Sad to say, variations on this:
“Is there anyone who thinks sexual harassment is a real thing? Is there anyone who doesn’t know it’s all a lawyers’ ramp, like ‘racial discrimination’? You pay a girl a compliment nowadays, she runs off and gets lawyered up.” (John Derbyshire in the National Review, via Slate)
are not limited to the right. Last year in memoir excerpts published in the NYRB, the late, otherwise great Tony Judt wrote about the difficulties of indulging in “the joys of flirtation.” I took particular issue with this passage:
Nevertheless, the anxieties of contemporary sexual relations offer occasional comic relief. When I was Humanities dean at NYU, a promising young professor was accused of improper advances by a graduate student in his department. He had apparently followed her into a supply closet and declared his feelings. Confronted, the professor confessed all, begging me not to tell his wife. My sympathies were divided: the young man had behaved foolishly, but there was no question of intimidation nor had he offered to trade grades for favors. All the same, he was censured. Indeed, his career was ruined—the department later denied him tenure because no women would take his courses. Meanwhile, his “victim” was offered the usual counseling.
[via evanfleischer: rachelfershleiser]
![Who is “we,” pray tell, Nation magazine:
We’d like to think that women in power would somehow be less pro-war, but in the Obama administration at least it appears that the bellicosity is worst among Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power. All three are liberal interventionists, and all three seem to believe that when the United States exercises military force it has some profound, moral, life-saving character to it. Far from it. Unless President Obama’s better instincts manage to reign in his warrior women…
[still from Battlestar Galactica Season 2, episode 12 “Resurrection Ship part 1.” President Roslin, dying of cancer, has just told Commander Adama to assassinate his superior officer.]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lij0mpRZ0K1qa0rqvo1_500.png)
