Fascism Watch for 3 May 2023: Good Morning

Florida Republicans have floated a bill requiring that people who blog about Governor DeSantis, his cabinet, and other elected officials including state representatives to file with the state. Is this fascist enough for you yet?

DeSantis’s new board at the New College of Florida – a publicly -funded state institution, I remind everyone – is explicitly saying they will purge the college of ideologically incorrect students and faculty. They’re also planning to aggressively expand the “Don’t Say Gay” bill to bar more discussion of LGBT people (see also), and are threatening Disney in new ways in an attempt to censor the company’s films, television, and… well, whatever they put out. They’re being quite up front about it: get on our side or we will use the power of the state to fuck you up.

Relatedly, rightists and other fash are howling about a new Peter Pan movie in progress at Disney because not all of the characters are white. We Hunted the Mammoth has coverage. The racism may as well be on picket signs now.

This is the Putin plan, by the way. Step at a time, starting at the same place. The intent is obvious.

Texas Republicans have introduced a bill to require mass internet censorship of abortion information. It would require active censorship both by the website operator and internet access providers.

Also in Texas, Republicans have introduced a bill calling for massive tax cuts explicitly only for heterosexual families – the bigger, the better. Same-sex parents are explicitly excluded. So is everyone who has ever been divorced. I’m including this over here for a few reasons, but the biggest is that this is also explicitly copied from Orban policies and law in Hungary; the neo-fascism is, as the original, international. Which would be hilarious if it wasn’t pure evil.

A nazi (allegedly) responsible for a series of (very real) pipe bombings in California has been arrested and charged. He sure does like his nazi crap.

CMS Wire has a hilariously misinformed article claiming that Mastodon, which the author seems to think is a single monolithic company with a single controller, bought Gab and absorbed it and is therefore full of Nazis. This is particularly hilarious that Mastodon as a primary collective/federated entity is the only system so far to successfully use the Nazi bar phenomenon against nazis, successfully siloing them out en masse.

They have a partial correction up with doesn’t actually improve the reality, like, at all. Seriously, not even a little. Here’s a series of toots talking about it.

Finally, this is related to everything: “I’ve been saying this for a few years now, but it’s worth recording here for the record: It’s impossible to overstate the degree to which many big tech CEOs and venture capitalists are being radicalized by living within their own cultural and social bubble. Their level of paranoia and contrived self-victimization is off the charts, and is getting worse now that they increasingly only consume media that they have funded, created by their own acolytes.“

That’s the beginning of a discussion that’ll be ongoing for a while, I think.

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Today’s Cultural Warfare Update: 3 March 2023

Tennessee’s new ban on drag in public was specifically amended to fall right before Pride – and it’s very broadly written to criminalise drag at Pride. And, as I’ve mentioned many times, these are all quite intentionally written to be so vague as to be applicable against trans people as well. This is all very intentional, of course. Fascists engaged in a freeway banner hanging thanking the governor for signing the legislation and encouraging more. (It’s down in the article and the original source link – via The Tennessee Hollar – is Twitter, so I’m not linking directly.)

Republicans in Florida are planning to aggressively expand the “Don’t Say Gay” bill to bar more discussion of LGBT people (see also). More on this in the Fascism Watch, since there’s context. (If you wonder why I’m having a hard time seeing these as separate any more, well, here’s another example.)

Walgreens, under threat from Republican state attorneys-general, has stopped sales of RU-486 and similar drugs in several states where they are still legal. This was never about “states rights” and never will be; that was always, without exception, a bald-faced bad-faith lie. As is everything else they say, when that’s the approach they think will get them what they want at any given moment.

What it will take to get centrist and centre-left journalists to realise this, I can’t tell you, because they fall for it every. goddamn. time. and it’s infuriating. See also Today on The American Prospect: Prominent center-left journalists were swindled by obvious nonsense about a St. Louis gender clinic. More on that nonsensical “whistleblower’s” bullshit story collapsing in on itself here.

The Southern Baptist Convention has started kicking out churches with female pastors – even though some of those pastors have been in position for literally decades. None of this is coincidental timing, of course, and it’s not even ideological – the preacher interviewed at the link is very conservative and is leading a very evangelical church. But WOMAN BAD, so out they go.

Talking of, Fox News is mad that trans women are likely to be included in a planned museum about American women’s history at the Smithsonian. I mean, of course they are, WIMMEN being included in HIStory?! “Outrageous! Deranged! It’s HIStory, you bitches, now go make me a sammich.” Plus trans, of course, which makes everything spicier.

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It works – but what do I do with it?

So I have an iMac A1225, 4G RAM, could be expanded to 6G, 2.4GHz Core2Duo. 24″ display, circa 2007-2009. Optical drive is weird and loud but reads. It had a bad hard drive fan, but unplugging it internally and swapping to SSD solves that problem by rendering the fan moot. I ran stress tests on it for an hour; it’s fine.

Now what do I do with it?

I can put a good 512G SSD in it and my cost (counting other parts) ends up $60. Would anyone local want it for that? It can run current linux (xubuntu suggested for RAM reasons), it’ll be fine for mail and web. Basic compy goodness, and while I’m not sure I trust this optical drive, not many people care anymore.

ALTERNATIVELY!

I could gut it, get a controller for the LCD, and make it into a monitor with good onboard speakers. Sell all the working internal parts on eBay – logic board, power supply, wifi boards, all that.

I feel kinda bad about gutting a perfectly functional machine with enough RAM and CPU to still be reasonably useful. But at the same time, I don’t know who would want this (even if they go for something like $100 on eBay) and I’m pretty sure I’d have more use for a decent 24″ LCD with reasonably good colour than this actual compy. Even if it is only 60fps.

It is at least an IPX display. It’s genuinely okay.

What do you think?

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Those link-only toots on Mastodon/Federation

As you may’ve noticed, for the last few posts, people on Mastodon and elsewhere in the Federation only saw links back to here in their Home feeds, rather than the previews and such they had been seeing. (Hi!)

At least the links were to specific articles, and not the blog home page, right?

This started happening when I upgraded to the latest drop of the ActivityPub plugin (0.17), which is alpha software in active development. It turns out this version introduced an unfortunate bug which caused it to federate only raw links to posts, but only when certain specific settings were in place.

As you can see, I’ve found a workaround.

I’ve reported both repro conditions and the workaround to the plugin dev team; I’m sure they’ll figure it out.

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A less terrible dreamwidth to wordpress importer

Okay. Since a few(!) people told me they wanted it, I made my Dreamwidth XML to WordPress importer marginally less terrible and it’s now on my github.

YOU WANT TO READ THE README. YOU REALLY, REALLY WANT TO READ THE README.

Nothing about this is plug-and-play. It assumes linux, it assumes you have or can install perl, it assumes you have full access to your WordPress install and if your Dreamwidth journal is of size you’re gonna need to make small and clearly defined changes to WordPress core code.

Yeah. It is that kind of party and I did stick my tits in the mashed potatoes. BUT IT WORKS.

It even has some features, like preserving your tags (better yet, it makes them into WordPress tags) and pulling down comments and keeping them correctly hierarchical, as far as WordPress will let you do that. Bask in the comment glory! It also preserves Current Music, even if it throws out Current Mood. (Sorry. Wasn’t in it. The mood, I mean. xD ) It’ll categorise your imports as category “imported post” if you want it to for easier searching, and if an imported post has no tags at all, it’ll tag it no-tag.

It’s just, you know, radically undertested lol.

Also I’m absolutely not saying it won’t work on a Windows Server install of WordPress ’cause it just might. But don’t ask me for help, I won’t have it.

Anyway, there y’go. Run, little importer! Be free!

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