Woke up this morning to coverage of the Male Allies panel from this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. GHC had gotten flak from the get-go for
- Having a “Male Allies” panel at all
- Having the new(ish) CEO of GoDaddy on the panel
So I was already expecting some negative reactions. What I hadn’t realized, though, was that the [white] dudes on the panel were going to talk at the audience for an hour, and not take any questions from the audience.
Protip: Until you’re ready to listen to women talk about the problems they face, and tell you what they want you to do to fix them, you’re not a “Male Ally.”
I had hoped to spend some time in this entry talking about Sean Haugh, and his first/only appearance in a senatorial candidate forum. He’s running for one of NC’s two Senate seats, as a Libertarian, and he was actually invited to participate in the 3rd and final debate, alongside current senator Kay Hagan and her Republican challenger Thom Tillis.
Major problem, though: I couldn’t bear to watch more than about 5 minutes of the thing. Hagan & Tillis spent literally 97% of their allotted time repeating the same pot-shots about each other. Sean actually answered the questions based on his principles & his platform, but it was just too unpleasant to watch the other two go at it.
It’s available to stream from the WRAL website, so go ahead & see if you can last any longer than I did.
Just so we’re clear: I have known Sean for years – he used to be a WXDU DJ, and was married to a friend of mine – and he’s one of the most principled people I know. We disagree on a lot of issues, inasmuch as he’s a Libertarian and I’m a Scandinavian-style Socialist Utopian, or something like that.
So I don’t know that I’ll be voting for him next month, but I’m thrilled to death to see a different viewpoint represented in a televised debate. Or, rather, given how the whole thing unfolded, I’m thrilled to see even one single coherent viewpoint represented in a televised debate.
Side note: I finally bought a Chromecast to stream the debate to my TV, a task that it had some difficulty achieving successfully. But for straight-up YouTube videos which are available for native Chromecasting: The damn thing is amazing. Multi-person collaborative YouTube playlist building, from multiple devices to yr TV, for $35? Bizarre & Jetsonsy. The future.