fuck rammstein, btw.

listen to this instead.

let's remind ourselves of this key point.

i'm not a free speech absolutist, and i've never claimed that i am. rather, i've often contrasted myself against a chomsky-type character that advocates for essentially no restrictions on speech at all by suggesting that i support restrictions in scenarios where a group has the possibility to inflict legitimate harm. the very careful, difficult and subtle point is trying to figure that out: does whatever group of thugs and demagogues actually pose anybody any threat, or are they just a bunch of dumb bikers, or something? it's very tricky, and there's no clear rules, you have to kind of figure that out as it goes.

so, if i saw a serious neo-nazi march that was actually out to hurt people, i would strongly advocate shutting it down. if i saw a couple of kids with backwards swastikas on their hats that they picked up in a buddhist shop and thought were nazi symbolism march down the street singing du hast, i'd be a little less willing to get assertive.

but, that's not the key point i want to make.

the key point i want to make is this:

free speech is not the idea that you can say what you want without consequence. free speech is the idea that you should not be restricted from saying things that you may face consequences for saying.

the former position is held by people like ann coulter, who argue in favour of free speech in self-serving ways, and do not actually understand it. the second position is that pushed by centuries of western liberal philosophy, who attempted to try to find a middle point between freedom and what they may have defined as some kind of pre-civilizational hobbesian fantasy reality.

i've been over this enough that i don't want to bother with it, but i'll point out the following, point form:

1) free speech is about a social contract between individuals and governments. it's not about private property, not about employment and not about conversations between private individuals.
2) free speech is not about "open discourse".
3) people that are offended or affected by the speech of others also have speech rights, and the right to disagree with the people that offended or affected them.

they should have done this a long time ago.

there are potential complications surrounding things like blood clots, but we need stop thinking like moral ideologues and start thinking like actuaries.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/u-s-fda-announces-emergency-authorization-for-convalescent-plasma-to-treat-covid-19-1.5075949

if you're "smart", you'll do what you're told...

the war against covid-19 is the new war on drugs.

i want to see statues of oscar wilde and alan turing stand behind the throne in the british parliament one day, as a reminder of the stupidity of queer oppression.

i wanted to make some calls today, but had to sleep off the migraine.

it's humid outside, and that is helping, but it's not clear for how long.

i'll have to be up early in the morning to make those calls tomorrow, if this is done (and it may not be).

this is what i like to see!

when the state shits all over the rule of law, they have no authority and should be ignored.

are they going to come back every night?

how many crimes are they ignoring or facilitating while they trample all over people's rights?

https://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/another-night-another-covid-19-party-ticket-at-same-victoria-home-1.24191114

it's a major contrast, though, it really is.

in 2003, the liberals were taking principled positions in standing up for international law.

in 2020, they're supporting cia puppets and arguing for intervention on behalf of industry.

it's a stark change.

powell has endorsed biden, btw.

which is a red flag....

they make it seem as though colin powell was just mistaken or something, rather than a war criminal that was lying through his teeth.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-intelligence-assessments-of-saddam-s-iraq-got-it-right-new-paper-says-1.5697028

the reports i tend to cite are from bodies like the iaea, which got it right, as you would expect.

likewise, i cite bodies like the iaea when i reject claims of iranian nuclear programs.

tabernacle, indeed.

a little bit of cheating is normal in the west.

but, the numbers he is throwing around are huge, and decidable.

you're probably not here if you don't read.

but, it's probably easier to give your friend a video than talk them into learning to read.

what is the right tactic for the democrats to defeat this kind of cheating?

well, clinton did the same thing in the 2016 primaries, and we saw sanders pull it off in specific states by sheer volume.

biden will need to get turnout up so far amongst white voters that standard republican cheating tactics fail.

and, it has to be white voters, because those are the votes that get counted, in the end.

he won't. he's fucked.

greg will fill in the details, if you want them.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/21/how-to-rig-an-election-an-interview-with-greg-palast/

how do you spot this on your own?

here's the trick: whenever you hear politicians complain the other side is rigging the election, what they're doing is called projection, a kind of pseudo-scientific idea that poli sci has yanked from psychology with great insight.

so, the reason it was obvious that trump was up to something is that he told us he was, by blaming it on the democrats out of the blue.

israel should be democratic and secular, not jewish.

the two state solution died 30 years ago.

we're waiting for a palestinian rights movement, and it's going to be bloody, but it's required.

there's no potentiality of an independent palestinian state and there hasn't been since 1967.

so, is the israel-uae thing a foil against biden's embrace of war and neoconservative imperialism?

it seems like a pr stunt, mostly. frankly, i actually support the annexation of the west bank - so long as it comes with full citizenship rights. it's better sooner than later, as it's the only potential outcome 20 years from now.

but, i'm happy enough to see trump sit on his hands for four more years in hopes that 2024 offers a better slate. he doesn't have to be gandhi, he just has to avoid fucking things up worse than they are.

...just like real dictators have facial hair.

you need to follow somebody named greg palast in this election.

google him.

look for the fedora. because he's a real journalist, and real journalists wear fedoras.

https://www.npr.org/2020/08/22/904693468/more-than-550-000-primary-absentee-ballots-rejected-in-2020-far-outpacing-2016

i can't stand him.

that's not going to change.

and, it's going to be a vicious four years, if he wins.

maybe this works for him.

i doubt it....

but, the way he's organizing his campaign is more or less designed to piss hyper-liberal voters like me right the fuck off.

so, when i hear biden channel dubya, it makes me want to puke in his face.

yes, dubya is still the worst president ever.

i don't even think trump is worse than clinton. i mean bill. and, that's not an endorsement of trump.

there has not been a "good president" since fdr - they're all horrible. but, if my primary concern is foreign policy, it's not even close - trump is somewhere near the middle since the end of wwII, and dubya is absolute dead last.

i don't care about 'decency', and have no interest in voting for it.

however, i do want to remind you that the last time america swallowed that kind of claptrap we woke up with dubya and his cronies on the button.

whatever you feel about this election, please concede that the personal conduct of the president is not a relevant input on policy formation and should be the least of your concerns in making voting decisions.

and, don't be surprised if i lace into you as a backwards reagan democrat, if you don't.

that wasn't the worst migraine ever, but it was bad, and i don't think it's over.

my fan still isn't working.

i'm going to have to tough it out until it is...

i'm going to start typing goobledygook soon, if i haven't already, so i need to stop and let the migraine, an interference pattern itself, pass.

your brain is a physical system.

of course it is subject to error, like any other system

and, that's where i step back and start wondering.

migraine imminent.

out for a bit.

i don't want to post a lecture. this is a good short analysis that gets the point across for people who need it.

the thing about your brain is that it is constantly changing, constantly reacting to things, and the question of how your brain may interfere with itself is something that i think we need new physics to totally grasp. i'm having trouble even finding the right language to try to describe what i'm thinking, and i think it's because it doesn't exist more so than that i am ignorant (although none of us are without ignorance). 

our brains are creating and destroying new neurons all of the time, and even the dna is subject to modification. there's random error involved here, there's epigenetics, there's adaptations and there's that self-interference, enough that the premise that a brain might exist as an entity that cannot be fully reduced to it's parts is less crazy than people may have thought through the nineteenth and 20th centuries.

i don't think we have the physics yet to really get a handle on this. but, there's enough factors to wonder if how your brain interacts with everything around it is really reducible to it's components or not.

what i was getting at is that, as this is so complicated to us right now, and we can't functionally reduce the brain to a chain reaction of chemical events at this time, we still have to treat it as though it is greater than the sum of the parts, at least in some ways.

if you can work this out for me, i'll concede the point.

but, if you want to tell me that you can fully predict brain patterns in advance, i'm going to suggest that that isn't really consistent with our existing concepts of physics, which suggest otherwise. and, then it kind of opens the question - is the holistic concept of the mind merely randomness and error? or is there something else that getting through the more general difficulties of modern physics might get us to?

i concede that this is hard to talk about due to a deficit of language, but i hope i got my point across.

in the west, it is true that we generally tend to be skeptical of descartes, nowadays, but there's some room for ambiguity there, too. i think a lot of the criticism is falling into the error of interpreting the allegorical a little too seriously.

i mean, sure - the mind is a part of the body, in a purely chemical sense. but, that doesn't actually mean they're the same thing, unless you want to get strictly reductionist. ironically. the mind can be a part of your body and still be something different, at the same time.

do not let me troll biden like this, in person.

it's an interesting potential wedge issue, though, dualism v monism.

i guess they were trying to do some damage control on all of that dualism in his convention speech.

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/joe-biden-kamala-harris-greet-hindu-community-on-ganesh-chaturthi-2283766

i think there's some reason to stand in solidarity with zoroaster, though, myself.

again: i have no opposition to this. do what you want. i'm not in your way. have fun.

but, it doesn't strike me as this pressing social justice concern, or this great civil rights victory, or something.

it largely strikes me as a trivial change to the law.

it's just, that, what exactly ought a marriage mean to a secular person?

we don't talk about gay baptism, for example, although...well, i guess maybe we do, but it means something else. i think a bathhouse baptism might be a lot of fun.

but, baptism as a ritual just seems silly to a non-religious person. why doesn't marriage seem equally antiquated of a notion?

and, the answer is those benefits in the real world, which should be available to people, anyways.

i've always wondered....

who are all of these gay christians that want to get married, anyways? like, it seems like a contradiction in terms, the intersection of homosexuality and christianity. you'd think the number of gay people that want a marriage would be pretty small.

so, you hear arguments about things like workplace benefits, and they're good enough arguments, from a pragmatic viewpoint. you may want to expand dental coverage to your spouse, for example. ok. but, i'd rather support universal dental care!

and, you can lay out this sequence of arguments, and for each one there's always some better argument that doesn't involve getting a religious body involved, or carrying through with a secularized religious ritual.

so, in a sense, you could say that i'd rather fight for a society where people don't need to come up with clever ways to support each other....

i would, personally, not be interested in signing a contract of that sort, regardless of the genders involved.

i guess my opposition to christianity and religion in general is more potent than my support for the normalization of queer rights.

but, there's better reasons to get pissed off at religion than that....

but, i mean, people ought to be allowed to do whatever they want. i have no prerogative to interfere.

so, you won't see me really give much of a fuck about that.

i don't actually think it's a very meaningful victory for anybody, at all - except, perhaps, a victory for the church's attempt to sanitize homosexuality as "normal".

the idea that a set of vows is somehow more or less sacred depending on the genders of the people saying them strikes me as asinine.

but, the idea that the vows are meaningful in the first place strikes me as fairly daft, too.

if we have to have marriage, then, yeah - let anybody who wants to get married, sure.

but, i'd rather the state remove itself from the process altogether.

actually, i oppose straight marriage.

if you're curious.

i don't think marriage should exist at all - i think it should be thrown in the dustbin of history.

i don't care who you shack up with, and you can exchange whatever vows you'd like, but the idea of a lifelong partnership with religious significance strikes me as obsolete.