US politics has been pretty fascist lately. The state is filling up concentration camps, engaging in mass state violence against people on the basis of racialized traits, deporting them to random countries without any respect for habeas corpus, exerting state pressure on the free press to censor speech critical of the current administration, and Trump is openly floating the idea of an unconstitutional third term.

Fascism is clearly on the rise, and they’re winning more and more power. None of this is far removed from us in the FOSS community – there are a number of fascists working in FOSS, same as the rest of society. I don’t call them fascists baselessly – someone who speaks out in support of and expresses solidarity with fascists, or who uses fascists dog-whistles or promotes fascist ideology and talking points, or boosts fascist conspiracy theories – well, they’re a fascist.

If one consistently speaks in support of a certain political position and against the opponents of that position then it is correct to identify them with this political position. Facts, as it were, don’t care about feelings, namely the feelings that get hurt when someone is called a fascist. Fascists naturally do not want to be identified as such and will reject the label, but we shouldn’t take their word for it. People should be much more afraid of being called out as fascist than they are afraid of calling someone a fascist. If someone doesn’t want to be called a fascist, they shouldn’t act like one.

It’s in this disturbing political context that I saw an odd post from the Cloudflare blog pop up in my circles this week: Supporting the future of the open web: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy. Based on Ladybird’s sponsorship terms we can assume that these projects received on the order of $100,000 USD from Cloudflare. I find this odd for a few reasons, in particular because one thing that I know these two projects have in common is that they are both run by fascists.

Even at face value this is an unusual pair of projects to fund. I’m all for FOSS projects getting funded, of course, and I won’t complain about a project’s funding on the solitary basis that it’s an odd choice. I will point out that these are odd choices, though, especially Omarchy…

  • Auli@lemmy.caEnglish
    51·
    2 days ago

    Speak out for who else? Who else has been killed that makes international news. And no your daily school shootings do not make international news.

    • Jayjader@jlai.lu
      41·
      22 hours ago

      At the risk of being callous and blunt, the international news has been covering the killing of tens of thousands of Gazans for over a year now (soon to be 2). They have also covered the Ukrainian civilians getting drone struck (striked?) for close to 3 years now. The flash floods in Pakistan a few years ago that literally turned half of the country blue as seen from satellite images because of how much water there was were also all over the news. The Hamas higher ranks getting killed by exploding pagers in civilian areas (with heavy collateral damage) was also all over the news in western countries, at the very least.

      To be clear, I don’t know if the ladybird dev has said anything on any of these issues. I just want to assert that plenty of killings make international news. Charlie Kirk was not the first nor the exception, what was new with him was that he was named, a far-right agitator, and had an existing (para-)social following. All of which cast a poor light, for me, on this being what someone chooses to speak up on.

    • CrocodilloBombardino@piefed.socialEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      This is a silly argument. There are killings that make international news. There are killings that make Swedish news. He doesn’t comment on any of them, only when a far right agitator dies in America is it suddenly important to him.