Wednesday, July 31, 2024
i don't exactly want to criticize israel for torturing palestinian terrorists. these are not good people, and they don't treat israelis very well in the reverse context. i think the situation should be seen more as a police operation than a war, but bad things happen in wars, and israel intends to win the ones it participates in.
it's the latter point i'm more concerned about.
israel should realize that it is not helping itself by engaging in torture, that it is counterproductive, and that it won't help to deradicalize the terrorists, which is ultimately their actual goal. as the more civilized entity, it needs to take the higher ground and stop doing this.
those who are guilty of torture should be charged under israeli law and incarcerated as the law allows for. israel is a country governed by the rule of law. that needs to be asserted.
i would like to congratulate them on taking out that motherfucker haniyeh, though. apparently, they did it via a rocket strike directly into iran. i wish america would remove it's enemies with a comparable level of competency.
i had a (female) coworker about 15 years ago that you used to call me kermie, and repeatedly tried to engage me in singing 'it's not easy being green', due to my sour and sardonic exterior and utilization of dry wit that went over most people's heads, in addition to my tendency for observational humour.
his response to the harris campaign's invocation of pop stars over substance would be correct, in context. we have no idea what this woman's policy positions are and it's beginning to become clear that she has no real intention of telling us. it wouldn't help her win.
just put the lime in the coconut.
yeesh, indeed.
i don't know if kamala harris is black or not, and i don't really care. i'm white.
i'm pretty sure that, unlike barack obama, she's definitely not white.
i do, however, want to make a request to black people in the united states to vote for the candidate they most agree with, not the one they think is the blackest. if you ask the mirror on the wall who the blackest of them all is, you'll end up voting for this guy, and nobody wants that:
miami getting flooded is more than a flesh wound.
it was a long time ago now, but some dead guy said something about content of character, rather than colour of skin, and he wasn't even very liberal. you should look that up. it was good advice.
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
for clarity's sake, i want to make something unambiguous.
i only use marijuana and alcohol in social situations, as a means to eliminate anxiety. i am not an extroverted person, and i don't enjoy being around people. i need the drugs as an escape from social interaction.
further, i don't like house parties; i think they're lame and pathetic. marijuana is not something that should be done in the privacy of your house, it's a social drug that should be smoked at concerts and in large gatherings, essentially exclusively.
what that means for me is that when the pandemic happened my drug use completely dried up and i simply haven't had the opportunity to pick it back up since.
they closed the border in april of 2020 and i wasn't able to get back over again until may of 2023, but then these new landlords showed up and threatened to illegally evict me, which has forced me to stay inside since june of 2023. i was able to get out to one party in may, 2023 before i had to lock myself inside and wait for them to leave, and i'm still waiting. i have consequently had a single night of drinking since april of 2020, because i have absolutely no interest in getting drunk in my basement, or in somebody's backyard or garage in windsor, ontario. sitting around doing drugs and talking is utterly boring and pathetic to me.
i haven't been to a concert since april, 2020.
likewise, as i think smoking pot out of boredom in residential neighbourhoods is pathetic and lame (put the bong down and read a book instead), i have only had that single opportunity to get out of the house to get stoned.
i got very depressed in june of 2020 when i realized i wasn't going to be able to go out all summer and spent most of the period from june 21, 2020 to aug 1, 2020 smoking pinners and taking walks around the neighbourhood to try to cope with the fascist lockdown. even then, i had to go outside and take a walk. i can't handle smoking anything in the house, i think it's disgusting. i stopped at the end of july, 2020 and haven't touched the stuff since, except at that one party in may, 2023. at all. i came to the conclusion that government pot is a dangerous narcotic and that only homegrown or illegally grown marijuana should be smoked, as the government stuff seems designed to create dependence. normal marijuana is not addictive, but the government pot seemed to be.
even when i was a cigarette smoker, i always smoked outside. i quite smoking cigarettes in january, 2016.
i didn't decide to become straight edge in 2020 and it probably won't last, but i haven't had the freedom to live as i want to, since, and these decisions made by others and enforced on me have had that outcome: no marijuana since aug, 2020 and no alcohol since april, 2020, except for one night in may, 2023, when i was able to get out to a party.
i currently have no interest in drugs at all and i won't until i'm able to go back out to appropriate venues for drug use, which include places like bars and concert halls, not houses and back yards.
we have mandatory retirement for the supreme court in canada, and it's a relatively uncontroversial idea.
biden's proposal, like most of his ideas, strikes me as unworkable and awkward, and perhaps even designed to fail. you don't want your supreme court overturning laws every time a new president gets elected, but that seems like the obvious outcome of his initiative. that's insane, and will turn the country into a legal basket case.
what i'm really getting from this is simply that the democrats are sore losers that want to change the rules of the game because they lost it. they lost control of the court in a fully democratic process and they'll have to accept the will of the people, until they can win it back.
mandatory retirement, however, would be a good way to put a maximum age limit on the justices, to ensure they're not completely out of touch with reality, and aren't senile in office, like the president. perhaps that is the best way to look at this proposal: it is as incoherent as biden is generally these days, and evidence that he ought to remove himself from office.
the christians in the lebanese government should be standing with israel as an ally against hezbollah, which is ruining the country and trying to control it with fear, and not condemning it. this is a very disappointing response from the lebanese foreign minister.
i would call on christians in lebanon to try to replace this guy with somebody that is willing to stand up against hezbollah.
(and, lebanon has a weird government policy, where the foreign minister and most of the army leadership has to be a christian, which is in israel's potential favour)
i'm not going to like kamala harris, and i'm not going to like her because she's about three slots too far right for me to consider voting for, which has generally been the case for me with most democrats. harris, biden, clinton, obama, gore - all conservatives. i won't vote for conservatives.
i endorsed kerry, because he was actually a liberal. i did endorse hillary clinton, but i think it was a mistake.
i have otherwise not suggested voting for the democrats at any point since 1996. i usually endorse the greens, but made exceptions in 2004 for kerry and 2016 for clinton because i felt it was actually worthwhile, and i think i was wrong in 2016. in 2024, i am again endorsing jill stein.
however.
i have to acknowledge that, maybe - maybe - kamala harris might be the planet's last chance. we have now blown past 1.5 degrees and are on the brink of tipping into negative feedback cycles. time's up. she has yet to demonstrate as much, but she might still do so. i need to hear her make a very clean break from biden's pathetic and failed climate policy in order to deduce that she is, and i'll tell you what i want to hear.
i believe it was naomi klein that first pointed out that the economics of neo-liberalism were in direct conflict with the kind of of government policy required to address climate change, and that this was fundamentally a baby boomer problem. the correlation between the boomers lingering on past their welcome and best before date (to the point that a senile boomer had to literally be forced to resign at the last minute) and the fact that government has failed to address climate change as a serious issue is not a coincidence. the washington consensus put in place by bill clinton has been an absolute death sentence for the planet because it takes the tools government needs to address the problem away from it.
i read something recently that suggested that biden has succeeded in building seven charging stations. so much for positive tax incentives as a serious government policy. it's a joke. it's been clear for a long time that, in order to get some people in government that are willing to have government actually do things, a complete generational overhaul was going to be required. biden was never going to articulate the manhatten project style economic policies that are required to aggressively transition the country.
i have yet to hear kamala harris present her climate strategy. i've yet to hear her present any policy at all.
i want to hear her come out and clearly state that she is going to spend trillions of public dollars on transition, and that she is going to go into debt in order to do it and that it doesn't matter how it gets paid for one day, what matters is that it gets done. further, i want to hear her say that she is going to declare the issue a national security emergency (because it is) and use executive orders to fund it if congress is going to remain stupid. if i hear that very specific thing, i might endorse her.
there's not going to be another chance to do this.
this is it.
time's up.
Sunday, July 28, 2024
no matter how you split it up or cut it up, lebanon is different than almost any other country in the mena area (except israel) in that muslims are a clear minority group in lebanon, and shi'ites are a minority in a minority.
hezbollah has no democratic legitimacy and should not be ruling at all, let alone by force.
if you stand with democracy in lebanon, you stand against hezbollah, and it's a serious issue that needs serious addressing.
the lebanese army is essentially failing to protect the people against hezbollah. lebanon is very much a failed state.
israel could present itself as filling that vacuum left open, and seek to generate political support to do what the lebanese army won't. a lasting political union between the two canaanite groups, the israeli jews and the lebanese christians, could benefit both parties.
but, the lebanese have to make that choice.
how likely is it that you could get the christians in lebanon to build an alliance with israel to push out hezbollah?
the problem in lebanon, as i understand it, is fear. the christians in lebanon are deeply fearful of the muslims, and essentially willing to do what they're told to avoid sharia law. this is a horrific situation and not something that should be tolerated by the west, but trying to get the christians to choose to fight over submission is a historical problem that goes back centuries. unlike muslims and jews, christians legitimately don't like to fight.
however, there is a natural alliance between the maronites and the israelis and it could lead to a lasting peace if you could convince the lebanese of it's utility. as the issue is fear, the israelis should propose to protect the maronites (and the druze and sunnis) from the shi'ite muslims, in exchange for collaboration.
if israel can present the idea effectively, this is an opportunity to win their freedom that the christians in lebanon might not see again for a long time. they should choose to align on the right side of history and rise up and take control of their own destiny, with help from israel and, hopefully, a nato willing to pull it's head out of it's ass and make a correct choice for once.
the other option is going to be catastrophic for everybody in the region, and there's no other clear way to avoid it.
israel has reversed and is changing policies it brought in about 20 years ago and going back to policies it had before that, which means a more aggressive occupation zone surrounding israel in order to better protect it's borders. the first phase was a re-occupation of gaza that is unlikely to end in the near future, and should not end in the near future; the fundamental condition for the occupation to end is that the international community needs to find a way to deradicalize the population in gaza via aggressive education initiatives, which the united nations needs to be doing the day-to-day work on from a legitimately neutral perspective, and not be acting as "free palestine" proxies in regards to. morally speaking, israel cannot be expected to withdraw, otherwise. this is going to be a diplomatic fight that could take a generation to enforce.
gaza cannot be a country and the idea that it can is retarded. it should be annexed by egypt when the conditions allow for it, which could be 50 years from now. for the foreseeable future, it will need to be occupied by israel to prevent further violence.
if they don't like that, they should have thought about it before they carried out the october 7th attack. the consequences need to be deep, longlasting and real to creative a disincentive for further attacks. in the short term, they will need to get used to occupation, and they will need to find a way to change who they are as a culture and as a people if they want to end it. this has to be the end of this barbaric terrorist bullshit; there can be no further tolerance of it.
and, no, gaza is not like afghanistan. the comparison is moronic. afghanistan is a mountainous region with a gigantic surface area that, if laid out flat, would be one of the biggest countries in the world. gaza is an enclosed space that is smaller than most cities. the tunnels will slow the process down, but they have a finite number of exit points that can be mapped and controlled with enough effort. it's a challenge that is surmountable. the challenges present in afghanistan mostly don't exist at all in gaza and to the extent that they do, the comparison requires the acknowledgement of a substantive difference of scale. israel should be able to get hamas under control and pacify gaza at least as well as it has in the west bank.
a policy change is also in process in regards to the west bank that will likely lead to annexation, which has been in process for decades. opposition to this process is properly dated to c. 1995. it cannot be reversed at this point, and i frankly don't think it should be. instead, israel should offer full citizenship rights to the existing inhabitants of the west bank and tell them to take it or leave it. jordan and saudi arabia should absorb the remnant population.
the next phase is lebanon.
tersely, there is a river flowing through southern lebanon. under international law, the lebanese state is not supposed to have militias south of the river, but it has ignored this (and hezbollah has especially ignored it). this region was previously occupied by israel; the iranians moved in to the vacuum when israel withdrew, which was not what was supposed to happen. the region was supposed to remain a dmz.
if the un won't enforce the dmz and push the iranians out, the israelis are justified in pushing the iranians out themselves by force and occupying the region and that may be in the process of materializing. this is, however, a dangerous activity by israel, and it may result in an all out war between israel and hezbollah. while israel would be morally and legally justified to carry out this operation, it may be strategically foolish. this is in many ways a judgement call, as they need to do something to push the iranians out, and the united nations is of no utility to israel. nor are the iranians rational actors willing to negotiate in good faith.
it was clearly a mistake to withdraw. that doesn't mean reoccupying is the right thing to do, strategically, even if it is the right thing to do legally and morally.
worse, it is an open question, of which the legalities are less clear, if israel intends to occupy areas north of the river. i have previously argued that israel has a convincing, but convoluted, territorial claim to most if not all of lebanon. i would nonetheless advise against doing that, at least right now, if they intend to push to the river at all.
israel's better option is to seek for a political revolution in lebanon, or perhaps even organize a coup. lebanon is 40-45% christian, and the christian areas are the more urban areas. muslim arabs are invaders to lebanon and largely live in the rural areas; the christians are the indigenous canaanites, a sister people to the hebrew jews. if tel aviv can get hezbollah pushed out of power, it may find a much more friendly government in lebanon that doesn't require attacking and may seek to act jointly to eradicate the terrorist group, perhaps with nato help. they may seek to demilitarize the zone south of the river voluntarily, which is the preferred outcome.
israel has a problem here that it needs to deal with, but it is not invincible and it may be in the process of making a mistake that it should think carefully about. israel will probably defeat hezbollah in the end, but it must seek to avoid a pyrrhic outcome.
israel needs an ally in lebanon if it is to do this with seriousness and with serious likelihood of longlasting victory.
i've pointed out repeatedly that there's a lot of spooks reading this site.
why does trump talk about hannibal lector as though he's an illegal immigrant? i don't know.
i know that i have used hannibal lector as a comical example of why anarchists can't eliminate jails and posted about it for years. anarchists like to argue that crime is economic and communism will make crime obsolete, which is probably mostly true, but that doesn't give us a plan with how to deal with legit nutcases, like hannibal lector.
(i don't want to cite jeffrey dahmer in arguments. it's reductio ad hitlerum. hannibal lets me get the point across with delving into the extremes.)
here is one example:
this isn't exactly trump's stump, but it's oddly close, and i've been using it online since the 00s.
it's curious.
hey, you should fire this bum vance, don coyote.
i'm going to be moving on, but i want to draw attention to a part of the debate.
do you remember when biden started bragging about his golf game, and trump told him he was full of shit? this was a role reversal - biden sounded a lot like trump all of a sudden, and trump was right to tell him he was lying, because he was.
well, sort of.
an open question over the last ten years has been whether it's accurate to call a trump a liar or not, as lying requires a mens rea component, in addition to the actus reus. that is, you can't accidentally tell a lie; in that case, you're just wrong or misinformed. a lie is a special case of being wrong where you know you're wrong and purposefully say something that isn't true, knowing you're wrong, in order to mislead somebody.
so, was biden lying about his golf game?
i want you to consider the possibility that he wasn't, which i suspect is the actual case, and extrapolate that to the problems inherent to the biden presidency, and which are likely going to manifest themselves in the harris campaign, malignantly.
what if they told biden his golf game was better than it is?
what if they told him it was improving when it was actually deteriorating?
the reason they would do that is that they would be rewarded for it, as yes-men and yes-women (the yes-people, and i'm not talking about bill bruford), because biden had an ego, and inflating it came with self-interest. you tell the president what he wants to hear, not what is true, because you get promoted for it.
so, will biden ever learn that his golf game isn't what he believes it is?
it doesn't really matter.
but harris likely needs to address the issue and eliminate a lot of people if she wants to win and if she wants to govern effectively.
it's worth remembering that the people that advised joe biden and continue to advise kamala harris are not public servants hired to govern the country, but political staffers paid to advance a campaign and a candidate. there's been some outcry amongst partisan democrats "why didn't you tell us!?". the answer is obvious enough, and that it is that these are people with mortgages and bills and ending biden's campaign would also mean they would lose their job. that would be like signing up to get fired. it's not in their self-interest. there was a similar issue with liz truss, where they actually caught a number of people behind the scenes talking to each other, where the conversation was something like "she's fucking incompetent, but i need the squid, so fuck it."
a better question to ask is why it is that democratic candidates didn't see this coming. i want you to go back and watch the 2020 debates and tell me with a straight face that he looked capable and competent. he didn't. so, why didn't anybody primary him? the answer is that nobody thought they could win, and they were probably right. still. even after his resignation, biden would still win primaries against virtually anybody running, with the possible exception of bernie sanders.
this is a "it's not me, it's you" type situation, from the perspective of voters. biden won in the first place because the field was horrific. harris ended up as vp because there was nobody else willing to do it. for all the rhetoric about choices from an identity politics marketing perspective, the reality is that the party doesn't have many popular candidates that can win close elections in contested districts, because you could never raise enough money to run, if you actually had popular support. it's a catch-22.
so, the country ends up stuck with the bidens in the spectrum, and keeps voting for them, even after they're senile, and even after they've resigned.
i'm cringing at harris, but they are correct on some level. they need to build grassroots support. but, they're going to do that by focusing on populist economic messaging and presenting a serious candidacy, not on stupid pop culture memes that make her look desperate and half-retarded. presidents should spend the summer getting shitfaced and falling down the stairs. right. and, the actual truth is that this woman is so right-wing, the uk tories would tell her to fuck off and go call nigel farage. she's too conservative for the tories; they'd call her an extremist. you'd think these people could figure that out, but they can't and they're probably never going to.
so, the american people need to figure it out for them and organize on their own. i would advise choosing the green party as the vehicle to do it with.
Friday, July 26, 2024
so, kamala harris has begun her campaign for president by copying the cover art from a recent pop singer and declaring solidarity with hamas.
she likes hot sauce too, right? carries it in her purse?
ugh.
*gag*.
this is beginning to feel like deja vu.
at the end of this, i want the strategists in the democratic party to be forced to wear dunce caps and paraded down pennsylvania avenue.
what do i think of "drag queen story time"?
i think it's very silly and that the correct response is to realize it's very silly. most sane, rational people will consider it comical. nonetheless, is there some valid concern?
there might be. for example, i'm reminded of the time that i went over to sarah's place, and she picked out some clothes for me, and her daughter took the opportunity to jump on my lap when i was sitting down, with the expectation that i would read her a book (which she had picked out for me), and then proceeded to tell me i was stupid for wearing women's clothing. this hurt my feelings, and she never apologized for it. i nonetheless read the book, to sarah's bemusement, and when i stopped to answer a question she asked me, the child bit me, apparently as punishment for stopping. don't bite me, master. i could not possibly hit a child, so i was a sitting duck, too. so, there's a real concern that the drag queens may be the victim of abuse by spoiled kids and some attempt should be made to protect the drag queens from abuse by rotten children.
i'm not actually a drag queen, i'm a transgendered person that had just gone back on hormones and was trying to explain it to my unimpressed ex-girlfriend, and i had no intention of reading the child a story when i went over to sarah's on that day in roughly 2009ish. the kid would have been about five, a little younger. she'd be almost 20 now. one nonetheless needs to ask why the child told me i was stupid, and the answer couldn't be anything other than that her mother had told her as much, which sounds about right. the child was probably literally repeating something she heard her mother say about me. i realized that.
i think that the underlying concern that some conservative parents have about this is that the children are being exposed to a type of mental illness that is being normalized, which is an idea that has no clinical basis. simply wearing clothing is not a mental illness and is not in the dsm. to exaggerate the point, i want to draw attention to the women protesting against drag queens while wearing pants, apparently oblivious to the reality that they are cross-dressing, themselves. well, if women can wear pants, why can't men wear silly princess dresses? there is no rational response to that question, as clothing is merely a social construction, and one that has changed over time. by current standards, jesus himself would have been a drag queen, because he walked around in dresses, as was the norm at the time (and remains the norm in conservative parts of the middle east).
one of the reasons that the persians were seen as barbarians by older middle eastern cultures is that they wore trousers. to the greeks and babylonians, this was unconscionable. all greeks knew that real men wore robes.
viewed rationally, wardrobe choice is a meaningless triviality and all clinical analysis views it that way: cross-dressing itself is not only not a mental illness, but it's exceedingly difficult to even define as the goal posts are constantly shifting, as illustrated by the women in pants protesting exposing their children to drag queens, as they stand beside them, in their pants.
there is perhaps some latent concern underlying this "born in the wrong body" thing, but the idea was never intended to be interpreted as some kind of metempsychosis or something. that might be seen as a symptom of schizophrenia, sure. however, nobody has ever literally thought they were born in the wrong body. it's a figure of speech. it's to be interpreted poetically.
there are still two conditions listed in the dsm that are trans-related and one of them does have some vague relevance, but it is abstract and unlikely to manifest itself in real life. parents should nonetheless be protective of anybody that wants to put their kids on their lap, from strangers at the library to creepy santa clauses to religious freaks. a trusted priest or pastor with repeat access is more likely to abuse your child than a drag queen reading a book in public at the library. there's nothing particular about the trans issue, but i want to be real about this.
the first of these conditions is dysphoria, which is widely misunderstood. there are a lot of people, myself included, that get diagnosed with being left out of society due to their gender identity, which triggers conditions like depression or anxiety. for me, it's frankly more of an excuse for a guaranteed annual income, but i am diagnosed with anxiety stemming from discrimination due to gender identity. this is a real condition in the dsm, but it is a reflection of the society, and not of the identity itself.
the second of these conditions is the one that may be of some legitimate concern to conservative parents, and it is the diagnosis of transvestism as a fetish. clinically speaking, a drag queen is supposed to be defined as a gay man that puts on women's clothing for purposes of sexual arousal, in order to masturbate or have anal sex with other gay men. it is a kink, a fetish, a sexual quirk. on it's own it is harmless, but it has the potential to lead to obsessive behaviour. do you want your son climbing up on that dude's lap? maybe not.
but, i think that this is something that should be easily identified by discerning eyeballs. the drag queen that shows up to storytime in lingerie is not the same thing as the drag queen that shows up to storytime in a silly princess dress. the mistake that conservatives are making is conflating these things, but the use of language is unhelpful. technically speaking, these aren't clinical drag queens, as drag is a sexual activity, and what they are doing is a type of performance art. a better term would be "female impersonator" rather than "drag queen", and some change of language may be helpful to clarify that this is actually harmless and silly rather than creepy and gross.
parents and librarians should nonetheless be careful to erect those filters, as they would in any other context, and which they no doubt probably do.
i haven't seen any pictures of a drag queen story-time with dudes dressed like porn stars, but i would be uncomfortable with that. sure. it's not real. rather, having cinderalla (or perhaps the ugly duckling) told by a female impersonator in exaggerated costume can and should be silly and fun and so long as that is actually true it should be tolerated and enjoyed for what it is.
i was thinking about this while i was in the shower, and i'm waiting for some soap + humidity to soften me up (a side effect of the forced drugging by the losers upstairs has been patches of rough, dry skin, which has been extremely annoying, and has required an all-of-drugstore response) so i'm going to write it down. i am eventually going to be splitting posts like this off of this politics feed, but i've been unable to sit down and do any meaningful work and might not be until i'm able to relocate. it's taken me a long time to recover, and every time i get close, they drug me again. i don't fully understand, but they appear to be muslims trying to enforce some backwards religious code on me, which i don't care about, but i'm not able to escape. they want me to look like a bearded gay man, or something. i don't really understand and don't remotely care; i want to send them to jail for enforcing their laws on me, but i'm having a hard time generating sufficient evidence.
what i was thinking about was the open question of whether the germanic, celtic, slavic and other migrations that ended the roman empire were actually seen not as the rampaging barbarians that the church historians recorded them as but actually as liberators of christian-enforced slavery by the vast majority of the population, who rejected this weird middle-eastern religion that was enforced on them with violence by strange foreigners. i'm not going to prove this claim, so much as i'm going to generate an argument that it is a reasonable supposition by using a series of analogies within more standard, recorded history. a characteristic of this period, c. 450 to c 1000, is that there was little remembered writing outside of the churches, which were governmental and administrative bodies throughout most of europe under a system called 'papal supremacy', where the pope essentially assumed the powers of the emperor. this didn't formally end until it was dismantled by napoleon, in 1806.
first, i want to present an unrelated model that i've used to try to understand the nature of migrations into europe over a long time frame. there's this heated debate in pre-european archaeological circles over whether the indo-european migration was violent or peaceful, with the peaceniks pointing out a lack of clear evidence of violence in the record itself and the war mongers arguing that the central motifs in indo-european culture were all about war, and drawing conclusions. i've tried to resolve this debate by looking at recorded history and pointing out that there has been an essentially unbroken stream of violent horse-backed warriors moving from the steppes for as long as there has been historical records (something that was only really resolved when the russians overwhelmed the horse-backed warriors with superior technology, and eventually with tanks. horses can't fight tanks. at all. hence this giant country called russia, that formed in response to this constant stream of violence.), and almost none of that could be found in the archaeological record if it were searched for, so it's really incumbent on the peaceniks to present their positive case, which they can't. violent migrations from asia into europe were likely a near constant reality going back 6000-8000 years before present, and only ending around the year 1700.
likewise, i think we can look at the question of how northerners were seen by romans by looking at existing history, but we have the ability to look both before and after the period that middle eastern christian colonizers occupied the bulk of europe.
first, consider the byzantine response to advancing turks and arabs in the late dark ages, which was to call on the franks and germans (then seen by the byzantnes as barbarians) to liberate them. we call this the crusades, which from a byzantine roman perspective was a war of liberation (although it suffered from the unfortunate reality that the remnants of roman civilization in the middle east left several centuries previous, in a depopulation event cause by plague, war and economic collapse that peaked in the late 7th century and made it easy for arab bedouin groups to take over in syria and israel). there has also been some serious scholarly research (not some trans girl with a blog) looking into the idea that the viking invasion of christian europe was a response to charlemagne threatening to invade scandinavia, that they targeted the churches for this reason and that they met a minimal response outside of the cities because much of the rural population wasn't christianized at all, and did in truth see them as liberators. we spend a fair amount of time criticizing the inquisition, which lasted into the age of enlightenment (and may have claimed netwon, who was himself a secret alchemist, had he not been very careful about it), without stopping to realize that they were killing witches because they were pagans. this is in truth clear evidence of indigenous religious practices carrying on in europe very late into history. the great peasants revolt likely had a pagan religious slant to it (as did many of the attempts to ward off the plague in the first place). while they have sadly not survived, there are records of indigenous scottish religious practices being practiced in remote locations as last as the 17th century. eastern europe, which had crusades launched against it, did not itself convert until roughly that late, and there are in fact some baltic and finnish tribes in russia that never converted at all and are the last known legitimate vestiges of the old ways in europe. it is reasonable to suggest that perhaps the farmers and peasants in france let the vikings walk in to fight the church, which they despised, precisely because they were still worshiping derivatives of odin, themselves....at least until the vikings became corrupted by christianity, themselves, and became worse oppressors than the remnants of roman rule were.
so, we can see that the idea that the germans were seen as liberators is recorded in several places in history after roman rule, notably with the crusades (well documented in constantinople) and the viking invasions (well documented, at least from the church perspective). there are also undertones of pagan practices in major events like the great peasants revolt (the centrality of the grove, for instance) and the inquisition that draw into question how christianized europe really was, and how they might view a foreign pagan force to come to fight the church for them.
it is also possible to look at roman attitudes towards germans and celts at the dawn of constantine and the beginning of roman christianity and deduce ideas about how the people viewed their chiristian oppressors and how they may have viewed germanic warriors coming to fight against them.
there were in fact several late roman emperors that saw the goths (a swedish warrior group that migrated into the empire from the region around today's crimea, fleeing the huns) as having noble and ideal qualities, which is something the romans also projected onto the celts, even in the form of late classical art. this is very well documented. our contemporary concept of the noble savage - naked, naive, pure, just, honest but void of civilization and law- was in fact created by roman art, depicting the celtic warrior class. there are surviving statues in rome of celtic warriors that demonstrate how the romans literally placed the naked celtic warriors on a pedestal, as ideal representatives of humanity in a pure and raw state. it is easy to deduce that, in the celts, the romans saw themselves, which is true; italic tribes likely only separated from celtic tribes some time around the halstatt period (c. 1000 bce), and the celtic and italian are the most closely related dialects, which might even be why spain and france so easily converted to latin as the lingua franca. you can contrast this to how the romans saw the carthaginians, which was as creepy foreigners with weird customs. there is a very large amount of evidence from the late classical period that the romans saw the germans and celts as something closer to themselves, and that they contrasted this with their middle eastern slaves (the romans literally brought millions of semitic slaves to europe from syria, and it is these people that eventually became italian and french and spanish christians), who were foreigners that had weird customs that were not like them. there is also actually archaeological evidence of roman pagan cultural practices (like sacrifices) in italy that is contemporary to the germanic invasions, and which seems to suggest either a reversion out of fear (the christian perspective) or a brief return to free cultural activity, which is what i'm hinting at.
this is an important consideration, as the history of europe is decolonized to present indigenous perspectives, and remove introduced christian concepts. we can easily construct the earlier period - we still have the statues of celtic noble savages on display in roman museums - and we know all about the renaissance and what followed, but this historical gap of christian occupation still suffers from the fact that it was written by the occupiers, and the bulk of historians are frankly not cognizant of the depth of the biases. we know the history was written by the church. we say it. we don't understand it and we've yet to put the pieces together to build a history of europe that eliminates and expels christianity, which is overdue and necessary to complete the decolonization of europe and allow it to return to it's indigenous roots in roman, greek, celtic and germanic cultural practices.
adults have a right to choose to be gay if they want. it's harmless behaviour. no state or social institution should be oppressing anybody for consenting, free choices made by adults.
but, orphaned kids placed with gay parents didn't have the ability to make that choice and it's not fair to make it for them.
my own position is that parents don't have and should not have rights, what they have is responsibilities that are to be defined in the context of the rights of the child. this is a next step from a "best interests of the child" policy to a "the kids have fucking rights" policy. i have a consistency in perspectives that the rights issues in all scenarios belong to the children and never belong to the parents.
now, older kids (say older than 10) that can make that choice should be allowed to, if they opt to. some kids even know they're gay at that age, or end up without parents because they're gay. that is a special situation, gay people adopting gay kids, that allows for the child to consent and that actually makes sense.
it's placing newborns with gay adults that is making a choice on behalf of these kids that the placement agencies do not have the right to make and should not be making.
and, yes, being gay is a choice. the science is abundantly clear on the point. it's a complex choice, with voluntary and involuntary factors, but it's unambiguously and unquestionably a choice, and that choice should be respected, even if you think it's gross.
i don't usually call myself a liberal, but my position on the gays is right out of on liberty, which is a foundational text in canada, but doesn't tend to get much traction in the united states, where the issue is still defined by religion, which i was not raised in and don't care about. i am, nonetheless, expressing a viewpoint shared by a large plurality, or outright majority, of white northerners in the united states; it's a liberal or libertarian position, it's really not about accepting gay people into conservative society or letting them participate in conservative and religious institutions like marriage. however, because the issue only really exists politically in the south, they have warped and defined a narrative that really doesn't reflect how most people approach the issue.
most people think that the gays should be left alone so long as they aren't harming anybody, and that they're absolutely free to fuck however they choose and want, so long as it's consensual.
Wednesday, July 24, 2024
i don't enjoy the company of gay men or women, and i think they're unnatural and disgusting, but that's ultimately just my opinion. there's lots of categories of people i don't like: muslims, christians, capitalists, etc. i couldn't exist if i refused to interact with everybody that i hate. it is possible that their perversions may have some effect on their politics, but it strikes me as remote. it does follow that being homosexual might be a reason i'd vote against you, but it probably wouldn't be in most situations.
being gay certainly wouldn't be a reason i'd vote for you. not realizing that anal sex is disgusting isn't a political position.
i think straight marriage should be abolished, so my position on gay people getting married is kind of oblivious. i think the premise is abjectly stupid, to be blunt with you, but i don't really care. it's dumb, but it's a harmless, silly delusion. so long as straight people are getting married, i don't see any particular reason to tell gay people they can't, but my actual position is that all marriage should be abolished; i support marriage abolition, and not "marriage equality", but i'm not at all hung up on gays getting married in the mean time, i'm just not in support of it and wouldn't vote for it.
however, something that i do have an issue with is gay people (both men and women) raising children. i don't think that's something that society should ignore or accept. i would actually support congress and parliament enacting legislation to prevent gay "couples" from adopting. it's not an issue of the rights of the gays, it's an issue of the rights of the kids. kids should have the right to not be subjected to having gay parents, as that's a situation that you kind of can't get out of, if you get placed in it. the only arguments i've seen that address this have to do with socio-economic outcomes, but that's a red herring that doesn't address the emotional trauma involved with being placed in a gay family and having to deal with the social stigma of having gay parents. society can and should strive to do better for it's children than that. this is something that we have an ability to make a conscious choice to not do and should not be done.
at the very least, children placed with gay "couples" should have the ability to opt out some time around the age of 5 or 6, and continuing until the age of majority.
i mean, i can imagine how i'd react to having adopted gay parents, and it wouldn't be accepting or inclusive of them. i'd be out of there before i turned 15, even if it meant sleeping on the streets.
i am, however, going to present my opinion on who harris should pick as running mate.
first, drop the identity politics. politics is not consumer branding. people are sick and tired of this.
harris should realize that she has little experience in any substantive governing role and pick somebody older than her with a large amount of experience. the media is currently confused about the value of experience in the mind of voters. harris should not be confused with them; she should realize that an older candidate will give her legitimacy, and also that it will be a pragmatic necessity in helping her govern.
this is a list of mid-level senate seniority (the top two are republicans, chuck grassley and mitch mcconnell):
patty murray, ron wyden and dick durbin are reliable soft-left senators in safe seats. any of them would strengthen the ticket.
she wants experience and legislative know-how, not somebody that is flashy or camera friendly. her role is going to be the camera friendly one. she needs somebody competent that can actually govern.
he probably shouldn't have published this.
but, one thing you can say about manchin is that he's generally honest.
was joe biden terminating his campaign a selfless act?
no.
what would have been selfless would have been dropping out before the primaries to allow for a democratic process to unfold. trying to cling to power when it was clear five years ago that he was senile was incredibly self-centered and arrogant and delusional.
in the end, he got pushed out by donors (and probably the pentagon) and quit at the last minute because he was too unpopular to win, throwing a catastrophic situation into the lap of a woman who does not have the competency to deal with it, and who was irresponsibly put into a position of power in the first place.
joe biden is not a selfless hero, he is a selfish piece of shit and should be and will be remembered that way, as one of the worst presidents that the country has ever had.
did joe biden pass substantive climate legislation that will reduce emissions?
no.
what joe biden did was pass massive tax cuts for fossil fuel companies, and market it as a climate change strategy.
the political obituaries lionizing biden as a climate hero are going to be read in ten years and ridiculed. the "positive incentives" in the form of massive tax cuts and subsidies are largely tied to efficiency measures that the companies were in the process of advancing anyways and will have no effect at all, meaning the net result will be an increase rather than a decrease in emissions. analysts will look back at the biden administration as a failed opportunity.
in fact, these bills were written to receive and in fact did receive the support of joe manchin and moderate republicans and should be analyzed from that perspective. these were not "progressive" bills at all. not remotely.
i don't have time for it, but somebody needs to do the math on how many tax cuts and subsidies that biden sent to major polluters and emissions producers. turn it into a graphic. make it sobering.
this is what biden was very good at, smoke and mirrors. he was a master of spin. and, i can only tell him to go spin in his grave.
i'm a very white person and, as per the polling results, kamala harris is therefore a much less interesting candidate to me than joe biden was, even as i couldn't possibly endorse either of them, because they're both conservatives.
i don't consider the outcome of the election, in terms of popular support, to be unclear. trump is going to win the swing states, he's going to win the popular vote and he's going to win states that are not currently considered to be in play. this should be seen as a massive failure in democratic party strategy, given that they have an overwhelming structural advantage, but they continue to be hell bent on running horrifically weak and unelectable candidates (of which i include biden, clinton and harris) when all they need to do to win by substantive margins is run electable candidates, which they have, but won't support.
the narrative developing in this election is boring. the democrats want to run a black woman by claiming she's good enough, smart enough and goddammit people like her. like the people writing the narrative, the narrative had a best before date of about 1985. nobody cares.
i don't know what it means to be qualified to be president, but kamala harris has no executive experience and i'm not aware of any bills that she wrote while in the senate for ten minutes. she's been a career politician that has accomplished nothing of substance and survives by shaking hands and soliciting political donations. she is simply going to do what she's told.
i'm not interested in these candidates and the polling outcome is clear. this is consequently now boring to me and you should expect minimal commentary and analysis.
i frankly don't see a substantive difference between trump and harris on policy issues (which is why the election is going to be about personalities and not issues) and don't really care who wins. please vote for jill stein to help develop a viable third party, instead.
i want to say one thing about biden before i shut this down for the cycle.
Tuesday, July 23, 2024
jd vance is really a throbbing gristle fan. that's what is underlying the weird quote.
===
While you are sitting here right now if someone rang you up you might say that you are in a workshop with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, but that would be untrue. What you are really experiencing is a massive data input in no particular logical order: tree creaking almost subliminal; floor hard on ass; need to shit soon; am I hungry; do you think that person still likes me; on and on and on. And we filter it. So, who builds the filters? That is the big question, who controls what does and doesn’t come through the filters, when, at any given minute there is this huge waterfall of information pouring in and our senses are picking it all up.
Then we had them do an exercise that was simply “write everything that happens for one minute,” and it took everyone several pages and was not linear and was some of the most beautiful poetry we’ve ever heard.
Our concept of what we interpret as “reality” is completely malleable. And if it’s malleable then anyone can sculpt it. A lot of our war has been to help others realize they can sculpt it themselves by using tools as simple as cut-ups to reveal the secret war in language, showing how easily we are being manipulated to become consumers. Western capitalism is almost a better product than heroin. In the Middle Ages, if you said to people, “We want you to wear the symbols of your enemy on your clothes and pay for it,” they would just say, “You idiot!” But now people can’t wait to wear corporate brands on their body—they brand themselves with their enemy and pay huge sums of money to reinforce this power system. So it’s a huge and very serious war.
======
in fact, i think lou reed once said something similar to that, as well.
bernie's been doing this for a while. if he thinks it's better to call off the hounds for now, he seems to have a plan. ok.
note that bernie is in better mental shape than either biden or trump, despite being older than both of them.
is bernie's patience going to work out?
perhaps his hands are tied. perhaps he's playing it by ear. perhaps he's picking his battles.
what kamala is likely to actually do is what is called pivot, except that she doesn't have a base to pivot from. it follows that when she pivots, what she will actually do, functionally, is abandon.
i've been calling don the coyote, because he's sneaky and smart. you have to be smart to be a coyote. a genius. wiley, even. hence, don the coyote. yet, perhaps the metaphor is now better applied to kamala.
i mean, if this was a normal election cycle, she might pivot away from 'defund the police' and towards a 'tough on crime' messaging. she can't. she's just going to show up and walk away from her voting base on day one, while trump is paying fake wrestling stars to do fake photo ops and building massive levels of support amongst young men.
ugh.
but, bernie is right. for now. chill out. let her tell us what she wants to do first, don't put words in her mouth.
Monday, July 22, 2024
i understand that certain assholes want to ensure that politicians don't do things to reduce rent or take down property values, but there are real world consequences to that kind of greed.
i need to move.
i can't. there's nowhere to move to.
this is creating a serious conflict between myself, my landlords and would-be tenants that want to move in and also have nowhere to move to. it's resulted in police calls. it's tying up the court system, with no end in sight. i've had to lock myself inside the house, while people sit upstairs and wait for me to leave (so they can change the locks), under threat of illegal removal. it's a mexican standoff that's been going on for over a year and could linger on for up to three or four more.
i've never missed a month of rent, and i'm legally allowed to be in the unit i've signed a lease to, the landlords just want to double it and are aggressively trying to throw me out.
it may not be much longer before these kinds of pressures lead to violence or unrest, as frustrated people need to find some way to let out their anger. we can't go on like this, something has to break.
in most cities that i've been to, the downtown core has multi-purpose and multi-level buildings throughout itself as a defining architectural decision. so, for example, some of the places i rented in ottawa had pizza pizzas or chinese restaurants on the main floor, and apartments upstairs.
that essentially doesn't exist in windsor, where all of the buildings are either company-built skyrises (like the chrysler building) or they are single floor commercial spaces. the latter takes up a disproportionate part of downtown windsor, which robs the city of prime real estate.
if they built apartments on top of these businesses, i can promise you people would move in. i'd much rather live within walking distance of the tunnel, night clubs, etc than have to transit in to downtown, which is a pain in the ass, but the only places to live downtown are condos, corporate high rises (of which there are very few) or subsidized units. there's no normal affordable housing.
one of the biggest safety problems in downtown windsor is that nobody lives there. homeless people outnumber residents, and people just go downtown to access services or to go to bars. most of the buildings downtown, where so many people want to live, are subsidized housing. you have to go way out of town to rent a traditional apartment building in windsor.
while there is a 45% vacancy rate in the city's commercial sector, there is a 1% vacancy rate in the city's residential sector. what that tells me is that large amounts of the city are not zoned correctly.
the days of office spaces in a small city like windsor are likely over, and that's ok.
they should convert these offices into apartments. it solves several problems at once.
there's a number of articles up trying to determine what kind of difference the debate made in polling projections and comparing harris or biden to trump and trying to draw conclusions from a 2% difference in a 5% margin and an almost certain bradley effect.
i'm going to say this once and without an in-depth analysis.
right now, voters demonstrate no preference between biden and harris and the debate has had no demonstrable empirical effect on the democrats' polling numbers, which is rather being driven by the weak economy, as measured in terms that matter to working people, rather than terms that matter to stock brokers. this indicates that people that want to vote democrat are voting for the party and not for a candidate. it basically doesn't matter who the face on the party is.
there is currently no empirical evidence to support the idea that harris will perform better than biden, except with black voters, but it is marginal. there is some evidence that harris will perform worse than biden with white voters, but it is marginal.
further, trump is doing extremely well with young male voters, which is a key democratic voting constituency. the swings you are seeing towards trump in key states are happening in the micro-demographic of men between the ages of 18-35, which is a demographic that any democrat needs to win if they hope to secure any election.
by keying in on young male voters, trump is basically pulling the rug out from under the democrats' feet.
harris needs to focus on winning back young men, or she's going to lose states that nobody currently expects are even in play.
the only politician that the democrats have that can counter trump in this key demographic is bernie sanders. harris, conversely, whatever you think of her as an individual, is just about the worst candidate possible to pair against trump.
are the democrats....stupid? it would appear so, kent.
the media is wondering if some of the status quo governors - some of whom are actually very unpopular, like gavin newsom - might try to take a run at kamala harris.
what would be the point of that? they're just different faces on the same set of pro-corporate policies.
i don't think joe biden was a very good president, but he seemed to have a relatively close relationship with bernie sanders, whether it was cynical or practical on biden's end. there's a good argument that bernie is next in line, and not kamala harris.
i'd like to see sanders take a run at the nomination, even if it's just to put some better ideas on the table, because the reality is that people didn't like harris very much in 2020 because her ideas weren't very good, and that's just going to get worse with more power. the media will like kamala harris but she's going to have a very hard time mobilizing base voters in places where she needs to win, like michigan and wisconsin, because those voters aren't going to be enthusiastic about her policies, which are going to be more "centrist" (that is, conservative) and pro-corporate than biden's.
somebody needs to take a run at her from the left and try to mobilize traditional democratic voting constituencies or trump is going to steam roll her in the end.
bernie will be more popular with younger voters than harris will be, and probably across the board, in almost every demographic. there's a reason for that and it is policy based.
her politics suck.
running harris against trump is going to be 2016 all over again, except worse, as harris doesn't have the entrenched base that clinton had.
did i get to joe?
i don't know.
i don't know how i could know. there are known unknowns. you know, that was actually a reasonable analysis. we should skip the lesson in kant, for now.
i know that this site doesn't have much of a real audience, but has generated the attention of certain spooks, and there have been several times when i've wondered if very powerful people in both of the countries on this continent were tuning in. i still don't know who has been stalking me, who bought my house to get to me, etc. it's not some dumb kids in muscle cars.
when i read the news reports, i thought there was going to be a final speech from joe, but it turns out that it was a statement posted to twitter.
does anybody think that joe biden resigned by posting to twitter and instagram?
is it even a prank?
we'll find out when joe wakes up in the morning, at roughly the crack of dawn. gotta start your day nice and early, gotta make the best out of life. is this real, or did somebody resign for him? if so, that's going to go down as one of the best pranks of all time, and will consequently justify itself as trending on youtube.
or, maybe joe is preparing his final epic speech.
remember joe: the white zone is for loading and unloading. if you want to unload, you go to the white zone.
Sunday, July 21, 2024
...and, then i checked the news.
trump is going to utterly annihilate kamala harris. it'll be the greatest election win since the 80s.
that doesn't mean that they'll let him be president again, though.
i want you to ask yourself this question: who will do what they are told more obediently, trump or harris?
the media will tell us what the pentagon wants.
what do i think is actually going on in the united states election?
going back to 2016, my projection was as follows:
- the polls suggest clinton is going to win
- but the media has made it obvious that trump will be the next president, even if clinton wins.
the idea that elections are free and fair in the united states is a kind of axiom in the west, but most of us know it's not true. it's classic doublethink, right out of orwell. the united states is in truth a dictatorial military junta that allows for self-governance at the domestic level and a certain veneer of democracy at the international level, but it intervenes when it's control becomes tenuous. americans vote for presidents to do things like cut taxes and reform health care, but the president's actual role in the constitution is as commander in chief. tax cuts and health care are supposed to be dealt with by congress.
so, it's less that the pentagon wanted trump to win and more that it could not accept clinton. trump was seen as an easily controlled dunce, which is what he turned out to be. clinton was seen as somewhat of a radical, and it wasn't due to her gender, it was due to an intersection of a set of policies that were considered unacceptably liberal in the united states when she was younger and the reality that she demonstrated, as secretary of state, that she was for sale to the highest bidder, and not subject to oversight or control by the pentagon. if some sheikh wants ghadaffi gone, they just need to name the price, and it doesn't matter if that would blow up the balance of power with the turks and russians or lead to world war three (which it essentially did. libya is at the core of ukraine. libya is at the core of syria.).
the pentagon outright flatly and permanently rejected clinton as commander-in-chief, so a soft coup was organized through the media and some razor-thin results in two states and trump was put in charge, as a puppet, to allow for cental command to consolidate. it worked.
now, i told you from day one that biden's foreign policy was going to be a catastrophe but the pentagon seems to have misjudged him. 2020 wasn't seen as a substantive election from the pentagon's perspective, so they let it go through. they made a mistake, and now they need to get biden out of office.
i don't think it's a coincidence that this picked up after the nato conference and i don't think the issue is biden's age so much as i think it is his stubbornness. drunk with power, biden stopped listening to his generals and is becoming a threat to upend the balance of power and potentially create some vicious hot wars. he's lost his mind. biden knows better, or so he thinks. the pentagon doesn't allow for that and, frankly, the pentagon is right: biden does not know better, and biden's foreign policy decisions have been catastrophic across the board, everywhere. so, cue the media shift, and if you listen carefully to biden, he seems to realize he's the victim of a soft coup in motion.
i'm going to shift the narrative a little, then.
biden needs to step down...or else.
"or else what?"
or else he gets removed.
and, that might be why trump got shot at, to set the narrative up. i don't know. i know that when the american media starts moving in lockstep like this, even when they're right, it's because they're being directed by the pentagon, and it's obvious enough what the reason for it is.
Saturday, July 20, 2024
the icc claims the israeli settlements are illegal because the "palestinian people" deserve self-determination.
while i understand what they're attempting to state, and the ruling has a sound legal basis, the ruling is also rooted in complex historical inaccuracies. it would be helpful if we could start by defining what the term "palestinian people" actually means.
there is an interesting article here about the territorial changes in the ottoman empire:
i'll let you sort through it yourself, but it is abundantly obvious that the entire coastal region of the eastern mediterranean was split into ottoman provinces from the mid 16th century until the end of world war one, when the british and french created their own provinces, of which palestine became one (by mimicking ancient roman political divisions).
generally speaking, the ottomans considered the eastern mediterranean coast to be a part of the province of syria:
before the mid 16th century, the region was controlled by other varieties of turks, by crusaders, by arab colonists and by byzantine romans, and while the area was called palestine after the philistines, who were greeks, there was never any sort of palestinian state, or really even a distinct palestinian province after the end of roman rule. the region was broadly seen as southern syria or northern egypt, depending on who was more powerful at the time, and variously under the control of despots in constantinople or on the arab peninsula.
the closest thing to a palestinian state was the crusader states.
so, who are these "palestinian people"?
i don't mean to be disingenuous. the context of the ruling is clear enough, and it is relatively obvious that it intends to refer to the people that lived in the palestinian mandate created by great britain after the first world war, out of the southern parts of the ottoman syrian province. this was a political identity created by a colonial power, and not an indigenous identity, but it is what they mean.
but, who are these people? and where did they come from?
while nobody has ever wanted to admit it, everybody has always known that they were about 80% indigenous converted hebrews and about 20% colonial arabs and turks (with a substantial amount of genetic influx from subsaharan slaves, brought in by arabs). this was obvious enough that ben gurion wrote a book about it, and it has since been confirmed beyond a doubt by modern genetic science.
so, if the "palestinian people" are actually converted hebrews, and we agree in principle that they should have self-determination, what does that actually mean?
it would mean that they need voting rights and land use rights in an israeli state.
because they're actually hebrews.
this is where the ruling gets confused, as it confuses what is a religious conflict between a single ethnic group (hebrews, some of which are jews, and some of which are muslims) with an ethnic conflict between arabs and hebrews, which is not the actual truth, even if it has taken on that form in territorial wars.
if the palestinians are arabs, they are not indigenous to the region, and should seek self-determination outside of it. if the palestinians are hebrews, which they actually are, they should seek self-determination within the hebrew state. there is no logical or legal basis to have a hebrew state that is muslim parallel to a hebrew state that is jewish. that would be like trying to carve pre-revolutionary france up into catholic and calvinist spaces, and we see how that turned out (not good. lots of dead people. for a long time.).
and, that brings us to the actual issue before us, which would be the land use laws and enforced segregation in the hebrew state, which claims to be western and democratic, but has segregation laws that are neither thing and need to be abolished. this is done by supporting a civil rights movement within israel, and not by arguing for parallel states on the same land that will have no future but perpetual warfare.
the icj ruling is consequently misguided, but not for the reasons proposed by netanyahu. the "palestinians" in the west bank, who are mostly muslim hebrews, need to have some right to compensation if the indigenous group, which is the jewish hebrews, wishes to seize the land for itself, which means what? it is hebrews seizing land from hebrews. they are seizing their own land from themselves and then giving preferred status to a member of the indigenous religion over the introduced one, which has the added layer of complexity that they're basically the same fucking religion, anyways.
what i want the icj to do for me - please - is to sit down and try and actually define these terms properly in order to clarify what they're actually fucking talking about. their ruling is rendered incoherent without properly defining the terms they're using, but if they were to actually do so, they would find they don't have an issue to adjudicate on, besides the lack of egalitarian land use laws in a country that sees it's particular indigenous denomination of a set of shared cultural beliefs as superior to any other derived one.
i want to remind people that it was the democrats that pushed down all kinds of restrictions on personal freedom during the pandemic, and the republicans that argued against them, and in favour of greater personal liberty. in a state like new york, that likes to party and be free, and where democratic support was suppositioned on the cultural assumption that republicans were crusty old losers and democrats played the saxophone and smoked pot, this was a defining, generational, cultural shift.
older democrats probably don't get it.
i'm both old enough to realize the shift and young enough to have been incredibly annoyed with democrats for severely degrading my summers over 2020, 2021 and even 2022. i have had a different issue to deal with in 2023 and 2024, but i wasn't allowed to cross the border into detroit to have fun between march 2020 and may 2023 and it was the democrats that were responsible for that.
people in their 20s and 30s may never forget that.
like ever.
for the next 50-70 years.
regarding the question of national vs state-level polling, you certainly want to look at state-level polling as superior to national polling, and it is a basic mistake to suggest otherwise. i don't know how else to put it: that is simply wrong. any prof would mark a giant red X over it.
it is also the same mistake that the media made in 2016.
what you do when you try to distribute national polling to state-level polling is make a bunch of crazy assumptions, like that black people in georgia are similar to black people in illinois because they're black, then try to force racist generalizations on to micro-demographics. again, these are misapplied techniques used in branding and marketing, they are not designed for politics. the statisticians actually doing this should know better and they will admit it if you prod them and ask them the right questions, but they're getting paid to do a certain thing, and most of them don't give a fuck.
i would have agreed with 538 a few weeks ago: the democrats have an inherent advantage in the current electoral college system. the game is rigged, so to speak. that wasn't the case 20 years ago, and it may not be the case 20 years from now, but the basic underlying math is that the republicans are seen as psychotic extremists in far too much of the country to give them a serious chance at winning.
the reaction to biden's cognitive decline (which i don't think is substantively worse than 2020. that is, what i'm saying is that you should have realized he was out of it four years ago, and i wonder what effect consistent republican messaging on the point has actually made. it's subconscious. it gets to you. it would be repeat the lie, if it wasn't actually true, but that latter point is merely a happy coincidence; they'd lie to you if it wasn't. it's just easier to repeat the truth, i guess, but it's the same propaganda model, and i suspect it actually worked.) even indicates as much; people are trying to push biden out because they're afraid trump will win. this isn't some shift towards trump, it's a reaction against him.
in context, however, the culmination of recent events has shifted the race, and it follows that 538's model will shift to adjust...in two months. this is a criticism of 538's model (and of nik nanos' model in canada) that i've been making for years, that it is an inherently conservative model designed to measure brand preferences for soda or cereal or some other purchasable commodity that is being misapplied to politics, which are not conservative, but incredibly dynamic. it works on some level for party loyalty in terms of buying memberships or making donations, because that is kind of like buying soda or cereal. sort of. the core voters can be tracked into terms of consumer preferences, but core voters don't swing elections, independents, new voters (often low information) and young people do. however, when people shift political allegiances, as is currently happening, it tends to happen immediately and all at once. not only is 538's model going to have difficulty picking up sudden shifts in voting preferences in michigan or pennsylvania (or new york or oregon), but it's actually designed to smooth them out, meaning you have to wait for several months after the shift has occurred before the conservative models reflect it.
despite the introduction of advanced voting, elections are still snapshots, they aren't averages. you want to look at snapshot polling to make election predictions, not smoothed out conservative averages. my insistence on doing this is against conventional contemporary wisdom, which is in truth not so wise (they actually should and do know better) but is the reason i consistently beat the models when i sit down and do the math carefully. 538's model consequently isn't wrong, exactly, it just has a tremendous time lag built into it that makes it essentially useless for this application, which it wasn't designed for, and that is 538 and nik's fault: they should know not to use this model for this application.
what the model is useful for is tracking political donations, so the parties like it, but you can't use it to predict elections where voting preference is dynamic, and 538 itself should clarify it, because they know it.
now, the flip side of the argument is that you need to ponder this question: will the debate, and the news conference, and trump getting shot at, and him picking a log cabin republican for vp, and the internal revolt against biden, be things that have long term effects on voting preference, or will it actually smooth out? is 538 arguing it will smooth out? i don't actually think they are, but if it does then their model will make an accurate projection, and what you're seeing right now will be a blip that comes out in the wash.
i don't think that's the case. i think these are real shifts that will last at least a year or two, that biden is permanently done for. 538's model is designed to not pick that up until october, by which point it might have actually flipped back, if it were some other scenario. i wouldn't project that.
in some elections, 538's model will work because you don't have dramatic shifts. in this election, it won't work, because you're going to see massive fluctuations, as everybody realizes these are shit options across the board and nobody knows what to do. 538 should acknowledge that his model can't project an accurate result in the presence of massive fluctuations because it is actually designed to negate them and explain that to people so they get it.
however, the 538 site, which i haven't been to in a while, is useful because it shows it's work. ignore the model, and look at the most recent polling. don't take the grading system overly seriously; try to pick out the surveys that use phones (and therefore have random sampling) while mostly ignoring the online polls. those snapshots will tell you what people want today, not what people will pick in november, but if you follow the snapshot polls, you will get better outcomes than the smoothed out averages, unless the situation stabilizes, which i doubt will happen.
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