Meta is successful because people can promote their small and local businesses. Because money can be made from ‘likes’. Because of the algorithm. Because people can get their news inline with their family photos. It’s everything.

Everyone who leaves Meta reduces the value of their advertising just a little bit. If lots of people leave, it will make the company less profitable.

The USA is just clarifying what the rules always were.

Trump likes and wants money?

The timing though, the way all these companies are scrambling to enable bigotry before Trump even takes office, shows that they are now afraid of the consequences of being seen not to discriminate. They believe they cannot continue to do business in Trump’s USA while being seen to stand up in even the smallest way for anyone but cishet white men. The preemptive compliance has set in even faster than we thought it would.

Investigations of Trump reliably conclude just after it becomes impossible for them to have any effect on him. It feels a little deliberate on the part of both Republicans and Democrats.

At the same time, any good they do does not erase or counterbalance the harm. Jimmy Savile, the UK’s worst celebrity paedophile who abused hundreds of children, conspicuously did a lot for charities throughout his career. He said that he knew God would look at all the good he had done and it would make up for the bad things. There was a calculus in which he only had to do more good each time he did bad, and it would cancel it out. It’s a twisted view. Harm is harm and is not changed by any independent “good” act a person does. But apparent goodness can change its significance in the light of the harm that accompanies it.

Savile’s apparent selfless good acts were actually a calculated attempt to win license to do harm, and a psychological coping mechanism to allow him to believe in his own basic goodness before God. Plus the reputation for selfless goodness served as a smokescreen to prevent people seeing clearly what was really going on, and to win the support and protection of powerful people. Seen this way, while the charitable works may have had some helpful effects, these were not genuinely good actions but in large part self-serving and an integral part of the dynamics of this man’s abuse.

I think the same applies to men like Cosby and Gaiman: the overt charity or the overt feminism changes its meaning when you see how it serves them psychologically and reputationally, amd how it may be a functional part of the whole abusive operation.

Matt Bernstein in a recent video (it’s long) discusses men who act as outspoken self-avowed feminists but then abuse their power to treat women terribly. The feminism may be genuine, but it may also be their smokescreen, or a mix of each, and when a man is very loud about being a feminist you have to look carefully to see which is the case. Some are genuine, but you have to ask. Maybe Gaiman was doing the feminist smokescreen, or maybe he’s just so messed up that these two sides of his life - the feminism and the abuse - just didn’t really encounter each other.

Sorry, I meant that in the course of human history it’s not new, though this attitude has always been present in the relatively young history of the USA. I was trying to be optimistic that it can be changed, even if it’s hard to see how right now.

Thing is, we are now seeing where that approach will always lead. The ideology of “you need to fight everyone else for your piece of the pie, and theirs too if you can get it” has created immense suffering in American society. It has only been like this for the relatively short time that the American ideology has been teaching people this. It can be changed, and in my more optimistic moments I’d see we’re seeing early signs of a change even now.

The same foot again.

That was the aim of DEI. Otherwise the usual groups get de facto preferential treatment. It’s not so simple as just “do nothing and everyone gets a fair shot.”

“The term ‘DEI’ has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.”

Isn’t that what it’s supposed to be? It has only become “charged” by being unpopular with the new fascist regime.

He has thrown in his lot with the Party of Personal Responsibility, with its proud tradition of denying responsibility for everything and blaming someone else.

The idiocy of people like RFK Jr. looking at avian flu, polio, measles, whooping cough and COVID, and deciding that vaccines are dangerous so should be banned, is quite incredible. And now he’s in charge of US health policy.

The Supreme Court, who are corrupt and take bribes, ruled that bribes are legal. Also that even if they weren’t, the law doesn’t apply to the President.

Still, it’s good to see there are people there who won’t just go along with anything.

I wonder if that’s why Microsoft’s recent products are, you know, the way they are.

Unfortunately we’re about to elect a Conservative government with the same reactionary social and religious agenda, the same racism, and the same hatred of public services and love of privatization as the Republicans, who will welcome “closer ties” with the USA. I absolutely do not trust them not to sell Canada out at the first opportunity.

Declarations of war have been a bit passé these last few decades. You can bypass a lot of tedious paperwork by calling it a fight against terrorism, a defense of liberty, a peacekeeping mission, or just a special military operation. If Trump’s USA invades us up here in Canada you’ll be told we’re being liberated from the dictatorship of middle-of-the-road electoral politics and an oppressive woke agenda of tolerance. And if we fight back we’ll be an insurgent threat to be neutralised in the cause of freedom. Only when we’re either dead from bullets or lack of healthcare, or wearing the straightjacket of corporatist Christofascism, will we be truly free.

Hey, they’ll fight whomever the Great Leader tells them is the tyrant!

(I believe the tyrant is currently trans people, poor immigrants, independent women and non-assholes.)

Not to mention overdosing on money and ego. That stuff makes a person crazy.