Fascism Watch for February 21, 2023, I guess?

[solarbird]

I’ve been tagging things #fascism watch for a while, but I haven’t really had it as a category for a while. Maybe that, too, should be brought wretchedly back to active life.

Jezebel has coverage of DeSantis’s political retaliation against a teacher for posting video of the emptied library shelves at the school where she worked. The point is to deny the reality, of course, no matter how obvious it might actually be. And that’s always true in authoritarian regimes.

“Russia plans Belarus ‘absorption’ by 2030” isn’t a surprising headline, but there appear to be leaked/exposed documents saying basically that. I don’t know much about this particular source, but I am seeing it reported multiple places following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Academics are slowly migrating away from Twitter, and mostly to Mastodon, since you and/or your institution can have your own instances and not be subject to Musk’s or Zuckerberg’s fashy whims. I’m obviously strongly in favour of this and hope it continues; this kind of decentralisation is pretty critical in social media right now. See also Mastodon over Mammon – Towards publicly owned scholarly knowledge and Replacing academic journals for similar efforts related to publishing work.

Supreme Court rejects Ohio man’s bid to sue police over arrest for Facebook parody is very bad, but less definitively than the article makes it sound – I’m told – because it was turned away over jurisdictional issues, not the merits of the case. So I’m not a lawyer, but take some care over this one.

The lower court’s ruling, however, sounds to me like a travesty, and a recipe for yet more ever-increasing abuse by police.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}.