another way to articulate what i'm saying is that the legacy of slavery was so deep, and so long lasting, that it went so far as to permanently damage the genome of american blacks - requiring a type of reparations that are beyond anything we have yet to even really seriously consider.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, how do you fix that?

you bring in more black africans, and encourage black americans to breed with them.

i mean, it's not irreversible.

and, really, the white elite has a responsibility, here.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i just want to point out that there is actually a very good historical example of artificial selection in humans, and it isn't the nazis but the european colonists in the americas, who quite consciously bred african slaves for traits like strength, endurance and obedience - the last of which is correlated with low intelligence.

i think i just heard a million aneurysms. but, science is about data. and, sometimes, that data is upsetting. pointing out historical fact doesn't uphold any kind of racial theories.

did it work? well, statistics around black americans - very narrowly, very specifically - consistently pull out traits that are not replicated in black caribbeans or black africans. these differences are often explained via cultural differences, and i actually don't wish to reject that as a substantive factor.

but, it seems like these breeding experiments were not entirely unsuccessful - although this observation is better understood as an argument against racism, and not in favour of it. the same thing would happen i you took any other group and artificially selected for the same traits.

and, that's actually something that makes me angry, too. i share your indignation on this.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

"the general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know." - noam chomsky

i think this is no less true of people that call themselves academics, though, noam.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-turkey/syrian-kurdish-official-deal-for-syrian-army-to-enter-afrin-idUSKCN1G20QB

this article is making it seem as though the syrians are to be presented as protectors against turkish violence, and that might be the point; that way, the locals will welcome the syrians back in, rather than fight against them.

but, it doesn't change the point that this is deeply co-ordinated (the russians have given the turks entry into the airspace, and can't be too upset, if they haven't shot at anything), and that the goal from the start was to expel the kurdish occupation and hand the enclave back to the syrian government.

http://www.naharnet.com/stories/en/242338-pro-regime-forces-to-enter-syria-s-afrin-within-hours

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

https://www.kuna.net.kw/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=2692300&language=en

no, this isn't unprecedented at all.

everything you think you know about syria is a lie.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

http://gulfnews.com/news/mena/turkey/turkey-to-hand-over-afrin-to-syrian-army-once-kurds-defeated-1.2160467

rex tillerson is, in fact, an idiot.

it's entirely plausible that the turks are just fucking with him.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

the purpose of the turkish attack on afrin was to facilitate a syrian liberation of the region.

the narrative that the cia, i mean the media, is presenting to you is utter propaganda, but it's not clear to me if it's an american lie meant to save face or if the turks are just playing the americans for idiots, at this point.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i'd rather just ban any greeting from store clerks, sales people and cashiers altogether.

i just want you to shut up and take my money. don't greet me. don't ask me how i'm doing. don't pretend i'm your friend. just stick to the transaction, and cut out the small talk.

but, in the greater scheme of things, i understand why the anglos might be...i'd just consider this childish, and kind of look at somebody making the argument as though they're an imbecile. to legislate on this is less maddening and more depressing.

if i lived in quebec, i would probably ignore the law.

https://www.mtlblog.com/news/its-official-young-montreal-anglophones-dont-want-to-live-in-quebec

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

good.

i hope they're ordered to pay compensation, for lost profits.

and, i hope it costs her votes, too.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/b-c-launches-challenges-of-alberta-s-ban-on-wine-1.3809744

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

i just think that this leniency we have towards anti-abortion protesters is a corollary of the systemically misogynist rape culture that we live in, and it kind of gets under my skin.

we're talking about people that break restraining orders, ignore trespassing laws and harass and assault and stalk people.

that's not speech.

so, why are we so lenient about this? why don't we prosecute them to the full extent of the law, as we would anybody else that behaves that way?

i'm sick of this.

they break serious laws. throw them in jail.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

again: this is stupid and will not succeed in accomplishing at all.

did the protestor have a restraining order? was it broken? then send him to fucking jail, already.

further, you charge the people spitting on the patients with assault, and, if they don't smarten up, then you send them to jail, too.

you don't defeat self-righteousness with prohibition. you have to at least try to educate the stupid out of them, but if it doesn't work then you need to remove them from society, altogether.

that doesn't protect the victims, here, though. how do you do that? and, what is the ideal in a free society?

in a free society, the ideal is to create vigilante groups of counter-protestors that can be deployed quickly via social media. i'd put a call out to the community for this. the counter-protesters would show up and chase the protesters off.

this is preferable because it defeats speech with more speech, rather than with state violence.

https://news.vice.com/en_ca/article/a3j8nk/no-protest-zone-outside-abortion-clinics-gaining-momentum-in-canada

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, the chinese media picked this up, huh?

http://en.people.cn/n3/2018/0124/c90000-9419274.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

most chinese-canadians will take reasonable enough positions, like this.

and, i don't care if it's hard to ask them to choose sides. life is hard; sometimes you have to make hard decisions.

but, this reality should not blind you to what's happening, or make action seem less necessary.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/vince-wong/the-chinese-canadian-community-cant-fight-racism-with-islamophobia_a_23357709/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, make it a big deal.

embarrass them.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

it's an act of war.

don't take it lightly.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

it doesn't matter if it upsets the chinese-canadian community, which votes conservative, anyways.

foreign infiltration is a serious thing.

so, whose side you on?

and, if you answer wrong, expect consequences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqtQBU3DEuA

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2017/12/07/Chinese-Trade-Deal-Take-Canada-Cleaners/

so, what do you do when you wake up one day and realize you've got thousands of chinese spies in the country causing instability with the intent to overthrow the government?

well, you figure out if they're here legally or not, first. if they are, then they get freedom of expression, even if they're foreign agents - sorry. it's up to us to figure that out on our own, and ignore them, not up to to the government to track them down and punish them for what our constitution is explicitly in place in order to sanction.

but, it should also be a bit of a wake-up call.

1) there's clearly an issue of infiltration that should be addressed through running more stringent background checks. if the chinese government is going to do this kind of thing in canada, it should expect retaliation in the form of extra precautions to make sure we're not allowing spies in.
2) a good percentage of these people are probably not here legally, and the ones that can be identified should be immediately deported - once they've received their due process.

trudeau should not ignore this, as it will just perpetuate the idea that he's a door mat that the chinese can walk all over at will.

he must retaliate.

and, jagmeet singh must cut his beard, too.

as mentioned previously, i believe that this is probably a chinese psy-op.

proof: clearly...

http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/anti-immigration-groups-at-parliament-hill-protest-demand-apology-from-trudeau

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

we could go to mars tomorrow, in theory. we understand how to do this...

but, we don't have the engineering capacity.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i need to be clear on why i gave up on immortality, but i'm going to be terse.

it's not theoretical. we could probably do this in a few years, in theory. and, i have no doubt that we'll get there. but, the only thing that's important to me is whether or not we can get there in my lifetime.

and, i claim that we can't - but that the problem is not theoretical but computational.

i don't think you realize how much data your brain actually holds. it's going to be many orders of magnitude above petabytes. at our current storage abilities, we wouldn't be talking about data centres to store humans - we'd need a data center to store one human.

on top of that, the problem is going to be np. what that means is that transferring back and forth is going to be inconceivable with classical computers. so, we'll need to be able to compute non-linearly, first. and, despite some claims to the contrary, i don't think we're anywhere near this - and i'm not even convinced it's possible. the biological approaches to beating np strike me as more plausible, but they may be hard to scale, and it presents a different kind of threat for ai, when you start putting these bacteria colonies all over the place. that would no doubt wipe us out through disease.

the way i understand humans is that we have ridiculously fast processors and limitless hard drives but very small registers and almost no ram. so, there's this bottleneck in computation brought on by the insufficient amount of memory that we have to calculate in - and we end up dropping things from registers, because we just don't have the space for it. we're going to have to go through that bottleneck in extracting ourselves, too.

i looked into this quite seriously and, in the end, i made a bet with time. i might lose it. but, i'm usually right about these things.

this statement was not true when the record was released.

it might be today.

but, i don't think i made the cut.

we'll see, though.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

do negative numbers exist, or are they merely abstractions?

this one is a little more tricky, and, while it's hard to tell given my age at the time, i think i may have lost my debate partner, who, unlike myself, had finished the second grade - along with the second year of university.

it was in the years between when my parents split up and my mom remarried, and i was going to school full time, so i guess it would have been in the first or second grade. my mom got a room mate over those years, who was a philosophy student at ottawa university. i was always told the relationship was platonic, but i always thought otherwise. she officially slept on the couch.

the most important thing i remember about this woman was that i was to never, under any circumstances, touch her organic peanut butter, which was very expensive. i could have as much of the regular peanut butter as i wanted.

she let me try it once, and i didn't like it anyways. chalky. dry. sugarless.

they told her i was smart, and she wanted to test for herself, so she asked me to come over and talk about things. and, i remember that we talked about a lot of things, but the only part of what we talked about that i remember was negative numbers.

i was quick to react.

"there's no such thing as negative numbers."

she frowned. but, i continued.

"a number is the same thing as how many things there are..."

..and, she shifted in her seat a little at that...

"....so, what the number 3 means is that there are 3 things. how do you have minus three things?"

the frown lifted a little, as she became aware that i was thinking in what she understood as the correct terms.

well, she said, you have minus three things when you take away three things.

i rejected this, flatly. for, taking away three things is not the same thing as having three negative things - that is not existence, that is merely a way to describe things that don't exist.

and, then she did something that neither of us were expecting to do - she pulled out a textbook and explained to me that there was an idea called natural numbers (the whole numbers you can count), which were a subset of real numbers. i remember understanding this, or at least recognizing it as an obvious truth. then, she scrawled this backwards E on a piece of paper, which i did not understand the meaning of.

because negative natural numbers are a subset of real numbers, that means they must be real, that they must exist.

what i remember from this point was being confused. i trusted her on some level; or, at least, i knew she ought to be right. but, it didn't sit right with me. how could negative numbers exist? how could an absence of something be a real thing?

but, i had no argument.

i know today that her argument was wrong, and i maintain my own intuition on the matter, but neither really deduces the correct outcome.

so, what do you think?

do you think they exist?

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

your sermon on the mount,
from the hood of your car...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxG2UWhvXJI