now this what i call some goddamn commentary

Catherynne Valente brings the smackdown, for reals, in There’s No Such Thing as a Smart Fascist.

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Fascism Watch for 1 June 2023, the You Can’t Be Pure Enough edition

Uganda’s president signed the country’s new criminalisation-of-homosexuality law, which includes the death penalty in various circumstances. This law has been worked and promoted for many years by American Christian evangelist groups – The Family in particular, but by no means just that – and represents what they really want. President Biden threatens sanctions and says this will impact every aspect of American-Ugandan relations; we’ll see. That we’ve seen more out of Joe Biden than out of groups like the Human Rights Campaign on this is revolting – and revealing.

“India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks — experts are baffled,” reports Nature. Well, I’m not baffled, because this is exactly the kind of thing fascists want, and yes, India has been in the grip of its own religious-fascist surge for these last several years too. Everything they’re removing from schools is knowledge to give people the ability to realise what’s happening to the world around them as authoritarians team up with polluters and carbon-energy moguls to keep everybody stupid and ignorant.

Donkeyballs Donald promised on day one “to use an executive order to alter the US Constitution if elected again.” Specifically an executive order to overturn Constitutional citizenship. He’s a fucking fascist.

A quick reminder that the regret rate for gender confirmation surgery is incredibly, shockingly low, particularly compared to basically any other kind of surgery – and also shockingly low compared to deciding to have children. Just as a reminder.

Normally I’d say something here like ‘you can’t appease fascists, particularly religious ones, because no matter what you do, it’s not enough‘ but it’s not really appropriate but is particularly hilarious because it’s against their own true believers: the “anti-woke” (racist/white nationalist) right is going after Chick-Fil-A and there is not enough popcorn in the world.

Republican Texas moves to block all diversity, equity, and inclusiveness programmes at state universities, joining Republican Florida in camp “fuck yeah white dudes forever.” That Fucker Mike Pence is mad at the Dodgers for undoing their disinviting the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence from Pride night.

It’s always, always projection: Turning Point USA partners with registered sex offender for pastors event. TPUSA are big into the “queers are all pedo ‘groomers'” hate generation, you see. So, well, naturally this. See also “Right-wing activists for children craft affair lie about reporter who exposed allegedly abusive Christian camp.”

Jonah Goldberg sees an upside to violence against Target and threats against other companies involving LGBT people in marketing and promotion. “The right wing columnist is looking forward to a time when brands are less “political.” By less political, it seems, he means that some types of people won’t be represented in advertisements or have merchandise tailored to their interests due to reasonable fears of far-right violence.” Meanwhile, rightist-owned businesses are stepping up refusals to do business with LGBT people.

Musk Twitter and other fash and fash-adjacent media:

Ben & Jerry’s have finally ended all advertising on Twitter, explicitly because Musk has turned it into an alt-right/neo-fascist disinformation fountain. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is getting pretty cranky at Twitter being what Twitter is now, regarding an impersonation account tweeting out fake policy and lusting after Elon Musk. (Elon has, of course, been boosting the account.)

Not much from the individual states in this update – but here’s Georgia:

Finally, Atlanta Police Arrest Organizers of Bail Fund for Cop City Protesters, because of course they do. What Atlanta PD have been doing in response to protesters should be national news but most national media absolutely refuse to cover it.

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An update to the project storage system project

So I’ve kind of become unfond of the hang-arbitrary-boxes-to-the-rack system I had developed initially. I mean, it worked! It worked fine! I didn’t have one come down in six months of testing, even just using tape to attach the boxes to their hangers. Failure rate of zero.

I just decided it was too irregular for me, and kind of ugly. Your milage may vary and the parts needed to make it work aren’t going away. It’s staying a feature.

But it’s also limited in terms of how big a project you can hang off the thing, right? So I started thinking about it, and came down on an idea of what amounts to pointer objects, pointing to, say, a nearby closet or other storage area that doesn’t actually have to be visible. The pointer objects could make the hidden storage visible, reducing the size of the problem and maybe even eliminating it entirely.

So that’s what I did:

Read more: An update to the project storage system project

They’re designed so you can use four colours via filament swaps even on a single-nozzle printer, and it’s not even fussy about it – these were printed using the Filament Friday high-speed profiles.

Plus I built them so they attach (with glue or double-sided tape) to the box-hanger elements, so those objects get re-used without modification, keeping them easily available for box hanging if you actually prefer the original idea.

Pointer (number) plate attached to single-height box plate. They fit double-height plates exactly so you can use those too.

The idea of the big white area is that you can either put dry-erase material on it and then use dry-erase markers, or you can just use a post-it of some kind instead. I did the latter because I don’t have any dry-erase material handy? But once we have spare money again I’ll do that I think.

Number plate with post-it on double-height box mounting plate, attached via double-sided tape.

(Okay, it’s not a real post-it, I was out of white ones and I wanted it white. YOU GET THE IDEA.)

So this is what a central unit looks like with number plates, which I think is a lot better than the add-on-boxes approach. Plus it lets you point to much larger boxes stored elsewhere – arbitrarily large storage elements, in fact. You could use this with standard shipping units if you were so inclined and had access to shipping units and weren’t using them to build, idk, a house or something.

Meanwhile, in the closet just to the right in this picture, the corresponding boxes. Notice that some of the boxes are much larger than anything you could actually hang directly on the unit. And now that I’m actually using it – the labels above are made up, but then I realised “oh wait I have actual projects too big for this system UNTIL NOW” – I can say I strongly prefer this version of the system.

But the old one is still 100% available if you prefer it. Anyway, in the closet:

ignore the “medium” label, I had an idea, it didn’t really work

And I realised yesterday that I have a laminator, so I can shake these designs up just a little and then laminate them and use dry-erase markers on these, too, if I want. In case that’s important for some reason. I mean, hey, you never know.

Anyway, that’s the big update. This is really starting to work for me. If you actually try this, let me know how it goes? There’s already a desktop-and-drawer open-organiser standard floating around in 3D-printing land, it seems to me that there’s room for a narrow-space vertical organisation standard too and if other people started designing for it that’d be pretty amazing. It is, after all, all out there and open.

(I can also a picture a single long row of these, along, say, one wall of a classroom, with one basket for each elementary or middle-school kid, right? Each with their own storage box that they printed. Art stuff could be in it, or something like that. Maybe above their coats, who knows?)

But I suppose we’ll just have to see whether the interest is actually there.

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A series of replies from a long and unfortunate conversation (1)

I got into a fight with someone I thought of as a friend – an asshole, but also a friend, in that way that a lot of people have at least one asshole friend in their friend group. I’m not saying everyone has that, but… it’s kind of a thing.

And the thing is, this person is more of an anglophile than they want to admit, and they have a lot of connections to what is frankly described as English TERFdom. And I was hoping by throwing so much of my writing over to this other social network (not Twitter, not a blogsite) that I’d be able to keep nudging them away from all that.

But then, it seems, not as much. I suppose I’ve already posted about that already. Trying to have this discussion was pretty emotionally gruelling and in the end we got to a point where I just wasn’t willing to do it. But I’m keeping it some of here, mostly for a post I’m going to reference in the next Fascism Watch.

First reply under the break. More in the next few posts.

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A series of replies from a long and unfortunate conversation (4): short, shouty, and incomplete

After that, the other person went off in ways that really made me explode, because it showed me they hadn’t been listening to me, not actually, not for years, and that if anything, they’d come in with an agenda and intent to win, not have a conversation.

And it wound me up so much that I mostly just screamed at them and told them to leave.

I’m including it for completeness, though. I’m not including an incomplete and un-posted reply I’d been working on before this happened, because it’s super rough and speculative, and there’s no real point. But the gist of it was following up on the previous post, nr. 3 – there are more trans people now than there used to be because they aren’t all dead. Along with other, more speculative reasons.

But this final part is all in reaction to that rightist propaganda going around about how “even Europe is backing off” puberty blockers and trans-affirmation and pointing to the Tory-controlled NHS, and a couple of exaggerations about changes in two other countries which were, surprise, also forced by the right. Because that’s what shows medical concern: bowing to hate and pressure campaigns from international authoritarians.

And now I’m already getting angry again, so here’s the last part, under the fold.

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A series of replies from a long and unfortunate conversation (2): why do they keep it for themselves

(This entry wouldn't crosspost, and neither would (3), for unknown reasons. So I'm doing it by hand.)

Second reply in that long and unfortunate conversation referenced last post. This one’s mostly replying to the other person echoing fash/TERF propganda that they’re turning all your kids queer through massive surgical intervention on 12 year olds and eliminating gender nonconformity and erasing lesbians and butch women through surgery and so on, which is nonsense, and yet.

Every post was a thick stack of propaganda, so I would have to pick and choose one or two parts to try to isolate and break down. That’s why even these truncated replies are so short, compared to what one might argue they needed to be.

Reply two below the fold…

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A series of replies from a long and unfortunate conversation (3): hypothetical and unobserved side-e

(This is the other one that wouldn't crosspost for unknown reasons yay. Don't know why.)

This is the one I'm posting because I want to reference it in a Fascism Watch, because it has data from what happens if you don't let trans people transition. In particular, the person I was talking to was going on about irreversible damage from puberty blockers (not real) and that there are no long-term studies on puberty blocker effects. That last one's extra not true, and they moved the goalposts when provided with examples of 25-year-studies and 40 years of clinical use, declaring all of that "not long term."

In part, they claimed that there were vanishingly few cases of precocious puberty so studies of those cases weren't enough to matter and didn't count. I started by calculating the numbers. Spoiler: it is not vanishingly small.

They also posted an undersourced graph showing as many as 11 hysterectomies a year nationally supposedly for gender identity reasons. I took that as 100% real, then went into what happens when trans people are not allowed to transition, and drew a comparison. Spoiler: it's mass death.

Details under the fold.( Read more )

oh my god trump is so fucking stupid

jesus fucking christ he’s so fucking stupid

i mean i know he’s fucking stupid but he’s so fucking stupid, literally if you made something up about how you’d manipulate a stupid-ass motherfucker like him this is what you’d come up with and i know this because this is what i came up with when i did that and

oh my god he’s so. fucking. stupid.

roger stone on hot mic describing how he manipulates trump

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