Guest post by Maureen Brian.

Midnight on April 4th was the deadline for companies to submit their data on their gender pay gap, if any, to the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Then some editor at the BBC had the notion of inviting wannabee-famous Jordan Peterson to comment on the whole exercise for BBC Radio4 Today.

In the course of a very scrappy interview it became quite clear that he didn’t like it. Not one bit. Certain things, it would seem, are ordained by God – that people who work long hours are all men and thus should be paid a lot more just for being, that the bulk of child or elderly relative care must fall upon women, that … Read the rest

Some right-wingers are, of course, saying it’s not fair, it’s censorship, it’s plickal krecknis.

Williamson’s hiring in March outraged some liberals, who pointed to 2014 tweets (since deleted) in which he opined “the law should treat abortion like any other homicide” and added, when considering an appropriate punishment for women who undergo abortions, “I have hanging … in mind.”

Williamson’s firing on Thursday prompted equally-angry responses from some of his fellow conservatives in the media, who contended the move shows they are an oppressed minority — “ghettoized,” in the words of the Resurgent’s Erick Erickson.

Ghettoized by the Nazis of plickal krecknis. It will be the gas chambers next, just you wait and see.

Kevin Williamson's firing is another

This just in – The Atlantic has fired Kevin Williamson, the “women who get abortions should be hanged” guy.

Kevin Williamson has been fired from The Atlantic.

From Jeffrey Goldberg's letter to staff: "The language he used in this podcast—and in my conversations with him in recent days—made it clear that the original tweet did, in fact, represent his carefully considered views."

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) April 5, 2018

"The tweet was not merely an impulsive, decontextualized, heat-of-the-moment post…Furthermore, the language used in the podcast was callous and violent. This runs contrary to The Atlantic’s tradition of respectful, well-reasoned debate, and to the values of our workplace."

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) April 5, 2018

That’s good, but why was he … Read the rest

Allison Meier at Hyperallergic tells us about a database project to collect fugitive slave ads, which are themselves a source of information on slaves and slavery.

Readers of the May 24, 1796 Pennsylvania Gazette found an advertisement offering ten dollars to any person who would apprehend Oney Judge, an enslaved woman who had fled from President George Washington’s Virginia plantation, Mount Vernon. The notice described her in detail as a “light mulatto girl, much freckled, with very black eyes and bushy black hair,” as well as her skills at mending clothes, and that she “may attempt to escape by water … it is probable she will attempt to pass as a free woman, and has, it is said,

This is just silly. Joe Pompeo at Vanity Fair on the woke young versus the [??] old at the NY Times the night Trump won the election:

Reporters and editors were in overdrive, tearing up one historic front page for another. The story that America’s paper of record had been gearing up to tell in the coming days—months, years—was being obliterated in real time. From a journalistic perspective, that wasn’t exactly a bad thing. The new story, after all, was more fascinating, more chaotic—utterly unprecedented. And Trump’s election was the kind of Earth-shattering event that only comes around once or twice in a newsperson’s career. So for someone like Dean Baquet, the Times’s then 60-year-old executive editor, the

Madeleine Albright was on Fresh Air yesterday to talk about her new book: Fascism: A Warning and about the fascist trend.

Albright was the first woman secretary of state. She was appointed to that position by President Bill Clinton in 1997, after having served as his U.N. ambassador. Her new book examines how fascism took hold in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. Then Albright moves on to look at current authoritarian leaders in several Eastern European countries, Turkey, Russia and North Korea. One chapter is devoted to President Trump, whose election, she says, added to her sense of urgency in writing this book. Albright is now a Distinguished Professor of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.

…

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: …And part of

A little vignette of what it’s like to play at Being the Government with Trump in the room – a slice from a longer piece about ogod ogod it’s chaos he’s so nuts he blows off everything anyone suggests to him ogod ogod.

And now, the little vignette:

Aides often become frustrated with the President’s short attention span. One official described Trump as frequently meandering from the topic at hand in meetings, particularly if he believes the positions being aired by his advisers differ from his own point of view. He’ll stall sessions with non-sequiturs, complaining at random about Amazon’s tax status or proclaiming that he’s only visited Russia once, for the Miss Universe pageant in 2013.

We all know … Read the rest

In Mueller news – he does have the authority to investigate the things he’s investigating.

Paul Manafort’s legal strategy for evading the charges filed against him by special counsel Robert Mueller was fairly straightforward. His attorneys argued, among other things, that many of the charges Manafort faces — which include fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy — are largely outside the scope of Mueller’s authority. After all, Mueller was appointed to investigate collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign during the 2016 race. What does Manafort’s allegedly having laundered money by buying real estate in Brooklyn have to do with any of that?

Trump fans have been saying that, noisily all along. Problem: it’s not true.

Late Monday night, Mueller’s team

Learn something new every day. Today-I-learned that Sinclair has employment contracts that say employees have to pay Sinclair MUCH MONEY if they quit or are fired. That sounds illegal to me, but apparently it’s not.

https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/status/980811757726810112

If you can’t read the screenshot – it basically just says “employees have to pay Sinclair MUCH MONEY if they quit or are fired” in more legalese and detail.

That helps explain why they can’t just say “No” when Sinclair tells them to read lying canned bullshit on camera.… Read the rest

Taslima asks a pointed question.

Why are they so interested to take pictures? pic.twitter.com/Ze0ZGWxR24

— taslima nasreen (@taslimanasreen) April 3, 2018

I have to say, I’m a little grossed out by all those shameless naked hands poking out. They’re obviously doing it on purpose – carefully pushing their naked nude unclad hands out front so that we can’t not see them. The sluts.… Read the rest

Suzanne Moore has a lot of sympathy for Niall Ferguson and other endangered guys like him.

Up steps the latest victim, poor Niall Ferguson, author, history professor and lover of empire, who wrote in the Sunday Times that he had to endure a “disproportionately vitriolic response” for organising a conference that featured only white male historians. How he has suffered, I can only imagine.

Jordan Peterson, another minor academic, became major simply by outlining how wrong we are to talk of the various ways in which western culture has been deemed oppressive to women. Excuse me, but didn’t Camille Paglia do that 20 years ago?

To such men, any notion of inclusiveness, or of the dread “diversity”, becomes a

Trump and Pruitt are putting their shoulders to the wheel, or their feet to the floor, pushing us to create more and more and more pollution to make American great again.

The Trump administration openly threatened one of the cornerstones of California’s environmental protections Monday, saying that it may revoke the state’s ability under the Clean Air Act to impose stricter standards than the federal government sets for vehicle emissions.

The announcement came as the administration confirmed it is tearing up landmark fuel economy rules pushing automakers to manufacture cleaner burning cars and SUVs.

We want dirtier burning cars, god damn it. Dirt is good. It’s like cowboys n shit.

Pruitt’s announcement said that the administration will abandon the federal