where all things come to die

"I wish I did not have to sugarcoat my sadness, but if you swallowed it raw, naked, and uncouth, it would curdle your insides and shrivel up your tongue."

#he's slurring his words a little but that's about it #the evidence of joe biden's parkinsonism was substantially stronger #liberals just really want to believe in Evil Brain Syndrome

End image description.]

I have said it before, but I really recommend Henk de Berg's Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying. It was written before Trump 2.0, back when the comparison was bold and provocative.

De Berg points out that Hitler engaged in a lot of shameless Trump-like grandstanding and self-enriching behaviour. It just doesn't get talked about as much, because it's been overshadowed by the atrocities.

Both men, de Berg points out, have a very deliberately crafted communication style that reads as unhinged and incoherent to their political opponents, and spontaneous and authentic to their supporters. De Berg uses the example of Hitler practicing his furious tirades in the stairwells, only to exit cool and composed a few seconds later; and Trump absolutely losing it and threatening a prospective employee at a party, but turning around quite calmly and explaining that it was a test.

Trump, according to de Berg, isn't incompetent; he deliberately cultivates the image of a loose cannon so that people will be more likely to capitulate to him; news agencies will do nothing but talk about him and devote huge amounts of time to trying to predict his decisions; and people in his organization who are smarter and more skilled than he is will abandon all attempts to strategize against him, and simply compete with each other for his capricious favours. His actions seem illogical partly because he wants them to, and partly because the logic behind them isn't the same logic that other people are using. It's not about peace or justice or mass prosperity; it's about calculatedly creating chaos, and then seeing what people will give you to make it go away.

happy big tiger friday, here's dasha :)

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

"At least we're getting richer"