i missed this, but it's a good tweak.

i support this.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/patent-drug-board-changes-1.5241413

i've said this before: if orwell was actually right, you wouldn't actually know it.

and, the more right he is, the less you'll be able to figure it out.

it was generally understood that a few of the people hanging around were cops. nobody pointed fingers at each other. and, the truth is that we weren't doing anything particularly sketchy, either.

but, i actually think the truth is quite a bit more startling than that.

i actually think i was at parties where 15 out of the 20 people in the room were cops. i think that it was cops that dominated the organizing committee. and, i ultimately think that the point of the whole thing was a sting.

so, it's not a question of finding the cop. most of the activists were/are cops.

why did i think erin was a cop?

because she was an agent provocateur. i caught her trying to incite violence several times, and she once tried to talk me into smashing up somebody's car (i didn't). it was classic, textbook undercover cop shit.

she was also way too old to be a first-year student.

there were other tip-offs. but, the incitement/entrapment is the classic giveaway, and she was about as obvious as could possibly be about it.

ok, so i've got up until the end of the 18th synced and have posted my last correspondence with esa/erin/shelly. i want to clarify a few things before i stop to eat.

although she did make a few dodged passes at me, erin and i did not have a romantic or sexual relationship at all. whereas sarah was polyamorous, or at least saw it as an ideal to attain to, erin was just a lost soul. it's true that i was a little older then, but it's also true that erin was older than sarah was in the relevant time frame. by the time sarah was erin's age in the time i knew erin, she had already had two kids.

erin's language was colourful, and seemed to suggest a deep level of promiscuity, but i'm actually not going to call her a slut, because i don't think most of what she said to me was actually true.

my initial interest in erin was purely musical. she had perfect pitch, was a competent guitarist and songwriter and was also a concert-level pianist. and, she had confidence in herself, too. she was a real musical talent and i regret not being able to do some work with her.

but, she was completely disinterested in me as an artist. in the end, i don't even know if she liked my writing, because i couldn't even get her to listen to anything. whereas i saw erin as a potential collaborator, she seemed unwilling to look past the fact that i wasn't technically a music student. i was studying law when i knew her, and that's what she saw me in the role of. the fact that i may have actually had more music credits than her at the time (it would have been close.) didn't matter; she seemed unwilling to accept that kind of cross-pollination. she seemed to firmly insist on a strict division of labour....

...or at least that's how it seemed, naively, from a distance.

i told you there was a twist, and here it is: it was several months previous, some time in the spring of 2013, that i first became convinced that esa was actually an undercover cop. so was illuminous. and, i suspect the wobblies were, too.

my awareness of this was quite acute, and it strongly affected how i behaved, but i took the opportunities provided to me as they arose.

and, if you go back and look at the situation from this prism - one where she knows she's a cop, and i know she's a cop, but she doesn't know that i know she's a cop - some things may begin to align themselves more rationally.

i've made some progress, but it seems like i'm in for the night, and maybe the weekend. we'll see how i feel tomorrow.

i mentioned that this was going to come off as a periodical, because i launched the appspot site and am mirroring it here. so, the politics document is going to probably be close to 400 pages because it has a dozen essays and as many more short writing assignments in it, whereas the music journal is only going to be around 100 pages, if that.

as an aside, what about these old book reviews? am i ever going to back to these? eventually, it's just that i've been trying to prioritize finishing the music. i know - that sounds like a joke. but it's actually true, and, ranting aside, i insist i've done a lot of work on this, and that it will start to come together soon enough.

i'll concede that i'm doing too many things, but i'm not giving up on any of it, and i know where my priorities are in getting the discography finished first.

the flip side of that is obvious enough: when or if this does get done, expect me to dive into piles of books pretty quickly.

and, yes - i think this is worthwhile. i wouldn't be doing it, otherwise.

listen.

i can be steadfast in my refusal to vote for somebody without hating them. and, i can wish them the best, even as i insist that i don't want them making decisions. i can feel empathy for them, even as i'm just hoping they quit as soon as possible...

actually, i think this is kind of sad.

i don't want to be contrite. i don't want to say it's too little, too late. it's more like the girl that's falling all over herself to appeal to the guy at the party that doesn't know her name.

i've been massively critical, but at, this point, this isn't the right approach; at this point, it's just self-debasing.

in the end, i hope he has the self-respect to step down.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-jagmeet-singh-addresses-turban-head-on-in-new-quebec-ndp-advertisement/

i'm still calling for autopsies on the dead humans, but understanding the mechanism of what's happening is key.

it seems to be more or less equivalent to the tar build-up you get from regular smoking.

and, if you're surprised by this then you're stupid.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/e-cigarette-vaping-lung-damage-1.5270986

the ndp may very well lose every rural seat that they have in this election.

and, i'll say it again: the greens need to have people on the ground ready to pick up those voters.

(don't tell them that may is a minister)

the fact of the matter is that the ndp are resorting to calling people racists because they're embarassed at what happened. it's a face-saving mechanism. but, they're just digging themselves deeper into a hole.

i don't doubt that there's probably a lot of unease about singh's religious beliefs and personal appearance, but to act surprised or shocked by this is just stupid. it was the most predictable thing that's happened in canadian politics in decades. i predicted it immediately upon seeing the headline.

and, i'll expand on the point: in addition to these kinds of issues occurring in eastern canada, the ndp should expect to see declining numbers as a general phenomenon in rural ridings, including in northern ontario as well as in bc. and, i've seen recent polls where they're even running behind the liberals in fucking saskatchewan.

this is a catastrophe for the ndp, and it is absolutely about the leader. but that's not racism, per se.

i probably wouldn't have much of a problem with jagmeet singh if he presented himself more like ujjal dosanjh, or niki haley. it's not the skin colour that bothers me, it's not where he's from and it's not what language he speaks. what bothers me is that he openly displays his religious beliefs in ways that make it clear that they will be a factor in how he governs, and while you might be able to make sense of that in the context of the social gospel, this is something that is broadly inconsistent with where the ndp has stood in the political spectrum since the retirement of tommy douglas. it's not surprising that ndp voters across the country would react poorly to the thought of electing somebody that is going to put his religious values ahead of pretty much everything else. and, frankly, i agree with them.

i pointed out years ago, now, that this would be a disaster for the party if he refused to cut his beard. i was right.

and, the party needs to stop calling people racists for this and get their head around the actual point: left-leaning canadians don't want to vote for religious people.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ndp-racism-new-brunswick-green-party-elizabeth-may-jonathan-richardson-1.5269606

and, i think opposing this for ethical reasons is a red herring.

being a mouse is going to suck, regardless: minimal cognitive abilities (despite advanced emotional abilities), low lifespans and probable eventual death via predation. i mean, if your most likely endpoint is being eaten alive by an owl at 30% of your maximum lifespan, then why is being grown for pancreas cells so terrible?

i mean, you realize that the mouse can probably feel it's own brain being ripped out by the claws, right?

i'm not even arguing that their lives are meaningless, either - this isn't an exercise in absolute nihilism, and i'm not suggesting that we should discard their experiences. what i'm pointing out is that there's nothing really preventing a donor mouse from being happy and well taken care of. in fact, as it would be for a pregnant mother, you'd want to ensure that a mouse that is bred for this reason is well-fed and kept away from environmental harms.

i have a harder time justifying purely experimental research, and largely argue against it. i don't think we should torture them. that's cruel.

but, we're the advanced species, here, and i don't see why we can't do this humanely.

https://theconversation.com/human-animal-hybrids-are-coming-and-could-be-used-to-grow-organs-for-transplant-a-philosopher-weighs-in-121228

so, let's all understand this.

https://theconversation.com/forget-about-designer-babies-gene-editing-wont-work-on-complex-traits-like-intelligence-51557

well.

are they going to put patents on it?

if it came down to it, i wouldn't feel particularly constrained by any laws restricting my use of chinese gene-editing technology, here in canada - i would consider those laws to be unnecessarily restrictive, and ultimately unjust. sorry.

in the past, i would have expected canada to get this right under a liberal government. but, we're heading towards a dark age, here.

https://theconversation.com/genetic-engineering-and-human-animal-hybrids-how-china-is-leading-a-global-split-in-controversial-research-121473

if we could abort the reprobates, should we?

well, my lumpenproletariat wouldn't be much of a revolutionary force, would it?

i think the better question is: if we could abort the reprobates, would we? and, i'm not sure we'd be able to stop the experiment, which would ironically make us a bunch of reprobates, wouldn't it?

it would be a struggle.

as it is, we actually can't, and we'll never be able to, and that's what the science actually says.

and, i'll reiterate the basic point: the inheritance of personality was, at best, ever a speculative hypothesis. it was never upheld by any actual science.

if you care to look at the actual record, rather than be manipulated by dishonest religious and conservative groups, what you will find is that, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the actual scientific consensus was caution. the period between mendel and watson/crick was one where biology was reaching towards but ultimately grappling with something that it didn't fully understand. mayr's modern evolutionary synthesis came quite a bit later, and still has some unresolved problems around the species concept and the role of selection v the role of drift, so we're still not entirely there yet. and, the recent change in attitudes around the heritability of homosexuality is instructive in getting to the point - a popular consensus, even amongst working scientists, is not science itself. you have to actually do the research.

the politicians were saying one thing, it is true - often with the support of the church and often broadcast over mainstream media. there was a developing popular consensus around the inheritance of personality, precisely because it upheld the existing protestant religious doctrines. further, a specific interpretation of social darwinism was used to justify a specific concept of competition within capitalism. let us not forget that classical liberal economics predates natural selection, and that the influence flowed from the field of economics into the field of biology, and not the other way around.

but, what the scientists were saying the whole time was "hold your horses. let's back this up. these hypotheses are interesting, and may be right, in the end. but, we need to do the actual research, first. we can't jump to these conclusions like this. and, we don't have the data to draw the inferences you're drawing."

it turns out, in the end, that what we've learned by actually studying dna at a molecular level is that genetics code for proteins, which in turn code for your body chemistry. so, your dna defines the chemistry in your body, including how it produces and reacts to hormones, which have some effect on your behaviour. but, dna does not do things like create ancestral memories or control for behaviours, and we are not genetically predetermined in the way that the calvinists and other protestant groups believed we were. these things are determined primarily by the environment, and at least provide for the illusion of free will.

what that means is that these hypotheses were mostly wrong, and you can't abort the reprobates, after all.

but, it isn't contrary to christian teachings, or at least not contrary to the calvinist ones.

the fact is that it was often used by protestants to try and kill off catholics and control the descendants of the slaves and indigenous groups. and, let us remember that slavery itself comes to us via religion, as well, even if many prohibitionists were, in the end, driven by religious conviction.

https://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j20_3/j20_3_54-60.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4001825/

this is the ultimate origin of eugenics, right here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconditional_election

https://www.google.com/search?q=Total+Hereditary+Depravity

the fundamental reason that we had nazism and "progressive" eugenics was what weber called the "protestant work ethic".

there's just a lot of lingering ignorance in religious communities about this, and a lot of denial about the fundamental and defining role that religion played in the historical "progressive" movements that mostly existed on the west of the continent.

the real root of the problem lies in calvinism, and it's idea that you can be born without the ability for redemption. i'm actually open to arguments that calvinism isn't even really properly categorized as christianity, because it doesn't believe in forgiveness. but, it's at the root of the problem, here, in it's arguments that you can be born lazy, and can't be reformed.

"racist scientist" is a contradiction in terms.

if you're a racist, you don't believe in science, and if you're a scientist, you don't believe in race.

like, as soon as you mention race, you're doing pseudo-science.

there is a very clear, broad consensus about race in the scientific community: race is not a scientific concept.

"Let's just state for the record: talking about needing 'population control' through ABORTION for the sake of CLIMATE is talking about EUGENICS," - some conservative idiot

no, it isn't. and, the use of caps lock doesn't help the argument.

eugenics is the idea that you can improve the genome through artificial selection, and shouldn't be seen as a blanket negative or a bad word. so, something we've been able to target and almost get rid of, for example, is tay-sachs disease, a debilitating condition with no potential upside. that is eugenics, and we should all support doing it. i understand why conservatives are afraid of this, as it challenges their religious perspectives, but we're walking into a future where gene editing via crispr will provide us with incredible opportunities to revolutionize the genome, and we should enthusiastically embrace this as a way to make us better. i support this, wholeheartedly.

in the past, what we've had is politicians driven by poor understandings of the science of genetics that have speciously done things like tie negative personality traits to base racial characteristics. there was never any science that upheld any of this, and the idea of tying their actions to science was always rooted in ignorance. these politicians were in truth usually religious and usually driven by the speciousness of calvinism and evangelical christianity in general; when they justified their actions using science-y language, it was always shoddy and always just a gloss to push forward their backwards religious convictions, more comparable to a contemporary anti-vaccine activist or anti-gmo activist than any contemporary concept of genetics. hitler himself was a roman catholic, not an atheist.

likewise, the idea that you can eliminate gay people or autistic people has always been pseudo-science. with the latter, it's not something to celebrate: if we could eliminate autism, we should do it, but you can't, and the science has never suggested you could. autism is currently understood as a series of mutations in real-time, not something you can flip in a test-tube. the danger has never existed with the actual science, but always existed with corrupt politicians that want to use pseudo-scientific theories to advance their pre-existing agendas. and, that's the irony here: these religious groups might think they're fighting against science, but they're really just fighting against their own ignorance.

providing women with real reproductive choices is not about artificial selection, although it could be argued that there's a basis of natural selection in undoing the existing systems of patriarchy and dominance. one of the reasons that religion needs to be destroyed is that the patriarchal systems it perpetuates are undoing the necessary role of women as gatekeepers of the genome, which is distorting the effects of natural selection. again: i understand that conservatives think "god" is making choices here, but they're wrong, and should be ignored.

so, this isn't about eugenics, and suggesting that it is is just alarmist demagoguery.