Thank you for your replies. I will go over this piece by piece.
I get the feeling that as soon as I stop being a novelty, I will turn into a lolcow myself. I am, after all, defensive, short tempered, and have poor impulse control. And I have the kind of optimism y'all love to poke fun at.
What makes a lolcow is
hubris, not mere Autism, social awkwardness, or making mistakes.
Someone aware of their flaws who works at correcting those flaws cannot, by very definition, be a lolcow. Also important to note: Lolcowdom is not an end-point. Someone who is a Lolcow can reform, and in so doing, cease to be a Lolcow. It is one of the things that this site celebrates more than anything else, save perhaps when a child molester goes to jail.
Yes I will be running for local office myself next year, here is my crappy no-money beginnings of a campaign page:
https://www.facebook.com/WarrenLynchForWard2/
As you can see, I'm pretty silly and "unprofessional". Before Brianna, I made campaign commercials for Vermin Supreme. But deep down, I really do care about the issues.'
I wish you luck in that regard, you're already doing better than several local Progressives in my area.
-If Brianna's transgender, that makes her incredibly brave, and it's a big first for a federal candidate to be transgender, and real petty of you to pick on her about it.
-If Brianna's not transgender, that's extra mean to say that then. I know a lot of tall awkward women who are a lot more mannish looking than Brianna, (a lot of them in politics, in fact!) and I hope you don't say that about them too.
Brianna is unquestionably transgendered, and there's nothing wrong with this at all. We found proof of her name change years ago, as well as comprehensive evidence as to her previous identity.
No one cares, in and of itself, that she's trans. In fact, Wu falls into the rare category of a transgendered lolcow that isn't especially hated for being a trans-as-identity biology denier, something that puts her well above the likes of many cows we cover on the Rat King subforum.
So what's the problem, you may ask? Why bring it up?
The reason we keep discussing it and its relevance ties to the fact that Wu constantly tries to portray herself as having a lifetime of experience as a woman, and has done this for almost a decade now. If you look at her Twitter, and d
o a search of her account for "as a woman," she's brought it up hundreds of times, and that's
after a full account purge of her older, pre-2016 tweets.
The problem with Wu doing this ties into another, equally-big problem she has: Constantly claiming to have qualifications she does not (she repeatedly has claimed to have engineering, business, and language degrees; she has none of these), loudly declaring how knowledgable she is. More than once, Wu has done this only to follow it up with a legendary example of how she has no idea what she's talking about, like the infamous "
Will I have to install a BIOS?" Incident. She is someone with no qualifications who constantly parades herself about like she has them, portrays herself as an expert in her given fields, when the average user of this website has more vetted bonafides than her.
This is bad enough, but Wu constantly uses her position as an alleged "woman in tech" to talk over more qualified voices. Have you seen
her appearance at South by Southwest? If you haven't, I
urge you to check it out when you get the chance - Wu not only caused several people who were originally going to be at the panel to leave, but during the panel itself, she spent the majority of it whining about Jace Connors, an individual she knew was a hoax over a year previous - and talking over two panelists with actual qualifications, including someone who did work trying to help get information technology to women in developing nations and someone who has done actual work to defend internet privacy.
It's not just this, either. She constantly claims to have grown up in poverty and been homeless, but those are both lies. She grew up in the lap of luxury and wanted for nothing. She's still fantastically wealthy, yet constantly claims to be the face of oppression and gets the vapors over how hard she has it. She's lied so often, and so easily, that for many on this board, it's easier to point out the times she's unambiguously told the truth.
-If Brianna's faking her issues positions, she's some kind of master actor, because she routinely gets asked a battery of random questions from a room full of people about the issues, and comes out looking great.
Clearly, you've never seen her deer-in-headlight responses when she gets asked something outside her comfort zone. Unfortunately, there's a lot of those:
* Our own
@GethN7 could give you his own account of
what happened when he dared to ask Wu several questions she found uncomfortable on Twitter, leading her to
use her connections to Twitter's support staff to get him indefinitely suspended despite breaking no rules.
* During one of her panel appearances, Ethan Ralph tweeted a picture of her out. Brianna Wu promptly lost her fucking mind and demanded he be ejected from the event by security. While Ethan Ralph is a
gigantic asshole (and has a thread here), this doesn't change that her response to something comparatively minor was heavy-handed overreach.
* During
her interview on the David Pakman show, she came across as unhinged. Relatively moderate questions that Wu wasn't prepared for left her
completely flummoxed. She could not give actual answers beyond "forcing the issue" to why
she had gone against the advice of law enforcement and publicized her own harassment on Twitter.
* She has systemically gone postal whenever asked about providing proof of
Natalie O'Brien's existence. Even comparative neutrals like Game Objective
got hostility from her for daring to even ask.
If Wu seems like she's been stable and handling criticism with aplomb, it's only because you have yet to see her get actual questions tossed her way.
-I do wish I got paid more, but she pays me enough for it to be super worth it. Most other progressive politicians pay even less. It's the establishment politicians who are sitting pretty like Jay Gonzalez and Charlie Baker, those ones give out the sweet paychecks. Except it feels gross to work for them. Whereas say, Bob Massie gets crowds to scream and cry for him on the regular, but has all unpaid volunteers. But they're glad to do it, because it's Bob Massie and he's progressive!
My friend, I've done political work for the Democrats since 1998, so believe me, one former operative to one currently in the machine, I know they pay ass. What you might not be aware, however, is that not all campaigns are this threadbare on the ground. That a relatively new development, brought about mostly because the current batch of progressive politics are big on exploiting the true believers.
I speak no hyperbole when I say that the Wu campaign is solely for one person: Brianna herself.
As long as she gets hers, fuck everyone else.
-Anecdotes about how Giant SpaceKat supposedly was run do not concern me all that much. Everybody has faults in their first business in a field. I care about how this campaign is run. Which is a bit amateurish like a typical first-time campaign, but way more far reaching than any other first-time campaign I have seen. And I'm confident that it's been going well enough to:
A) push Stephen Lynch left
B) make him make a lot of horrified faces
C) make a lot of strides publicizing progressive issues
D) learn enough things to do better next time and perhaps win in 2020
-Yes Brianna can be snobby and have an ego, but so can literally 99% of politicians. It takes a lot of self confidence to run for office, and the line between "self confidence" and "ego" is very blurry. There are some politicians who are semi-poor, or who are humble, or who are humble AND poor, but the field is VERY small. Bernie Sanders comes to mind, and even he's not poor any more. More like upper middle class, a little richer than Brianna even. Maybe Mike Connolly? As politicians go she is shockingly real, personable and direct. We had a good 40 politicians on The Young Jurks, and we liked maybe 1/5th of those. Brianna was one of them. Also Tito Jackson, Bob Massie, Mike Connolly, Pat Jehlen, Sam Hammar, Ayanna Pressley and a few others. Brianna might be the newbie in that bunch, but she knows the issues a lot better than most of the incumbents. Certainly better than Stephen Lynch does.
I can understand why you might not want to dig too deeply into her background and you're willing to give her a grain of salt on her past business decisions - that's fine, but at the same time, Wu's been rattling on every single issue Lynch has ever had, to the point of calling the dude Alt-Right. You can't simply ignore the terrible leadership she's already shown - which includes
complete giggling contempt for the people who kickstarted her, her very financiers - and then turn around and claim that terrible leadership on the part of her opponent is game to hammer away on. It's not only hypocritical, it completely undermines your own side and makes you seem like an ideologue.
There's a reason that
multiple progressive groups
and sites take serious issue with Wu's congressional run.
She hated Bernie before she started pandering to his supporters, to the point where
she bemoaned that Sanders' supporters were in league with Gamergate. And while pandering is a common behavior amongst politicians, we have a
special bit of experience with Wu in this regard.
Maybe she learned all this direct-ness by having every aspect of her life made fun of all the time. But your picture of her as this fake person... it could have maybe been true a couple of years ago, but that's not the Brianna I know in 2018. It's hard not to be fake and detached. But running for office snaps you out of it, with all the people you have to meet. And I bet being relentlessly trolled makes you analyze how you act a lot too, just like being out there shaking hands and fielding questions does.
Again, I understand why you might not be willing to acknowledge this, but Wu's a pathological liar and a gigantic egomaniac.
There's a side to Wu you haven't seen, Warren, and for your sake, I hope to god you never see yourself. My first coverage of Wu began because of a friend of mine, who discussed their own experiences with Brianna and more importantly, the company she keeps. Brianna Wu is someone who will not hesitate to use every means at her disposal to destroy, deplatform, and disenfranchise those who offend her morality. The people who have talked to the Farms, mostly under condition of Anonymity, are, to put it simply,
fucking terrified of her, because even to this day she has an enormous amount of reach and has shown a willingness to use her followerbase as a personal army.
Stephen Lynch is TEN OR FIFTEEN TIMES as rich as Frank and Brianna are. His buddies in the real estate industry have him set up for life. Even Chris Voehl is more wealthy. So wealthy he could afford to pay $50k on a campaign where no one sees him hardly. He has so far raised like $200 dollars TOTAL, and the rest of his campaign money is tens of thousands of dollars of 'loan to self'. You may think Brianna is "scamming" people by inspiring them to donate, but at least she inspires people at all. Stephen Lynch inspires nurses and teachers to protest outside his house! And Voehl inspires... memes at best? Mystery novels?
I'm not surprised that Lynch has an arsenal of problems all his own, including the fact that he is likely much more financially entwined with other interests than the Wu family. Where many, if not all of us, draw the line is that
we've all seen the sort of thing she does when given even a scrap of power.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, but even a wafting scent of power is enough to corrupt Brianna Wu.
Brianna may have some blind spots as regards the working class. I think so did I when I was younger and less poor. Us lower income folks can definitely be "mean" and that can be unpleasant to be around. It's easy to be rich and tell yourself you only like "nice" people, and end up in a classist bubble. But Stephen Lynch, despite his accent, built such an impenetrable diamond-hard bubble around himself when he gave his soul to real estate developers decades ago that he 'thinks' Brockton's jobs crisis is due to "lack of housing". Suuure it is, Stephen. all those boarded up houses are just luxury condos waiting to happen, right?
Wu doesn't have "blind spots" for the working class.
Wu is completely encapsulated within a bubble on Twitter and refuses to engage beyond it. When she engages outside this bubble, she fails. She has no empathy towards other people, and that is a major reason so many people on this board take issue with her: Because every time there was a national tragedy, Wu was there - not doing what she could to help, but portraying herself as the
personal victim of whatever tragedy just went down.
There is a reason she never goes on any program where she can be interviewed by someone who will do anything but pitch her softball questions that, ideally, she's pre-scripted. You will never see her engage in a debate or discussion if she can help it.
And Chris Voehl IDK. My theory is he is Bigfoot. I will find out more when I finally meet him on Tuesday.
Tell us how that goes, a friend of mine is convinced he's the Mothman and you'd settle a bet.
