solarbird

@bird@solarbird.net

This blog is where @moira writes in longer form, and also where she has collected all her old blogs and journals (LJ, Dreamwidth) into a single gestalt. Content here is also cross-posted to Dreamwidth, where she maintains an active presence to this day.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

solarbird, to politics

the party of plague is still a party of plague

Nothing is ever about “bodily autonomy” with Republicans. Nothing. Today’s example:

The Republican Senate of North Carolina just passed a ban on masking for medical reasons in public.

For bonus points, it has an exemption preserving the right of the KKK to march around masked. Republican leadership refused to allow a floor vote to take that out, so passed it with the exemption intact.

But masking for medical purposes in public? That they’ll make illegal.

[link]

solarbird, to art

MEGAMAP

I HAVE NO SENSE OF PROPORTION

and also don’t know when to stop

Welcome to MEGAMAP, wherein I quickly combine my map with the other two that I know are actively maintained, 2023 Seattle and April 2024 2 Line Eastside Connector. I expected it to take about 10 minutes, instead it took like an hour and a half and involved a lot more editing than I expected. But now it’s poster-sized! About 660mm/26″ squareish but not quite square. And north isn’t perfectly consistent because all three maps have their own separate ideas about what North is, but it’s within a few degrees so doesn’t actually matter in the least.

As far as I know, and I do know, this is the largest single print-type bike map in over a decade, since King County stopped maintaining its county-wide map.

As before, it’s on my Github. Enjoy!

[link]

solarbird, to art

Greater Northshore Bike Map Release 1

HAPPY FRIDAY IT’S BIKE MAP RELEASE DAY!

Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map Version 1 – May 2024 is basically the same a RC2 but with an improved legend, some credits, and the full resolution version is finally available! It’s 24″ wide if you have the full version.

Download from Github

The purpose of this map is to connect the maintained City of Seattle Bike Map and the new to-be maintained 2 Line Bike Connector Eastside Map. So it’s all about connecting the connections to the other connections. I will be intending to maintain this one, hopefully with continued input from other people.

The map is uses material from King County GIS, the very outdated and somewhat inaccurate Kirkland Bike Map, satellite views via Google Maps, and important contributions from:

Erik H. on Facebook (Bothell)
@sip (Shoreline)
@MHowell (Tolt Pipeline Trail)

I’ve put it on Github for the moment because I already have an account there and it does versioning. I still need to figure out a license but it’ll be CC-credit or something like that. ^_^

Enjoy!

[link]

solarbird, to news

Tell NBC News what you think of Ronna McDaniel

Should you wish to tell NBC News what you think of hiring serial-liar, election-denier, and coup defender and thus participant Ronna McDaniel, NBC News have a contact email for the editorial staff.

I recommend you let them know what you think. I certainly did.

[link]

solarbird, to tech

a story in two images

mark zuckerberg's threads account as seen from mastodon, with two posts visible, the first of which is "First post in the fediverse!" with a waving hands icon, the second of which is talking about the beta.Grunkle Stan "this is beautiful" meme wherein the frame is inset with a report filed by a Mastodon user named Grampa against Mark Zuckerberg. Apparently users are reporting him on sight. xD[link]

image/jpeg

solarbird, to cooking

okay gastrodonians gimmie a hand with this

So I have this skillet.

A small skillet, silver in colour, not non-stick and not black/cast iron. The handle appears to be cast, the skillet itself is smooth.Obviously, it’s a skillet. And it looks like a cheap skillet – real cheap. But I don’t think it is.

The handle is cast iron or steel of some kind, despite being silver. The handle is also magnetic and heavy. The actual pan part, however, is aluminium, with no hint of magnetism, and also quite heavy – heavier than I feel it should be, like it has a slab of copper sandwiched inside layers of aluminium. There are three big thick bolts holding this thing together.

This is an object I feel like had to have been made with a purpose. I don’t know what that purpose was. And despite being a decent baker, I am no chef, and am merely an adequate cook in the sense of “I can follow directions correctly and produce the intended meal.”

So what the hell is this for?

Am I wrong about it having a special purpose? Is it in fact really cheap? Because it looks cheap. But it doesn’t feel cheap, and I think that’s important here.

Is it some sort of esoteric camping kit? Is that it? Feels way too heavy for that but it is nicely small.

What’m I missing here, Gastrodonians? Is this some sort of special implement? Or is it just a weird kind of cheap pan I’ve never seen before.

Do you know? ’cause I sure don’t.

[link]

solarbird,

It’s weird. Particularly with this combination of materials and the confusing combination of crudity and heaviness.

I thought at first it was just stainless or something and maybe there’s a very thin layer of that on top but… I doubt it. There’s no magnetism on the pan part. With a set of very, very strong rare earth magnets there might be a hint of it on the smooth side, but maybe not. And definitely not on the very very clearly aluminium side.

solarbird,

The back is definitely aluminium. Or if not, it’s doing a great job of faking aluminium oxidisation. I’ll reply from my primary mastodon account with a photo.

solarbird, to science

this is some 1820s science right here

What.

“We have discovered that hard, electrical conductors (e.g., metals or graphite) can be adhered to soft, aqueous materials (e.g., hydrogels, fruit, or animal tissue) without the use of an adhesive. The adhesion is induced by a low DC electric field.“

Most importantly: it stays stuck with the voltage turned off. It’s stable for MONTHS. Reverse the polarity of the electrical flow and it unsticks. YES REALLY. This is some literal “Alessandro Volta playing around with bananas in a shed” science AND YET it WORKS and we DID NOT KNOW.

Here’s a video. Holy shit. What.

[link]

solarbird,

Sadly I think skin will be a fairly poor use; you’d have to go down multiple dermal layers before getting to tissue that I think might work, and even then, you’d be dealing with new layers of skin growing out and old layers being pushed off and dying.

solarbird, to art

AI-driven tools on real photos

Oh I hate this so much.

Not the article, it’s fine. It’s the photos. Mostly the top one.

It looks fake.

There’s a credited photographer: Ann Hermes. She’s 100% real, a working professional, she’s done a lot of work for a lot of clients, she’s easy to find.

And I don’t know what happened – what tool caused it or what – but the lead photo shouts AI PHOTOGRAPHY at me.

There are a few reasons for it – the central figure’s facial and head hair is a big one, something about the antique touchtone telephone on the left really bugs me (proportions? size? I can’t tell?), the lighting just feels odd, and some letters are kinda fucked up) – but the details aren’t important. That’s not what bothers me.

What bothers me is that this is a most-likely real photo that’s making me think it’s an AI-generated fake. And it bothers me because…

…see…

if people are going to start using tools on real photos that make them look a little fake, particularly if the ways they look a little fake are the same way that AI-generated actual fakes look fake, then that’s incredibly bad.

So far we’ve been lucky enough in ’24 not to have to deal with really good fakes. We’ve mostly had trash fakes. But if the real photographers start to use tools that make their real photos look fake in the same way as AI renderings, then these AI renderings not being really good fakes stops mattering very much – if at all. We lose that little bit of edge we had against AI-driven disinformation.

I mean, maybe that’s not what happened here. Maybe his hair really is that kinda weirdly defined and she did some HDR tricks to bump up the definition and contrast not even using AI tools. Maybe she corrected some lens distortion and that’s why the phone looks funny. Maybe she boosted the black level a little to de-emphasise some dark areas – it’s tempting, I’ve done it, but you have to be careful with it or it looks weird. Maybe the light just was a little odd, and/or she set up some reflectors to make it that way because the scene was too high contrast otherwise. Or maybe she did it afterwards using ordinary levelling tools.

But however it happened – and whoever did it, be it the photographer, the layout artist, the web designer – it still came out setting off my AI alarms.

And that’s incredibly bad.

Fuck.

[link]

solarbird, to politics

KOSA again, yes, again

The Kids Online Safety Act is being given another push in Congress. The EFF have the details and a button to take action. Go do it, even if you’ve done it already.

One of the ways they feel safe about passing this shit is watching NO! responses fall as they keep trying. So we have to keep it up, and that means every time.

[link]

solarbird, to writing

Across All These Emptied Lines, Chapter 9: Not Since Monte Cristi

As a reader on Discord said, “stuff just keeps coming back today!” and, well, it is the first time I’ve managed anything in Of Gods and Monsters in a really long time.

I’m not confident this adds as much to the story as I’d like but it does add something, and it’s got decent length to it, so. 2620 words, this instalment rated T, series still of course rated M.

[Read on AO3]

[link]

solarbird, to politics

Sign this petition

Here’s an online petition to demand Oklahoma remove the terrorist-inciter LibsOfTikTok from the Oklahoma state library oversight board. That she’s on it is an obscenity. If you don’t have a throwaway email address, get one, then go sign it using it.

(Because they will bombard you with political mail, not because of nefariousness. If you don’t mind that, then sure, use your regular address.)

Sign it even if you’re not in Oklahoma, because if they’re going to hire a terrorist like LOTT from out of state, they can damn well hear from commenters from out of state too.

[link]

solarbird, to politics

Fascism Watch for February 26, 2024: we’ve got to break through the wall

It’s amazing how quickly paranoid delusions can go from being paranoid delusions to being the black-letter reality on the ground, isn’t it?

I mean, I was mad about the Bush II administration making the Edgy Left actually correct in ways they’d never actually been correct before, via his torture regime, via adopting hideous domestic policies including mass surveillance (with Democratic complicity), and via the horror show of their war in Iraq. Unfortunately, they actually did.

But even then, there were limits. I was assuring my nervous friends that Bush II, despite all this, was functionally an old New England Republican when it came to matters of having a Republic, and that he would leave office on time and in an orderly fashion – as he did – just as I assured Republicans that Obama would do the same.

Now, obviously, all of that is out the window.

So I want to present a list of items which are very well documented facts, but would’ve been absolutely, patently insane 10 years ago. I mean, the kind of rantings that got you thrown out of every conversation and mocked for years afterwards – and which are all now verified as true. It’s mostly not a list of their social agenda, thought there’s a bit of that at the end; it’s mostly a list of their authoritarian agenda, and the lengths to which they are going in their attempt to claim absolute power forever.

I want to present them this way so that they are all in a single place, easily accessed, and from a wide variety of sources.

And I want you to convince your friends that all this absolute paranoid conspiracy-theory lunacy is no longer any of those things, but is instead actually absolutely real.

For most people, the Republican Party has become so authoritarian, so treasonous, and so despicable so quickly that the mere act of reporting their own words gets you classified as a conspiracy-theory-swallowing lunatic. This must end.

I have no doubt in my mind that many people most of you know absolutely refuse to believe that any of this is happening despite the fact that it’s all horribly real.

What I’ve been doing for years is trying to break through that wall of disbelief, and what everyone needs to do now is exactly the same thing. You get it; that’s great. But you’ve got to break through the wall of denial still held up by so many, many, many others.

You have to convince them that it’s real, and you have to convince them that it affects them, personally, because frankly, most people will vote for the Leopards Eating Faces Party if they think they’ll get something out of it and the leopards will only eat other peoples’ faces.

And it’s never just other peoples’ faces.

That reality will not be denied forever, but it can – and if the Republicans have their way, absolutely will – be denied until it’s too late.

Here’s the list:

I could put a lot more in this list, but I think it’s long enough already.

Get out there. Good luck – and good hunting.

[link]

solarbird, to politics

superbowl jesus ad, part 5: the triptych

Welcome to Part 5 of a series of posts focusing on the fundamentalist propaganda “He Gets Us” Superbowl ad of 2024.

I strongly recommend you read at least the first section of Part 1 before proceeding, if you have not already done so. It defines a variety of critically important terms, outlines the overarching purpose of this entire series of ads – this billion-with-a-B propaganda campaign – and the relevant religious-political beliefs of those who designed it.

If I could summarise Part 1’s first section in a paragraph, believe me – I would. I have tried, without success. That’s why I point people back to it, because to echo Dickens – without that knowledge, little of what follows will have full meaning for you.

The next three images comprise what I think of as the Intentional Racism Triptych.

On our left panel, we have slide seven. It features one of the least obviously AI manipulated or re-drawn images of the entire selection. It shows an idealised, even nostalgically-rendered oil field with a small number of scattered derricks, with no fracking equipment visible. The field itself is semi-arid to arid, with a mix of brush, tumbleweed, and other similar low scrub plants scattered about. In the distance lie tall hills, somewhere between what I’d call mountains and foothills, without snow. Above that, we have a very blue sky with a smattering of clouds.

In the middle distance sits the a car, the driver’s door open. Strangely in this context, it is a car and not a truck, a four-door sedan/saloon car out of the 1980s, evocative of an early-80s SAAB 900 but with internally inconsistent headrests. (I see you there, AI image generator. Hello!)

In the foreground, in the middle of a dirt road which looks very much like a thin-layer-of-sandy-dirt soundstage, our Saviour – the man who has already found Jesus, an older white man who is an oil field worker – washes the feet of our Sinner, a young Asian woman who is dressed mostly like a hippie in flowing patterned silks and bikini top, albeit more of a 90s hippie revival variant than the original. To her side lies a protest sign reading “CLEAN AIR NOW.”

This Saviour was brought to you by Exxon-Mobil, apparently. He’s where he’s supposed to be, doing “Real Man” work, in a “Real Man” place, bringing oil out of the ground for capitalism. The oil field is pristine, and there’s not a hint of pollution…

…which brings us to the sins of our Sinner. She’s dressed inappropriately for the location, and immodestly on top of that. She’s somewhere she shouldn’t be – and being Asian, that’s not limited to “a protestor in an oil field.” And on top of everything else: she’s a liar.

The air is visibly pristine. Her call for “CLEAN AIR NOW” is therefore a lie, a demand for something she already has – and is therefore an excuse to shut down oil production and hurt the “real man” doing the “real work” and the economy.

I know, I know, as I said, they have their own definitions of truth, and don’t care if something’s an objective lie – but that’s only for them. Definitionally, she’s not one of them, so if they can call her a liar, they will.

She might even be a Chinese communist, since – as goes without saying in their community – all environmentalists are lying communists anyway, and Chinese people are always suspect. Making her ambiguously east Asian – one might say “Chinese enough” – just adds the spice of fashionable racism to the recipe.

“Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?”

Senator Cotton will want to know.

Now, because the most important image of a triptych is always the one in the centre, let’s skip ahead to the right image first: slide nine.

This image shows a quiet evening scene in a suburban neighbourhood built… it’s hard to say, but I’d guess as early as the late 1910s, and the early 1950s. As always, in the nostalgic and “better” past.

We see two houses, separated by a single narrow driveway, both with established greenery and lush lawns. Two mixed-gender couples are arranged in front of the right house, one on the left side of the frame, and one on the right.

The left couple is clearly Muslim. The hijab-wearing woman – our Sinner – is sitting in an old woven-ribbon-style folding lawn chair, her feet being washed, as the man stands attentively behind her.

The right couple’s man is white, intended to be sitting on some sort of gardening chair, but it’s an AI mess and doesn’t work right but that doesn’t matter. He holds a green apple with a bite taken out of it, which in this context has to be symbolic of something, but the obvious meanings don’t make a lot of sense in this context. His eyes are closed, which also seems to me like it has to mean something, but I’m honestly not getting it.

The woman – our Saviour – is just ambiguous enough to be white, or not, depending upon the viewer. The way she’s rendered, she’s got that Kinda Ethnic vibe that they like when they want not to use a white person but don’t want to make it clearly someone not white either. She’s not wearing a head covering of any kind, obviously, but could be a convert from Islam who married a white man. That would make her okay, fit to lead our Sinner out of her sin – which is, of course, being a Muslim and holding Islamic faith.

While religious conversion isn’t intrinsically racist, in this case, it obviously totally is. See everything from “Jews for Jesus” to the “Muslim Ban” that Trump is pledging to reinstate.

Finally, we move to our centre image, slide eight – by far the most overtly racist image of the set. I want to make that very clear, as I will be describing the intended racist message in explicit terms. That description of their message is fucking well not an endorsement of that message.

Read on only if you understand that last paragraph, because this one’s bad.

In this image, the thin veneer that is the top-level message of compassion, equality before god, and reconciliation has been ripped away; this particular slide is propaganda against refugees and asylum seekers from the south.

Our scene shows a bus full of people unloading passengers on a Chicago upper-middle-class white-picket-fence residential street in the very late evening. It’s essentially one of the Republican “migrant buses,” the kind DeSantis and Abbot have been using to send asylum seekers away from services to a blue state without coordination, notice, or compassion, often in the winter. This exportation of people – arguably kidnapping – serves a variety of purposes which have been discussed elsewhere. The driver is Christian – it’s not ambiguous, there’s a cross hanging above him – and unhappy.

In most of these images, the “saviour” and the “sinner” are on similar levels, physically. Often one is sitting and the other is kneeling on the ground, but there’s interaction to it, an acknowledgement of each other. They’re communicating, sometimes quite clearly. It’s part of the top-level intended message of reconciliation.

Not here, though.

I want to stress, this next sentence is how they know this will be read by their own people:

Here you have the angry dirty brown illegal Sinner carrying her anchor baby at full height, looking away, with a mixture of anger and fear, while the white Saviour woman kneels on the ground, looking down, washing the Sinner’s feet. There is no sense of communication between them; our Sinner is ungrateful and unreceptive. Our Savour, the white Christian, is looking down, tense and unhappy, at clean water turning a dark, filthy brown as it washes from the Sinner’s foot back into the basin.

Please understand – the washing water is clear and clean in every other image where it is visible, no matter how dirty the feet are; after all, it represents in part the forgiveness of Jesus, so stays forever whole.

But not here.

That difference means it’s not the dirt on her feet spoiling the water: it’s her, herself, spoiling the water – the water of God’s forgiveness.

One might even say it’s meant to show a kind of poisoning of the water, instead of the blood.

This image is out-and-out racist hate propaganda, pretending – just barely – to be merely one more variation on the theme. Our Sinner’s sin is being here at all and not white, and she is not worthy of redemption.

Even the gay man in image twelve is treated better than this, and believe me, I still have things to say about that image.

I don’t know if I have any Christian followers reading this, but… this is… serious business blasphemy, right? Top level scream-it-to-the-heavens blasphemy against the core message of Jesus. Isn’t it?

You might want to consider yelling about that.

Next. Slide.

[link]

solarbird, to politics

superbowl jesus ad, part 4: a lie so blatant it must be true

Welcome to the fourth post of a series analysing the imagery from the billion-dollar “He Gets Us” propaganda campaign to recruit people into fundamentalist evangelism, focusing specifically on the ad run during the 2024 Superbowl.

I strongly urge you to read the first section of Part 1 before continuing, if you have not already done so. That first section explains the overall theological structure of the ad. Without understanding that structure, the terms “Sinner” and “Saviour” as used in this series will not make sense, but I don’t want to have to paste that explanation back in to each of these posts.

Caught up? Nice.

One of the more curious parts of this event has been the maker’s disclaimer stating that they absolutely did not use AI, that they hired a photographer – they even named someone – and that these images are photographs.

I suggest you revisit Part 3 of this series if you still give that any credence.

Personally, I’m willing to accept that a photographer played some role. I’m convinced that the images actually used were at very least heavily reworked with AI tools, if not re-created from whole cloth using the photographs as training material, but I admit that it’s possible that in some way a photographer was involved. Maybe in the rough drafts.

But why lie about it?

AI art is, obviously, huge right now. A lot of tech is super into it; several months ago, it would’ve got them a lot of attention if they’d made interesting images and said upfront that’s how they did it. Maybe they decided to hide it because the mood on AI has shifted so much. I don’t know.

But that’s not the important part. The important part – the important question – remains…

…why lie about it?

Particularly given how obvious it is that it’s a lie?

Even though they absolutely couldn’t get images that weren’t obviously at very least heavily AI altered, if not entirely AI rendered, they decided to lie about it. Why?

The answer is very simple: they can’t not lie. They actively can’t. They can’t avoid it.

I mean, sure, they could’ve told the truth here, but the more they feel that being honest about it would hurt them in some way – even just making them look bad – the less likely that becomes.

I wish it were because of PR. I really do. But it’s not. It’s because they have adopted a very different definition of truth.

For most of us, truth is weighed against observable, measurable reality – at least, where that’s possible. The truth of science, or more generally, the truth of empiricism.

Empiricism is the idea that you can observe the world, measure it, test against it, and accept that what happens reveals things about the world (and the universe). It means you can use those tests – that data – to make decisions about your life. To improve it, even. It’s core of the scientific method, amongst other things.

Babies are, in many ways, empiricists.

But that’s not how the fundamentalist evangelical movement defines truth.

Their truth is defined by God Said. If observable reality differs, then it’s reality that’s wrong, and it’s wrong because God Said.

Yes, really. That’s the key. Right there. God Said, so It Is. It’s that simple.

This is an example of a group using inherited wisdom as its metric of truth. It’s pretty common, historically, and before empiricism took off, it was absolutely the standard in Western thought. It’s core to both western conservatism and their flavour of authoritarianism, and built upon the idea that we are all living lesser, degenerate forms of an ideal way of living that we must constantly strive to recover. In their case it’s extremely literal, in that it’s the Fall of Man in the greater sense from the Garden of Eden, and the absolute, perfect, and utterly unchanging Word of God as represented in the Bible.

And believe me, they harp a lot on that perfect and unchanging part.

In practice, is any of this actually preserved across generations? Oh hell no. It’s basically two to three generations back, as modified to suit nostalgia, simplified re-renderings of memories from childhood and parental stories, and – of course – to serve white Christian cishet male dominance over others.

Don’t believe me? In the 90s, they didn’t really care about trans people. I’d see more hate-forward people try to tease those in authority forward on it and they’d be “That sounds very, uh, medical. Is it homosexual? Then whatever, we care about stopping the homosexuals.” Before the late 1960s, they didn’t even care all that much about abortion or birth control, because caring about those things was Papist, and they were way more concerned about race mixing.

However, they’ve decided hating trans people is eternal, so now, for them, it is. It’s always been true and therefore it’s always perfect and unchanging and God Said.

This next part’s really important to understanding what’s happening around us. I’m begging you, understand this. I’ve been trying to get people to understand it for twenty years.

If truth is measured against inherited wisdom, then the truth of a statement depends upon conformity to that inherited wisdom.

That stays true even if that inherited wisdom is in the form of a Perfect and Unchanging Word Of God that changes a lot every generation and a half. How much something supports your worldview – again, God’s Word – becomes the only measure of truth, regardless of anything reality might have to say about it.

This literally is how you get most flat earthers. This is how. Right here. This. They’ve decided that’s what God Said, so God Said, and that makes it real. I have seen this happen, someone already deep in that community going over the edge to flat-eartherism, because someone proved to him that the Bible says the earth is flat, and so, he said, “You’re right. The BIble does say the earth is flat. So it is.”

This definition of “truth” – this definition that has zero direct reliance upon observable reality – is also how they can so guilelessly set up lie factories to manufacture new types blood libel against their enemies.

It’s how they could say for decades that “homosexuals” were violent vicious evil mentally-ill psychopathic paedophiles who want to rape your children, give them AIDS, and turn them gay because it’s the only way we can reproduce. It’s how they can say the same sorts of things – often exactly the same things – about trans people now, along with all the other insanity they make up.

They are aware, of course, that whose who “haven’t found Jesus” have different definitions of truth. Their leadership in particular has always been highly aware of this.

The way they’ve gone about handling that hasn’t changed much in decades. First, get a couple of fundamentalist or socially-allied “sciencey” people to either cherry-pick or just straight-up fabricate data (the “make shit up” method) and publish papers that look like science, that look real to people who don’t know how their whole system works. Paul Cameron was a particularly famous foot soldier in this part of the war; look him up, if you want. He was a professional liar generating blood libel to get people killed.

Then set up some “sciencey” or “policy-ish” sounding sockpuppet groups, and have them generate a bunch of bullshit that sounds like research or analysis. The important part is that whatever they do has to be towards the goal of ‘proving’ the desired result, as opposed to studying the actual data and seeing where that leads them.

Footnote each other back and forth for a while, then generate some another layer of new sockpuppet organisations, referencing the first two. Then the first layer can start referencing the third, and your bullshit generator is up and running.

Eventually, you get enough noise that the credulous media starts hearing and parroting it and treating your bad-faith horseshit as legitimate, both-sidings it against reality for the horse race and the views.

That’s what they did against against lesbians and gay men people for decades. That’s what they’re doing to trans people now, with the absolute intent of going back to doing it against LGB people if they manage, in the end, to “ditch the T.”

If there was one thing in the world I wish I could do with this knowledge, it’s get it into the heads of journalists and in that way convince them to stop playing along. To stop meeting bad faith with good, to stop parroting bullshit because it’s “both sides.” Just fucking stop. I don’t care that they can lie to you with sincerity, they can lie with sincerity because they’ve decided God Said This Shit We Made Up, and because of that, actual reality doesn’t matter.

It’s not even that they don’t know. They know their methods are bullshit. They know their data is bad. And they don’t care, because their own data doesn’t matter, not even to them. The lie serves God – in that they’ve decided it serves their goals that they’ve ascribed to God – and that makes it true.

Even though it’s in every way a lie, a knowing lie, made in the most complete possible bad faith, that’s what they’ve decided.

So when it comes to lying about something as obvious as this AI art bullshit…

…they can no longer even tell they’re lying.

It’s better for them and their movement, they’ve apparently decided, for then to declare that this isn’t AI art. That it’s photography, as nonsensical as that is. So despite all the obvious bullshit of that statement – despite everything your own lying eyes tell you – that’s what they’ve decided is true.

So that’s what they rationalise, and that’s what they say.

If that sounds like everything you know and hate about MAGA, and everything you know about how Donald Trump works…

…congratulations. You have connected the dots.

Now.

Where we were, before this got so long?

Ah, yes. Slide seven. Tomorrow.

[link]

solarbird, to politics

superbowl jesus ad, part 2: there’s so much more to unpack

This is the second in a series of posts analysing the imagery from the billion-dollar “He Gets Us” propaganda campaign to recruit people into fundamentalist evangelism.

I strongly urge you to read the first section of Part 1 before continuing, if you have not already done so. That first section explains the overall theological structure of the ad. Without understanding that structure, the terms “Sinner” and “Saviour” as used in this series will not make sense, but I don’t want to have to paste that explanation back in to each of these posts.

Back? Great.

We left off part one three images into this collection, so here, we start with image number four. If you want to see the images as we go, you can find them on youtube. I won’t be (re)linking, since most of the people with it are horrible, but it’s not hard to find. We’re going through them in the order they appear in the video.

I have learned since Part I of this series that there is a credited photographer for these images, and that the surreal nature of them is intentional. I am reasonably willing to consider that some parts of these are photographs, but I also have a very difficult time believing they are not heavily manipulated using AI tools given the various very clear tells. But that’s speculation on my part, and in the end, not really important; I only mention it because if the AI commentary in Part I.

Image four is … wow. What the hell am I even looking at here? What kind of dreamscape nonsense are they presenting us this time? Seriously, it’s taken me a few goes just to try to start on this one.

First, you have what amounts to a day-for-night sky, which, of course, never works. Then in the background you have Discount Vasquez Rocks with extra greenery and none of the light matching anything else in the image. In front of that on the left, you have an early-1960s pickup truck that looks like something from Tremors (1990); in centre we have a strange land of discontinuity and a partially-derendered metal guardrail where distance means nothing; and on the right, we have some soundstage alien trees that remind me of Lost in Space and a smouldering campfire pit and two remarkably, and I do mean remarkably, large oil lanterns of a kind I saw featured in a Technology Connections youtube video, except those were normal sized.

Moving forward you have another discontinuity and a transition to what looks like a matted-in and fairly sloppily-dressed soundstage. On the left, we see what looks like some strangely vivid purple meadow sage, which isn’t even a North American plant but also does look kind of like something I’ve seen but don’t know by name. I’m honestly wondering if they wanted purple sage because of the Zane Gray novel.

On the right you have some sort of vegetative mass reminiscent of… honestly the only thing that comes to mind is the creeping terror from The Creeping Terror (1964). Matte vegetation like that does exist, but I’ve never seen it look like this myself.

(one billion dollar propaganda campaign. a billion dollars. they put this on during the super bowl.)

Forward centre we have our Sinner and our Saviour. The Sinner is an older Native/First Nations man of indeterminate tribe who is sitting on a long piece of desert driftwood, his foot being washed in a metal washtub by our Saviour, an older white man, who carries vague cowboy iconography including… I honestly don’t know what that’s supposed to be. It’s placed and shaped a little like a holster and sits vaguely like leather but it’s also reminiscent of a bandana hanging out from his coat.

All of the foreground pieces are set on a television-grade thin-sand-on-a-soundstage “ground” and I am so psychically damaged by this cowboys-and-indians-but-fundamentalist mashup of stereotypes that it’s genuinely hard to piece together. If they didn’t lean so much into anti-Mormon hate I could take that approach to it, but the thing is, they really do historically hate what they call “the cult,” so I have a hard time thinking that’s a factor here.

Not gonna lie, this one’s pretty opaque in the specifics just because it is such a visual clusterfuck. I can’t tell if they tried too hard or not hard enough and had to rush it and just ran with the inchoate melange we see here.

Regardless, the intended surface-level read is “reconciliation” with “through Christ” on the side. That’s the same for all of these. That’s the sales pitch.

But the deeper read – I think the key here is that in their culture, God gave the White man this country and a manifest destiny to “settle” it – and Christianise it. It was a holy mission; you can even see it referenced as such in secular cowboy films of the mid-20th Century such as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

In that context, the Native man’s sin is a combination of not being white, not being in the Bible and not yielding to the Manifest Destiny of Christian America. The white man is good in terms of being surface-level gracious to his inferior, and also for being a vaguely cowboyish rural white man with an old truck which has a rapidly dying battery because he left the lights on, I guess.

Because the white cowboy is always the good guy, right?

I’d guess this is also pushing back a little on land-back and treaty-rights movements. But the iconography is so vague and unfocused I can’t point to anything and say, “See? This means that” so I won’t.

(one billion dollars. for the love of the gods. a billion dollars.)

Next slide, please.

This one is much simpler and at first glance doesn’t need much analysis, but bear with me – it does.

A 1960s modernist building with long-brick walls and no windows fills the left and centre background. It has two metal doors which do have windows, and an armoured and very obvious security camera not really pointed at anything in particular. There’s a small anti-abortion protest on the right, beyond which we can see a somewhat shabby motor hotel with a cleverly branded rooftop sign reading MOTEL, in case you weren’t sure. Beyond that are palm trees, implying California, though it could as easily be Arizona or… sure, even Florida, the colours on MOTEL could be right for Florida.

But given who they hate and the small size of the crowd, I’m leaning towards California.

In front of the clinic on a badly-decayed concrete sidewalk there is a bench, on which sits our Sinner, a young white woman not visibly pregnant but she’s wearing baggy clothes so there’s room for ambiguity. Her jumper is thick and has extra long sleeves, and we’ll get back to that. She has a tattoo on her right leg, and we’ll very definitely get back to that. Her left foot is being washed by our Saviour, one of the anti-abortion protestors who, like everyone else in her group, is both white and overdressed for the weather.

This one in at first glance seems less bad than most, if you ignore the underlying meaning of the ad’s framework. But the combination of MOTEL, “bad part of town” (via the trifecta of decaying infrastructure, generic family planning clinic in an old building, and security camera), and most importantly the tattoo give it away.

Our young woman is placed in the role of the Sinner here because she’s been sex trafficked. The tattoo is an ownership indicator. MOTEL is indicative of where she’s forced to work. She might be seeking an abortion, she might just be seeking birth control, and both of those are sins too, but the big red flag here is putting her in the role of Sinner for being trafficked for sex.

Being a woman, she’s always at blame for anything related to sex, up to and including being kidnapped for forced prostitution and raped, so naturally, having been trafficked for sex makes her the sinner in this perverse little diorama.

By proximity and habit, they’re also implying collusion between the “family planning clinic” and the sex traffickers. This has been a trope through their modern history, since at least the early 1990s and almost certainly before. They also have a history of asserting for internal consumption that “family planning” agencies aid child molesters and other rapists.

I don’t know that the extra-long sleeves imply she’s hiding needle tracks in her arms, but they might.

If she had Jesus in her heart, whispers the theme, she wouldn’t be here. That’s both the general miasma of their belief system and the specific context; accept their version of Jesus and she can get out.

You’ll excuse me if I throw up in my mouth a little bit at these self-righteous motherfuckers, particularly since if she’s there for an abortion, they will absolutely demand that she carry her rapist’s child to term if she wants them to help. After all, it is go, and sin no more.

Not sinning any more includes delivering that rapist’s baby.

Otherwise, she’s on her own.

Next. Slide.

[link]

solarbird, to memes

i still can’t believe literally nobody reacted to this

Apparently, no one noticed that Zoom Earth was literally talking about the City of Townsville in this post about a cyclone.

Zoom Earth post showing a satellite photo of a tropical cycline approaching Townsville, Australia, replied to with a picture of the Powerpuff Girls standing drenched in heavy rain in, well, Townsville, of course.Powerpuffs save the day, everyone.

[link]

solarbird, to politics

Fascism Watch for 22 January 2024, the Cultural Warfare Edition

There are people out there who are dismissive of the whole term “culture war” and “cultural warfare,” and I can see their point a little – a very little – but the idea that somehow “war” and “warfare” is downplaying what they’re committing on us frankly blows my mind.

I mean, the point of war is to kill enough of the enemy until they surrender, and that’s what they’ve been doing my whole life. So even though they used it first, frankly, I’m kinda good with that description.

So, what’d you miss last week? Let me catch you up with a comment-heavy linkfest.

I want to lead with this because it happens literally every time fascists take over: The brain drain from red states continues as 73% of college applicants consider reproductive rights, and a quarter are ruling out colleges based entirely upon political politics such as abortion bans. It’s a video-only story, unfortunately, but that’s the key takeaway.

Mind you, the people behind thes laws are against education in general anyway, even if it’s free, if any “liberal” politics are are involved. It always ends up with the smart and motivated people going anywhere else they can – if they can.

Which is why so many fascist states work to close their borders. Like Republican states are toying with, regarding women and abortion. This is not a coincidence.

Now, let’s get into some of those laws – new ones showing up in state houses, and court cases as they unfold:

The Utah Republican State House passed an invasive anti-trans bathroom ban, and it’s a bad one. “Papers, Please” is how Law Dork describes it and he’s not wrong.

The Supreme Court is allowing Idaho to enforce its strict abortion ban, even in medical emergencies. I’ve been saying it for a long time, and the reality is self-evident, and sometimes they even say it themselves: they want women with bad pregnancies to fucking die already, because God Said.

Reporting on the Idaho Republican Party’s official position opposing abortion even to save the life of the parent is what got me my first Twitter ban, back in the day. If you have friends still in denial about this, find some way to get them out if it. See also .

There’s more on Indiana’s attempt to re-ban same-sex marriage in “Indiana Republicans want to re-write the law to eliminate the word ‘gender’” In addition to eliminating ‘gender’ in law in favour of ‘biological sex’ as defined as Republican fundamentalists would insist, it specifically also says that the queers can’t marry. So there you go, yet another example of “they won’t stop with the T” in action.

They’ll make all of us illegal again if they can.

Kansas Republicans are putting together an abortion ban despite the state passing a constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights in the state in 2018. This is again because – as Beau says – they don’t give a fuck what you want, they don’t want to represent you, they want to rule you.

Oklahoma’s got a real two-fer going: first, the state chairman of the Oklahoma Republican Party has proposed licensing for journalists. That’s not fascist at all! Secondly, Republican Representative Justin Humphrey filed a bill targeting furries, banning them from schools and extracurricular events, and requiring them to be removed by parents – or animal control.

This is how far Republicans are willing to go to find people to oppress. Jesus fuck.

These are a little ancillary, but it’s still about the effects of Republican cultural warfare laws:

In leopards and faces news, Bill O’Reilly Is Furious As His Own Titles Get Removed After Supporting Florida Book Bans.

It’s only a letter to the editor, but the Columbus Dispatch not only published it, but pushed it to wire services and Apple News, and that’s good: A disturbing sight. Ohio Republicans joy over hurting kids, families show true hatred. It’s pretty solid, and shows how letters to the editor can still be meaningful – particularly when syndicated. This got put in front of a lot of people.

Finally, let’s move to propaganda and knock-on effects. These might not be laws, but they’re still important:

“Dr. Phil’s upcoming show, developed in partnership with Christian media, will feature a doctor who admits to leaking trans children’s private health information to a right wing think tank,” reports Assigned.

People ask me, sometimes: what can I do about all this? Well, this is one of those cases what you do is get ahead of this story if you know people who watch this kind of show. Talk to them about the reality first, before the propagandists can plant their disinformation flags.

It really does help, because even if they believe the disinformation, they’ll still be less likely to take it up as unquestioned truth.

But you have to get there first for it to work.

Missouri health clinics priced out of gender-affirming care by rising malpractice premiums. This is intentional, and a technique from before they overturned Roe v. Wade. If you can’t ban health care, you can at least make it impossibly expensive. Either way, you get what you want: no health care for the people you hate.

Conservative Magazine Wonders Why Women Don’t Accept Transphobia as the New Feminism, also writes that women would be happier if they’d just accept that “evolutionary biology” says that women are different to and therefore lesser than men. Astoundingly, this has had some traction in the UK. Less, happily, in the United States so far.

Also in the UK: James Cleverly to ease restrictions on anti-abortion protesters outside clinics. They’re coming for abortion rights there, too.

This Week in Barrel Scraping: Chaya Raichik Accuses United CEO of Wearing Drag. It’s because United supports having a diverse workplace, because of course it is.

Finally, let’s wrap up on a long-read: The Outing of Bubba Copeland:

Before Stonewall, getting outed could be deadly. After an Alabama mayor’s suicide, it’s clear that’s a climate some want to revive.

— By Evan Urquhart, for Slate

[link]

solarbird, to news

Fascism Watch for 22 January 2024: the Simonyan/Fatale Intersection

Yeah, I’m so far behind on things I want to post about, and I want to stress: not even just fascism watch shit. I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to manage all of it this year, because the flood is going to be absolutely massive.

Before we get into domestic matters – that’s coming out later in a separate post – I had a couple of interesting notes from Russian state media. It’s propaganda for the domestic audience, though one should assume they’re well aware we’re listening in.

First, Russian Media Monitor highlighted this particular clip with the title “Margarita Simonyan says Russians don’t want a normal life.” But much more interesting to me is her commentary here on the US, specifically, her exact and repeated invocation of American fundamentalist evangelical rhetoric, including describing “woke” – using the word in English – as a “new religion.”

I have to stress that this is all very exact, hitting the same notes and hitting the same language points – up to and including an actual English word they’ve appropriated. There’s not one word out of her that I don’t recognise from the GOP core voter block.

That doesn’t mean they’re in lockstep. But just as with the last fascist upsurge a century ago, they’re listening to each other, exchanging ideas – and language. It’s not even new. For example, “cuck” – /pol/’s favourite insult when it was the centre of online fascist recruitment? That’s from 1930s French fascism, straight up. They used it first, in the same ways and for the same reasons.

Secondly, here’s Margarita Simonyan condemning democracy in very clear and explicit language, saying that the Russian people will never accept it again after the events of the 1990s. It’s in a clip entitled “Scott Ritter guarantees the US will soon betray Ukraine,” and they do have Ritter up there doing his usual Death to America shtick. But I’m more interested in Simonyan, the self-described Russian imperialist and defender of true Russian freedom and… democracy? Against “western Fascism”?

Have fun reconciling that. I don’t know how their viewers are going to square that circle, or if they’re even going to try. It’s still interesting, not for the usual fashy “100% bad faith say whatever is best at the moment” bullshit spew, but for the fact that the more obvious you make this kind of bad faith, the more people fall into cynicism about everything you say. Outside the committed block, of course.

As for Ritter being there, well, they’ve had him doing the rounds a lot lately, doing the whole Lord Haw-Haw routine for domestic audiences (and those listening overseas, such as myself), giving Vladimir Soloyvov a challenge coin, proclaiming that “Russia has already won” and “the US will betray Ukraine” and “NATO has already collapsed” and all that.

I’m sure it’s good for boosting morale at home, but it is interesting that they’re having to bring him out to do the round again. You can only do that so many times, and they’re always very careful to say that the war will go on for a long time – something else I’m not sure how domestic viewers are going to square.

Maybe those protesting Russian war wives are making Kremlin propagandists a little… nervous.

We’ll see.

[link]

solarbird, to politics

Fascism Watch for 14 January 2024: Hurt Schools and Boost Racism? Why Not Both?

Republicans love racism and hate education so very very much, so when they can do both at once it’s a bloody bonanza! And they’ve been really going at both again over the winter.

Where do we start?

DeSantis was behind this: New Florida law blocks Chinese students from academic labs. It’s Chinese as in came themselves from China, specifically, but c’mon. Like this won’t be seen as the racist broadside it is.

Also in Republican Florida, Palestinian-American Student Expelled Over Mom’s Online Support for Gaza. Mmm, group punishment and oppression. It’s a private school, but that doesn’t really make it better, just maybe less actionable.

In Republican Texas, Prosecutors Won’t Drop Charges Against Brownsville ISD Honor Student who was arrested on bullshit charges after reporting his principal for bullying. HE’S ELEVEN YEARS OLD. ELEVEN. And for a little while, they put him in solitary, because that’s who they are. It’s the kind of sadistic horror show that wouldn’t play in a movie because it’s too bluntly evil, too stupidly, blindly cruel, and yet, here we are.

(In non-education related abuse by cops, we have Ohio prosecutors broke rules to win convictions and got away with it and 3 Tacoma police officers found not guilty in 2020 death of Manny Ellis – the latter is now being investigated by the Feds.)

Naturally, Elon Musk has been involved in attacking schools and boosting racist lies on his fascist propaganda fountain once known as Twitter, where he endorsed a tweet saying students at HBCUs – Historically Black Colleges and Universities – have very low IQ scores, far below the (white, obviously) average. He may’ve done a little walking back of that, but if he did, it’s just to cover his ass. He does this shit all the time, and uses the power of his platform to broadcast it to as many people as possible.

Over in Republican Texas, evangelicals continue their efforts to either destroy public schools or take them over as religious schools: In Texas, debate over school chaplains escalates school board culture wars. “Conservative Christian activists are hoping to turn Texas public schools into a ‘mission field.'” They’ve long seen it that way, of course.

Furor over the Ivies — and crickets about Florida addresses the right’s war against the Ivy League schools. This was written before they were able to whip up enough of a ragefest to force out Claudine Gay, but sets the stage well. The key takeaway is that this didn’t start with her and won’t end with her.

Talking of, Indiana University just suspended a tenured professor for two semesters. Officially it’s for bullshit reasons involving improper paperwork and use of a meeting room, in reality it’s in response to allowing an anti-war Israeli to speak about Palestine.

(Meanwhile, on the pro-war Israeli side, Israeli military chief rabbi-designate under fire over remarks on rape, by which they mean he said raping enemy women was basically okay, that “it was permitted [for warriors] to ‘satisfy the evil inclination by lying with attractive Gentile women against their will.’” He doesn’t deny saying it, he just says it was a “theoretical question.” Don’t fucking care, he’s still literally arguing “soldiers raping enemy women is fine.”)

To round off and give you an historical medium-read that’s not too bad, Teen Vogue once again does the heavy lifting so many US newspapers won’t, writing up how the Second Ku Klux Klan rose to prominence a century ago. As they say, it’s good background to have in times like these.

Finally, I have a few updates about anti-LGBTQ campaigns outside the US that I haven’t been able to fit in anywhere else. So given a lack of “anywhere else,” let’s get these out here:

  • This is one of the way anti-LGBTQ law is used against straight people, as Russian rapper who attended ‘almost naked’ party jailed for second time. It wasn’t his New Year’s party, he was just there, but they’re making an example out of him, charging him with “Gay Propaganda” and re-charging him with something new every time he gets out.
  • Burundi President calls for stoning of gay couples. While African countries had their fair share of post-Colonial-era homophobia, American evangelical groups have been encouraging it, growing it, and test-marketing anti-queer hate propaganda for decades.
  • For example, in Uganda, where fundamentalist evangelical group The Family are hugely behind much of the propaganda used to whip their government into making our existence punishable by death. There’s not that much we can do, but there are measures like this: Joe Biden boots Uganda from trade deal over horrific “Kill the Gays” law. It’s not much, but it’s something that carries at least a little actual weight.
  • Meanwhile in the UK, Disgusting Transphobic Labour Leader Set Upon By Disgusting Transphobes, as Terf Island shows how these purity tests have no lower limit and are eternally self-ratcheting. There’s now a conspiracy that Keir Starmer – who has been running from his previous lip-servious support for the rights of trans-people since he realised he has a shot at becoming PM – has a trans child and they’re using it to go after him. The horrible party is that he’s still better than the Tories – if he can manage somehow not to fuck this all up.

That’s it for today. Good luck out there, stay healthy, and stay warm. Things will slowly get better – but only after we win in 2024.

[link]

solarbird, to writing

Hey, Federation!

Should I keep posting excerpts over for Federation, or would it be better if I just federated entire posts?

This isn’t Patreon I’m not getting paid and there isn’t any exclusive content. (Tho’ I do maintain a Patreon, sorta, if anyone wants to throw me money, and a few people do and I very much appreciate that, thank you!)

Mastodon […]

[link]

solarbird,

Thanks! This is the sort of thing I was thinking about, whether that might be a help for people. I’m not fond of the idea of massive-spamming people’s timelines, obviously, but since the official interfaces put on a “read more” and at least some of the clients (Ice Cubes also) does…

I wonder if Ivory does?

(Also, I love that I’m just replying at the blog and you’ll actually get the reply because both-directions federation works in 2.0 it is amazing xD

solarbird, to news

January 7, 2024: Sunday Shorts

A set of topics with too few parts to make a post. How do we do this?

Big oil ‘fully owned the villain role’ in 2023, the hottest year ever recorded writes The Guardian, citing abandoning climate pledges and going back in big on carbon fuels expansion again. It’s hard to be surprised, and I’m not, and we’ve seen indications of it all […]

[link]

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