the democrats are running on abortion.

hillary clinton once supported a constitutional amendment to restrict abortion rights. i don't think she ever reversed herself on that, either.

but, the democrats are running on abortion.

joe biden's response to the end of abortion rights, as president, was to tell people they should elect somebody that would stand up for their rights, and legislate abortion rights. not him, though, apparently. in fact, he nominated anti-abortion judges.

but, the democrats are running on abortion. they'll get lots of votes, too. so, why would they change anything, if they're getting lots of votes? it's a perennial vote driver.

there are lots of issues where the democrats have a history of being confusing or breaking promises, and this is one of the worst. if abortion is your ballot issue, be careful who you're voting for. you might not get what you're expecting.

the alberta ndp party is very small. according to the cbc article, it had 16,000 members a few months ago; that made it very easy for naheed nenshi to crash the party and buy his way into power. he received over 60,000 votes, which was a commanding win of 86%. 

yet, 63000/x = 0.86  <----> x = 63000/.86 = 73000. 

73000-63000 = 10000.

16000 - 10000 = 6000.

6000/16000 = 0.37.

 that also suggests he only got around 35-40% of historical ndp voters, and he brought the rest in.

then, is nenshi a viable candidate? yes, he is. but, he's a conservative.

this is essentially the same thing that jagmeet singh did and i would expect more or less the same outcome. on some level, nenshi may be viable, but traditional ndp voters are going to like him less than anybody else in the province and leftists don't have a lot of brand loyalty to parties that abandon their mandates. nenshi will appeal more to alienated progressive conservative voters than to ndp voters, but the trick is that there's 3x as many pc voters in alberta than ndp voters so that might actually work.

i would expect nenshi to destroy the party in the long run, even if he manages to win a term or two. you're not going to recognize the party when nenshi is done with it.

this depicts what people from the eastern mediterranean coast looked like c. 250 ce.

they're pretty white - partly from roman, greek, armenian and iranian migration, but there's not a lot of reason to think the migration patterns in the region were substantively different 1000 years previously. the migration patterns did change dramatically after the end of the last roman-persian war, when the region was depopulated, c. 650 ce.

jesus probably actually looked relatively similar to this guy:

something else that should be pointed out before i stop for the night, and this will upset people but it is true, is that the post-exile or post-captivity jews that "returned" to israel from babylon, and brought this religion that was heavily influenced by iranian zoroastrianism with them, probably interbred heavily with their iranian overlords and probably looked a whole lot more like modern russians or poles than they did like modern arabs, who have a substantive amount of subsaharan dna as a consequence of the arab slave trade. roman propaganda tells us that the ancient canaanites were darker skinned than they were, but it is extremely unlikely that they were as remotely as dark skinned as arabs are today. when the jews left israel after the roman exile and settled around the world, they were likely not very different looking than other southern european groups, meaning that this idea that they lightened their skin in europe is actually a mistake; rather, the jews that stayed in the south probably grew darker over time, due to the influx of dna from africa that occurred as a result of the arab slave trade.

if you're serious about decolonization as a concept, rather than a buzzword, you should fully comprehend that dearabization and deislamicization need to be placed at the conceptual core of decolonization, and the means everywhere where arabs and islam acted as a colonizing force; it means in both north and subsaharan africa, in the middle east, in eastern europe, in india, in iran, in central asia and in south-east asia. arabs are only indigenous to the south of the arabian peninsula, the area near yemen, and islam is only an indigenous religion in the deserts of arabia. it is a colonizing, imperializing force everywhere else in the world. 

if you don't include dearabization and deislamicization in your concept of decolonization, you are not serious about decolonization, you are just using the language to enforce and implement some other ideology, like arab supremacism, like anti-semitism or like islam itself.

in israel, what decolonization means in an actually coherent sense is dearabizing the genetically hebrew indigenous population, as it is arabs that colonized the region in the name of islam and that is what needs to be undone to decolonize it. palestinians are jews that were colonized by arabs and converted to islam, and they know it. that is what the truth actually is.

further, if you are a jew, you should realize you will attract more flies with honey than with vinegar, even if that looks difficult now. your grandchildren will thank you for making the effort.