i want to clarify something that i said earlier.

in canada and the united states, the government can take virtually any land from virtually anybody it wants, so long as it provides a fair compensation for it, which is a court-ordered remedy. that is, the compensation is a part of common law, not legislated law, and it's there because the government has a historical habit of just taking land without compensation. while this is in some way a consequence of colonialism, the connection is convoluted, and the state uses the process, called eminent domain, on non-indigenous owned land more frequently than on indigenous controlled land. it doesn't matter what it's for, either - it could be for highways, for infrastructure or, yes, for settlements. the courts just insist that when the government steals your land, it pays you a fair price, meaning what we have here is a court-enforced requirement that the state buy your land rather than steal it.

what i said previously was that i think israel should follow western precedent on eminent domain seizure as a guiding principle in how it deals with the west bank, which is obviously never going to be a palestinian state. it currently does not do that, it just takes it. the reality is that all western governments give themselves the right to eminent domain; what makes israel different is that it is not providing compensation, and that is what should change.

i'd like to see somebody walk around canberra with a video camera and ask people what their ancestors did to get sent there.

i bet more people know than you'd imagine.

the british conservative party is campaigning on a policy to fly illegal immigrants to rwanda. 

that's not a joke. that's an actual policy. it's based on an act of parliament that declares rwanda a "safe country" and is accompanied by a large cash transfer to the genocidal dictator of rwanda, who has run the country without elections since 2000. 

rwanda was of course the site of a relatively recent round of genocide, based on tribal bickering. you couldn't come up with something that was more mean-spirited if you tried to.

and, the media is concerned about marine le pen.

is there a core of a good idea here, though?

australia is apparently full. so, i might suggest instead that they make it an eu wide policy and that they exile all of the migrants to elba, and then dare them to try to escape to a stable of white horses waiting in a remote village not far outside of marseilles.

so, europe has a problem with immigration, but it has international law to deal with, as well. over-population has consequences, and we're dealing with it in canada, too. i actually don't think there would be much particularly wrong with shipping the migrants out to a detention centre on a remote island, so long as it's relatively humane conditions, and then processing them at a reasonable rate and sending them back. however, it would really have to be a block-level decision and not one made individually.

there is, thankfully, essentially no possibility that the tories are going to win the election on thursday, but they should not be allowed to live this down. this should be remembered at every election for decades.