The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Too many things to read this afternoon

Fortunately, I'm debugging a build process that takes 6 minutes each time, so I may be able to squeeze some of these in:

Back to debugging Azure DevOps pipelines...

This shit again

So far in this election cycle, I've given money to only one candidate: Elizabeth Warren. I believe she's best qualified of everyone running to become president in January 2021, and I also agree with most of her policy proposals. And I like that she's not afraid to show her anger.

That said, the adjective "angry" applied to a woman can signal something else. Joe Biden disappointed me greatly when he employed it to introduce a whiff of sexism, which I expect to become an absolute miasma before the Iowa Caucuses. And I'm bloody sick of it.

The Atlantic is too:

The profound irony of Biden’s “angry, unyielding” accusation is that Warren herself is the first to admit to her own anger. A foundation of her campaign is that there is nothing wrong with being angry—and that, to the contrary, if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention. In an email to supporters late last week, Warren rejected the premise of Biden’s accusation, writing, as she has before: “I’m angry and I own it.”

But what Biden and his advisers seem to know all too well is that once an idea builds—once it becomes the stuff of sound bites and headlines and Overton-sanctioned debate—it becomes extremely difficult to counter. To tell someone “Don’t think of an elephant,” the linguist and philosopher George Lakoff has suggested, is meaningfully identical to telling that person to think of an elephant. Biases are powerful things. So, in politics as in other fields, are emotions.

Anger may be an ethic of the moment. But anger, flung as an accusation at Warren, is not about economic disparity or racial injustice or environmental catastrophe. It is about the familiar standbys: “likability.” “Electability.” “Charisma.” Anger, rendered as a criticism, summons those ideas—without explicitly invoking them. It summons history, too. It is a targeted missile, seeking the spaces in the American mind that still assume there is something unseemly about an angry woman. It is attempting to tap into the dark and ugly history in which the anger displayed by a woman is assumed to compromise her—to render her unattractive precisely because the anger makes her uncontrollable.

Exactly. Maybe, as a Gen-X, cis-gendered, straight, educated, 40-something, white American man of some privilege, I have a piece missing that I actually couldn't care less about the sex of a politician when evaluating her policies or ambition. Or maybe other people in my demographic—specifically other people more than about 10 years older than I am—need to either get over themselves or just stop voting.

So yeah, apparently we have to deal with all this crap again, because people would rather get bent out of shape that a woman has the audacity to run for president than to get rid of the senile man-child currently holding that office.

Elizabeth Warren's early career

I'll be watching the debate tonight, as the candidate I support (including financially) has become the party's front-runner. Today's Washington Post takes a long look at how she got started in her career:

Warren loved her job [as an associate law professor at the Houston Law Center]. To keep it, she realized she would have to maintain a good relationship with [Professor Eugene Smith], while also deflecting what she described as increasingly inappropriate behavior from him.

He regularly sat in on her classes, evaluating her talent as a professor. He wrote memos to the law school dean and others as part of the process to determine whether she would be promoted from associate professor to tenured faculty member. He was, in many ways, the gatekeeper to her future.

But, according to Warren, he was also increasingly a harasser: He commented on her clothes and appearance in ways that made her feel uncomfortable. He told dirty jokes and invited her out for drinks, which she declined. She had to get home to her family, she reminded him, hoping he would get the hint.

Warren thought she was managing him until that day in early 1979 when she said he lunged for her in his office.

“If Gene wanted to sink me, he could,” she said. “If he had said, ‘She’s not very good. Let’s push her out the door,’ I would have been gone. And so, when he chased me around his office, I wasn’t afraid of him physically so much as I was afraid of what I knew he could take away from me.”

He didn't. And right now, Warren is ahead in the polls for both the Democratic Party nomination and for winning the general election next year.