forcing people to treatment should not only not be enforced but should be aggressively avoided. the resources should only be available on the basis of enthusiastic free will. otherwise, it's a drain on resources with essentially no likelihood of success.
Wednesday, April 15, 2026
the state, at whatever level of government, should offer services, but those services cannot be forced on to addicts due to their constitutional right to security of the person and the reality is that they don't work. meth and opiate addicts have an almost 100% relapse rate after treatment. you can detox them and get them in housing and almost all of them are back on drugs in a few weeks. it's a revolving door. this is really just directing resources away from other people that need it, and that's noteworthy in a housing crisis.
if you establish the precedent that drug use in public is a public nuisance that harms the public rather than try to condemn them for a defect in character or try to order them into treatment against their will, you should be able to get them off the street, but that doesn't give them somewhere to go.
what they want is some backwoods space to get high in.
i say give them a small area around the dump, put a consumption site near it and regularly send firefighters, bylaw and police in to check up. they'll clear out of downtown voluntarily.
the harm principle remains extremely important in canadian criminal law.
drug users have successfully argued that drug use doesn't create any harm, and they haven't been effectively countered or challenged. the argument is false - drug use creates a myriad of harms.
addressing the issue in canadian law means addressing the harms that drug use creates, not dwelling on the defects of character, which has not been successful. canadian law tends not to concern itself much with moral considerations or normative values. you can basically do what you want in canada and get away with it, without consideration to moral degradation, just so long as you do not harm anybody.
the public nuisance angle addresses that by focusing on the harm that drug users create and not on normative value judgments. it should be effective but it's up to the crown to make the case.
otherwise, the police need to focus on the more obvious criminal behaviour like theft and vandalism, which creates clear harm, and can be addressed.
i'm in the middle of something here. i'm told they were evicted. i'm a little skeptical. i'm taking it issue by issue.
i agree that the existing court precedent is absurd on it's face, but it's based on the idea that drug use is a personal choice and doesn't affect anybody. if that were true, nobody would have any legitimate grounds to be upset by drug use - it would be something that people put in their own bodies at their own harm, and nobody else's concern.
that's been the argument drug addicts have used for decades, and it's been fairly successful. but it's not true. drug use has all kinds of collateral and incidental effects and produces all kinds of externalities.
- trespassing
- garbage
- rats
- theft
- air pollution
- discarded needles
- etc
while some of these are civil issues, drug users generally don't have much in terms of assets.
i think the solution is to address the false assumption - that drug use doesn't harm others - and focus on the things you can get them on. i promise you that you can find another reason to arrest somebody, other than the drugs, in almost any scenario cited.
i think they should be charged with public nuisance on a regular basis:
180 (1) Every person is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than two years or is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction who commits a common nuisance and by doing so
(a) endangers the lives, safety or health of the public, or
(b) causes physical injury to any person.
Definition
(2) For the purposes of this section, every one commits a common nuisance who does an unlawful act or fails to discharge a legal duty and thereby
(a) endangers the lives, safety, health, property or comfort of the public; or
(b) obstructs the public in the exercise or enjoyment of any right that is common to all the subjects of Her Majesty in Canada.
it would be up to the crown to prove the case and establish a precedent, but that should not be difficult. somebody smoking meth on public land is very clearly endangering the health of the public and obstructing their right to enjoy the public property.
i have made this argument before to the windsor police and have not been able to get them to act. perhaps somebody else should try.
the catholic church has tended to act in it's self-interest in supporting wars that are in it's benefit, whatever that means at the specific time. it might mean anything from ignoring hitler to hiring normans as mercenaries in italy to sending peasants to die in the middle east. it is a deeply machiavellian institution that is concerned strictly with maximizing it's own power and it's own wealth.
the current papacy, since napoleon, has been restricted from holding any real power. this isn't the institution's choice. if allowed to kill people again, the papacy would jump at the opportunity. it is of the utmost importance to global security that the papacy continue to be marginalized in a political sense.
the papacy has launched several crusades over the last thousand years (including crusades in europe to convert germans and slavs with violence and to wipe out heresies in southern france by punishment of death), has overseen the inquisition, has condoned slavery of non-christians (heathens and saracens), has launched pogroms and other attempts to commit genocide against the jewish population and has even overseen a military dictatorship at times, including wars of conquest against other italian city-states. it has also picked sides in virtually every european war that there ever was, including things like sanctioning the norman invasion of england in 1066.
it just might be the most absurdly ahistorical statement that i have ever seen.
this is good.
small businesses contribute to inflation and retard wage growth. they're horrible for the economy.
sometimes, small businesses are the only way to do things, and independence is particularly important in the creative sector. but, broadly speaking, the goal should be to scale as much production as possible and unionize as many workers as possible, and that means driving small businesses to bankruptcy is progress in the technological development of social productive capacity.
this is progress.
don't be misled by teachers' unions or media propaganda on the topic.
the purpose of introducing participation marks into high school is to inflate the marks of under-performing students and push them through, so they aren't repeating years, or bringing down averages. it's not intended to improve student outcomes. it's meant to manipulate results.
the purpose of participation marks is to inflate grades and reward people for effort instead of for aptitude. the logic is that you shouldn't fail if you try real hard.
i had huge problems with this when i went to university, as i found myself consistently graded down by 10% or sometimes 20% because i didn't think sitting through somebody reading me a textbook was a valuable use of my time when i could read it myself with a substantively higher retention rate. i also had an undiagnosed severe social anxiety issue that i didn't fully understood until i was much older that prevented me from leaving the house, and still does, for weeks at a time. i'd get 95% on the tests and assignments, and end up with a B+ in the course because my attendance was low, or sometimes even non-existent. that happened something like 10 or 15 times. it severely soured me on the education system.
i had straight As in high school because there weren't participation marks to grade me down like there were in university.
people don't tend to learn very well in classroom settings. that's science. most people learn better when they read in quiet rooms by themselves, but some people with learning disabilities do better when they touch things with their hands. absolutely nobody learns things optimally or even at all by listening to teachers; you forget 80%, 85% of what the teacher tells you five minutes later, because your biology doesn't allow you to retain it. holding to the classroom model is working against biology and against science. the classroom setting is literally the absolute worst way to teach people things and should be being aggressively abandoned in favour of more scientifically demonstrated learning models, which include online learning. those online learning models were developed with decades of science. they aren't just holding to some debunked conservative prussian model of learning out of backwardsness and stubborness.
eventually, i just started dropping courses with participation grades and avoiding teachers that included them. the ubiquity of participation marks in university was ultimately a large factor in my abandonment of the university as a career option; it wasn't the only factor, but it was a big factor.
i would argue for the opposite approach - there should be a drive to completely abolish participation grades from the post-secondary system. students should be evaluated entirely on their aptitude, and not on how hard they work. some students will fail; some wealthy students will fail. it's good for society to identify them, so they don't end up as prime ministers.
the education minister should be consulting scientists on what the best way that children learn is, and not asking teachers, who have their financial self-interest as their primary goal, and of whom many have no discernible science credentials. but the latter description - no discernible credentials - also describes paul calandra, who is a legitimate grade A fucking idiot. you would have extreme difficulties finding a bigger dumbass than calandra if you made a strenuous effort to search for one. he's going to fuck up anything at all he's assigned to and certainly shouldn't be in cabinet.
we're all trapped in capitalism, we're all slaves to capital in varying degrees, with absolutely no way out. the more money you have, the more you're enslaved to it. we can try to minimize the amount of capitalism we're forced to consume, but escaping capitalism is virtually impossible. the best hope to escape capitalism today is via automation and artificial intelligence, but it's a long ways away.
for that reason, having some level of education about all of that boring capitalist bullshit is definitely in an individual's self-interest, but only to ensure they can interact with it as little as possible. a truly free person would essentially never interact with capitalism at all, but true freedom is an abstraction and an ideal and something nobody can achieve.
the goal of a free individual should be to minimize the amount of time they waste on capitalism and maximize the amount of time they spent creating and enjoying art, reading, learning, debating, engaging in politics and whatnot.
so, when the issue is regime change in iran, that interests me. when the interest is the environment, that interests me. but when the issue shifts to finances and economics, i'd rather read about something else.
trump is continuing to tell media he's going to make a deal with iran any minute and that this is winding down, even though the reality is that it never started. fucking idiot.
so, i'm changing directions and altering my focus. this was a giant disappointment brought on by false expectations. i insist that regime change in iran would have already happened by now if the president wasn't working so hard to maintain the state in place, and what's happened just makes it more inevitable now than ever.
there is no alternative to regime change in iran.
but trump does not want regime change in iran, and in fact pretty clearly actively opposes regime change in iran. the situation is going to have to sit frozen, in place, for the next 2-3 years, until somebody else takes over and gets it done.
i'm not interested in what donald trump has planned for iran, which is some kind of business venture that allows him to profit off their depravity and oppression. whatever. boring.