Fuck Kavanaugh. Fuck the GOP. Dear fellow majority, please start fucking showing up to your polling places.
I'll say something somewhat related and useful to mind though: You don't have to pick sides in a he-said-she-said situation. It's entirely possible for both the accuser's story to be credible and for one to acknowledge that there isn't sufficient evidence to break the accused's presumption of innocence. Ford could be telling the truth, I can believe that, and I may even develop a dislike for Kavanaugh for it while still not specifically condemning him for an action that I can't prove he did because I strongly believe in the presumption of innocence principle. Believe all women, but also innocent until proven guilty. (Also mind that men can be victims and women prepetrators, among other things. Only a Sith deals in absolutes.)
Kavanaugh's conduct throughout this ordeal, especially the weird anti-liberal rant out of absolutely nowhere for no reason, and his professional record already make him a shit candidate though. The GOP orchestrating a sham investigation into the matter certainly makes him look guilty of
something, even if he's 100% clean (yeah right), and McConnell is a scumbag of the highest degree forcing through a vote on a fucking Saturday for a hot garbage candidate that nobody except Trump actually wants. It may prove to be a Pyrrhic victory for the GOP as liberal voters become more motivated than ever to get them out of office, but with potentially decades of a hard conservative majority running the SCOTUS basically without even needing to acknowledge the existence of their other four fellow justices I don't see how they fail to come out ahead still.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/05/no-shock-powerful-hate-identity-politics
when people disparage identity politics
"The trouble is, not all identities count as equal. The more power they carry, the less likely the carrier is to be aware of it as an identity at all. Nobody asks me: “When did you come out as straight?” or “How did you balance travelling as a foreign correspondent with raising children?” because straight men don’t get asked that. What is often dismissed as “identity politics” might be more accurately just called “politics” originating from the concerns of less advantaged groups."
"It’s not difficult to see why the right has a problem with this. Their agenda is centred on preserving and extending privileges that already exist. Denigrating equal rights campaigners as “grievance politics” practitioners, the irony is that they practise the very methods they lampoon. Railing against liberal elites, feminists, migrants and Muslims, they have cornered the market in victimhood. Trump’s presidential campaign made an unvarnished appeal to white, Christian Americans – what is that if not an identity?"
"When British women are being paid 18% less than men, gender is a material concern; when for every $100 in wealth a white person has in the US an African-American has just $5, race is a material issue."
Blegh. Well, I can't say I know British statistics specifically but I hate disingenuous feminist talking points. Women aren't individually paid less than men, once you control for all other factors. Women collectively make less than men because women less commonly hold the highest paid positions in businesses. e.g. Female software engineers make as much money as their male counterparts, it's just that 80% of software engineers are male. Granted, that might still point to a gender problem but it's certainly not as simple as "just give women more money." Women need the opportunities, the drive and encouragement, and, most importantly though many people are loathe to hear it, society needs
time to evolve. Resolving the gender pay imbalance inherently cannot be a quick fix.
We can't simply fire 200 of the male CEOs from the 476 current Fortune 500 companies that have a male CEO and replace them with women. We've gotta wait for them to leave their posts, then maybe a qualified woman will replace them. If we need more women in STEM, particularly Technology and Engineering where men are about 80% of the field (women actually outnumber men in Science), we've gotta wait for those little girls we're encouraging to get into STEM fields to grow up, earn their degrees and start applying for those jobs. Etc. It takes decades of slow change to happen. And ultimately, if they still don't go into those fields as often, well shit maybe they just don't want to do it and we should stop trying to invent problems that don't actually exist. Punishing the majority (i.e. white males) by trying to use law to artificially speed up the process, when most of them individually haven't done anything wrong and aren't benefitting from their alleged privilege, is exactly what's caused the rise of hyper-conservatism in current Western society.
All the same things apply to "durrrrr white people make 20 times more money than black people." No, a double-digit number of white people make like 2000 times more money than
everyone else combined, including all the other white people. Yet the people most prone to "identity politics" want to put down
all white people (men specifically) as if Jeff Bezos having $150B means jack shit to anyone but Jeff Bezos. The real problem is class warfare, as it really always has been.
That said, I don't disagree with his basic assertion that so-called identity politics is really just plain ol' politics. Politics is simply large-scale people management, that's government. It's human, and our experiences are shaped by the groups to which we identify. It's the same argument pushing for more diversity in business and academics. It matters in politics too. Still, it takes time.
