is this iran fiasco serious?

the russians are there. this isn't granada, it's not even iraq. it's a potentially wwIII starting situation.

so, why is the coverage so middle of the road? why aren't people freaking out? and, you can make an argument for desensitization, but i don't actually think that most people are taking them seriously - not viscerally, not deep down, not in their gut. we seem to collectively know this is theatre.

i don't think that the americans are that crazy. and, let's be clear, here: an american attack on iraq would put them into the same category of rogue state as the worst basket-cases on the planet. they could find themselves losing long term allies, stuck on a thousand foot pier out to nowhere with this israeli noose tied around their neck. the world will rally around the defense of iran.

but, trump needs a bad gay that he can play toy soldier with - and one that's willing to play along.

but, what if i'm wrong? or what if somebody fucks up?

then, you're looking at a multitheatre event open up overnight.

so, am i getting better?

it's not clear.

i'd say it's more like i'm riding a wavefunction in and out of reality - i'm getting better and worse and then better again. whether i'm reacting explicitly to the smoke or the enclosed air is sort of moot at this point, as i'm getting clear cause and effect around the pressure in my head with the bathroom fan. there seems to be something building up on that side, and i do in fact think that it's smoke.

so, i cleaned the bedroom fan out; you know how they get. it was long overdue. it should stop me from tiping over, anyways.

i don't know if i'm going to stay up or not, but it seems unlikely just right now. the literature is keen to point out that these migraines are not like strokes, but tell that to my body, which seems to think it just had one. it's just constant tiredness...

my mind isn't tired. i want to do something, anything. but, my body is so overwhelmed that i don't think there's any other option.

so, i guess we'll try again in a few hours....

so, that was the week from hell.

what can i do besides pick back up from where i was?

i'm still at less than 100% following those migraines. these were serious events, really, and i t could take more than a week to sleep them off. but, you can't sleep forever....

i'm going to take a little nap, get something substantive to eat (i had a lot of fruit today, but my stomach appears to want pasta) and then try to get back to work after.

that may be a little obtuse on the hustings.

i predict we will eventually descend to the point where something like dipshit don enters somebody's stump speech. wait for it.

i already gave you a nickname for trump.

don the coyote.

they call him that because he's quick-witted, which he has to be as he fights off environmentalists, and their damned windmills.

while i grew up around it, and consequently have experiences to share with talking to addicts, i actually have little positive to say about the aa/na system. if anything, i think it fed into a cycle of guilt and dependency that kept my mother reliant on it. but, there's a false dichotomy out there that forces you to choose between the "scientific" ideas of harm reduction and the "religiosity" of abstinence.

in fact, the science upholds abstinence as the preferable approach to actually eliminating addiction, but in order to really utilize the fact, it would have to be separated from the cult that is the minnesota model.

i tried to get her to go to science-based addictions counseling, but it's underfunded and kind of obscure. to a lifelong addict, aa is a social club. you meet friends, you find partners - it's a community, and in fact is not unlike a church. whatever it's defects, it has that.

think of it like this: aa is the social network that nobody really likes but everybody knows everybody is on, so it's hard to get off of it, even if you know the other platforms are way better. so, you need mass migration in order for it to work.

but, why?

maybe he's a little embarrassed.

so, after pointing out that turning off the fan gave me hemiplegic migraines on both sides of my body and i was going to turn it back on, the property owner comes back down to talk today, insisting i'm nuts and i should turn it back off. he had a hard time believing that second-hand smoke could trigger migraines, which is in fact widely known and understood. it's a primary trigger.

legally speaking, the fan is in my space. the hydro is in my name. i can run the fan where and however the fuck i want, and it's his prerogative to make whatever adjustments if he doesn't like it

but, i'm trying to be reasonable, here - both as a legal formality and as a human thing to do. so, i consented to a second experiment....

we at least agreed that the fan is only going to work on the side of the apartment with the bathroom, which he seemed to think was less profound than it is. sure, that's not the whole apartment; it is half of the apartment, and the half i eat and clean myself in. there's good reason to want to pull any bad air out of there. but, the fact is that i spend my time typing and reading and sleeping in the other side of the apartment, which is far more of my time. so, i volunteered downgrading to a table fan in the other room for now, and seeing what kind of effect it had.

i was still recuperating from two major migraine events in what was then the last 24 hours, so i went back to sleep. i'm expecting to start hacking when i get up in a few minutes to eat, but we'll see. i think i can smell it seeping in, already....

he swears up and down he isn't smoking, and, as mentioned, i'm not going to get into an argument with him without being able to reference any kind of proof. that's pointless. but, he didn't seem baked today, and i think i'm starting to piece together a story.

when i moved in here, he had a 9-5 job as an auto-mechanic of some sort. so, he'd leave early and come home late; it's fine, i'm quiet. he'd go away for long weekends, too. in fact, he mentioned he was rarely home, and that was kind of a part of the agreement - he wanted somebody that would be home most of the time, because he wasn't going to be. fair enough.

canada legalized marijuana at the end of october, 2018 and his habits started to change rather dramatically. he started skipping days - he claimed he got migraines, albeit not the crazy ones i get, and with the air quality around here it's easy to believe, even if i hadn't had one before yesterday. then, he seems to have stopped going to work altogether. his hours of awakeness shifted. he seemed to spend days or weeks inside....

the fact is that you can get addicted to aspirin if you try hard enough, but it is broadly understood that marijuana is not habit forming and is of least concern to recovering addicts or people with addictive personality types, except in the sense of being a gateway back in. now, this is a different idea than you hear with kids, which i agree is nonsense. but, have you spent time talking with addicts? my mother is a heroin addict and an alcoholic who has been on methadone for what is now decades, and i used to go to meetings and get-togethers with her and her second husband, who she met through aa. addicts will tell you themselves that what industry reps call "harm reduction" is not an effective means to wean people off of drugs, even if it's an effective way to reduce secondary costs associated with drug use. you can't give a heroin addict a joint and tell them to chill out; the weak marijuana high just triggers them into wanting a stronger opiate high, and they can't stop until they get access to it. so, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of addiction to think you can replace something stronger with something weaker. addicts go from stronger to stronger to stronger to death.

my thought was that maybe he went and bought a few grams and got thrown back into something else. certainly, something happened last fall.

the way he's describing it is that he was being over-prescribed for depression (he didn't specify the drug), and he claims he stayed home for months because he couldn't deal with the doses. he was afraid to drive, specifically. the medication was making him stoned, apparently. it was a kind of mea culpa in code.

he claims he's ok, now. and, indeed, he's been back to work this week. 

i'm not here to lay out a punishment for the guy, but i'm going to take what he said as a confession and a statement of intent that things will get better. and, i'll have to measure how things progress from here.

the fan was a mild concession. i'll probably clean it today, regardless, and work it in to my monthly cleaning routine, and we'll see how loud it gets once it's fixed up a bit.

yeah, well, my sunday school would be full of greek philosophy, not psychobabble from the mythological jesus.

i don't even know. they threw me out.

you get the point.

unlike elizabeth warren, john bolton doesn't seem to have gone to sunday school.

he never learned the lesson in the boy that cries wolf.

long wars are long.

deep down underneath his actually quite recent steely resolve lies putin the pussycat, remember.

so, might he make a deal with the donald on venezuela? would america leave ukraine, in return?

he is quite a naive man, convinced that russia and america can be friends, despite this 1500 year old civil war.

the russians should not move on this, not even one inch to the east.

and, they will regret it if they do.

i went for some groceries today and had migraine number three click in right before i left. so, i was kind of grouchy.

regardless.

if you're wondering why i told some christians that approached me in the parking lot to fuck off, it's because they were christians, and that's what i always do when christians approach me.

i will make it a point to tell them to fuck off the next time they approach me, too.

#fuckchristians

yeah, but they talk about this like nobody's actually reading it.

i don't actually even see the utility of sanders winning if it's not policy-driven. it might even be counter-productive, if you just get a backlash to it. if there's some gulf between reality and perception here, the focus should be turned back on voter education.

i guess this goes back to being an anarchist: the movement is more important than the people in it, and if it's a sham then you need to pull the deck and start over again.

revolution is perpetual, and destruction is never negative; you have to destroy to rebuild.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/05/14/biden-needs-to-be-challenged-by-someone-other-than-sanders/

what i heard was that she decided to speak at a sunday school class, instead.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/14/elizabeth-warren-fox-news-town-hall-1320068

would i take drugs for the headache, which is what i suspect this is actually about?

i've denied atavan. i've denied t3s. i wouldn't accept marijuana in smoked or pilled form as a prescription, under any scenario. so, it's extremely unlikely.

i might take an aspirin once in a while, but i'd actually rather avoid it.

in fact, this is the kind of thing that i'm straight-edge about, more so than moderate recreational use. i don't want the dependency, and i don't see any reason to think i can't control this environmentally, as i haven't had difficulties doing this previously.

so, if my choice is between taking migraine drugs, whatever they are, and moving somewhere else, i'd rather move somewhere else.

i'm of the belief that i need more air flow in the basement, not more drugs to compensate for it.

i was still tired when i finished eating, so i took a nap, and i woke up to another splitting headache. my attempt at a shower led to another hemiplegic moment, although this time on the other side of the body. it didn't make it all of the way up my left side, but it's kind of a scary thing to have happen in the shower.

so, i've had migraines on both sides of my body in the last 24 hours, after turning off the fan on request.

his concern seemed to be not wanting to replace the device, but the basement air is clearly making me sick, whatever the cause. i mean, that might not even be smoke - and i haven't really smelled smoke in the last little bit., although i've been sleeping, too.

i've set up a box fan beside my bed for now, instead. if that works, great. if not, i'll have to turn the fan back on - and i'll have to plan to get out of here.

i still think the onset was so sudden that it must have been a shift in magnetism, but i don't think stale basement air is an unsurprising cause of headache, either.

the fact is that i'm till tired and am going back to sleep. i just wanted to check the weather, and they seem to have balanced it back out again. hooray.

i don't know how you fault me for this.

i did my due diligence....

but, people fucking suck. and, that's life, and you have to deal with it.

the smoke seemed to clear out for the weekend, only to come back in on sunday night - and i forced myself to go to sleep early on sunday, when it did. i was up on monday morning, feeling better, but skeptical.

it was ok for the day, but came in in the afternoon, so i had to make a complaint, finally, in the form of an email, which i'm going to withhold for the moment. the property owner showed up at my door a few hours later, red-eyed and adamant that nobody was smoking pot.

yet, he was clearly stoned, himself, at the time of denial.

what am i supposed to do? argue with him? he's obviously full of shit, and not willing to budge on it. people don't care about truth anymore; they'll lie to your face and make fun of you for believing it. but, there's no meaningful arbiter, here, no point in the debate. i'll keep the arguments for the judge, if i have to.

i don't want to go through this again; that's why i took so long to say something. the letter simply made the nature of the complaint clear and hoped that he would rectify the problem, however he may. but, the bottom line is that if he wants to do drugs on his property, i can't stop him - i can only ask that he lets me out of the lease with compensation, and lets me move somewhere else. if it were only that easy, right. the fact that he's lying about it is deeply discouraging, but i need to react to the facts in front of me.

i've had the bathroom fan on more or less nonstop since, i think, december. i've tried to turn it off a few times, and just noticed the air quality in here tank immediately. but, he made a request for me to turn it off, so i did so to keep the peace in the short run - and instantly had my first hemiplegic migraine in almost two years. it was weak, and gone in a few hours; it started in my right hand and didn't make it further than my wrist. i didn't try to talk, but i got a bit more sleep.

i'm going to assume that turning off the fan shut down a magnetic field in the basement and essentially gave me an electric shock, which triggered the migraine. we'll see where things go from here, but if they become more frequent i'll need to turn the fan back on, clearly.

so, am i back in the same shitty situation i was in two years ago? it's looking more and more like it.

i'm going to try to eat. but, i'm less than happy, this evening.

and, is the weather depressing?

i'll grant you that: if i'm depressed about anything right now, it's the weather.

well, it was supposed to be nice this weekend. fuck.

*sigh*.

it's not just the transiting. it's not any fun to go out in a sweater; i want to wear as little clothing as possible. at least if i stay home i can hang out in my underwear. with this weather, i'd have to wear layers, and it's just a shitty prospect.

i've said this so many times before: aliens are more likely than god. but, that's not just a reflection on the likelihood of our origins, it's an analysis of religion, itself. if you follow the line of reasoning forward, it actually brings up the same question that you hear so often in challenging the religious stories: why doesn't god talk to us anymore?

where are the aliens, anyways?

i want to be clear about what i'm suggesting, first. there's a constant in our religious mythology, across generations, that god came from the sky. you can trace this in the indo-european language and across comparative religion, as well. we have this idea of the skyfather that is really almost universal in our religious myths, and that also extends to non-indo-european religions. everywhere you go, you have the father in the sky and the mother in the earth. is there something to this? well, it's embedded in the mythology. every culture has these stories of beings descending from the sky, and of humans ascending to the heavens.

a rank cynic would discard it as nonsense, but a scientist would seek a naturalistic explanation. if there are aliens in the universe, they are no doubt biologically alive entities that move through the universe in obedience to the laws of physics. that is, aliens are not a supernatural phenomenon but are rather a naturalistic one. so, one way to offer a naturalistic explanation for religion would be the suggestion of extraterrestrial contact, you'd just need to find some evidence for it in order to prove it.

i'll let you discard this as a hypothesis once the fossil record is complete. in the mean time, i'd support some active archaeological work seeking alien artifacts.

but, why don't they come here anymore, then?

maybe they're dead.

what it is is more evidence that canada is moving backwards while the rest of the world is moving forwards.

the prohibition on genome editing in canada should be ended immediately.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/canadian-scientists-fear-blowback-over-crispr-babies-could-undermine-their-work-1.4934732

i can only hope that farmers in the midwest are able to understand that when these politicians from out-of-state swoop in and start talking about ways to have them compete with each other, that they are not acting in their interests but against them.

as he unveils more policies, it's becoming clearer that sanders is not a socialist, but rather a dirty, stinky old progressive.

he's probably still a lesser evil, until such a time as a better candidate emerges.

but, i will do my best to criticize him from the left.

what kind of socialist argues for more competition?

c'mon.

wake up.

it's not 1919.

it's 2019.

it is very disappointing to hear so-called self-identified socialists advocating for an increase in anarchy in the production of food. that's the kind of nonsense you expect to hear from a conservative like elizabeth warren.

a socialist would understand that encouraging competition in food production could only harm the society's food security, leading farmers to undercut each either by increasing or decreasing production in order to hurt each other and drive each other out of business, thereby negatively affecting consumers and benefiting the banking class. i understand that there were some ignorant farmers that took this position roughly one hundred years ago, but i also understand that it was partly responsible for the devastating corporatization that took hold in the prairies preceding the dust bowl, and led to bankers on the coasts buying up the farms. competition is harmful to everybody except the rentier class and always leads to consolidation - and this is economics 101 in 2019. this is a foolish policy that will harm farmers and consumers and help bankers and the elite.

socialists understand that the way forward in food production must be to end competition between farmers by creating unions and co-operatives that help them work together in determining how much they plant and which markets they target. these unions and co-operatives would also lead to profit sharing. farmers should be in business together, not competing against each other.

in the existing world economy, the family farm is an absurdity. any policy designed to protect the family farm will merely isolate the farmer that lives on it, making it easier for the banks to step in in the long run. the way to push out agribusiness is not through increasing alienation, but through increasing co-operation. as mentioned previously: the choice that farmers have is between allowing the banks to come in and create an outside monopoly, or working together to create their own monopolies.

competition is over. deal with it.

honestly.

why shouldn't i have been able to borrow a few hundred dollars at a high usury rate between welfare checks in order to go drinking and dancing at a gay bar?

there's no rules in our society against any of that. and, i will fight you tooth and nail if you want to change it.

i will repeat: i would oppose any attempt by the government to place a prohibition on usury.

you hear about the horror stories with pay day loans, but you don't hear about the people that need access to quick cash with little collateral, and are able to responsibly pay it down quickly.

about this time in 2017, i decided at the last minute to go to movement, the large techno party in detroit. i hadn't planned for this, so i didn't have money put aside to do it. and, it's expensive. so, i took out either a $200 or $300 loan from a pay day loan service, in order to hit the parties in detroit. i carefully calculated what the interest would be and effortlessly paid the loan down on time.

i know this isn't the type of scenario you're used to hearing regarding pay day loans; i spent the money on beer, cover and cigarettes. crazy, right? well, i had fun. there are vlogs. regardless, i wouldn't have had access to the cash at a bank.

i don't think you should take away something that is actually useful to responsible people because irresponsible people abuse it. nor do i think that banning pay day loans is really going to have much of a useful outcome, as people that need the money will just go to loan sharks.

i might rather suggest a religious motive underlying an opposition to usury, and push back with the explanation that we live in a secular society, and don't want to legislate out of a bible or a koran.

see, the trust-busting may be populist, but it's the supply management that is an actual policy.

good to see.

https://www.motherjones.com/food/2019/05/how-can-dems-win-back-rural-america-bernie-sanders-and-elizabeth-warren-agree-on-the-answer/

ok, i'm going to get back to it, let's hope things are stable for a bit.

i was caught up. now, i need to catch back up...

i'll make another bold prediction, though: a ban on gun ownership is going to actually be a ban on black gun ownership.

they won't enforce these laws on white people.

i've said this before: in order to learn that gun bans don't work, and collectively move towards a more effective approach at ending gun violence, we'll probably need to go through the process of enacting gun bans, and watching them fail.

and, that's fine.

but, i'm still here to tell you it won't work. s'all. really.

anarchists are assholes, aren't we?

we don't think we have the obligation to stop you from making mistakes - we're happy to stand aside and watch you fail.

it's the prime directive, after all.

again: i wouldn't oppose a handgun ban. i have no interest in guns or gun culture at all.

but, i wouldn't expect it to be successful in reducing gun violence.

kenney's climate change policy actually sounds better than trudeau's.

cocaine, obviously.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-oilers-daryl-katz-sinus-infection-1.5131497

that was a lot of sleep, even if i kept trying to wake up. and, am i feeling better now? i'm feeling a little better than i was the last time i tried. if that continues, i may be at full strength by monday.

the air in here has cleared out substantively.

so, what happened?

i dunno. i'm going to ask him to add a check for stress hormones on thursday, but i'm operating under the assumption that i'm dealing with anxiety due to second-hand marijuana smoke exposure as a consequence of elevated cortisol levels. and, because it's not making me high, i'm not sure if the elevated stress levels are occurring due to the actual effects of the drug, or due to a psychological aversion to marijuana smoke. see, that's the trick, right: because i really, really don't want to be exposed to the drug, it would be almost impossible to know if the stress is a consequence of exposure or a consequence of the disinterest in exposure. it's just as likely that i could be freaking out at the premise of being exposed as i am freaking out at the actual exposure.

but, i mean, that's not going to change: 95% of the time, i don't want to be exposed to drugs, and i'm not going to chill out about it. if it's true that i'm freaking out at the idea of exposure, that's a constant that will never change.

for right now, the air is better and i feel a little better so i'm going to try and start the day off fresh by getting something to eat and showering. hopefully, i'm reading to get back to work afterwards.

what do you really do about this?

the environment has to come before the economy, which means i'm not standing in solidarity with automotive workers that are being laid off to make way for electric vehicles. i don't want to send these people back to work manufacturing dirty, gas-guzzling suvs. so, what do you do, then?

this is a big facility, and the company is apparently losing a function for it. so, the primary concern ought to actually be in finding some kind of way to take ownership of the factory.

"you mean, you think workers should have control over their means of production?"

yeah. it's crazy, huh?

there's no use in flailing against capital, to try and save antisocial labour; it's a backwards, reactionary and conservative approach. but, that's what malatesta said, right? unions are necessary to fight against capital, but they are also inherently reactionary, inherently conservative.

once you get the factory out of the hands of the company and into the hands of the workers, the next thing to look at is how to make a more socially responsible product, like solar panels, or even electric cars. you then retrain the workers, and off you go.

but, i'm not going to cry over the demise of automotive jobs - good riddance to a destructive industry that has done enormous damage to the world we live on.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/no-change-in-how-unifor-negotiates-with-fca-amid-gm-saving-300-jobs-1.5128350

there was a time in the very distant past when the ndp were an example of something called "prairie socialism", based around a fundamentalist christian imagery and ideology. even back then, they were scary in their enforcement of puritanism and evangelicalism. it was bordering on being a cult. it is widely understood that their most important leader in the last century, thomas douglas, was essentially a nazi in his support for eugenics, which was something that was widespread on the "christian left". they supported all of the terrible, oppressive, tyrannical, conservative things that progressives supported in the progressive era.

the ndp's health care plan, as initially enacted in saskatachewan, was not single payer. rather, it was quite similar to obamacare, in that it was a law that mandated the purchase of insurance premiums, and attempted to decrease costs through group coverage. the single payer system in canada was brought in by the federal liberal party in stages from the 40s to the 80s, culminating in the canada health act by the elder trudeau, and modeled not after the system put in place by the ndp but rather after the nhs in britain - which was put in place by the tories. the ndp supported this system, but so did the conservatives, and the idea that the ndp were ever the "party of healthcare" or that douglas was ever the "father of healthcare" is really just party propaganda designed for internal consumption. it's historical accuracy is highly dubious, at best. every piece of legislation in our healthcare system was passed by the liberals.

in the 70s, douglas was pushed out by a clique of jewish socialists and they started to swing away from the "prairie gospel" messaging and towards the kind of universalist socialism that was popular amongst the jewish left at the time. they started to moderate in the 80s under broadbent, before being relegated to fringe status in the 90s under a sequence of unpopular female leaders. it turns out that the canadian left had a big problem with voting for women.

the party was revived by a city councilor from toronto named jack layton in the early 00s, who tried to brand himself as some kind of twee leninist, and was very much in the prototype of lenin in the sense that he was really a conservative in disguise. the ndp don't like to tell you this, but he was in fact an aristocrat, with a long family history in the conservative party. his father and grandfather were both cabinet ministers in right-wing governments; his son is now a city councilor in toronto. while the ndp under layton admittedly offered an attractive alternative to the governing liberals, who were moving quickly to the right, the truth is that they were at most a centrist, if not a centre-right, party by this point. layton's legacy is in continuing on with the moderating of policy that was started in the broadbent years. and, to an extent, they had to do this, because workers in the populated parts of canada had joined the middle class; they weren't interested in radical politics anymore.

layton died of cancer shortly after the 2011 election, and the party was taken over by a self-declared thatcherite from montreal, a former cabinet minister in the right-leaning provincial liberal governments of the 00s, one thomas mulcair. the ndp had managed a large breakthrough in quebec as a result of a backlash against michael ignatieff, a truly awful candidate in every way. mulcair continued the right-ward journey of the ndp, to the place it is now in the spectrum, which is just another neo-liberal party.

and, activists in canada have reacted accordingly by abandoning them; they are on track to losing party status, this election.

in 2019, the ndp is driven not by any variant of utopian socialism but almost entirely by oil politics. the notley government in alberta was an oil dictatorship, just like the previous and current conservative governments, running a scorched earth policy to maximize exports from the tar sands. notley was truly the queen of mordor, lost entirely to reason, and driven by a singular purpose. in southern ontario, it is the party of unifor, a union of automative and pipeline workers that are themselves directly financially tied into the ongoing environmental rape of the planet. it has been wiped out of saskatchewan, and will soon be wiped out from quebec. and, in bc, it is increasingly being squeezed against a rising green movement that no longer trusts it's motives or ambitions.

you will not get anything from the ndp at this stage in history besides a continuation of the petro state. and, thankfully, the canadian left seems to understand that - and is abandoning the party in droves.

the minimum wage in canada is set by provincial legislation and is province specific. i think there was a federal minimum wage in the past, but it fell out of disuse quite a long time ago, and there are actually good reasons for this: if a federal minimum wage were set to reflect the cost-of-living in the most populous province of ontario, you'd end up with starvation wages in more expensive provinces like alberta, where a living wage would be upwards of $40/hr. it's a big, diverse country. this is a policy that should be localized.

i would actually even support legislating it at the municipal level, but we'd have to change the constitution to do that.

i don't work, but i believe that ontario's minimum wage was frozen at $14/hr by the ford government when it took over last year, which cancelled a planned raise to $15/hr. this was put into place by the previous liberal government of kathleen wynne, which was by far the most left-wing government in the entire country, and the most left-wing government the country has seen in a very long time. they made some unnecessary cuts to services at the municipal level, but i was broadly supportive of the wynne-mcguinty government.

it follows that mulcair would really not have had the jurisdictional power to set or raise the minimum wage, and would have faced a strong backlash from the provinces had he tried. yet, the truth is that he didn't actually propose doing that. there was a big media hoopla in canada in the previous election about mulcair's promise of a minimum wage for federal workers being "misleading" or "dishonest", but i never found that he was confusing, himself. rather, the media misunderstood him, and then blamed it on him. but, let's be clear on what his proposal was: his proposal was to ensure that federal workers - unionized government workers - would get a "minimum wage" of $15/hr. this might have affected some part time students, at most. but, i would not consider such a proposal to be very substantive.

i've been vocal in my support for higher wages for workers, and any suggestion to the contrary is a bold-faced lie. the ndp are good at that....

i mean, there's all this opposition to gmo wheat, which i currently do not believe exists in canada.

but, wheat is a hybrid organism created by artificial selection: it is already genetically modified by humans.

the fact is that the activists don't know that (and i've talked to them. they don't.), so they're operating on fear, uncertainty and doubt in just opposing the unknown. and, they'll you that: they're afraid of something they don't understand.

there is a good reason to oppose the patent laws. i'm on board with that. but, i'm not afraid of gmos, and don't think you should be, either; i want to embrace science, and i want to live in the future, not the past.

the greens are actually pretty science-focused, but there's not a lot of them, right now, either. i might not agree with everything they say on the topic, but i can't expect to find the perfect party out there in the cloud, either.

at the least, i haven't yet seen the kind of embrace of anti-science propaganda from the greens that i saw from cheryl hardcastle. if it materializes, i'll have to adjust.

to be clear.

1) i have no opposition to labeling products as gmo, if it's what people want. i'd buy gmo items, if they were labeled; i know that they use gmo corn in doritos, and i know they use gmos in margarine and it doesn't affect my purchasing decisions. i think the industry is over-reacting in opposing it. so, it's not my issue, but i wouldn't campaign against it. but, as a standalone item, i'd abstain from a vote, because i don't think it's a serious health concern. sorry.

2) i have a broad, general opposition to intellectual property rights, as well as to regular old property rights, and do not think that chemicals should be patented at all. this would extend to an opposition to patenting seeds. so, i would actively agitate for and support legislation to ban companies like monsanto from patenting seeds.

3) are gmos safe? well, i don't see any reason to think they wouldn't be. while i will succumb to the argument that you can't know for decades, i think even skepticism around it is pretty far-fetched. your body is just going to break the consumed dna down as protein, either way; the enzymes in your stomach have no way of knowing where it came from.

4) i think embracing gmos is going to be exceedingly important in managing global food supply with rising populations in a world with a changing climate. it should be in the list of solutions to climate change, not something resisted by climate change activists.

5) i'm a logician, so i think there's a special place in hell for the naturalistic fallacy. and, i have a rather visceral disdain for fucking hippies....

if trudeau wants to run on a platform that makes it seem like he works for the world bank, may should campaign directly against him on it - and fairly aggressively.

i'm not in a swing riding. or at least, i don't expect to be in one - we'll find out soon enough. i'll have to watch the polls. there's a lot of recent immigrants in this riding that are likely to lean conservative, so if a conservative swing rises up on their backs, i'll have to vote ndp to try and stop it. i'll otherwise probably vote green.

the conservatives will probably run a muslim candidate in an attempt to push for this. so, you're looking at a mostly muslim religious right v. the ndp union base in this riding. if there's a green surge, the liberals may end up in fourth; they're not going to be seriously competitive.

the liberal candidate i voted for in the last election in the neighbouring riding (frank schiller) was actually anti-nafta, and while i neither expected him to win nor to change the party's perspective (which was cautiously pro-trade....pro-trade in theory, if skeptical about the existing agreements), it was a kind of protest vote to actually hit the 'x'. i didn't like the ndp candidate (who is known locally for protesting against gmos...i'll never vote for somebody like that.....), but i wouldn't have voted for a pro-nafta, business-liberal type of candidate, either. if they had run that kind of candidate, and i had to choose between pro-business and anti-gmo, i would have probably voted green. the anti-nafta thing was in fact a very important consideration for me... 

the liberal party's position on trade in 2015 was an open question, in that they didn't talk much about it. their past position was confusing, in that they supported "free trade" in principle but tended to be critical of the actual agreements. chretien ran on dissolving nafta, then had to settle for some weasel words from clinton, which was widely criticized but actually largely consistent with the party's position: free trade, but not necessarily free trade. it was a kind of "freer trade" position. they just didn't publish how they'd tweak that, and it really wasn't an election issue, or at least not from their perspective. i think they thought this was settled. i'm not sure how to say this without being sardonic: the position that the party has taken over the last few years is not going to be very popular in his own voting base. it's no doubt a part of the reason that he's had falling poll numbers, already. liberals in canada have historically been apprehensive about trade, and slow to embrace the neo-liberal paradigm; it's kind of downright bizarre to have the son of a protectionist come in and embrace this global regime, now that it's crumbling all around him. he might claim the country is immune to this, but the actual truth is that he's probably losing voters in his own base over his position on it. i'm not going to sort through the resolutions presented at the last party convention, but i would expect them to say something rather different than what trudeau is demagoging on about.

mulcair badly flip-flopped on the tpp over the course of the election, and it might be one of the things that cost him voters, but you have to be careful how you analyze this sort of thing. i would suspect that something like "if the ndp are the same as the liberals anyways, i'd might as well vote for the liberals" might have sunk in, and it might have been a factor in the shift; the tpp would not be the only part of that, but it would be a segment of it. you get weird and counter-intuitive outcomes in a three-party system; you'll get things like people on the left of the ndp base voting for the liberals in protest at a centrist policy in the ndp platform. so, it might seem weird that ndp support started to shift to the liberals when mulcair indicated support for the tpp, to the point that he had to really aggressively backtrack on it, given that the liberals were at least no less in favour of it, but it's the nature of the way things work in our system. by the end of the election, it seemed like mulcair was running directly against the tpp, despite initially supporting it - and still managed to lose votes to a party that all evidence suggested was more in favour of it. at this point, it's not clear that it matters what jagmeet singh says about the topic, given that the ndp has lost so much credibility on the left around topics of the sort. i would expect an ndp government to be pretty pro-globalization, at this point, regardless of what the guy says on the trail.

the greens have never backtracked on their alter-globalization position, and should be the preferred choice for voters that are unhappy about the current trade regime, and actively want to change it. that doesn't mean it's clear how they'll govern, it just means that they are at least providing some hope for some kind of policy shift.

i suggested in 2015 that may and the greens should make trade a central issue. it's even more important to do that, now.

at least clinton tried to lie about it, right?

trudeau's been doing this for a while now: he's campaigning as an unabashedly pro-globalist, openly pro-elitist.

people should throw cake at him.

he appears to want to run on a pro-nafta, pro-globalization platform.

it's hilarious. he's really this clueless. he seems to think it's 1988.

i'll just be happy when he's gone...and, yes, he'll be gone soon.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2019/05/09/trudeau-canada-best-equipped-to-resist-populist-tide.html

i'm reminded of the term "e-tard", which is used to refer to mdma addicts that end up in a state of emotional stasis as a consequence of overuse.

this is a survey with multiple studies, and they seem to all say one of three things:

1) some of them couldn't find a signal
2) most of them reported increased levels of cortisol in non-habitual users
3) some of them reported decreased levels of cortisol in daily users

so, the idea that marijuana reduces stress reduces to the idea that an addiction to marijuana completely dismantles your body's ability to cope with stress altogether, meaning you'd be unable to experience stress when you actually had to. the long term result of such a thing would have to be negative...

i mean, your body doesn't produce stress hormones by accident. they're there for a reason, and it can't be healthy to get rid of them.

and, i'm actually going to state that it appears to be a robust and accepted conclusion in the literature that it increases anxiety in moderate to casual users.

i guess i could just sit here and let this guy destroy my endocrine system to the point that i'm incapable of experiencing stress, but i hardly want to do that.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6174415/

if you're arguing that dismantling your endocrine system is an effective stress reduction method, you'd might as well just argue in favour of giving people lobotomies.

At socially relevant doses, Δ-9-THC raised plasma cortisol levels in a dose-dependent manner but frequent users showed blunted increases relative to healthy controls. 

right. so, this is proof of two things:

1) moderate thc use increases cortisol levels
2) you can actually smoke yourself stupid.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2863108/

if marijuana actually increases cortisol, it's certainly not going to act as a stress reliever or anti-anxiety agent.

you would think that any serious scientific argument for "marijuana as a medicine" would try to link marijuana use to decreased cortisol levels, rather than rely on subjective opinion surveys, which is what they seem to actually do.

the silence on the topic is telling.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306453017301130

still no response from the doctor, so i sent a final fax, and we'll need to have it corrected at the follow-up.

it should only take a second to fix, so i don't know what the problem is. we'll find out on thursday.

i'm not feeling much better. what is happening? is it second-hand smoke? well, i'm not getting high from it. i know i can smell the drugs, and i know i'm having a bad reaction to it, but i have enough experience with marijuana to know what it's like and this isn't anything remotely like a pot buzz. when i went through this last year, it was more obvious that i was getting second-hand stoned, even if it felt like marijuana mixed with an unidentified stimulant - something i've never discarded in my mind. i tested positive for thc, remember. what i've been feeling lately is very different, it's just a wash of emotional "anxiety". what does that mean?

it's this kind of numbness, a dizziness, an absent-mindedness. it's an inability to focus, but it's also a really negative mood swing. i could describe it as feeling like i'm being squeezed, but that probably doesn't actually help much. is it the weather? it just won't stop raining, and just won't warm up, and i know i'm affected by it. maybe.

maybe it's cortisol. i talked about anxiety being hormonal, and wanting to check for specific levels of specific hormones in order to react. what i'm experiencing seems to be consistent with a cortisol build-up, meaning i might just need to get some more exercise - something i've already concluded, regardless.

the way to find out is to do a test.

i'm going to get up, make some coffee and eat. but, i suspect i may spend most of the day sleeping...

hi.

i no longer have time to pick up a new blood test sheet and have the tests completed, so we will have to wait until the 16^th. you should not expect test results in before then, as i will not be filing a lab that indicates concerns about a risk factor related to recent sexual activity with women. i at no point indicated as much. what i indicated was

1) that i have only had one consensual sex partner, and she was female, but that this relationship ended in 2006 or 2007. this would certainly not indicate a recent risk factor, as it was 12-13 years ago.

2) i was concerned about possible exposure to stds because i woke up in a man’s car after a night of drinking in detroit, and he was trying to convince me to have sex with him. i lost several hours that night, which was in september of 2016 (and not spring as i erroneously indicated, apologies for that). i also had bruises on my thighs, and a sore anus. i could even smell the lubrication in my farts, after requiring several hours to pass a bowel movement. while i don’t remember it happening, the obvious conclusion is pretty obvious: i had some pretty rough anal sex that night. i suspect that i may have been drugged at the bar. i understand that this would legally qualify as rape, but i have no evidence to work with and little understanding of my own projection of consent when i was blacked out. if somebody were to present me with evidence that i was passed out during the sexual activity (the anal sex) then i would change my mind, but i would not be interested in pressing charges against somebody that thought they were having consensual sex, just because i was blacked out. i apologize if anybody is upset by that, but i think intent is important, in context.

it follows that while i have very strong and compelling reasons to think i probably had sex with a male that night, i have no reasons at all to think i had sex with a female. nor do i have reason to think i’ve recently had risky sexual activity with any other female sexual partner, or reason to think i’ve had sexual activity with a female in the last ten plus years at all.

when i stated that my one and only consensual partner was female and many years ago, this was misinterpreted as a claim that i have recently had sex with a female. i need this corrected before i have my blood taken.

i would normally consider this to be trivial. on a purely social level, i don’t care whether people might think i have sex with men or women, or if they think i might have sex with both. the truth is that i don’t have sex at all, but i can’t control the perceptions of others, and don’t tend to pre-occupy myself with it as a concern. so, i don’t care if you think i’m gay or straight or bi, and i don’t care what you think about gay or straight or bi people.

however, as mentioned, i am deeply concerned that i am being harassed by the windsor police department, who are interpreting my gender expression as some kind of evidence of sexual deviance. there has recently been a rise of religion in north america, and a distinct rise in transphobia as a consequence of it. religiously motivated politicians are currently routinely using trans people as rhetorical punching bags, and this appears to have had some effect on the conduct by the officers in the department. i am deeply concerned that an officer may pull the file and use it as evidence that i’m some kind of sexual deviant - that my gender expression is some kind of nefarious ploy to gain access to women, or something. one way that religious politicians are using this is scare-mongering about using the bathroom. this is the existing narrative in religious communities, and the narrative i’ve been receiving from the police.

i have recently had poorly written health documents misinterpreted and used against me, documents i’m apparently not able to correct, so the necessity to ensure a higher quality in the documentation is something i need to be pro-active about.

again: the fact is that the contents of the file were a misunderstanding between myself and my doctor, and i have been pro-active in attempting to correct them. the lack of response is frustrating, but we can wait until the 16^th to have this corrected if we have to.

i’m also going to want to add a test for my cortisol levels, as a continuation of the line of thought that led to me checking for heavy metal poisoning last year. please remind me if i forget.

jessica parent

email: death.to.koalas@gmail.com; vm: 5199161358

what would be my conditions regarding accepting a prescription for anxiety?

well, it would have to become endemic, first. i'd have to convince myself it isn't environmental, first. right now, i think i'm having a negative reaction to the second-hand marijuana smoke, or something else, from upstairs, so i don't want to take a pill - i want to get away from the smoke.

second, i'd have to have tried a few other things first. fresh air. vitamin d therapy. fucking yoga, even; well, if i'm anxious, it might help. accepting drugs as a solution would have to be a last resort, after everything else fails.

but, in theory, what are my conditions?

well, the first thing you'd have to do is prove to me that you know what the cause of the anxiety is. i'm not into witch doctors that think they can prescribe based on reading your aura; if you think i have a chemical problem and this is the reason i'm anxious, i want you to tell me what chemical i'm producing too much or too little of, and i want you to tell me why. if you can't do that, i'm going to call you a quack and tell you to push your pills on somebody else. i'm also going to want a blood test that actually proves the hunch, and i'm going to want the medication level chosen in a way that is proportional to the results of the blood test. further, i'm going to want regular testing and adjustment.

this should be a basic and unstated requirement, really, but my understanding is that it is essentially never done, because the doctors get heavy kickbacks from the drug companies and don't really, actually give a fuck.

as mentioned: i don't have a history of anxiety in introversion, like this. i can only describe it via comparison to hormone therapy, which is a brutal and awful experience. i'm not enjoying this, and i want it to stop.

what about me and cursive?

well, they're a known entity, but i've actually never taken the time to explore the discography all that carefully. i've heard a number of their records a number of times, and keep putting it aside for later, but have never gotten around to it. it always seems like i might or might not like it, and i've just never been certain.

but, it seems like i'm not going anywhere tonight, and i'm pretty overcome with a feeling of overall shittiness right now, so i'm going to try to sleep it off and see if i can wake up clear-headed and sober-minded or not.

it's just incredibly frustrating to be unable to focus on something simple.

i might have to do some air quality testing...

i've been telling myself that i'm better off waiting either for subsidized housing - which is probably the only non-smoking housing in the entire city - or hoping i can win these lawsuits and buy some property.

but, this is becoming intolerable. i don't want to live like this.

if i have another day or two like this, i'm going to need to get another drug test and consider filing. given how secretive he's being about it, the drug test is probably the only way i'm going to prove anything...

i've been trying to listen to this record since yesterday and haven't been able to do it. i'm having difficulty focusing and i'm also having difficulty sleeping. i keep getting these feelings of really powerful anxiety washing over me, and the only way to stop it is to sit still for a few hours. i then get these powerful feelings of negativity wash over me: anger, sadness and a feeling like i want to start crying. i'm also extremely hungry, but i eat on a schedule, and i'm not going to break it due to some kind of adverse reaction to something that i don't fully understand. i will sit in hunger, instead.

i want this feeling to go away.

this is very unusual for me, and what's frustrating about it as that i don't have any experiences to compare to it, excluding the feeling of being through hormone therapy. i don't have any history of suffering through depression. i'm not bipolar. i'm not schizophrenic. i have no reason to think i have any kind of chemical abnormalities, although it sure feels like one is being introduced.

the only way i know how to describe what i'm feeling right now is to compare it to the feelings i had when i went through hormone therapy a second time about ten years ago.

i simply can't listen to music in an anxious state like this, it's not possible to focus on it or analyze it, and because music is an intellectual experience rather than an emotional one, it means it's not possible to enjoy it, either.

why is this happening?

frustratingly, it seems to be because my neighbour is smoking something. again. it smells like government pot. he doesn't go to work any more, either. they seem to have turned him into a zombie, and i'm downwind from it and getting affected by it, too.

so, i was maybe going to venture out to see this tonight, but instead i'm going to have to sit inside and deal with a sudden onset of unwanted anxiety. and, i just want all of these drugs i'm surrounded by to go away....

https://cursive.bandcamp.com/album/vitriola

when they turfed wilson-raybould a few months ago, my deduction was that she wouldn't do this, and they wanted somebody to do it.

and, now it's done.

a victory for her client, perhaps. but, the government would not have wanted this to carry forward into the fall, either.

motives are funny things. you never really know what they are.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/in-an-inspired-performance-henein-did-incalculable-damage-to-the-trudeau-brand

if anything, the ndp should be acknowledging the reality and volunteering to pull their candidates from these areas, where they have no serious chance of winning.

listen.

if you look at these white rural northern and eastern ridings, where people are really not going to vote for a practicing sikh, then a green presence in the riding is actually giving people a way to avoid voting conservative, or not voting at all.

this is specific to the type of riding where the liberals are never competitive, and the ndp don't have a serious chance in this cycle. the harsh truth is that ndp made a ridiculous tactical mistake; the greens should not be criticized for trying to correct it, if that's what they end up doing - and they should.

in the long run, a green-indigenous alliance makes more sense than an ndp-indigenous alliance.

well, the ndp have the noose of oil princess rachel notley around their neck, while the liberals have to deal with trudeau, who's never seen a pipeline he doesn't like.

there's fertile ground for the greens, there, in indigenous communities, who must be feeling abandoned by both of them.

a major coup for may would be romeo saganash.

so, he must have been assigned a task. but, this isn't how you approach this problem.

the numbers he's using (where he tries to determine where the support would come from) are empirically derived, but there's no reason to think they'd be reflective of what a green swing would actually look like. i mean, it's what people are saying now, or said in the past, not what people would say in six months. if a green swing actually happened, it would be a mass movement away from the ndp, which is what you saw in bc the other day - the ndp sank from first to third, and the green win was the consequence of a big swing across those two parties. you might see some ridings where the swing is from the liberals to the greens, too. but, this isn't an incremental, proportional thing - this is a conscious, dramatic, purposeful shift in voting intentions.

you would consequently want to look at ridings that have a long history of leaning generally to the left, not necessarily to the ndp but probably mostly, and not try to find the right proportional swing in the mass of random ridings. the ridings he pulled out are pretty ridiculous suggestions, which is reflective of him not doing this right.

but, you also need to factor in the local economy. guelph is an interesting example, because he won on a large split in an off election for the liberals. don't be surprised if mike schreiner is the first casualty of a liberal resurgence in ontario. he's actually kind of a weird counter-example in that he's a sort of an environmental conservative, and not reflective of the party's future in any way; for the greens to breakthrough, they're going to need to push people like schreiner out and away. there's no future in this besides vote splitting.

and, on that note, you need to look at the local economies in play, too. the ndp seats in southern ontario are probably pretty safe because the economy is so centered on the automotive industry. things may change down the road, but seats like windsor and hamilton are unlikely to swing.

it's rather the rural and kind of mixed "small city with a rural mentality" ndp seats, seats with majority white populations, seats with people that would love bernie sanders, that are likely to be most vulnerable to this kind of a swing. this would include not just large swaths of bc, but the entirety of eastern canada and a lot of northern ontario. the conservatives are trying to run against the carbon tax in these regions, but rural people are also both stewards of the environment and the people that are experiencing the effects of climate change the most. are you going to tell people suffering major flooding right now that climate change isn't happening, then expect them to vote for you? they don't care about profit margins for oil firms in calgary.

i don't like jody wilson-raybould; i think she's a conniving opportunist, and may would be foolish to recruit her, as she'd stab her in the back in no time. philpot, on the other hand,  may have been a victim of her own naivete, but she may have also badly miscalculated; i'm not sure either option reflects on her well. regardless, the greens would be wise to target indigenous voters in rural ontario and pretty much all of manitoba on a sustainability platform.

the other potentially up for grabs ridings would be ultra liberal urban ridings like ottawa centre, some of the ridings in the heart of montreal (including papineau) or some of the ridings in downtown toronto. it would be a strong message to have the greens unseat catherine mckenna, and i'd love to see them turf chrystia freeland. it would be the ultimate victory to unseat trudeau himself.

canada has a history of big swings, from the prairie populist movements in the west to the periodic regime changes that happen in quebec. they're hard to predict, too - and it can't be done using the methods grenier is pulling out, here.

you won't know it's happening until a week before it does. but, i think this is more of a 2023 thing. for now, they should be looking at carefully taking advantage of jagmeet singh's unpopularity in the ndp voting base.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/grenier-green-breakthrough-1.5128063

but, it is what i want you to think of me.

obviously.

i'm not technically a virgin, but i'd might as well be.

well, what do you expect to happen?

i'm 38 years old, and have been in gender transition since i was 19 because i don't have a financial or medical path to get through it. i'm stuck in suspended animation, and probably will be until i die.

any arrested development that set in when i was a teenager (which was already substantial at 19, given that i lost five years of female development as a teen) has just maintained itself in stasis. i never really got through puberty; i neither developed into a male, nor a female. i've been in a holding pattern...

you shouldn't expect anything other than what i'm saying, because i haven't had the opportunity to mature. when a person has what are essentially the sexual experiences of a pre-teen girl, namely nothing more than unrealized fantasies that are assumed will happen one day, the behaviour is going to align with the experience.

i wouldn't even know what to do.

i have the emotional and sexual maturity of like a 12 year-old girl.

i just couldn't fathom it.

i'm just imagining what would happen if i showed up in a room with some stranger looking for sex.

i would never get that far. if i somehow had the nerve to start it off, i'd pretend i had an appointment and cancel, then delete the account. but if i was going through some kind of breakdown that week or something, i'd probably start crying when i got there, and the thing would no doubt stop - or, if i were unlucky about it, i'd get raped.

it's just beyond the realm of anything i could imagine actually doing.

if there is some dating site with my pictures up on it, it's not me. it would either be some pathetic person trying to trick people or it would potentially be a set-up by the cops.

i've never done it. i probably couldn't.

i'll ask the same question i've asked in this space so many times before.

if a cis-female dresses up at a party, does that mean she's looking for sex? i think we've come to the collective cultural decision that it doesn't, actually - that you can't deduce motives from wardrobes.

then, why do you think it's ok to make this same deprecated assumption about trans females?

of course, it isn't. my wardrobe says nothing about my intentions. at all.

now, that doesn't mean that i don't have the right to dress up and go out and dance and have fun.

it just means that i'm not particularly interested in getting laid when i do.

it's not complicated, really.

but, i mean, i'm not actually looking for anybody.

i'm celibate by choice, and prefer to spend almost all of my time alone.

if i did have a dating app up, it would say:

trans female looking for straight cis male

i don't use dating apps because i don't date.

and, i don't use hookup apps or whatever the lingo is for them because i don't have sex.

you can look all you want, there's nothing there. and, if you're disappointed, it's a consequence of your own delusions, not anything i've ever projected of myself - i've been clear on the point for years.

don't misunderstand me: i don't think there should be much tolerance for assholery at a concert, or other live event. if people are being disruptive or oppressive they should be asked to leave.

but it's perhaps actually fairly predictable to learn that when you advertise a space as being heavily policed that people don't want to hang out there anymore.

just get off twitter....

i mean, something i've been noticing for a while is that a pattern opens up.

the moment a bar or coffee shop or political movement or whatever else starts advertising itself as a "safe space", attendance seems to dwindle, and the place eventually shuts down.

"safe spaces" seem to actually be terrible for business. it's like putting a giant "squares only" sign in your window. the bookings start to suffer, the place picks up a reputation for being lame, etc. it's a death knell....

if twitter wants to walk down this path, you should help the arab dictatorship that operates it along to it's own demise. i mean, do you realize who is running this?

just use a different platform.

#deleteyouraccount

you should really stop being worried about being thrown off of twitter and rather go out of your way to actively avoid using it.

let's shut down twitter altogether.

#boycotttwitter.

and, just to be clear on the point.

what the government does here in the prohibition regime is two things:

1) it claims to prevent the sale of narcotics. this is with minimal, if really any, success. what it actually does is just inflate the price.
2) it protects drug dealers from violence at the hands of the community.

this is really just an instance of the same error that the libertarian right makes over and over and over again. it seems to think that if you just take the government out of the way, you'd have this perfectly free market and you'd be able to sell whatever you want at whatever price you want, because property rights exist in the ether or something. there's this broad, general lack of understanding of the need to have a state come in and actually define what a property right is and then uphold it and enforce it with violence.

so, you might think that all drugs would be decriminalized in an anarchist society, and there would be acceptance and permissiveness and the whole thing. but i have to disagree - and you just need to ask the family members and friends of drug users to learn this. the more substantive effect of removing the state would be removing the protection that dealers enjoy. they'd get lynched in public; it would be more dangerous than it is, now.

mushrooms are certainly a least concern, and i might imagine a level of permissiveness for adult use, however obscure it may actually be. but if i caught you selling to my underage daughter, i can tell you you'd walk away with a pretty busted up face over it.

"but i don't really want equality! i only want equity!"

yeah?

cry me a fucking river.

you get equality, not equity. deal with it.

i'm actually fucking sick about hearing about #metoo.

this is not a populist movement. if it is anything at all, besides a mainstream media construction, it's a vanguard movement inside the elite of the democratic establishment.

if it has any effect on the upcoming cycle at all, it will strictly be in reaction to it.

this isn't because people don't want equality, it's because the way it's being presented by this particular clique of people is puritanical and extreme - and very much outside of the mainstream. again: if you live inside twitter, you wouldn't know that. but, nobody uses twitter; well, nobody outside of the establishment, anyways.

i don't expect the reaction to be very noticeable, though. more likely is crickets. perpetually. and, people getting up and walking away....

"me too" has a previous usage in a context of demeaning internet jargon. we would once speak of the annoying "me too" posters that would interject themselves into a thread, offering nothing of value. there is even a long history of shit posting and sarcasm constructed around this, where people would disingenuously post "me too!" on threads just to be annoying and pointless.

in the long run, it will be the original usage that predominates.

and, the hashtag may even end up subsumed - as an example of something that people don't like.

put another way: the fact the mushroom users are a small market, and they're consequently a little harder to find (you have to know a bigger dealer, usually), is probably a good thing that you want to maintain. you don't want people to be free to throw shrooms around - you want them to be hard to find.

so, the ideal thing is not to decriminalize it technically so much as to just not enforce the laws around it.

but, on the theoretical scenario that you find somebody selling shrooms to kids, should that person go to jail? yeah. absolutely.

this is what pompeo was talking about.

it's been in the works for years.

and, i'd like to thank him for drawing attention to it.

https://canadians.org/fr/node/11895

it happens.

don't pretend it doesn't.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evgj3k/what-makes-people-on-shrooms-jump-off-buildings-and-die

actually, peter mackay is wrong (as usual) and mike pompeo is actually right.

what pompeo is talking about is a chinese proposal to ship tar sands oil to asia through the arctic, an idea that has been floated for a while due to difficulty getting through bc, and a desire to avoid working through the united states.

we can debate aspects of this. i am opposed to all pipeline expansion; the united states wants to steal the oil; my government wants to sell it to china at higher prices than it can get in the us market. these are competing interests, no doubt.

but, to suggest that pompeo was making things up is disingenuous. the chinese have, in fact, heavily infested in tar sands infrastructure, and they're not doing it for our benefit.

https://canadians.org/blog/did-canada-china-fipa-influence-trudeaus-decision-buy-kinder-morgan-pipeline

doing mushrooms in your 20s is about as socially acceptable as watching saturday morning cartoons or wearing pajamas.

you should have grown out of it by then.

again: i don't exactly want to say that denver made the right choice in rejecting the decriminalization. smoking mushrooms is not unheard of, but you usually eat them, so it's hard to come up with a context where simple use would be infringing on the rights of anybody else. this is in contrast to marijuana or tobacco, where you have to infringe upon the rights of the people around you in order to use it.

it's consequently easy to make the free market or right-libertarian argument that you hear from "real capitalists", namely that the state doesn't have the right to tell you what to do with your own body. and, as mentioned, i don't actually disagree, really. i don't think i would vote for it, but i wouldn't have any active opposition to decriminalization, either; if i were in denver, i'd just be sitting this one out. i would probably abstain from a vote. nor would i see the need to push for the kind of bylaws that i would support around marijuana use, to keep it out of residential neighbourhoods and stop it from becoming a nuisance for non-users. unlike marijuana use, you can really have a trip in your basement without bothering anybody, it is true.

but, a left-wing perspective needs to consider the picture more holistically and look at the broader health implications, and i will reiterate the following truths:

1) adults don't do mushrooms; they're a drug that is almost entirely for kids. i mean, i'm sure you can point me to some 29 year-old that does mushrooms, but an analysis of their life isn't going to produce a flattering profile for a potential user base. adult mushroom users are going to be losers, through and through.

2) it follows that you're proposing decriminalizing something with a very small potential adult legal market that is going to be largely full of undesirables and a much larger potential underage market. if you're going to legalize mushrooms with an attempt to control a market, you're not going to get anywhere unless you put the legal age somewhere around 14, as that is really the target usage age, about 12-19. you're going to see use fall off dramatically after that - and that's a good thing. you don't want adults using mushrooms. i'd rather have my kids do mushrooms than meth, granted. but, is making it easier for kids to get the stuff really what you want?

3) the idea that psilocybin has some kind of clinical benefit is a marketing lie being pushed to you by capitalism, not an actual scientific reality. mushrooms make you crazy. if you want to mess with your hormone levels, there are ways to do it without stimulating schizophrenia; any potential benefits, however controversial, could be arrived at with a far less dangerous delivery mechanism. further, the term "spiritual" should obviously be outright banned from any scientific or medical discussion around anything - these claims are not worthy of serious scrutiny. "microdosing" is pseudoscience through and through.

4) there are real dangers not just from overuse but from a bad trip. mushroom use is currently marginal; it's not something very many people do. you shouldn't confuse the fact that use is marginal with a misperception that there aren't consequences from it. i mean, how many people are hospitalized for drinking bleach? does that mean drinking bleach is safe, or that almost nobody drinks bleach?

and, you just have to ask somebody that's used the drug to understand that you need to approach it with caution. you're not going to find anybody walking around saying "mushrooms are harmless", like you do with these ignorant hippies around marijuana. even the advocates know you have to be careful.

so, it's more like that decriminalization would be pointless - this is neither a drug that is currently used by many people nor a drug that has the potential to develop widespread use among adults. it's just going to open up the market for kids. but, if there was potential for widespread use, or if widespread use ever became a reality, the inevitable consequences would be widespread problems with mental health as a result of it.

opiates were supposed to have clinical benefits, too. that's how we ended up with an opiate crisis....

but, i mean, the snake oil industry doesn't care, right? the big pharmaceutical companies aren't concerned about your well-being. if they think they can profit, they will. they don't care if it kills you or not...

to be clear for the sheltered folks that don't know.

mushrooms won't make you see things like acid, or at least not in any dose considered reasonable. that's not the "hallucinations" people refer to, in context.

a mushroom hallucination is more like a period of temporary schizophrenia. the literature may use terms like "paranoia", but that's not really what it's about. the trip will turn you into a conspiracy theorist; you'll start piecing together things, making sense of things that never made sense before. when you wake up, you'll have to grapple with this: either you put together some nonsense (an example might be coming to the clear certainty that your partner must be cheating on you, then realizing when you come to that you were lost in a fantasy and they actually aren't), or you did make sense of something that alluded you. this is why you get people talking about epiphanies on trips; the same thing that makes you a delusional conspiracy theorist for a few hours could also make you a brilliant detective.

the problem is when these conspiracy theories become real in the presence of agitation. you do hear every once in a while about somebody going on a killing spree with a butcher knife due to a mushroom trip; it's infrequent, but it happens. if you do mushrooms, you should at least be prepared to have to deal with this, because it's going to happen.

but, you're not going to think you're talking to a unicorn or something. that's acid.

i've done a fair amount of mushrooms in my life, but not since i've moved to windsor, and only once in the ten years before i left. in fact, i think i've only done them three times since i turned 21. i don't know how many times i did them in high school. 40? 50?

and, that's the thing with mushrooms, as well as acid: people legitimately grow out of it. i still smoke pot and drink beer, but i don't imagine that decriminalization would make me more likely to do mushrooms again. as adults tend to avoid it because it's kind of intense, decriminalization would be likely to fuel an underage market, which is maybe not terrible because they aren't habitual like marijuana or alcohol or nicotine, but is what it is, nonetheless.

you should not expect much of a legal market for this drug for adults.

i don't want to say to approach this with caution, exactly. i don't have any real opposition to decriminalizing. but, if you don't have the experience, trust me on this: a mushroom trip is a substantively more powerful experience than marijuana or alcohol, to the point that there's no comparison. i mean, you can argue that smoking a joint is kind of like taking two or three shots of vodka at once, only that it tends to last longer than the shots will. you'd have to eat a lot of marijuana to get tracers, and you'd have to go through some kind of dramatic alcohol poisoning to have something like a mushroom trip.

mushrooms will make you imagine things that aren't true; a part of the trip is the conspiracy theory. you may find yourself immobile at points, or lost observing geometric patterns unfolding in front of you. you might become unresponsive to others. while it might lead to euphoria, to suggest it can help cure depression would be dangerously misleading; what mushrooms do is heighten your existing emotional state, so it's only likely to get you euphoric if you're already in a good  mood. if you take shrooms when you're having a bad day, the negativity you're feeling is actually going to end up amplified, and you're going to have a "bad trip". i am beyond skeptical of this research, and willing to call complete bullshit on it. 'shrooms are relatively safe if you're experienced and in a positive state when you do them, but they may lead to agitation and violence if you aren't, and you should not be treating them like they're some kind of medicine.

you can teach your kids to use alcohol and marijuana sparingly and responsibly; 'shrooms are in a different category, and you should be telling your kids to mostly avoid them. 'shrooms are only for special occasions...and only when you're sure the environment is safe.....

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/05/07/720828367/a-growing-push-to-loosen-laws-around-psilocybin-treat-mushrooms-as-medicine

as i support a one state solution with equal rights for all and not a two state solution rooted in exclusion and ethnic nationalism, i actually don't think it's important whether the canadian embassy in israel is in jerusalem or tel aviv, although i might suggest that the employees on the ground may be safer in tel aviv in the short run.

yabba dabba dooo!!!!!!!!!!

i'm telling you: you want to run against him like he's stockwell day. that's your model.

i ended up sleeping until almost midnight, got up to eat twice and am now back to sorting through reviews for the day.

i should go get my replacement blood test sheet in the next few days, but it apparently isn't ready for pickup yet. as it is, i don't expect to go anywhere today at all.

let's hope i can get through most of the month before the next sleep. but we'll see how that goes.

no. stop.

if i'm a conservative hindu or muslim from india or africa just off the plane for not that long, and i came here with some money to get a job that was waiting, i'm sort of disenfranchised off the cricket bat.

the conservatives may align more with my values of free markets and traditional values, but they're racist, and i don't really feel welcome at their events, even if the leadership insists i am.

the liberals may seem more welcoming, but i'm not a liberal, and i don't like their policies very much. high taxes, women's rights, restrictions on industry...this stuff is weird and foreign to me. i came here for the free markets.

if the ndp parks themselves in the middle of this and acts as a kind of a "young turks conservative" party that is both legitimately welcoming of newcomers and yet also interested in traditional and conservative value systems, it's going to find itself very appealing to a very large number of people. it may end up on the right in a technical sense, but it's going to take voters from both parties.

it's going to completely lose it's base of white activists, though.

i know that a lot of people are going to recoil at how i'm presenting this, but the data is clear enough, and i actually think this is healthy. the spectrum right now is full of redundancy and disenfranchisement. there's a lot of asians in canada, now, and they don't have the same cultural baggage; they don't fall along the same ideological, party lines. it's perfectly natural for them to organize along their own divisions.

in the long run, you end up with mergers or marginalizations. a centre-right ndp would eventually push the conservatives into the fringes, and help the liberals rediscover themselves. but, in the short run, it would be a healthy and democratic turn of events to enfranchise a set of voters that are maybe even less interested than they ought to be....

then, when their kids swing left, they do it for the right reasons, as they rebel against their conservative parents. and, i'll be here to cheer them on when they do....

would he have won if his name was paul beta?

we'll never know.

i would imagine that a paul manly from vancouver island would probably be a lumberjack. i appear to have been wrong - he'd rather plant trees than cut them down. canada's changing.

this is a byelection, so turnout was probably low. nonetheless, it is clearly a very good result for the greens. i pointed out a while ago that the greens were going to replace the ndp in the spectrum, as deindustrialization (and the subsequent collapse of unionized workers) gives way to a fundamental shift on the left towards sustainability. this is certainly a step in that direction.

it's healthy to see a three-party system open up in bc, though. what that means, in bc, provincially, is that you have the liberals on the right, the ndp in the centre and the greens on the left. this ends up complicated federally by the conservatives. so, who gets squeezed in that system? the liberals or the ndp?

if the ndp are becoming the new immigrant party, and they are, they are going to end up on the center-right, as a replacement for the old progressive conservative party, and as a reflection of the values of new immigrants. i'm not scare mongering. i believe in democracy - they should be represented, and neither of the old parties can really do it. but, with their abandonment of socialism, the ndp of the future will try to give you a kind of traditional conservativism without the racism; this is an evolution of multiculturalism, in a way that neither of the old parties can articulate. that mix of inclusion and conservatism means it's going to end up something like the democratic party in the states. and, they may be more successful running to the right of the liberals in the long term, too, as they try to carve out a space between the old parties.

but, that means that the new left in canada is the environmental movement. there is some evidence that the greens may leapfrog the ndp this election, and that's long overdue.

now, if they could just get rid of tipsy lizzy. by 2023. they'll need to.....

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/nanaimo-ladysmith-byelection-1.5125549

i don't see any particular reason why it's necessary to choose between kin selection and group selection as some kind of monolithic force. there's nothing wrong with arguing that insects operate on group selection, whereas mammals operate on kin selection; there's no reason to interpret evolution as an ethereal natural law that exists "out there" somewhere waiting to be discovered, and rather a lot of reason to conceive of it as driven by randomness and chance.

one of the things that bugs me about evolutionary biology right now is this tendency to assume that any kind of mutation is an adaptation, beneficial, a response and has a cause, and that it must be demonstrated otherwise, if it is the case. it's teleological, and the field is littered with it. but, it's not consistent with the basic scientific method, either. rather, when presented with a specific mutation, the null hypothesis should be that it's a consequence of drift, and you should be doing hypothesis testing on it to determine if there's evidence that it's actually an adaptation or not. the idea that you have to choose between these two models is coming from this similar place of mythologizing around evolution as something almost supernatural in scope.

in terms of human societies, i don't think there is really a serious debate at play. we kin select. artificially. that's obvious.

https://prospect.org/article/evolutionary-roots-altruism

of course i'm all about mutual aid.

but mutual aid has to be mutual, which means you don't push for it if you're pretty sure you're not going to get it back. and, there has to be common cause to make sense of it, too. so, that means no mutual aid with fascists. obvious, right? but, is islam a fascist thought system or not?

i'm more willing to extend solidarity and support and aid to the people trying to escape islam than the people trying to establish it. that means solidarity for secularists in the middle east, and it means solidarity for atheists and secularists in the west, too. i would have common cause with a kid trying to escape their muslim parents, rather than the muslim parents trying to enforce themselves on the kid. and, of course, i'd say the same thing about christians, too.

so, it's a question of the poverty of the breadcrumbs one expects to receive in return for mutual aid with muslim groups, which isn't missing the point but rather clarifying it.

mutual aid is often attributed to kroptkin, which i think is at least useful, even if you can find somebody else older than him. what's forgotten is that kropotkin was a scientist and his concept of mutual aid as an anarchist social idea was actually a corollary of his evolutionary theory. dawkins doesn't like the comparison, but i think he's being obsequious to cultural censorship in denying it; his own work, as described for popular consumption in the film nice guys finish first, is really a clarification of the evolutionary concept of mutual aid, and an expansion of it to a modern treatment and understanding. using computer trials and game theory, he's able to demonstrate that successful social behaviour treats mutual aid as an assumption, but is also quick to deny it upon any sort of betrayal. one could argue that this is essentially a mathematical proof of the lesson that anarchists should have taken from their own struggles, most famously the difficult question of alliances in the spanish revolution, where they've had the best chance of serious implementation.

what that means is that you need to calculate where mutual aid is an effective strategy and where it's likely to lead to being taken advantage of and then adjust accordingly. and, i can't imagine how providing mutual aid to this system of dominance and oppression is going to lead to anything but a catastrophic outcome for people on the left, with leftist values and leftist aspirations. providing mutual aid to muslims can only lead to the undoing of any kind of leftist struggle.

but, it also follows that it is important to extend mutual aid to the people that you expect to return it, which very explicitly includes those that are trying to get out of the mental and physical grips of the religious system: apostates, queers, feminists, academics, anarchists, socialists, atheists, punks, rebels, lumpen and other people that are standing against what the religion stands for.

there was no reason for you to be confused about where i stand on this, and i'm happy to acknowledge that we may disagree, if you identify as a member of the "christian left" or as a theist or as a "progressive". i'm none of these things, and i've never claimed common cause with you, either. but, i hope that this clarifies my perspective - which is that of the anarchist or libertarian left, if slightly updated with the replacement of kropotkin with dawkins - if you were previously confused about it.

this seems way too simple to actually be reflective of the truth, but it underscores a concept of groupthink in the party base. the media is talking about things like "electability" and pointing to polls about the topic, but this is a kind of entrapment leading to what i think is probably a strawman: you asked them that (leading) question so you could say that. you didn't ask them about tribalism in the party.

there's no reason to think this is permanent. granted. but, it indicates that democrats may just not really want to deal with a lengthy primary - that they want continuity, unity and a common front. this isn't necessarily about "electability", but may actually be about hierarchy, and a desire to put the party first. it may be a kind of corporatism, or collectivism, that is about subsuming the interests of the individual into the interests of the collective; people might just not want to cause a ruckus, right now. in that analysis, biden is leading because he's seen as legitimate; he's the rightful heir, whereas bernie is a distant second in succession, and the rest of the field are upstarts and pretenders.

under that reading, perhaps sanders was ahead in the polls because the media told voters that sanders was ahead in the polls. and, perhaps biden is now ahead for the same reason.

if the base is interested in a policy discussion, that could change. if it isn't, it might not - and bernie needs to get out and register.