A group of researchers from several universities recently published a report on the attitudes and beliefs of employed men, which shows that those with wives who did not work outside the home or who worked part-time were more likely than those with wives who worked to: (1) have an unfavorable view about women in the workplace; (2) think workplaces run less smoothly with more women; (3) view workplaces with female leaders as less desirable; and (4) conside female candidates for promotion to be less qualified than comparable male colleagues…
I saw this in my own research for Ending the Gauntlet: Removing Barriers to Women’s Success in the Law. Many of the women partners I interviewed described a lack of support and sponsorship from key men in their firms. Several talked to male colleagues who admitted that the success of married women as equity partners invalidated the choices they and their wives had made about how to divide the responsibilities of work and family.
In the wake of Mr. Awlaki’s death, some administration officials, including the attorney general, argued that the Justice Department’s legal memo should be made public. In 2009, after all, Mr. Obama had released Bush administration legal opinions on interrogation over the vociferous objections of six former C.I.A. directors.
This time, contemplating his own secrets, he chose to keep the Awlaki opinion secret.
“Once it’s your pop stand, you look at things a little differently,” said Mr. Rizzo, the C.I.A.’s former general counsel.
Mr. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director and now an adviser to Mr. Obama’s Republican challenger, Mr. Romney, commended the president’s aggressive counterterrorism record, which he said had a “Nixon to China” quality. But, he said, “secrecy has its costs” and Mr. Obama should open the strike strategy up to public scrutiny.
“This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, and that’s not sustainable,” Mr. Hayden said. “I have lived the life of someone taking action on the basis of secret O.L.C. memos, and it ain’t a good life. Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a D.O.J. safe.”
I hope everyone on the Nobel Committee feels like an ass.
Could Picasso Draw Better Than Raphael?
The late-academic optical record, the basis of Picasso’s training, thus contained the seeds of its own implosion. After all, the reality the “traditional” artist was seeking to recreate was no longer latent in the model. Reality lay rather in perception. Reality was the product of reflected light. Just how radical this development was easily escapes us when we behold historical scenes painted by Bargue’s collaborator Gérôme, whose colleagues and students produced many of the drawings employed in the Cours de Dessin. Yet the photographic aura saturating Gérôme’s pictures is unmistakable. The disconnect with truly classical art causes his work to be dismissed as kitsch, a perfectly defensible conclusion but also beside the point. Impressionism, for its part, simply took the recording of optical phenomena to a new extreme, dissolving form in reflected light. Perception’s medium became the message.
Historically, these were the first major steps towards Modernism’s sundry solipsisms, for the artist’s notion of what he was about, deprived of objective grounding in classical principles of form, inevitably became increasingly subjective. Picasso was the protean exemplar of the extreme stylistic instability that was the inevitable result. And in a cultural climate that cherished novelty and originality above all, he achieved mythic stature. At least where his draughtsmanship was concerned, he was inclined to feel he deserved it.
INTERVIEWER
That’s not showing much respect for your fellow women, at least not the writers.
PARKER
As artists they’re not, but as providers they’re oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter. And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word. I’m a feminist, and God knows I’m loyal to my sex, and you must remember that from my very early days, when this city was scarcely safe from buffaloes, I was in the struggle for equal rights for women. But when we paraded through the catcalls of men and when we chained ourselves to lampposts to try to get our equality—dear child, we didn’t foresee those female writers. Or Clare Boothe Luce, or Perle Mesta, or Oveta Culp Hobby.
Golly! Zounds! Gadzooks! These are the kind of things Captain Marvel would say. Almost any other superhero would be too mature for such, childish silly words. And yet, during Shakespeare’s time, they made him one of the more edgy writers out there. They’re not just random sounds, but contractions, meant to make absolutely shocking sentiments less outright obscene. Golly, zounds, and gadzooks were, in order, god’s body, god’s wounds, and god’s hocks. While thinking about the Almighty’s ham hock region might offend a few people, each of these words are the kind of things now deemed perfectly innocent. This shows a huge shift in social mores since the time of the Shakespeare.
Every day these days, apparently, is Memorial Day.
By its public displays, the country is gripped by an immense, endless, and apparently unpayable debt to the men and women who have fought our wars for us, and this is true no matter how popular or unpopular those wars were at the time, or have become recently. The notion of this debt stretches back in time. In his capacity as Official Historian For White People, Tom Hanks agitated for a memorial to World War II veterans because we might “forget” what they’d done as they steadily died off. Not long before that, Tom Brokaw, the Man Who Invented World War II, began the cultish Greatest Generation phenomenon, even though, in our history, that generation is sorely taxed for the pole position by the powdered-wig set of the mid-18th Century, and by the generation that came of age in the years 1860-1865. Dozens of other books, Steven Spielberg movies, and HBO miniseries followed in Brokaw’s wake. The implicit assumption was that the country that had passed the G.I. Bill had not yet “done enough” to honor the veterans of The Good War, which is why we now have an ungainly marble corral in Washington, a triumphally Augustan plaza that is unspeakably gaudy next to the quiet majesty of the memorials to the Vietnam and Korean wars. The sins of the country that had abandoned many of the veterans of those two wars — a defeat and a bloody draw — were subconsciously expiated by the garish tribute paid 50 years later to the people who’d fought the last war America actually won. And, then, suddenly, there were two more wars, one of them unpopular and based on lies, and the other one seemingly oblique and endless. And there were The Troops. And, it seemed, for the rest of us, the twain did not meet.
But just because my choices are limited doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Just because I don’t have absolute freedom doesn’t mean I have no freedom at all. Saying that free will doesn’t exist because it isn’t absolutely free is like saying truth doesn’t exist because we can’t achieve absolute, perfect knowledge.
Harris keeps insisting that because all our choices have prior causes, they are not free; they are determined. Of course all our choices are caused. No free-will proponent I know claims otherwise. The question is how are they caused? Harris seems to think that all causes are ultimately physical, and that to hold otherwise puts you in the company of believers in ghosts, souls, gods and other supernatural nonsense.
Bad week for Sam Harris in my reading.
In Mosiah 25:21, there is a word replacement where the text itself indicates what the word replacement should be: “Therefore they did assemble themselves together in different bodies, being called churches.” One might profitably go through the next several verses and replace the word “church” with the word “body” and see if a mystical meaning becomes apparent. For instance: “And thus, notwithstanding there being many churches (bodies) they were all one church (body) yea, even the church (body) of God.”
