Jonathan Freedland wrote a book about the American revolution almost 20 years ago. The timing was not great.

The American revolution, I argued, was our inheritance, a part of our patrimony mislaid across the Atlantic. From a written constitution to a system of radically devolved power to the replacement of monarchy with an elected head of state, it was time for us to bring home the revolution that we had made in America.

Mere months after publication came the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

“So you want us to live the American dream?” one interviewer asked. “All a bit of nightmare now, isn’t it?”

And that was then.

That, or something like it, has happened at intervals ever since. If

Weirdness.

A tweet by Lindsay Shepherd:

"Wilfrid Laurier University is not safe for their students nor the surrounding community" – local antifascist group

I actually kind of respect how militant these people are.

Their writing needs some work though. pic.twitter.com/9zG5YauFUO

— Lindsay Shepherd (@NewWorldHominin) December 30, 2017

Oof – the writing and thinking in that post is so bad I have to go look at the Facebook group. I’m especially curious about what any of that has to do with the IWW – the Industrial Workers of the World aka Wobblies.

The About page sounds IWW-compatible, ish, sort of.

The General Defense Committee (GDC) acts in defense and solidarity for those oppressed by capitalism. We advocate for a model of

In the least surprising news of the day:

It pays to be a chief executive officer in the United States, according to a new report revealing that the pay gap between U.S. CEOs and their employees is larger than in any other country.

The report may be new, but I’m pretty sure the finding is not. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it before, more than once, because we’ve been arranging things this way for a long time.

The U.S. CEOs of the top publicly traded companies came in first on Bloomberg’s 2017 ranking of Global CEO Pay-to-Average Income ratio. According to the analysis, CEOs in the U.S. averaged $14.3 million in annual pay, making 265 times more than their average

Originally a comment by iknklast on Maybe it’s time for Vanity Fair to do one.

Vanity Fair, which looks like it is on its last legs

That’s the same thing he says about every news source he doesn’t like – looks like it is on its last legs. He has no imagination, no creativity, no ability to hold enough phrases in his head to even say anything that isn’t a repeat of what he’s said dozens of times before.

And I wish everyone would shut the hell up about Hillary and focus on what we need to focus on – Donald J. Trump, toddler-in-chief. I am sick of hearing pundits who have never been to the midwest for any … Read the rest

An article at Scientific American claims that new research suggests that men are less green aka environmentally conscientious than women because they think green=girly.

Some researchers have suggested that personality differences, such as women’s prioritization of altruism, may help to explain this gender gap in green behavior.

Our own research suggests an additional possibility: men may shun eco-friendly behavior because of what it conveys about their masculinity. It’s not that men don’t care about the environment. But they also tend to want to feel macho, and they worry that eco-friendly behaviors might brand them as feminine.

Oh noes.

We showed that there is a psychological link between eco-friendliness and perceptions of femininity. Due to this “green-feminine stereotype,” both men and

Was Vanity Fair’s “advice” to Hillary Clinton sexist shit or “lighthearted” and amusing speaking up to power?

Maybe it's time for Hillary Clinton to take up a new hobby in 2018 pic.twitter.com/sbE78rA5At

— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) December 23, 2017

Well the fact is she has taken up a new “hobby” – she’s not running again, and she’s doing other things. But by “hobby” they really mean hobby, as opposed to serious grown-up work; they mean go away, be quiet, don’t keep being public and saying words.

Funny that they didn’t say that to Sanders or Biden, isn’t it. I wonder what the mystery ingredient might be that makes it ok for them to keep being public and saying words and … Read the rest

Another chilling piece of ugliness from the Trump administration via Chiraag Bains, a former senior counsel in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions retracted an Obama-era guidance to state courts that was meant to end debtors’ prisons, which throw people who are too poor to pay fines into jail. This practice is blatantly unconstitutional, and the guidance had helped jump-start reform around the country. Its withdrawal is the latest sign that the federal government is retreating from protecting civil rights for the most vulnerable among us.

What are we to conclude from this? That Trump and Sessions want to see poor people rot in jail because they can’t pay court fines.

The Justice

John Stuart Mill on how women are trained to accept subordination:

All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that women should be collectively rebellious to the power of men. They are so far in a position different from all other subject classes, that their masters require something more from them than actual service. Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other slaves rely, for

Shawn Vestal points out that it’s really not a matter of not knowing sexual harassment is not ok.

As a man, on behalf of men, speaking with the full power and authority of the patriarchy at my back, let me just say: We don’t need sexual harassment training.

None of us needs a seminar to learn not to swap a job offer for sex. None of us is just one bullet point shy of understanding he shouldn’t lock the door and start masturbating in front of a woman. No man requires a PowerPoint to get that he shouldn’t ask a subordinate to watch him take a shower or text [her] a nude picture of himself.

Knowing they shouldn’t is part … Read the rest

A horror out of Karachi: a pair of teenage neighbors tried to run away together from their poor neighborhood of Ali Brohi Goth, and were murdered by their male relatives. First the 15-year-old girl, Bakhtaja, was tied down and electrocuted, and the next day it was 18-year-old Ghani’s turn.

His father finished dinner, then returned. With the help of an uncle, he strapped his son to a rope bed, tying one arm and one leg to the frame with uncovered electrical wires.

Bakhtaja had endured 10 minutes of searing electrical jolts before she died. The boy took longer, and eventually the uncle stepped in and strangled him. The couple were buried in the dead of night.

You’d think parental … Read the rest

Updating to add: disregard the whole “the minute they” part, because I overlooked the date. This is actually about how they did both at the same time…which is even more ridiculous but also less sneaky. My source was an excoriating Twitter thread by Ben Wikler.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand the minute they get their slash taxes on the rich bill signed, they say they’re going to slash Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Of course they do. Inch by inch they get closer to their goal: heavy taxation on the poor and zero taxation on the rich.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said Wednesday that congressional Republicans will aim next year to reduce spending on both federal health care and