This is it. This is Germany in the 1930s and what you do will be recorded in the history books. Your children and grandchildren will look back and ask what you did. Will you be able to look them in the face?

Fascism thrives on fear. It wilts under scrutiny. Never look away. Never stop fighting. Hold them accountable and make them pay for every cruel thing they do. It’s the only way we get through this. Support this newsletter for just $5 a month or $50 a year and we’ll get through together.

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I haven’t written about the regime’s push for trans genocide lately, and shame on me for that. I know there are “consultants” out there telling Democrats to stay away from trans rights as an issue, and frankly, those consultants can fuck off.

While they’re smugly citing test audiences and polling, Republicans are whipping themselves into a murderous frenzy.

As part of this escalating campaign, the Trump regime has been exploring whether or not it can ban trans people from owning guns. The conceit here is that trans people are “mentally ill” and shouldn’t be allowed to be armed. They’re a danger to the community, you see.

First, that’s garbage because being trans is not a form of mental illness. This is well established, and I am not going to lay out the evidence for that any more than I feel the need to prove fucking gravity exists. I do not debate reality with liars and Nazis. It lends credibility to them, and they deserve nothing but the back of my hand across their face.

Second, claiming the regime wants to take guns away from the mentally ill would sound less like bullshit if headlines like this didn’t exist:

Right. So…fuck off with THAT story.

Each step is right out of the genocide playbook. It’s important to understand that the person who shot Charlie Kirk wasn’t even transgender. He was in a relationship with a transgender woman who had absolutely nothing to do with the murder. She didn’t even know until after and immediately cooperated with the police because she was appalled by the killing.

That doesn’t matter to the right, who continue to sprint down the road to mass murder. Because that IS the intent here. The fascist fucks were never subtle about it. The only thing keeping the press from speaking the truth is their cowardice. Even as the smoke from the mass crematoriums blackens the sky, the New York Fucking Times and Washington Post will find a million excuses not to name the crime for what it is.

This is why it is vital we stand and defend the trans community. As I’ve explained before, it doesn’t matter if you have a personal stake in this or not. I do not know a single trans person in the real world. I don’t care what they do and why would I? It’s none of my fucking business. Do you care about what some rando in Kansas or Maine is doing with their lives? What clothes they wear or what genitalia they have? No. No, you do not. And they don’t give a shit about you, either.

The only reason the right obsesses about trans people is because they’re the perfect group to start the genocide ball rolling. Small, poorly understood, and certainly not rolling in money to mount large-scale legal and media fights.

But the death and horror will not end with the trans community. It never ends with one group. There’s always another that needs to be purged and then another and then another after that.

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The regime is quietly building concentration camps in red states. Do you honestly believe only immigrants are going to fill them? Why do you think Republicans are starting to talk about “institutionalizing” trans people now? Where do you think they’ll be going?

At the same time, the right is already deep into normalizing hatred of the homeless. The rich and powerful have despised them forever. The unhoused represent a visceral reminder of the greed and inhumanity of the wealthy. It’s even worse today. Let’s do some quick math to see why.

There are around 770,000 homeless people in America. To house them all would cost around $11 to $30 billion a year. Let’s settle on the high end: $30 billion.

Now let’s look a the five richest people in the country:

• Elon Musk $428 billion

• Larry Ellison $276 billion

• Mark Zuckerberg $253 billion

• Jeff Bezos $241 billion

• Larry Page $179 billion

That totals up to $1.377 Trillion. With a “T.” There are about 902 billionaires living in the United States with a combined wealth of $5.7 Trillion (still with a “T”). Just those 902 people alone could end homelessness in America with the loose change in their bank accounts. The interest they earn on their money alone wildly exceeds the amount needed to keep children, veterans, the mentally ill, the sick, and the poor off the streets.

They can do the math, too. So every homeless person they see is a reminder of what a filthy piece of shit they, personally, are. And so, they have their puppets in the regime waging war on the very people their policies have put out of their homes and left to rot.

And since we’re working our way up to Final Solutions, why not just kill them all, right? Just ask Brian Kilmeade of Fox News:

Yeah, he feels just awful about it. So much so that three or six months from now, if he even waits that long, Kilmeade will go right back to demanding the homeless be executed for the crime of being homeless.

But, again, it won’t just be the trans community and the homeless. The first time an autistic person hurts someone, they’ll pick up the rallying cry that autistic people are dangerous and should be “institutionalized.” For the protection of society, of course. It’s not their fault that they were injured by vaccines, RFK Jr. will say. Very sad. Tragedy, really. But we have to do what’s best for he public.1

We’ll eventually circle back to targeting Muslims. Very dangerous. Terrorism is a national security threat, don’t you know? Maybe the Chinese when tensions with China reach a breaking point. Black people commit an awful lot of crime, and you know, someone has to pick those crops now that the migrants are gone. Idle hands are the devil’s playthings, and what better way to keep them busy than to put them back into the fields? And weren’t they happier in the fields back before the War of Northern Aggression, anyway?

I know! Crazy! Hysterical rantings of a stupid liberal drunk on Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Except that’s what you said last year, and now the regime is openly talking about wiping out the entire trans community. That’s almost three million people. And they’re “joking” about killing the homeless. And they’re calling the left sick and deranged animals that have to be put down. And they keep building concentration camps. And and and.

It’s all the language and steps towards genocide, and they’re working up the courage to start the killing. Just because they’re planning to start with trans people and you’re not one of them doesn’t mean a fucking thing. You’re on that list. EVERYONE is on the list. Literally no one is safe when the wheels of genocide start to turn.

Even loyal members of the Nazi Republican Party can find themselves in a camp with a tattoo on their arm if they say the wrong thing or express the wrong opinion. Maybe their neighbor informed on them because they were jealous. Maybe their coworker wanted their promotion. It doesn’t matter. Evidence isn’t necessary, just vibes and the need to keep feeding the machine new victims.

But right now, the regime is targeting the trans community. They’re the levees holding back the flood of state violence against the rest of us. We’re already failing the immigrant community, and if we allow the trans community to fall, they WILL come for every group on their extensive list of people to eradicate to “make America white, male, Christian, and heterosexual again.”

Stop the machine now. Before the regime fills the mass graves of Stephen Miller’s dreams.

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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 46 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

ABC just announced that Jimmy Kimmel Live will be suspended “indefinitely” over comments he made on Monday night about the killing of right-wing Christ figure, Charlie Kirk. Kimmel made the apparently fatal suggestion that Kirk’s killer might be among Trump’s MAGA base. “The MAGA Gang is desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel told his audience on Monday. “In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.”

Kimmel’s remarks on his television show were made with his vocal chords, forming sounds we normally refer to as “speech.” The First Amendment is supposed to protect remarks like Kimmel’s, even if people in power consider his words objectionable or even offensive.

Kimmel’s suspension, effective tonight, comes on the heels of the cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” by CBS in July, a move that was widely seen as capitulating to criticism by Donald Trump of Colbert’s show, which frequently features a monologue that makes fun of Trump. The parent company of CBS, Paramount Global, was involved in a merger with Skydance Media that needed the approval of the Federal Communications Commission. CBS had just agreed to settle a spurious defamation suit by Trump for $16 million. Colbert, during his nightly monologue, called the settlement “a big fat bribe.” Exactly three days later, CBS announced the cancellation of Colbert’s show, effective at the end of his current contract in May.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr went on the podcast of right-wing provocateur Benny Johnson this afternoon to denounce Kimmel’s remarks on Monday as “the sickest conduct possible.”

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Carr’s statement was a clear threat to revoke the broadcast licenses of stations that air the Kimmel show.

Podcaster Benny Johnson was one of six arch-conservative “influencers” who were being secretly paid by the Russian state media company RT to produce and distribute video content that was “consistent with” a secret Kremlin program to influence U.S. politics to be more supportive of Russia’s war against Ukraine, according to a Department of Justice federal indictment of the RT employees who had arranged the $10 million in payments to the American “influencers” involved in the scheme, including podcaster Johnson.

Benny Johnson wasn’t indicted for accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Russian front-group to produce propaganda, but Jimmy Kimmel had his show suspended because he decided to exercise his right of free speech in criticizing right-wing Republicans for engaging in hypocrisy over the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Shortly after the cancellation of Colbert’s show was announced, Trump went on Truth Social and posted this threat: “Next up will be an even less talented Jimmy Kimmel, and then, a weak, and very insecure, Jimmy Fallon. The only real question is, who will go first?”

Jimmy Kimmel’s show was first, suspended indefinitely. Jimmy Fallon is under direct threat by Trump and his autocratic FCC.

This is the way Putin runs Russia. Threaten newspapers and broadcasters that they will be shut down unless they take the Kremlin’s line. How is what happened with CBS and ABC any different? Trump forced CBS to pay him $16 million to get the FCC to approve the merger of its parent company with a company run by Trump supporter Larry Ellison’s son, David Ellison, whom his father backed in his establishment of Skydance Media and its merger with Paramount.

In Russia, people like Larry and David Ellison are called oligarchs. Now we have American oligarchs, who like those in Russia enjoy special privileges and support by the regime so long as they play Trump’s game and fill his coffers with pay-offs and political support.

Donald Trump is going after anyone he doesn’t like or is insufficiently supportive of him and his political party. He blackmailed CBS with a spurious lawsuit and threatened to cancel its merger by denying FCC approval. He threatened the broadcast licenses of ABC affiliates that air the Jimmy Kimmel show. He filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and a $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times, threatening to bankrupt both media organizations.

Nobody is safe with this fascist regime in power. Free speech is dead so long as Putin’s best friend is in the White House.

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Talk about an embarrassment of riches! I could start quoting at the very beginning of the 85-page lawsuit Trump filed in Florida yesterday against the New York Times and Penguin Random House Publishers’ book, “Lucky Loser,” by Ross Buettner and Suzanne Craig and two other Times writers and not stop all the way to the lawyers’ signatures. In fact, here’s just one jewel from one of the last pages of the lawsuit: “The value of President Trump’s one-of-a-kind, unprecedented personal brand alone is reasonably estimated to be worth at over $100,000,000,000.”

If you have the same trouble I do with all those zeroes, here’s how much that is: One hundred billion dollars.

Donald Trump is President of the United States, “the most powerful man in the world,” as he might describe himself. According to his own calculations – not Forbes magazine, not the Times, not the Wall Street Journal…himself – he’s worth more than any rich guy on the planet, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison included. Upon reading that Trump had filed the lawsuit, the first question I had was, why bother?

Silly me. It’s not a lawsuit. It’s an 85-page tantrum. Do you want to know how much of a tantrum it is? Trump spends page after page whining and complaining that the Times published an article in September of 2024 titled, “The Star-Making Machine That Created ‘Donald Trump’.” Why, you might ask, is Trump so upset with that particular article? Well, in it, the authors say that Mark Burnett, the producer of “The Apprentice,” the television reality show Trump starred in, “discovered” Donald Trump.

That’s it. As close as I can determine from reading the entire lawsuit, that’s the single word that set Trump off. He spends line after line, paragraph after paragraph, page after page “proving” that he was a really, really big deal long before Burnett came along and offered him millions to go on TV, so how could Burnett have “discovered” him, when he was right there ruling over New York City all along?

As proof of Trump’s genius, here is just one claim in the suit: “President Trump built much of New York City’s famed skyline, owning and operating many of the key New York landmarks.” This, after claiming that the Trump name is “synonymous with worldwide excellence, luxury, and opulence” and “the highest standards of class, quality, and consumer satisfaction.”

How, Trump whines, could the New York Times have written that Donald Trump had to be “discovered” as if he was just some schmuck who showed up for a casting call, when he was famed around the world for building the New York skyline? And how could the Times have reported that Donald Trump was “discovered” and made a star by Mark Burnett when the Times itself, as far back as 1986, “wrote of ‘big time real estate entrepreneurs such as Donald Trump,’ while another newspaper included the phrase ‘the nation’s firmament of big developers—the Donald Trumps.’”

Think about that for a minute. The year 1986 was 39 years ago. How many paralegals or law firm associates did it take to dig up that quote from the Times so Trump’s lawyers could throw it in there to “prove” that the New York Times knew he was a big deal 39 years ago? That’s what Trump uses to prove “actual malice,” that they knew or should have known that Trump was a rock star long before the Times says he was “discovered” by Burnett. Here is how the lawsuit puts it: “Clearly indicating Defendants’ actual malice, the Book and the First Article center on the absurd, fanciful, and false story that President Trump somehow owes his public persona and celebrity status to Burnett and other NBC executives.”

What appears to have driven him over the edge was a quote from the Times article published in 2024: “Mr. Trump had mostly luck to credit for being discovered, at age 57, by Mark Burnett, then the hottest name in the hottest new television genre.”

See that? They used the word “luck,” when as the lawsuit puts it, “NBC and all of the producers are indebted to President Trump for making ‘The Apprentice’ a smash hit in a way that no other celebrity could have accomplished. The Book and the First Article revolve around this false, malicious, and defamatory premise that Burnett and NBC ‘discovered’ and made President Trump, despite the authors’ admission that before ‘The Apprentice,’ President Trump was already charismatic and famous.”

Because of course he was. Trump has sued a newspaper, a publisher, and four writers not for defamation, but for insufficient adulation. All the way through the lawsuit, Trump insistently corrects what he considers the record. He complains about a judge who said Mar a Lago is worth $18 million, when according to Trump, it is “worth 100 times that amount.” Mar a Lago has “ten times the acreage of Palm Beach’s most expensive home.” Even Robin Leach featured the place on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” way back in the 1980’s, yet another reason Mark Burnett could not have “discovered” Donald Trump, because Robin Leach had already done it.

I waded through page after page of this, Trump alternately bragging about how rich he is, what a business genius he is, how successful he was winning the election of 2016 and then winning again in 2020, only to have it “stolen” from him, and winning yet again in 2024, even recounting the moment he came down the “golden escalator” in 2015, the punch line in jokes on late night television for ten years, but here treated like the rolling back of the stone on Calvary Hill.

Then I came to this: “President Trump coined the iconic catchphrase ‘You’re Fired!’”

That sealed the deal for me. How could anyone have written anything less than a pean to Trump’s sheer genius, when he was the first man on earth to tell someone they were fired?

He wants $15 billion for all the damage that has been done to…what, exactly? He’s the president. The Times reported today that Trump and his sons have turned a couple of crypto deals and a license to sell AI chips to the Emirates into a couple billion just in the last month or two. He’s been in office only 9 months. They’re working on converting his $800 million palace in the sky into Air Force One, that he will be taking with him when he leaves office. He’s gold-leafing, at taxpayer’s expense, everything at the White House but the grass on the South Lawn. His two older sons are making so much money there is gold plated snot running from their noses. How much do you figure he’ll make from being President of the United States by January of 2027? A hundred billion? What does the man have to complain about?

He's on track to make himself the wealthiest man in the world, but his delicate ego can’t take it that the New York Times and its writers said that Mark Burnett “discovered” him. Hand that man the crying towel. His makeup is running.

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The day after Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in Utah, I wrote in Slate about how worried I was about what was to come. What I saw in those first few hours after the murder was that “many conservatives are trying to make this into their Reichstag fire: the moment the movement has been waiting for to use as a pretext to suspend democratic rules, crush its opponents, and put itself fully in charge.”

It’s happening.

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There is a massive MAGA crackdown on free speech underway, and of course the hypocrisy is stunning, but so is the velocity and the ferocity. What’s clear to me is that this is going to go far beyond standard “cancel culture” fare where angry internet vigilantes band together to get someone fired for a bad tweet (although that’s happening, too). Instead, we are seeing focused efforts from some of the most influential people in the Trump administration and in his orbit building out a framework to criminalize progressive organizing, chill liberal speech, penalize criticism of conservatives, and crush any media outlets that might report honestly on what’s happening.

The Trump universe is practically publishing its playbook here. The highest-up members of this administration are telling you exactly what they’re planning to do.

At the top of the list is designating liberal groups as domestic terror organizations. “It is a vast domestic terror movement,” Trump’s top policy advisor Stephen Miller said after he and vice president JD Vance took over an episode of the Charlie Kirk show. “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, eliminate and destroy this network and make America safe again for the American people.”

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Vance has singled out George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation as organizations he believes are funding these liberal terrorist groups. They are not — there is no vast network of violent left-wing groups, let alone foundations funding a vast network of violent left-wing groups. There is no evidence that the Kirk shooter was affiliated with any liberal organization (I’m not even sure the claims that his politics are clearly and unequivocally “left-wing” should be taken at face value, but that’s another post). Vance, the vice president of all of America, is out in public saying there is no “unity” with millions of his fellow citizens.

Trump has said he would like to designate Antifa a domestic terror organization. Despite being the scariest right-wing bogeyman, Antifa isn’t an organization at all. It’s an ideology, one adhered to by a smattering of anti-capitalists and anarchists, but on the right it has turned into a catch-all for “protesters we don’t like.” It seems to be expanding now into “people whose politics we don’t like” — that is, people who oppose Trump and the MAGA movement. Anyone who criticizes fascism could ostensibly be branded “antifa” by this administration.

The legal framework for all of this is unclear to put it mildly. But with a Supreme Court squarely in Trump’s pocket and a Democratic Party that is both out of power and entirely feckless when it comes to mounting any kind of resistance, I’m not sure that this administration needs the law on their side in order to do some serious damage. I’m not sure they need the law on their side in order to change the law. They certainly don’t need the law on their side in order to flout it.

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Marco Rubio’s State Department says it is deporting visa-holders who celebrated Kirk’s murder. Attorney General Pam Bondi said that “there’s free speech and then there’s hate speech,” which she seemed to define as any speech criticizing conservatives, and pledged, “we will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” After a massive backlash (conservatives don’t really want hate speech criminalized, because that would pose some big problems for them) she clarified: “Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment. It’s a crime. For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over,” Bondi posted on X. Then, after an Office Depot employee refused to print out fliers for a Kirk vigil, she threatened to bring the full force of government down on anyone who doesn’t behave how she wants. “Businesses cannot discriminate,” she said. “If you want to go and print posters with Charlie’s pictures on them for a vigil, you have to let them do that. We can prosecute you for that.” (Of course, conservatives have been arguing for decades that businesses can discriminate, recently going all the way to the Supreme Court to argue that a baker should be able to discriminate against gay couples in making wedding cakes).

When ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Trump for clarity on Bondi’s comments about hate speech, Trump said, “We’ll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly, it’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart.” He then claimed that ABC had already been forced to pay him $16 million for a form of hate speech (not what happened) and told him, “maybe they’ll go after you.” He also said that he has asked Bondi to look into jailing non-violent protesters who confront him in public.

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Trump is suing the New York Times, saying they defamed him and demanding $16 million. He already took $1.1 billion in funding away from NPR and public broadcasting. He has previously called for the FCC to pull the broadcasting licenses of NBC and ABC, and I have no doubt that those demands will be reupped in the wake of the Kirk murder. House Republicans are attempting to censure Rep. Ilhan Omar and remove her from her committee seats because they don’t like her comments about Kirk’s murder — which were not celebratory, but rather highlighting Republican hypocrisy.

There is an important distinction between the government penalizing speech and facing other consequences for what one says or writes in public. I don’t think the culture of snitching to peoples’ employers about their online conduct is a good one, and I think firing people for bad tweets is often an error. This is nuanced, of course. Some social media posts suggest that a person cannot do their job fairly, or that they will discriminate; some create liabilities for an employer. There isn’t a hard-and-fast rule at play when it comes to professional consequences for social media behavior. But there is a hard-and-fast rule at play when it comes to the government responding to speech and protest, and that is: The government doesn’t get to punish speech and protest.

This is the rule by which the Trump administration is refusing to abide. Deporting people for their comments is the government punishing speech. Bringing RICO suits against liberal organizations is the government punishing speech.

This has a much broader chilling effect. Authoritarian governments don’t need to punish every single comment they dislike; they only need to create a culture of surveillance and make an example of a few in order to keep the many in line. I can feel it already, this sense — especially among journalists but I imagine others as well — that one must be extra careful about how one talks about this administration, that maybe it’s just not worth writing or saying certain things. In the wake of Kirk’s murder, some conservative activists made a website where users can submit social media comments about Kirk that they believe deserve punishment. This is the kind of snitch culture that is often cultivated in authoritarian regimes; it’s the making of a modern Stasi. It creates a climate in which people are scared to say what they think, even to their friends and relatives; it’s a climate in which there is only one acceptable ideology, and where The Truth comes from the regime rather than from reality.

The aim here is to use the full force of government to destroy any opposition to the MAGA regime. It is to make progressive organizing dangerous. It is to make liberal criticisms of these very authoritarian actions totally verboten.

I have to believe that they will not succeed — that too many Americans will find this unacceptable, that our courts will quash these efforts. Will this regime listen to the courts, though? And how long will it take before the public backlash is large enough to matter?

We are walking into an extremely dark era.

xx Jill

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A trolley problem, some personal stuff, a bit of Islamic jurisprudence, and then the Honda. 

1)  Trolley time.  Let’s start with the trolley problem.  People proposing trolley problems often do them in two parts.  First, there’s the anodyne one with the easy answer:

A trolley is rushing down the tracks towards a group of five people.  If it hits them, they will die.  If you pull a switch, you can divert the trolley onto a different track.  There is one person on that track, and they will die instead of the five.  Do you pull the switch?



And of course you answer “yes” and then you get sucker-punched with something like this:

Five people are dying of organ failure, from different organs.  If they get transplants they will live out their normal lives,  Without the transplants, they will die.  In front of you is a healthy person who has the organs that they need.  If you kill the healthy person you will save the five.  Do you kill them?



Okay so on one hand trolley problems can be a legitimate tool for exploring values and morality.  There’s a lot of interesting stuff you can unpack with them. But on the other hand these little bait-and-switches can be, frankly, very irritating.  They’re set up to put our rationality at war with our intuitions, emotions, and habits of thought. 

Yes, that can sometimes be a useful or at least informative exercise.  But for most of us, the likely response is going to be less “Hmm, maybe deontological ethics are more appropriate here than a simple utilitarian analysis” and more “Oh, ffs.  Now you’re just being ridiculous.”



We’ll return to this shortly.  First, a short digression on living green.


2)  La Vie Vert.  Mrs. Muir and I live pretty green.  That’s a bit of a surprise to me when I think about it, but that’s just how things worked out.

We live in a small town in Germany.  We have a car, but we don’t drive a lot — public transport is a thing, and so are bicycle paths.  Mrs. Muir rides an e-bike to work when the weather is fine.  Our two older boys take the train home from university.

We have solar panels on the roof of the garage.  Several rainwater tanks.  A large backyard garden where we grow a lot of our own vegetables. We’ve got a compost pile, which I am weirdly proud of.  Probably more relevant, we don’t fly off anywhere for vacation.

We sort of fell into this lifestyle, and we’re not doctrinaire about it.  We certainly don’t proselytize, or even much discuss it.  But yeah climate change is a thing and we’re pretty aware of that.  We have four kids, aged high school through college.  We think a lot about what kind of world they’ll inherit.  So, you know, you do what you can.

(At this point someone starts prepping a comment about how riding a bike to work is meaningless, because the real cause of climate change is big corporations and government policy and putting solar panels on the garage is just a displacement activity that doesn’t address the real problems.  To which I reply,  (1)  every bit helps, and (2) we are *also* politically active, details not relevant to this blog post, and (3) the personal is political.  Of which more anon.

Right, so… green-ish by German standards, which means by US standards I’m basically Swamp Thing.


[he’s really green]

Okay, now a brief note on cars.

3)  Cars.  Cars are not great for the planet.  There’s a lot of other stuff that’s not great for the planet, but cars are actually right up there: personal automobiles account for about 11% of global CO2 emissions.  Planes get a lot of attention, but passenger cars collectively?  contribute more than three times as much as aviation.  Because the world has a lot of passenger cars.

We’ve all seen the graphics, right?


Passenger cars are just a mass of negative externalities.  The CO2 is the biggest one, but there are a bunch of others — parking, traffic, accidents, other sorts of emissions, environmental damage, you name it.

So from this we can derive some… not rules, but let’s say guidelines.  Passenger cars are sometimes a necessity, obviously.  That’s especially true if you live in the United States, which has spent most of the last 100 years designing itself to be unlivable without a car.  But you should use them responsibly, and as little as possible.  Walk, bike, or take public transportation when you can, and don’t use a passenger car for silly stuff and whim.  That’s all objectively reasonable, yes?

4)  When the Almighty gives you side-eye.  Islamic jurisprudence has a useful concept:  “makruh”.  (Makruh tanzihan if you’re being pedantic.)   Actions that are makruh are not haram — forbidden, sinful — but they are discouraged.  You won’t be punished, religiously or legally for doing something that’s makruh.  But you just… shouldn’t. 

One classic example of makruh is coming to mosque when you smell bad, either because you haven’t bathed or because you’ve eaten garlic or onions or some such.  You’re not going to Hell for that.  It isn’t a sin or a crime.  But you’re being a jerk and you shouldn’t do it.  In the opposite direction, another classic example of makruh is wasting water while cleaning yourself.  A thirty minute firehose shower might be your preferred way to unwind, but water is precious and you’re wasting it on gross self-indulgence.  You shouldn’t do that.  Basically, makruh is Not Cool, Bro.

IANA Christian ethicist, but I don’t think Christian ethics have a close analogue.  There’s venial sin, but that’s not really the same.  Venial sin is still sin; it’s just not bad enough, by itself, to damn you.  Makruh isn’t a sin and you won’t be punished for it.  But you have to imagine God looking at you and shaking Their head and being like… really, my child?  Really?

I like makruh a lot, because I think it covers ground that Christian and Christian-derived ethical systems kinda miss.  To give a particular example, I think the stuff I mentioned a couple of paragraphs above — using passenger cars unnecessarily, excessively, or for silly stuff or whimsy — would come pretty squarely under makruh.  It’s not evil, nor is it something you should be punished for.  But you just… shouldn’t.

That said…

5)  The Gearhead Gene.  So I am neither handy, nor mechanical, nor particularly interested in engines or machines.  But this was not inevitable.  My grandfather was an automobile mechanic.  My uncle was a mechanical engineer and an inveterate tinkerer.  He was the kind of guy whose basement and garage were workshops, and who was constantly messing with his car.  He had several patents.  All were for mechanical gizmos intended to be used in, on, or adjacent to internal combustion engines.

And sometimes these things skip a generation.  Our youngest son, who I’ll call Jack, got the Loves Things That Go gene. 

 

When he was small, Jack would stop and stare at interesting vehicles and machinery.  Bulldozers, backhoes?  Cherry pickers?  *Fire trucks*?  Utter fascination.  Okay, that’s pretty common for little kids.  But Jack never grew out of it.  Quite the opposite!  By the time he was ten, Jack had encyclopedic knowledge of a wide range of machinery, from farm tractors to airplanes.  Jack could talk for hours about airplanes.  

And when he hit his teen years, he got into cars.  Rally cars, muscle cars, differentials, gear ratios, whatever.  If it was connected to cars, especially to how cars work, it was devoured and digested.  A little while back I innocently asked whether he thought front- or rear-wheel drive was better for a family car.  I got a twenty-minute answer, and it was basically a fast dense text-only PowerPoint presentation.  Jack had read and thought deeply on this topic, and his thoughts were organized.

Okay, so now Jack is in his late teens.  And he has just taken several years of savings, money from allowances and odd jobs, and he has bought a car.  Specifically, a 1989 two-door hatchback Honda Civic.


[Behold.]

6.  Wait, what?  

I know.  But here’s how it went down.  Jack spent hours and hours researching what the best cars were that might be in his price range.  “Best” here meant a bunch of things, but in particular reliability, simplicity, and ease of repair.  He wanted a car he could work on.  This nudged him towards an older car, because more recent models are more likely to be opaque or hostile to an amateur mechanic.  And apparently the ’89 Honda Civic is well-nigh legendary for being rugged, reliable, low-maintenance, forgiving, and both cheap and easy to maintain and repair.

Furthermore, this particular Honda was what they call a “barn find” — meaning, a car that has been sitting in a barn (or wherever) for years and years, because reasons.  Maybe the owner got too old to drive, but lived on for many years anyway.  Maybe it was in legal limbo for years because of a contested divorce or disputed inheritance.  Maybe someone just forgot about it.  These things happen.  Whatever the reason, despite being older than Amazon, Taylor Swift, Zohran Mamdani, Linux,  Photoshop, Bagel Bites, Home Alone, Friends, the Lion King, and the independent nations of Croatia, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine, this car had less than 100,000 km (60,000 miles) on it.

So we drove for over an hour to a used car lot, which was run by — I am not making this up — a plump, sweaty guy in a sports coat with three days of stubble and hair implants.  And then I spent two hours pacing around the lot listening to podcasts while Jack examined every square centimeter of that car, and then got on a series of intense video calls with his car-focused buddies to debate pros and cons.  I would sometimes catch odd words and phrases like “cylinder head”, “torque”, or “after-market carburetor” but then I would just pop the earbuds back in and take another lap around the lot.  There are times in life when my presence is a value-add, and this was not one.

And in the end, Jack went and haggled with Sports Coat Guy.  And got him to knock a couple of hundred euros off the price, because the after-market carburetor was putting too much torque on the cylinder heads, which might reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.  Or something.  That stuff just skipped a generation, okay?  I have other talents.

So now he has this car.

7.  The Plan.  Jack’s plan is simple.  Step one is, fix up the car.  It’s in working order — this is Germany, there are rules, you can’t sell a car that hasn’t passed inspection — but he wants it to be in excellent working order.  This has involved more long conferences with his car buddies.  Also, weirdly shaped packages have started showing up on our front porch.

Me:  So… what is that?
Jack:  It’s a tachometer!  
Me:  You found a tachometer that will fit?
Jack:  Oh, that’s easy.  You just go to EuropaCentralHyperMegaAutoPartsBay.com.  You can connect with people selling over thirteen billion distinct parts for a hundred and forty thousand different makes and model of car, going back to 1883.  They don’t do paint, though.
Me:  Huh.  When I was your age, we just had… junk yards, I guess?
Jack:  [silence that mixes incomprehension with pity]
Me:  Well okay, so… it didn’t have a tachometer… but you’re going to give it one?
Jack:  Yup!
Me:  (knowing it’s a mistake, but can’t stop myself)  Why do you want to add an tachometer?
Jack:  Well you see, with an tachometer you can see visually when the RPMs are departing from the zones specified in the manual.  Obviously even in the absence of an tachometer you can still hear that, and you just shift gears or, perhaps, adjust the choke.  But that just gives a crude approximation.  Now an analog tachometer, which this is, is accurate to within about 500 RPM.  You get that variance because there’s a magnetic coil…

[two minutes of, basically, white noise]

Jack: …pop the clutch, thereby reversing the polarity of the neutron flow.  So, really, you should have a tachometer.
Me:  That’s… that’s great, son.  Good luck with that.

So step one is fix up the car.  Step two is, road trip.







[road trip]

Jack has another interest, and that’s hiking.  Specifically, minimalist hiking, where you just take off without much gear.  Jack isn’t obsessive about it — he’ll carry the basics, a sleeping bag and a lighter, a water bottle and a knife — but he likes being able to throw stuff together in a few minutes and literally head for the hills.  The problem is, he’s mostly hiked out the (fairly modest) trails around our small corner of central Germany.  So the plan is — once he’s worked a bit more and saved up enough money —  to take off in the Honda for some serious hiking. 

He’s already poring over maps.  The Camino de Santiago?  The Seven Hanging Valleys?  The Highland Way?  Maybe some Alps?  So many possibilities!  Throw a bag in the car and hit the road, Jack.

[the mountains are calling and I must go]

8.  And back to the trolley.  Okay, so how do I feel about this?

Objectively, as a green-ish person, I should feel mild disapproval.  Passenger cars aren’t great, right?  One young man using a passenger car to drive thousands of kilometers around Europe, just so he can walk up and down some mountains, is objectively wasteful.  The personal is political, right?  It’s not a sin or a crime, but it’s probably makruh.  This is at best a self-indulgent luxury, and Jack shouldn’t be doing this.  

Okay, so I can recognize this intellectually.  But I absolutely don’t feel it.  What I feel is not disapproval, but a mixture of amusement, love and pride.  And when I probe my feelings, it feels like someone is trying to force me into one of those gotcha trolley problems.  I mean, objectively  you should kill that one dude to save five, right?  Right?

To be clear, I’m not looking for either criticism or validation of how I feel here.  (Ha ha, looking for validation online.  Who would ever do that.)  No, this is more… thinking out loud.  That trolley-problem gap between objective analysis and gut feeling is darn interesting.  I don’t know if I have anything useful to add to the conversation — there are literally people who are devoting their careers to this stuff —  but these things always get more interesting when they’re happening to our own wonderful selves, in real time.

And that’s all.

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Once upon a time, I was a hardcore gamer. I know, shocker. A white male Gen Xer into video games? Who has ever heard of such a thing? I was SUCH a gamer that I worked at EB Games, which then became GameStop. I was a manager for several years and, honestly, I loved it. I loved being around video games all day.

I stopped playing heavily when I became a stay-at-home dad, which seems counterintuitive. You’d think being at home would give me MORE time to play. Well, yes and no. I was home all day and COULD play as much as I wanted, but that came at the expense of ignoring Jordan, the newborn infant. Which, to my eternal shame, I did for a short time. At three months, babies don’t do much but sleep, eat, and poop so…I played. A lot. Specifically, World of Warcraft and Halo.

But after a few months, I realized that I was being a really shitty parent and made the extremely difficult decision to stop playing video games. Online video games, at least. Single-player games could be played in small clips, paused and saved whenever. It was online gaming that had really become a time vampire. It was unbelievably difficult to put down, and if I had been ten years younger, in my twenties, I might not have had the maturity to do it. Later, I watched more than one younger parent fail that same struggle.

I’m explaining this because when the kids were older, I started to play online again, and it was…different. Maybe 12 years had passed, and what had been a toxic environment was now radioactive.

I was in that first wave of people to play console games online. Computer gaming was a little different. At the time, those players skewed a bit older (gaming rigs were expensive), but console gaming was for anyone. So screaming adults and kids mixed it up and it was…eh. Not a lot of mature conversation to be had.

But when I went back a decade or so later? Jesus fucking Christ, it was unhinged. Almost every time I turned on chat, someone was screaming racial slurs and misogyny. Nonstop. Sometimes it was a kid, sometimes it was an adult. It was pervasive.

After a while, I got bored and stopped turning on the audio, which made it hard to play a team game. And so I drifted away from online gaming. Again. It was a lot less difficult the second time.1

Why am I telling you all of this other than to give you some insight into my life as a stay-at-home parent? Well, to give you some frame of reference when I tell you that gaming culture does not, under any circumstances, produce leftists.

• It does not produce left-leaning moderates

• It does not produce strident socialists

• It does not produce rabid Marxists

• It does not produce hardcore communists

• It does not produce class warriors intent on toppling global capitalism

• It absolutely does not, in any fucking reality, produce homicidal trans activist leftists who hunt down and shoot Nazis

Because that is quite literally what Republicans are trying to sell the public, and I am telling you that is a fucking lie.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox (R-Magic Underwear) has been working the cameras nonstop to get this narrative out there and the fucking legacy press has been more than obliging:

“Robinson has not been cooperating with investigators, but the people closest to him have been working with police, Cox said. So far, Robinson’s friends have painted a picture of a young person radicalized in the dark corners of the internet, according to the governor.

“Clearly, there was a lot of gaming going on, friends that have confirmed that there was kind of that deep, dark internet, Reddit culture and these other dark places of the internet where this person was going deep,” Cox said.”

If you were to ask every reporter covering this story to name a single hardcore lefty connected to gaming culture or Reddit or online forums in some way, they would give you a blank stare and drool. But just about every single far-right killer has been linked to neo-Nazi forums or incel chatrooms or some other nasty “deep, dark internet” crap. It’s par for the course.

Let’s be perfectly fucking clear here. I am not saying video games are to blame. That’s also a pernicious lie for imbeciles, and I’ve been having THAT argument with “adults” who should fucking know better since I was like, I dunno, ten years old?

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

Lil' Ogre was adorable!

Video games do not make people into homicidal assholes. Here’s some actual data to back that up:

If video games or online gaming culture made people into homicidal lunatics, Japan and South Korea would be drowning in mass murders. But they’re not. Why? A lot of it has to do with our gun culture. A lot MORE of it has to do with our white nationalism problem.

It’s really important to understand that white nationalists have deliberately made online gaming MORE toxic. It was already bad, but they inject as much poison as they can. Why? So they can recruit. Neo-Nazis have been using video games as recruitment for quite literally decades:

Games Elevate Hate to Next Level

Hate groups are increasingly using racist and anti-Semitic computer games to recruit young people, the Anti-Defamation League charged in a report released Tuesday.

Ethnic Cleansing, Shoot the Blacks and Concentration Camp Rat Hunt were some of the titles studied by the group. The objective of these first-person shooters are predictably similar -- to kill as many non-whites, Jews and everyone else they hate as possible.

The proliferation of so-called "white power games," which can be bought or downloaded online, is part of a larger strategy by extremists to recruit younger members, said Abraham Foxman, the national director of the ADL.

That was 2002. Fucking 23 YEARS ago. You know what article has never once been written?

Marxists Elevate Class Warfare Through ‘Call of Duty’

or

‘SimCity’ Champions Socialism, Parents Worried

or

Is The Zombie Apocalypse in ‘The Last of Us’ A Secret Communist Recruitment Tool?

Young white men do not go deep into gaming culture and fall down the rabbit hole into the deep, dark, Reddit corners of the internet and come out screaming for universal healthcare and equal rights for the LGBTQ community.

That. Does. Not. Fucking. Happen.

When young white men go down that rabbit hole, they either laugh it off and go on with their lives or they are warped into rabid, violent right-wing hatemongers.

I know this. The FBI knows this. The fucking legacy press goddamn well knows this. They KNOW it because they’ve written that story so many fucking times, it’s practically a template on their computers. Along with, “Nation mourns dead schoolchildren but Republicans refuse to act2 Washington/Congress/both parties paralyzed by infighting.”

But that’s not the narrative they want because, like I explained yesterday, if they tell the truth about who Kirk’s killer is and why he did it, they would have to talk about who the American right REALLY is. And they would rather put the lives of hundreds of thousands of trans people at risk. They would rather enable a fascist regime to demonize “the left” than admit the American right is a violent death cult. They would rather lie and lie and fucking lie to the public rather than admit their role in bringing America to the brink of disaster.

After all, as long as there’s someone else to blame, trans people, antifa, immigrants, “radical loony leftists,” the press can keep making money and pretending they’re not part of the genocide machine they set in motion.

But they can play make-believe all they want. When the regime falls, and it will, they are going to fall with it. Nazi propagandists were held accountable. I don’t see any reason not to do the same here. These rat fucks are going to get trans people killed simply to protect the martyrdom of a Nazi weasel piece of shit like Charlie Kirk? Fuck that and fuck them.

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