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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: January 6th, 2025

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  • botched gender affirmation surgery that left him with a mangled useless sex organ

    I keep hearing this around here. Is there any actual reason to think it’s true?

    Even if the bit about the surgery is true, it’s a very reductive explanation of issues which clearly aren’t new in his life. He was brought up by far-right parents and his father apparently showed him no love. He has been poisonously insecure all his life, only now he has the power to inflict his psychological troubles on the world. Ever since he got financially lucky in the 1990s, he has had the money to buy influence and pay people to do what he wants, so he has never become equipped to deal with people as equals and has all kinds of issues and insecurities around power. He discovered early that, while he had trouble making friends, he could make an impression on people by being edgy and controversial, and has never managed to move beyond this into a more mature persona.

    I feel like saying “it’s all because of his wonky penis” trivializes how profoundly this man’s life has messed him up, and how many complex factors are at work in his psyche. It also implicitly insults anyone else who doesn’t have “normal” genitalia.


  • A leaked memo from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Research Service division revealed Sunday that the agency has banned some key language from its vocabulary, including the words “climate” and “vulnerable,” as well as the phrase “safe drinking water.”

    Other baffling entries on the memo’s banned language list are “greenhouse gas emissions,” “methane emissions,” “sustainable construction,” “solar energy,” and “geothermal,” as well as “nuclear energy,” “diesel,” “affordable housing,” “prefabricated housing,” “runoff,” “microplastics,” “water pollution,” “soil pollution,” “groundwater pollution,” “sediment remediation,” “water collection,” “water treatment,” “rural water,” and “clean water,” among dozens of others.

    So they’re not allowed to talk about reality, or how to make anything better. And the fascists in charge must know this is what they’re doing, but they don’t care.

    I keep thinking of how the Buddha recognized three poisons of the mind: greed, hatred and ignorance. Right-wing politics is pure poison.