Honestly, it is very much a “Why not both?” situation. Of course, Trump wants to distract from the Epstein files, but advancing the techno-fascist agenda is its own goal that is pursued by a lot of people in Trump’s orbit that do not care much about the Epstein files.

Yeah, people have to understand that right-wing politics considers science merely a tool to accumulate wealth and power. Thus right-wingers will not acknowledge that science pursues scientific truth, but rather insist that science that contradicts them must be a challenge to their interests that aims to embolden their political opponents and thus must be expunged.

We all know what is going to happen…

RuneQuest does a similar thing: Everyone can do magic on a basic level, but it takes skill and time to become proficient. To me this always made more sense than the “chosen one” logic inherent in other RPG systems, because most RPG classes are inherently defined by a difference in skill.

I understand the feeling. For me personally, the pandemic years are just a blur and I am incapable to tell them apart.

You will not be surprised that Gabriele D’Annunzio, one of the forgotten masterminds of fascism, described fascism as a “secular religion”.

Three big harassment campaigns that pre-date GamerGate were…

• The harassment of Kathy Sierra by the neo-nazi Andrew “weev” Auerheimer and his followers
• The backlash against “Mass Effect 3” and - particularly - how people like Casey Hudson, Jessica Chobot and Jennifer Hepler were singled out for personal harassment
• The harassment of Anita Sarkeesian after the launch of the Kickstarter for “Tropes against Women in Video Games”

None of these events incorporated all of the elements that would lateron form the core of GamerGate, but they can be seen as test runs, particularly insofar as many of the same actors (such as Auerheimer) were involved, as the core of the attacks were often misogynist and queerphobic, and because much of the harassment was conducted in the same way, weaponizing social media in order to single out individuals which were blamed for a whole slew of (often non-existing) problems/faults/…

I can imagine it being a LEGO set.

For those who aren’t aware of it: “Shinigami Eyes” has become far less reliable and in some cases outright harmful due to the creators of the extension flagging people (yes, even trans people) they personally disagree with. One example is the creators denying the existence of intersex people, thus many advocates for the rights of intersex people are now flagged by Shinigami Eyes.

Thank you! I am. I meant the Hohenzollern branch that ruled in Prussia.

The whole ceremony. I need to show off that dress.

🫂

Probably an enemy to lovers plot line…

For those who are not familiar with Brianna Wu: She has tried to be a left-wing grifter, before she discovered that it got her nowhere and thus decided to be a right-wing grifter instead. She tried to the right-wing’s “good trans woman”, agreeing with everything they said, until the above message. And yeah, she is already trying to spin this yet again…

And if you think that all of that is rather weird, she is also the creator of this masterpiece.

Thanks for pointing it out. Unfortunately, I can’t find an option to change the alt text.

AFAIK they are offering them a few months of salaries in order to preempt Swedish labor laws which would make it a much more arduous process. So at least there is that.

A conman will say what he thinks people want to hear.

My pleasure.

To add to what SpookyBogMonster already said: On an international stage the big proponents of these views nowadays are Xi Jiping’s faction in China or North Korea, while even Cuba (which had upheld these views for a long time) have now abandoned this position.

In the US and in Europe, it’s a fringe position among leftists, mostly popular with those who also hold favourable views of Xi Jiping’s China and North Korea. It’s a very vocal minority though and infamously one of the key developers of the Lemmy platform is one of those.

Because it is not a coherent political standpoint, the justifications are all over the place. Ultimately people are being bigots and they come up with slew of explanations to justify their bigotry. So the arguments vary…

One of most popular argument goes something like this “Only rich capitalists engaged in homosexuality and transsexualism because of degenerate bourgeois ennui. True Workers™ are never homosexual and transsexual. Therefore any homosexual and transsexual must be a member of the bourgeois class and cannot be a True Worker™.” (Which is just circular logic.)

There are other arguments in the vein of “China (or another socialist country of choice) is queerphobic, China is socialist, therefore socialism must be queerphobic.” (Which fails to acknowledge that other socialist countries like for example the GDR were remarkably progressive in comparison to its capitalist neighbors.)

Then there are other circular arguments like “Capitalist societies are rotten to the core. There is more queer visibility today. Queerness is proof of capitalist rot.”

Appeals to queerphobia of the past like “The Soviet Union criminalized queerness. The Soviet Union is the socialist ideal, therefore we should do like them.”

Or there are appeals to the authority of some queerphobic socialist writer of the past. As well as riffs on the argument from the screenshot which boil down to “Individualism is bourgeois capitalism. Queerness is an individual choice. It cannot be allowed under socialism where collectivism reigns supreme.”