it was malatesta that pointed out that the employed segment of the working class, itself, actual workers, has practically no revolutionary potential, because it is utterly reliant on the interests of capital - that the class conflict only really works in one direction. capital is consequently seeking for ways to maximize rent extracted from workers, but workers are themselves seeking only to be exploited ahead of each other - because that is what they are, as proletariat. they have no other function in the economy besides having their labour exploited.

a true revolutionary potential must be sought amongst the lumpenproletariat: the unemployed, the student class and other people that do not occupy paid positions within the system.

this is a fundamental insight of classical anarchism: all that workers will ever support is the reactionary and conservative aims of the existing status quo.

offer me solutions, offer me alternatives, and i'll decline...

again: this polling firm is not measuring undecideds. but, you can see from the prime minister question that around 20% is non-committal.

this is a guess, but i would suspect that the data would be consistent if it were presented more rigorously; that you would see that scheer has really not moved, but that trudeau is losing support to "none of the above". we've seen this before - it was predictable.

it's going to be hard to avoid discussing the tax changes as a driver, if it cements itself. but, you should be careful: you're probably going to conclude that it's wealthy people that are changing their votes, and you'd probably be wrong. after all, the whole point of going after 1% of the population is that it's not going to swing the election.

increased enforcement for tax confiscation may hurt the liberal party's finances with the upper middle class, but it's going to be the working poor that's going to switch their votes to the conservatives. we're talking about people with very low levels of education that are easily confused by right-wing propaganda. they don't understand marginal tax rates, or even the basic concept of progressive taxation - they see a tax increase and assume they get targeted, that it threatens their employment prospects, etc. they've been brainwashed for decades with the idea that wealth trickles down from tax cuts, and they actually believe it.

i met somebody working at a subway last week that opposed her own wage increases because she was afraid she'd lose her job. she's going to vote conservative for the explicit reason of preventing herself from getting a raise. that's what happens when you get your information from the sun. the root of the problem is that she couldn't calculate the increased cost to the business on an overnight shift: she thinks $20/night in wages is going to cost her her job at a busy 24 hour fast food restaurant. she honestly didn't seem to be aware of how much money a busy subway makes. and, nobody seems to have told her anything about how a general wage increase should actually increase business.

but, they don't just make them ignorant - they make them angry, too. i bit my tongue. i had to.

if a swing to the conservatives comes out of this, it's going to be in the exact demographic that gerald butts thought he was appealing to - your working poor voters that are literally conditioned by the conservative press to reject anything that might be in their own interests.

cynical politicking has consequences.

the ndp have an opening here, too, but they have to understand their voters better.

http://poll.forumresearch.com/data/12df314f-eb51-46bb-9048-577d7da5cec9Fed%20Horserace%20Release%20Sept%20.pdf

the goal at the moment needs to be ensuring that people that gave the state all of their information don't get deported.

these people have a stranglehold on the state.

i don't think that wide open immigration benefits anything or anyone, except capital. open borders is the definition of 'unregulated capitalism'; it's a key plank of neo-liberalism. but, if you find the rules too restrictive - and i actually might not find them too restrictive - then it's your prerogative to attempt to liberalize them over time.

right now, you should support anything that stops the deportation orders.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/senate-republicans-unveil-skinny-amnesty-for-daca-recipients

alright, so...

i am awake, now.

where did i leave off on friday morning? i had a tentative mix of liquify up. i'll need to check that. if it's done, i should get through the paper work around the end of 1999 pretty quick; that will include two more completed alephs and a punt on the period 1 disc. if not, i'll need to finish and move on. it won't be long, either way.

so, expect the next thing here to be a closing of inri031 and to be moving forward into the year 2000 within a day or two.

they're not presenting legal arguments - not citing precedent - but are rather presenting opinions that belong in a philosophy classroom, on some kind of contrived moral basis.

and i'm not even sure that most of them could explain the difference.

if you set up a conflict with lawyers on one side and philosophers on the other, and then ask lawyers to moderate, who do you think is going to win?

like i say - it's frustrating, because they should win the argument, they just refuse to actually approach the situation coherently.

Unlike the administration’s previous travel bans, which were intended as temporary measures as homeland security officials were instructed to review vetting procedures, the new restrictions are not time-limited. 

so, if you flip back a few pages, what i argued around the so-called muslim bans was that:

1) they obviously were not "muslim bans" - that argument would fail (and it has failed, because they obviously weren't muslim bans)
2) there was no logical policy connection between a travel ban and public safety, which is the argument they should have presented, and would have actually worked.
3) the information i had in front of me suggested that the president's actions, here, are almost beyond legal scrutiny anyways, so long as the sunset clause exists - all he has to do is cite "national security" and he should basically be permitted to do whatever he wants, so long as it's temporary. basically, you can shut the constitution down for a few weeks, but you can't suspend it altogether.

now, here's the twist: all of the legal battles on the question are surrounding the question of whether it's a muslim ban, which is an unwinnable argument. so, the narrative has constructed itself in a way that makes it seem like expanding it to non-muslim countries will make it harder to fight, as it's now not targetting a specific religion.

except that it was obviously never targetting that religion in the first place, and they were always going to lose those arguments.

if they had presented the correct argument in the first place - which is that there isn't a logical policy objective - this new order would be dead on arrival.

...and it is still the case that this ought to be shut down....

....but, the court process to shut it down has to exist before it can happen, and i see no evidence that this is going to happen.

this is where the rabbit-hole of neoliberalism has brought us to: he will likely get away with exactly the policy that should shut him down, for the precise reason that the opposition has no concept of what the law actually says, because it's been brainwashed with foucauldian drivel.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/25/trump-travel-ban-extended-to-blocks-on-north-korea-and-venezuela