Some good news, at least: James Damore had charged that Google violated labor laws by firing him, claiming that he was merely providing useful internal criticism of Google’s procedures, and you can’t fire someone for that. His claim has been thrown out. It seems Google was very careful to clearly state its reasons for the firing, and it wasn’t because he was trying to improve their training methods: it was because he was bigoted and promoting discrimination. Oops.

The NLRB memo includes talking points that Google prepared and read over the phone to Damore when he was fired. “I want to make clear that our decision is based solely on the part of your post that generalizes and advances stereotypes about women versus men,” Google’s talking points stated. “I also want to be clear that this is not about you expressing yourself on political issues or having political views that are different than others at the company. Having a different political view is absolutely fine. Advancing gender stereotypes is not.”

Now Damore still pursues “a class action lawsuit in which he accuses Google of discriminating against its white, male, and conservative employees.” You might think that maybe that has a better chance of success, since he’s arguing that he’s opposing discrimination against men, but look at what Google said. They’re against “stereotypes about women versus men”. Those hurt men as well as women, so they were also careful to insulate themselves against the charge that they were favoring one sex over another.

A few days ago, I mentioned that Christian Ott, who lost his Caltech position for sexual harassment, had landed a new research position in Finland. We could argue endlessly about whether it’s appropriate for him to return to academia at all, whether there should be a path for rehabilitation, etc., etc., etc., but now it is all moot: the University of Turku has made a surprise announcement.

The University of Turku has decided to terminate the employment contract of Dr Christian Ott on 7 February 2018. Dr Ott’s fixed-term employment relationship of two years as a senior researcher was to start at the beginning of March.

​– I have considered the matter and decided that the employment of Dr Christian Ott to the University of Turku will be cancelled. I came to this conclusion after extensively hearing the science community, says Rector Kalervo Väänänen of the University of Turku.

Well alrighty then. Maybe something really is changing in the world of 2018. Maybe the powers-that-be are finally having to listen.

I hope Ott has some other skills for a backup career. I hear refrigeration repair has excellent job prospects, carpentry is always useful, and that coal mining is making a big comeback.

Last weekend, Uma Thurman spoke out about Harvey Weinstein and his history of abuse — but she also criticized Quentin Tarentino. Thurman had been seriously injured in a car crash while making Kill Bill, thanks to Tarentino, and she also disclosed how Tarentino stood in to the movie to perform some degrading acts personally, spitting on and choking her. There were no accusations of sexual harassment against him, instead he just comes across as insensitive and crude (which one might guess from his movies, anyway). So now gives his side of the story, and proves that he’s insensitive and crude. Why is it these guys are always so painfully unaware of how awful they make themselves look?

The interview starts off poorly, with the reporter making this condescending remark.

I offered Tarantino the opportunity to clarify because at this moment, stories get written and then picked up across the globe, often getting twisted to suit convenient narratives in this #MeToo moment.

What “convenient narratives” are those? What “twisting” is going on? Gosh, all those #MeToo accounts sure are imaginary.

But then, everything he says confirms everything in Thurman’s account — he just adds this bizarre happy twist to all the unpleasant facts. So Thurman was injured in a crash, and Tarentino was the happy hero who found the video footage of the wreck.

She asked, could I get her the footage? I had to find it, 15 years later. We had to go through storage facilities, pulling out boxes. Shannon McIntosh found it. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t think we were going to be able to find it. It was clear and it showed the crash and the aftermath. I was very happy to get it to Uma.

Never mind that he was responsible for the incident — smile, everyone, he filmed it! He had an assistant search through storage facilities and found it! He was such a good guy to give her a movie of the scene he made her do that nearly killed her. If only he’d been able to explain all that to Maureen Dowd, then people wouldn’t be so mean to him.

Part of my job on the piece was to do an interview with Maureen Dowd, and back up Uma’s claims. And we never hooked up. Me and Dowd never hooked up. I read the article and basically it seemed like all the other guys lawyered up, so they weren’t even allowed to be named. And, through mostly Maureen Dowd’s prose, I ended up taking the hit and taking the heat.

And then there’s the incident. It’s clear that Thurman didn’t want to do the scene, she had objected multiple times, she wasn’t much of a driver, but hey, Tarentino checked out the road. It was going to be easy. This is a classic example of someone not listening to another person’s concerns and simply sailing right past them.

…I heard her trepidation. And despite that we had set up everything in this shot, I listened to it. What I did was, I drove down this road, this one lane little strip of road with foliage on either side, in Mexico. I drove down it, hoping against hope that it would be easy and safe enough for Uma to drive. So we’re going down the road and I’m looking at it, watching it and I thought, this is going to be okay. This is a straight shot. There are no weird dips, there were no gully kinds of things, no hidden S-curves. Nothing like that. It was just a straight shot.

Uma had a license. I knew she was a shaky driver, but she had a license. When I was all finished [driving], I was very happy, thinking, she can totally do this, it won’t be a problem. I go to Uma’s trailer. Her makeup person, Ilona Herman was there. Far from me being mad, livid and angry, I was all…smiley. I said, Oh, Uma, it’s just fine. You can totally do this. It’s just a straight line, that’s all it is. You get in the car at [point] number one, and drive to number two and you’re all good.

How can anyone possibly think Tarentino wasn’t listening? He was very happy! He was smiley! Therefore, her worries were nonexistent.

I came in there all happy telling her she could totally do it, it was a straight line, you will have no problem. Uma’s response was…”Okay.” Because she believed me. Because she trusted me. I told her it would be okay. I told her the road was a straight line. I told her it would be safe. And it wasn’t. I was wrong. I didn’t force her into the car. She got into it because she trusted me. And she believed me.

By this point, I was more than a little disgusted with how often Tarentino was telling us that he was fucking happy, as if it didn’t matter what her feelings were. Time to blame the reporter!

The thing about it is, the good things I did are in the Maureen Dowd article. However, they are de-emphasized to not make any impression.

Then there’s the tale about Tarentino deciding to stand in for Michael Madsen to spit in Thurman’s face. It was OK, because the scene required the spitting, and Tarentino didn’t trust Madsen to get it right, so he needed to step in and do it so they wouldn’t need as many takes. What a hero!

The shot was, Michael Madsen had snuff juice. And you see him spit out a stream of snuff juice. Cut to Uma’s face, on the ground and you see it hit her.
Naturally, I did it. Who else should do it? A grip? One, I didn’t trust Michael Madsen because, I don’t know where the spit’s going to go, if Michael Madsen does it. I talked to Uma and I said, look. I’ve got to kind of commit to doing this to you. We even had a thing there, we were going to try and do it with a plunger and some water. But if you add snuff juice to water, it didn’t look right. It didn’t look like spit, when it hit her when we tried that. It needed to be that mix of saliva and the brown juice. So I asked Uma. I said, I think I need to do it. I’ll only do it twice, at the most, three times. But I can’t have you laying here, getting spit on, again and again and again, because somebody else is messing it up by missing. It is hard to spit on people, as it turns out.

Now that get me wondering — where did Tarentino acquire this amazing skill at spitting in people’s faces that Madsen lacked? Has he practiced it often? If people frequently mess up when they try to spit on people (and how does he know that?), why does it have to be a perfect spit for his movie? I think he was getting a little too in to this opportunity, which he wrote, to do something degrading to a woman on screen.

What about the choking scene? Apparently, he’s also an expert in strangling women for verisimilitude, and features his strangler’s hands in a couple of movies.

I was the one on the other end of the chain and we kind of only did it for the close ups. And we pulled it off. Now, that was her idea. Consequently, I realize…that is a real thing. When I did Inglourious Basterds, and I went to Diane [Kruger], and I said, look, I’ve got to strangle you. If it’s just a guy with his hands on your neck, not putting any kind of pressure and you’re just doing this wiggling death rattle, it looks like a normal movie strangulation. It looks movie-ish. But you’re not going to get the blood vessels bulging, or the eyes filling it with tears, and you’re not going to get the sense of panic that happens when your air is cut off. What I would like to do, with your permission, is just…commit to choking you, with my hands, in a closeup.

There’s this thing called acting, but Tarentino wants real panic and fear in the women in his movies, and he’s willing to put it there personally.

It’s also the case that he is the one writing these movies, insisting on the random violence and viciousness. He doesn’t get to excuse it by pointing to the printing on the page and saying that the choking and the murder and the spitting are in the script, therefore he’s got to do it personally.

This is one of those interviews where you like the subject less and less as it proceeds, because he is so oblivious to what he’s saying and his excuses are all so self-serving. And then I thought of the brutal misogyny inflicted on Jennifer Jason Leigh in the last Tarentino movie I saw, and realized that was literally the last Tarentino movie I will ever see.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised — Forrest Ackerman was a notorious weirdo, an obsessive collector, and a major character in science-fiction fandom, so he was kind of a real world Comic Book Guy.
And now it is revealed that he was one of those men.

I guess this is the time to remind the boys here of #MeToo. I and other young women like me were subjected to a different kind of “Forry worship.” How differently would any of you have felt, when all you wanted was to talk about monsters with the “over eager editor” of your favorite monster magazine, if your Uncle Forry had forced wet kisses on you? If he had put his hands all over you, pinching your “naughty bottom” and squeezing your “boobies”? If he had enthusiastically related with a big grin how he wanted to strip off your clothes with everybody watching? And if, in the face of your total refusal of any of his attentions every single time you saw him in person, he never didn’t try again, and again, and again? And if for years, in between those times, he mailed you letters with pornographic photos, and original stories about how naughty you were, and how he wanted to hurt and abuse you, yet all the while make you weep and beg for more? And if he continued that behavior, despite written and verbal demands to cease, entirely unabashed for more than two decades? No, I can’t forget him either — or how he turned my childhood love of monsters into something adult and truly monstrous.

But he was also a promoter and collaborator with famous SF authors, like Marion Zimmer Bradley…oh, crap. Never mind. Someone please put the cover back on the open sewer.

I like Pink. I’ve got several of her albums on my phone, and I think her latest song is lovely.

But then I watched the video and realized that she is a mammal: a filthy, stinking, sweaty, hairy mammal. Pink has nipples. I am so disillusioned. Until I saw that video, I hoped that maybe she was some kind of mollusc, or possibly an arachnid…I’d even have settled for an annelid.

But no. Mammal she is, with mammae, no tentacles or siphon in sight, no spinnerets, not even any chaetae. I am not the only one shattered by this revelation: lots of people are upset that Pink has flashed the world with the news that she is not only a vertebrate, but is also a member of the class Mammalia.

At least some people have been vigorous in their denunciations.

Nipples and breasts are a normal part of human anatomy. Not just women’s anatomy, either. Men have nipples too. Shocker, I know. But you never see this kind of thing when men are topless, much less when you can, god forbid, see their nipples through their shirt. Societal shaming of women’s breasts and nipples is ridiculous, outdated, and frankly, it’s a steaming pile of horseshit that needs to stop.

So let’s just go ahead and clear this up for the people who haven’t turned the calendar page yet: Stop trying to police women’s bodies and their clothes based on your own views of modesty and propriety. Seriously. STOP.

As Lauren Duca so eloquently put it for Teen Vogue, “The thing about nipples is literally everyone has them, but we choose to sexualize only women’s nipples. There isn’t something inherently sexual about female nipples as compared to male nipples. Anatomically speaking, female nipples are for feeding babies. And yet, because we apply this absurd stigma to female nipples, as if we’ve all agreed to pretend the mere sight of female nipples will lead us astray.”

Wait, what? They’re not outraged that a mammal has been allowed to flagrantly sing in public at all…but some people are upset to discover that mammals have mammary glands? That makes no sense at all. It’s right there in the name, people! Jeez. Are you also going to get pissy when you find out teleosts have bones, or that arthropods have jointed limbs?

Christian Ott, the astronomer with a history of sexual harassment and who left Caltech, has a new job: he’s an astronomer with no teaching duties in Finland. Good for him, maybe. There’s always the question of what to do with the ‘naughty boys’, AKA abusive assholes, once they’ve been caught. Throw them in jail? They’ve ruined women’s careers, but unfortunately that often isn’t a prosecutable crime. Ban them from academia forever? We don’t actually have a mechanism to do that. I’m not going to declare that Ott ought to be fired from every position he lands, but it is going to be a growing problem.

Janet Stemwedel has some recommendations for what any abuser can do to regain trust.

1. Own what you did.
2. Accept the descriptions of the harm you did given by those you harmed.
3. Have your defenders stand down.
4. Avoid the limelight.
5. Don’t demand anyone’s trust.
6. Shift your focus to work that supports your scientific community, not your individual advancement.

I think that’s a good set of things for the individual to do, and it looks like that’s a hard set of hurdles to cross — I note that a lot of abusers can’t clear step 1. But I’m curious about what institutions should do, since there’s a reasonable concern that they will repeat their behavior. Yet sometimes these guys have a tempting skill set and a history of success within their field of research, so it would be a waste to demand that a highly trained scientist resign themselves to the job of gas station attendant for the rest of their lives. So what are universities to do?

I have some suggestions.

1. Make employment provisional. Don’t hand them tenure, but temporary appointments subject to review are a good starting point. That’s what the University of Turku has done: Ott has a two-year appointment.

2. Isolate the person from students and post-docs. Again, that’s what Turku has done — he has been appointed “a senior researcher without any teaching or supervising responsibilities”.

3. Monitor the heck out of the guy. I don’t know how Turku is handling this, but at my university we have yearly reviews of teaching, science, and service. They should have an explicit fourth category for people like Ott, a review of interactions with colleagues and students. That means someone should be talking with other personnel every year to catch potentially harassing behavior before it becomes an issue, and any concerns should be openly discussed with him and his colleagues.

4. Apply the Stemwedel suggestions to him. If he’s denying his actions, don’t hire him in the first place. If he turns into a blustering, grandstanding prima donna who demands attention and distracts his colleagues, fire him, no matter how good his research.

I’d add a fifth, but it’s awfully hard to police. Every large department already has its own enablers and jerks, and one way harassers can thrive is by constructing their own local community of like-minded obnoxious twits who sympathize with them. Watch who the new hire is associating with — if they’re building their very own clique of good ol’ boys, they can be difficult to deal with later.

Basically, let him work, but don’t forget his past.

Seeing is not believing, since the porn peddlers are busy adapting software to insert your face in any ol’ smutty scenario they want.

Like the Adobe tool that can make people say anything, and the Face2Face algorithm that can swap a recorded video with real-time face tracking, this new type of fake porn shows that we’re on the verge of living in a world where it’s trivially easy to fabricate believable videos of people doing and saying things they never did. Even having sex.

But of course these tools are being refined to appropriate women’s images — it’s what this culture does. I’m sure the gay porn will be following along shortly.

It’s interesting that they’re reporting on the work of a single guy, “deepfakes”, who’s basically a script kiddie churning through existing software to slap celebrity faces on pornographic movies, as if that is some grand achievement. No one is questioning his motives, in part because he’s got enough shame left in him that he doesn’t let his identity out.

According to deepfakes—who declined to give his identity to me to avoid public scrutiny—the software is based on multiple open-source libraries, like Keras with TensorFlow backend. To compile the celebrities’ faces, deepfakes said he used Google image search, stock photos, and YouTube videos. Deep learning consists of networks of interconnected nodes that autonomously run computations on input data. In this case, he trained the algorithm on porn videos and Gal Gadot’s face. After enough of this “training,” the nodes arrange themselves to complete a particular task, like convincingly manipulating video on the fly.

Artificial intelligence researcher Alex Champandard told me in an email that a decent, consumer-grade graphics card could process this effect in hours, but a CPU would work just as well, only more slowly, over days.

“This is no longer rocket science,” Champandard said.

I’ve seen several articles on this subject recently. Oddly, no one seems to be asking deepfakes why he’s doing this, which also says something about the culture. I guess it’s taken for granted that guys with expensive computers will sink hours of time into this strange hobby of making obsessive masturbation aids.

It mainly seems to be women and sex workers who are questioning the ethics of their behavior.

Porn performer Grace Evangeline told me over Twitter direct messages that porn stars are used to having their work spread around free to tube sites like SendVid, where the Gal Gadot fake is uploaded, without their permission. But she said that this was different. She’d never seen anything like this.

“One important thing that always needs to happen is consent,” Evangeline said. “Consent in private life as well as consent on film. Creating fake sex scenes of celebrities takes away their consent. It’s wrong.”

Even for people whose livelihoods involve getting in front of a camera, the violation of personal boundaries is troubling. I showed Alia Janine, a retired porn performer who was in the sex industry for 15 years, the video of Gadot. “It’s really disturbing,” she told me over the phone. “It kind of shows how some men basically only see women as objects that they can manipulate and be forced to do anything they want… It just shows a complete lack of respect for the porn performers in the movie, and also the female actresses.”

It’s a collision of pedestrian realities, that some men will go to great lengths to make simulated sex that won’t involve interacting with icky women, and that they feel no obligation to respect other human beings.

Courtland Sykes is a candidate for the US Senate from Missouri. He has certain opinions about feminists. Fasten your seatbelts, this is going to accelerate fast.

“I want to come home to a home cooked dinner every night at six,” Sykes said, referring to demands he makes of his girlfriend. “One that she fixes and one that I expect one day to have daughters learn to fix after they become traditional homemakers and family wives.”

According to Sykes, feminists push an agenda that they “made up to suit their own nasty snake-filled heads.”

The candidate said that he hoped his daughters do not grow up to be “career obsessed banshees who forgo home life and children and the happiness of family to become nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she devils who shriek from the top of a thousand tall buildings they are [SIC] think they could have leaped in a single bound — had men not been ‘suppressing them.’ It’s just nuts.”

You banshees! How dare you! Courtland is hungry. Make him a sandwich, because he doesn’t know how and will starve if no woman serves him!

I agree with his last sentence. It is just nuts.

You’re not going to elect him, are you, Missourians?

I stand amazed at the progress we have made. People work together to aid those in need…like at The President’s Club Charity Dinner in London. They’re trying to raise money for hospitals! How can one possibly criticize them for that?

You can trust men to fuck it up.

It is for men only. A black tie evening, Thursday’s event was attended by 360 figures from British business, politics and finance and the entertainment included 130 specially hired hostesses.

All of the women were told to wear skimpy black outfits with matching underwear and high heels. At an after-party many hostesses — some of them students earning extra cash — were groped, sexually harassed and propositioned.

They’ve been doing this for 33 years, in relative obscurity, which has only been broken because a couple of women went undercover as “hostesses” to discover what shenanigans were going on. It was an unpleasant night for them.

At 10pm last Thursday night, Jonny Gould took to the stage in the ballroom at London’s Dorchester Hotel. “Welcome to the most un-PC event of the year,” he roared.

That was an omen. I’ve noticed that only assholes take pride in not being “PC”. That’s exactly what it was, too: a parade of privileged assholes letting their hair down to just be themselves, i.e. deplorable and unpleasant.

The nature of the occasion was hinted at when the hostesses were hired. The task of finding women for the dinner is entrusted to Caroline Dandridge, founder of Artista, an agency specialising in hosts and hostesses for what it claims to be some of the “UK’s most prestigious occasions”.

At their initial interviews, women were warned by Ms Dandridge that the men in attendance might be “annoying” or try to get the hostesses “pissed”. One hostess was advised to lie to her boyfriend about the fact it was a male-only event. “Tell him it’s a charity dinner,” she was told.

“It’s a Marmite job. Some girls love it, and for other girls it’s the worst job of their life and they will never do it again . . . You just have to put up with the annoying men and if you can do that it’s fine,” Ms Dandridge told the hostess.

Two days before the event, Ms Dandridge told prospective hostesses by email that their phones would be “safely locked away” for the evening and that boyfriends and girlfriends were not welcome at the venue.

The uniform requirements also became more detailed: all hostesses should bring “BLACK sexy shoes”, black underwear, and do their hair and make-up as they would to go to a “smart sexy place”. Dresses and belts would be supplied on the day.

For those who met the three specific selection criteria (“tall, thin and pretty”) a job paying £150, plus £25 for a taxi home, began at 4pm.

Now I wonder, though — I bet the attendees are furious right now at being exposed. Caroline Dandridge is probably being angrily denounced by organizers for having let a few spies sneak in. No one is upset by their behavior, but only at being caught in this behavior.

I also wonder whether the President’s Club Charity Dinner will take place next year, whether it will change its rules, and whether anyone will attend. Were the attendees actually there for an opportunity to assist worthy charities, or for the opportunity to harass and abuse women with their good sexist buddies?

When Garrison Keillor was fired for “inappropriate behavior”, the only explanation we got was Keillor’s: he’d merely touched a woman’s back, in an innocuous, friendly way. This has gone too far, some people raged, when harmless social behavior can get you fired! The problem was that MPR was silent. They gave no details about what had actually driven them to give him the boot, so only Keillor’s narrative was out there.

No longer. MPR News has published a long account of Keillor’s problematic history.

An investigation by MPR News, however, has learned of a years-long pattern of behavior that left several women who worked for Keillor feeling mistreated, sexualized or belittled. None of those incidents figure in the “inappropriate behavior” cited by MPR when it severed business ties.

Nor do they have anything to do with Keillor’s story about putting a hand on a woman’s back:

• In 2009, a subordinate who was romantically involved with Keillor received a check for $16,000 from his production company and was asked to sign a confidentiality agreement which, among other things, barred her from ever divulging personal or confidential details about him or his companies. She declined to sign the agreement, and never cashed the check.

• In 2012, Keillor wrote and publicly posted in his bookstore an off-color limerick about a young woman who worked there and the effect she had on his state of arousal.

• A producer fired from The Writer’s Almanac in 1998 sued MPR, alleging age and sex discrimination, saying Keillor habitually bullied and humiliated her and ultimately replaced her with a younger woman.

• A 21-year-old college student received an email in 2001 in which Keillor, then her writing instructor at the University of Minnesota, revealed his “intense attraction” to her.

MPR News has interviewed more than 60 people who worked with or crossed professional paths with Keillor. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity because they still work in the industry or feared repercussions from Keillor or his attorneys.

The article tries to portray both the good and bad sides of Keillor, but you can’t escape the broad conclusion: he was a bad boss, autocratic and oblivious, and was only tolerable while you were on his good side.

People who worked with him across the decades say Keillor could be funny, charming, compassionate and gracious.

By other accounts, he could be cruel and dismissive. The office was driven by his moods, former colleagues say. A common complaint is he would punish his staff with prolonged aggressive silence, as Fleischman described.

He also grew tired of and discarded musicians, writers and staff, many of whom had been loyal to Keillor for years. Some employees were terminated without warning.

I now understand better why MPR should have tired of supporting him. There’s still a mystery, though: none of the stuff cited in the article was part of the specific case that led to MPR firing him. Only one person, Jon McTaggart, president of MPR, “knew the content of the allegations against Keillor”, and those haven’t been revealed yet. I don’t think the story is quite closed.