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potatosteinsillustrations · 1 year ago

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The LGBTQIA+ Collective deserves more than being hidden and obscured.

While a bit of old news let's talk about this: A friend of mine passed me this link (read the articile it is actually really good) a couple of days ago and we landed on the same conclusion: How lame it is to see Epic half assing this.

Pride is a ceebration but also a rallying event to demand basic human rights for a collective and as such corporations shouldn't half ass their "support" by hiding any references to the LGBTQIA+, it is such a retrograde move that hurts the collective a lot, more than they think as it empowers the alt-right.

Epic's message is clear: they aren't willing to commit, they just want to cash in... Which is a horrible way to celebrate the diversity of their fanbase. It says a lot of the company's (not talking about employees, more on that bellow) stance on basic human rights: they don't care enough to commit. Epic decision to obscure and hide the collective is tactless in an era in which LGBTQIA people are harrassed and stripped off their rights. This decision most likely has nothing to do with the people in the company which are employees, this kind of stuff is usually a decision made at the executive levels, I don't think most Epic employees would agree this was a good celebration of the LGBTQIA community.

With all this said it comes as no surprise after the poor handling of 2021's Rainbow Royale:

I stopped doing Fanart of the game around that time and later I uninstalled both Fortnite and the Epic Store app from my computer mostly because of the CEO's lax moral compass which allows him to side with transphobes just because they were briefly against Apple (FWIW I don't own Apple products nor do I care about 'em)

Pro PR tip: You never, ever side with book burning, homo/transphobes, alt-righters.

And lemme be clear: I'm not saying Sweeney is a homo/transphobe, I'm saying I can't see eye to eye with a person who is willing to put his beliefs in human rights topics on pause to side with a transphobe. The fact that he is more willing to be vocal about his fight against Apple, to defend Elon Musk and Twitter blue and on the other side actually being OK with hiding and obscuring the very community they are supposedly celebrating with Rainbow Royale tells me I don't want to use his store and products, at all.

And it is ironic that he has the nerve to say this:

I'm not saying you should cancel Epic or its CEO, stop doing fanart or uninstall anything from your computer/console, I made that decision for myself and I'm no one to tell you what you do. You do you without remorse (as long as you don't harm anyone around you).

What I'm saying is: Epic do better dammit. Epic's history with the LGBTQIA is one of employees doing their damn best trying to celebrate a collective they actually care for but marred by stupidly short sighted executive decisions that affect a collective which has in recent years seen how they rights are stripped from them via brute force and are suffering constant harrasment and attacks from the alt-right. TL;DR if you are a company or corporation you aren't forced to celebrate Pride, but if you are going to do it, DON'T FUCKING HALF ASS IT, the LGBTQIA collective deserves more than being hidden and obscured. This is your reminder that... 1) Corporations aren't your friends 2) You shouldn't form parasocial relationships with 'em 3) Vote with your wallet 4) There's no ethical consumption under capitalism

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fahrni · 2 years ago

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Saturday Morning Coffee

One cup down, time for the second one and some writing. ☕️

ESPN

CINCINNATI – Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin was taken off the field in an ambulance after receiving treatment on the field for over 10 minutes, which resulted in the game between the Buffalo Bills and- Cincinnati Bengals being suspended until further notice Monday night.

I have a lot of thoughts on this matter having been through it myself, at the age of 17.

Was it a tragic accident? Yes. Is it the end of the world for Mr. Hamlin? No, definitely not. Is it scary? Oh, yes, it most certainly is.

WillowTree

Today, Jan 4th, marks the official start of our next chapter as WillowTree, a TELUS International Company.

So, yeah, we are now a part of TELUS International.

What do I expect? Bigger engagements over the next year with bigger brands. I see it as a huge positive.

Realistically, only time will tell, but I’m feeling really good about it. 👍🏼

Tech Dirt

Near the end of 2022, Elon Musk issued an edict to the journalism community. Obey me, he said, or you will be banned from posting on Twitter.

I’ve been reducing my use of Twitter each and every day for a while. I’m down to checking it once or twice a day because there are folks there I haven’t found on Mastodon.

Mastodon has definitely become by new social network home. You can search me out using @[email protected] or go directly to curmudgeon.cafe/@fahrni. I’d love to connect on Mastodon. 😃

Slate

In the past year, there’s been a sharp uptick in anti-LGBTQ incidents around the country. One group estimates that there’s been a 12-fold increase in demonstrations and political violence targeted at the queer community, just since 2000.

Love is love. LGBTQ+ rights are HUMAN RIGHTS! Look, if on the basis of religious beliefs you don’t agree with LGBTQ+ folks, fine. But they’re human beings who deserve to be treated as you would anyone else. Yes, it’s that simple, and it is a choice.

Let’s put it in Christiany terms. WWJD? Do you think Jesus would’ve shown nothing but hate and contempt for the LGBTQ+ community? I think not. He would have shown them kindness, compassion, and above all else, love. ❤️

Goto 10

Another BASIC game I made back in the 80s was one that I actually designed with one of my younger sisters. She had expressed interest in all this “computer stuff” I was doing and wanted to know what it would take to make a game.

I’ve been following Paul’s site for a while and it’s a lot of fun. If, like me, you have a place in your heart for the BASIC programming language, subscribe to Goto 10 and enjoy.

NTDEV

It’s 2023, and Windows 11 is finally a mature operating system that most people would be happy to use. Sun Valley has finally arrived, and it’s all about a long overdue reinvestment in design under Panos Panay’s leadership. But is it enough?  Let’s take a look.

TL;DR - Windows needs more work to bring everything up to a modern look and feel.

The author goes on to identify nine distinct UI styles, that’s right nine. Talk about technical debt.

From a code design perspective would it be better to go through all those UI frameworks and make them use WinUI 3 or would it be better to touch each individual application to update their UI?

I have been of the opinion you’d hit a wider range of apps if you updated the frameworks to use WinUI 3.

I’ve even written about it. I did get some great feedback that from that piece that basically said the design models are too different to make the Win32 API wrap Win3 UI. I can accept that. But, if it could be pulled off, an entire class of applications would look modern without their authors modifying them.

Perhaps a compromised approach would be to make some of the newer UI Frameworks use Win3 UI and rewrite the UI for old Win32 API apps? 🤔

NPR

When the employees announced they were unionizing, Microsoft vowed to remain neutral and let the employees make their own decision about joining, CWA said.

This sounds really great but the skeptic in me wonders how much Microsoft will allow this to happen in others areas of the organization?

Gaming is full of nightmarish stories of long hours and, even worse, abuse.

I’m hopeful this new union will address both of those and make for better work conditions. 👍🏼

Business Insider

While I’m always excited to see what innovations companies like Apple have in store, I have some serious concerns about betting on AR/VR glasses as a growth market.

For quite a while now I’ve had zero interest in AR/VR technologies. In my opinion AR could be useful in many industries as long as the tech is as easy to wear as a pair of glasses. I could see them being useful to mechanics, electricians, builders, and various trades I’m not thinking about. Otherwise they’re just expensive toys.

I thought Apple Watch Apps would flourish. They have for some developers but they’re mainly little views into data from your iPhone. That’s not bad, it’s just the way they are.

Hey, all I’d like to see is custom watch faces. That’s it. Then, perhaps, someone could create a watch face that looks like Dumbledore’s watch. Kim bought me the Fossil collectible one year for Christmas. 😃

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occupyscifi · 6 years ago

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The Partisan Generation

This generation

It was the morning that his daughter airily declared the moon landing a fake news Jewish plot to let liberal scientists run the government that Lenton Ayre realised things had gone a bit far with this generation.

“and, you know its because gun control libtards in the Hollywood elite that we lost the Iraq war” she added, gazing into her eglasses at the endless stream of retweets, status updates and weather pattern like emojis swept over her “because, you know. There were WMD’s - that’s the truth. Only the cultural Marxists wanna cover it up. There’s like a whole thread on ReddChan about it and all the instagram influencers are saying…”

“honey, I just asked what you were gonna be studying in school today” he replied, cutting her off before she could do the whole ten minute screed on the snowflake liberals that then could segway into a whole monolog that took in every conspiracy theory from JFK to flat earth. Instead he would rather talk about their real education. As someone who was assiduous in his working habits and concerned for his children’s future he had of course taken them out of the local state school and put them into the Musk-Bezos academy that had opened in a refurbished mall just out of town. This was less a matter really of intellectual choice, more that since his own employer was a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Amazon he could either send his kids to the Inspire! Academy or he could find himself a new job.

That Lenton would not have minded quite so much, but all his rivals could only offer him the Netflix online-ed course for his two teenagers. That would hardly have been good fathering, he had figured. Although considering his two children’s current subjects of conversation he wondered if it might just have been better to join one of the local Trump Revival churches and get them home schooled. At least he wouldn’t have had to worry about exams, and they would have a willing audience to talk conspiracy theories with.

“Rani, dude. What is that libtard bullshit?” Ayre’s son retorted, his own smartglasses reflecting the latest news from the hardcore manosphere where he spent most of his time. Since he was wearing his ‘science is my superpower’ tshirt his sister was clearly in a trolling mood “you’ve been sucking down that stupid crap your latest gaywad lametoob boyband crush soyboy has been saying, right? Everyone knows that they’re just a front for Kremlin. Those pretty commie boys want to turn you Stacy’s into their harem so that honest patriots like me can’t get what we’re owed….”

“Kev, you can’t get a girl cause you’re a fucking misogynist incel loser” said his sister quickly “don’t start blaming other people for your problems”

“okay, kids please” said Lenton raising both his hands in what his NLP Yoga teacher had assured him was a calming pose that leant him an air of kindly authority “can we have some calm? You know something a little less partisan at the breakfast table?” lenton scrolled through his own smartglasses looking for non controversial content. It was surprisingly hard “now, can we all agree that congress are a bunch of assholes? Or that kittens are super cute?”

His son opened his mouth to argue

“okay, how about dogs in cars, with their heads out the window?”

Kevin shut his mouth and nodded.

“I mean, I don’t know where it comes from” moaned lenton later at the popup office where he spent his days in online content creation “my daughter spouts anything that comes from the Kremlin via whatever hot youtube boy she’s currently hard crushing on, and my son says anything that some rock hard libertarian science guy says. Neither of them give it a second thought. I don’t know why, cause whenever I say anything they’re on me with laser sight scepticism”

“eh, I blame the technology” complained his colleague as she thumbed through mentions in her livefeed, feeling the desperate need for validation more than the caffeine hit in the cup in her hand “these kids, they wanna be spoonfed everything. I remember when we was their age. We hadda actually google search stuff. If you wanted to throw shade you hadda go to the effort of writing a livejournal about it. Now these kids just get a bunch of recommendations straight into their eyeballs. No thought required”

“too right, Tina. Its about hard work” said Lenton, looking at the day’s workload “it’s the attitude that’s the problem. They’re just too lazy to challenge anything” he scanned the list of hot button to do items “so, what talking points are we monetising for cultural leaders today?”

“we got a contract in from Russia. They want to see the latest round of the Israel Iranian conflict spun as being caused by Jewish bankers. Was thinking we can feed that one in via the Foxosphere. They love a bit of Jew baiting so long as we call em progressive liberal internationalists”

“good call” said Lenton, paging through the various socially destructive ideas and fake news he was being paid a hefty commission to inject into public discourse “we’ve got our screaming mob on retainer. Can get them with placards and slogans anywhere we need them. Although the RNC still hasn’t paid them for that last job. Something about how they weren’t violent enough against those BLM people…”

“they’re actors” sighed Tina as she refilled her mug from the genuine organic roast machine. Her mug bore the cheery slogan ‘world’s greatest stripper’ always reminding her of her grandmother, whose gift it had been “if they want proper violence then they have to get the real white supremacists, but they’re all booked up defending the Canadian border from UN one world government liberal invasion, or whatever we told them was the problem”

“thought it was LGBTQ infiltrators?” replied Lenton. It was hard to keep up. They were after all paid to shape the news and the information that influenced people, the consequences were not really in his pay grade.

“whatever” sighed Tina as she took another high protein cookie from the stack. They were super moreish but were almost physically indigestible. The resulting diarrhoea was always good for the waist line “and we got another Koch brothers contract up. Top dollar to get the key 18-25 demographic thinking that renewable energy is a problem”

“simple. Thread through the manosphere as being that renewable energy is unmanly and feminising. We can to nostalgia stuff around the petrol engine. The far right will love a bit of Tesla bashing….”

“and Tesla will pay us double to spread the counter message” said Tina, finishing her coffee “cool” she paused “look, don’t worry about your kids. They go through phases. Shit, I was tumblrd out when I was their age, woulda cut my best friends head off if she’d said a word against my fandom. They grow out of it”

“yeah” said lenton, already downloading the days false news and astroturf memes ready to infect the information stream of the western world with “but, you know they just seem so extreme. I don’t get why” he added as he pumped a thread blaming vaccinations for causing sexual inadequacy into a mainstream news forum where it would have an active effect on roughly forty five percent of the readership “I just don’t see where they get those ideas from”

#conspiracy #social media

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astudentscribe-blog · 7 years ago

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Tech Dopes and Politics

https://www.recode.net/2017/7/3/15904484/pincus-hoffman-linkedin-zynga-clinton-win-the-future-democrats-dnc-trump

This became MUCH longer than I thought, and yeah, it’s a slog.

Oh, where to begin with this shitstorm. Let’s start with some snark and then move onto more serious concerns (though really, it’s not like those are going to be held too far apart because good lord).

This is the kind of idea that two dopes in a sitcom or movie would be talking about to anyone who would listen. They’re young, white, male, and rich, though not necessarily in that order. They’re tired with politics or the delivery business or media - really, the exact what they’re tired of doesn’t matter so much as the disdain for “X as usual” (which they never really define nor care to). They’ve got this great idea though - “what if you could change the way X worked with just a click? Introducing, Win The Future! (with a giant poster board of a “WTF” logo in simplistic font, probably with some kind of geometric-esque symbol for branding)”

Everyone, except maybe the most gullible person, or someone who has no idea how politics or the internet work, in the room look at these two like they’re probably high. They never get mentioned again, except as a brick joke several acts later, and only in a positive light if the writers are trying a “take that” at consumerism and such. You’ve probably seen something like this in numerous versions of media, enough that I don’t even have to really give a specific scene because the idea of two rich novices trying to tell everyone EXACTLY what will fix their problems is built into satiric writing. Shit, the Big Bang Theory’s probably done this more times than years I’ve been alive.

In this article? Played completely straight. No winks, no asides (except one kinda-sorta-maybe), just two scrappy underdogs with degrees from little-known universities like UPenn, Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford, armed with only $5 billion between themselves, trying to change the world. The underdogs in question: Mark Pincus, co-founder of Zynga (of Farmville fame, among others), and Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn (the eternal punchline of social media platforms).

I’m trying not to dip into ad hominem too much here because there are plenty of smart, compassionate, self-aware people who happen to be wealthy, I’m sure. Not most of them and certainly not the ones you hear the most about, but I’m willing to grant that not everyone with an income over $250k a year is an abominable moron divested from reality. But as the tone may suggest, I’m skeptical.

And it certainly does little to suggest you fit in that category when you spout this nonsense:

“It’s become this competitive insider’s world,” said Pincus, who has donated nearly $2.5 million to candidates and causes, according to federal records. "Whether it’s me or my family and friends … we just feel - we’ve always felt - left out. It just feels like the bar is so high for any of us to have a voice and choice.”

Setting aside for a moment the gurgling rage that threatens to dispose of my ability to construct coherent thought, the lack of self-awareness in those three sentences is almost staggeringly funny. It almost makes me think the writer was trying to slip an aside in about how absurd that statement is, coming from that source, but given a) it’s from recode and b) the generally positive tone of the piece, it seems unlikely.

Mark Pincus is from the neighborhood in Chicago were the terms “Trixie” and “Chad” sprung up to describe the young affluent type who was as vapid as they were wealthy, and boy does it seem to fit. Pincus’ career tab on his wiki page goes, “Before he became an entrepreneur, Pincus worked in venture capital and financial services,” which is shorthand for ‘he wasn’t quite rich enough to buy an island, but enough to make some really dumb purchases at the yacht dealership” and was rich enough to be “an early investor’ in basically every major social media platform of the early-00s. Richard Hoffman has a similar setup, growing up in Palo Alto and Berkeley, attending Stanford and Oxford, becoming an “angel investor” and investing in too many startups to list here for practical purposes. They are, if you hadn’t guessed, both white, live/work in the Silicon Valley area, and incredibly well-connected (Hoffman’s a member of the Bilderberg Group, if you ever want to fantasize about the closest thing to the Illuminati in real life).

This is not to diminish anything good either of them has done. Jury’s out on social gaming’s ultimate effect on society, but I lean towards neutral at worst, and it’s been helpful to people in all sorts of ways, and Zynga upended the market and general consensus on that. Hoffman, while being one of the guys behind PayPal (yeah, another one), a member of Microsoft’s board and has a history of investments in Facebook and Airbnb, is probably most notable for a number of tech-related philanthropic endeavors and was the money behind Crisis Text Line.

The notion they’re advocating, of a more democratic process, is not a bad one at all and if we’re choosing between folks like these two and Peter Thiel or even Mark “I’m So Normal Guys Look I’m Going To Iowa” Zuckerberg, I’m with Hoffman and Pincus any day (Never mind that a world relying on the deep pockets of tech billionaires for political reform makes me gag). But to call these two anything but “insiders” is a fundamental failure to grasp how much power and access that the people with lots of money (remember: $5 billion between them) have compared to the vast majority of voters in this country.

And, you guessed it, it gets worse. The only platform items that the WTF (I still cannot fucking believe) have committed to far are “Whether or not they believe engineering degrees should be free to all Americans, and if they oppose lawmakers who don’t call for Trump’s immediate impeachment” per the article above. Which, uh, that’s cool how about college for everyone not just engineers (while super important and underappreciated), and second, again, uh yeah but that has the same effect as threatening to boycott space travel: the people who agree with you are already there, the people who dislike it aren’t gonna move (especially for you), and there’s really no practical effect that’ll happen in the near term (i.e. Elon Musk loses it Howard Hughes-style, Spruce Goosing our way to space and when a Democratic majority takes the House, for space and Trump respectively).

Worse, in the same vein as saying they’ve “felt left out” the article details an approach that is, well, concerning.

In politics, though, Pincus sees a similarly — needlessly — complex game. Replace the Xbox controller maybe with the impenetrable machinations of Congress, where bills and markups and votes are often the stuff of hard-to-discern theater. So, too, are the costs of playing increasingly high at a time when political money can — and does — flow uninhibited to campaigns in the forms of hard-to-track nonprofits and super PACs.

Simple things are not bad - simple ideals like universal health care, college tuition for all, anti-discrimination laws, equal pay for equal work, guaranteeing the right to vote for every person in the Constitution are all ones I’ve heard Democrats talk about and I for one embrace enthusiastically. But this isn’t about simplicity of ideal, this is simplicity of process - and democracy, even the lacking measures that are so often twisted or bandied about for gaining power, is inherently messy and complicated. It’s designed that way, because if something is simple, then it is easy to manipulate and seize control of. Tech guys, more so than most businesses it seems, are all about efficiency - getting down to basics, streamlining workflow and production, which again! All good things! But politics and civic service is not a business, and it cannot be operated on the same principle of a business - those in power have to be held accountable, and that means you will inevitably sacrifice some efficiency. Not the kind of partisan wrangling and obstructionism (again rooted in accumulating power rather than serving the people or process, but that’s another rant for another day) that has been a problem for the last two decades, and for both parties but predominantly the GOP; complexity is not a vice - if we wanted simple and efficient, we’ve had plenty of examples and most of them we’ve fought wars again at one point or another.

No, this kind of simple suggests that you just don’t want to learn or be troubled to get your hands dirty in what you see as a nasty business, the holier-than-thou kind of simple. It’s the kind of simple where you run into a problem you can’t fix with a check or a call to someone you know, so you call the system broken and impenetrable and fund-raise or petition based off of the frustrations of other people, usually those who have far less money, power, access, or time than you do. It is the simple that is based off of good intentions because it’s easy and you’re scared and you’ve seen the other side go for easy and simple and win, even while lying or rejecting reality entirely. “He doesn’t speak like a politician, he thinks like one of us! He’s authentic!”

And now this is the part where I have to make more in the way of conjecture rather than history and background, but it’s equally important.

As a general rule, Pincus told me in June, WTF aspires to be “pro-social [and] pro-planet, but also pro-business and pro-economy.”

I said this already on twitter, but how can you much more of a useless “both sides” centrist techie stereotype can you be? Other, just as useful ideas from this platform:

"We’re pro-puppy, but also pro-kitten."

"Pro-blue skies but pro-clean water.”

“Pro-justice AND pro-equality”

Also, “pro-social” - whatever the fuck THAT means - is the only mention of anything in the ballpark of issues of racial justice, economic inequality, women’s rights, LGBTQ issues, and more. Hold onto that for a moment.

The exact direction is up to its supporters, who can steer the organization through the campaigns they choose and promote, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that WTF seeks to push Democrats further to the political left.

“I’m fearful the Democratic Party is already moving too far to the left,” Pincus said. “I want to push the Democratic Party to be more in touch with mainstream America, and on some issues, that’s more left, and on some issues it might be more right.”

Yeah, this is pretty concerning, especially given a long list of failed centrist political programs like No Labels or Americans Elect. Both of those groups (which, disclaimer, the latter I signed up for with its “national online primary” in 2012) tend to focus towards “fiscal responsibility” and “treating America like a business” and policy like a balanced budget amendment (nope) and tone policing stuff like you see from Peggy Noon or David Brooks. It usually couches this in “both sides are bad” rhetoric or in the case of some more progressive elements, decries both parties as being basically the same (see: “She’s no better than Trump!” for a more progressive take on it with 2016).

What WTF isn’t: “Pro-politician,” Pincus said. “So we’d like to see either political outsiders or politicians who are ready to put the people ahead of their career.”

And then we circle back to the “simple because it’s easy” route, where anyone can look at the current White House and go “jesus christ, I don’t have any experience but I can certainly do better than that!” Because politicians are an easy target (boy howdy do I know that) and it’s easy to find things in the political system that seem antiquated or archaic or overly coated in red-tape and you can sure bet that some of them are. But it’s the one we’ve got, and making another out of whole-cloth should terrify anyone who understands half of what that’d entail.

Time to come back to that idea I said to hang onto at the top of the page, “pro-social.” As I noted, there is not one mention of what are commonly referred to as “social issues” - LGBTQ rights, civil rights, women’s rights, all of which (if the names didn’t tip you off) tend to be about what the folks in power already have and minorities tend to not. There’s one mention of immigration policy, and that’s in the context of the Muslim travel ban being a catalyst for rounding up an email list of wealthy white liberal donors, and “affordable healthcare” is similarly piled into that one block quote from said email. And that’s frankly not surprising.

These two, and pretty much everyone else mentioned or sniffed at for this idea, is of that rich, white, male, and young demographic I talked about back in the beginning of this novella. So, no, it’s not surprising - it is still frustrating, and dangerous because it begets ideas like this:

Initially, Pincus had planned to solicit feedback at launch on recruiting a potential challenger to Democrats’ leader in the House, California Rep. Nancy Pelosi, in a primary election. That idea is on hold — for now — but Pincus and Hoffman are still trying to solicit candidates to run elsewhere as so-called “WTF Democrats.” For Pincus, one of his early targets: Stephan Jenkins from Third Eye Blind. The two have met in recent months, in fact.

At first, Pincus planned to pitch potential supporters on challenging Pelosi, an audacious move at a time when insurgent Democrats are wondering if her leadership in the House has given Republicans too much opportunity to go on the attack. Days before the launch of WTF, however, the Zynga leader opted against proposing such a plan. (Asked if he backed a fight to unseat Pelosi, Hoffman told me hours earlier he was “waiting to see,” but stressed that he’s “certainly not opposed to it.”)

Also on Pincus’s potential target list: California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who he derided as a “career politician.” Feinstein also isn’t an introductory target for WTF, but Pincus said he’s already had conversations with folks like Jenkins, the frontman of Third Eye Blind, about someday challenging her.

Pelosi and Feinstein, two of the most powerful women in Congress, are the only listed targets this group has been public about so far. The only reason for doing so seems to be that they’re folks who have been in politics for decades and based in the San Francisco area. You could say it’s the “career politicians” thing (see: No Labels for an example of another centrist group that talks about experience in political arenas like leprosy) but that doesn’t really add up. There are Democratic leaders in Congress like Senator Chuck Schumer of New York (18 years in the Senate, another 18 in the House), Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont (42 years in the Senate), Steny Hoyer of Maryland (36 years in the House), or John Lewis (elected just months prior to Pelosi in 1987); all of which are senior to Pelosi and Feinstein, but with zero mention - and while you can make arguments that careerism has influenced any and all of the individuals I just listed along with Pelosi and Feinstein, only the latter two are singled out as public targets.

Yeah, you can probably guess the difference, but here it is: tech companies are shit when it comes to women in their midst. Tech culture (and venture capital and business in general and… ad infinitum) is notorious brutal to break into, and even more so for women who often deal with harassment, stagnant wages, lack of promotion, and hostile atmosphere. The most visibly toxic results of tech culture’s osmosis into society are, unfortunately, displayed often enough on Twitter and the White House (and sometimes at the nexus of the two), but it also manifests itself in ways that are, in the big picture, subtle or even benign in their appearance, but have the overall effect of leaving women on the outside of policy and power - and leading to bullshit like Viagra being covered by every fucking insurance plan in the known universe, but birth control being a coin toss (at best) prior to the ACA.

Ridding Congress of the deadwood is a popular drumbeat and has been more or less since there’s been a Congress to campaign about, and especially against. But kicking out people based solely on the fact that they’ve been there for a long time is a great way to ensure that the folks who make up the institutional memory of how to get things done and passed (see the current Republican Congress as to how important it is to have the folks who know how to make a deal and negotiate with the other party). And when it’s clear that you’re only thinking of doing that, at first blush, to the women in power, including arguably the most efficient and successful political operative the House has seen since Henry Clay?

Yeah, fuck that nonsense. I’ll ride with Nancy Pelosi and complexity any day over two rich bros who think they know just how to fix all our problems with one easy solution.

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