“We get to a stretch in the road where the navigation says continue for several blocks. She says 'no, make a right here.' I said 'I’m required by Uber to follow the GPS.' She said 'no, make a right here' and she became kinda belligerent.... She kept calling me stupid. She said this was the only job I can get because I’m so stupid. And that I was a retard. She hit me on my shoulder. That was the final straw. I’m used to dealing with drunk passengers on different levels of intoxication. I pulled over immediately. I said, 'ma’am you need to exit my vehicle.' She said 'you’re supposed to take me home.' I said 'I understand that but you just crossed the line."The recording makes Warner look horrible, but she's inviting us to see her subjective perspective in "a situation that made me feel very uncomfortable and I became defensive and eventually angry." She says:
"I'm not trying to make any accusations against that driver, I don't know what's in his heart... Whether it's because of my experience as a prosecutor, maybe [I'm] hyper-vigilant, but whether I was justifiably uncomfortable, I can't tell you that... all I can tell you is what's in my heart."His heart, her heart, what is she trying to say?
She says she felt uncomfortable with the route the driver was taking and went into "fight or flight" mode, saying her years of prosecuting sexual assault cases may have put her on edge or more sensitive than most.So, she's a woman, alone in a car with a man, and she's vulnerable, because she's intoxicated and needs to trust him to get her home, and he takes what she now claims looks like the wrong route — though it was apparently just the GPS route Uber requires him to take — and she goes all authoritarian on him, yelling at him, ordering him to do things and attaching shocking epithets and accusations.
2. Meanwhile, "2 women sue Uber, alleging sexual assault by drivers" (NY Post). This is a class action in federal court, accusing Uber of failing to do adequate background checks and monitoring.
The lawsuit... alleges that Uber markets to young women traveling alone and puts profits over their safety.... It asks the court for unspecified damages to compensate the women, and also seeks court-ordered safety measures including fingerprint background checks for drivers and a panic button on the Uber app that would alert the company and authorities to safety problems....There is a perception that a woman needs to be vigilant about the potential for a sexual attack from an Uber driver, and the lawsuit is an effort to make Uber provide the vigilance. But Uber oversees billions of rides. The incidence of attacks is probably already quite low. Maybe Uber should do more. Should the app have a panic button? The rider has a phone and could call 911, but there are situations when you're just wary — perhaps like Jody Warner — and you think the driver is deviating from the norm and maybe he's not.
You know, we're talking a lot these days about how much a woman should react on the spot when something starts going wrong. The Jody Warner case may explain why sometimes these women report that they felt "paralyzed" or unable to speak up. Look at the horrible consequences for Warner of opting for fight mode.
Posts
240 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 240 of 240The most common form of ideological argument in the US since the 1970's (maybe earlier).
Liberal - Assert #1
Conservative - Rebut #1
Liberal - Assert #2
Conservative - Rebut #2
Liberal - Assert #1 again
...
KittyM,
What is the percentage of women that take extended breaks, of from several months to several years, during their careers compared to the percentage of men that do so?
@Jupiter "I don't owe you any courtesy."
No, you're right. We are two strangers on the internet, and in that sense don't owe each other anything.
But if we don't engage with the arguments the other person is making, respectfully and fairly, then what on earth is the point? Just a trading of insults? That's not for me.
"You and your ilk have been playing on the sympathies of your betters for my entire lifetime, and I am sick of the lot of you." I don't know what you mean or what you are even referring to. Who do you mean by "me and my ilk"? Liberals? Feminists? Women? And how have we (whoever we are) play on the sympathies of our betters? And who are our betters, anyway?
These are just a lot of references that I honestly don't know, so I do not follow your thinking here.
"The market does not treat everyone equally. There are winners and losers." Yes. But why should women on the whole be the losers? How about redheads? Or tall people?
I personally like the level playing field analogy. If the idea of working towards equality worries you from the "how can everybody be the same" point of view (which is not what the idea is, but I'll let that one go), then let's work towards a fair start for everyone. A level playing field. So - you're lazy, stupid, pig-headed, unpleasant...you do less well. You're smart, hard-working, ambitious, charming...you do better probably.
But let the playing field be level!
The thing that you ignore is the subtler forms of discrimination. What is like to work as a woman and be treated with less respect by the boss. Let me ask: do you think I am making it up when I tell you it is harder for me and my female colleagues to be treated with respect, to have our opinions taken seriously, than my male colleagues? You lack imagination and empathy if you cannot put yourself in my shoes in your head.
Or do you think all those things women complain about is so much hot air?
The interesting thing about the O'Reilly - Weinstein cases is that finally some men can see that yes, it is true, it can be quite dangerous out there for women. It wasn't all just bubble-headed rubbish. This is the kind of shit we have to put up with on an alarmingly regular basis.
"do you think I am making it up when I tell you it is harder for me and my female colleagues to be treated with respect, to have our opinions taken seriously, than my male colleagues? "
You have to put yourself in the shoes of male colleagues, and see and hear what they do. You are right, there is subtle discrimination that hurts women, but it often goes something like this -
Scenario 1
- Man does inadequate work or some notable blunder.
- Supervisor or peer - "This sucks you ^$%%*! This is why (in detail)" Also, jokes, ribbing about screwups. Sometimes (affectionately meant) for life. That's the way men go.
Scenario 2
- Woman does inadequate work
- Supervisor or peer - (silence); or at best a subtle (or clumsily subtle) attempt to teach while sparing feelings.
Scenario 1 improves performance and teaches better. Women are too sensitive (or its too politically sensitive in the organization) to teach women as in Scenario 1.
Many other things of this nature. It is far, far easier to lead men than women, for this and related reasons. And this goes for female leadership too. I have seen women doing Scenario 1 to men, but not to women.
SlateStarCodex: All In All Another Brick In The Motte
3. The feminists who constantly argue about whether you can be a real feminist or not without believing in X, Y and Z and wanting to empower women in some very specific way, and who demand everybody support controversial policies like affirmative action or affirmative consent laws (bailey). Then when someone says they don’t really like feminism very much, they object “But feminism is just the belief that women are people!” (motte) Then once the person hastily retreats and promises he definitely didn’t mean women aren’t people, the feminists get back to demanding everyone support affirmative action because feminism, or arguing about whether you can be a feminist and wear lipstick.
That was a post from 2014, and the quoted text was one of 6 examples offered. It's, like, literally a stock trope!
"We want special treatment, we deserve it because women are different."
Well, what you're asking for is unequal treatment. I thought you said you wanted equality.
"We do want equality. That's all feminism is about, is getting equal treatment for women."
Well equal treatment would mean you wouldn't get special consideration for X, Y, and Z. You'd be judged by the same standard and would have the same responsibilities and expectations.
"That's not fair to women--we demand special treatment because we're different."
Ok but what you're asking for isn't equality.
"How can you possibly oppose equality? Feminism is about equal treatment and we as women deserve equality!"
And round and round she goes. It goes, sorry.
KittyM;
"The market does not treat everyone equally. There are winners and losers." Yes. But why should women on the whole be the losers? How about redheads? Or tall people?"
For that matter, why are there so few Asian-Americans in the NBA? There can't possibly be any legitimate reason. We know that as a fact, because we just assumed it. Racism! Get on it, KittyM! Quit whinging about some female software developer whose annual paycheck came up short a couple K. Those poor Koreans are losing out on millions!
"And round and round she goes. It goes, sorry."
No, no. Some progress does get made. Round and round xi goes.
Now back to DBQ, who at least makes a reasonable argument.
My view is that a person who decides to make some money picking people up at bars and taking them home in his car can expect to deal with some drunks. And unless he has some special sauce to avoid it, he can expect women who are alone to be prone to mistrust him. These are predictable aspects of his chosen means of making money, and he should be prepared for them. Whereas, a person who calls a cab should not be expected to deal with the cabby's passive aggressive behavior as if it was a harmless quirk.
Further, a woman's position is not the same as a man's. Women are victimized by strangers at a much higher rate than men, and almost always by men.
KittyM said..."The market does not treat everyone equally. There are winners and losers." Yes. But why should women on the whole be the losers? How about redheads? Or tall people
Tall people on the whole are winners--they're treated better. Tall men & tall women out earn short men. That's a well documented phenomenon. Short men are discriminated against, in that sense.
To my knowledge there are 0 programs designed to rectify that imbalance.
But let the playing field be level!
Whoops! We're back at the start of the cycle. Ok. Level playing field = treat everyone the same, right? So if a man stays at a given company for 10 years and takes no leaves of absence and a woman works at same company over the same period of time but takes two 18 month leaves of absence, should they make the same salary at the end of 10 years? Let's say they're "doing the same job" in that scenario. Is a level playing field one that treats them the same and concludes that the woman has a total of 3 years less experience so her lower salary is just, or one that concludes that the woman had to take that time off to have children so she shouldn't be "punished" with a lower salary and should be treated unequally & given a salary boost so she makes the same depsite less total time on the job?
We can do this all day. "Women make less in profession X!" Ok, let's look at the profession. It has a number of different jobs and it turns out the jobs that include the most unpleasant or dangerous work (be it climbing trees, catching fish, working long hours, or travelling a lot) are much more likely to be filled by men. Since those less pleasant jobs have to pay more to attract quality candidates those men skew the average of all men in the profession...even though a given similar woman in any of those jobs (that is a woman with an equal time on the job, experience, skills, etc) is likely to make the same as a given man. But hey, if we look just at men & women in that profession the men make more! Is that result unfair? It's a consequence of an actual level playing field (where the jobs are all open to anyone but certain jobs are shunned by women and embraced by men) giving an "unequal" result. Does that situation mean women "are losers" and action must be taken to help them out??
"Level playing field" is not much better than "we just want equality." Let's define some stuff, here.
People driving strangers around are attacked more often than drunk people catching a ride from strangers.
I know that when I'm feeling vulnerable, my go-to response is to call the other person a "retard". I can't tell you how many times that reaction has saved my virtue.
Mary Beth said...I know that when I'm feeling vulnerable, my go-to response is to call the other person a "retard". I can't tell you how many times that reaction has saved my virtue.
Winner. When I'm afraid I usually do my best to anger and provoke the person I'm afraid of, too.
Of course "how dare you question a victim/survivor's reactions?! How dare you not understand that everybody's different and everybody reacts differently? How dare you not believe the much-later assertion of the survivor that she was acting only out of fear? You're a victim-shaming rape culture apologist."
KittyM said...
But taken as a whole, women are still struggling as a group. That is absolutely a fact of life.
This is not true. By just as many measures women are better off. They live longer, have more education, and work less. They are sexually assaulted more often but murdered less often.
Feminism is a movement that seeks to rectify these injustices. The goal is equality.
This is plain and simply a lie. The feminist goal is to create a framework of law and policy as favorable to women like them as possible. That means taking money from others to give to them, creating special rules for them, hiring preferences, and normalizing their bigotry and favoritism among other elements.
This is provable by looking at their actions and inactions. For example they can only bring themselves to criticize the UVA rape case by noting the impact on women. The men directly effected merit no consideration even though they were actually punished for something that was clearly a fraud from the first reporting.
Remember that car service that was supposed to be by women, for women? Althouse posted about it.
This woman was abusive toward a driver in a way that you can only be if you are a jerk, drunk or sober.
A football field is level, few make it the NFL. A swimming pool is level, yet Michael Phelps always wins.
I don't think you will be too happy if things are dialed back to a level playing field, Kitty.
What you want is an increase in the handicap access you are currently allowed because weaker sex. That;s fine. I agree we need to make accommodations for women like we do under the ADA. I don't have a problem socializing the important role women play in society, like birthing babies and extending the male lifespan by limiting our alcohol intake.
I have a friend (female) whose Uber account was cancelled because she was drunk and tried to make out with the Uber driver.
I also met an Uber driver who had a camera pointing out toward traffic. He said there had been a lot of cases of cars forcing accidents for insurance reasons. He also said he turns the camera on the riders when he picks up really drunk people.
It is interesting, how when we are drunk and alone, how much we depend on the kindness and honesty of others.
A woman who is drunk and alone is the weakest Zebra.
Equality is very important. 58,220 US troops were killed in the Vietnam War. Does KittyM know how many of them were women?
@Fabi, do we count the women who died when their C5A crashed during "Operation Babylift"? Do we count the American Red Cross worker who was murdered by a US soldier? Do we count civilian missionaries murdered by the Pathet Lao or the Viet Cong?
“No, Uber drivers get a percentage (depending on category of ride, e.g., X vs. XL etc.) of the total fare, which in turn is computed by Uber based on an algorithm considering both distance traveled as well as time spent en route. An ultimately 20-mile ride, even though originally a 1-mile distance was indicated, will gyp neither Uber nor its driver.”
But that fare is calculated BEFORE the person ever gets in the car, in other words a flat fee. Unless I am mistaken, UBER will never jack up the cost of your ride after the fact, for example, if there is for some reason a longer route, longer time taken. So again a 1 mile ride, that turned into 20 does not get charged more to the customer. Unless UBER is eating the difference, someone is out time or money.
You wave your arms and basically cancel out every word I spoke above, in lieu of your wanna believe. So, now I say again, NO. Garbage in, garbage out! You are mistaken. Rather than your blithe “UBER will never jack up the cost of your ride [compared with an initial pre-ride estimate] after the fact” — instead Uber always does this. Indeed, beyond the initial (post-ride) fare computation immediately deducted from the rider’s charge card, Uber can and sometimes will alter the final fare by a further amount up to a day later if they decide they have reason to.
The value referenced in my comment specified US troops. That's should answer your question, Big Mike.
Gahrie, you don’t have a video of him not attacking her last week. So maybe he did, you don’t know.
MichaelMcNeil
Uber does not alter charge after a ride. They raise prices in high demand periods and give you the choice of accepting 2 or 3x normal fare. They do not come back and up the cost a day later. I have taken hundreds of Uber rides in multiple cities and it does not happen.
You do not know what you are talking about.
As far as that bullshit “kidnapped” discussion up-thread is concerned, any Uber driver will be more than happy to let any Uber rider out as soon as it is safely possible. They don’t like the route — and the driver doesn’t want go their desired way? Then out the door they go. The fare will end up being appropriate (via Uber’s algorithm) to the distance and time taken getting to the point where the rider exeunts the vehicle.
To be clear. When you pick Uber x or Uber SUV or Uber black you are given a price to your destination. SUV is most expensive, x is least for a private ride. Black is about twice the cost of Uber'x. You are charged the quoted rate whether it takes twice as long as anticipated or half.
Michael whoever-you-are: I too have driven hundreds of Uber rides in multiple cities. FYI, I drove for Uber for a year (ending about a year ago), and they (Uber) could too (and sometimes did) change the fare after the ride completed, up to a day later. I’d say you haven’t been examining what happens to fares in detail.
Michael McNeil
I have spent around $600 in last month riding the goddamn Uber and similar amounts monthly for the last two years in Atlanta, NY, DC, SF, and LA. I have never once been charged after the initial ride. If you actually were an Uber driver or user you would know that you get a fucking receipt about one minute after leaving the car with the amount charged, the route taken and the time of the ride. They do not charge more a day later.
You are charged the quoted rate whether it takes twice as long as anticipated or half.
Absolutely false. It is common indeed for an plugged-in requested ride (perhaps with an accompanying 2nd rider) to only involve half of the mission; first one passenger is dropped off, then the ride will continue elsewhere with no plugged-in destination. Or a trip will be made to the requested point, whereupon the rider picks up a box or another rider and we take them back to the original point of debarcation. Many other such combinations of some entered and some entered points of stop are possible and happen. I’ve never not been properly paid for the miles and time — the total time and distance that it actually takes — involved in a trip.
I spent much of the late afternoon hanging draperies and missed a lot of the give and take on this thread. I want to go back to what KittyM wrote at 3:47, because my career in software development goes back to the late 1960s. So that everyone knows what that era was like, many of the computers in use still had a punch card or punch paper tape interface, there was no virtual memory operating system so it was one program at a time on any machine. Fortran II was being replaced by Fortran IV. Strongly typed languages were still years away, and the term "software engineer" was also a decade in the future. "High tech" were 300 baud telephone modems that you put the handset into two openings in the modem to connect. Also green screen monitors were just arriving on the scene and graphics terminals were still years away.
For me, with all my experience, the surprise is that the differential in median pay between male and female software developers is only 4%. Among the best software developers is a group of men -- nearly always men -- who are not so much anti-social as a-social. The nerdiest of the nerds, the geekiest of the geeks. Projects that don't have at least a couple of them had better be small or they're likely to fail, because these guys will work 36 hours days (yes, I know precisely how many hours there are in a calendar day) if that's what it takes to track down and swat a bug. Most women initially don't want to work with guys like these because they don't make small talk and don't try to fit in with the crowd and are generally sort of icky, but they're harmless and even nice guys if you bother to get to know therm. Which a lot of women don't.
These guys are generally unsuitable for management, and typically don't even want to be bothered with management roles or supervisory tasks. So they stay as software developers collecting the raises that come with longevity and success in one's career. By contrast other men, and nearly all women, are very willing to move out of software development and into lower management or more senior technical roles. So that effect alone would tend to skew salaries. I myself wrote my last code in the late 1980s, so the salaries I earned thereafter as a system designer, systems engineer, and project leader would not go into calculating the median salary of a software developer.
"Let the playing field be level." Oh, KittyM, if you only knew how badly the field is already skewed in favor of women. In the final years before I retired from the large corporation where I worked I was picked to join a team to identify women suitable for grooming to take senior technical leadership roles, and to groom them for those roles. Management had noticed that such jobs were heavily (about 5 or 6 to 1) dominated by men. I think I was picked because I had had some success mentoring young women for key roles on key projects, resulting in well-deserved promotions. But in the case of one woman in her thirties who clearly had the requisite skills and talent, but when we approached her she expressed no interest whatsoever in being groomed for a more challenging technical position. The leader of our team proposed that we force her to take on the assignments that would ready her for a technical leadership position, and I had to put my foot down -- there were young men who would have given anything to be considered for the type of assignment this woman was being forced to take on. At that point we weren't helping women; we were discriminating against men.
There's another anecdote from circa 1992 that may shed some more light. We were on a system development project for a DoD agency, and the team working on the Phase I software wound up having to put in some very long hours to get it tested, debugged, installed, and stress tested on time. Which they did. And they were given a bonus, to be divided up among the team members by the team leads. There were three women on the team, and about five or six men IIRC. Two of the women were single and one was a single mother with two kids who had to pick her children up from day care at 5:00 every day. In the end the team lead did not give a share of the bonus money to the single mother, because she was never available when they were working late into the night. I later separately asked the other two women how they felt about that, and they were vehement, and I mean very seriously vehement, that their team lead had done the right thing. They had no sympathy for their female colleague at all, because they felt that they -- and the men -- had to pick up her slack when she left at 4:50 to get her kids.
I suppose I could ask you what you would have done in the team lead's shoes, KittyM? What was that single mother's fair share? Would you risk losing her to a rival company (which we did) or would you risk losing the other two women?
I think that today's women do have it hard, but their own attitudes and collegiate indoctrination are what make it hard and there's very little that the rest of us can do about that. At the end of my career I heard more "but I worked so hard, on this" than I think I heard in the previous forty years. Why should anyone care how hard you worked on the software if it doesn't do what it's supposed to? Shouldn't I be a lot more impressed with the individual who didn't work all that hard but the software meets all its requirements and is well-documented and coded according to corporate standards? A lot of men get it pretty quickly. For too many women, it takes time and there's resentment.
Plus there's the issue of giving corrective input. I could be pretty straightforward with a man; he'd understand that there's nothing personal and that I'm trying to help him improve. With women, you tread on eggshells. After all I'm not interested in dealing with an EEO complaint just because a woman doesn't like to be told that her code does not meet company standards. It's a real issue and it hurts women, and the KittyM's of the world contribute to the problem.
There's more -- as I said I've had a long career -- but I've typed enough for a night.
Michael: I didn’t say Uber changing the fare after the ride completes happens often or usually. I do say it can happen, and I recall seeing text to that effect in Uber’s description of their fare-computing machinery — but I’m not going to go through all kinds of old records to find it now.
That’s an entirely different matter, moreover, from whether an initial estimate of fare controls what gets charged after the ride completes. It doesn’t.
MichaelMcNeil
You are describing a multi passenger ride where one is dropped sooner than the other. It is customary for the person going furthest to be charged. You are wiggling far far away from your original assertion that all, all, rides are up charged later (8:10 pm comment) which of course is untrue. Sounds like you drove a cab, dude, not an uber. Or were a specialist in Uber pool. LOL.
Michael McNeil
Then what does that receipt with the map and cost mean, you know the receipt that has the exact amount charged as on the phone when you chose the ride. You drove a cab dude and have never driven an uber or ridden in one. And, btw, you did write that they charged more days later every time. Read what you wrote.
Why don't women ever complain about the fact that there aren't enough female garbage workers?
Remember: 1920 - that was the year women were given the right to vote nationally. Not even 100 years ago.
Repeal the 19th
Classic Althouse troll: shouldn't [some controversy] really be taken as about [angle that's nowhere near morally decisive in the controversy]? Then lots of cross-purposes discussion at people in good faith taking up the *general* angle of discussion proposed vs people happy to claim victory on the specific controversy.
Then we have attention-seeking comments to the effect of "it's kidnapping if the driver doesn't immediately follow your GPS-overriding instructions!" Don't engage with idiots - we all see they're idiots already.
@HoodlumDoodlum
I'm just a country boy who gets confused by all your highfalutin' abstract talk, but I figure my motte & baily can beat up your reductio ad absurdum any day. If I understand you, your position is that a woman in an Uber at night who feels in danger from a male driver is in no different a position than a man who feels in danger from a woman driver and the test for how to respond reasonably is the same for both. And that if it's not, women should stop bangin' on about equality in the workplace. Have I got it?
I wonder whether you didn't vote for Hillary because you were worried about a woman president facing a nuclear threat during her period.
@Peter, didn’t the word that Chris Stevens and our embassy at Benghazi arrive in Washington right around 3:00 AM, and did Hillary not screw up our response? If she can’t be trusted with the security of our embassies, should we have entrusted her with the security of the entire country? Does not asking the question answer it?
Peter said...If I understand you, your position is that a woman in an Uber at night who feels in danger from a male driver is in no different a position than a man who feels in danger from a woman driver and the test for how to respond reasonably is the same for both.
Failed at your first "if" there, Peter; you don't understand me.
My position is that if equality means equal treatment then we should use the same standard to evaluate the appropriateness of the actions/response of a man and a woman. In the instant case people are attempting to excuse the woman's clearly-inappropriate actions by saying, in essence, "well because she's a woman we can't use the same standard we'd use for anyone else/a non-woman. We have to cut her a bunch more slack." My position is that you can either believe in equality/equal treatment OR you can believe that this woman should get special consideration/extra slack, but you can't believe in both.
I think it'd be much easier just to say "this woman acted inappropriately and we should dismiss her post-hoc rationalization wherein she tries to excuse her behavior by falsely appealing to our sympathy/care for victims of crimes." Since the whole discussion STARTED with an assertion that we must take her rationalizations/appeal seriously, though, I don't think I made my headway in convincing people to take that path.
"We ought to treat everyone equally" is the fall back argument.
Everyone agrees with that.
"We ought to have sympathy for this woman and excuse her bad behavior in part because she's a woman and we can't prove that she didn't feel the things she now claims to feel (and as a corollary people feeling those things ought to be excused for acting badly)" is the tougher argument being made.
When pressed on that second argument the response is to fall back to the first argument. "Hey, we just want equal treatment!"
"But let the playing field be level!"
How do you know it's not?
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