if you believe that, go back to school with your kids.

this is, what, the tenth time they've made this stupid, obviously wrong claim?

https://globalnews.ca/news/7294893/coronavirus-reinfection-hong-kong-study/

to be clear.

what i'm having would appear to be a "migraine with aura", in which case the hemiplegia is a part of the aura.

that is different than a "hemiplegic migraine", which is apparently something that mostly affects kids.

i'm not convinced i see the difference, and when i pushed it he didn't give me a good response, but it was clinically relevant to him.

so, the neurologist got uber wonky on me and denied my hemiplegic migraines, claiming it was a specific condition that mostly affects children rather than being a description of a "migraine with aura" like i was using the term. so, despite experiencing extreme weakness on one side of my body in a stroke-like way, which is the literal translation from latin greek, i should be describing my migraines as "with aura" rather than as "hemiplegic". language matters, apparently.

he doesn't think it's likely that the migraines are the result of head trauma.

rather, he strongly suggested i refrain from inhaling any kind of smoke (which is hard if the neighbours upstairs are smoking), as that struck him as the most likely trigger, something i actually found myself in agreement with him around. it's pretty clear, really - when the air quality comes down, the migraines come in.

i can't stop them.

there's some possibility of a stroke, but there's nothing i can do.

i can take drugs to ease the pain, but i don't want to.

and, i just have to deal with it - and try to avoid bad air.

so, that was an overwhelmingly unproductive week that just evaporated into nothingness in front of me, and i was hoping to get some sleep this morning to start fresh, but so be it.

i'm kind of floaty, but i need to get going.

i have to make a call this afternoon regarding these headaches. while i wish my weekend was less wasted, it's sort of topical, at least. i mostly just want to know if these are something to be concerned about (i don't think they are) and talk about what this means long term, and maybe ways to get out of them when they come in. i fought that headache off for what, three days? and, then it got me in the end, and i'm still not sure it's done yet.

i was *this* close to being done, and now i'm back in lalaland again.

*grargh*

now, i'm sleepy, but won't be in five minutes.....that's what it's been like all morning....it's almost like somebody put something i don't want in my water or something...

pro-tip: if you're 45 years old and you think you're smart enough to run a country......

....that suggests you're pretty dumb.

they're all in their 30s and 40s....i think trudeau might be the oldest, at 48.

i don't think there's a single person in the inner clique over 50.

they should be out having fun, like normal people, not trying to run the country.

this is a job for older people.

"no one listens to filth pig"

touche.

so, i mean, i often suggest that this government has swung hard to the right, and it's true, but...

a lot of it is just the reality that they don't have the slightest idea what they're doing.

this is a hard country to run, that requires a lot of very careful balancing acts, and a very deep base of knowledge in the country's history.

you can't bullshit this.

you can't wing it.

you can't make it up as you go.

they're too young to govern.

that's the truth - they got over-zealous, they threw away their brains, and they're lost in a canoe in the dark without a light, floating up schitt's creek to the fall....

it's not catastrophic. not yet. but, if nothing changes, wait for it.

this entire discussion is alien to them.

but, it's in any text on canadian foreign policy.

the frustrating thing is that it's absolutely clear that these people are not carefully overturning a policy that they've researched, for sound reasons that they've argued rigorously.

they don't even know why the policy existed, or that they're overturning it in the first place.

"but we're special"

that was what they said.

yeah, we're in a special tariff category.

if they haven't woken up yet, we're doomed.

the reason that canada was the leading voice for the rule of international law through the second half of the twentieth century is because it realized it had the most to lose from the order collapsing; the threat was existential, and well understood - both from the americans to the south and the russians to the north.

canada would be the first to go, if the system ever fell apart.

so, when chretien held to this position - until the day they dragged him from his office - he was holding to a position rooted in a very deeply held view, of an international order that was of his party's design, for his country's survival.

it wasn't a triviality.

and, to suggest it "wasn't worth it" is about the most ignorant thing i could imagine somebody possibly saying.

just a reminder that history is still being written....

i can understand that it may seem incredulous to believe that this institution called the liberal party of canada actually rigorously held to the idea that any kind of military action outside of the security council is a war crime from the time the council was formed, right up until the invasion of iraq in 2003. that sounds like a fairy tale.

but, we're the ones that set the damned thing up in the first place.

to answer the question as to why the security council was so central to liberal foreign policy before ignatieff (who broke it.), you need to understand why we created the security council in the first place, which had a lot to do with our own security.

it's 1945. what country in the world is most in threat of an american invasion? hint: it's not cuba, even if we eventually formed a bond with the cubans over a shared threat.

so, that is why the security council exists in the first place! of course we held to it, and we held to it very strenuously, with the very sporadic counter-examples coming exclusively under conservative governments.

but, this is the reminder: the liberals, themselves, have yet to break from this rule in actual fact. they've said stupid things about venezuela, and supported shady groups in ukraine, but the basic policy has not yet been reversed, and can consequently still be salvaged, if the right dipshits are pushed out of power in enough time.

it was one of the things i liked most about the party, and one of the things i liked most about the country. it'll be a sad day to see it go, if it comes to it.

it doesn't have to.

it's still good.

listen...

when i had these discussions about reviving the union movement in the early 00s, there was still a sense of dissent and reversal to them. the neo-liberal project was far advanced, and we knew it, but we had yet to feel it.

and, when we had these discussion around '11, we knew it was done, but we still held to it, because we didn't know what else to do, besides drink in the park.

but, we can't still be having these discussions in 2020. it's done. let's get the memo, let's move on....

i'm going to mexico,

where there's nothing but the sun.

nothing.

(except car factories)

i can't not vote against erin o'toole. he's an unacceptable candidate for high office.

ugh.

so, this isn't like "the west v the east" or something....

islam is a western philosophy, through and through.

this is the future v the past, science v religion, enlightenment v counter-enlightenment, revolution v reaction, liberal v conservative.

if you're going to look at the board this way, and i don't think it's wrong to do so, in fact i do it all of the time, then what the rise of islam in the west is is the reactionary, conservative counter-revolution to the enlightenment.

it's the return of christianity, in a mildly different variant.

it's not something new, not an invasion, not an overrunning; it's a return to the past.

and, i want to look forwards, not backwards.

the freedom to have an identity is, again, a contradiction in terms.

it's only freedom from identity that makes a coherent use of the language.

i identify as a member of the species.

well, sometimes.

that is all.

and, i don't want an identity as an ethnic or religious type, either.

identity is slavery.

i'm an individual; i'm free.

and, of course, they're going to tell you i'm a jew, because it's what they do.

don't like somebody's opinion? must be a jew.

i think i'm ancestrally hebrew on my dad's side in some combination, but i don't actually know with any certainty. i also think i'm ancestrally cree, italian, french, irish, finnish, norwegian, malagasy and welsh. that is, i'm a mix - and any hebrew ancestry that i have is incidental, and not any important than the rest.

my father was a non-religious catholic; my mother is a non-religious anglican. i eventually went to a catholic school, but i didn't participate. my mom baptized me when i was four because the public school system started at age 5 and the catholic school system started at age 4. it was a question of getting me to school a year early; it had nothing to do with catholicism. i did not take the eucharist, did not get confirmed and don't even know what the next sacrament even is. so, i'm not technically a catholic, by their own admission criteria.

i'm a born and raised atheist.....

this is the original version of the parenti article, for the purposes of full disclosure & transparency:
http://www.swans.com/library/art9/mparen01.html

that's a different type of soundtrack for the blind, apparently.

it also follows that accusing china of colonialism in it's west is a kind of false equivalency, because islam is the root cause of colonialism, as we understand it in the west.

it doesn't really make sense to argue that they're colonizing a colonial ideology.

what the chinese are actually doing is decolonizing the uighurs by deislamifying them.

it's also a good time to post the parenti article about tibet, which debunks a lot of myths:
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html

there's no question that the chinese could have been a little less zealous in tibet. they didn't have to be quite as heavy-handed as they were.

but, i'm basically in support of the policy.

we should all be seeing this as a way to help the uighurs move past an obsolete identity that has them mired in the past, not as a way to take something away from them.

so, what i'd like to see the chinese do is implement a very careful, considered type of mass conversion program that has a specific focus on deislamifying them, but through positive incentives rather than violence and fear.

i've been pretty clear that i actually vaguely support treating religious conviction like a mental illness. i don't believe in the premise that "religious freedom" is some kind of human right - it's a contradiction in terms.

so, if i basically agree that the uighurs are batshit insane, what's the best way forward? the answer is that i'm not fundamentally opposed to what china is doing in principle, it's more in the details. how do you separate the muslim from the uighur in a way that is fundamentally just and fair?

when you see articles about china at sites like the atlantic, you need to correct for a level of bias, immediately. you expect a level of intense exaggeration in the media around "human rights abuses" in china, but you also expect that there's a kernel of truth underlying them. the truth is that nobody really knows what they're doing, and these kinds of articles should be taken with a grain of salt.

but, i don't think it's impossible to secularize these groups in a way that is ultimately beneficial to them and, in the end, has them freely choosing to move past their religion as backwards. in fact, i'd support it - and would argue it's the only approach with any chance of success.

if the chinese come in here with giant sticks, it's just not going to work, in the end.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/08/china-pathologizing-uighur-muslims-mental-illness/568525/

the most dangerous virus out there right now isn't covid-19.

actually, maybe there's something to that.

i've been pushing the idea of secularizing islam to defang it. maybe it's a better idea to corporatize it, to discredit it.

if we can get to megamosques quickly, we might get to herd immunity not long after.

we tried to escape.

but, here they are, knocking on the door, again...

it's almost like they're the abusive boyfriend that has followed us across the country, and found us hiding in a witness relocation program, and just left off back where we were, before we escaped.

the fact that they're the same as us is exactly what the problem is.

they're not different than us, they're the same as us - but they're the worst part of us, the part of us that we fought so hard to escape from and leave behind.

"western civilization" is hellenism.

christianity is just a little, small, piece of that.

i feel like a pagan standing in the third century watching the empire collapse in the face of a primitive, backwards system of thought.

i feel like we're being recolonized by a new type of christian....

and, i expect that secularism will win, so long as we can have that debate, so long as our own leaders don't sell us out. it's just a bit of a scary point in history, as it could in theory go either way...

again: i don't see islam as something foreign. it's fundamentally greek, so it's fundamentally western, unlike systems that derive from east of the indus. my concept of "the west" is greek, not christian, so it includes russia and iran and north africa and arabia, as well as some parts of black africa that ended up greek in the pre-columbus period (like ethiopia).

i'm not afraid of being invaded by a foreign culture. that's not what islam is.

what i'm afraid of is reverting to the past - just as i would be by the rise of an evangelical movement.

i just see them as a new christian denomination, a new type of evangelicalism.

and, i'm fully aware that the christians & muslims will eventually unite and gang up on secularism.

is it possible that i'm mistaking corporatism for censorship?

google sells ads. that's the point. so, if your exact phrase is close to something that can help it serve an ad, maybe it might want to expand the term a little. that's an invasion of privacy, perhaps, but it's not as scary as the image i just posted.

the terms i'm testing with make such a thing fairly unlikely, unless google is running ads for mosques, or something (would they even allow that? well, it's inevitable that we'll see a muslim jerry falwell, eventually. maybe it might help if they speed that process up.). if you can show me where the algorithm failed, i'll concede the point. but, it seems like it's too much of a stretch, in the context of the terms i'm using, and the way that the server is reacting.

google should have some kind of way to tell the engine that i want to search for a specific phrase.

quotes don't work anymore - they've decided that when i tell them i want to search for a phrase, i don't actually, really, i'm just confused.

it's curious that we can still get curious results about dechristianization, though:

https://lmgtfy.com/?q=dechristianization

i'm actually flipping this around from the conservative arguments you hear: i like the fact that i get good results when i search for dechristianization, that reflect what i actually want to see.

why i can't i get the same kind of results when i search for deislamificatoin that i get for dechristianization? why do i get censored for one and not the other?

but, no - don't react by censoring my second result. fix the problem with the first...

if it's not clear enough, i want a search engine that gives me what i'm searching for, with absolutely no censorship at all, whatsoever.

i mean, i'm searching for it. that's the first hint.

i wonder what kind of fascist agreements this government has made with google, and what we're going to learn about it when they're removed from office.

they do this kind of thing in china; are they doing it here, too?

something like this is right out of orwell:

and, it's kind of scary to see it in front of you.

if i'm looking to find some kind of information of some sort, and the search engine gives me the opposite of what i'm looking for, i'm not going to just read that instead - which is what they seem to expect, bizarrely.

rather, i'm going to turn the computer off and find some other way to get the information i'm looking for, instead.

this is useful to me, until it isn't.

if the internet loses it's value as a search tool, i'm just going to stop using it altogether, and go to the library, instead.

i may have spoken too soon regarding the openness of information on the internet, and it's utility as a means to find information.

google is clearly filtering results around certain phrases, and i do not like that it is. bing isn't any better....

i don't want my search results filtered, and i have no interest in reading the propaganda that the corporate media wants me to read, instead.

the religion is legitimately oppressive.

the question is what the most enlightened way to react to it is.

and, i won't pick a side in a struggle between nazis and muslims.

the world would be better off if they killed each other off.

likewise, as somebody that is exceedingly apprehensive about the increasing numbers of muslims in the west, i need to find that careful balance between looking the other way at offensive assertions of islamic values that are harmful in theory but not in practice, and cracking down on assertions of oppression and intolerance by people that hide behind a veil of religious freedom - even as i suggest that the line between islam as a supposedly peaceful religion and islam as a vehicle of hate is much finer than the multicultural propaganda might suggest.

it's a very subtle debate and it can't be had by ideologues.

but, remember: my argument is that christian nazis and muslim jihadists are essentially the same thing.