Monday, May 20, 2019

i tried to turn off the fan again last night and then took a nap, and i when i woke up the headache was coming back in. i caught it before it "turned over", so i'm kind of sitting on the brink - i'm either going back into a migraine, or it's going to pass.

and, again, i could smell it. it's cigarette smoke, specifically. so, i've got the fan back on....

i left off on may 10th, meaning i lost ten days. and, i did feel better, but now i feel like shit again - and, specifically, i'm completely unable to focus on anything.

everything else aside, that's the thing that is making this so frustrating to me: once my head starts racing, i get scatterbrained and useless and i can't focus on anything.

i need complete sobriety in order to be productive. maybe you're different, but that's me - any drug at all makes me useless.

let's hope the fan clears the shit out of here and i can refocus in short order. if not, i'm just going to get slowed down that much further.
i mean, the real winners here are lawyers.
the bill that is floating through the congress right now - referred to as the equality act - is something that has been introduced at many levels of government in many places. it took something like ten years to get it passed at both the federal level and provincial level in ontario, but it has been law here now for several years. in fact, the process that led to our version of the equality act coming into law may be well known to people around the world because it is the exact amendment that produced jordan peterson's shamefully disingenuous and dishonest transphobic rant around the use of gender pronouns. if you're wondering what the fuck he was even talking about, the bill passed by the house of representatives is exactly the same thing that he had a demagogic panic attack over.

and, i'll be clear enough - i support these word changes in the law. i mean, if we're to enforce anti-discrimination laws, these are things that should be covered, certainly.

but, there's a tendency for observers to exaggerate the nature of a victory such as this.

i don't think that discrimination - of any sort - is something that you fix with government policy, but rather something that you fix by radical social activism. this is a tool for activists to use, and activists should be thankful for it, but it is a first step in the process rather than a last one and, in the long run, we'll get further with honest attempts at social inclusion than the heavy machinery of human rights litigation.

so, my response is muted, and it's no accident - it may be overdue, but i don't see these kinds of things as the victory that others do.
i was watching a kind of anti-putin propagandist make the awkward, if at this point widely stated, confluence of stalin with putin (because putin is responsible for how many deaths?), when he made the inevitable transitive projection: was stalin worse than hitler?

and, he deferred to the crude numbers, but then pulled back, as hitler's gross death toll would have no doubt been far greater in the end, including an additional 30 million soviet citizens, if his plans were to be be believed feasible, and we do have every reason to think he would have at least tried.

looking at hitler's plans for the soviet union, which he just labelled "living space", as though it were an uninhabited frontier land, are a useful prop in truly understanding his own depravity, and how truly divorced from any kind of theory or logic that it truly was. much of what we today call indo-european studies - which is an objective scientific study of a well-understood migration of peoples about six to eight thousand years ago and not a racist pseudo-science - came into being after the war, and much of it was developed by the soviets themselves, but even in hitler's time it was widely understood that the urheimat of indo-european speakers, religion and cultural origin must have been somewhere in the russian steppes.

what kind of white supremacist calls for the destruction of his own race?

in truth, when you look at the list of groups that hitler was calling for the extermination of, you see a veritable rainbow benetton coalition. at the top of the list, we have the jews and the gypsies, who are at least widely interpreted as non-white. somewhere rather far down the list you have the africans, who were certainly deemed inferior, but not of any pressing concern. more important to wipe out were the homosexuals and the communists, who would have mostly been white, in context. the irish, as white they were, were subhuman; the english were lazy, the slavs were useless eaters. but, alliances were forged with the oriental japanese, the swarthy italians and spaniards and even a number of turkish and muslim groups in the middle east. that doesn't really add up, does it?

but it was his plans for the slavs, specifically, that are so clarifying. the slavs are the whitest people on the planet, yet he appeared to have every intention of simply depopulating the old russian empire and moving his germans in to replace the extinct indigenous groups. and, he was explicit: the slavs needed to be exterminated. outright.

it was simply madness, full stop, and trying to make too much sense of it is simply not worthwhile.