Oddly enough women don’t see Ivanka Trump as a diversity hire.

CES, the eading consumer-electronics trade show, is facing criticism after picking Ivanka Trump to serve as its keynote speaker next month in Las Vegas, after years of being accused of overlooking the role of women in technology.

I find that pretty disgusting and I’m not even a woman in technology.

She has no knowledge or experience or credentials in the field, and she also has no knowledge or experience or credentials in any other field. All she’s ever done is parlay her corrupt father’s celebrity and money into money and celebrity for herself.

“This is a terrible choice on so many levels but also – what an insult to the YEARS AND YEARS of protesting how few women were invited to keynote & being told it was a pipeline problem while similarly-situated men were elevated,” tech commentator Rachel Sklar tweeted. “There are so many great, qualified women. Shame.”

…

While the president’s daughter has been involved in White House efforts to boost the economic empowerment of women and their families, and spoke at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in The Hague this year, her engagement with technology is limited.

Plus “has been involved in White House efforts to boost the” blah blah blah doesn’t even mean anything. It’s just noise. Maybe she’s done some actual work, but frankly it seems highly unlikely, and we have no way of knowing what actual work she has done and how good it was. She’s just there, nepotizing, because nobody has managed to stop her yet.

Shapiro said in a statement: “We welcome her to the CES keynote stage, as she shares her vision for technology’s role in creating and enabling the workforce of the future.”

Blah blah blah. Again, it’s just handwaving. It’s meaningless. She has no “vision,” she has nothing to say. Barbie gives a keynote.

Joan Smith points out some implications of the Cyprus outrage:

This sequence of events is a stain on the Cypriot justice system, but what lies behind it is a hugely disproportionate anxiety about false accusations. Indeed it is one of the principal myths that undermine rape investigations, even though the idea that there are high levels of false allegations is unsupported by evidence. In the UK, a handful of widely publicised cases that ended in acquittals or a decision not to proceed to trial has tainted the entire system for investigating rape. Many people do not understand that a decision not to prosecute reflects an assessment of the available evidence, and does not mean the victim was lying.

The Crown Prosecution Service denies the accusation that it has become “risk averse”, but there has been a 52% drop in the number of rape cases prosecuted since 2016, despite an increase of 43% in complaints to the police. According to the latest figures for the year ending in March 2019, there were 58,657 allegations of rape in England and Wales but only 1,925 successful prosecutions. Unless you are a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist, it simply defies belief that more than 55,000 women are lying about being raped every year.

Sadly, though, a hell of a lot of people are dyed-in-the-wool misogynists.

The truth is actually much worse: a habit of treating women as untrustworthy witnesses has imbued our own criminal justice system with a corrosive degree of suspicion. It’s far from unusual for victims to face intrusive demands for personal information, including school and medical records. They are made to feel as though they, rather than their alleged attackers, have shameful secrets in their past.

Bitchez be lyin, right?

New rule for women: don’t report gang-rape, because if you do you could find yourself convicted of lying.

The UK government is to raise concerns with the authorities in Cyprus over the fairness of a trial in which a British teenager was found guilty of lying about being gang-raped.

A judge ruled on Monday that the 19-year-old wilfully indulged in public mischief in claiming she was raped by a group of Israeli males aged between 15 and 22 while she was on holiday in Ayia Napa in July.

The ruling by Michalis Papathanasiou at Famagusta’s district court in Paralimni was immediately and strongly condemned by the defence team and rights groups. They claimed the trial was full of legal irregularities that called the verdict into question and suggested a desire to protect relations with Israel may have influenced the process.

Or that plus a settled conviction that all women are lying whores.

The case against the student hinged on a statement retracting her original accusation, signed after hours of questioning by detectives in a police station that was neither recorded nor attended by a lawyer. She said in court that the police had forced her to change her story, telling the judge she was “scared for my life”.

Sounds like the Central Park 5 but in reverse. Sometimes the cops coerce suspects into signing a false statement, sometimes they bully an accuser into signing a false statement.

The legal aid group Justice Abroad said the trial had been far from fair because Papathanasiou had refused to consider whether the defendant had actually been assaulted.

Then…how did he or anyone come to the conclusion that she was lying?

“We are not surprised by the result given the frequent refusal during the trial of the judge to consider evidence which supported the fact that the teenager had been raped,” said Michael Polak, a barrister with the group.

“Shutting down questioning from our Cypriot advocates and the production of evidence into the trial on a handful of occasions, the judge stridently stated, ‘This is not a rape case, I will not consider whether she was raped or not.’”

Uhhhh…isn’t that like trying someone for burglary without considering whether there was any burglary or not?

The teenager, who has already spent a month in prison, could be jailed for up to a year and fined in excess of €1,000 (£850). Although released on bail from Nicosia general prison, she has been forced to relinquish her passport, moving from safe house to safe house ever since.

Tell us more about cis privilege.

What is transphobic? Saying that a man competing against women in sport is unfair is transphobic. We’re told.

Advantage? What advantage? What advantage could that doctor in the middle possibly have?

Mike Bloomberg describes for us his vision of hell plan to get lots done because desks and screens.

Dallas News:

Since my younger daughter is only 11, I didn’t expect the weight of the letter she brought me that night around 11 p.m., hours after I’d put her to bed.

In glittery red ink, the same she used for her Christmas list, her words sank my heart. At a friend’s birthday party, they were playing on the little girl’s phone. The girl handed it to my daughter and said, “Boys are disgusting.” My daughter clicked on a male classmate’s Snapchat story to find a video of him and a few other boys from her class laughing as they watched rape porn. She said the woman was bound up, saying “no” as a masked man approached her.

Her letter went on to describe a group of boys in her sixth grade class frequently joking about assaulting the girls in the parking lot. She said if any of the girls aren’t sitting with their legs closed, the boys will ask if they want to get pregnant. And if the girls’ legs are crossed, boys from this group often walk by and say, “Spread ‘em.”

This does not give me hope for the future.

Princess Ivanka gets another fawning interview with people who should know better:

[T]hings got worse at the end of the interview when Brennan went to extreme lengths to portray her as a moderating force in her father’s White House.

On the topic of immigration, Brennan described Ivanka as “vocal in your opposition” to the inhumane family separation policy her father implemented in April 2018, noting that she described the policy as a “low point.” But Ivanka was not in fact “vocal” in opposition to the policy — in fact, the opposite is the case.

As my colleague Emily Stewart chronicled at the time, Ivanka — supposedly an advocate for women and families in the administration — only spoke out in opposition to the family separation policy after her father signed an executive order in June 2018 ending it. She was conspicuously silent in the days leading up to that point, as heart-rending stories and images of children being separated from their families along the southern border were in the news.

Because guess what, Ivanka isn’t some stealth-decent person working undercover in her daddy’s corrupt regime. She’s what she looks like: a pampered rich offspring who has no intention of cutting off the cash supply by offending her rich daddy.

Brennan’s misleading characterization of Ivanka’s position on the family separation policy was later echoed in a tweet from the Face the Nation account that included video of the exchange and has a ratio of more than 3,100 (largely critical) replies to 151 retweets as this is published — one that indicates CBS’s framing is going over [badly].

Ok, but you have to admit, her hair is very smooth.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Hey, how about interviewing the people at Ma’s Pie Shop?

I just wish for someone who I feel good about voting for

Honestly, that’s not a realistic wish, unless your bar for “feel good about” is fairly low. (And maybe it is for you, in which case the rest of this post will seem like I’m jumping on you. I’m really just using your post to take aim at a commonly-expressed sentiment that I think is a problem in general, even if it isn’t a problem in your specific case.)

Even if all of politics came down to a simplified one-dimensional ideological spectrum, you would have to be one of the relatively few lucky ones who happens to occupy a point on that spectrum that is at or close to a viable candidate.

Add in another dimension, such as personal qualities of the candidate, and it gets even harder. Allow for one or more other political dimensions (e.g. social and fiscal), and… your odds of finding a viable candidate close to you in political space are pretty slim.

Voting isn’t like picking a restaurant for your small group of friends, where it really ought to be the case that you can find a place that all of you feel good about; it’s like trying to select a single dish that your entire town will eat. There just isn’t likely to be any way to satisfy all those disparate diets and allergies, let alone mere preferences. The best you can hope for is something that will keep you nourished; tasty and exciting is not a realistic expectation.

What on earth is Google doing giving money to Devin Nunes’s campaign?

I ask not because he’s a Republican but because he’s a lying Trump-enabler.

In November, Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA) was in the spotlight — the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, which was leading the impeachment inquiry into President Trump. He used his star turn to push “fantastical conspiracy theories” about Democrats. Nunes falsely accused Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) of trying to obtain nude photos of Trump. He promoted the discredited notion, advanced by Trump but rejected by the intelligence community, that Ukraine took significant steps to meddle in the 2016 election. The debunked contention is part of a broader Russian propaganda effort to absolve itself from hacking the DNC servers by pinning the blame on Ukraine.

…

Nunes’ antics during the impeachment hearings capped a year when he filed six defamation lawsuits, seeking hundreds of millions in damages from Twitter, a GOP political operative, media companies, a retired farmer, and a fictional cow. The suits were all filed by an attorney, Steven Biss, whose law license was suspended twice by the state of Virginia. 

In response, Google quietly rewarded Nunes’ behavior with a check for $5000 to help him get reelected. The donation was revealed in a little-noticed FEC report that was filed on December 20. 

The short answer to my question is “so that Nunes will treat Google well.”

It’s all for sale.

That’s alarming.

That is very alarming. It seems likely that social workers tend to move in Woke circles; if that’s true they likely feel immense pressure to silence the relevant dissenting views.

Everybody’s favorite Veronica Rachel winning hearts and minds some more.

Gotta love an academic who calls people “dumbass” on Twitter.

You’d think this was satire but apparently it isn’t. Hold the presses: facial recognition technology “misgenders” trans and nonbinary people. You don’t say! How very shocking!

Yet, for all its advances, facial recognition technology—created by training computer vision algorithms on massive datasets of photographs of faces—might have a critical shortcoming: only being able to “see” two genders.

Sexes, you mean. The average differences in male and female faces aren’t a matter of gender but of sex. They’re physical. Vision algorithms don’t know from people’s inner feeling.

New research by Jed Brubaker, Jacob Paul, and Morgan Klaus Scheuerman (lead author) in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Information Science department reveals that many major facial recognition services misclassify the gender of trans and non-binary people.

Because they can’t see the magic gender, they can see only the sex. If you asked them to classify people’s politics or taste in food they would get that wrong too. If you want to check people’s invisible attributes, you don’t send facial recognition technology to do the job.

“We found that facial analysis services performed consistently worse on transgender individuals, and were universally unable to classify non-binary genders,” said Scheuerman, who is also a PhD student in Information Science at CU Boulder, in a statement.

Oh for god’s sake! How would they be able to? How would anyone? Do you feel confident that you can pick the non-binary people out of a crowd? Of course not! It’s a self-applied label, not a concrete recognizable specifiable category.

At a minimum, this miscategorization has the potential to result in social discomfort and exclusion, reinforcing stereotypes that serve to “other” those who do not identify with the traditional gender binary.

“When you walk down the street you might look at someone and presume that you know what their gender is, but that is a really quaint idea from the ‘90s and it is not what the world is like anymore,” Brubaker said. “As our vision and our cultural understanding of what gender is has evolved, the algorithms driving our technological future have not. That’s deeply problematic.”

Oh yes, so quaint, from those stupid ’90s, which might as well be the 4th century. It’s like corsets, or crucifying rebels, or living in a pleasant villa in Pompeii.

Oh please.

New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet and Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron agreed that both of their papers have to do a better job of covering President Donald Trump’s supporters.

Not this crap again. They do cover Trump’s supporters. We hear endlessly about forgotten people in forgotten small towns and their forgotten hatred of immigrants; we hear far more about forgotten small town Murika than we do about big city Murika, where a vastly larger percentage of people live.

Baquet and Baron joined NBC’s Chuck Todd on Sunday to talk about how the Trump administration has waged war on fact-based reporting, and what news outlets should do to push back against disinformation. When asked about why people support Trump despite his numerous falsehoods, Baquet said “I’m not convinced people want to be lied to,” but journalists have a job to report the truth even when its counter to the lies that “bad politicians” offer their supporters.

“I don’t want to be dismissive of people that support our president. They’re owed our respect they certainly have mine,” Baron said as he jumped in. “They feel the so-called elites in Washington have not paid attention to them, that they don’t understand their lives…They feel that the president is actually listening to them and addressing their concerns and so they tend to believe him.”

Blah blah blah blah. They have no right to “feel” that the president is actually listening to them and addressing their concerns, because he isn’t, and it’s obvious that he isn’t, and there’s zero reason to think he is or ever would be. We don’t need to “respect” people who think that because Trump is a racist and a pussy-grabbing pig and a hater of immigrants and a mean shithead who publicly insults everyone who stands up to him, therefore he cares about them and will make their lives better. Trump is a greedy profiteering law-breaking exploitative real estate hustler, and he has no interest whatsoever in farmers and workers. None. We do not have to respect people who are mindless or mean or both enough to think Trump is a friend to working stiffs.

I am so tired of this bullshit.

Cute.

Festive Xmas message from the Coalition Against Trans Antagonism:

2019 CATA community Transmas

“Pin the tail on the TERF / SWERF fascists!”

Haw haw obliterate their eyes, geddit?

Oh those people. Yes, I remember them.

Scrolling down the Facebook page I get the feeling the “group” is one very angry person. Possibly as many as two.

Trump is ratcheting up the crazy and disgusting.

Which they should be able to do very easily – oh yes it’s dead easy to provide abundant housing for non-rich people in a week or two, especially in a system that is categorically hostile to all forms of public housing.

Yeah! Why haven’t you replied to my tweet where I called you Crazy Nancy? Are you playing golf or something?

Hmm. Science! And skepticism! Science and skepticism! Together! Jonathan Jarry’s Twitter profile:

Science + skepticism for the public. Podcasting, writing & talks.
@McGillOSS
. One half of The Body of Evidence (w/
@DrLabos
). Feelings don’t care about facts.

Sounds good. Yay science, yay skepticism, yay for the public. The slogan makes more sense as “facts don’t care about feelings” but maybe he’s being playful.

Any trends to talk about?

How much time do you have?

Uhhh…denialists? Seriously? It’s “denialism” to say that people can’t change sex? (And it’s the opposite of denialism to say that men are not men if they say they are not men?)

What did happen to Ockham’s razor?

Psychology Today:

Here’s what really happened: On November 21, Kayum Ahmed, a South African and an adjunct member of the Columbia University Law School faculty, spoke at Fieldston about apartheid. In the Q & A, which was recorded on video, in response to a student’s question, he said that “xenophobic attacks are a shameful part of South African history, but in some ways it reflects the fluidity between those who are victims becoming perpetrators,” and that he uses the same example in talking about the Holocaust. “Jews who suffered in the Holocaust and established the State of Israel,” he told them, “today perpetuate violences against Palestinians that are unthinkable.”^*

If a speaker had made comments such as these about any historically marginalized group in the U.S. other than Jewish people, it is hard to believe that an official from the school wouldn’t have condemned it long before the students left the room. Apologies would have flooded parents’ in-boxes. Counselors would have been on hand.^**

I can think of another historically marginalized group that is an exception in that way. Women. (The author is a woman – Pamela Paresky PhD.)

I suppose it can happen to any (or almost any) historically marginalized group. People who are dominant in one context can be marginalized in another, and vice versa. That’s part of what “intersectionalism” is about.

To be clear, I do not have a problem with schools allowing speakers to say things like this in front of students. I think it’s important for students to see that words do not equal violence, to learn about antisemitic conspiracy theories, and to see firsthand that antisemites don’t all announce their bigotry by looking like Nazis or a skinheads. If a school would allow similar ideas about any other group to be shared without condemnation, then allowing it to be said about Jews would not be a marker of antisemitic undercurrents at the school. But of course, they wouldn’t. And that’s the insidious nature of antisemitism. It’s the form of bigotry often embraced by those who claim to be enemies of bigotry and advocates of social justice. 

But so is “TERF” hatred. I think the two are at least matched.

Long before this incident, some Jewish parents expressed concern about the school’s mandatory “conversations about race” program for all third, fourth, and fifth graders. Despite research indicating that friendships between children from different backgrounds reliably diminish bias and discrimination, and that emphasizing differences is counterproductive to those ends, the curriculum requires each child to self-identify as part of a segregated, racial “affinity group.”

The mutually exclusive options are African American/Black; Asian or Pacific Islander; Latino; Multiracial; White; and Not Sure. Each child must pick one. “Jewish” is not among the identities from which children can choose.

God, what a muddle. “Asian” is geographic; “White” is racial; “Latino” is…what? Geographic, linguistic, racial, what? Is a Mayan the same as a Guatemalan of all-European descent? And then, what about the Irish? What about Italians? Eastern Europeans? The US slices and dices its prejudices and belittlings very fine.

Regardless of whether their ethnic backgrounds happen to include one of the non-white available categories, Jewish children (age 8 to 11) are forced to “self-identify” (a misnomer) as one of the available “affinity groups” even if their Jewishness is the more salient aspect of their identity. Jewish children who do not fit any of the non-white racial categories are required to choose “white” or “not sure” (which was renamed the “general discussion” group). 

They weren’t all that “white” in Warsaw in 1942.