i got a letter that the landlord is "doing electrical work" on monday.

i'm mildly concerned, yes. but, i know my rights.

this is just a friendly reminder that landlord interference with hydro or water in ontario is a felony that is potentially punishable by imprisonment.

Common offences under the Act

The following offences are reported most often:

For landlords:

• disconnecting or interfering with a vital service that the landlord is required to supply to tenants (e.g. heat, electricity, fuel, gas or water)
• failing to provide rent receipts to tenants who request them
• illegally evicting a tenant without following the eviction process
• failing to make a tenant’s belongings available within 72 hours of eviction
• collecting unlawful security deposits
• altering the locking system for a rental unit or residential complex without giving the tenant replacement keys
• providing false or misleading information in documents filed with the Landlord and Tenant Board.

http://www.mah.gov.on.ca/page142.aspx

i don't have time. i'm trying to plan a delicate move.

but, if necessary, i will send people to jail for their stupidity, and not think twice about it.

it was july 29th, 2013 that i signed a lease for my basement apartment, starting on august 1, 2013, after having reached an agreement, in principle, on the 26th.

i don't expect the situation to be much different: if i find something, it will be on the 25th or the 26th or the 27th.

....or even the 28th.

or the 29th.

let's hope it's not the 30th.

that's how this city works.

i've actually never bought anybody dinner before.

i've been on something like five dinner dates in my life, and it's actually very important to me that the bill is....it's less that i want to split it, and more that i want separate bills.

because, why the fuck would i buy you dinner?

buy your own fucking dinner...

i would have hoped that we would have raised our girls and women to look a weinstein in the eye and say "no, i don't want to.", get up and walk out - and then press charges for soliciting prostitution.

in a situation where a weinstein-type offers advancement in exchange for sexual favours, and an actress agrees, then the correct legal description of the situation is that the weinstein-type is soliciting prostitution from the actress, and the actress is consenting to the proposition.

so, we need to ask ourselves if this is permitted behaviour or not.

and, while i don't exactly like it, i'm not sure it should be illegal.

i actually don't think i've commented on this since some more information has come out.

frankly, with the weinstein case and other cases like it, there are two scenarios that need to be separated:

1) situations where he blocked entrances or otherwise prevented disengagement. he should be charged with rape in these circumstances.
2) situations where he coerced sex in exchange for favours. in these situations, what he is actually doing is soliciting prostitution. and, the women involved need to acknowledge that they engaged in a form of prostitution - they consented to sex in exchange for career advancement.

the idea that they were unable to consent due to a power imbalance is neither consistent with any kind of feminism i'm aware of nor coherent in the context of english legal traditions. it's some kind of application of foucault's theory of power, in a way that denies women basic agency - which would be expected of foucault, as he was not a feminist.

in the first situation, i support full prosecution. rape is never ok.

in the second situation, we need to ask ourselves whether we want to enforce laws against prostitution or not. is this a situation where women should be free to make this choice on their own, or should this be considered criminal behaviour? should we be prosecuting both sides of this, or focusing solely on the johns?

personally, this is the kind of prostitution that i'm broadly not opposed to, as there is largely a real choice involved. where i am opposed to prostitution is when it is a false choice - a choice between prostitution and paying rent, for example.

maybe a lot of dudes out there have bigger aspirations than just bringing home the bacon....

you just have to remember that the real bond of ownership is taxation, and the real people that own us - all of us, men and women together - are the people that tax us.

patriarchy is less a system schemed up by men to control women, and more a system schemed up by the state to ensure a steady stream of tax revenue.

abolishing patriarchy is consequently less about giving women freedom at the expense of men and more about giving serfs, peasants and slaves of both genders the freedom to define themselves in ways other than to maximize tax revenue for the elite.

i think it's a little bit of both.

these critiques are not new. greer & her colleagues made them themselves.

but, the flip side of this is a little bit of existential dread, and that's the idea i think should be focused more strongly on. the people that are using ad hominems and dismissive language aren't helping in developing an understanding of what's actually happening.

so, let's be blunt: is it possible that a big component of what's happening with young women right now is that they're rejecting the freedom their mothers won for them and longing for an era where they were less free? that they are looking over the precipice and suffering extreme anxiety from it?

i mean, you can frame it however you want, you can use whatever language you wish - but is that not the real crux of it?

these reactions are fine, even expected in a broader view of history, it would just be useful if these people would understand that they're standing up for conservative value systems and stop pretending otherwise...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/02/thats-patriarchy-how-female-sexual-liberation-led-to-male-sexual-entitlement

anarchists acknowledge the reality of dominance and hierarchy, but reject it's normality or inevitability, and instead seek to abolish it - which means we try hard not to live in it.

it's not enough to act at an atomistic level, but it's a necessary start.

actually, i think that feminism - which i define as the abolition of patriarchy - is also the emancipation of men.

feminism also means that men don't have the responsibility to take care of women any more. this is usually articulated in terms of women being autonomous, but these statements are equivalent, because it's the relation that is the enslavement: patriarchy enslaves men and women equally in a bond of dominance and servitude to produce offspring to be taxed by the lords.

i don't fit into either side of this equation. i once told the only partner that i've ever had that i didn't own her and didn't want to own her, and she took it as an insult. she came to me to talk about a life decision once, expecting me to make it for her, and i just refused to do it - i told her she had to make that decision herself. i mean, we talked it through and stuff, but i made it clear that it wasn't my choice, and i didn't want it to be my choice. she just looked at me like i was hopelessly queer, which is what i told her from the start and what she'd spent the last two years denying - she wanted an alpha male to make decisions for her, and was just turned off when i refused to be that. but, broadly speaking, i haven't spent my life within or trying to escape from this relation, but just avoiding it altogether.

regardless, i think this discussion is often lost. men aren't losing control, so much as they're gaining the freedom of escaping from the role of being the controller. and, when you really understand that, you don't need to talk about "male allies to feminism", you can understand that they're being equally emancipated and equally benefiting from the collapse of the relation.

it's typical of capitalism to set everything up as a zero sum game. but, if that's how you're seeing gender equality, you're not really grasping it properly - and maybe you're not truly accepting it.

if i ever find me pot of gold, i'm going to buy that whole intersection.

my last name is parent & i'm from ottawa.

so, i kind of feel like i should live at the intersection of ottawa & parent...

when i was in ottawa, there was an intersection of parent & murray and i've always regretted not living there.

if you're pro-capitalist then you are, by definition, not a leftist - a leftist is an anti-capitalist, by definition. you can be a wide variety of things on the left, but a capitalist is not one of them.

so, you can call yourself a liberal or a progressive or a conservative or a moderate or whatever other right-wing ideology you'd like, but you need to stop pretending you're left of centre - because you're really not.

the only way i'm able to interpret the labour market is as something you're forced to do to pay rent.

so, my goal, then, is to minimize the amount of time wasted - not maximize the "reward" i'm able to extract.

the only difference between being a teacher and being a janitor, to me, is that teachers have longer hours, and therefore less freedom. so, i'd rather be a janitor...

when i look at the labour market, i'm not looking for something "rewarding".

i guess i don't even think it's even possible - which is the basis of my rejection of labour.

so, people run statistics off about "rewarding labour", and i'm not really able to extrapolate an actual job title from that.

for example, i would consider teaching to be monotonous and degrading - really, anything with kids sounds like hell. is that a "rewarding job"? i don't think so...

i studied computer science for a while thinking it would at least be stimulating, but the actual job that programmers do is incredibly repetitive. likewise, what i learned from studying law is that it's 99% lying and utter bullshit, which is pretty much the opposite of what i'd consider "rewarding".

to me, the most rewarding job is the one i have.

it'd just be nice if there weren't fucking rentiers getting in the way of everything.

i just feel like life is too short to waste working and raising a family.

and, i know i'd be very unhappy with a routine and a schedule and monotony.

i mean, there's pages and pages and pages here written on the topic...i don't think i could be more clear than i have been....

i applied for a cashier job the other day out of curiosity.

that is the first time i've applied for a job since 2008.

i'm neither white, nor am i male, nor am i interested in finding a job.

i was in a relationship many years ago, but i've literally never asked anybody out on a date before. ever. further, i prefer men to women.

i walked out on the only girl i've dated because i did not want to have children with her.

the issues i've had are related less to being unable to exist in a field and more to being unable to maintain interest in one. i did not want to be a mathematician, so i switched to computer science; i didn't want that, so i switched to law; i didn't want that either and just focused on music.

my interests for many years have been on working on my art projects, not on finding a job.

nor have i ever voted for anybody on the right, or done anything but criticize right-wing politicians. i explicitly endorsed hillary clinton, and i voted for justin trudeau. i voted for kathleen wynne a few times, and for the green party this year.

i've been as clear as i possibly can be that i'm a revolutionary leftist that seeks full emancipation through automation and redistribution - and that, as such, like all leftists, i understand that my single biggest opponent is religion, first and foremost.

you can save your pseudo-analysis for somebody else.