listen - i just don't think that "multiculturalism" is a liberal concept. it's very tory in concept, this idea that we should accept our differences and try to get along in perfect harmony. that is a deeply conservative vision of how a society ought to operate.

liberalism should be striving for an idea of post-culturalism, which seeks to rip all of these obsolete cultures to shreds and move together as a unified, secular society with common humanist values rooted in empirical, scientific truths.

this just doesn't exist in the discourse. i'm being asked to choose between being accepting of multiculturalism and doubling down on christianity, which is a choice that exists strictly on the right of the spectrum - it's a choice between the tories and the reform party, and i don't want to and won't pick a side on it.

like everything else with this government, the nice rhetoric quite readily exposes itself as a distraction for absolutely naked colonialism, when challenged in any way at all.

it's actually been quite a while since a government has been this blatant about it's assimilation policy.

and, this is just...

It’s an issue that must be resolved within Indigenous communities, but governments are grappling with it, too, especially as both B.C. and Ottawa are preparing to enact the principles of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which stipulates that they must give consent to industrial development on their traditional territories. By endorsing the declaration, the federal government has said it will aim to secure Indigenous consent on projects but does not guarantee it.

*sigh*

the obligation to seek consent does not come from the united nations, and is not recent. it comes from the canadian supreme court, and is now many decades old established practice in canada. the federal government is already obligated by well established case law to seek consent....

in fact, the united nations declaration is largely built on existing canadian case law, rather than the other way around.

gotta love the fucking globe and mail. ugh.

the reality is that the band councils were designed to be a rubber stamp for the government in ottawa, and that's exactly what they usually are.

the area that we're talking about is about 20,000 square km and has a population of about 2,000. it's mostly densely forested land, punctuated by rivers and valleys. people live in camps - in tents - and survive by fishing and hunting. i want to hesitate to suggest that jobs don't exist, but the idea of a job is more communal than financial, and the exchange of currency for a task is actually somewhat corrupting to the communitarian basis of the economy.

the 2,000 people are distributed amongst five clans which, if you're scottish, you know is synonymous with a concept of extended family. so, the population is essentially composed of five isolated, extended families living in camps in the woods. they share everything; they're family. and, they broadly make decisions by unanimous consent, not by majority decree. anybody involved in any kind of activism has run across these kinds of decision making bodies and is aware of how difficult they can be in actually getting anything moving; they are perhaps not well suited to activism, and could certainly not be effectively extrapolated to an industrialized, urban economy, where you have a multitude of class-based competing interests trying to take control of a body that is seen as wielding authority (and has the sympathies of law enforcement). could you imagine a city of even 200,000 people operating on unanimous consent?

but, likewise, the introduction of western-style voting to very small, close-knit communities in isolated areas is likely to create conflict where none currently exists, and where there isn't actually any rational basis for conflict. when you take class out of a society, you largely eliminate the concept of democracy, because you don't have interests competing against each other; rather than have different interests competing over control of the community, you have a community discussing what is in it's best interests - like a family does, in the western system.

it's consequently less of an ethnic conflict than it is a difference of scale. when indigenous society has scaled up in the past - as it did with the six nations, or the settlements in cahokia - it has needed to adjust, and adopt confederacies that look something like western systems of governance. it is well understood that the united states took the six nations governing structure as a model when it started off with it's 13 states. likewise, the kind of governing structure that exists in the indigenous regions of bc today is not foreign to western culture, and even still exists today in certain isolated areas of europe - including on certain islands in the united kingdom, itself.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-a-contested-pipeline-tests-the-landscape-of-indigenous-law-who/

the social norm is that that we should go to school when we're young and retire when we're old, but i think this is backwards.

we ought to have fun when we're young, and go to school when we're old.

and, i wish i had figured that out when i was younger...

so, i'm going through these old emails and the most bizarre thing is going through my mind: i want to go back to school.

i say that like it's some kind of shock. it's not, or not exactly, it's that.....

i was such a mess at the time, the archetype of the kid that just doesn't know what to do with themselves. and, i was just a kid. i had no idea at 20 what i wanted to do with myself; i knew i liked music, but i knew i needed to find some way to pay my bills, so i found myself dragging myself through these programs, while daydreaming about how to get out of them, and then, at the end of it, i just completely abandoned everything.

i didn't go to the government interviews because i didn't want a government job, i wanted to work in academia. then, i didn't go to grad school, because i didn't want to be a teacher, i wanted to work in the private sector. then, i didn't finish the programming degree because i didn't want to work in an office behind a computer. then, i didn't finish the law degree because i didn't want to rubber stamp corruption. and, it was just like - fuck it, i'm going to finish my art and go from there...

but, that's just another way to put something off, right? i had an abstract end date of 40 years old: i'd be done the art by my 40th birthday, and then focus on academic work one way or the other, whether that means going back to school or just working on the website. and, i was making good progress until mid 2015, when the shit hit the fan - and, now, 50 seems like a more realistic goal.

i don't feel this is something out of the public discourse, but it's out of a novel or something - real people don't do this, right? real people figure out one thing or another, they don't walk down all these dead-ends, only to retrace the same steps again.

the thing is that i'm remembering how much of a disaster the whole thing was. i wasn't just your typical unfocused kid, i also had anxiety problems that made it impossible to meet people. i had gender issues. i was on drugs. i spent something like five semesters without a fixed address, trying to teach myself group theory from a distance, between jobs, at 3:33 am, stoned, in my girlfriend's stairwell - it was insane. and, i found myself malnourished and underfed half the time, on top of it. but, how do you explain that to your profs, you know?

"i'm sorry my assignment is late, but my parents kicked me out of the house, so i had to spend the week trying to find somewhere to sleep."

i should have dropped courses and went back later, but i was over-confident about it, and decided i could work it out. and, besides - i had no other source of income besides student loans.

the thing is that i had strong semesters of straight As, too. i've been over this before - my transcript is bizarre. it's half As and half Ds, because i either aced courses or blew them - because i was either stable and focused or completely disinterested or often actually literally starving.

i'm alumni, so i can register at carleton. but, the cost is prohibitive. and, it won't be until i finish the discography, however long it takes...

...but, if i find myself back in a legitimately stable position, in the long run? yeah.

what i decided is that if i'm going to teach, i don't want to start until i'm in my 50s or 60s. to me, that's the right age to teach - when you're older. young people should live lives, not just move from the desk to the board. and, students deserve somebody with some life experience - not some kid out of grad school.

i'm not re-evaluating. i'm just reflecting.

trudeau is kind of making a mockery of his party, and of his father's legacy; it's easy to forget that this is really the last remaining representative of the ancient british liberal party - these are the last whigs left standing. they're supposed to be all about science and data and empiricism, not about identity politics or emotional responses to complicated issues.

i don't want to vote for the inter-faith party of karmic unity and cosmic harmony. i want to vote for the science party.

will the real liberal party please stand up?

i think i posted something like this a few weeks ago, but what's my projection for the 2019 election?

there's some signalling that the liberals want to run on islam, which is a complete misunderstanding of the 2015 election - but one that the liberals have repeatedly broadcast that they hold to. they think they won because they stood up for accommodation rights in quebec, which is empirically incoherent. trudeau got lucky; the country didn't want to give harper another mandate, and the ndp, against all good sense, ran a blowhard fiscal conservative with a beard, allowing the liberals to avoid the split. we can't be allowing our election narratives to be defined by these awful tory media outlets like the globe and mail....

it might seem stupid on first glance to try and frame the narrative as christianity v islam, which is exactly what they seem to want to do, unless you buy into this fucked up narrative that seems to be dominant in the core of the party. christianity may be dying a slow and painful death, but even the least generous numbers are going to have christians outnumbering muslims in this country by at least 10:1. you only run on this if you think that the fastest growing and rising demographic, secularist atheists, are driven more by an animus against christians than they are by rational thought, and that they're going to feel some kind of imperative to stand up for muslims against christians. it's a tactic that insults the intelligence of voters.

if they run on this, they're just going to tune out young people, who are going to vote for third parties or stay home.

but, more concerning to me is that it broadcasts that there is an increasingly powerful faction in the liberal party that sees the european heritage of canada as something that needs to be abolished - as something that belongs to the past. i'm not going to stand up for christianity, exactly. but, i'll fight pretty hard for enlightenment values, and see good reason to push back against another abrahamic perversion. what's frustrating to me is the options that are available: in an election being framed as between islam and christianity, with no discernible third party of mention, am i going to have to write-in science?

so, i'm quite certain that i'm not going to be voting for the liberals, this time around. and, i'm also quite certain that i'm not going to be voting for the ndp - who will almost certainly win this riding fairly easily. to me, the decision in front of me is whether or not the green party candidate is going to be able to convince me to get up and vote, or if i'm going to sit this one out.

and, i actually think that my disillusion is going to be defining.

i don't think the fundamental nature of the last election has changed, which is this dramatic 20 point swing on the left. i don't see much evidence to suggest that harper will outpoll scheer in terms of absolute numbers - he may even do a little worse. but, if trudeau is unable to get people to actually vote for him, he could end up in freefall due to apathy.

it's still early. but, the volatility on the left has the potential to produce a wild outcome - if only somebody would step up and actually try to appeal to it.