make america great again!

http://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.ca/2016/11/i-crashed-on-first-listen-through-but-i.html

re: the fake news. not the norm macdonald fake news, the facebook stuff.

it was late 2013 that i just got fed up and unplugged.

so, i wasn't paying attention to facebook over the election. i haven't had a feed to check in around three years.

feb 25, 2015

this somewhat ironically explains why i discarded social media and went back to traditional media.

the cat pictures were admittedly bad. the memes were worse. but what really permanently turned me off was the lack of filters, combined with a disturbing level of mass ignorance.

i was hooked up to a number of "libertarian" type political movements, most leaning towards the socialist brand of libertarianism (anarchism). occupy, idle no more, groups against tar sands development and other protest groups with similar purposes that organized large protests and generated substantial interest.

i'd guess that roughly 75% of the articles that i'd read that had gone "viral" within that political spectrum were absolute nonsense. the stuff on gmos was particularly illiterate. and, it would just get shared by dumb hippie after dumb hippie after dumb hippie. it's the perfect example of how lies can become truth if they're repeated often enough - which in this case means if they're shared over enough feeds.

i reacted, of course. you send out crap in your feed, i'm going to correct you. but, what it lead to was a lot of interpersonal tension, accusations that i wasn't on "their side" and just general close-mindedness to criticism. the meme was authoritarian truth; how dare i challenge it with my puny citations!

what i learned was that social media isn't a replacement for anything - it's merely an evolution of the mob mentality. it reminded me of how important good journalism really is, and why it can't be tossed aside as a relic of the past.

i think that free-thinking people ought to be very cautious of how social media might shape social movements in the future, mostly for the worst. it really pushes a conformist mob mentality, with little interest in fact checking.

i think we can probably blame the anti-vaccine campaign on social media.

i fear it's just the beginning.

j reacts to the possibility of toll booths in canada

you might expect me to be opposed to toll booths, and i am. but not really.

"isn't that why we pay taxes?"

well, maybe that's what you'd like your tax money to be spent on. but you're being a little presumptuous. not everybody that uses the roads pays taxes, and not everybody that pays taxes uses the roads.

reality check: while i'm not currently paying taxes (i get way more back in rebates than i pay), i have paid taxes in the past. i don't even have a driver's license. and, i think this is becoming a lot more common with younger people, especially younger people in the cities.

if i were to stand up and say "i pay taxes. shouldn't i get on the bus and the subway and the light rail for free? i mean, that's why i pay taxes, isn't it?", i'd likely get eye rolls. but, it is fundamentally the same argument. i use public transportation and am expected to pay for it. i'm also expected to subsidize highways that i don't use. where's the reciprocity in this?

i think a just solution can happen in one of two ways:

1) we neither have toll booths on highways nor do we have toll booths on subways or buses or light rail.
2) we have toll booths on highways, just like we have toll booths on subways and buses and light rail.

i prefer the first option. but, my opposition to the second is not going to be so high - not so long as i have to pay to get on the bus.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/news/trans-canada-highway/road-tolls-will-they-actually-reduce-congestion/article32974843/

if, in the end, we end up using toll booth revenue to fund public transit? that's some wealth redistribution in the right direction...

j reacts to the reports of the demise of nafta being greatly exaggerated (from canada)

i think that what trudeau is trying to say, here, is that he doesn't expect that trump will actually ask to renegotiate nafta, so he's not going to comment on a theoretical that he doesn't expect to actually happen. it's a pretty standard public relations tactic when faced with a lack of clarity in events happening around you.

it's consistent with what he said earlier, too: that he'd love to sit down with the president and talk about renegotiating nafta. sure. pull up a seat, don. because the liberal party always loved nafta, right? it wasn't something that mulroney fucked up hard and that chretien had no realistic means of escape from and had to eat whether he liked it or not. what trudeau was doing was calling his bluff.

sure. let's renegotiate nafta! there's this list of stuff, here, that we've been waiting for 25 years to squirm out of...

trudeau is not going to get along with trump. and, it may be the best thing he can hope for, too: because nothing unites canadians behind the liberal party like an asshole republican in the white house.

http://globalnews.ca/news/3072173/justin-trudeau-canada-will-only-respond-to-concrete-proposals-from-donald-trump/

to be clear: i'd love to renegotiate nafta, and i couldn't ask for a more clueless idiot than trump to renegotiate it with. how's that for playing a hand?

free trade with the united states - reciprocity - has always been in the canadian interest. the liberals have always supported it. but, the agreement was negotiated and signed by the worst prime minister that the country has ever had. he sold the country off. he threw away our sovereignty. he caved on everything imaginable. so, of course the liberals opposed it - and they were right to oppose it.

but, then they win the election in 1993 and they can't escape it. if they sign it, we're fucked. but clinton knows he can't get a renegotiation through congress, and he's not interested in opening it up. so, if they don't sign it, we're even more fucked because we're poking the eyes of our biggest export market. it's a brutal cost-benefit analysis. but, they were right to sign it, even after they were right to oppose it.

so, they signed a deal they opposed because they didn't have a choice. and, they've been waiting for the opportunity to renegotiate ever since.

so, yeah - let's sit down and talk. you've twisted our arm.

if the liberals had the opportunity in 1993, they would have scrapped nafta and started from scratch. that wasn't an option, then. we got sucked into an agreement that was primarily between the us and mexico. the fta was bad, but it was better because it was actually about us. so, i would strongly support this, still, today. remember: if we trash nafta, the fta still exists. that would be a good start. but don't count on it....

"NAFTA was built upon CUSFTA. The text of CUSFTA was used during negotiations with Mexico and there were some new provisions. For example, trading automobiles had to be adjusted because Mexico’s investment rules were also somehow adjusted and one of the big changes connected with NAFTA and Canada-US free trade agreement is the Investment Chapter. NAFTA has also chapter 11 which deals with dispute settlement connected with the protection of investment. The CUSFTA did not have this chapter. There was no particular investment dispute settlement, there was only some general dispute settlement between government, but in the case of NAFTA, US Government was very concern of protection of US Investments. Mexican court system was adequate for the US and Canadian investments so the part be of Chapter 11 was added and NAFTA became the first RTA which contains an investment arbitration."

so, if trump were to come in and trash nafta, reverting back to the fta, i'd be about 95% of the way there, in terms of supporting a free trade agreement with the united states, specifically.

chances of that happening? i'd say close to zero.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/introduction-north-american-free-trade-agreement-isds-khachatryan

j reacts to the death of fidel castro

ah, fidel. things could have been so much different. but it was largely not your fault, and history will acknowledge that. the modern mithridates. may you rest in the peace you never had.

j reacts to the recounts in wisconsin & pennsylvania (and michigan)

i don't expect that the recounts in wisconsin or michigan will change the tallies much. you'll note that i never argued that the elections were being rigged by a foreign power, or that the voting machines were suspect or that data was being altered (with the possible exception of early voters calling in to change their votes, which i think should be investigated). what i argued was that the polls were obviously being manipulated to exaggerate white voter turnout and minimize turnout from non-white voters, and this indicated that there was an understanding in the background (and the sources suggested deep state intelligence collusion) that voter suppression tactics were going to swing the outcome of the election. the media used terms like "likely voters" as code words and jargon; what they meant was that they expected that the minority vote was going to be suppressed.

i didn't argue that the tactics weren't used in north carolina or florida or arizona, either. what i argued is that the margins in these states make the manipulation less obvious, and that it would consequently be a lot harder to prove. resources should be focused on the places where the fraud is most obvious, and that would be in wisconsin & pennsylvania & michigan.

(put another way, the polls predicted that the results in north carolina & arizona & florida were going to be close enough that a systemic bias could be explained solely in the margin of error. basically, they could cheat in these states and get away with it because polling is not perfect. that was not true in pennsylvania or wisconsin or michigan, where clinton was ahead by margins that exceeded any reasonable error. you have to rely on not just a systemic bias but also on an unreasonably large shy trump voter effect in these states that was consistent through all polling and even the exit polling. either people were lying to the polling firms consistently for months and the data reflected it or they weren't and votes were destroyed.)

i initially just thought they were using bad modelling. it took me time to realize that what should have been bad modelling was actually at the least predictive due to the understanding that the election was going to be stolen through voter intimidation and discarded ballots. they were modelling voter suppression, and that voter suppression that they modelled actually happened.

what that means is that the paper trail is probably in provisional ballots if it exists, but that there's no guarantee that it's there at all. a proper accounting would no doubt yield a correct result, but it would take a long time and probably break privacy laws. and, those ballots may have very well just been discarded.

i don't expect that there's going to be any way to prove that it was stolen, other than to point at the polling discrepancies and argue that this is fishy (and to point out that the media seems to have seen it coming). this was an inside job and these guys are pros. they know what they're doing. they didn't leave a smoking gun at the polling booth.

it's not that trump's vote totals are higher. they're not. he underperformed romney.

it's that millions and millions of votes for clinton seem to have just disappeared. and, if they disappeared then they disappeared. you're not going to find them hiding somewhere in a school gym in scranton.

i don't think this was trump's cronies showing up with baseball bats and giving people offers they can't refuse. i think this was highly co-ordinated. and i think they cleaned up - i think they destroyed the evidence.

if you're lucky, you might be able to find data that indicates that ballots were destroyed and that might be useful in passing reforms. but, i say that like it's some kind of accident, right?

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yes, i'm saying that the united states is in truth a military dictatorship with a fraudulent veneer of fake elections designed to trick people into thinking they live in a democracy in order to prevent a real revolution. i've been saying that for years.

look at american foreign policy. it destroys democracy everywhere it finds it. but, you think it wants it at home?

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but, i want to be clear: what makes this election different is not that it was stolen. the 2000 election was stolen. the 1980 election was stolen. the 1968 election was stolen. and the 1960 election was stolen, too. what makes this election different is that they stole states that were obviously not even in play. the difference is how brazen they were, and how much contempt they showed for voters in the process.