Notices by solarbird (solarbird@solarbird.net)

The New Republic have called for an exit from Twitter saying that if you’re on X you’re complicit with Elon Musk

HEEEEEEY LOOK THE FUCKWIT MEDIA IS FINALLY NOTICING THAT TWITTER’S A FASCIST PROPAGANDA AND DISINFORMATION MACHINE AND ONLY TWO YEARS LATE! WOOOOOW!

Jesus fucking wept.

#fascism #politics #uspolitics

Say “You know that rape taunt going around? If you do this in front of me, I WILL IMMEDIATELY PUNCH YOU IN THE DICK.”

Or whatever you’re willing to say, but say it as strongly as you’re willing to say it. They’re looking for social permission from men. You must pre-emptively deny that in the strongest terms you’re willing.

This is about force now. Not reason.

I think I’ve squared a circle. Doesn’t mean it’s real; just that I’ve found a way to square it.

Walk with me.

Let’s say you’re Trump and you’ve promised mass deportations and huge tariffs on China and other countries.

Let’s say that mass deportation is incredibly expensive – maybe you’re aware that Hitler’s camps and extermination programme were eating 13% of Nazi Germany’s GDP in the middle of their wars of conquest.

Let’s say you’re also aware that this will take years and years and years, because there’s literally no way to do this quickly. Physically, I mean. 15 million people can’t be thrown out overnight, or even over months. It’ll be years.

Let’s also say you want to keep inflation down, particularly to keep prices from skyrocketing due to your tariff policies. Tariffs are, I remind you, a tax an imports that get paid by the importer, and which are passed on to the customer. They are inflationary, by design. At least, until and unless they torpedo the economy entirely, at which point, well, you’ve set off a second Great Depression, just like Smoot and Hawley.

Now, let’s say that it’s very important to you to keep wages down as well, because nobody wants to pay workers if they can avoid it. If you want to bring back a lot of manufacturing in an already-tight labour market, that’s going to raise labour costs. It just is.

So you assign an amoral monster like Tom Homan – author of Trump’s Family Separation policy – as the “czar” of immigration. He’s promising the largest deportation force in history and recently said his answer to preventing “family separation” is to expel the entire family – citizenship be damned.

(He’s also a contributor to Project 2025 and a visiting fellow at Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 absolutely is the agenda. All of it.)

Then you start talking to people you’re already very friendly with, the operators of private prisons. They are utterly ready and looking forward to the new policies. They see it as an opportunity to double – or better – the size of their evil industry in all its forms.

Your inner circle have already acknowledged you’ll have to build camps – lots of them, big ones. You’ll call them “prisons” or “detention facilities” or “military camps,” not “concentration camps,” you certainly won’t call them that. Let’s say “facilities.”

Prison “facilities” are already well known for requiring prison labour, and for their pennies-per-hour payment to inmates. Private prisons have pushed the envelope on this in many ways; prison labour is a profit centre. One I was working against, before the fascist era.

So.

Imagine, if you would, the very easy jump.

You’ve got to do something with these hundreds of thousands of imprisoned people, don’t you.

Imagine expulsions taking months, then years. Years at a time. Perhaps they stop working so hard on speeding up the process. Perhaps they slow-walk it, timed to, say, suit the availability of “facility” beds.

Of course you’ll put them to work. A rotating cast of “facility” workers – “prison workers” – worked slowly through the system so there’s no one there quite long enough to start organising.

Paid, technically. At pennies for the hour, as a token, a pretence that it’s not slavery. But, of course, it is. You recoup the pennies you have to pay by charging them for everything. Maybe even their bed.

And just like that you have highly profitable… North Korean-style labour camps, with entire families of workers imprisoned, for who knows how long while they are put to work as factory labour for the private prison companies which become the new internal outsourcers of zero-cost labour.

Slavery, though not by name.

Maybe you’ll tie camp expansions to increases in tariffs. Raise them in parallel, timed so that the internal outsourcing absorbs the cost of the new tariffs. And then look – no price inflation, no wage inflation.

And whole new class of people to look down upon forever, if you like.

It’s quite the plan. Very neat. Very clean. Given that Trump voters actively want “military camps” used against immigrants, it’ll be a very easy sell.

And very, very profitable. Slave camps always have been, really.

And all you have to be is an abomination upon the earth.

And all your supporters have to do is let you be one.

Is that the plan? I don’t know.

All I know is that all the pieces seem to fit.

#fascism #politics #uspolitics

I am not seeing nearly enough cishet men react proactively to this national wave of rape threats.

Most men listen only to men, particularly on topics like these. These men specifically only listen to men. Not listening to the opinions of women is the point, because as far as they’re concerned, we don’t get to have any.

Right now, these men are testing what they can get away with. They see but don’t care about how women react; if anything, they like the revulsion and anger, and look forward to more of it when they actually start “grabbing women by the pussy.”

But they do want to see how other men will react. They want to know what other men will say or do.

Passivity now, in the face of this, is permission. And your men friends are watching. If you don’t object, they probably won’t either. So if you’re against this – and you fucking well need to be – you need to get ahead of it.

And the next time, and the time after that? Every other time the fash test something? Because they will be testing everything they can?

It’s the same reality.

You have to get in front of it. Independently. Not just a thumbs up to a woman’s post. Preferably in your own words.

And you have to start right now.

#fascism #politics #uspolitics

How the fuck do you get a 33-point swing in favour of the guy campaigning on an ethnic purge against you?

This exit polling graph tells me everything and helps me understand absolutely nothing:

Trump won Latino men 53-45 after campaigning for months on the basis of an ethnic purge against Latino people, promising to expel millions of people, and if you think that’s only going to be undocumented people, you’re out of your goddamn fucking mind and you have to know that.

Trump won Latino men 53-45 after a hate rally in New York City against Puerto Ricans, who are Latino, and who got the word out.

White women still voted for Trump, but swung towards Harris. It’s stupid and it’s evil.

But how the fuck do you win the people you’re campaigning on purging?

Without this swing, I think I was mostly right. My higher hopes hinged on white women shifting more than they did, and they didn’t, which is fucking self-destructive. But this… I just… did not see this coming. It wasn’t in any of my calculations. It’s suicidal past a level I don’t know how to handle.

How do you get votes from people you’re promising to purge?

And now I don’t know what to think at all.

[link] #politics #USPol #fascism #politics #uspolitics

Election Liveblog

I’ve never done an intentional “liveblog” before, but since I’ll be glued to it all anyway, I’ve decided hey, why not. This is the liveblog root, and updates will be in the replies below, which are also Federated so you can follow along on Mastodon and other Federated social media.

I’m also going to experiment with reply threads grouped by topic.

How active will it be? That’s a dang good question, and we’ll find out. I’ve got a few items queued up already to start reply threads. Let’s gooooooooooooooooooo~~~

[link] #politics #USPol #fascism #politics #t0000000000bs_ #uspolitics

Results and Exit Polling thread root

Holy shit the Latino – meaning in this case mostly Puerto Rican – exit polling in Philadelphia. Massive turnout, 90% Harris.

This insanity right here is why I kept hammering on how Elon Musk thinks Trump’s plans will crash the economy, but he thinks that’s good and wants it to happen, and why I kept begging everyone else to talk about it too.

But the media ignored it, so a majority of voters still trust Trump with the economy over Harris. Batshit insane.

A pitch I did not expect to have to make on this final day

For years now, I have been railing against the Republican Party as a literal – literal – Party of Plague. In these closing days of the campaign, they have quadrupled back down on this in ways that will kill millions of Americans.

Not “might.” Will.

Appointing RFK, Jr. as czar of public health and letting him “go wild” will kill millions. Not might: will. Not immediately, no, but over time. Trump himself is utterly refusing to promise he and his party won’t ban vaccines and said on Sunday that RFK Jr.’s pledge to eliminate fluoridation of water on day one “sounds OK to me.”

If they do this and make it stick, millions will die. And an outsized number of them will be children.

Courtesy McNadoMD on Mastodon, here are a few of the diseases mass vaccination eliminated from American life, and which banning vaccination will bring back, along with some of their symptoms and progression paths.

Lockjaw and rabies:

Diphtheria:

Whooping cough:

Polio:

You get the idea, right?

These aren’t the only ones. These are just a few of those less often mentioned in these modern times, because people have forgot they exist.

When I say the Republican Party is a Party of Plague, when I say it is a goddamn death cult, I mean every single one of those words in every way you might think.

They are promising economic ruin and they are promising ethnic purges and now they are promising mass death of children.

All while killing pregnant people for their vile sense of domination, of course. Let us never forget that, since their families certainly won’t.

One of the things their apologists keep saying is that “Trump doesn’t mean it” and “Trump won’t do it,” and “That’s just Trump being Trump,” and they talk about “Trump derangement syndrome,” and say that we’re stupid for believing what their candidate fucking says he’ll do, and meanwhile, they get enraged about shit they completely make up about us and the candidates who are with us.

We react to things their candidates promise. They react to shit they make up wholesale about us. We are not the fucking same.

If only the political press would catch on to that fact.

The very last day of a campaign is a pretty lousy time to bring up another topic, even if it’s not really new. But this is, again, so murderously psychotic that I can’t not bring it back up.

Maybe you can bring it up, too, on this final day of this hellish and evil campaign, this Monday, November 4th, 2024.

Zero days remain.

It is Lastday.

[link] #medicine #politics #science #USPol #fascism #politics #uspolitics

oh ho ho

yep.

looks like the trump campaign figured out reason nr. 1 in my list and are absolutely freaking the fuck out.

So they’ll be pivoting to denialism and Plan B/Coup II probably full-time now. But the bigger the gap, the fewer people will go in with them, so we need every vote in every state, because Coup II all about the psychological.

Time to bring it home, team. Let’s get it done.

this looks to me like what we call a “tell”

“Scoop: What Trump is hearing about his chances in a tight 2024 race,” writes Axios. I’m not linking it, because I think it’s shenanigans.

What he’s supposedly hearing is that he pretty much has the election pretty much in hand, better position than 2020, blah blah blah blah [fart noises].

I’m calling bullshit on the whole story, because this “internal” memo that they “scooped” is using as its thesis data from fucking Real Clear Politics, an absolutely canonical clown car, and if they had real, actual, good internal data showing what they’re talking about, they’d be using it. And they’re not.

Given that even Trump should know that, I’m thinking much less “this was a scoop” and a lot more “This was propaganda written to be ‘scooped’ up and reported as a ‘scoop,'” and Axios happened to be the ones who bit.

Further – I think it’s a tell. Between that and Trump going all in on telling his cult that he has a truly massive lead that can only be overtaken by fraud, what I’m actually hearing is that the Trump campaign thinks they’re losing.

I think they know something very bad about their numbers, and I think I know what it is, and I think it’s more than one thing. 1: I think the gender gap is higher than they or pollsters have been thinking it is; 2: I think likely voter composition is different than they think it is and pollsters haven’t caught up either (this is, however, reflected in enthusiasm numbers); 3: I think Trump has failed to get past his hard upper limit of 47% and thanks to that racist hatefest in New York, Latino men who had been leaning towards not voting for a woman got a big slap of reality in the face, and finally…

4: People who don’t math very well are saying that Harris’s wide lead in early polling just reflects how Democrats always turn out more for early voting than Republicans, and that her lead is not even as good as Biden’s was in 2020, but that ignores that this time, Republicans are in fact turning out in early polling, and way more than they have for a while, and Trump’s even been encouraging them.

A lot of people don’t seem to be catching on to that, and it matters.

And while a lot of these numbers are shaky at best – there’s one set of numbers going around that is in fact from a decent polling agency but the question it’s hanging on is kind of fucked up so I don’t think it’s reliable – Harris’s lead appears to be bigger than the party turnout differential.

And what that means is that some of those early-voting registered Republicans are voting for her.

Mostly women, no doubt. But still, I have seen some numbers that make me go holy shit. And not just in Kansas.

I’m wondering whether the Trump campaign have figured all that shit out. Particularly with their panic about Republican women not voting the way their men want them to, and talking about how maybe women shouldn’t be voting at all and maybe the 19th Amendment needs to go away so that women can’t vote.

Their reaction to losing is always to prevent the people who vote against them from being able to vote at all. I see no reason for this time to be different. If they’re saying women shouldn’t be voting at all, that tells me they’re being absolutely brutalised by women voters – as they damn well should be.

So now they’re moving forward on their Plan B of setting up the faithful for mass rejection of the results and a second coup attempt.

Another thing I said a very long time is that to get through this without major violence, we need the fascists to think that they’re on the very cusp of victory throughout, and not to believe they’re actually going to lose until they literally can’t win.

That’s what 2024 has always been about, and I think they may’ve just figured out they can’t win.

I really would’ve preferred them not figuring this out for another few days, but, well… four days beforehand, that’s not so bad. One day after would’ve been ideal, of course, but four days before? We can work with that.

Keep up the pressure, team. Stay at your posts, or if you’re not at your post, get to one and start pushing us across the finish line. If these numbers confuse you, forget about them all – in fact, ignore all the polls entirely. I could be so very, very wrong. I don’t think I am and my history is good, but in the fog of war, anyone can be fooled, including me.

So stay on target. First we have to win this, then we have to keep it. And we can’t leave anything “on the field,” because this is – as I have said many, many times – for all the marbles.

Eyes. On. The. Prize.

3 days remain.

[link] #politics #USPol #fascism #politics #uspolitics

Project 2025

Everyone, and I do mean everyone, needs to understand this:

Of course he knows who is behind Project 2025. Dozens of people from his previous administration were behind it and/or contributing to it.

And because most people don’t actually care about things like Project 2025 until it affects them personally and directly, here’s how people can find out how it affects them personally and directly. It’s an extraction engine that lets you pick topics and get summaries.

Project 2025 is Trump II, and everyone who knows anything damn well knows it, including him.

Make sure that means everyone.

25 days remain.

[link] #politics #USPol #fascism #politics #uspolitics

“grab my pussy,” diapers, maxipads on ears, and now Vance sample jars

Let’s talk about those horrible JD Vance semen-sample jars for a moment, because it’s weird – holy crap it’s weird, it’s Monseur Boeuf Le Tet let’s go to Mexico and found a UFO religion weird – but it’s also gross and violent in whole new ways.

And yeah, I said violent. I meant it. Walk with me.

So. If you don’t know, Republican/MAGA cultists are going around with medical sample jars containing fake semen. They’re labelled JD Vance Full Family Kits.

Yes, really. But they’re not weird.

If you ask them, they’ll tell you it’s for Democrats. Democrats who can’t have kids, which means even on the surface level, this is exactly as gross and mean as it appears. They’re mocking people who can’t have children but want to, and echoing the Christian Nationalist line that a family isn’t a real family if they don’t have children, as well as JD Vance’s line in particular that if you don’t have biological children you aren’t a real woman.

But if you dig a little deeper, it’s even worse than that.

You see, once again, this is something that comes out of American fundamentalist cults. These items are talismans of their beliefs. Sure, they’re nasty sneers aimed at strangers they’ve chosen to degrade and hate, but they’re also talismans of their religious beliefs.

And there are two obvious meanings to this talisman. First is the statement, just below the surface, that if you can’t get pregnant by your weak Democrat – who naturally isn’t really actually a man since he’s not MAGA – then don’t worry, JD Vance is our God-Emperor’s apprentice. Therefore, he is a real man, and will be able to get you properly pregnant like you want to be, just like any Real Man could.

The second is uglier.

The second is a promise. A promise being made to women who don’t want children. And that promise is, we will make you pregnant like you should be, bitch.

I was going to write about JD Vance’s style of misogyny vs. Trump’s style of misogyny soon, but I guess I’ll talk about it here and now, because this is a manifestation of it.

Trump’s style of misogyny is the sort that doesn’t outright hate women, it just doesn’t think of women as adults. Women aren’t responsible, women in general can’t be trusted to make the right decisions in general, but occasionally, you get one that proves themselves, similarly to a bright child or trustworthy teenager. You can bring those on and grant them with responsibility, much like you might trust a properly-raised child. They just should never be in actual charge; a man must be the actual boss, because you need an actual adult – always a man – at the top.

Plus there’s the sex, of course. That’s important. And babies, also important. But when all is said and done, select women can be treated as mostly people too. Not quite full people, of course, but – mostly people.

JD Vance’s misogyny is much, much meaner. JD Vance’s misogyny – and the misogyny of his entire cult – deeply hates women. Deeply, as in, deeply resents our necessity for sex and childbirth deeply, as in, wishes we didn’t have to be here.

Given that, then if women must be around, it must be only for the purposes of reproduction and childcare, and okay, sex. Also, they should serve their superiors – men – since that’s useful and right too.

JD Vance has pretty much come out and said this, with his commentary about only families with children being real families and the only purpose of post-menopausal women being to raise kids.

And if you’re in a society that permits women not to have and raise children, then maybe you’re not in a righteous society at all. So they intend to fix that, by making damn well sure you have those kids and you raise those kids and that’s it, because that is, after all, your only valid purpose.

And so, this carrying around the talisman of Vance, this symbolic manhood of Vance, this statement that “it’s for Democrats” and a “full family kit?” It’s absolutely a promise. It is a symbolic promise to make unmarried and/or childless woman into literal Handmaiden’s Tale handmaidens.

They will make you fulfil your only valid purpose.

Most of them are probably not fully conscious this is what they’re promising. A lot of them are just in the cult, and the cult is doing this, so naturally, they are as well.

But some of them know.

Take a look at this guy and go ahead. Look at that incel sneer. Tell me he doesn’t know what he’s promising.

I dare you.

He knows.

78 days remain.

[link] #politics #USPol #fascism #politics #uspolitics

I have plenty to say right now, but…

Let’s face it, anything too analytic I have to say about anything but the assassination attempt will get swamped. So here are a few thoughts on that, starting with what we appear to know Sunday morning:

• Yep, sure was a registered Republican. That’s solidly confirmed.
• White, male, apparently cis (certainly gender-confirming), thank fuck for that
• HOLY SHIT DEMOLITION RANCH T-SHIRT HOLY SHIRTBALLS WTF (YouTube gun enthusiast channel, look it up)
• There’s an image of an Instagram profile going around THAT COULD BE BULLSHIT, WE DON’T KNOW RIGHT NOW. If it is real, it paints a motive of a very Christian person who was very aware of Epstein’s crimes and could well have been set off by the Trump-Epstein connections, of which there are a lot. This one makes a lot of sense to me, but WE DON’T KNOW IF THAT SCREENSHOT IS REAL YET. But we will in a day or two. Maybe even later today. But at time of writing, we don’t.
• Various agents – directly Trumpian, Russian, Iranian probably, Mainland Chinese probably – are absolutely flooding the zone with shit, as Bannon likes to say, and as they always are to maximise confusion and anger. Remember that.

A few thoughts, all of which are blunt:

• PANICKY BASTARDS, please remember that this does NOT give Trump the election, like some of you are going off about. Nazi dickholes killing Martin Luther King, Jr. and RFK didn’t cost Nixon the ’68 election, now did it? Yeah, sucks to be on the “like Nixon” side of this comparison but it’s still worth remembering.
• RETURN-TO-NORMALCY NITWITS: There were a lot of assassination attempts on Hitler, too, a few of which came really close to success and were very obvious. This neither made him a better person nor calmed down either him OR his party. He’s still the same monstrously evil fuck he was yesterday and no plans have actually been changed.
• CONSPIRACY CRANKS: For fuck’s sake, this was not a kayfabe. Look, I understand the impulse, I do. I really do. But the man is a coward. He just is. There’s no way in hell he’d risk live fire in the direction of himself, or even near it. It is not a “shock” that an amateur, under- or self-trained sniper missed, it’s frankly more of a surprise that he got as close as he did. Speaking as someone who has been a member of a gun club and was considered a pretty good shot, it’s not as easy to hit those as television and movies make you think.

Over the next day or two, more of this will become better confirmed and more clarified. Until then, keep your shit together as we all try to figure out what and how. And most of all, remember:

None of this makes Trump a better person or more fit for the office.

None of it. Remind people of that. He’s still the Day One Dictator, the man promising – explicitly! – mass deportations and de facto military occupations of blue states that will target 20 million people or more. He’s still the man promising to ramp up climate change as far as he can for his oil company friends, survivability be damned. He’s still the man running on a platform to wipe out trans people and he’s still the man who absolutely will let the fash end abortion nationally and go after birth control.

None of that has changed.

Do not fucking surrender, and don’t let people forget who he is, because they will try.

Particularly not your Trump friends and family, who we all must still try to rope back into reality, or if we can’t manage that, at least … reel in a bit. Dampen their enthusiasm. Get them not to send that money, or encourage their friends to do the same.

Game’s still on. Take a day if you need to, but then get back out there.

113 days remain.

[link] #politics #USPol #fascism #politics #uspolitics

Vive la France

We win this, if we fight.

And that means everywhere.

[link] #politics #fascism #politics

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] #science #science