title pending

these are images from a 1930s pamphlet that endorsed kudzu, entitled "stop gullies: save your farm"

Canebrakes built up incredibly rich, fertile soil and are amazing at preventing erosion. They form incredibly strong mats of rhizomes. And their roots are known to go 10 feet deep into the soil.

Like, they may express that, even internally, as "i wish i could live in a village" but that's because saying shit is free and thinking out every half-formed desire into a fully-spun political program is tedious for most people. If you spend any amount of time playing it out, it's not really what they want. What they want is the opportunity to form community and connection, or networks of care outside the capitalist labor system, or exposure to people in otherwise non-overlapping spheres of life. They want whatever the opposite of capitalist atomization is, and they're pointing at a time and place that had that in order to say "see? I know it's possible, and therefore it's reasonable to want." It doesn't matter that other things in that time and place were bad, because that's not the part they're pointing at, and acting like they're trying to get everyone to hop in a time machine and go back to medieval europe or precolumbian america is being a little silly.

Notably, bigots and reactionaries do this too. Your average us republican fascist doesn't actually want to go back to the 1950s, no matter what he says. What he's gesturing at when he says it is a desire to recapture, in the present, the parts of the 1950s he considered "good" (segregation, enforced patriarchal family structure, more rigid gender regime) while keeping everything else.

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"

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.