#so many examples of this ID be here all day but the abortion debate is the best example

[moodboardsbysarah]

So much of what people call “feminism” is actually just women jealously competing with each other and women lashing out in insecurity at each other… and then trying to blame men for it.

You know, like women do anyway with or without feminism.

[trans-advice]

Hey, for the past 5 or so years I have privately identified as nonbinary or not conforming to any gender, and even recently requested that my boss and coworkers use they/them pronouns. About a month ago I stumbled across a "gender critical" blog and started reading it. I know it's a bad idea to engage with trolls, especially when it will impact your sense of self, but I felt restless that my existence was being debated and wanted to hear the other side. Now I am feeling confused (1 o 2 asks)

I’m feeling confused and gross, wondering if all this time I have been actually working against my own feminist beliefs, or if I’m just being naive and getting indoctrinated. Like,I worry about me being a female who simply didn’t subscribe to gender stereotypes, tricking myself into thinking I"wasn’t like the other girls". I have also been wondering about what it means to identify into an oppressed group, and why we can’t talk about it without being dismissed as a dumb TERF. (1 o 2 asks) Thx

— Eve: CW: long post, possibly rambley, could’ve used better editing, transphobia, “gender critical”, recuperation, discussion of “terf” politics, recuperation of liberation movements, politics, oppression, rape culture, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist,

So basically I have tried for almost 4 weeks to write a response detailing this stuff. however it’s gotten too unwieldy. i tried to condense it, but this was as close as i got. it’s practically like 3 drafts back to back. I couldn’t figure out the differences & when i saw similarities it seemed significantly different enough. so I’m not editing any further. here’s a mindvomit. i wish i had this more polished but I can’t do that & i didn’t get a response.

however I’m going to make a history book recommendation, a referral to gendercensus2020, and i need to emphasize that these are much more like personal beliefs & not generally the tone of this blog which aims to give advice & positivity, while this is inherently political, the good bad & ugly. and there are trans people of various persuasions so I don’t want alienate them. i dissecting some ideologies that are transphobic, how they became that, how they got recuperated, and how you can find the same concerns being addressed. I’m answering this because it totally makes sense to me that this is asked in good faith & I want to respect your concerns & show that there are better methods of liberation activism that are trans affirmative, or at least must become & develop into such.

So I’m going to recommend the book “Transgender History (Second Edition)” by Susan Stryker, which I have put on our blog’s google drive account, so hence a link. It goes into the historic common ground between the feminists & LGBT+ peoples. It also gets into historic movements. And on top of that, the first chapter is literally a list of terminology deconstructing gender, which is also helpful for analyzing topics feminism analyzes..

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IvCwNvCJ_EiDmOer4zS8SbFGz4m-WDJ1

another thing you need to know regarding the label lesbian back in the day is that it was a catchall for any woman who didn’t have sex with men. now granted, this was a cisnormative understanding, but basically lesbians included celibate women, asexual women, and of course bisexual women in addition to gay women.

basically the normal advice of wait til you have your own money to have sex, wait til your mid 20s, don’t rely on a man to pay your bills etc, all of this comes from political lesbianism, which was like be celibate or else have sex that doesn’t involve sperm. (granted, communities cannot be monoliths if they want to be ecosystems, like any movement label there are different interpretations made by members of it, and therefore there are some strands that uphold a homonormative appreciation for conversion therapy. perhaps a middle ground for understanding how that happened is that joke about macho sexuality purity “if a man masturbates with his hand, he’s using a man’s hand to get off, then it’s gay.” granted, there was of course a political/economic reason to this, but still, it seems in terms of history that this joke was considered actually legitimate.)

“lesbian” was a catchall for women who didn’t have sex with men. this included ace, celibate & gynephiliac women. part of the reason these communities were conflated again had to do with the economic pressures to get married which I’ll detail a few paragraphs from now. (while this next thought could be incorrect because I did just learn about ‘compulsory heterosexuality" a month ago, I think the vestiges of those economic pressures are basically the gist of “comphet”.) the goal of political lesbian as well as lesbian separatism was to build an economy/get money that didn’t require submission to patriarchy, via marriage, pregnancy etc. so basically in an effort to build like support networks, “men” were shunned as much as possible.

however these networks ended up replicating capitalism, (partly due to oppression against communes & other anti-capitalist activities) which then replicated the oppressions of capitalism. it makes sense that transphobia had formed of assimilation/respectability politics for such feminists. To quote from the criticism section of the Wikipedia article on the women’s liberation movement.

> The philosophy practised by liberationists assumed a global sisterhood of support working to eliminate inequality without acknowledging that women were not united; other factors, such as age, class, ethnicity, and opportunity (or lack thereof) created spheres wherein women’s interests diverged, and some women felt underrepresented by the WLM.[208] While many women gained an awareness of how sexism permeated their lives, they did not become radicalized and were uninterested in overthrowing society. They made changes in their lives to address their individual needs and social arrangements, but were unwilling to take action on issues that might threaten their socio-economic status.[209] Liberationist theory also failed to recognize a fundamental difference in fighting oppression. Combating sexism had an internal component, whereby one could change the basic power structures within family units and personal spheres to eliminate the inequality. Class struggle and the fight against racism are solely external challenges, requiring public action to eradicate inequality.[210] >

birth control helped to liberate women & that accommodation/handicap for reproductive health disabilities (disability is merely inability to do something that’s Normative. so if having a uterus, pregnancy/menstruation/having breasts etc aren’t considered normal, which is especially common in a patriarchal society for these examples, then it’s disability.) It should be said that due to the desire for bodily autonomy to regulate our own body parts, as well as a desire to manage our fertility & sterilization, the transgender movement has a lot in common with feminism’s female-as-disability movement.)

it should also be noted that before the medical transitioning became accessible that us trans people relied a lot more on social transitioning than medical transitioning. it should also be mentioned that the medical procedures are available & used by cisgender people too.

that being said, since both cis females & transgender women were denied birth control etc, there was a very intense fear of impregnation happening & trans women going back in the closet not only to get money under patriarchy but also because life raising a kid is hard. like if you’ve ever seen “the stepford wives” & look at how the ally husband betrays his feminist wife, then that should clue us into how a lack of birth control scared us.

the problem with the school of feminism that emphasizes physiological sex over gender identity (in order to deny the existence of trans people with female-organs or not) is that it doesn’t account for birth control & how that’s affected the landscape, the economy etc, the revolutionary impact of birth control basically. it also ignores that trans people & cis women feminists have the same goals when it comes to getting freedoms about reproductive rights & bodily autonomy. therefore it ends up being transphobic & wanting to run back into the times when we didn’t have abortion access because they want to hurt us.

That being said though, we need to have birth control & more in order to help liberate trans people too, so if somewhere doesn’t have birth control, then we’re not doing well either because it’d pay a lot more to be transphobic (which of course it doesn’t now when we have birth control & various medical & other technologies). i think what I’m trying to say is that similar to disability accomodations clashing with each other, if we of the women’s liberation, the trans liberation, and the gay & lesbian liberation, and the bisexual & ace liberation get stranded then we’re all doomed. granted we might be doing that due to defensiveness with hostility similar to how in the 1980s feminism got very conservative in USA & how some transgender people get spared in systems with strict gender conformity & anticolonialist values, it’d be wrong to say that all our liberations are in conflict with each other. they can be mishandled, but ultimately, safety still tends to favor cisheteropatriarchal people. internalized patriarchal thinking is like internalized queerphobia, and so forth.

I want to emphasize that it is relatively easy for transgender people especially nonbinary people to find gender critical discourse somewhat appealing. Here’s why: TERFs & Gender Critical discourse is agender-normative disability discourse regarding reproductive health & other AFAB organs. (a disability is being unable to do things that society considers normative. so if you can’t drive & your locale de facto requires it, then that’s a disability. also in usa you’ll find that pregnancy & disability are the main things welfare programs prioritize. a pregnancy can be harmful, but can be easier with the right monitoring etc. which again is the same with disability.)

the problem though is that they then insist on misgendering you as one of the binary genders based on objectification of your body (specifically, “morphology”). point being, because you feel dysphoric over being misgendered as something nonbinary as being mislabeled as cisgender, this implies that you are indeed transgender.

https://gendercensus.com/post/612238605773111296/the-gender-census-2020-is-now-open

—

Now to be clear, there are historical economic considerations that made the decisions to specialize on the intersectionality of cisgender AFABs, but the economy & technology has changed. Basically marriage back in the day was economically necessary because there was effectively no birth control available. Therefore, to get child support etc, required getting the father to pay the consequences. However, marriage was very much a chattel property institution, marital rape was still legal, and women couldn’t get credit etc in our own names.

#

At the same time, similar to birth control being unavailable, hormones & other procedures for medically transitioning trans people were unavailable as well, which meant social transitioning & wardrobe etc were the main methods of affirming our gender. however, we sometimes got lucky & had a doctor write us a note affirming our gender & sometimes we got even luckier & govts accepted this. this however required getting labelled sick & begging doctors to give us treatment & getting money for this since insurance companies etc still discriminated against transgender people even when we agreed to have our gender identity situation labelled as sick & medically necessary. (similarly insurance companies still refuse to cover abortions & so do some doctors & hospitals.)

#

So this meant that AFABs were concerned about getting hijacked via impregnation. Because of the patriarchal economics of the whole thing, people were afraid of “the stepford wives” repeating itself in their own lives, where the mind can only handle what the ass can stand would mean trans women would go back into the closet.

#

Granted, that’s a bit misrepresentative of trans women & trans people because trans people & cis women who can get pregnant do have a lot more in common. we take the same meds, go to the same clinics, menopause etc gets taken due to distress over how our bodies work, etc. then again, how would trans AMAB people have gotten the money for child support?

#

historically & still to this day we basically had to beg doctors for the ability to get hormones to get a surgery to get a gender marker change & so on, which granted, what we trans people had available to us varied from locale to locale because it required collaborations of trans people, doctors, and the local govts & especially their police stations. again, before roe v wade abortion providers were super underground & secretive & there were specialized units at police stations for hunting down patients & providers under the charge of “murder”. it’s the same dynamics.

#

seriously trans people & people with bodies that can get pregnant, menstruate, menopause, etc, we go to the same clinics! women’s health clinics take trans patients, planned parenthood takes trans patients, do i need to go any further on how trans people & feminists have the same interests regarding reproductive health?

—

as for political lesbianism:

basically the normal advice of wait til you have your own money before having sex, wait til your mid 20s, don’t rely on a man to pay your bills etc, all of this comes from political lesbianism, which was like be celibate or else have sex that doesn’t involve sperm. (i’m not sure what the conditions were like surrounding not piv sex among the straights, and therefore what the likelihood of avoiding piv sex was. I do know that rape culture was much more heavily normalized than it is now.)

“Lesbian” was a catchall for women who didn’t have sex with men. this included: - ace, - celibate - bisexual - gay women. Part of the reason these communities were conflated again had to do with the economic pressures to get married, (while this next statement could be incorrect because i did just learn about ‘compulsory heterosexuality" a month ago, i think the vestiges of those economic pressures such as weddings are basically the gist of “comphet”.)

The goal of Political Lesbianism as well as Lesbian Separatism was to build an economy that didn’t require submission to patriarchy, such as that of marriage, pregnancy etc. In efforts to build like support networks, “men” were shunned as much as possible.

However these networks, (partly due to lacking radicalization) ended up replicating capitalism, (partly due to oppression against communes & other anti-capitalist activities) which then replicated the oppressions of capitalism. It makes sense that transphobia had formed of assimilation/respectability politics for such feminists. To quote from the criticism section of the Wikipedia article on the women’s liberation movement.

> “The philosophy practised by liberationists assumed a global sisterhood of support working to eliminate inequality without acknowledging that women were not united; other factors, such as age, class, ethnicity, and opportunity (or lack thereof) created spheres wherein women’s interests diverged, and some women felt underrepresented by the WLM.[208] While many women gained an awareness of how sexism permeated their lives, they did not become radicalized and were uninterested in overthrowing society. They made changes in their lives to address their individual needs and social arrangements, but were unwilling to take action on issues that might threaten their socio-economic status.[209] Liberationist theory also failed to recognize a fundamental difference in fighting oppression. Combating sexism had an internal component, whereby one could change the basic power structures within family units and personal spheres to eliminate the inequality. Class struggle and the fight against racism are solely external challenges, requiring public action to eradicate inequality.[210]”

[junker-town]

8 reasons why the 76ers are going all-in right now

Philly is built around two stars under the age of 25, yet has pushed all its chips into the middle this year. Why?

The 76ers traded for Tobias Harris early Wednesday morning, signaling to the rest of the Eastern Conference that they’re not here to mess around. Philly’s here to win, and they want to win now.

This began when the Sixers traded two important role players for Jimmy Butler earlier this season. Now, they’ve pushed all their chips in trading for Harris. That’s two big-name borderline All-Stars who are set to hit free agency in July.

Philly’s plan, according to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, is to re-sign both of them — and keep Joel Embiid and re-sign Ben Simmons. It’s a wild plan in a top-heavy Eastern Conference.

But how did we get here in the first place? The 76ers famously ate dirt for years before hitting the lottery and drafting Embiid and Simmons. Those are two franchise-altering talents with which to build a future.

But at some point, Philly decided a distant future wasn’t enough. The Sixers needed to compete now — right now. Philadelphia accelerated The Process, and now has a roster with three All-Stars and a fourth player, Harris, who many believed should have been named to the team this year.

What happened for Philly to abort its future plans? Here are 8 theories:

1. There have been so many different voices running the show

Remember that Philly’s had three different general managers in just a little over two years: Sam Hinkie, Bryan Colangelo, and now Elton Brand. The vision went from tanking, to building a future, to competing for the right now. It’s understandable that plans change.

This is Brand’s first go-round at running a team, and it appears he and 76ers ownership decided that The Process was complete. It had landed the Sixers two perennial All-Stars: that’s something you can build around.

It reportedly was ownership’s idea to trade for Jimmy Butler, and once they saw the team could use an added bump, it may have been their idea to trade for Harris, as well. Regardless, ownership clearly felt Embiid and Simmons were ready to compete for a deep playoff run right this second, and Brand does the bidding of ownership.

2. Joel Embiid’s window is actually now. Like, right now

For one, mega stars get antsy these days when their franchise isn’t trying to win quickly. Example A(D) is playing out in New Orleans. The 76ers do not want to draw Embiid’s ire by playing for the future over the present.

Embiid’s in the first season of a five-year, $147 million extension, but a player’s choice to leave his franchise doesn’t happen overnight. It’s an accumulation of missteps and disappointments that culminates with a star being fed up with his organization.

The Sixers know Embiid’s window was blasted wide open when he finally set foot on the court after missing his first two seasons with injury. They want to maximize his window, right now. That means getting him the supplementary stars, spacing and playmakers to make a run in the East.

3. Embiid’s health also isn’t guaranteed

Remember: This is a superstar who missed the first two seasons of his career with foot injuries, then only played 31 games as a rookie before tearing his meniscus. He played in 31 games and still almost won Rookie of the Year. That’s the kind of player you’re dealing with.

Embiid is so good, it’s not even a debate. Few players at any position have the impact he has on a game, at a position that was considered a dinosaur.

Embiid, though, will always run the risk of re-injury. He’s playing outstanding basketball right now, and while he also may be dominant for a long time, Philly cannot take that for granted.

4. LeBron is out of the East. Now’s the time to go for it

LeBron’s monopoly on the Eastern Conference crown is gone with him. There are four teams with legitimate odds at winning it all in the East: the Bucks, Raptors, Celtics, and Sixers. The others are the three favorites at the moment because of their depth, versatility, and time played together, but the Sixers now have the most star power of the group and they can replenish their depth on the buyout market.

Do they have enough to beat the Warriors? Probably not. But making the NBA Finals gives any team a shot at an upset.

There’s also no guarantee the East power structure stays this way:

Kyrie Irving could very well leave Boston this summer. If he stays and the Celtics trade for Anthony Davis, this is a totally different conversation.

Milwaukee has several key free agents this summer: Khris Middleton, Brook Lopez and Eric Bledsoe. It will be hard, if not impossible, to keep all of them

Kawhi Leonard becomes a free agent this summer. If he leaves Toronto, they aren’t nearly as strong of a team.

Then there’s Philly, a team that has an opportunity to pair four potential All-Stars for the next four years. LeBron’s departure has turned the East into a battle zone, and the Sixers just brought in two extra hitmen.

5. If it fails, they can always reset this summer

That’s the beauty of trading for soon-to-be free agents: if it doesn’t work out, Philly can wash its hands clean and start from scratch.

The 2019 free agency class is expected to be loaded, with talent at almost every position. That class includes both Butler and Harris, who have player options they’re expected to exercise to cash in on a max or near max contract this summer.

The Embiid-Simmons-Butler trio has been rocky. The Sixers have won games, but there’s clearly still some kinks to be worked out. Butler likes the pick-and-roll, head coach Brett Brown likes ball and player movement, Simmons still can’t shoot, and Embiid likes to slow it down. Harris should fit seamlessly into any offense, but there’s a risk he doesn’t.

If it all goes south, the 76ers could let one of or both Butler and Harris walk for nothing in free agency and still have max cap space to attract big-name free agents around Embiid and Simmons. They will have traded away several young players and future assets in the process, but worst-case scenario is re-upping and going after a max free agent or two this summer.

6. Are we sure Embiid/Simmons is built to last?

Simmons only has one more year guaranteed on his rookie contract after this season. After, he’ll be eligible for a rookie scale extension that could pay him in the $150 million ballpark to stay in Philly.

Players generally don’t turn down the rookie scale extension: Kristaps Porzingis could become the first if he opts to sign a qualifying offer with Dallas instead of committing long-term.

But what if this situation isn’t ideal for Simmons? Sure, he’s on a playoff team with as good a chance at winning the East as any, but his role has been diminished with every move the 76ers make. Embiid is the guy right now. Does Simmons want his own team?

We never know what players want, and everything could be fine in Philly. But players are unpredictable, and they’re choosing to secure their future on their own terms. You never know what someone is going to do until the time comes. If Simmons was to decide he wants out, the Sixers will have maximized the time they have with him and have two supplementary pieces to join with Embiid.

7. Blame (or credit) Markelle Fultz

If Fultz is healthy, the Sixers probably don’t need to make any big trades in the first place. A healthy Fultz is the third-head of the dragon the 76ers were supposed to build.

But Fultz has been the furthest thing from healthy. He forgot how to shoot, dealt with a mysterious shoulder injury that killed his game altogether, and hasn’t even played since early December. Instead of showing flashes of being that third star, his game was reduced to memes and viral clips.

Philly put him in the starting lineup to star the season, but as it was failing, everyone sensed the Sixers needed to do something. Eventually, Fultz left the team for doctors who diagnosed him with Thoraccic Outlet Syndrome. His status is still unclear. Surprisingly, Fultz is one of few players who hasn’t been dealt ... yet.

Still, the 76ers made all these trades to find the core players that Fultz was supposed to be. His situation forced Philly to abort its slow-and-steady plan, because they were no more top picks coming their way. The only other way to get other difference makers was to trade for one or to sign one in free agency.

8. Because this is the whole point of The Process

You play to win games, after all. After years of doing the opposite in service of being great down the line, Philly is at that point.

They have two young stars who should be All-Stars for the next 10 years. You build around that right [expletive] now. Go for gold. Go get guys who can win, and win big. That’s what they did in trading for Jimmy Butler and Tobias Harris.

Whether it works out or falls apart remains to be seen. But in an era where teams are kicking the can down the road, Philly deserves applause for playing to win in a conference with no clear-cut winner.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Brett Kavanaugh has never been a popular Supreme Court nominee — and he’s probably becoming more unpopular still following allegations earlier this month by Christine Blasey Ford that Kavanaugh had attempted to sexually assault her when they both were in high school. No one this unpopular has ever been been confirmed to the Supreme Court; the only previous nominees who polled as poorly as Kavanaugh either had their names withdrawn (Harriet Miers) or lost their confirmation vote (Robert Bork). And all of this polling was taken before at least two other accusations surfaced of potential sexual misconduct involving Kavanaugh1 — and before Ford and Kavanaugh’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is scheduled for Thursday.

President Trump and Congressional Republicans are not afraid to take unpopular actions in pursuit of their ideological goals. Last year, they spent many months trying and failing to pass a repeal of Obamacare, even though those efforts were extremely unpopular. And they passed a tax bill that was highly unpopular at the time of its passage, although its numbers have since improved some. The Supreme Court is at least as much of a priority for Republicans.

The difference on Kavanaugh is that there are several other conservative nominees who could potentially replace him — and who may have been better picks in the first place. In other words, you would think Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have better options. Amy Coney Barrett, for example, a judge on the 7th Circuit and one of Trump’s reported finalists when Kavanaugh was chosen, has several advantages from the GOP’s point of view. She’d potentially be more conservative than Kavanaugh, at least on issues such as abortion; she’s already been confirmed (to her circuit seat) by the current Senate; and it might not hurt Republicans to choose a woman when the four conservatives on the current Supreme Court are all men.

Barrett also isn’t facing several accusations of sexual misconduct, as Kavanaugh is.

But there’s a midterm coming up in just six weeks. And there’s about a 3 in 10 chance that Republicans lose the Senate, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast. Could Republicans really get Barrett or another nominee confirmed before then? And if not, could they confirm her in the so-called “lame duck session” after the midterms but before the new Congress meets on Jan. 3.

The answers are “possibly” and “probably” — but the timing is getting dicier by the day. As of Tuesday morning, we’ll be 42 days away from the Nov. 6 midterms, and exactly 100 days away from when the new Congress convenes. The eight current members of the Supreme Court variously took between 50 and 99 days to be confirmed:

How long does it take to confirm a Supreme Court justice?

Days from nomination to confirmation for current members of the Supreme Court

Justice Days from nomination to confirmation Ruth Bader Ginsburg 50

–

John Roberts* 62

–

Neil Gorsuch 65

–

Sonia Sotomayor 66

–

Stephen Breyer 73

–

Samuel Alito 82

–

Elena Kagan 87

–

Clarence Thomas 99

–

Days until midterms 42

–

Days until next Congress 100

–

*Roberts was initially nominated for associate justice and then withdrawn and re-nominated for Chief Justice; our count of his confirmation time includes the combined time from both nominations.

Source: WIKIPEDIA

That makes the timing awfully interesting (and makes Republican complaints about Democratic delays to the process a little easier to understand). If Kavanaugh were to withdraw his name today, and Trump were to nominate someone else in his place tomorrow, the GOP might be able to confirm the replacement before the midterms — but the timing would be tight and would require a faster confirmation process than for any current member of the Supreme Court.

The lame-duck session would be a safer bet, but it’s not without risk for the GOP. One problem is that they might lose the Senate — to repeat ourselves, there’s about a 30 percent chance of this. Because the Senate is a much heavier lift for Democrats than the House, in the scenarios where the GOP loses the Senate, they’d probably also lose the House by wide margin; in our simulations, Republicans lose an average of about 50 (!!) House seats in scenarios where they also lose the Senate. The House doesn’t have any say in the Supreme Court nomination process, but would Republicans really want to push forward a nomination after losing by such a landslide margin?

My guess is probably yes — a Supreme Court seat really is that important to them. But the politics are uncertain; there aren’t really a lot of recent precedents for a party taking such significant action during the lame duck session. And several Republican senators, after just having seen their colleagues take a drubbing in the 2018 midterms, might be skittish about what such a vote would mean for their survival in 2020, when the Senate map is a fairly tough one for the GOP.

In addition, there’s the chance the next nominee could have vetting problems, too. Historically, about 25 percent of Supreme Court nominations lapse, are voted down or are withdrawn.

Here’s the thing, though. The longer the GOP takes to replace Kavanaugh, the worse the timing problems become for them. If, say, the confirmation process on Kavanaugh drags out for another two weeks before he’s voted down or withdrawn, and then Trump takes another two weeks to choose a replacement because the overall process has become such a mess, then confirmation before the midterms would be extremely challenging. There also might not be enough time to seriously vet the new nominee before the lame-duck session, giving Republicans less margin for error then, too.

So why not just “plow right through” and vote to confirm Kavanaugh anyway, allegations and everything else aside? Although there’s a good chance McConnell is bluffing, that seems to be the current plan, with McConnell having promised a vote in the “near future” on Kavanaugh and no accusers other than Ford set to testify.

The problem is that this is an extremely live news story; with several new accusations having come out against Kavanaugh over the weekend and debates about the credibility of Ford’s allegations still ongoing. It’s hard to know what would happen to Kavanaugh if more accusations came out after he’d already been confirmed to the Supreme Court, but the possibilities include impeachment and serious long-term damage to the Court’s reputation — along with whatever additional price the GOP had to pay at the midterms. Even if the GOP were able to confirm Kavanaugh before the midterms this year, a landslide election could put the GOP in a considerably worse position to hold the Senate when other Supreme Court nominations come up in 2019 through 2024.

Put another way, there are huge risks to the GOP in both rushing to confirm Kavanaugh and in letting the process play out for several more weeks — which means encouraging Kavanaugh to withdraw now, however painful it might be, is probably their least-worst option.

There is one other possibility, which is that McConnell — who reportedly didn’t want Kavanaugh to be chosen in the first place — could be rushing through the process in the hopes that Kavanaugh will be voted down (or forced to withdraw once it becomes clear that McConnell doesn’t have the votes). Back when Ford was Kavanaugh’s only accuser, this had seemed like a fairly likely exit strategy: The hearings would be engineered to allow Kavanaugh to save face, and perhaps to allow Republicans to stoke some grievances with their base. But wavering GOP senators such as Susan Collins and Jeff Flake would find some excuse to oppose his nomination and his nomination would be pulled. This scenario still seems like a distinct possibility — but the fact that the Kavanaugh story is developing so rapidly, with the stakes continuously increasing with every news cycle, could mean that McConnell is now pot-committed to the bluff even if he’d been hoping to keep his options open before.

I haven’t said much about the potential electoral upsides to the GOP of the confirmation process, such as possibly increasing base turnout, and putting vulnerable Democratic senators such as North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp to a tough vote on Kavanaugh or another nominee. That’s because I’m a little bit skeptical of them. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, it’s not clear that rank-and-file voters care about the Supreme Court as much as party activists and other “elites” do. And despite predictions that Anthony Kennedy’s retirement would help the GOP, Republicans’ electoral outlook has only gotten worse since then (and they’ve had especially poor polling in the past week or two).

For all that said, the Kavanaugh story has become unpredictable enough that its electoral effects are fairly uncertain, even if they’re weighted toward the downside for the GOP. If I were a Republican member of Congress facing reelection in 2018 or 2020, I’d just much rather take my chances with Barrett than with Kavanaugh.

[jeniferdlanceau]

"Belarus is a place that badly needs shaking up"

With widespread protest taking place across Belarus, the design of public spaces and social legacies has become a critical project for the nation's architects, says Owen Hatherley in his latest Opinion column.

For one of the least-visited capital cities in Europe, the Belarusian capital Minsk is a city very concerned with its surfaces. In a country often described as Europe's last dictatorship – a definition I suspect will have to be updated in the next few years – it is a city of resplendent facades.

Minsk was destroyed in the second world war and re-planned as an axial, neoclassical showpiece. Its government has retained state ownership of much of its industry and a Soviet approach to much urban development. In the centre, at any rate, buildings are freshly painted, pavements are freshly paved and there is an almost German level of cleanliness. And, by post-Soviet standards, the infrastructure – roads, metros, buses – is fast and straightforward.

This neo-Soviet governance extends to the city's new architecture, although it's the late USSR with all the enthusiasm and futurism gone. In the centre, a reconstruction that began in the 80s proceeds apace. New public buildings are domineering, symmetrical and vaguely classical.

The Belarusian capital Minsk is a city very concerned with its surfaces

In the suburbs, you can see large concrete panels being raised into place to form housing complexes as if it's still the 1970s, but then in the real 70s there was a rich culture of architectural debate within mass housing – and much criticism. Western-style hotels and malls have been built, bland and empty.

Belarus may have missed some of the chaos, war and extreme poverty of its neighbours, but it is a place that badly needs shaking up.

I don't want to put words into their mouths, but this seemed to be part of the project of the sixth Minsk Architectural Forum, an annual workshop for young architects organised by the Belarusian Association of Student Architects. Organisers Stefania Soich and Arzu Mirzalizade had – as is usual for the forum – little financial assistance from the official Union of Architects or Minsk's architecture schools. What money there was came from the sponsorship of a paper manufacturer.

The format is that four groups of architects each work on a project on a chosen theme. This year's theme was defining Minskness, and its expression in the city's many, often large and formal, public squares. I was one of the tutors for one of these four groups, but I wasn't expecting the scene when I arrived at the Forum's venue: the Zair Azgur Museum, dedicated to a Stalinist-era sculptor.

On steel shelves reaching all up to the ceiling of a triple-height space, in a tiny red-brick building in a housing estate, were dozens of busts and statues of notables, writers, revolutionaries and dictators. Mao, Churchill, Thomas Mann, Immanuel Kant, Khrushchev, Kim il Sung, Stalin, and around 20 different Lenins. This was an ingenious place to choose for the young students – most of whom have lived all their lives under Belarus' president Aleksandr Lukashenko – to confront the question of Minskness.

Soviet culture's apparent persistence in Belarus represents more an efficient inertia than a still-extant tradition

Sad as it may be, Soviet culture's apparent persistence in Belarus represents more an efficient inertia than a still-extant tradition. Conservation has served the Stalinist classical centre well.

By contrast, a modernist riverside promenade built between the 1960s and 80s has been disfigured by speculative development. The worst example is a crass, ziggurat-like apartment block that destroys many of the city's meticulously planned vistas, but which rather oddly plays home to Nobel Prize winner and post-Soviet conscience Svetlana Alexievich.

There is propaganda on the streets, showcasing sylvan scenes with "I love Belarus" signs, airbrushed families going to the opera (amazingly cheap, in a city where the cost of living is high) and anti-abortion posters (Lukashenko wants the birth rate up).

The fortnight I was there coincided with the anniversary of the start of the Russian Revolution, when women's day protests spiralled into a strike wave that brought down the Tsar. Minsk's response? A poster campaign celebrating 100 years of the Belarusian police.

Public plazas, such as the preposterously huge October Square, are often empty and chilling, yet a protest wave – against a tax on the unemployed, in a country whose much-publicised employment policies have collapsed under the weight of the financial crisis – was spreading, quietly, around the country.

It is these squares, so obviously a showcase of power and planning, that the students were supposed to focus on. Ukrainian sociologist Natalia Ostrichenko's students developed a series of metrics and graphs to find out how well these spaces were used (don't be disabled in Minsk was one obvious lesson). Belarusian architect and author Dimitrij Zadorin's group proposed turning the shabby, ignored courtyards behind the grand Stalinist facades into community spaces.

Soviet public spaces and social legacies are going to be crucial

My students researched two squares of different eras: Station Square, whose grandiose, crenellated twin towers are a cousin of Berlin's famous Karl-Marx-Allee, and Freedom Square, the centre of the reconstruction project that has tried to graft an 18th-century small town into this totally 20th-century metropolis. One is very post-Soviet, with cramped underpasses full of people selling flowers, pies and lottery tickets. The other has become the city's main hipster district, with craft beer and homemade blinis under the ersatz heritage facades. But both of them, they found, were state projects. In fact, Freedom Square's start-ups and small cafes are carefully managed by a city-run, profit-making Minsk Heritage Company. The students produced a critical brochure for the two squares, where the enticing gateways open out to show a much more complex reality of state capitalism and constantly manipulated heritage.

Satire has to be subtle here. Cynical comments about the authorities are normal, but nobody ever mentions the president. Anthroplogist Michal Murawski's group chose to put all the things they don't like about the city – anti-social interactions, ubiquitous kitsch, surveillance and policing – and throw them into a gigantic bowl of borscht, with the grandiose Dynamo stadium as the bowl. When they unveiled the project to the public at the end of the forum, the students – all dressed in matching borscht-coloured outfits – were keen to distinguish between the Sovok, the remnants of Soviet attitudes, especially to authority, and the Soviet, which they thought could still mean something different to the deeply conservative policies of Minsk's contemporary rulers.

As this most apparently stable of societies faces the most widespread protests in decades, those Soviet public spaces and social legacies are going to be crucial. To see them being approached with such humour and nuance suggests that Belarusian architects are going to have an interesting role to play.

Owen Hatherley is a critic and author, focusing on architecture, politics and culture. His books include Militant Modernism (2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (2010), A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys Through Urban Britain (2012) and The Ministry of Nostalgia (2016).

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