again: i don't oppose the premise of using violence to shut down hate speech.

i'm just not convinced that milo yanananawhateverthefuck is threatening enough to justify that kind of response. i'd rather advocate just ignoring his stupid, ignorant ass.

but i don't oppose the tactic, in theory, for the reason. and, it is disingenuous to suggest that leftists would oppose the tactic, or are literalists about free speech.

rather, faux liberals should stop pretending they speak for anybody but themselves and take their reactionary appeals to maintain the status quo back to the republican party, where they belong.

actually, i think it's a neat trick for malcolm turnbull to deny access to these migrants and then blame it on donald trump. why aren't these refugees going to australia in the first place? and, what obligation does the united states have to accept refugees captured trying to enter australia?

i can only think of two things.

1) the australian position may be to blame the displacement on american military action, which is both myopic (as though australia was not a willing accomplice...) and clearly past it's due date.

2) it's actually the pr that trump wants.

you know who trudeau is starting to remind of, though?

nick clegg.

based on the debates, i would have said i'd pick clinton by about a 53-47 margin - which is no endorsement of trump, but a biting indictment of clinton. that is to say, i think clinton was right about 53% of the time and trump was right about 47% of the time. again: read that as massive disagreement with clinton.

i endorsed clinton solely on the hopes that she'd get a democratic congress and push through infrastructure spending. i'd actually have preferred trump on foreign policy.

based on what we've seen so far, i can support about 10% of what trump has done. that's not very impressive. but, i do legitimately think it's a higher level of support than what i'd have for clinton at this stage.

i'm sorry. but that's reality. trump is at least tossing liberals a bone. clinton would be no less friendly to investors, doubling down on the existing global order and readying us for world war three in the middle east. and, if all other things were the same (a republican congress....), she would be no more successful at pushing through an infrastructure package - in fact, probably less so.

we'll see at the end of the day how the trade talk works out. but, i may end up pleasantly surprised: and i will be very surprised, because it still doesn't make any sense for him to pull out of the tpp or rewrite nafta.

the medium term future might very well pit liberals against nihilists and leave conservatives disenfranchised.

no. let's get this right.

the 2016 presidential election pit a conservative (clinton) against a nihilist (trump). and, it turns out that when you disenfranchise liberals in this way, they will not automatically choose conservatism over nihilism because they are not uniformly of the view that conservatism is preferable to nihilism.

i'm on the fence, myself.

today, we have a conservative party (the democrats) and a nihilist party (the republicans). liberals remain disenfranchised. and, they will not automatically choose the conservative party over the nihilist party in the future, either - because they may not see that as a preferable option.

it is still not clear that clinton was the lesser evil. if anything, it's less clear now than it was five months ago. even if the tpp does in the end come back and nafta ends up unscathed,  there's no way that clinton would have dropped the tpp, or even pretended to renegotiate nafta. so, that's at least something positive...

the way forwards is that liberals need to re-enfranchise themselves, not scratch their heads over why they can't build momentum around conservative policies and conservative politicians.

i forgot that i appended to the psilocybin symphony in the first week of january, 2015.

in fact, california has more people than canada and a bigger gdp, too. californians may be exaggerating the importance of canada by it's relative size and desirable social systems; the truth is that a merging of california and canada would be one in which canada would be the junior partner - we would more accurately be talking about canada joining the united states of the pacific coast, and that's not something canadians are going to go for.

if california were to separate from the union, it would be better off going it alone - and it would probably take at least nevada with it, too, along with oregon and washington.

i just finally finished the entire rebuild for 2014.

i need to do the entirety of 2015, too, but the posting was far more sporadic. i lost almost all of january to show reviews. februrary, march and april were all spent on the guitar concerto. may put together a lot of loose ends. and, then the interference hit in june and july and i got sucked into the canadian election cycle over the fall and then the american one over the winter and the spring (which was spent archiving...)

the vlogs also start in october, 2015.

i'm going to stop to clean tomorrow. i don't know how much more i'll get tonight. and there's still a lot to do. but, i feel like i just got over a huge hump, too.