i want to be clear: the issue is less that the conservatives are looking like they're going to win a lot of seats. they're not.

the issue is more that the ndp may end up with 10 seats or something - not enough to help the liberals pass a budget.

that's what happened to dion, right?

a dion/layton coalition would have been stable, and the governor-general would have had to accept it.

but, he needed the bloc. and, that just didn't add up.

i'll remind you that the polling at this stage of the democratic primary is essentially being manipulated to generate headlines.

the media wants warren to win because they think they'll get the best ratings that way. they essentially want a rematch in terms of demographics. and, they think the pocahontas thing will boost ratings. it's the sad reality of it. so, they've been fucking with demographics to get the results they want, in an attempt to control the electorate, because they know that a substantial amount of people want to vote for the most popular candidate so they can tell their friends they voted for the winner, or they can feel like they won, or something stupid like that.

they clearly think biden is bad for ratings, and they're probably right. but, it's too early to expect the media framing to push him out. and, beware - because it's warren they're tying to ease in, not sanders. and, i don't know how that actually happens, in terms of actual, real voters on the ground.

and, they want to bury sanders altogether and be done with him.

there are certain demographic trends that you want to pay attention to. one of them is that sanders is not doing well with white voters right now; he has to get a handle on that, if he wants to win. but, the actual stories should be completely discarded as absolute nonsense, at this point.

in canada, you want to pay close attention to the undecideds, which i think i demonstrated pretty clearly the other day. in the last election, a large number of people were heavily engaged, and you could expect that the undecideds would make a choice. in this election, turnout is almost certainly going to fall. so, those conservative numbers are not as inflated as they were before.

frankly, at this stage in the process, the conservatives should be exceedingly worried about polling in the low 30s. for them to have a serious chance, they should be polling at at least 35%.

but, likewise, the liberals cannot be expecting to hold their majority with the numbers they have.

a deeper question is how inflated the ndp numbers are. they're only running at around 13-14%, before you adjust for turnout. those numbers will probably fall, but how far? is the better model to 1997 or to 1993? will they maintain party status?

and, are the bloc serious? because, if they are, we could end up with a nightmare scenario where the liberals win a plurality and, yet, the liberal + ndp + green totals are not enough to govern. the debate right now is whether the greens or the ndp end up with the balance.

it might end up being the bloc....

so, the reason that i don't like you is not that you're a female.

the reason i don't like you is that you're a self-absorbed bitch.

i don't like people that are shallow, that are self-absorbed, that are materialistic, that are narcissistic, that are selfish, that are self-centered, that are self-important or that are class-supremacist.

and, that holds equally well across both genders, and anybody in between.

in a post-gendered world, the only truly women's issues would have to do strictly with biology.

and, they wouldn't be afforded greater or lesser importance than issues of male biology.

and, i think that when we discuss something like childcare, we should be framing it in terms of the needs of the child, rather than the needs of one of the parents.

depending on the scenario, that could mean leave for either of the parents, or even for both of them.

i don't think that should be seen as a women's issue. and, that it is, is reflective of a sexist bias....

i guess it's a kind of a leftist tradition that you construct your own spin on the distributive justice rule that defines your personal concept of communism, much as guitarists are absolutely required to do a cover of little wing at some point in their careers.

i've indicated an affinity for technological determinism, and where i am in this materialist march towards the end of history is at the cusp of the rise of large-scale automation, a post-industrial revolution, meaning i'm in the ideological space of post-work anarchism.

so, the abilities part is a little passe.

how about this, instead then:
from each according to their interests, to each according to their needs.

that way, somebody like me can be an artist (or a blogger) if they want, if they choose. we just can't sit around smoking drugs, watching oprah, and expect new cars to show up in our laneway when we need them.

as usual, marx had the right idea: from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.

and, that is equality of outcome.

but, not determined by gender bias, or with a slant one way or the other.

and, don't talk to me about "equity".

that's just newspeak for misogyny.

pull yourselves up by your own pantyhose...

and, what i say to these scores of women that refuse to accept being treated as an equal is: too fucking bad.

a lot of women today absolutely hate it when you treat them equally.

they insist on being treated like princesses.

when you actually don't believe that women are weaker then men, really truly don't, it has a very big effect on how you act.

and, the way women are conditioned today is to react exceedingly negatively to that.

maybe you don't want what i want; maybe you want to continue living in a hierarchical society, maybe you want to maintain chivalry, maybe you want to hold to religion. maybe you want fixed gender roles.

so, we can disagree on that point, and have a debate, and vote and what not.

but, get the language right: you're the misogynist. you're the one insisting on maintaining these unequal gender roles, you're the one that thinks women are the weaker sex, you're the one that believes in chivalry and courting and dominance and submission. in a word, you're the sexist.

and, you're mad at me because i'm a feminist, not despite of it.

it's a problem with this orwellian distortion of what we call "feminism" today.

i'm a feminist in the wollstonecraft sense: i'm a radical egalitarian. that means i believe that you have to teach women to learn to take care of themselves, because nobody is going to do it for them. to me, that's what feminism means - the abolition of patriarchy, and an order of complete and total equality.

and, that means that women need to learn to think about other people when they make choices.

today, we teach our girls to be radically self-absorbed, that the universe revolves around them, and that they have no responsibilities to think about the people around them at all. in a statement, we are teaching our girls to be the worst kind of men, which is not the abolition of patriarchy, but the inclusion of some women within the structure of patriarchal dominance.

and, then they call you names when you insist on actually being a feminist.

it needs to stop.

i have no patience for this kind of radical egoism, whether it's coming from women or men

if i'm upsetting people, if the status quo hates me, if i'm unpopular with the in crowd, then that means that i'm doing something right.

if i was easy to digest, easy to swallow, easy to read, i wouldn't be much of a social critic, now would i?

i'm here to make you uncomfortable.

i'm here to make you cry.

so cry, if you want to. but then change. drop the entitlement, and learn to realize that you're not the centre of the universe, that there are other people on the planet besides yourself.

you're right: i don't like you much.

but, it's not your gender i don't like. it's your attitude. it's you that's toxic.

i'm not going to be brow-beaten by a bunch of faux-feminist, functionally misogynistic, selfish, neo-liberal third-waver nihilists.

because i'm not afraid of you.

and i don't want to fuck you. so, you have no control over me.

i will call you out as you need to be called out. and you need to be called out.

listen, when you bring somebody that you live with, that you share a bed with, to a party with your friends, then her behaviour had better have something to do with you.

because, if it doesn't then she doesn't care much about you.

and, it's time for her to find another bed to sleep in.

i should have walked away much earlier. because the misogynist, the douche bag, the person with no respect for women, was her. i was naive; i thought i was helping her find a way out of something that was harmful to her, and that i just needed to be patient and wait for her to grow up, when all she wanted to do was keep harming herself.

and, in the end, she ended up impregnated by somebody that was 30 years older than her. if i had stuck around a year longer, i would have been stuck with that. forever.

it's my body that's important here, not hers - my autonomy, my rights, my agency, my dreams, my desires. and, i have every right to tell the people around me that if their behaviour is not consistent with what i want, then i'm going to get up and walk away from them.

but, there's no reason to be hateful about that. an adult should be able to look at the situation and say "just because i don't want to live with and date a shameless slut that refuses to have any respect for herself doesn't mean i can't still be friends with her.".

and, i'm still not willing to give up on her, on that level.

and, yes: i do still think that somebody is smoking, although it seems to at this point mostly be a weekend thing. it's not one or the other, it's all of the above.

but, if i can get the cracks filled, and stop the smell from seeping up from under the floor, then i can hopefully start with a more thorough cleaning routine and ultimately get the fan off within a few days.

there's a home hardware around the corner - five minutes, by foot. i can try tomorrow, if i can get enough work done tonight.

if i can fix this once and for all for $10-20, that's fucking great.

so, what i'll need to do is move everything away from all of the walls, clean everything around them and do it all at once.

like i say: i don't care if it makes the problem worse, structurally. i just want the smell to go away. if he wants to actually maintain his property one day, he can do that at his own prerogative; as it is, he doesn't seem to want to do anything except get high and watch tv, so i'll have to do it for him.

if it's more than $50, i'll send him the bill. otherwise, it's not worth it.

https://www.homehardware.ca/en/568g-polyurethane-low-expanding-foam-sealant/p/2030867

we probably shouldn't even be there.

we're barely g10 at this point.

g20 still. firmly.

an actual g7 at this point would include china, india and brazil and leave canada, italy and france behind.

brazil's economy is now actually officially larger than canada's.

if you were wondering.

i care about the smell.

i don't care about his property.

and, it's his own fault for being a lazy, worthless, piece of shit.

belgian neutrality was always bullshit anyways, right?

trudeau and macron need a third stooge. but, i don't want to interfere with belgian neutrality. alas. the franco-phony is a lot smaller than it used to be.

they're both complete idiots and the world will be better off when they're gone.

exhibit a - trudeau is offering to send helicopters to brazil to put out the fires, as though brazil doesn't have the resources, and as though they're not doing it on purpose. it's like offering a lion a glass of milk. thirsty kitty, right? dipshit. worse, i think he thinks it'll win him votes, as though meaningless symbolic gestures overpower actual substantive policy decisions.

because it's the thought that counts.

derrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp......

anyways, i'm figuring out that the smell is indeed seeping up from under the floor, which seems to have some cracks in the foundation. i don't think that the problem is air humidity at all. at this point, i no longer care remotely about the piece of shit upstairs, so i'm just going to get some expansion foam at the hardware store and seal up around the baseboards. it's his problem if it ruins the foundation - he's not maintaining the place anyways, and refuses to do basic maintenance. that should keep the smell out. i'm just going to wait a few more days for this rain storm to pass, first. and, to finish october, which won't be much longer.

go clutch your pearls in front of somebody else.

i don't give a fuck.

again: i'm not a conservative, and i don't care about your moral outrage.

did i offend you?

did i upset you?

did i hurt your feelings?

was i rude?

good.

and: fuck you. for good measure.

how much of the dtk blog, which is going to be ramping up in late 2013, am i going to archive here?

anything posted to the appspot site - at all - will be archived here. i consider that to be a formal writing project. so, the cd and concert reviews are relevant to this space for that reason. this will be somewhat of an expansion in scope, moving forward.

random youtube comments that are purely about music can stay on the dtk blog, solely.

tentative reviews are a more complex scenario and are going to need to be dependent. i keep coming back to the idea that a timely record review is news. but, i'm more interested in the idea that it could reflect how i'm feeling.

for example, that touche amore record released at the end of 2013 was kind of exactly what i needed at that point in time, and it's more for that reason that it makes sense to post here.

i'm going to over think this. and, i'm sure i'll break or modify my own rules.

i just want to point out the obvious: i might endorse the band, but that doesn't mean the band endorses me, and in a body of writing this large, i'm sure i've said something that is upsetting to virtually everybody. this is a part of the reason i have the music blog separate: i know that being interested in my music reviews doesn't mean you're interested in my far leftist politics. but, the reverse also applies: just because you don't like my politics doesn't mean i can't listen to certain types of music. i think you should probably know by now that i don't tend to care much for property rights.

so, i'm hesitant, but i'm going to go forward with it, because there's going to be enough overlap anyways that i'm spitting on a fish. and, i'll remind you - if you don't care what i think about politics, just hit the dtk blog, straight up. the link's on the side.

free will is probably a false dichotomy.

we probably need a dialectic...

and, i don't think that's such a crazy suggestion either.

we don't have much say over how our heart beats, or even if  it beats. and, we call this an autonomous nervous system.

but, we can sit and do math homework in our underwear if we want.

it's just a simple way to understand that not all decisions are the same: sometimes we have a choice, and sometimes we really don't.

rejecting descartian dualism means that most real-world decisions would exist in a mixed state, between something like digestion and something like math homework. we can't completely undo our physical realities. but, we can direct it in some way or another. and, how much of that is real and how much of it isn't depends on how purely intellectual the decision actually is.

you can see that with something as simple as going grocery shopping. you know you shop differently when you're hungry, right? and, that kind of mixed up way to look at it is getting to the right idea: it's very complex to separate, to the point of probably being impossible in most scenarios.

i think the conceptual error is that we want to think of decision making as a generalized concept. so, if you can understand how you can make one decision and it is free (or not free) then you can generalize that understanding to all of the other decisions.

i would rather insist that you interpret every single decision making process as an independent experiment, and reject the process of generalization.

"i changed my mind. that's what it's there for."

regarding camus and free will....

i don't actually think that determinism has much to say about free will. when i speak of coercion, i'm erecting my framework in more of a gramscian context than a descartian or newtonian one.

and, i think that's a consequence of quantum physics.

but, that's not to abolish the contradiction, either - because even if this universe isn't deterministic, that doesn't mean we're actually making autonomous decisions, and i'll bring you back to gramsci for that.

where i think camus is more relevant here is in rejecting formal thinking around the topic. this is something where science breaks down, because you don't have a concept of repeatability. you have no controls. but, i think i'm stretching the point.

in practice, i think you want to strive to be free as much as you can, while always continuing to question yourself. why did i do that?

the feds simply can't be expected to negotiate in good faith. they never have.

the court, itself, has a fiduciary responsibility to oversee the process.

by "waste of time and money", what she means is "dangerous because it may provide more rights than the claim is actually asking for".

she's essentially trying to make a deal.

the article is using an activist concept of indigenous title rather than a legal one, and it would not hold up in court. but, they should go through the courts, anyways. from the sounds of it, they will certainly not get everything they want, the court will restrict them to what is defined in the constitution, which is essentially land use, but at the least it will ensure that they're not getting swindled by the government. again.

she's not trying to circumvent the courts out of the goodness of her heart.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/aboriginal-title-rights-elsipogtog-first-nation-mou-1.5132320