from context to context, city to city, annoyance to annoyance, person to person, i've only ever wanted one thing out of life:

for everybody to just go away and leave me alone.

i don't know why it is, exactly, that this is such a difficult request for people to adhere to - or why it is that this is so universally difficult for people to understand.

i'm slow to get started again today, but here i am.

i'm waiting for the guy to come to finish the last little bit of painting...

i really don't enjoy the smoke coming up from downstairs, or living life in a fog. again: i can't understand how anybody enjoys this on a daily basis. it's maybe making me understand why so many drug addicts kill themselves.

i feel like shit.

but, i have to wait until i can get things out of here before i can finish taping the walls over.

i finished august last night, and, again, it took some time, but it was the heaviest month, so far. hopefully, september is a little faster....

i've identified dawkins for a reason, and it's that his arguments push atheism into a different era. early hitchens falls into the same category, although hitch enjoyed pushing buttons in ways dawkins doesn't bother with. religious thinkers will accuse him of missing points, but in doing so they are the ones missing the point: the points dawkins supposedly misses are, in truth, discarded as anachronisms. he doesn't have time for that nonsense. whether consciously or not, dawkins tosses entire swaths of argumentation in the trash heap where they belong, and then absolutely correctly just shrugs his critics off when they point it out. that's what science calls progress, no matter how loudly the theologians may howl, otherwise.

what's the use in debating aristotlean physics every time we want to talk about quantum mechanics?  you maybe do it for five minutes at the start of the course. but, you don't dwell on failed theories. this is obvious to a scientist, but very difficult for a theologian, that wants to carry on ancient arguments into perpetuity.

but, the ideas of the new atheism are going to be connected more to an undiscovering of the past. asimov. russell. these were thinkers far ahead of their time, that were unfairly forgotten in the "new left" of the 60s, partially as a reaction to stalinism. what's going to unfold to future historians is how reactionary the baby boomer generation was. as they die off, their rejection of science is going to fade away, and we're going to pick up where we left off.

there will be new authors. we don't know who they are yet. but, they will be approaching atheism as a renaissance, and the new left will consequently be a kind of rediscovering of who it is that we once were - as we chart a path forward for who we wish to become.

bill maher is broadly new left, but he's not a leading figure, and not an intellectual.

maher's biggest claim to fame is that he has a habit of thinking he's really smart, and having it blow up in his face when it's demonstrated that he's not. he's right once in a while, granted - makes the odd point worth taking note of. but, broadly speaking, he's a dolt.

he's on the new left's side of the spectrum, though. mostly.

and, i've stated repeatedly that i think sam harris is a dilettante - and that he's not even an atheist.

harris is also on the new right.

he's not that different than trudeau.

so, how's this for a real world choice.

party A - you can buy it at the corner store, and smoke it wherever you want.
party B - you can only buy it at specific places with restricted hours, and you're not allowed to smoke it inside.

i'd actually go with party B. keeping it out of my breathing space is more important to me than liberalizing access.

unfortunately, the liberal party position is that you can only buy it at specific places with restricted hours, and you're obligated to smoke it inside - which i disagree with on both planks. i think everybody was expecting the conservatives to offer minimal changes on this policy, so i was hoping this wouldn't be a ballot issue.

i will not be voting for doug ford in this election. i have too many disagreements with him.

but, let's hope the ndp have a better set of ideas than the liberals do, on this.

to be clear: i think marijuana should be sold at corner stores. the rules should be somewhere between the rules for nicotine and the rules for caffeine; it is in theory as dangerous as nicotine, but in practice closer to caffeine in it's negative effects.

i remember buying jolt colas at the store when i was a kid, and maybe i should have had to flash an id to do it. some owners wouldn't sell it to me.

but, i'd also like to see laws restricting smoking in apartments.

so i'm in favour of very easy access, but stronger restrictions on where it can be used.

the truth is that the wide swath of sitting politicians, right now, really has no future besides retirement. the new spectrum is going to make very little sense to most of them, and they're not going to make sense within it, either.

i really wish that wynne would have stepped down while she had the chance.

what she's up against is a generational overturn as much as it is anything else.

and, the only reason that this generation didn't see this overturn coming is that it thought history ended when they assumed power. this isn't ahistorical; but stagnation in the face of generational overturn sure would be.

and, what happens to the evangelical right, then?

it just dies.

so, in the new spectrum, trudeau and ford would both be considered conservatives - whereas wynne would be hugging the centre, and somebody like gilles duceppe would represent the future of the left.

the new right is a synthesis of religious ideas. it is going to be very brown. you want to look towards people like tariq ali reza aslan.

and, the new left is being constricted by people like richard dawkins. it is going to be very white.

maybe you're going to have to switch sides.

a lot of people are gong to have to switch sides.


*i imagined reza aslan, but typed tariq ali. brain freeze.

can ford get as high as 70% of the brown vote?

stop.

your vision of a pluralistic, liberal utopia is nonsense.

brown people don't want this. not muslims, not hindus, not sikhs - not anybody else. leftists don't want this. not anarchists, not socialists and not even liberals, either. market advocates don't want this. queers don't want this. christians don't want this.

nobody wants this.

the only people that want this are burkean conservatives - because the vision of pluralistic liberalism is in truth the same thing as the vision of class harmony.

but, the divisions are collapsing.

white people abandoned conservatism generations ago; the conservative block of the future is first and second generation religious conservatives and free market advocates. ford is going to realign this.

and, the new liberal base is educated white atheists that think markets are empty intellectual abstractions.

get with it, or be swept aside.

because nobody wants what anybody's been selling.

i'm a thief,
i'm a liar;
there's my church,
i sing in the choir.

haaaaaaallllllleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelllllllluuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuulllllllllijahhhhhhhhhhhhh

the best way to identify a nihilist is to ask them if they're christians.

there are words coming out of your mouth.

but, their meaning is nil.

nihil.

zilch.

and, this is how we must treat nihilists - how he must fight to negate their existence.

those people are nihilists - blatant liars.

they lied in court.

their words are worthless.

i never told anyone's kids to be quiet.

i pointed out that buddy's 50 year old, 300 pound mentally retarded niece was going to damage the floors if she kept running across it like a stampeding elephant - that you could hear the entire building shaking and it clearly was bad for the structure.

she actually literally damaged the light fixtures in the hallway with her girth coming down from above.

they told me they would keep the noise down.

but, i was clear - i told them at least 20 times after that that it wasn't a noise complaint, it was concern about the amount of weight coming down on the floor and how it was damaging the structure.

their insistence on interpreting it as a noise complaint, despite my repeated insistence to the contrary, was almost some kind of political correctness, as they couldn't believe i was complaining about fat people coming through the floor.

but, i was, in fact, complaining about fat people coming through the floor.

this woman is retarded. she stomps when she walks. she needs some training to teach her not to do that, but nobody wanted to address it.

the ndp actually has the opportunity to come down in the middle on this: keep the monopoly, but liberalize access. they can make the liberals look like zealots, and the conservatives look like nihilists. and, that will no doubt best reflect the views of most voters.

marijuana should not have been a ballot issue, and i didn't want it to be a ballot issue and i'd like other things to be ballot issues.

but, wynne has made this a ballot issue, and positioned herself on the unpopular side of it.

this is her own fault.

i'm far from a market advocate. it's not the point.

if ford is smart, he'll tone the "free market" rhetoric down, because it's going to alienate people that otherwise agree with the crux of further liberalizing access.

i mean, we have an lcbo monopoly, but we don't have access problems to alcohol. the issue is less who and more how.

the reality is that liberals' legalization plan is designed to restrict access, not to liberalize it. it's as close as a continuation of prohibition as they could have gotten way with - it's really just a step away from restricting sales to the internet. and, the hurdles to get pot in the store (including having to sit through an anti-drug lecture - not joking) are so outrageous that online purchase could very well be preferable to most people.

nobody voted for that kind of nonsense. and, even a strict fiscal conservative is just going to interpret it as a waste of money.

they could have just sold it at liquor stores. they could have let bartenders sell it. they could have done a million things differently - but they took the most conservative approach possible.

and, i worried about this.

it's going to backfire. the question is how badly, and how well the ndp can help mitigate.

i don't know why the liberals took such a foolish position on this issue.

this was the wildcard conservative position i was worried about...and only ford was likely to have seriously taken it....

if the conservatives seriously run on this - and are the only party running on it - then they will probably win a majority.

on this particular issue, the wynne government has prioritized the narrow interests of the conservative minority over the interests of the majority. as far as i can tell, it's a consequence of the inner party being out of touch with the concerns of real voters. but, this is entirely self-inflicted - they could have legislated open access. they decided not to.

let's hope that the ndp doesn't let them bogart this. but, i suspect they're going to be just as clueless, and just as concerned about appealing to middle-of-the-road conservative voters.

ontario leans left 3:1, and has for forty years.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/pc-leader-doug-ford-cannabis-ottawa-morning-1.4573790