#it is als not a prestige show that gives them awards

[mean-vampyre]

I'm begging y'all to learn about how the industry works before writting 5k words on why your niche show is the most popular show in a streaming service and it should be renewed because u love it. Take that energy and put it into something that matters, workshipping showrunners is always a bad idea and you shouldn't have to work this hard to get them more money

#this is soooo embarrassing #babes it's all about the money if a show was profitability it wouldn't get cancelled #that's not how thing works nobody jas a vendetta against your show #think about the fact that a niche show that attracts internet users will never be a driving force in a svod #they only make money by getting new subscribers #how many of ur internet friends you think are subscribing to max to watch the show?? #it is als not a prestige show that gives them awards #and since I'm already here #thinking that by working yourself ro the bone to get the show another season the showrunner will reward you with a good story??? #delusional! they are not obligated to give you what you want just because you are the audience

[pwilzfan73]

In Praise of Patrick Wilson, Scream King

The classically trained actor has been acclaimed for his work onstage. But in ghost stories like “Insidious” and “The Conjuring,” he’s proven to be a master of horror.

Patrick Wilson in “The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It.” The actor brings both an intensity and a reassurance to the franchise. Credit...Warner Bros.

By Calum Marsh, The New York Times.

June 6, 2021

Ed Warren is sitting in a musty living room in North London, trying to establish contact with a demon. Behind him sits a little girl, said to be possessed. The demon won’t talk, she insists, unless he faces away and gives him some privacy. With his back to the girl, Ed gets down to business. “Now come on out and talk to us,” he says brightly.

Out comes the demon, cackling and taunting in a fiendish, guttural voice, like a cockney Tom Waits. He wants to rattle Ed, but as played by Patrick Wilson, Ed’s not easily rattled. Alongside his wife, Lorraine, he works as a paranormal investigator, and this is hardly his first tête-à-tête with a malignant spirit. “Your father called you Edward,” the demon snarls, trying to get under his skin. But Ed just rolls his eyes and shakes his head impatiently. “You’re not a psychiatrist, and I’m not here to talk about my father,” he says. “Let’s get down to business. What do you say?”

This scene in “The Conjuring 2” (2016), the sequel to the sumptuous, vigorously terrifying “The Conjuring,” encapsulates what these hit movies do so well. The director James Wan shoots the entire conversation in one long, unbroken take, zooming in so slowly that the movement of the camera is virtually undetectable. The demon, in the background, is a sinister blur. Instead, our attention fixes on Ed, staring ahead.

In “The Conjuring 2,” a scene with a demon in the background depends entirely on the range of emotion in Wilson’s face.Credit...Warner Bros.

Wan is demanding a lot of his lead here — the effect of the scene hinges entirely on Wilson, and without a cut, in extreme close-up, he has nowhere to hide. But he proves more than capable. The five-minute scene is an acting tour de force, and one you might not expect in the middle of a haunted house picture.

The range of emotions in Ed’s face is mesmerizing. Wilson, a classically trained actor with a background in stage dramas and Broadway musicals, is able to do so much with subtle changes in the cast of his eyes and his manner that you can tell from moment to moment exactly how he is feeling — apprehensive, irritated, disturbed, chagrined. For a split second, his composure waivers. Then he steels himself, blinks and gains it back. This is a frightening confrontation, to be sure. But it’s compelling mainly for the intensity that Wilson exudes.

Of course, Wilson, who plays Ed again in the new sequel, “The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It,” has been a known talent for more than 20 years. In the early 2000s, he earned Tony Award nominations for his starring roles in the musicals “The Full Monty” and “Oklahoma!,” and in 2003 he was nominated for an Emmy and a Golden Globe for “Angels in America,” the television adaptation of Tony Kushner’s play in which he played a gay Mormon attorney struggling with his sexuality during the AIDS crisis.

“Angels in America” is a more straightforward acting showcase, and Wilson’s performance, full of stifled passion and moral compromise, is sensitive and powerful. He shares scenes with Al Pacino and Meryl Streep, but his is the most affecting turn.

Like many celebrated stage actors before him, Wilson soon tried to parlay his growing prestige into movie stardom. The results have been mixed. Over the next few years, he appeared in a number of high-profile Hollywood movies, but many of them were poorly received, like the limp remake “The Alamo,” the over-the-top domestic thriller “Lakeview Terrace” and the big-screen version of “The A-Team.” When he starred as the reluctant superhero Nite Owl II in Zack Snyder’s ambitious adaptation of the graphic novel “Watchmen,” critics complained that he was miscast.

It was in 2010 that Wilson found an unexpected niche: the horror movie. That year, he starred in “Insidious,” an early experiment in the producer Jason Blum’s low-budget horror revolution and a creepy, atmospheric ghost story with a playful touch of David Lynch.

Wilson played Josh Lambert, who, for the first two acts, seems like the typical horror movie patriarch: stalwart, steadying and, as the haunting begins to escalate, staunchly disbelieving. He spends a lot of time reassuring his wife that she must be imagining the scary things she’s been seeing around the house and that ghosts aren’t real. Until it turns out that ghosts are real, and that in fact Josh has a history with them.

Patrick Wilson opposite Rose Byrne in “Insidious.” He does so much with a stock character.  Credit...FilmDistrict

In “Insidious: Chapter 2,” he’s an evil spirit pretending to be human to his family, which includes Barbara Hershey, left, Ty Simpkins and Byrne.Credit...Matt Kennedy/FilmDistrict

At the end of the second act, it’s revealed that Josh had an encounter with a demon as a child, but that his memories had been repressed. And Wilson, as he accepts this information, manages to subtly disclose a lifetime of trauma. With a faint shifting of the eyes and delicate tensing of the muscles, he conveys flashes of bone-deep dread lingering at the back of his subconscious. Suddenly, a familiar and somewhat flat character gains a new dimension, as Wilson transforms a stock type into someone dynamic and real.

Wilson reprises the part in “Insidious: Chapter 2,” with Josh’s body inhabited by a malevolent demon and Josh’s soul trapped in the spirit world. As the demon-Josh, Wilson has the difficult task of playing an evil spirit pretending to be human, convincing his loved ones that he’s the same old Josh as he secretly conspires to kill them. Occasionally, the mask of the happy husband slips, and Wilson reveals a glimpse of frenzied menace. It’s a terrifying performance reminiscent of Jack Nicholson in “The Shining.”

Ed Warren is Josh Lambert’s opposite. Ed’s role in “The Conjuring” movies is a stabilizing presence.

He and Lorraine (played by the wonderful Vera Farmiga) are called on to investigate happenings that seem to defy scientific explanation, and their arrival on the scene, usually after ghosts and demons have done some preliminary haunting, is accompanied by a sense of reassurance that is rare in horror movies. Wilson gives the calming impression of unflappable expertise, an almost fatherly stolidity, not unlike what Tom Hanks brings to many roles. However frightened we may be, we’re heartened that Ed knows what he’s doing.

Patrick Wilson with Vera Farmiga in “The Conjuring.” Their chemistry helps ground the movie.Credit...Michael Tackett/Warner Bros.

Ed is a man of God, investigating the demonic possession on behalf of the church, and one of the most striking things about Wilson’s performance is the intensity of his religious conviction. When he thrusts a cross at a spirit to dispel its power or reads Scripture in Latin to save the day, he doesn’t seem to be simply holding props or quoting dialogue but to regard these objects and rituals with palpable awe. He makes you feel Ed’s faith, as well as his belief in evil and the supernatural. It makes the scary stuff scarier and feel more real.

Wilson and Farmiga’s screen chemistry has been widely praised, but it’s difficult to overstate just how potent they are together. Their warmth and tenderness are a crucial reprieve from the pulse-quickening horror around them, and the affection they show one another is appealing precisely because it contrasts so sharply with the rest of the action. They are so magnetic that their minor roles at the beginning of the “Conjuring” spinoff “Annabelle Comes Home” practically spoils the rest of the movie: Having had the pleasure of watching them at the start, you’re disappointed to see them leave.

Shortly after Ed’s confrontation with the demon in “The Conjuring 2,” he notices an acoustic guitar in the corner of the same room. The family of the possessed little girl hands it over to him, and he proceeds to imitate Elvis Presley and sing “Can’t Help Falling in Love” in its entirety. The scene does not advance the plot. It’s not a misdirect; it doesn’t culminate in some twist or revelation or jump scare. The openness and gentle humor Wilson embodies is worth a dozen heart-stopping scares: Indeed, that openness and humor are what makes the scares worth anything in the first place. “The Conjuring 2” is already 136 minutes — a more prudent editor might have advised cutting the extraneous scene. But this moment, so earnest in its sentiment, is the heart of the movie. Like Wilson’s performance, it’s perfect.

#patrickwilson #pwilzfan73 #actor #movies #verafarmiga #patrick wilson #theconjuringthedevilmademedoit #edwarren #lorrainewarren #insidiouschapter2 #insidious #rose byrne #the new york times

[alhamdulillah10]

This Life of Deception

This worldly life is like an unchaste woman, who is not satisfied with one husband. So, be satisfied with whatever Allah grants you from this worldly life.

Walking thereon is like walking in a land that is filled with beasts, and water that teams with crocodiles. That which causes delight, turns to be the source of grief. Pain is found in the midst of pleasures, and delights are derived from its sorrows.

Lusts were granted in abundance to humans, but those who believed in the unseen turned away from them, while those who follow their lusts were caused to regret.

The first category, are those, in which Allah says, “They are on (true) guidance from their Lord, and they are the successful.” (Al-Baqarah, 2:5)

However, the other category, are those to whom Allah says, “(O you disbelievers)! Eat and enjoy yourselves (in this worldly life) for a little while. Verily, you are the Mujrimun (polytheists, disbelievers, sinners, criminals, etc.).” (Al-Mursalat, 77:46)

When the successful ones are aware of the reality of this worldly life being sure of the inferiority of its degree, they overcame their vain desires for the sake of the Hereafter. They have been awakened from their heedlessness to remember what their enemies took from them during their period of idleness.

Whenever they perceive the distant journey they must undertake, they remember their aim, so it appears easy for them. Whenever life becomes bitter, they remember this verse in which Allah says, “This is your Day which you were promised ” (AI-Anbiya’, 21:103)

Surah Al-Hadid (its title meaning, ‘the iron’) talks about the reality of the transient life of this world. Several descriptive words are used to reveal to us its true reality. After that, Allah warns us to remember that the life of this world is nothing but a “deceptive enjoyment”

In order to see the real meanings being described by our Creator as He details to us the reality of the life of this world, it would be beneficial to ponder on the root meanings of the several Arabic words Allah has used in the above verse. All the meanings have been taken from Edward William Lane’s online Arabic-to-English Lexicon:

لَعِبٌ

(i) Play, sport, game, fun, joke, prank, or jest.

لَهْوٌ

(ii) Diversion, pastime, sport, or play; especially that which is frivolous or vain; that which occupies a person so as to divert him or her from that which should render him sad or solicitous/anxious/concerned.

زِينَةٌ

(iii) Decoration, finery, show, pomp, or gaeity.

تَفَاخُرٌ

(iv) Glorifying or boasting (viz. to each other), praising or commending own selves for certain properties or qualities, such as enumerating or recounting the particulars of their own ancestral nobility or eminence; or their honorable deeds. Contending for superiority by reason of honors arising from memorable deeds or qualities, or from parentage or relationship, and other things relating to themselves or their ancestors; also: boasting of qualities extrinsic to themselves such as wealth, rank or station.

تَكَاثُرٌ فِى الاٌّمْوَلِ وَالاٌّوْلْـد

(v) Contending, one with another, for superiority in number of (different types of) wealth and children.

مَتَـاعُ الْغُرُور

(vi) The word مَتَـاعُ means anything useful or advantageous viz. utensils, furniture, or food, and the word الْغُرُور means that by which one is deceived; something false and vain. In other words, the life of this world is a provision that is deceptive. It can be used to achieve the best end i.e. Allah’s pleasure and an abode in Paradise in the Hereafter, but is very deceptive in and of itself.

Allah has used a total of five terms and phrases to describe to us the reality of the life of this world in the Quran. Analysis of their meanings clearly reveals that indeed, the life of this world is such that it makes a believer lose focus of the Hereafter.

Consider this – games are fun to play. They cause us to get really involved in them, whether as participants, or as onlookers. The aspect of winning versus losing, or earning more points by achieving a target, enthuses the more keen ones among us to a state of physical and mental euphoria.

When anyone is involved in a game as a participant, whether he is playing outside, or playing a computer game indoors, he is distracted perhaps from more pending matters that require his attention. For some sports enthusiasts, tearing themselves away from a game to answer a call of nature, eat a meal, or pray an obligatory prayer also becomes difficult.

Now, with this picture in mind, we can see why Allah has called the life of this world “a game.” We get so involved in the “game” itself, in its short-term goals and enjoyments, that we tend to lose focus on the importance of the Hereafter. As an example, someone might postpone performing Hajj if important events related to his career are scheduled to take place at the same time in the calendar.

Allah has next called the life of this world “لَهْوٌ” – a “diversion.” It has the potency to make a person lose focus of the goals of the Hereafter. Imagine a person driving  a car; if he or she spots something interesting on the side of the road that will “divert” him or her from driving, he or she will definitely lose focus of the road, resulting in a possible collision.

تَفَاخُرٌ بَيْنَكُم

These words imply boasting to others, and being boasted to, as the above explanation has stated, about intangible assets of prestige and value, such as honorable lineage, awards and achievements, or righteous deeds. Anything that can cause a person to become proud in and of themselves, can be boasted about. It is important to note here, that a person’s intention makes the difference. Several people display their, awards and plaques in their drawing rooms or offices, where they receive guests. This, too, if done to establish one’s credibility in one’s profession, for example, as a practicing doctor whose patients want reassurance that they are coming to a reliable person, would not be blameworthy. However, if it is done to make oneself appear better than others, than it would be تَفَاخُرٌ بَيْنَكُم.

It is interesting how Allah has combined two of the words He has used in this verse of Surah Al-Hadid to describe the life of this world, in another verse in the Quran: the first verse of Surah Al-Takaathur:

أَلْهَاكُمُ التَّكَاثُرُ

“The mutual rivalry for piling up (the good things of this world) diverts you (from the more serious things)“. [102:1]

Since تَّكَاثُرُ means contending to increase in numbers of tangible blessings, it is clear from this verse too, that human beings are “diverted” in this life by this, from their primary goal – which should be success in the Hereafter.

The word زِينَةٌ means beauty and decoration; anything that is instictively pleasing to look at, or beautified to attract our attention. This could include everything that falls under the umbrella of beauty e.g. scenic landscapes, lush vegetation, flowers, and waterfalls, to those things that are made beautiful; which the human heart enjoys.

Bring to mind jewelry, interior decor, architecture, branded/stylish couture, fashion, luxuries, accessories and diverse cuisines. Human beings love to create, experiment and play around with every conceivable kind of raw material provided by Allah, to transform it into something beautiful for their adornment or consumption. Yes, the life of this world definitely revolves a lot around زِينَةٌ !

Allah goes on after this, in the above verse, to elaborate the simile of this world’s life: of it being like the vegetation or herbage that grows on earth, and pleases its tiller/farmer when it reaches its lustrous, colorful peak viz. the plants or crops become strong and fully grown, bearing fruit or grain. However, after a short period of this lustre, color and vibrance, the plants eventually wither, become dry, lifeless straw, and die. The same earth that was alive with crops a while ago becomes empty and plain again; the color, leaves, fruit, grains or flowers are nowhere to be seen, as if they never existed!

That is, in reality, the same thing that happens to everyone and everything during the life of this world. The young, beautiful face becomes wrinkled and haggard; the lustrous hair becomes limp and grey; the strong bones become brittle, and strong muscles give way to weakness; the eyes lose their sight; the erect spine becomes bent. Moreover, every inanimate thing also goes into decline: the architecturally sound mansion becomes depleted and worn over the years, erosion causing its dilapidation and ruin; the clothes lose their newness, shine and glory, withering away; ‘new’ technology loses its value and becomes obsolete and unwanted; the flashy vehicle goes out of vogue and ends up in a junk yard as rubble. The list is endless.

Now that our eyes have been opened to the truth about the life of this world; about how its adornments and distractions are alluring but deceptive in nature, because they divert our attention from the Hereafter and make us think that all this ‘glitter’ will last forever; when in fact, everything on this earth will turn to dust as Allah has promised, we should remember the importance of consistently reciting and reading the Quran as a daily routine, so that we are reminded of this important fact about this transitory life. That way, the reminders such as this verse, that tells us in the end about the two options we have before us – either painful torment, or the forgiveness of Allah and His pleasure – will help keep us focused on those deeds that will enable us to enjoy the truly enjoyable, beautiful, desirable, and eternal life, in shaa’ Allah — the one in the Hereafter.

Please share.

#islam #allah #sunnah #islamquotes #revert islam #hadith #islampost #allahuakbar #muhammad ﷺ #dawah #quoteoftheday #daily life #life quote #life #life quotes #real life #akhirah #dunya #deenoverdunya #deen #ramadan #islamicreminder #islamicquotes #beautiful quote #qur'an #quran #haqq #quranquotes #islamic reminders #islamic books

[bluewatsons]

Mary-Hunter McDonnell & Brayden G. King, Order in the Court: How Firm Status and Reputation Shape the Outcomes of Employment Discrimination Suits, 83 Am Sociol Rev 61 (2017)

Abstract

This article explores the mechanisms by which corporate prestige produces distorted legal outcomes. Drawing on social psychological theories of status, we suggest that prestige influences audience evaluations by shaping expectations, and that its effect will differ depending on whether a firm’s blameworthiness has been firmly established. We empirically analyze a unique database of more than 500 employment discrimination suits brought between 1998 and 2008. We find that prestige is associated with a decreased likelihood of being found liable (suggesting a halo effect in assessments of blameworthiness), but with more severe punishments among organizations that are found liable (suggesting a halo tax in administrations of punishment). Our analysis allows us to reconcile two ostensibly contradictory bodies of work on how organizational prestige affects audience evaluations by showing that prestige can be both a benefit and a liability, depending on whether an organization’s blameworthiness has been firmly established.

Much sociological research documents elite corporations’ considerable advantages, including in the policymaking process (Mizruchi 2013; Useem 1984), the creation of market institutions (Fligstein 2008), and the production of culture (Peterson and Anand 2004). Scholars offer numerous explanations for business’s influence, but one common theme is that societal institutions tend to promote business interests due to their social prestige (e.g., Kim 2012; Mizruchi 2004). When firms occupy positions of prominence, individuals act favorably toward them, even when the firms’ behavior would normally elicit negative reactions. In turn, this favorable treatment allows corporations to reproduce their advantages and influence. The tendency toward favorable treatment of prominent businesses mirrors Matthew effect propositions (Merton 1968): an organization’s prestige, including its high status or good reputation, predisposes audiences to view it favorably, especially under conditions when the quality of its behavior is in question (Benjamin and Podolny 1999; Bothner, Podolny, and Smith 2011; Kim and King 2014; Podolny 1994; Sine, Shane, and Di Gregorio 2003; Stuart, Hoang, and Hybels 1999; Thye 2000; Waguespack and Sorenson 2011).

Of course, the advantages the corporate sector enjoys often come at the expense of employees and communities. Theoretically, legal action against corporations, whether civil or criminal, operates as an external constraint on corporate power by punishing businesses that engage in prohibited behaviors. In this way, the law is meant to provide an autonomous means through which society holds business accountable for its actions. However, the legal system’s ability to promote prosocial corporate behavior may be undermined by the Matthew effect, insofar as elite firms are able to garner more favorable outcomes. This possibility is supported by past work finding that elite corporations enjoy considerable influence within the legal domain (Heinz and Laumann 1982; Shaffer 2009), and that litigation generally favors business interests (Brace and Hall 2001; Dunworth and Rogers 1996; Hadfield 2005; Kenworthy, Macaulay, and Rogers 1996). In fact, in one of the earliest sociological treatments of the subject of corporate crime, Sutherland (1949) explicitly warned that status within the business sector distorted the enforcement of laws applied to corporate offenders.

Despite Sutherland’s proposition, the precise mechanisms through which corporate prestige influences judicial outcomes remain unclear. Furthermore, research on corporate litigation has to date “devot[ed] next to no attention to distinctions between litigant types” (Hadfield 2005:1277), which hampers our understanding of why certain corporations seem to receive more favorable treatment than do others (Dunworth and Rogers 1996). The lack of research in this area is surprising, considering the substantial body of work at the individual level devoted to exploring the characteristics associated with sentencing biases. This work provides robust evidence that evaluators respond to the uncertainty and complexity of legal proceedings by searching for salient characteristics of defendants that can be heuristically used to assess blameworthiness. Individual characteristics that prior work has linked to biased outcomes include race, age, gender, socioeconomic status, and perceived character (Albonetti 1998; Nadler and McDonnell 2011; Steffensmeier and Demuth 2006; Steffensmeier, Ulmer, and Kramer 1998). Yet we know little about the characteristics of organizational defendants that produce similarly biased outcomes in legal proceedings. The present article addresses this issue by exploring whether and through what mechanisms corporate prestige operates as a salient organizational characteristic that distorts legal outcomes.

Our exploration of the relationship between corporate prestige and legal outcomes provides an additional opportunity to reconcile two ostensibly contradictory findings about the effects of organizational prestige in evaluative settings. The first, consistent with the Matthew effect proposition, suggests that prestige leads audiences to give organizations the benefit of the doubt in evaluative situations (Davies et al. 2003; Dowling 2002; Fombrun and van Riel 2003). For example, organizational status eases regulators’ concerns when a company experiences product failures (Kim 2012), and investors react less negatively to earnings restatements when a firm belongs to a high-status industry (Sharkey 2014).

Interestingly, a second body of research supports a contrary proposition that prestige can be a liability to firms in evaluative settings, insofar as it can translate into increased scrutiny and harsher reactions from audience members. For example, reputable companies’ actions are more consistently subject to scrutiny from their peers and the media (Edelman 1992; Fombrun 1996; Pollock, Rindova, and Maggitti 2008) as well as agitated stakeholders (Bartley and Child 2014; Briscoe and Safford 2008; King 2008, 2011; King and McDonnell 2015; McDonnell and King 2013). Kovács and Sharkey (2014) found that books that receive prestigious awards are subsequently rated more negatively by users, suggesting that status markers can produce heightened expectations that lead to more negative evaluations (for other examples, see Malmendier and Tate 2009; Rhee and Haunschild 2006).1 In these cases, rather than inducing more favorable evaluations as the Matthew effect would predict, prestige appears to amplify concerns about motives or behavior (Hahl and Zuckerman 2014).

We seek to reconcile these opposing sets of findings by exploring the boundary conditions under which an organization’s prestige might shift from a benefit to a liability in the litigation process. Specifically, we propose that the influence of prestige on legal judgments depends on whether a firm’s blameworthiness for a charged transgression has been firmly established. Drawing on social psychological theories of status (Berger et al. 1977; Correll, Benard, and Paik 2007; Ridgeway 1991; Wagner and Berger 2002), we claim that the mechanism through which prestige influences stakeholder evaluations is elevated expectations (Kim and King 2014). When an organization is initially accused of deviant behavior but its blameworthiness has not yet been firmly established, a positive reputation or high status will lead evaluators to expect that it behaved appropriately. But once an attribution of guilt or blameworthiness has been established, a positive reputation and high status become a liability, as evaluators react harshly to violation of their expectations. Evaluators are more likely to feel betrayed when an organization they trust and admire has deviated, which can elicit an especially punitive response: what we call a halo tax. Accordingly, once an attribution of blameworthiness has been substantiated, we expect evaluators to punish a more prestigious organization more harshly than its peers.

Importantly, in the context of civil litigation, our proposed boundary condition suggests that an organization’s prestige is likely to affect legal outcomes differently at different stages of a lawsuit. In the first phase—the trial—the jury is asked to determine culpability. During this phase, it is uncertain whether the company’s actions merit blame. The aggrieved party will provide evidence to show that the company’s behavior was wrongful or negligent, and the company will offer evidence of its innocence. Under these conditions, we argue that the positive expectations associated with prestige ought to benefit the accused company, creating a halo effect for the accused. Firms that are found blameworthy in the first stage of the lawsuit then move to the second stage: the punitive phase. Here, the company’s blameworthiness has been established with certainty and the jury is asked to determine an appropriate punishment. Under these conditions, the positive expectations associated with prestige have been clearly violated, which we expect will lead to a halo tax in the form of harsher punishments.

We test our hypotheses using a unique archival dataset of jury verdicts from employment discrimination claims filed against a sample of large U.S. companies between 1998 and 2008. We chose employment discrimination as our empirical context because it is a clear example of an organizational transgression, as indicated by highly institutionalized efforts to suppress it, including anti-discrimination laws and ubiquitous sensitivity training programs (Nelson, Berrey, and Nielsen 2008). Legal research documents that employment discrimination lawsuits are especially difficult to win, partly due to biases held by judges and juries (Selmi 2000), which emphasizes the uncertainty of these proceedings.

Ultimately, our results provide evidence for both the halo effect and the halo tax. In our model predicting a jury’s initial assessment of liability, we find that a firm’s status is negatively associated with the likelihood of being deemed blameworthy for employment discrimination. However, in the second stage of litigation, after a company’s blameworthiness has been established, we find that a firm’s status becomes a liability, especially when it is coupled with a good reputation in the domain in which the transgression occurred. We argue that these observed effects can be explained by the benefit (in the former case) and the burden (in the latter) of positive expectations.

Background and Theory Development

Before delving into an analysis of how organizational prestige affects evaluative outcomes, it is necessary to first clarify what we conceptualize as complementary components of prestige: status and reputation (Bitektine 2011; Sorenson 2014). Although they are sometimes used interchangeably (Lang and Lang 1988; Lange, Lee, and Dai 2011; Love and Kraatz 2009; McDonnell and King 2013; Rindova, Williamson, and Petkova 2010; Rindova et al. 2005), status and reputation are different forms of prestige. Status refers to an actor’s “relative social standing” (Sorenson 2014:63) and usually denotes an actor’s position in a hierarchy (Graffin et al. 2013; Podolny 2001) or social rank (Washington and Zajac 2005). Although different sociological literatures vary in their definitions of status, a common theme is an emphasis on a hierarchy that emerges within a group and allows actors with certain status characteristics to obtain greater power and influence (Berger et al. 1977; Correll and Ridgeway 2003). Among organizations, status is often made visible in the form of rankings or patterns of deference that elevate one organization over another (Espeland and Sauder 2007; Podolny 2001).

Reputation, in contrast, refers to shared perceptions of an actor’s unique and distinguishing qualities (Fombrun and Shanley 1990; King and Whetten 2008) and frequently invokes an audience’s perceptions of a firm’s past actions or performance in a particular domain (Fombrun 1996; Roberts and Dowling 2002; Sorenson 2014). Reputation is multidimensional and can be rooted in a variety of different performance criteria (Rao 1994). The same organization can have a positive reputation in one domain, such as product quality, and yet have a weak or negative reputation in another domain, such as treatment of employees.2 In evaluative settings such as legal proceedings, we expect a firm’s reputation in the precise domain in which it is being evaluated will have the strongest effect on outcomes.

Although status and reputation differ conceptually, they are both thought to confer advantages. The benefits that come from being associated with a high-status position are sometimes treated as equal to the positive outcomes associated with having a good reputation. In fact, recent research demonstrates that actors benefit from having both, especially when they are aligned (Kim and King 2014; Stern, Dukerich, and Zajac 2014). Kim and King (2014) argue that the evaluative benefits that come from status and reputation stem from the same underlying mechanisms: behavioral expectations. Status characteristics theory and expectation states theory propose that certain qualities are ascribed with status and subsequently shape expectations associated with actors who have those qualities (Berger et al. 1977; Correll et al. 2007; Ridgeway 1991; Wagner and Berger 2002). Similarly, an actor’s reputation in a particular domain can shape expectations for future performance in that domain (Raub and Weesie 1990). As evidence of this, Kim and King (2014) find that high-status baseball pitchers and pitchers who have reputations for throwing with great accuracy receive more favorable calls from umpires than do low-status pitchers or pitchers who have reputations for being wild and inaccurate.

Lawsuits in the United States provide a natural setting in which to test the effects of reputation and status on audience evaluations. Key to our theory is the notion that these prestige markers ought to matter differently when an actor’s blameworthiness is uncertain versus when it has been clearly established. The U.S. legal system bifurcates a lawsuit into two discrete phases that vary in terms of established blameworthiness. In the next sections, we discuss how the enhanced expectations triggered by organizational prestige are likely to influence audience evaluations within these two separate phases.

The Trial Phase: How Prestige Influences Evaluations Made Under Conditions Where Blameworthiness Has Not Been Established

The positive expectations associated with prestige ought to be especially beneficial when actors face controversial situations for which their level of responsibility is unclear (Lange et al. 2011; McDonnell and King 2013; Rindova, Petkova, and Kotha 2007). For example, some past research finds that audiences are less likely to assign a reputable organization responsibility for a crisis, such as when its products are deemed harmful or dangerous (Fombrun 1996; Klein and Dawar 2004). Other work finds that key external audiences, like the media, are less critical of prestigious organizations implicated in a crisis (Balzer and Sulsky 1992; Coombs 1999; Ulmer 2001). Critical stakeholders like politicians are also less likely to cut ties with high-status organizations accused of bad behavior (McDonnell and Werner 2016).

Reputation and status inform the holistic assessments evaluators make of firms by shaping expectations (O’Donnell and Schultz 2005). Specifically, people tend to infer less blame and responsibility for actors’ bad actions when they have pre-established positive expectations about the actor. This tendency stems from various social psychological theories, including status characteristics and expectation states theories (Berger et al. 1977; Correll and Ridgeway 2003), as well as theories of motivated reasoning (Traut-Mattausch et al. 2004). The former theories propose that an actor’s position in a status hierarchy produces performance expectations, and these expectations lead to reproduction of the hierarchy. The concept of motivated reasoning, in contrast, emphasizes that people tend to interpret evidence presented to them in a way that allows them to confirm their priors (Ditto and Lopez 1992; Kunda 1987). In explorations of motivated reasoning within the context of jury decisions, prior work shows that decision-makers are likely to interpret the evidence presented in a way that confirms their preexisting beliefs derived from racial stereotypes (Rachlinski et al. 2009) or initial impressions of a defendant’s moral character (Nadler and McDonnell 2011).

When the quality or appropriateness of performance is difficult to evaluate, observers will fall back on previously held beliefs and expectations about an actor. In turn, these expectations color observers’ judgments and inferences when they are faced with evidence of a potential organizational transgression, such that the actions of high-status and reputable companies are likely to be interpreted in a more favorable light. For example, one experimental study found that participants evaluating a price increase were more inclined to infer that the action stemmed from a positive and fair motive when the company was reputable, but they tended to infer a negative and unfair motive when the company was less reputable (Campbell 1999). Applied to the context of employment discrimination trials, this research suggests that juries tasked with evaluating a defendant firm’s culpability for employment discrimination are less likely to deem a prestigious organization’s actions as blameworthy. Thus, we expect the following:

Hypothesis 1a: In the first stage of a lawsuit where a company is charged with a transgression, the defendant firm’s status will be negatively associated with its likelihood of being found liable.

Hypothesis 1b: In the first stage of a lawsuit where a company is charged with a transgression, the defendant firm’s reputation will be negatively associated with its likelihood of being found liable.

We also contend that the positive effects of status and reputation on jury evaluations will be greater when the two forms of prestige are aligned. Past research indicates that alignment between status and reputation magnifies the potential for an actor to receive advantages (e.g., Stern et al. 2014). One reason for this is that, as Kim and King (2014) found, status and reputational alignment sharpens behavioral expectations, magnifying innate biases. Another reason is that whereas status is a diffuse signal of prestige and quality, reputation is domain-specific and informs evaluators’ choices about when and how status should influence their judgments. Accordingly, alignment between status and reputation reinforces expectations about a particular kind of behavior, which may be directly relevant to evaluations of blameworthiness for a particular transgression. Thus, if a high-status company is also known for being a good employer, the jury in an employment discrimination lawsuit may believe that the company’s high status is partly a result of being such an outstanding employer, giving the jury more reason to expect the company treats its employees responsibly.

Hypothesis 2: When charged with a transgression, a firm’s status will interact with its domain-specific reputation to negatively affect the likelihood that it will be found liable.

The Punitive Phase: How Prestige Influences Evaluations Made Under Conditions When Blameworthiness Has Been Established

The same positive expectations associated with high status and good reputations can, however, have detrimental effects once an organization’s blameworthiness for a transgression has been established. Prestigious organizations are held to a higher standard precisely because more is expected of them. When it is proven that they have engaged in actions that do not accord with their proffered image, they are more likely to be pegged a hypocrite, provoking a more punitive response from evaluators (Harrison, Ashforth, and Corley 2009).

The scope condition of this halo tax is that an organization’s blameworthiness has previously been established, such that observers have no choice but to revisit and question their prior beliefs and expectations. Evaluators who previously believed that an organization maintained a high standard are motivated to punish the organization for failing to live up to that very standard. Illustrative of this, King and McDonnell (2015) found that organizations with better reputational standing are more likely to be targeted by activist groups when they fail to live up to their reputation. Similarly, Rhee and Haunschild (2006) found that firms with higher reputations for product quality suffer greater market penalties in response to a product recall.

Psychological research on the inclination to punish suggests there is a strong relationship between the anger elicited by an offense and the extent to which people are inclined to punish the offender (Bies 1987; Kahneman, Schkade, and Sunstein 1998). Demonstrating a phenomenon they call “betrayal aversion,” Koehler and Gershoff (2003) found that people recommend more severe punishments when a person or entity they trust behaves in a way that violates their trust. Relatedly, Rosoff (1989) discovered that high-status physicians found guilty of a serious crime were evaluated more negatively than low-status physicians who committed the same crime, and Skolnick and Shaw (1994) found that high-status criminals were judged more harshly when their crime was deemed to be related to their profession.

Extended to the organizational setting, betrayal aversion suggests that the transgressions of high-status or reputable organizations are especially likely to provoke feelings of outrage from their audiences, as audience members may feel duped, jilted, or betrayed given the strong, positive expectations they had for those organizations. This should, in turn, provoke an especially punitive response.

Hypothesis 3a: Once an organization has been found blameworthy for a transgression, higher status will be associated with harsher punishments.

Hypothesis 3b: Once an organization has been found blameworthy for a transgression, more positive reputations in the domain of the transgression will be associated with harsher punishments.

We also expect that the alignment of status and reputation will magnify the harshness of punishment. Inasmuch as alignment sharpens expectations associated with status in a domain-specific area, juries will see employee discrimination by high-status companies that have a reputation for being a good employer as an even greater betrayal.

Hypothesis 4: Among firms found blameworthy for a transgression, a firm’s status will interact with its domain-specific reputation to positively affect the harshness of punishment.

Research Setting

Employment discrimination lawsuits in the United States result when an employee or prior employee of a company alleges that the company treated them adversely (e.g., by firing or refusing to promote them) because of their membership in a protected class. Federally recognized protected classes include those based on gender, age, disability, religion, race, or nationality. This context presents an ideal setting for exploring our theory. The United States has formally prohibited discrimination since the passage of Title VII in the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Sutton et al. 1994), which remains the primary federal cause of action that gives victims of discrimination a right to sue their employer. However, discrimination continues to be a pervasive problem in the U.S. workplace (Edelman 2016); in recent years, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has received nearly 100,000 discrimination charges per annum (USEEOC 2013). Employment discrimination is therefore a clear example of misconduct that is nevertheless common enough to enable empirical investigation.

These cases also represent an ideal opportunity to study how prestige affects organizational punishment because of the manner in which punishment occurs. Organizations found liable for discrimination have to pay a monetary sum to the employee, referred to as the employee’s “damages award.” One portion of that sum, the “compensatory damages award,” is meant to compensate injured parties for the direct financial or emotional harms they suffered as a consequence of the discriminatory action. This aspect of damages is legally limited to the wronged individual’s real or projected losses established in the evidence (e.g., the value of their lost salary), giving the jury little discretion over the awarded amount. However, the jury has more discretion to determine a separate portion of the plaintiff’s damages, the “punitive damages award,” which reflects a sum that the jury can make the corporation pay for purely punitive reasons, meant to demonstrate society’s disapproval of its deviant behavior. The punitive damages award, which can vary extensively from case to case, provides an easily observable and quantifiable proxy for the severity of audience reactions across different cases of deviance. For this reason, punitive damages have been used in other research exploring the mechanisms that affect the severity of punitive responses (e.g., Nordgren and McDonnell 2011).

The structure of employment discrimination suits makes them especially useful for testing our predictions about the disparate role of prestige in attributions of blameworthiness (when there is uncertainty about the firm’s culpability) versus allotments of punishment (when a firm’s deviance has been established). Employment discrimination lawsuits are bifurcated into two discrete phases. The first phase, the trial, determines whether the company is liable, or blameworthy, for a proscribed discriminatory action. Aggrieved employees will provide evidence to show that a company wrongfully discriminated against them, and companies will offer evidence of their innocence. During this first stage, a company’s blameworthiness is uncertain. Some charges of employment discrimination are supported by overwhelming evidence, such that blameworthiness is clearly apparent before a formal declaration by a jury, but such clear-cut cases are unlikely to be in our sample of cases that go to trial and are ultimately decided by a jury. We interviewed a prominent corporate defense attorney who explained this as follows:

There are very high expenses associated with litigating a case through trial, so it is not in the interests of either party to litigate a trial where the outcome of the case is clear. If there is clear and compelling evidence of discrimination, the economic incentives of the defendant are to settle the case, as opposed to waiting for a jury verdict. The cost of a jury verdict is typically greater than a settlement . . . and precedential consequences of having an adverse judgment that could be applied in future cases strongly push companies to not litigate the case if the evidence is clear. So, really, it is only the hard cases that go to trial.

As this quote illustrates, the cases typically litigated before a jury are those for which the outcome is difficult to predict, such that the first stage of a trial is properly characterized as having a considerable degree of uncertainty about whether the defendant company’s actions were in fact deviant.

Firms found liable for discrimination in the first stage of a trial then move on to the second, punitive, stage: the damages phase. At this stage, the court holds a separate proceeding to ascertain the appropriate amount to make the company pay the aggrieved employee. Again, both the employee and the company will present evidence to encourage the jury to award an amount in their favor. But here, the company’s blameworthiness for a deviant action is no longer uncertain because the company has already been found liable. The two stages of a lawsuit thus represent two evaluative settings that vary in terms of whether blameworthiness has been established, providing an ideal context to test our hypotheses.

Past research on corporations and litigation points to numerous advantages that companies have in the process. For one, the “size and complex interrelationships of large corporations make it difficult [for ordinary plaintiffs] to compete with them on an equal basis in investigations and in litigation” (Clinard and Yeager 1980:313). Moreover, because corporations are often “repeat players,” they accumulate more legal expertise and relationships with judges that improve their chances of successfully navigating the litigation process when compared to “one shot” plaintiffs (Galanter 1974). We propose prestige as an additional source of power that corporations uniquely possess over relatively unknown, individual plaintiffs, but we also account for the relative influence of corporate resources and past experience in our analyses.

Methods

Sample Creation

To test our hypotheses, we built a dataset of all employment discrimination cases against any of the 826 unique companies that were surveyed for Fortune’s Most Admirable Companies rankings between 1998 and 2008. The Fortune rankings are regularly used in organizational scholarship as an indicator of a company’s prominence in the corporate field (e.g., Fombrun and Shanley 1990; King 2008; McDonnell and King 2013; Roberts and Dowling 2002; Staw and Epstein 2000). To create the sample each year, Fortune surveyors begin with the Fortune 1,000, from which they select the 10 largest firms (based on asset size) from each industry. They then collect survey data about these firms from industry executives, directors, and security analysts. Fortune aggregates the survey results for each company, then assigns each company a reputation score that ranges from 0 to 10. Fortune ultimately uses this data to create and publish a list of the 50 Most Admired Companies, but our sample includes every company surveyed (including those that were not ultimately selected for the final published list), providing a sample of organizations with a wide variation of scores. By limiting our analysis to companies surveyed for the rankings, we are able to more accurately quantify and compare the relative status of all companies in our analysis. However, this sampling strategy does limit the scope of our findings to firms that are fairly large and visible, which are likely to have the kind of well-established reputations and status orderings that are perceptible to lay audience members. As past research shows, the Fortune ranking has become a commensurable status hierarchy within the corporate realm (Bermiss, Zajac, and King 2014), and maintaining one’s position in the ranking is greatly valued by prestigious firms (McDonnell and King 2013). Thus, the ranking exhibits similar qualities to other status rankings (see Espeland and Sauder 2007).

Having established our sample, we searched the Westlaw jury verdicts database for all employment discrimination cases brought against sampled firms. This database is a comprehensive legal resource that includes a searchable archive with information on the jury verdicts or outcomes of civil (noncriminal) cases brought in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Ultimately, we identified a total of 922 employment discrimination cases brought against companies included in the Fortune rankings that were decided between 1998 and 2008. From these, we culled a subset (n = 176) that settled out of court and never went to trial, as well as a subset (n = 112) that were dismissed by the trial judge for failure to provide a colorable case or for lack of adequate evidence (i.e., dismissal or summary judgment). We ran several robustness checks to ensure that culling of this subset does not introduce selection bias for our ultimate analysis. Unpaired t-tests of means comparing the firms in the top 50 percent of status and domain-specific reputation with the firms in the bottom 50 percent yielded no evidence of significant differences in the incidence of settlement or dismissal between these two groups. Supplemental regressions of the likelihood of settling out of court and of early dismissal also showed no indication of a company’s reputation or status being significantly associated with either outcome.

To focus on cases that were decided by comparable juries, we omit from our analysis a subset of 17 cases that were decided by a judge (i.e., bench trials) or an arbitrator. Additionally, because class action suits, as opposed to suits brought by individuals or small groups, are likely to present idiosyncratic incentives against litigating due to the potentially extreme damages awards they invite when successful, we omit a further four cases that were expressly labeled as class action lawsuits.3

Of the remaining 613 employment discrimination cases in our sample that went to jury, the company was found liable for discrimination in 303 cases and was deemed not blameworthy in 310. Data on incorporated controls were missing for 94 of these firms, reducing our final sample size to 519 cases.

Dependent Variable

In our analysis predicting the outcome of the first stage of employment discrimination suits, we use a binary dependent variable coded “1” if the jury found the company liable and “0” if the company was found not to have engaged in employment discrimination.

For companies found liable of employment discrimination, we capture the extent of punishment through the punitive damages award, a continuous count variable indicating the amount (in dollars) that the company was assessed as punishment for its discriminatory action. A total of 303 cases in our sample resulted in a verdict of liability and produced a damages award. Federal guidelines do not allow punitive damages to be awarded for violations of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), so we omit 24 cases that rested solely on claims brought under the ADEA. Data on punitive damages were not reported in three cases, and data on incorporated controls were missing for 38 firms, reducing the sample size to 238 cases in models predicting punishment.

Independent Variables

Our measure of organizational status is based on the general score of favorability a firm received in the Fortune Most Admirable Companies rankings. This Most Admired index is a proxy for overall audience assessments, being founded, in part, on surveys capturing industry leaders’ and analysts’ perceptions Each organization included in the list is given a raw score that ranges from 0 to 10. Inherent in this process are comparisons that executives and analysts make between peer firms. Surveyed individuals are asked to rate the 10 largest firms in their industry along various dimensions, allowing Fortune to construct a positional hierarchy of firms within and across industries (for details about the ranking process, see Bermiss et al. 2014). Because the Fortune rankings are collected from surveys administered in the year prior to that in which they are reported, the rankings have a natural one-year lag. We therefore base our status variable on each company’s score in the same year that the verdict in a given case was decided.

We chose to use the Fortune Most Admired rankings to capture status because they (1) are positional, (2) convey relative standing of general favorability to an organization, as opposed to the domain-specific judgment of quality associated with reputation (Rhee and Haunschild 2006; Sorenson 2014), and (3) are available for a large sample of firms across the full panel of our archival analysis. Importantly, we are not arguing that jurors are aware of the Fortune rankings per se, but rather that the Fortune rankings provide a colorable and quantifiable proxy for perceptions of organizational status in the general population from which jurors are drawn (Bermiss et al. 2014). Although the Fortune rankings are constructed from surveys of industry insiders, prior work provides evidence that the rankings reliably align with perceptions held by external audience members. For example, the Fortune rankings predict the willingness of a broad set of actors to associate with a given firm, including audience members within its corporate community, like business partners (Sullivan, Haunschild, and Page 2007), as well those outside its corporate community, like politicians (McDonnell and Werner 2016). Other work demonstrates that a firm’s Fortune ranking predicts how it will respond to social activists and manage its public image in the media (e.g., King 2008; McDonnell and King 2013). These findings suggest that the Fortune rankings accord with a firm’s own beliefs about the general public’s assessment of its status. We acknowledge that the Fortune ranking is an imperfect proxy for specific juries’ assessments of corporate status, and it does introduce potential measurement error. But given that prior research demonstrates that the ranking has validity among activists and other outsiders to the corporate community and maps on to their strategic interactions with companies (e.g., King and McDonnell 2015), we deem it a defensible assumption that the rankings align with jury members’ perceptions of status.

One concern about the Fortune rankings as a proxy for general audience assessments of status is that the measure has been historically dominated by recent performance (Bermiss et al. 2014). This could introduce measurement error in our setting insofar as industry insiders are more likely than the general public to prioritize performance indicators in their assessment of status (Brown and Perry 1994). Substantiating this concern, the raw reputation scores in our sample show strong correlations with firm size and performance. We address this issue by implementing Brown and Perry’s (1994) method for removing the financial performance halo from the Fortune ranking, which involves a two-stage empirical strategy. First, we ran a regression in which we predicted reputation as a function of four indicators of size and performance: liquid assets, Tobin’s Q, total employees, and logged assets. The models show that each of these variables significantly predict Fortune rankings. Next, we computed the residuals from this model, which substantively correspond to that portion of the Fortune ranking that cannot be explained by size and recent performance. We then used these residuals as the measure of status in our models, rather than the raw Fortune ranking.4

In contrast to status, reputation scholars argue that most organizations’ reputations rest on a set of specific practices or characteristics that distinguish them from competitors in a particular domain (e.g., Bitektine 2011; King and Whetten 2008; Lange et al. 2011). We examine the effect of domain-specific reputation by utilizing the annual ratings of firms’ social reputations provided by Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini & Co (KLD) STATS (Statistical Tool for Analysis of Trends). The KLD data draw from diverse sources, including media reports and firm disclosures, to construct yearly numerical ratings of firms’ strengths and weaknesses in seven social domains: community, corporate governance, diversity, employee relations, environment, human rights, and product. Employment discrimination naturally touches on two of the social domains covered in the KLD STATS: diversity and employee relations. To create our proxy for domain-specific reputation, we computed a net composite score of the number of strengths minus the number of concerns in these two areas.5

Like our measure for status, KLD data are an indirect proxy for an individual jury’s perceptions of domain-specific reputation. However, KLD data are a common proxy for reputation in organizational sociology (see, e.g., McDonnell, King, and Soule 2015) that corresponds with perceptions held by outsiders to the corporate community (Werner 2015). Although the precise data collection practices utilized to construct the KLD reputation scores are proprietary, the organization reports that its scores are at least partially constructed using sources readily observable by the average member of the public, including media reports and public criticisms by major NGOs. Thus we deem it a defensible assumption that these scores align broadly with the perceptions of typical jurors. KLD data were only available for around 75 percent of the firms in our full sample, leading to a smaller sample size in models that include our proxy for domain-specific reputation.

Control Variables

We introduce a battery of control variables to account for case-level and firm-level attributes that might influence perceived blameworthiness and punitive responses in the course of a discrimination suit. Among the case attributes that drive outcomes, prior work in criminology suggests that the severity of the defendant’s offense is a primary determinant of the severity of punishment (Steffensmeier, Kramer, and Streifel 1993). The severity of firms’ discriminatory behaviors can vary considerably, and we account for this in several ways in our models. First, we consider the underlying adverse employment actions that allegedly occurred in each case. The summaries of sampled cases in jury reporters provide a detailed breakdown of 25 separate categories of adverse actions, ranging from termination to harassment to a failure to hire. Often several adverse actions are alleged within a single case. We include binary indicators in the models for each of these adverse actions, coding them “1” if a given action is alleged to have taken place in a case, and “0” otherwise.6 A second way we account for offense severity is by controlling for the number of people who were allegedly adversely affected by a discriminatory action, as indicated by the number of plaintiffs in the case.7 Finally, in models predicting punishment, we account for varying offense severity by controlling for the level of harm the victim suffered as a direct result of the discrimination, a sum captured in the compensatory damages portion of the verdict. This portion of a verdict is meant to compensate a plaintiff for losses accrued as a direct result of the discrimination. Compensatory damages may include economic (e.g., lost wages) and non-economic (e.g., emotional pain and suffering) damages. To correct for a pronounced right-skew in these latter two variables, we transformed each by taking its natural log.8

Because different classes of discrimination may elicit different punitive responses from jury members, we include a dummy variable for each federally-recognized protected class on which a discrimination claim is based. These include race or nationality discrimination, gender discrimination, age discrimination, disability discrimination, and religious discrimination. Recognizing that juries’ responses to cases involving different classes of discrimination are likely to vary between communities and over time, we also include a variable, win ratio for similar suits in prior year, that captures the percentage of cases in the same state in the prior year where a company was found liable for the same category of discrimination as a given observation (e.g., religious discrimination, racial discrimination). Additionally, prior research suggests that the victim’s gender may affect punishment. Defendants tend to be punished more severely when they victimize women, who are perceived as more vulnerable (Curry, Lee, and Rodriguez 2004). To control for this possibility, we include a binary variable, female plaintiff, coded “1” if any plaintiff in a case is female, and “0” otherwise.

To protect the anonymity of jurors, information on individual jury members in a case is not publically available. We are accordingly unable to control for the demographic composition of individual juries. Given that jury members are selected from random drawings of local voting populations, we do not expect jury compositions would vary systematically with respect to firm prestige. However, because legal and cultural responses to discrimination may differ by region, we do include fixed effects for the circuit in which each case was brought. We account for potentially meaningful differences in venue in two additional ways. First, federal and state venues can differ in their discrimination statutes, rules of discovery, and standards for summary judgment, each of which could affect case outcomes. We thus include a binary control capturing whether the case was brought in federal, as opposed to state, court. Second, to address the possibility that companies may enjoy a “home field advantage” when they face a jury in their home state, we include a binary variable, home state case, that is coded “1” when the case is in the state where the defendant company is headquartered, and “0” otherwise.

In addition to these case-level controls, we account for several firm-level characteristics that may be associated with legal outcomes. One variable likely to play a central role in attributions of blameworthiness and punishment is the defendant’s prior experience with similar cases. Interestingly, the organizational and criminological literatures suggest two competing mechanisms through which prior experience could influence case outcomes. The organizations literature predicts that prior experience should benefit firms through a “repeat player” effect, whereas the criminology literature suggests that prior experience could provoke a disadvantageous “repeat offender” effect. The repeat player effect, first posited by Galanter (1974), suggests that firms acquire expertise and develop critical relationships over the course of repeated litigation in an area, improving their ability to successfully navigate the complex litigation process. The repeat offender effect, supported by robust evidence in the individual criminal context, suggests that a lengthier record of deviance can disadvantage defendants in the legal process by indicating a pattern of deviance that makes the defendant appear more blameworthy and less capable of rehabilitation (Steffensmeier et al. 1993). To control for the effect of prior experience, we include a variable capturing the total number of times a firm was charged in a discrimination lawsuit in the prior three years.9

To account for each firm’s general size and performance, each of which have been shown to correlate with the commission of proscribed conduct (Clinard and Yeager 1980), we include controls for logged assets and Tobin’s Q. In the organizations literature, Tobin’s Q is a common proxy for market performance that is operationalized as the market value of assets divided by the replacement cost of assets. This variable is superior in this setting to other common metrics for performance (e.g., ROA), because it is less susceptible to managerial manipulation, which is common during periods of social scrutiny (McDonnell et al. 2015; Watts and Zimmerman 1986). To account for variance in the available resources that firms can devote to their defense, we include a control for the total amount of a firm’s cash stores. Given that firms are naturally more likely to be accused of employment discrimination when they employ more people, we also control for each firm’s number of employees.

We account for potential temporal factors that might affect jury outcomes through fixed effects for the year in which each verdict was decided. Finally, to address the possibility that jury members may have different expectations and responses to discrimination committed by companies in different industries, we include fixed effects for each company’s major SIC industry division (i.e., two-digit SIC code), as reported in Compustat. Table 1 provides summary statistics and correlations of these variables.

Table 1. Summary Statistics and Correlation Matrix

Model Specification

We test Hypotheses 1 and 2 using a probit model that predicts the likelihood a firm charged with employment discrimination is found liable. The probit regression is appropriate for models with a binary dependent variable. Every case that went to jury was included in this first stage.

The models testing Hypotheses 3 and 4 include only firms that have been deemed blameworthy for employment discrimination, as only firms found liable will go on to be assigned a punishment by the court. Our dependent variable, punitive damages, is a highly overdispersed count variable, so we use a generalized linear model with negative binomial errors and a log-link function, using the glm command in Stata. One common way to correct for potential bias in a skewed count dependent variable is by log-transforming it and then running an OLS regression. The alternative we use, a log-link function in a generalized linear model, has the advantage of returning predictions directly on the dependent variable’s original measured scale, negating the need for back-transformation and simplifying interpretation (Cox et al. 2008; McDonnell and Werner 2016).

We expect that results within a state are more likely to be correlated than those between states due to localized laws as well as potential regional differences in attitudes toward discrimination. Additionally, our data include multiple within-firm observations, which are also likely correlated with one another. Accordingly, we cluster standard errors at both the state and firm levels. All models were run using Stata 14.0.

Results

Results from the models predicting the likelihood that a company charged with employment discrimination was found liable are shown in Table 2. Model 1 includes only the control variables. The models provide mixed evidence that larger firms (in terms of number of employees) are less likely to be found liable than smaller firms. Models 1 and 2 provide additional suggestive evidence that firms do enjoy a home court advantage, as firms are significantly less likely to be found liable when a case is brought in the state in which they are headquartered.

Table 2. Probit Regression Predicting the Likelihood of Being Found Liable in Cases of Alleged Employment Discrimination, 1998 to 2008

Model 2 introduces our measure of status to test Hypothesis 1a. In support of this hypothesis, the model demonstrates a statistically significant and negative relationship between a firm’s status and its likelihood of being found liable for employment discrimination. Post-estimation margins analysis of Model 2 indicates that firms with a status score one standard deviation above the mean are around 14 percent less likely to be found liable in a discrimination trial than are firms with a status score one standard deviation below the mean.

Model 3 of Table 2 introduces the proxy for domain-specific reputation to test Hypothesis 1b. This hypothesis is not supported, as the model provides no evidence that a company’s reputation, as indicated by its net KLD score for employee relations and diversity, is related to the likelihood of liability. Model 4 of Table 2 tests Hypothesis 2 by including an interaction of status and domain-specific reputation. Again, we find no support for the hypothesized effect. Taken as a whole, these results suggest that holistic, generalized signals of prestige, such as status, may carry more weight for evaluations of corporate conduct in ambiguous situations than do more applied indicators of prestige, like domain-specific reputations.

Table 3 shows models predicting the extent of punishment through assessed punitive damages. These models yield several interesting results for control variables that warrant mentioning. First, across all models we find that past involvement in discrimination suits appears to broadly benefit a defendant firm, as the number of past discrimination suits a firm has faced is negatively related to the level of punitive damages a liable firm is assessed. This finding supports Galanter’s (1974) notion that firms are advantaged by being repeat players in the legal system: past experience confers enhanced capabilities for achieving more favorable outcomes in future suits. This also highlights that punitive processes are distinct for organizations and individuals, given that the latter tend to be punished more harshly when they have prior charges on their record that mark them as “repeat offenders.” Because the offensive actions at issue in discrimination cases are normally undertaken by different deviant individuals within a firm, juries might not perceive firm-level offenses as contributing to an aggregated “record” in the same way as they accumulate for individuals. This may be remiss, as some scholars argue that corporate recidivism signals a firm-level problem, suggesting “a corporate atmosphere favorable to unethical and illegal behavior” (Clinard and Yeager 1980:117).

Table 3. Generalized Linear Models Predicting Punitive Damages Levied Against Companies Found Liable for Employment Discrimination, 1998 to 2008

Results for the other control variables vary markedly across the models and should be interpreted with caution. Here we discuss only the variables that show a significant association with punishment in the final model (Model 4 in Table 3), which incorporates all hypothesized effects. This model suggests that cases alleging racial discrimination, as compared to age discrimination, draw significantly more punitive damages, whereas those alleging disability discrimination yield significantly smaller awards. Cases that produced more costly harm—indicated by greater compensatory damages—draw significantly larger awards, supporting the notion that discriminatory actions that caused more harm are punished more aggressively. The significant effect of the female plaintiff variable suggests that juries may be more punitive when at least one of the victims of discrimination is female. This finding complements criminological work that shows violent crimes with female victims are sentenced more stringently (Curry et al. 2004). Finally, the significant effect of Tobin’s Q suggests that better-performing firms may be punished more harshly for transgressions. Predicted values from the final model suggest that a firm with performance one standard deviation below the mean would pay around $23,000 in punitive damages, whereas a firm with performance one standard deviation above the mean would pay over 20 times more: $470,000. One possible explanation for this is that outperformance might carry a connotation of corruption or injustice when it is won during periods of objectionable conduct. This resonates with the more general claim that stakeholders respond negatively to outperformance that appears to have been achieved through illicit means (Harris and Bromiley 2007; Mishina et al. 2010).

Model 2 in Table 3 introduces the proxy for status. In this second stage of litigation—once an organization’s culpability has been established—we find that organizational status becomes a liability, in support of Hypothesis 3a. Notably, the effect of status on punitive damages is net of the effects of firm size and profitability. Post-estimation margins analysis of Model 2 indicates that a firm with status one standard deviation below the mean would pay a predicted value of $183,143 in punitive damages, whereas a firm with status one standard deviation above the mean would pay $674,860.

Model 3 in Table 3 introduces the proxy for domain-specific reputation. This model produces no evidence of reputation having a significant independent effect. Hypothesis 3b is thus not supported. The interaction of status and domain-specific reputation in Model 4 is statistically significant, suggesting initial support for Hypothesis 4. However, interaction terms in a nonlinear model must be interpreted with caution (Ai and Norton 2003; Mood 2010), and post-estimation margins analysis of this model yielded no evidence that the interaction produces a significant effect at any particular point in the observed distribution of our data. Given this mixed evidence, we explore the interaction effect in more detail through a battery of additional models (see the online supplement). As a key robustness check, we replicate the interaction effect in a linear model (an OLS regression with a logged dependent variable), which allows for a more straightforward interpretation. In the linear model, the interaction term remains statistically significant and positive. This evidence provides clearer support for Hypothesis 4, insofar as it demonstrates that the interaction has a significant average effect across the full distribution of status and reputation. However, we are unable to identify exactly where in the distribution the effect is driven. Future work is needed to more precisely illustrate the moderating role that reputation (and the associated mechanism of hypocrisy) plays in driving the halo tax.

We ran a number of additional alternative models to probe the robustness of our findings. First, we acknowledge the potential for selection bias to affect our results, as only the firms found liable for employment discrimination are selected into the second stage of a lawsuit and assigned punishment. To mitigate concerns about selection bias, we replicated our models as a two-stage Heckman selection model. In this estimation, the probit regression predicting liability is used as a first-stage model to estimate a selection effect coefficient (referred to as the inverse Mills coefficient, or λ) that is included as a control in the second-stage model predicting punishment. We use the win ratio for similar suits in prior year variable (described earlier) as a selection instrument. Supporting its efficacy as a selection instrument, this variable is highly correlated with a firm’s likelihood of being found liable for employment discrimination, but it is not significantly associated with punishment levels or the underlying error term of the second-stage model. Results for all key variables are substantively identical in these models. Furthermore, the lambda coefficient in the second-stage model does not approach statistical significance, which suggests that selection is not a serious concern in this context.

Our data also include a handful of significant outliers vis-a-vis punitive damages, introducing concerns that these outliers may be unduly biasing the effects we observe. To rule this concern out, we replicated the models in Table 3 with models winsorizing the dependent variable at the top and bottom 10 percent of its distribution. Although the size of the coefficients for our independent variables is expectedly smaller in these models, their statistical significance increases, which provides strong evidence that the effects observed in Table 3 are not being driven by the presence of outliers.

In summary, our results suggest that an organization’s status generates a halo effect during the first stage of litigation. However, in the second stage, when blameworthiness has been unambiguously established, high status can provoke a halo tax, especially when it is paired with an admirable reputation in the domain in which the transgression occurred. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings in the next section.

Discussion and Conclusions

Many observers argue that corporations receive deferential treatment in society. One of the arenas in which they are advantaged is the legal domain (Nielsen, Nelson, and Lancaster 2010). In the United States, legal intervention is a primary mechanism through which social proscriptions of employment discrimination are enforced, and yet past research shows that legal means are often quite ineffective at improving workplace conditions for the underrepresented (Edelman 2016; Hirsh 2009; Kalev and Dobbin 2006). One key reason for this seems to be that prestigious companies are less likely to be found liable when discrimination charges are brought against them. Interestingly, we also found mixed evidence that larger firms (in terms of number of employees) and firms headquartered in the state in which a suit is brought are less likely to be found liable.10 Our analysis confirms that the legal arena is not an even playing field. The most powerful firms—larger and more prestigious ones—are more likely to avoid sanctioning by courts when charged with discrimination. Firms are also less likely to be held liable for discrimination when cases are brought in their home state, where their status and political power are likely augmented.

However, our analysis provides a twist to the story of corporate legal favorability. Although prestigious firms are less likely to be found liable of discrimination charges, once juries rule against them and find them blameworthy, those firms are punished more harshly for their wrongdoing. In the case of employment discrimination suits, we see that juries assign greater punitive damages to higher status companies, especially when their high status is coupled with a strong reputation in the same domain as their transgression.

We assert that the same social psychological mechanism—expectations associated with prestige—underlies both phenomena. Because juries have high expectations of prestigious firms and are motivated to see behavior that matches those expectations, prestigious companies are initially treated more favorably, but once those expectations have been demonstrably violated, juries turn against them. The former process, which is grounded in aligning judgments with expectations, is commonly referred to as a halo effect and is thought to underlie the Matthew effect (Kim and King 2014). We refer to the latter process, which is driven by a violation of expectations, as a halo tax.

Our analysis also produced one unexpected finding: although an organization’s status led to both a halo effect when juries assessed blameworthiness and a halo tax after blame was established, a firm’s reputation had no clear independent effect. Rather, reputation only augmented the extent to which a high-status firm experienced a halo tax in the punitive stage of litigation. Why would this be the case? Although we did not hypothesize the difference in effects, we can speculate. Because status represents “common knowledge” that captures a global heuristic of quality, audience members may rely more heavily on status signals in uncertain evaluative settings (Chwe 2013). But domain-specific reputation might play an important role in punitive processes because of its instrumentality in identifying hypocrisy. A high-status organization that has a good reputation in the domain of its transgression may be perceived as having intentionally dissembled and unjustly benefitted from its repute, triggering a more punitive reaction from audience members. When a high-status company deviates from its domain-specific reputation, audience members may be especially likely to punish it for being inauthentic (Hahl and Zuckerman 2014; Hahl, Zuckerman, and Kim 2017).

Our findings have several important theoretical implications. First, they help resolve a contradiction in the literature on organizational status and reputation. On the one hand, reputation and status should protect a firm from outside scrutiny, inasmuch as the halo effect predisposes audiences to give reputable firms the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, audiences are more likely to attend to controversies involving high-status or reputable firms, and might judge them more harshly, given that these firms are not meeting audience members’ high expectations for their behavior. Our study attempts to reconcile these contradictory roles of prestige and provide a theoretical explanation for the conditions that underlie the halo effect and the halo tax. We argue that positive expectations associated with prestige benefit organizations when there is uncertainty about their blameworthiness for alleged wrongdoing. Once their culpability for a transgression is established, however, the positive expectations associated with prestige turn into a liability. Demonstrable violations of positive expectations lead audiences to punish high-status actors more harshly than their peers who are culpable for similar wrongdoings.

Our findings also provide several unique insights for the sociology of law, particularly pertaining to corporate power over legal outcomes and the effectiveness of the legal system to address discrimination. Contributing to research on the social construction of organizational misconduct (Greve, Palmer, and Pozner 2010), our study provides evidence that organizational prestige plays an important role in processes of labeling and punishing organizational misconduct. In labeling processes, where social-control agents are tasked with categorizing actions as either transgressive or not, our findings suggest that organizational prestige may incline evaluators to interpret ambiguous actions as appropriate rather than deviant. This is particularly likely for actions at the margins of misconduct, where prestigious companies may be given more leeway to engage in actions that would raise a red flag for other companies. It is also likely to be important in more ambiguous situations where information is sparse and actions are less readily observable, when evaluators are likely to place greater weight on a firm’s status as a heuristic device. Thus, prestigious firms may be freer to cross normative boundaries in contexts characterized by a lack of monitoring and transparency. In contexts characterized by a lack of ambiguity, however, as when deviant organizations are “caught red handed,” our results suggest that prestige operates as an aggravating factor likely to provoke more severe punitive reactions from evaluators, especially when an organization has a positive reputation in the domain in which it has deviated.

From a policy perspective, these findings underscore the complex role that prestige plays in deterring (and incentivizing) illegal corporate behavior. It is arguably especially critical to deter prestigious firms’ misconduct, given the extensive damage that transgressions by trusted organizations can do to stakeholder confidence. Prior research suggests that reputable firms that violate normative expectations spread legitimacy losses far beyond their isolated transgressions, shaking stakeholders’ confidence in business partners, public sector collaborators, and innocent industry peers (Jensen 2006; Jonsson, Greve, and Fujiwara-Greve 2009; McDonnell and Pontikes 2017). We find that prestigious firms are less likely to be deemed blameworthy for transgressions, which suggests these firms could face perverse incentives to push the envelope, knowing they are less likely to be held legally accountable for their transgressions. This is especially worrisome given recent evidence that actors within reputable firms are in fact more likely to transgress legal boundaries (Mishina et al. 2010). However, we also find that prestigious firms pay a considerably higher price for their transgressions when they are deemed blameworthy. To the extent that this halo tax is recognized, it may serve as a mechanism of reputational fitness that operates ex post to discourage prestigious firms from straying too far from the high expectations the public holds for them.

Our study has a number of limitations that warrant acknowledgment but that also signal opportunities for future research and extension of these initial findings. First, we exploit the structure of legal cases as offering a natural way to test our theory, insofar as they separate attributions of liability (when blameworthiness has not been established) from assignments of punishment (when blameworthiness has been established with certainty). But the rigid procedural structure in this setting also represents a limitation of our study. Future work is needed to understand the circumstances in which the halo effect and halo tax affect evaluative outcomes outside the legal setting, where attributions of blameworthiness and administrations of punishment are not so cleanly bifurcated. For example, how does the status of the accused organization operate to influence a consumer’s decision about whether to join a boycott, or a government’s administration of sanctions for alleged human rights violations?

Rooting our analysis in the context of employment discrimination lawsuits poses two additional important and related potential limitations. First, because employment discrimination is a civil claim, it is not clear to what extent our findings would generalize to the criminal setting, where the burden of proof is more stringent.11 Second, it is not clear how our findings might generalize to legal claims brought against individual agents or employees of a firm, rather than the firm itself. Rooting our analysis in the civil setting arguably has more practical real-world application, given that criminal claims are rarely litigated against organizational defendants (Garrett 2016). In the legal academy, the reputational consequences of corporate prosecution for criminal acts are thought to be so severe that it is often equated to a “corporate death penalty” that would unjustly punish countless innocent stakeholders of a firm, such as its employees and shareholders (Hamdani and Klement 2008). Accordingly, rather than naming a firm as defendant, prosecutors of white-collar crimes often work closely with a firm and its independent counsel to identify and charge the individuals responsible for the deviant acts. The extent to which our findings generalize to the context of white-collar crime at the individual level is not clear, but it would likely be of interest to many given the considerable scholarly attention devoted to the subject (Benson, Madensen, and Eck 2009; Simpson 2002, 2013). A large body of work in criminology, and in white-collar crime more specifically, examines the attributes of defendants that affect legal outcomes, such as race, age, gender, socioeconomic status, and perceived character (e.g., Albonetti 1998; Nadler and McDonnell 2011; Steffensmeier and Demuth 2006; Steffensmeier et al. 1998). To our knowledge, this work has not considered how the status of the employer of individual white-collar defendants affects the outcomes of their prosecutions. Does working for a high-status company convey the same halo effect and halo tax for a deviant employee as it would for the company? This represents an interesting question that might be pursued in future research.

Although it helps establish the practical validity of our theoretical propositions, our decision to empirically pursue our research questions using archival data drawn from real legal cases does limit our ability to establish with certainty the causal role of our proposed mechanisms. This is because our data are subject to a first-order selection problem: discrimination charges are not assigned randomly, and we cannot rule out the possibility that an employer’s status and reputation may affect the circumstances in which employees who are discriminated against will bring charges, or whether employees themselves will perceive that an adverse employment action was taken with discriminatory intent. Future work might address these limitations by exploring the halo effect and halo tax in a controlled context, such as through an experiment, where evaluators’ expectations could be measured directly and our proposed mechanisms could be manipulated to provide more robust evidence of causality.

Our use of archival cases also imposes data limitations, as we have no ability to directly observe jurors’ perceptions or access full case transcripts. Instead, we rely on common proxies for prestige from the organizational literature. The construct validity of these proxies in the context of discrimination suits rests on an assumption that they meaningfully align with status perceptions of the general populous from which jurors are drawn. Given that prior work shows these measures meaningfully predict how organizations interact with activists and outsiders to the corporate community (e.g., King 2008; McDonnell and King 2013; McDonnell and Werner 2016; Werner 2015), we think this assumption is defensible. But we acknowledge that individual jurors’ familiarity with the firms in our sample is likely to vary considerably, which does introduce measurement error. Further work is needed to shed light on the precise manner in which information about a defendant’s status and reputation is shared with jurors over the course of a trial, as well as how prestige signals might be manipulated by legal counsel to their clients’ advantage.

Another limitation of our study is that we only measure reputation that aligns with the domain of the transgression, rather than reputation in unrelated domains. Work in impression management finds that firms that face social challenges often try to buffer their public images by bolstering their reputation with charitable endeavors in other, less contentious domains (McDonnell and King 2013). A firm’s reputation along unrelated dimensions might prime evaluators to see them as less blameworthy, without triggering as strong a repulsion to hypocrisy when they are deemed blameworthy. Future work is necessary to assess our theory and the generalizability of our findings with respect to other dimensions of reputation.

In summary, our study provides evidence that prestige confers a beneficial halo effect when audience members make attributions of guilt under conditions of uncertainty, but prestige produces a detrimental halo tax when audience members allot punishment after blameworthiness has been established. Our findings demonstrate the unevenness of the legal playing field and provide evidence that prestige plays an important role in shaping corporate legal outcomes. But our study also provides insight into the limits of corporate prestige by showing that in instances of proven blameworthiness, prestige becomes a liability for corporations. Thus, prestige both elevates corporate influence and creates an inherent risk for firms that engage in deviant behavior.

Notes

Status research at the individual level also indicates that status may be a liability in certain situations. Graffin and colleagues (2013), for example, found that high-status members of the British Parliament who were implicated in an expense scandal experienced greater pressure from journalists nd were consequently more likely to leave Parliament. And Wheeler, Weisburd, and Bode (1982) found that the severity of punishment meted out to individuals prosecuted for white-collar crime was positively related to their occupational status.

In a review of theoretical work on the reputation construct, Lange and colleagues (2011) said that researchers tend to think of reputation in one of three ways: (1) as being known, (2) as being known for something, and (3) generalized favorability. Reputations certainly consist of different dimensions, but our purpose is not to offer a new operationalization but rather to note that underlying all these definitions is a belief that organizational reputations consist of shared perceptions about quality and standing.

Only six of the 53 class action suits in our data went to trial. Of these six, two were dismissed on summary judgment and two ended in a verdict for the defense. The two that resulted in a verdict of liability produced an average damages award of nearly 30 million dollars.

We also ran the models with the simple raw score from the Fortune ratings; these models produced substantively identical findings as those incorporating the variable produced by Brown and Perry’s (1994) method.

In separate models, we used an alternative measure of domain-specific reputation by utilizing Fortune magazine’s annual rankings of the Best Places to Work. The results for this alternative measure are substantively similar to those using the KLD-derived proxy. We opt for the KLD proxy in our primary models because it allows for consideration of both strengths and weaknesses in the domain at issue (providing a score that encapsulates both good and bad reputations). Additionally, while the KLD data cover the full Fortune 500 for the period we study, firms had to apply to be considered for the Fortune ranking, such that the latter proxy for reputation potentially suffers from unobservable selection bias.

To avoid overestimating our models, we only include controls for adverse actions that occurred in at least 5 percent of the cases in our sample. These include, in order of frequency, termination or constructive discharge, harassment, hostile work environment, failure to accommodate, loss of benefits or pay, failure to promote, failure to hire or rehire, closer supervision or scrutiny, and demotion.

As noted earlier, we exclude class actions from our sample, so our findings with regard to this variable are limited to cases with single plaintiffs or smaller groups of plaintiffs. This exclusion is meaningful insofar as prior work suggests that cases with very large numbers of victims may actually provoke a less punitive response from jurors, because jurors have more difficulty emotionally identifying with larger and more abstract groups of victims (Nordgren and McDonnell 2011).

In the case of compensatory damages, we add 1 before taking the natural log so as not to lose observations with a value of 0.

We also ran models where we instead controlled for the number of times a firm was found guilty in the prior three years, which is a more accurate proxy for the repeat offender effect. We control instead for total cases in the prior three years, because this produced better fitting models and both variables produced substantively similar effects.

Insofar as size may be considered a proxy for status, one might argue that the observed effects of employees at each stage of a trial (negatively influencing the likelihood of liability, but exaggerating the extent of punishment) is further evidence of Hypotheses 1a and 3a. However, these effects might also be explained by two other potential mechanisms we cannot rule out. First, given that larger firms have more employees who might sue, they may be especially motivated to establish legal precedents that dissuade their employees from bringing suits, leading them to spend more money on legal defense, which could lower their likelihood of being found liable. Second, juries might be motivated to punish firms that employ many people more severely when they discriminate as a deterrence measure, given that more people would be affected by such firms’ discriminatory behaviors if left unchecked.

Interestingly, the distinction between civil and criminal cases is rarely made in sociological work in this area. Rather, definitions of corporate crime in the sociological literature generally encapsulate both, casting corporate crime as “conduct of a corporation, or of employees acting on behalf of a corporation, which is proscribed and punishable by law” (Braithwaite 1984:6; Simpson 2002).

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#status #reputation #deviance #legal profession #employment discrimination #lawsuits #litigation #punishment

[curly-q-reviews]

ROAD TO THE OSCAR MAYER WIENER AWARDS 2K19

Black Panther, 2018 (dir. Ryan Coogler)

Nominated for: Best Original Score, Best Original Song, Best Motion Picture of the Year, Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing

ok y’all lets get this party started with a movie i didnt get to catch in theaters (i think i ended up renting it) but people were absolutely raving about it all of last year, and for good reason i gotta say!  it was one of the better marvel films that came out last year (though in my humble opinion Infinity War takes the gold)

speaking of marvel lets talk about it for a spell!  lets have a lil sit-down chit-chat shall we!!  cause its kind of insane how much of an american media phenomenon marvel has become, they are arguably single-handedly responsible for reviving the superhero movie subgenre and now these types of movies bring hollywood more dineros than they probably know what to do with (besides make more superhero movies).  what used to be a niche market where only your most hardcore of nerdy types dared to dwell has been embraced into the mainstream wholeheartedly, and now its hard to imagine the american film industry without them. 

from a film critique standpoint, marvel movies seem to be a hit-or-miss as far as quality, however i cant really think of a particular marvel movie that i thought was a total piece of hot garbage (the first two Thor movies come close but they were more boring than anything else).  however last year was a real success for the studio, they just kept pumping out quality movies left and right and once disney managed to get its grubby lil mouse paws on Spider-man it was a done deal baby.  DC and other companies have tried again and again to recreate the success that Marvel has managed and so far they’ve failed to various degrees.  Marvel’s just got that special something with their cinematic universe, some magical combo of great actors and creative directors and an ever-expanding budget that keeps them staying at the top every time.

so whats my stance on superhero movies???  well theyre not my usual cup of tea but i gotta say they’re real damn entertaining.  i kinda view them like a high-speed ride at an amusement park, super fun and thrilling and exhilarating and just a real good time!  but thats about as far as it goes for me, and im sure thats the same for a lot of people.  to be honest its kinda refreshing to have movies that quality-wise are up to my standards that i dont have to think too hard about.  so for me the movies i typically go for are like museums, whereas superhero movies (and action movies in general) are like a carnival.  both entertaining and fun, but the latter is just all about letting loose and not wondering about the why’s and how’s.  when i think about it, this kinda mindset is for sure a factor in how these movies got so popular, because with the shitshow that is our current government and the potential imminent death of our planet people are once again looking for movies as a form of escapism, rather than a way to get deep and philosophical and ask the tough questions and see something profound. 

with that being said, despite some exceptions that have proven me wrong to my utter joy and delight (im looking at u Logan), i expect movies that are nominated for wiener awards to be more like museums than like carnivals y’know what i mean?  u catchin my drift???  u takin what im dishin out????  the academy awards have a long history of prestige, of nominating the best of the best of any given year. quite a few movies that won oscars are now considered to be timeless classics.  which is why superhero movies, at least the typical marvel types that are chocked to the brim with CGI and epic massive fight scenes and explosions, dont really strike me as anything that could eventually become a timeless classic.  the amount of computer-generated effects alone will make these movies feel really dated as soon as like five years from now with how fast technology is progressing.  i just dont see it happening.

and that brings us to the first wiener award nominee ill be talking about, Black Panther.  this isnt director Ryan Coogler’s first time at the rodeo; his first feature film Fruitvale Station received critical acclaim in 2013, and the spiritual Rocky sequel Creed actually got nominated for some oscars a few years ago.  so we’ve got a promising and talented director at the helm which is a great start!  we’ve also got a stellar cast with the likes of michael b. jordan (who has been in all of Coogler’s films so far), lupita nyong’o, angela bassett, and forest whitaker in the bunch.  it also has the astronomical financial backing of Supreme Overlord Disney so u know this is gonna be some high-quality shit.

so i’m gonna tell y’all why i think this movie got nominated for so many oscars, because in a way i do think this movie is deserving of noms from the academy.  theres no denying that it is very groundbreaking for a movie of this scale and magnitude to have a black director and a nearly all-black cast.  in fact, i think a lot of the crew members (including set and costume design) were black as well.  thats fuckin huge my guy.  and this movie was by no means a flop either; it ended up being one of the highest-grossing films of 2018 and stayed in theaters for a loooong-ass time.  and not only were the people on this project mostly black, the movie itself is a story praising and showing off the beauty of african culture without exotifying or demeaning it in any way.  like i can say 100% without a doubt that this movie deserves its best costume design nom cause holy shit the outfits in this movie are stunning, just the perfect blend of ancient/current tribal african aesthetics and a more futuristic sleek style that any fashion enthusiast can drool over.

i cant say much about best musical score or best sound mixing or anything like that cause it all seemed like typical marvel stuff to me and wasnt all that memorable.  however i can say that the production design on this movie, while it didnt impress me as much as costuming, did still impress me.  the one thing i gotta knock it on is all the fucken CGI, like whole entire towns and landscapes were digitally rendered.  i wouldve been a lot more impressed and would agree more to the production design nom if they used more practical effects and real sets/locations. 

so.  best picture.  this is where i feel the most conflicted.  cause this is where i now have to look past all the pretty fancy visuals and music and look at the actual meat of this movie, its story and characters.  usually best picture noms also get noms for things like best actress, best script, and best director, cause those are all really important elements of a good film.  ur movie can look and sound as pretty as it wants but if the storys shit and the characters are shit and the actings shit then u dont have much going for u.

and by no means am i saying that Black Panther was shitty in these aspects, it was just well.  passable.  it was ok.  but nothing to write home about

we got some good performances from newcomers letitia wright and chadwick boseman, lupita kills it as always, but then everyone else was like.  okay.  michael b. jordan didnt really do his best in this and idk if its the script’s fault or something but it was weird.  and speaking of the script it was uuuuhhhhh well.  not great.  every time i think about that “what are those” reference i die a little inside.  and the story overall wasnt really anything new when u break it down, just another “son of king struggles to take his place” narrative.  and that aspect of the story couldve actually been more developed into something interesting, i found myself really intrigued with the political scenes.  but there just wasnt enough of that cause they needed to make more room for the PEW PEW POW EXPLOSIONS

granted, movies with lots of shimmer but little substance have been nominated for best picture before (just look at James Cameron’s Avatar which is apparently getting a sequel now????????).  and its not even that this movie is completely devoid of substance cause theres some interesting things going on plot-wise, and some stand-out characters too (shuri is the boss and no one can tell me otherwise).  its just, u know, a good superhero movie.  nothing really profound about the story itself except for the cultural, historical, and social context behind it.

so lemme get back to why i think this movie got a best picture nom.  i think the academy wants to keep up their appearance of being #woke now by continuing to nominate more than one poc-heavy project each year, but they seem to be caring less and less about the actual overall quality of these movies.  and theres even some movies on the noms list that i think actually have what it takes to be a strong oscars contender, like If Beale Street Could Talk and BlacKkKlansmen.  but i think in Black Panther’s case, they were under a lot of pressure to give it top noms (or any noms at all) because of the intensely positive response this movie got, as well as the accusations of racism to people who didnt think it was as great as fans were saying. 

also i have no doubt that Supreme Overlord Disney like threw piles and piles of money at the academy like they tend to do (cause i’d bet good money thats the only fucken way Incredibles 2 got nominated for anything)

well anyway ive gone on long enough about this, lemme know what y’all think.  really the only nom im iffy about when it comes to this movie is Best Picture, but the others i think are well enough deserved, especially costume design.  so i guess the one thing i struggle with is this: does a movie becoming a pop culture phenomenon and being groundbreaking in its cast and crew count as enough for it to be nominated for the top prize of the wiener awards, despite any fallbacks in script, direction, and acting?  idk man im just hoping it doesnt get the award by default or something but then again maybe after watching all the other nominees it may turn out that the rest of them were worse than Black Panther i guess i’ll have to find out

stay tuned for my A Star Is Born review y’all stay fresh and funky eat ur vegetables stay in school u dont need drugs when ur high on life

#road to the oscar mayer weiner awards 2k19 #curly q reviews #black panther #oscars #academy awards #oscars 2019 #chadwick boseman #letitia wright #lupita nyong'o #forest whitaker #angela bassett #marvel #superhero movies #best picture #fruitvale station #creed #ryan coogler #thor #avengers infinity war

[ajw720]

recently heard some industry ppl talk about their hopes for emmys. d wasn't even mentioned. talked abt seeing mc/lachlan honored. they were young & def watched+liked ACS. this highlights d's challenge: most agree that his performance was award-worthy. but emmys are NOTORIOUS for awarding actors based on familiarity/goodwill/who's "earned" it, not who is the critical/GA fave. it's not just about the work, it's about who voters **want to see win.** d has to give them a reason. (1/2)

d's young, new to "prestige" tv, & up against industry bias. actors like that need a story that makes them stand-out, sympathetic/admirable/lovable. it's obvious his image/campaign is being consciously mishandled. his PR ppl absolutely should know better than what's happened this year. i do wonder if fx/rm is waiting for the nom to start helping out, b/c it's def needed. if they don't tho & things continue as we've seen so far, no one should be shocked if he loses the emmy (2/2)

***************************************************************************

Anon, I agree with every word. I may not have access to Industry Peeps but I have been reading about it and I have been a fan of entertainment for years. This is how awards work in general. And this category in particular is known to be used as a vehicle to  honor lifetime achievement.  IF D was to win, he would be the second youngest person, at the age of 31, so not that “young” when speaking about the makeup of hollywood, to win.  The other was 17 and his win was in the 1970s.  

A quick review of previous winners in this category include so many actors with a long history in the industry, a lot of goodwill with voters, and established hollywood pedigree including; Al P/acino (likely to be nominated again this year though I don’t think P/aterno was strong enough for the win); William H. M/acy; Richard J/enkins; Michael Do/uglas; Kevin C/ostner; Brendan Gle/ason; Paul Gia/matti; and Robert D/uvall.  I think this list speaks for itself.  

This year D’s major competition, as you identified, appears to by K/yle who has never won an Emmy (he did win a GG for T/win P/eaks in the 90s). He is PRECISELY the type of person industry voters would choose for the win with a long history of cool, “prestige” movies and tv shows.  The first season of T/win P/eaks was highly regarded as was his stellar performance and IF he was to win, it would absolutely be to reward him for his CAREER.

D’s other major competition may be Cumberb/atch who has won in this category before and is someone hollywood loves and has embraced with open arms.

I think most probably would say D gave the best performance.  But i have already read someone quoted as saying he is young and he will have more chances.  This is his FIRST major role in a critically acclaimed show that is that brand of television that is that is held to a higher standard, embraced by critics, and that attracts major, A list talent.  B/laine was fabulous, but it didn’t garner him the same type of attention as ACS, and understandably so, as Andrew is a career defining role.

Right now, as a young actor in his first major award worthy role, the SOLE focus should be on campaigning for that award and reinforcing an image of a person who industry peeps would WANT to reward not just for his performance but because they believe in D/arren C/riss as a person and think he has earned the emmy.  

But instead of focusing on creating a GOOD image his team is continuously working against him. It is CONSTANT and nearly everyday that they engage in behavior that appears to sabotage his chance of winning.

Last night’s tweet, as an isolated thing, maybe would have made me roll my eyes, but I could have ignored it.  But it is one in a list of so many damaging things.  

And to be clear, the photo is stunning.  It actually make me really angry that they took a photo of D looking so happy and carefree (his face looks serene and content) and reduced it to serving that woman and her young, teenage fans, and making D looks like a jerk in the process.  It has been so long since I have seen a photo of D with a real genuine smile and they effectively took this one away from him.  Fact M’s teenage stans are not voting for the emmys.  And they are the only people who found this funny.  Industry people who ARE voting and hold D’s emmy fate in their hands, see this and think, that guy has an over-inflated ego.

Add this to the CONSTANT and NEEDLESS promotion of everything and anything that will pay him. It is EXCESSIVE and RIDICULOUS and makes him look like he is for sale.

Then we have the bar that he is associate with.  And while I do think most who vote for the emmys KNOW she is a beard, what they don’t know is how much D is choosing and how much he is being forced to comply with. We know that the last thing he wants to be associated with is an establishment that is offensive in many ways, but I would guess most of the voters do not have a clue just how destructive his team and beard are an how much they are enjoying shading his character (I still contend needless names like Slut and Nice Rack were intentionally done to hurt him public image).

And of course we have the offensive and horrible way he was marketed throughout ACS with the constant reinforcement of how he is the straightest man to ever walk the face of the earth,  and hey don’t forget, he is white as well which doesn’t even make sense in context of the role. The former makes him sound insecure and is highly offensive to members of the LGBT+ community and the later makes him sound like he is afraid to embrace his ethnicity in fear that people won’t cast him in roles.  Then add that most of the voters likely know or strongly suspect he is queer, it just makes him sound scared.  and yes I know closeting is common in hollywood and that in and of itself not only has no bearing on the voting but to some may be an added bonus if he is seen as one who is willing to play along for his art and sacrifice himself  to get ahead.  This issue is the manner in which he is presented to the world, particularly in print.

And then there is the small issue that his “fiancee” is beyond embarrassing and her behavior is deplorable.  

Add this all up, if i was an emmy voter with limited info, I don’t think I would vote for him.

Which is why it has never been more important to launch a campaign that makes the voters WANT to embrace him, vote for him, and jump on board the DC train hailing him as incredibly talented and someone that casting directors should be fighting over to have a meeting with about their projects.  

And “his” team is not even trying.  Not only that, I think their every move is meant to hurt him.  Aside from finally breaking him and C up (not happening and I think they know it, I think the encagement was in part a last effort to try one more time) there is nothing they would enjoy more than watch him lose this award.  And in the process, destroy his dedicated fanbase of people who know the truth (they won’t but they are really trying to isolate us).

With RR, he is an idiot, I don’t think he would have a clue how to run the campaign even if he wanted to help out. But SS?  What the fuck?  What are they thinking?  They are one of the most powerful PR firms in the industry.  Award campaigns are business as usual for them.  Why they  are not just allowing this destruction but actively participating in it is unfathomable.  

Anon, I still can’t figure why Fox/Rm have yet to intervene.  This is their product and their talent (I know Fox is a lame duck in many ways, but I would think they would not want to harm their deal and RM absolutely has a huge stake in this. He loses on so many levels if D was ever to expose him).  

They should have stopped his team from actively trying to destroy him months and months and months ago. And they didn’t.  We cannot turn back the hands of time. But it is NOW TIME.  They need to step up to the plate, stop his team from engaging in harmful actions, and take this campaign over. Because you are right, if they don’t, I don’t think he will win either. And NO ONE should lose because their team is petty, ungrateful, and actively working against him as they know he is planning to leave them in the dust and likely are also afraid of the power he may have when he exposes them all for the roles they have played that has been the horror story of his life for these long nearly 8 years.

So I am holding out hope that if D (really when as I think the nomination is a lock) is named on the list of 5 actors, fox/rm take over completely. 

Also, I hope D keeps continuing to remind us of who he is. He is not powerless. No he can’t stop them, but he can counter them with his own posts. I am willing to bet he has hundreds of photos and stories from ACS we have yet to hear. Now is the time to remind everyone.  As well as continuing to network and market himself as the wonderful, charming, brilliant, talented person he is.

This is all just so frustrating to me I cannot even begin to imagine how D feels. This should be the best time of his professional life so far, and it has been nothing but a long nightmare since the encagement was announced in January. He earned this and deserves to have a legitimate chance of winning.

[techzant]

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Nowadays, individuals falter when you request that they pick into your email list. Be that as it may, guess what? If your offer is sufficient, they will in any case pick in.

What’s more, what better approach to introducing your proposal than through an enticing video on your lead catch page.

VideoDyno will compose an exceptionally amazing video content that will persuade your page guests to select into your email list.

7. Upsell Video Script

Upsell Video Script

Need to sell a redesign of your item, perhaps the superior form of your product?

At that point let VideoDyno compose the ideal Upsell video content that will have your light clients moving up to the exceptional rendition.

8. Affiliate Review Video Script

Affiliate Review Video Script

Do you audit advanced items through recordings? Do you have an associate item survey site, and need to add recordings to your item audit?

You can undoubtedly make itemized and persuasive survey recordings with the assistance of VideoDyno. The product will pose a few inquiries about the items and its upsells/strategically pitches.

Also, with that, it will make an extraordinary audit video content for you to voice over. Cool, right?

Get Access Now

Catch and Hold Eye With Music, Images, Icons, and Fonts

icons and fonts

Browse 40,000 pictures, 5,000 video cuts, 650 ambient melodies tracks, and 1000 text styles to make your video catch and hold eye like there’s no tomorrow.

Include Professional Voice Overs With Instant Text-To-Speech

Voice overs

Spare many dollars on proficient voice-overs, costly amplifiers, or bothers of home recording and consequently transform your content into a voice-over!

Browse 14 different voices and languages and rejuvenate your recordings, without recording a solitary word.

Do you need your voice on record? Forget about it. Simply record it at that point add it to the video, in several ticks inside VideoDyno.

Look over 50 Pro Video Frames That Make Your Video Pop Off The Page

50 Pro video frames

Look over 50 eye-getting video outlines that coordinate your site marking and catch the eye, even on the busiest sites!

Include Trust-Building Branding With Logos and Watermarks

Branding

Proficient marking makes your recordings stick out, look proficient, and win trust. Furthermore, they prevent your rivals from taking your difficult work.

Download Videos To Your Hard Drive

Download Videos To Your Hard Drive

Each video you make with VideoDyno can be downloaded to your hard drive at whatever point you need, so it’s all yours eternity and offer at whatever point and any place you need.

Make 100s Of Videos and Dominate Your Niche Faster Than Ever

VideoDyno permits you to make the same number of recordings as you need, so you can flood YouTube and Facebook, Instagram and Google with recordings that make crazy measures of traffic to your sites and offers.

In a split second Share Your Video On Facebook and YouTube In a Single Click

Advocate your recordings after delivering on social channels and catch more crowd to transform them into supporters and purchasers.

Export Your Scripts In 3 Formats For Later Use Or Edit

Full Training Section With PDFs and Videos

For more data about this item, click the button below:

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How Can It Work?

There are 8 fundamental strides to do when utilizing VideoDyno, yet don’t stress since they are all fill-in-the-clear:

Stage 1: Log In To The Member’s Area

Stage 2: Start With A New Script

Stage 3: Add A Background To Build Prestige

Stage 4: Complete Basic Information About The Product

Stage 5: Define Your Audience

Stage 6: Insert Feedback For Your Product

Stage 7: Give A Slight Modification If You Want and Save It

Stage 8: Customize Your Video Script With Built-In Options and Publish It

WATCH THIS DEMO VIDEO

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VideoDyno Review — Is it worth purchasing?

VideoDyno permits you to make changing over in immense different sorts of video quickly in any specialty you need.

It will let you get before your specific target audience, the individuals that rave about your item.

Make 8 different sorts of deals contents

2. Run advertisements for yourself or customers with the demonstrated contents and recordings

3. Sell your items and administrations even in the darkest or serious specialties!

4. Offer to a more extensive segment of clients effortlessly!

5. Sell in more than one language by interpreting the contents with Google!

6. No video skills are required. Trust me, I am horrendous at video creation, and I made this high changing over video utilizing VideoDyno

7. Business LICENSE INCLUDED so you can make and sell video advertisements and deals recordings to the neighborhood and online customers!

Don’t miss out on this deal of a lifetime.

Who Should Use It?

For the most part, VideoDyno is a MUST-HAVE thing for:

 Affiliate Marketers

 Marketers

 Com + Amazon

 Freelancers

 Website Owners

 Social Media Marketers

 Local organizations

 Any different sorts of online business

Pros and Cons

Pros

Auto-compose demonstrated to-change over video direct mail advertisement contents and promotion duplicate for various specialties

Convert your contents into deals recordings with 100% customization

Get up and running inside a couple of moments by addressing basic inquiries

​1-Click Facebook and YouTube sharing for moment traffic

 No copywriting skills required — simple to begin

Sell video deals contents and deals recordings as a help

14 Day Money Back Guarantee

Cons

 No Cons Found.

Pricing

VideoDyno has 1 Front-end and 5 OTOs:

– Front-end: VideoDyno ($47) (See Details)

– OTO1: VideoDyno Unlimited ($67) (See Details)

Downsell To Lite $37 (See Details)

The Unlimited update is perhaps the most impressive redesign they’ve ever offered in a funnel.

With the VideoDyno Unlimited, you will have the option to make boundless video contents, boundless video advertisements, boundless video direct mail advertisements, render boundless recordings, gain admittance to cutting edge social sharing highlights.

Besides, a lifetime admittance to EmailDyno that lets you make gainful email swipes for their email marketing. I think this is the most overwhelming redesign offer they’ve ever made.

– OTO2: VideoDyno DFYDyno ($67-$197) (See Details)

Choice 1: 50 DFY Funnels ($67) (See Details)

Choice 2: 100 DFY Funnels ($197) (See Details)

With the DFYDyno update, you will gain admittance to accomplished for-you contents, recordings, items, video direct mail advertisements, deals pages, and more with complete Whitelabel rights that you can set up and start selling immediately.

You can leverage VideoDyno to create new and improved sales videos and start selling these DFY products to make profits and keep 100% of them.

– OTO3: VideoDyno Business ($59) (See Details)

With the VideoDyno Business, you will get full business highlights including an, especially accomplished for-you proficient-looking YouTube Business Website with a custom checkout.

You likewise get the Team and Virtual Assistant Access, Clients Access, DFY Client Contract Templates, Business Finder include, and 100+ Facebook Ad Templates.

– OTO4: VideoDyno VoiceReel ($99) (See Details)

VoiceReel is their shiny new tech that assists anybody with making genuine human-like voice-overs for their recordings in numerous different dialects utilizing A.I.

VoiceReel lets you make huge amounts of voice-overs with full power over how they will sound and simple to utilize the supervisor to alter, consolidation, or change voice tone/pitch as they like.

This is ideal for anybody making video direct mail advertisements or video promotions.

– OTO5: PlayerNeos Professional ($49) (See Details)

PlayerNeos is a cloud-based intelligent video maker that helps transform any customary video into a business machine.

Utilizing this, you can include catches, menus, purchase currently fastens, pick in structures, new custom thumbnails, logos, watermarks, and even auto-play the video on any program.

You can likewise locate others’ high-traffic video and piggyback on them with their select in/catches included.

Note:

Here are some Upgrade joins for your reference. You should purchase the Front-End (FE) right off the bat and afterward you could purchase any OTOs if you love.

If you purchase OTOs alone, you will get NOTHING and it requires some investment to demand a discount. If it’s not too much trouble recollect FE is an unquestionable requirement that has a bundle to in any event ensure the item is functioning admirably.

Conclusion

After the dispatch deal, the cost will go up, and VideoDyno will likewise be sold uniquely at a repetitive charge. You gotta pay each month to utilize it.

Try not to let that happen when you can granddad yourself in at a one-time cost.

I trust that in my VideoDyno audit can assist you in deciding all the more precisely and rapidly. Much obliged to you for perusing. Best of luck to you!

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The post VideoDyno Review — An All-In-One Video Script Building Platform appeared first on TechZant.

source https://techzant.com/videodyno-review/

#Internet #marketing #business #money #online

[leobellicose]

Former Taliban captive Yvonne Ridley converts to Islam

Former Taliban captive Yvonne Ridley converts to Islam

BRITISH-born, award-winning journalist Yvonne Ridley is well known in the Muslim world for her outspoken views and defence of Islam.

She endeared herself to the Muslim community in Britain when she reverted to Islam 30 months after making international headlines when she was captured by the Taliban on an undercover assignment in Afghanistan.

She was a senior reporter of the Sunday Express at the time, having spent nearly 10 years in Fleet Street working for several prestige titles including The Sunday Times, The Observer, Daily Mirror and Independent on Sunday.

If you were being interrogated by the Taleban as a suspected US spy, it might be hard to imagine a happy ending.

But for Ridley, the ordeal in Afghanistan led her to convert to a religion she says is “the biggest and best family in the world”.

The formerly hard-drinking Sunday school teacher became a Muslim after reading the Koran on her release.

She now describes radical cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri as “quite sweet really” and says the Taleban have suffered an unfair press.

Working as a reporter for the Sunday Express in September 2001, Ridley was smuggled from Pakistan across the Afghan border.

But her cover was blown when she fell off her donkey in front of a Taleban soldier near Jalalabad, revealing a banned camera underneath her robes.

Her first thought as the furious young man came running towards her? “Wow – you’re gorgeous,” she says.

“He had those amazing green eyes that are peculiar to that region of Afghanistan and a beard with a life of its own.

“But fear quickly took over. I did see him again on my way to Pakistan after my release and he waved at me from his car.”

Ridley was interrogated for 10 days without being allowed a phone call, and missed her daughter Daisy’s ninth birthday.

Of the Taleban, Ridley says: “I couldn’t support what they did or believed in, but they were demonised beyond recognition, because you can’t drop bombs on nice people.”

It has been suggested the 46-year-old is a victim of Stockholm Syndrome, in which hostages take the side of the hostage-takers.

But she says: “I was horrible to my captors. I spat at them and was rude and refused to eat. It wasn’t until I was freed that I became interested in Islam.”

‘Flappy knickers’ Indeed, the Taleban deputy foreign minister was called in when Ridley refused to take her underwear down from the prison washing line, which was in view of soldier’s quarters.

“He said, ‘Look, if they see those things they will have impure thoughts’.” “Afghanistan was about to be bombed by the richest country in the world and all they were concerned about was my big, flappy, black knickers.

“I realised the US doesn’t have to bomb the Taleban – just fly in a regiment of women waving their underwear and they will all run off.”

Once she was back in the UK, Ridley turned to the Koran as part of her attempt to understand her experience.

“I was absolutely blown away by what I was reading – not one dot or squiggle had been changed in 1,400 years.

“I have joined what I consider to be the biggest and best family in the world. When we stick together we are absolutely invincible.”

What do her Church of England parents in County Durham make of her new family?

“Initially the reaction of my family and friends was one of horror, but now they can all see how much happier, healthier and fulfilled I am.

“And my mother is delighted I’ve stopped drinking.”

What does Ridley feel about the place of ?

“There are oppressed women in Muslim countries, but I can take you up the side streets of Tyneside and show you oppressed women there.

“Oppression is cultural, it is not Islamic. The Koran makes it crystal clear that women are equal.”

And her new Muslim dress is empowering, she says.

“How liberating is it to be judged for your mind and not the size of your bust or length of your legs.”

A single mother who has been married three times, she says Islam has freed her from worry over her love life.

“I no longer sit and wait by the phone for a man to ring and I haven’t been stood up for months.

“I have no man stress. For the first time since my teens I don’t have that pressure to have a boyfriend or husband.”

But there has been a phone call from at least one male admirer – north London preacher Abu Hamza al-Masri.

“He said, ‘Sister Yvonne, welcome to Islam, congratulations’.

“I explained I hadn’t yet taken my final vows and he said, ‘Don’t be pressured or pushed, the whole community is there for you if you need any help, just call one of the sisters.’

‘Straight to hellfire’ “I thought, I can’t believe it, this is the fire and brimstone cleric from Finsbury Park mosque and he is quite sweet really.

“I was just about to hang up when he said, ‘But there is just one thing I want you to remember. Tomorrow, if you have an accident and die, you will go straight to hellfire’.

“I was so scared that I carried a copy of the vows in my purse until my final conversion last June.”

And the hardest part of her new life?

“Praying five times a day. And I am still struggling to give up cigarettes.”

The post Former Taliban captive Yvonne Ridley converts to Islam appeared first on Portal Islam dan Melayu | ISMAWeb.

Credit kepada RZ sumber asal Artikel Portal Islam dan Melayu | ISMAWeb di Former Taliban captive Yvonne Ridley converts to Islam via Blogger http://sayupgema.blogspot.com/2018/02/former-taliban-captive-yvonne-ridley.html

#Malaysia

[hottytoddynews]

I often get the question, what was Mose like at home? My answer to that is, the man you see performing and the man you hear singing those lyrics, that is the man he is was at home.

My dad had no hobbies, did not golf, did not play tennis and did not spend money on a single hobby that I can recall. He spent his time listening to music of all sorts, the stranger the better. He did some yoga stretching in the morning and some Tai Chi that sometimes embarrassed us kids when we had company over. He liked to run at the track in his younger days, then switched to swimming and actually had a schedule of high and low tides for the Long Island Sound; the beach was just a couple miles from home.

Other than that, in his free time, he liked to cook and read books – many books. He made lists of “to read” books on small pieces of paper. Mose read esoteric type books with content about the cosmos, the human brain, books with titles like, “The Fabric of Reality,” “A Field Guide to the Invisible” and “The Nature of the Universe.” And yes, he did play the piano at home, but he only played repetitive hypnotic runs to keep his mind sharp and his fingers limber.

Mose was one of the least material persons I have ever known. He was not one to ever be seen shopping with the exception of grocery shopping. His entire wardrobe took up five feet of space in his closet, most clothing purchases being made by my mom. He called me long distance one time to tell me his luggage was missing and in his luggage contained his only belt. He described the belt to me in detail, hoping I could assist him in finding an exact replacement. I also recall the time my mom replaced our 20-year-old couch with a new one. My dad’s space in the den was at one end of this old couch. The new couch was placed in the den, and the old couch was placed in our foyer by the door awaiting a ride to the local thrift store. When I walked in the door, Dad was sitting on the old couch at his usual space reading his book. Mose eventually warmed to the new couch.

My dad never had much of a record collection. I started buying records when I was 9 years old. I could play a song over 40 times and each time feel a sense of elation. Dad was different, he listened to a song once and it made a connection in his brain, like a mathematical equation, and that was all he needed – that one time. That, to me, is very strange. To this day, I have many favorite songs I still play over and over. With Dad, one listen was all it took.

About receiving awards, I know Mose always has appreciated praise but never let it get to his head. He did not believe in the show off, “look at me,” “I’m great,” attitudes that run so prevalent through the entertainment world. I was with him in Sedona, Arizona when he received a beautiful Lifetime Achievement Award. He smiled and thanked those responsible then handed the award to me and said, “I am not carrying that on the plane.” When I asked him why he did not want to go to the Grammy Awards after he was nominated, he replied, “I don’t believe in renting shoes.” In reality, he may have already been booked at a small club in Des Moines, Ohio, and Mose, after 65 years of what he called, “On the Job Training,” never missed a single gig.

Mose preferred the setting and intimacy of a jazz club, and that is where he really earned a living. The record companies all tried to cash in and make Mose a commercial success. Mose wanted nothing to do with backup girl singers and A&R men arrangements. He wanted to sing his songs his way at the places he liked best. Atlantic tried to get him to Muscle Shoals, Mose declined. Burger King offered him a huge payday for one day’s work. He told me, “I ain’t singing about no hamburger.” Mom was not happy.

I knew a club owner and promoter that told me, “After 35 years of promoting shows, Mose was the only performer to ever to give me money back.” The promoter had paid Mose but lost money on the show. Dad gave him some money back. Why? Because Mose was also interested in keeping his club going so he could keep coming back to play.

In 1989, I accepted a Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame award on his behalf. Mose had a gig somewhere else that date, so Dad wrote a little something for me to read to the crowd after accepting his award. It read:

There are very few places in the world where a person could have heard as many different kinds of music as I was able to hear growing up in Tippo, Mississippi. Also, the aphorisms, the ironies, the speech patterns with their exaggerations and understatements have served me well and are still a part of my dialogues with myself.

If it takes a village to raise a child, then I was certainly raised by Tippo, Mississippi.

Ten years before Elvis got to Beale Street, Mose had already been there. Getting Zoot suites made for him and performing on keyboards with the BB King Orchestra at Mitchell’s Hotel, a black only club on Beale Street in 1947. Dad told me years ago that he first heard Rock’ n Roll on Beale Street in 1942 from the band Tuff Green and the Rockettes. Mose also remembered hearing a matinee solo performance at the Orpheum Theater by Harmonic legend Sonny Boy Williamson that made a huge impression on him.

Mose was in New York City in 1956 playing piano with the giants of jazz, Jerry Mulligan, Al Cohn, Zoot Simms, Stan Getz and others. After a short time, Mose presented a cassette tape to Prestige Records. The executives at Prestige loved what they heard and immediately had Mose in the studio recording. What Mose gave them was a suite of sketches, songs, evoking the atmosphere of his hometown – Tippo, Mississippi. Mose called it his Cotton Country Suite. The record company renamed it Back Country Suite. Songs from that era included: “Parchman Farm,” “Blues,” “One Room Country Shack,” “Highway 49,” “The Hills,” “Mojo Woman,” “Devil in the Cane Field” and “Creek Bank.”

From that first record, Mose was receiving critical acclaim from audiences and critics alike. Mose went on to record two more albums that same year. It was 1957. Today there are over 50 albums to choose from. My dad wrote over 220 songs. Most folks know four or five. My advice: listen to more Mose!

One of my favorites from Grammy Nominated Album on Blue Note Records, Ever Since The World Ended, is titled “Top Forty.” This song to me represents the way my dad looked at the business of the recording industry.

Top Forty By Mose Allison

When I make my Top 40 Smash hit Rock ‘n’ roll record Everything is gonna be just fine When I make my Top 40 Smash hit Rock ‘n’ roll disc I’ll be the record company’s valentine No more philosophic melancholia Eight hundred pounds of electric genitalia When I make my Top 40 Smash hit Rock ‘n’ roll record Everything’s gonna be just fine When I make my fuzz tone Wah-wah Synthesized record Everything is gonna be just grand When I make my fuzz tone Wah-wah Synthesized disc I’ll have to get myself a moving van Costume, hairdo, made up cute A personal connection in a business suit When I make my fuzz tone Wah-wah Synthesized record Everything is gonna be just grand When I make my dynamite Heavy soul Freaked out record Everything is gonna be just swell When I make my dynamite Heavy soul Freaked out disc I’ll be living it up pell mell Mountain top hide away Three-car garage Out there hustlin’ that sonic massage When I make my Top 40 Big beat Heavy soul Freaked out Solid gold Synthesized Rock ‘n’ roll record Everything is gonna be just fine

When my dad passed, he was comfortable and with family. We each got to kiss him, tell him we love him and that it was okay to let go, go home. So he did. No one gets out alive. Dad was 89 and his was a life well lived. I only feel very fortunate and grateful to have had such a cool dad. I get to ride the turnrows of Mississippi and listen to Mose and I can do that till the day I “go home.”

Finally, a reporter once asked Dad, “You were socially relevant before Dylan, satirical before Newman and rude before Jagger. How come you are not a big star?” Dad simply and honestly replied, “Just lucky I guess.”

WAS by Mose Allison

When I become was and we become were Will there be any sign or a trace of the lovely contour of your face And will there be someone around With essentially my kinda sound When am turns to was and now is back when Will someone have moments like this Moments of unspoken bliss And will there be heroes and saints Or just a dark new age of complaints When I become was and we become were Will there be any Susans and Ralphs Lookin’ at old photographs And wondering aloud to a friend What was it like to be then

By John Allison

For questions, comments, or if you would like to contribute your own Reflections story, send it (along with photos) to [email protected].

The post Reflections: A Few Words About My Dad, Mose Allison appeared first on HottyToddy.com.

#hottytoddy #olemiss #oxfordms #oxford ms #mississippi #university of mississippi #the grove

[caveartfair]

Armory Show Director Out after Sexual Harassment Allegations—and the 9 Other Biggest News Stories This Week

01  Benjamin Genocchio was replaced Wednesday as the executive director of The Armory Show after a report was published in the New York Times, in which multiple women accused him of sexual harassment.

(Artsy & the New York Times)

Genocchio will be replaced by Nicole Berry, who has been the New York art fair’s deputy director since she joined last year from EXPO Chicago. A spokesperson for The Armory Show did not say whether Genocchio’s departure was permanent. “The Armory Show seeks to maintain a respectful workplace and prohibits harassment or discrimination of any kind,” wrote the spokesperson in an emailed statement from Thursday. The Times story detailed a range of allegations against Genocchio, ranging from inappropriate comments to running “his hand up [a colleague’s] sequin pants” and asking her, “Is this the only time I get to touch your ass without getting yelled at?” This incident was recalled by Artnet’s then-marketing coordinator, Colleen Calvo, who said it happened as she was checking guests into the company’s holiday party in 2014. Genocchio served as editor-in-chief of the editorial wing of the online art website until joining The Armory Show in 2016. The Times did not interview Genocchio, but he issued this statement to reporter Robin Pogrebin: “Launching start-up news websites definitely led to conflicts with a few employees, but I never intentionally acted in an inappropriate manner nor spoke to or touched a colleague in a sexually inappropriate way. To the extent my behavior was perceived as disrespectful, I deeply and sincerely apologize and will ensure it does not happen again.” The allegations against Genocchio follow sexual harassment allegations against Knight Landesman, who stepped down as a co-publisher of Artforum at the end of October.

02  A judge’s ruling Tuesday cleared the way for the planned auction of 40 artworks from the Berkshire Museum’s collection but the Massachusetts Attorney General asked an appellate court to halt the sale.

(via the Berkshire Eagle)

The struggling museum hopes that the sale, due to start on Monday at Sotheby’s in New York, will bring in as much as $60 million to shore up its endowment and help it pivot towards science and nature programming. Deaccessioning is typically frowned upon unless the proceeds are used to buy more art. This move by the museum has prompted widespread criticism, as well as a legal suit by a number of plaintiffs, including the three sons of the painter Norman Rockwell—a local icon who had donated paintings that will now appear at auction—and the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office (AGO), which joined as a plaintiff in an emergency motion on November 1st. Judge John Agostini ruled that none of the original plaintiffs had standing, and “scolded the [AGO] office for failing, as he saw it, to provide ‘any other theory by which the proposed auction would violate the law of public charities,’” the Berkshire Eagle reported. In his 25-page decision, Agostini called deaccessioning “a necessary evil in the museum industry due in large part to loss of funding and economic upheaval.” But the AGO filed an 11th-hour motion with the Massachusetts Appeals Court on Friday, asking it to prevent the sale. A ruling is expected by Monday.

03  Recently resigned Stedelijk Museum director Beatrix Ruf told the New York Times that the controversy over her paid side-employment was a “misunderstanding.”

(via the New York Times)

Ruf resigned in mid-October amidst questions over whether her paid, private art advisory services were in conflict with her role as steward of a public institution. In her first interview since then, Ruf told the Times over email that her outside activities had been approved by the Stedelijk’s board. She also said the $500,000 in profit she received in 2015 represented part of a farewell bonus from her former client, Swiss collector Michael Ringier, as a “thank you” for 20 years of work, and did not represent any ongoing service provision. In October, the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad published an investigation into her earnings at Currentmatters, her art advisory firm, which far exceeded her $130,000 annual salary at the Stedelijk Museum. “Choices that museum directors make about exhibitions affect the market value of works of art, and if the director is simultaneously advising private clients, the ethical lines can become blurred,” the Times wrote. But if she fully disclosed her activities to the board and they were approved, the blame may lie with the board, said Jo Houben, director of an art-related Dutch nonprofit, when interviewed by the Times. The museum’s supervisory board, which was responsible for overseeing Ruf, has commissioned a pair of independent investigations into the affair. The findings of both reports will be made available to the public.

04  After a five-year delay, the Louvre Abu Dhabi will finally open its doors to the public on Saturday.

(Artsy)

The day will be a milestone for a French-Emirati partnership that hasn’t always been popular in France—and has been marred by criticism of its workers’ conditions. At the press conference earlier this week, Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, chairman of Abu Dhabi’s Tourism & Culture Authority and of the Tourism Development and Investment Company (TDIC), was keen to put all this behind. He celebrated an institution that will be, he said, a “hub of tolerance,” and congratulated “genius” French architect Jean Nouvel. As part of the deal, the Louvre committed to a 30-year cooperation with Abu Dhabi, which included the loan of artworks for 10 years, four exhibitions per year for 15 years, and the use of the Louvre name. In exchange, the Emirati agreed to pay the Louvre €974 million ($1.12 billion) over three decades, providing funds that have been used, in part, to fund the Paris museum. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is surely hoping some of its contentious background will be eclipsed by its stunning inaugural display, which gathers around 300 loans from 13 French institutions, as well as 300 pieces from the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s fledgling collection.

05  The four artists shortlisted for the prestigious Berlin Nationalgalerie prize called on organizers to pay the award’s finalists.

(via The Art Newspaper & artnet News)

Finalists Jumana Manna, Iman Issa, and Sol Calero, along with the prize winner Agnieszka Polska, issued a joint statement on Friday, arguing that artists who are shortlisted for the prize should be compensated for the work the award requires—including mounting an exhibition and participating in panel discussions, among other commitments. They asserted that the prestige and solo museum exhibition that comes with winning the Berlin Nationalgalerie prize—given every two years to an artist under 40 residing and practicing in Germany—doesn’t necessarily replace monetary compensation. “The logic of artists working for exposure feeds directly into the normalization of the unregulated pay structures ubiquitous in the art field,” the artists wrote. They also voiced concern that an emphasis on their birthplace and gender (all four are women; none were born in Germany) in press materials has overshadowed their art. “It is clear to us that in a more egalitarian world, the fact of our gender and national origin would barely be noticed,” the group wrote. In response, the Nationalgalerie told artnet News via email that it “welcomes the statement of the four nominees” and will evaluate their points seriously.

06  A Brooklyn jury found in favor of the 5 Pointz graffiti artists on Tuesday, following a closely watched trial that hinged on a rarely tested provision of federal law.

(Artsy)

The verdict against defendant Gerald “Jerry” Wolkoff, the developer who destroyed graffiti mecca 5 Pointz, which housed the artists’ work, will not be the final word in the case. Due to an agreement reached between the parties prior to the start of jury deliberations, the judge presiding over the case will ultimately decide its outcome. The lawsuit dates back to November 2013, when Wolkoff whitewashed 5 Pointz overnight, before any of the artists were able to remove or preserve their work. A group of artists sued, alleging Wolkoff committed violations of the 1990 Visual Artist’s Rights Act (VARA). The act grants visual artists limited rights over work they created but do not own, and can entitle them to monetary damages if their works of a “recognized stature” are destroyed, or if mutilation to the work is prejudicial to the artist’s reputation. There remains little case law on the VARA, especially in the context of graffiti art. The judge’s final ruling in the 5 Pointz case will potentially bring much-needed clarity around the applicability of the statute, paving the way for more aggrieved artists to seek justice if their works are damaged.

07 A New York appeals court is allowing a claim over a $25 million Modigliani painting to proceed against the Nahmad family.

(via The Art Newspaper)

The court ruling from November 2nd allows the grandson of Parisian art dealer Oscar Stettiner to continue his claim against the powerful Nahmad family of art dealers. In 2011, the plaintiff, Philippe Maestracci, sued seeking the return of the Amedeo Modigliani painting Seated Man with a Cane (1918), which was allegedly looted from Stettiner by Nazis. This week’s appellate ruling gave Maestracci legal standing in the case. In rejecting the Nahmads’ argument that Maestracci was bound by France’s or Switzerland’s statutes of limitations, the court cited the recently enacted Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act. The act gives claimants six years from the date that they discover the location of a Nazi-looted work to begin its recovery. The decision potentially clears the way for other cases that may have arguably been subject to statutes of limitations.

08  Scholars and art historians in the U.K. have called for an end to the fees museums charge for reproducing images.

(via The Times of London)

Dozens of art historians told The Times that the “unjustified” rule, which requires scholars to pay to reprint historic artworks, represents a “tax on scholarship.” Historians assert that they pay thousands in fees to reproduce works—many of which are legally out of copyright—for academic texts that carry minimal commercial viability. “Copyright generally expires 70 years after an artist’s death, but galleries say that digitally scanning an artwork creates a new copyright,” reported The Times. British institutions like the Tate and the British Museum charge the fees, arguing that the costs of creating and reproducing images are high, while low-resolution images for non-commercial use come with little to no fees. Although the charge can vary, some scholars have said that certain museums are inflexible when it comes to pricing. A letter penned by 28 signatories stated, “We urge the UK’s national museums to follow the example of a growing number of international museums and provide open access to images of publicly owned, out-of-copyright paintings, prints and drawings so that they are free for the public to reproduce.”

09 London’s Lord Mayor Andrew Parmley has returned a Dutch Old Master painting looted by the Nazis from the Netherlands.

(via The Art Newspaper)

Insured for £1.5 million, Jacob Ochtervelt’s painting The Oyster Meal (c. 1664–65) adorned the walls of the Lord Mayor’s official residence for nearly three decades before being returned on Monday to Charlotte Bischoff van Heemskerck, the 96-year-old daughter of the work’s original owner, J.H. Smidt van Gelder. Following the announcement, Lord Mayor Andrew Parmley called the occurence “a happy, albeit long overdue resolution for her and her family.” Following the British retreat after the Battle of Arnhem (a major battle during World War II in the eastern region of the Netherlands), the Nazis took fourteen works from a bank vault where Smidt van Gelder, the director of the region’s children’s hospital, had stored them. The painting by Ochtervelt was one of six works from the vault that the Smidt van Gelder family could not locate following the war. Europe’s Commission for Looted Art made a claim on behalf of the heir of the original owner earlier this year. Recalling the battle and the painting, Bischoff van Heemskerck said that the work “is very meaningful to my family, and we are delighted to bring it home again to honour my father’s legacy.”

10  A conservator discovered a grasshopper encased in the thick paint layers of a Vincent van Gogh landscape.

(via The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art)

Conservator Mary Schafer found the small insect after magnifying the bottom of van Gogh’s 1889 landscape Olive Trees while researching the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s collection of French paintings. While it is not totally out of the norm to find plant or insect matter in works made outdoors, Schafer hoped that the insect—unnoticeable to the casual observer—would provide an opportunity to discover more information about the work (like, perhaps, the season in which van Gogh painted it). But fossil insect specialist Dr. Michael S. Engel said the little creature had died prior to embedding in the masterpiece, making more precise dating impossible. Further analysis of the painting, however, did find that a red pigment van Gogh used may have faded over time, impacting how the color is seen today, a morsel of information that may serve to clarify the the original hues of Olive Trees.

from Artsy News

#Artsy News

[kgstoryteller]

Bomb First-by David Bromwich-centrally thematically linked with “killing justice: the taste of knives”

For an American president, bombing is easier than thinking. For an American lawmaker or opinion-maker, it costs nothing to celebrate the resolve of a president who bombs. On the evening of April 6, Donald Trump reversed his apparent policy of declining to attack the Assad regime and fired fifty-nine Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian government airfield. The cause was a report that the Syrian air force had dropped a chemical bomb that killed at least seventy-two civilians. John McCain and Lindsey Graham—who have been among Trump’s most strident critics in the Republican Party,  and who have long been calling for the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad—immediately applauded the action. The House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, approved it as “proportional.” Trump’s rapid and definitive response was likewise praised by Fareed Zakaria: “I think Donald Trump became president” by bombing—a true president at last (he meant) after weeks of dithering and confusion. Ezra Klein also gave a qualified justification of the missile strike against a nation that has never attacked the United States: Trump had acted “well within the norms of American foreign policy.”

This was a peculiar turn of fortune. A president who for many months, both before he won the election and after, had been characterized as dangerously unstable by the people he calls the establishment, now witnessed the same establishment promote him to the ranks of the sane and responsible. What conclusion will be drawn by the mind of Donald Trump?

There was a risk in the sudden violence. Syria is a battlefield in which Russia, too, has fought and built up military assets and invested considerable diplomatic prestige. But Trump had taken the precaution of warning the Russians to clear their people from the target area; and when a Russian UN envoy was asked what he meant when he warned of “negative consequences” of the bombing, he chose not to mention US-Russian relations. He said: “Look at Iraq, look at Libya.”

By the end of George W. Bush’s second term, the Iraq war had displaced almost five million people in a country of 27 million. By the end of Obama’s second term, the Libya war had displaced 400,000 in a country of six million. These are facts the world may choose not to forget as quickly as Americans often do. Five or six years ago, it was the satirical usage of a few critics to speak of “multiple wars” or “perpetual war”; but mainstream journalists now speak casually of how an adviser or a general needs credibility for “our next war.” But look at Iraq, look at Libya.

Coverage of the chemical attack in Syria—and of the American missile strike that issued as a “punishment” of Assad to enforce “international norms”—was apparently supported by evidence satisfying to journalists and editors. But here, as in the treatment of secret information about Trump and Russia, there was an order of logic in the reporting that should have set off an alarm. For something new was happening in both cases: the major newspapers, networks, and websites vouched for conclusions—regarding the accuracy of the inferences about Trump; regarding the source and motive of the chemical attack in Syria—which they described as having been drawn from a sound interpretation of solid evidence. Yet only conclusions were disclosed. The evidence was revealed in the broadest outlines and with little effort to trace the path by which it acquired legitimacy. So, in the latest instance in Syria, the most clear-cut evidence provided to reporters was simply “an image of the radar track of a Syrian airplane leaving the airfield and flying to the chemical strike area Tuesday.”  It was assumed by reporters that this meant the use of chemical weapons had been ordered by Assad and that the incident followed a regular pattern of chemical attacks by the Syrian government. The last assumption, however, was exceedingly careless.

The documented attacks that the reporters seemed to have in mind occurred on March 19, 2013, near Aleppo, when more than two dozen were killed; on August 21, 2013 in Ghouta, near Damascus, when many hundreds died of chemical poisoning; and (exactly two years later) on August 21, 2015, in the town of Marea, north of Aleppo. A Reuters story by Anthony Deutsch several weeks after the third incident summarized the conclusion by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons that banned weapons had indeed been used; the same story revealed the uncertainty of the investigating body concerning which side had used the weapons. Deutsch spoke of “a growing body of evidence that the Islamic State group has obtained, and is using, chemical weapons in both Iraq and Syria.” These indications have scarcely been mentioned in recent US reporting on Syria. The Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may have had them in mind when, in his initial response to the recent incident, he said that there are “continuing questions…about who is responsible for these horrible attacks.”

None of this affects what Americans should think of Bashar al-Assad. Before the war began, Assad was one more regional despot like Saddam Hussein and Muamar Qaddafi, who, though oppressive and illiberal, posed little international threat. In the civil war, Assad and his allies, Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia, have committed atrocities and inflicted suffering on the Syrian population on a scale that can never be atoned for. His enemies—ISIS, Al-Nusra (the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda), and various proxy warriors bankrolled by Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia— have often done the same. Which of these parties you hate the most, if you are Syrian, may depend on which has killed the largest numbers of your family.

Now, more than five years into this intractable conflict, is it plausible that the United States can alleviate the sufferings caused by Assad—and by his enemies, too—with a full-scale military attempt to overthrow the government of Syria? The American establishment seems to have answered almost overnight with an automatic yes. But the execution of this policy, while keeping us in the fight against ISIS, would add to our list of enemies the other most formidable military powers in the country, namely the armed forces of Syria, Iran’s proxies, and Russia. The stated object of the policy would be to stop the bloodshed, but it would entail a drastic acceleration of violence.

Go back a moment to the lesson that Trump is apt to learn from events of the past week. Would it be wrong to reduce it to the following? “You can make some highly respectable new friends by throwing missiles at an obnoxious foreign power. It works like a dream so long as you do it fast and give it a humanitarian gloss.” In the sheer quantity of the attention paid, and the narrowness of the attention, something terrible about our political culture has come to light. Consider The New York Times on Friday April 7. The morning edition featured no fewer than nineteen stories on the Syria missile strike, with headlines varied and supple: “Anguish Sways the Isolationist”; “A ‘Significant Blow’ to U.S. Ties, Putin Says”; “A One-Time Strike Aimed at Halting Use of Nerve Gas”; “63 Hours: From Sarin Attack to Missiles Falling”; “Trump Fires a Warning Shot in the Bannon-Kushner Battle”; “An Unexpected Change of Subject at an Elegant Diplomatic Dinner”; “Trump’s View of Syria: How it Evolved, in Tweets”; “Trump’s Decision Has Some Critics Cheering and Some Supporters Booing”; “GOP Lawmakers, Once Skeptical of Obama Plan to Strike Syria, Back Trump”; “Was Missile Attack on Syria Illegal? Explaining Presidential War Powers”; “Syrians Opposed to Assad Feel Sense of Satisfaction, but Also Fear Reprisals”; “Once Critical of President, Refugees Offer Approval”; “A Global Divide Over a Missile Attack”; “Missile Strike Signals a New Reality in Syria for Friends and Foes Alike”; “Measuring Action Against a Government Already Under Siege”; “Wasn’t Syria’s Stock of Chemical Weapons Destroyed? It’s Complicated”; “Asking If U.S. Remarks Helped Embolden Assad”; “Who Was in the Room With Him? Trump’s Advisers During the Strike”; “For Tillerson and McMaster, Action on Syria Is Chance to Step Out of the Shadows.”

The headlines are a shade less redundant than the stories themselves; but the words that inevitably stand out are attack, strike, decision, action, Syria, Syrians, and (most of all) Trump. Though a critical note is struck in some places, along with a decorous show of scruple concerning the balance between executive action and constitutional law (with law on the whole portrayed sympathetically), the overall message is never in doubt. The newspaper of record is telling a president whose legitimacy it has challenged ever since the election—a president who craves approval almost as much as he loves attention—“Now you have made yourself important in a good way.”

Democratic lawmakers have done much the same: Senator Chuck Schumer, when he gave the questionably legal Tomahawk attack his vote of confidence last Thursday, was only following the path of Richard Gephardt when in October 2002 he stood beside George W. Bush in the Rose Garden to display a unified front supporting a possible war against Iraq. Indeed, in the years since 2002, there has not been a Middle East war for which the United States did not invoke a humanitarian motive: to free Afghanistan from the religious tyranny of the Taliban; to create a multicultural democracy in Iraq, in which Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis could participate equally; to allow the Arab Spring to flourish in Libya by awarding the rebels the victory they deserved. From the Libya catastrophe, Barack Obama may have learned something but his party learned nothing.

Meanwhile, it looks as if the relentless Democratic strategy of pinning Trump to Russia has turned back to plague its inventors. Deprecation of Putin and all things Russian was the necessary means to delegitimize Trump, as the Democrats saw it, but the end in view was the destruction of Trump. Weirdly, the Democrats lost sight of this and now Trump has gone up against Putin and rallied the Democrats to back him. They are left holding Trump as their indispensable ally and humanitarian war as a favorite cause, which at an opportune moment could displace any other: the cause of climate change for example.

Put this down to a lack of political talent and consistent thinking. The larger discouraging fact is that almost by definition, a member of today’s Democratic Party has no interest in foreign policy. However clouded by militarism the judgment of senators like McCain and Graham and their understudy Tom Cotton may be—and however simple and sweeping the nonintervention doctrine of Rand Paul—these Republicans are actually people who have information and opinions they are ready to espouse. Democrats have more to say about Obamacare and abortion and trans bathrooms than they do about Iraq, Syria, Yemen, or Russia. But what you can do at home is limited by the energy and dollars given to enterprises abroad. In February, the Defense Department reported that over the past two-and-a-half years, the United States has spent $11.9 billion fighting ISIS alone: an average of $12.8 million per day.

On April 9, on the CNN news show GPS, General David Petraeus summoned Americans to a lengthened Syrian war. It would not, he said, be a war lasting just a few years beyond 2017, but “a generational struggle,” a venture that would require us to measure out in careful quantities the necessary “blood and treasure.” Petraeus may yet run for president. He is looking ahead to a merger between a new cold war and a great-power scramble for the Middle East. In response to this extraordinary proposal, his interviewer, Fareed Zakaria, offered no challenge and no question.

April 10, 2017, 12:32 pm

Image: Ford Williams/US Navy via Getty Images Guided-missile destroyer USS Porter firing a Tomahawk missile at Syria, April 7, 2017

#Trump Syria permanent war no debate