Rose McGowan in 1998, one year after signing the nondisclosure agreement, and now.

File under Trolley Problems. A soldier explains what Oxbridge philosophers cannot. It's a sign of how far we've fallen that it has to be explained at all.

A thousand years ago when I was about to begin my military career, a wise old retired Marine colonel, a veteran of the carnage at Tarawa, gave me some advice. Paraphrased here, he said

So you want to be a career soldier? Good for you. But remember that the longer you stay in uniform, the less you will really understand about the country you protect. Democracy is the antithesis of the military life; it’s chaotic, dishonest, disorganized, and at the same time glorious, exhilarating and free — which you are not.

After a while, if you stay in, you’ll be tempted to say, “Look, you civilians, we’ve got a better way. We’re better organized. We’re patriotic, and we know what it is to sacrifice. Be like us.” And you’ll be dead wrong, son. If you’re a career soldier, you may defend democracy, but you won’t understand it or be part of it. What’s more, you’ll always be a stranger to your own society. That’s the sacrifice you’ll be making.

"A military in service to a democracy is an authoritarian order in service to a free one: every soldier is simultaneously both a soldier and a citizen." A living breathing contradiction in terms. Before we negotiate with others we negotiate with ourselves.

“They’re gonna look at me and they’re gonna know."

Feminism in 2017. "It's complicated"

It was never an “open secret” among me and my then-colleagues that Leon Wieseltier, the longtime literary czar of the New Republic, behaved inappropriately with women in the workplace. It was simply out in the open.

2

When I was in high school, I let my guy friends shoot crumpled paper balls into my cleavage at lunch. I thought this made me cooler than the other girls, and that my ability to assimilate and remain sexualized was special.  

The author's wedding photographs, on their own webpage,

by Aaron and Whitney Photography

3
Rose McGowan: "I have been silenced for 20 years."
She chose silence.

'There are powerful forces at work'
Vanity, insecurity, Freudianism and careerism.

"Weighing the Costs of Speaking Out About Harvey Weinstein: Annabella Sciorra, Daryl Hannah, and other women explain their struggles with going public."

All told, more than fifty women have now levelled accusations against Weinstein, in accounts published by the New York Times, The New Yorker, and other outlets. But many other victims have continued to be reluctant to talk to me about their experiences, declining interview requests or initially agreeing to talk and then wavering. As more women have come forward, the costs of doing so have certainly shifted. But many still say that they face overwhelming pressures to stay silent, ranging from the spectre of career damage to fears about the life-altering consequences of being marked as sexual-assault victims. “Now when I go to a restaurant or to an event, people are going to know that this happened to me,” Sciorra said. “They’re gonna look at me and they’re gonna know. I’m an intensely private person, and this is the most unprivate thing you can do.”

Gawker 2010.
For the archives

When Ross Douthat Was 'That Guy' at Harvard

You know, That Guy: The conservative dude who ranged the quad like a pro-life Socrates, challenging Liberals to another insufferable partial-birth abortion fight? The guy who ruined all your parties; the guy with the... weird posters on his dorm wall.

This is the picture painted so clearly by a 2001 Harvard Crimson profile, written when Douthat—whose name we still don't know how to pronounce—was a senior. There is much delight to be found in young Douthat's life before he became the New York Times' official reasonable conservative columnist. But nothing compares to the lede:

When Ross G. Douthat tells you that he hopes to become one of the world's most prominent writers, you get a sense that he just might. "Coming to Harvard, I now have a new sense of the power and success that is at our fingertips - I know I will be one of the 25 richest writers of the future", he says.

So we immediately learn that young Douthat began his career as the worst kind of writer: One who got into it for the money. Soon, Douthat imagines, he will be flying to a private island in the South Pacific to rendezvous with fellow millionaire authors Dan Brown, James Patterson and R.L. Stein to hunt the most dangerous game... MAN.

But Douthat's Harvard experience wasn't simply a fast track to the top of Forbes' "25 wealthiest writers of the future" list. His combative-to-the-point-of-incoherent views (he claimed that the Oscars are the product of "left of left wing politics") and his role as editor of the much-maligned conservative newspaper The Harvard Salient took its toll on his social life. He told the Crimson

At parties, when people find out I am the editor the Salient, there are always lots of groans...but as a writer, I find being a conservative a liberating thing because you are the only one saying something from that viewpoint.
Nevermind that you are probably saying these viewpoints to the back of a cute sophomore as she runs away from you. But Douthat didn't even really need friends: He could just chillax on a beanbag and write Bill Buckley fanfic in the the sweet dorm room he had decorated according to what he called his "conservative aesthetic":

His room is adorned with posters of Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe - stars from Hollywood's glamour heyday - as well as a towering tribute to Gladiator. "I think that Russell Crowe's evocation of manhood is something all men should aspire to", he explains, "particularly when there are such obvious parallels between Rome and the United States, with the combination of splendor and decadence of Empire."

Yes, and there was that great scene in Gladiator where we saw that Russell Crowe's character had a poster of Audrey Hepburn in his room.

Of course, this article was written almost a decade ago, when Douhat was just That Guy at Harvard. Today, Douthat is That Guy at the New York Times, writing columns about how the welfare state is bad because it helps too many people and Avatar is a call to heathenism. With a couple of books already in the bag, he's well on his way to becoming one of the world's richest (least poor?) writers. It would be unfair to judge Douthat the prominent public intellectual by what he said as a 22 year-old college student.

repeat from 2012

Guardian

If some of the foreign fighters in Aleppo were callow, others such as Abu Salam al Faluji boasted extraordinary experience. Abu Salam, a rugged Iraqi with a black keffiyeh wrapped around his head, said he had fought the Americans in Falluja when he was a young man. Later he joined al-Qaida in Iraq and spent many years fighting in different cities before moving to Syria to evade arrest. These days he was a commander of the one of the muhajiroun units.

I found him watching a heated debate between the Syrian commanders about how to defend the buckling frontline.

The government attack had begun as predicted and mortars were exploding in the streets nearby, the sound of machine-gun fire ricocheting between the buildings. The mortars were hammering hard against the walls, sending a small shower of shrapnel and cascading glass, but Abu Salam stood unflinching.One Syrian, breathing hard, said that he had fired three times at the tank and the RPG didn't go off.

"Don't say it didn't go off," Abu Salam admonished him. "Say you don't know how to fire it. We used to shoot these same RPGs at the Americans and destroy Abrams tanks. What's a T72 to an Abrams?

"Our work has to focus on IEDs and snipers," he told the gathering. "All these roofs need fighters on top and IEDs on the ground. You hunt them in the alleyways and then use machine-guns and RPGs around corners.

"The problem is not ammunition, it's experience," he told me out of earshot of the rebels. "If we were fighting Americans we would all have been killed by now. They would have killed us with their drone without even needing to send a tank.

"The rebels are brave but they don't even know the difference between a Kalashnikov bullet and a sniper bullet. That weakens the morale of the men.

"They have no leadership and no experience," he said. "Brave people attack, but the men in the lines behind them withdraw, leaving them exposed. It is chaos. This morning the Turkish brothers fought all night and at dawn they went to sleep leaving a line of Syrians behind to protect them. When they woke up the Syrians had left and the army snipers had moved in. Now it's too late. The army has entered the streets and will overrun us."

He seemed nonchalant about the prospect of defeat.

"It is obvious the Syrian army is winning this battle, but we don't tell [the rebels] this. We don't want to destroy their morale. We say we should hold here for as long as Allah will give us strength and maybe he will make one of these foreign powers come to help Syrians."

The irony was not lost on Abu Salam how the jihadis and the Americans – bitter enemies of the past decade – had found themselves fighting on the same side again.