naw, i'm staying in tonight.

i was going to go to some all night dub step thing, but that makes no sense for a lot of reasons. dub step is horribly frustrating; it should be the forefront of electronic music, but it's in truth just about the worst cliche this side of la bamba.

but, i feel a hundred million thousand times better. let's hope the weather comes in stronger next weekend and we have a better summer this year.

that means it was just a slight return. just a little one. not the whole thing, just the start. soon...

(it's those giants hands. they could move mountains.)

how was the show?

well, i've skipped the opportunity to see them quite a few times in the past. i'm not really a big fan, either - i've been watching from a distance for years and years, pretty consistently frustrated that they never really went to the next level in their sound. think of it this way: my tastes are just that little bit too elite for this band. they've just never been quite good enough for me.

what that means was that my expectations were a little muted, and that i did enjoy the show, relative to what it was; there were strong moments, and there were long segments that should have never made the record in the first place, which is true of everything they've ever done.

the setlist was their second record start to end, with the first few tracks from source tags and codes as the encore.

i'll do this better in a bit...

i thought it was going to be warmer tonight. i have no plans, but i want to double check. right now, i expect to stay in.

i want to mention something else, though, and it's the issue about that dude that was messing with my drink.

i did not experience any signs of drugging last night, and can confidently state that my drink was not spiked with anything. rather, it is clear enough that the guy just didn't understand the seriousness of what he was doing as he was grabbing at my drink. i brought this up to him rather sternly and i do i hope that he walks away from the experience better cognizant of what not to do with strangers at a bar.

so, what happened?

well, i'm standing near the bar waiting to order a drink. it's a mostly older male audience for this show, so i'm having a little bit of difficulty getting to the bar over the mass of much larger shoulders than mine. and, these guys are going to take up two or three spaces at the bar each, too; it's a difficult crowd for me to navigate, and one i'm going to naturally find myself at the bottom of a pecking order surrounding. but, i eventually get to the bar, order the drink and some random stranger i've never met before goes to try and grab it out of my hand. he then just generally starts acting weird about the drink, even expecting me to give him the change i got from the bar.

i assumed he was doing a bad job of hitting on me (he was just being rude, truly.) and just walked over to the other side of the venue to ignore him. but, as i'm watching the opening act (who were pretty boring, truly), i'm running over what just happened and a specific thing that he did becomes kind of concerning to me - he placed his fist over my drink.

what am i talking about, exactly?

well, suppose the drink is lying on the bar, so that the spout is perpendicular to the table the beer is on. now, imagine a hand hovering over the spout of the drink, closed-fisted.

so, in total, i just experienced a total stranger sneak up on me, mess around with my drink, and hover a fist over the top of it, in a motion that seemed as though he dropped something in it. at this point, i've already consumed a fair amount of it. what do you do?

well, what i did was find him and confront him on it. why was he messing around with my drink? did he put something in it? if so, what did he put in it? i'm not going to enjoy this if i don't know what it is, but if i understand what's happening then i can adjust.

it actually became clear to me rather immediately that i was not dealing with somebody that dropped something in my drink but rather with somebody that was entirely clueless as to the concept of personal space. he was entirely oblivious as to why he shouldn't do what he did; he didn't think it through before he did it, and it wasn't clear that he understood my concern, once it was brought up. his only response was an appeal to individuality, he wouldn't do that, but that was not convincing because i'd never met him before.

i do believe that i have been drugged in detroit, and in fact more than once. this was perhaps not somewhere i expected any such concern to be at all serious. but, i had to react to what i experienced.

let this be a public service announcement: if you are a scruffy-looking dude at a bar of any sort at all, you don't want to do anything at all that might lead the female-identifying people in the room to think you drugged their drink. we have good reason to be concerned about things of the sort, as this is an actual real thing that actually happens in the actual real world. please be more aware of what you're doing.

so, i did get in to the trail of dead show for free last night. it's not the first time that has happened. i was let into a screaming females show for free once in ferndale, off of the top of my head. it's happened more than twice, though.

on it's face, it seems to have just been good luck - i happened to walk into the venue at the same time that somebody at the counter had an extra ticket. she scanned the extra ticket. score.

but, how plausible is that, really? i mean, the person that works at the door has all the extra tickets, right?

so, i'm not going to claim that i understand the actual factors underlying my free entry last night, but i'm appreciative, nonetheless: to whatever entity or ratio, naturalistic surely, that hustled me in last night, do please accept my heartfelt gratitude.

canadians are unusually polite, in fact, actually.

but, good things happen to good people, too. if i have faith in anything, it is that.

this is the first major initiative she's launched that she's actually correct about.

it's easy enough to forget that clinton campaigned for years on appointing judges that would implement a constitutional restriction on abortion rights. this isn't just public knowledge, it's direct from her campaign literature, over decades. in her statement of "safe, legal and rare", the emphasis was always on the rare, and the justification was always to do with the safety. she didn't like abortion, it bothered her on a moral level, and she never saw it as a right, or an issue of personal bodily autonomy - it was a question of making a compromise, a least bad choice, to protect a woman's health. so, there was this false narrative floating around in 2016: vote clinton to save roe v wade! no. clinton doesn't actually support roe v. wade at all, and would have done exactly the opposite. warren seems to be a little bit more pro-active about abortion rights for the sake of abortion rights, so you can see the contrast in their positions pretty dramatically. if something like what warren just put down here was actually on the table in 2016, that argument would have actually made sense, and i actually suspect that clinton might not have lost the female vote.

in the sense that this kind of legislation is only possible to talk about now after the long shadow of clinton over the democratic party has finally been cast off, this is long overdue - this was going to be an issue regardless of who won and regardless of who shaped the court, and something the broader party base should have mobilized around a long time ago. it will forever be up to speculation as to whether clinton's personal dislike for abortion rights was a factor in the slow pace of legislative reform around the topic, but that's in the past now, and i'll give warren props for taking initiative on this, finally.

everything else she's proposing is still stupid, though.

https://www.vox.com/2019/5/17/18628684/abortion-elizabeth-warren-platform-roe-v-wade

i would support a ban on charter schools, and also on vouchers. in ontario, i support the abolition of the catholic school system and the cessation of all further public funding to faith-based institutions. i would also support writing the curriculum in such a way that would essentially force private religious schools to offer religious classes as a voluntary after-school program; i would outright ban religion in private schools if it were possible and likely to be constructive, but it isn't likely to be constructive and probably isn't possible so the next best thing is to crowd it out by loading the curriculum up with so many other things that there is no longer room for religion as a separate class.

there should be one public elementary and high school system for everybody with common standards and testing, regardless of race, class, gender or anything else.

also: donald trump would be the most pro-zionist nazi of all time.

it's hard to make sense of the claim.

stated simply: it's ridiculous, and you're ridiculous for believing it or broadcasting or disseminating it.

i have been vocal about the necessity of violence toward "nazis" for a very long time, and while these socratic dialogues on youtube and elsewhere are actually an ideal medium for this kind of discussion, it's easy enough to take anything you want out of context and frame it in a way that seems silly or obtuse. i insist that my arguments were always quite subtle, but the bottom line is that you have to actually read the dialogue in order to understand the debate.

so, let's make two things clear regarding the necessity of violence towards nazis.

the first is that there isn't a choice in the matter, and that the absence of a choice is what defines a nazi as a nazi (that being the second thing). if you have a choice to avoid violence, you are not dealing with an actual nazi. so, let's actually talk about the second thing first, then.

it might surprise you to learn that i'm also a free speech maximalist, as i'm arguing that you have to show no mercy to nazis. isn't that a contradiction? well, if you're upset with me, then you're enforcing your own speech rules: you're trying to protect the nazis. you are raising your voice and telling me it's wrong to threaten nazis, and i should be quiet - which is policing my speech. then, you claim i'm advocating violence; but, that's what i'm saying about the nazis. the point i'm making is just that everybody actually agrees that some limit has to exist - nobody is in favour of unrestricted speech. we have laws against libel, against uttering threats, etc and nobody actually disagrees with this. so, when i say i'm a speech maximalist, i mean that you need the most stringent requirements possible to justify speech restrictions - it's not enough to be offended (anyone can be offended by anything; it's irrelevant), there has to be a concrete understanding of meaningful harm, it has to be meaningfully defined and it has to be a credible threat.

so, what's the deal with the nazis, then? who are these people? what is a nazi?

a nazi is not somebody that says something mean to you at a party, or acts in a passively aggressive manner towards you without justification or even somebody that says something racially derogatory in a crowded room. no, a nazi is something far more dangerous than that: a nazi is somebody that seeks to actively politically organize the machinery of society to eliminate a set of groups they find undesirable (like jews, or homosexuals, or leftists) from the gene pool, or from the cultural memory. so, a nazi does not merely say something mean about jews - a nazi is actively politically engaged in eliminating the jews from the planet. a nazi doesn't push a queer person aside; a nazi has the queer person executed. a nazi isn't rude to communists; a nazi has the communists rounded up and imprisoned, placed in camps or shot. it is due to the nature of the nazi's violence that reason and argumentation is foregone as meaningless; as you cannot reason with a hungry bear or a rabid dog, you cannot reason with a nazi - you must kill or be killed. the illusion of choice is held at your own peril. there is no logic but the logic of violence; if not pre-emptive, then in self-defence.

so, when i say that there is no peaceful debate with nazis, it's important to understand what i mean when i say 'nazi'. and, it's equally important not to be overly broad. see, this is the tricky part: i can place down an abstract definition of what makes a nazi a nazi relatively easily, but it's a lot more difficult to decide whether any specific group or individual fits that definition or not. due process is necessary, and evidence must be consulted as rigorously as possible. by placing nazis in a very limited, specific category and claiming there is no choice but to fight them, i am also implicitly arguing that violence has no place in the vast majority of discussions and debates. i will be just as quick to insist that you not throw that word around lightly as i will be to insist that those that fit it's definition are treated appropriately.

today, the most dangerous nazis in the world are not white supremacists (who have no meaningful organized movement) but are rather militant islamists. euroskeptics like marine le pen do not fit my definition of a nazi, but isis and hamas both do. the saudi theocracy is a nazi dictatorship. etc.

in a sane political climate, this would be a curiosity[ - something weird that nobody really cares about. but, bernie has painted himself into a corner by playing up the russiagate narrative so dramatically; had he been less fantastical on this narrative, which most good observers saw through, then he'd have a more rational footing to react to this from.

i don't know how many democrats there are out there that are going to get conspiracy-eyed over this. i'd guess that, right now, there are probably a measurable number of them. he may have talked himself into a lot of trouble.

the in and out candidate might be him.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/17/bernie-sanders-mystery-soviet-video-revealed-1330347