surprise that they fail.
The truth is that women do what men do well or badly but always grimly. They have women's interests, not men's. These are distinct, I'd guess so that men and women can be close without crowding each other, evolutionarily speaking.
So I'm always drawn to call out calls of sexism. Both types are wrongheaded. The outrage ought to be directed to either.
From one of Insty's links: In an interview this afternoon, Pao said the departure was a “mutual decision” with the board, due in part to different views on growth potential. “They had a more aggressive view than I did,” she said.
I'm sure the board decided that her passive vision of negative growth potential by alienating the customers was counterproductive to the bottom line.
I subscribed to the Times for many years, but cancelled my subscription about 18 months ago. The relentless liberal spin was a big part of the reason, but their complete incompetence at handling the digital aspect of their business was the coup de grace. Since I cancelled I get several emails a week begging me to come back at rates so low they can't be profitable. I suspect their business model is in trouble.
"But put the usual reflexive retorts aside for a moment and take a look at how bad this example is."
OK. "Usual reflexive retorts" put aside. Objectivity mode turned on.
1. This example is not particularly bad for a newspaper that has staged whole campaigns in the guise of news reporting.
2. It fits their narrative and reinforces the prejudices of their target audience. Why are you surprised?
3. Selective indignation at Prog outrages is better than none at all, but the faux surprise shtick is getting old.
This brings back happy memories of Howell Raines"s 2002 crusade against Augusta National, ginning up continuing front page stories in the Times (e.g., advertisers still haven't pulled out of Masters broadcast) in a failed effort to compel Augusta to admit women. The Times never disappoints.
God Bless Ellen Pao for shattering the stereotype of Asians as bright, hard-working and success-driven.
God Bless Ellen Pao for shattering the stereotype of Asians as bright, hard-working and success-driven.
Yeah, I was wondering how long before the Asian thing worked its way into this thread. Twenty-first post - not bad, I guess.
Who needs women!
The world's saddest cook shows how to prepare for a fun saturday night with the microwave.
H/T Lem's place
Behold the poetry of pockets of toxic misogyny.
on the entrenched male-dominated culture of Silicon Valley
Those naughty men, always inventin' and makin' things and doin' stuff. They should stop it so others won't feel sad.
I run Linux; each component has the name of its creator/maintainer, and I've never seen a woman's name associated with any of the software.
The real problem here is that a major obstacle to women (or African-Americans) getting big jobs is the idea (fact?) that you can't ever fire them, however justifiably, without setting off a major Twitstorm, boycott, lawsuit, etc. It's a lot less risky to hire or promote a white male, because if he doesn't work out you can move him out and try someone else, while you'll be stuck with a disappointing woman or minority.
As is often the case, the unintended consequence of the Progressive/feminist approach is to make the underlying problem that much worse.
NYT Over the top biased? No fucking way! Check out this lead to a story of how Alabama's Republican governor "does the right thing" and orders the infamous banner of hate lowered by executive order.
UNLIKE previous Alabama governors, Robert J. Bentley is not a fount of oratory. Nor is he a champion of “kinder and gentler.” His dyspeptic refusal to accept federal funds for Medicaid expansion, in a state where more than one million of 4.8 million residents depend on the program, betokens a stunning indifference to the Hippocratic oath. (The governor is a dermatologist.) Yet Mr. Bentley recently took a page from the Obama playbook and used a surprise executive order to remove four Confederate flags from the Alabama Capitol grounds, not far from the very spot where Jefferson Davis was sworn in
See, he credits the governor with being like Obama for a second there. Isn't Howell Raines a generous spirit?
Re: MisterBuddwing:
Yeah, I was wondering how long before the Asian thing worked its way into this thread. Twenty-first post - not bad, I guess.
And there's so much to comment on!
Like the comment quoting the article as follows:
Silicon Valley’s well-publicized lack of interest in hiring anyone who is not male and white is contributing to the problem. (emphasis added)
It appears that someone with a few more brains than the original authors noticed that Asians exist, and revised this to:
Silicon Valley’s well-publicized problem with gender and ethnic diversity in its work force persists.
The unsubtle racism of the liberal bourgeoisie. They really would prefer to forget us.
It's particularly apt in this case, because some of first criticisms out of the gate were that the Reddit user base were especially hard on her because she was an ethnic minority (Asians are minorities when it's convenient). But that really didn't work here, since her predecessor, Yishan Wong was also Asian and, as far as I am aware, never provoked the same level of resentment.
Sorry, should have been "salient" not "apt" up there. I was going to say something else originally.
Well, Ann, you got me to click the link, renounce my vow to avoid the Times, elevate my blood pressure and leave a comment. Many of the comments beat the SJW drum and characterize the entire incident as yet more proof of Silicon Valley misogyny. The article is on target for its audience, my neighbors, the low-information geriatrics who populate the Upper West Side. Like the woman upstairs who is convinced that Republicans don't like dogs. In this market, the Times' perspective rules and Ellen Pao is a truth-to-power victim. Thank God for the internet.
There is no real connection between the two stories, other than the fact that Ellen Pao is involved in both. Pao's lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins was kinda sorta a sexual harassment case, only she initiated the affair and didn't suffer any repercussions. It was kinda sorta an institutional sexism case, except she had a pretty middle of the road career for someone who didn't get selected as a partner. But both of those issues are specific to the company -- you could go next door and find a completely different culture. And, of course, Pao lost on every issue -- you can't ignore the fact that she told her story to a jury, and the jury didn't buy a word.
It is interesting to remember Kleiner Perkins' defense, though. They argued that Pao was not a team player, prone to backstabbing and trying to squeeze in to projects that were already completed in order to get the rewards. So she gets to be CEO of Reddit -- and promptly pisses off all the volunteer members of the team. The end came when she backstabbed the wrong person, and the motivation for it all seems to have been the desire to clean up the site for a possible sale. Which would amount to squeezing in on a finished project just in time to get the rewards!
NYT will apparently never transcend their infantile "SF-internet-white-males = evil sexists and racists" snobbery. When members of a community are so opposed to a person that some of them craft "Chairman Pao" memes and 'c**t'-filled disses does not automatically mean that the community should not get what it wants. Reddit's CEO is a challenging job; you want to safe-space it enough that it could potentially have mass [advertiser] appeal, yet you cannot interfere in existing subcommunities without upsetting the incumbent members. And it's not enough to simply hide them from the front page; muckrakers will delightfully track down and point out every teenage-bully thing you don't want associated w/ your brand.
"Ridiculously opinionated" seems to describe a high to very high percentage of NYT articles.
"I subscribed to the Times for many years, but cancelled my subscription about 18 months ago."
Consider yourself lucky. I was a subscriber for years and then tried to quit about 12 or 13 years ago. I had signed up for annual automatic renewal and could not cancel. I finally had to cancel the credit card to get rid of them.
Reddit's CEO is a challenging job; you want to safe-space it enough that it could potentially have mass [advertiser] appeal, yet you cannot interfere in existing subcommunities without upsetting the incumbent members.
Which is why the idea of an outside CEO from the venture capital world is puzzling. There's no real potential for exponential growth or a quick exit. What the site essentially does is host other people, who both generate and consume the content. There are no strong barriers to competition, and no easy way to control what content is produced.
It seems like for that job you want a farmer personality -- someone who goes out every day and makes minor improvements, and plans to make a little bit of money steadily over a long time. Basically, the opposite of Pao.
I dropped my WSJ print subscription when they started writing it for women.
If Silicon Valley is so white-dominated & misogynist, what does it say about the Democratic Party that Silicon Valley is a huge cash cow for the Party?
Funny how you don't see those two thoughts in the same room at the same time.
As a feminist who disagrees with most of 21st century feminism, I have to wonder why today's feminists want to adopt, as icons, women (Pao, Hillary) who have advanced in their careers not based on their accomplishments, but based on their sex partners. There are plenty of accomplished women that would be better exemplars: Nancy Pelosi or Nikki Halley or Carli Fiorina . You may disagree with their politics, but they have advanced on their own accomplishments. You may admire Margaret Chase Smith or Lurleen Wallace, but are they the women we want to hold up for our daughters as examples of how to succeed as a woman in politics?
It's pro-female SJW hysteria all the Times...
@H,
I think the reason that so many women admire women who advanced on the coattails of their husbands (or sex partners in general) is that many women look upon the careful choosing of a husband (or sex partner) as a vital part of a woman's lifetime of accomplishments. However important a man's choice of a bride may be in his future success (& it's often very important indeed), it's just not seen socially in the same light, in spite of maxims such as "Behind every successful man....".
C'mon Furious A, at least give @iowahak credit for that quote! He was on fire yesterday.
Two words: Jill Abramson.
"If Silicon Valley is so white-dominated & misogynist, what does it say about the Democratic Party"
I suspect that, from the worldview of the NYT, the Democratic Party approximates the known, acceptable boundaries of thought. Therefore, it's not the DP that's horribly full of white men, it's the enlightened modern world itself; no particular stain on the Democrats.
By contrast, any "bad" characteristics of conservatives/Republicans/etc. are evidence of said group's unique evil backwardness.
Therefore, liberal/Democratic malfeasance (if you accept it as such): evidence of our fallen age.
Conservative/Republican malfeasance: evidence of RepubliKKKon evil.
"Yeah, I was wondering how long before the Asian thing worked its way into this thread. Twenty-first post - not bad, I guess."
Affirmative action sets itself on fire again. Failing upwards may work in the public sector but not in the business world.
A tiger mom personality who had sex with her married boss, then married a criminal and was fired because she wasn't executive material. If she were white she would be instantly forgotten, not hired to be a CEO. If she were a man, she never would have gotten the KP job with her winsome personality.
Maybe she should run for president.
"C'mon Furious A, at least give @iowahak credit for that quote! He was on fire yesterday."
Did I quote something and not give credit?
I had a hard copy subscription to the Sunday NYT for probably ten years after I moved to a suburb of sufficient affluence to rate home delivery. I had picked it up on the newsstand for another ten years or so before that.
I canceled for all the reasons cited in these comments. I can't imagine why the NYT doesn't poll their former subscribers to find out why their subscription base has suffered such a decline. I think the consultants have convinced management that the decline is all Internet based. They think the paywall is their salvation. And that is why I keep four different browsers on my computer. Forty articles is more than enough to make it through a month of Althouse NYT links.
So Pao and Archuletta. Two women who got their jobs because they filled a niche and satisfied the SJWs. Two people who couldn't actually do their jobs and had to resign yesterday. At least Pao didn't screw up 25 million people's personal information.
But hey. Whoever put them in the jobs in the first place probably felt good about it for a while.
Ann, I believe Mike's comment about giving credit to @iowahawk was directed at the commenter named Furious A, not at you who may have the initial A and occasionally be furious.
Interesting how Pao seems to "doubt humanity" in the face of stupid, anonymous Internet trolling, but she apparently has no problem whatsoever with her ex-gay black husband defrauding people of millions of dollars in his bogus ponzi scheme hedge fund.
MayBee at 12:55. Here's Archuleta's testimony. She can only answer questions by reading prepared remarks on her file-cards. It's almost painfully embarrassing to hear. Start at about 3:43, and listen for only a couple minutes (if you can stand it that long).
Big Mike: The New York Times should learn from Reddit -- quality of content matters, and people on the internet can tell when they're being fed something of low quality this is written from an out-of-touch, sensationalist point of view.
Does anyone here think anyone at the Times is capable of parsing that sentence?
That sentence is grammatically incoherent, so there's no reason to expect anybody from anywhere to be capable of parsing it.
Michael K said...
What surprises me about this story is that Reddit would hire a litigious under-talented candidate for a CEO job.
There was a mini-scandal years ago when it was learned that somebody set up a small firm that tracked lawsuits against doctors and sold that database to other doctors who could check and see the risk of seeing new patients. Too bad there was no similar firm in Silicon Valley,
7/11/15, 9:29 AM "
Micheal does that site still exist and does it offer the reverse service so a patient can avoid questionable doctors?
Michael said...
The real problem here is that a major obstacle to women (or African-Americans) getting big jobs is the idea (fact?) that you can't ever fire them, however justifiably, without setting off a major Twitstorm, boycott, lawsuit, etc. It's a lot less risky to hire or promote a white male, because if he doesn't work out you can move him out and try someone else, while you'll be stuck with a disappointing woman or minority.
As is often the case, the unintended consequence of the Progressive/feminist approach is to make the underlying problem that much worse.
7/11/15, 10:29 AM
Off topic but you have in essence described why unemployment rates in most European countries are always so high no matter how well the economy is. Once hired it's almost impossible to fire hence employers are loath to hire in good times when extra staffing is needed because you can't get reduce staff when it isn't. As for your point, it probably is true and unsaid at small to mid-size companies that can't afford the risk of carrying deadwood or the litigation cost of letting them go.
In the SJW universe like the communist party of old its not always easy to know who is in favor and who isn't in a favor from moment to moment. Clarence Thomas is black but not authentically black. Pao was one an authentic woman and a woman of color but now she is not. I suppose for those who care about these things the NYT is the Pravda on the Hudson. And the WaPo is the Izvestia on the Potomac.
"you have in essence described why unemployment rates in most European countries are always so high no matter how well the economy is."
Yup. That is certainly the case in France. There is a famous cafe right next to the Pegasus Bridge that was assaulted by the British 6th Airborne Division on D-Day. The cafe owner heard the noise and, when he realized what was happening, opened the cafe as a first aid station for wounded British troops. His six year old daughter awakened too and she now runs thence which is still there.
"Arlette Gondrée, who now runs Café Gondrée, was a small child living in the home when it was liberated. It is not certain that the famous Gondrée café was the first French house to be liberated during D-Day. In the book Commando du Pont Pegase written by the French historian Norbert Hugedé, it is written that it was the house owned by Mr Picot, a few hours before the Gondrée's house."
Madame Gondree made our lunch when we visited. She has one employee and has no more, in spite of brisk business, because she could never fire or lay one off one if business is slow, as in winter. Her photo is all over and the Royal Family have visited but she still makes luncheon sandwiches.
'the cafe" became "thence" thanks to autocorrect.
The changes over time that have been made in the original article are breathtaking. For those with good eyesight, there is a comparison of two versions of the article here.
For example, it originally started in a fairly just-the-facts-ma'm sort of way:
Ellen Pao, the interim chief executive of Reddit, resigned from the online message board on Friday after a week of ceaseless criticism from scores of angry users over the handling of an employee departure.
Ms Pao will be replaced by Steve Huffman, who, along with Alexis Chanian, started Reddit from a two bedroom apartment in a suburb of Boston a decade ago. Ms. Pao said she would remain as an adviser to Reddit's board for the remainder of the year.
Apparently that wasn't nearly enough red meat for whomever it is the NYT is trying to appeal to, so somebody named David Streitfeld was brought in to punch it up, and we get:
Ellen Pao became a hero to many when she took on the entrenched sexist culture of Silicon Valley. But sentiment is a fickle thing, and late Friday, the entrepreneur fell victim to a shrill crowd demanding her ouster as chief executive of the popular social media site Reddit.
Ms. Pao's abrupt downfall in the face of a torrent of sexist and racist attacks, many of them on Reddit itself, is likely to renoew charges that bullying, harrassment and ugly behavior are out of control on the web...
This comment by Ann is such bullshit. The NY Times pretends to differentiate between reporting and opinion and she pretends to be outraged. She pretends to believe that this crosses some kind of line and the comments that follow pretend to be be upset. It's the old game between the Left and the Nice.
There is no distinction between reporting and editorializing. The NY Times doesn't even have to use loaded terms to advance its agenda. It sets its course simply by what it writes about and what it doesn't. In the limited space that it devotes to prose outside of the ads, it writes about the things it considers important in terms it considers appropriate. If the subject is non-white female oppressed by evil white pigs it will find the story. That's why Pao's story is there; it has nothing to do with her as an individual.
That's why you will find the murder of nine people in Charleston by Dylan Roof reported endlessly and tied to a flag, the South, guns and Republicans; but why you won't find any story about an even greater carnage any weekend in Chicago.
And Ann will find another and another and another subject for her blog. But she won't understand that her posts are such an empty, meaningless waste of time. Because the game's over and the Times has won. The evolution of change will accelerate. We are being fundamentally transformed just as Barack and Michelle Obama promised.
Being "the last Jew to understand where the cattle cars are headed" isn't something to be proud about." But not realizing what the train is for is just stupid.
The article has been completely rewritten. Only the words Ellen Pao appear to remain unchanged.
Digital editing, pah! You capitalists are so soft! I am remembering way we had to cut each page out of every history book by hand, up hill, both ways, barefoot, in the snow...
Mountain Maven—
"You don't know how good you have it here at the university! I've worked in the private sector! They expect results!" — "Ghostbusters"
This has probably killed Reddit. It was once the Next Big Thing. Now it's the Old Big Thing. People on social media do not go back to the Old Big Thing.
Welcome to MySpace, Reddit.
Re: richard mcenroe:
Reddit was "the next big thing" five years ago, maybe. It's been old for a long time in internet years.
As ever:
Fool me once, shame on you.
Any more than that, and it's my fault...Again.
Althouse, next Easter season, you should consider giving up the NYT and New Yorker for Lent:)
I feel bad for the original writer who had his work changed out from under him.
I wonder how much control he had over the edit.
"The inexperienced female minority CEO fires a well liked, very competent subordinate"
-- Wasn't the subordinate she fired... a woman?
"Ridiculously opinionated article at the NYT" - what a brilliant tautology! :-)
Shortly after Pao lost her discrimination suit, ABC brought her on to Good Morning America to talk about discrimination against women in corporate America. Although I think the lead in mentioned that she'd lost her suit, that fact was not, as far as I can recall, even mentioned in the interview. Nobody asked, Well since the jury didn't believe your claim that you were discriminated against, why should anybody listen to you about how other women are victims of discrimination? I guess that wouldn't have fit the narrative.
Still, her experience should help other Asian/Asian-American women get corporate jobs, by proving (twice) that you can fire them and get away with it.
I did no know that Iowahawk nailed the stereotype earlier. The thought had occurred to me after reading about the grifter habits of Ms. Pao and her fraudster "husband".
This has probably killed Reddit...
Some ("me and a friend", above) say the SJWs' mobbing of Brendan Eich has doomed Firefox.
@Bay Area Guy, you'd think the Professor would give them up right this minute for the sake of her sanity.
Re: Matthew Sablan
And how! Initially, I had not realized how the comprehensively the rewrite took what was a fairly objective, factual piece about Madame Pao leaving Reddit after a massive customer revolt, and turned it into an over the top bit of agitprop. And then a third rewrite (while correcting the obvious inaccuracy about Silicon Valley only wanting White men) made sure to clean up by removing the name of the terminated employee -- one assumes (given the tenor of the other revisions) so readers could be insulated from the uncomfortable reality that the terminated employee so vigorously supported by the user base was a woman.
Her lawsuit "did reveal a community that casually tolerated an atmosphere where machismo was prized and women often seemed to be relegated to secondary roles."
And yet.... she lost the lawsuit.
Perhaps she can carry an inflatable router on her back as performance art.
At least this article is just annoying to read. When there's a major court case going on and the Times weighs in with a fake article it can often affect the outcome. One example of many I could site: the Central Park wilding retrial that found the whole gang innocent. The Sunday Times ran a 3-4 page article with a veneer of objectivity when it was all advocacy. For instance, showing a precise "timeline" of events where all the times were just guesses by the NYT. Saying a witness described the victim as wearing short black sweatpants but they were really blue and long, ergo the Times deduces that that testimony is not reliable. But in the dark blue becomes black, and sweatpants bunched around your ankles (after you've been raped) will look short. And they acted as if the sperm not matching the suspects was a new discovery that when it was known at the first trial. (The guy who did the penetration wasn't caught, the ones who beat the crap out of her were.) A couple of days after the article the judge overturned all of previous verdicts.
now that was an article to be pissed about.
Nobody above mentioned that Pao remains an adviser to the Reddit Board for either the rest of the year or another year (depending on source).
So good luck with repairing all those issues she caused with the user base and the volunteer staff of Reddit!
Unless this is just her payoff to avoid a lawsuit, which is possible, maybe probable, and she will "advise" them by quietly never communicating with anyone on the Board again, ever, her disruptions of reddit.com will continue.
I'd advise the Reddit Board to ask her to prepare a detailed report about something not asociated with Reddit, like their competitors, or the sexism in Silicon Valley, to be delivered the day her extended contract ends, without communication before then, or after.
What I'm curious about is that Asians are very well-represented--indeed statistically over-represented--in Silicon Valley. Yet they are variably counted as white when explaining how few minorities there are in Silicon Valley, and as non-white when they are the purported victims of prejudice, like Ellen Pao. I wonder if Prof. Althouse, as a stalwart defender of affirmative action (the only cause for which she has ever demonstrated), with lots of contacts among the chattering classes, can specify the decision principles which specify when Asians are white, and when they are not.
I try, several times a week, to read the NYT, but it has become unreadable. Even the sports pages are largely unreadable.
NYT is now on its third iteration of the same story. Do they edit news as they go along or are they trying desperately to write something that won't make them look like a bunch of 3rd rate hacks?
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