if i'm depressed, drugs are going to make it worse, not better.

i need clear air and coffee and free space, not depressants that are going to force me to sleep for 30,40 hours at a time.

i've been drugged, i'm fairly sure of it.

i can't stay awake...

they don't seem to be trying to kill me, and might think it's some kind of treatment for depression. but, i'm useless until i can sleep it off and get my brain back.

decolonization = deislamicization and that is nowhere more true than in the middle east.

we often tend to frame the conflict in the region as being islam v the west, but this is rooted in ignorance. the west mostly supports the islamicist regimes in the region, which consistently root out any sort of populist movement for any sort of freedom with violence and tyranny and oppression; these regions have vicious religious dictators because we put them there and prop them up.

the uprising in egypt was a secularist movement before it got co-opted, and while there never really was much of a movement in syria, the initial protesters were leftists and not religionists.

that is the real struggle on the ground in the middle east: the struggle against the tyranny of islam (which our governments support), and that is the struggle i support.

i will stand in solidarity with movements on the ground that seek to overthrow the religious authorities and assert something in the spectrum of secular democracy or even arabic socialism, and i can be pragmatic about it in terms of supporting targeted strikes against the clerics, but i don't care about the interests of american imperialism in the region, and i will not shed a tear for anybody who dies in the service of the empire.

it's not like you were conscripted....

you volunteered; you did it to yourself, it's your own stupid fault.

now, i would certainly support an expansion of tuition support to ensure people don't have to make stupid decisions to feed their families.

but, fuck nationalism, fuck jingoism, fuck war, fuck afghanistan and fuck the troops that died fighting for pipelines and heroin.

oh, and btw.

if you're going to sign up for the military, and get blown up in afghanistan, i have no empathy for you.

if you don't want to die in a war, don't sign up for it.

fuck the troops.

yeah. i find this tendency on the fake-left to do away with what they call "means testing" to be rather bourgeois, when you look at it closely.

i'm going to suspect that it probably came out of a historical movement to push back against governments that were creating unrealistic cut-off points. so, rather than fight about who is poor and who is deserving, they just argued to throw the whole thing out the window. i've also heard people like david graeber argue that you'd actually save money if you eliminated means-testing, which is something that may be true sometimes, but shouldn't be generalized too dramatically.

i highly doubt that it cost anything close to 20 billion dollars to administer this program, and these kinds of numbers are kind of necessary to keep manageable when you're dealing with credit ratings agencies that want to come in and push imf reforms.

the flip side is that a lot of this will get clawed back at tax time, and that's fine. but, this isn't the time to write checks for the wealthy, if there ever was one. and, i wonder when the left will re-embrace progressive taxation and wealth redistribution, like it used to.

if a lot of wealthy people benefited from this, it's just another reason to raise their taxes to at least get the deficit manageable enough to keep the vultures out, if freeland isn't one herself.

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/up-to-22-billion-in-covid-aid-may-have-gone-to-high-income-canadians-fraser-institute-study

you can't vote for me, i'm in and from canada.

and, understand this basic truth: there is no statistical correlation between the number of burned buildings and the number of victims of police brutality.

you can burn down every pizza parlour in the country, and you'll still have thugs and pigs smashing heads, at will.

you'll just have less heart disease, instead. well, unless they go to burger king, instead, then you're making the problem even worse.

addressing structural racism needs a more thought through set of tactics than this, but you're not going to be of much use implementing them from inside of a corporate-run prison.

if the answer is standing there and saying "they don't represent us", and then calling the cops?

that's a fail, at the movement level.

and, understand this - i support abolishing the police, in literal, actual terms. i'm not tucker carlson; i'm an anarchist. i'd like to be on your side.

but, as an anarchist, i wouldn't stand around like a trained seal and just watch this shit happen, i'd step in and stand with the people being harmed; i'd place my solidarity in the right place, i'd stand up against people being oppressive.

if blm wants to redefine policing, it's got a golden opportunity to show us what it means.

i support an actual revolution, and can look the other way at a diversity of tactics.

but, i don't have time for rioters and looters that are just taking advantage of the situation.

and, ideally it is the movement that deals with this itself, rather than whining "they don't represent us".

take control of your movement, blm - shut these people down, if they don't represent you.

listen, i've been clear that i just think this is stupid, and ultimately plays into the hands of conservatives. i've been on the ground in these movements frequently enough to know that they lose the plot in five minutes and just turn into aimless shit-disturbing, or end up so tactically inept that they just advance the views of their opponents.

it's frustrating, but it's the story of the left.

we need a more serious economic catastrophe, and a more class-based politics, before you're going to get anywhere with a lumpenproletariat uprising. as it is, these are sadly even largely middle class kids that are just looking for trouble...

i mostly agree with the the actual worker at the pizza shop.

things you should smash up and burn:
- churches
- mosques
- banks
- police stations
- symbols of power, dominance, oppression and control

things you should leave alone:
- stores
- houses
- fire stations
- community institutions that serve or represent the working class

in minnesota and wisconsin specifically, largely white states with liberal leanings and large numbers of working class voters, this kind of thing is tone deaf.

it is going to get trump elected.

and, that's why my map was what it was when i posted it.

this can be reversed, still. but, if this narrative asserts itself, trump won't just win wisconsin, he'll win minnesota, too.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-blm-convention-1.5701697

my grade three teacher had a thing for yellow submarine.

and, in hindsight, perhaps lsd.

he kind of disappeared. we never got a straight answer.

freakin' kids.

this should be taught in grade school, along with other timeless classics like beethoven's fifth.

be kind to your children.

please.

the world depends on it.

energy. momentum. love.

it's just physics.

conservation law.

qed.

i forget sometimes that there are children in the room.

ok, maybe your dog cares about you, but not if you raised it like a nazi.

i'd rather flip this over; dogs, like kids, need love, first and foremost. and, these wise words are perhaps useful, in the context of parenting:

and in the end,
the love you take
is equal to the love
you make

i mean, you don't think your dog cares about you, do you?

you're just a cookie dispenser.

your dog would eat you in a minute, if you ran out of treats - and your kids will too, if you raise them that way.

the woman is basically stupid, if she thinks that kid will grow up caring and compassionate.

that kid is going to turn into a utility monster. that's what she's teaching it - selfishness as a virtue.

https://www.cbc.ca/parents/learning/view/train-your-baby-like-a-dog-parenting-is-here-and-the-internet-is-angry

so, i dunno what the next step is at all.

it's still true that the only non-smoking housing that exists is run by the city. but, i'm losing confidence in that being a way out.

i may find myself wanting to move to a small town, but i know that opens up a lot of other problems around my gender identity. i'm more likely to get into a fight with the church than care what they think, but christians are known to kill people they don't like, and i have my safety to concern myself with.

what it means is that if i thought there was no escape before...

it's ubiquitous.

it's just the normal outside air smell, now. all day, every day, everywhere, all the time.

you walk down any street in this city nowadays, and all you can smell is low quality drugs for miles around, and carbon monoxide from the cars.

it's a truly disgusting combination.

i was guilty (for a few weeks.), but i've stopped. and i can only hope that everybody else does soon, too.

the headache is getting a little better, but i'm still overwhelmingly drained, and unable to stay awake.

am i depressed? is that possible?

it's a depressing scenario all around. i think that tuesday was the only day i've bothered to brush my hair and look presentable all summer. there's just nothing to do, no reason to get out of bed.

if i could get those testicles cut out tomorrow, it would help. really.

and the smell of smoke is not pleasant. at all.

i need to make some calls today, but am not expecting to be productive for a while, still. that fan is paramount, and i just need to make the point about it - i'm basically useless without it

the irony is that this article is, itself, just conservative party propaganda that the liberals seem to have repurposed and adopted as their own, as they seem to no longer want to be the party that dominated this country through the 20th century.

it was about that security council resolution. and that is all. really.

don't let them tell you it's about anything else, including the canard of women's rights. that is the most uninformed and most ignorant analysis possible....

https://globalnews.ca/news/7300684/commentary-trump-trade-advisers-comments-about-canadas-role-in-afghanistan-grossly-uninformed/

to be clear: i basically think assange is just leaking cia propaganda, just doing their dirty work. he doesn't seem to really realize it, or at least he didn't; maybe he does, now.

mccarthy would have essentially been the conservative 1950s version of assange, in that sense.

i've called assange a useful idiot.

i think there's a major parallel, even if the spectrum flips.

yeah, my understanding is that mccarthy was essentially a useful idiot - that the fbi fed him a lot of psy-ops, and that he was essentially a foot soldier for the secret service.

and, i've said largely the same thing about contemporary actors, that are out there right now pushing what is essentially just propaganda about russia, in order to take a loose canon president down a notch.

https://theanalysis.news/interviews/demagogues-from-mccarthy-to-trump/

does this seem kind of oddly current?

i think most people realize how absurd that is, today.

yet, they wear masks to the mall and don't see the irony.

but, your kids will....

if you read up on this era, you learn that it's only half the case that the politicians were idiots; they knew that wasn't going to be useful, but they pushed the fear anyways, because it was more about control and dominance.

we're in a very weird moment.

....and it's the city.

i'm just a few blocks from where the 401 hits the ambassador bridge. maybe the one thing that was nice about the shutdown was the decrease in air pollution; now that it's come back, it just stinks that much worse.

my headache and sleepiness is not going to go away until i'm able to find a new fan on the weekend, and i'll probably buy two. the 31st is a monday, so i don't know if it'll clear 24 or 48 hours from now. and, that will be the end of this somewhat awful month.

i'm going to make an omelette, but i don't really expect much between now and then.

i just can't function in stagnant air like this. it's not the temperature, it's the stillness. i need constant flow.

this is a perfectly valid observation.

that is all.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/right-now-biden-is-underperforming-hillary-in-battleground-states/

if the glove fits.

i hear he has some good ideas about health care reform.

(there's an odd fit of coughing from a dark figure in a bright suit, coming from far in the background)

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/27/mitt-romney-staffers-support-joe-biden-402408

you're neither fixed, nor free.

you're stochastic.

you're not free, not exactly - not any more free than an electron in a field is. we are subject to the effects of external forces. clearly.

but, you're certainly not predetermined.

that's not even classical.

that's not even wrong.

frankly, this strikes me as obvious, and i can't fathom how anybody could think we're born with a specific amount of intelligence. that doesn't even strike me as worth testing for, that strikes me as fundamentally clear.

but, what the "we are born blank and can change" people are really up against are the christian snowflakes, the ones that think god made us all unique and variation is an expression of divine will. that is not the debate in the literature, but perhaps it ought to be, because it's what it really is.

if you take a step back from that for a minute, the idea that you're born with a specific iq, or a specific weight, or a specific height, ought to be considered ridiculous. it just doesn't make any sense, intuitively.

and, even eye colour changes, too. mine have been blue, green and brown at various points.

https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/plasticity-its-time-to-rethink-the-notion-that-intelligence-is-fixed/