I read the news today, oh boy, and there’s nothing reassuring.
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This big name hacker, Jake Appelbaum, has been using his reputation to harass, stalk, and abuse women. I’ll spare you the details, but jeez does this ever sound familiar.
This didn’t happen because we’re broken as a hacker culture, or because we’re hackers and thus too undeveloped to comprehend empathy. People like Jake can be found in other places; priests and churches, Hollywood, the porn industry, and more. Wherever power imbalances, hero worship, and secret-keepers intersect. People like Jake are found in hacker culture, too, and it’s past time for hacker culture to deal with it.
Know any other organizations with “power imbalances, hero worship, and secret-keepers”?
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A boy writes a graphic letter describing how he’d rape and murder girls at his school, and hands it to a girl with a smirk. Again, I’ll spare you the ugly details. What’s shocking is that despite a clear school policy, administrators did nothing to punish him or assure the girls that they were safe, only requiring that the boy take his exams in isolation.
“The principal and school staff didn’t do a thorough investigation and were negligent in ensuring protection of students, and school staff against a potentially violent person,” said a parent of one of the girls. The Sentinel is not naming the parent because it would identify the minor girl.
Another parent of one of the girls said, “I am in complete shock and disbelief at the principal’s response to this dangerous situation. I felt like the school was protecting the perpetrator and ignoring the possible threat to the victims. I am at a loss of words that a person who would write such a descriptive rape and kill list would be allowed to stay on campus at all.”
No one thinks there might be something deeply wrong with a student who writes explicit, violent pornography about fellow students and hands it to the subject of his fantasies?
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Don’t worry, though. Someday, Earl Erhart will be there to defend men like him accused of rape.
Earl Ehrhart is worried about his sons. Both boys attend Georgia public universities, and Ehrhart, a state representative from the Atlanta suburbs, has heard all about the college sexual-misconduct hearings in which young men are presumed guilty until proven innocent. The proceedings are flawed, he says, they’re like “kangaroo courts.” And their rulings are so biased against the accused, Ehrhart fears that his boys—as with male students across the state—could end up expelled based on a false accusation of rape.
Somehow, these guys are always far more worried about men being accused of rape, then of women being raped.
I went through fraternity rush once, way back in 1976. I attended one frat party — it was all about alcohol and getting women drunk enough to go to bed with you, and was an evening of crass jokes and boorish behavior. I never went to another frat party, but when people say some aspects of a university encourage rape culture, I can say yes, they do.
But Earl Erhart will be there to protect it.
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I wonder how some jobs get to be so male-centric. Masonry, for instance. That’s highly skilled labor, and in a competition, Shania Clifford excelled at it.
Judges in the masonry program, a field usually dominated by men, originally awarded Clifford first place by a whopping 72 points.
Larry Moore, her instructor, said the scores of the top performers usually vary by only a couple of points, but Clifford’s column for the state competition was exceptional.
“She had the best plumb there,” Moore said. “Two or three corners were perfect.” Plumb refers to how straight a vertical edge is.
And then later the competition officials retracted the win and gave it to the guy who finished third, instead.
I wonder how some jobs get to be so male-centric?
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Laila Alawa wrote “9/11 changed the world for good“, where “for good” is a common English idiom meaning “permanently”. Unfortunately, the usual gang of professional illiterates and idiots, like Pam Geller and Milo Yiannopoulous, seem to have had to run it through Google Translate to get it from English to their native tongue of Hate, and it garbled it to “for the good”, and they then announced to the world that Alawa is a Muslim who thinks 9/11 was wonderful.
On Tuesday, June 14, 2016, I woke up to a hell that even I could not have predicted,” Alawa wrote yesterday in a post on The Tempest, an online publication she founded and runs. “Hundreds of people were tweeting at me, the vitriol, hatred and fury in their messages each worse than the last one.
It’s remarkable how often stupidity and hatred go hand in hand.
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The latest scandal out of Australia is that a wealthy radio presenter and football team president joked on air about paying $50,000 to drown a woman football reporter. He apparently doesn’t like her, comparing her to a spider, which makes it OK. I really don’t understand where he gets his casual sexism.
This is a promotional ad for his radio station.
Nope. Nothing unusual about that picture. Nothing at all.
I really should stop reading all this stuff people send me every day. It’s not good for my mood.
Oh, heck. One more.
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Another college football player flushes his career and life away.
An ex-Vanderbilt University football player will serve at least 15 years in prison after he was convicted by a jury Saturday of encouraging three teammates to rape an unconscious woman he was dating, and filming it in his dorm room.
It’s not just the rape that was awful. On what planet is it considered fun to invite your friends to join in a rape, and to record it? Planet Privilege, I guess.
What happened to the second place finisher? Also non-male?
Ah, a nice dose of depressing news to go with my breakfast and coffee. What better way to start a Monday morning. Thanks PZ.
Fifteen years! I’m relieved.
Probably not white enough.
Not mentioned. The claim in the article is that the scores on the judges’ sheets weren’t entered correctly into the system, so in fact she originally came third and the third-place contestant came first, while the second-place contestant’s position was unaffected. The question becomes whether they made a foolish clerical error and then did a bad job of addressing it (not telling her she’d been bumped, but telling the new first-place winner he was going to the national competition), or are cooking the books and lying badly about it.
re 1:
2nd place finisher?
remained 2nd, the score sheet apparently typo’d 1 for 3 and got them swapped so they swapped them back. How a 72 point difference could be due to poor penmanship or typos is incomprehensible. It strongly suggests ‘no girls allowed’ as a mason (the profession, that is, not the secret society that shares the same name)
the comments on several of the articles from locals aware of how the competition works suggests this is not a one-off; that the people who run the competition have pulled this shit before, whenever a woman does well in the competition.
many appear to be calling for a boycott. again… those are locals who actually seem to know a lot about this.
1. Unsurprisingly, he has a history of this behavior – and despite actually losing jobs over it, he’s never shown any indication of remorse or change. He probably won’t stop, either, until he goes to jail or gets hit with a major civil lawsuit over it.
3. The frustrating thing about this is that Due Process absolutely should be part of any school misconduct hearing. Not at a super-high level of proof (the worst punishment a university can impose is expulsion, not damages or prison time), but definitely there. But it’s so blatantly obvious that Ehrhart and their ilk are coming from a place of bad faith on this – they certainly didn’t give a fuck about due process and misconduct hearings being done right before it started seeming like men might actually be held accountable for rape on campus.
Also, fuck fraternities for the 1000th time.
@PZ Myers
If they wanted to, they could easily go after the fraternities over this. It’s almost always a misdemeanor to provide alcohol to under-21 people, and frat parties are rarely secret – hell, the “finals club” up in Harvard was busing in freshmen girls for their alcohol-laden parties. But they don’t, and if they did I’m positive the Ehrharts of the world would start whining and blustering about the police “ruining the futures of promising young men”.
I was 19. Free rum & coke, multiple beer kegs, hundreds of people going in and out. There were also rooms set aside for sex, with rules read out to us about their use (“if there is a tie hanging from the door knob, wait your turn…once you’re done, get her dressed quickly and out of the room”, etc.)
There were drunk people draped over the balconies and the yard, and the police cruised by looking for the frat that was using a giant sling shot to fling water balloons at people many blocks away (it was the one I was at), and they didn’t care about mere drunkenness.
Re: SkillsUSA: Eh, not prepared to jump to conspiracy theories yet. The description in the article sounds like the organization running the competition reported it as sloppy accounting in getting the scores from the individual scoresheets to the master score lists they pulled the winners from. And both the fact that happened and how the communication was handled is pretty typical for these sorts of competitions, unfortunately; these are way more important to the competitors than they are to (at least some of) the people running them. There aren’t enough passionate volunteers enthusiastically donating their time to promote their craft to young people, so some of the needed roles are filled by ‘volunteers’ that the first type harangue and cajole into coming to help out, and it shows.
I was on the other side of an error just like this one in a JETS (Junior Engineering and Technical Society) competition, about thirty years ago. It’s a pain from that side to, if not as pain-ful. I scored second in physics at the regional competition & qualified for the state finals, but was surprised not to place in the top two in mathematics, which was my stronger area … Since I qualified, I was able to compete in both subjects anyway, but I didn’t prep for the math competition. (If I couldn’t even place in the regionals, what was the point?) A month after the state competition, I got a package with my first-place medal for math from the regionals with a form letter about a scoring error. Gee, thanks, guys.
Wait … Maybe I actually got third, but some *girl* got first, and they had to fix it. Crap. No, wait, I’m sure if a girl had gotten first place in math at regionals, I would have noticed, and asked for her phone number, or at least for a tough matrix algebra problem with her phone number as the solution.
I work very closely with the Skills USA competition that made the judging mistake on Shania Clifford’s project and know the people involved. They have volunteer judges and scorers who rate each project and then total the scores one of them made a mistake totaling the scores and it wasn’t caught. I’ve seen the sheets and it’s clear the mistake that was made in looking at them, one value was added twice. The third place finisher had one value not added. Shania was awarded first place at the competition but when the 3rd place finisher saw his score sheets he saw his total was wrong. He contacted his school and the correction was made.
Only the winner of the state in each category can compete in the national competition. Both the Ohio Department of Education and Ohio Skills USA tried to get the national organization to change their policy but they wouldn’t make an exception. Shania was still offered a change to attend the event but couldn’t compete. It’s a shitty situation, everyone thought she won, but due to human error she didn’t actually win. No rules were changed because of her gender. By the scoring rules the 3rd place finisher should be the one to compete at the national level. The school district lied to the parents and Shania about what happened made the issue about sexism and not a simple mistake.
The Dispatch was also incorrect in saying she was the first female to win that category. She didn’t win and she wasn’t the first female to win it. I’m not saying there isn’t sexism in many career tech fields and we are working to increase participation in “non traditional” career fields, but this is a basic math issue and not a sexism issue.
No, wait, I’m sure if a girl had gotten first place in math at regionals, I would have noticed, and asked for her phone number, or at least for a tough matrix algebra problem with her phone number as the solution.
Gee, why is it that women don’t go into STEM fields more? I can’t imagine. So disappointing, too, when STEM is full of men who would like to fuck them.
Regarding the masonry section:
If there truly was an error in scoring, if she truly scored third instead of first, then she doesn’t deserve the gold medal and it should be revoked. Yet they let her keep it, prompting me to wonder why… and the only answer that makes sense to me is that they know they are being dishonest, they just want to give her a consolation prize in the hopes that she shuts up about it.
Dishonesty and cowardice.
Are you sure that isn’t a typo? Or has the universe suddenly started bending toward justice?
For our non-antipodean friends, Eddie McQuire is a knobhead who called an Aboriginal player an ape . And who referred to sacking a TV presenter as ‘boneing her.’
@11 HappyNat:
I’m simply too fatigued by repeated injustices of this kind to be able to dredge up any benefit of the doubt for organizations when things like this happen. I simply do not buy your explanation, unless genuine supporting evidence is made public and posted in a public forum, such as all judges’ notes, score sheets, all correspondence relating to the event, etc.
I’m with #13 Holms on this one – if her win was a mere clerical error, why was she allowed to keep the gold medal?
If it’s any consolation, I can’t think of one person I know who likes or respects Eddie McGuire. Even when he was a hack sports reporter for Triple M back in the early 90s, before he became a “media personality”, I found him to be too full of himself. He hasn’t improved over the years, and having his mates to back up his comments no matter how awful doesn’t help
Homles @13 and Robert Westbrook @16
She was allowed to keep the medal because she is a high school kid who was awarded the medal in a ceremony at the event. Should they come to her house and take it off of her wall? The scoring error wasn’t noticed until days later. They also offered to fly her and her family to the competition because they felt bad about the error. Everything was done to make the 17 year old feel good about her work. Do you really think taking away her medal would prove anything?
Having a woman win masonry, although not the first time in the history of Ohio, was exciting, but she didn’t win by the numbers. The story is there was a mistake in scoring and it meant that a man won instead of a woman.
@HappyNat:
I have witnessed similar errors at middle school level and, yes, awards were taken back. It may not seem like an accomplishment, but it shows the winner and not winner that mistakes do happen, and that you should not be rewarded for someone else’s mistake. i wouldn’t want a gold medal from a competition I did not actually win. It would be a farce. I also felt that way when I was in grade school. Kids can handle things like that if you let them. There is no need to “make her feel good about her work” when third place is still a good achievement.
I have also seen lots of “clerical errors” regarding scores awarded to girls. When I was in middle school, it seemed some very smart girls could not place in many STEM based competitions. I won’t say it was systemic sexism, but it’s happened enough that I’m with others on this thread in saying:
Provide scans of the original sheets along with affidavits from the judges saying these are their scores. Even just producing the numbers that were on the first and third place score sheets and how they were mis-copied would be a huge step forward, and, if truly a real screw up, would be accepted by the competitors. Otherwise it sounds like a boy complained that a girl beat him and he was coddled.
Again, why would she want a bullshit award she never earned?
So, it’S OK that unqualified adults hurt kids to teach them a lesson?
This is bullshit.
Again, this is bullshit. Some kids will be able to handle it, others won’t. Every single kid, even those who can “handle” it will be deeply hurt and disappointed. And you make it sound like those who can’t handle it are now the guilty party because they didn’t take it with grace.
Can you seriously not grasp the difference between “coming in third, clear and true and being awarded third place at the ceremony” and “coming in third but being told you won only to have your win taken away from you days later”?
One can be a triumph, the other one not.
Even if this whole thing is the “best case”, i.e. the places were switched due to an error, there’s no excuse for that error.
HappyNat,
So, if the organisers were soooo concerned about Shania Clifford’s feelings they let her keep an award she wasn’t entitled to, why did she find out she wasn’t going to the national competition via a Facebook post by her replacement?
@Gilliel #20:
Yes, I grasp the difference. You don’t seem to grasp the American culture, no matter how much I may hate it myself.
So your remedy for the problem is to never have any errors? Most contests in the US involving kids are done completely by volunteers. That also means errors happen often. I think it’s horrible and abhorrent that these volunteers don’t care about their work. I run into the same problem with coworkers here, as well.
Would you rather they never fix any errors that happen? That is what I read from your comment. They gave the wrong award to the wrong person. They can either fix the error, or they can hide the error. If they announce that it is fixed, again, I would not have wanted the award to remind me of what I was given and had taken away. I am stating how it happens in the USA. Unfortunately, in the competitions I participated in, there were sometimes more errors than accurate data. I’m sure it’s different in Germany and many other places where things that kids are involved in actually matter to the adults. Too many American adults care not one whit if they are accurate when they are dealing with “kid stuff” which extends to even college level competitions. Also amateur competitions can be plagued by this as well because it is not professional. This is yet another part of American culture that I despise, yet cannot do anything about on a large scale.
methuseus @19
Copies of the score sheets with the errors were provided to the Dispatch, the school district and the family. That the Dispatch choose to ignore them and run with the incorrect story is on them, they aren’t known as a bastion of great journalism. I’m sure you can make a public records request to obtain them. I don’t know why she decided to keep the medal, she could have returned it but the government isn’t going to send people to her door to take it back. I also don’t know why the district and family went to the press to point out she didn’t in fact win.
Nick Gotts @21
She found out from his FB page because the District didn’t want to deliver the bad news to her. They were informed the moment the error and correction were realized, they did nothing until the family contacted them. The way the educational hierarchy is set up it would be inappropriate for the education department to contact the family directly and would have caused even more of an uproar. The district was upset and made the choice to argue with the department instead of informing the family. They were more interested in scoring political points than having the best interest of the student at heart.
methuseus @22
Except the error was fixed, hence the article. The third place finisher will not be able to compete in the national competition which is the real prize. You can say she was coddled but imagine the article if it had been demanded she return the medal as well.
As an aside I get tired of the criticism of the “everybody gets a prize” mentality. It reads to me like, “back in my day we knew who the losers were and they knew who they were and we liked it!”.
methuseus
Grasping it doesn’t really come into the picture here. Rather approving or disapproving
Well, you say yourself that those people don’t give a shit about doing the work they volunteer for correctly or about the kids involved. Obviously “just let people fuck things up and then hurt kids to show them we have to correct it” isn’t the way. Errors happen. How many errors happen really depends on many factors, people giving a shit being a big one.
If you cannot reduce the amount of errors then abandoning the whole thing seems like a reasonable thing to me. After all, if the aim is to give kids realistic feedback then those competitions suck and are not fulfilling their goals.
Happy Nat
Except that of course it has been demonstrated that “everybody gets a prize” actually increases outcomes across the board because kids will dare.
@Gilliel
So we’re basically in agreement. I was merely reporting how things work over here. I try to change things when I get the chance. I still don’t understand why the only things youth are involved in that most adults think have worth are baseball and football, and sometimes basketball. Rarely soccer. Almost never anything academically related.
@neverjaunty #12: OK, I know that’s a theme here, but does that mean I can’t even joke about it? Not that I wrote or thought anything that crude, for that matter … In any case, that’s pushing it a bit far. Having a shared passion for differential equations is unusual enough to at least make one consider the possibility of a date, right? If I’m not allowed to think brains are sexy, my wife will be very disappointed.
But you’re ignoring the effects on young women in STEM fields who are constantly being considered for their datability, rather than their thinking ability. Would you want to enter a field where every man you met was thinking about getting into your pants rather than work or study? Even “jokingly”? It’s inappropriate, and it contributes to STEM fields having fewer and fewer women involved at each level of achievement. Yes, you’re being part of the problem, with that joke.
Sorry, my 28 is in response to Scott’s 27.