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 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 […]

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solarbird, to random

giving up on block editor, going back to classic

This is pretty Inside Baseball posting, but:

How the hell does anyone use the WordPress block editor? I’m running Firefox (latest) on MacOS (latest), against WordPress (latest), which I’d think should be fine. But it’s unstable as hell, well into the realm of destroying work.

It’s biggest and worst trick is eating […]

[link]

solarbird, to politics

Fascism Watch for 6 January 2024: The Disinformation Disputation Edition

Here, let’s have a bit of good news on a topic I talk about a lot, because there actually is some, and then go into some popular disinformation, how and why it’s wrong, and methods used to create and spread it.

The good news: Democracy might be finally returning to Wisconsin as the state Supreme Court rules along ideological lines that discontiguous […]

[link]

solarbird, to politics

Fascism Update for January 5, 2024: Republicans vs. LGBTQ children

Republicans are lining up in opposition to a proposed Biden administration rule aimed at protecting LGBTQ foster children from abuse. Yes, you’re reading that right. The specifics are that they don’t want a rule requiring that LGBTQ kids be put in supportive households, vs. ones that will abuse them, because of “religious liberty,” as […]

[link]

solarbird, to politics

2024, and then, it slowly begins to get easier

This was supposed to be the peak year. The year they were most likely to take power, and lock it in.

For the fundamentalist / fascist movement, I mean. This is the year I charted out back in the early 2000s, the apogee of the era I started writing about as a kid in like 1990 as a possibility which could still be avoided.

It’s still a strong […]

[link]

solarbird, to politics

Fascism Watch One-Shot: I think this speaks for itself.

Well, you can’t say he didn’t warn you.

Note that if you combine “dictator” and “dictatorship” they would be as large as “power,” making the biggest words “revenge,” “power,” and “dictator(ship)” in roughly that order.

Ask your red-state relatives if this really who they want ruling the United States.

[link]

solarbird, to politics

once again, fuck nazis and those who support them, who are, basically, nazis

Substack says it will neither remove nor demonetise Nazi content, that they’re going to keep supporting Nazi content with exposure and money because they think that’s for the best.

You know how I keep banging the “Elon Musk’s experiment with turning Twitter into a fascist propaganda and disinformation fountain must fail” drum? How I keep […]

[link]

solarbird, to politics

Fascism Watch for 19 December 2023: A blended pot-pourri of anti-LGBT activity and Christian Nationalism

So let’s talk about anti-LGBT activism and Christian Nationalism, and how they intertwine, via a set of connections relevant this month. The two go together like steak and potatoes, like apple pie and ice cream, like Spiderman and animation. But while both are super important to talk about, it can be a bit of a melange, with the themes not always clear […]

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solarbird, to politics

Fascism Watch for 18 December 2023: Dictator Day One

Let’s talk about Dictator Day One Trump.

Let’s talk about an easy rhetorical slide. That doesn’t sound like it should be the first thing we talk about, but bear with me a second, I’ll get there.

You may and may not recall Trump saying he wanted to be a dictator on Day One when interviewed last week, or doubling down on the […]

[link]

solarbird, to politics

tucker carlson is “open to” the earth being flat

No. Really. This isn’t the Turning Point conference where he flirted with it several months ago but was very clearly working in a joking way, this is very recent and he’s not obviously joking at all. He’s using it to push the idea that the truth is unknowable, an idea that fascist movements use to cement belief in the great leader, however.

That, […]

[link]

solarbird, to news

this was also always a lie

Elon Musk’s oft-quoted declarations about Tesla “autopilot” being safer than human drivers was always a lie:

Tesla keeps these paying liability sponges behind the wheel largely through the strength of a statistical lie: that Autopilot is safer than human drivers. … When road safety researcher Noah Goodall adjusted the best publicly available […]

[link]

solarbird, to politics

Fascism Watch Follow-Up: It’s Okay To Call For Individual Attacks And Genocide On X.

If the last update wasn’t enough for you, calling for both individual attacks and mass genocide is literally fine with Elon’s X, formerly Twitter.

Business Post of Ireland has the story:

Elon Musk’s X has instructed staff not to suspend users that post explicitly racist, sexist and homophobic content, or who send sexual material to […]

[link]

solarbird, to politics

Fascism Watch for 6 December 2023: “No one can go as low as [Trump],” Kushner said. “You shouldn’t even try.”

Remember: there is no such thing as a moderate Republican. See also New Hampshire Republicans moving to make all abortions illegal. They say “after 15 days” in the bills, but that’s a rhetorical lie: not only can pregnancy not be detected for 14 days, it’s medical practice to assume 28 days as a minimum progression until you can better determine […]

[link]

solarbird, to random

Major bugfix: This should be the first post everyone actually sees in ages!

If you can see this from any Federation instance (Mastodon, Misskey, Firefish, Akkoma, etc), please take a moment to hit the reply button! I want to see if posts are getting out properly again. I can’t see likes from this side (yet), so those won’t work, sorry – they actually have to be replies.

Basically, the good people at […]

[link]

solarbird, to politics

Fascism Watch for 1 December 2023: the Finding Out Edition

Yesterday, we reported on Elon Musk’s latest episode of Fucking Around, where he told advertisers, including specifically the CEO of Disney by name, to go fuck themselves for not wanting to advertise with nazis.

Today, we can report that Elon Musk is Finding Out. Specifically, he’s finding out that people told to fuck off will go No, I don’t think I […]

[link]

solarbird, to politics

Fascism Watch for 30 November 2023: Elon Thinks Not Giving Him Money is Censorship

The focus on reporting about this absolutely batshit bonkers interview is primarily about Elon telling advertisers not to advertise on Twitter and also to go fuck themselves, and secondarily, it’s like the Japan Times with their article, “Elon Musk says advertiser boycott may kill X.”

Neither are wrong. However, if you watch this interview, a couple […]

[link]

solarbird, to art

Fascism Watch for 29 November 2023

Let’s lead with the latest Twitter / X explosion, because Elon’s really running out of ideas:

WaPo have – finally – had enough, and are suspending advertising on Musk Twitter after Musk tweeted his endorsement of the batshit-insane “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory. Not just once, either.If you don’t remember, Pizzagate is the […]

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solarbird, to politics

Stop KOSA

KOSA, the so-called “Kids Online Safety Act,” is – amongst other things – an anti-LGBTQ ‘trojan horse’ a bill, one that will let red-state attorneys general go after LGBTQ people online in other states. There have been revisions; the revisions have not fixed it.

Some conservatives have already telegraphed their plans to use KOSA to […]

[link]

solarbird, to politics

Fascism Watch for 28 November 2023: Catch-up Part 3, the It All Blurs Together edition

First, let’s get to the latest and the meatiest of the matter:

Historian begs Americans not to downplay Trump’s threats to use the military against them

It’s about Trump’s plans to use the Insurrection Act to turn the military against American citizens. That ties in, as always, with Republicans working to end a quiet […]

[link]

solarbird, to politics

Fascism Watch for 2023-11-16: How Does X/Twitter Work As a Disinformation Fountain?

I’ve said repeatedly that Elon Musk deliberately turned Twitter into X, a far-right disinformation fountain and propaganda machine. But I don’t think people understand what that means, so let me show you how that works, in numbers, with data.

The University of Washington’s Centre for an Informed Public ran a big analysis of news media on X, and what […]

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solarbird, to politics

Fascism Watch for 16 November 2023: All the Way Down

I mentioned in a recent update that the GOP is fascist all the way down, and what I mean by that is lawless authoritarianism with a deep contempt for elections, democracy, and the will of the voters in general. As Beau of the Fifth Column likes to say, they want to rule you, not represent you.

Getting rid of Trump forever will help – a lot – but will not […]

[link]

solarbird, to politics

Fascism Watch for 2023-11-15: Let’s Talk Again About Mike Johnson

Let’s get a little caught up on Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

He’s already in trouble for getting that clean extension of the funding bill through the House. Normally, I’d say he’ll survive it, because there’s no better option available to the MAGAts, but given that they want to close the government and crash the economy, […]

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solarbird, to politics

One of the reasons I haven’t been doing these lately

There are a bunch of reasons I haven’t been on top of the Fascism Watch agenda the last few weeks. Part of that is exhaustion, part of that is extra work, part of that is other financial stress – basically, there are a lot of reasons.

But part of it is that at least some of the media has finally, after all this time, caught up with me. At least on some […]

[link]

solarbird, to politics

Fascism Watch for 17 October 2023: the Let’s Talk Republicans and Abortion Again

We’ve been talking for a while about states with comprehensive abortions bans losing prenatal care and gynaecological practitioners, like in Idaho. Well, it’s spreading to more states, now, as they start enforcing their Republican policies. Alabama is now facing closures that will require people to drive 100 miles while in labour, or give birth in an emergency […]

[link]

solarbird, to politics

Fascism Watch for 2 October 2023: the End of Politics Edition

Let’s get another layer of caught up, shall we? All these links are news, and there’s a lot of it. Occasionally I think I shouldn’t try to knit these articles together when I’m this far behind, and I should just give a list of article titles with links; I’ve done that in the past.

But I think this tells a more holistic […]

[link]

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