china does not sign agreements.

the reason china does not sign agreements is that it does not want to be bound by them.

so, the chinese have no military alliances, no trading agreements and no allies - because they don't see themselves as a part of an interconnected world, but as an independent voice that can never be integrated.

the british appear to be unable to understand this.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

the british have been trying, and failing, to sign a trade deal with china for 500 years.

you think an oil pipeline is going to do it?

have you ever read a book before?

fucking idiots...

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

rather, what christy clark is doing is unprecedented - she's supposed to shut up and get lost. she has no business weighing in on this, and should be roundly condemned for it.

but, i'll give you the answer: the reason is that the federal government wants to sign a trade deal with china.

but the reality is that this pipeline is not going to get a deal with the chinese, who will take the oil and laugh at us for destroying our country for their benefit.

i'll say it: trudeau and notley are simply useful idiots.

https://ipolitics.ca/2018/02/11/exactly-trans-mountain-national-interest-prime-minister/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i think this battle was lost 20 years ago, when dubya was installed in a coup, but don't expect me to fall in line with the agenda to shut down democracy in america.

http://theconversation.com/government-regulation-of-social-media-would-be-a-cure-far-worse-than-the-disease-92008

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

if you were looking for a way to split the misogynist component of the ford vote, you'd have to run somebody that much more obnoxious. and, short of running his brother's corpse, i'm not sure that this is even an option.

what province does kevin o'leary live in?

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

the re-entrance of patrick brown is unlikely to alter the outcome of the race.

he was probably the party's best candidate in the general. but, he won the leadership by campaigning on the right, and then sharply turned to the centre. of course, it's hard to take the guy seriously when he runs on the right for votes in the party, then runs in the centre for votes in the general - the only conclusion to draw from that is that we don't know if he's on the far right or in the centre.

i'm going to suggest that his platform shouldn't have been taken all that seriously in the first place, and you'd no doubt see see a return of "primary brown" if he were to win.

but, the conservative base is not known for cheek-turning, and is unlikely to see a reason to take gambles when it has clearer options in front of it.

maybe he eats into mulroney's numbers just that much more, but i already think she's out of it. but, i don't even think he eats into elliot's numbers.

but, i should address the other gender argument. if a 75% female pool helps ford, shouldn't a 60% pool scale him back? well, not unless you think there are moderates voting for ford because they're misogynists. and, while i don't doubt that ford attracts some misogynists, they're not moderates, and they would not prefer brown. that is, i'm sure the identity vote is there, but it's not going to jump to brown. the key idea about tga being so key to ford's victory is that the women she's peeling away from mulroney and elliot are extremists, not moderates.

don't misunderstand me: i'm glad he's fucking with the process. and, given the circumstances, i actually kind of think that the leadership race is the right place for him to clear his name, in a kind of a "you made your bed...." kind of way.

if you're going to take him down in a back room, having him denounce you back in public is really quite retributive, isn't it?

but, he's neither going to win, nor is he going to change the outcome of the race.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

canada is an economic union that no longer makes any sense.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

confederation, as we understand it, has no future.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

alberta's interests are to maintain a high dollar and market access for a product that cannot be produced sustainably.

this harms the rest of the country, both economically and environmentally; the rest of the country's interests are to keep the dollar low to boost exports of less catastrophic commodities, from food items to marijuana to lumber to whatever else.

so long as we remain under economic union, we have no choice but to harm each other.

there are not any policies that can fix this. these are two sides of the same scale. and, we will continue to be at each others' throats until our ruling class figures that out.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

and, if your ambitions are to smile as you kill, please turn your ambitions upon yourself.

i think the claim that i lack ambition is pretty obviously false.

rather, my argument is that a market-driven, competitive society makes actual ambition virtually impossible to actualize. i mean, look around you. it's a constant. in order to be successful, you have to throw your ambitions away, first.

there's room at the top, they're telling you still
but first you must learn to smile as you kill...

all that ambition is ever going to get you in this society is a one way ticket to permanent poverty.

and that is what you see in front of you when you look at me.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

don't trust the corporate polling.

they lie.

to your face.

repeatedly.

https://climateactionnetwork.ca/2015/04/07/61-of-canadians-say-protecting-the-climate-more-important-than-pipelines-and-tarsands/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, what am i even doing?

well, i've just been sitting here ranting for a long time. i'm kind of feeling in limbo, between things.

i keep trying to do the cleaning i need to do in here, so i can sit down and get back to work, but i keep getting distracted. and, i've actually barely slept in days.

i think i'm going to get some work done for the night, and try to focus on the prep for the week tomorrow. the end point is doing laundry & tucking myself into bed to finish the rest of the rebuild, but it will have to wait yet another day before i get that in motion.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i might suggest trying a $50 bicycle with a $100 lock, next time.

i paid $30 (usd) for one to leave in detroit, + $30 (cad) for a lock, and i think it's still there.

i should check soon.

https://www.straight.com/life/1033991/bike-twitter-users-bought-replace-ivans-stolen-bikehas-been-stolen

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

in other news, i hear that congress has put out a related secondary warrant on charlotte & emily bronte, sisters, for posing as men, for the purposes of influencing public opinion.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

no.

nothing i've seen about the alleged russian involvement "tests the limits of free expression".

this is basic, garden variety free speech, long established, and a guilty verdict would set a precedent that would extend a chilling effect to to every corner of the internet.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

wow.

this is really fundamental. textbook first amendment.

if these russians are indicted, it will end free expression in the united states and reduce the bill of rights to a sad joke.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i don't know exactly how broadly applicable the first amendment is to non-citizens in the united states.

but, if past precedent is not wide enough to acquit those that are charged, a new precedent should be developed that is wide enough to acquit.

can we get the aclu involved, as well as other civil rights groups, please?

you should be shocked by this, alright.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

this is what i told you from day one, though.

russiagate is a ploy to take away your rights and extend the powers of the security state.

if it's not obvious to you at this point, you're hopeless.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i'm sorry, but what crime is being committed here?

i'd like to see the court come down hard on the justice department here, in extending constuitutional protections of free speech to these russian citizens.

and, i guess you need to watch your mouth when you speak in america nowadays, don't you?

you might get charged with the thoughtcrime of freedom of expression.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/us-politics/us-special-counsels-office-charges-13-russian-nationals-with-interfering-in-politics/article38006035/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

the senate marijuana vote is scheduled for the same day as the ontario provincial election.

are they going to vote it down outright and hope nobody reports on it?

sober second thought, huh?

it's too brazen...too contemptuous....but, this government is not learning from it's errors...

so, i don't know exactly why, yet. but that's not a coincidence.

jameet singh must cut his beard.

it's funny how these aristocrats always end up in the wrong party, though, isn't it?

the dauphin is obviously a conservative, whereas the younger mulroney appears as though she'd be more comfortable in the liberal party.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

if mulroney pulls out, it doesn't change much, the votes just go directly to elliot.

but, what if tga pulls out?

then ford's life gets a little harder, as those votes mostly go to mulroney first.

let's say first choices are this:

ford: 48%
mulroney - 27%
elliot: 25%

you would expect elliot's votes to go mostly to mulroney. but, ford isn't going to need many of them...

i guess the way to say it is this: the new candidate turns a probable ford victory into a guaranteed one, via vote splitting with female voters.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

yeah.

it's early.

but these are my predictions of the outcome of the race, after the ranked balloting works itself out (subject to change as more evidence comes in):

1. doug ford - 55%
2. christine elliot - 20%
3. tga. - 15% ----> votes go mostly to ford (because it's psychologically different to rank ford second)
4. caroline mulroney - 10%  ----> votes go mostly to elliot

the wild card entry really eliminates any chance that mulroney has of winning.

she should focus on her seat.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, what's with this wildcard late entry, this tanya granic allen?

last minute entries are usually fronts for somebody looking to split the vote. and, on first glance, it may appear that somebody wants to cut into ford's base.

i don't think so, actually.

identity politics is a terrible virus that must be destroyed, but, so long as it is here, we have to analyze it. and, there are certain demographics that are well understood, through empirical analysis, to vote almost entirely on identity. obama got something like 98% of the black vote.

women are currently also another group that prioritizes identity over ideology in making decisions. i say this with no happiness; i wish it were not true, and i hope it changes, over time. but, in the present moment, the reality is that women vote for women.

so, running a third woman on the right - that is different than the two in the middle - is probably an attempt to siphon identity votes away from the two centrist candidates. she's meant to appeal to women that prefer ford's politics, but will vote for a woman, if possible, no matter what, anyways.

will it cut into ford? probably not, because he's so polarizing. i don't expect ford's numbers to move much in either direction.

now, deductive logic doesn't mean anything in reality. but, if they're running her to eat into ford's base, it's poorly thought through (which would finger mulroney rather than elliot - and do remember that mulroney is the establishment candidate, here).

given how far to the right the tory base is, this wildcard entry could even beat one or both of the two centrist female candidates.

based solely on an identity politics analysis in the tory base, i would expect tga to beat mulroney, at least.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i could plausibly be in the list.

hope so...

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/liberals-write-off-200-million-in-student-loans-feds-will-never-collect-1.3806500

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

also: i'm not convinced trudeau is interested in running for another term.

i think he'd prefer to move to hollywood to focus on his acting career, frankly.

i mean, this is when and not if, right? trudeau will eventually end up working in film. the question is about when he gets bored with what he's doing, which is no doubt tied to what kind of opportunities exist in front of him.

the point i'm making is that we may find that electoral factors are less important of a consideration to trudeau over the second half of this mandate. he could very well be close to zero fucks territory, and if doesn't happen now, it will no doubt happen in the next cycle.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, how are they going to do this?

they're going to drag this along until the end of the year, and then pro-rogue parliament some time in late 2018 or early 2019.

the truth is that this session is already far too long. they should have reset parliament at least once already.

it would be very strange if they didn't do this some time in the next 6-12 months.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

it seems like what we're going to end up with here is not an industry focused on domestic consumption, but an industry focused on export (for medical use).

canada is, of course, a colonial state. we exist to mine resources for export. and, that's what the government is actually doing: setting up that industry for that reason.

don't be surprised if we're still talking about local decriminalization ten years from now, while we're living off tax revenue from exports.

i fully expect it to be legal in michigan before it is in ontario.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

this gets to the heart of the point of why i don't want an elected senate: it's just going to create gridlock, and slow things down.

until trudeau ruined the senate, in an apparent attempt to americanize the way our system operates, which has never been functionally bicameral,  we had a massive advantage in the way our government worked: because we only had one house to pass legislation in, we are able to avoid all of the petty nonsense that comes in sending legislation back and forth between houses, as well as all of the superfluous study.

the reality is that the senate is not going to do anything the house hasn't already done. doing the same thing twice is wasteful and inefficient. if we were going to reform this, it should have been to make the process faster and cheaper, not slower and more expensive.

again: these changes are not enshrined in any law. these are just procedural changes. and, they will not survive justin trudeau's mandate.

in the mean time, we're just going to have to be patient, until we can undo it.

https://www.straight.com/cannabis/1033756/unelected-hacks-canadian-senate-delay-marijuana-legalization

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

but, just a reminder:

i don't care if i'm popular.

i care if i'm correct.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i want to clarify the context a little.

because when i was 8 or 9 years old, i didn't know that my dad had this history, where he really had his life changed about ten years earlier by a dirty knee-on-knee hit. the way he explained it is that it literally blew his knee out, and that it never healed properly. but, i couldn't have known any of this.

he just didn't talk about it. and, i don't think i ever saw him on a pair of skates.

it wasn't until years later that he filled me in, on a drive through the place he grew up in, an impoverished and crime-filled district in west ottawa ('bayshore') called the ritchie street project. it's around the britannia pier.

rather, the dad that i knew as a young child was not a hockey player but a scholar!

my parents split when i was a toddler; my mom had developed into quite a violent alcoholic, and my dad ultimately had to get away from what was an abusive relationship and start over. so, we had the twice weekly visits, to start, when i was 3 and 4 and 5. and, we basically did the same thing every time he picked me up: we went to the south gloucester library (this has been closed for years, but was near the kmart on queensdale). but, these were not recreational sessions, they were learning sessions. and, the truth is that i could read better than most high school kids by the time i entered kindergarten.

so, this interest in reading wasn't spontaneous, it was taught. and, in truth, my interests reflected what i'd been exposed to - and were very much integrated and internalized into my own being as a consequence of it.

(and, it was the same thing with my younger sister, too, who was maybe even reading that proficiently a little younger than i was.)

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

as for the claims of outperforming bobby smith at the high school level, he at least had an mvp trophy to back him up on the point. 

it was kind of like four touchdowns in one game, granted. but, the trophy existed. i saw it...

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

apparently, he played on a line with bobby smith when he was a kid, and used to set him up all the time.

in fact, he tended to make some outlandish claims about the whole thing, in terms of who the more important playmaker on the line was.

bobby smith:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Smith_(ice_hockey)

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

and, my dad was actually drafted by the ottawa 67s back in the 70s (although he ruined his knee before he got there), so it's not like i didn't have opportunities to learn, here.

he was an excellent skater. nearly pro. well, besides the fucked up knee.

"i'd rather stay in and read, dad. sorry."

no regrets, either.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

actually, i never learned how to skate.

it's true that my parents weren't really able to afford a pair of skates until my dad remarried. but, i still hadn't turned ten, yet, i had lots of time to learn to skate, if i wanted to.

the reality is that, as a child, i preferred to stay in bed and read than go outside and play. so, the fact that i never learned to skate is really due solely to disinterest.

and, i never developed an interest, but rather grew up to see it as a kind of triviality.

people in canada tend to look at you like you're from a different planet when you tell them you never learned to skate. but, i kind of tend to look back at them the same way. why not just sit around and roll boulders back up the hill?

....because skating around in circles is pretty much the definition of a foolish waste of fucking time, isn't it?

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

"take their kids away"

see, i'd even reject this statement.

...because those kids don't belong to their parents. kids are autonomous individuals that own themselves. so, the kids were never theirs in the first place.

parents have obligations, but they don't have - and don't deserve - rights.

the rights need to be solely in the hands of the children, and in the hands of the society.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

"the only way to be free is to abolish all property"

gee. isn't that what jesus said?

no.

what jesus said is "sell everything you own, and follow me into poverty, for, in the end, you will have everything in the after life.". i understand that there has been much confused conflation of this point, and the marxists could get a little confusing in ways that the anarchists were generally more clear about, but what jesus said about property in conjunction with the afterlife is actually the literal opposite of marxism, which insisted that we not throw our property away in a use sense but abolish it in an ownership sense, and, most importantly, that we dispel with this absurd notion of the afterlife, which keeps us enslaved, in favour of the here and now.

i grasp that you can find me dozens of historically important "christian socialists", some of which generated movements (tommy douglas was one), but the actual reality, here, is that they just didn't understand the socialist part of it very well, confusing ideas that were hostile to religion for ideas that were friendly to it, perhaps due to translations that managed to miss the point.

if somebody tells you they want to abolish property in english, and you've never heard anybody say that before, they have to explain what they mean - otherwise you're likely to interpret it in the jesus freak (for no christian denominations are sufficient, here) kind of way.

so, that intersection is only in your head.

there is no common cause.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

for example, they talk about an inability of communally raised children to form emotional attachments.

but, that's the purpose of this. it's a feature, and not a bug. that "emotional attachment" is a propertarian relationship that keeps the individual bound to their biological or sexual relatives; breaking that attachment is freeing one's self from the slavery inherent in the propertarianism of the family unit.

these critiques always follow along the same way, in fundamentally missing the point of why it is so important that we get rid of families, in the march towards a more communistic future.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

drastic?

listen, the idea of a nuclear family will not make any sense to generations raised outside of the slavery of private property. it only seems drastic because you've never known anything else.

rather, i might put forth the idea that it is the nuclear family that is a drastic and unnatural step away from our evolutionary lineage, and that, once it is abolished we may scarcely remember it at all.

it will be far less of an issue, when we get there, than many imagine it will be.

http://www.academia.edu/3070388/Plato_and_the_Abolition_of_the_Family

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i agree with the state authorities; homeschooling isn't something that the broader society should be tolerating, as the ramifications have an effect on all of society.

if parents want to behave antisocially like this, and instill those anti-social values in their children, the state has the obligation to interfere. they would be negligent in not doing so.

sorry, liberals. i'm very leftist on this point: education is to be determined by the whole community, and the nuclear family (which, in the end, must be abolished altogether) should have essentially no say in the matter.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/a-big-state-versus-a-poor-family-canadian-s-son-forcibly-removed-in-norway-1.3804956

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

actually, i think these rules should stay in place.

we have a responsibility to take care of people that were born here. that responsibility does not extend to the whole world; rather, people born elsewhere are the responsibilities of their respective governments.

where there are issues about foreign governments being unable to afford to take care of their own citizens, i would prefer to see policies designed to maximize trade with those countries, so they can generate the wealth to do so.

the ndp are doing this because they think it will be popular amongst the voting base they are keying in on. jenny kwan has really become a problem in this parliament, and i do hope she loses her seat soon. but, this policy will not be popular, here, not even amongst minorities, and the liberals would be smart to distance themselves from it before it gets stuck around their neck.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/immigration-hussen-medical-inadmissibility-1.4537076

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

np: dmst

maybe there's no physical evidence that the carbon tax exists, but this is just the world of the corporeal, the play thing of satan.

you need faith that the carbon tax exists.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

guys.

listen...

just because you can't measure the carbon tax, doesn't mean it's not there.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

this is the kind of thing they're going to do, though.

this is from the mclean's article. an accurate quote, but without context.

"A carbon tax would add about $1,200 in additional annual costs for families with children.” - kathleen wynne.

(ominuous music)

why does kathleen wynne want to increase ontario's bills by $1200 year, per capita?

and you wonder why she's suing these losers for defamation, right?

again: i don't know how many ontarians can read. i think our literacy level is relatively high, right?

ugh.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i'm not addressing the point, i'm just backing up my own.

http://www.macleans.ca/economy/economicanalysis/kathleen-wynnes-attack-on-the-ontario-pc-carbon-tax-plan-misleads-voters/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

this is confirmed, though: the progressive conservatives are running against a carbon tax that the provincial government has already ruled out.

they're running against a complete strawman.

these are the facts here.

1) trudeau has put down an ultimatum to pick between a carbon tax and a cap and trade.
2) ontario (current premier: kathleen wynne) has chosen cap and trade.

that is, ontario has ruled out a carbon tax.

3) patrick brown, previous conservative opposition leader, put together a platform that proposed replacing the cap and trade with the carbon tax. this would be really complicated, as the cap and trade system is actually international (and includes california). but he had reasons to do it.
4) it should not be surprising that conservative voters in ontario don't like the idea of a carbon tax.
5) patrick brown resigns amidst questionable allegations of "sexual misconduct" involving potentially underage girls.
6) all of the conservative leadership contenders decide they're running against kathleen wynne's proposal to bring in a carbon tax.

this is not a joke. they're really doing this.

and the post claims the debate showed they weren't ignoramuses...

i don't know how many ontarians....how do i put this? how many of them can read a book? but, it's too late to backtrack, now.

in addition to the anti-queer dog whistling, is this going to be the election about the imaginary carbon tax?

somebody find me a wall to start banging my head on.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i have no interest in watching the pc leader debate.

sorry.

the truth is that this riding is an ndp lock.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

coyne is often daft, but he's making the right argument here.

and, i want to clarify a point: in canada, this is a position that is academic rather than partisan. i would consider andrew coyne to be a conservative; he'd probably call me a left-wing extremist.

but, we're going to sound almost identical when it comes to this. and, it's because we read the same textbooks, not the same political pamphlets.

what trudeau has done to the senate is, constitutionally, pretty much the most objectively wrong thing that a canadian prime minister could possibly do.

and, this is why you will get the same responses from conservatives that you do from social democrats.

http://nationalpost.com/opinion/andrew-coyne-the-senate-has-no-business-meddling-with-the-budget

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

if it's passed in the house (and it's not ultra vires, in which case it is null), it's law.

i don't care about royal assent.

fuck the queen.

fuck the senate.

let's take a stand on this, canada.

as far as i'm concerned, marijuana is already legal. do you agree? then, let's act like it.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

well, i dunno.

is justin trudeau a potential dictator?

it seems comical. not because he's a liberal icon, but because he's obviously a dunce.

but, they said the same thing about hitler, didn't they?

i don't know what you even seize in canada, really. the oil fields, i guess. i wouldn't expect a canadian invasion of america any time soon. and, in that sense, it's hard to predict what might happen if he were to launch a coup tomorrow.

but, what he's done to the senate has crossed the line of 'concerning' and entered the region of 'scary'.

as a country, we have to address this as soon as we can. there are three options that are consistent with our history as a democracy:

1) elected senate. i think this is a bad idea.
2) abolition. i think this is a bad idea.
3) return to the previous status quo of unelected senators that only interfere in the process as an absolute last resort. i'd prefer this.

the idea of an unelected, activist senate is not a serious option in a free & democratic society.

'last resort' means 'if the government is trying to pass unconstitutional legislation'. and, we have a good example.

in the late 80s, the mulroney government tried to pass a law that would criminalize abortion, in clear contradiction to a court ruling that had struck the previous laws down as unconstitutional. the law was clearly ultra vires. so, it was an abuse of power, for that reason. this law was ultimately blocked in the senate.

it was the first time that the senate had blocked legislation in decades. and, presuming we can elect responsible governments, that's about as often as i want to hear from the senate - every few decades.

it's there, in case of emergency. but, it shouldn't be used unless necessary, because it's hopelessly undemocratic.

and, when the government loses it's democratic legitimacy, it breaks the social contract.

in my view, the marijuana legislation has already been passed. and, if the senate blocks it in the end, the country has a good reason both to discard the senate's behaviour (in favour of the relevant judicial precedent) and, frankly, to openly revolt.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

but, more seriously, about the senate.

we now have a reality in front of us that is actually kind of a pressing emergency. when most of us weren't paying attention, the trudeau government erected an unaccountable, unrepresentative & unelected layer of government at the top of the pyramid that has the power to completely negate the country's democratic institutions.

canada now has a really big problem on it's hands. and, all of the parties, including liberal backbenchers, should be standing up and making a lot of noise on that point.

it didn't matter when they didn't do anything. but, now that they are meddling in the democratic process, something needs to be done to formally minimize the influence of the senate.

otherwise, we are on a one-way ticket to the kind of fake democracy that exists in iran.

you need to take this seriously.

the sudden emergence of an unelected activist senate is probably the biggest crisis of democracy that the country has ever had to deal with.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

hey, if jeff sessions has a problem with canadians moving to florida because they puffed a little back in the 60s, that's actually really ok.

we'll just park our money in cuba, or mexico, instead.

you dummies...

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

the reality is that the liberals have a majority in the senate and could push the bill through tomorrow.

they're not doing this because it's not happening.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i need to be clear about what's happening in canada right now.

the liberal party in the senate is blocking legislation from the liberal party in the house. on first glance, it appears as though the liberals are just hopelessly incompetent; it's a schizophrenic system, akin to what happens to a body when it gets overrun by cancer.

but, this cancer is not accidental. this is by design.

in fact, the liberal party redesigned the system, so that the liberals in the senate would be able to block legislation from the liberals in the house. they did this by splitting the caucus in half.

this is the way this is supposed to work:

1) trudeau makes an election promise. like proportional representation. the dry run was marijuana legalization.
2) after the promises win the election, the party passes legislation in the house and sends it to the senate.
3) the party controls the senate, but what they've done is split the caucus in half. half are called liberals and half are called 'independents'. they were all appointed by the liberals. that way, the party can block it's own legislation without technically voting against it, then blame it on the opposition.
4) then, they can run on the same empty promise in the next election.

the model is the obama administration, which managed to avoid doing anything substantive through years of unified government via a similar mechanism.

but, the next government isn't going to want to do anything like this. the conservatives are still going to exist in the senate. they will eventually regain a majority. and, they will promptly undo everything that trudeau has done, in order to reassert control over it.

in the mean time? don't fall for this.

trudeau's words are not worth the paper that somebody else wrote them on.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

blaming andrew scheer for opposing marijuana legislation in the context of trudeau giving him the opportunity to do so, despite having a majority in both houses, is like blaming a lion for eating a child that's fallen into the exhibit.

i'm not stupid.

i'm not falling for that.

sorry.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, who's fault is this?

it's not andrew scheer's fault. he's the opposition leader. he's opposing. that's his job.

he does not have a mandate to compromise. he does not have a mandate to work with the government. he has a mandate to oppose every single thing that's put in front of him; that is what an opposition leader must do in a westminster system.

bipartisanism is a purely american concept. that is just not how our system works. if he were to do anything else, he would be incompetent and ought to be removed in a vote of no confidence.

no. this is unambiguously, 100%, entirely, completely, not-even-a-little-bit-somebody-else's fault but justin trudeau's.

and, i expect him to take responsibility for it.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i called this.

and, this is why trudeau set the senate up this way: so he can make whatever promises he wants, then blame it on the senate when it doesn't actually happen.

...the senate that he actually has a majority in.

just like obama!

is this going to actually happen? well, there's an election next year...

thankfully, whether legal pot actually happens here or not, this catastrophic joke of a "reformed senate" will not last one day past trudeau's eventual removal from power.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2018/02/15/politics-not-independence-leads-to-senate-delay-on-pot-legalization.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i'm actually chomping at the bit to go after these religious groups - and demonstrate the point i've been making for a very long time: religion is never an ally to the left, but always the enemy of the future..

i'm not interested in building understanding. i want a full out war. and i want these forces to be defeated.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i'm not worried about wynne on this.

it's horwath that i'm more concerned about...

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

to be clear: i'm not interested in compromising on the sex-ed curriculum. in fact, as mentioned here, it still has a long ways to go in removing religion from the system and replacing it with science.

i would push back hard from the other direction.

i don't think that students should be given waivers; if parents take them out of class, the students should be given failing grades and forced to redo the year. no exceptions.

and, if either wynne or horwath take compromising tones on this, it will be a vote breaker: i'll vote for the one that takes the stronger stance against ford.

and, if they're both unacceptable, i could very well not vote at all.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2018/02/14/leave-sex-ed-to-the-experts-not-fear-mongering-politicians.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

it's not that there aren't also white people opposed to the sex ed curriculum on the grounds of anti-queer bigotry, of course there are, it's that it isn't a swing demographic - that's the tory base.

they don't have to run this for them.

who it's for, who they're trying to swing, are socially conservative immigrants.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

i need to repeat.

doug ford is going to be running on a deeply neo-liberal, pro-immigrant & pro-trade - but anti-queer - platform.

that's his punching bag, here.

jagmeet sigh must cut his beard.

this is why ford will win the primary.

it's also also why he'll lose the general.

the tories have already lost this election. but, their coalition requires those socially conservative middle-class immigrant voters. the demographics in ontario are such that you simply can't win with the typical white conservative demographics. they have to reach out. and this is really all they've got for them, at this level of government.

and, what it's about is teaching that homosexuality is normal; the parents don't want their kids taught that homosexuality is natural, as it contradicts their religious beliefs. the rest of it is trivial. this is pure anti-queer bigotry masquerading as "religious freedom".

i would actually argue that, the more that parents push back against science in the name of upholding religion, the more important it is to ensure that their kids are given exposure to the science, to unbrainwash them.

i have absolutely no patience and absolutely no sympathy for these parents. the harder they push, the harder society should push back. for the sake of democracy, it's imperative that their kids are educated, and not left to languish in ignorance, where they can perpetuate their hate to the next generation.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/doug-ford-is-gambling-ontario-parents-are-still-concerned-about-sexual-education/article37988965/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

if the government is serious about legislating around s. 35, we're going to be launched into a significant debate in the country, and are going to be subjected to a lot of voices (perhaps including mine.) that ought not be prioritized.

i have partial indigenous ancestry, and it is in fact visible, but i'd never claim to be, and never have claimed to be, culturally indigenous. i've used it as pushback against certain baseless accusations, but it's been with the intent to twist their own words around and make them seem stupid when they are in fact being stupid, as people stuck in a certain mode of thinking have difficulties thinking things through logically; pointing out that i am partially indigenous (as a substantive number of canadians in truth are...) has the effect of allowing people to see the actual arguments more clearly, and not be blinded by base racialism. nonetheless, the closest thing i have to any childhood upbringing in indigenous culture would be the couple of months i spent learning about tree leaves in the scouts program. i do not speak on behalf of indigenous people, and would not claim that i do.

...but i was close enough to the idle no more movement to be able to direct outside observers to some important internal voices within the country. and, i'm going to direct people to these two voices, specifically.

the first is chelsea vowel, who split publishes under an indigenous name that i'd have to copy and paste in order to spell right. she publishes fairly widely, but she also runs a blog (google 'chelsea vowel'). and, i'd expect that she'll be writing quite a bit on what's coming up.

this is her most recently published article:
http://www.chatelaine.com/opinion/indigenous-languages-census-canada/

whether you call it 'religion' or 'spirituality' doesn't matter much to me; i don't want 'spirituality' in the schools any more than i want religion in them. but, i don't have any ideological opposition to teaching language, in principle.

and, i recognize the importance of protecting languages, too.

but, i'm just looking at a school curriculum, and i'm not convinced that teaching languages that are barely spoken is a useful way for kids to spend in-class time, considering all of the science that kids need to be learning to be competitive nowadays. i mean, consider if you're a second-generation chinese immigrant that grew up with chinese as a first language. i know that kids in western europe are expected to learn multiple languages, but you have to keep in mind that there are really only two major languages in western europe - there is the germanic language group and the romance language group (in addition to the smaller celtic and basque groups). dutch isn't so hard if you know english, and french isn't so hard if you know spanish. telling a kid they need to learn an indigenous language on top of learning chinese, french and english (four different language groups.) and learning about everything else is...you'll get a handful of kids that can do it, but the reality is that we can barely get english kids to speak french in this country. the truth is that less than 20% of canadians self-identify as officially bilingual, despite taking 15 years of instruction in both languages. so, the end result of this is inevitably that most kids don't learn to speak the indigenous language at the end of the process, anyways.

and, i don't see what is being accomplished by taking time away from other studies to learn what are going to be very difficult languages for most canadian kids, and difficult languages that they don't have much use for in day-to-day life.

so, i'm not opposed on principle. but i just don't see this leading anywhere but failure - and broadly so.

if you're going to do this, what you're going to need to do is look at something like an arabic language school for a model. and, i don't think that's the right path forwards. i'd be more likely to argue that we should abolish arabic schools than that we should build indigenous schools, regardless of the actual history that i'm not addressing.

so, i'm not going to argue that language should be kept out of schools the way i'd argue that spirituality should be. but, i would argue that if we're going to be bringing in more languages in schools that the kids would be better off learning more important languages, like chinese. this has to fall on parents. and, if in the end, the language isn't being used, it belongs in a museum, and not in a class room.

maybe funding voluntary after school programs is a better idea.

another voice i'm going to draw attention to is pamela palmater:
http://www.pampalmater.com/

pam is very active, and you will see her on the news from time-to-time, but she's more broadly in the "ignored by mainstream media because she pushes difficult truths" category.

if there is bullshit in the legislation, pam won't just find it, she'll organize and fight against it. she should be the go-to source.

i'm sure there will be groups on the ground, as well. some of them will be legit. others will be organized in the classic cia data-mining manner, and operate as front groups for the state, with aimless foot soldiers that are barely informed of what they're talking about. the independent press will fall for this.

but, i'm going to suggest that the more careful side of the independent media focuses less on the movement building and more on the academic analysis, as what's coming up is going to be shrouded in legalese, and probably difficult for most people to understand. the state will make the legislation look very pretty. i can guarantee you that. it will be these academics that will see through it, if necessary.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i can't be unique, right?

you probably know this person: the one that calls people out on their bullshit, because they are their friend.

and, you can't imagine how frustrated that person is going to get in a social grouping where everybody's just fucking full of shit all the time. they'll be constantly calling everybody out, won't they?

and, that person is consequently going to want to get out of that situation asap.

which is what i did.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

my position is that i was an excellent friend, but i was surrounded by people that were too stupid and narcissistic and selfish and close-minded and short-sighted and just fucking capitalistic assholes to realize what being a good friend is, and what just being a fucking narcissist's outlet to rant in the mirror is.

these people weren't looking for friends, they were looking for parrots to talk to themselves to.

and, i made the correct choice to distance myself from all of these people - because all of them were stupid and narcissistic and selfish and close-minded and short-sighted, and all i've ever wanted or been interested in or been able to deal with is honesty and transparency for the common good.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

you can separate your friends from hangers-on by focusing on those that are willing to stand up to you, those that are willing to criticize you and those that are willing to set you straight when you're wrong.

it is those that focus on evidence over loyalty that are actually your friends, and those that insist on vacuous nonsense like "loyalty" that are trying to manipulate you for self-interest.

those that remain quiet, that let you make stupid mistakes, that take your side withouut conditions - these are not your friends.

and, when people make ultimatums about support on the basis of loyalty, they are certainly not your friends, either.

nor are they very intelligent... or somebody that you should lament the loss of. these are people that you not only don't want to fall for, but that you want to actively push away from you.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i'm very much evidence-based.

solidarity without evidence is as vacuous as faith.

and, if i'm never on your side? maybe you're always wrong. and, rather than crtiticize me for not taking solidarity with positions that are vague or incorrect, maybe you should sharpen your argumentation, or flat out change your position to better align with the evidence.

if you can't convince people that you're right, that's your own fucking fault, isn't it?

friends are people that criticize each other in an attempt to get to a better approximation of the truth, not people that mindlessly fall in line behind each other to serve each other's narrow or dishonest self-interest.

solidarity without evidence is what is wrong with this world, and what needs to be abolished in order to build a better one.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

one more thing:

i'm about 5' 7" - right between my mom (5' 6") and my dad (5' 8"). that's on the lower range for xy, but it's still kind of tall for xx. so, my hands are not small due to height; i'm about average height, however you measure it.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

measuring from the top of my middle finger to the base of the palm, i'm around 6.6" - which is actually below average, even for women.

i need to do something productive.....

but, to complete the thought: the last time i checked hand sizes with my ex-gf's daughter she was about seven years old, and had roughly comparably sized hands. my hand size is truly not in the range of adult women, but more comparable to that of a young girl's.

back to work...

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

personally?

i'm willing to accept that i may have had minimal testosterone exposure, but i'm less interested in my digit ratios and more interested in my body hair patterns.

my father was italian, jewish, french and cree. he was as hairy a man as you ever will meet. i'm told my maternal grandfather was a roughly normally hairy guy. so, i should have expected something between normal and ape-man, growing up.

in truth, i've never seen more than peach fuzz, from my belly-button up to my neck. i mean, nobody is truly hairless, sure. but, my chest hair would be in the normal range for women, rather than the normal range for men. and, i was not on testosterone suppressors early enough to expect to prevent growth...

i've repeatedly argued that this is the only phenotypical evidence i have to present.

i remain convinced that my identity is not exactly a choice - although i will argue until i'm blue that i have the right to make that choice - but more of a function of my early upbringing.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

2.8/2.9 = .96551, which puts me in the normal female range.

but, this strikes me as a neo-phrenology and not something to take particularly seriously. given what we know about the importance of nutrition, i would reject the rigidity of this correlation, in the first place: i would not accept the claim that finger length is determined in the womb, but would rather point to environment factors and request that more study be done to clearly demonstrate the point.

but, does this idea that hormones in the womb might affect your sexual orientation make sense?  no. this is no less irrational than the idea that it is genetic, which is indeed deeply irrational (and void of any meaningful evidence, i might add).

that said, i can accept the idea that androgenic changes may affect gender identity rather than sexual orientation. and, if you read the studies properly, which i have, you'll see that this is usually what the data actually suggests, but that researchers continually present it in screwy ways.

you'll note that, like the birth order studies, which i will repeat have the strongest correlations that we've been able to find, far stronger than this, this idea simply does not apply to women. they've really only discovered a very specific thing, which is that xy fetuses that are underexposed to testosterone in utero develop more feminized traits - that is, that this is perhaps a partial explanation for the 'queeny' type of queer male, as well as the male to female transsexual.

but, what about bears? are you going to tell me that you think macho, rough gay men are what they are because they have a lack of testosterone? that's ridiculous. and, let's be clear about this: more than half of the population of gay men out there are hyper-masculine, tough guys with chiselled body-building type physiques, and that pride themselves on this hyper-masculinity.

the queeny types may not transition, in the end. but even the queeny gay men that identify as queeny gay men for their entire lives are expressing a kind of gender fluidity, and a kind of gender-queeredness. and, as mentioned, this actually makes sense, because an xy fetus with zero testosterone in utero would just end up female, and if the presence of testosterone is low enough, the testes may grow but not fall. we can do these experiments and see what happens. sure.

but, as a general explanation, this fails horribly. it does not describe the phenomenon of masculine gay men, which in truth is statistically the most of them. and it does not describe any kind of homosexuality or bisexuality in women at all.

what it describes is the phenomenon of effeminate men, whatever their orientation. and, it didn't require a study - you could have pulled it out of a textbook.

besides putting forth the argument that masculine gay men are created by an exaggerated excess of testosterone in the womb, and presenting some research for it that argues that heterosexuality only exists in a narrow range of testosterone production, i don't see how this idea of exposure in utero has any future. to my knowledge, this has not been done. and, the idea would likely not go down well, either.

but, i'll remind you that i'm skeptical about the idea that digit ratios are developed in the womb in the first place..

(and, yes, my hands are very small.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_ratio

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i'm a bad example.

but, my own gender notwithstanding, this is something that happens, sometimes, at the early stages of relationships: sometimes feminist dudes find themselves with women that are much less feminist than they are.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

and, i gave her three three months, even.

it just produced denial.

"i told you in november than i'm moving out on february 1st. it's mid january. what are you doing?"
"you're not moving out."
"but, i am."

and, so she shows up at my new apartment mid way through february and wants to move in, because she's on the brink of being evicted.

and, yeah - i fucked her in that apartment.

more than ten times.

but, i never let her move in.

remember this. it's a life lesson.

when somebody is cruel to another person, it's only ever half that person's fault. the other half of the blame belongs to the person that lets it happen.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i've gone out of my way to reject comparisons regarding myself. there is no basis of similarity, and that will only become more clear as time unfolds.

the similarity is with the ex-partner, not with me. but, i'll concede a similarity, even as i point out that it's really not a similarity with me, but a similarity with her...

we got a place together and decided on splitting the rent 50/50. i would not have accepted any other arrangement; i fully expected that she would pay her way. at the time, i thought she wouldn't have accepted anything different, either - we didn't really have this discussion, though, it was just unstated.

i mean, i made her pay 50% of the bill - and 50% of the tip - on the first date. she actually liked my insistence on this at the time. and i insisted. strongly. i guess she'd never met anybody that had this mindset; i must have come off like a character in a novel. in hindsight, i think she may have said one thing and actually desired another. i may have been pushing social expectations on her that she actually wasn't prepared to accept, after all.

so, when it came time to put the lease down, however many years later, we thought we knew where we both stood without having to talk about it.

maybe i should have asked.

(although, as it happened to be, she had a larger income than me at the time)

then, she cheated on me. so, i walked out on her, leaving her with a monthly rent that she couldn't afford to pay. and, she had just spent a thousand dollars, all of her savings, on a bicycle, too.

one might ask the question. she didn't have a math degree, and tended to stare back at me blankly when i spoke in math, but she wasn't a stupid person: she could do enough math to realize that her income was not sufficient to pay the rent.

so, why did she cheat on me, then?

because she never thought i'd do it. she thought i was bluffing.

she took me for granted.

that's the commonality, here.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

fuck, i'd be happy to never leave the apartment again. really.

well, except concerts.

i dunno how well i'd be able to meet friends around here, because i haven't tried. i've spent a lot of time avoiding people, and almost no time looking for them.

which isn't to say i'm an exception. i had my share of sketchy behaviour; i walked out on somebody with a lease, and eventually left her homeless, forcing her to shack up in a way that left her with an...let's say an unprepared pregnancy. and, while i'd do the same thing a second time, and think i was right to do it, i'll take some responsibility for the fact that my cruelty had some unintended consequences.

what i'm unwilling to deduce is that i'm a loner because of this.

i really am alone primarily by choice.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

at the end of the day, all three of these dipshits are going to end up with ruined careers, completely separated from each other, and plausibly at opposite ends of the country - alone. that's what happens when you behave like this, and they're all guilty of it.

there are no good guys, here. and, nobody gets out of the situation alive. everybody gets turned on. everybody loses.

it is a tale of three morons.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

in fact, the only new record i spent any substantive amount of time with in 2017 was the new do make say think record and, by default, it consequently wins record of the year.

and, it's a strong record - it's going to deserve somewhere in the low 90s, out of 100. it deserves mention, at least.

if there were stronger records released last year, i'm not the person to look to for elucidation, at this point. broadly speaking, i need to dig hard to find what i want; i'm not going to find much of value in these year end lists, and, for me, 2017 was a 'me' year, where i focused mostly on my own music, while restricting my exploration to acts i already had a high confidence in. i don't expect to spend much time digging over 2018, either. rather, i'll probably end up cycling back over 2019 or 2020.

when i get to the process of digging, you will no doubt be surprised by what i pull out - and much of it will be obscure or forgotten.

i've added a few new acts to my core list over the last few years, and they've mostly run the course, at this point. cloud nothings & la dispuye are done. i'm going to give touche amore one more, at most - but they're going to sell out, not break up. but, in truth, wasn't even really keeping up with that, and that's something i'm going to be doing as i finish what i'm doing over the next few weeks.

i have no intention to move from firefox to chrome, due to the spyware that comes packaged with chrome.

no, i mean google spyware. installing chrome on your system is basically like installing a trojan for google. and, because i exclusively use older machines, all of the bloat is a substantive problem.

but, i'm going to hope that firefox follows their lead on this point. because, i don't really run ad blockers to block the ads - i'm post-paradoxical on the ads, i don't even see them - but because the ad blocker dramatically increases the responsiveness and speed of the browser.

i came to this conclusion about the ads quite some time ago, though, when i was walking past a billboard. i realized that i'd walked past that billboard at least 500 times, and had never taken the time to read it. this is why they make the ads invasive in the first place, of course.

but, in a situation where the ads are purely text? i won't even notice that they're there.

rather, i suspect that google is beginning to realize that it's business model is really very delicate, and not due to ad blockers but due to the actual efficacy of the delivery method.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/critics-wary-as-google-s-chrome-begins-an-ad-crackdown-1.3803866

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

aaaaand, in other news, former prime minister kim campbell has invented a time machine.

this is what she had to say, upon returning from the 1950s.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/former-pm-kim-campbell-says-sleeveless-dresses-demeaning-for-tv-broadcasters-1.3801543

i don't know why they keep putting microphones in front of her. it's been one disaster after another, for twenty years going.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

oh, and you can get back to me in june about which way the market has been moving over the last six months.

jagemeet singh must cut his beard.

not really a lot to react to here, other than that we once again see that this government cares more about what the foreign press thinks than it does about what canadians think.

i wrote an essay about this:
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/thoughts/essays/aboriginalself.html

will we get something like a nisga'a agreement?

if you read the essay, you'll see why i'm skeptical about the idea that what the government is up to is anything more than a continuation of existing assimilationist policies, mostly for the benefit of the resource sector - which is not just oil but also minerals.

we'll see what it looks like, though.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-speech-indigenous-rights-1.4534679


jagmeet singh must his beard.

the warren peace report

so, is amy goodman complicit or misinformed?

i'm actually going to vote for both. i'd be surprised if anybody needed to actually explain to her what is actually happening; it would be a first in so long as i've been watching or listening to the program , which is, off and on, about twenty years or so. she's the host, so it's her job to be quiet and let others speak. but, she will correct you if she knows you're wrong, and i've never heard her say anything that isn't correct. it would be hard to believe that she's just misinformed, seven or eight years into this.

but, there's not actually a meaningful contradiction in taking what these spooks she brings on her shows say seriously and actually knowing what is actually happening. that contradiction only arises when you synthesize, and start generalizing; so long as you avoid that step, you can hold these contradictions separate and believe both of them. orwell described the phenomenon as doublethink. and, the context is devastating, because amy goodman has most certainly gone through standard pc brainwashing; all that the intelligence networks need to do is send her a brown person and tell her they're from syria, and she'll instantly drop any kind of critical analysis, because that person needs to be able to tell their story.

and, so she can believe a fact-based narrative on the one hand, which is that syria was never a civil war at all, but always a proxy conflict. there is no substantive movement against assad inside syria, but only a rat's nest of foreign fighters carrying out foreign interests, for money or religious orthodoxy (which are equally corrupting influences). and, she can allow these cia tools to pretend they're telling a syrian narrative, too. as long as they don't directly interweave, it doesn't matter.

so, is she misinformed, then? she is in the sense that she allows herself to be, through the mental trojan horses that the state has installed inside of her, which then let them in to feed on her mind. and, if she's not careful, she could lose her mind altogether, in which case she would quickly end up more classically uninformed, on top of being misinformed.

how is she complicit then? because she does know the truth of it, even as she upholds the doublethink. it would be bad enough if it was just silence. but, she of course runs an influential broadcast.

these questions are important, because i don't actually think she's been bought. i think she's actually struggling with this.

the propaganda is powerful. it's designed by professionals to hook people. and, in the end, nobody is invincible.

not even the ineffable amy goodman.

we'll be back in a few minutes....

democracy now has had it's head lodged in it's rear around the syria issue for years, now. it still doesn't seem to have figured out that there never was an internal uprising, and these people they pull in are a combination of western intelligence agents and their naive useful idiots.

what should the united nations do about the situation?

well, where is international law being broken?

1) the russians were invited by the syrians.
2) the turks were invited by the russians.

so, they are not breaking international law.

however, nobody invited the kurds. and, nobody invited the americans.

it is the kurds and the americans that are in breach of international law, here. so, the united nations really ought to be acting to fund an expeditionary force to expel the americans and kurds, and reassert syrian sovereignty over the east of the country.

but, that would start a war, you say.

no. it would be the american refusal to withdraw, and obey international law that would spark the war. the united nations has a mandate to uphold international law. it can't be avoiding conflict out of consequence, it has to lay the law down on the americans and kurds, who are operating as a rogue state.

and, it is the activist left that is eating cake, here. for, it wants to argue that the united nations should step in to protect the kurds, under a concept of international law that it pulled out of it's ass. rather, a legal un operation would differ from a turkish force only in ability. the turks are the ones upholding the law, here.

we have entered a new world, where the russians are the ones upholding the rule of law, and america is the rogue state that requires sanctions.

no, really.

it doesn't matter what dead people might think, if they were to magically arise from the dead and look at us now. dead people are dead. their feelings are irrelevant.

it doesn't matter if they were your ancestors or not: they are still dead, and their feelings are still irrelevant.

i repeat: the people of the past will never understand the present. so it doesn't matter what they might have thought.

but, the people of the future will understand the present, which will be their past. their views matter. and, it should be the focus of the contemporary government to govern for the future, and not for the past.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i'm going to close this down by making a request, and this request is not limited to this issue, or this government, or even this country.

to all those bastards that would wield power to harm others, however necessarily or unnecessarily, let this point be clear: a leader, be they a prince or something else, should always be judging themselves through the long lens of history, rather than the short term fluctuations of public pressure.

democracy would be preferable. but, despite the heavy and thick propaganda, it's really not possible to synthesize republican government with any kind of democracy. there is no stable way to build a government where representatives are constantly being replaced via plebiscite; either you elect people and walk off, or you move to direct democracy. our system is not a direct democracy, and is therefore not really a democracy at all, and in such a system a government is really truly required via obligation to be unpopular, when it feels it is necessary, for that is the reason we have a representative government, and not a democracy.

the system requires benevolence, which in context means having the integrity to make unpopular decisions that will eventually be seen as correct.

so, this is my request: fuck populism. be benevolent.



jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

really.

you thought pierre did all  those things, huh?

nope.

so...constitution?

nope. sorry. mostly jean, actually.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

yeah.

it's been chretien the whole fucking time, guys.

since pearson.

really.

he should get a diamond jubilee, soon.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/hp/1977-v12-n1-hp1112/030819ar.pdf

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

"no society should ever be destroyed!"

well, then you're a conservative and your opinion is invalid.

no, really.

if that's your answer, i don't care what you think.

because it's daft.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

you don't hear this debate.

nobody asks the question any more: what were these societies like, before contact?

maybe the question is closed, but it hasn't lost it's historical value. sadly, few people seem to care about the answers to these questions...

what kind of technologies did they have to make their labour easier, or not have to make their labour harder? was the society hierarchical? was the distribution of resources fair, or were there tyrants that took more? what social norms existed in the society? were gender norms enforced, and how so? did the society accept the freedom of queer people to be queer, or did it enforce arbitrary rules around sexuality? did the society accept non-conformity and the freedom to be different, or did it enforce a conformity of thought under threat of expulsion or death?

were they some abstraction of noble savages, or would a modern mind look at the society and see the same underlying problems of salem witch trials and scarlet letters and think it is more akin to a quasi-fascism?

and, if so, should this society be destroyed?

we tend to just imagine that life is always greener, don't we? we don't really analyze this question: how free were the indigenous peoples, before contact? truly? all of them? is this a culture that should be resuscitated? or should it be taken off life support? and, how free would they be today, should they reassert sovereignty?

truly?

all of them.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

* note that the question of whether the traditional indigenous cultures were tyrannical is separate from the question of whether the colonial powers were also tyrannical, which is not ambiguous.

the only reason i would think about italy is if it's the south of italy... 

this canadian would give a whole lot away to avoid snow for the rest of her life.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

norway is, in fact, in the list of ancestor countries, but i would be quick to jump on a way to finland, while placing norway in the uk/ireland/france pile of "what's the difference?".

i'll at least concede that canada to norway is largely a sideways move, whereas canada to ireland, especially, would be a step backwards. i don't think that western europe has a good future; if i'm moving back to europe, i'm going to try to pick somewhere that is going to retain a majority indigenous population, like finland or switzerland (i don't have swiss ancestors).

all i'd get out of moving to norway is the need to learn to speak norse. finnish isn't even germanic - it would be hard to learn. but, a move to finland would legitimately be a move to the very fringes of the empire. and, i may find that my opinions are not seen there as radical. 

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

woo!

go finland!

http://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2333-less-than-a-third-of-finns-believe-in-god.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

listen.

i didn't migrate here. i was born here. i have indigenous ancestors, but i reject ancestor worship, so i don't care what my ancestors did or what my ancestors thought, or think it is in any remote way binding on me - i am an individual, i am not my ancestors, nobody owns me, i am not indebted to anyone, and i have no obligation to anybody to do anything.

so, i don't feel an obligation to watch my mouth in my neighbour's house, so to speak. i was born here as much as anybody else and have the right to say what i want where i want, like everybody else does. where our individual ancestors came from and what they thought is simply irrelevant; they are dead, and nobody cares, so what i see in front of me is a competition for ideas. if my ideas are different than theirs, then we'll have to fight about it and one of us will win and the other will lose.

but, would i move to one of the places my non-indigenous ancestors came from, if some indigenous group wrote me a check and gave me a plane ticket?

i would.

well...i'd go to finland, for sure. i'd be apprehensive about italy, but, with the proper conditions, i'd go. i would not want to live in france or in the united kingdom.

if presented with a realistic option, i'd rather leave. because i'm an individual - i'm not attached to a community. i'm free, on that level of mind control.

on the level of rent, on the other hand....

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

"but, we can't separate our religion from our identity."

i agree - they can't.

but, that's not a feature. that's the bug. that's what is wrong - too much collectivism, not enough individualism.

i just don't think it's an argument. what i think it is is a diagnosis.

and, i have absolutely no interest at all in accommodating a culture that cannot separate the individual from the whole. until it can get to the point where it's members can say "i am an individual. i have a self. and i am distinct from my community. i have interests and ambitions and desires that may differ from my community and i am interested in expressing them, even if it doesn't conform with the norms in the community. i exist as an individual, to better myself, as an individual, and not merely as a corollary of the community i come from.", i just don't see anything that is worth saving. to the contrary, i might argue that such a society really ought to be destroyed, in the first place.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i agree that religiosity is primarily a function of poverty, rather than (a lack) of education, but this article is underestimating the effects of governments to maintain religion as a tool of control through demographic tinkering and immigration.

if you were to slow it down with a co-efficient such that the tipping point happens around 2050, i'd be in greater agreement.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201204/atheism-defeat-religion-2038

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

you know, i don't buy it, this idea of "spiritual awakening".

i mean, consider the term. make me laugh. i'll grant that a "spiritual awakening" is what you would expect would happen to a population, after you've dumbed it down with television to the point that it can barely operate a cash register. in that context, a "spiritual awakening" would be something like "mass insanity".

but, i actually i think we're on the cusp of a paradigmatic rejection of religion in the west, and that it could be almost entirely eliminated, at least amongst white people, by the year 2100. the next generation of white americans could very well define itself by it's godlessness.

and, i welcome that.

but, i wish the left would stop trying to appeal to the dying demographics of religious observation, and key in that, by paying too much lip service to religious values, it is slowly losing what will be the dominant atheist vote to the right.

the way things are shaping up right now, the atheists will get the tipping point to seize power once the boomers seriously die off, but, when they do, they will be republicans. and, that's a problem.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

geez.

there really are a lot of religious crazies in bc, aren't there? you need to be careful when you're in the mountains, out there.

they shouldn't be doing this, either, of course. but, it's not anywhere near as bad. i would be a lot less upset if they were just giving kids pamphlets on native religion. and, the world religions courses i took were too focused on the monotheistic religions, and not really a 'world religion' course, in the broadest sense.

i'm mostly posting because i like the idea of the atheist comics. and, i would suggest that he should be allowed to distribute the atheist comics regardless, as the bibles have already been handed out.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/gideons-versus-godless-abbotsford-public-schools-criticized-for-distributing-bibles-1.3514276

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

"sure.

i'm all about teaching my white kids indigenous knowledge. all of this eurocentric academic stuff might claim it's empirical, but it's really just racist.

i mean, it's what the indigenous people were raised on, right? for thousands of years? and, look how they turned out.

that's exactly how i want my kids to be."

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i just remember learning at some point in grade school about the scientific definition of life. i think it provided seven criteria like growth, reproduction and movement.

i don't think a chair meets many of them. and, i would have expected a teacher to correct an indigenous student on the point, because what their parents told them about chair spirits was wrong.

"no, sweetie. chairs aren't alive. these are the criteria used to determine if something is alive."

but, maybe i've only interacted with very sneaky chairs over my life time.

given that they are teaching children that chairs have spirits, i have to wonder what the science curriculum looks like in these schools.

jagmeet singh must cut is beard

no, seriously, i think this is why the indigenous religion is so much more widely scoffed at than others, which are not really any less stupid. i mean,  i'm an atheist, as you know, i don't have time for any of it, but the indigenous stuff is particularly lame because these aren't new ideas to westerners (unlike the eastern religions, which were legitimately something different) but ideas that western culture has already deduced are wrong.

it's not an issue of relativism. it's not about seeing things from a different perspective, or making way for ideas that are different. rather, it's something more akin to a kind of orwellianism: to be respectful of indigenous religious positions, you have to open yourself up to the possibility that basic empirical facts like the shape of the earth or the effects of smoke inhalation are, actually, wrong, and on the strength of evidence that not only wouldn't hold up in a lab but wouldn't even hold up in a court.

i tossed thales out there. he was an early greek philosopher that put forth the theory that inanimate objects have spirits. this is, in fact, as western an idea as anything socrates came up with. but, that was 2500 years ago. and, it's been viewed as a disproven and false theory in the west for most of the last 2500 years.

we could take about a lot of things, here. dna. migrations. the age and size of the earth.

maybe indigenous cultural leaders should be focusing less on retaining ideas that everybody else in the world knows are wrong and more focused on finding ways to modernize and synthesize what's left of the culture, to facelift it into something that is less self-parodying.

because, i'll make fun of christians. and i'll make fun of muslims. and i'll make fun of jews. but it's never as personal as it is when i make fun of people with indigenous beliefs, because they haven't developed that distance - they haven't entered modernity.

i want to help them, not make fun of them. but they make it hard...

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

you know, thales may have had some concept of a distant land beyond the oceans, from phoenician and egyptian records, and dim memories of possible contact.

he may have had an x haplotype, which has been found in strange percentages amongst indigenous people on the eastern coast.

i could imagine thales walking into an indigenous village..

"i am thales, the great sage of ionia. please bring me your greatest minds, so we can sit and contemplate existence."

*pause*

one steps forward.

"sage, huh?"

*split screen to thales, tied up, and being slowly lowered into a burning pit*

"no, no, you're ignorant for not being open-minded. maybe thales was right, and every inanimate object does have a spirit. how do you know that that chair doesn't have a spirit? and how do you know that it isn't evil? and how do you know that evil spirits don't like burning sage? you just need to expand yourself to different possibilities.

you bigot."

gee.

i guess that's a reasonable, well thought out position.  isn't it? shouldn't we all respect this deeply thought through position? i mean, isn't science supposed to be skeptical?

i guess that's it, then.

i'm just a big racist. i need to expand my horizons, to let go of my ignorance of the chair-spirits, the desk-spirits, etc and open my eyes to the broader spirit world.

sorry.

(it actually sounds to me like the teacher should have her license revoked and be sent to a psychiatric ward.)

"so, people that believe that smoke is a medicine, and that bathing items in smoke cleanses them of 'negative' energy are ignorant?"

yup.

that sounds like the textbook definition of "ignorance", if you ask me..

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

your kids will meditate in school.

the school system should not be encouraging children to inhale or otherwise bathe themselves in toxic chemicals to tap into some disneyfied concept of magic, it should be explaining why this "cultural practice" is both foolish and dangerous, and why the smoke of these grasses is not beneficial but harmful.

the school system is meant to educate kids, not to make them ignorant.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/16/canada-mother-ban-indigenous-ceremonies-public-schools

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i would support a ban of this type, in the public schools. this is not educational, and does not belong in a class room - not even if viewed through a racist filter as some kind of harmless magic trick.

even taking a softer stance of informed parental consent, there should have been a consent form sent home. and, yes, i would have prevented my kids from taking part in such a farce, although i would have also taken it as an opportunity to debunk the ceremony.

"first, sweetie, you don't want to breathe in the burning sage. it's carcinogenic. that means it causes cancer. they might tell you it's some kind of medicine, but this is simple ignorance - it is, in fact, actually poisonous. you should tell the other kids that, especially the indigenous ones, because they might not know it. so, when you see them start burning the leaves, step away from smoke. don't breath it in. and, i'll be calling your teacher in the morning to talk to her about unnecessarily exposing children to dangerous levels of smoke, before i call the principal in the afternoon.

these people suggesting that there's any magic value in breathing in smoke are just making up nonsense. i've raised you well enough to see that on your own, but i'm just telling you again. excepting the combustion taking place, there's no energy being transferred in the process. science would reject their claim outright. there's just dangerous smoke that you want to get away from, and an incredibly irresponsible teacher that is unnecessarily exposing you to environmental toxins, and a lack of decent critical analysis."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/16/canada-mother-ban-indigenous-ceremonies-public-schools

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

no. having remote farmers try remote farmers is not a decent summary of the idea of a jury of peers.

i don't know the facts in the case. it seems like somebody was trespassing, and they got shot after causing a commotion on the property they were trespassing on; extra-judicial, and perhaps not proportional, but without being clear on the facts, i'm not going to weigh in on it.

i'll restrict my comments solely to the idea of a jury of peers.

the idea of the jury of peers was meant to reduce bias in the court system, in an era where activists and dissidents specifically (rather than just general poor people) had to face two systemic, institutional class problems in what was essentially a racially homogeneous (if religiously heterogeneous) island, on the fringe of europe. the first systemic, institutional class problem allowed for wealthy aristocrats to essentially target people they saw as problems on trumped up charges, through relying on judges more than willing to play along, through common interests or bribes or even coerced threats. the second problem was of apathy in the judicial process, from the bottom up. what putting decisions in the hand of juries did was take the decision away from an authority that was institutionally unreliable, due to these class biases and interference, and put it in the hands of what ought to have been a neutral body.

so, juries were about talking decisions away from biased, corrupt judges and putting them in the hands of people that had no ulterior motives, and were better able to independently analyze the evidence. i know that your average tory will push back against this, but it is actually the truth of it. and, at the time, it was a good idea - not a perfect idea, but a good idea.

since then, a lot of things have happened. to begin with, the british judicial system has evolved to take itself more seriously. we can have a discussion about critical legal theory, but i think everybody can agree that it's at least gotten a lot better. another major shift is that the system has been transported from a racially heterogeneous island to a racially diverse colony on a large continent, opening up new issues of biases in the jury, itself.

i'm not a conservative. i don't see value in holding to tradition for the sake of it. i want to look at why a system existed, ask whether the tactics employed by it serve their ends and tweak it to better serve those ends. and, if the purpose of a jury selection was to eliminate systemic bias, the fact that the jury selection process today actually introduces bias makes it an open question as to whether it's something that should be continued, or if there are contexts where it should be suspended.

the most obvious context where it should be suspended is in a situation where the following three things are true:

1) the victim is of a historically oppressed minority group
2) the accused is in the dominant majority
3) it is impossible to construct a jury that doesn't also reflect the dominant majority.

that is a situation where bias is inevitable, and the system should step in to prevent it, by moving to a trial by judge.

so, i wasn't there. i don't have the facts. i'm not reacting to the decision. but, this article gets the point about juries completely backwards: it was meant to remove bias, not to introduce it. and, if a trial by jury cannot operate without that bias, as i think is true in this case, the judge should step in.

this man could not have possibly received a fair trial by jury, under the circumstances.

further, in order to prevent the judge from falling under the same bias, the judge's decision to not step in should be subject to outside judicial review before the trial, if requested; if lawyers on either side are so convinced of the impossibility of a fair trial by jury, they should have a body to appeal to before it starts.

http://nationalpost.com/opinion/colby-cosh-gerald-stanley-being-tried-by-his-peers-isnt-a-bug-its-a-feature

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.