Fascism Watch for 24 March 2023

Wow, Republicans are going after so many people. Stress to your cishet friends that they’re moving bills that’ll make it difficult or impossible to get treatment for things like breast cancer and prostate cancer in their states.

Make it matter personally, to them. That’s the only way they’ll do anything.

Florida’s Republican/DeSantis State Board of Education will vote in April to expand “don’t say gay” to all schools at all grades. The Orlando Sentinel also has the story. There are other anti-LGBT bills floating around as well; here’s a separate article that is more specific about some of them.

In addition to all that monstrosity, Republicans in the House are floating yet another forced-detransition and health-care-insurance-ban bill that is so broad that it prevents things like cancer treatment and birth control. Medical malpractice insurance would become somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible to obtain for any medical professional who works in any way with anything that directly or indirectly affects a “secondary sex characteristic,” so goodbye prostate and breast cancer treatments in Florida if this passes. Law Dork notes that just listing the provisions of HB 1421 took half his newsletter.

But they’re so very, very focused on hurting trans and other LGBT people that they just don’t care. After all, it’s no doubt in god’s hands.

Meanwhile, despite no actual scientific evidence to support it, the World Athletics Council have banned trans women from international track and field, saying that they have “conducted their own research” and claim there can be an advantage. I wonder how many youtube videos they watched. But in better news, Minnesota’s House has voted through a bill strengthening Minnesota’s position as a refugee state for trans people.

The Republican head of a public charter school board – and explicitly a big DeSantis fan – who forced a principal to retire over his classical education charter school showing a picture of Michaelangelo’s David – has a bizarre interview with Slate. Read it for yourself just for the “quoi?” of it all.

Republicans in Missouri are moving to block all state funding for libraries over a lawsuit against the law they passed last year banning a variety of types of books. That’s called extortion! 2022 was the biggest year in recent history for book bans, and it’s not even close. (There are action items at the link.)

No fiddle too small: GOP lawmaker ‘very sad’ Utah parent used his law to request ‘sex-ridden’ Bible be removed from school. Pass stupid laws, get stupid results.

Goddamn, 45 is losing it. And definitively trying to stoke violence. Explicitly saying there will be “death and destruction” if he’s indited, and hilariously, the first word I accidentally typed instead of “arrested” was “elected,” and that’s also true. Dean Obeidallah thinks Trump’s first 2024 rally being scheduled for Waco, Texas during the 30th anniversary of the Branch Dravidian compound siege is a signal supporting violence to his farthest-right supporters. I think that’s a bit of a reach but I’m also not saying he’s wrong.

And yet, as WaPo writes, all he has to do is snap his fingers and the entire party is his again.

OAN (One America Network), the most Q-Anon of the fash networks, has some of their hosts out on TikTok making videos that spreads their disinfo without identifying in any way for whom they work. As always, the intent is to deceive, and the OAN brand is pretty badly tainted, so they’re trying this, I guess.

The Texas Observer has a decent article up on how far-right funders keep popping up new astroturf “local citizen” groups. The Observers focused in on Dallas, because they’re in Texas, but it applies just as well basically everywhere.

MSNBC knows the score: “Conservatives didn’t hide it when they began to zero in on trans people as the greatest moral threat after marriage equality became the law of the land. In trans people, they saw a new pathway to recycle the same lies about grooming and pedophilia, alongside a newfound faux concern for the safety and athletic achievements of cis women and girls.” See also my backdated posts at the very beginning of this blog – from 1992. Literally nothing they say has changed, only the targets.

And we beat them before the last time they started this war. And we’ll beat them again, as many times as it takes.

Not much twitter today: Matt Taibbi Can’t Comprehend That There Are Reasons To Study Propaganda Information Flows, So He Insists It Must Be Nefarious. Also, Twitter have defined a whole set of “slurs that don’t count as hate speech” but who knows how that’s going to work, except Mr. Radical Free Speech Elon’s basically saying “we’re shadowbanning it” which was… the basis of the whole fake conspiracy bullshit around Twitter to begin with.

Christ, what a trainwreck. Remember, it is always a good day to leave Twitter behind forever.

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gosh, I wonder why

Record numbers of people are out of work due to illness, reports Boing Boing.

Gosh, I wonder why.

(Endemic means “everywhere,” not “gone,” you fucking assholes. Fucking learn already.)

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basically a one-day build: 3d printing filament-out alarm

I wanted an alarm that would go off with I was just about out of 3D printing filament. So I made one. Took the latter half of one day and another half of a second day so that’s kind of a one-day build. If I had a faster printer it would’ve been a lot less time. xD

It’s very simple, there’s a tube through which the filament passes, it plays an mp3 when there’s no more filament present, and does so loudly enough that I can hear it from other rooms. It’s rechargeable, charges by USB and presents as a (very, very slow) USB drive, so you can change the mp3 it plays. It’s not fancy – and the electronics are all stock, I didn’t make ’em – but it’ll do. Mostly what I made is a case to accommodate the electrics and guide the filament over the switch.

I’ll probably print it again in a prettier colour – this is just my final test print, sorry about the scratches – but this’ll do for now. If I use it much, I’ll definitely print a prettier one. ^_^

Here’s the board I used; I put the case on Thingiverse if you want one; the switch is 20x11mm and wired for normally-on operation. When the filament holds it down, the switch is off; when the filament goes away and the switch pops up, it turns on.

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