The cruelest anti-Kavanaugh argument yet.

From "How This Brutal Confirmation Process Could Shape Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court Justice" (Time):

Even if Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, he will carry scars from the brutal process to get him there.... [A]s he limps over the finish line... the question could soon shift from whether he will be confirmed to what kind of justice he will be.

Will Kavanaugh... dig in on the far right, radicalized by the experience? Will he swing the other way towards the middle, determined to improve his reputation among women? Or will he be able to move past it entirely?...

“What [Kavanaugh said at the hearing] was so explicitly partisan, so permanently political, so grudge-bearing, that I don’t see how somebody puts on a new robe, goes to a new court and forgets about that,” says John Q. Barrett, professor at St. John’s University School of Law. “The public will never forget about that. This guy, if he’s going to be confirmed, will now be heckled and protested and a pariah for the rest of his life for a segment of the country.”...

“It will raise questions about whether he could ever view any issue that touched on questions of sexual misconduct fairly, given what has happened,” says Melissa Murray, professor at New York University School of Law.

The linked article doesn't come out and make this argument, but it caused me to see it: Kavanaugh should be rejected because the confirmation experienced has ruined his mind. He's damaged now and can no longer think in the properly judicial way that was once within his capacity. A moderated version of that argument is that people will worry that he's now damaged and skewed and that's reason enough to keep him off the Court, to preserve the belief in the legitimacy of the institution.

I'm not making these arguments. I'm just seeing them and finding them horrendously perverse and cruel. Why not devise a confirmation process that is such an ordeal that it will drive out the very qualities we want in a judge? First, it would be torture, and second, you could never confirm a nominee. It's an inherently self-defeating process.

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Fan Bingbing didn't build that.

"Without the Party and country's good policies, without the love of the people, there would be no Fan Bingbing," said Fan Bingbing, quoted in "Vanished Chinese actress Fan Bingbing broke her silence with a groveling apology to the Chinese government, which she owes $129 million" (Business Insider).

... Fan broke her silence on microblogging site Weibo with a confirmation with the financial accusations against her as well as an apology to "society, my friends, the public, and the country's tax authority."

The actress said: "For a while, due to my not understanding the relationship between benefits of the country, society, and individual, I and others took advantage of a 'split contract' to avoid tax problems, and I am deeply ashamed."

ADDED: Speaking of structuring your affairs to avoid tax consequences, the NYT has a big exposé of Trump's tax avoidance: "Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father."

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Where Can You Afford to Live?

The short answer to the question of where young people can afford to rent in the UK is 'practically nowhere'. For example if you want to live in London then you might just be able to afford a one bedroom apartment if you earn north of £51,000. If you earn the average wage for a person in their 20's then you could move to Brighton where you would only have to pay around 50% of your salary, on

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"Students Filed Title IX Complaints Against Kavanaugh to Prevent Him From Teaching at Harvard Law."

The Harvard Crimson reports, naming a student who supposedly said she'd filed a complaint with the University’s Office for Dispute Resolution and has been urging other students to do the same. We're told that "at least 48 students had signed an online petition certifying they had filed a Title IX complaint against the nominee."

The student who got this started argued that Kavanaugh could be accused of gender-based harassment under Harvard's definition: "verbal, nonverbal, graphic, or physical aggression, intimidation, or hostile conduct based on sex, sex-stereotyping, sexual orientation or gender identity." Kavanaugh's mere presence on campus, she and others said, makes a "hostile environment" under Harvard's definition.

[The student] said she hopes students who have previously felt reluctant to file complaints with the University — whether related to Kavanaugh or to other experiences — will see that the formal process gives them “power” and “a right to our feeling of being safe.”

“I hope that, as students file these complaints and engage with this process of singling out accusers and harassers on campus, that it actually can be seen that this process is a little less formidable than the reputation of the process is on campus,” she said.

Another leader in this activism said:

“If you had a meeting in Wasserstein, you don’t know if he’s going to be there... It would be pretty terrifying for any survivor or any person to walk into a building on campus and see someone who has been alleged of a very serious crime.”

Terrifying to see a person accused of a serious crime? Kavanaugh's temperament is being questioned, but what about the temperament of these potential lawyers? Do they not feel called to deal with the difficult world of legal problems? This made me think about one of the most reviled Supreme Court cases, Bradwell v. Illinois, which allowed the state to bar women from the practice of law, back in 1873. From the concurring opinion of Justice Bradley:

The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.... 

Why don't activist, feminist women aspire to strength?  Promoting the timidity and delicacy of women and running to the authorities with specious, backhanded complaints — what lowly, destructive activism!

IN THE COMMENTS: Lyssa said:

Every now and then, quote-unquote feminists have s minor freak out because some female celebs or young women in general don’t want to be associated with the word “feminist.” This is why. I don’t claim to know what feminism really means; it seems to be something different to everyone, so I generally avoid the term entirely. But if feminism involves this kind of weakness, I want absolutely no part of it.

If I were still in law school, I’d get that Bradley quote put in a t-shirt. It’s awsome.

"Awsome" = a typo or a word that means cute (that is, inspiring people to say "aw").

Anyway, I've had that problem with feminism for close to half a century, but I still care about salvaging the word. Why give it away to people who are undermining the very cause that matters to you? I remember saying — 35 years ago — that I didn't want to call myself a feminist because I didn't want to wear a label with a meaning that wasn't clear and stable and within my control. But that never meant I didn't care about participating in the struggle over the meaning of the word. It's a big struggle, and I say never surrender.

CORRECTION: I thought the activist students were law students, but now I'm seeing the word "undergraduate" in the first and second paragraphs and have deleted the references to law students. I hope it is true that law students know better than to engage in this maneuver and that they are leaning into strength and readying themselves to confront the roughness of the real world.

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Venturing into the territory of mocking Christine Blasey Ford, Trump makes a misstep.

I think it's very dangerous to privilege some people to make ruinous accusations against another person, and we've got to find a way to challenge accusers, even though it is important to protect real victims and to encourage them to come forward.

It's incredibly difficult to figure out how to do this, and it's especially hard when quite a few people want the accused taken down whether the accusations are true or not, and they can and do intimidate those who want to put the accuser to the test. Christine Blasey Ford testified in a supportive environment, and those who hope she's wrong were afraid do anything to test her credibility.

But Trump isn't one to be intimidated, and he is plunging in, attacking the credibility of Christine Blasey Ford. I'm reading "Trump Taunts Christine Blasey Ford at Rally" (NYT):

Playing to the crowd of thousands gathered to cheer him on [at a rally in Mississippi], the president pretended to be Dr. Blasey testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday. “Thirty-six years ago this happened. I had one beer, right? I had one beer,” said Mr. Trump, channeling his version of Dr. Blasey. His voice dripping with derision, he then imitated her being questioned at the hearing, followed by her responses about what she could not recall about the alleged attack.

“How did you get home? I don’t remember. How’d you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember. How many years ago was it? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. What neighborhood was it in? I don’t know. Where’s the house? I don’t know. Upstairs, downstairs, where was it? I don’t know,” Mr. Trump said, as the crowd applauded. “But I had one beer. That’s the only thing I remember.”

"Dripping with derision"? "Pretended to be" her — but did he imitate her voice and mannerisms? I don't see video of this at the NYT, and I haven't tracked it down myself, so I don't know if that is accurate. Is Trump showing people the way to challenge an accuser or engaging in antics that no one else should attempt and that Trump alone seems able to get away with?

I suspect the latter. But there's one thing he's plainly done wrong. Christine Blasely Ford did not wonder if it was upstairs or downstairs. She clearly testified that it happened upstairs. You're critiquing someone else's presentation of the facts. You'd better get your own in order!

ADDED: Here's how WaPo presents the "imitation" in video (along with other Trump imitations):



So there you can see that Trump absolutely does not attempt to copy Ford's voice. It's full-on Trump voice. He does not use any mannerisms to depict Ford. It's all in words, the text you see above. WaPo's other examples are all different, not much of a pattern. There's the problematic gesturing while copying the words of a disabled reporter, but really nothing else. The rest is just dramatic speaking and gesturing. He is mocking people, but there should be mockery in politics — not mockery of anyone's disability or possible victimhood — but mockery of the arguments and statements that you're trying to refute.

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Where Was Germany Divided?

Today is the Day of German Unity. The day on which Germans celebrate the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990. The question that Waz would like you to answer on this day is, 28 years after reunification Do You Remember Where Germany Was Divided?

All you need to do to test your knowledge is draw the historical internal border between East and West Germany on a map of the country. Once

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Mapping Migrant Deaths Around the World

Australian broadcaster SBS has mapped out migrant deaths around the world. Their How many asylum seekers never make it to their destination uses data from the Missing Migrants Project to show dead and missing migrants across the globe from 6 January 2014 to September 2018.

The map shows that the Mediterranean is still the location where the most refugee deaths occur as people try to enter

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At the Afternoon Café...

... I couldn't get to everything I'd wanted this morning. I'd meant to work my way through "'The trauma for a man': Male fury and fear rises in GOP in defense of Kavanaugh" (WaPo), and I've got a lot more to say about stoking the fear of masculine anger and the fear of fear. I mean "Male fury and fear"... aren't half the books about Trump called either "Fear" or "Fury"? What is really going on? But that will have to wait a bit. How can it wait, when everything is an eeeemergenceeeee these days? Courage! And pick your own topics, including bland and ordinary things that don't inspire the slightest quiver of trepitude. Trepitude???

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Mapping Mass Graves in Iran

Following the Islamic Revolution in 1979 the new Iranian government began to violently purge itself of non-Islamic opposition. After the 1988 Iran-Iraq war the Iranian government began further mass executions of its political opponents. PainScapes has now identified over 100 locations across Iran that they believe are the sites of mass graves created by the Islamic Republic of Iran during the

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I want to say “Educated: A Memoir” by Tara Westover is one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Here, read it yourself (Amazon link, audio version is fantastic).

But is it all true? Westover comes from the most insanely deprived and dangerous childhood and ends up with a PhD in history from Cambridge University, but is her history of herself 100% true? It's such an extreme tale! Here's some well-articulated analysis:

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