the pentagon should consider a remilitarized germany to be a greater threat than an economically recovered russia, and i'd suggest it's likely that it actually does.

if the consequences of military support for ukraine are german aggression, which is inevitable, that is not in america's self-interest, or britain's.

canada should not be paying for this.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/canada-pitches-in-76-million-for-faster-german-air-defence-systems-in-ukraine-1.6882166

national polling in the united states is not very helpful right now and will become less helpful over the upcoming years, as rural america disappears underneath a wave of exurban and suburban housing projects that give the democrats a decisive structural advantage.

biden should be favoured to win. substantively.

but shit happens.

i'm surprised this record has become so obscure. it sold well.

let me correct a historical misunderstanding while i'm at it. 

did you know that the nazis, and hitler, actually liked islam? because they did, and because there's actually a longstanding pro-islamic thread in german history going back to a seminal history textbook called the history of the decline and fall of the roman empire by edward gibbon, as published in the late 18th century. gibbon's thesis was that christianity contributed to the fall of the empire by making it "decadent" and "weak", via it's embrace of pacifism. islam, on the other hand, was a militaristic religion that made the arab armies strong and dominant. for that reason, islam is superior to christianity, and a vigorous civilization (like the germans) should choose islam over christianity.

"Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers [...] then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world." - adolf hitler

now, of course, the nazi elite actually adhered to a kind of neo-paganism that was about trying to reconstruct an indigenous german faith to replace this jewish system of christianity with, but the nazis were classist and saw the value of the jewish value system to brainwash the masses with. don't try to make sense of nazism; nazism is like quantum physics, nobody really understands it. just shut up and compute. so, the nazi vision of the world was something like there being a german elite of neo-pagans at the top and a mass of muslims at the bottom.

for that reason, the nazis did not persecute muslims. there are some anecdotes of muslims being persecuted,  mostly because they were mistaken for jews, and a handful of arabs ended up at auschwitz because they were homosexuals or communists, but there simply wasn't any kind of systemic extermination of arabs or muslims at all. to the contrary, the nazis sought out alliances with nationalistic muslim resistance armies in the middle east because they were fighting the british. the muslim nationalists saw a "natural ally" in hitler, as they had a common enemy, the jews.

the italians complicated this, and hitler was actually pissed off about it. hitler actually criticized mussolini directly for making it harder to win the support of muslim nationalists.

again, that doesn't mean that every muslim was a nazi. but, think about it. the ideologies are actually quite similar, if you do a rational comparison. these muslim leaders were correct - hitler was their natural ally.

there's even a wikipedia page about this:

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

every once in a while i hear somebody suggest that being critical of islam is in some way some kind of nazism, and i always just gasp. this is actually one of the most ignorant positions you could possibly take.

attacking jerry seinfeld is just the most recent demonstration that these protesters are in fact nazis. seinfeld has nothing to do with this.

listen, i know there's a fine line here. i agree that criticizing israel is not anti-semitic. however, what we're seeing repeatedly, and everywhere, is at times vicious attacks on individual jews and not reasoned criticism of netanyahu's government.

i've been in these protests, and i know the truth, which is why i'm so quick to react. i'm an anarcho-communist; i'm on the furthest fringe of the left. these are, at least nominally, my tribe out there. yet, i know they hate jews, because i've seen it. even when they are presenting reasoned critiques, and it isn't anti-semitic, you can tell from their tone of voice and their body language that the jew-hating is visceral and real and the actual driving force, not some level of solidarity with palestine or hamas - because these are people that have no common ground with hamas at all.

the right is correct, here; this blatant jew-hating has become mainstream and it's an issue that needs immediate addressing. i'm critical of islam, but i don't treat individual muslims like this at all. i know that people are diverse and it's not fair to make assumptions.

the name palestine derives from an ethnic group that occupied the gaza strip during the iron age and leading into the classical period and that is referenced in the bible as the philistines. this ethnic group is also referenced in egyptian hieroglyphs as having migrated into the region during a period called the bronze age collapse, c 1500 bce. cross-disciplinary historical investigations, including genetic studies, have identified the philistines as a greek ethnic group that moved into the gaza area as a part of a large migration southwards that the egyptians referred to as 'sea peoples' and would appear to have been a mix of indo-european groups, including halstatt period celts. these sea peoples conquered the eastern mediterranean region and dismantled most of the urban centres, replacing them with a seafaraing civilization that became what we call the classical civilization of greeks and phonecians, as told to us in the homeric epics. my own opinion after having looked into it is that they were essentially early vikings. 

during the period that the philistines lived in gaza, west semitic speaking tribes inhabited the region between syria and egypt. these people are known to history variously as phoenicians (the greek name for them) or canaanites (apparently their name for themselves), and what we call israel and jewish identity broke off from the canaanites some time during the iron age, but it actually remains unclear how due to the obscuring and enduring influence of the bible, which is a useless source of actual history. there is essentially no evidence that anything in the bible before the captivity is anything more than a late founding myth, but it is relatively clear that a semitic speaking people migrated into the area with the persians and re-occupied the phoenecian coast, after it had been devastated by the barbaric assyrians. these are the people we today call the jews. outside of a linguistic continuity, it's not clear what relationship these jews actually had to the canaanites and phoenecians, the remnants of which fled assyrian barbarism by migrating to north africa. however, these jews then remained put in the levant through most of antiquity, while living in close proximity to the greek  philistines, who, quite oddly, were actually there first.

what eventually happened was that the romans conquered the entire area, made the area then called judea into several different provinces and, many centuries later, eventually renamed the area from judea to philistinia in a conscious attempt to redefine the space ethnically, and in an act that we would today label clearly as genocide. before it was persia,  the mortal, perpetual enemy of rome was carthage, until it was destroyed. the historical sources are not there to back me up, but i strongly suspect that the destruction of judaea was the last stage in the destruction of carthage and that most of the tropes we today label as anti-semitic (like the baby-eating thing) are actually roman propaganda against the carthaginians (although the carthaginians actually do appear to have practiced a type of child sacrifice relatively late into antiquity). this decision by rome to change the name of the province was eventually adopted by conquering arabs, who inherited the name of the province as philistinia, which in arab is falasteen and in english is palestine.

in depth genetic studies on the current inhabitants of gaza and the west bank, as well as what we call israeli arabs, indicate that they are overwhelmingly hebrew in ancestry. that's right - the palestinians are actually converted jews. however, if we could find some actually philistines in gaza today, and we no doubt could if we looked hard enough, we would learn that they are of r1* indo-european greek ancestry. these philistines could perhaps migrate back to europe; i'd propose their quality of life would dramatically increase, if they did. 

while the question of eastern european jewry's origins is a valid scientific question, it has at this point been extensively studied and determined that there was a genetic bottleneck that took place and that a small number of middle eastern men moved into eastern europe with a smaller number of women and did eventually marry some of the slavic speaking women that were indigenous to the region but overall retained an almost gross level of inbreeding. as such, it has been thoroughly scientifically proven that eastern european jews do in fact have overwhelming middle eastern ancestry. the claim otherwise is intuitive and based on skin colour, but skin colour is not exactly a fixed characteristic, and people that are not of subsaharan african ancestry will vary their skin tones wildly depending on their exposure to sunlight. pigmentation is a variable trait and an adaptation. my own skin colour has varied dramatically from swedish white to sicilian brown, and my picture archive demonstrates it clearly.

while the actual truth is that both jews and palestinians are actually hebrews, they are just hebrews with different religions, it nonetheless follows that philistines are a european tribe and ethnic group, while the jews are clearly of west semitic ancestry (despite having very curious iranian cultural overtones). if anybody should go back to europe, it should be the philistines, if we insist on having a witch hunt to actually find them.

i'd really rather boycott metro or sobeys if i was concerned about high costs, as loblaws is actually relatively competitive. the cheapest grocery store here is walmart, as it is everywhere else, but loblaws is frequently a close second.

the boycott appears to be lowering prices, though, which is predictable.

justin trudeau still doesn't know what the rule of law is, and at this point he should be embarrassed because he simply comes off as horribly ignorant, like a pretentious child using words he doesn't understand. the irony is that his government has repeatedly skirted or even suspended the rule of law, such as with the illegal police crackdown on the bodily autonomy rights protesters that shut down ottawa a few years ago.

there has been no government in canada's history with less respect for the rule of law, or which has suspended it with such disregard.

i think this is a fitting and appropriate way to dismantle these sites. i mean, the sites needed to be dismantled in some way. how to do it? this is the most appropriate and most correct way to do it. i would like to see this tactic applied to the other sites across the country. let's make these idiot protesters feel the same way the victims of the hamas attack did, up to a difference of scale; it's worthwhile to point out that nobody was killed and i hope nobody was actually raped. 

i want to point out that it is obvious that the counter-protesters were police officers from the anecdotes in the times article, and that shouldn't surprise anybody. i like the cops' sense of humour, snark, irony and justice here, which is rare. i don't normally applaud the cops, but this is awesome. they even sent firecrackers into the camp, like palestinian terrorists routinely send into israel, in an apparent tongue-in-cheek nod to norman finkelstein.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/03/us/ucla-protests-encampment-violence.html

the irony of pro-hamas supporters complaining about their party being ransacked by masked vigilantes should not be lost on anyone.

but, this is fundamentally about muslims complaining about being colonized, which is hilarious.

those "kids", who are apparently mostly actually middle aged men without university educations, should be happy that nobody raped them, killed them, or tossed their severed body parts around like soccer balls n the street.

the bbc is claiming that netanyahu's decision to close al jazeera will not help the peace negotiations. i actually disagree.

in principle, the israeli state should not be shutting down any media organizations. the unquestionable factual reality that al jazeera is a horribly biased, openly anti-israel source that spews factually inaccurate, skewed, brutally anti-jewish propaganda out to the west, and that their warped framing of the conflict as "israel's war" is actually having some effect on a subset of the population, is a reason to not shut al jazeera down.

however, al jazeera is state media run by the qatari sheikhs. it's a mouthpiece for the qatari government, who has played a major role in representing hamas. where does the head tyrant of qatar actually live? in a cushy villa in qatar, where he's bankrolled by iranian nazis. qatar is also an iranian beachhead on the arabian peninsula. when one of the primary news sources, as poor and propagandistic as it is, is also a lead negotiator, that creates a conflict of interest. eliminating that conflict of interest should help focus the qataris more on the plot.

that doesn't mean it's something that should be supported, exactly, but the bbc is wrong in it's analysis, at the least.

of course the capitalist pro-drug vampires will mumble something about "removing the stigma around drug use". right. what does that mean, exactly? because it's an objective fact that drug use is disgusting, unsanitary, unhealthy and not something that normal people want to be around, for the reason that it attracts criminals and that drugs make people crazy. drug use is a vector for disease transmission. there is a stigma around drug use because it's disgusting, and that stigma should absolutely remain in place.

should we try to remove the stigma around scatology while we're at it? mmmm. yummy.

rather, what these people are saying is that they want to normalize drug use, and anybody telling you that should get punched in the face. 

the stigma around drug use is a good thing and should remain in place. addicts should not be brought out of the shadows, they should be locked in closets and brushed under the rug.

bc is recriminalizing drug consumption in public spaces. the truth is that they didn't understand the idea around legalizing it in the first place, because the idea was being pushed by capitalist opportunists rather than actual health experts. the same thing, or more, is on the brink of happening in washington and oregon. these are blue states that might be handing the republicans a gift in the upcoming election cycle. i'd keep an eye out for some surprise upsets in the pacific northwest, due to public bafflement that the state won't do anything about dangerous drug users, which is what the actual policy was and not what the policy is supposed to be.

in portugal, which is supposed to be the model, the state continues to run the kind of mental health institutions that are considered to be arcane in north america and that is what the actual policy is in that country. portugal does not have a libertarian drug policy that lets the free market deal with drug use, it has a socialist model that rounds up drug addicts and puts them in mental health institutions, where they are forced to undergo intense rehab in a manner that would be considered unconstitutional in both canada and the united states. this is not some kind of secret; it's easily found in a basic google search. unfortunately, it would appear that neither the political activists nor the politicians nor the minority of health workers that have supported this approach have ever actually read up on what the portugese model actually is, but have instead relied on second or third hand word of mouth descriptions that no doubt originated in social media posts. the idea that the portugese model is a free market model is a purplemonkeydishwasher interpretation of what the portugese model actually is, and this is an actual example of a real life failure in policy brought on by poorly sourced information sharing over social media (and yet is not the kind of 'disinformation' we hear about by pro-government scare mongerers).

it's worthwhile to point out that when useful and correct information that contradicted bad policy by the state was shared over social media, it was attacked as 'disinformation' but the same state bodies were equally eager to write bad policy based on actual poorly sourced information that came to them via the same vector of social media. this proves that the problem is not the technology itself, but the people using it; we should not fear computers or social media, we should fear state institutions run by ignorant people and we should approach the problem by launching education campaigns for government workers, to ensure that the state is better at processing information it receives from questionable sources. we should fear ignorant public servants, not the tools they use to poorly gather information with.

it takes little to no foresight to predict that a free market drug policy divorced from the socialist portugese model of aggressive, enforced rehabilitation would simply lead to chaos, carnage and death. we in truth were not following the portugese model of recent years, but the chinese model of the nineteenth century, when british gun ships introduced opium to the chinese masses in order to weaken the population, and the chinese state didn't take the threat seriously. china certainly takes the threat of mass drug addiction seriously, nowadays. yet, the governments on this continent see the populace as a threat and an enemy to contain, which is fundamentally different from the cultural communitarianism that exists in china. you have to understand that the state is killing people on purpose and that it isn't some coincidence that it targeted portland, oregon, which is the most socialist city in the country.

what's happening, however, is a moral panic rather than a carefully thought out change in policy. while predictable, moral panics are not helpful and don't create good policy, either. we're moving from one failed policy to another, which is reflective of the systemic failure underlying all of the failure in the first place.

i'm typing this as i'm yelling at a smoker that lives upstairs that i thought had moved out and apparently hasn't. this person signed a non-smoking lease and then ignored it. she knows i have asthma, she knows the property is non-smoking and she's listened to me yell at her to go smoke somewhere else for months but she just keeps smoking anyways. this person doesn't care about the well-being of the people around her in the remotest bit; she's simply a worthless, self-centered piece of shit. is there some mental illness underlying her selfish and narcissistic behaviour? my guess is that it's mostly bad parenting, and a culture of hedonism. she's a reflection of the capitalist society she exists within. yet, what i'm experiencing is a clear example of why a policy that forces drug users into residential areas is exactly what nobody wants. this woman chain smokes nicotine and occasionally smokes marijuana; i've smelled some heavy substances that i think might be meth, but she doesn't seem to smoke meth every day. if you're annoyed by the crackhead at the park because you don't want your kids around her, imagine having your kids forced to breath the shit in twenty times a day from your neighbour because the government tells her she's only allowed to smoke crack inside her apartment. this is not a better outcome, this is the worst policy possible. public health experts have been trying to rid the world of second hand smoke for decades, and then the stupid government shows up and tells addicts (who are almost always renters) that they're only allowed to smoke drugs inside their rented units, thereby creating a government policy to maximize the consequences of second-hand smoke. what a disaster.

rather, what we need is something like bars for drug users. bars were the ideal compromise to deal with moral panics around alcohol use, as it kept the drunks inside while keeping them out of residential areas. i don't understand why we haven't had marijuana bars pop up, as it would get the potheads out of residential spaces, where they pollute the lungs of non-smokers. likewise, we should have bars for crackheads and junkies, places where the cops can also keep an eye on what's going on.

i support the actual portugese model of aggressive treatment, to a point. i actually think that most of these people are hopeless and that trying to help them is just a waste of public resources that could be spent on more worthy social assistance recipients, like disabled people. i would rather continue to criminalize hard drug use and force people into treatment when they're in jail (which is the only way we could implement the actual portugese model in north america, because we have bills of rights), and i think there should be hefty $1000+ fines for smoking anything (marijuana, cigarettes, fire pits, bbqs) in residential spaces. nobody should ever have to deal with any kind of drifting or second-hand smoke from their neighbours, ever, at all. yet, if we're to treat the issue like a mental health issue then we need to actually take that idea seriously and generate the resources to do so, not wave our hands and leave it up to the market to figure it out. that is the lesson from the failed free market drug policy in the pacific northwest: free market approaches just don't work.

the comments are reprehensible and i condemn them in the strongest terms possible, but this is exactly the situation that free speech advocates seek to avoid in criminalizing clearly despicable speech. by arresting this woman and charging her with hate crimes, the state is creating a martyr, who will generate supporters. now, she can claim she is the one being persecuted, when she should be being criticized as an aggressor and a nazi. this is a gift to what is in truth the far-right, even if it labels itself as left-wing.

a better idea is to let her speak freely, and call her an idiot when she's done.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/hate-investigation-demonstration-comments-1.7190914

is killing your dog not illegal in south dakota?

am i missing something?

kristi noem should be charged, clearly.