Dr. Lina Prince St. Cameron

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.

Can 'Superman' Win the Culture War? A right-wing backlash erupted when James Gunn described the hero of his new film as an “immigrant” who models “kindness." But the Man of Steel has faced these attacks before—going back to 85 years.

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

Clip of a Feb. 1940 comic from Look magazine of Superman decimating the Third Reich.

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:

A 1940 newspaper clip from the Springfield Leader and Press, declaring: Superman Poisoning American Children, Irate Nazis cClaim."

"Superman Arouses Teutonic Anger" reads the headline in the Amarillo Daily News"

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 ...

this is what happens when a culture of "I was only following orders" turns on itself

it won't be as dramatic as a city falling out of the sky… it'll be more and more unmarked vans grabbing more and more people

US citizens aren't any safer than immigrants with this lawless regime and corrupt SCOTUS

the mobilizing ideology of this false Presidency is "what if we could kill even more people than COVID did— didn't, we mean, what if even more people happened to die from 'uncontrollable' infectious disease and murdered by police and killed themselves... that'd be great!"

so ends the Grand Republic

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

"It was only because others were unknown to us that we could fear them, hold interest in them, and encounter new perspectives."

this was an understanding America used to have that vanished over the past thirty years, and people don't understand how important a thing it is that they've lost.

HOMUNCULUS TEARS: ALCHEMY FOR THE BROKENHEARTED “To be an all-powerful god is a lonely thing…” As I mentioned before, the concept of “other” didn’t exist to someone so powerful. She had managed to not read my mind, to allow me to remain separate from her up until now, but I was in the immaterial world. If she tried to contact me, I would be laid bare, and she would no longer see me as a separate person. I had to act before that happened. It was only because others were unknown to us that we could fear them, hold interest in them, and encounter new perspectives. Without anyone she could consider “other” around her anymore, I was sure she would eventually do something extreme. I needed to remain separate from her so I could set her straight when that time came.

which stuck in my brain a bit because that actually happens to be a load-bearing bit of plot in a recent book

(the woman in question does lose her grip on reality and try to bring about the end of all things, which seems in keeping with what we've observed of people isolating themselves with LLMs)

I came across this and a couple other contemporaneous posts and the thing that struck me is the emphasis on tasks that would ordinarily involve working with people instead being handled through LLM prompts and how that means there's no exposure to An Other Human Being

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?

if you're not here for law and are interested in a more drawn-out of the below thought and others, see the quotes

I dunno what I'm doing with this account, other than closing the blast doors again for the night.

there's nothing I could say legally about Skrmetti that hasn't already been said with much more detail and at much more length than Justice Sotomayor, and, well, the reasoning swayed 3 justices

culturally my response is this, which could be elaborated into legal argument but would be self-injurious

there was a time where there'd still be culture writers who would write about such things, but most of the places I used to read them have been shuttered

most of the people I know are games critics more than anime critics, but sites cross-subsidized

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.
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