I was just contacted via LinkedIn by a recruiter from a company whose board looks like something out of Austin Powers. What could go wrong?
Palantir isn't that interesting or scary, but that dude is a creepo for sure. It's nice of Stanford to serve as a tax-deductible child grooming service for him, though. (The undergrad is herself a piece of work. In conclusion, I think Halfordismo is too intently focused on Chicago and not enough on burning Palo Alto to the ground.)
2: My favorite detail in that piece:
he addresses his staff using an internal video channel called KarpTube, speaking on wide-ranging subjects like greed, integrity and Marxism. "The only time I'm not thinking about Palantir," he says, "is when I'm swimming, practicing Qigong or during sexual activity."
"The only time I'm not thinking about Palantirunfogged," he says, "is when I'm swimming, practicing Qigong or during sexual activity."
To the OP: I'm willing to believe that Lonsdale's behavior was unethical (and predatory) but not illegal, but I think that Clougherty's immaturity and fragility were certainly part of her appeal to him. I suspect he's not a paragon of social whateverness himself, so it was unlucky he chose this particular girl to have an inappropriate relationship with, since I think her claims have become way more serious than whatever actually happened. Unclear consent? Almost certainly. Rape? Probably. Imprisonment? Sex slavery? Probably not.
His statement doesn't specify that it's with a partner.
The problem with Silicon Valley is that they're too isolated from the real, pressing problems that need to be solved. Like snow removal.
I thought they actually did have a suggestion for that, the stupid road electrical grid or whatever that lights up and melts snow and serves as network conduits and who knows what else.
Also there's plow.me, which unfogged should probably discuss.
Also there's plow.me, which unfogged should probably discuss.
Isn't that a bit on the nose for a sex thread?
6.1: I dunno, they call their sales support engineers " forward-deployed engineers". There's something a little creepy about that. Or maybe it's just pathetic.
" forward-deployed engineers". There's something a little creepy about that.
No surprise they adopt milspeak. Dance with the one what brung ya.
You are the road, I am the snow, plow me.
The mother-daughter relationship in that article is... unusual.
I don't believe a single word either of these two people say. She is from a merely less-rich* background and a professional child model.
What, a week in Rome and a birthday party at Hearst Castle in a designer dress and ohhh she's just so confused? Jeez, I watch shit every night in which accepting a soft drink from a guy is too much commitment and compromise.
Couple extreme assholes playing each other viciously as only the decadent and disgustingly privileged can.
*"Anne, a former systems engineer who sold a software company in 2000"
Bob McManus gets it exactly right.
I'm willing to believe that Lonsdale's behavior was unethical (and predatory) but not illegal...Rape? Probably.
That would kind of push it into "illegal" territory.
But good lord could there be a more unsympathetic couple of people here? Can we just resolve the matter by chucking them both into a volcano?
24.last: only if you include that mother. Jeezus, that lady is fucked up.
A shield, cone, or composite volcano?
25: The mother really stole the show, huh?
I read the story and really couldn't see any reason to have a strong opinion about what happened. Minimum, he shouldn't be mentoring undergrads -- fully consensual or not, if the undergrads are supposed to have professional mentors, they shouldn't have to have that complicated by whether the mentor wants to have sex with them. Beyond that, who knows?
It sounds at least like the kind of bad relationship where I'd think it wasn't a good thing for her, but other than that I don't know what to say.
Honestly, while I sort of like Emily Bazelon much of the time, this was a clear case of padding of an article that turned out less interesting than hoped for. Next!
I don't understand why they were disappointed with the 10 year ban from mentoring. What did they think Stanford was going to do, revoke the guy's diploma? Put him in academic jail? Brand him in the face with the letter A?
30 is typical of these kinds of cases: students want things to be handled in-house, but then are disappointed that the strongest in-house punishment is something like, two years suspension.
The interlude with the psychiatrist sounded a bit too much like the sessions the little McMartin Preschool kids (etc) went through. Play tapes, reify perceptions, repeat, repeat, repeat.
To be perfectly honest, there is something very suspicious about that Bazelon article coming out this weekend
Slate Review One Fifty Shades of Grey
"She tempers Ana's raw vulnerability with enough dignity that we have to admire the gamesmanship she brings to playing hard to get. She's good at it, and the rewards are greater than any helicopter ride.
He dances with her in his living room to Frank Sinatra. Eventually he even introduces her to his parents, who have never once met any woman he's been involved with.
Oh my God, ladies, are you dying?"
"But this time things are different. Christian is so taken with Ana that he deflowers her with "vanilla sex," something he's never had in his life--therefore kind of making him a virgin, too. He even tolerates--possibly enjoys--the post-coital pancakes she whips up in the morning. There, as the sun bathes the steely kitchen in flattering, hopeful light, the tableau of every woman's fondest dream is realized: a romantic night with a sexy if possibly demented stranger, followed by a Maxwell House commercial.
It's a class-A fantasy. He's trouble, but she's special enough to change him, an end she achieves largely via the kind of coy rebuffing techniques championed by books like The Rules. "
"The second is the movie's hot, naked display of wealth."
||
Have people seen this yet? Now there's healthy parenting for you.
|>
The interlude with the psychiatrist
There might be a seat for him on the volcano oriented catapult.
He also said that prolonged-exposure therapy doesn't "encourage perspective-taking" and that Lonsdale might have an entirely different view of the relationship. "My role is not to question her veracity but to help her get well."
Not my area of expertise but surely whether the trauma actually happened is relevant when you're engaged in prolonged exposure therapy. If it turns out the patient is a fabulist then how on earth can endless mirroring and repetition of a made up event help that patient "get well".
If there were true justice for all, we would run out of space at the rims of volcanoes.
35: Wow, that's awful. I was trying to come up with ideas for her, but looks as if she's got a lawyer working on it, and it's the kind of problem that has to be soluble. (For anyone who hasn't clicked through: young woman, raised by fundamentalists, born at home, homeschooled, never went to a doctor, no birth certificate, no official record of her existence. She's left home, her parents refuse to help her establish her US citizenship, and she needs help getting papers.)
In NYS, if I were her, I'd get on the phone to the Department of Health Bureau of Vital Statistics to figure out how to order a delayed birth certificate for a non-hospital birth. If I found someone helpful, problem solved. If not, I'd find some way to apply for the issuance of such a certificate that they would at least have to refuse, exhaust whatever administrative remedies there were for the refusal, and then sue the DOH (in the form of special proceeding that you bring to get judicial review of an administrative determination). That puts the problem in, not my lap (DOH isn't my problem), but the lap of someone in my office, and I swear we'd figure it out -- part of the job we do defending suits against the state is finding the ones where the issue is a citizen having a good faith problem with bureaucracy and getting it unwound.
The mother's website has now shifted from deleting posts mentioning the whole thing (but The Internet Never Forgets*) to just straight up taking the whole site offline.
One of the nice surprises of the internet is how it has enabled these kind of things to blow up into REALLY SUPER PUBLIC status, which can push back really hard against abusive recluses like her parents.
*This has a pretty great bit where she shifts from talking about how hard it is for her (so sad) to hawking essential oils, too.
To be perfectly honest, there is something very suspicious about that Bazelon article coming out this weekend
That certainly was my first thought about that article, and pretty much my last. I didn't even get as far as "oh God, Palantir," which I usually do, because it was winking* so hard ("oh, ethical questions about higher education...").
*assume traditional thing-thang vowel slippage here
24: The first sentence was about how far I'd be willing to credit the guy's version. The last is sort of my ranking of likelihood about what happened.
38 has to be the most practical, detailed, bureaucratically expert strategy for resolving a problem a stranger has on the internet I have ever seen.
I just happen to be almost exactly the right person to call (or, sue, really. I can't do anything for you if you're not suing one of my client agencies). But if you are, and you've got a weird problem that you're in the right about, there's a good shot I can wheedle my agency into fixing it for you.
Now there's healthy parenting for you.
When I first saw the OP story, all I could think was that it was written for the sole purpose of trolling Halford.
Fuck you. Fuck Halford, too, but he knows what he's doing.
I wonder if there's any punishment that could be applied to Stanford for failing to explain to both mentors and students the role mentorship is supposed to play in the course.
If this is your understanding of the situation
He dismissed his role as her E145 mentor as a "supercasual thing." He had older friends who also dated undergraduates, he said. "I didn't think it was any big deal."
you shouldn't be allowed to have any formal, ongoing role in the class.
I love 39. "You're having a panic attack....you need an oil!"
Goddamnit, I was saving 35 for the coming week. You owe me.
You can still post it. Nobody's around on the weekends.
Nobody's around on the weekends.
Nobody important, at least.
If everyone stops talking about it, I'll post it in the morning. If everyone keeps talking about it, then I'll ...not bother.
What if we intermittently talk about it?
Or just talk about talking about it, like we are now?
What we talk about when we talk about talking about it.
35: clearly some kind of night of the long knives is called for in this case.
Maybe I will make my own down quilt to sleep in.
I think the youtube videos and other (available through the wayback machine) posts on the mother's website have enough interesting details and complications to support an additional post. (Her article on living in the same house with your now-adult children is really something else, and I'm sure there are other "gems" scattered in there.)
I have a sad story.
Two weeks ago I was in a bar talking to a guy I didn't know but had seen around and talked with before. He seemed on edge, which turned out to be because he had gone looking for his son, a high school senior, at the son's job. The son had never seen him when he was old enough to remember. So, he gave his son his number and left. While I was at the bar, he got a text from his son saying something like, "What do you want?" He asked for advice on how to answer the text. I was not much help. He went to talk to somebody else, probably because I'm not good for advice on that kind of stuff. I don't know if he ever answered the text.
A few days later, I was at the bar again and was told that he was in intensive care. He had gone to get a hernia fiixed and had complications. The complications were related to alcohol withdrawl. Apparently, not drinking all of a sudden sent his body into collapse. His liver and kidneys were causing problems. He was incoherent. Also, he had no insurance (the person recounting this to me was saying how he had been trying to get the guy to sign up for Obamacare). He has houses that he rents out, so assets are there. Anyway, he is in the hospital for over a week with no recovery and on dialysis. He doesn't recognize anybody.
So, I go to the bar last night and learn that he died three days ago. The doctors said there was no hope of recovery and they turned off the machines. He was younger than me.
Younger than springtime if spring was born during the Carter administration.
There's probably a useful moral to the story. Maybe about drinking. He certainly didn't seem drunk to me when I talked to him. But I guess if you are always drunk, you can be really drunk without seeming drunk, especially in surroundings where everybody else is drunk.
Or maybe the moral is sign up for Obamacare so you can leave your estranged children an estate.
33, 41, 70, I have nothing original to say.
There's probably a useful moral to the story. Maybe about drinking.
"Don't stop."
By then she was also a professional model.
I read this and judged, and then felt a teeny bit bad for judging. And then it turned out I was right the first time!
72: He didn't need Obamacare. Everyone on dialysis qualifies for Medicare. Still terribly sad.
I got a message from my (schizophrenic!) mother telling me that they needed my support with my Dad's illness and that she thought I should go to Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings, because Al-Anon had been helpful to her.
I looked them up; it sounded unpleasant, but it didn't sound like the ACOA program was going to be encouraging me to do what she wants. Meh, it all sucks.
That is really sad. Something about how we enable alcoholism as a culture.
77: Do you have to enroll or something? He was in the hospital's intensive care unit, unresponsive, for a while before he was put on dialysis.
78: I prefer moral lessons that require me to rethinking fewer things.
77: I don't know. Usually Medicaid--unlike Obamacare--is retroactive.
79: It turns out that the answer is No.
Maybe I'll mention that to his dad if somebody points him out to me. Thanks.
Bostoniangirl, that sounds really stressful and designed to cause self-second-guessing. My sympathy.