you could always turn it into a mall...

it probably couldn't withhold the weight of people in it.

so, what do i think they should do with the al aqsa / temple mount complex, for example?

what i actually think is that they should turn it into a museum, and i'm not really interested in having a discussion about competing religious access to different crumbling walls here in the 21st century. it's a ridiculous discussion to have, and i'll get up and walk out of the room if it erupts. these people are all idiots that aren't worth listening to.

we need to look towards the future, and leave religion in the past as we walk forwards as equals together.

i've mused in the past about creating a new religion, but it's just a social engineering ploy. it's worthwhile to contemplate it, though. i mean, they say that most of the region converted to christianity, and that was probably something that was invented by roman social engineers to create unity. it worked, for a while. ironically, the muslim invasions would have likely failed if it weren't for theological debates about things like monophysitism, which alienated the egyptians and the descendants of the hebrews, but you learn from your mistakes, right? it did work for a while.

so, if you could create some new messianic religion and then convert both the palestinians (who are the descendants of the jews, remember.) and the jews to it, you could conceivably eliminate most of the root causes of the existing problems, even if you end up creating more in the long run. at the least, prying people away from their existing mythologies is probably a positive step towards an atheistic future.

but, i'm only half serious. and i am half serious.

i don't want to tear it down, it has value to archaeologists, historians and anthropologists. but, we need to find a way to leave this debate behind, because it's really, actually a pretty stupid and backwards thing to be fighting about.

what would be ideal would be for hebrews and arabs to move forward towards a secular society, together. if i am going to fight for anything at all, it is that, and is only that.

there's not going to be a two-state solution in israel. it's not a question of what you like or don't like, it's a question of what's realistic and what isn't.

that said, i'm not shy in pointing out that i don't like ethnic nationalism and i don't like the idea of the nation state and i don't want the world cut up into segregated, ethnic enclaves. however, that's secondary to what the reality on the ground is at this point, which is that israel controls almost all of the west bank, leaving nowhere left to actually put a palestinian state.

i understand that this is hard for people of a certain age, that have been pushing this idea at least since camp david. that was 40 years ago. the facts on the ground have changed, since then.

we can do better than jared kushner, but this is something that's going to require a fresh and new perspective on, and it's inevitably going to come via generational change.

as stated previously, i support a single state with equal rights for everybody. i know this is hard, but it's the only realistic choice in front of us - whether i like it better or not.

i don't often have time for historical ceremonies, but d-day is something we should maintain some collective memory of.

to begin with, it's probably the only time in history that britain invaded france. even the plantaganets were already there.

jokes aside (yes, that was a joke. sorry.), if you know or knew or heard about somebody that died that day, you have a right to pride regarding it. and, that's a rare statement coming from an anarchist.

there have been very few wars in history that had to be fought; this was one of them. and, we should remember the singularity of it as much as we remember the thing itself, as it should help us to see the triviality of the next war we have thrust upon us.

so, is hate speech free speech?

yes.

but, all that means is that the government shouldn't be regulating speech, even if it's "hateful". that doesn't mean that the "hateful" speaker has a right to be heard. free speech also means that protestors have the right to drown out the "hateful" person, and prevent them from being heard, if they really insist - so long as they are not being threatening or harassing, themselves.

what free speech really means is that the government needs to back off, that it shouldn't pick a side, and that it's neither there to police nor protect free expression: this is up to us, as citizens, to work out.

so, as a free speech activist, what i want to see is protestors yelling down ann coulter while the cops sit quietly and watch. should the yelling turn to violence, she would then deserve protection. but, she does not have the right to be heard over the crowd, if the crowd decides otherwise - she only has the right to be drowned out.

in order to gain control over the space, she would need to be asserting property rights, which is a different concept than free speech. once she is in a private space, she can use private security to assert her privilege - not her right - to be heard in a space she has property rights over, or that an owner is asserting property rights over on her behalf. and, i actually don't like that, either, but i'll respect it as the existing legal order in most cases.

generally, a public speaker would not have these kinds of property rights at a public university, and should not, either. the public university should be seen as a state institution, and should not be regulating expression one way or another.

so, again: if you have a speaker at a public university being drowned out by protestors, then that is not a violation of speech rights but an expression of it. if you disagree then, at best, you're confusing property rights with speech rights.

the only way that a speech violation can occur here is if the police come in and try and control the situation, as the government is then taking a side in a debate that they are obligated to avoid taking a side on.

and, at least somebody is taking the right perspective on this.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/internet-speech/social-media-blackouts-are-authoritarian-power-move

and, yes, our own idiot in toronto has picked this up entirely, backwards framing and all.

again: it is the students that have actual speech rights here, and they should be launching a constitutional challenge against the orwellian "free speech" policy. but, they've bought right into the narrative, and seem to actually believe that they're opposed to free speech.

...because they're fucking idiots.

https://www.marxist.com/canada-student-protests-suppressed-under-guise-of-free-speech.htm

we need the aclu to start doing mass teach-ins or something.

really.

https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/rights-protesters

what i support are free speech protestors - that is people holding up signs and disrupting events in the name of promoting free speech - but this has become somewhat of a unicorn, a kind of contradiction in terms, in the idiocracy we've inherited from our parents.

of all the idiocy we see before us, of all the orwellian backwardsness, of all of the dystopic screwiness, the way the speech debate is framed is the single, worst offender. nothing is this vacuous.

it is tragic that the discourse is so poor. truly. it's depressing, really.

and, i will slam you both, at every opportunity.

tl;dr - both sides of this debate are full of idiots, both sides are technically equally wrong, and neither side knows what the fuck they're talking about.

if you've been following my writing for any length of time, you already know that i think that the contemporary debate on free speech in the united states is incoherent, and i'm not on either side of the debate.

i've already posted this in many places, but i'll summarize my perspective here.

i do not think that a posh for-profit speaker can claim "freedom of speech" to silence a crowd that is opposing it. rather, it is the crowd that is exercising the freedom of speech in drowning out the posh speaker. so, the crowd has speech rights, here, not the speaker.

but, the issue has been framed in a way that is legally, philosophically and rationally bankrupt, in attempting to argue that the protestors are infringing on the for-profit speaker's right to speak - something that exists nowhere in any law at all.

insofar as the constitution of either the united states or canada is relevant, it has nothing to say about the rights of for profit speakers to speak at universities. what it has to say is that the government cannot interfere to control the outcome. what that means is that the only group that is guilty of breaking the constitution is the police.

i haven't had the occasion to involve myself in these debates, up to this point, but what these students should be doing is launching constitutional grievances against the relevant police forces. but, they're so horribly ignorant that they don't even understand what they're actually doing, or what is actually being done to them.

i will gleefully make you look stupid if you try and paint me on one side of this debate that is incoherent through and through, and that i am viciously in opposition to both sides on. so, don't bother.

this is a perfectly orwellian article: protecting free speech is equated with dismantling it.

the freedom to speak does not imply the right to be heard, and the only entity in society that has any obligation to uphold speech rights is the state - but it is important to recognize that the state is unique, and imperative that we don't attempt to draw parallels between the special obligation that the state has to protect speech and the behaviour of private citizens.

free speech is the right to yell in a crowd, not the right to speak on a stage.

https://business.financialpost.com/opinion/now-that-justin-trudeau-has-tasted-de-platforming-directly-he-should-help-stop-it

this is one of the few things that you can cite foucault on, and one of the few topics he wrote about that is worth reading. and, you should actually read it - he will correct a lot of widespread existing myths.

was jesus gay?

well, i don't think he even existed at all. but, it's a question that is more interesting than may initially appear obvious, in the sense that it can help us understand how wrong our current mainstream (not scientific. mainstream.) understanding of homosexuality is.

you usually start this off by appealing to his band of merry men, and claiming that it's kind of obvious that somebody that asks grown men to denounce their possessions and follow him around the countryside must be gay. i mean, what did they do when they weren't creating bread out of thin air?

but, you're kind of missing the broader historical point, and the reality that sex between men was pretty normal in the greek world, which is the actual world that jesus lived in, rather than a jewish one. the jews were allowed to return to israel by the persians (or were perhaps actually first settled there by them.), but then they fell to alexander, and when the romans moved in it was just as the hegemon - the area was really deeply greek from the time of alexander to the years immediately preceding the crusades, which was nearly 1500 years.

in classical greece, as in classical rome, sex was something buddies did with each other to prove they were friends. so, you have propaganda about roman emperors that "wore their male partners out", which was just mean to broadcast their strength and dominance and virility. in america, we had "don't ask, don't tell"; in the ancient world, sex between soldiers was encouraged by the leadership to demonstrate fraternity and equality, as they fought to uphold a warped concept of liberty. and, the mystery cults that were dominant at the time of jesus would have been full of all kinds of sex, with all kinds of people, including those we would today consider to be far too young to consent. if the mass has a memory of bacchian ritual embedded within it, it's worthwhile to ask what part of the body you're consuming.

it's easy to forget that these categories we have - "gay" and "straight" - didn't exist until the victorian period, and are a consequence of exiting the dark ages, where they'd burn you at the stake for sodomy. before the rise of christianity, people didn't think in these categorical ways, or try to find an answer as to why people were "different" - because they weren't. homosexual sex was perfectly normal.

so, you hear this sarcastic question - "when did you decide you were straight?" - as though you can't answer that, and it therefore follows that you didn't decide you were gay, either. but, you did decide you were straight, as a part of a process of socialization and normalization growing up in childhood. you weren't born that way, it's not a default, it's not inherent or more normal.

so, did jesus have sex with his apostles? i think you should assume that this is obvious, and the burden of proof is on demonstrating that he didn't.

but, following that logic, i'm going to take them every six hours with the intent to maintain a constant dose, as my body is actually going to metabolize most of what i'm taking in two to three hours.

i'm concerned that if i take them bid instead of qid, i'll just end up pissing it out.

so, i'm going to get something to eat, and i'll need to make some calls when the sun comes up, but i don't plan to leave the house until i'm caught up and a few weeks ahead on the concert research, finally.

and, i could get september, 2013 published while i'm at it.

what i've been doing, and the test results justify this, is taking extra androgen blockers as i feel i need them.

and, i think what i was tying to cortisol is probably actually testosterone. i didn't end up with the cortisol test, because it doesn't make sense relative to my schedule, and i was smoking drugs at the bar last week.

so, if i'm feeling anxious or agitated, i just take an extra one. for now.

once they're gone, though, i'll be off the cyproterate altogether.

so, the answer is "not yet". one thing at a time.

if i switch, it will be to a patch, but i'm not sure that fits my lifestyle well, at this point. maybe when i'm older...

for right now, it's the cyproterate i'm worried about and the testosterone i want to flat out get rid of.

if i'm removing my testicles largely out of concern for my liver, shouldn't i be switching to injections?

my primary concern about the injections was always that they were carcinogenic, and i'm not sure that recent studies uphold this concern, but you have to understand the difference between the way this works.

if i start getting injections, what happens is they give me enough estrogen for a month all at once, and it slowly gets metabolized and excreted. so, i have a maximum estrogen level a short time after the injection, and then decreasing levels for weeks. functionally speaking, what that means is that the actual experience i'd be undergoing is near constant estrogen withdrawal, which is kind of missing the point. i haven't seen anybody make the link, but i wonder if the high suicide rate in mtf trans people could in some way be tied to these injections, as withdrawal is...well, it's the hormonal reaction associated with menstruation, but literally on steroids. again, the thought process is that the actual experience of having injections is a short "high" followed by weeks of withdrawal. you would also expect to see bursts of physical effects, followed by decreases; for example, you might see a brief and rapid increase in breast growth (often cited as the reason people want injections), but this would be followed by decline, and then another spurt, and you'd kind of have to get used to that every month - which i suspect would be very difficult.

injections of modern estrogens, do, however, come without the stress on the liver, which has side effects of blood clots from coagulation factors. but, i should point out that these risk factors were mostly tied to what is called conjugated estrogen, that is estrogen that the human liver has difficulty metabolizing. what i and most people take is a middle risk factor - not as dangerous as the old horse estrogen that they used to take in the 60s and 70s, but not free of the risk factor the way that the injections are (as they bypass the liver).

if you take them orally, it's a different game - rather than load yourself up with an absurd amount of estrogen and then wait for it to metabolize, what you do is take small amounts constantly, to maintain a constant hormone level. that actually means that i don't have a cycle at all, i'm just on estrogen all of the time, similar to women taking birth control pills, which, let's be honest, is really a modern woman, isn't it? the difference is that i'm taking something like 150-200x as much as estrogen as women on the strongest pills are. well, i'm on 8 mg/day, now - you do the math. and, the more you take, the worse off it is on your liver...

removing my testicles will increase the efficacy of the estrace because it won't be fighting with what's left of the testosterone anymore, and fwiw my testosterone test came back at 0.4 - clinically acceptable, but just barely. it was lower than that last year. it's still in the range of "chemically castrated", but at the very upper end of it. it's just tolerance, like anything else, and you would expect to have to increase your dosage over time. i want it closer to 0.1, but i don't want to increase my dosage, because the cyproterate is legitimately hard on your liver. when i get the testicles out, that should fall back to negligible levels again.

i don't expect to actually cut my estrogen, but taking the testicles out should remove the need for another dose increase for quite a while.