this isn't a prediction, it's just a thought.

indiana used to be the sole red state in a sea of blue.

the new map may have illinois as the only blue state in a sea of red.

it's interesting how stark the line down the middle of the map is, isn't it?

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b9/ElectoralCollege1996-Large.png/650px-ElectoralCollege1996-Large.png)

what's also interesting to me is that, in a few cycles, that might actually flip over, as that line from north dakota down to texas increasingly leans democrat, while the line from minnesota to louisiana is increasingly lost. minnesota is the last to fall. will it fall in 2020?

i'm not going to predict the map.

but, this is going to be sort of an interesting experiment. how long can snl and etc avoid lampooning joe biden for? it's sooooo tempting.

yeah, it's gonna be a rough election. and, i don't think that biden has a serious chance.

it feels like 1996, and biden feels bob dole.

giving money to charities is thatcherian because it's essentially a privatization of the welfare state, which is the fundamental purpose of government.

it's neo-liberalism at it's worst.

i'm actually opposed to this. religion has no role to play in this response; directing these resources to charities is something you'd expect from a right-wing government. it's thatcherian. and, it's exactly what donald trump just did.

the way to help poor people is not to force them to deal with religious groups but to give it to them directly, and that's supposed to be what government does. they could do this through the cra, or they could do it through local assistance programs set up by the municipalities.

but, this money should not have been given to charity groups, and canadians should not be forced to deal with religion in order to access it.

https://globalnews.ca/news/6845930/coronavirus-support-vulnerable-canadians/

there's nowhere to go....

i simply haven't been anywhere else.

if i picked this up, where did i get it?

at the grocery store.

...like everybody else that's getting it, right now.

so, if we're going to bring poor people in on purpose, we need to be properly funding support systems; if we're not going to fund the support systems, we should stop bringing them in on purpose. the market will not take care of it on it's own.

the people we bring in on purpose should be properly screened for educational requirements to ensure they can succeed and contribute.

the "mistake" that democrats tend to make (and it's disingenuous to call it a mistake. they generally know what they're doing.) is to take these studies that are about skilled immigrants and apply them to unskilled immigrants. so, you'll see them argue that farm workers create multiplier effects, when all of the actual data suggests that they don't. or, they'll argue that refugees are a net benefit on the social system, by citing studies about skilled immigrants.

i'm happy to bring in refugees, if we're willing to fund the social infrastructure - housing, language training, cultural adjustment classes, etc. but, the argument from our leaders in recent decades has been that we don't need to do that because "the market" will take care of it, and that is really the crux of my dissent.

the market will not take care of it; if you saturate population levels at the lowest levels of society without funding the systems required to deal with it, you just put enormous strain on the system, and everybody suffers from it. the likelihood of anybody succeeding in this mess, domestic or foreign born, is exceedingly low. what people call "the american dream" was at best a delusional fantasy in the 20th century that was propped up to advance statist interests - it's not even a desirable fairy tale in the 21st century. the entire concept should just be flushed down the toilet as utter nonsense.

they did nutritional tests on the huddled masses on staten island back in the middle of the twentieth century and found that italian immigrants had shrunk in size due to malnutrition. they were better off in sicily. but, that wasn't the point - american businesses were looking for cheap labour, so they brought them in with fraudulent appeals to a false utopia that almost nobody actually got to. what we got instead was widespread organized crime.

i don't see any use in being foolish about this, given the hindsight of history - your chances of success on this continent if you don't have an education are approaching zero. yes, there's an epsilon, but that epsilon itself is reduced by the number of people competing for sparse resources. people arguing otherwise are either dishonest or stupid.

but, the bourgeoisie is of course famously short-sighted.

it's a shame that it's not critical mass, isn't it?

yesterday got away from me, i guess. i broke a plate early in the morning trying to cram it into my fridge and it kind of threw me off for the day. i just dropped it, out of clumsiness. i ended up sleeping earlier than i wanted, and later than intended; i wanted to get the recycle out this morning, and missed it altogether. i ended up unexpectedly tired all day...

i could smell some drugs in the air from the neighbours and am going to blame it on that. but, i was out shopping on wednesday night. if i finally got it, that's fine, i'd rather beat it myself, but let's hope it's quick.

it seems like the divisional court is canceled until the fall, but i'll want to get a verification on that. right now, i'm going to plan to get to toronto, regardless, so i can file these stupid motions in person, and yell down the coordinator if i need to. this is the end of june. if social distancing isn't actually working, and the peak hits in mid may rather than late may, there's some chance they may be open by then.

let's see if i can type up a point form list of things to do today and stick to it:

- i was going to finish the rest of the pasta today, but i had to toss it. so, i'm going to make some eggs, instead.
- i need to redo my sheets due to complications from breaking the plate of pasta.
- i'll have to reimage the 90s laptop, as well. i can do that while waiting for laundry.
- i'll want to get in the shower, after that.
- and then i'll want to finish that vlogging update, for the second half of march, and then do one for the first half of april, as well.

if seasonal influenza has a r-nought around two and was stopped with social distancing, and covid-19 wasn't stopped with the same practices in the same places at the same time, it would have to have a much higher r-nought value.

i'm not going to guess. but, it's a bound.

i think this is stretching, though.

i'd like to see more widespread testing for influenza in covid-19 patients.

well. where'd all the flu deaths go?

you need to answer this in some way.

nononononono, let's think this through.

let's say the haphazard hypothesis is correct - that social distancing has brought down flu deaths. it obviously hasn't been so successful for covid-19. if influenza deaths have crashed to almost zero, while covid-19 deaths have skyrocketed, in the same period and the same geographic spaces, what conclusion can we draw?

it must be that the coronavirus is a lot more contagious than the flu, right? so, just how high is that basic reproduction number, then?

while also approaching the situation from the opposite direction, these people are explicitly recommending that both viruses be tested for.

https://journals.lww.com/pidj/Citation/9000/Coinfection_of_Influenza_Virus_and_Severe_Acute.96209.aspx

this article is making the opposite point, which is no less valid, in theory. but, the context is that flu deaths are strangely down.

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/03/covid-19-can-coexist-with-other-respiratory-viruses.html

china has made a lot of progress over the last several decades.

but, it's still china.

i need to present a little caution: just because the information coming out of china is being increasingly realized as completely wrong doesn't mean that this happened on purpose, or that it's some kind of nefarious ploy.

they could have just been wrong.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2764787

like i say, it makes you wonder what the co-infection rate is, and how often the cause of death is being misreported.

just because you died with covid-19 in your body doesn't mean it was the cause of death. but, nobody has time for the autopsies just right now, and it may be creating a confused perception.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/6/20-0299_article

so, supposedly the executive order is to ban people with green cards.

these are legal immigrants - skilled workers. they aren't depressing anybody's wages. they're the kind of migrants america should want more of.

dumb policy, through and through.

we should make an announcement that we're willing to look at any skilled applicants that the americans don't want.

why do all of the ads for face masks have pictures of women?

if i'm not clear, when i say "enforce labor laws", i mean sending employers that hire migrants under the table to jail.

i'd like to see a major clampdown...

but, i'd almost never support deporting somebody. and, i'd eventually like to see the borders largely erased - once some of the things i've talked about are in place.

the short answer is that bringing in skilled labour will usually increase aggregate demand, because these are people that end up with spending money that is recycled back into the economy. you actually want to talk about multiplier effects, not wage suppression.

however, bringing in unskilled labour will generally have minimal effects, as they are paid so poorly as to only be able to subsist, if they aren't sending their excess wages out of the country. if they aren't occupying jobs that domestic workers can do directly, they are at least setting the wage floor much lower than it otherwise would be.

it would follow that you would want to put a focus on skilled immigration to plug holes in labour demand, while insisting that labour laws for unskilled labour are strictly upheld, to prevent employers from taking advantage of immigrant labour.

a total ban on immigration is stupid, though.

that means you're banning students and skilled labour as well, in sectors where there may actually be labour shortages.

again: you're going to have a hard time pinning me down into a partisan position on this, because i denounce both parties equally. i don't believe in borders, and i'd like to erase them from the map. but, i'm staunchly critical of the democrats for upholding what is essentially a system of slavery, designed to maximize profits for corporate farmers, while keeping prices low for consumers. this is not a just system, and should not be maintained.

if you think you're standing in solidarity with migrant workers by standing with their employers, you're either a delusional idiot or you're a fascist asshole. these people are underpaid, they're not protected by labour rights, they face massive abuses and they are often void of basic civil rights in the process. i don't use the term lightly - they are enslaved.

making the issue about immigration is a cop-out. the issue is about labour rights, and standing in solidarity with the workers - not with the employers - means standing up for their rights to collective bargaining, to fair wages, to safe workplaces and to everything else that workers fight for and largely get in the united states and in canada. they are not lesser than us, and they should not be treated as though they are - they deserve the same rights as us.

now, it follows that if you were to actually enforce all of these things then mexican labour would lose it's absolute advantage. if employers had to pay all of the same things for imported labour that they do for domestic labour, imported labour would just have added costs attached to it. this would increase the competitiveness of domestic applicants; it would even the playing field.

but, that's just a corollary to the basic point, which is that a legitimately leftist position means standing in solidarity with the rights of workers, and not with the rights of corporations or the rights of consumers.

i don't know what he's doing, so it's hard to analyze. but, it's not clear to me that a ban on foreign workers is a worse idea than the status quo is.

this is a different issue in canada, which does not share a border with a third-world country, but actually flies in migrant workers who exist under a specialized place in the labour code. we've essentially legalized paying them under-the-table. it's a program that is an absolute affront to any concept of labour rights, is unreformable and should be outright abolished.

in the united states, you could just enforce the laws, and that would most likely be good enough to end the abuses.

so, they seem to be adopting a marxist argument about surplus labour depressing wages, which i don't dispute in specific contexts, but seems a little weird to bring up, in context.

yes, it is true that if you increase the supply of labour while reducing it's demand or otherwise holding it steady then you will suppress wages. that's economics 101. arguments against this rely on the question of what effect immigration has on demand, which is variable by sector. and, demand for labour is indeed rather low right now. but, wouldn't it make more sense to lift the lockdown? as demand is low for labour across the board right now, it's hard to see how banning immigration would have much of an effect on wages.

while i acknowledge that immigration is a factor in reducing wages in the southwest, i don't generally support policies intended to slow or ban migration into these regions. rather, i tend to point fingers at employers that hire people under the table, and a system that is erected to look the other way at it. so, i would rather see increased enforcement of the labour laws than bans on immigration. in the end, i would actually support a schengen-style agreement for the nafta countries that upholds free movement across the borders, but it has to be accompanied with stricter enforcement of labour laws, and the mexicans have to up their game on union rights.

if we actually enforced the labour laws properly, then mexican labour would be more expensive, and the issue would resolve itself.

could he do it?

if he decides that immigration is a threat to national security, he would have the power to ban immigration via executive order, whether that's enforceable in reality or not. i still don't know how you do it, besides completely shutting the border down altogether, which would quickly lead to an economic and social catastrophe.

as was the case previously, the proper way to fight the order is to question it's efficacy, not to argue it's "racist". given that the united states has more cases and deaths than anywhere else in the world, it does not seem as though it would be a particularly rational policy. if somebody challenges it in the right way, they'd no doubt win the case. but, what we've seen from groups like the aclu recently is pretty disappointing, and i don't have a lot of confidence in them to make the right legal arguments.

as is so often the case, i don't know what donald trump's claim to ban immigration actually means and will not be able to comment much until he clarifies it.

it sounds too absurd to take seriously, and probably is.

that's not to say that the grading systems are perfect, or that i don't have criticisms about the way that grading is done, right now. i certainly do, actually.

but, if we want to live in a complicated society then we need to have some way to ensure that the people that are administering it have the qualifications to do so.

otherwise, we end up living in the film idiocracy.

the right to have the opportunity to go to school is not the same thing as being entitled to succeed when you're there.

arguments against the division of labour came out of a nineteenth century context, where specialization was less pronounced and factory work was particularly vicious - people died in factories all of the time, after having been relegated to the working class, and therefore discarded as expendable. these arguments need to evolve with the technology, and the realities created by it.

holding to the crux of what the anarchists were trying to say on the point means the following:

(1) we should abolish the feudal idea that people are born to perform certain tasks. in a modern context, that would mean something closer to abolishing foreign workers on farms than it would to abolishing grades. the point is that people need a way out.
(2) none of us should be assigned to accomplish the same task for our whole lives. that is, we need to be able to change careers, sometimes. that is something that is normal now, and was quite esoteric 200 years ago, where your entire identity was defined by the task that was assigned to you.

arguing that we should be allowed to change our role in society, which is the point of arguing against the division of labour, does not imply that we should be waiving requirements to demonstrate that you're qualified to do the job in the first place. it just means we shouldn't force people into menial roles for life, which we do continue to do.

i might support a pass/fail system if you decided that you need 90+% to pass. that's probably a better reflection of reality, nowadays, anyways.

but, evaluating technical students on what they learned is necessary to ensure that they're actually able to do the job they want to do, in the end. that's a hierarchy that we need to maintain to ensure that our bridges don't collapse, and our doctors are able to do what they're expected.

"but grading is hierarchical and oppressive."

well, we'll let the D+ engineer design your house, then, and let the C- surgeon do surgery on your mother.

it's a dumb argument. and, it hurts more every time i see it.

i want to make my position clear on this.

if you're a classical civilization major, then going to school is an experience. you're there to meet people, to have discussions, to take part in debates, etc. your letter grade is ultimately somebody's opinion on your arguments and writing style, and doing away with it isn't such a big deal.

but, if you're an engineering student then you need to be evaluated on what you actually learned, which means you need to be tested. a pass/fail system for engineers or doctors or (...) would be reflective of total societal collapse, and this virus really isn't bad enough to be talking like this. so, these people have to be evaluated somewhere at some point, they can't just be passed and moved along. the students will mostly agree with me on this point - they don't want bullshit on their transcripts.

the policy should be centered on what stem students need, not what is convenient for arts majors.

if you're a good student and you've been keeping up then you probably don't need in-class instruction anyways and you can probably just write the exams like nothing happened. the schools should have that option available, allowing the best students to still get letter grades based entirely on their exam scores. if they're lucky - and next year isn't cancelled anyways - then they should get over this without much more than a hiccup.

slower students that require attention from the teachers, and/or haven't been keeping up, and can't pass an exam in these circumstances should be given the opportunity to repeat without it affecting their gpa.

so, what should it say on the transcripts?

it should say something like CANCELLED.

and, where necessary, students should be refunded entirely.

i know that i wouldn't want to pay for a grade that says PASS. i'd feel ripped off...

another option is summer school.

and, i'd advise you take that as a blessing and just fucking go, if it's available.

see, as maclean's is the asshole of canadian journalism, it is no doubt looking at the situation from a liberal arts perspective, where grades are more important than knowledge. but, if you're studying something technical, you would have actually learned something in the period of classes that were cancelled, and you can't just waive that aside with a pass/fail option.

at some point, these kids have to write exams. that could be done at the high school level, by setting up online testing, which surely wouldn't be particularly difficult.

"but, i didn't study. classes were out."

well, i guess you'll fail the exam then, won't you?

awww.

or, the universities may set up a qualifying process.

but, we can't collapse into the fairy tale reality of a pass/fail system. such nonsense would permanently impugn the credibility of our academic system, and if i was an employer, i wouldn't even look at students that graduated in this period.

i know it's a bitter pill, but i would actually recommend that everybody cut their losses and repeat the year. if you're a high school student, you might have to skip that year off that's become standard. if you're a university student, you should just repeat the courses.

https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/pass-fail-grades-should-be-the-only-option-during-the-coronavirus/

the initial reports were that this disease didn't cause gastric or intestinal problems, but then there was a slew of evidence suggesting it actually did.

how many of those cases were patients that tested for multiple pathogens?

i know this is a can, but i'm at least pointing to a valid source of error that i hadn't thought of previously. under normal circumstances, just assuming the new virus is the cause of death would be a massive medical error. correlation doesn't imply causality. people may be being a little sloppy on that point, right now, because the resources to work it out are so stretched.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/researchers-report-21-covid-19-co-infection-rate

it makes you wonder.

correct me if i'm wrong, but i do believe that the assumption right now is that anybody that dies after having tested positive for the new virus died from it. they're not doing autopsies, or otherwise rigorously attempting to determine exact causes of death.

if flu deaths are unusually low, it opens up the question - how many deaths that we're assigning to covid-19 are actually in people that tested positive for covid-19, and actually died of the flu?

what kind of comorbidity is there? are they doing testing for it?

we could just be having a weak flu year. it happens. it was warm this year in europe, right?

but, i'm exceedingly skeptical that the reason flu deaths are down is due to distancing; i'd consider it far more likely that we're not getting the cause of death right in a lot of cases.

https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/news/world/remember-the-flu-coronavirus-sent-it-into-hiding-but-at-a-cost-439681/

he haunts us still.

i know, i know.

hey. what was the nep for, guys?

i'm waiting. i know you know.

maybe kenney can make a deal with the younger trudeau about a quasi-nep, for now.

it'll go well with his keynesian stimulus plan.

if we had an nep right now, alberta wouldn't be searching so frantically for foreign buyers.

but, i guess they'll just have to shut the tar sands down instead, won't they?

awww.

i hope that our governments and businesses in eastern canada aren't buying foreign oil, right now....

so, like, can i go buy a barrel of oil for $1.50 and set up a lemonade stand outside to sell it with?

why did i go to a christian school if i'm so axiomatically opposed to judeo-christian morals?

i've told this story before, and a few times, actually. so be it.

back in the 80s in ontario, the public school system didn't have kindergarten. if you're my age, or a little younger, you might be aware of the political struggle around full day kindergarten without being fully cognizant of the reality that it wasn't available at all when you were at that age. however, because i was born in january, i wouldn't have been able to attend pre-school for another year.

my mother, and it was my mother's choice, had two options in front of her:

1) i could skip what would amount to two years.
2) i could get baptized.

so, my mother baptized me at the age of four in order to send me to the catholic school so i didn't have to skip the year. i've heard rumours that they were planning on switching me after, but it never happened.

my father was never religious, but his mother was, and my mother had to really put her foot down to stop me from being baptized as an infant - a decision that is likely at the root of the fact that i have never had a relationship with my paternal grandmother. my mother was basically afraid of the priests, and the reputation they have for molesting young boys, so she wouldn't let me anywhere near a church under real fears that i'd get assaulted. she has some mental issues, but it doesn't mean she didn't actually believe the threat was real, and i don't doubt that she did.

i remember the event - it was scary. i didn't know this guy, i didn't know what he was doing and i found the surroundings to be unsettling. my mom's strict instructions to not go anywhere alone with the priest made me wonder what the fuck was happening. so, it was actually kind of a traumatic experience.

it says a lot about the role that religion played in my mother's life, and by extension my own, though - not only did she refuse to have me baptized when i was an infant, but she had such little concern for the sanctity of the ritual that she cynically performed it on me out of no religious conviction and simply to send me to school when i was a toddler.

there are two other reasons why my mother baptized me at that age besides so that i didn't skip the year:

1) while canada's school system is not explicitly segregated, the catholic schools are about 95% white.
2) my mother was and remains an angry, violent & frequent drunk. i seem to be the only antidote that ever worked - something i'm self-aware of. but, sending me to school would give her an opportunity to drink during the day when i was gone.

i did not participate in the other sacraments, and would not be considered a catholic relative to their own admission criteria.

in hindsight, i wish i had switched, by high school if not earlier. in later years, my dad insisted on the superior quality of the catholic system, but i'm not sure how true the claim actually was.

i'm an anti-christian to my bones.

i'm not the person that is struggling with my faith, but is essentially a christian in my views.

rather, i'm the person that vehemently rejects every word that is written in the bible and even identifies historically and culturally with groups that fought wars against christianity, all of the way into the enlightenment.

it's not my history, it's not my culture and i won't be smeared as though it is.

so, it's like...

i can't stop you from building up and tearing down strawmen about me. whatever.

but, if you have a legitimate interest in what i actually think, you should realize that my rejection of christianity is both constant and total and that i've stated my views on these topics rather clearly for a rather long period. nothing i've said recently is inconsistent with my previous views, and if you think it is then you misunderstood me previously.

free labour is not solidarity, it's slavery.

or, maybe it's the answer to the question i earlier posed about how a slave can stand in solidarity with his master.

that rule was a part of the "common sense revolution" brought in by the extremely right-wing mike harris, fwiw.

i just flat out refused to do this - not because i was lazy, but because i strongly hold to the principle that all labour should be compensated for.

it's true that i was working two jobs and had a full course load, so trying to make space for it was nearly impossible. but, that wasn't the reasoning underlying my position - it was a labour rights position, defined by leftist ideology.

and, while i'm thinking about it, i will call on the province to abolish this requirement immediately. nobody should ever be forced to perform unpaid labour, ever, no matter what.

https://www.ocsb.ca/community-involvement/

i completed five years of high school at st. pius x in ottawa, and used those credits to get into three different universities (i settled on carleton because it was close) but i don't think i technically have a high school diploma. the reason is that i resisted the community service requirements, under an argument that i felt unpaid labour was unjust. in the end, i decided that holding to my principles in resisting forced service was more important to me than having the diploma was.

so, i've been consistent on the point for a long time.

if there's one constant in my public persona for as long as i've been typing for, it's a total rejection of religion. so, nobody should be surprised that i don't have time for sacrifice as a concept, and that i don't see it as a redeeming trait.

so, if that wasn't clear previously, i'll make it clear now: when i talk of solidarity, it is always about advancing self-interest through numbers and power. that's how we win, we work together. it's never about making sacrifices for others, or giving back to the community - those are religious ideas, not anarchist concepts, and they are ideas that i thoroughly reject.

it is probably the case that a lot of people have the concepts of solidarity and sacrifice intertwined with each other, for the reason that they interpret the world through a religious filter.

when you don't see the world through the filter of a religion because you could never be bothered with it, these ideas are not just separate but largely contradictory. solidarity is mutual aid, which is about advancing shared self-interests - it has nothing to do with sacrificing for others, which is just flat out irrational.

it's important to recognize these linguistic and conceptual subtleties when dealing with the left, which is starkly irreligious. we may perhaps use some of the same words, but they don't always mean the same thing to leftists that they do to religionists.

don't misunderstand me - intentions matter. i'm not somebody that would argue otherwise. but only up to a point...

if you're sick and you hug your grandmother, is that solidarity because you had good intentions?

or is it just involuntary manslaughter?

standing with the weak is not an opinion, it's not a feeling, it's not a conviction. it's not an opportunity to be self-righteous, or demonstrate you're a part of the elect.

standing with the weak means designing and implementing policies that will actually be effective in protecting them, and it is nothing more and nothing less than that.

nothing that our governments have forced us to do has been effective, and it is therefore not real solidarity - real solidarity is promoting policies that actually work.

yeah.

this is maybe so obvious that i missed it altogether, but, obviously, solidarity cannot be a universal value shared across humanity. how does a slave stand in solidarity with it's master? rather, solidarity requires an external force to act against. so, anybody interpreting solidarity as a universal truth would be kind of missing the plot.

slave owners would stand in solidarity with each other against slave revolts, as bankers would stand in solidarity with each other against regulatory agencies. that's not any less real than working class solidarity, or any other type of it.

so, rather than being some kind of universal truth, individuals need to pick who they are in solidarity with and who they are in solidarity against. so, for example, as an openly transgendered person, i cannot stand in solidarity with religious groups, as they do not acknowledge that i exist - they are my political opponents, and i must stand in opposition to them, not in solidarity with them. to suggest otherwise would be for me to act against my own self-interest.

and, no, solidarity is not the abstention of self-interest, it's the realization that self-interest is best obtained by working together with those that have the same self-interests.

are we all in this together with this disease? no, we're not. this isn't about working together to achieve common goals at all, it's about forcing through laws by gunpoint that only benefit 1% of the population. and, pointing that out is not right-wing, it's left-wing. i am not under any threat from this disease at all, so i am being forced to suffer dramatically from these measures, with absolutely no benefit. none of this is in my self-interest. so, why would i stand in solidarity with something that harms me, and i gain nothing from? you can assign romanticized concepts to such behaviour, but it just strikes me as stupidity. there needs to be reciprocity, or what's the point?

worse, what we've done has been brutally ineffective in protecting the people that require it. this is supposed to be about protecting the elderly, and the fact is that they're still getting killed by this thing at high rates. so, not only is supporting these policies at my expense not in my self-interest, but the fact is that it's not even smart policy - it's not working, and it was predictable that it wouldn't work.

solidarity should be measured by results, not by intentions. supporting very targeted measures to actually protect the weak that would actually work, which is what i argued for, is a stronger level of solidarity with the weak than supporting these ineffective lockdowns that it was obvious from the start would be pointless.

maclean's is the asshole of canadian journalism, and everybody knows that. but, let's not reduce solidarity to stupidity. let's try to be a little more thoughtful than this.

https://www.utoronto.ca/news/what-solidarity-during-coronavirus-and-always-it-s-more-we-re-all-together-u-t-expert

i remember stumbling into this over ten years ago now and thinking it was absolutely brilliant.

actually, i've noticed alex jones is in the news with those protests.

he's an actual russian spy.

if you were looking for one.

so, terrence moonseed was a recurring character, here.

it's been done for a while, now.

spain, you're lame.