Notices by josh buermann (buermann@mastodon.social), page 2

Been a while since a sitting US president has personally participated in book banning, I think? Though I suppose it is what you would expect to happen after they campaigned on free speech, which has become the clearest indicator that somebody reviles it.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/17/a-great-shock-julianne-moores-childrens-book-under-review-by-trump-administration

President Biden did not have the power to cancel student loans, but an unelected, unappointed, unconfirmed presidential advisor on the perennial Presidential Catfood Commission will try to cancel the entire Department of Education, creating a fun puzzle for pundits.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/shaharziv/2025/02/14/will-student-loans-be-cancelled-if-trump-shuts-down-education-department/

"sources told ABC News the enforcement operations this week... are the type of routine immigration raids that have been customary of ICE for years"

Is that true, ABC News? Are 500 ICE arrests on a January day typical? Why should we believe 'sources'? Where's the data? Can anybody be bothered to do rudimentary journalism, or help readers do it themselves? Is this a dramatic escalation or is it escalating drama?

https://abcnews.go.com/US/newark-mayor-ice-raided-business-agents-make-arrests/story?id=118049052

Immigration theater is bad for business, among other things.

https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/01/kern-county-immigration-sweep/

So 200 above average for a day, but they're goosing the anecdata by sweeping up legal immigrants, citizens, and veterans at seafood stores, so you'll have to pardon the inconvenience while it shakes out.

https://myfox8.com/news/ice-agents-raid-seafood-store-detain-us-military-veteran/

You expect MAGA to brag about their ICE enforcement since the whole pretense of the movement is that Biden never arrested any immigrant for anything. But anybody could look up ICE's data (if you hassle google enough they'll eventually cough it up) and figure the same average of 300 ICE arrests per day for the first three months of last year as I just did.

https://www.ice.gov/spotlight/statistics

lol MAGA is gaming google's recency bias to muddy whether they're enforcing immigration more effectively or just with added cruelty in the already cruel and capricious system they created:

"Quick Google searches for Ice operations, raids and arrests return a deluge of government press releases... with the same timestamp and read: 'Updated: 01/24/2025'."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/06/ice-us-immigration-deportations-google

Since America is rolling coal into a bottomless maw one can only pray that Trump pushes his 30-day rounds of theatrical tariff threats too far and convinces everybody to buy all the Chinese solar panels and EVs they can make, since there doesn't seem to be any limit to that, either.

https://farmingdale-observer.com/2025/02/04/china-builds-a-massive-250-mile-solar-park-to-power-beijing/

Trump OPM general counsel Kloster has really inflected his Catholicism with a distinct brand of misogynistic anti-semitism.

And embarrassingly uncultured. Asia Argento comes from a long line of deeply Catholic Italian and ítalo-brasileiro film makers. Pointing to her as self-evident proof of Jews using Hollywood to corrupt Western masculinity is generally offensive to the broader concept of human intelligence.

https://bsky.app/profile/sharonk.bsky.social/post/3lguyjbtepc2e

"Andrew Kloster, a self-described “raging misogynist” with a public history of racist comments and insistence on loyalty to President Donald Trump, has been installed as general counsel for the federal government’s human resources agency, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)."

https://www.pogo.org/investigations/raging-misogynist-now-federal-government-h-r-s-top-lawyer

#KlosterFuck

Old conservative think tank gripes about the "policy uncertainty" of the Obama administration grow funnier every year.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91268902/trumps-freeze-federal-aid-blocked-federal-judge-now
https://www.aei.org/economics/five-reasons-why-obama-really-is-freaking-out-business/

#KlosterFuck

#Facebook's enhanced moderation rules ban "fuck" but have a misogynistic carve out for "motherfucker". Kinda like how you'd get auto-modded for saying something anodyne like "I hate peas" while millions of motherfucking trolls are exempt from any moderation at all. Really fixed the discrepancy!

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/facebook-instagram-meta-hate-speech-content-moderation/

Is all content moderation necessarily a "political enterprise"? Like, the kind of dehumanizing rhetoric now being explicitly endorsed by Facebook against entire classes of people -- in their own examples used to bully others into joining the dehumanization campaign -- tends to lead to individual hate crimes and terrorism before it escalates to political bodies.

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/facebook-instagram-meta-hate-speech-content-moderation/

"Despite Facebook’s claims that it had cracked down on hate speech, in 2020, researchers found Facebook was still promoting anti-Rohingya hate videos from Ashin Wirathu, the extremist monk they’d supposedly banned years before. (Just now, it took me approximately 5 seconds to find an anti-Muslim 2020 interview with Ashin Wirathu, with English subtitles, still up and visible on a Facebook page run by Indian Hindu nationalists - and I wasn’t even asked to log in)."

https://little-flying-robots.ghost.io/facebook-destroys-everything-part/

"Facebook played a key role in Myanmar’s slide into hell. During that blood-soaked period from 2016 to 2018, website’s attention-hunting algorithms pumped vast amounts of ferocious anti-Rohingya content into the feeds of millions of Myanmar Facebook users, and the site failed over and over to counter dangerous hate speech, ignoring pleas from local activists, including some people I knew."

https://little-flying-robots.ghost.io/facebook-destroys-everything-part/

Pixelfed at a disadvantage attracting TikTok Maoists who want to stick it to Congress by sticking with the CCCP:

"American social media users have responded by moving to an unlikely alternative: Xiaohongshu... which means “Little Red Book,” often shortened by US users to RedNote, surged to the top position on Apple’s US App Store on Tuesday."

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/14/tech/rednote-china-popularity-us-tiktok-ban-intl-hnk/index.html

Meta now allows you to deadname trans people and if you link to Zuckerberg's competition you might as well be dead to him.

https://www.404media.co/meta-is-blocking-links-to-decentralized-instagram-competitor-pixelfed/

The most absurd claim in this catalog of Harris campaign consultants' excuses is that three months was too short a campaign. Nothing about a competitive primary -- she'd veer left and stake out very unpopularist positions she'd be compelled to flip flop on when billionaire donors complained or anybody bristled at it -- could have possibly helped her. It's bizarre how nobody ever suggests that the non-stop fundraising spam to buy more ads must have suppressed turnout.

https://archive.is/qIJ61

Anti-genocide protest voters getting what they wanted from Trump would be a hilarious coup against everybody who advised Kamala Harris to shut the door to any change from Biden's genocidal policies and instead sent zionists out to mansplain Oslo and the Old Testament.

https://archive.is/sCLqv

Joe BIden showed up at the State Department to brag about his foreign policy accomplishments one last time before everyone who has either mentioned climate change or is not a white man is summarily fired.

"America is no longer at war" is another of Biden's tall tales, like joining Gandhi on the salt march or springing Nelson Mandela from prison not once but three times.

https://www.forever-wars.com/biden-through-the-devastation-of-gaza-argues-for-his-legacy/