An update to my post about facebook from yesterday; turns out it's much worse:

transparency.meta.com/policies…

[Do not post} Insults, including those about [...] Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.”

You can see the full diff from last version if you click "Jan 8, 2025" and yeah it's a doozy.

Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day. I couldn't really concentrate on work. It's hard to believe that they published this with a straight face, and harder to believe that the media isn't dunking on them for it.

On the bright side the policy technically lets you go around calling people insane for being straight or cisgender* if anyone is still on there and wants to get banned from that platform in a blaze of glory.

* or indeed simply having a gender and I'm not sure fascists know how to use words right.

Is that the yearly Europe will freeze without Russian gas event?

Most of this pathetic fearmongering, based on the terror of a cold spell in the middle of winter is just fun geopolitical fiction. We can all imagine EU has no gas reserves suddenly, or ended last two winters with 80% capacity just for fun. In this world Ukraine that did not signal their plans for the last two years, apparently just did so to sabotage its backers, the goofy trolls they are. Jamal and Turkstream pipelines had just disappeared, as such installations do, to which this energy "expert" could surly attest. In the meantime LNG technology has been rightfully forgotten. And so if EU wanted to buy Russian gas it cant for the wretched Ukraine forbids it...
Obviously issues like the fact Russia shut down Nordstream before it had it's smoking incident should not concern us. There was not a single decade of gas blackmail of any of these soon frostpunk-turned states. Winter is a brand new concept in this part of Europe, and no one ever considered its strategic implications here, that is before the author of this thin-piece.

But the detachment from reality trophy is won by the claim of marvelous straight up climate denial;

Europe has seen consistently colder temperatures on average since 2016.

Honestly it's hard to even make fun of such utter bullshit. Where does that even come from?

Global mean temperature between 2013 and 2023 was 1.19 to 1.22°C warmer than the pre-industrial level, which makes it the warmest decade on record. European land temperatures have increased even faster over the same period by 2.12 to 2.19°C, depending on the dataset used.

EEA: Global and European temperatures, Published 26 Jun 2024

Reminds me of this piece from Michael Parenti:

Class gets its significance from the process of surplus extraction. The relationship between worker and owner is essentially an exploita­tive one, involving the constant transfer of wealth from those who labor (but do not own) to those who own (but do not labor). This is how some people get richer and richer without working, or with doing only a fraction of the work that enriches them, while others toil hard for an entire lifetime only to end up with little or nothing.

Those who occupy the higher circles of wealth and power are keenly aware of their own interests. While they sometimes seriously differ among themselves on specific issues, they exhibit an impres­sive cohesion when it comes to protecting the existing class system of corporate power, property, privilege, and profit. At the same time, they are careful to discourage public awareness of the class power they wield. They avoid the C-word, especially when used in reference to themselves as in "owning class;' "upper class;' or "moneyed class." And they like it least when the politically active elements of the owning class are called the "ruling class." The ruling class in this country has labored long to leave the impression that it does not exist, does not own the lion's share of just about everything, and does not exercise a vastly disproportionate influence over the affairs of the nation. Such precautions are them­selves symptomatic of an acute awareness of class interests.

Yet ruling class members are far from invisible. Their command positions in the corporate world, their control of international finance and industry, their ownership of the major media, and their influence over state power and the political process are all matters of public record- to some limited degree. While it would seem a sim­ple matter to apply the C-word to those who occupy the highest reaches of the C-world, the dominant class ideology dismisses any such application as a lapse into "conspiracy theory." The C-word is also taboo when applied to the millions who do the work of society for what are usually niggardly wages, the "working class," a term that is dismissed as Marxist jargon. And it is verboten to refer to the "exploiting and exploited classes;' for then one is talk­ing about the very essence of the capitalist system, the accumulation of corporate wealth at the expense of labor.

The C-word is an acceptable term when prefaced with the sooth­ing adjective "middle." Every politician, publicist, and pundit will rhapsodize about the middle class, the object of their heartfelt con­cern. The much admired and much pitied middle class is supposedly inhabited by virtuously self-sufficient people, free from the presumed profligacy of those who inhabit the lower rungs of soci­ety. By including almost everyone, "middle class" serves as a conve­niently amorphous concept that masks the exploitation and inequality of social relations. It is a class label that denies the actu­ality of class power.

The C-word is allowable when applied to one other group, the desperate lot who live on the lowest rung of society, who get the least of everything while being regularly blamed for their own victimiza­tion: the "underclass." References to the presumed deficiencies of underclass people are acceptable because they reinforce the existing social hierarchy and justify the unjust treatment accorded society's most vulnerable elements.

Seizing upon anything but class, leftists today have developed an array of identity groups centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and life-style issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpe­trated against us all. Identity groups tend to emphasize their distinc­tiveness and their separateness from each other, thus fractionalizing the protest movement. To be sure, they have important contributions to make around issues that are particularly salient to them, issues often overlooked by others. But they also should not downplay their common interests, nor overlook the common class enemy they face. The forces that impose class injustice and economic exploitation are the same ones that propagate racism, sexism, militarism, ecological devastation, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like.

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