Links - 21st July 2019 (1)

'I tattooed my face so I couldn't get a normal job' - "Kayleigh Peach was so determined to become a successful tattoo artist that on her first day as an apprentice she got the word "cursed" etched over her eye.She thought her tattooed face would put off most employers and leave her no choice but to pursue her ambition."
She probably then complains about discrimination

Michael Cohen’s Non-Crime: Prosecutor Twists Campaign-Finance Law - "a candidate may intend for good toothpaste and soap, a quality suit, and a healthy breakfast to positively influence his election, but none of those are campaign expenditures, because all of those purchases would typically be made irrespective of running for office. And even if the candidate might not have brushed his teeth quite so often or would have bought a cheaper suit absent the campaign, these purchases still address his underlying obligations of maintaining hygiene and dressing himself.To use a more pertinent example, imagine a wealthy entrepreneur who decides to run for office. Like many men and women with substantial business activities, at any one time there are likely several lawsuits pending against him personally, or against those various businesses. The candidate calls in his company attorney: “I want all outstanding lawsuits against our various enterprises settled.” His lawyer protests that the suits are without merit — the company should clearly win at trial, and he should protect his reputation of not settling meritless lawsuits. “I agree that these suits lack merit,” says our candidate, “but I don’t want them as a distraction during the campaign, and I don’t want to take the risk that the papers will use them to portray me as a heartless tycoon. Get them settled.”The settlements in this hypothetical are made “for the purpose of influencing the election,” yet they are not “expenditures” under the Federal Election Campaign Act. Indeed, if they were, the candidate would have to pay for them with campaign funds. Thus, an unscrupulous but popular businessman could declare his candidacy, gather contributions from the public, use those contributions to settle various preexisting lawsuits, and then withdraw from the race. A nice trick!"
By Bradley A. Smith, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission

We don’t want billionaires’ charity. We want them to pay their taxes | Owen Jones - "Rather than philanthropy, the super-wealthy should give their money to governments that know better how to spend it"
Interesting assumptions - governments are superior in social spending

Will the Guardian now investigate its own tax arrangements? | Coffee House - "Something odd happened at the Guardian on Monday as the paper’s editorial staff were basking in the glow of their just-published splash about the Panama papers. They were understandably excited, having sat on the revelations for months, and were about to put flesh on the bones of the stories that had broken on Sunday evening about the elaborate tax-avoidance schemes of assorted Tory bigwigs. The Guardian was one of 107 media organisations that had been secretly going through the cache of 11.5 million documents stolen from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca... they either didn’t know or had forgotten about the Guardian Media Group’s use of a tax-exempt shell company in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying corporation tax when it sold its 50 per cent holding in Auto Trader to Apax Partners in 2008 (hat tip to Guido Fawkes). Further, they were similarly ignorant about the hundreds of millions GMG has invested in offshore hedge funds over the years. But that seems unlikely. After all, right-wing hacks like me lose no opportunity to draw attention to the paper’s creative tax affairs, particularly when confronted with self-righteous columnists like Owen Jones and Polly Toynbee wagging their fingers at Vodafone and Starbucks for avoiding paying their ‘fair share’. A second possibility — and, admittedly, this is farfetched — is that the paper’s hacks have actually read and been convinced by the former editor Alan Rusbridger’s long, rambling explanation of why the directors of GMG aren’t tax-dodgers after all. In his 2,000-word essay on the subject, published three years after the allegations were first put to him (so much for transparency!), he claims it was perfectly right and proper that GMG didn’t pay a single penny in corporation tax on its £302 million profit from that sale. Insofar as I understand it (and I’ve read it three times) the gist of Rusbridger’s argument is that GMG’s tax affairs are all fine and dandy because they’re perfectly legal. Hmm. Couldn’t exactly the same defence be made of the Tory bigwigs?No, the correct explanation, I believe, is that the paper’s hacks were applauding the sheer brazenness of their hypocrisy"

Owen Jones Distances Himself From Guardian - "Challenged by Toby Young on the Daily Politics, Owen Jones swerved the question of the Guardian attacking offshore tax shelters whilst sheltering half-a-billion of its assets in the Caymans:
“I am not responsible for my employer’s tax affairs.”
While writing in today’s paper that “while the poor’s smallest misdemeanours are punished, the rich are able to draft the loopholes they then use to avoid tax”"

Owen Jones, HSBC, The Guardian and mel - "For a long time I have been very frustrated with the Guardian’s lack of coverage, and particularly investigation, into HSBC crimes. The reasons are obvious – the Guardian is a bigger recipient of advertising revenue from HSBC than all other online papers. What I find even more frustrating is the dishonesty of its contributors in admitting that, or that their income from HSBC has any bearing on their editorial policy. If so, that would be the first time in the history of newspapers."

10 tricks to appear intelligent during development meetings - "While you may think you work for the good of the people of [fill in the name of country here], you actually work for the donor. And donors love nothing more than holding meetings...
5 | Say: ‘I don’t see a gender component’
Letting the group know you care very much about gender issues is something that will endear you to peers and supervisors alike. Donors love people who are looking for the gender angle, even if the project is the artificial insemination of goats in the Andes mountains...
9 | Openly mock the standing government
The only real barrier to your success as a development organisation is whoever’s currently sitting in the presidential palace/mansion/hut. You and the donor are the most effective team ever assembled for this kind of work, and the plans you’ve collectively put together would be an unmitigated success if not for the policies of the president/king/high lord of all he/she surveys."

What Makes Call-Out Culture So Toxic - "Because call-outs tend to be public, they can enable a particularly armchair and academic brand of activism: one in which the act of calling out is seen as an end in itself.What makes call-out culture so toxic is not necessarily its frequency so much as the nature and performance of the call-out itself. Especially in online venues like Twitter and Facebook, calling someone out isn’t just a private interaction between two individuals: it’s a public performance where people can demonstrate their wit or how pure their politics are. Indeed, sometimes it can feel like the performance itself is more significant than the content of the call-out. This is why “calling in” has been proposed as an alternative to calling out: calling in means speaking privately with an individual who has done some wrong, in order to address the behaviour without making a spectacle of the address itself... most call-outs I have witnessed immediately render anyone who has committed a perceived wrong as an outsider to the community. One action becomes a reason to pass judgment on someone’s entire being, as if there is no difference between a community member or friend and a random stranger walking down the street (who is of course also someone’s friend). Call-out culture can end up mirroring what the prison industrial complex teaches us about crime and punishment: to banish and dispose of individuals rather than to engage with them as people with complicated stories and histories. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that there is a mild totalitarian undercurrent not just in call-out culture but also in how progressive communities police and define the bounds of who’s in and who’s out. More often than not, this boundary is constructed through the use of appropriate language and terminology – a language and terminology that are forever shifting and almost impossible to keep up with. In such a context, it is impossible not to fail at least some of the time... How do we hold people to account who are experts at using anti-oppressive language to justify oppressive behaviour? We don’t have a word to describe this kind of perverse exercise of power, despite the fact that it occurs on an almost daily basis in progressive circles. Perhaps we could call it anti-oppressivism... when people are reduced to their identities of privilege (as white, cisgender, male, etc.) and mocked as such, it means we’re treating each other as if our individual social locations stand in for the total systems those parts of our identities represent. Individuals become synonymous with systems of oppression, and this can turn systemic analysis into moral judgment. Too often, when it comes to being called out, narrow definitions of a person’s identity count for everything."

Why Does Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Anger Lefty Feminists So Much? - "We’re accustomed to feminist icons like Linda Hirshman and Gloria Feldt scoffing at the “stay-at-home” mom – a snub of their feminist forbearers and a sign that the women’s movement has still only seen limited success. No one was surprised, for instance, when women’s activist Hilary Rosen suggested Ann Romney “had never worked a day in her life.” For these women, choosing to be a wife and mother rather than pursue a high-powered career was simply not an acceptable choice.But the tides have shifted. Now the career woman who has focused almost exclusively on building her professional credentials (and we all know you don’t rise to elite corporate positions without sacrificing family) is the target of recent feminist frustration. Suddenly women on the left are bashing high-level professional women as elitist, unable to sympathize with the problems of real working women... Women like Dowd or Bamberger are not concerned about such traditional goals of “feminism” – they’re merely striking a feminist pose in defense of their real agenda: a bigger government controlling more of our economy and society. When Sandberg instructs women to take control over their choices, or Mayer makes difficult corporate policies, they undermine the progressives’ raison d’etre. The independence and real feminism Sandberg and Mayer represent flies in the face of the collective activism, gender-based politics, and expanded government that progressives really seek to advance. “Feminism” is a mask, as well as a weapon, for the advance of the state – and it’s an effective one."

Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers - "In addition to Mayer, two other female executives — Kathy Savitt, former chief marketing officer, and Megan Liberman, editor-in-chief of Yahoo News, identified in the lawsuit as Yahoo’s vice president of news at the time — are accused in the lawsuit of discriminating on the basis of gender.“When Savitt began at Yahoo the top managers reporting to her … including the chief editors of the verticals and magazines, were less than 20 percent female. Within a year and a half those top managers were more than 80 percent female,” the lawsuit said. “Savitt has publicly expressed support for increasing the number of women in media and has intentionally hired and promoted women because of their gender, while terminating, demoting or laying off male employees because of their gender.“Of the approximately 16 senior-level editorial employees hired or promoted by Savitt … in approximately an 18-month period, 14 of them, or 87 percent, were female,” the lawsuit said."

Silicon Valley men push back on gender equity efforts - "“It’s a witch hunt,” he said in a phone interview, contending men are being fired by “dangerous” human resources departments. “I’m sitting in a soundproof booth right now because I’m afraid someone will hear me. When you’re discussing gender issues, it’s almost religious, the response. It’s almost zealotry.”... Few were willing to talk openly about their thinking, for fear of standing out in largely progressive Silicon Valley.Even so, “witch hunt” is the new whispered meme. Some in tech have started identifying as “contrarians,” to indicate subtly that they do not follow the “diversity dogma.” And self-described men’s rights activists in Silicon Valley said their numbers at meetings were rising... Few were willing to talk openly about their thinking, for fear of standing out in largely progressive Silicon Valley.Even so, “witch hunt” is the new whispered meme. Some in tech have started identifying as “contrarians,” to indicate subtly that they do not follow the “diversity dogma.” And self-described men’s rights activists in Silicon Valley said their numbers at meetings were rising... Another start-up investor, John Durant, wrote that “Charles Darwin himself would be fired from Google for his views on the sexes.”And the investor Peter Thiel’s business partner, Eric Weinstein, tweeted, “Dear @Google, Stop teaching my girl that her path to financial freedom lies not in coding but in complaining to HR.”... “Some companies have hiring goals like ‘We’ll give you a bonus if you’re a hiring manager and you hire 70 percent women to this organization.’ That’s illegal.”... “Some companies have hiring goals like ‘We’ll give you a bonus if you’re a hiring manager and you hire 70 percent women to this organization.’ That’s illegal”... Cassie Jaye, who lives in Marin and made a documentary about the men’s rights movement called “The Red Pill,” said that the tech world and the men’s rights community had “snowballed” together and that the rise in the number of people in Mgtow is new.On the Mgtow message boards, members discuss work ( “Ever work for a woman? Roll up your sleeves and share your horror story”), technology (“The stuff girlfriends and wives can’t stand — computers, games, consoles”) and dating (mostly best practices to avoid commitment).“I think there are a lot of guys living this lifestyle without naming it, and then they find Mgtow,” said Ms. Jaye, who calls herself a former feminist."