it's just not clear what the actual facts are.

http://ideas.time.com/2013/07/10/eugenics-are-alive-and-well-in-the-united-states/

it is well understood that the american health care system has struggled with the reality of eugenics for over a century now, and that these policies have gone from having widespread popular and state support to being kept an open secret, to avoid scrutiny.

i'll admit i was a little surprised by this asserting itself as a political issue, as it is usually the kind of thing that is reserved for nuts at book signings and wacky anarchists with unwieldy blogs. but, it is indeed probably long past due for a national inquiry into the broad treatment of not just africans but also hispanics, native americans, jews, homosexuals, people with mental health issues and a few other groups across the entire system. we know that there was a time when operations were done on people without their consent; it's not clear to what extent this continues to happen, but you hear things. do marginalized groups die in elective surgery more often than others, for example? are they denied access to treatment by insurance companies in different proportions? can you pull these sorts of numbers out? can you try and make sense of them? because anybody who has looked into this knows that they are actually there, and there's nothing coincidental about it. it's not about class. and, it's not an accidental correlation, or a subconscious oversight. there should be no naivete about the conclusions drawn from the analysis; everything you'd pull out of such a thing would be entirely intentional.

so, the thought is that something like a higher birth mortality rate for african americans isn't going to be a consequence of class, or the result of subconscious bias by the doctors, but rather a pretty clear systemic policy to reduce the birth rate. why jump to these conclusions? because that's something that has actually been legislated by "progressive" groups in the united states (and some right-wing groups in canada), and something that nobody is really sure about the real extent of which it was ever actually stopped.

you'd have to start with an inquiry in order to actually understand the actual facts, which i will repeat that we are not entirely clear about, right now.

another way to articulate what i'm saying is this: i would be opposed to bailing out the banks on private student loan debt.

and, let's be clear what a student loan forgiveness really is: it's a bailout.

again: i'm not a muslim. i don't have a moral problem with usury. i'm not going to support an anti-debt bill for the sake of it. if consenting adults want to sign an agreement, it's up to the courts to regulate it, and that goes equally well for everything else that muslims don't like: divorce, child support, mortgages, pay day loans and student loan debt, too.

so, if the government wants to step in and cancel a debt that was taken out by citizens to attend an institution that is public in scope, that is a question of democratic oversight. if there is support for this, it is up to the people to enact it.

but, for a government to cancel a debt held between a private citizen and a private institution, even if it is acting as an intermediary in the loan, would be overstepping it's bounds and interfering in a process that should be determined via the rules of contract law and regulated by the courts - an area of law that is far more flexible than classical liberals would have you believe.

my position is actually that the government didn't do it's due diligence in researching my background before it gave me the money, and the loan should be declared a gift for that reason. if a banking institution doesn't do it's due diligence, it has no right to expectation; that is, the courts have determined long ago that if the bankers give money to people they had no reasonable expectation would be able to repay the loan, then the debt can be declared null and void. consent requires competency. i could very well argue this in court, one day. for now, i just ignore the loan collectors.

but, the point is that the issue of private debt is not up for the government to regulate, but up to the courts to deal with. public debt is a different issue - that is a question of the public will.

there are only around 20 private universities in canada, and almost all of them are religious in focus.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/education/canadian-university-report/article-why-there-are-only-a-few-private-universities-in-canada/

if you're going to wipe out student debt in the united states, it should be limited to people that attended public institutions.

income is perhaps not the most relevant factor, but i would oppose a bill that wipes out student debt for private institutions.

it would seem as though this is going to be an issue in the next parliament.

on first glance, this is actually kind of shocking - this appears to be very right-wing legislation. but, there is a consistency with the new liberal party, in that it doesn't seem to care about the rule of law, or the enforcement of constitutional rights. in this case, it appears to be holding to a retributive concept of justice that, while popular with "progressives", would have been thought of as barbaric by historical liberals.

it will be interesting to me to see if the ndp support this oversight provision in the next parliament or not, because we would see a reversal in position if they do - i would expect the ndp to support a fire and brimstone policy, and the liberals to reject that as primitive.

https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/may-2019/corrections-bill-lacks-key-provisions-judicial-oversight/

i would be in support of extended judicial oversight over the prison system to ensure that prisoners are not being abused by the police, but such an amendment cannot be proposed by an unelected body. it must come from the house of commons.

i would hope that the next government introduces the legislation in the appropriate body - or that a private member does, if it will not.

my position on violence has been the same for a very long time. i will eventually post things from the mid-00s that articulate this view, and i stated it repeatedly over occupy: violent revolution without critical mass is stupid, but once critical mass has been achieved it becomes both necessary and desirable at the first opportunity.

that is, the question of whether the utilization of force is justified or not rests largely on where the balance of power actually lies.

marx would agree with me; jesus wouldn't. you decide which is right-wing and which is left-wing, but i'm on marx' side and not jesus'.

gandhi's argument also relied on critical mass. people tend not to understand what gandhi actually did very well; it wasn't a non-violent march for ethical or religious purposes, but rather a show of superior force. and, gandhi knew that. what he was saying was "this is the size of my army. shall we arm it with the help of, say, the russians, or will you admit your position is hopeless and withdraw without a meaningless fight?". it worked because the british were rational - it would have likely not have worked against a donald trump or even a winston churchill, who would have been obsessed with rebuilding the empire. the point is that it was not non-violent or non-threatening, but even actually a return to the way that the romans and persians would conduct wars in the post-hellenic period, coming out of a shared greek heritage: generals would put their forces down on the table, and everybody would decide the winner in the terms of a board game, because the greeks realized that these constant civil wars were just pointless destruction. the barbarians did that. the greeks were better than that. and, generals would actually abandon cities after admitting defeat on the risk board. gandhi would have launched a brutal, bloody civil war if the british forced him to. but, they didn't.

so, i will tell activists that they need to back down and stop picking physical fights with cops; they will have a better chance at winning a legal argument than winning a confrontation, as they have no army in which to fight. but, i will also tell them to bide their time: if they had the sufficient amount of forces behind them, i'd be the first to join their side. and, we could see that in our life times...

in fact, the republicans that opposed the new deal were very similar to the british liberals that abolished the poor laws, thereby creating the gilded age; insofar as reaganism is rooted in thatcherism, the claim that the opposition to the new deal was an early type of neo-liberalism is actually quite well-grounded. reagan's dismantling of the welfare system, his welfare queen and the whole thing, is right out of the liberalism of victorian england.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-deal-democrats-republican-party/

nancy pelosi is clearly descending into alzheimer's or something similar to it and needs to step down from her post as speaker immediately.

i will repeat: i am calling on the immediate resignation of nancy pelosi due to clearly declining mental capacity.

another way to think of it is like this: liberals and leftists tend to generally prefer to avoid thinking about things in terms of applying universal rules to specific circumstances and would rather prefer to look at the evidence in front of them in determining an answer that is most relevant to the situation at hand. that is, liberals prefer an empirical-based reasoning that tries to understand the world the way it is, whereas conservatives prefer axiomatic systems that try and define the world from first principles. pacifism is clearly axiomatic rather than empirical and consequently is inherently right-wing. but, the basic point is that a liberal would consequently fundamentally just not understand how a pacifist thinks; to decide that these rules are paramount, and not subject to experience and evidence, that the rules are always the same in all circumstances no matter what, would simply make no sense to a liberal. conservatives need structure and order; liberals need uncertainty and chaos.

the people that you call "progressives" in the united states are generally called "conservatives" in most other places in the world.

this is a good article explaining why conservatives are going to be inclined towards pacifism. if you self-identify as a progressive, and this makes sense to you, then you should put things together and realize that your history and values are on the right rather than the left.

leftists, on the other hand, have historically seen violence as an unavoidable necessity to advance social change.

they missed the argument from property rights, which is more fundamental in my view: if you support property rights, you're far more likely to oppose violence as a rule than you are if you don't. it is conservatives that are big into property rights; the left doesn't support property rights at all, but rather supports dismantling them with violence and redistributing the wealth by force.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-conservatives-hate-war/

there's not really such a thing as an anti-intervention or pacifist left; the left advocates for violent revolution by definition, so an actual leftist is in a situation of determining what kind of struggle it wants to support and what kind of struggle that it doesn't want to support. it follows that you should be exceedingly skeptical of the motives of anybody that chooses isis as an example of a struggle to support, by not intervening - that is not a person that has social values that you want to give a platform to, but somebody that you should do everything you can to keep away from any kind of power; any leftist worth calling themselves such would categorically reject isis in the most violent terms possible, see them as an enemy that needs to be annihilated and be left with a decision over whether they want to fight against isis with or without the aid of imperial forces. that is, it's not a question about whether you want to fight isis or not - this is not debatable - but only a question of if you want to fight them with the empire, or carry on your own campaign against them. seeking dialogue with isis is equivalent to denouncing the left.

people that oppose war on moral grounds, by citing religion or conscientious objection, are not called leftists but are rather called conservatives (or sometimes progressives), and are on the right side of the political spectrum, not the left side of it. a socialist revolution would have absolutely no use for these people at all, whatsoever; they would probably end up in work camps.

so, the question is not whether bernie would support the use of force - of course he would, he calls himself a socialist - but whether you can justify his use of force or not, and i've yet to come up with much of an argument against him.

i never formed a strong opinion around kosovo, which i think is partly due to my age. i cite yugoslavia as my first conscious experience with dishonest government media; it was the first time i seriously questioned whether what these people were telling me is actually true or not. in the end, i had to conclude that because the claims were all around questionable (which is perhaps how my teenage mind interpreted the claim that the issue is very complicated), i didn't have enough evidence to form a meaningful position. i haven't really evolved this, because i haven't really had a good reason to. but, in principle, i would have supported the bombing campaign, if it was really intended to stop a genocide that was actually happening; the thing is that it is not at all clear how much of that is true and how much isn't - unlike in syria, where the atrocities by isis are well documented, and often carried out in public.

do people remember kosovo? well, i'm 38 and it's blurry. it's certainly a larger slice of the electorate than vietnam or nicaragua, but you're nonetheless going to lose at least half of most rooms by even bringing it up. further, my memory is that there was not an anti-war movement attached to the campaign, either. even keeping in mind that it was carried out by a democratic president, i did not encounter a lot of opposition to this war on the left, nor is it a situation that resonates as a mistake with many people today. so, this article appears to largely be shit-disturbing.

but, i think it's a reasonable discussion to have, nonetheless - because i would not vote for or support a pacifist for present, because i'm a leftist, rather than despite it; pacifism is a right-wing thing, not a left-thing one.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/06/23/bernie-sanders-foreign-policy-doctrine-227193

i'm in the mainstream of my own political culture, trust me.

there was a big movement against the wto back in the 90s. there was even a short-lived supergroup involving the bassist for nirvana, the guitarist for soundgarden and the singer for the dead kennedys called "the no wto combo". it (the movement, not the band) collapsed after 9/11.

this was the hesitation with trump. yes, he's awful, on certain issues - for me, the most important thing is the climate. you couldn't have worse leadership on that file. really.

but, is he going to destroy the wto? 'cause i'll take that, however it happens.

and, remember: the democrats are historically the conservative party in the united states. the republicans are historically the liberal party.

there is consequently a certain logic in the democrats embracing islam that is not transferable to the liberal party of canada, and is better attached to the prairie gospel messaging of the historical ndp.