https://thehumanist.com/news/national/why-are-the-poor-more-religious

i don't have a moral problem with forced secularization. and, i've said this before: if you could present a tactic to me that i believed would be successful in wiping out religion by force, i would be in full support of it.

but, everything we've tried has failed. religion is truly a virus: the more you fight it with force, the stronger it gets.

so, you need to find some other way to do this.

....not because using force is wrong (given that religion is a violent type of mind-control, i don't think it is; this is really an inversion of the logic used in the spanish inquisition, which wouldn't have been wrong at all if we actually had souls, or hell actually existed.), but because it just doesn't fucking work.

what works is poverty reduction. in the absence of scarcity, religion withers away relatively quickly. so, i promote this instead.

but, it's pragmatic, and not idealistic.

(and, no, i don't have puritanical ancestry; the only ancestry i even have here from the nineteenth century, let alone the seventeenth century, is indigenous. my european ancestors came here looking for work during the later stages of the (second) industrial revolution, not for an escape from reason during the enlightenment. and, it is the former model i would uphold the primacy of: economic migrants, not religious refugees.) 

i believe in open borders, and i don't think we should focus too much on belief in admittance criteria (it should be more about education).

but i simply don't want to be the world's dumping ground for unreformable puritans, or seen as a sanctuary for "religious freedom" in the midst of a world trying to drag these people away from their delusions.

if that upsets you, we'll have to fight about it.

see, and this is what you would expect - it's the same criticisms you hear from westerners rejecting christianity.

what i'm worried about is the possibility that the arab world's muslims may end up secularized before north america's do, because we're going out of our way to present ourselves as an escape from modernization.

in old age, am i going to have to move to iran in search of a more secular society?

https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4898/the-rise-of-arab-atheism

listen.

i might be ok with multiculturalism.

but, islam isn't.

Across the country, the Muslim population is growing at a rate exceeding other religions, according to Statistics Canada. It is even growing faster than the number of Canadians identifying as having no religion, though just barely, according to the National Household Survey released Wednesday

that's old news.

but, if you still don't understand why i identify islam as the most dangerous competitor and opponent that the secular left has in front of it....

islam is the primary force that atheism needs to defeat in order to become transcendent.

and, this is the struggle that will define this century, and in which you will need to take sides on: islam or secularism.

make your choice.

i know i've made mine.

i don't want you to think i'm a clairvoyant, or a psychic or a prophet.

i reject all of these things.

i embrace being wrong, and have no intent of hiding or distorting when i was. and, a lot of what i'm going to upload was wrong - from a certain distance. that's ok.

what i'm providing is not prophesy but a logical analysis based on evidence. what that means is that the analysis is only as good as the evidence is, so if the evidence is flawed or out of date then the analysis is, too. it also means that the analysis is going to change as the evidence does.

if you're looking for absolute truth, i'd suggest searching inside your ass. stick your head in there nice and good. you'll find it, eventually. it's in there, somewhere.

is the dauphin really less trudeaumania and more beatlesmania?

you can just imagine him doing a bed-in with sophie for the canada east pipeline, right...

it's not the fucking 60s anymore.

you know, when the beatles went to india, they actually thought that john lennon was a cia agent.

just saying.

you'll see it, though.

this is what conservatives sound like, here:

"my four year economic action plan will create 1,000,000 working class jobs* for ontarians".

how?

"tax cuts!"

what?

"jobs can trickle down too, you know."

see, this is why they don't teach economics in school: so the conservatives can brainwash these uneducated schmucks to vote for them with waves of utterly incoherent nonsense.

and, enough of them will fall for it, too.






















* jobs will only be made available for fairies and unicorns.

my perspective is this...

if you want to run on "job creation" (as though governments create jobs, like this is the soviet socialist republic of ontario), and you think that marijuana regulation and student loan aid are "fringe issues", then you've just broadcast that you have no idea what a government does and have no business running to represent anybody at all.

you'd might as well just wear a shirt that says "i'm incompetent" on it.

these polls that say voters care about the economy are 100% conservative propaganda. and, the write-ups are literally following a fifteen year old template.

we live in a globalized economy.

the government doesn't make four year economic plans.

i mean, it's not like i'm unconcerned. but, i know better than to think that government policy has any effect on the job market...or who i vote for in the ontario provincial election is going to make any difference in the shape or direction of the economy.

it would be less comical if the ndp was pushing it. but, the conservatives are supposed to be about free markets.

"we need strong economic managers to stay out of the economy, and lead the way in teaching ontarians how to get the government off their backs" - average conservative voter

it's not even something you can analyze. it's just incoherent. and, it's been that way for decades.

all they're doing is mindlessly repeating what they were told.

the old adage is that all politics is local, and this is especially true, here.

this is really the reason that wynne has a chance, still - as unpopular as wynne is, the left really, really doesn't trust the ndp.

so, the liberals can hold their base, and hope that they got an opportunity.

https://socialistaction.ca/tag/andrea-horwath/

to be clear: i still think the liberals can win this election.

...because it's becoming clear that no large movement to the ndp is happening.

i'm clearly offside with public opinion: i actually like wynne, and rather dislike horwath. wynne comes off as genuine, if flawed. horwath is an absolute flake. i don't believe a word that horwath says, for better or worse.

the reality is that the liberals have a better record than the ndp does.

but, the fact that the ndp aren't moving means that wynne still has enough of a base to build on. if the ship starts sinking, that will be what it looks like; if she can stay above water, she can strike.

so, if the liberals win, it's going to be because the province makes a last minute and very sober decision to vote for somebody they don't like, but has policies they prefer. that's dangerous. it's rare. but this is a bit of a weird place; this has happened before, here.

polls always overshoot the tories. it's especially bad in this province; i suppose we've all forgotten the last election. and, we still have huge numbers of undecideds...

...but it's getting a bit dire.

if they ran a leadership convention tomorrow, i might even buy a party membership to vote for dion to replace trudeau...

of course, all science is always wrong.

you know that, don't you?

that's we why love it...

this is just a friendly reminder that newtonian physics has been superseded by the theory of relativity. it doesn't matter much on small scales, so we keep using newtonian physics in engineering. but, when you're talking about large scales like those used in planetary mechanics, newton was simply completely wrong.

jupiter's pull on the earth is not large. but, deducing that it is therefore negligible is classical thinking - it's wrong.

rather you want to think of the solar system as a number of objects suspended in a kind of ether. no, i'm not bringing back the ether (einstein disproved the ether.), but it was a useful conceptual idea for so long for a reason. you don't want to think in terms of equal and opposite forces (although they're there). you want to think in terms of plucking a string.

so, imagine that jupiter and earth are connected with a string. it would be a a very thin string, granted. but, plucking it is going to set of all kinds of vibrations, which are going to propagate in all kinds of directions. and, it's the fields that are going to interact - not in terms of how strong the inverse law is, but in terms of what the change is.

so, it's not |g| that's important. it's delta g that's important. and, it's also delta g that's unpredictable.

for, removing even the smallest piece of a jenga tower can take the whole thing down.

my position is that it's an active research topic. you're better off looking it up than listening to me. but, throwing away tidal drag when it is an active research topic is just ignorant.

i merely seek to draw your attention to your ignorance.

do i think the liberals would be leading in the polls if they had switched leaders a few months ago?

probably, yeah.

what about kathleen wynne? does she have a strategy?

no.

i mean, not a serious one. she just has to stay on message and hope for the best. there isn't a policy or an announcement - at least not from her - that's going to change the outcome of the election.

my position, made here, is that she should have resigned many months ago. she decided not to.

the one thing i would request is that you refrain from making deductions about shifts in political directions in this province. her unpopularity is hers - not her party's and not the broader left's.

her policies are actually quite popular; it's the spokesperson that isn't.

i have no real advice for her other than to try and conquer via division.