Fascism Watch for 2 June 2023: the Banned and Banned Back edition

This one’s a bit late because I wanted to see if anything much happened overnight; I was rewarded with the Bible-banning story, so I think it’s worth it. Eat it, fash bastards – and happy Pride, everybody else.

Pentagon kicks off Pride Month by caving to Matt Gaetz, cancelling drag show. Don’t take this kind of thing lightly; it was run by volunteers and all that and the previous couple went over well. It’s about ceding ground to the NO FAGGOTS crowd, pure and simple.

Montana’s deliberately extremely vague supposedly anti-drag law has already – only a week after being passed – been used to shut down a trans author’s talk on the history of LGBTQ+ and Two-Spirit people in Montana. That was the intent, and here we are.

Eat it, religious fascists: Bible removed from school library after parent demonstrated it was pornographic under new Republican laws.

The Guardian UK might bow to the anti-trans hate crowd, but The Guardian US have so far done a much better job of not doing that – see today’s all too accurate column. Conservative activists in America are doing everything they can to treat LGBTQ people as less than human:

“Here’s what we should do,” instructed the right-wing pundit Matt Walsh recently. “Pick a victim, gang up on it, and make an example of it. We can’t boycott every woke company or even most of them. But we can pick one, it hardly matters which, and target it with a ruthless boycott campaign. Claim one scalp and then move on to the next.”

“Texas wants to wean trans youth off meds in a ‘safe and medically appropriate’ way. Doctors say that’s impossible,” and that’s because it is. This is literally lifesaving care. We know the “side effects” of trans people not being allowed to transition, and that side effect is radically early death.

But, of course, that’s what the Christian authoritarians want. See this Catholic writer, writing about how angry he is not just about Pride, but that Ted Cruz opposed Uganda’s death penalty for homosexuality. And see how one-time Trumpist forum The Donald is now literally 75% anti-LGBT hate threads.

See also “Pride Month feels different as threats, fear of violence grows.” But it’s not just aimed as us queers, of course: Ex-GOP candidate indicted in drive-by shootings at lawmakers’ homes.

Arizona’s Democratic governor has our backs as the Republican legislature works to pass anti-LGBT bills. She’s a big reason why Arizona hasn’t been in these reports very often.

Pro Publica have done an analysis of writings by the current Supreme Court membership, and built a chart of what rights have been questioned by whom in writing. The problem with this approach is that a lot of the farthest-right members of the court have very little written down, so these numbers are unduly optimistic in my view. But it’s still useful information.

This headline is wrong: nothing shames the right, because they have no shame at all. They literally don’t care. They just want to hurt people; they want pain and they’re going to get it. Nothing else actually matters. But it is going to be pretty hard to have schools when your student-teacher revolt turns into mass resignations and then you have no one left to teach.

Musk Twitter doesn’t remove much hate speech, even when it gets violent, but they particularly don’t remove hate speech and violent threats from bluecheck users, preferring to promote it. The Daily Beast has numbers. (They use “may” in front of “promote,” but we know for a fact they do, so.) This is part of why Twitter’s latest valuation is 1/3 that of what Musk paid for it last year. I like to mention that despite its irrelevance – that’s not why he bought it, after all. He bought it to use for far-right propaganda and the 2024 election.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

popcorn salt annealling is the shit

If you anneal your 3D prints, like, ever, that whole “pack it in popcorn salt” trick works an absolute treat. You still get a little shrinkage on the X and Y, and an even smaller (but borderline) height climb on the Z, but it’s way WAY less than without it, and otherwise the geometry just stays perfect and none of the details go anywhere or anything. I’ve been putting off trying this for months – partly because I don’t really do that much annealling lately – but now I’m like “wow okay I really learned something today” and wish I’d done it a few months ago.

It’s pretty easy. I put a layer of salt in a glass jar, then placed an ordinary plain generic PLA object at the bottom, before packing the rest of the jar with more popcorn salt as tightly as I could, tapping it a lot to make sure I got the best possible surrounding of my object, and using the lid to put some pressure on the salt from the top.

Then I hit the whole thing with 70°C for an hour (15 minutes preheat, 45 minutes at temperature), took it out and measured it, then repacked and reheated the same object at 80°C for 90 minutes (after preheat) and it’s fine, modulo a lesser degree of the inevitable X-Y shrinkage. The second heating cycle changed nothing dimentionally, despite the higher temperature.

If you’re using a PLA that anneals to a higher glass point after annealling and you have reason to care about geometry, this is a great solution. You can even re-use the salt. I wouldn’t eat it after using it forthis, of course, but you can use it all you want for annealling.

Anyway, this is a great trick and if you do 3D printing you should try it.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

pride month and corporations (clearing the decks)

Here’s something important about Pride and Pride Month and companies showing up at Pride events and all that, something most people don’t know or remember.

Until the 90s, and to a large degree still in the 90s, being “homosexual” meant being impoverished.

It meant being ruined. Unemployable. Fucking destitute.

This is why groups like GLEAM (trans-inclusive Gays, Lesbians, and Bisexuals at Microsoft) showing up at Seattle Pride was such a big deal, because it showed you did’t have to be destroyed by coming out. You could live an ordinary life. A… dare I say it… mostly normal one.

In short, queer didn’t have to mean desperate, and that mattered. It mattered a whole lot.

At the same time, companies showing officially up at Pride – as companies vs. employee groups, and it was rare for a long time – meant they agreed. It meant they wouldn’t fire your ass on the spot if they found you out – like most companies had done, for a very long time, and many still did.

In short, you could be queer and still have a job.

And at that point in time, in the 1990s, in the AIDS peak, that was fucking revolutionary.

I suppose it doesn’t mean that so much any more, but it’s absolutely what it meant back then. So when you talk disparagingly about “Rainbow Capitalism” and “Corporate Pride” – try to remember this history, because that’s how it used to be. That’s what it meant.

It still means that, to a degree.

Particularly now, now that it’s becoming harder again.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.