Tan and Shepard say that …. uses his charisma and fame within the …. world to prey on vulnerable people. …….
“[…] is charismatic and has a high public profile,” Shepard added. “People are afraid of confronting him.”
Or just one of the reasons why some men seek fame and etc?
Let’s be honest about it, Bill got far more pussy as a politician than he would have done as a lawyer.
Yeah. But he’s had to have Shrillery hanging around all that time, too. Helluva price to pay. There’s a story goes back to her college days. She went to sleep on some guy’s shoulder, kid gnawed his own arm off, rather than disturb her.
Humble lawyer, she’d have divorced him years ago. And he’d still been able to go in at bat.
I like the one about the girl, after the grope “hiding out in the hotel bar”.
Computer geeks really annoy a lot of women. They are the sort of tactless, spineless, charmless dorks they hated at school. But these days they often have huge amounts of money and fame because of Silicon Valley.
So they are torn between contempt and desire (well, mainly for unlimited shopping and their own NGO).
Applebaum is exactly that sort of dork. Upskirt photos? I mean we are not talking about a serial predator. We are talking about a man who is about one step up from a child molestor because he can’t handle anything tougher. The allegations against him are typical of an immature, uncertain, inexperienced manchild who can’t get laid.
If he was Larry Ellison no one would care. Or, at TW points out, Bill Clinton – no one cares he is probably a rapist. But I do like this:
“He once got good drunk at a bar…and discussed how he would ‘use my ass’,” Shepard said.
Yeah, that is going to work. Smooth. Another career destroyed over a sexual incompetence misdemeanour.
bloke in france – “I like the one about the girl, after the grope “hiding out in the hotel bar”.”
It does make it sound like this happens to her 76 times a week.
I also notice she has not complained. This was anonymous denunciation until the media found some colleagues who were willing to stick the knife in. Even then what they saw is hardly a great crime. *Trying* to kiss a girl. *Trying* to take some pictures. Not actually doing much.
But no doubt in Britain he would be doing 15 years by now.
For the avoidance of doubt, SMFS, because I’d hate for anyone else on this blog to think you agree with me…
I have my doubts about this particular story. Elsewhere, it would not surprise me at all to find that sex pests are only too common in the computer industry.
Given that said pests, in normal circumstances, couldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding, I’m reserving judgement on “social media” and all the other stuff they are peddling.
I have no problem with stereotypes being offensive, only with their being inaccurate. People in my line of work (software engineering) are certainly more likely to have abstruse interests, to find enjoyment and diversion in things most people don’t and to be more-than-usually focussed on detail, for example. But the idea that they are boorish, chauvinist, afraid of women or sexually repressed is just bollocks. You get a few dandruffy weirdos in IT, to be sure, perhaps a slight over-representation among the server-bashing end, but no more so than, say, lab techs in a biology department. Software engineers are staggeringly normal for the most part, other than necessarily being not-normal intelligence-wise.
What BiCR said.
bloke in france – “I have my doubts about this particular story. Elsewhere, it would not surprise me at all to find that sex pests are only too common in the computer industry.”
I think it would depend on what you mean by a sex pest. I would think that hard core weirdos are more likely to be found, say, photographing models. I would think that most of the problems in Silicon Valley are people who are just not that good at relating to other people – and the fact that they have obscenely large amounts of money in many cases makes them a target in a way that, say, school bus drivers are not.
Bloke in Costa Rica – “I have no problem with stereotypes being offensive, only with their being inaccurate.”
Only two robust findings in the social sciences: 1. IQ tests work and there are racial differences and 2. stereotypes are largely true.
http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/27657/
“But the idea that they are boorish, chauvinist, afraid of women or sexually repressed is just bollocks.”
There are two flaws with this argument. One is that those things do not go together. I don’t think that they are likely to be chauvinist. If anything computer programmers are likely, in my experience, to be painfully PC. Nor are they likely to be sexually repressed. But afraid of women? I think that is likely to be true and hence the PC attitude to women – not having a great deal of confidence, they will adopt what values society tells them they should have towards women.
The other one is the composition. It is entirely possible for most people in software to be normal. It is a living after all. But still for enough of them to lean towards autism and general introversion for the stereotype to be real. This man is a good example. I am sure that boorish behaviour is common to a lot of groups. But if you told a random stranger this story and asked if he was in IT or used cars, I don’t think most strangers would pick used cars. You could meet thousands of normal IT people – but still have a very high concentration of people with Asperbergers in the field.
I’d go one further than BiCR.
Pure hardware/admin types aside, you have to be a social chameleon to be a good IT pro, because not only do you have to understand your job, you have understand the job of the guy (or girl) you’re writing the software for. And often that requires talking to people at all levels of the organisation, doing very diverse jobs.
OK, some do sit there and code off specs. But I’d wager not that many. I wouldn’t hire a code monkey I couldn’t put into a 121 with a business person unless it was an extremely specialist role.
Corvus Umbranox – “Pure hardware/admin types aside, you have to be a social chameleon to be a good IT pro”
People are taking what was, in the end, a defence of the poor man awfully personally. And really to the point that a sensible conversation is not possible.
But sure, in an ideal world, employees would be Supermen who could do everything. However if your choice was someone with poor social skills who could program and someone who got on with everyone but who could not write code if their life depended on it, which would you employ to actually run your computers?
Come on people, embrace the stereotype. Computer geeks are having a huge impact on mainstream culture. Even Hollywood acknowledges it. That cultural impact revolves entirely around the stereotype of IT geeks. It is also undeniably true.[1] Saying that they are the same as everyone else devalues what is unique about this subculture.
[1] People who argue that Silicon Valley men are just like everyone else would have to ignore events like Comicon and people like Bill Gates, who was first romantically linked to someone when he married one of his employees around the time of his 40th birthday. And even Gates is a social butterfly by the standards of the industry – look at Paul Allen.
The ones who can’t code to save their lives generally get promoted to management.
Also, you’re missing the point. The coding is the easy bit. Figuring out what people really want the software to do – that’s hard.
“I have my doubts about this particular story. Elsewhere, it would not surprise me at all to find that sex pests are only too common in the computer industry.”
In fact I would say the opposite is true, merely because sexual predators tend to go where their victims are (I.e. Paedophiles working in care homes, etc) and in IT there are hardly any women.
It’s the old thing – be attractive, then it’s acceptable behavior. There also does seem to be a push by feminists/ diversocrats to subvert the tech industry to their ends at the moment.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/at-work-silicon-valley-female-leaders-launch-tool-to-measure-and-improve-diversity-1462317428
http://www.wired.com/2016/02/intel-knows-it-isnt-where-it-wants-to-be-on-diversity/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/silicon-valley-struggles-to-hack-its-diversity-problem/2015/07/16/0b0144be-2053-11e5-84d5-eb37ee8eaa61_story.html
Jonathan, of course, there’s no bastion they won’t eventually try to subvert.
Except their local mosgue.
“If anything computer programmers are likely, in my experience, to be painfully PC.”
Well that’s cobblers right there. There’s a well-known correlation between being a software engineer and libertarian/anti-authoritarian thinking. It’s not as strong as the propensity to be an atheist, but it’s significant.
Also, what CU said. Most of my design work is semantic, not syntactic. Once you’ve worked out what the code is supposed to do, the how is usually straightforward.
Corvus Umbranox – “The coding is the easy bit. Figuring out what people really want the software to do – that’s hard.”
You mean like Facebook? Which started as a way for computer geeks to rate the sexiness of the girls who wouldn’t date them? Not exactly fighting the stereotype was it? People persistently do other things with software.
Bloke in Costa Rica – “Well that’s cobblers right there. There’s a well-known correlation between being a software engineer and libertarian/anti-authoritarian thinking. It’s not as strong as the propensity to be an atheist, but it’s significant.”
So your spurious correlation is fine but mine is not? Is it true anyway? Intel caved into the feminists faster than the French Army facing the Wehrmacht. Facebook has always been PC. It would be hard to think of anyone in Silicon Valley who is libertarian or anti-authoritarian except Peter Thiel. And he is Gay. Perhaps the IT industry likes to think of itself this way. Perhaps in the privacy of their own bedrooms they are. But there is not a lot of evidence in the real world for it.
Well, yeah, because I’m a software engineer and have been for a very long time. If Tim Newman said people who work in the oil industry do X, would that be a spurious correlation?
Facebook was written by students (or very recent former students.) And guess what’s on the mind of most students? Getting drunk, getting laid, and maybe getting a degree after a few years.
You’re talking about megacorps with a big PR budget to spend. Don’t confuse that with the programmers.
I’ve been a software engineer since the late 80s, mainly on the Free Software side of things. I see BiCR’s portrayal far, far more than I see your ‘cringing inadequate’ stereotype. Almost all of the talented programmers I’ve known over the years (yes, of course there are the 9-5ers) have been extremely intelligent, extremely independent-minded, and couldn’t give a shit if someone is black, white, gay, straight, trans or whatever so long as their code was elegant.