is corbyn really in contention?

i should begin by pointing out that it wouldn't be so crazy if he were. i pointed out a while back that the tories are going to eventually lose power, and theresa may is so awful that you almost wonder if she wants to get out of the way in order to avoid dealing with brexit. she's just about the worst candidate you could possibly imagine. what i was thinking at the time was that the election has the potential for a strong third party showing given the continuing broad cynicism over new labour, but i guess the cynicism around the lib dems is even worse, and paul nuttall seems more bnp than ukip. for all the talk of corbyn being unelectable, the situation seems to have been reversed; it is may that is clearly unelectable, and corbyn that seems to actually be benefiting from being the only sane choice - he's just in the right place at the right time to capitalize off of a clearly incompetent prime minister bumbling her way into an unnecessary election.

maybe you have to be outside of the country, sometimes, to see the obvious. and, despite what the pundits are saying, the fact that may is losing support was obvious from the start - if corbyn's associated rise wasn't, necessarily. and, i do believe that a strong third party could have performed very well in this election, so long as they didn't lack credibility (lib dems) or sanity (ukip). again: corbyn is lucky that he's become the clear default.

but, are the polls really suggesting a tight race?

well, these yougov polls are interesting things. they have gigantic sample sizes, which is a good thing in principle. but, there's no meaningful way to understand whether or not the respondents are representative. there's going to come a time in the near future where you can no longer argue that online polls exclude certain demographics, like pensioners and the very poor. but, it's still the truth of it, right now. and, it's not hard to understand why you should be skeptical when an online poll produces better results for corbyn than anybody else.

the telephone polls are suggesting that he's about 5 points behind, perhaps a bit more.

that said, you have to realize that labour doesn't need to win the popular vote in order to win the most seats, largely due to the regional dominance of the snp in scotland. you would need a good seat projection model to figure this complexities of this out.

my own understanding is that if he can get close to 5 points, he could reasonably expect to keep the conservatives to a minority, and if he can get it under 5 points he has a reasonable chance of winning a minority, himself. but, this is tricky math, and i don't have the intricate insights into it that i did for the canadian election in 2015.

so, is he really in contention? probably not. but, he could hold her to a minority, and set up another election relatively soon.

i woke up today with something unexpected: a sunburn.

what? i don't burn...

...or at least i didn't burn...

i'm wondering if this is a consequence of quitting smoking. see, for years i'd go outside for a few minutes a dozen or so times a day. is that why i didn't burn? and, is taking that out of the equation why i am burning, now?

something else i did yesterday as i was walking was that i spent some time with a new record by an old favourite.

after such a long wait, i was a little worried that i was going to get something geared more towards the broken social scene crowd. those fears are unrealized; this is a do make record, through and through.

none of their records really sound the same, and this carries it on. what i might suggest jumps out is a new set of influences. there are nods to acts like 65daysofstatic, yann tiersen and perhaps tim hecker buried into the mix. this a useful facelift, but....

what i'm left to wonder is what might have been had they been releasing all of these years.

this is not as strong as their 2009 disc, which i expected even at the time it was released to be their last and which i've interpreted as a fitting farewell for all of these years, but it's certainly stronger than their 2007 disc. it doesn't sound like an appendage, though. it sounds like a start of something new.

let's hope they keep releasing.

these companies that are saying that they want to invest in mexico are actually wrong.

the single biggest thing that made mexico such a corporate paradise was the state-owned oil company, which kept inflation and rent low, which is what allowed american manufacturers to make a profit off of the wage differential.

but, the decision to break up the state-owned oil company is unravelling all of that. inflation is kicking in, which is going to increase property values and exert upward pressure on wages. mexico has very draconian labour laws. this is a tinderbox waiting to happen.

those looking to invest in mexico should do so expecting the return of long term labour unrest in the next few years. and, people will look back on the privatization of oil as the country's single largest mistake - much as canadians do.

but, what we assign to muslims in this period was always tenuous to begin with - you had what were basically romans in spain, and basically persians in baghdad (which let us not forget was just a renamed babylon), as well as egyptians, doing the bulk of the actual work. there were no great discoveries made in the peninsula.

to use an example that readers can understand, consider isaac newton. isaac newton actually wrote volumes of work on theology - not because he wanted to, but because he had to. christians today will even argue that newton was a true believer. but, this was all a political necessity, given that he was overturning the christian world. how much more could we have gotten out of newton had he not wasted so much time writing theology in order to prevent himself from being executed?

the reality of the so-called islamic golden age is something much more like that. the religion was at best irrelevant, and in fact measurably worse than that.

here's a question for neil: does he think it's a coincidence that this interest in astronomy happened in babylon, the world's ancient centre of astronomy? the constellation names are greek and roman, but they're converted names. all of this work was initially done in babylon. so, what allowed the babylonians, the assyrians, the mesopotamians, the sumerians, to refind themselves in this period of arab military dominance?

the answer is peace. that is, the absence of war. what the arab armies brought was an end to a thousand years of war between persia and rome, fought in exactly the areas in question. when the war lifted, the people found their ancient roots - which were neither persian, nor roman, nor arab.

for the culture to flourish again, it needs to escape the consequences of being a culture of war. and, does religion help or hinder this?

the "islamic golden age" construct is not just reactionary, it's also revisionist in the sense that it's meant to counter biases in european history. i don't think it's particularly controversial, at this point, to acknowledge that european historians have historically been hostile to islam - as greek and roman historians were hostile to persia, and islamic historians were in turn hostile to europe. there were large, civilizational conflicts at play over huge time periods.

but, what the "islamic golden age" construct does is wrongheaded in attempting to remove disdain for reverence. it is a myth-based approach to history designed to counter the established european biases, and in doing so just converts the problem into a narrative that is no less wrong.

the arabs were thuggish despots that rapidly conquered a large area that was weakly defended due to centuries of war and then dominated it under heavy taxation. what you call islam today developed as a means to facilitate and organize these conquests. in time, they became weak and were defeated by a superior foe (the mongols).

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/17192/beyond-tolerance-and-intolerance_deconstructing-th