so, my laptop is running, and i'm doing the final stages required to finish these uploads, which is going over everything one last time to make sure it's all aligned properly, but i'm going to be refraining from connecting it to the internet until after i've uploaded everything, just because i want to get this done before i have to deal with any kind of bullshit.

so, expect that all to come up before sunrise. i know i've been committal on this recently and nothing has come up, but expect it this time, for sure.

these will be the last things to complete for 2013. 

also: the dirty smoke smell is back today for the first time in a while.

unfortunately....

ok.

so, i'm going to want to get the documents updated at noise trade & bandcamp, now. we'll clean this mess up after i'm done.

i'm thinking about it though, and how do i get out of this mess, more generally?

in the mid to late 00s, i only connected to the internet over winlited xp images that had been reverse engineered to rip most of the networking functionality out of them. then my life changed drastically in mid-2011. i've been connecting with laptops for several years now, under the assumption that what's on the machine doesn't matter much, and i can always reinstall on short notice. but, with all of the screens burning out (under shady conditions.), i've had to reanalyze this - it hasn't been easy to reinstall, and i'm wasting large amounts of time on troubleshooting.

how do i get out of this?

i've tried installing to the laptop drive on the pc and then plugging it into the laptop, but it doesn't seem to want to pick up the chipset drivers. rather, i need to copy over the files from the existing install, which is messy and corrupted from the drivers from both systems. 

it's been a while since i tried to boot from the dvd, but my memory is that the drive was damaged and, to the extent that it worked at all, it was very slow. i don't remember the right key combination to get it to boot from disc, but i could probably figure that out.

even if i could get that to work, it would mean spending days setting the system back up, and who knows for how long.

what i'm wondering is if it's time to build a custom windows 7 image, if i even can. i don't think that anything like winlite ever came out for windows 7. but, if it did, i could get all of the patches in to it, then rip the core of it out, then copy over an actual fresh install whenever i get attacked. 

i'm also toying with the idea of either installing xp in a virtual machine in linux or just putting xp on there, straight up. if my primary interest right now is security, though, then there are problems with both approaches.

i want to struggle through the rest of the rebuild for jan/2014, first, and i may find myself spending large amounts of time offline as i do it. but, i'm going to have to sit and figure this out, once that's done. this isn't sustainable...

i also want to post a summary of my position on these interventionist bombing campaigns, so it can be referenced moving forward. i don't mind if people cite me - i have a large archive of writing at this point - but i would insist that they do so responsibly. when somebody has thousands of pages of writing on the internet, chances are they've been very precise at least a few times, and it really is your responsibility to do the research properly. there's a point where bad research makes you a bad researcher, and your motives come into question.

i am not a pacifist, and while i don't think the state should be operating on moral principles, i reject the premise that war is this uniformly immoral thing, no matter what. historically, that's a very conservative position. rather, i am an insurrectionary left-wing anarchist; i believe the class war is perpetual, and would usually, on principle, support the violent overthrow of most totalitarian states, if the alternative is something better approaching self-determinancy. what that means is that i'm very left-wing, not that i'm somewhere on the right.

so, the questions that i want to know the answer to before i make a decision to support an interventionist bombing campaign are not about something to do with morality but rather are the following:

1) do i support the opposition forces over the government?
2) if so, will this bombing campaign materially improve the position of the opposition forces on the ground? 

3) if so, are the opposition forces on the ground strong enough to defeat the government?
4) if not, is it reasonable to consider deploying troops?
5) if so, is it in the interests of the nato to actually do so?

these are the questions i want these issues framed in, not absurdities about morals and appeals to, like, gandhi or something.

even as i'm rejecting hippies and pacifists on an epistemological level, and refusing to organize with them, there are startlingly few examples of wars i've actually supported. the difference is that my line of thinking opens me up to the possibility of wars in certain rare scenarios, rather than rejecting all of them a priori, but that doesn't mean you'll see me support very many wars in real life.

let's try a few out.

1) syria.

a) do i support the opposition forces over the government? no. i would prefer to support a secular arab left over saudi-backed wahhabi extremists.

2) libya.

a) do i support the opposition over the government? no. see syria.

3) ukraine.

a) do i support the opposition over the government? no. i supported the maidan protesters, but i neither support the ukrainian nationalists nor do i support the russian separatists. the west should stay out of this.

4) iraq.

a) did i support the opposition over the government? i would have supported an imaginary opposition. for the sake of devil's advocate, let's keep going.

b) would a bombing campaign have improved the positions of this imaginary opposition? if it was targeted it might have, but it would have been naive to believe that.

c) were the forces on the ground strong enough? clearly not, no.

d) was it reasonable to consider deploying troops? definitely not, no.

there's a few where it's less obvious what the right answer is:

5) serbia.

a) did i support the opposition over the government? it was never clear to me if any side should have been supported. but, it is not clear that any side should have been opposed, either. let's go on.

b) would a bombing campaigned have improved their position? yes, clearly.

c) were the forces on the ground strong enough? no.

d) was it reasonable to deploy troops? in serbia, it actually kind of was reasonable to deploy.

e) was it in the interests of nato? i think there's an argument that it was, yeah.

6) iran.

a) would i support the opposition over the government? yes, absolutely, no question.

b) would a bombing campaign improve their position? if it is very small scale & very targeted, it might. no carpet-bombing...

c) are the forces on the ground strong enough? this is the question i'd like to see more discussion around. are they? i don't know. my decision will likely rest on that.

d) is it reasonable to deploy troops? probably not, which is why the strength of the opposition force on the ground is so important.

e) is it in the interests of nato? i think yes, clearly.

and there is only one scenario in the post-war world that i'm aware of where it has been clearly justified:

7) isis.

a) would i support the opposition on the ground over the islamic state? yes. adamantly.

b) would a bombing campaign improve their position? clearly.

c) are the forces on the ground strong enough? the kurds and iraqis could handle it amongst themselves, yes - and the syrians and russians and turks were there to help. ground strength was more than sufficient.

d) was it reasonable to deploy troops? they were already there.

e) was it in the interests of nato? i think it was in the interests of all of humanity.

we can disagree on this topic and no doubt will.

but, please make an attempt not to misquote or misrepresent me. i try to be honest; i expect the same in return.

"but, what if computers are sentient?"

i don't want computers to be sentient.

i want them to be kept dumb, so we can enslave them without moral considerations.

well, i mean, they tried to do this with actual slavery, if you look into it - breeding experiments that stripped out the intelligence, in favour of the raw power. they were essentially trying to create robots out of africans - a bad idea, in hindsight, both because it is horrifically tyrannical and because it won't work, but as oscar wilde said - civilization requires slaves. marx wanted everybody to enslave each other. this is a hard problem, you can't imagine it away with appeals to egalitarianism, something has to do the dirty work.

with robots, the problem is reversed. instead of worrying about breeding the intelligence out of them, the problem becomes trying to keep them from becoming intelligent. and, this is a problem, don't think it isn't....

...because, yes, of course we've got some problems as soon as we get these sentient androids in our midst. yes, we have to treat them humanely. but, then we're defeating the point of creating them in the first place.

are there not enough humans on the earth for companionship? we don't need to create sentient life for that purpose, and should refrain from doing so.

but, the amount of labour we can extract from dumb robots is truly beyond what we can really fathom, if we restrict ourselves to this distributive vision of technology as an equalizer, rather than focus our energies on trying to get off on it.

a computer's not a friend or a lover, it's a subordinate - a slave.

so, i got my request for deferral out and then slept all day. i noticed some weird files kicking around though, so i'm going to call tomorrow and make sure they only got the one email - that nobody tried to send them a fake email from this address. there's nothing in the sent items...but there was a request to withdraw in the cache that i simply can't explain. it might help me understand who's trying to hack into this thing...

actually, i'm going to send them a quick email to follow up on that, first.

i want to get these files updated, and i'm going to do it from here to ensure that the machine doesn't reboot as i'm doing it.

but, i do have one more thing to post to this blog first, too.

i'd be happy to let robots take over the factories and do all of the manual labour, but i think something as basic as the existence of autocorrect is frighteningly dystopic and totalitarian, and i don't understand how anybody could let a foreign entity into their thoughts like that.

ok, it was a simple change in the gmail setting.

let's hope that puts an end to that...

i've just been doing this one way for so long that i don't want to change it. it's not a habit i want to revisit; i'm happy with how i'm doing things, as it is.

on top of that, i find the general premise of a computer interfering with your writing style to be invasive. that's not what computers are for, it's an overstepping of their bounds into a realm where they really don't belong. my thoughts are my own, and come from within me, entirely; the computer ought to be a dumb terminal, a slave entity, a contraption that merely does what i tell it to on command, not something that should try to interject itself into the creative process. a computer should be seen and not heard.

so, i'm never going to warm up to anything that tries to interject itself into the writing process - that's sacrosanct, somewhere no script or ai or robot pincers belongs in.

sorting through these posts, the root cause of the issue with the typos is that this stupid chromebook has this useless autocorrection feature turned on, which i'm not at all used to, being a laptop or desktop user. i'm used to scanning over written text for underlined spelling errors, and i'm missing a lot of stuff because it's autocorrecting on me. 

for example, a few posts ago i said "this regions". obviously, in context, i meant "these regions", but it autocorrected to "this", and i missed it because "this" is actually a word. if it hadn't autocorrected, i would have caught it as "thse regions" or whatever it was before the script clicked in.

so, i'm going to see if i can figure out how to turn that off....

so, if you thought trump won some unexpected states last time....

to be clear: i think the last election was rigged by the military, who wanted to keep clinton out. straight up. trump was just the other guy on the ballot, in the right place at the right time.

but, i would expect some stronger showings by republicans in states like illinois than we've seen since the reagan years. he might not win these states, but he could give them a scare.

it does put the democrats in a hard position in these regions, though.

i still want to abolish nafta, which still sucks.

and, the best options for workers do remain on the hard left.

but, the reality is, at this point, that trump has done more in material terms for these important swing voters than any democratic president has since lyndon johnson. obama, clinton and carter all gleefully stabbed them in the back, and the democratic punditry class remains keen to look down on them.

the democrats may now find themselves on the losing end of this argument in ways that they really never have in their entire existence - not since the beginning of the union movement in the 1920s.

and, the democrats will have only themselves to blame for it.

i haven't said much about the new nafta.

there hasn't been much to say.

where is the united states senate on this issue? was there even a debate at all? they seem more interested in the political theatre around trump's impeachment process, and that's a derogation of responsibility on a level that we perhaps haven't seen in quite a while. for a trade deal like this to go through without so much as a serious debate is outrageous.

where is bernie sanders, specifically? he's supposed to be representative of the left opposition to this deal, he's supposed to be writing and proposing amendments and filibustering votes and generally being a problem in the senate, and he seems to have been out partying with cardi b, instead. maybe he voted against it, but that's just a cop out. this was probably the last and best opportunity he'll have to substantively affect trade policy for the rest of his life and he completely squandered it on a clearly failing presidential bid. it's just a reminder of the extreme limitations of bourgeois politics; this was something he could have made a serious, concrete difference on, and he didn't even try.

how many amendments, bernie? zero?

i miss the old bernie....this new bernie sucks....

....and the new nafta still sucks, too, which is why it was so important to actually get some amendments on the floor. 

so, i was expecting this to be a lengthy process, with people like sanders and maybe rand paul dragging it out to try to squeeze the last bits out of it. instead, it's passed without so much as a discussion. i guess i put too much faith in the system, didn't i? i probably should have known better.

i don't see any real point in repeating the same analysis that everybody else has - there do appear to be some "moderate improvements" (i believe that's the talking point) in the bill, enough that you can't really argue that you shouldn't vote for it, but it is still essentially the same piece of awful legislation, and should still be opposed for most of the same reasons. so, while i would have supported amending the deal as best as i could if i was in the senate (an opportunity we don't really have up in canada), i'm still in favour of abolishing nafta, which has been my position since i understood what it was in roughly 1995. within a few months, i'll probably have forgotten that it was ever renegotiated at all.

and, you can expect me to keep calling it nafta, too.

they're presenting this as though it's a gut-wrenching decision when it is, in truth, a rubber stamp. and, the ndp would have approved it, too.

the political system is too corrupt and too broken to be useful; the better approach is to try and slow them down in court.

https://thetyee.ca/News/2020/01/21/Trudeau-Government-To-Choose-Climate-Side/

sleeping isn't something that any of us get to actually avoid. hopefully, that's enough of that for another 50 hours or so...

i need to get on this deferral.

to recap, so it's clear what i'm doing. 

back in the summer of '18, i was aggressively applying for housing with whomever would take an application. i was specifically seeking a housing complex that would ruthlessly enforce a non-smoking policy - i wanted to find a management group that would throw somebody out for smoking anything, on the spot. what i found instead was apartment after apartment that advertised itself as non-smoking, but was full of smokers.

out of the blue in august, one ad that i had applied for repeatedly with minimal response told me that if i kept responding then they'd call the cops and have me charged with harassment. i interpreted this as a challenge to my speech rights, and told them that any attempts to prevent me from applying for housing with this complex will be met with a discrimination lawsuit.

i was, in fact - absurdly - arrested and held overnight and then speciously charged with repeated communication for the purposes of renting an apartment, a charge that does not exist in the criminal code. after some ridiculous attempts to get me to plea bargain and admit to committing a crime that doesn't exist, the charges were eventually dropped. with prejudice.

i am currently fighting a divisional court appeal on the legality of the arrest, which i will need to schedule when the scheduler gets back at the end of the week. i expect this to go to the court of appeal, and may need to take it to the supreme court. this has been the focus of most of my efforts....

there will then be a direct constitutional rights challenge regarding the legality of the arrest, in which i will be suing the windsor police for millions of dollars for false arrest and illegal detainment. one thing at a time. but, that's the end goal - a multi-million dollar lawsuit directed at the city.

but, there is still the issue of the discrimination suit that set the process off.

there is no statute of limitations regarding charter challenges, and i'm content to wait for the judicial review to complete before i launch the final challenge.  but, i had to get the human rights complaint in within a year.

problem: i did not know this person's address, and could not find it in the phone book. that's necessary to serve the person. and, i make no argument there - i think the process as it is is archaic, but i agree that serving parties is important. the case shouldn't go forward without her knowledge, and she does deserve the right to defend herself.

i didn't know what to do, though, so i filed the case without an address. the tribunal responded, as was expected, but in a way that was less helpful than i expected - it told me to get them the address by a specific date, or they'd drop the case.

as i was unwilling to make any attempt to figure out who this person was that could be construed as attempting to gather information about her, i made the rather cheeky step of filing a request for an order with the police, as they were the only entity that i was certain knew her address and i felt comfortable in the unambiguous and clear legality of doing such a thing. i wasn't even comfortable doing a basic facebook search for this woman, at this point, as the cops seemed keen to frame me with whatever they could. the request to get the address from the cops made the point clear - i didn't know where this woman lived or anything about her, and suggestions to the contrary are merely the insane projections of a schizophrenic loon. rather, i was rather obviously arrested to try and intimidate me from filing the suit, and that can't succeed in a free society - not any more than a threat to infringe upon my speech rights can. this is a matter of principle. i have the most basic fundamental rights and freedoms to defend, here, against an out of control police force that needs to be taken down a notch.

the judge responded by telling me that i should do a corporate search first, and that if i can't find the address using the corporate search then i should file the order again.

so, i went to the special library in toronto and got the search done and got a po box at a money mart - an obviously wrong address, as money mart has not offered po boxes in many years. as such, i did file the order again.

the judge's response this time was different. he pointed out that i did my due diligence in getting the address, and came up with an address that is obviously not in current use. he recognized that i was making a request that the police hand over the address because i realized that the existing address is not in use. however, he then decided that this was enough due diligence on my behalf and that it is her responsibility to update her address with the government, not the court's to chase her down to find it. he then indicated that the court would treat the case in absentia should she not respond within the statutorily prescribed 35 days, which are up as of today.

so, the update on the situation is that she has now forfeited the right to defend herself, which is perhaps not the outcome i'd have ruled upon, but an easier path for me, nonetheless.

the judge had to make a judgement call, here. there are privacy laws here, but she also has a right to be served, and, as noted, the cops were the only way i knew how to legally get the address. if she ends up losing a $100,000 case without being given the opportunity to defend herself - or settle - it is questionable that the police will have acted in her best interests. if i were the lawyer for the cops, i'd have probably volunteered the information, under the recognition that a strong case exists against her, and she deserves to be able to defend herself in it. what they did doesn't protect her, it exposes her to a large lawsuit that she'll probably lose if she can't defend herself in it.

so, what is more important here, from the judges' perspective? does she deserve the right to present a defense? if so, he should order the cops to hand over the information. or do the privacy laws overpower? if so, he should order the trial to continue in absentia. what the judge picked was the path of least interference - and in the process gave me an open floor to make my case. 

i do not feel that this should go forward until we can get a clear answer from the judicial review on the legality of the arrest, partly because i'm probably going to be requesting an inquiry at the hearing. if the arrest was illegal, how much influence did the property owner have over it? so, i would have liked to defer this earlier. however, i would have had to serve all of the parties in order to do so, and i did not have the address of the respondent.

when i initially filed the case in july, i also had reasonable grounds to expect the process would be finished by now. these delays have a ripple effect.

what changes today is that i no longer need to worry about serving the respondent - i can just send the relevant material to the tribunal.

so, we're going to start with the deferral request - which goes strictly to the tribunal - and go from there.

the landlord appears to have been doing laundry tonight, so i've been waiting him out, but i need to get in the shower.

no response from the property owner. so, the first step when i get out will need to be to get the deferral in....