if you're telling me that the choice is between putting kids in jail and putting them in foster homes, and you're upset about hearing them cry when they're being taken out of jail and placed into care, so they should therefore by left in jail, then you're a fucking idiot.

it's not a left/right distinction. it's a smart/dumb distinction.

and, i'll acknowledge that you might be ignorant about the options, but, in that case, you should educate yourself before you speak.

yeah.

if you want to be maximalist, we can include hail to the thief, and then criticize it as a weak attempt to regain their glory years, but then jump immediately to the fall of math.

you'd then need to follow 65dos through the 00s up to we were exploding anyway..

and, then, i suppose you'd jump to son lux.

i would argue that 65daysofstatic kind of picked up where radiohead left off about '01 or '02, and you should direct kids towards that band, instead.

you can tell what generation a person places themselves in by analyzing their reaction to radiohead, who sort of form a generational bridge.

there's younger people that have barely even heard their classic work - we call these millennials. unambiguously.

and, there are plenty of older people that started off listening to their 90s works and then kept listening as they changed their style. these people are on some kind of cusp, but have decided to move with millennials for social advancement or whatever other reason.

then, there are people like me that grew up on their classic material, and tried to give kid a a chance, but ultimately rejected it. i like amnesiac better; always have. kid a is a mediocre record. C/C-. we're gen x, and not interested in what millennials think. at all.

no, i mean, honestly?

who cares about radiohead in 2018?

i would be interested in radiohead doing a 90s tour in a small venue, but i'm not interested in watching them perform their recent material in a hockey arena.

given the very low quality of radiohead's recorded output over the last 15 years, it's hard to believe they still command such a large audience.

they haven't done anything worth mentioning since amnesiac.

sorry.

i mean, maybe you should be reading "hush money" as "payment for services rendered".

i really don't think that there's a lot of people left in america in 2018 that are going to get particularly upset about the president having consensual sex out of wedlock.

but, he has a lot to gain in a young male voting demographic by projecting the image that he's regularly fucking porn stars on the side.

i mean, at this point, you need to make a choice: either this is all bullshit to boost his public image, or there's enough evidence to lay prostitution charges.

i'm actually of the opinion that these porn star stories are fabrications to try and make trump look like a badass - that he thinks banging porn stars will actually win him votes.

it trudeau reacts by exacerbating the situation, and signs a bilateral deal with mexico that is good for shareholders at the expense of workers, we will understand where his head was the whole time.

if he takes a step back, and insists on getting tougher with mexico, we'll know he was just misguided and clueless and frankly straight up ignorant.

kinda can't win.

shouldda offered to dissolve from the start....

your job goes to mexico.

the company pays lower wages, and consequently gets higher profits.

that comes out in terms of dividends, which go to shareholders - like a young justin trudeau in the 90s.

and, like his own kids over the upcoming years.

so, when a justin trudeau stands up for a nafta, it is easy to understand why - the wealth trickled up, and he's exactly who it tricked up to.

there is absolutely no question at all that ordinary canadians will be way better off with a bilateral deal with the united states than they will be with a three way trade deal that includes mexico. but, it is not clear to me if trudeau doesn't understand this or is in fact behaving in the interests of the investor class - that 1% - that benefits from the existing arrangement. he is, himself a trust fund kid.

if you lost a job because of nafta, trudeau was in the class of people that made money from it.

we will have an answer to that question when we see whether he seeks to redefine the trade relationship with mexico or not. i would hope that he will realize that a nafta without the united states would be a foolish thing for canada to carry through with.

....as a tpp without the united states is also a foolish thing for canada to carry through with.

but, we'll see the answer to this, shortly.

i never thought i'd see a day when the republican president of the united states had a better plan for canada than the liberal prime minister does, but here we are.

so, that's april.

as expected, it was a little shorter, and i expect that to hold for the rest of 2014.

the market is not opening up like i hoped, but i do have some showings on the weekend.

back to looking for the day...

it's not like the stock market follows some law of gravity or something.

but, the policy right now is money destruction. and, that means divestment, and deflation.

if you want the dow at 30,000, it's not an impossibility, but you need to print the money that takes us up to 30,000 tokens worth of credit, first.

and, if you insist on destroying money, instead, you're going to deflate the bubble.

to be clear: there's no reason you can't inflate the dow to 40,000, 50,000 - 100,000. but, it's a question of how much money you want to print, to do it.

what you can't do is create paper wealth and destroy it at the same time.

i actually think that you'd get a very strong response if you set up a program to rebuild syria and asked the refugees to volunteer.

i think they'd jump at it.

and, i think they'd thank us for it.

i want to be clear, i'm not saying that we should just round the refugees up and fly them back and yell "see ya later" as we drop them out in parachutes.

we should train them in construction & send them back with bags of concrete, beams of steel and hard hats galore.

we should teach them how to demine, and let them loose.

give them shovels & cranes & other tools to pull back the rubble with.

i just think we need to redefine solidarity. we can't absorb the whole world,. and, even if we take in hundreds of thousands of them, it doesn't rebuild the country, which remains a pile of rubble. so, i want solidarity to mean helping rebuild destroyed cities, helping to fight gangs, dismantling systems of oppression...

the old saying is to teach a man to fish. i think that generalizes to teaching people to fight, and teaching people to rebuild.

this isn't outside of our history, either. remember the marshall plan? well, understand that it wasn't charity - unless you understand it as corporate welfare. building things means awarding contracts....

trudeau should just make the carbon tax federal.

if republicans passed a law in congress declaring america a christian state, would that make it true?

would it withstand a court challenge?

i understand the underlying debate about jewishness v. democracy, and i understand that israel is going through a phase of racist nationalism. but, i have a hard time believing that this kind of anti-palestinian racism is easily abstracted to explicit support for jewishness, and everything that means.

israel is not a jewish state, but a modern secular society with some severe racial identity problems.

and, i suspect that this may backfire badly.

i don't see how a declaration of this sort would have any meaningful legal ramifications, either.

supreme court judges are not supposed to arbitrarily overturn precedent. they're supposed to actually have a good reason - a miscarriage of justice.

so, it's going to be harder to reverse roe v. wade than you think.

they're either going to have to come up with an argument as to why the ruling was wrong, which is going to be hard given that it clearly wasn't, or they're going to have to come up with something that somehow lets the state overturn a right to choose - some kind of trump card over personal autonomy. it's hard to imagine what that is.

in theory, it would be easier to legislate an end to it, and then let the court uphold the new legislation. but, if such a thing were plausible, it would be done by now.

how much money would the republicans lose in fundraising if they could actually pull this off? how many votes would drift elsewhere? it's kind of at the centre of their party.

i don't want to say you shouldn't remain vigilant, because you should. i just hardly think you should get apocalyptic about it...

we should send the refugees back to rebuild.

who else is going to do it?

and, why don't they want to?

the french and polish didn't stay in britain. they wanted to go home.

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/8xbqx3/raqqa-residents-blame-the-us-for-neglecting-the-citys-recovery

and, why does it take the fucking atheist to tell you to respect your goddamned elders?

again: russophobia is a very old term, at least as old as the victorian era, but apparently tied to the western european fear of being overrun by mongolian hordes, as a consequence of the very real mongolian invasions of the middle ages.

i first encountered the term in the 90s, when i was reading up on the great game.

and, the term "islamophobia" may very well be actually etymologically derived from it.

it seems like some people don't know who stephen cohen is.

stephen cohen is the country's leading russian-american scholar.

country's.

leading.

scholar.

and, the fact is that if you've never heard of stephen cohen, you have no business saying anything about russia at all.

(& tucker carlson is a jerk.)

you can tell me that that could have happened anywhere, and you're right, but it hasn't.

if the ndp are going to start accusing people of racism, they need to make sure their arguments are grounded, otherwise it's going to backfire. it's one thing to accuse somebody of racism when they're being racist - that will resonate. it's another to accuse somebody of being racist when they're not being racist - that will backfire. we've all been in a room with the airhead activist that thinks everything is racist - that's an experience we can all draw on, and instantly identify with. horwath wants to strenuously avoid being typecast that way.

the empirical fact is that the jane & finch area is dangerous, and that it is reasonable to take precautions before entering it. we can have a discussion about root causes and whatnot, but it's just daft to live in denial of the reality of it - or to accuse the facts of being racist.

i've only been near there once, and i was assumed to be a prostitute and nearly assaulted while hitch-hiking up wilson, near jane. the reality is that i didn't know where i was. i didn't see any signs indicating i was on jane street, and i was off it before i realized it. but, had i known where i was, i would have immediately gotten away from the area - because i would have realized that it's not a safe place for a lightish-skinned trans girl to walk around by herself.

which is what i learned, quite quickly.

as mentioned repeatedly, i don't think of marijuana as something i want to do to relax by myself; that actually strikes me as kind of absurd, as smoking pot by yourself all the time is going to make you paranoid and anti-social.

it's something that should be done infrequently, and with people.

and it doesn't reduce anxiety or cure cancer.

the only clinical evidence that exists on the topic actually suggests that marijuana makes anxiety worse.

sorry.

it's absolute, utter bullshit....

sometimes, if you want to be at the right meetings to get the right information to further your research, you need to compromise a little.

and, that's what happens when you open up research dollars to private funding - the most powerful lobbyists stand in between academics and their research, and are able to extract concessions in exchange for access.

it's fundamentally incompatible with a free society. but, if america was anything approaching a free society in the past, it hasn't been in a long time.

if you listen to what joe is saying, you might be tempted to believe that there's some kind of vast right wing conspiracy or something...

glenn makes a good point, but i'm not sure if he realized the depth of it. despite record arms deals, the saudis just got their asses handed to them by the russians in syria - and saudi money talks through talking heads in washington.

i think that if you want to understand the surreal and bizarre positions that democrats are taking right now, saudi money coming through think tanks and foundations, like clinton's, probably has a lot to do with it.

the fact is that bill blair was the police chief of a major city where more than 50% of the population was born in another country.

it's reasonable to reserve judgement, until he does something.

i'm going to wait to see what bill blair does before i comment on the situation.

the government had to do something. it's taken a first step. let's see what's next.

if anything, i would expect prices to go up, as these companies will need to find a way to pay down their losses, in addition to regular inflation.

despite the rhetoric to the contrary (or perhaps because of it), things like this always go up in price under the conservatives, because they're not as strenuous about regulating arbitrary price hikes. for all their rhetoric abut "free markets", empirical observation clearly demonstrates that the only "freedom" that conservatives really believe in is the freedom of property owners to set prices however they want.

https://business.financialpost.com/commodities/energy/ontarians-may-see-a-7-reduction-in-their-monthly-bills-as-gas-utilities-halt-cap-and-trade-activities?video_autoplay=true

why don't we figure out if pizza is a vegetable (and tomato sauce comes from a fruit, btw) or not, first, before we start worrying if soy is really milk?

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/plant-based-milk-milk-fda-determine/story?id=56640141

so, what will the americans now refer to the mammalian excretion of goats as, let alone humans?

for future reference.

you can call it a soy-based protein drink if you'd like, it's still better.

i'm not being sardonic.

for every town in saskatchewan, there exists a railroad line, however abandoned - for that is either the reason the town exists, or the reason the line does.

and, if you want to attract people to this landlocked flatland, where you can watch your dog run away for three days, which projects the idea that it exists in the last century, if not the one before that, then something like this might help quite a bit.

if i was a conservative, i'd say something about how the greyhound is shutting down because it's not proftable, so why the fuck should the government take over a failing business?

but, i'm not a conservative, so i'm actually looking at the situation as an opportunity to reduce carbon emissions.

if the state is going to take over a transportation network, it has the obligation to do it in as ecologically sustainable a way as is possible.

given that so much of the rural west was settled by the premise of rail expansion, why not think forwards instead of backwards and replace the buses with electric rail?

the court simply needs to determine whether discrimination is taking place, or not.

when an institution says "i'm discriminating on restricted grounds, because of my faith", it isn't offering an excuse or a reason to allow for it's behaviour, it's merely providing an explanation as to why it needs to be prosecuted in some way or another.

i haven't read the trinity western case or have been following it, but it showed up on the sidebar there.

to begin with, i don't see what any of this has to do with accreditation. a school may pass rules i don't like, but that doesn't have anything to do with whether the students that have enrolled in the school have passed the proper academic requirements. if the debate is being had at the level of the question of whether accreditation should be upheld or not, i can't reasonably side with the queer advocates. and, i might point out that anybody that has graduated from this institution and met all academic requirements has quite strong grounds for a lawsuit -  the unclear question is who should be held liable for it. and, i don't think it's the school.

however, i believe that this was not the question before the supreme court. the question before the supreme court was whether the tribunal had upheld the existing precedent. and, i've framed this differently, because i think the issue is often lost in translation from legalese, as this is what a tribunal is supposed to do. the idea underlying the existence of the tribunal is that there are certain cases that come up that essentially follow the same template over and over. our legal system is based on the idea of stare decisis - that is, that new cases should be settled in the same manner as previous ones were. sending these cases to full trials is just reinventing the wheel over and over - they do not require new decisions or actual judges to work them through, but merely knowledgeable adjudicators to apply the existing precedents. and, in fact, the adjudicators cannot create new law - their scope is very narrow, defined through statue to interpret existing jurisprudence. so, the idea is that these cases are already decided, that they don't need to be decided again and that going through the rigmarole is just a waste of everybody's time. this is why when the issue appears in an actual court, the issue before the judge is whether the precedent was correctly applied - that is, interpreted in a correct and reasonable manner. the adjudicator was never supposed to produce a novel ruling in the first place...

so, if the supreme court comes back and says "the ruling is reasonable", that is not delegating responsibility to the tribunal, or removing itself from the process. what that is doing is saying "the tribunal correctly interpreted the precedent that was already set by the court, and there is consequently no need for an actual trial.". it was the court that set the precedent, and the court that consequently produced the ruling. if the court felt that the tribunal was overstepping it's bounds, that is what a ruling of incorrect or unreasonable actually means...

so, that is what the court did in this case: it said that this question was determined in a previous ruling, the tribunal correctly applied a reasonable interpretation of that ruling and there is no value in bringing the case to a full trial. the court should have then assigned costs to the party responsible for wasting everybody's time.

and, how can the system be so cold to "religious freedom" or the observance of "religious rights"? because there's no such thing, really. it's a legal fiction, often perpetuated by people that don't understand the law well. "religious freedom" is a very restricted idea that applies solely to government, it's not something that has any meaning in a conflict between individuals, or between individuals and institutions. in this case, what the university was trying to argue was that it could restrict the rights of others by denying entry on restricted grounds. they then labelled their attempt to restrict the rights of others as an exercise of their own rights. the tribunal had seen this kind of charade before, and applied the proper precedent to shut it down. end of story. its not a balancing, it's just a bad argument - and one we've been through before, at that.

so, if you have a problem with the ruling in the university case, you need to look at the existing precedent; i haven't read the case, so i don't know what that was.

now, there is a valid criticism here, in that it cements the law in place pretty strongly. before the introduction of these tribunals, the court may have overturned an argument and created new precedent. these tribunals make that a lot harder. but, it's not yet clear if that's good or bad. if the way that courts deal with these tribunals is by more rigorously enforcing their own precedents, that is probably a good thing. what i'm getting at is that the courts are now going to need to demonstrate that the existing precedent was unreasonable, before they overturn it. that should help to prevent the arbitrary overturning of precedent. and, it should hopefully feed back into the tribunals, by providing for clearer instructions in terms of more specific legal tests. in the end, you might need a math degree to be an adjudicator, as it's going to require understanding complicated theorems, with dozens of corollaries.

but, i want to go back to the legal question, as i would have rather seen the issue raised on grounds of discrimination - i would have rather seen the accreditation denied on the entrance requirements. it's subtle. but, we have a critical theory for a reason, and it works the other way when you have a liberal judiciary, as we do in canada.

kristy duncan should resign in protest.

(i don't expect her to...)

they just abolished the ministry of science.

fuck.

i might suggest to mom that she's better off selling her mansion in the burbs and downsizing to something more appropriate for her new life as an ex-mom. she may find she's saving money on travel costs, as well. it's unhealthy to cling to the past; it's time to move on.

and, to the lady that wants some muscle to protect her, she might be better off posting an ad in the classifieds, if she feels like that's what she really wants. but, she might want to drop the entitled attitude that suggests her partner is obligated to fork out $50/week. that, itself, might be the reason she's posting an ad like this in the first place.

sneaky.

...or, better yet, convince another girl to pay for the privilege?

when your daughter grows up and leaves the house, can you just buy a new one?

then, there's this ad, which appears to be a "mom looking for daughter" ad.

it's too far from campus.

but, again - it's a real reflection of marketization. it's hard to know if this is an old mom that wished the experience wasn't so short, or a mom-that-never-was looking to skip the messy toddler phase and jump right to college (or fearful of the catastrophe of having a son...), but it's a marketization of parenthood, nonetheless - in a way that inverts the costs.

what is this ad really for? a roommate? or a partner?

if you open the ad up, it explains that she's looking for a bodyguard - and asking them to pay $50/week to be the bodyguard. even if you include rent, that's still only about $75/week paid out in exchange for a premium service.

of course, the sad reality is that this woman is almost certainly going to get raped by the person she's "hiring" for "protection".

but, what i find more interesting is placing something like this in the context of the marketization brought on by neo-liberalism - it is the conversion of what has generally been considered normal relationship duties into a service to be traded over a market.

i'm sorry, but i just honestly don't have a use for a phone.

- i don't have any friends.
- the only family i talk to is my ageing and increasingly out of it grandmother
- i don't have a job

but, more importantly is that i interact with the internet very actively - i don't consume media, i create it. so, i like things like keyboards and mice and big monitors.

a phone just strikes me as a computer with a really small screen and a very difficult data entry procedure. just a lot of headaches.

to an extent, is that kind of the point? to stop people from typing?

listen: i get that it might be, that a push to get people away from their keyboards and back to their idiot boxes might be in the interests of the elite. but, i'm just not going to do it. if they could somehow succeed in reducing the internet into a watching & listening experience, i'd get bored with it and tune out. i'd keep typing and just file it on my hard drive. or, maybe i'd just get back to recording...and reading actual books...

i don't pay for cable because i wouldn't watch it if i had access for free. and, as it is, i don't consume the media being pushed down - i'm not even aware of what most of it even is.

so, when i say that a phone is just an expensive paperweight, i actually mean it.

listen, nobody expects these third world countries to wake up tomorrow and be beacons of sexual freedom and gender & economic equality.

this is going to take a long time, and it's going to have to come from below.

but, the difference between russia and saudi arabia, or china, is that the russians are actually showing some progress. it's slow. and it's not monolithic; they're moving backwards in some areas. but, it's a start - and certainly far more promising than these other states.

and, i mean, it's not like they're screening for lesbians, right?

it's a silly argument.

i have not had sex with a woman (or at least i don't remember it...) in well over ten years, and it's not been due to lack of opportunity.

as mentioned: i would prefer my own space. but, i don't think there's anything subversive in applying and seeing what they say.

the place could very well be run by third-wave feminist post-grads that think the idea of a transwoman in the basement gives them street cred.

you just don't know until you ask.

another way for me to articulate this is that i have no interest at all in forcing myself into a room that i haven't been invited to be in; i don't want to be where i'm not wanted.

that doesn't mean i'm sanctioning those views. it just means it isn't a battle that has any upside in winning.

regarding applying to live in a "girls only" building...

well, i do identify as a girl.

however, i recognize that this is exceedingly complicated.

the fact is that i'd rather live by myself insofar as that is actually possible. but, i see these units open up from time to time that are essentially basement rentals, with access to the kitchen. regarding that kitchen access, i'll point out that i already own a microwave and could afford to get a small fridge in a big enough basement. i could quite easily organize my meals so that i only need very sporadic access to the kitchen. i pretty much require my own bathroom, though.

i wouldn't apply to a boys only space, because i wouldn't classify myself as a boy - that is not the correct place for me to live, if we must live in gender categorized dwellings. but, i have applied to live in girls' spaces before, and could very well do so again.

is it discrimination if they tell me i'm not a girl and therefore can't stay there? sure. but, i'm actually willing to accept this kind of discrimination as allowable. stated tersely, i would accept the right of cis women to erect cis-female-only spaces - to a caveat.

so, if a property owner decides she wants to split her house up into rooms and only rent to cis-femaless, and the cis-females that live there agree to that, i don't think i have any place arguing against it - that would be invasive on my behalf, because we're sharing parts of the residence. but, if a cis-woman owns an apartment building and decides she only wants to rent to cis-woman, i would consider that to be discriminatory, and argue she should be taken to the human rights tribunal - and that whether she's refusing to rent to me as a trans-woman or as a cis-male is secondary to the female-only policy. this idea would apply equally well to race or orientation or whatever else. and, i believe that the existing jurisprudence actually draws the line at pretty much this exact point.

so, while i'll sue the owner of an apartment building for refusing to rent to me because i'm trans, i do not feel the same animus towards somebody running a rooming house for girls - even as i don't feel any apprehension about applying as a trans-female.

subtle enough?

i just have enough empathy - and am perhaps girl enough - to be able to understand the situation from the other side. even as a transwoman, i might not feel comfortable living in a rooming house with a transfemale at a different stage of transition. i'm trying to avoid a property rights argument, because it's missing the point - it's more about freedom of association. what i think is that it should be up to the tenants.

but, the logic collapses as soon as you start talking about separate apartments - then i go back into trans-activism mode.

we're at a historic juncture where us-russian relations could be taking a turn for a major thaw, and the liberal prime minister of canada wants to start a war in ukraine because he thinks he's fucking rocky.

sacre-dieu; incroyable.

and, deeply embarrassing.

...and, unless they run a libertarian candidate in my riding, i think i decided to vote green in 2019 quite some time ago.

i suspect that the greens are better positioned than the ndp to pick up an anti-war vote, at this point.

whatever hawkish pro-war wing exists in the democratic party simply does not have a parallel in canada, where the liberals didn't just oppose iraq & vietnam but actually even opposed the first world war.

liberal voters in canada expect the party to pursue peace with russia and back efforts by the american president to reduce conflict.

he's going to get eaten alive for these words, by his own base of supporters.

because he thinks he's running for office in the united states...

his father was an important voice for denuclearization and global peace, and i'm frankly embarrassed for him that his son turned out to be a fucking idiot...

i am ashamed and astonished to hear this kind of extreme right-wing pro-war, jingoistic rhetoric from a liberal prime minister of canada.

the guy understands the world through a prism of sylvester stallone movies. he's a product of the american military-entertainment complex.

a dunce, basically.

and, the party needs to force him out before he completely obliterates them.

canada does not understand international relations like it's a rocky film or want to go back to the dangerous days of the cold war, and this man does not speak for this country.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-reacts-trump-putin-1.4749814

i am not a pot-smoking hippie that wants to jam with bongos in a van down by the river.

i am not a drunken frat boy metalhead looking to wow girls to get laid.

i'm not even a straight-edge punk looking to start a revolution (although i have stronger sympathies with this).

what i am is a studied jazz guitarist that writes some kind of classical music for consumption over headphones and wants to do so in a quiet, controlled environment.

and, my hair is long because i'm a girl - not because i'm a rock star.

if i wanted to be a dude guitarist, i'd cut my hair and join a punk band. but that's not what i want to be. at all.

in actual fact, i don't write, listen to or even have much respect for the type of music that is associated with heavy drug or alcohol use.

and, again, i've been very clear on this point for a long time: i am a nerd. i listen to nerd rock.

i know pretty much every genesis record inside and out, but i've never owned a metallica record, or even bothered to listen to one all the way through.

your distorted preconceptions are a consequence of your own refusal to listen, not of any inaccurate projection on my behalf. i was crystal clear. i really was.

i actually like the 40 degree heat, and am sad to see the heat wave go. at least it's still relatively warm.

so, i'm looking at listings that are proudly boasting central air, or working the a/c in the price and it's just like...i want to open the window in the summer, guys. i don't want your a/c.

it's not even an irrelevance. i explicitly do not want to live in an air conditioned space - and it's not a cost thing, i legitimately find the a/c uncomfortable, and the humidity very nice.

i've pointed out before that i'd really be happiest in a tropical rain forest. and, maybe the reason is because i have relatively near ancestors that lived in one.

i keep pointing out that i don't really know where my paternal grandfather was from, other than that he was dark skinned. but, a sleeper theory is that he may have been south asian because my dad had an unusual blood type.

my dad loved the extreme heat, as well.

i'm getting ahead of myself. i need to see what the pay out is first. and i need to have the money in my hands.

but, if this was just a few thousand dollars less, it would be workable.

and, note that it's also 1100+ square feet - about twice as big as i'd need.

if i can find an 1100+ square foot house for $40,000, can i find a 550+ square foot house for $20,000?

i'll keep an eye on it, but i don't think it's realistic just right now.

https://www.kijiji.ca/v-house-for-sale/windsor-area-on/spacious3-open-plan-bungalow-mobile-home/1368388853?enableSearchNavigationFlag=true

it looks like i'd have to move to thunder bay or sudbury or something, and that's...

i'm not ready, yet.

i want to finish the discography, first - so that when i make that move, i'm just bringing books.

there are empty lots for sale here for around $20,000.

and there are houses to be moved off of the land for around $10,000.

that's less than $40,000.

but, i'd have to find a way to cough up the cash to move it...

you know, i always expected i'd move to a cottage one say, once i got a little older and didn't care about the city life any more. and, that's what is available in this price range: cottages in the middle of nowhere.

i'm not there yet.

here's another crazy idea...

could i buy a house?

well, if i get a big enough payout, is that enough for a down payment?

i don't want a fancy place, i want an area that i can keep the smoke out of. and, one of these little houses i've seen come up for $650/month in rent is absolutely good enough.

it's probably not feasible. i'd have to sign a 50 year mortgage or something. but, what's the cheapest house here that i can find...

in america, you had chattel slavery; in canada, we had the underground railroad.

in america, you conquered and often slaughtered the indians as you moved west; in canada, we signed treaties with them (except in bc), offered them protection from american settlers & tried to make them more british through coercive assimilation policies. mirror reflection...

the general constant is that the basis of canadian civilization has largely been constructed in reaction to american civilization - less in terms of open opposition, but often in terms of learning from mistakes. so, in many ways, canada is america's sober second thought. and, that is the canadiana, the canadianism, the good governance of canadian history - that we pay very close attention to what america does, but we don't copy it the way a colony might, but rather understand the flaws and benefits and try and learn from and improve it via careful empirical analysis...

if we've strayed from this path recently, i can only suggest getting back to it.

of course canada shares a common history with the united states, but it's as reverse images of each other.

so, canada was initially a weakly populated french colony that was conquered by the british by accident. the british were colonizers in the true sense of the word, but the french were mostly interested in trading with the natives. so, the british created high density colonies and then expanded them, while the french scattered small trading communities at a day's travel distance from each other, from the mouth of the saint lawrence to the mouth of the mississippi - new orleans, st. louis, detroit, montreal...

when the british conquered canada in 1763 as a part of an unrelated conflict in europe, it was essentially handed over to the natives. it's not really clear if the british thought they'd seriously hold new france in the long run & the natives spent decades waiting for them to come back. but, for the purposes of our story, we have to point out that, in 1763, canada was almost void of british settlers - it was a french & indian colony, conquered in the french & indian war.

the first major movement of british citizens into canada actually happened between 1776 and 1793, as a consequence of the revolutionary war. so, while america fought a war for independence, canada inherited the loyalists - a shared history, but a mirror reflection.

the second major wave of immigration into canada came during the potato famine. given that the population of canada was very small at the time, this was a major event in our population history. in america, the irish were absorbed; in canada, they really changed the nature of the country. mirror reflections.

likewise, our constitution was written roughly contemporaneously to the american civil war, in the mid 1860s. confederation was 1867. and, we wrote our constitution to reject american governing traditions, because we fingered them as the cause of the civil war, which we didn't want. so, in canada, the division of powers is almost entirely reversed - and that's not an accident, it was done on purpose. the canadian framers believed that the cause of the american civil war was the constitutional protection of states' rights, and they made sure to keep it out of their own document because of it. mirror images.

and, i could continue, but i don't want to get too contentious by defining difference into the 20th century.

canadians don't broadly know the details, but we live the difference, intuitively. it's a true cultural, intergenerational memory in the sense that it's blurry in minutiae, but very real in broad scope.

the democrats seem to want to be the greater evil, all of a sudden, for some reason.

i don't get it.

but, so be it.

i don't know how we ended up in the surreal situation where senate democrats are more hawkish than the republican president, but i am in full support of disarmament (as i always have been), i have no interest in a war with russia and i do not believe that the democrats' shift towards the extreme right on this file is going to do anything besides accelerate their collapse in blue states.

every time i hear a democrat attack russia, i'm reminded of how much of a catastrophe clinton would have been on foreign policy if she had won.

the democrats should have an easy mid-term win in 2018, but they insist on running in favour of an insane conflict that nobody wants.

this can't happen.

especially not here.

it doesn't matter if it affects me or not, in the end.

my reaction is more as a trans-atheist activist than it is as somebody being denied housing.

again: i can't let this slide.

this needs to be cut out at the root.

i can take pictures.

film it.

maybe call the news?

one of these companies is advertising an open house on the weekend.

this is advertised on their website, on kijiji & elsewhere.

so, i sent a question about the open house, and they claimed there was no vacancy & consequently no open house.

i have screen shots of the ads. & i have emails claiming there's no vacancy & no open house.

so, when i show up there on the weekend, i'd better not find an open house.

if i do, i'll be launching litigation on monday.

islam is the new christianity.

i will be strongly proactive and exceedingly aggressive in fighting this.

i am an outspoken & unabashedly leftist indigenous queer person of colour on disability that has been speaking out against islam for years, under the concern that a society that normalizes islam would readily and perhaps even gleefully incinerate my rights, as it drags me out of my home and strings me up a tree.

and, i do believe that this is exactly what's happening with a number of these big rental companies.

i mean, i'm not sure what the precise reasoning is. is it my gender expression? my sexual orientation? the fact that i'm single? the fact that i'm an atheist? the fact that i'm disabled? my skin colour? my indigenous background? my politics? all of the above?

but, i don't have a choice but to prosecute anybody that is carrying out this kind of discrimination.

even if it does not directly harm me, monetarily.

even if the end result is that the company pays a fine rather than restitution.

this is exactly what i've been speaking out against, and i consequently must stand up for my rights.

i didn't want this fight, but i saw it coming, and i'm ready to fight it.

i repeat: liberals are supposed to hate the rentiers, to denounce them as idlers and thieves and insist they charge fair market prices.

today, they're just an accepted part of the bourgeoisie. granted..

...but, they were initially the singular problem identified by liberal economists, and attacked by liberal politicians. to a very large extent, the purpose of liberalism was initially to abolish the rentier class, who at the time were nearly exclusively tory.

that was the entire point of the theories devised by the likes of smith & ricardo: to abolish rentier capitalism.

it clearly hasn't worked so well. but it's useful to put what they intended to do in proper context.

so, there really shouldn't be anybody except tories arguing against going after people that are trying to inflate the rent; liberals are supposed to be virulently opposed to that.

what liberals and leftists are supposed to agree on is that the real public enemy is the rentiers.

property can be freedom, if you can find it, and it sustains - albeit at the expense of the freedom of others.

but, what i'm describing in both scenarios are examples where property is theft.

which is a reminder that property is an impossibility in a truly free society.

and, i do think that there's an issue in this city with chinese landlords refusing to rent to non-chinese people - as there is in pretty much all cities - and perhaps also, increasingly, with muslim landlords refusing to rent to non-muslims, which i would suspect is also pretty normal (even if the chinese dwarf the muslims in terms of populations, here, meaning it's much less visible, as of right now).

the chinese landlords just simply don't return my calls or messages.

these are difficult cases to prosecute on circumstantial evidence.

but, the only way that's going to stop is if people start suing them when they're sure of it.

a second factor that seems to be screwing up the market here is that a lot of the houses near the ambassador bridge seem to have been bought up by asians looking to rent furnished rooms to asian students.

and, they're explicit about it.

"looking for indian student to share room."

it's not like i want to share a room with an indian teenager for $200/month. that's not the point. the point is that the market has been flooded - there is currently a dramatic oversupply of furnished rooms for students. and, this is eating into the normal market.

again: these people will eventually give up. but, for now, a lot of them have 416 numbers, and seem to be operating with toronto mindsets and toronto prices. they're asking for too much money, trying to tap into a market for international students that largely doesn't exist.

the result is that we're going to have a lot of empty, furnished rooms in houses that would have held low income people up until a few months ago - and the city is continuing to broadcast a low income housing shortage.

there should be more strenuous rules around things like offering shared rooms, or converting apartments into rooming houses. or, at the least, they need to crack down on landlords that refuse to rent to non-students.

again: the market will eventually sort this out.

but, i now have 2.5 months.

so, when you see these cops in bc pushing around these indigenous groups for protesting these pipelines, this is legally not a lot different than israeli soldiers pushing around palestinian kids - it's an illegal occupation operating solely by physical force.

so, if the feds want to lay a pipeline from alberta to lake superior, they can use eminent domain (even in indigenous regions), run a bullshit consult process and be done with it, so long as they fight off the court challenge. they can do that because the area was ceded to the crown in the numbered treaties. these numbered treaties are contentious, but they do legally exist.

in british columbia, the land was never ceded to the crown, so eminent domain is illegal (although it does happen). the consultation process is not a rubber stamp, but a nation-to-nation dialogue about sovereign land rights. and, if the natives say "no", then the crown has no further authority - not under legislation, and not under a constitution that really shouldn't even be in force at all.

i'm taking things to extremes that they have yet to be taken to, but eventually must be taken to. and, i do suspect that it will be a resource conflict that eventually leads to constitutional collapse.

what legal basis does an unratified constitution have over an area that is being illegally occupied under international law?

we don't talk about this in canada. but, british columbia is really a special case.

a proper rule of law would immediately acknowledge that the tribes in british columbia should have full sovereignty. not even nisga'a sovereignty. absolute, full sovereignty.

they didn't sign anything. we didn't trick them into signing things, we didn't give them a bad deal - we just showed up and started building.

there is no legal reason why vancouver should be in canada.

it's a crisis waiting to happen.

i think i need a personal update.

i appear to have forgotten to mention that i finished rebuilding february, 2014 on the 10th; i think i thought i'd get through this fairly quickly, and not need to update. i guess i forget that i spent most of march with a broken recording machine. it was a heavy posting month. but it's done now...

how's the smoke? well, it has gotten dramatically better, but i wonder if the heat is a factor. the flip side of that is that the a/c might be off downstairs, which is a sign suggestive of the idea that she has left. that said, i've also been very ired this week for some reason, and my sweat smells alarmingly like marijuana. so, i don't know. it's weird all around, it really is.

i would expect that the posts will start to slow down again soon. i guess we'll have to see....

i'll need to stay in on monday because of the weird message about the electrical. i don't currently have any showings planned until saturday.

the constitution of canada itself, as it relates to british columbia, is actually only applicable on very shaky grounds, to begin with.

i would not expect the idea of a province of british columbia to exist long enough to make it to the next century.

this land does not belong to canada at all.

to put it simply, by what logic does the canadian government claim it has a right to build a pipeline through an area that never ceded it's sovereignty to it except the logic of sheer force overpowering legal and democratic legitimacy?

the only legal claim that canada has to british columbia is the 1763 proclamation.

british columbia is actually, legally speaking, a canadian military occupation of unceded territory.

http://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2014/03/this-particular-group-is-not-signatory.html

but, all jobs are bullshit jobs.

that's the fundamental point.

now you can disagree with me, but i keep telling you i'm a fucking anarchist....

well, let's forget about the silly religious nonsense for a second and ask a functional question: why do we dispose of dead bodies in such a wasteful fashion?

the reason is that we realized, apparently at some point very early on, that dead bodies can make us sick. we didn't come up with useful ways to understand this until the last century, but we realized that something about these dead bodies was causing us harm. so, we buried them, or we burned them.

even the zoroastrians, who insisted on feeding dead human bodies to wild animals, had the good sense to remove them from human contact by placing them on placards in the sky. a persian city in antiquity would have these fifty foot platforms with dead bodies on them, to be fed to eagles and vultures. gruesome, but arguably more holistic than cremation or burial.

now that we do understand this, why don't we adjust to it? because we also understand something else - all of that organic material is just going to waste inside of a metal coffin.

again: i'm not a utilitarian, but i think we need to be more rational about how we recycle human remains, and so there's something kind of inspiring about this.

http://www.critical-theory.com/jeremy-benthams-preserved-corpse-haunt-nightmares/

if the situation were reversed, and somebody asked me to smoke away from the window, i wouldn't just get up and move, i'd check in to see if i was far enough away. i would register that concern and respect the request not to smoke in their window.

because that's just what canadians do in that kind of situation.

that's the cultural expectation in this country.

it follows that the entire concept of "smokers' rights", while quite american, is really deeply uncanadian.

the canadian cultural norm is that smokers should be expected to move when told they're causing discomfort. because, that's just what we do, here, in canada.

speaking of differences between american and canadian culture, what i'm dealing with with these smokers is a good example of it, and i've pointed this out before.

i have a neighbour who is smoking near my window, and it is bothering me. there is no reason she needs to smoke near my window other than that she wants to. i have asked her to smoke elsewhere repeatedly, and done various things to chase her off, but she doesn't care: she's going to smoke where she wants.

i simply don't understand this. i don't understand why somebody would reject the requests of their neighbours like this, and the reason i don't understand this is that i was raised in a more canadian manner - while this person may very well have been born in the united states.

a typical canadian response to a situation like this is to understand that smoking beside the window is causing your neighbour discomfort and to get up and move. canadians are generally concerned primarily with politeness, and rational means of conflict resolution. we place a high importance on the concept of compromise and are often willing to bend over backwards to keep the peace.

a typical american response is to make up a right to smoke on their property (in fact, canadian jurisprudence does not recognize anything like a right to smoke in your yard, nor does it have any constitutional protections for property, but does uphold ideas like nuisance, trespass and enjoyment insofar as it recognizes the damage caused by second-hand smoke) and tell their "annoying neighbour" that they can do what they want and to fuck off. and, american jurisprudence may actually be sympathetic to this viewpoint, in ways that the canadian jurisprudence simply isn't.

what's going on in my backyard here is really more than a conflict over smoking, and that's why it's proving so difficult to resolve. this is a cultural conflict. as a canadian, i expect this woman to be a good neighbour and smoke away from my window and can't comprehend why she won't relent. but, as an american, this woman is obsessed with her imaginary property rights, and unable to understand how i have any say in the question of where she's smoking.

if i were to move back to ottawa...

i just spent an hour comparing, and the market might even be better in ottawa, right now. certainly, the advantage of relocation appears to no longer be apparent.

i have a long time before i need to take that idea seriously, and it relies on the premise that i get a large payout. but, how would i do it? is it feasible?

i guess i would sell as much furniture as i can and just ship back my electronics & books & clothes. that would avoid the need to hire actual movers; i could probably hire a taxi-van to get my stuff out in two or three trips.

i asked my aunt about this years ago, as she moved from ottawa to fernie, bc, and she said you can buy space in a train and have it shipped. i couldn't imagine another way to do it, short of convincing my mom to  take a road trip. and, if it's just gear and books, and a bicycle, how much could that cost? a few hundred dollars?

so, if i get a $4000 payout, and the market here doesn't open up...

i'd then hitch back to ottawa. or, maybe take a bus, if i feel like splurging. could i hitch with the train and be a real hobo for a few days?

i guess the next step would be finding a place in ottawa to store the gear. this entire scheme is going to rely very heavily on my grandmother. can i use her storage bin? can i sleep in her spare room?

so, i have an algorithm. let's see if the inputs pan out.

i just saw an ad for something that is very enticing in an area of ottawa that i like quite a bit. windsor, you're losing me, here...

i got a letter that the landlord is "doing electrical work" on monday.

i'm mildly concerned, yes. but, i know my rights.

this is just a friendly reminder that landlord interference with hydro or water in ontario is a felony that is potentially punishable by imprisonment.

Common offences under the Act

The following offences are reported most often:

For landlords:

• disconnecting or interfering with a vital service that the landlord is required to supply to tenants (e.g. heat, electricity, fuel, gas or water)
• failing to provide rent receipts to tenants who request them
• illegally evicting a tenant without following the eviction process
• failing to make a tenant’s belongings available within 72 hours of eviction
• collecting unlawful security deposits
• altering the locking system for a rental unit or residential complex without giving the tenant replacement keys
• providing false or misleading information in documents filed with the Landlord and Tenant Board.

http://www.mah.gov.on.ca/page142.aspx

i don't have time. i'm trying to plan a delicate move.

but, if necessary, i will send people to jail for their stupidity, and not think twice about it.

it was july 29th, 2013 that i signed a lease for my basement apartment, starting on august 1, 2013, after having reached an agreement, in principle, on the 26th.

i don't expect the situation to be much different: if i find something, it will be on the 25th or the 26th or the 27th.

....or even the 28th.

or the 29th.

let's hope it's not the 30th.

that's how this city works.

i've actually never bought anybody dinner before.

i've been on something like five dinner dates in my life, and it's actually very important to me that the bill is....it's less that i want to split it, and more that i want separate bills.

because, why the fuck would i buy you dinner?

buy your own fucking dinner...

i would have hoped that we would have raised our girls and women to look a weinstein in the eye and say "no, i don't want to.", get up and walk out - and then press charges for soliciting prostitution.

in a situation where a weinstein-type offers advancement in exchange for sexual favours, and an actress agrees, then the correct legal description of the situation is that the weinstein-type is soliciting prostitution from the actress, and the actress is consenting to the proposition.

so, we need to ask ourselves if this is permitted behaviour or not.

and, while i don't exactly like it, i'm not sure it should be illegal.

i actually don't think i've commented on this since some more information has come out.

frankly, with the weinstein case and other cases like it, there are two scenarios that need to be separated:

1) situations where he blocked entrances or otherwise prevented disengagement. he should be charged with rape in these circumstances.
2) situations where he coerced sex in exchange for favours. in these situations, what he is actually doing is soliciting prostitution. and, the women involved need to acknowledge that they engaged in a form of prostitution - they consented to sex in exchange for career advancement.

the idea that they were unable to consent due to a power imbalance is neither consistent with any kind of feminism i'm aware of nor coherent in the context of english legal traditions. it's some kind of application of foucault's theory of power, in a way that denies women basic agency - which would be expected of foucault, as he was not a feminist.

in the first situation, i support full prosecution. rape is never ok.

in the second situation, we need to ask ourselves whether we want to enforce laws against prostitution or not. is this a situation where women should be free to make this choice on their own, or should this be considered criminal behaviour? should we be prosecuting both sides of this, or focusing solely on the johns?

personally, this is the kind of prostitution that i'm broadly not opposed to, as there is largely a real choice involved. where i am opposed to prostitution is when it is a false choice - a choice between prostitution and paying rent, for example.

maybe a lot of dudes out there have bigger aspirations than just bringing home the bacon....

you just have to remember that the real bond of ownership is taxation, and the real people that own us - all of us, men and women together - are the people that tax us.

patriarchy is less a system schemed up by men to control women, and more a system schemed up by the state to ensure a steady stream of tax revenue.

abolishing patriarchy is consequently less about giving women freedom at the expense of men and more about giving serfs, peasants and slaves of both genders the freedom to define themselves in ways other than to maximize tax revenue for the elite.

i think it's a little bit of both.

these critiques are not new. greer & her colleagues made them themselves.

but, the flip side of this is a little bit of existential dread, and that's the idea i think should be focused more strongly on. the people that are using ad hominems and dismissive language aren't helping in developing an understanding of what's actually happening.

so, let's be blunt: is it possible that a big component of what's happening with young women right now is that they're rejecting the freedom their mothers won for them and longing for an era where they were less free? that they are looking over the precipice and suffering extreme anxiety from it?

i mean, you can frame it however you want, you can use whatever language you wish - but is that not the real crux of it?

these reactions are fine, even expected in a broader view of history, it would just be useful if these people would understand that they're standing up for conservative value systems and stop pretending otherwise...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/02/thats-patriarchy-how-female-sexual-liberation-led-to-male-sexual-entitlement

anarchists acknowledge the reality of dominance and hierarchy, but reject it's normality or inevitability, and instead seek to abolish it - which means we try hard not to live in it.

it's not enough to act at an atomistic level, but it's a necessary start.

actually, i think that feminism - which i define as the abolition of patriarchy - is also the emancipation of men.

feminism also means that men don't have the responsibility to take care of women any more. this is usually articulated in terms of women being autonomous, but these statements are equivalent, because it's the relation that is the enslavement: patriarchy enslaves men and women equally in a bond of dominance and servitude to produce offspring to be taxed by the lords.

i don't fit into either side of this equation. i once told the only partner that i've ever had that i didn't own her and didn't want to own her, and she took it as an insult. she came to me to talk about a life decision once, expecting me to make it for her, and i just refused to do it - i told her she had to make that decision herself. i mean, we talked it through and stuff, but i made it clear that it wasn't my choice, and i didn't want it to be my choice. she just looked at me like i was hopelessly queer, which is what i told her from the start and what she'd spent the last two years denying - she wanted an alpha male to make decisions for her, and was just turned off when i refused to be that. but, broadly speaking, i haven't spent my life within or trying to escape from this relation, but just avoiding it altogether.

regardless, i think this discussion is often lost. men aren't losing control, so much as they're gaining the freedom of escaping from the role of being the controller. and, when you really understand that, you don't need to talk about "male allies to feminism", you can understand that they're being equally emancipated and equally benefiting from the collapse of the relation.

it's typical of capitalism to set everything up as a zero sum game. but, if that's how you're seeing gender equality, you're not really grasping it properly - and maybe you're not truly accepting it.

if i ever find me pot of gold, i'm going to buy that whole intersection.

my last name is parent & i'm from ottawa.

so, i kind of feel like i should live at the intersection of ottawa & parent...

when i was in ottawa, there was an intersection of parent & murray and i've always regretted not living there.

if you're pro-capitalist then you are, by definition, not a leftist - a leftist is an anti-capitalist, by definition. you can be a wide variety of things on the left, but a capitalist is not one of them.

so, you can call yourself a liberal or a progressive or a conservative or a moderate or whatever other right-wing ideology you'd like, but you need to stop pretending you're left of centre - because you're really not.

the only way i'm able to interpret the labour market is as something you're forced to do to pay rent.

so, my goal, then, is to minimize the amount of time wasted - not maximize the "reward" i'm able to extract.

the only difference between being a teacher and being a janitor, to me, is that teachers have longer hours, and therefore less freedom. so, i'd rather be a janitor...

when i look at the labour market, i'm not looking for something "rewarding".

i guess i don't even think it's even possible - which is the basis of my rejection of labour.

so, people run statistics off about "rewarding labour", and i'm not really able to extrapolate an actual job title from that.

for example, i would consider teaching to be monotonous and degrading - really, anything with kids sounds like hell. is that a "rewarding job"? i don't think so...

i studied computer science for a while thinking it would at least be stimulating, but the actual job that programmers do is incredibly repetitive. likewise, what i learned from studying law is that it's 99% lying and utter bullshit, which is pretty much the opposite of what i'd consider "rewarding".

to me, the most rewarding job is the one i have.

it'd just be nice if there weren't fucking rentiers getting in the way of everything.

i just feel like life is too short to waste working and raising a family.

and, i know i'd be very unhappy with a routine and a schedule and monotony.

i mean, there's pages and pages and pages here written on the topic...i don't think i could be more clear than i have been....

i applied for a cashier job the other day out of curiosity.

that is the first time i've applied for a job since 2008.

i'm neither white, nor am i male, nor am i interested in finding a job.

i was in a relationship many years ago, but i've literally never asked anybody out on a date before. ever. further, i prefer men to women.

i walked out on the only girl i've dated because i did not want to have children with her.

the issues i've had are related less to being unable to exist in a field and more to being unable to maintain interest in one. i did not want to be a mathematician, so i switched to computer science; i didn't want that, so i switched to law; i didn't want that either and just focused on music.

my interests for many years have been on working on my art projects, not on finding a job.

nor have i ever voted for anybody on the right, or done anything but criticize right-wing politicians. i explicitly endorsed hillary clinton, and i voted for justin trudeau. i voted for kathleen wynne a few times, and for the green party this year.

i've been as clear as i possibly can be that i'm a revolutionary leftist that seeks full emancipation through automation and redistribution - and that, as such, like all leftists, i understand that my single biggest opponent is religion, first and foremost.

you can save your pseudo-analysis for somebody else.

we need to turn the latin american refugees into an army of inigo montoyas.

and, tell these gangs to prepare to die.

so, what do we do with all of these people?

broadly speaking, i don't think that most of them have valid claims. this is a fundamentally different issue than what the united states is seeing on it's own border. what the americans need is a good neighbour policy, to get to the root causes of all of the migration out of the area. in the short term, i'd like to see them convert the migrants into a peasant army and send them back to fight the gangs.

well, i mean, that's what the british did when people started escaping the continent - they armed them and sent them back. i understand that the ameicans are at the root of the problem, but if the migrants don't fight the gangs in central america, who will? and, why do we seem to think it's ok that nobody is fighting them?

the issues we're dealing with on our border are nothing like this, they're a mixture of desperation and hysteria. and, you need to kind of look at the issue, one by one.

regarding the haitian immigrants, i find it disturbing that trump is ordering them out - these are people that fled a catastrophe and have built new lives in a different country. but, the argument that they should be allowed to stay in america doesn't generalize to being allowed to stay in canada. they were brought to america as guests, and deporting them is inhumane and unjust, true; however, fleeing to canada doesn't fundamentally change the injustice of deporting them. the argument is that they have jobs and families in america. do they have jobs and families in canada? most of them don't. and, while i acknowledge that they have a right to trial, i do think that the end result in almost all cases should be to send them back to haiti. i may not like the administration's decision, but it is not canada's responsibility to step in and offer a consolation prize; the immediate danger to them has passed, so they should go home and help their country rebuild. in the mean time, they should be housed on the border in as humane conditions as are possible.

i don't know how accurate the anecdotes about migrants from nigeria or pakistan are, but these are more traditional claims, and need to be treated as such. i do understand that some of these people are fleeing actual violence, but the vast majority of them are economic migrants and should be sent back, at their own cost. under normal circumstances, i may be less inclined to insist on housing at the border, but the situation right now is extreme, and extreme measures need to be taken to address it.

and, insofar as whatever latin american refugees that appear on our border are concerned, i do believe that they should be sent back from here as well - with whatever help we can give them to fight the scourge that has driven them out. i want to be in solidarity with these migrants. it's just not sustainable to absorb them; it makes more sense to help them fight back. or, to put it another way: viva la revolucion.

i'm a leftist, not a liberal. i can only explain this plank by plank, i guess. maybe, i might even convince you...

i would actually like to hear the ndp sound a little more like jeremy corbyn on the topic.

well, i'm actually going to argue that my position on immigration is not right-wing, but unabashedly marxist - and that this is a good example of where liberals and leftists disagree. it's also just about the only thing that trudeau is really even a liberal on; he's a moderate conservative on everything else.

so, i'm once again arguing on the left of the liberals....but, that's ok - it's the ndp that are weird here, spectrum-wise.

regardless, nobody is 100% this or that, and you'll find plenty of liberals that lean to the right on immigration - as well as plenty of conservatives that lean to the centre. that's not where my head is, but that's the reality. and, so maybe the more important thing i'm pushing back on regarding spectrum politics is the idea of this as a ballot issue.

so, i'm not a liberal that's leaning right on immigration - i'm a leftist that is taking a pretty textbook marxist position on it, even if that's rare amongst leftists nowadays (who tend to be liberal on immigration,). i'm weird because i'm not mixing spectra - i'm weird because i'm ideologically pure on the point. but, if i was a liberal leaning right on immigration, i wouldn't see it as a ballot question.

if i disagree with doug ford on a hundred things, and agree with him on one (even though that's not actually even true, here - our positions are not at all the same.), i'm not going to ignore the hundred things and vote for the one. that would be rather foolish.

and, it would be just as foolish for you to define me that way, if it were even true in the first place.

the value that the canadian immigration system is built around is that you should not be discriminated against while demonstrating your worth to the country.

so, you should be judged based on your abilities and talents, not by your nationality or race.

who is better upholding that idea, here?

sadly, it seems to be the tories.

what is uncanadian is a wide-open immigration policy.

and, it is uncanadian precisely because it is so intrinsically american.

canada is twice the size of the united states and has a tenth of the population.

it's understood that the weather has a little bit to do with this - it's cold here. that's true.

but, this is largely a reflection of the historical differences in immigration policy.

the united states let anybody and everybody in. we did things differently.

we have both provincial and municipal levels of government indicating that we do not have the resources available to handle what is happening at the moment.

this is not a debate about values, it's an empirical question.

what tory should do is broadcast media images of refugees sleeping on the street, while canadians are turned away from the shelters due to crowding, and let the federal government deal with the fallout - both internationally and, increasingly, domestically.

historically, canada has been a very hard country to cross into.

we didn't accept huddled masses yearning to be free - we subjected them to rigorous screening. this rigorous screening is what defines canadian values on the topic, not wide open borders.

perhaps hussen has his history confused, and is thinking of the united states when he imagines canada as an asylum for refugees - and perhaps what he meant to say was that mcleod is being unamerican.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/07/13/lisa-macleod-ahmed-hussen-ontario-asylum-seekers_a_23481772/

islam is a hetereopatriarchal, pro-capitalist, propertarian system of thought that keeps people in line through an elaborate hierarchy and a ruthless system of enforcement.

it is christianity on steroids; it is everything the left opposes.

it is the status quo. and, these people will align with the status quo.

that is the premise of the neo-liberal doctrine.

so, i mean, you can sit there and be a pro-muslim liberal if you want - you're just a status quo bourgeoisie. fine.

but, you can't do this, from the left - you're just stuck in a mess of contradictions.

maybe what's about to happen in the campaign to bring back sex ed will get some people to wake up...

meanwhile, i'm looking for a sufficiently sized smoke-free apartment that i can afford and would request that people understand what i'm typing in this space if they're going to react to it.

and, all those apartments available for august 1st better not still be available on august 2nd, lest some human rights complaints appear with a zealous vengeance.

the conservative party will trot a white face out to announce it's policies, and pretend that it's catering to a christian base that is, in actual truth, dwindling to the point of near extinction.

and, our tepid media will parrot the point, cowering in fear of being labelled critical of islam.

but, anybody paying the slightest bit of attention to the issue knows the reality: in getting the sex ed curriculum reversed, muslims in ontario just scored their first major victory under the new government.

and i can only continue to plead my case until it is acknowledged as correct.

do you realize that something like 70% of the homeless people in our society are queer?

it is 2018, and activists in ontario now have to re-win a debate over whether sexual identity and gender identity are appropriate topics to teach to children.

that's absurd.

all of the progress we had on this topic is now gone.

and, the reason we are faced with this absurdity, the reason we have to fight battles we've already won, is that we let in too many refugees with right-wing attitudes, and they've overwhelmed us in terms of voting numbers.

this is going to keep happening if we don't take steps to address the imbalance we're continuing to create.

and, it is the most vulnerable people in our society that are going to suffer the consequences of this.

we need to face the facts and adjust to them.

if you introduce hundreds of thousands or even millions of religious conservatives into a secular liberal democracy., it's not going to be a liberal democracy much longer - because those religious conservatives will use the democratic (and non-democratic) institutions to enforce their religious beliefs, thereby overwhelming the secular institutions.

this is not an argument about race.

this is an argument about religion.

and, all you're doing is proving my point for me.

i warned people that this would happen.

i stood up against it...

you told me i was being alarmist.

and now it's happening.

and you don't even realize it.

so, is the right-wing's latest excuse to attack queer people that they refuse to be erased by the religious views of conservative immigrants?

my argument against immigration from socially conservative societies is that it will/would strengthen the socially conservative movements that exist in this country, and lead to me being attacked, demeaned and discriminated against. i'm in an exceedingly vulnerable group that is only beginning to win rights in this society, so i need to be exceedingly pro-active about being attacked, and very pre-emptive about identifying threats to my well-being.

and, what exactly is happening to me, right now?

huh?

some of you are evil, and i can't get anywhere with you.

but, i reiterate the claim that a lot of you are beyond fucking naive about this, and repeat the claim to look at the actual evidence in front of you and pull your heads out of your asses.

i'm still just embarrassed.

ontario just literally set the clock back 20 years on sex-ed, and is now trying to stamp out renewable energy.

i'm not mad yet. i'm not upset. i'm really just embarrassed.

and, i think that this is going to carry on for quite a while, still.

the ignorance is just astounding.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/ontario-government-cancels-758-renewable-energy-contracts-says-it-will-save-millions-1.4012450

california.

new york.

british columbia.

you paying attention?

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/ford-repealing-sex-ed-curriculum-to-please-social-conservatives-horwath-1.4012116

if i lose my studio, i will have nothing left to lose - and nothing left to gain.

so, how do you "fix" me?

you don't.

you fix society - and, realize i don't seem so nuts anymore.

...or you just let me live in my head.

i'm not a willing participant.

i'm a very different person than i was fifteen years ago.

at the time, i was still looking to experiment. i thought i had a good understanding of myself, but i wasn't sure. and, i learned a lot of things about who i am and what i want.

today, i know what i want, and i know that what i want is a solitary existence. i know that i'm not interested in exploring my sexuality any further, and i know that i'm going to respond violently to anybody that pushes the point.

you can listen to me and help me find a nice, isolated place where i don't have to socialize with people....or we can do this the hard way and leave a trail of frustration, tears and carnage on the way to me getting what i want - or dying trying.

i need privacy. space. alone time. isolation.

if i end up in a rooming house, i'm not going to make friends, i'm going to make enemies.

i repeat: i have absolutely no intention of living in a rooming house.

i'm not a well adjusted young person looking to leave a cool, hipster lifestyle with lots of friends.

i'm a middle-aged hermit with extreme psychological conditions that make socializing almost impossible.

so, i'm not calling people in rooming houses and i'm not considering the possibility.

worst case scenario, i would prefer to sleep in a storage bin and spend my days in the library until something comes up.

as with working, trying to coerce me into that kind of situation is a waste of everybody's time.

i'm not going to eat during normal hours. in fact, forcing me to live with other people would quickly lead me into a schedule where i sleep during the day so i can avoid people during normal hours. i would tend to eat at 3:30 am..

...and not leave my room during normal hours.

if the other tenants are socializing or having a party, i'm going to sit in my room with the doors closed.

if people try and hit on me, i'm going to yell at them.

i just simply don't want to be around other people in my living arrangements.

i am more likely to kill myself than consent to moving into a rooming house with strangers.

it's simply not a realistic option.

a pardon for latimer is tricky, as there are certain aspects of the case that indicate foresight. the problem here is clear intent, and the law doesn't tend to forgive that when the consequences are so severe. the pardoner may be less interested in these details.

but, for these reasons, a retrial is not worthwhile; whatever the merits (or lack thereof) of his actions, he admitted to a first degree murder, and there just isn't room for free speech, there.

i'd like to see arguments. it's one of those things where the reasons are more important than the outcome.

i don't want the kind of landlord that's going to interpret litigation as something to be afraid of.

i want the kind of landlord that's going to look at the order, understand i was right to make the claim and help me out of a bad situation.

i'm really hoping the order comes in soon, because i'm going to need to show it to people when they ask for references.

i mean, generally, one uses their existing landlord as a reference, with the premise being that the existing landlord has good judgement. i'm going to understand why they're going to not want to give me a good reference, that's fine, i'm not going to argue the point. but, the argument i'm going to have to make is that the court found them negligent.

so, they can claim i'm the tenant from hell if they want, but the fact is that the court ruled in my favour, so clearly their perception is flawed - it is rather the case that this is the landlord from hell, and that the property is terribly managed.

and, this is what the court does - it gets in between these matters.

i'm sure i'll run into people that are likely to take the landlord at face value and ignore the court, or even interpret the court ruling with disdain; i should interpret that as a red flag, and these kinds of managers as people i don't want to rent from...

i have time.

i can wait.

i need to be aggressive when i see an end point, though.

assad was in the process of stepping down when the saudis invaded by stealth, with the attempt to prevent the transfer of power to a constitutional republic.

the propaganda around syria is really absurd; you have been fed a fantasy reality, and most of what you believe is probably false.

while the saudis ended up losing this war, largely because the turks pushed them back, the chaos in syria prevented assad from stepping down.

if the war is coming to an end, it is reasonable to assume that assad will quite quickly put in place the transfer of power that the war was intended to prevent - this time with russian protection.

so, if your primary consideration was the removal of assad, the russian victory will facilitate this, rather than prevent it.

sobriety is pretty cool.

you should give it a try.

and, the first step is admitting that you have a problem.

listen.

i'm going to acknowledge that it's very unfortunate that the industry has created this class of drug addict that has been taught to deny their addiction, under the cover that it's not actually a drug but a medicine.

this is the kind of denial of reality that we generally associate with joining a cult - which is the argument i'm going to make for the human rights commission if i have to do it. it really is. there really is a kind of "cult of pot".

well, that's pretty human really - i've argued that much of religion is a ufo cult, but the other dominant component of religion is drugs. the dominant christian ritual appears to have come from a greek wine cult - a 'mystery religion', perhaps that of dionysus - where one is initiated by getting shit-faced. as religion becomes more conservative and institutionalized, it tends to drop these associations, which appear to be deeply indigenous. rainforest tribes tend to centre their religion around psychedelic use. it's kind of a human universal...

so, it's unfortunate.

but, its not the first time this has happened in human history. and, we need a public education program that stops this absurdity in it's tracks, reverses it and teaches people that it is wrong.

that is going to be hard for some people, but sometimes the best medicine is tough medicine, right?

further, i've always argued that habitual smokers ("potheads") are in fact drug addicts and do in fact need counselling.

i support legalizing the recreational use of marijuana in a social setting.

i categorically reject the medicalization of marijuana.

and i strongly oppose smoking either marijuana or tobacco in any sort of enclosed area, whatsoever.

fucking loser...

i bet she's watching friends.

smoking drugs in your apartment by yourself is not "cool".

it's just about the fucking lamest thing that a person can possibly do.

why would i want to be stoned, in my apartment, by myself, at 10:00 pm on a thursday night?

but, i am. against my will. in violation of the security of my person. in contravention of my basic rights as a human being.

if that sounds like "fun" to you, you need a psychiatrist. it's hellish.

all i can do is drink coffee and hope something acceptable comes up soon.

this is going to be a frustrating night.

and, as soon as i post, she starts blazing again.

ugh.

on second thought, i do think she's still down there, because the air conditioner is still in, and i can smell what i think is third hand smoke.

seriously.

it's kind of a measure of how much this woman smokes that i can smell her coming in from downstairs. it's more of a measure of how bad the floors are, though.

the third hand smoke is dangerous, still - but it's not getting me stoned, at least.

if i could pull out a pay check and transport myself somewhere else, i'd be gone by now.

i don't care about money. i don't care about "winning".

but, i don't have the resources to do that, so they're going to have to pay for their negligence in helping me get out of this place.

there is no question that the ideal outcome of the previous move would have been to stay here; i'll take the payout in lieu of it, but what i really want is stability.

that's clearly not an option, as i'm being bombarded with smoke from every direction and nobody seems to care.

so, i have to make the best of a bad situation and accept compensation for negligence; but, sure, i'd rather people weren't negligent, and i'd rather people were respectful of my rights to breathe carcinogen-free air and not get randomly stoned when i'm trying to read. yeah. sure. that's too much to ask of these people, apparently.

but, i can't repeat the same mistake of moving into a smoky apartment, either.

in the end, i'm not concerned about "winning". this isn't a game. there aren't "winners" and "losers" in most things in life, that's a bunch of fucking neo-liberal stupidity, there are compromises and consequences and adjustments and settling for reality.

and, what i want is stability, at some point, in the end.

if they want to be stupid about it, i should get interest on top of it, in the end, too.

i've stated before that i don't really expect this company to actually pay me the court's order.

and, so, maybe i should take the fact that the market is so slow with a bit of positivity - as, if i'm here until october, it will at least help me recoup two months rent.

....because the court order will surely allow me to withhold rent until the debt is paid down.

that is obviously not what i want. i want to be gone on august 1st, and send the company to collections if they won't pay. 

but. the other upside of this possibility is that it will allow me to move immediately, which is what the market seems to want. if i don't pay rent for august, i won't have to wait until september to move, because i won't have already paid rent for august. and, they can try and sue me on a per-day basis in the end if they want, but they'll have a hard time winning that argument if they're in arrears, and that would be preferable to paying the whole month, in the end.

people want to believe in backwards republican economics, so what they're doing is inflating a bubble via unjustified "consumer confidence".

it has nothing to do with global trade. investors really, honestly believe in the economy right now. somehow, trump is a great salesperson for financial stability.

...because most people are complete fucking idiots. you really can't understand the situation in any other terms.

you can't create money and destroy money at the same time, that's a contradiction.

it's a bubble that should have burst by now. i'm surprised it's taking this long, but so be it. and, we'll see how long it takes, in the end. but, understand this - the longer it takes, the worse it ends up.

you can't destroy money and create money at the same time.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-stock-markets-next-step-could-be-its-most-pivotal-2018-07-12

this just isn't that kind of site.

if you thought i was interested in posting about thai boys, you had me all wrong.


sorry.

i strongly suspect that the pothead just moved out.

if true, now what?

i don't want to waste energy or expend thought at work.

i want to save it for the discography.

so, what kind of jobs would i apply for?

- cashier jobs
- survey jobs

basic, entry level stuff that requires no energy, no thought, no effort.

...although, i don't want to work in fast food, it's too draining.

no, i need to be clear.

if i'm going to take a job, it's because i don't have another choice. if there was any way out...

so, i'm not looking for advancement.
i'm not looking to "climb my way up".
i'm not looking to save for retirement.
and, i'm certainly not looking to get off of odsp.

i'm just looking to minimize the amount of time i have to waste as a slave, for the shortest amount of time possible.

it's just a trick for the rental applications. 

i would turn down a promotion if offered.
i would reject full time hours.
i will not attend social gatherings with staff.
i will not socialize with staff on breaks.

it's just in & out with the least amount of energy expended possible - the bare minimum.

because i don't want to be there. at all.

but i understand that we have to do things we don't want to, sometimes.

i just want to stress the have to. as in - being forced to. being coerced to. against my will.

& until i don't have to, any more.