and, if she wanted to, she could then go after all of these corporate executives and greedy suits for lost wages using a concept called unjust enrichment.

i mean, there's this kind of cultural misunderstanding of contract law, as borne out in decades worth of hollywood film.

"did you read the fine print?"

but, it's a nineteenth century concept of law, it's not reality, and it hasn't been since before the emancipation proclamation. there's all kinds of rules about what can and can't be inside legal contracts, and judges rip them up all of the time.

you can't sell yourself into slavery.

and, you can't consent to much, as a child.

what i'm saying is that there's a pretty good chance that a judge might look at the situation and say something like:

"sure, she signed it away. it's true. and, the law let her do it. but, she was a child, and how can a child consent? what legality is there in a law such as this?

what should have happened is that the adults in the room should have realized that they had an obligation to do what was in her best interests, which was create a trust in her name that she could access at a certain age, because she wrote these songs and they must belong to her.

so, i therefore rule that the fiduciary obligation of the parties overpowers the existing contract, and give her the rights to her own songs."

and, because she's taylor swift, it just might work.

and, there's a really positive upside to this, as well: if she can get a judge to make that ruling, and it can withhold a few appeals, it will become the new legal reality. so, it will stop people from preying on child artists in the future - they will be legally required by precedent to carry through with their fiduciary obligations.

hey, i'm an advocate of self-ownership all around. but, i'm an artist, too. i'm in support of people owning their own songs, certainly.

if she was 14 or 15 or 16, she would have needed to use some kind of power of attorney, and essentially relied on a concept of fiduciary obligation. they should have put the rights for her into a trust that she could gain access to as she aged. that they didn't would be a breach of the fiduciary obligation they had to her.

this is an over-simplification, of course. and, i don't know the relevant case law. but, given the context, it's worth taking a shot at this - because she could get a novel ruling.

https://mentalfloss.com/article/85007/how-michael-jackson-bought-publishing-rights-beatles-catalogue

i'm reminded of the time that michael jackson bought out the rights to paul mccartney's work. and, he wasn't happy about it.

taylor has something going for her, here: she was a minor. that means her rights to consent are questionable.

i think she should sue.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/arts/music/taylor-swift-rerecord-albums.html

The study found that genetically related people tend to be similar in their behavior, which tells us that sexuality has influences buried somewhere in the DNA.

no, it doesn't - because genetically related people tend to share conditioning as a consequence of being from similar, or the same, families. it baffles me that this assumption is still kicking around, all over the place. 

i've been clear for years that i think you want to look more to pavlov than mendel if you want to understand this, which isn't even to suggest "nurture", as though it's something that is taught. the plotline to gravity's rainbow is a kind of a twisted joke, but i actually think he got the right idea about it. the result is that sexuality occurs mostly by accident, mostly by chance.

but, at the end of the day, i also think there's a choice involved - and i do think we can control our conditioning if we want to, although i think it's immoral to enforce it.

they point out that people want to resist a genetic explanation because they don't want to be clinicized, and i think this is a valid point, but i'm ultimately more interested in what the truth of the matter is. the flip side of the debate is that people want to insist on biology as the answer so they can get around religious objections, but this is a bad argument because it shouldn't actually matter what religion says in the first place.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/opinion/genetics-sexual-orientation-study.html

how would a thrill kill kult / ministry concert go over in the middle east, do you think?

see.

i'm sorry.

it's true.

christianity is, at it's core, a perverse zombie vampire cult.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_Germany

and, let's make sure we understand this, too.

this isn't about christians v muslims.

christianity is dead and buried in europe. and it's not coming back from the dead - there will be no zombie jesus ransacking the european parliament.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/report-shows-highest-percentage-of-atheists-in-former-east-germany-a-828526.html

like i say, this is tricky.

because i want them to organize and represent themselves, if they are here....that is, i don't want an apolitical mass of recent immigrants, i want them to participate....and, yet, i know i'll end up fighting against them if they do.

harmonious multiculturalism is just a burkean conservative fantasy reality. their religion is going to guide their politics, and i'm going to end up on the other side of it - if not brutally targeted by it.

so, what we're left with is two choices: either try very hard to pull them away from their faith and identity and all of the oppression and hate that comes with it, or put up barriers to entry. once again: what doesn't work is laissez-faire neo-liberalism on immigration policy.

in canada, the population is still quite small. we can talk about spending more money on integration, still. in gemany, they let the issue get out of hand, and it's created a mess.

the first step is for the political establishment to take responsibility for creating the problem via insufficient attention to integration programs.

my biggest enemy is not any of these other things, but religion.

that is the thing i wake up every day and need to fight.

everything else is secondary.

and, i don't want you to misunderstand my points.

muslims are people, too. so, they are entitled to all of the same civil rights i'd give to everybody else, including rights of due process and even freedom of assembly. and, i'm certainly not advocating physically removing their clothing - they deserve bodily autonomy, like anybody else.

but, where i draw the line - and what makes me different than a conservative - is that i reject the idea of "religious rights", and am especially vocal about it when religious belief comes into conflict with other rights. while i insist that i am consistent about this, that i am merely applying the same standards to muslims that i apply to christians and jews, i also recognize that there are differences of scale, because, in the world we live in today, islam poses us challenges that the other religions don't pose us, or at least don't pose us anymore, or at least don't pose us right now.

so, i do not think that you have the right to oppress people because your religion says it, whatever your religion, and whoever you're oppressing.

further, because my end goal is secularization rather than multiculturalism, i am willing to support policies that slow down the rate of immigration for the benefit of social cohesion - partly because i realize that the other alternative is a lot worse.

if forced with a binary choice between (1) living in a society where religious muslims are participating in the political process and potentially fighting for laws that uphold their beliefs while challenging the secular nature of the state and (2) not having any muslims at all, i would find the second option more appealing. see, this is the trick - i ultimately don't particularly care what the people around me think or believe, but i really don't want to have to deal with fighting them off in the political arena, because i've spent the better part of my life fighting off christians, and kind of want to leave that behind and move on. it's deflating to find yourself victorious in the battle between secularism and religion, only to have your own side cave in by bringing your enemy all of these fresh recruits.

reality is not a binary choice such as this; this is a thought experiment. but, it demonstrates where the limits of tolerance exist, and where the actual fears lie. because, in the end, i'm not going to obey their laws. and, of course they're legitimate - because any sizeable group should be politically represented, as well.

as mentioned, the ideal is to let them come and then convince them to abandon their faith when they get here. but, that means that we need to have programs designed to integrate them, and it means that the rate of immigration cannot be so large as to overwhelm them. there are legitimate questions around both of these things, today, here in front of us.

is it because god made us unique or something?

that's bullshit, obviously.

yeah, i don't think there's any value in seeing life as sacred or unmodifiable or something. i don't even know exactly what the argument is; it just seems reactionary, either way. it's a very conservative position, which is kind of uncharacteristic for this county.

i wouldn't just support liberalizing these laws. i would argue for substantial public funding into the field.

https://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/features/gene-editing-in-canada

the thing about these guys is that they won't tell anybody what they're actually doing. so, it's fashionable amongst science-y types to just write it off as nonsense, but that's actually not very rigorous. the more science-y approach is to point out that they can't be analyzed, so we can't know whether what they're doing makes any sense or not. that's fundamentally different from a clairvoyant or a fortune teller, or even a magician, where we can break it down and explain how it works.

they might have a great scientific model. they probably don't. but...

that said, i don't think that this is something that public dollars should be funding reports on, either. cbc should really be embarrassed for running a story like this.

can somebody at wikileaks or somebody get this out there so we can figure it out?

my analysis is not based on a secret formula, and i don't have a crystal ball, so i'm not trying to predict the future. i'm just looking at broad trends around the solar cycle, and what are at this point quite rigorous correlations from ancient  ice core tree ring samples.

we are bottoming out right now. so, that means that the conditions for a very cold winter do in fact exist. but, we can also be sure of something else: things will be getting better, soon. the cycle will be clicking back in, and when it does we should expect it to get very, very hot and very, very fast.

so, i'm going to split the difference with their secret wisdom. i'm expecting an early fall, and a brutal start to winter, yes - in this part of the world. it may be very different elsewhere. i'm not talking about global average temperatures, i'm talking about local weather.

but, i think there's a lot of uncertainty around what happens at the beginning of the upcoming year.

if the bottoming out clicks in, and gets stuck for a long time, we could indeed have a late spring and one more shitty summer before it flips back over. but, none of us should have any kind of confidence in that actually happening. given that we don't actually understand the physics of this - all we have is an observed pattern - it's actually just as likely that the cycle could click back in very hard. and, we would then want to expect an early spring and a scorching summer.

so, we should expect to get hit early, but we should also have some hope that this is the end of it for a good while. and, we should get ready to exit this little blip we're in, and be prepared for a much warmer future, as it is coming. soon.

so, we might have one more crappy spring left. or we might not.

it'll be clearer what's going on as we get closer to the solstice.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/farmers-almanac-winter-1.5262555

what it means is that there aren't any meaningful boundaries.

or, that they're so clear as to not need to be stated.

as it was with the furniture...

when your ex pees with the door open, it's because she feels utterly safe and comfortable around you, and completely trusts you.

like, she wanted me there when she was giving birth. i didn't go, i felt it was not my place. but she invited me repeatedly and was a little upset when i didn't go.

but, it didn't prevent her from peeing with the door open when i did come over.

like, up to five years after we broke up.

she just really doesn't like the idea of me being on hormones. that's all. and, when she admits it, things will get better. i just hope it doesn't take another ten years...

it's the same thing with the bans on the headscarves at work.

if you see that as an attack on a minority group, i can understand why you might oppose it. but,  i rather see it as a way to prevent a repressive system from attacking actual repressed minorities - and people that are pushing back against it as upholding a system of oppression.

we can have definitional debates all day, right?

but, i'd ask you to sit down and be honest about it.

muslims, like jews, and east asians, are actually a pretty well-off group. the data's pretty clear on that point. and, islam is a pretty shitty system, too - all you need to do to realize that is to educate yourself about it.

it's ultimately a definitional question.

i'm not interpreting muslims as a repressed minority; if i did, i might see the situation differently. queers are a repressed minority, certainly. native americans are. african-americans are. i tend to stand with them, against the systems that repress them. but, muslims, like other asian groups, actually tend to do fairly well. who is oppressing the muslims?

rather, i'm interpreting islam as a system of repressive rules that wants to oppress people. like christianity. or capitalism. or, yes, fascism. so, i'm pushing back against the ideology on that level - this is a system that wants to hurt people.

to draw an equivalence between queers and muslims would consequently be to draw a parallel between the oppressed and the oppressors. and, i won't do that.

because i'm not phishing for votes.

i think we should be enforcing these laws, myself.

but, the way i'd want to articulate it is: i think we should be standing up for civil rights, which often means pushing back against religious authorities that want to restrict them.

you're tolerating their intolerance.

but, should you?

or, how much should you?

why?

because queer rights are a civil rights issue - these are positive rights.

but, tolerating islam is about turning a blind eye to civil rights due to cultural relativism, it's allowing them to uphold their systems of oppression via these processes of intellectual acrobatics. that's what you're tolerating.

you simply can't draw an equivalence between "tolerating queers" and "tolerating islam".

that actually is trumpian - it's like drawing an equivalence between anti-fascists and nazis.

wow.

what a blown night.

i gotta get up, eat, shower and then pick it up.

afaik, no serious inquiry has been called into the question of ballot stuffing in the 905 and 416.

but, i do think the data would support such an inquiry.

i mean, much has been made of his 20% approval rating, which set in mere weeks after the election.

little has been made of the fact that he also had a 20% approval rating a few weeks before the election.

and, no - i'm not going to retract....concerns....about the legitimacy of the last election in ontario.

i don't want to do the research right now and find the sources - i'm too far behind on what i'm doing - but i will draw your attention to the curious fact that ford's approval rating a few months after he was elected was essentially the same as his approval rating a few months before he was elected.

if you were to collect this data and graph it, you'd get this weird normal curve, or parabola, depending on your analogy.

so, we're left with two ways to analyze the situation.

1) ford managed to dramatically increase his popularity exactly where and when he needed to, and then lost all the support he somehow gained immediately after he gained it.
2) bullllllshiiiiiiit.

given that he brought in the same people that were accused of doing this in the 2011 federal election, and it happened in the same places, i'm leaning towards 2).

and, i wonder.

what are these guys up to just right now, anyways?

i'm an openly trans person walking around in a city with a sizeable muslim minority.

i understand these numbers. they mirror my own experiences.

and, the left needs to stop ignoring them and start coming up with tactics to address them.

"but, it's his house."

yeah.

and he signed a fucking lease.

like, i just want to...

he smokes with the windows closed, and the shades drawn. he stays inside for days at a time. i see a stray butt here and there outside, but i can't prove anything. i'd have to do something stupid to get in and take a picture or something, and i'm obviously not going to.

it's just an absolutely absurd situation.

but, at least the gas is clearing out. before he lit up, all i could smell down here was the orange air fresheners. it was a pleasant change.

i want to stand with the people that are trying to get out of islam. my solidarity is with the apostates. fully. unwaveringly. that leads me to a position where i shouldn't oppose immigration itself, so much as i should actively work to convert muslims to atheism when they get here. and, in practice, that's how i actually act.

but, i know enough to be mindful of the possibilities of muslim voting blocs, and the threats they may pose to freedom in a secular democracy. and, at the end of the day, the people will speak, and when they do they must be listened to.

it's a careful line to walk.

and, it would be very helpful if the more responsible parties would take more responsible positions.

and, it's not a question of tolerating queers, either.

there's nothing wrong with being queer. what are you tolerating, exactly? consensual sex? that's not tolerance, it's the absence of oppression.

i mean, it's like saying that letting women vote is being tolerant. it's an abuse of language.

with islam, the language is properly defined, and you're talking about tolerating this huge list of things that are actually illegal in virtually every liberal democracy. you're talking about turning a blind eye to basic human rights for entire classes of people. i know that the newspeak is increasingly being indoctrinated, but it's incredibly challenging from an intellectual standpoint; we want the laws to be universal, to apply to everybody, to be void of these exceptions that harm people. and, it's a struggle to come face to face with it, and turn away from it, often on a daily basis.

and, no: i don't have an obligation to tolerate smokers, either.

i was actually going to point out that it seems like the air is finally clearing out, but then somebody lit a smoke.

i'm going to eventually catch him. and, it's going to be an exceedingly messy scenario, when i do.

one of the non-crazy parties in germany (in france, in the uk) needs to run on a platform of decreasing immigration from countries with right-wing value systems.

this game of chicken that they're playing is running it's course. and, somebody's going to get killed.

the people are speaking. and, the rulers need to listen.

the fact is that people don't like them because they're actually terrible.

i want a post-cultural society.

"multiculturalism" is just an algorithm for violence.

we need to stop pretending we can just air drop millions of these people into these secular societies and think it'll work it out.

well, what would the saudis do if five million german techno deutsche bags showed up out of nowhere and decided to party outside the mosque in mecca?

"c'mon, barbie, let's go party..."

the end result would probably look a lot like a concentration camp.

the germans have an opportunity to demonstrate that they've evolved a little, but i'm not interested in jumping around the fundamental point. i think they have a right to self-determination, and in a non-colonial society like germany, that could very well mean putting up walls and telling people they just really aren't welcome there.

because they really might not be.

and, they don't have an obligation to get colonized.

now, i know - it's a fraction of the population. it's not a horde of muslims, banging on the gates of vienna - or at least not yet.

but, the mainstream narrative needs to adjust itself to the reality of the situation, which is that there's an integration problem, and this keeps happening over and over again for a reason: islam is a very difficult culture to be tolerant of because it crosses lines that arguably shouldn't be tolerated.

google threw this at me. i didn't look for it. i guess i recently posted about journalism, and about the hell's (in the rebuild), and it constructed it for me via the magic of algorithms. great.

but, it's an interesting thing to watch re: the question of google stealing profits from journalists.

i guess what's underlying this, really, is a question of a division of labour. and, i suppose a fast way to summarize my position is to simply state that the accounting process is so reductionist, so difficult to calculate, that doing so is virtually impossible. and, again: that's a standard position on the left.

i think i'd expect warren to push through a policy based on a reductionist concept of the division of labour. sanders, less so.

i mean, there's a reason i can have all of these debates.

i went to school for a very long time, and i studied a lot of things.

- math
- math-physics
- math-economics
- computer science (and math-comp courses)
- law

also: courses in english, biology (and some math-bio, but mostly in game theory), music, history, philosophy, psychology...

philosophy is another course with big overlaps with math, but i'm mostly self-taught / dabbling on that front. it's an experiential thing, though. like, math and physics and comp. sci profs will tell you stories about liebniz or newton or descartes or whatever. you don't get credits for it, or get quizzed on it, but it's a part of the process.

if i had stuck around a little longer (or shown up a little later), i'd have probably ended up with enough credits in "mathematical biology", which is the mathematical study of dna sequencing, to get a minor in biology, as well.

having a math degree means you take a lot of interdisciplinary courses that also count as credits in other fields, like physics and economics. and, as such, i would also qualify for a number of minors, almost by accident. i'd have to look into it to be comprehensive, but i know i have enough for physics and economics, to be sure.

it was really not clear to me which one was going to be worse.

and, trump is not as bad as i feared.

but, i mean, voting for a republican is not an option for me, and can't be. it's more like that i'd end up voting green, with the understanding that it would help the republicans win, and either be apathetic about it, or actively hoping for it.

there are obvious reasons why i can't support them, directly.

specifically regarding white voters in midwest states, i would suspect that bill clinton's support for nafta was probably a big factor in voting against hillary.

so, these studies and polls that are trying to...

the premise is that people are voting for things they believe in, that they actively support. and, i think that is wrong.

it is probably the case that most trump voters did some kind of calculation that led them to conclude that he wasn't as bad as clinton, rather than found some kind of policy that they actively supported. and, it is likewise the case that most clinton supporters were mostly acting out of fear at what trump would do if he were to actually win.

in hindsight, the biggest measurable differences are twofold.

1) trump has been terrible on the climate. clinton may not have been very good, but trump is clearly worse. i think that much is not controversial.
2) trump has been better on foreign policy, clearly. it wasn't clear how he'd govern - he said a lot of things that didn't make sense. but, he's largely withdrawn from syria, which is good. and, he's mostly avoided starting new wars anywhere. clinton was crystal clear that she would have been far more aggressive in using force.

obviously, you want an option that is better than either - you want a better climate policy than trump's, and a better foreign policy than clinton's. but, that didn't exist, or at least not in the form of a major candidate.

and, if we're debating which is worse for the planet in the long run, it's not an easy answer; they're both bad, granted, but somebody has to govern.

obviously, i don't like the options on the table very much: i neither like clinton nor trump. i didn't want either to win. but, one of them was going to...

and, in weighing lesser evils, i do not think that trump comes off nearly as poorly as others would suggest - or, in hindsight, that clinton would have offered much of an actual improvement.

if you actually look at the evidence, clinton's positions are largely aligned with trump's on the vast majority of topics that he's criticized for the most loudly. so, if you're angry about immigration, it's not clear that clinton would have been more to your liking. if you're angry about abortion, it's not clear that clinton would have been more to your liking. etc.

on the other hand, it is likely that clinton would have been a belligerent commander-in-chief, and a war-time president, by her own making.

as mentioned: i don't exactly think that trump has had a good presidency.

but, i don't think he's had a horrible one, either. i would rather rank him in the middle of the pack over the last fifty years - he's been about average.

he's not as bad as either bush, he's not as bad as nixon and he's not as bad as reagan. and, he's about a coin toss with the clinton that actually governed.

i understand that, if you want to run against him, you want to exaggerate how bad he is. and, he'll do the same thing in reverse, too. but, the fact is that the economy is not so bad right now, and he hasn't started any wars - low bars, granted, but relevant in a reality where his immediate predecessors were pretty shitty.

also, i did endorse clinton.

weakly.

but, i'm not sure it was the right choice.

i probably would have voted for jill stein, if i could. but, if i had voted for clinton, i might have been in the group of people that did so, and regretted it.

and, no, i don't think there's anything wrong with religious animus.

rather, i think that religion is a virus of the mind that needs to be eradicated as we move towards an entirely godless, fully secular future.

further, i've been as clear as i can that i don't have any animus towards race, but have a strong degree of animus towards religion.

so, to be clear.

- i do not want to be a mathematician.
- i do not want to be a computer scientist.
- i do not want to be a lawyer.
- i do not want to be a politician.
- i do not want to be a school teacher.

- i do want to be a (studio) musician.
- i do want to be a blogger.
- i do want to be a polemicist.
- i do want to be a social activist.

- i don't care if i have money or wealth or status or family.
- i do care if i have a safe, healthy environment to create in.

i was at some point planning on becoming a school teacher, i suppose a high school teacher, but i've since developed a strong aversion towards spending time with young people.

it's been a slow process of rejecting a lot of opportunity...