and, what do i think about canada day?

i think it's a jingoistic, chauvinistic display of mindless nationalism towards a country that is middling at best. we are not remembering an uprising, or a declaration of independence from a colonial overlord; confederation was in fact thrust upon us by the nation's elites in order to advance their own interests (and end the gridlock in what was then the canadian parliament of ontario & quebec), without so much as a plebiscite. there is no organic movement attached to this day, no expression of the popular will. if anything, it was designed to limit democracy, and there was mass opposition to it.

so,  i would support a day to celebrate canadians, a kind of workers holiday, before i supported a day to celebrate canada as a geopolitical entity.

and, i don't need an excuse to get drunk.

i was going to go to detroit, but it seems like i'll be inside catching up on some cleaning instead.

i mean, i understand that they have to do this.

but, i'm not sure how much real value they're getting in closing at 21:00; it seems strangely early. if they closed at 23:00...

but, whatever. it's just a few more weeks.

for the record, i would have actually liked to see the show at ufo tonight, but i was planning on catching what i thought was the last bus, at 9:00.

i double checked before i meant to get in the shower at 7:30; the last bus was at 8:00. impossible.

i'm always late for everything, so the idea that i'm going to actually catch the 20:00 bus on time, like, ever, is pretty remote. and, considering that the show won't start until 22:00 or 22:30, why do i want to go over at 19:30 or 20:00? but, i'm at least clear on the scheduling, now. and, they say they'll be done on the 19th.

so, is biden fading after all?

well, harris appears to have a bump at his expense - tentatively. there's a signal, but it's not yet robust. that is, the bump could very well fade. or, to put it another way: now it's her turn to say something stupid. and, i'm going to ask another question: what is harris' reach with white voters?

i'm going to point to a fact that i will come back to over and over again as this plays out: for all of the talk of generational renewal, and the reality that the general voting population is undergoing a generational shift, there remains very little evidence that this is happening in the party itself. i'm not that impressed by the younger candidates in front of me, but if they want a generational renewal then they're going to have to get out and register more young people, because, as it is right now, the key demographic in the primary is in fact still older white voters, and in fact affluent ones at that. you're not going to win this primary by dominating black voters, and you're not going to win it by sweeping millennials, either. the person that wins this primary is going to do so by dominating the baby boomer vote, which is also, in fact, the reason that clinton won the last one.

i've never claimed that biden is ideal from the party base perspective (which is not mine), but he's the last of his kind. he's a dinosaur; it's true. but, that's an asset in this particular race, and not a liability - even if it kills him in the general. it's not a bug, it's a feature.

i still believe that the primary is fundamentally between biden and sanders. the media is trying very hard to insert warren as a replacement for sanders, and is waving around numbers to prove it's working, but the signal remains pretty weak. i would actually expect most warren voters to move to biden. but, she is the wild card. and, she could actually help bernie win in the end, if she takes enough delegates away from biden.

despite polling saying otherwise, which may have somewhat of a bradley effect to it, i would think that harris' ceiling is fairly low, due to the nature of the primary she's fighting. and, see, this is the point that i think a lot of the middle aged candidates aren't grasping: this is still their parents' party. it's not their kids' party. not yet.

if somebody is successful in a massive voter registration drive, that could change. otherwise, we're going to see what we saw in new york in 2016, where sanders was filling stadiums full of people that weren't able to vote for him and then got badly beaten amongst actual, registered voters. it may, in the end, still be sanders v. the universe, but they're all going to run up against the same brick wall that he did.

so, biden has a tremendous demographic advantage in the party, even if his numbers with black voters soften up a little. if he gets 50% of the black vote instead of 70% of the black vote, it doesn't change the outcome. and, nobody seems to want to come to terms with the only strategy that there actually is to counter that: they all need to get out and start registering new voters, because a dominant proportion of the existing ones are out of the reach of essentially all of them.

is trump a racist?

it would seem that way, yes.

but, guess what?

hillary clinton is a racist.
george w. bush is a racist.
bill clinton is a racist.
george bush was a racist.
ronald reagan was a racist.
jimmy carter may have been too smart to actually be a racist, but he didn't transform the office in any meaningful way.
but, gerald ford was a racist.
and richard nixon was certainly a racist. massively.
and, lbj was a racist,
and, jfk was a racist.
and, eisenhower was a racist - although maybe less so than some of these other guys.
and truman was a racist.
and fdr was a racist....

i only skipped one of them. and, while i'm not going to argue that barack obama was a racist, i will point out that a number of his policies were, in actuality, actually also kind of racist. he certainly didn't undo anything, anyways.

so, the thing that's weird about this is that the situation is being presented as though it's novel: that donald trump is a racist president, and that's something that's unusual, or out of the ordinary, rather than being the status quo for the last two hundred odd years.

how about this: the office of the president of the united states is actually a racist institution, and what we learned recently is that it's going to take a lot more than electing a half-black person to change or fix that.

so, i'm going to make a not so bold prediction: the next president of the united states will either be a racist, or will carry forward a set of explicitly racist policies.

to be clear: my position on this is that a good faith application of the court order means that the state should be doing much more to move these kids into foster care, much more quickly.

what about the issue of corporate detention facilities?

corporate run jails - whatever their flavour - are something that you really can't have in a free society, for a couple of reasons that reduces to the profit motive interfering with the public good. that is, a corporate run jail is erected on a conflict of interest. the public good is to focus as much on rehabilitation, and keep people out of jails as much as possible; the public good is to reserve these institutions for the worst offenders, and try to get everybody else out back into society as quickly as possible. but, the profit motive of a corporate jail is to keep people in as long as possible, for as trivial a thing as can be imagined.

so, you can't have a for-profit model around these things; i'll accept accusations of minarchism in my argument that prisons should be converted to hospitals rather than shut down completely, but you need to leave the state in charge of it. you can't have people profiting from this.

now, i'm not imagining that these kids are being asked to do labour while they're locked up, although i wouldn't put it past them. but, this is where the situation gets particularly problematic in the united states when it comes to private prisons. our court system has ruled (forced) prison labour unconstitutional in canada, even in the context of sending inmates out to pick up trash. but, the reason you have jim crow in the united states - and this has more to do with that than you may realize - is that you allow for slavery for the incarcerated. that is the other position i would take on this: i would support a constitutional amendment to abolish all slavery in the united states.

so,

1) more resources to more quickly move kids into foster care, even if i understand that there is a bottleneck at the end in terms of how many placements are available.
2) you need to take out the profit motive, which may reduce the number of kids being processed.
3) a constitutional amendment to ban prison labour.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/30/20074048/democratic-2020-candidates-homestead-child-detention-facility-florida