Friday, July 28, 2017

i've been saying for a while that mccain often says a little too much, a little too frankly and a little too clearly - and in the process tends to confuse people expecting the usual obfuscating language.

watch the show.

indeed.

i suppose he's not volunteering the seat.

hard core no bullshit realist analysis aside, it was still the right vote.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/28/politics/john-mccain-maverick-health-care/index.html
"but, you're an anarchist. wtf?"

my arguments are actually quite ideologically left-wing. you just don't know what anarchism is.

anarchism sees the family as an extension of the church, which is itself an extension of the state. the anarchist revolution must consequently abolish the family unit, as if it does not do so the underlying patriarchy will re-establish the state. so, anarchists will generally refrain from supporting things like gay marriage, which are seen as a way for the state to co-opt the queer movement, and instead argue for abolishing marriage altogether. this is not the same thing as a libertarian privatization of marriage; anarchists want the whole institution shuttered and left for dead. we often clash with mainstream pseudo-left parties, and in doing so put through the argument that their proposals are simply not of the left.

in replacement of the family - which i will again stress is an extension of the state - anarchists will argue for collectivized concepts of child rearing that implement democratic decision making. and, this is very key, for child rearing cannot be the decision of any one parent, as that is an undemocratic process. this isn't anything new, either. it's actually closer to the way we evolved. and, it's been proposed as least as far back as plato.

so, who are these gummamint-out-of-my-family types, if not anarchists? they're just conservatives. and, it's not some accident that they regurgitate these religious arguments that are meant to control them. if they wanted real freedom, they would support council democracies meant to overturn the influence of the church; they don't, though, they just want to follow the dictates of authority, and be led into believing what is right and what is wrong. the last thing they want is the ability to actually make decisions for themselves.

putting the control in the hands of a small number of doctors (to be enforced by courts upholding process) is not ideal, but it is at least transitional away from a system of religious authority. ideally, we would have more integrated councils with deeper medical consultation. but, the last thing we want is to give control back to the church via the vector of the brainwashed sheep. the authority here must be academic, and not genetic.
this writer is far more politically correct than i am, and far more patient in the face of the absurdities and idiocies of faith than i ever was, am now or ever will be.

but, this is the absolutely key point that we must continue to fight to uphold against reactionaries that would turn back the clock:

The first is to recognise that children do not belong to their parents. Second, when a claim is made that parents have rights over their children, it is important to step back and examine the language used. We need to remind ourselves that parents do not have rights regarding their children, they only have duties, the principal duty being to act in their children’s best interests. This has been part of the fabric of our law and our society for a long time. Third, if we are concerned with the language of rights, it is, of course, children who have rights; any rights that parents have exist only to protect their children’s rights.

this is actually much tamer language than i would use, and gives parents far more control over their children than i would allow. but, it is the crux of the point, here.

and, it is one that is settled in law.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/24/charlie-gard-tragic-respect-courts
if we're letting these parents make complicated medical decisions about their kids, why don't we let them run the nuclear power stations while we're at it?

doctors: treatment won't work.
parents: no. treatment will work. because....faith.
actual media headline: "parents adamant that treatment would work."
proper media headline: "delusional parents won't let go of severely retarded child."

this is a non-issue. the courts made clear decisions based on evidence from the bottom up. the parents, on the other hand, do not have anything resembling a coherent argument.

for the republican party and the catholic church to involve itself in this is disgusting.

and, for the media to even carry it as a story is irresponsible.

the parents need counseling, not a bunch of fucking vultures reinforcing a lot of religious nonsense.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/gard-parents-uk-appeal-dropped-1.4218717
riiiiight.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/attorney-general-david-eby-defends-donation-ban-delay-1.4225757
it's not that i really liked flash. it's that html5 is so unnecessarily cpu-heavy. this is needlessly eliminating a whole class of perfectly functional machines, and is going to pointlessly create a lot of waste right at the point where we should be doing so much more to prevent it.

years ago, now, i decided to put aside an old pIII for the purposes of sending a signal from youtube out to an even older television. "surely", i reasoned, "a pIII is plenty good enough to send a signal out the back of a video card". and, for years, it certainly was.

a lot of younger people are likely to scoff at the premise of utilizing a pIII for anything at all. but, in fact, it is the idea that a pIII is not powerful enough to launch a web browser to run a video out that is preposterous - as those of us that are old enough to remember running half-life on even slower machines will remind you. it's a pIII - ok. but, you should be able to stream video with a 486.

i've watched this machine slowly lose it's functionality. there's not actually any reason for it, though. the cpu is in perfectly good working order. it has a gb of perfectly good ram. and, it's running a newly refurbished 40 gb hard drive, which is plenty of space to boot windows xp from.

i suppose that the easy thing to do is to buy a quadcore raspberry pi. they're only $100, right? but, the premise is ridiculous. why do i need multiple cores to do something that a 486 should be able to do? and, why should i create a pc full of waste in order to do it?

what is my solution, exactly?

well, the thing that's killing me right now is flash. a few months ago, i had to update firefox in order to block html5 - as absurd as that is. now, i can no longer block html5, and the cpu just sputters out when i try and run video. there is no logic underlying anything that is being pushed down, except the logic of google pushing the hardware market. they may claim that flash is insecure, but that is something to do with porn sites, and not something to do with youtube - unless they are blocking flash to prevent nsa spying of user histories, which they're required to hand over by law, anyways. that excuse is nonsense.

there's no reason youtube needs to block access to older hardware like this. nor is it going to actually drive the market in any meaningful way...

after losing resources to upgrade firefox in order to block html5 to allow flash playback, and then having to succumb to html5 itself, my next step in this fight against google is going to have to be to downgrade to a tiny linux. but, this is a pIII. these distributions are designed for commodores and amigas. it's ridiculous that i need to downgrade a pIII that runs xp perfectly in order to access playback on a website!

but, i can only strip out so many unnecessary cycles before i'm forced to deal with the reality of the site's heavy javascript.

...and there's no reason for any of this besides greed.