I choose to believe that Scott Adams is in hell and it is just an endless expanse of office backrooms where no one, not a single soul, is around to care about your Takes and Observations

God but that new angle is desperately needed. There’s still this pervading feeling that if you point out that they’re being fash it’ll be the gotcha that wakes up the duped supporters when, like: the fascism is the feature! They know! We’ve lost the consensus that fascism is a priori bad!

I bang this drum a lot but: Donald Trump is not a fascist and danger to the world because he’s Adolf Hitler. He’s a fascist and danger to the world because he’s Donald Trump. It’s reasonable to find parallels with the two, but contingency is also important and doesn’t take away from the main point!

I’m all for seeing parallels to historical fascism but modern fascism doesn’t need to follow its antecedents 1:1 to be fascist. Else you get asinine semantic games, i.e. when border camps were labelled “concentration camps” and some tied themselves in knots to show how they’re not exactly Dachau.

That responsibility *should be* primarily directed at protecting the vulnerable from the comparatively powerful — which could be Musk but could also be the arsehole with pictures of random women and a ready prompt for Grok. I know that’s not how the law or regulation tend to work. But they should.

What really pisses me off about “free speech absolutists” (ugh) is that there is not and has never been an unfettered right to say or publish whatever the fuck you want. You can argue the boundaries of that, that’s totally legitimate, but yes a functional society has a responsibility here.

Man with access to actual centuries of evidence of habitual US military atrocities, including in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam: hmm yes you see these were unavoidable and also Abu Ghraib just kinda did that.

(And in fact gaining ground; it’s notable that more progressive West German outlets often looked to the UK as an example of laudable acceptance when it came to trans issues!)

I’ve got a chapter on West German press discourses on transness coming (Soon™) in the collection I’ve edited with @historyned.bsky.social and @sarahfren.bsky.social but suffice to say it remains galling that the reaction I write about is still so prevalent.

Secondly: this came during significant feminist headway: women being able to work without make permission, able to open bank accounts, and so on. For BILD et al, who wouldn’t acknowledge trans identity, trans men were another example of women encroaching on the last bastions of masculine privilege.

I found two things deeply fascinating about that little episode. Firstly, the inversion of the “expected” panic from a 21st century perspective, where the most visible anti-trans forces are railed against trans women.

Hey Parker, good to see you back!

Because if you don’t go full-throatedly into battle for Renee Good — one woman the entire apparatus of the government is attempting to destroy having already killed her, and for whom you have clear and obvious evidence of what they are doing — then what fucking use are you.

People claim that Democrats can’t make any big interventions against Trump because they have no power. Okay, so here’s a singular case. An agent of the federal government murdered a woman in broad daylight and the president is openly lying about her. Will you let that stand?

Do you think that Renee Good’s wife, having had her love wrenched violently from her, should live with the stigma of being married to a “terrorist”? Should her children, having lost their mother, have to navigate that?