The Thursday edition of the Jolt is here. One more day, then Jim's back. If K-Lo hasn't made him walk the plank. De Blasio and the Uber-Menschen Bill de Blasio, 60 to 0 in . . .: The de Blasio administration has backed away from its fight with the app company Uber, agreeing on Wednesday to drop for now its plan to place a cap on the number of vehicles Uber operates in New York City. . . . Under an agreement with the company, the city will conduct a four-month study on the effect of Uber and other for-hire vehicle operators on New York's traffic. "For now" is an important caveat in this arrangement, and I am confident that the City will get just the results it wants in this "study." But oh, man, this is embarrassing. The de Blasio administration, which had already chosen as targets du jour Central Park's horse-drawn carriage industry and the New York Police Department, decided that it should start in on the hit ride-sharing service Uber. (By the by, coincidentally, totally unrelated, Bill de Blasio pocketed $500,000 in campaign donations from the yellow-cab barons in 2013.) Uber responded with a campaign of pure shock-and-by-god-awe. The San Francisco–based company aired television ads criticizing the mayor, it held rallies outside City Hall, it challenged de Blasio to a public debate (he declined) -- it added to its cellphone app a "de Blasio feature," which showed hypothetical driver availability and wait times if the mayor's cap went through. My personal favorite tactic: Uber made an ad buy on public transit -- now as you're walking Lexington Ave., you see MTA buses displaying ads for Uber. That's Grade-A trolling. On Monday, de Blasio whined to reporters, "Uber is a multibillion-dollar corporation, and they're acting like one." No shift-stick, Sherlock. Mr. Mayor: When you set out to kill the king . . . I've no idea if Uber would do it, but the prospect of the company contributing big bucks to a de Blasio challenger in a primary or the next general is uber-delicious. The Redemption of Tim Hunt Once again, Cathy Young -- who, writing at the Daily Beast earlier this year, doomed the claims of Columbia's Mattress Girl -- is doing, well, actual journalism. Her most recent column is about "sexist" scientist Tim Hunt: Remember Tim Hunt, the Nobel Prize-winning British biochemist mocked and vilified on Twitter and in the media after he reportedly told a gathering of women scientists that "girls" in the lab are a nuisance because they are lovesick crybabies, and suggested sex-segregated labs as the solution? Remember how we were told that this shocking incident reveals still-entrenched sexism in the world of science? Well, now that the dust has cleared and the story has faded from the American press, there's a postscript that amounts to: "Never mind." It turns out that, just as Hunt has claimed, the 72-year-old scientist's comments during a luncheon at a science journalism conference in Korea in June were an awkward self-deprecating joke—greeted with laughter (not the reported "stony silence") by a mostly female audience. The "Tim Hunt, misogynist scientist" narrative has been falling apart piece by piece over the past month; last week, it was finished off by a snippet of audio recorded by a female attendee and made public by The Times. Now, attention should turn to the real scandal: irresponsible journalism magnified by social media frenzy. On said frenzy, Young's spot-on wrap-up: No one bothered to ask how plausible it was that a scientist who had worked with women and was married to a prominent female scientist actually believed women should be relegated to their own all-girl labs—and would stand up and say that to a roomful of female scientists and journalists. The "sexist scientist" narrative was too good. As Guardian commentator Ann Perkins wrote with open glee, "The mask has not so much slipped as crashed to the floor. … Here at last is someone who has come out with it. Women at work are a nuisance." Jarringly, Perkins called this "a moment to savor"—not, as some thought, because of Hunt's humiliation, but because he had supposedly laid bare the pervasive hidden misogyny faced by women. In a more recent Forbes column, science writer David Kroll wrote about a European Research Council grant recipient, Debra Laefer of University College Dublin, who presented her pioneering research on architectural restoration techniques at a session Hunt chaired at the Seoul conference. Kroll expressed regret that the Hunt scandal overshadowed Laefer's remarkable work. A shame, indeed. That's what happens when the feminist mainstream is less interested in celebrating real female achievement than in railing against imaginary male chauvinism. Exactly. And it betrays the shallowness of so much of the feminist Left. As my colleague David French wrote earlier this week: "Feminism always comes back to hating men." It's not a "sisterhood." It's a witch-hunt. Maybe They Should Ditch 'Democratic Party,' Too As the kids say: *smh*. Via CTpost.com: Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson are history in Connecticut. Under pressure from the NAACP, the state Democratic Party will scrub the names of the two presidents from its annual fundraising dinner because of their ties to slavery. Party leaders voted unanimously Wednesday night in Hartford to rename the Jefferson Jackson Bailey dinner in the aftermath of last month's fatal shooting of nine worshipers at the historic black church in Charleston, S.C. Really, though: about time. After all, it's not like Thomas Jefferson contributed anything worthwhile to this country. ADDENDUM: Since Jim is not here to wax about the Jets' offseason, your gridiron fix for the week comes courtesy of ESPN: 
Ouch. | 
Comments
Post a Comment