20-12-2015: retracing some steps

tracks worked on in this vlog:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriclaimed

your constitution is hundreds of years out of date, functionally obsolete and needs a serious rewrite, and you're just going to fall further and further behind until you figure that out.

i could say something ironic about false idols. but, this is more like blood-letting.

i mean, don't let it get as bad as it's gotten with the christians.

it's an over two hundred year old text, and you're still thumping it around like it's a state of the art document. will you be doing this when it's two thousand years old? how long before enough is enough?

don't be that country.

canada's constitution is only 33 years old. it's a modern, comprehensive document - far superior to your moldy old thing.

(deleted post)

jessica
somebody just asked me if that means i think communism was right (the comment was painfully stupid and has been removed).

the constitution is actually so old that it says nothing about communism because it didn't exist yet, and couldn't have existed yet. it was before marx ever wrote anything. it was before the failure of the french revolution. in fact, it was before any kind of industrial revolution in the united states.

this is actually useful in grappling with how irrelevant the document is. we currently live in a post-industrial economy; call it what you will, but it's defined by the unravelling of the socialization of labour. and, that phenomenon suggests that marx was very wrong.

yet, you want to base your society around a document written before the industrial revolution? you want to hold to it without modifications? read it literally?

i think you need to rip it up and start all over again, myself. it's become so out of date that it's an impediment to progress.

John Roy
+jessica It has been changed since the industrial revolution, it can be amended, has been many times before. Tearing it up and starting new wouldn't help much. If we did that then most of what was already on there would return.

deathtokoalas
+John Roy the modifications are minor. you replaced chattel slavery with wage slavery, for example. but, the document is still fundamentally designed for an agrarian society, and an agrarian economy. it can't and won't be able to keep up with changes in the modern world. so long as america holds to the archaic document, it will fall further and further behind.

you have routine yearly crises around trivial governing issues that most countries couldn't even contemplate. it's not an expression of greater democracy, it's just a waste of everybody's time and everybody's resources. it actually fuels mass apathy. you can't get basic agreements signed. you can't participate in international forums as a full member. it's really a noose around your neck. and, it's only a matter of time before the rest of the world gets fed up and relegates you to the status of a failed pariah state.

i'm not sure if he's applying for president or that-barely-used-snl-cast-member-that-nobody-is-aware-of.

i gotta wonder though: is this focus grouped? and is the republican base really that warped? or is this just desperate, aimless flailing?

as a canadian, what i really see here is some kind of weird, post-modernist version of stephen harper.

see, you gave him the benefit of picking a segment where he's saying something that's actually true. in an attempt to "prove she's tough", hillary has become a horrible, barbaric, war monger. her stint as secretary of state really renders her unelectable, in the same way that ignatieff was unelectable from the start in canada. trump is more so, mind you. and, she'll get a little help from history - she's so close to dubya, that he will probably end up taking credit for her catastrophes. but, only if she's forgotten...

she was really amongst the worst foreign policy leaders that the country has ever had. this was predictable, but not to this extent. we all should have known she has going to wave her cock around a little in the republicans' faces. that was predictable. but, the scale of it was not predictable. the consequences of her rather substantial errors are going to take decades to resolve.

it may be the best argument for electing her - so she can fix the mess she created.

again: i'm not suggesting trump is better. i'm suggesting that trump v clinton means we're all fucked. they're both lunatics. they're both war mongers. they're both insane. we're probably looking at an escalation of world war three, either way.

but, this is a trick - he doesn't sound smart here because of the tone of his voice. he sounds smart because he's actually right, for once.

but, the broad swath of you seem pretty stupid for thinking that intelligence is contained within style rather than within substance.

we should really all take a moment to reflect on the candidacy of bernie sanders. i think this is bigger than the current election cycle. people say that about every election cycle, i know. but, i think it's actually true this time.

the united states is in one of those historical pivot points, where it needs to choose a longer term direction. the direction being presented by clinton differs little from the direction being presented by the republicans. and, it is a path towards the conversion of the "perpetual endless wars" of the "war on whatever" towards a serious geopolitical conflict that could only be referred to as a new world war.

i mean, these forces are already in full swing. it's not a question of starting something. it's a question of stopping something.

i'm not exaggerating when i suggest that electing sanders may be the only way to save the country.

but, this is in fact the time of year when the sun is down for days at a time. there is somewhere in canada that will have no light over that period.

www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/15-days-of-darkness-in-november-its-not-going-to-happen/59800/

what if the reason we can't make contact with extra-terrestrials is that we're in some kind of a system that treats us as an infection, and we simply haven't been treated yet?

what if it doesn't even know we exist, yet? what kind of depths would we need to penetrate to set off a reaction?

see, this is why cosmological theories don't impress me. i'm not really looking for a technical argument right now, but all these broadly unjustifiable assumptions just mask the limitlessness of the actual possibilities. nothing we think we understand about the universe makes sense unless we assume it's a closed system. but, i think we have more reasons to think it's open, and then the entire concept of the universe collapses - on the basis of reversing a single, tiny and mostly unrealized but absolutely vital and yet entirely baseless assumption.

this is just a little bit of historical fiction that i was thinking about as i was having a smoke.

i was thinking about something i typed somewhere, about how any kind of serious cold war monument would have to recognize the struggle of the cuban and angolan freedom fighters against the apartheid regime. that's loaded language. but that's also the correct and necessary language - perhaps toned down only by a miniscule degree. the cubans and their communist allies would need to be recognized as being on the correct side of history in that struggle, however complex the situation may have been.

it got me to thinking that you really have to put apartheid in the context of the cold war, and we never do that, here. so, we don't really understand it, because we don't put it in context. at the bottom line of everything else, the new british empire - and remember that south africa was a reasonably important british colony - had to maintain an imperialist friendly regime in the face of russian interests in the region. finding some way to transition power that was acceptable to the british would have meant ensuring that there were no communist-friendly elements, and that was a non-starter for decades. it's not a coincidence that the anc took over at the same time as the collapse of communism, allowing for eventual effective western co-option in the absence of any meaningful russian influence.

so, then how does that lesson apply to israel? well, it would suggest that any effective strategy would have to remove israel's strategic usefulness to the british imperialists. that is at the core of the issue. the americans will only change their policy relating israel when maintaining control of israel is no longer such a pressing geostrategic necessity. this is related to oil. so, the solution is oil independence - or fossil fuel abandonment.

that got me to thinking about the fracking push in the united states....