i'm not working for anybody.

i'm not supporting or endorsing anybody.

i've endorsed non-voting, and i'll do it again: don't vote.

what i am is a disenfranchised textbook leftist stuck in a society that has swung hard to the right, and that has somehow confused classical conservatism with socialism.

all of the parties are too right-wing for me to support.

the liberals are supposed to do better than this.

i'm going to do dishes, brush my teeth, make coffee and then we're doing legal stuff tonight.

no more fucking around...

the liberals are supposed to do better than this.

it seems like i'm in tonight.

the liberals are supposed to do better than this.

there goes jenny kwan clutching her pearls again...

she is by far the single most annoying member of parliament. i hope she loses her seat.

the reality is that most of them aren't legit refugees, and most of them will be sent back. the article also notes where popular opinion stands on this point, which is important, because it's a policy issue.

jenny is entitled to her opinions, but she's not entitled to make up facts. this guy is just telling the truth, and it's long past time that the ndp started to, too.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-oct-1-2019-1.5303044/irregular-border-crossers-aren-t-real-refugees-says-conservative-candidate-1.5303979

the liberals are supposed to do better than this.

and, don't tell me i'm ignorant, either.

it's not my country. it's not my history.

you're ignorant.

read up on canadian history, and get back to me.

the liberals are supposed to do better than this

the irony here is that the liberal party itself is the institution least likely to understand that.

so, who leaked the pictures?

i suspect - without evidence - that it may have been an inside job, because you'd have to think like an american to think it would hurt him, and that's a quality you'd assign to a frustrated liberal staffer, or somebody trying to make a move for the leadership spot.

the liberals are supposed to do better than this

to be clear, and terse, that is the reason why the blackface pictures are not hurting trudeau: canada is a different country with a different history that sees race through a different lens.

when we see somebody in black makeup, we don't see 19th century american minstrels mocking black people. that was something that happened in a different country with a different culture.

we just see a white guy in makeup.

the liberals are supposed to do better than this

americans might think that canadians are pretty much the same as them.

but, canadians think we're very different.

we're to america as the irish or scots are to the brits.

the liberals are supposed to do better than this

what's the most recent announcement from the conservatives?

they want to cut foreign aid, and give it away as tax cuts.

good luck winning an election in canada with that.

the liberals are supposed to do better than this

like, bananas are racist, now?

what?

the liberals are supposed to do better than this

so, this type of article is actually predictable, from the tory media, that is so out of touch that it doesn't know it's out of touch. i even told you that something like this would happen, that you'd get bizarre self-rationalizations to explain why the pundits were so wrong.

but, listen. i explained the reasons why canadians were unlikely to care about the types of "scandals" hitting him. blackface is an american thing; the reality is that canadians don't "get it", because it doesn't make sense in the context of our own history. i told you it wouldn't hurt him much, and it looks like it hasn't. if anything, singh seems to have taken a hit for over-reacting. and, the snc-lavalin thing was a triviality - it was just as predictable that nobody would care about that, either.

canadians want to vote on social issues, we don't want to get bogged down by stupid scandals. if you were to replace trudeau with any other politician, you'd see the same thing.

so, it's not because trudeau is special, it's because these things don't matter to people. and, in that sense, perhaps we are special - we seem to be immune to the smear campaigns in the tory media, across the board.

maybe it's because so few people read the papers?

they were able to get to wynne for some reason, and a smart media analyst could maybe try to figure that out, but it was an anomaly in this country. this kind of thing usually fails here...

so long as the conservatives remain terrible, and the ndp runs a guy that thinks he has a magic beard, and the liberals are half-ways acceptable on policy (the latter point being questionable, at the moment), these kinds of things will not hurt them.

if you want to beat the liberals, you need to beat them on policy that people actually care about. that's been true for a hundred years, and it'll probably be true for a hundred more.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-justin-trudeaus-brand-is-too-big-to-fail/

the liberals are supposed to do better than this

i know there's people reading this blog. lots of them.

you need to start sending me cash.

yes, you're going to get this for free anyways, but only up to the point that i can actually do it - and i need cash to exist.

so, what happens if i run into financial issues and have to....ugh.....get a job?

i'll less time to think, less time to write, less time to create and less time to party. posts will dry up. you'll lose this. the horrors.

you're supposed to buy my music, that's how this is supposed to work. that's what i want you to do. but, if you find that difficult for whatever reason, you can throw me money at patreon or even at noise trade.

i'm obviously getting something out of this, and i'll do it for free for as long as i can. there's no threat that i'm going to stop, so long as i can keep going. the question is - how long can i keep going?

the liberals are supposed to do better than this

no, i don't think the universe is a hologram.

the liberals are supposed to do better than this.

so, what happened?

i fell asleep yesterday morning around 9:00 and woke up around 16:30, then didn't get to groceries until close to 19:00. i spent all night last night doing groceries - i even made it out to the all night grocery store to pick up a few things i couldn't find elsewhere, before close.

i didn't get through that facebook process.

i bought a large pizza right at 2:00, ate 60% of it (i hadn't really eaten since friday), watched a lecture on the universe being a hologram (the idea that you can embed three or four dimensional space into a two-dimensional surface goes back as far as euclid, but the mathematical truth of this construction says nothing about empirical reality - this is a typical positivist error. it's tautological, basically, and not such a deep observation, when looked at carefully. i once heard hawking argue that reality is defined as the model. ack. noooooooooooo. also, the observer effect doesn't imply that humans have laser eyes, like superman. we capture the light that already exists; we don't create it. that's not interfering with anything, a priori. but, i think susskind was just using a bad pop culture analogy there, and should be more careful about the words he chooses. it came off as hokey quantum mysticism. i think he knows that humans aren't ubermensch, that we don't have laser eyes. and, he can do the experiment with kryptonite, if he's not sure.), took a shower and fell asleep.

so, i lost a day and a half and will pick up where i left off.

i did spend a lot of last night outside, so i didn't waste the weather. and, i'm good to go on groceries for a while, now. i let myself get low on a few things the last few months. the crash in the weather means it's time to start putting nuts away for the winter....

i'll want to make sure that there's nothing tonight, but i don't see anything. and, we're looking at rain all day tomorrow. so, let's get to the legal shit, i guess.

the liberals are supposed to do better than this. 

the black bloc are cops, guys.

they've even admitted it more than twice.

the liberals are supposed to do better than this.  

should bernier be at the debate?

elizabeth may can't really argue against it, without coming off as a hypocrite. singh doesn't want him there.

see, this is a point where anarchists break with communists, in that anarchists tend to position themselves more in the liberal tradition of free speech. just about every anarchist i've ever studied would argue that what you need to do in this kind of situation is let bernier discredit himself. if you find yourself in the position of being afraid that his ideas may spread if provided a platform, you're implicitly implying that you think he's on to something.

i don't think that bernier will help his own cause - he's the kind of politician that people like less, the more they hear of him.

i think there's a valid argument that he's wasting everybody's time. but, i don't want to exclude him on the basis of censoring him - i'd rather let him make a fool of himself. that is how we get rid of bad ideas, like ending supply management.

the liberals are supposed to do better than this.