white people resist making puns off Chinese last names challenge (impossible)

specifically the stance of Likud.

it’s not 2014 anymore. we aren’t canceling anyone. we’re getting canceled. JKR is doing victory laps. NHS has banned HRT for minors, as have 27 states. we’re kicked out of the military, and forbidden from security clearances. teachers in Florida can’t even use their own pronouns. Medicaid/Medicare/ACA funding for HRT for adults is stripped now. we can’t get passports with the correct gender marker. Sarah McBride has to use the men’s bathroom in Congress. Newsom calls us freaks. conservative media is calling us groomers and every time there’s a mass shooter they spread the rumor the shooter was trans. “gender ideology” is the new Satanic Panic. NYT keeps running op-eds on why Dems should throw us under the bus. Nancy Mace shouted “tr*nny” three times on the House floor and wasn’t censured for it.

you really think we’re the ones holding the cards?

hugs. hugs to all my trans sisters, brothers, siblings. we need each other now more than ever.

my partners got out of Georgia and they were both broke as fuck. it is possible.

it’s fucked. I’m so sorry. I know it’s a million times easier said than done, but I can’t help myself to not give advice:

join social media groups for the trans community in a blue state, look into the orgs there, see if there’s a couch you could crash on. save up what you can for gas or a bus ticket. once you get there, plug into the community, connect with services, find work. it’s risky but it’s better to try than to give up and die.

I’m sorry 🫂 there’s not always a happy ending. the genocide of Native Americans, for example.

take care of yourself, and take care of your trans and migrant siblings. that’s all we can really do, but maybe it’s enough. ❤️

definitions:

• prisons hold prisoners accused or convicted of crimes. the big difference between prisons and concentration camps is scale and homogeneity - camps are bigger and have one kind of prisoner.

• gulags hold political prisoners but aren’t as big as concentration camps. kinda Soviet-specific.

• reeducation camps hold masses of political prisoners with the goal of indoctrinating them with some ideology. the Xinjiang camps for the Uighurs are an example.

• concentration camps are mass prisons for political prisoners - usually prisoners of war or ethnic minorities. most Nazi camps, along with the Japanese internment camps, were concentration camps.

• death camps are concentration camps used for mass murder/genocide. Auschwitz was the major Nazi death camp for the Holocaust, though there were a few others.

• refugee camps are mass temporary shelters. you’re allowed to leave. FEMA camps and various UN camps are good examples.

Alligator Auschwitz is a concentration camp because it’s 1) massive, 2) full of the same type of prisoner (ethnic minority migrants), 3) who can’t leave. it’s not yet a death camp, but most Nazi camps weren’t death camps (they centralized that!)

💯%. the US was heavily isolationist at the start of WWII, and pretty anti-Semitic. for example, the St. Louis, a boat full of Jewish refugees, was turned away from the US and Canada in 1939 - and turned back to Europe, with many Jews eventually imprisoned and murdered by the Nazis. there were also the blackshirts in the UK, who were pro-Nazi, and PM Chamberlain had a peace treaty drawn up with Hitler. and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with the Soviets, of course.

so if the Nazis had been content to murder only German, Austrian and Czech Jews, they would have gotten away with it.

on the other hand, Nazi ideology (e.g. “lebensraum” and their belief in the destiny of the Aryan race to conquer the “inferior” races) drove them to war, to invade Poland and to break their pact with the Soviets. and they also spent tons of resources on the Holocaust, at the expense of their military.

so basically yeah, isolationist Nazis would have totally survived, but otoh Nazis aren’t isolationists.

yeah, they could have been like Belarus!

I support NATO, in the sense that if NATO dissolved Europe would get eaten like a three-course meal by Russia. Ukraine shows that all too clearly. it has many problems, though.

Left libertarian, NixOS naturally.

Larry David’s humor is perfect for this. what a mensch.

the 8bit FOX interview with Tucker Carlson felt incredibly on theme. you could seriously remake Papers, Please with these aesthetics.

darkly hilarious that all they had to do was put a red bar behind the “APPROVE” and it tricked the three remaining brain cells of their viewers.

what happens when you ignore a court order? remember, he’s absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for official acts. he can pardon anyone he wants to. he controls the military. his cult of personality dominates the Republican party. Alito, Kavanaugh, and Thomas show absolute loyalty to him, and even decisions that should be slam dunks are 5-4 now. he’s cleaned house in DoD and IC, and replaced the generals with sycophants. he has increasing control of social media, and an extensive network of allies.

I think he could successfully lead an outright coup at this point. but what’s the rush? safer for him to follow the plan.

they’re both. they’re trolling us, and they’re deadly serious. it’s the “haha jk unless” approach to manifesting Overton window shifts with irony, aka meme magic.

my comment here analyzes it more: https://lemmy.ml/comment/17320556

definitely not playing it down. the whole point of meme magic is that it shifts the Overton window so bills like these can actually pass. it’s a kind of “irony laundering.” they “troll” the Left, the Left raises alarm, the Right keks and calls us hysterical, the Center sees us as crying wolf and tunes us out. the Right pushes the “troll” legislation as far as they can because “it’s just a prank bro,” until we’re weakened enough they can actually pass it.

it’s like how the Right goads us into calling them “fascists” because they’re literally being fascists, the Right gaslights saying we’re always calling everyone “fascists,” until fascism reenters the Overton window because the Center thinks “fascism” doesn’t mean anything anymore.

honestly, the Left should have used this kind of meme magic back when Republicans were calling centrist Dems Socialists. if we’d used this strategy as well as the Right did we could be executing Billionaires by now.

it’s legislative shitposting/meme magic. one of them gets an idea for the meme: adding “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as a mental illness to troll the libs. it provokes a reaction in us, because it’s 2025 and for all we know the damn thing might pass at the rate the fascists are consuming the state, and the Republicans’ base feeds off of our panic and grief, fueling their schadenfreude. Republican voters are the real trolls; these legislators are just their proxies.

basically, this is the meme magic formula that took 4chan from “ironic” Nazi trolls to an outright fascist resurgence across the West, that took Trump from a meme candidate to the Oval Office, that took the 51st State rhetoric from obvious hyperbole to deadly serious. it’s “just a joke” when you’re defending it, it’s “just trolling” when you’re pushing it through, and it’s “owning the libs” when you’re executing on it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Newsom pulls a Tulsi Gabbard and switches sides. He had Charlie Kirk (of TPUSA) on his podcast where he “completely aligned” with him on trans rights (i.e. eradicating us), then had Steve Bannon on. That’s a bit much even for the Liz Cheney flank of the DNC.

I suspect Newsom doesn’t see any future for his party, and is bailing out instead.