do you dispute the obvious truth that hezbollah will eventually be destroyed by nato?

then you agree that it's now or later.

and it's better to do this as soon as possible.

the mistake that was made by committing to ukraine makes this difficult to impossible, which is harming our would-be allies in russia and emboldening our arab and chinese enemies.

i'm going to say what i said previously.

a broader war against hezbollah is clearly morally and strategically justified and i'd like to see nato come to israel's defense. unfortunately, nato is bogged down in a pointless war in ukraine, which has no strategic value to the united states or to europe, and which is a conflict that is even directly against europe's self-interest, and is wasting billions of dollars and screwing up all kinds of economic efficiencies attacking the russians, who want to be our friends, when those funds and resources could be spent securing a more strategic area, namely the middle east, and destroying people that hate us and want to fight us, namely muslims. this is the catastrophic and backwards mess biden has created, which the next president will need to clean up so that nato can more easily defend it's interests in strategic reasons like the suez canal and red sea, a well as the persian gulf, instead of wasting money and time fighting in eastern europe, which is useless, and creating enemies out of would be friends.

hopefully, joe biden is the last hurrah of the cold war and the end of the 20th century and the last idiot trying to fight the ruskies and the next set of leaders just pick up his entire foreign policy disaster at an arm's distance like a soiled diaper and throw it in the bin, in an attempt to start over fresh from scratch. we'll see.

so, a broader war against hezbollah is justified and i think america should be taking the lead in fighting it.

as it is, unfortunately, it might not be very smart for israel to try to do such a thing alone, even it is morally and strategically correct. they need to find some allies somewhere in order to do this. that may require waiting for the united states to elect somebody that realizes the wisdom in pulling out of ukraine and more efficiently allocating nato's strategic resources to more valuable areas, first.

bc has long been in a weird scenario where it had a liberal party that was supported by people that were conservatives, because the urban/rural divide in the province is so dramatic as to build a very clear dichotomy in a two party system. it's hard to define a workable dialectic in bc, when you've got rugged outdoorsmany conservatives on one hand and effete urban elitists on the other. you just get squeezed.

the conservative plurality in bc has, for decades, hated voting for the liberals.

it is consequently likely that support for the new conservative party is being exaggerated by enthusiasm for a blue option on the ballot. i've posted a few times about how david eby seems to be an odd duck in the ndp, and that he may be facing the opposite problem, namely a lack of enthusiasm from his base, as he tries to moderate specific positions, which is overdue and required and should not be reversed regardless of the outcome. the bc ndp's position on drug legalization was insane and had to be re-evaluated.

i have also been vocal about the need to force addicts into treatment if you want to help them at all, or basically stop pretending and let them die on the streets.

but i can't support this. this isn't the right way to do this. 

this is a very scary change in the law that could result in your kids getting rounded up and thrown in asylums and would hopefully be struck down immediately as unconstitutional. this is going from one unacceptable extreme to the other. we cannot be allowing doctors to make consent decisions, or forcing care decisions on people, even if they're crazy. bodily autonomy and the right to security of the person is and must remain paramount.

rather, drug addiction is an issue that needs to be dealt with by increased policing and a return to charging drug addicts with criminal offenses and throwing them in jail, where they can get treatment options while incarcerated. british columbians should be extremely frightened by a government that wants to argue for the removal of requiring consent to treatment, rather than just going back to putting drug addicts in jail cells where they belong.

https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/ebys-finds-new-found-urgency-on-involuntary-treatment-on-eve-of-bc-election

ukraine cannot defeat russia. the idea is retarded.

what america wants is a long, drawn out war that costs russia a lot of money and what russia wants is to fight that war in ukraine and against ukrainians instead of in russia and against germans.

this president's legacy will be as a war mongering incompetent buffoon stuck in the ideology of the 20th century.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/09/18/america-ukraine-russia-biden-00179657

are trump's tariffs going to lead to inflation?

that would be a very free market position, which thinks all tariffs are bad, and which has little to do with any actual existing free trade agreement. it's a talking point amongst right-wing politicians, but it doesn't reflect any existing economic policy anywhere.

the discourse reflects the attempt by kamala harris to position herself to the right of donald trump on economic issues, which everybody can see is the empirical fact.

it is not the case that tariffs always lead to inflation. in practice, politicians tend to use tariffs when local economic factors favour foreign production as more cost effective, so it does lead to inflation. this is politics, not economics.

tariffs are supposed to help domestic production by increasing the costs of foreign goods, which is supposed to help domestic producers compete. that will lead to an increase in costs in the short term. however, if the tariffs actually work, the domestic producers begin to outcompete the importers, and costs come down via economies of scale. in the long run, there is no inflation, but there is an increase in local production and an increase in local jobs.

in order for the tariffs to actually work, the underlying economics have to work. that is the question to ask: can american producers scale up production in such a way that they can offer locally produced goods at a cheaper cost than foreign producers, or do the foreign manufacturers have a comparative advantage in the production of these specific goods that makes it impossible for local manufacturers to compete?

as everybody knows, the major input factor has long been and remains the cost of labour. it is difficult to make trump's economics work, and the result will probably be more inflation and less local production. however, there's a caveat to this, and it is prison labour.

yeah. prison labour is legal in the united states, and it allows local firms to compete with chinese manufacturers. that's not what those union workers are voting for, but it's what they're going to get, and it makes sense if you're the pentagon, as it brings production of sensitive materials home and harms the export economy of your most serious global opponent. much of the "reshoring" that has occurred over the last ten years is using prison labour, which requires capturing blacks and mexicans into the prison-industrial complex. that is what trump's tariffs are really about, and why they're likely here to stay.

the united states is becoming more like china every year.

tariffs on developing industries is also a good idea in general as it helps them develop without facing pressure from outside competitors.

the way to get what american workers want is actually to build organized labour movements in asia. the uaw and other big unions should be sending agitators to china and vietnam to do the very difficult job of organizing union movements in very oppressive workplaces. american intelligence agencies should be working with the unions to do this, as it is in america's strategic interest to develop organized labour movements in asia.

you won't get that kind of thinking from trump.

tariffs are neither bad nor good. tariffs are hard. trump won't get the outcome he's marketing, but he is likely to get deep state and systemic support, if he focuses on specific items of national security. it's up to union workers to understand what they're voting for.

i'm having a lot of continuing lingering issues with these stupid religious people, who refuse to allow me the right to self-autonomy in choosing my gender and sexual orientation but want to decide it was determined by "god".

there is no such thing as god. it's a dumb, primitive idea that has no place in the 21st century. we don't need god to explain the universe. the idea creates more questions than answers and is no longer a useful way to understand the world.

but, that's just the point - this issue about gender and orientation isn't a debate amongst atheists, who understand these are all choices and all exist on a spectrum. "born this way" is a religious position, it's not based on any kind of science, and this is a debate that exists strictly in the religious community, where on one side you have biological determinists that insist god made your gender and heteronormality is baked into it and on the other hand you have religious inclusionists that want to argue that god made everybody equal and we need to love each other how we're made.

i don't take either position.

i vehemently reject the existence of god as stupid and primitive and childish.

i take the position that evolution is random and unguided and that i've somehow evolved cognition and we've somehow developed medicine to the point that i have the ability to do what i want to my body and therefore have the right to because i own it. i wasn't born as a transgendered person. there is no biological condition called "transgenderism"; it is not a genetic condition, it is not genetic variation and it is not some kind of disease. it is an arbitrary, harmless and meaningless choice that free people can make to modify their body, as transhumanists, in a free and secular and liberal society.

so, i want to get out of this bullshit. i'm not interested in the debate, as it has been framed by the religious left. i own my body and want the right to do what i want with it and the right to fuck who i want, when i want, however frequently or infrequently, in the way i want. this is about free will. this isn't about god, which is an intellectually bankrupt idea that needs to be aggressively forgotten.

i would imagine that, in a free society of the future, people will modify their bodies as they choose, arbitrarily, without being constrained by archaic anachronisms like gender identity theory.