Losing the Faith

So, in terrible news, Trump's trying to pull some strings to pass this massive internet censorship bill, featuring all the kinds of internet censorship we're terrified of, including mandatory ID for accessing basically any website, specifically to crush state regulation of AI, because apparently this man will always see the moral bottom of the barrel and start digging.

6/14/2026

There is no damage more irreversible than death

Happy international Asexual day 🙌🏽

Butch identity doesn’t just go hand in hand with trans manhood and transmasculinity: they are chosen family, they’re friends and comrades, lovers and beloved.

If you deny the lived experiences of trans men and transmasculine people you don’t get to pretend like you see the beauty in the complexity of butchness.

I used to work at a TV station in Ohio. On weekends, we only had an 11pm news broadcast. Not much happened on weekends, ya know? I worked Monday-Friday 9-5, but someone on the weekend shift quit, so I also had to come in at 9pm on Sat/Sun to work the 11pm news. It was brutal. I worked seven days a week, even if two of them were ~3hrs.

This was a particularly bad winter. One Saturday, we had a level 2 snow emergency: That means you should only travel if you absolutely must. Like, it's not uncommon for cops to pull you over in level 2 emergencies to ask where you're going and why. It is genuinely dangerous to drive in that much snow.

I told my boss as much, how I almost crashed on the way home at 12:30am after a news broadcast. I told him I would need to call off if there were a snow emergency again during a night snow.

He told me, point blank, "If you ever call me about the goddamn snow, I will take it as a call of resignation."

And that was that! The very next Saturday, snow fell again. It was a level 2, but would become level 3 by sunup. Level 3 means driving is literally illegal except for ambulances and snow plows. I stared out the window, watching the snow, and I had to make a choice.

"Will I die for this? Will I kill myself to keep this job?" I made $11/hr.

The world is full of disasters. It is also full of people who have learned to profit off of disaster. It is an unfortunate fact of life in the modern social media/online environment that in order to avoid spreading scams, you have to make a continuous effort and you have to be cynical.

There are a lot of wonderful, well-meaning people in the world who want to help everyone who asks for it. Unfortunately, those people are easy to scam.

These are some rules to prevent you from either falling victim to scams or from passing scams along to other people.

These are not suggestions, these are not things to take into consideration, the rules listed here are RULES that you need to adopt in order to keep from spreading scams on social media.

Rules:

Never, ever share screenshots of fundraisers or resources that you haven’t verified yourself. If you see a screenshot of, say, the Antelope Valley Fairgrounds Instagram announcing that they will be accepting evacuees with RVs, you go find the Antelope Valley Fairgrounds website, you find the social media linked on their website, and you check that the post you’re seeing actually came from the entity it’s claiming to. Once you have proved that the post actually came from the entity it’s claiming to, double check that entity with a couple of verifiable sources. So, for instance, if I was checking on the Guitar Center Music Foundation I’d check Guitar Center’s website and maybe I’d look for news articles about donations from the foundation. If I was looking up the Antelope Valley Fairgrounds, I’d look for a local newspaper calendar of events that linked to the fairgrounds or would check the city websites in the area and search “fairgrounds” on them. I would not share a link to a social media page for an organization until I was 100% certain that it was actually associated with the organization. You shouldn’t either. If you see a post that claims to come from a specific group but all you have is the screenshot of the post, go find the group’s website and if it all checks out you may share it IF AND ONLY IF you add the link to the post. And if a post has a link already, click through it and STILL check that everything looks okay.

Never give money or information to someone with a free email address. This sucks. I know. But if the group you’re looking at only has a gmail address or a protonmail you have no way of knowing if they’re legitimately associated with the organization at a glance. And even if they ARE associated with the organization, the free email account demonstrates a lack of planning/commitment that has troubling implications for the handling of your money or data.

Do not share screenshots of “resources,” headlines, social media posts, or news articles. I’m done with screenshots. Screenshots are easy to fake and almost always remove context from the discussion. A standalone screenshot isn’t information, it’s a trap to get you to share something without thinking. Do not *trust* screenshots of “resources,” headlines, social media posts, or news articles. Always assume a screenshot is faked unless you have found the original post yourself. A screenshot isn’t a “resource” it is an un-source, it is intentionally removing information from the viewer and we are well past the time when people should have understood that sharing screenshots without a link to the original text in context is never, every trustworthy.

Do not give money or information to accounts without a history. This may mean individual social media accounts, or it may mean a shiny new mutual aid project that popped up near your house. It’s unfortunate that people have their accounts deleted, it’s unfortunate that new orgs have trouble finding support, but the likelihood that a new account is a scam is simply too high to trust your money or information with it. If someone is asking for money or offering help on an account that hasn’t posted for years, or that suddenly changed all its content, or that has only existed for a month with no links to other, older sites and socials, you shouldn’t trust that account.

Okay, those are the RULES. Those are the lines you draw in the sand. The TL;DR version is this:

Don’t share posts you haven’t personally verified

Don’t give money or information to accounts with generic email accounts like gmail

Don’t share or trust screenshots that have no links or further context

Don’t give info or money to brand new accounts

I absolve you of any guilt you have surrounding this. You want to share that post to help a stranger but they have only had an account for a week. You want to spread that resource, but unfortunately it is only available as screenshots of an anonymous instagram account. You think that perhaps that mutual aid group really can help people, but the only way contact them is to put your info into a google form and send an email to their gmail account. That post seems really helpful, but actually you can’t find anything that suggests that the Mt. Pacifico Aquatic Center exists outside of this twitter account. No more guilt! Guilt be gone! You do not have to feel bad for not sharing these things, or not reaching out, or not giving money because doing so would be irresponsible and would put other people at risk of being tricked by scammers or wasting what money they can donate on a potential fraud.

Now, some tips:

Always, always, always take at least ten minutes to think about giving someone money or your information online. Read the post that moved you, then re-read it, then go sit away from it for ten minutes and think about it. There’s a good chance you will still want to give, or sign up, but ten minutes away will give you a chance to consider if there are any red flags in the post that inspired you.

Independently search everything you’re going to share. Go outside of social platforms and check on search engines. Check Wikipedia. Look up the website and send a while clicking around. Go on a *different* social media platform and check their account.

Just straight up search “[SUBJECT] Scam” before you do anything. See if this thing you’re looking at is actually an old scam that’s revamped for a new disaster. See if you can find an explanation of how something might be a scam or risk in a way that you didn’t understand before.

Get used to getting away from social media. Go check websites.

Learn domain name syntax. “musicfoundationguit.arcenter.com” is a bullshit scam. “guitarcenterfounditaon.org” is a bullshit scam. “guitarcenter-foundation.org” is a bullshit scam. The actual domain is “guitarcenterfoundation.org” and the link to the correct page isn’t going to be “guitarcenter.foundationfires.org” it’s going to be “guitarcenterfoundation.org/fires”  

Tips for Orgs:

If you do not want your org to look like a scam you are going to have to put some effort into it. Unfortunately this will probably also require at least a little bit of money; I know it’s hard to get money together at the beginning, but it will pay off in the long run.

Invest in a domain and hosted email. You can get relatively inexpensive hosted email through most domain registrars and even if you only get one email address for your domain you can forward it to all the free gmail and protonmail accounts you want. But buy a domain, set up a simple website, and get an  info@[yourdomain].com email set up because you don’t want people emailing “[email protected]” because it’s super fucking easy for a 1337 hax0r like me to set up “[email protected]” and scam the people who want to reach out to you.

Make a blog on your actual website, not on a social media site. A blog means that you can make regular posts and establish a history to prove that you are real and you do real stuff; it will also help with SEO and help to ensure that when people search for your org YOU are what comes up. Keeping up calendars of previous activities with links to those activities is also good.

Set up social handles on all the sites you use, make a “socials” page on your website, and link to your handles so that people can verify if you’re the one posting something. If you don’t make it extremely easy to find your socials, that means it’s extremely easy to set up fake accounts claiming to be you. Then put the link to your website in the bio on your socials.

If you are offering something or holding a fundraiser or doing anything on your social media page, link it back to your website. If you have an IG post offering resources, you should include a url for your site in each image. If you share a photo on twitter with the info for a march, that should link back to your website with more info about the march. If you post a fundraiser on tumblr you need to link the fundraising page of your website on that post.

If you absolutely positively cannot set up a website and a real-ass email address, set up a linktree, choose a primary social media to post on that all the others refer back to, and very explicitly state what your email address is and that you do not have other email addresses somewhere that's difficult to miss. Build a history of posts and link to other orgs that you work with or any writeups or stories about your events or projects. The point of all of this is making yourself easy to verify. "[email protected]" sucks but it sucks a lot less if it's in the bio of "@northfulltertonfnb" and that page has a two year history of posting meal share schedules and menus.

It is Holocaust Remembrance Day and I would like to post some thoughts. My first thought is that we do not remember anymore. My second thought is that we have never remembered well enough.

People have become quiet, perhaps fearing that remembering 6 million dead entails some other thought. It is a gruesome fact that this entailment has been created in so many minds. That good people stay silent out of fear. That there is this ugly cloud around remembrance itself. This should all be rejected. We should remember what happened because it happened.

Here is what I would like people to know: We never have truly remembered the Holocaust because we never truly knew the Holocaust. The depths of that evil are truly undiscoverable.

People say this insulting thing--that we place Holocaust remembrance above all else. I say we most certainly have not. We do not even know the Holocaust enough to remember it, much less elevate it. And once you learn it, it is a unique event in human history.

When the camps were liberated, there was little mention of Jews specifically. The Nazis were so depraved to so many. The world was an antisemitic place. The initial news reports were of the horrific treatment of POWs. People could not comprehend what had happened to these men in these camps. It broke the human mind.

General Patton vomited when he visited Ohrdruf. Eisenhower wrote that "the visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick." Soldiers doubled over, throwing up. At Dachau, soldiers could smell death and decay five miles before they reached the camp. One liberator recalled seeing soldiers vomiting, crying, experiencing disbelief and rage. Nurses wrote of seeing "human wreckage, living skeletons, diseased, infested with lice and maggots."

That is what happened to the POWs; What happened to the Jews was worse.

And that greater suffering of the Jews? That is another part of this story many of us have never known well enough to properly "remember."

So many in Europe had suffered so horrifically that they resented the Jews for suffering worse. After liberation, Jews were forced into displaced persons camps alongside antisemites and individuals who had harmed Jews during the war--housed together with displaced Germans and Austrians, many of whom had been Nazi collaborators, until Earl Harrison's 1945 report led to separate Jewish camps. Harrison wrote that "we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them."

When Jews returned to their homes after liberation, much of the rest of Europe turned on them. Stealing their clothes and their homes. Beating them to death. Telling them the Germans should have made soap from their bodies. These are things we do not remember because we never knew them in the first place.

Another thing we never knew: the safest place in Europe for European Jews after the war was Germany, where Allied Forces could protect them. These Jewish survivors lived in worse conditions than any other group of survivors. They were not recognized as special. They were recognized as lesser. Their pain was held against them. Their lack of statehood, too. The horror of these conditions led the Americans to eventually pressure the British to open greater immigration gates to British Mandated Palestine. Millions of displaced people; the Jews were treated as the least among them. That is the aftermath of the Holocaust. A history we do not know enough to remember.

We have never truly held this history in our popular imagination. The sardine packing used by the Einsatzgruppen in Lithuania and other Soviet territories; the death camps in Poland. Everyone calls everything else "The Holocaust" these days, but few things are like the Holocaust. Josef Mengele conducted experiments on twins, sewing children together to create conjoined twins. Prisoners were subjected to bone grafting experiments without anesthesia. Mengele injected dye into the eyes of children attempting to change their eye color. Prisoners were deliberately infected with typhus, malaria, and other diseases to test treatments. Limbs were amputated and doctors watched them attempt to heal, or transplanted bones to observe nerve regeneration.

Women were subjected to sterilization experiments. They did the sardine packing—forcing naked people to lie facedown in rows in deep pits, then shooting them, with the next group ordered to lie on top of the bodies and then shot, layer upon layer. They kept a list of every Jew in Europe, including the youngest children, and hunted them all down across the entire continent until 6 million were murdered. They became more and more psychopathic as time went on. Augmenting each other in their lust for Jewish death and suffering.

When you actually learn about the Holocaust, it is a human horror story unlike many others, at least in our direct domain of experience in this Western world. Jews were ignored at best after the Holocaust; at worst, murdered by their neighbors. Formal Holocaust remembrance days weren't established until the late 1970s in the United States. Even then, this word, "Holocaust," was opposed by many survivors. "Holo" means "whole." "Caust" is from the Greek kaustós, meaning "burnt." "To burn in whole."

Many Jews, including survivors, fought against the term; it felt sacrificial. It was only in the late 1980s and 1990s that "Holocaust" remembrance itself became a "thing." Schindler's List was, at the time, revolutionary; yet people treat this all now as if it had been forced upon them. Now, with this history we do not remember and/or malign, we march around the world and say, "Oh, this is like the Holocaust."

Were children hunted down across a continent? Were people injected with disease? Were limbs amputated to watch them heal? Were they packed into "sardines" to be executed—generations upon generations removed from this earth? When one method of mass murder--shooting--proved insufficient for the scale of murder desired--were more "efficient" mechanisms adopted? Are the names of millions still missing because literally no one was left to remember they ever existed at all?

HEY YALL.

USAMERICAN DEMOCRATS SUCCESSFULLY REMOVED EVERY ANTITRANS RIDER FROM EVERY FUNDING BILL

Spread the fucking word because LORD knows democrats fucking suck at spreading it themselves and will fail once again to inform their base

But just in case you’re sitting there going “the Dems aren’t doing anything,” THEY ARE

IT IS JUST SLOW

AND MOSTLY INVISIBLE

BUT THEY ARE