*applause*.
so, lets start to wrap this up, now.
Thursday, October 17, 2024
there's no evidence for this.
he's (again) making an ass of himself on the world stage and it's driving home the reality that he's a closet muslim.
he's even calling for un sanctions on india. laughably.
india should send prime minister dumbass a letter explaining that they're a rising nuclear power and canada is on a direct path towards becoming a third world country, and already is through large swaths of it's urban areas, beset by ghettos, overwhelming poverty and mass drug addiction and homelessness. india should not be taking lectures from a backwards, third-rate country like canada.
i'm currently in an extremely difficult situation and i need some cash.
so, incomplete release up to mid 2004 are restricted to inri075, inri077, inri078, inri086, inri087, inri092 & inri093. the rest are done.
the more i yell at these disgusting people to go away, the more they harass me. they are pathetic losers; bottom-feeding trolls.
if you want to help me out, now is a good time to download some full discographies:
1) inri: 51 releases for $758. this is the synth pop and electro-grunge focused project i did when i was a teenager in the 90s. there is one pending inri project, inri086. 1994-1999.
2) deny everything: 21 releases for $355. this is the project for the post-inri experiments as i was trying to refocus and chart future paths, 1999-2000, and is about the 2000 american election. this project is completed. 1999-2000.
3) j's adventures in guitarland: this is about the classical guitar lessons i took from 1999-2001. project on possibly indefinite hiatus. i won't come back to this until everything else is done first. i need a 21+ fret midi classical guitar with a pickup. if i can get into subsidized housing, i can do this; it may otherwise be a serious challenge to ever finish this. currently, 3 releases for $55, and no serious plans for more until i get to the very end of the process. 1999-2001.
4) jjjjjjjjj: serious music project started in 2001 and worked on sporadically from 2001-2007 as unrealized scored music and then put on hold until 2014, then worked on intensely from 2014-2018. this project comprises symphonic works, official (instrumental) lps, academic projects and works of a more serious nature (more broadly), mostly written as scored pieces for large orchestras and performed by midi sequencers and software synthesizers (with frequent overdubbed live guitars and basses and sometimes with live keyboards and live drums and rarely with live flutes, mandolins or other instruments outside of the usual contemporary rock/jazz instrumentation). currently, 42 releases for $857. this is a continuing project that will continue growing and, in the end, will occupy the largest space in my discography, over the largest time frame, since 2001, although these releases are dated to their re-release cycle, beginning in 2013. 2001-2040.
5) the cynicide collaboration: was supposed to be a live performance "rock band" style project put together by a high school acquaintance named jon, but he abandoned working on it before anything got done. i wrote one song for this project, with demoes dated to 2001 that was finished as a solo composition in 2014 in a style that was adjunct to that intended by jon. i have guitar demos of songs written and performed by jon that were intended to be cynicide collaboration songs, but i don't own the performances or the songs and should not release or complete them (and they're not that good, unless you like early 00s nu-metal). i would have, in the end, completely redone these songs as i was recording them (and, yes, i would have done all of the work), but i didn't do that then and i shouldn't do it now. this project is almost certainly permanently closed and completed, but i will state again that there are demos that i'm restraining myself from finishing on jon's behalf. as far as i know, jon is still alive, but his life will likely be much shorter than mine. initially summer of 2001, then completed in summer of 2014, both as short stints for a few months each. 2001.
6) rabit is wolf: successor project to the cynicide collaboration, made up of just me and the proposed singer. some demoes were recorded in 2001-2002 that were shelved and not finished until 2014-2015, when i finished them as a solo project (and removed sean's vocals in the process) and transferred the compositions to jjjjjjjjj. this project is completed and there will be no further recordings. 2001-2003.
7) fuel true anarchy in the americas: noise + politics, formed in 2001 after 9/11. a demo was released in 2004 and remastered and expanded for a 2021 re-release. i do not currently have plans to reopen this, but it is semi-permanently closed. 2001-2004.
8) the trivial group: this project developed out of the various ideas worked on from 2000-2002, contains aspects of all of them and is the only conceptually unified successor project to inri. unlike the other post-inri projects, it even includes vocals as a central part of the compositions, for the first time since 1999. the trivial group released a series of singles over 2002-2004, culminating in a gigantic 2xlp dated to mid 2005. i decided in 2005 to put the trivial group down and pivot to different ideas, conceptually, but as of 2025 it is still in post-production and it's release sequence is still being finalized. i still have work to do in finishing this project, but i don't intend to write further for it as the next series of tracks reformulated themselves for release in the proverbs project. 2002-2005.
9) throatmotor: i played live bass for a band called throatmotor for about a year, from 2004-2005. the same acquaintance jon had joined the band as a guitarist and brought me in to play bass for him. throatmotor combined blink 182 or sum 41 style early 00s pop-punk lyrics and guitars on top of electronic post-production in the gravity kills or god lives underwater genre sphere, with a bit of an aphex twin vibe from the use of an actual minimoog, and was outside of my sphere of interest, as an artist. it was very syrupy, very poppy. i filled in because they needed somebody that could learn the songs fast and do it, and i tried to work with it by acting either more as a cellist (given that the songs had synth bass parts) and introducing harmonic counterpoint (for the slower songs) or as a third guitarist by introducing overlapping riffs (for the faster songs), but the reaction was muted, and i wasn't that interested in what they were actually doing and intending to do and i mutually separated from the band in mid 2005 (and was replaced by jon's girlfriend, at the time, who just followed the root notes, which is all they expected from me or wanted me to do). i did produce one short demo for throatmotor dated to early 2005 that has some of the characteristics of it (aphex-y synths, some wobbly time signatures, cut up drums, unison crescendos) and that i will complete under that moniker, but it was not well received and reflects the fact that we weren't on the same page, musically. a few bass parts were recorded, but i don't know what they did with them. i didn't record the parts myself and i don't remember the parts i wrote anymore. beyond completing this track, i wouldn't be further interested in throatmotor. 2004-2005.
10) akousmatikoi: 2002-2007.
11) cycles per second: 2004-2007.
12) tetris: 2003-2040.
13) pi: 2003-2040.
14) proverbs: 2007-200.
15) everything (at the new jessica amber murray site): 1994-2040.
i'm currently updating my text discography because it might be a while before i get back to it:
this is the late 2003 and early 2004 sequence, between when i got back from bc and when i moved to sandy hill with red indicated "not done" and green indicating "complete":
this is the csis records update sequence:
so, incomplete release up to mid 2004 are restricted to inri075, inri077, inri078, inri086, inri087, inri092 & inri093. the rest are done.
trudeau's utterly incompetent and pathetically childish outburst against india needs to be the last straw from the apparatchiks in the liberal party leadership.
the americans and british think we're idiots, and are trying to be nice about it.
can we get this idiot out of power before he embarrasses us further?
i believe that i'm currently listening to mauricio velasco and sean hansel live stream a complete lie about the identity of jessica murray (who is myself, born jason parent) from upstairs in this duplex to a platform (probably a video game platform) that i have no interaction with and don't care about.
i can't really stop sean from stealing my name. my legal name is actually jessica parent. my mother's birth name is kerry murray, so i started using the name jessica murray on the internet to try to create a level of obfuscation. i didn't want people to connect the dots. this blur on my identity (which has never been hard to figure out. look at the url on my bandcamp site on the side, it's jasonparent.bandcamp.com. who do you think built and owns that site?) has allowed sean to walk into a point of ambiguity and confuse people, apparently to try and get laid.
i think mauricio's motive is that he always wanted to make a movie about me and i've firmly and consistently told him to fuck off. i don't respect mauricio as a human being, and i don't respect him as an artist. the absolute last thing i want is this idiot that i don't like making a film about me. i have since begun posting vlogs on the internet, and he seems to be trying to take control of them because he thinks he is entitled to some concept of ownership of any film about me, which he obviously isn't. then, he's trying to plug sean in for me because i don't want anything to do with it.
this is disgusting and psychotic and these losers belong in and need to go to jail, but it's so absurd that i've had a difficult time putting it together and convincing somebody. it's foundationally, fundamentally irrational. i'm pretty good with deductive thought, but you can't deduce things from nonsense, you need to wait until you get evidence. i've had to sit here and wait for them to do what they're doing in order to try to understand it.
they apparently want to take over my vlog, and they want to pretend sean is me. mauricio is the "director". sean is the "actor". in reality, i filmed these vlogs myself by talking into a cheap handheld device, frequently talking to myself in the mirror. you can see the green camera in most of my vlogs and a lot of my pictures. it's not ambiguous; i'm obviously shit-talking into the mirror. nobody is "directing".
my writing style is idiosyncratic. that will be easily deconstructed. neither of these two idiots will convince anybody that they're me, online, for more than a week.
sean has no musical talent. he can't play guitar like me, he can't write songs like me and in fact i'm also a better technical singer than he is, and i think my lyrics are better than his. he's not going to be able to write lyrics like i do, and he can't use the gear i own in any meaningful or productive sense. it's an algorithm for mass disappointment.
i don't want to work with sean further. i took his vocals out of my songs because i thought they sucked; bad singing and worse poetry. it was jon's idea, it just sort of happened. blame it on jon, not me, but this is actually done with. i have no further recordings with sean and no work left to do that involved him in any way. sean has no further role to play in my art or my discography.
that doesn't matter. they want the vlog; they think they're making some kind of film. they're complete retards.
as mentioned, i can't block sean from using the name "jessica murray", if he's pathetic and lame enough to keep at it, rather than come up with his own name and identity. i can't copyright the name. i can tell you that the sites linked to this page are mine and the sites not linked to this page are not mine.
it would be better for everybody if they just bought an oxygen and a macbook and played around on it and tried to sell what they came up with. my obscure gear is designed to write and produce jazz. i'm a jazz musician. it's not something they can use to make pretentious electronic music. they could be doing something substantive instead of harassing me. what does their fixation on controlling me say about their artistic abilities and inclinations?
i don't use gaming platforms, and anything livestreamed that way is not and never will be me. go watch their videos and try to convince them to go live their own lives and leave me alone.
i have to acknowledge that i have picked up some pretty cinematic moments on my vlog camera, but it's not any sort of mockumentary. it's legitimately real life, raw and unfiltered. there's no script. it's just real.
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
after failing to confirm their motion on the 6th, the landlords have legitimately forgotten to reserve me and appear to have filed a document with the wrong date on it. that motion won't be heard.
this application costs around $400, plus labour for the lawyer, and it puts it off to at least the 1st of november, as motions are only heard on fridays. they won't get the money back. they'll have to pay it again.
the most likely outcome is it for it be rescheduled to next year, anyways, and the longer this takes, the less sense it makes. i overheard some rescheduling motions on friday, and i'm likely to get to trial before they can file to cancel me. yet, those slots in april are also filling up and, the longer this takes, the higher the chance that april fills up, too.
so i may be safe here for quite a while. it's looking like november, 2025, but i don't want to still be here by then.
the situation is toxic and unsafe (for me) and i need to get out. if you can make some purchase as an act of charity or altruism to help get me out of here, please do.
maybe they should have thought about the consequences of their actions before they acted. israel is acting out of self-defense, and that is a legal act.
iran is not the west's primary enemy, it's a relatively small country with a long history of being destroyed by outsiders because it has historically been poorly governed by authoritarian regimes and has been on the brink of collapse, once again, for decades. it won't take much for israel to topple the jenga tower over.
the united nations should be helping israel to remove the terrorist regime in iran and return iran to the international community and iran is delusional to expect otherwise.
the russians saw the americans lining up in poland, clearly intending to move in. so, they struck first.
i picked that graphic for a reason. look at it carefully.
the russian operative was to move the war west, so that it was fought in ukraine instead of in russia. this is ukraine's longstanding purpose to moscow, after all, as a buffer state, even if it would rather that buffer state be poland than ukraine.
america's purpose in digging in has been to bleed russian resources, take out some ships, etc. the hope is that it can reduce russia's strategic capabilities. this has clearly backfired, as america is having difficulty producing missiles and munitions, and the cost of the war has become a major political issue that is negatively impacting the popularity of the current administration.
russia has since annexed four provinces in southeast ukraine that were absorbed into russia in the distant past and were appended to ukraine by khruschev during the soviet period. this was supposed to russify ukraine, which was a fine enough idea when the soviet union existed, but has resulted in a region that russia considers a part of russia outside of russia, after the collapse of the union. these areas are also russian-speaking.
by annexing the regions to russia, putin can claim he is expelling ukrainian invaders from russian territory, which is an awkward claim but has some convoluted logic to it.
while it seems on it's face that the russians are halted due to incompetence, given these competing objectives, it is possible that they were trying to create a trench and dig in, a la world war one, or at the very least were slowing down the process on purpose. this is after all what the russians want - to fight the war in ukraine, if the americans insist on fighting it. winning would actually be counter-productive, then, as the americans would just start another war somewhere else. so long as this trench across ukraine exists a distance from russia, the russians basically get what they want.
however.
the russians have recently been moving west:
i picked that graphic for a reason. look at it carefully.
there is a jagged grey line in the middle of the picture. that line is the official border of the russian federation.
what happens when russia gets to that line? does it stop?
will it get there before the reinauguration of donald trump in january? if it does, this slow trudge west could produce the conditions for a truce.
is that what the russians wanted all along?
is that why this is taking so long?
i'm going to rephrase what i said previously.
the iranian threat to israel gives the pentagon an excuse to get out of ukraine before it becomes a massive drag on american resources, like vietnam was.
if they don't get out soon, that's the inevitable outcome, and we'll be talking about them getting out eventually, after having squandered trillions and after having gained nothing.
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
what about the jews? i blame the christians, i blame the muslims. why don't i blame the jews?
well, first of all, nobody blames the jews. when the jews are to be blamed, we blame ze jews.
i'm talking about colonialism, very explicitly, and in the context of this discussion, the jews really don't count. gentillism notwithstanding, and perhaps i am wrong, but i am not aware of a single example of a jewish state ever trying to conquer, convert or colonize anybody. the jews have needed to defend themselves throughout history, but israel never tried to conquer egypt or syria or arabia. there might have been a jewish kingdom north of the caucasus in the middle ages, but the stories told about it are dubious and it's existence is difficult to even prove at all. this would have been a majority turkish state, if it did exist. the story is that they adopted judaism to counter the christian russians to their north and the muslim arabs to their south, so they didn't have to be absorbed by either, and could play them off against each other. there's perhaps a warning embedded in this that judaism could be a colonizing or imperial force, but the fact is that there is no actual clear example of that happening anywhere on the planet and anywhere in history.
except joshua. i guess. but they were joshing about joshua. that never actually happened.
if you look closely behind the scenes, there's often some sneaky jewish oligarch making plans for aristocrats and generals. i have to give you that. however, that wasn't what the spread of christianity was really about. you can't blame christianity on the jews; it would be more accurate to blame it on the greeks, anyways.
it's hard to get your head into the mindset of the political, social, religious and military leaders around the collapse of a decaying empire, and what they might have imagined the outcome of forcing this religion on everybody might have been, but the writing they have left behind (the bit that was vandalized and rewritten repeatedly rather than just burned and forgotten) tells us they were trying to build a common culture to unify the empire. this is understandable, on some level. american culture, from cherry pies to hamburgers and rock and roll, is a pretty real unifying force across the pond, from the beatles' days in hamburg to the british invasion and beyond. we think we have a common culture, and we do, but it's not about a shared appreciation of shakespeare or voltaire, it's about the gramscian conditioning of american beliefs on the conquered peoples, and we've got this figured out way better than the romans ever did. the romans inherited pan-hellenism, and that worked in the east (it is the real culprit behind christianity), but the west was half carthaginian and half celtic and slowly being conquered by germans and there was no history of a unified culture or even a cohesive civilization in these regions, who had been dealing with greek and lebanese traders and settlers on their land for centuries and clearly didn't like it. something that happened repeatedly during the same period that christianity developed in egypt, syria and greece was that the gaulic west (britain, france, spain) tried to split away from rome and form an independent celtic empire. this independent celtic empire was roman and latin, to be clear, but it held to it's own customs, it held to it's own religion and it may have held to dialects of gallic, while not wanting to be completely cut off from the roman world (and it never had been. the primary source of tin in the west had been britain for hundreds of years previously. the city of marseilles was founded by greeks; barcelona was founded by lebanese. we don't know how far out to sea the egyptians or carthaginians made it. these regions were integrated into the trade networks, going back centuries.). so, the empire was falling apart and the social engineers wanted to find a way to extend panhellenism to the west of the empire to keep it together. you can't blame them for wanting to do that, but you can blame them for showing up with swords and ordering people around; that, however, was a pretty roman thing to do and not much of a jewish thing or much of a greek thing to do at all. the romans liked showing up with swords and ordering people around. the spread of christianity was just one of the many ways they did that, in the end.
so, i don't blame ze jews for christianity and i don't think christianity is even really that jewish. christianity is fundamentally platonic. islam breaks with christianity in being more about aristotle than plato, which is one of the reasons islam is so much worse than christianity.
the weird thing about ze jews is that they were basically indo-europeans anyways. judaism takes it's basic themes from zoroastrianism and is essentially a sky god religion, in the indo-european tradition. there is nothing much like yahweh in traditional semitic religion; yahweh is really more like thor or zeus. we know that existing judaism was reformed in the hellenic period to align with platonism itself, and we know it was heavily influenced by zoroastrianism on it's way out of captivity. the extent to which it may have mingled with greek invaders in the bronze age collapse is itself unclear. the stories that do have clearly semitic connections (like the flood) are general myths from the region and seem distanced from their origin by several layers. in a lot of ways, judaism is closer to greek or roman paganism than christianity is, and should seem less problematic to a pagan than christianity would.
but this is all very abstract.
the basic historical fact is that jews just don't conquer or colonize. they just don't. that's an islamo-christian thing.
there is a conflict of narratives in defining european identity. i get it.
this is the correct narrative:
one of the things i cannot tolerate about the contemporary fake left, and do not have common ground with them on, is their negation of a secular humanist narrative. i move beyond criticism of them on this point.
the canadian government's issue with india has a number of layers. i don't think any of them are substantive and i don't think any of them should be supported by anybody, but trudeau's party machinery thinks attacking india is going to be populist for the following reasons:
1) trudeau has failed in securing a free trade agreement with india, and is lashing out like a four year-old child that didn't get what he wanted.
2) trudeau has been criticized for a trip to india he made where he and his family put on indian clothing, like a dress rehearsal for a play or something.
3) partly due to the absence of the free trade agreement, and in a reckless act of obliviousness regarding our relationship with the americans, the liberal party is trying to curry favour with the chinese by aligning against india, and by generally trying to create problems with india.
4) sikhs are a powerful lobbying group in canada with an incredibly disproportionate amount of power. that is actually true.
5) the liberals also seem to be specifically targeting indian students and scapegoating them for the housing crisis. there is some truth to this, but it's trudeau's fault not theirs and the messaging from the liberals on the issue has some dark undertones that have to do with their polytheism, which is seen poorly by powerful sikh and muslim elements in the party.
6) there has been a growing anti-india undercurrent in upper class fake left circles for the last several years that has to do with conflicts between the invading and colonizing muslim minority in india and the indigenous hindu majority, which seeks to protect it's culture and history from encroachment by muslim and arab (and iranian) colonialism.
it's the last point that i'm interested in because i think that the west (north america and europe) should be prioritizing india as a major ally because we have an indigenous cultural overlap with india that we don't have with the middle east, africa or china in the sense that indian religion is exceedingly similar to (and in many ways exactly the same as) the indigenous european religions of the celts, germans, slavs, romans, hittites, persians and greeks. we all speak dialects of the same language and we all had similar cultural and religious beliefs; further, we are all struggling against the effects of islamo-christological imperialism and colonialization by christians and muslims of middle eastern origin. buddhism is also a force in india, and we know today it was introduced by greeks after alexander and is not ancient, as was previously thought. indian historians understand the important role that hellenism played in india in the classical period. as a westerner, it is at the core of my culture and identity to stand in solidarity with indian nationalism against the effects of islamic colonialism, and to stand in support of deislamification in india, in parallel to the ongoing but largely completed process of dechristianization in europe and america. a close cultural relationship with indigenous indian religion can help us better understand who we are, as westerners and as europeans and as decendents of european settlers.
a big part of the reason that india is being targeted is due to the ongoing attempts by muslims to colonize it. muslims tend to have a special level of disdain for hindus. this is coming out in the diaspora politics and identity politics in the liberal party.
this tilt towards islam and in conflict with indian polytheism has powerful lobbying voices but it is not the direction that we should go in in the west as it would be undoing the dechristianization process that culminated in the french revolution, which was our final break with the past. conservatives in europe tend to get confused about this or outright deny that europe was forcibly colonized in a violent series of wars and genocides that even included crusades in france and poland, the latter during what we would generally call the age of reason (that is, extremely late), and that even included an inquisition to burn the indigenous women, who held to their indigenous customs the longest. we have already fought this war, and it was a long war, a thousand year war, and we won it. christianity has been defeated in the west. let us align not with a new christian menace in the form of islam, but with our indigenous roots in indo-european polytheism.
for that reason, i am going to come down extremely harshly on the liberals if they push this stupid fight with india for stupid reasons that are not in the interest of canada and not in the interest of western civilization.
a re-embrace of polytheism also makes sense in redesigning our culture to embrace holistic meaning in the process of decarbonization. the garden of eden, and genesis in general, is a stupid and retarding myth that has screwed up how we approach resource management and needs to be thrown in the trash. indigenous and polytheistic cultures are less likely to see humans as unique or created to control or steward and more likely to see themselves as a part of a complex ecological web that needs to co-exist in nature rather than dominate over it. we need this change of mindset, and overthrowing the patriarchal hierarchical social model in the monotheistic religions is central to getting to that point.
i'm not exactly proposing that you believe in athena or shivu or vishnu or thor as actual real things, and it's not clear how seriously that was ever actually taken. what i am proposing is that this is exactly the shift in culture we need in order to survive and an indo-european compact and alliance based on shared indigenous beliefs and value systems is likely the best vehicle to actually do it.
no.
israel is a strategic asset worth defending.
they should reroute money and resources from ukraine to protect israel, if necessary. yes, that is what putin wants, but it demonstrates the reality that going into ukraine was a mistake in the first place.
nato will eventually withdraw from ukraine with untold billions or trillions spent, and can only hope it hurts the russians more, which was the strategy but is an unclear outcome.
jd vance is beginning to identify himself as a classic demagogic fascist in waiting and i'm beginning to wonder if it's worth voting for harris to block him from office.
the main reason i endorsed hillary clinton in 2016 was to block pence, which didn't seem helpful, in hindsight. i'm apprehensive about falling into the same trap, but i think vance will be a more substantive pick in terms of function.
i can't understand why anybody would take a man that looks like a chimp and has the grooming etiquette of a dog seriously, but the thing about demagogues is that they're successful con artists because they find out what you want to hear and say it. i don't want to hear anything from a man like vance at all. somebody that's dealing with a mortgage they can't afford and food they can't buy might be more open to suggestion. it's the immense increase in inequality in the united states over the last five years that allows a vance to be possible.
i'm not there yet, but his ability to effortlessly produce not just bald-faced lies but incoherent bald-faced lies is very worrying. large amounts of what he says cannot be deconstructed at all because it is literally incoherent; he has a tendency of putting words together in a manner that produces no discernible meaning. this isn't hyperbole. he projects meaning between the words, but the words themselves frequently have no meaning, and if you stop to try to deconstruct it, you'll instantly run across this outcome. what?
there's enough in front of us to produce serious concern.
Monday, October 14, 2024
harris is indeed losing but it's not because she's not pro-muslim enough, that's for sure.
opinion polling in the united states has repeatedly demonstrated overwhelming support for israel amongst white and christian voters, and the fact that she is losing states like wisconsin and pennsylvania, and is not winning in georgia or arizona, is no doubt a part of that. pro-hamas fake leftist candidates are losing at the district level in left-wing ridings over this precise issue. this is a losing issue for the centre-left and the fake left that it needs to back away from. democratic voters in left-wing ridings themselves are indicating that they are pro-israel and anti-hamas. these losers on the street are a fringe minority that represent extreme right political inclinations, appear to be funded by foreign governments and have no place in a moderate centre-left political tent.
it would seem intuitive and obvious that democrats should be the most pro-israel and republicans should be trying to win these conservative muslim voters, as the existing democratic coalition has absolutely zero common ground with hamas or with palestinian nationalism in general. right-wing religious fundamentalism has a more obvious home in the republican party. it is not remotely clear why democrats think they can or even want to hold muslim voters. these are obviously republicans, culturally speaking.
the important swing vote in michigan is black voters, not muslims. spend some time in detroit. it's very black. this isn't a race for city hall in hammtramck, so the fact that this microdemographic has two or three saturated areas that they dominate locally is not relevant. they're still less than 2% of the population of michigan; blacks are pushing 15%.
radical islam is unpopular in the united states and if harris was smart she would do everything she can to distance herself from it as being seen as soft on islamic extremism will cost her 10x as many votes as she might ever hope to gain (but never will. they're republicans.), but she has already demonstrated in multiple campaigns that she is not very good at this.
when she loses, she will blame it on biden, but she should blame herself for running a poor campaign that has not strongly come out on moral considerations, like backing israel in it's fight against terrorism, but tried to fence sit to hold a small demographic with little voting power and a lot of lobbying power by taking a morally ambiguous position that refuses to condemn terrorism in clear enough language. that is sending a message to americans that they are correctly confused by.
it should be noted that obama was not confusing or ambiguous on terrorism. obama repeatedly walked up to the podium and loudly and bellicosely declared that america would track the fuckers down and slaughter them like the filthy animals they are. that is the correct populist position and what america wants to hear from harris, but that she won't deliver because she's apparently kind of dumb.
i think the fundamentals suggest biden would have been more competitive, and the outcome has demonstrated that. harris is losing enough white voters in the rust belt that she's going to lose almost every rust belt state and she's neither generating black support nor holding moderate white support in more conservative southern states because she doesn't have roots in the area. biden is more popular amongst both black voters and white voters than harris is.
after being sure to blame harris losing on harris (and not on biden, or on putin, like they did in 2016), the democratic party should permanently disbar nancy pelosi from ever speaking on their behalf ever again.
i think the indians were fully justified in eliminating the terrorist asset and, if it was them, that they continue to aggressively pursue their struggle against sikh extremism and terrorism via further targeted assassinations.
canada should be helping india target and eliminate terrorist elements, not complaining when it succeeds in neutralizing them.
further, canada and india have a security relationship that is very important. sikh separatism is not an important consideration and should not upset that important security relationship.
Sunday, October 13, 2024
if you take a look at the trump family together nowadays, you'll notice that the one and only male in the group that doesn't look like a life long loser, and doesn't have to hide behind the dirt and crud and shit all over his face because he has no self-confidence and no self-esteem, is the one that's married to the pretty girl.
there's one pretty girl in the pile, and one guy that doesn't look like he needs a makeover.
they're truly a hideously ugly group of people. i wouldn't want to be seen with them.
the reason that israel is occupying lebanon is that the united nations has failed to keep hezbollah out of the area. the whole concept of peacekeeping has proven itself useless, except to prevent legitimate acts of self-defense; the un won't react to terrorists, so it gives hezbollah free reign, but it expects israel to follow the rules because it's a state. this is untenable and unsustainable, and the only possible outcome is for israel to push back.
the un will try to stop israel because it's a state but will ignore hezbollah because it's not. this is stupid and backwards and cannot continue; this has to change. the un should be getting out of israel's way and aggressively attacking the terrorists.
the fact that they now won't leave when the israelis are trying to move in and do their job for them truly demonstrates how useless and irrelevant the united nations is in today's world. we need serious reform at the un, and this is clear evidence of it.
nonetheless, israel should not be targeting these groups directly. yet, it should be realized that israel does not have a moral responsibility (it has a legal responsibility, but the law is flawed) to go out of it's way to avoid un targets. if israel sees guys with guns in a tower, it should not stop to figure out who they are, it should shoot to kill.
by refusing to leave and then blaming the outcome on the israelis, unifil is actually adopting the tactics of hamas, which it has become morally equivalent to.
they need to acknowledge they have failed and get out and if they won't leave then israel will have to remove them and is morally justified in doing so.
i don't really want to take away your guns. the science suggests that wouldn't work for most crimes. it might reduce crimes of passion, where people go into temporary insanity and fits of rage and can't think, and while that is a legal defense, how often that really occurs in real life is fairly obscure.
i'd rather take away your game consoles.
i think that would be more likely to actually succeed in reducing violent crimes.
banning things generally doesn't work.
however, violent video games have no social utility and create a large amount of social harm. banning them is worth a try to help get gun violence down.
it would need to be done in conjunction with other social changes in the entertainment industry, like banning violence in movies and violent imagery in music videos, but it would be a potential step in the united states changing it's culture of barbarism and violence, which is the cause of the problem.
Saturday, October 12, 2024
it's very pathetic that i have to do this but some losers named maurico velasco and sean hansel that i went to high school with - and are not my friends, and have not been my friends in 20 years - are continuing to try to steal access to my sites. i have been trying to tell mauricio to fuck off and leave me alone for 30 years, but the loser is obsessed with me because he's a classic closeted repressed homosexual. unlike him, i am not gay.
i was forced to work with mauricio in a school project in grade 10 against my inclinations and he decided after that that we were best friends. the feeling was not mutual. i've been trying to get rid of him ever since, and he won't fuck off.
these two pictures were taken of me, jessica parent, in march of 2013, not long after i had died my hair pitch black.
i was at an outdoor festival the day previously and i had just woken up relatively hungover.
in early 2014, google+ forced me to upload a picture, which became my youtube profile picture. i actually did not want to upload a picture, but i was forced to by the algorithm in order to make a post. i picked the worst picture i could find, which was this one.
this has since become my brand id picture.
this is not a picture of sean hansel, who is a natural blond. this is a picture of the person born jason parent, now named jessica parent, and who has been using the online name of jessica murray since c. 2005 in order to create a layer of separation between my trans identity and my birth name (and past life).
jessica murray = jessica parent = jason parent.
one of the ways to be sure this is a picture of me is that my eyes are crooked. i had an unsuccessful surgery to "fix" a lazy eye (which i didn't have) when i was young and it wasn't done right and has affected my vision as an adult and left my eyes misaligned. they get crooked when i'm tired or stoned, or hungover as in this picture.
the one and only picture of sean hansel, who did record some guest vocals for me in late 2001 and early 2002 as a part of the process of demoing some tracks, none of which were used in the final compositions, is the bottom picture at the following album cover:
sean is the blond that looks like a lumberjack. i am the dark haired bono look-alike in the lennon shirt. my hair is dyed black in that picture as well.
i used this picture because it is the only picture of sean i had, as it was taken by my ex-girlfriend sarah on a trip to a concert with me and some old high school friends. the picture was also in early 2003, very close to the terminus point of rabit is wolf, and consequently very nearly contemporary to the demos (it was a few months later).
i don't know why sean is pretending that is a picture of him, but it is the tip of something more sinister. it is not. it is a picture of me.
Thursday, October 10, 2024
Wednesday, October 9, 2024
the other difference between iraq and iran is that iraq was not responsible for 9/11 and iran is responsible for 10/7.
that was the reason the world supported an invasion of afghanistan and not an invasion of iraq, and should be the reason the world supports an invasion of iran, if it's done correctly.
the difference between iraq and iran is that saddam hussein was a secular dictator and iran is run by a theocracy. the long term goals in the middle east should be secularization - that is, decolonization, deislamicization. saddam hussein was an asshole, but he was keeping the religious out of power, and he should have been kept in place for that reason, as it was obvious that taking him out would unleash a pandora's box of religious extremism, and that was what we got. then, we had to go in and erase isis from history.
in iran, it's the opposite; the religious extremists are in power and the population is largely fairly moderate. iran is a white country that is relatively european in culture but has been colonized by arabs and islamicists that are trying to enforce their rules on a population that doesn't want it.
regime change can plausibly work in iran; it was obviously going to fail in iraq, at least in the medium term.
now, i need to be careful about this. it has to be done the right way, and iraq is a poor model. i'd actually like to see a united nations mission that is led by the turks and indians on a mission to remove the irgc, because it is an illegitimate and undemocratic terrorist group. that would look more like afghanistan, which was the right way to do iraq, but suffered from the problem that too many countries realized it was a bad idea and wouldn't vote for it.
i would like to see canada vote in favour of a united nations mission to remove the irgc and push for regime change in iran, as we voted in favour of removing the taliban after 9/11.
israel should be careful not to do anything that creates inflationary pressure in the west, as that is going to get them strangled by the americans. bombing the oil is a bad idea.
bombing the nuclear facilities is a non-starter because it's essentially impossible.
i would support an assassination of the ayatollah, although they could never tell anybody they did it (kind of like they haven't taken responsibility for eliminating the hardline prime minister).
and i think that serious regime change in iran is a good idea that the people of iran are likely in support of.
canada's position on israel is clearly out of date and needs a complete overhaul. it has no relevance in today's world, and does not reflect reality on the ground.
the fake left parties in canada are currently run by very stupid people. that wasn't always the case. the reality is that they're running against the iraq war, which this is definitely not, and which nobody thinks it is.
should israel take out iran's nuclear facilities? this is not a helpful question. if they could do it on their own, they already would have.
the real question is whether the united states would do this, and it has not been american policy for the reason that it would be very difficult. these facilities are cut into mountains. the americans have preferred to use the iaea because it's more effective.
that said, israel does have an active policy on the issue, which is sabotage. the israelis have used cyberwarfare, assassinations, infiltration, etc to slow the iranians down. this is the approach the israelis will continue to use until or if the americans order a strike and that will depend largely on whether they think it will work or not.
Tuesday, October 8, 2024
it's relatively clear to me that, if you look at the messaging, this pro-hamas movement in the united states is foreign interference by iran in the american election. these kids have been brainwashed by islamicists under the direction of an iranian psy op, and there's a reason they're targeting the children. they're trying to peel muslims out of the democratic party and get them to vote republican, which makes a lot of sense (because they're conservatives) and indicates where iran's preferences are regarding who wins this election. it's also setting up a long term attempt to take over the republican party, the party of god, to have an iranian revolution in the united states.
there are hundreds of missing people in the carolinas right now and this next storm is going to be even worse.
it's not exactly biden's fault.
but, it's october. it's not august. it's october.
i'm reminded of this post i made in july.
i would rank trump somewhere in the middle of the pack of presidents of the last 50 years. he was nowhere near as bad as bush, jr and he was nowhere near as corrupt as reagan. whether he was better or worse than clinton in terms of actual policy is a coin toss, even if clinton can honestly and fairly blame everything on the republican senate.
biden is more near bush jr territory - economic collapse, pointless wars due to incompetence and mismanagement at the highest level, the perception by others and projection of abject weakness, etc. all we need is miami to sink into the ocean this summer, and we're reliving history as farce.
they adjourned the motion until november 1st on a weird technicality that i suspect is a strong message to the landlords to pull the fuck out.
they might drop this and let the issue go to trial in april.
i think they're on the brink of selling it and this might be a huge break for me, even if it doesn't get the precedent for the benefit of the poor.
it's really not up for me to pontificate on the memory of the terrorist attack on oct 7th. i'm not jewish.
(i did a dna test and it pulled out about 2% jewish dna, which appears to be from a jewish migrant to philadelphia in the 18th century that is in my mother's distant ancestry. nobody on my mother's side of the family even knows that and they wouldn't accept it if i tried to explain it to them. ironically, my mother and her sisters do have slightly jewish features and it is obvious once it's pointed out. i actually don't at all.)
i will say though that the anti-semitic mobs defacing jewish community centres and other jewish institutions are a serious developing problem that we need to address collectively as a culture and as a society.
in canada, this is what hate crime legislation was passed to address, and i would hope that charges are laid appropriately.
i actually didn't take shop in school. at all.
the 90s were kind of half-backwards and half-forward thinking in terms of gender identity. nowadays, this isn't an issue, but you were still expected to segregate along gender lines in the 90s. they at least gave you sort of a choice.
i went to one of the better high schools in ottawa. ontario, and most of canada, has a publicly funded catholic school system. it's actually a constitutional right, going back to what was called the "manitoba schools question", which lead to laurier's great compromise. this is middle school history in canada. canada had some slavery that was abolished earlier than the united states, but it was too cold here for plantations, so the slavery that existed was closer to indentured servitude. there has never been a large population of black people in canada. the school question was about catholics (irish, italians, francophones, spaniards (also very low total population, always. this area was never settled by spanish or portugese, only by british and french.)) and protestants (germans, brits, scandinavians). since then, we've had massive levels of immigration from non-christian countries, which has created an almost race-based school segregation that really needs to be abolished but is going to be very hard to get rid of because it's in the constitution and is intentionally hard to get rid of due to it being a legitimate rights issue 100-150 years ago, as the protestant brits started governing catholic french colonies.
in the 90s, the catholic system in ontario was 99% french, irish or italian. there were never more than 50 black kids in the whole school at any one time, and it was usually closer to 20. in later years, there started to be more christian arabs from egypt or syria. the "protestant" or public system was everybody else. the catholic schools were better funded and had better programs.
my mother's family was anglican and i didn't get baptised until i was four and only because the catholic school system started at age four while the public system started at age five. my parents sent me to preschool. so i would have otherwise skipped a year, which would have defeated the point. my father's parents were catholic, at least tentatively. my father's father was not a very good or nice person, from what i hear.
both of my parents were atheists and i was not raised to be religious. i did not accept the other sacraments of eucharist (i didn't want to be a vampire. really.) or confirmation (the latter being the catholic version of a bar mitzvah) when i was in middle school. i have never gone to a catholic church for service with my parents, ever.
my parents just realized that the catholic school system was better, so had me baptized to get me into the school. there's a richard dawkins video where he discusses this as a phenomenon in britain, although i don't recall the name of it.
well, that, and my mother was off-the-wall racist and didn't want me to go to school with "somalians". canada absorbed a large number of somalian refugees in the 90s. i have tended to criticize this decision, but on some level she had a point. i would probably be a very different person than i am now and received an inferior education as a young person if had gone to public school, and the person i am now would not respect the person i might have been very much.
it wasn't that bad, really. it's not like i was beaten by priests or something. so, i had to spend a few hours a week when i was a kid in a "religion" block during elementary school, which the school i went to treated as Colouring Book Class. i don't remember a single religious lesson at all of any sort. in middle and high school, the classes had themes that were like geography or sociology courses, or at least were if you're an atheist. grade 12 religion was about morality and wasn't particularly tied to catholic theology; i did a project on pesticide runoff in southern ontario as a moral issue, and i learned a fair amount about the intensity of agriculture in ontario and the amount of pollution it creates doing it. grade 11 was a "world religions" course that had sections on islam, buddhism, hinduism, judaism, protestantism etc and is really something every kid that age should be taught as it helps you learn a little about the people around you, for better or worse. i have more respect for buddhist and hindus than i do for muslims. we even had a field trip to the local hindu temple and the local jewish synagogue.
so, it's not like i got molested and beat up or anything, although i know some people did. some of the differences were a waste of time but some of them were useful.
it did, however, mean that i had the privilege of going to a high school with a large music department, a drama department, an esthetician department, an electronics department and several other departments that most public schools didn't have the funding for.
that gave me some options to avoid taking shop with. i did not want to walk into the room at all. ever.
i only had to take something like it thrice, in grade 7, in grade 9 (as a third of the course) and in grade 12. that was the total requirements.
in grade 7, they let me take home ec instead, which was helpful as i learned how to sew for the first time.
i flat out skipped school for the section in grade 9 and it didn't affect my grade due to the grading system which took two out of the three sections. the other two sections were computers (which were still exotic things in the 90s) and visual art.
in grade 12, i took a course on electronics instead. like, breadboards and boolean math and whatnot. we built some circuits. i learned how to solder.
so, i'm sorry, but i actually didn't ever go to this class in school. sorry.
Monday, October 7, 2024
"Violence never brings peace. History proves this, yet years and years of conflict seem to have taught us nothing." - the pope, recently, when speaking about the oct 7th terrorist attack on israel
what an utterly stupid statement. i would suggest burying the pope in the Neville Chamberlin Cemetery for Failed Statesman when he finally dies. he's going to finally die, right?
history demonstrates that violence is required to protect the world from barbarism and that, without violence, barbarism always wins. the primary recent example is the second world war, which the event he's talking about has some context within, and which the papacy has some responsibility for.
just another nazi pope?
don't listen to the fucking christians, please. they've cause enough fucking problems.
when i talk about decolonization, i'm talking about marx.
when you talk about decolonization, you seem to think it's a code word for "hate whitey".
i support actual decolonization in it's actual marxist meaning, which, in the levant, means kicking the muslims out. to be terse. the muslims are the invaders and the colonizers. the indigenous groups are all christians, pretty much everywhere in the fertile crescent, turkey and egypt (but not in arabia proper or iran).
support for islam in the region is support for imperialism, not some kind of fight against it.
this is a part of the reason that the "nationalist" groups (which were all fascist groups) the soviets used to support in the region were all secular groups. the soviets at least realized the hypocrisy of supporting muslim groups in the region and arguing it's "anti-colonial". the contemporary fake left has no interest in whether it makes any sense or not and doesn't care if it's a mess of incoherent contradictions. it has no real theory.
you have to get the muslims out before you can build a free society, and this is what the anti-imperial movement in the region needs to be about. the fake left has lost the plot.
i'm being obtuse about this to smack you up the head and get the fucking point across.
to be clear: people are talking about the displacement of muslims from southern lebanon as some kind of bad thing. but, that's the outcome i want to see because it's the easy way to decolonize the region. if a million people have really left, they are almost all shia, and that would be pushing to 20% of the population. there's only around five million people in lebanon, and only around two million shia. that would be half the shia population that has left. that's great news.
the mass removal of shia invaders and colonizers from lebanon, where they are not indigenous and do not belong, is what i'm defining as a just outcome. that's why i'm supporting this.
decolonization, in the context of the levant, means deislamicization. that's the proper meaning of the term. by targeting these colonizing invading shia, who are being protected by iran via hezbollah, israel can potentially tip the balance of power in lebanon back towards the indigenous inhabitants and decolonize the region of islamic imperialism. that goal is worth supporting, on it''s face.
to those muslims fleeing lebanon, i say to you: good riddance. don't come back. go back to where you came from.
Sunday, October 6, 2024
i am finishing up a legal document that is going to change the law around evictions in ontario and make it far easier for tenants to fight off aggressive landlords that buy their property trying to throw them out. i'm going to win this case. i'm right.
i'd actually like to make it against the law - as in you go to jail - to buy a property with the intent to evict a tenant. you've got mens rea. you've got actus reus. you can criminalize this if you have the political will.
right now, i can throw out a shitty definition and open a path for defense. others will have to follow the path to beat down the weeds and turn it into a route.
i'm going to take an unusual position on bombing in lebanon.
the roman emperors then fiddled around with their provinces but the basic idea kept coming up in the levant that you had syria, phoenecia, palestine (the new name for judea, because the jews were cancelled by hadrian) and arabia. for example, this was the empire under septimus severus, who was an important ruler in terms of redefining the imperium:
a couple of decades later, they split the empire up in four regions and introduced the idea of a diocese. the diocese of the oriens contained the provinces of egypt, arabia and syria, each of which were cut into multiple provinces.
constantine reunited the empire and converted it to christianity but it split into a tetrachy again when he died and was permanently partitioned in 395.
you'll note that the diocese of egypt was split from the diocese of oriens (both in the prefecture of the east), meaning the oriens is now composed of syria and arabia (including palestine/judea and phoenecia).
the empire then began to reorganize into "patriarchates" run by church despots and a number of "heresies" began to develop. in europe, the primary heresy amongst germans was arianism, which insisted that jesus was a man and not a god. the extent to which these arians were christians at all or if this was just an excuse for roman history to gloss over the non-christianity of the german tribes is an open question, but the issue played a primary role in the conflict between latins and germans, which collapsed the roman empire and eventually resurrected into the reformation (it never really went away. the reformation was fundamentally a part of the long war between germany and italy). in the east, they had the opposite heresy, called monophysitism, which claimed jesus was not a man but was only a god. this was popular amongst semites and i'm pointing to it because it became a key factor in the inability of constantinople to hold the east in later centuries. in both cases, people have a problem with the contradiction - the double think - that jesus can be a a man and a god at the same time. it didn't fly in either direction, it seems. a lot of people died over this bullshit.
the above picture is from c. 450. so, you had patriarchates develop in the east around alexandria (egypt, and which became coptic christianity), jerusalem (judea/palestine, after the jews were cancelled, and which did not develop into it's own church) and antioch (syria, which today is mostly a catholic denomination but has historically been connected to the armenian church, which is an eastern orthodox church). you'll also note the existence of a persian church. you also had the better known greek orthodox church in constantinople and the roman catholic church in rome.
the arabs reconquered the coast, but then quickly lost it to the seljuks, who had since taken over persia. this is leading into the first crusade (against turks, not arabs), which was about 100 years later and was intended to help with the byzantine (eastern roman) reconquest of the region, but they didn't give it back to the romans, they set up germanic warrior-king states that were eventually reconquered by turks and arabs, who in time began working together (indeed, a consequence of the crusades was that the muslims reunited to fight them off, when the romans and germans couldn't help but fight each other).
the reason these reconquests were successful in the short run is that the region was actually majority christian. the crusades were a corrupt disaster run by barbarians, but the basic crux of their purpose - to liberate christian indigenous groups suffering under imperial muslim rule - is basically true.
three things have happened since the 1970s.
you'll note the following maps:
it would follow relatively clearly that israel is targeting the shia regions, which makes sense because hezbollah and iran are both shia groups (hamas is sunni).
that is important in how i frame this.
i've stated something like this previously: i'm going to support israel's actions on the basis that it could lead to the liberation of lebanon. what am i talking about?
the left (or what i call the fake left) has recently become the stupid party, which is frustrating. it is very common amongst leftists on the street to talk about jewish or christian colonialism in the levant and support for hezbollah or hamas as resistance groups struggling against colonialism. comparisons to the crusades (which they don't understand at all and which most of them know of solely through monty python) are frequent. they often embarrass themselves.
i am not a conservative, i am a hard left socialist. i want to apply my engels correctly, here, and avoid making the mistakes that are endemic on the fake left. i would argue that if you do this correctly, you realize that hezbollah is a colonial movement that is colonizing lebanon with shia muslim settlers on the direction of iranian imperialism. it follows that if you want to have a true anti-colonial narrative, you support the jews pushing the shia back, and opening space back up for the christians and the druze, who are the indigenous groups.
lebanon is very old, but it has only been called lebanon (after the hebrew word for a mountain) recently. very far back in history, lebanon was the centre of the civilization that the greeks called phoenician and who called themselves canaanites. these people were not arabs and did not speak arabic, they were basically jews and basically spoke hebrew.
these three language groups at the bottom of the tree - hebrew, phoenecian and moabite - correspond to modern israelis (and many palestinians who were jews before they converted to islam), lebanese and jordanians.
it is not clear what religious views the ancient hebrews had, but they were probably similar to the phoenecians and these three groups would have, at the time, formed a cultural continuity called "canaan". the canaanite people and their north african colony in carthage were systematically erased from history by the roman senate at the conclusion of the punic wars; valuable practical information was converted to latin and the rest of it was erased, burned, destroyed and forgotten. our knowledge of this region's history is consequently more sparse than it should be.
the old testament is a work of fiction written in babylon by captured hebrew slaves, but the archaeology does uphold two key ideas: (1) that the assyrians burnt everything down c. 700 ce and took the survivors back to mesopotamia as slaves and that (2) when the persians took out the babylonians (who had since overthrown the assyrians), they did so with a level of strong philphoenecianism and a desire to rebuild canaanite civilization. i have never seen it suggested that the sort of mysterious origins of the persian empire (the history we have records a personal conflict and is probably a legend written by greeks) have to do with the collapse of canaan cutting off trade networks into the iranian plateau, but it's a good theory in the framework of a marxist filter on history. that is, the iranians may have taken down the babylonians with the intent to rebuild the ports on the coast in the first place. secular and mythological history records a figure named cyrus who conquered most of the middle east, freed the jews and rebuilt the phoenecian port cities in lebanon with the motives of rebuilding the phoenecian trade networks and building a navy to conquer europe with.
the ancient persians are themselves more obscure than they ought to be because the muslims tended to prefer greek sources and systematically destroyed ancient iranian culture and written iranian history. iran, itself, is a victim of arab colonization, and they know it.
this is a map of persian administrative divisions before alexander and is where "real history" really starts.
the three provinces of yehud, samaria and phoenecia were hebrew or canaanite speaking, while eber nari spoke aramaic and became aramea. the people in the province of arabia were not what we call modern arabs (who at the time lived on the red sea coast and south towards yemen). the region is called edom in early sources and contained in the canaanite cultural sphere. the region, like other canaanite regions, eventually began speaking aramaic. there's some curious evidence that they worshiped zeus; the region may have been mostly greek, following the bronze age collapse (well before alexander).
these new jews that came into the region with cyrus were certainly monotheistic and were very heavily influenced by the persian religion of zoroastrianism. like the druze thousands of years later, post-captivity judaism is actually a syncretic religion with a very heavy indo-european influence. unlike islam as it developed centuries later, judaism is not at all similar to indigenous semitic religion and has almost no lingering semitic cultural references (like a moon based calendar) besides some myths recorded in the old testament, like the apparent remembrance of child sacrifice in canaanite religion in the story of isaac and abraham. the story of abraham and isaac seems designed to dissuade lingering concerns about child sacrifice in canaanites. besides that, judaism is an overwhelmingly iranian religion and these new jews that came into the region (after the assyrians burnt it to the ground) seem to have at least intermingled heavily with the persians while they were in slavery.
aramaic became one of the four official languages of achaemenid persia, which was famously conquered by alexander the great and split up amongst his generals. the levant was where they all met, and the place they fought wars in. further, the indigenous armenians and iranians (under the parthian tribe rather than the persian tribe) eventually won independence and came in and out of the levant. when the dust of the collapse of the persian empire, and subsequent reforming under the parthians, settles and when the military influence of greek rule is replaced with the cultural hegemony of hellenism, there is actually a hellenized independent jewish state in the region that speaks greek and aramaic and does not include phoenecia, which remains a part of seleucid syria:
this gets absorbed into rome in a way that splits phoenecia off into syria more or less permanently.
it is still true under trajan, at rome's greatest extent.
however, in 135 ce, the emperor hadrian absorbed the province of judea into syria to create syria-palestina, removing the jews from the map and replacing them with the philistines and thereby completing the dream of cato. well, that's what you get for pissing the romans off. that was, like, 300 years previously.
constantine reunited the empire and converted it to christianity but it split into a tetrachy again when he died and was permanently partitioned in 395.
you'll note that the diocese of egypt was split from the diocese of oriens (both in the prefecture of the east), meaning the oriens is now composed of syria and arabia (including palestine/judea and phoenecia).
the conversion of the empire did not happen in 325 at the council of nicea but, by 395, at the least, the process was beginning. the real end of pagan influence in the empire is usually considered to be when justinian closes the academy in 529, which leads to an exodus of scholars to persia and was really also the clear beginning of the decline of roman hegemony.
this is a zoom in to the map at 395 showing the diocese of the oriens.
the empire then began to reorganize into "patriarchates" run by church despots and a number of "heresies" began to develop. in europe, the primary heresy amongst germans was arianism, which insisted that jesus was a man and not a god. the extent to which these arians were christians at all or if this was just an excuse for roman history to gloss over the non-christianity of the german tribes is an open question, but the issue played a primary role in the conflict between latins and germans, which collapsed the roman empire and eventually resurrected into the reformation (it never really went away. the reformation was fundamentally a part of the long war between germany and italy). in the east, they had the opposite heresy, called monophysitism, which claimed jesus was not a man but was only a god. this was popular amongst semites and i'm pointing to it because it became a key factor in the inability of constantinople to hold the east in later centuries. in both cases, people have a problem with the contradiction - the double think - that jesus can be a a man and a god at the same time. it didn't fly in either direction, it seems. a lot of people died over this bullshit.
the next thing that happens is that islam conquers the region in the 7th century, and islam very quickly became the dominant religion in the former persian empire (including meosopotamia) but it took a very long time for that to happen in the former roman diocese of the oriens (syria, palestine/judea and egypt). the romans held on to asia minor for quite a long time and periodically reconquered parts of the levant, including all of lebanon and a good percentage of israel but they couldn't hold it:
the arabs reconquered the coast, but then quickly lost it to the seljuks, who had since taken over persia. this is leading into the first crusade (against turks, not arabs), which was about 100 years later and was intended to help with the byzantine (eastern roman) reconquest of the region, but they didn't give it back to the romans, they set up germanic warrior-king states that were eventually reconquered by turks and arabs, who in time began working together (indeed, a consequence of the crusades was that the muslims reunited to fight them off, when the romans and germans couldn't help but fight each other).
the reason these reconquests were successful in the short run is that the region was actually majority christian. the crusades were a corrupt disaster run by barbarians, but the basic crux of their purpose - to liberate christian indigenous groups suffering under imperial muslim rule - is basically true.
a result of the crusades, and the eventual muslim victory in them, is that the christians in the broader middle east began to be colonized. that hadn't been the case before the crusades, for the simple reason that the christians were the overwhelming majority and the muslims were the overwhelming minority. islamic history (which is mostly fictional narratives and silly stories. like the guy that swam across the mediterranean) glosses over this, but the reality is that the early muslim states in these regions were military dictatorships with a small number of muslims ruling over a christian supermajority. if the muslim ruling clique had gotten too pushy with the christians, the christians would have overthrown them, and they eventually did.
when did these areas in the old diocese of the orien convert to islam?
This combination of factors meant that the Middle East became predominantly Muslim far later than an older generation of scholars once assumed. Although we lack reliable demographic data from the pre-modern period with which we could make precise estimates (such as censuses or tax registers), historians surmise that Syria-Palestine crossed the threshold of a Muslim demographic majority in the 12th century, while Egypt may have passed this benchmark even later, possibly in the 14th. What we mean by the “Islamic world” thus takes on new meaning: Muslims were the undisputed rulers of the Middle East from the seventh century onward, but they presided over a mixed society in which they were often dramatically outnumbered by non-Muslims.
to this day, there's a large coptic christian minority in egypt that identifies itself as the indigenous group in egypt, but islam has been the majority religion for a long time, now. the indigenous group in syria and armenia are also christian, but they were ravaged by a series of genocides by the turks in the 20th century.
what made lebanon different than anywhere else in the middle east until recently is that it remained a majority christian region all the way from the arab conquest in the 7th century until the 1970s, which is why it was turned into it's own country by the french mandate following the dissolution of the ottoman empire in 1918. otherwise, it would have remained a part of syria, as it always had been. lebanon has been called the principality of beirut (the city was probably built by the phoenicians, rebuilt by the persians, conquered by the greeks and romans, converted to christianity, conquered by the arabs, conquered by the turks, fought over in the crusades and then conquered by the french) and been a part of the province of syria since not long after the crusades, when the ottomons turks (in constantinople) conquered it from the mamluk turks (in alexandria):
three things have happened since the 1970s.
(1) a large influx of palestinian refugees, who are muslims, and are mostly introduced arabs
(2) christian lebanese migration out of lebanon, especially during the civil war. these are descended from the canaanites/phonecians/hebrews.
(3) iranian shi'ite colonization, especially in the south.
it's less that there's been any specific attempt to ethnically cleanse the region and more that the colonizing muslims are increasing their population through migration and high population replacement and the indigenous christians are losing population share through low population growth and emigration.
that said, hezbollah specifically has also been a brutally vicious occupying force, and has for several decades been attempting to enforce it's religious laws on the indigenous people in an extra-legal manner, including via capital punishment and torture. there have been uprisings against hezbollah in recent years, but the indigenous population finds themselves stuck. they just keep leaving instead of fighting.
i've pointed out already in this space that the lebanese have to fight back if they want to win and they don't want to do that so they're not going to.
however, what i want to see happen is for israel to try to rectify some of the demographic changes that have been happening, to push hezbollah out and to give the indigenous lebanese a chance to defend themselves or even to voluntarily choose protection by israel. the jews should get this without explaining it to them. they might not take the chance and israel needs to adjust it's messaging but i think this can be a just war worth supporting if it leads to lebanese self-determination in the end.
i'm being careful about this.
for now, if israel keeps targeting the shia regions, and keeps pushing hezbollah out of the region and out of the government, i'm tentatively in favour of it.
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