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.