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.

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.”

The official reason for me getting fired were budget cuts, but I knew that the new department head actually wanted to hand my responsibilities to a buddy of theirs they had brought on board. Despite being there longer at the department than the new head and their buddy, as well as excellent performance reviews I had no chance to keep that job.

After years of giving a platform to climate change denialism, transphobic fearmongering, pearl clutching over too much woke at liberal colleges, both-sideing the efficacy of vaccines and indulging in Covid conspiracy nonsense, the NYT has finally achieved its goal.

For those wondering why Allen would care about praising Trump: Not only was Woody Allen Epstein’s neighbor; he and his “wife/adopted daughter” were “frequent dinner guests” at Epstein’s.

That reads a little bit like victim-blaming, because the worship of billionaires only applies to one segment of the working poor. Another big part of the problem is billionaires corrupting the political system to the point where whoever gets elected immediately gets love-bombed by the richest people in the world who promise them a share of the loot. Convincing people that voting “for the other guy” won’t solve the systemic problems of our political systems is a tremendously difficult job and the billionaires and their bought lackeys know this.

If anyone is interested in how serious Putin’s threats are… The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation states:

France engaged in a slow, but steady build-up of its nuclear arsenal and by 1980, it neared the threshold of what the Soviets considered posing the threat of “unacceptable damage” to the Soviet Union.

Yes, France has reduced its arsenal since the peak of the Cold War, but it is still around the same level as 1980.

Strange how self-declared “”“libertarians”“” like Milei always turn out to loooove mass surveillance once they are in power. /s

The news of the “AI bubble bursting” make me thing of Hunter S. Thompson (as quoted in the movie "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas):

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Well, when did you last conquer two villages, hm? See…!

I remember when Microsoft first attempted to prevent the standardisation of Open Document Format (used by LibreOffice and others) and then bullied its way into getting approval for own OOXML standard. Already back then, supporters of FOSS warned that Microsoft would use the overly complicated OOXML to maintain its stranglehold on users of Office-like software.:

Whenever applicable and possible, standards should build upon previous standardisation efforts and not depend on proprietary, vendor-specific technologies. Albeit, MS-OOXML neglects various standards and uses its own vendor-specific formats instead. This puts a substantial burden on all vendors to fully implement MS-OOXML. It seems questionable how any third party could ever implement them equally well, especially when a standard comes with 6000 pages of specifications without serving its minimalistic purpose.

These people can help.

It is very telling how much science backlash is rooted in the base desire of the rich and powerful to suppress any speech that contradicts them. It never was about (scientific) truth or facts, it was always about the power to impose their will on others and independent science challenges this totalitarian claim to power.

Since the first messenger who told Tigranes that Lucullus was coming had his head cut off for his pains, no one else would tell him anything, and so he sat in ignorance while the fires of war were blazing around him, giving ear only to those who flattered him.

Plutarch, ~ 100 A.D.

Because I could not believe it myself, I went and checked and it seems to be authentic. Link to a digital version of the book (the picture appears on page 30): https://kokusho.nijl.ac.jp/biblio/100357933/1?ln=ja

The art is by Aïda Amer who works for Axios.

It’s quite amazing how these people show their asses on LinkedIn and think it makes them look smart, instead of proving that they completely lost touch with reality. It fits the picture that one the very same day they laid of thousands, Microsoft also send out an invitation to hear them pitch genAI at GamesCom. That’s corpo brain on late stage capitalism.