given that i live much closer to detroit than toronto, would i even take advantage of that, if it made sense?

sure.

in canada, what you call an "undocumented immigrant" would not receive any kind of healthcare benefits. like, at all. i believe you need to present citizenship to get a health card, but don't quote me on it.

this is one of those issues that a room full of politicians is going to instantly jump to pandering around in the worst possible way, but has anybody really thought this through?

suppose that somebody is in the united states legally but temporarily, either for the night (as i often am) or for a job or for a vacation. does that person get health benefits while they're there? if so, what are the criteria for gaining access to the system?

you could argue it's a human right, but, see, this is where that argument gets messy, because when you've established a right you have to be consistent about it. if your argument is that health care is a human right and therefore everybody should have it, you'll need to get used to people entering the country for the health care system. and, this is something that we do deal with here in canada.

you could argue that it should be a residency requirement, then: so long as you have an address in the united states, you can get access to the system. but, what do you think happens, then? and, how do you treat people without a fixed address?

so, do you want to incentivize entering the country illegally? do you think it's a good idea that illegal entry gets you better health care than legal entry?

again: i'm a socialist and not a progressive/conservative, so i'm more interested in the labour side of the equation than i am in faith through works or something of the sort. i actually would put stronger labour regulations - including a stronger enforcement of minimum wage laws - ahead of migrant rights, in terms of precedence and importance. if you actually start enforcing the labour laws, you'll find the demand for migrant labour start to dry up, which is what the socialist side of the equation wants to see as the end goal. but, jumping to giving health care to non-citizens out of political expediency seems to be hastily thrown together pandering and ultimately rather poorly thought through, doesn't it?

the focus should be on getting citizenship rights to the people that ought to have it, and getting the people that ought not to have it out of the labour market. good luck with that.

there's nothing happening tonight that's of much interest to me, either in windsor or detroit. i can't find an interesting early show. and, my backup plan is often the leland, but there's an instrumental hip-hop night there tonight and it's just sooooooo sloooooooow.....i'd be bored to tears....

there's a spectrum of music like this, from slow hip-hop to dubstep. and, i just don't understand what the point of going to a dance club and listening to slow music is. there's lots and lots of people that seem to like it, though. when i end up in spaces like that, i just end up hanging outside smoking and talking, because i can't get any adrenaline to move from the beats. i guess you'd have to be on a lot of weird drugs or something to get into it.

i need to catch up on end of the month stuff, anyways. cleaning. laundry. rent.

i think i'll be out tomorrow, though.

if you're curious...

i've spent a lot of time in the sun this month, and it's left me with a very deep tan. my father's heritage was never made fully clear to me, but he identified at various times as french, "indian" (by which he meant native american) and italian. my mother has suggested there was some jewish in there, but he never mentioned it himself. and, i have pictures of myself in my paternal grandfather's lap; he had the type of short, curly hair that you really only see in africans and jews, although i know his mother was french canadian and very white.

so, i have some kind of mix of tanned ancestors. and, while you may find me pasty white in early march at the end of the winter, i tend to get very dark in the summer, if left out in the sun, so dark that i've been asked if i'm african more than once (and, again, i might actually be).

none of my pictures or videos are altered in any way, with the exception of increasing the exposure, which would actually have the (unintended) effect of lightening my skin. there are no filters applied to anything. i don't have any reason or really any desire to make myself look darker than i am.

the reality is that i change colours based on exposure to the sun, which draws out a more important point - namely that race is not a biological concept.

what do i think about busing?

i was born in canada in 1981. this is neither something i've dealt with in my lifetime, nor in my geographic area. it has no relevance to me at all, and i've never had to form an opinion about it or take a stance on it.

but, what is the legal issue, here? well, on the one side you have the rights of parents - something i tend to minimize - to send their kids to the school of their choice, and on the other side you have a social engineering policy designed to better integrate kids. the media coverage doesn't seem to be framing this as an issue of competing rights, but that's exactly what it was in the 70s. i mean, if i had kids, i'd want some kind of say or another on what school they're attending....that's not a trivial concern....

in canada, we try to address segregation (insofar as it exists; our black population is much smaller, so we have more asians, and they tend to be relatively advantaged when they come in) through city planning rather than busing. that is, we try to ensure that we don't have these sprawling wealthy gated communities on one side of the city and these low income slums on the other, but rather create mixed neighbourhoods by city ordinance. so, developers are required to create a certain amount of low income housing in proximity to their bedroom communities. yes, we've been slacking on that recently, but it still defines the way our cities are created.

so, when i was a kid, my mom's welfare-subsidized townhouse was literally across the field and down the path from my father's four bedroom mansion. you can look them up on google maps. my mom was on farriers way, and my dad was on mozart court. the schools didn't have to bus people around because the neighbourhoods were mixed up.

i understand that i'm side-stepping the question, but maybe that's the point. i don't want to be snide in pointing to the unnecessary carbon footprint that busing creates, but i think there's a valid desire to have kids go to school in the communities they live in, across the board.

and, let's not forget that kamala harris was not a poor kid, either. i think the framing is a little skewed, in that sense.

so, i think i might argue that if you want to increase integration then there are probably better ideas than busing, and that there are valid reasons to push back on it, even if i would broadly defer to the community over the individual in terms of "parenting rights". and, i'd have to see the specifics of what biden actually argued - which i have not taken the time to look into in detail - before i could form an opinion on it.

but, that's not a thirty second soundbite of a black woman hitting an old white man with a bad tan on being racist. again: i'm not sure how substantive what she said really was, but i acknowledge that she sounded good saying it.

so, i watched the debates, and these candidates were every bit as awful as the previous bunch, broadly. there was precious little substantive debate, but what we heard was mostly a lot of terrible ideas that will do little to solve a lot of serious problems that are desperately in need of real solutions, along with a lot of misleading rhetoric that bordered on demagoguery (especially on the family separation file; that discussion existed in a fantasy reality that is defined wholly by fake news on social media. the court has ordered separation to advance the best interests of the child, and liberals should be supporting that by demanding a good faith application, not blathering on about family values like a bunch of republicans.). they spent more time talking about what they wouldn't do, or what they would undo, then about what they wanted to push forwards. bernie's fading appeal notwithstanding, this is a reactionary and conservative party. and i honestly, legitimately wouldn't want to vote for any of these people.

is the most important task to defeat donald trump? adamantly not. the most important thing is to prevent a return to the previous status quo. trump has broken a number of things, which opens up an opportunity for the left. the most important thing needs to be to prevent electing somebody who is just going to turn the clock back and pick up where obama left off. the most important thing needs to be fighting to take advantage of the crisis (read: opportunity) that trump has left us with, to use his policies like a shock doctrine, to embrace disaster capitalism to push forth serious, revolutionary ideas. a visionary needs to assert itself, or they're going to lose. unfortunately, bernie remains the closest thing to one.

somebody else needs to step up.

a return to the previous status quo needs to be the thing that is fought against the hardest. if the left loses the primary, the general will be unimportant, as it was in 2016.

so, who just wants to turn the clock back? who do you scratch off the list as unacceptable, immediately?

biden got hit, but i actually think he defended himself well enough. there's no question that he's the "back to the future" candidate, and that, to me, is the biggest non-starter. but, putting biden and sanders beside each other exposed how badly biden has aged, recently. if sanders is 70-something going on 90, biden looks and sounds like a centenarian. i'd almost argue that you want biden out there to make sanders look younger, at this point. he really came off as a doddering old man, and functionally disqualified himself in the process. sadly, i don't expect the democratic base to have the same reaction, as it is itself much older than the general voting population. so, how old is too old? there may be no clear answer, but biden is quite clearly too old.

the worst candidate on the stage, in my view, was marianne williamson, who is an example of the kind of candidate that i would actively campaign against. love always loses in the end; if you want to win, you have to fight. you don't want a pushover as commander in chief. prayer circles and yoga mats don't win wars - not for armies and not for working people. she would be a clear disaster and needs to be opposed as strenuously as possible.

harris was articulate and forceful, certainly, but if you actually listened to what she said rather than the way that she said it, it exposed her as lacking meaningful, substantive ideas. she often rambled or trailed off in ways that....she didn't come back to a core message. politicians will often sidestep questions, but they do so to reinforce themes. she was all over the place, and kind of came off as incoherent. so, i didn't really like what i heard from her, even if i concede that she sounded good saying it. and, i'd say something similar about gillibrandt.

i would otherwise actually argue that nobody really distinguished themselves on this night. nobody really said what i wanted to hear. and, i actually wouldn't expect to see much poll movement from it.

there are too many candidates, right now, and it really just muddied up the process. let's hope the field is a lot smaller for the next round, so we can have some more detailed discussions and more pointed analysis.

we got little out of this, and probably shouldn't have expected much different.

see, africans - and in canada, almost all africans are recent immigrants from africa - think i'm cute and want to take me home.

and, i don't mind getting hit on, either, even if i'm invariably going home by myself. that's confidence building, actually. go ahead and hit on me, i'm cool with that.

but, it's a big difference. and, the fact is that the laws are worse in africa, if anything. so why the dramatic difference?

and, south asians are variable, but it runs the gamut from open acceptance to quiet negation. and, i'm not going to get in between somebody's thoughts - those are scared to the individual. work it through, if you need to. that's fine. i'll be here once you have, and walk away if you decide against it.

again: i know better than to get racist about this. racism is stupid, and i'm not a stupid person. but it has something to do with the upbringing, and i have to stress the importance of trying to get in between it, because i want to feel comfortable with everybody, and not have this nagging weirdness with this specific group, which is just drawn out by experience.

i've met cool arabs in windsor. don't think i'm saying i haven't. but, it's singular. it really is.

i hit a few shows in the university district tonight and then ended up downtown for last call. i got hit on at the end of the night, which is fine; there was no event to take note of. and, i left feeling safe enough.

i need to get a pynchon reference to one of the bands, and then check out the debates over a plate of spaghetti.

what's the right answer on this taliban vs al qaeda thing in afghanistan, though? the perception seemed to be that tulsi won the point, but that only holds if you're one of these right-wing isolationists. i think the congressman actually made the right point.

let's look at some statements and determine their truth values.

1) al qaeda attacked the united states on 9/11.
evaluation: unclear. while the united states has never convincingly argued the point, released any evidence or tried anybody in a court of law, this is what we are told, and is the assumption underlying the military action. it is technically an unproven assumption rather than a true statement, but we need to work with this unproven assumption in order to have this discussion at all. so, let us treat this as true, even if it really is unproven.

2) the taliban directed the 9/11 attacks.
evaluation: probably false. that is, i have never seen this claim made by anybody, but i've never seen it disproven, either.

3) the taliban were involved in the 9/11 attacks.
evaluation: unclear. well, let us look at both sides of the debate, here. the united states claims that the taliban refused to hand over bin laden, which would make them guilty of aiding and abetting a terrorist group, should the accusations be proven true in a court of law. but, what do the taliban say about this? crucially, the taliban claim that they were protecting the group from a false accusation. that is, the taliban refused to hand over bin laden until the united states could provide any evidence that they were actually behind the attacks. so, we're left with a conditional statement: if al qaeda were actually responsible, then the taliban were culpable; if al qaeda were not responsible, the taliban were protecting innocent people and not culpable for anything, but actually sort of heroic.

so, if al qaeda was responsible - which she clearly believes - then the taliban are guilty of aiding and abetting them and need to be dismantled for that reason, lest they continue to aid and abet other violent extremists (which they have in fact been doing for decades, as was pointed out, often as a front for the cia-linked pakistani isi). whatever way you parse it, gabbard's statements were incoherent, unless you reject the premise of aiding a terrorist group as creating yourself a worthwhile terrorist target, which is a far-right isolationist position that you'd expect to hear from a taft or something; her position is that america should not be interfering with groups that are aiding and abetting extremists because it doesn't reach the bar of a direct threat to the united states or it's interests, which is a very, very conservative approach to the war on terrorism.

again: i'm a socialist. that means i support struggle, including armed struggle. it means i support revolutionary overthrow of tyrannical governments. it means i support the fight against fascism, including the fight against islamic fascism, in whatever form it takes. and, it means i'm not a pacifist. bringing the empire in makes things very complicated, and sometimes it may make sense to oppose imperial behaviour in scenarios where you otherwise would support struggle, but to reject violence on some kind of moral level would be to reject my own politics. that is a conservative position, not a socialist position.

afghanistan at this point is a mess. but, i feel that the debate that exists is broadly disingenuous. regardless of who was responsible for the attacks, did america go to afghanistan to fight the taliban? i think it's clear enough that they actually didn't. so, is the continued existence of the taliban really a reason to withdraw? in truth, it isn't, as it's not the reason they were actually there. the actual reasons the united states are in afghanistan have to do with controlling a strategic mountain pass, and creating an unorganized state for poppy production. i mean, it's not a coincidence that bush put anthony harriman, whose family has a long history of importing heroin into the united states, in charge of the afghan security council. there's a pretty strong argument that america doesn't actually want to win this war, but just wants to continue to cause instability in the region. so, when do they leave, then? well, they don't. or, at least, not until the troops are needed elsewhere, anyways.

so, these debates are kind of pointless, as they're happening in a contrived reality. i may support a withdrawal, but we have to understand the actual situation before we start proposing it. 

so, i watched the first half 90% of the debate and actually fell asleep during it.

why does the media push warren? because it thinks a warren-trump matchup will bring the highest ratings. that would not be a valid option if warren's plans were not status quo (what is the consumer protection bureau up to nowadays?), but that is the only reason why, and don't fool yourself into thinking otherwise; they have an existing feud over twitter, and it looks to make for good theatre. and, he might beat her because of it, but they don't care about that.

so, she's going to continue to get preferential treatment over all of these charades because she's the candidate that can best maximize profit for the media. expect it. what i'm a little surprised about is that she avoided any direct attack last night.

broadly speaking, i found myself largely in disagreement with pretty much everything all of them said. i may share certain principles with the soft left on display here, but i'd argue that essentially all of these actual proposals would be total disasters. so, i'm not going to suggest that i found myself connecting to any of them; i was turned off by all of them. rather, i want to point out who sounded halfways intelligent and who didn't.

booker was the clear winner in terms of brain power, followed by de blasio and warren. but, booker had a contemplative nature in his responses, whereas de blasio and warren were more cocky about it. beta fell into a middle point, in the sense that what he was saying sounded good, but it was just a string of memorized talking points, with little projected thought behind it. if the criticism of beta was that his policies were vague, he was probably the most detailed on this night.

the rest of the candidates mostly came off as of below average intelligence for various reasons. klobuchar's accent, for example, is a non-starter. and, i think tulsi gabbard is running for the wrong party with the whole veteran shtick. castro's demand that everybody agree that illegally crossing the border be decriminalized fell absolutely flat, and both isolated him and made him look like a clown. and, while i thought inslee might be the sleeper pick, he didn't articulate himself well on this night. at all.

i'm not a democrat - neither literally nor figuratively. so, i'm not a good case study for a primary voter; i'm a better case study for a left-leaning independent voter in the general, that is going to waver between the democrats and a third party (or not vote at all). but, i wouldn't say anybody won the debate or convinced me they'd be a good candidate, even if booker seemed the least scary of the bunch.

so, with the debt thing, to clarify.

the goal should be as follows:

1) public universities should be subsidized entirely by taxpayers.
2) it should be hard to get into these schools, and they should regulate their supply of professionals based on what statistics regarding market demand exists for them that government can conjure up. so, free university shouldn't mean an influx of fine arts grads, but should also mean a more centralized production of professional workers.
3) private universities should eventually be phased out.

so, the reason you leave the private school debt in place is because you're ultimately trying to nationalize these schools. universal debt relief doesn't make sense in the broader context of this, unless it comes with a total socialization of education, which nobody is currently talking about. but, in the end, it's that socialization that you really want, and what the policy ought to be angling for.

if you set up a system where one type of schooling is "free" and the other one isn't, the expectation should be that the best students will gravitate to the least expensive option, so long as it is just as good, leaving for profit schools for legacy students of the rich and stupid. that is, you set up the public schools to push the private schools out of the market, over time.

so, i'm not concerned about income as a dividing line, here. i'm not complaining about giving hand-outs to rich kids, or pushing for a "progressive" approach over a socialist one. what i'm doing is pointing out that the universality doesn't make sense so long as the market continues to function, and that if you're going to leave the market in place you should be starving it rather than funding it.

so, go ahead and bail out the public school students, but make it clear to everybody that private school students will receive no such treatment, not now and not ever in the future, either.

there's really a 0% chance that i'm going to back biden, bootigeg, booker, warren or harris.

and, the more i hear from sanders, the less i like him.

i would like to support a serious socialist candidate, don't get me wrong. but, i do not think that trump is a particularly bad president (in comparison to his recent contemporaries) and will probably opt to support giving him a few more years to throw wrenches into the system over giving biden an opportunity to reverse what he's already done. the way i'd do that is by supporting the socialists....

and, i've already pointed out that there's not any real possibility that i'm going to support the democratic nominee for president, so the debates are not particularly interesting to me.

i'll watch them when they come up on youtube.

but, this space is probably going to be pushing one of the socialist parties this cycle.

annnnnd....

i'm staying in. it's official.

i was kind of half planning on making it home last night, although i realized i'd probably end up in midtown, and so was actually thinking about stopping at the magic stick for some late drinks. it depended on how things progressed. i mean, i wanted to catch the 9:00 bus, initially.

for tonight, there's no way to get home - the bus stops at 9:00. so, i'd have to find an after-party, and i can't even find a late party. i would have wanted to stop by the great lakes coffee shop to see some experimental techno sets, but the night dies after that - if i can't get home, and i can't, it's going to be long and tedious. and, yes, it is finally actually nice out, but this would be a waste i should avoid. it's a wednesday, so i can't complain too much about it being a slow night, although it is. but, the actual problem is the bus - if it was running, i'd go to the early show and come home. alas. i hope they do more sets of this sort in that space. for right now, it's better for me to wait until the weekend.

i need to catch up on some eating, and try and push ahead on the listings, instead.

what did i do last night?

i tried to catch a jazz show in hamtramck at the last minute, and made it to the bus stop for the 9:30 bus. it didn't come. so, i waited for the 10:30 bus. it didn't come, either.

i asked around and realized they started the construction back up on the tunnel on monday, and the last bus was at 9:00. dammit.

so, i stumbled into an open mic night at villain's, instead. a few people got to hear me pound on the drums for a few minutes, but it was otherwise kind of a blown night.

and, i'm back to what i was doing, now.

the angry, homophobic arab.

it's a problem that we've mostly resolved as a society in my experience (although i have little experience living in rural spaces), but that continues to exist in this demographic in rather noticeable numbers. which isn't to say that you don't also have passive, queeny arabs or even just secular, tolerant arabs, too - or that one negates the other in some way - but just that this is a lingering problem that doesn't really exist in any other segment of society and that there needs to be some serious intervention into in order to try and alleviate.

i shouldn't have to live fearful of angry, homophobic arabs getting violent with me, but the truth is that i actually do. that's what's actually real. so, when i speak of islamophobia being rational, there's an experiential basis to it; nobody else goes after me like that. and, it's consistent over a long period....

the most recent encounter occurred last night on my way out of a bar on my corner of downtown, which is shrinking and kind of dying. i decided to take a walk around the corner to get a smoke before i left or maybe talk for a bit and found some people outside of the bar at ouelette and university, under the newspaper building.

"could i buy a smoke from one of you?"

they said the smokes went inside. so, i thought to myself that i could wait for a minute for them to come back out, but the conversation quickly turned to my gender expression, and, more precisely, the way my gender expression made this particular male feel, which i was apparently supposed to care about.

i was making his thoughts race, apparently. did i know what i was?

"i know exactly what i am."
"well, you've got me thinking."
"you'd better keep those thoughts to yourself, then. i don't need to hear them; your thoughts are not my concern."

i understand what happened. this is an individual that appeared to be drinking, and so wasn't particularly religious, but was still holding to the idea that if i turn him on by walking over to ask for a smoke then that's my fault. well, that's what he was taught. unfortunately, what he was taught is wrong, but how do you make him understand that? the reality that he was reacting to an attractive trans-female rather than to a male aside, that is that he was attracted to me because i'm a hot girl in a perfectly heteronormative way, the fact is that it's perfectly normal to have random moments of sexual attraction to people of the same gender, and that doesn't even actually make you gay so much as it makes you a normal, healthy human. these thoughts are not sinful, not immoral, not unnatural, but rather the opposite of it - every human has them, and you're acting against your biology in trying to suppress them.

so, i had nothing to apologize for. i was hot, and he recognized it. high five?

no - he became angry and agitated that i was arousing him, and being insolent about it, as though i both had no right to dress like that and yet an obligation to submit, nonetheless. nope - fuck that.

so, i take a walk towards the bar, thinking there's somebody around the corner, and the other guy pulls out a smoke. i guess he had some smokes after all. he won't take the change for it. but, as i'm lighting up, i start to smell something.

"heeey. you guys are smoking a joint aren't you?"

this seems to have triggered the angry, homophobic arab. not only did i come over here and arouse him with sinful homosexual thoughts, and not only am i rejecting his masculine authority over my servile femininity, but now i'm trying to get in on a joint, too? infidel! he actually literally started swinging at me and yelling at me to get out of there, and i hardly wanted to get into a fight so i left, but i yelled to his friend as i was leaving:

"is this acceptable behaviour?"

and, he frowned at me. he knew it wasn't. and, i think that mr angry, homophobic arab got a talking to from his friend when i left, which is as good a starting point as any in dealing with this.

again: i approached these people because i'm not going to judge somebody by how they look. i'm not going to walk around avoiding arabs, under the assumption that they're all violent and misogynistic and anti-queer, that would be a shitty way to live, even if it wasn't completely wrong. but, nobody else acts like that. really. nobody.

in the end, i just hope that this guy is able to get the help he needs in better understanding that it's ok to have the thoughts he was having - that they weren't sinful, and that the people who told him that are wrong.

see, this is why we curse at the liberals under our breath and then vote for them anyways.

the bastards.

really.

this is not good enough, but i'll take it. and, then, what do you do?

because you know that retrofitting a school is an excuse for broader renovations, right? so, if this is just a scheme for school funding, what is there to actually complain about?

scheer's plan is a joke, and i'll leave it at that. trudeau's isn't much better, but you're stuck with these relativistic choices. let's hope the money actually gets there...

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/carbon-tax-school-retrofits_ca_5d1251d1e4b0aa375f544dfb?ncid=other_trending_qeesnbnu0l8&utm_campaign=trending

so, am i awake yet?

i was in around 9 am and crashed hard until around 7 pm. i did some cleaning on sunday night, but crashed hard again on monday morning. i didn't actually eat until monday evening - three smoothies and some eggs - but i crashed again at about midnight, for another 12-13 hours or so.

considering that i slept most of the day on friday, i only missed one day of sleep. what did i sleep in total, there? 3 + 7 + 6 + 13 = 29 hours. i should have slept 6-8 on saturday, 6-8 on sunday and 6-8 on monday and 6-8 on tuesday, meaning 24-32. let's hope i'm caught up.

and, i'm back to what i was doing.

this weekend is canada day...

he walked right into this.

chances are pretty high that somebody gave him the fork, and short of walking around with cutlery in his pants, which is likely to spur criticism of a different sort, there's not actually a lot you can do in that situation. i mean, i ate at a restaurant in detroit on saturday morning that gave me a plastic fork; my choices were to cancel the order or just use the fork, and i used the fork, and i'm not accepting responsibility for it, even though i didn't take the fork home (and i normally would have). if this draws attention to anything of substance, it's the fact that the issue we have in front of us is not a consequence of consumer choice, and will not be solved by focusing on consumption patterns. the problem we have in front of us is one of corporate culture, and needs to alter at the supply side; we don't have an issue with a demand for single use products so much as we have a corporate culture where they're seen as normal and are thrown at us when we don't actually want them. the responsibility here lies with the person that actually made the decision, and it wasn't him, as it wasn't myself that made the decision to use a plastic fork on saturday morning.

that said, if you're going to push for stupid policies then you should expect stupid coverage in response to your stupid policies.

no sympathy; he deserves this.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/pile-of-hypocrisy-trudeau-called-out-for-single-use-plastic-forks-in-photo-1.4481728

it's just not clear what the actual facts are.

http://ideas.time.com/2013/07/10/eugenics-are-alive-and-well-in-the-united-states/

it is well understood that the american health care system has struggled with the reality of eugenics for over a century now, and that these policies have gone from having widespread popular and state support to being kept an open secret, to avoid scrutiny.

i'll admit i was a little surprised by this asserting itself as a political issue, as it is usually the kind of thing that is reserved for nuts at book signings and wacky anarchists with unwieldy blogs. but, it is indeed probably long past due for a national inquiry into the broad treatment of not just africans but also hispanics, native americans, jews, homosexuals, people with mental health issues and a few other groups across the entire system. we know that there was a time when operations were done on people without their consent; it's not clear to what extent this continues to happen, but you hear things. do marginalized groups die in elective surgery more often than others, for example? are they denied access to treatment by insurance companies in different proportions? can you pull these sorts of numbers out? can you try and make sense of them? because anybody who has looked into this knows that they are actually there, and there's nothing coincidental about it. it's not about class. and, it's not an accidental correlation, or a subconscious oversight. there should be no naivete about the conclusions drawn from the analysis; everything you'd pull out of such a thing would be entirely intentional.

so, the thought is that something like a higher birth mortality rate for african americans isn't going to be a consequence of class, or the result of subconscious bias by the doctors, but rather a pretty clear systemic policy to reduce the birth rate. why jump to these conclusions? because that's something that has actually been legislated by "progressive" groups in the united states (and some right-wing groups in canada), and something that nobody is really sure about the real extent of which it was ever actually stopped.

you'd have to start with an inquiry in order to actually understand the actual facts, which i will repeat that we are not entirely clear about, right now.

another way to articulate what i'm saying is this: i would be opposed to bailing out the banks on private student loan debt.

and, let's be clear what a student loan forgiveness really is: it's a bailout.

again: i'm not a muslim. i don't have a moral problem with usury. i'm not going to support an anti-debt bill for the sake of it. if consenting adults want to sign an agreement, it's up to the courts to regulate it, and that goes equally well for everything else that muslims don't like: divorce, child support, mortgages, pay day loans and student loan debt, too.

so, if the government wants to step in and cancel a debt that was taken out by citizens to attend an institution that is public in scope, that is a question of democratic oversight. if there is support for this, it is up to the people to enact it.

but, for a government to cancel a debt held between a private citizen and a private institution, even if it is acting as an intermediary in the loan, would be overstepping it's bounds and interfering in a process that should be determined via the rules of contract law and regulated by the courts - an area of law that is far more flexible than classical liberals would have you believe.

my position is actually that the government didn't do it's due diligence in researching my background before it gave me the money, and the loan should be declared a gift for that reason. if a banking institution doesn't do it's due diligence, it has no right to expectation; that is, the courts have determined long ago that if the bankers give money to people they had no reasonable expectation would be able to repay the loan, then the debt can be declared null and void. consent requires competency. i could very well argue this in court, one day. for now, i just ignore the loan collectors.

but, the point is that the issue of private debt is not up for the government to regulate, but up to the courts to deal with. public debt is a different issue - that is a question of the public will.

there are only around 20 private universities in canada, and almost all of them are religious in focus.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/education/canadian-university-report/article-why-there-are-only-a-few-private-universities-in-canada/

if you're going to wipe out student debt in the united states, it should be limited to people that attended public institutions.

income is perhaps not the most relevant factor, but i would oppose a bill that wipes out student debt for private institutions.

it would seem as though this is going to be an issue in the next parliament.

on first glance, this is actually kind of shocking - this appears to be very right-wing legislation. but, there is a consistency with the new liberal party, in that it doesn't seem to care about the rule of law, or the enforcement of constitutional rights. in this case, it appears to be holding to a retributive concept of justice that, while popular with "progressives", would have been thought of as barbaric by historical liberals.

it will be interesting to me to see if the ndp support this oversight provision in the next parliament or not, because we would see a reversal in position if they do - i would expect the ndp to support a fire and brimstone policy, and the liberals to reject that as primitive.

https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/may-2019/corrections-bill-lacks-key-provisions-judicial-oversight/

i would be in support of extended judicial oversight over the prison system to ensure that prisoners are not being abused by the police, but such an amendment cannot be proposed by an unelected body. it must come from the house of commons.

i would hope that the next government introduces the legislation in the appropriate body - or that a private member does, if it will not.

my position on violence has been the same for a very long time. i will eventually post things from the mid-00s that articulate this view, and i stated it repeatedly over occupy: violent revolution without critical mass is stupid, but once critical mass has been achieved it becomes both necessary and desirable at the first opportunity.

that is, the question of whether the utilization of force is justified or not rests largely on where the balance of power actually lies.

marx would agree with me; jesus wouldn't. you decide which is right-wing and which is left-wing, but i'm on marx' side and not jesus'.

gandhi's argument also relied on critical mass. people tend not to understand what gandhi actually did very well; it wasn't a non-violent march for ethical or religious purposes, but rather a show of superior force. and, gandhi knew that. what he was saying was "this is the size of my army. shall we arm it with the help of, say, the russians, or will you admit your position is hopeless and withdraw without a meaningless fight?". it worked because the british were rational - it would have likely not have worked against a donald trump or even a winston churchill, who would have been obsessed with rebuilding the empire. the point is that it was not non-violent or non-threatening, but even actually a return to the way that the romans and persians would conduct wars in the post-hellenic period, coming out of a shared greek heritage: generals would put their forces down on the table, and everybody would decide the winner in the terms of a board game, because the greeks realized that these constant civil wars were just pointless destruction. the barbarians did that. the greeks were better than that. and, generals would actually abandon cities after admitting defeat on the risk board. gandhi would have launched a brutal, bloody civil war if the british forced him to. but, they didn't.

so, i will tell activists that they need to back down and stop picking physical fights with cops; they will have a better chance at winning a legal argument than winning a confrontation, as they have no army in which to fight. but, i will also tell them to bide their time: if they had the sufficient amount of forces behind them, i'd be the first to join their side. and, we could see that in our life times...

in fact, the republicans that opposed the new deal were very similar to the british liberals that abolished the poor laws, thereby creating the gilded age; insofar as reaganism is rooted in thatcherism, the claim that the opposition to the new deal was an early type of neo-liberalism is actually quite well-grounded. reagan's dismantling of the welfare system, his welfare queen and the whole thing, is right out of the liberalism of victorian england.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-deal-democrats-republican-party/

nancy pelosi is clearly descending into alzheimer's or something similar to it and needs to step down from her post as speaker immediately.

i will repeat: i am calling on the immediate resignation of nancy pelosi due to clearly declining mental capacity.

another way to think of it is like this: liberals and leftists tend to generally prefer to avoid thinking about things in terms of applying universal rules to specific circumstances and would rather prefer to look at the evidence in front of them in determining an answer that is most relevant to the situation at hand. that is, liberals prefer an empirical-based reasoning that tries to understand the world the way it is, whereas conservatives prefer axiomatic systems that try and define the world from first principles. pacifism is clearly axiomatic rather than empirical and consequently is inherently right-wing. but, the basic point is that a liberal would consequently fundamentally just not understand how a pacifist thinks; to decide that these rules are paramount, and not subject to experience and evidence, that the rules are always the same in all circumstances no matter what, would simply make no sense to a liberal. conservatives need structure and order; liberals need uncertainty and chaos.

the people that you call "progressives" in the united states are generally called "conservatives" in most other places in the world.

this is a good article explaining why conservatives are going to be inclined towards pacifism. if you self-identify as a progressive, and this makes sense to you, then you should put things together and realize that your history and values are on the right rather than the left.

leftists, on the other hand, have historically seen violence as an unavoidable necessity to advance social change.

they missed the argument from property rights, which is more fundamental in my view: if you support property rights, you're far more likely to oppose violence as a rule than you are if you don't. it is conservatives that are big into property rights; the left doesn't support property rights at all, but rather supports dismantling them with violence and redistributing the wealth by force.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-conservatives-hate-war/

there's not really such a thing as an anti-intervention or pacifist left; the left advocates for violent revolution by definition, so an actual leftist is in a situation of determining what kind of struggle it wants to support and what kind of struggle that it doesn't want to support. it follows that you should be exceedingly skeptical of the motives of anybody that chooses isis as an example of a struggle to support, by not intervening - that is not a person that has social values that you want to give a platform to, but somebody that you should do everything you can to keep away from any kind of power; any leftist worth calling themselves such would categorically reject isis in the most violent terms possible, see them as an enemy that needs to be annihilated and be left with a decision over whether they want to fight against isis with or without the aid of imperial forces. that is, it's not a question about whether you want to fight isis or not - this is not debatable - but only a question of if you want to fight them with the empire, or carry on your own campaign against them. seeking dialogue with isis is equivalent to denouncing the left.

people that oppose war on moral grounds, by citing religion or conscientious objection, are not called leftists but are rather called conservatives (or sometimes progressives), and are on the right side of the political spectrum, not the left side of it. a socialist revolution would have absolutely no use for these people at all, whatsoever; they would probably end up in work camps.

so, the question is not whether bernie would support the use of force - of course he would, he calls himself a socialist - but whether you can justify his use of force or not, and i've yet to come up with much of an argument against him.

i never formed a strong opinion around kosovo, which i think is partly due to my age. i cite yugoslavia as my first conscious experience with dishonest government media; it was the first time i seriously questioned whether what these people were telling me is actually true or not. in the end, i had to conclude that because the claims were all around questionable (which is perhaps how my teenage mind interpreted the claim that the issue is very complicated), i didn't have enough evidence to form a meaningful position. i haven't really evolved this, because i haven't really had a good reason to. but, in principle, i would have supported the bombing campaign, if it was really intended to stop a genocide that was actually happening; the thing is that it is not at all clear how much of that is true and how much isn't - unlike in syria, where the atrocities by isis are well documented, and often carried out in public.

do people remember kosovo? well, i'm 38 and it's blurry. it's certainly a larger slice of the electorate than vietnam or nicaragua, but you're nonetheless going to lose at least half of most rooms by even bringing it up. further, my memory is that there was not an anti-war movement attached to the campaign, either. even keeping in mind that it was carried out by a democratic president, i did not encounter a lot of opposition to this war on the left, nor is it a situation that resonates as a mistake with many people today. so, this article appears to largely be shit-disturbing.

but, i think it's a reasonable discussion to have, nonetheless - because i would not vote for or support a pacifist for present, because i'm a leftist, rather than despite it; pacifism is a right-wing thing, not a left-thing one.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/06/23/bernie-sanders-foreign-policy-doctrine-227193

i'm in the mainstream of my own political culture, trust me.

there was a big movement against the wto back in the 90s. there was even a short-lived supergroup involving the bassist for nirvana, the guitarist for soundgarden and the singer for the dead kennedys called "the no wto combo". it (the movement, not the band) collapsed after 9/11.

this was the hesitation with trump. yes, he's awful, on certain issues - for me, the most important thing is the climate. you couldn't have worse leadership on that file. really.

but, is he going to destroy the wto? 'cause i'll take that, however it happens.

and, remember: the democrats are historically the conservative party in the united states. the republicans are historically the liberal party.

there is consequently a certain logic in the democrats embracing islam that is not transferable to the liberal party of canada, and is better attached to the prairie gospel messaging of the historical ndp.

i've been saying this forever.

it's eyebrow raising, certainly, but it's suggestive that the party recognizes some of the demographic contradictions that are showing up across the existing spectrum.

it's up to voters to figure this all out and where the parties move in the future, but the existing reality of religious muslim groups supporting the liberal party (putting them in coalition with the pro-science party, atheists and queer groups) is not sustainable. that coalition will fracture, and it's a question of how to minimize the damage and put things back together. liberals don't like racism, and want to build a world where people aren't assumed to follow a specific religious ideology based on their race or ancestry, but they're fundamentally not on the same side as islam. on the other hand, while many conservatives hold racist views, they are fundamentally in coalition with the islamic worldview in ways that liberals have never been and never will be. if we want enfranchisement and accurate representation - if we want democracy to be genuine - we need to find ways to work through these contradictions and ensure that people are voting in ways that actually reflect their actual values.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/canadian-muslim-vote-eid-dinner-justin-trudeau_ca_5d0e87a2e4b0a39418636a3e

tariffs are hard.

but, i'm actually pretty strenuously opposed to these kind of wto agreements that reduce a country's sovereignty - meaning i actually think we should have never agreed to this provision in the first place. i consequently have no opposition to this legislation - i would support the removal of canada from the wto altogether.

but, understand what's happening here: we're suspending a rule put up by the wto to protect ourselves from the consequences of the slow unraveling of nafta. your new world order is over - we're back to having a history again.

but, tariffs are still hard, and i hope that the government remembers that before it starts using them haphazardly.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/safeguards-c101-analysis-1.5184780

"ernie, where's my breakfast?"

so, i made it through a two-day....bender?.....in detroit. where did i go?

i was late leaving, so i started at small's instead of outer limits. and, understand that i'm transiting via bicycle, so there's a lot of bicycle riding worked into this.

1) voyag3r. small's. 23:30-1:00 (on friday night).
2) solstice party. marble. 1:30-10:00.

there were some bernie sanders organizers in the eastern market on saturday morning. there's a lot of talk of foreign interference in elections, right? i was there as an observer, which is an important role for a foreign citizen to play in the democratic process. but, i wasn't intending to flyer, and i didn't want to waste the organizers' time - i can't help them at all. what i was hoping was to observe an organizing meeting, but there wasn't actually one there, it was just some people doing shifted outreach. so, i got eggs instead.

3) breakfast. bert's. i had bert's breakfast, at bert's. *ernie laugh*. 11:00-12:30.
4) helen lambrix & matthew smith. dequindre cut. the first part was a singer-songwriter set, and the second was a very appropriate drone set in the park. he even had the trumpet out, miles style. i kept punning in my head: "he sounds miles away, but he's right there". i was hoping for jazz in the afternoon, but i'll take drone, too. that worked out well, actually. 13:30-16:00.
5) i guess i would have gone to try the jazz thing in hamtramck, but i actually had to briefly go back to canada to get some more cash. 16:30-18:00.
6) helms alee & earth. el club. she's really savage on that kit - just viciously efficient. & earth were actually a lot more structured and written than i expected. i was expecting a doomy, girgy, swirly kind of thing, but it was actually kind of major-key and proggy; less like you're working through the consequences of realizing you're lost in a swamp surrounded by forests in a distant and faraway land, and more like you're playing zelda in your basement. it was an early show so the kids could come in and dance to bad "indie rock". we're going to rehabilitate this space rather than boycott it, right? 19:00-22:00.
7) cyperpunk dance party. pj's. i think the earlier sets were more along the lines of what i was looking for, but i missed them. the middle acts i saw were silly 80s pop bands, even if the second sounded like trent reznor trying to jam with tony banks, and almost worked in the juxtaposition (if they would have strained the contradiction hard enough). i thought the closing act was hip-hop, but it was actually a kraftwerky throwback and worked the better of the three. there were a lot of middle shows on saturday (a jazz show at northern lights, a noise show at the crow, a well known dj at tv and a hip-hop/punk outreach at the trumbull) and i ended up here thinking i'd get the most interesting sets. the jazz show was too far given the progression into the ordeal, and i wanted something other than dancing earlyish, but i left wondering how the show was at the crow. 22:30-1:30.
8) asher perkins. i can't remember where this was actually, msg me if you remember where it was, and i'll update it. the fact that this place is known for debauchery notwithstanding, i guess i must have been a hot mess by the end of this, because i got molested all night here by members of both genders, although it was mostly harmless: girls claiming we'd met before and trying to kiss me (and maybe we did, even if i wasn't in the best ability to recall memories right just then), guys saddling their arms around my waist, etc. asher has become kind of a trance dj, working a lot on the transitions, and it serves his style well - it's a good mix of danceability and introspection, allowing for both social and individual types of dancing. 2:00-7:00.

i got home around 9:00.

what i was hoping was that this government would see the economic logic in supporting a carbon transition, so that we would have this kind of two-handed approach, where the government was both supporting ecological sustainability and environmental destruction at the same time - and, yes, it would be a terrible contradiction, but it would at least be a step in the right direction.

what is defining this government is that it is actually defining it's environmental policy in lockstep with industry; we are not seeing the perpetuation of this contradiction, but rather the elimination of it. the most substantive legal changes they've made are an industry-friendly overhaul of the regulatory process (which the ndp also supported, btw); everything they've been doing is designed with the intent to reduce the government to a rubber stamp, and to act as a pr agency for the oil industry. it's not climate denial, it's climate apathy.

at least if there was an actual contradiction here, we could point to substantive, meaningful movement. but, there isn't. the infrastructure bank that was supposed to fund large scale transition projects is a joke. they're squandering a huge opportunity to industrialize marijuana waste products into petroleum alternative products. and, the carbon tax is just making environmentalism look bad, as it taxes consumers while giving industry a free pass.

i guess i underestimated the power of the oil lobby. renewables will need to find a way to bribe this government if it wants it to act.

as it is, the consistency is in truth very clear: oil matters, the environment doesn't - because money talks.

https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2019/06/21/Trudeau-Climate-Policy-Inadequate/

when we talk about "regulated capitalism", we often neglect to ask the question: who is doing the regulating? and, this is exceedingly important to stop and ponder, because in a system where property rights are enshrined as quasi-religious dictates, there is no possible answer to that question besides industry.

so, these "progressives" produce this false dichotomy, where they pit free markets and self-regulation against government regulation, as though the government isn't completely bought and paid for by industry - and has no choice but to be for capitalism to function.

"regulated capitalism" is consequently a contradiction in terms; the only possible regulators are the people that you're trying to regulate.

and, to a large extent, understanding this specific point is what socialism is really all about: we have to take control ourselves.

it really is socialism or barbarism. there is no third way.

so, when bernie talks about full employment as a human right within a system of regulated capitalism, there's three ways to interpret it.

1) he's just flat out full of shit.
2) he hasn't actually thought it through.
3) he's more radical than he's suggesting.

i think the right answer is (2).

so, what might an actual socialist say about something like a "jobs guarantee", or, as it is sometimes referred to by left-capitalists, "full employment"?

well, let's begin by understanding that labour is a commodity like anything else, and a capitalist always seek to reduce costs by any means in order to maximize profit. so, the capitalists - here, meaning those that own capital - are constantly seeking to reduce the cost of labour in order to maximize their own profits, that's just what capitalism is. and, this is what the class war is about: workers needing to band together to find ways to stop capitalists from exploiting them, which they will do in ever increasingly surreal ways if left to their own devices. there are no good capitalists - the game is that you cheat and lie and steal to get ahead.

as labour is a commodity, and capitalists seek to reduce it's cost, the law of supply and demand dictates that they ought to desire there to be a surplus of labour. when there is a deficit of labour, as there was after the small pox epidemic in america or after the plague in europe, then the price of labour goes up, which cuts into profit. capital wants to avoid this by always ensuring that there are more people than are required to do the jobs that need to be done for the society that exists around us to flourish.

(as an aside, an understanding of this is a part of the reason i don't work. if the capitalists want there to be more people than are required, then i'll volunteer to be surplus labour and go do something else, instead.)

how does capital ensure that it is maximizing it's own interests in creating a labour surplus? the answer to that question is via government regulation. through direct or indirect financing, the interests of capital (largely articulated through banking institutions) will do something called "capture" the government to behave in it's interests. that is, they work via systems of bribes and incentives, as well as through the revolving door. immigration policy in the united states (as well as in canada) has long been designed by the interests of capital to encourage excess amounts of immigration in order to reduce the price of labour. establishment politicians will then hold on to power by blaming the immigrants for "stealing jobs" and suppressing wages, in order to distract from the fact that the system is designed this way - this is what the capitalists actually want.

so, do you use government regulation to ensure a job guarantee? well, it's hard to make sense of such a thing, when you understand that the way it actually works is that the banks use government regulation as a tool to suppress wages with.

socialism does indeed call for full employment, but it does so not as a human right but as a consequence of the abolition of property. it is only when we take collective control of the means of production, that is when we abolish capitalism, that it will make sense to talk about full employment.

so long as the banks control the government via what is called "regulated capitalism", you will never see a jobs guarantee. it doesn't make sense within the constructs of the existing economy.

so, i've got the weekend roughly planned out (the occasion is the solstice) and it really is a wild one.

i'm not going to get to ann arbor for the fuzz fest, which is a shame. but, i'd be looking at far too much traveling time, which means far less drinking and dancing time. it would be better if there were known after hours spots in ann arbor, but the late night parties are all in detroit. so, if i go to ann arbor, the night ends at 2:00 and i'm stuck trying to get home; if i stay in detroit, the night will go until dawn, and potentially into the afternoon. as it is, there are good rock shows in detroit this weekend.

there are arguably better rock shows in pontiac, but it's more or less the same problem. at least there are buses, but do i want to spend all night on them?

thursday is pelican, and i can bike to ferndale (i'll be stopping around grand for electronic sets both ways), but understand that it's less than half the distance to pontiac. google says it's a three+ hour bicycle ride to pontiac from the tunnel; it's a nearly two hour bus ride. so, i'd probably rather go to touche amore on saturday night, but it means i'll have to sit on the bus from after eleven until around one or two. again: there's no late nights in pontiac. as it is, there's an earth & helms alee show in southwest, so it makes more sense to go to that. likewise, i'd like to catch astronoid on sunday, but it means throwing away the whole afternoon, and potentially getting stuck overnight. there are interesting shows at cliff's bells and ufo, instead.

but, if those shows were at least south of ferndale, i'd probably go to both of them, instead. i've got a roughly 15 mile radius to work with on my bike - you don't have to put the show 30+ miles out of town.

there are overnights on both friday and saturday, and there's enough happening that i could actually leave on friday night and come home on sunday night. i have a few different possible paths, too, so i'm not entirely sure. it's going to depend. as previously, there are dead spots on saturday and sunday morning, but i'm closer to filling them in than usual. we'll see how that works.

as for next week, i might not have time to push forward too much further. we'll see.

what's the update on my teeth?

i sent an email on friday afternoon requesting information about a fluoride varnish, and they sent me something back late on monday indicating that they don't usually do fluoride varnishes until after they've done the drilling.

that is literally complete bullshit: the purpose of the fluoride varnish is to prevent the need for drilling. and, i don't let people lie to me twice; i'm done with this dentist, done with this office and done with this hygienist. so, i'll be looking for dentist #3, probably on monday.

i explained in the email that the first thing i need to do is stop the bleeding, which is what the fluoride treatment is about. the city i live in does not fluoridate it's drinking water. so, a fluoride varnish would be like a chlorine shock in a dirty pool. i was able to find some peer-reviewed studies that indicate that the silver solution, particularly, can very effectively arrest existing carries, and shows especially strong results when the water source isn't fluoridated. obviously, the better answer is to fluoridate the water, but windsor is really a very, very backwards place. the fluoride should both kill existing cavities and stimulate very small amunts of rebuilding.

once i've had a fluoride treatment, i'm going to start using novamin regularly, which should aid in rebuilding. i do not believe that my teeth require more work than that.

i'm going to want to deal with the stains, though, too, and that's probably best done with sealants.

so, why did she tell me that? because she wants to maximize profit. it's profit over people - she doesn't care about me, she just wants to max out the coverage. fillings are expensive; fluoride treatments and sealants are cheap.

i suspect that this may be the norm in the "profession", and i may need to go through several dentists before i find a good one. they're not really doctors, they're more like mechanics in the sense that they assume you are overwhelmed by ignorance in the topic and can essentially be manipulated at will. so, they're constantly trying to rip you off - you can't give them the benefit of the doubt, you have to double check everything they say. as mentioned: i'm not going to let a dentist, or a hygienist, or a secretary lie to me twice. your teeth are too important for that. i just hope that any damage done in the cleaning is reversible.

i will need to find somebody willing to do a strong fluoride treatment, first, and willing to seal over the cosmetic issues, second. and, i'll be using novamin in the mean time.

bernie has no analysis.

and, did i watch sanders' speech?

i did.

and, i couldn't tell if he was standing on stilts or not as he was projecting his bourgeois fantasies.

there isn't a better option, and there hasn't been in decades. that is all i've ever said. but, it has long been pointed out by leftists of all types that he really shouldn't be calling himself a socialist, and he really drove that home pretty strongly by citing a person (fdr) who made it his life goal to stop a socialist revolution from happening - and succeeded.

he talked a lot about how freedom requires economic rights, but he didn't address the actual fundamental issue, which is whether a capitalist state will allow for these kinds of guarantees. i might put forward the argument that if these things were possible without a more structural kind of change then we'd already have them.

so, can you have a jobs guarantee in a capitalist economy? for a few minutes, maybe, but it will be gotten rid of as soon as the capitalists can figure out how to do it, and so long as they have the system on their side they're going to succeed in getting rid of it, eventually. can you have a right to housing in a society that agitates for a surplus of labour?

the left tends to come down pretty hard on hippies for just enunciating this shit without extrapolating on the reasons we don't already have it, or in understanding why the economy is designed to deny it.

and, the bankers may even sign off on his economic bill of rights, if there's enough people in the streets. but, good luck getting the courts to enforce any of it - that will take 200 years of building precedent.

the narrative is that sanders is the change candidate, but the more he speaks the more he's demonstrating that he really isn't, that he's just another moderate reformist that doesn't really get it.

listen: i could easily hang out at an afro-beat prog-reggae bar, if it was actually good. barry adamson night would be a riot. it's not "black" that i don't like. my dad may have been part african, remember. i've been listening to jazz and blues and what they used to call r'n' b of all colours for my whole life. it's hip-hop specifically that leaves me cold, because i don't like the politics underlying so much of it, and i have no interest in this kind of toxic masculinity that seems to be the purpose underlying the genre.

i don't like hip-hop for the same reason that i don't like heavy metal, and much of what passes for "punk" these days. it's not about race, really - it's more about gender. and, you know i have gender issues.

but, that's not the conversation going on in detroit, right now. the conversation going on in detroit right now is explicitly about race, and i'm not trying to co-opt it, i'm just pointing out how i intend to navigate it. i've always gone to "black events", periodically. that's not going to change, now. i just have a different concept of "black" than so many people seem to.

back in the early 00s, when i was in ottawa, i dated a girl that had a sister that lived in the apartment complex at elgin & mcleod, across from the museum. she used to take me down to the parking garage there on the weekends to go to this carribbean drum party that would run until four in the morning. and, i would drum with the rastas all night - it was always a good time, and they knew me for my musical training. i could hold a beat as well as they could, i wasn't your average syncopationless white kid, so they were always happy to see me. in fact, they would throw these skinny white bitches off the drums and put me on them - "you, you play, you got it.....wait, you want this, first?".

see, and i would think that detroit ought to identify more with the more developed side of the african musical tradition. being black in detroit should be more about tapping into this deep, rich heritage - because it's such a historically wealthy city, and it actually has a black middle class. if it was me, i'd be more irritated about losing my actual heritage than itchy about bringing in rappers from los angeles.

but, i'm just the polite white kid from canada. all i can do is watch and take notes, and ultimately vote with my feet.

so, how should you listen to my music.

attentively.

and, as always, please use headphones - high quality ones, preferably. do not listen to it on your speaker phone. please. i plead.

you also need to find a nice quiet spot by yourself, and actively focus on it as it is coming at you. so, you could listen to it on the bus, for example. or, in the library. or, on your couch or in your bed.

but, you won't get much out of this if i try and blare it at you when you're drunk, or lost in thinking about how to hit on the person at the other side of the bar. there are components you can trance out into, but not many people dance like i do.

of course i want my music to have a wider exposure. who wouldn't? that's the point: i want more people to listen to it.

but, even if performing it was actually remotely plausible, it would still be the wrong way to market it. i need you to listen to it in a quiet space, through headphones, alone. you won't understand it through the atmosphere of a bar or a concert hall - and it's not designed for that kind of ambience, either. and, it's not even a question of not compromising on it, i'm just adamant that it's just the wrong way to do it.

so, i need to get the recorded music to djs, record stations, record labels, stuff like that - and then try to convince them to listen to it in the right way. i mean, there's a reason the beatles stopped touring when they hit their experimental phase; it just no longer made any sense to try and create it live. i'm not getting anywhere trying to jam over a three hundred part backing track - it's boring, and pretentious, and misses the point. those three hundred parts took a long time to make - i actually want you to hear what they sound like.

i actually got somewhere at some point by trying to market the recordings via youtube trolling, but i wasn't actually moving any units and made the choice to retreat.

is this a harder problem than trying to market a band? i'm not sure it is, anymore, even if it isn't the expected set of problems that a diy musician tends to come up with. i mean, i'm still pressing records by hand, here, i'm just trying to get you to click a link rather than trying to sit you down and listen to a song. harder is questionable, but different is certain - this is a very different challenge, and i'm going to need to use very different approaches.

as it is, i have two choices.

i could put something together, and have it sound nothing like the recording. or, i could show up to the gig and pres play, like a dj set.

my music is not reproducible by live musicians, and is not intended to be.

i'm 38 years old and i've played in a band setting maybe four or five times in my entire life. i have no concept of what chemistry with other musicians is, or what compromising on a sound is. i've always imagined that the process of starting a band would essentially be equivalent to hiring musicians and giving them sheet music to play, but i've never actually done that in real life. it follows that i wouldn't actually know *how* to play in a live setting, and i'd no doubt get stage fright and have to run off and hyperventilate somewhere in a corner.

i would rather watch other people play something i've written than actually perform it myself.

but, i'm ok with this, because i've never identified as a rock star, but always as a composer of abstract music. excluding a small period of time when i was like 15 years old, i've really never had any serious aspirations to start any kind of actual band, but have rather always been seeking experimental musicians for the explicit purposes of studio work to create albums full of recorded compositions. i don't want to set up an amp in front of you and slay you with my technicality and skills, i want you to listen to things i've carefully constructed over many hours with a pair of headphones, and connect to that music by yourself.

and, i've never stated anything differently to anybody. all i've ever told anybody for the last 20+ years is that i'm an experimental studio composer with minimal interests or, frankly, ability in actual performance. i've cited people like frank zappa, billy corgan, michael gira, trent reznor, jimi hendrix and john balance that built careers around their reputations as studio musicians, with minimal abilities to reproduce their experiments in a live setting. i've never cited performing artists.

and, i haven't cut an original vocal track since 1999.

i'm not at fault. don't blame me. you imagined something that wasn't real. i've been honest with myself and everybody else the whole time, you just didn't actually listen to what i was actually saying.

i have presented myself as an artsy rock chick from day one; you misinterpreted me as a metal head guy. i don't even like metal. now, you're finally coming face-to-face with your own delusions, and you don't have anybody to blame but yourself.

i've been quiet.

i'm just stuck waiting for facebook to load. over and over. so, i haven't been wandering around the internet, reading things. but i want to get over this hump this week once and for all so i can get to actually planning these cases.

this week in detroit may be more ridiculous than movement - and that much better because it's that much less packed. i've been talking about the dead techno scene in detroit, but i should bite my tongue: if this weekend becomes the norm, the techno scene in detroit will be doing just fine, even if it's relying on touring djs (which i see no shame in). there's really only two residents in detroit right now, and only one of them seems to have a regular late night. normally, you get one long party on the weekend, if you're lucky, and you have to pick. outside of movement, i haven't seen a weekend like this since i moved here. really.

and, there's a few rock shows to pick from, too. meaning, this is going to be long and ridiculous - and i'm going to actually make it all the way this time, because i'll have those rock shows to push me.

that just means it's that much more important to stay disciplined as i push far ahead into the end of june and start looking at toronto and london dates seriously starting for july.

i'm not a progressive, i'm a leftist. there is a very different history, and we have very different policy aims. i have no patience for capitalism, and see no future for it, and i'm not interested in working with religious groups or even in respecting concepts of religious freedom.

my analysis is consequently from the liberal left, and not from this authoritarian conservative space that progressives exist within.

what focusing on impeachment means is that the democrats will spend the next 15 months focusing on ways to elect the next democratic candidate president, rather than on writing legislation.

and, so, your view on this really depends on why you supported a democratic majority in the house. did you vote democrat because you want the democrats to pass laws? or was it a protest vote against donald trump?

and, if it's the latter, and there are a lot of you, you might want to get the point out: because out here on the actual left, we don't vote democrat out of protest, but rather out of pragmatism. if we're doing protest votes, i'd rather cast mine for the greens or the socialists, thanks.

worse, there's also a lot of voters in the middle of the spectrum that may actually consider voting republican in 15 months if the democrats don't actually accomplish anything, which i'll remind you is what happened the last time they let pelosi run the house: she sat on her hands for how many years and let the republicans run the government, with minimal interference.

we have the same problem with the liberal party in canada, now, although this is more recent. if you're actually serious about building democratic support for this election and the next, you need to address the fact that voters are fed up with them because they don't actually do anything: they get elected on strong mandates to do things and then just sit on power for years. it kills morale; it's deflating.

in order to build a broad base of support, the democrats need to do things like pass anti-war legislation, reform the tax code and focus on serious health care reform. it doesn't matter that it's going to get vetoed - make him veto it. make him do it. the american people elected a democratic majority to the house, and they have every right to expect it to govern as one.

focusing on impeachment is an escape hatch, a distraction, a way out from actually governing. and, it's not going to build support for the next democratic president, but rather fuel cynicism amongst voters, who are going to conclude that the democrats squandered yet another majority, and are not a worthwhile pragmatic option - from either the center or the left.

democrats that are supporting impeachment are doing so because they don't actually give a fuck about any of this - they just want an opportunity to run in 2024, and consequently want to avoid electing a democrat in 2020.

it's the old cliche: those who demand security over freedom always end up with neither.

why is it important that the crown demonstrate a rational basis of fear - not a subjective basis, that is not an opinion, but an objectively determinable, reasonable basis of fear - in order to prove a harassment charge?

because you're talking about a restriction of expression, which is the most fundamental right in the constitution. our legal tradition, both constitutional and pre-constitutional, is very clear: an individual's right to expression can only be infringed upon when it succeeds in or threatens to meaningfully harm somebody else.

a more restrictive concept of harassment would consequently be struck down as unconstitutional on the first possible basis. that is not something that is consistent with canadian law.

the reason we insist on this caveat is that it is a very real possibility that a politician, like a mayor, or perhaps a powerful person like a landlord, may otherwise infringe on somebody's rights of expression, if given any sort of space at all, whatsoever. so, we insist: it is not enough to be offended, it is not enough to be annoyed, it is not enough to be bothered. it is not even enough to be afraid, without good reason. there must be a meaningful expression of realistic harm, and must even be a clear and present danger.

this is what being in a free society is all about: learning to tolerate people that are different than you.

again: i hope the voters in her borough make the right decision at the earliest opportunity.

and, transgendered people don't go to drag shows. ever.

it's a faux pas. bad form.

i'm not a gay male that dresses up in women's clothes to get off, i'm somebody that identifies as entirely female 100% of the time. so, you'll never see me at one, don't expect it.

as it is, i hope that the acquitted individual sues the cbc for defamation.

there's a lot of crazy people out there with chips on their shoulders, and they can't be allowed to ruin people's lives with baseless accusations, without consequence for it.

to begin with, an article like this should not be continuing to accuse somebody of something they were acquitted of. to use language like "harasser" to describe somebody that was acquitted of charges is an example of exceedingly poor journalism, to say the least.

second of all, if this woman feels as though she is under some kind of threat despite the fact that the issue has been analyzed and no evidence has been found to uphold her paranoia, then she should be seeking a psychiatric evaluation, as she likely suffers from some kind of mental illness.

i hope that voters take her mental competency into serious consideration when they cast their votes in the next election.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-friday-edition-1.5175775/i-live-with-fear-says-montreal-borough-mayor-whose-harasser-was-acquitted-of-criminal-charges-1.5175783

yeah. it's really not that smart a place to grow peaches. they'd be better off growing apples or tomatoes.

people do all kinds of stupid things, though, don't they?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/harsh-winter-destroys-peaches-cherries-in-essex-county-1.2667482

some people just don't know very much about recent history.

but, i guess some people don't know much about much of anything at all.

yes, jfk stole multiple elections with the help of the mob. that's actual history. it really happened. deal with it.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/oct/07/michaelellison

with the scenario developing in the persian gulf, it's important not to forget what actually happened in the gulf of tonkin.

trump wants to find a way to steal some oil. it's a central part of his desire to be president: he wants to find some country, blow it up, invade it and steal it's resources. openly. blatantly. as a show of force...

iran is the dumbest option on the table, but he's a dumb guy that is going to do dumb things.

i keep pointing out that the united states is literally unable to win a war in iran, and they know it, and that's why they won't do it. it would be completely insane, and the generals are still in charge, so it's not happening. but, if trump can't find an easier way to steal some oil, he might start to get itchy about it.

so, this is only a serious issue insofar as the president's mental health is a serious concern. and, that remains an open question.

the british have indicated that they have no reason to doubt the americans' claim. that is a careful way to state that they don't believe the reports, and have good reason not to, based on historical precedent.

the iranians would not be concerned about erasing evidence. there is no process to try them, no court of proper jurisdiction. and, the americans are hardly interested in international law. i frankly don't know why they even bother with a pretext anymore, as nobody is going to actually take it seriously.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2008/february/truth-about-tonkin

yeah, i'm sick.

i notice that my sinuses were blocked up on monday or tuesday, but i didn't start feeling sick until i got back from groceries on wednesday night, meaning i think that it's actually allergies. i mean, i felt fine when i left, and pretty awful when i got home.

we had a late spring, here. i bet the pollen indicators are off the chart.

there could be one awesome party in detroit tonight.

instead, there's going to be ten completely dead ones.

there's too many dance parties in detroit tonight, and each one is going to be mostly empty, except the one in the venue that nobody can fit into, which is the one people are going to want to go to because it's open late.

the rational thing to do would be to get one of the larger spaces open later, and co-operate in filing out a dense two-room party. but, detroit isn't rational.

i'd no doubt be failing like everybody else, it's just barely warm enough after all, but i picked something up last week and i'm still nursing it in my throat. it's a dry cough and a sore throat. i may have just smoked too much at the painted lady, i don't know. i know i'm sick, i know i haven't slept, i know i haven't eaten, and i know that none of the rock shows are interesting enough to pull me out early.

i will go out solely to dance, sometimes. but, i usually need the early show to get me out of the house, and it's not there, tonight.

so, i'm going to eat and clean myself up a little and see how i feel, but i'm probably actually going to bed early tonight.

we'll see what's going on tomorrow, but i actually think i'm planning something hefty for next week, and it probably makes more sense to stay in this week and get rested up for it.

but, the techno scene in detroit is actually very small. there's three hundred dedicated people, max. if you try and split that across five or six bars, you just get a lot of dead spaces.

it's a prisoner's dilemma, detroit. n-player. figure it out.

my habit, right now, is that i brush after i eat, which is usually once a day. i mean, if i ate more, i'd brush more. but, what's the point of randomly brushing?

for the short term, i'm going to start brushing before i go to sleep. i suppose that the fact that i drink a lot of coffee makes that worthwhile - it means i'll start wiping the coffee off of my teeth before i go to bed.

it turns out that estrogen is thought to be good for your teeth. that's good.

what about smoking? well, it's probably the primary problem, and i've largely reversed it.

and, i need to start actually going to routine cleanings, too.

i'm not young any more, but my teeth are in good shape. it's the gums that i need to be more proactive about.

so, what did the second dentist say?

well, i had the consultation done, first, and then the dentist came in. i think this is key to understanding the different analysis.

she agreed that the issues on my molars were too small to warrant drilling, but she pointed out an area of decay near the gum line that the other one didn't catch and suggested filling it in. in fact, i think it was exposed after the exam, which involved some water spraying (but wasn't what would be called a teeth cleaning).

in the summer of 2005, i fell off my bicycle on the way home from a concert and smashed my face on a metal grate at hog's back bridge. i still have a scar on my chin, and i bashed up a part of my teeth; i actually could have easily fallen in the rapids. this was sealed over in 2013 and i'd actually completely forgotten about it. but, i guess it was softening up and the water opened it back up, because there it is. i didn't realize what she was talking about until i got home and saw it in the mirror.

i decided to give it six months, and the hole is in truth a little but smaller than i remember it. but, i'm well aware that this isn't a choice - if anything, the fact that i chipped the tooth in that spot is just increasing the likelihood of cavity around it. we'll see how that tooth feels.

how about my gums?

i don't floss, because i've been told it's a waste of time. they've done systemic reviews; there is no actual science underlying flossing, it's the perfect example of what is called pseudo-science. ask your dentist to justify what they tell you about flossing by citing peer-reviewed science and become distraught when you realize that they can't because there isn't any. flossing was invented by the toothpaste corporations and is more about advertising than science. however, i might be overbrushing, and that's something i might want to be more cognizant about.

i've got most of my health under very strict control, but i've largely neglected my oral care. i think it's time for that to change, and for me to get my mouth up to code with the rest of my health..

the inability for marginalized groups to access credit in the united states is a part of the hierarchical systemic racism that keeps them impoverished.

the plan to go after institutions that are trying to expand credit to people with poor credit scores is consequently essentially a form of redlining.

it's a racist policy - and they don't get it.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/13/your-credit-score-is-racist-heres-why

the focus should not be on making it harder to get access to credit, but making it easier to get access to credit.

...because that's how the world works: you have to borrow money to get ahead.

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/blog/new-research-report-geography-credit-invisibility/

i support the expansion of credit to poor and marginalized people, and hope that the system of credit that amazon is designing can be taken advantage of by struggling entrepreneurs, many of them black and brown, that otherwise have no way to borrow money, and as such have no way to actualize their dreams.

the expansion of credit to the marginalized would be a central plank of any serious left-wing political movement.

i'm going to show up there, and she's going to be wearing a shirt that says "you could see russia from my dorm room in shanghai" and chanting drill, baby, drill, as she waves around her dental tools in the air.

that's just how my life is.

so, i made another appointment with a different dentist down the street, in the same mall that i do groceries in. and, i'm just checking up on the differences in education, and it's profound.

the dentist i saw today got his dentistry qualifications from a small jesuit school in detroit. he otherwise has an undergraduate degree in physics. if he went to grad school, he's not advertising it.

the person i'll see tomorrow has a doctorate in dental medicine from boston university, a phd from the wayne state university school of medicine, and masters and bachelors from the shanghai second medical university. she's also licensed in canada.

in the end, i might be wrong; it would be hard for me to disagree with her, if she tells me she wants to drill. we'll see what happens.

i spent a lot of time watching this when i was a kid.

i don't run into giant, meat-eating plants very often, but i'll probably always be a little sketchy with dentists.

"don't you believe in the division of labour? i mean, what are you, some kind of anarchist or something?"

it's the one at the back he wants to drill into.

i think it just needs a cleaning.

so, that's settled: my teeth are dirty, but they're healthy.

let me get on the phone and make some calls.

this is useful:

https://www.animated-teeth.com/tooth_decay/t1_tooth_decay_cavities.htm

i am, at worst, in frame A. but, not even.

he should have told me to floss more regularly, at most.

so, i'm calling a different dentist. clearly.

so, that's the second molar on my bottom right side that i'm looking for.

i don't see anything worth drilling for, yet.

do we have any dentists out there?

i can't tell which side is which, but they were concerned about the very back molars on my right (that is, *my* right) side. specifically, the very furthest one in the back.

i know i'm supposed to be looking for discolouration, but i also know it's supposed to be subtle. i need a better online tutorial...