listen.

yes, i support abortion rights. it's about self-ownership. i'm an anarchist. it's in the core of my politics.

further, yes, polling indicates young people support abortion rights and will vote for them if the issue comes up in a referendum.

however, i think i speak for most people under 50 when i point out that the existence of birth control and condoms makes abortion as a right somewhat of an uninteresting anachronism. if you're talking about people getting raped, that's one thing, and with a few exceptions even the most conservative states allow for abortion access in scenarios where people are getting raped. yet, it's a valid question to ask.

why weren't you on birth control?

why didn't you use a condom?

answers like "we got out of hand" are technically valid, but they don't produce an emotional or empathetic response. it's become an empty rights assertion that most people support in principle but that people are increasingly apathetic about.

people have the responsibility to make smart choices in life. less and less people care about bailing people out that make stupid decisions.

if you let the issue fester long enough, every single state in the united states will re-assert bodily autonomy and abortion rights.

however, the days where this is going to be a populist issue are long past as most people are going to shrug it off and say "you got pregnant? well, it's kind of your own fault, you stupid fucking idiot. it's hard to have empathy for you, when you were too fucking stupid to use a condom.".

there are more important issues in front of most people, politically, then the issue of whether irresponsible people have access to abortion or not, even if most people do support it, in principle.

i would never hang out with the women that bought the house or the people they moved in. they're a bunch of pathetic, disgusting, ugly, boring, backwards, gross, perverted losers.

the canadian government announced a 20% drop in immigration. sounds substantive.

is it enough?

well, that means going from 500,000 to 400,000. that is legal, official immigration; it is a cut of 100,000 legal new immigrants, officially.

i hope they don't just come anyways, or sign up as a temporary workers or foreign students. those numbers are not included in that number of 500,000.

canada is a big country geographically but has a dense population around the american border of around 40 million people. that would have been about a 1.5% increase in population, and is being instead reduced to about a 1.25% increase.

so, it amounts to a 0.25% decrease in projected immigration growth.

we need immigration reform in canada, there's no question, but the immediate issue in front of us is building enough housing, not making political decisions about immigration targets that are functionally trivial and will have next to no actual impact on anybody. the over-population issues we're dealing with took 20 years to build and cannot and will not be solved with minor tweaks over night. we need a major government-directed public works building project using public sector workers, land seizures via eminent domain, etc.

i'm still struggling to re-establish a sense of normalcy after covid. my life is not what it was previously, and it may never be. i am overwhelmingly worse off than i was before covid.

i want my pre-covid life back and will probably never get it back. covid-era policy restrictions may define the rest of my life.

but, for people under the age of 30 and especially under the age of 25 today, covid-era restrictions - and the traumatic experience of growing up in the pandemic - will form the core of experiences that define their entire life. what's after z is omicron. we haven't seen anything like this since the depression.

the reason young people are all of a sudden voting for right-wing parties isn't any of the reasons the media is imagining, and isn't some ideological shift, it's because the reality during the covid pandemic, which defined the youths of the current young generation, was that the democrats and liberals in general were the no-fun party and the republicans and conservatives (libertarians, really) represented the opposition to no-fun. joining the revolution meant siding with the republicans and the right against the no-fun of the democrats and the left.

that's not going to undo itself or go away.

that's probably permanent until some other cultural event changes it, 20 or 50 or 100 years from now. the next batch of young people will copy today's young people and etc. this is self-perpetuating.

the last similar cultural political shift was in the 1960s. what happened after 2020 is that opposing covid restrictions began to define the counter-culture, and it's going to slowly take over the mainstream as generational replacement sequentially removes the millennial generation from power.

as a musician, i'm actually happy to have a counter-culture back. there has been no counter-culture for my entire adult life. i wish i could get out of the house to experience it, but i'm stuck inside fighting with these stupid women trying to take over my apartment and steal my stuff. i'm on a path to a solution that will get me out to enjoy and participate in the counter-culture but it could take a while still.

it may be a better idea for liberals to try to take over the republican party, given that the authoritarian leftists in the democratic party represent a dead end, anyways. however, all of the symbols and marketing and relics of the democratic party are going to increasingly be a dead-end and a non-starter as they become moribundly unpopular as the covid-restriction no-fun emblems with an increasing share of the population, as boomers and xers and millennials slowly die out.

all of the models currently have georgia and arizona leaning republican. they should also have north carolina leaning republican but are dragging their feet in doing it. this doesn't factor in the difficulties that black people will have in actually voting in north carolina, either. it may be justified to have michigan leaning democrat, and michigan is the state that democrats have the best chance of winning because detroit is so black, but that is still a stretch. none of the other states should be leaning blue right now, and the data is bordering on colouring pennsylvania in as leaning red.

i want to be very clear what {ar, ga, nc} as republican means, even if you're generous and give nevada, new mexico, new hampshire and maine to the democrats. at 261 safe or almost safe ec votes, the republicans only have to win one more state - minnesota, wisconsin, michigan, pennsylvania or virginia - to win. there are also more complex combinations involving the forfeited states.

there is no question that trump is the clear favourite, beyond careful language and beyond ambiguity. it is very clear.

it should be pointed out that this is basically a reversal of the map from 2016 when trump had to win all three states, and did, and almost won minnesota, too. however, the trends are moving in the opposite direction, right now, and have been for quite a while.

what we're going to see in a few weeks is that the democrats need to completely rebuild their brand and marketing image. democrats need to understand this: they're not the cool kids. at all. they're losers. they're unpopular.

everything else aside, i think that the democrats' embrace of covid restrictions (and the republicans' campaigning against them) has flipped cultural perceptions about who is cool and who is lame to the opposite of what they were when i was a young person and happy happy joy joy is not sufficient to address that issue. because they refused to let anybody have any fun during the pandemic, the democrats may be seriously fucked for a long time. the liberals and ndp in canada may also have a similar problem, and they may try everything to fix it and fundamentally refuse to understand it.

the democrats probably need to completely rebrand to distance themselves from their conservative covid-era policies. 

right now this is starting to ankle bite and nip at your feet in the mid west. in the upcoming years, expect oregon and new york and massachusetts to become competitive, as actually really liberal people that were under 30 in 2020 move into their 40s and refuse to support the democrats. california may not need to sink into the ocean to become an island, in the end, if the fake left doesn't figure it out and foundationally adjust.