Trump’s good buddy former Milwaukee County sheriff David Clarke:

I am UNINTIMIDATED by lib media attempts to smear and discredit me with their FAKE NEWS reports designed to silence me. I will continue to poke them in the eye with a sharp stick and bitch slap these scum bags til they get it. I have been attacked by better people than them #MAGA pic.twitter.com/XtZW5PdU2b

— David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) December 30, 2017

I am UNINTIMIDATED by lib media attempts to smear and discredit me with their FAKE NEWS reports designed to silence me. I will continue to poke them in the eye with a sharp stick and bitch slap these scum bags til they get it. I have been attacked by better people than them #MAGA

BREAKING NEWS! When LYING LIB MEDIA makes up FAKE NEWS to smear me, the ANTIDOTE is go right at them. Punch them in the nose & MAKE THEM TASTE THEIR OWN BLOOD. Nothing gets a bully like LYING LIB MEDIA’S attention better than to give them a taste of their own blood #neverbackdown pic.twitter.com/T2NY2psHCR

— David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) December 30, 2017

BREAKING NEWS! When LYING LIB MEDIA makes up FAKE NEWS to smear me, the ANTIDOTE is go right at them. Punch them in the nose & MAKE THEM TASTE THEIR OWN BLOOD. Nothing gets a bully like LYING LIB MEDIA’S attention better than to give them a taste of their own blood #neverbackdown

Nothing like getting under the skin of lefties like I did today. I fight to win. You come at me libs you better bring a hard hat, some aspirin and your veggie wrap because it’s going to be a long day and I’m going to smack you around until you crawl back to your mom’s basement. pic.twitter.com/CgmrRiBp8Y

— David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) December 31, 2017

Nothing like getting under the skin of lefties like I did today. I fight to win. You come at me libs you better bring a hard hat, some aspirin and your veggie wrap because it’s going to be a long day and I’m going to smack you around until you crawl back to your mom’s basement.

This man used to be in law enforcement, until he resigned last August. People like that should not be in law enforcement, nor should they be on Twitter. I’ve reported him a couple of times now.

This is not normal and it should never become normal.

From the ACLU:

During the holiday season, many of us think about what we can do to help people struggling with poverty. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, on the other hand, decided just before Christmas to rescind a guidance meant to protect low-income Americans.

The 2016 guidance, issued by former President Obama’s Justice Department, urged state and local courts nationwide to abide by constitutional principles prohibiting the jailing of poor people who cannot afford to pay court fines and fees. Jeff Sessions’ action makes clear that he and his Justice Department are unconcerned by courts trampling on the rights of poor people.

The Obama Justice Department issued the 2016 letter after reports and lawsuits by the ACLU and other groups revealed how modern-day debtors’ prisons function in more than a dozen states, despite the fact that the U.S. two centuries ago formally outlawed jailing people simply because they have unpaid debts.

These efforts revealed that poor people were being locked up in Georgia, Washington, Mississippi, and elsewhere without court hearings or legal representation when they could not pay fines and fees for traffic tickets or other civil infractions or criminal offenses. These efforts also show that modern-day debtors’ prisons result from state laws allowing or requiring the suspension of driver’s licenses for unpaid court fines or fees without first requiring confirmation that the person could actually pay.

Modern-day debtors’ prisons received unprecedented national attention in 2015 when the Justice Department issued a 185-page report in its investigation of the Ferguson Police Department after the shooting of teenager Michael Brown. It documented how Ferguson police sought to advance the “City’s focus on revenue rather than … public safety needs,” leading to the routine incarceration of poor people to elicit court fine and fee payments, which raised due process concerns and reflected racial bias.

This wave of attention on draconian debtors’ prisons spurred the Justice Department to issue the 2016 letter on fines and fees.

But Jeff Sessions wants to see poor people locked up and/or made poorer by fines. It’s how he rolls.

The hot Donnie-news today is what got the FBI started on the Russia investigation. It turns out it was Papadopoulos blabbing to an Australian diplomat.

During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.

Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role.

The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired.

July 2016. That early.

The information that Mr. Papadopoulos gave to the Australians answers one of the lingering mysteries of the past year: What so alarmed American officials to provoke the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election?

It was not, as Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign. Instead, it was firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies.

Via one of Trump’s own people, babbling as he sucked down the gin. The FBI, on the other hand, did the opposite.

Once the information Mr. Papadopoulos had disclosed to the Australian diplomat reached the F.B.I., the bureau opened an investigation that became one of its most closely guarded secrets. Senior agents did not discuss it at the daily morning briefing, a classified setting where officials normally speak freely about highly sensitive operations.

There was debate about whether to go public or not, and the agency decided not.

Ultimately, the F.B.I. and Justice Department decided to keep the investigation quiet, a decision that Democrats in particular have criticized. And agents did not interview Mr. Papadopoulos until late January.

So we’re now living in Putin’s world.

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 it wasn’t a hideous, only-in-America mass shooting, it would be an election in which a man with fewer votes defeated an infinitely more qualified opponent who had won more.

Usually, I have managed to deflect these challenges, arguing that my book was a homage to a founding ideal, not to the necessarily flawed reality. But it’s time for me to admit my doubts about its core idea – its admiration for the US constitution and system of government. For this first year of the Donald Trump presidency has exposed two flaws in the model that I cannot brush aside so easily.

The first is the one we keep talking about, the one we were talking about only yesterday – the fact that much of what we think is mandatory is actually a matter of custom, and thus worthless in the face of someone like Trump.

The first is that Trump has vividly demonstrated that much of what keeps a democracy intact is not enshrined in the written letter of a constitution, but resides instead in customs and conventions – norms – that are essential to civic wellbeing. Trump trampled all over those as a candidate – refusing to disclose his tax returns, for example – and has trampled over even more as president.

Convention dictated that he had to divest himself of private business concerns on taking office, to prevent a conflict of interest – but in the absence of a law explicitly forcing him to do so, he did no such thing. The same goes for appointing unqualified relatives to senior jobs, sacking the director of the FBI with no legitimate cause, or endorsing an accused child molester for the US Senate. No law told him he couldn’t, so he did.

There’s not even anything ruling out complete incompetence or mental dissolution.

[T]his year of Trump has also shown the extent to which the US has an unwritten constitution that – just like ours – relies on the self-restraint of the key political players, a self-restraint usually insisted upon by a free press. Yet when confronted with a leader unbound by any sense of shame – and shamelessness might just be Trump’s defining quality – America is left unexpectedly vulnerable.

There’s impeachment, but it turns out that impeachment is entirely political. Trump could eat babies on camera and still the Republican Congress would not impeach him.

In 2017 we saw with new clarity that the strength of the US constitution depends entirely on the willingness of those charged with enforcing it to do their duty. And today’s Republicans refuse to fulfil that obligation. They, like Trump, are without shame. This was a fatal oversight by Hamilton, James Madison and their fellow framers of the constitution. They did not reckon on a partisanship so intense it would blind elected representatives to the national interest – so that they would, repeatedly, put party ahead of country. The founders did not conceive of a force like today’s Republican party, willing to indulge a president nakedly hostile to ideals Americans once held sacred.

And to the most basic everyday inhibitions and ethical considerations.

And these weaknesses in the US model have prompted me to see others. The second amendment does not compel Americans to allow an unrestricted flow of guns into the hands of the violent and dangerous, but the fact that the argument hinges on interpretations of a text written more than two centuries ago is itself a problem. It means America, in the words of that great revolutionary Thomas Paine, is too often “like dead and living bodies chained together”, today’s generation shackled to the words of their ancestors.

Yes. It’s not working out well at present.

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 community self-defense, where marginalized people are provided with a platform to speak and organize.

The GDC works in tandem with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a grassroots labour union, with the understanding that a broad strategy is needed for the defense of persecuted communities.

But the front page is another story.

The first item is the one Lindsay Shepherd tweeted.

No, Deborah. Trans students deserve an apology.

This troubling release has made Wilfrid Laurier University‘s position absolutely clear and it’s thoroughly unsurprising. Deborah MacLatchy has decided to inform us about some elusive “independent fact-finder report” (invisible to us commoners) seemingly created to entertain the alt-right’s favourite weapons “do non-binary people really exist?” and “cis people need a safer space too”. The MacLatchy administration has, once again, made it blatantly clear that Wilfrid Laurier University is not safe for their students nor the surrounding community. For shame.

No, Deborah. Showcasing blatant transphobia is not a “reasonable classroom teaching tool”. You wouldn’t showcase Peterson’s blatant misogyny- would you? Would you showcase it if it was aired on TVO? Your followers think that you would.

No, Deborah. You don’t do enough to ensure that your school has “necessary supports and tools to help those who have experienced marginalization and discrimination to engage fully”. Should you have had a postering campaign demanding an apology for trans students? Should the victim’s complaint been registered through unofficial channels? Your followers think that you should.

No, Deborah. We absolutely refuse to “turn the page on a very unfortunate incident”. We absolutely refuse to let you call trampling on our existence the “politicization of an issue”. We absolutely refuse to let you admonish us with your call to “put an end to it.”

Your followers, the far-right, aren’t going to stop. Your centrism will continue to cater to them. You’ve made it clear that our community must defend itself, and we absolutely refuse to take this sitting down.

A post December 25:

For all my trans and nonbinary siblings out there at holiday gatherings today, I hope it goes as smoothly as possible. For all the individuals whose pronouns won’t be respected or names will be ignored, chin up and try to stay strong. For everyone whose families might treat them with intolerance or bigotry, know that I love you, and that your worth isn’t determined by them. For anyone who can’t present the way they want to today, I hope that you get through it as quickly as possible, and maybe you can wear something that at least feels not whollly uncomfortable. For the people out there wearing binders, remember to stretch as you eat, your binder can get tight as your stomach fills up. For the transfem people out there who can’t shave or wear makeup today, you are still beautiful, you are always beautiful. And for the people who don’t have a family or place to go today, I hope you can find some safety and comfort.

What does that have to do with the IWW?

I don’t know, it seems to be a very small group; I wouldn’t have been aware of it if Lindsay Shepherd hadn’t tweeted it; maybe it’s just one person dressed up as a group. But I do wonder why the IWW is being arbitrarily attached to this touchy-feely gender idennidee stuff, especially when actual labor issues don’t seem to get a mention at all. It makes me wonder if there’s a fashion for co-opting labor and socialist groups to promote gender idennidee instead.

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 worker.

The analysis examined benchmark stock indexes across 22 nations. China and Norway ranked at the bottom of the list. Norway had the smallest pay gap with CEOs making $1.28 million compared to the income of its average worker at $64,346, an income “roughly equal to the income generated by 20 people,” according to Bloomberg.

This is not a stat to be proud of.

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 reasonable length of time, and mostly drive/fly through (where they are greeted with smiles by polite people who seem nice), but think they can parse the election by accusing her of ignoring the heartland and their needs.

The needs of the heartland are the same as the rest of the country – they need jobs, income, health care, child care, food, clothing, housing, affordable education – all the things that Hillary and Bernie both focused on. She ignored the wants of the heartland – criminalizing abortion, forcing everyone to read the Bible/pray in the schools, keep them furriners out of our country, and re-criminalize same sex orientation. While their at it, they want to force women to take up knitting and quilting as a hobby (see, Vanity Fair? You’re right with the picture here in the hate-filled heartland!), cook and clean, and be “feminine” (i.e. frilly and attractive until they are 30, and then disappear from view into the kitchen, known to exist only by the steady stream of yummy things that emanate from within).

As for Sarah Sanders, her New Years resolution should be to stop lying for money.

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 women judged eco-friendly products, behaviors, and consumers as more feminine than their non-green counterparts.  In one experiment, participants of both sexes described an individual who brought a reusable canvas bag to the grocery store as more feminine than someone who used a plastic bag—regardless of whether the shopper was a male or female.  In another experiment, participants perceived themselves to be more feminine after recalling a time when they did something good versus bad for the environment.

Well that’s stark. So apparently we all see basic decency as female and its opposite as male. If that’s true, how fucking tragic for men. Just doing “something good” is for pussies.

I find myself hoping the research is badly flawed.

Ironically, although men are often considered to be less sensitive than women, they seem to be particularly sensitive when it comes to perceptions of their gender identity. In fact, a previous study suggests that men find it to be more difficult than women to choose between masculine and feminine versions of everyday food and household items and will usually change their preferences to be more manly when allowed time to think about their decisions. Something as simple as holding a purse, ordering a colorful drink, or talking in a high voice can lead to social harm, so men tend to keep a sharp eye out for any of these potential snares.

Humans are so pathetic.

H/t Josh.

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 indeed saying they will or might run again, and not for her. She actually won the popular vote in 2016, which is more than they can say.

Erik Wemple at the Post comes down on the side of it’s sexist shit.

How do you boost Hillary Clinton’s favorability ratings with Trumpites? That’s a tough task, considering the enduring popularity of the whole “lock her up” movement. Yet one approach would be to line up a crew of young urbanites, put champagne flutes in their hands and have them recite snarky and demeaning New Year’s resolutions for the twice-failed presidential candidate and former first lady.

…

“It’s time to start working on your sequel to your book, ‘What Happened.’ ‘What the Hell Happened?’” riffs one staffer. Next up: “Get someone on your tech staff to disable autofill on your iPhone so that typing in ‘F’ doesn’t become ‘Form Exploratory Committee for 2020.’”

The presentation reaches peak condescension, with this “resolution”: “Take up a new hobby in the new year: Volunteer work, knitting, improv comedy, literally anything that will keep you from running again.”

One, she’s already not running again; two, knitting? How about fuck you, does fuck you work for you? Three, why her but not him and him?

Maya Kosoff, the Vanity Fair staffer who advises Clinton to take up knitting, tweeted, “i don’t appreciate being taken out of context to make me seem super sexist. this wasn’t a hillary hit piece either, fwiw! we made silly new years resolutions for a bunch of politicians.” Indeed, there are snarky resolutions, using the same formula, for others, including Trump adviser Gary Cohn, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and President Trump.

But they all have state power right now; Clinton does not.

At any rate, of course the angry toddler in chief was on it this morning, after Vanity Fair apologized.

Vanity Fair, which looks like it is on its last legs, is bending over backwards in apologizing for the minor hit they took at Crooked H. Anna Wintour, who was all set to be Amb to Court of St James’s & a big fundraiser for CH, is beside herself in grief & begging for forgiveness!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 28, 2017

Vanity Fair magazine apologized Wednesday after receiving blowback on social media for a satirical video suggesting New Year’s resolutions to Hillary Clinton.

Now, the president of the United States of America has made use of Twitter’s 280-character limit to tweet his own critique of the publication — for not being harsh enough on his former political opponent.

“Vanity Fair, which looks like it is on its last legs, is bending over backward in apologizing for the minor hit they took at Crooked H,” President Trump tweeted, using one of his regular derogatory nicknames for Clinton.

Trump went on to add that Anna Wintour was “a big fundraiser” for Clinton and had been “all set” to be ambassador to the Court of St. James’s (the formal title used in the United Kingdom for the American ambassador). Trump tweeted that Wintour “is beside herself in grief & begging for forgiveness!”

Wintour is editor in chief of Vogue and artistic director for all Condé Nast, which publishes Vanity Fair.

Whatever; he doesn’t like her, so in she goes.

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 Department helped shine a light on the harms of fine and fees when it investigated Ferguson, Mo., three years ago after the killing of the teenager Michael Brown by a police officer. As one of the lawyers on that case, I saw firsthand the damage that the city had wrought on its black community.

Ferguson used its criminal justice system as a for-profit enterprise, extracting millions from its poorest citizens. Internal emails revealed the head of finance directing policing strategy to maximize revenue rather than ensure public safety. Officers told us they were pressured to issue as many tickets as possible.

Even the local judge was in on it, imposing penalties of $302 for jaywalking and $531 for allowing weeds to grow in one’s yard. He issued arrest warrants for residents who fell behind on payments — including a 67-year-old woman who had been fined for a trash-removal violation — without inquiring whether they even had the ability to pay the exorbitant amounts. The arrests resulted in new charges, more fees and the suspension of driver’s licenses. These burdens fell disproportionately on African-Americans.

No wonder Trump and Sessions approve.

At the time of our investigation, over 16,000 people had outstanding arrest warrants from Ferguson, a city of 21,000.

That’s a staggering statistic.

In 2015 the DOJ got legal types together to work out a reform, and the legal types obliged.

Relying on Supreme Court precedent from over 30 years ago, the 2016 guidance set out basic constitutional requirements: Do not imprison a person for nonpayment without first asking whether he or she can pay. Consider alternatives like community service. Do not condition access to a court hearing on payment of all outstanding debt.

The DOJ also spent some money on it.

Along with private litigation and advocacy, these efforts have helped drive change around the country. Missouri limited the percent of city revenue that can come from fines and fees and announced court rules to guard against unlawful incarceration. California abolished fees for juveniles and stopped suspending the driver’s licenses of people with court debt. Louisiana passed a law requiring that judges consider a person’s financial circumstances before imposing fines and fees. Texas, where the court system’s administrative director said the guidance “was very helpful and very well received by the judges across the state,” issued new rules to prevent people from being jailed for their poverty. The American Bar Association endorsed the Justice Department’s guidance, and the Conference of State Court Administrators cited it in a policy paper on ending debtors’ prisons.

To justify reversing guidance that has had so much positive impact, Mr. Sessions asserts that such documents circumvent the executive branch’s rule-making process and impose novel legal obligations by fiat. Nonsense. The fines and fees guidance created no new legal rules. It discussed existing law and cited model approaches from local jurisdictions. The document also put state-level actors on notice that the department would take action to protect individual rights, whether by partnership or litigation.

But Trump and Sessions don’t like that, so out it goes.

Ugly.

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 maintaining obedience, on fear; either fear of themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others. All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but in their affections. And by their affections are meant the only ones they are allowed to have—those to the men with whom they are connected, or to the children who constitute an additional and indefeasible tie between them and a man. When we put together three things—first, the natural attraction between opposite sexes; secondly, the wife’s entire dependence on the husband, every privilege or pleasure she has being either his gift, or depending entirely on his will; and lastly, that the principal object of human pursuit, consideration, and all objects of social ambition, can in general be sought or obtained by her only through him, it would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the polar star of feminine education and formation of character. And, this great means of influence over the minds of women having been acquired, an instinct of selfishness made men avail themselves of it to the utmost as a means of holding women in subjection, by representing to them meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all individual will into the hands of a man, as an essential part of sexual attractiveness. Can it be doubted that any of the other yokes which mankind have succeeded in breaking, would have subsisted till now if the same means had existed, and had been as sedulously used, to bow down their minds to it? If it had been made the object of the life of every young plebeian to find personal favour in the eyes of some patrician, of every young serf with some seigneur; if domestication with him, and a share of his personal affections, had been held out as the prize which they all should look out for, the most gifted and aspiring being able to reckon on the most desirable prizes; and if, when this prize had been obtained, they had been shut out by a wall of brass from all interests not centering in him, all feelings and desires but those which he shared or inculcated; would not serfs and seigneurs, plebeians and patricians, have been as broadly distinguished at this day as men and women are? and would not all but a thinker here and there, have believed the distinction to be a fundamental and unalterable fact in human nature?

The Subjection of Women, courtesy of Project Gutenberg, pp 26-9