Mastodawn

🦇Jennie🏳️‍🌈Apr 20, 2024

@cstross that'll go down with hard right wing funding and propaganda: pretty much everybody supported trans rights until 10 years ago. Now look at it.

Rachel Greenham Apr 20, 2024

@cstross the attack on trans healthcare in this country is part of this. it's the same fight, with the same enemy, over bodily autonomy, using us as the wedge to, for instance, break the principle of Gillick competency.

@StrangeNoises Yes, and the Cass report contains a buried landmine—that it applies to under-25s, not just "children"—that makes it clear that they're aiming for total elimination, not the usual protect-the-kids (or rather control-our-chattels) rhetoric.

Moz Apr 20, 2024

@cstross isn't this normal for the US though? Similar groups are responsible for a lot of anti-gay laws and actions around the world already, and there's a long tradition of "US aid must never go near reproductive healthcare" specifically because of the antiabortion bullshit. I'm not sure whether the refusal to allow aid to be used against AIDS was the Reagan "death sentence for gays", anti-reproductive-healthcare or some foul combination.

@moz Yep, this is normal for meddling US evangelicals trying to export their misogynistic crap overseas. What's less normal is that they've found receptive ears in UK government and a supine right-wing media environment that boosts their messaging.

Scary Pumpkin Lantern 🎃 Apr 20, 2024

@cstross They‘re over here in Germany as well. Probably flooding all of Europe rn.

It’s like the clogged toilet in the US finally burst and their crap is drifting over because no one took care of it.

Dave Irving Apr 20, 2024

@orangelantern @cstross
We have them in Australia as well.

Sevoris Apr 20, 2024

@orangelantern @cstross considering how these people have been documented leveraging money from wealthy adherents and supporters everywhere else, Europe is exactly zero beyond reproach… it‘s just not commented on or documented as much…

Felix Frank Apr 20, 2024

@orangelantern @cstross wait you are blaming the US for the shit that’s happening here?

That seems rather delusional.

Steffen Christensen Apr 20, 2024

@cstross The internationalization of right-wing agendas are a growing challenge to independent democracies.

Paul Squires Apr 20, 2024

@cstross this is, perhaps, where the weirdness of our political / electoral processes may help. Without massive popular support this sort of thing is really difficult to drive through, and even if it is, it’s easily reversed.

Nini Apr 20, 2024

@cstross From America via Russia I'm sure, seems to be the case more and more often with these types.

Jamie Knight Apr 20, 2024

@cstross They’ll chip away at this for decades. Conservatives have been playing the long game since Nixon, Reagan and Thatcher.

Weekend Editor Apr 20, 2024

Probably I have a parochial American viewpoint, but it continually surprises me how much fascism revenant and its variations are a world-wide phenomenon.

@weekend_editor It shouldn't be surprising when you consider the prehistory of the fascist worldview is embedded in stuff that got churned up in Europe during the Thirty Years' War and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (and before that, the Reformation, and before that, early Christian theology). Fascism fills the power vacuum left by the retreat of monarchism in capitalist-imperialist systems, and it serves the Money well.

Weekend Editor Apr 20, 2024

Agreed the roots are deep, and the resurgence fills a need felt by authoritarian followers (e.g., consider Bob Altemeyer's absolutely masterful poli sci book, _The Authoritarians_).

After all, Genghis Khan, Amir Timur (Tamburlaine the Great), arguably Julius Caesar and some of the Tokugawa shoguns... they all came from somewhere.

It bewilders me why it keeps coming BACK. Some decades ago, stories from a Chilean friend who grew up under Pinochet were deeply confusing. Now I find my neighbors confusing, for similar reasons.

You may be onto something with the antagonism of democracy and the combination of imperialism and unregulated capitalism. Concentrated money wants concentrated power.

Surely there's some history book I'm missing?

@weekend_editor I thinkthe key mistake was in associating the adversary in the second world war too closely with Germany and specifically Nazism, rather than the mindset (which also infused Franco's Spain, Stalin's USSR, and others). Fascism tends towards stripped-down monarchism, too, and Putin's attempts to rebuild the Russian empire accelerated the resurgence.

But worst of all: folks who were adults in 1945 are all dying or dead now. Nobody remembers at first hand any more.

Weekend Editor Apr 20, 2024

I thought something similar during the financial crisis of 2007-2008.

Republican attempts to cut spending, particularly the social programs they hate, would have been anti-stimulus.

Adults who understood the Depression were gone, so we attempted to repeat their mistakes.

@weekend_editor Their UK counterparts succeeded in getting austerity policies into effect in the UK. Then they doubled down on it with Brexit. The results have been ghastly—14 years in which we've gone backwards by about 28 years' of growth.

Kenny Kravitz Apr 20, 2024

@cstross Part of me says let them come and waste their money, but because culture war is the only thing the Tories have left it's only a matter of time until the Tory right gets behind it.

TopKnot Apr 20, 2024

Question:
Will the UK break away from their current government and adopt the #American #Evangelic #Theocracy

Kind of like a reversal of the American Revolution 😜

#Atheist

Oggie Apr 20, 2024

@cstross As much as I hope it flounders and dies, I am still looking at the fact that we had about 75-80% approval, and now that it's illegal in some places it's down to maybe 65%.