i mean....

i get that this guy was being a jerk. and, good riddance. fine.

but, detroit can be frustrating when it comes to this, too. i've never seen a city go so far out of it's way to try and stunt investment.

so, the concern is that people from out of town (many who are white) are coming into the area and spending money. most cities actually go out of their way to design economic stimulus plans because they want that, they don't argue that it's "pushing out the local residents" (many who are black). now, i grasp that the way this guy was doing this appears to actually have been literally pushing out local residents by underpaying or not paying them at all, and bringing in workers that lived elsewhere - and no city would want that either. what everybody ought to want is a scenario where you create economic projects that bring in people from out of town (sometimes called tourists), who then spend their money in the local economy, which is then distributed to the locals, who then have money to spend on what they want to spend it on. that's called stimulus, or investment and it's what you're supposed to want, if you're a vaguely leftist liberal keynesian type. what they seem to want is loans for small businesses, while acknowledging that there's no market for what they're selling, because the poverty rate is structural.

what i'm getting at is what everybody knows: if they set up a bar designed to appeal solely to the local residents, it's going to fail, because they don't have the disposable income. in order to get the disposable income, you need to do things that create jobs - and then you need to find ways to attract people to spend money to pay the workers doing those jobs. then, once they've made some money, they can buy a venue, and put on shows for a local population that has disposable income from the employment created by the outside investment. detroit refuses to get this - it wants the end product without building it. this is just another example.....

i wish they would have tried to unionize or something rather than walk out, because the best outcome for everybody in the short run would have been for el club to keep being el club, and have it's profits better distributed amongst the workers, who could then use them to build the economy they want.

if the bar fails in the end, the neighbourhood loses a substantial income source, and everybody is worse off.

fwiw, the artist that i saw there on saturday - actress - happens to be both british and black.

that doesn't have much to do with why i was there, but it does happen to be actually true.

most of what i saw there were white rock musicians, because that's where they played, because it's where the best sound system was. but, the thing is that detroit is like 80% black, and rock music has a 90% white audience. so, any rock bar anywhere in detroit is going to come up to the same basic contradiction, unless you put it in a suburb like ferndale, which is kind of a shitty deal. it's a lot easier to put the thing downtown.

i guess the answer is to listen better.

but, i mean, i don't have a lot of patience for wage theft, either. if i knew what was going on, i would have  brought the iww in.

i'm hoping they can save the sound system somehow....you don't want that going to waste....

that article actually makes me wonder about what happened to me that night at the bar in february, 2017 where i ended up with a concussion and assumed it was an accident.

hrmmn.

this is very similar to what i heard the other night, so i guess it checks out.

if he's gone, he's gone.

but, the venue is still too small. which, i mean....it's great in the right circumstance. it's just a question of booking the right acts for a small space, and acknowledging that it's not the right space for others.

https://www.metrotimes.com/table-and-bar/archives/2019/02/25/new-ownership-takes-over-el-club-after-founder-accused-of-wage-theft-and-racial-discrimination

i heard some gossip about the situation at el club last night.

what i heard was third hand and one perspective, and i'm not willing to act on it until i hear some more information. but, whatever is happening at the location, it is clearly either scaring people off or pushing them out.

while i don't want to support a bad venue, at the end of the day, i'm going to go to where the bands are playing. and, i want to point something out about el club: it's actually a very small venue.

there's a sign on the door that says capacity: 305.

everything else aside, the sound in the club is good, and it at least ought to be a solid venue for a smaller act to play, if the issues can work themselves out. but, if you're an out of town band, and you think you can fill up a 300 person venue easily, then, everything else aside, i'd suggest you look towards a larger venue, because you're going to sell out el club very fast, and then everybody loses - you sell less tickets, people can't get in and the people that do go end up squished together.

what the city of detroit needs is an el club that can fit 500-600 people in it. what it has are the majestic and st. andrew's. and, the fact is that the culture at el club is no longer that different than the ones at these larger venues.

so, everything else aside, i'd request you think about picking the larger venue, if you think you can sell out el club.

stop for a second.

what are the historical parallels to a character such as osama bin laden? i've compared castro to mithridates eupator, but the pontic rebel is only one in a long line of roman hostis publicus - many of whom modern historians claim never actually existed, or were otherwise so dramatically exaggerated by the roman propaganda that they might as well have never actually existed.

sorting through propaganda, and validating or invalidating it, is a major part of a historian's job description. it is a substantial part of what a historian actually does.

so, i want you to contemplate a very real possibility - that future historians may actually argue that there never was anybody named osama bin laden. and, given the evidence they have before them, it may be the most reasonable deduction.

i will reiterate: this discussion is not currently in the realm of discourse, because the dearth of evidence is so staggering. i would like to be able to have a discussion and/or debate about who was responsible, but i need the government to release it's evidence before i can do that. all any of us can do is speculate, one way or another. the difference between my position and the mainstream position is simply that i am pointing out that the entire accepted narrative is purely speculative, and deductively equivalent to any conspiracy theory. but, then i'm taking a step back and saying "we can't do this. we don't have the basic facts.".

so, i will at least stand with the conspiracy theorists in requesting that the government finally release it's dossier, if for historical documentation rather than anything else. i mean, you don't think that historians 300 years from now are going to think that oswald acted alone, do you? there's enough time now, from that event, to understand that what we are told, and what so many of us continue to believe, is not what history will record.

but, i will lay something down fairly assertively: it is hard for me to understand how this happened without the aid of some kind of state actor, whether it was inside the country or outside of it.

so, to be clear: what that means is that if i do end up supporting the update bill in the end then that doesn't mean that i all of a sudden support nafta.

there's no contradiction in supporting the update package, and continuing to work to rewrite or dismantle the deal. and, if bernie wins, i would hope he pushes to renegotiate.

so, i may decide that this is better and be pragmatic about it, but i am sure that i won't decide that it's good enough, or stop agitating for change.

and, i have been clear for a very long amount of time that i am categorically opposed to intellectual property rights.

do i support the new trade agreement?

of course not, or at least not in absolute terms; this is still nafta, and i've been opposed to nafta for 25 years. that hasn't changed, and the reasons for opposing nafta haven't changed. what's changed is that the liberals and ndp have both swung hard to the right, and are expressing support for something that they used to oppose. i'm still where i always was.

but, the issue before us is not whether we can rip up nafta or not, it's whether we're going to accept the precise provisions, and i haven't seen enough of a close analysis yet to determine whether i think the positives are going to outweigh the negatives.

i mean, i've seen some language about labour standards that i like, and some language about intellectual property rights that i don't like.

the final text of the bill is not yet clear, so i don't know. i may support the revisions to the deal, in the end, while still opposing nafta, overall - or i may decide that the strengthened enforcement of intellectual property rights is more dangerous than the increase in labour standards is worth.

we'll see what the american congress comes up with.

we need to put the process on hold.

you can't be signing deals with an unreliable partner, and the united states is currently an unreliable partner. that is the language we should be using: we cannot rely on you to keep your word, america. and, we need to send a clear message to the americans that if they don't clean up their act then we're not interested in signing further deals with them.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2019/05/31/no-warning-for-trudeau-of-trumps-latest-tariff-threat.html

actually, i think this is completely absurd and preposterously tyrannical; we can't have the government going in and snooping around in your social media sites and firing you because they don't like your friends. that's despotic.

i hope that he sues for wrongful dismissal, and the court lays down some proper restrictions on what the government is allowed to do and not do, here.

https://globalnews.ca/news/5334013/the-commissionaire-former-door-guard-fighting-rcmp-allegations/

i watched something on lady grey this morning when i came in, and had to take some time to recollect myself. my rationalism is pretty cold, and i understand that the state is power and needs to put down rebels in order to keep being the state, but i have a general soft spot for children in my third law reality. it was never her fault. really. so, is it really the low point of english culture, of british civilization? it might be. for all the depravity that happened under monarchy and feudalism, and under the reign of this particularly murderous monarch, there must be very few documented executions of children.

anyways.

i was late for pile, but they were also unfathomably early. piii-ile! i figured they'd come on at 23:00, earliest, but they were a quarter done when i get there a few minutes after ten. the opening bands must have been very short sets. alas.

they let me in for free again, at least. 

i was just late. no reasons. i think i caught most of it; it seemed to be exclusively selections from the new record, and was good for what it was. and, i got some good rants out in the smoking section before i left.

i need to fast for a blood test tomorrow, so i don't know how useful i'm going to be for the rest of the night/morning, but i could conceivably get some reviews in. or not. i'm not overly focused on it at the moment.