stop being Good Germans, America the degree to which Americans have already normalized the machine of fascism /less than nine months into this presidency/ does not bode well for the future. there are already secret police abducting people as part of the day-to-day; the fascism is here and growing.

sure is a choice to go straight from denial of rights under the Due Process Clause to specifically next go after the practical means of self-defense (and I'm not here to talk about the ethics of gun ownership, so sod off). this DOJ move is a threat and pretending that it isn't will get people dead.

It's not even a leap of logic, more like a single step to the side, to go from "exploited laborers had it coming for not resisting their exploitation" into "POC had their oppression coming for being Lazy," or "trans people had their oppression coming for being Weird", or whatever else

Casting the exploitation of labor as a moral failing of the exploited laborer is, in a very real sense, the single most reactionary position possible. All other reaction flows out of the idea that victims "had it coming" for not being capable of resisting exploitation or abuse

people are seriously castigating a trans woman for "not billing enough for her work" because she was desperately trying to get people to pay her for her work. bona-fide trash. utter crab-bucket behavior with a side of transmisogyny, because most people seemingly can't help themselves from doing it.

This week, here's how Fox News attacked the new #Superman movie: They lashed out at it as "Superwoke," made jokes about "MS-13" being printed on his cape, and even mocked David Corenswet's name. Here's our story about the fake outrage, and Superman's history of facing such smears. @vanityfair.com

Das Schwarze Korps newspaper of Berlin was irate over a Look magazine comic in which Superman ties Nazi cannons into knots and drags Hitler (and Stalin) off for trial. It lashed out at Superman writer Jerry Siegel as a "beetle" and ridiculed his Jewish last name. Here's the Look magazine spread:

The right-wing backlash against #Superman this week got me thinking: Has this happened before? That led to the discovery of these headline — from April 1940, when the official newspaper of the SS took umbrage at the comic book hero and ridiculed its creators. My how times change ...

people don't need conspiracy theories about felon-President to understand he's a murderer all the trans people who've died from despair at the American Fuhrer's proclamations are also victims of murder by the hands of the government the deaths will not end until the illegitimate regime is ousted

to all the people who yelled at me for using delivery services to deal with my disordered eating, I'm sure you'll all be thrilled to know that there's much more friction between me and eating now! asking "do I really deserve this food?" every meal! often saying "no, I don't" your efforts paid off!

relatedly, how people are cooking their brains and hearts with genAI chatbots that encourage a kind of social solipsism, "talking" with a large-language-model that lacks anything epistemology would recognize as "knowledge," let alone any kind of interiority, in favor of further atomizing the user

I cannot emphasize enough how true & real this is. In almost anywhere on the political spectrum you ID with or major issue, there’s probably a bot/troll operation to encourage your rage and vitriol. And how/where that rage gets directed, esp understandable rage, is what they are out to influence.

I just switched accounts and this was at the top of my feed and I don't need to know why because there have been good reasons to boycott the New York Times for this entire millennium.

*in which the lead author is a non-staff writer best known in recent times for “just asking questions”-ing trans kids’ health care all the way to obsession (it’s all he’s written about over the past two months at his newsletter except for one piece where he claims people are trying to cancel him)

Five hundred and five pages of opinions. Five hundred and five pages so bad. Five hundred and five pages of opinions. How do you measure, measure a regime?

hiding from the general terror in the United States and posting elsewhere if you want to hear about performative gender and what Rock is a Lady's Modesty is saying as a work, it's not going to be here, not when so many people are looking for useful information about how things are going to hell

To be clear when I say “tested” I am not saying there’s any serious legal dispute - it’s made up. But the game here in intimidation, and the only way out of such pseudo-legal strongarm tactics is the expensive business of litigation. It’s just like the law firms and universities.

US institutions being “investigated” by federal agencies for providing standard-of-care medicine to patients need to lawyer up and fight back. Maybe they need to more financial backing to do so. Fed threats are completely baseless, totally disconnected from any law. They need to be tested in court.

trying to move off this account; if you want my long-winded spiels about media, you'll have to follow me elsewhere (you can ask ^^)

3. Likely by Monday, the ACLU will be posting important next steps on what you need to do to get your passport updated. They hope that the government decides to comply and issue guidance by then.

2. If you HAVE attempted to get your passport and were denied the gender marker, had it confiscated, or received the wrong gender marker, please let me know via DM, with your contact information, and I will pass it along. They are seeking people who were denied.

1. Alert, and please share widely. A lawyer at the ACLU has asked me to inform my transgender readers that they should NOT be applying for passports right now - the state department has not issued guidance to comply with the court order and they are urgently trying to get them to do so. 🧵

I will be writing more tomorrow, but, for tonight, I send my support to all of the trans people targeted by today’s ruling. You deserve better. And, to all of the amazing trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people in my life, you have taught me so much. You bring me life, and I love you.

Some of Asimov's summer wardrobe <3

America is a failed state and a negligent homicide like this is just another dead body in the pile of all the unique and precious human lives that have been snuffed out under this false regime the utterly banal inhumanity of “a pedestrian died as part of the military parade. pedestrians die a lot 🤷🏻‍♀️”

oh, Chekhov's Gun, you were mounted on the wall so beautifully, and yet mean so much less than one would have ever wanted

the Oracles of First Street continue to, seemingly, huff strange gases as a means of deciding cases that's why I refer to Justices of the Supreme Court as such Roberts engaging in special pleading that's been a tired legal argument since 2012 is an embarrassment to the institution and himself

There is no bodily autonomy for anyone in the United States until everyone in the United States regains the protection of due process of law with respect to bodies and minds. the fight to liberate those unjustly held by the false government of the current regime is also the fight to liberate bodies

wild that the Skrmetti decision dropped the day I have an appointment at the post office to get my photos taken for my Austrian passport that will be key to my safe exit from the United States as an annuitant of the US with panic disorder and bipolar disorder exacerbated by abuse working for the US.

BREAKING: The U.S. Supreme Court upholds Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors. Robert, for the 6-3 court, holds that the law is not subject to heightened scrutiny under equal protection and passes rational basis review. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p...

www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p... Skrmetti is out and the syllabus summary of the decision is that "Questions regarding the law’s policy are thus appropriately left to the people, their elected representatives, and the democratic process" and America votes on rights existing now. fuck.

I have crawled out of my fen to see what the Oracles of First Street have to say, because apparently they have a lot to say today

It's a three-box day at SCOTUS, meaning we are expecting up to 6 opinions today. Opinions start in 5 minutes.

Chris Geidner's work is very literally invaluable—he not only does excellent Supreme Court coverage that makes clear what's fact and what's speculation, but he's been on the beat of trans rights for longer than I've been trans. His work is a public good worth funding.

people say there wasn't enough discussion about how "abolish the police" worked as a policy objective and, like, this is a meme from 2020 — www.tumblr.com/drinkpisspis... I think the bigger problem was that the media was not willing to talk about it on this level and not the words "abolish police"

"ladylike" is a word used to diminish women and make them lesser as a way to gain status, and it's nice to see media deconstructing the notion of what is "proper" and "feminine" while America loses its goddamned mind over the idea that gender is anything more than what's taught in elementary health.

Rock is a Lady's Modesty is going full throttle against the definition of "lady" that fundamentally diminishes women and deconstructs gender in ways that the West does not seem capable of having conversations about (although who knows, I could be wrong, there could be some holdouts of literacy)

now appearing in the official English manga as of about two weeks ago

I'm trying to stop staring into the abyss and letting it stare back at me follow @chrisgeidner.bsky.social for legal news on trans rights; he's been on that beat for longer than I've been raising hell on the topic (watching the Labor Secretary hide from him was inspiring)

An 81-year-old Reagan appointee born during World War II has been protecting trans people in federal prison in the face of Trump admin efforts. Today, Judge Royce Lamberth sided with challengers who sought a class-wide preliminary injunction protecting hormone therapy and social accommodations.

For tonight, I’ll just say that I see trans people and respect the hell out of all that you all are doing to survive and even thrive in the face of an overwhelming campaign of hate, disregard, and ambivalence. You deserve better from so many people — far too many of whom know better.

I had something I would have addressed today, but I still haven’t found the words to weigh in without fearing that I would regret the words I might use.

someone who doesn’t have a host of mental illnesses and debilitating CPTSD could try and create that positive good at less mental cost for certain I don’t think I’m in a position to say whether or not trying to consolidate that information can be done sustainably by a person in these times, though

I’ve been doing what informational work I can because I am not well enough to be gainfully employed and have the benefit of Federal disability retirement but also I’ve been doing it for the same unhealthy reason as depicted in this passage from Homunculus Tears and it’s not good for me to continue

if an individual is doing it, then they’re going to be taking mental damage to gaze into the abyss and see it gazing back at them while distilling the firehose, and money doesn’t solve the problem of damage/time payment to make a professional version of what I’ve doing informally wouldn’t hurt less

it's a cost on the individual but benefit for the community and I don't see how to fix that without, like, charging people for access to curated summaries etc

there are more than enough lawyers on here, so the community isn’t so lacking for legal analysis as to require my legal thinking, at which point it would seem that my efforts to de-silo information could be done by an appropriately-trained LLM pointed at the same couple dozen feeds I’m listening to.

is there a positive good that can be extracted from the firehose? yes is the cost of watching even a highly-filtered selection of the firehose substantially greater on an individual than the informational value of doing so? yes, at least in my experience of the last half-year