Pao jury gives hope for our society

I rarely post good news on this blog, but the Ellen Pao verdict shows that there is some hope for humanity. This went to a jury, and was presumably a mixture of men, women, whites, and Asians. Pao's situation is strange:

Ellen Pao is married to a man whom I’ve written about in depth. His name is Buddy Fletcher, and and he has a history of filing dubious lawsuits inspired by perceived slights and financial desperation. In my opinion he is, at the very least, a scoundrel; the forces of law may yet prove him a criminal.

I wrote about Fletcher in Boston magazine; he’s a Harvard graduate, an African-American man, who went to Wall Street and tried to make a lot of money. He left his first job at the brokerage firm Kidder Peabody and promptly filed a lawsuit alleging racial discrimination. Like Ellen Pao, Fletcher charged that he was treated differently from the great majority of employees whose identity did not match his. In my article, I found that the grounds for that lawsuit were thin at best. Fletcher didn’t win it ...

He is broke now, because he is not a financial genius, and there is ample suggestion that he is broke even though he siphoned money from his hedge fund — including retirement money from Louisiana firefighters — to support a lavish lifestyle that included the ownership of three apartments at the Dakota, John Lennon’s old apartment building in New York. ...

One other fact about Fletcher that’s worth knowing: Until he fled New York, married Ellen Pao and had a baby, he had lived his entire adult life as a gay man. Not bisexual—gay.

The judge in Pao’s case has ruled that none of this is admissible, and I think that’s the right decision; in court, Pao’s allegations should stand or fall on their own merits. The mainstream media seems to have decided that it’s sexist or something to write about her marriage, and so I haven’t seen a single smart article that really explores her relationship with Fletcher and whether it’s had any impact on her decision to sue Kleiner Perkins.

Pao was intelligent, successful, and on the fast track at a high-status high-paying job. Then she has an affair with a married Indian partner at the firm, and tries to give him an ultimatum to leave his wife. Later she marries and has a kid with a gay black financial con man (assuming that the accusations are correct). And she sue her employer over some relatively minor slights. Weird.

The liberal feminists hate to ever admit that someone might be innocent, as the NY Times reports:

Even with her loss in the case, Ms. Pao’s suit succeeded in prompting debate about women in technology and venture capital, said Deborah Rhode, a law professor at Stanford University.

“This case sends a powerful signal to Silicon Valley in general and the venture capital industry in particular,” Ms. Rhode said. “Defendants who win in court sometimes lose in the world outside it.” ...

“Kleiner Perkins has been significantly tainted by the facts that have come out in this proceedings,” Ms. Rhode of Stanford said.

Too bad there are no jury trials in family court or juvenile dependency court. I think that Texas is the only state where a parent can demand a jury trial before his kids are taken away.

Meanwhile a somewhat different verdict came out of Oklahoma:

Members of a University of Oklahoma fraternity apparently learned a racist chant that recently got their chapter disbanded during a national leadership cruise four years ago that was sponsored by the fraternity’s national administration, the university’s president said Friday.

President David Boren said the school interviewed more than 160 people during its investigation into members of its now-defunct Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter who were captured on video taking part in the chant, which included references to lynching, a racial slur and the promise that the fraternity would never accept a black member. ...

Boren said about 25 members of the school’s SAE chapter will face punishment ranging from two expulsions the school announced previously to mandatory community service and cultural sensitivity training. The video, which surfaced earlier this month, showed fraternity members yelling the chant on a chartered bus while headed to a formal event at an Oklahoma City country club with their dates, Boren said. ...

Beginning in the fall, Boren said all current and future OU students will be required to take diversity training. ...

SAE’s national leadership disbanded the OU chapter in the wake of the incident and announced it was taking steps to become more inclusive, including requiring all of its members, nationwide, to go through diversity training and by setting up a confidential hotline for people to report inappropriate behavior.

SAE began collecting racial and ethnic data in 2013. Approximately 3 percent of SAE’s reporting members identified as African-American and 20 percent identified as non-white, according to Ayers.

We don't know whether the students have any racist opinions or not. They were just reciting some dopey chant just as they might sing a school song without necessarily believing every word.

I thought that it was just the commies who sent people to re-education camps for their opinions, and who set up confidential hot-lines for reporting any politically incorrect thinking.

I wonder if Boren has ever listened to rap music. If he were consistent, he would punish all the students who listen to rap music.

Somehow I suspect that Boren and the other white liberals promoting these policies would never live with black people themselves. Some of the most liberal areas in the USA are also areas where they have somehow figured out how to keep the blacks out.