even if we accept the hypothesis that these two muslim girls that falsely claimed hate crimes were doing so because they feared repercussions for being caught without their hijab on, it still leaves open the question of why they would choose this particular approach of escalating to the police.

in the case of the younger one, it could have just been a web of lies that escalated uncontrollably, but, even so, consider the depth of fear required to actually get to a police investigation without cracking. at 11, you have to have some concept of what's happening when the police are involved.

in the case of the older one, though, i'm sure there could have been approaches taken that didn't rely on blaming it on racist white people. like, she could have said it got caught on a tree, or something. why state, specifically, that somebody threatened to light it on fire? you have to know that is going to escalate, if you're a university student, right?

i'm left to think that at least one of these cases may have been a cry for help. and it doesn't seem like anybody's heard it. sadly.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

well, it would clearly be the latter, wouldn't it, chantal?

it was easier for the opposition to frame the narrative when people got their news from the establishment media that it controlled. the old tory media that i speak of.

nobody under like 50 gets their news this way any more.

so, you can trot your outraged conservative talking heads out on to ctv all you want, nobody really pays any attention any more. worse, that syndicated op-ed piece in the globe and the fp and the ... has a paywall on it. oops. hey, huff post doesn't. but i want to watch something, let me search youtube.

the opposition media of the future might actually have to figure out what people actually care about instead of just feeding it into us, gramscian style. you can't manufacture consent amongst a population that has stopped listening to you. you actually have to adhere to the market.

we call that democracy.

maybe the tory media might want to try a little of it. or it can go bankrupt and be replaced. whatever.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2018/01/15/performance-only-part-of-the-story-at-trudeau-town-halls.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

"They don't understand that I'm fighting their end, because if anybody does that to them, I'll be there." - margaret atwood, describing her younger critics

generational bulges are a problem, because they tend to pit the energy of youth against the wisdom of age. we get over them. and, they can have positive shifts in social attitudes that can, if institutionalized, be maintained. but, that same institutionalization can have dangerous tendencies, as well, when that energy refuses to yield to that wisdom, where it ought to.

so, margaret actually has an important role to play, here. hopefully, she's able to get through to a few people - not necessarily in changing their minds, but in helping them see broader perspectives, and make more careful deductions in doing so.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

see, the backlash to this piece is a good example of americans, and i guess that is beginning to mean young canadians due to the absence of toryism here for some time now, not knowing what a tory is.

the reality is that this is the response that you should have expected from this old tory, margaret atwood.

and, is she right? well, she often is, if you can put what she says through the de-torification process.

she may have picked a poor case to make her point on, however unintentional this may be, but i have to give her moral support, here. she's making the right argument, whether it's applicable in context, or not.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/am-i-a-bad-feminist/article37591823/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

if you don't mind me putting a damper on this talk of late capitalism.

late capitalism was supposed to mean a period where workers were in the process of taking control of production; if you want to abstract that out of the labour conditions of the nineteenth century, you could suggest that late capitalism is supposed to be a period of democracy, where the people as a whole co-opt production from the elite, and convert it into a tool for use by the masses.

i don't see that happening anywhere.

maybe we're at a point where the technology could allow for a transition, but i don't see it actually happening anywhere in front of me. workers seem to be more afraid that they're going to lose their jobs to automation, than in control of a movement to command it.

what "late capitalism" seems to mean to the people that are throwing it around rather seems to mean a collapse into decadence, as though the founder of historical materialism was nietzsche, or not even, his critics, and the end of capitalism - perhaps with it's underlying work ethic, and the civic values imbued within it by religion - is just a collapse into nihilism. this view conflates the end of capitalism with the end of history, itself perverted from the hegelian term, to mean the end of western history. it's an ultra-paradoxical response to the co-option of marxism into the scare story to preserve religion in the face of secularism. this is what happens when you let anybody that can afford to pay for it go to school.

but, historical materialism was always a pseudo science, anyways. it set down a plausible path of events, and then claimed it was a law of history. if you even want to take the idea seriously enough to do so, you could argue that marx was presenting a classical argument, and that we understand the world today in terms of probabilities rather than certainties. if you want to take it that seriously....

i think the reality is that the united states is not only not in late capitalism, but that it's devolved from a relatively late stage of capitalism under fordism, and moving into the labour movements of the 30s, and into an earlier stage of capitalism, which was accelerated by a return to mercantilism in the 1980s, under the phoney free trade agreements, which were designed to offload labour to countries with lower working conditions.

so, forget about late capitalism. the united states has essentially overseen a global return to mercantilism - which is the decadence that people are identifying. because that is the great comedy of nietzsche, or his critics: that the collapse into nihilism happened in the seventeenth century, and that the classical period of art (and science) is a consequence of it.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

islam is perhaps the last, great mythology for secularism to conquer. we went through hard struggles to defeat christianity, but the battle is largely won. this is my major annoyance with islam - right when we were winning the war against religion, these muslims have provided the cause of religion with a lot of fresh recruits, and in many ways thrown the struggle against religion backwards by a century, or more.

i mean, we have to have legitimate debates, now, over whether it's ok to put your daughters in scarves before they're allowed to leave the house. i don't want this debate. it's anachronistic.

really, it's unfortunate that the contemporary left has aligned with the historical right on this. leftists have generally historically agitated against these kinds of traditional rules, and stood in solidarity with the oppressed - not come up with opaque arguments about cultural relativism, and ignored individual rights in favour of some imaginary idea of collective ones.

so, i stand in solidarity with the girls that take these off. and i call for a future where they don't need to make up absurd excuses to do it, to avoid who knows what  - immediate physical punishment, banishment or perhaps even honour killings.

this is the issue, here.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

see, it is my immediate deduction from this very limited amount of information that an excuse to take the hijab off is the most obvious explanation:

A University of Michigan student was approached by a stranger who threatened to set her on fire with a lighter if she didn’t remove her hijab, police said.

The incident occurred between 5:30 and 7 p.m. on Friday just outside the campus in Ann Arbor. Police said the woman complied and left.

so, this university student took off the hijab between 5:30 and 7:00 on a friday night and left...perhaps to go to a party, or maybe a bar?

no. that's good. very good. i want to hear more stories like that. but, it perhaps underscores the incredible coercion in muslim families for women to adhere to the dress code, doesn't it?

i think that's the hidden issue, here.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/11/13/university-of-michigan-student-wearing-a-hijab-threatened-to-be-lit-on-fire-police-say/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

again: is this ultimately an excuse to take the hijab off?

let's hope that this is what's happening. but, i would urge these women to take a larger stand. i can provide some verbal solidarity, but they ultimately must emancipate themselves.

www.cnn.com/2016/12/22/us/michigan-student-hijab-incident-no-evidence/index.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

nonononono, i would actually consider the idea of a young girl damaging her own hijab to be good news.

that's what i want to see happen: young women getting together and burning these things. not because somebody told them to. but because they don't want to wear them any more.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, what actually happened then?

did she damage her own hijab because she didn't want to wear it, and then claim somebody else did it, so as to not get into any trouble with her parents?

http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/toronto/scarborough-hijab-attack-1.4487716

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

well, his policies are quite similar to harper's, in truth.

but, an interesting overlay would be to chart trudeau's approval rating versus those of donald trump.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/new-poll-shows-deterioration-in-approval-ratings-for-trudeau-liberals/article37601246/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

meh. just get divorced.

i think it's a crazy idea. i mean, i don't even want to take it seriously, kind of thing. when somebody comes to you and says "i want an open relationship", what that means is "i want to break up with you, but not for a few more months.". it's the kind of thing that happens when people want to break off a romantic relationship, but not a financial relationship. and, the end result is not actually an open relationship, but the demotion of the relationship to a friendship. partners end up as room mates.

this idea that you can be polyamorous and in a relationship is a consequence of the existing culture, which tells you that you can have your cake and eat it, too. it's a fantasy, in real life. and, i'd suggest to people looking at this seriously that they have to make that choice - that it's ok to be a polyamorous single person, but you shouldn't pretend that you can be in a relationship with somebody, too.

if you're in an open relationship, ask yourself: what does your partner do on saturday nights?

 

that's how you figure it out, right. if you find yourself in a situation where you're spending more saturdays apart than together, you don't actually have a relationship any more. what you have is a room mate.

and, in the real world, things get messy. three or four people might show up at the same concert, or the same restaurant. and, if you're avoiding that, what are you doing? making plans to not spend time with your partner? if you have to avoid your partner on a saturday night, there's no relationship there...

it's fun to be open-minded. but, when you start thinking through the ramifications, it doesn't work. and, it is an empirical question: the arrangement doesn't tend to work.

the prudent advice to give somebody going through this is to try and predict the outcome of such an arrangement in a few months time. and, it's not usually going to be a positive outcome, unless you either have both partners pursuing other options (in which case it's a mutual break-up in disguise), or you have one partner that likes to spend a lot of time alone, and isn't going to spend it thinking about where the other one is, or what they're doing.

in most cases, the person being propositioned with such a thing should take it as a red flag and walk away.

i don't have an issue with the language used. the distribution is the curve, or everything under the curve. it's a semantic point that a statistician would be splitting hairs over in "correcting" you on and most actually probably wouldn't bother with at all. a major hurricane hitting the united states would be a rare event, and whether you want to describe that using a "poisson distribution" or the "curve described by the poisson distribution" is just an issue in language, although i would perhaps suggest that you're misapplying the central limit theorem in a situation with not enough data points to do so, if that's what you're getting at by referencing normality. a misapplication of the clt like this could actually be used to argue for stasis. it doesn't change the point you're making.

and, yes - charting an increase in hurricanes since 2005 is kind of like charting a decrease in temperatures since 1998. or jet stream variability since 1725. 

but, the important thing you pointed out was that global warming is not the only factor. and, if you want to push this on this platform, that's the most important point you can make: the universe is complicated, and this increase in carbon on this planet is just one of the things that's happening in it.

so, i just accomplished something - i've closed all of the audio for period 2.

so, this is where i put the placeholder for period 2, for now.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/period-2

that means my discography is now completed for the period 1996-2003, with the caveat that i'll need to add a pdf file to each release for liner notes, and i have to finish the period 1 & period 2 discs, which are html front-ends on a pdf file that is the culmination of all of the individual ones.

i still have some work to do on this.

but, what's next?

it's jan, 1998 in the alter-reality. i left off in dec, 1996.that's a year worth a journal writing, and i'll need to get to it soon. but, i need to recalibrate, first.

first, i need to clean in here. i need to ship the rest of that order. but, i feel better about it now, because i'm over that hump.

i'm not sure how long it's going to take to recalibrate and get all this data in line, but i should be coming up on absolute final closes on inri000-inri015 in the upcoming weeks. and, then i need to stay up to date...

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

republishing inri074

around october, 2002 i met a friend. i was sort of in need of a friend, and i mean that in the friend sense. but, the mental condition i was in was the explanation of why i needed a friend, if you see what i mean; i was completely unstable in this period and did all kinds of absurd things, which isolated me - and i wasn't getting any better.

i dropped out of school under the realization that i was walking down a path that wasn't getting me anywhere close to what i wanted out of life. i ended up working three jobs to raise money for gender reassignment, and it crossed me paths with somebody that was also trying to think of ways to get out of the box in terms of ways to exist.

she was trying to save up money to go to british columbia. it was some kind of warped take on the grapes of wrath, where everything works out perfectly. but, the rent was eating into her savings, which was making the goal seem impossible. well, unless we stopped having fun.

so, i suggested she should just stay at my parents place. part of it was a hope that she would move her drum kit in, although that didn't happen. and, i might add that this was done with all of the reckless abandon that could be contemplated - we were moving stuff in without even asking, it was really remarkable.

and, it seemed to me that we were getting pretty close over that period.

so, when the time came that she had all that money put aside to go to bc, it was kind of a downer to let her go. and, she initially wanted to go with a friend who dropped out. so, i ended up going across the country with her.

now, i need to be clear: we weren't planning on coming back. we were going to pick fruit or something - we didn't know, exactly, we'd figure it out when we got there.

so, this was meant as a sort of farewell to certain people i hadn't talked to in months and didn't care if i was leaving, anyways. i think it let me work some things out on weird subconscious levels, but the truth is that these songs really aren't about anybody except me, and there's no use in pretending they are - i just liked the idea of a farewell disc.

this disc was initially passed around with a cut up version of the pretentious untitled mix at the end, but this was almost immediately ejected from future burns and is not present on this ep due to the poor quality of the mix. the remaining five tracks became combined into what i now call my eighth symphony.

written and recorded in late 2002 and early 2003. this was initially uploaded unmodified from a cd-r rip in may, 2015, but this was replaced with a version from source on nov 29, 2017 due to clipping due to an unrealized normalization on the burn. disc finalized as symph008 on nov 29, 2017. as always, please use headphones.

the hidden track is the final version and also appears on my ninth record, {e} (inri08x): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/e

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2003, 2015, 2017). 

credits

released May 3, 2003

j - guitar, effects, bass, synth, voice, piano, drum programming, generative programming (sounder), granular synthesis, sound design, soundscaping, loops, bowls, claps, tables, ebow, orchestral sequencing, digital wave editing, sampling, production, composition


jagmeet singh must cut his beard.