The reason tme's argue "TMA/TME rehtoric is useless because I could be mistaken for a transfem" is the same reason they transfeminism is Oppression Olympics is the same reason they say "Trans women will use accusations of transmisogyny to dodge accountability" is the same reason they try to leverage every marginalization they believe the trans woman they're arguing against to not have even if they aren't those marginalized identities themselves is the same reason they say discussions of intracommunity transmisogyny are "overly online" and doesn't exist in the real world.
Because it really is just a game to them. Their approach to intercommunity problems is completely informed by identity politics and is just "disc horse" to them. It is a game where whoever is the most marginalized is the one who wins the argument. In this framework, if transmisogyny is truly as bad and pervasive as we say it is then it's basically cheating to them. They see transmisogyny as this magical super oppression that allows you to win all discourse forever.
And their reaction to this is to try and "balance" what to them is an OP weapon in the game of discourse by either trying to discredit transmisogyny or try and claim it for everyone who isn't transfem.
Donald Trump does not acknowledge the ethnic cleansing as a genocide.
Of course the Trump administration denies the Armenian genocide!
(All that Turkish lobby donor money going to project 2025 was a dead giveaway for a start)
As we see Trump’s own little dickwig JD Babyface “Couchfucker” Vanceypants accidentally broke protocol and quickly rushed to appease the denialists in this regard.
As well as their refusal to commemorate the Memorial Day for the victims of the genocide, after Joe Biden’s administration officially recognised it in law!
Next Tuesday (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.
There are six lies that corporations have told since time immemorial, and Nick Hanauer, Joan Walsh and Donald Cohen's new book Corporate Bullsht: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in America* provides an essential taxonomy of this dirty six:
https://thenewpress.com/books/corporate-bullsht
In his review for The American Prospect, David Dayen summarizes how these six lies "offer a civic-minded, reasonable-sounding justification for positions that in fact are motivated entirely by self-interest":
As far back as the slave trade, corporate apologists and mouthpieces have led by asserting that true things are false, and vice-versa. In 1837, John Calhoun asserted that "Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually." George Fitzhugh called enslaved Africans in America "the freest people in the world."
This tactic never went away. Children sent to work in factories are "perfectly happy." Polluted water is "purer than the water that came from the river before we used it." Poor families "don't really exist." Pesticides don't lead to "illness or death." Climate change is "beneficial." Lead "helps guard your health."
II. Markets can solve problems, governments can't
Alan Greenspan made a career out of blithely asserting that markets self-correct. It was only after the world economy imploded in 2008 that he admitted that his doctrine had a "flaw":
No matter how serious a problem is, the market will fix it. In 1973, the US Chamber of Commerce railed against safety regulations, because "safety is good business," and could be left to the market. If unsafe products persist in the market, it's because consumers choose to trade safety off "for a lower price tag" (Chamber spox Laurence Kraus). Racism can't be corrected with anti-discrimination laws. It's only when "the market" realizes that racism is bad for business that it will finally be abolished.
III. Consumers and workers are to blame
In 1946, the National Coal Association blamed rampant deaths and maimings in the country's coal-mines on "carelessness on the part of men." In 2003, the National Restaurant Association sang the same tune, condemning nutritional labels because "there are not good or bad foods. There are good and bad diets." Reagan's interior secretary Donald Hodel counseled personal responsibility to address a thinning ozone layer: "people who don’t stand out in the sun—it doesn’t affect them."
IV. Government cures are always worse than the disease
Lee Iacocca called 1970's Clean Air Act "a threat to the entire American economy and to every person in America." Every labor and consumer protection before and since has been damned as a plague on American jobs and prosperity. The incentive to work can't survive Social Security, welfare or unemployment insurance. Minimum wages kill jobs, etc etc.
V. Helping people only hurts them
Medicare will "destroy private initiative for our aged to protect themselves with insurance" (Republican Senator Milward Simpson, 1965). Covid relief is unfair to people that are currently in the workforce" (Republican Governor Brian Kemp, 2021). Welfare produces "learned helplessness."
VI. Everyone who disagrees with me is a socialist
Grover Cleveland's 2% on top incomes is "communistic warfare against rights of property" (NY Tribune, 1895). "Socialized medicine" will leave "our children and our children’s children [asking] what it once was like in America when men were free" (Reagan, 1961).
Everything is "socialism": anti-child labor laws, Social Security, minimum wages, family and medical leave. Even fascism is socialism! In 1938, the National Association of Manufacturers called labor rights "communism, bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism."
As Dayen says, it's refreshing to see how the right hasn't had an original idea in 150 years, and simply relies on repeating the same nonsense with minor updates. Right wing ideological innovation consists of finding new ways to say, "actually, your boss is right."
The left's great curse is object permanence: the ability to remember things, like the fact that it used to be possible for a worker to support a family of five on a single income, or that the economy once experienced decades of growth with a 90%+ top rate of income tax (other things the left manages to remember: the "intelligence community" are sociopathic monsters, not Trump-slaying heroes).
When the business lobby rails against long-overdue antitrust action against Amazon and Google, object permanence puts it all in perspective. The talking points about this being job-destroying socialism are the same warmed-over nonsense used to defend rail-barons and Rockefeller. "If you don't like it, shop elsewhere," has been the corporate apologist's line since slavery times.
As Dayen says, Corporate Bullshit is a "reference book for conservative debating points, in an attempt to rob them of their rhetorical power." It will be out on Halloween:
https://bookshop.org/a/54985/9781620977514
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
This Is How the World Ends According to Science, January 15, 2026
There’s an 18% chance that global warming exceeds four degrees by 2100 and that’s not a small risk when the stakes are civilization-ending. In this episode of Weathered, host Maiya May talks with civilization collapse researcher Luke Kemp and strategic climate risk expert Laurie Laybourn about why high-end warming scenarios are often dismissed as “doomerism,” even though worst-case planning is standard in most fields. We break down how uncertainty in climate sensitivity and political derailment could push warming higher than expected and how climate shocks can trigger cascading failures across food systems, financial markets, and geopolitics. Understanding the climate endgame isn’t pessimism. It’s risk management.
PBS Terra
“Zero COVID” is one of those Internet microcosms it is easy to be dismissive of because it’s a thing that is pretty much exclusively believed by a tiny group of very online people and has no advocates with real power — but along with that these people are in very firm echo chambers that just constantly reinforce themselves, they are also starting to use it to spread propaganda blaming Biden for the pandemic (because he didn’t extend lockdowns for 4 years which is, again, a thing no politician anywhere did or is proposing) that other ignorant “leftists” are slurping up because they think they have to listen to everyone online who calls themselves a “queer disabled activist.” It’s probably about time we treat it as just as unscientific as the anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown-in-April-2020 people are/were. It might not be as dangerous, but I think it’s being made more dangerous than it needs to be because people aren’t spending more effort debunking it. And like, you clearly aren’t going to convince the hardliners, like with anything, but you can encourage others to recognize the warning signs of it and be more skeptical of — to use a real example I saw on Twitter this month — someone comparing Biden’s COVID policy to Reagan’s total inaction on HIV-AIDS.
Given the (warranted) suspicion given towards the disease denialism found in both Christian Science and Scientology, it can be said that if the claims of the neurodiversity movement were attached to organized religion, they too would be constantly lambasted.
