the left does not win when the working class is hegemonic. no...

the left wins when the working class no longer exists at all.

beethoven for all.

or give up - there's no point.

so, i mean, if you want to take this frugal, weberian position about class being a lifestyle choice, whatever. but take it to fucking church - keep it out of the left.

now, if you read the anarchist literature, they ask the question: why should we have communism?

is it so the workers get what they deserve, and everybody else can starve?

is it because it's fun to play government?

no - it's to abolish the coercive relationship between labour and capital, and ultimately to allow the proletariat the freedom to experience civilization.

we want communism so we can all experience and understand art.

that's the fucking point.

otherwise, why bother?

if you don't have to work, you're not working class.

you can choose to work if you want, but working class does not that make you. it's the necessity, the coercion, the lack of actual choice...

how many books you've read does not and cannot alleviate that condition.

the proletariat is not an austere group of self-disciplined, hard-working mechanics with ass-cracks that can barely read, and only the most bourgeois minds would imagine them that way.

the proletariat is the category of person that has to sell their labour to exist, or must starve. in that category, exist people of all kinds of education levels, interest levels, cultural affinities and ability levels. none of that has anything to do with it...

work or starve - that's proletariat. nothing more, nothing less.

it makes me laugh when i see self-identified leftists present ideas like "bourgeois" and "proletariat" as lifestyle choices or personality archetypes, rather than relationships to the managerial class, of which the individual has almost no control over.

it's just about the most bourgeois analysis possible, as it reduces class to a market choice.

ironically.

the move to end private prisons is welcomed and fundamental to ending the profitability of the school-to-prison pipeline. this is a positive step that should be applauded.

unfortunately, what that does, however, is shift the profitability to the state sector, which is something the united states has seen before - and i worry that you'll end up with stricter state laws to compensate. but, it's a positive step.

now, if they could fix the 13th amendment to get rid of the backdoor for slavery...

so, regarding the court stuff, which is building up. i want to make sure i'm not missing anything.

i'm actually not filing anything this week, after all.

- the karen case has two components:

a) the divisional court case, where i'm trying to get the cop charged with harassment and/or fired, is on indefinite hold until the end of the pandemic. there's nothing i can do.

b) the human rights case, where i'm trying to get a pay out from the karen directly, is awaiting an imminent response. i've recently made a second request to rule in the absence of a response. i need to wait, but i've decided to file form 10s every monday morning.

c) i will eventually be filing a constitutional challenge in this case.

d) i am waiting for a foia request from the cops to file criminal charges against the karen, and to prepare for the actual case, including the constitutional case, which i could file soon if i get a resolution in the human rights component. what i really wanted was a ruling against the cop, first, but...

- the discrimination case against the hospital has two components:

a) the human rights case is waiting for a response from myself by the 5th. this is what i wanted to do this week. but, i got a letter yesterday (dated jan 19th) that explained that they can't find the video. so, i have to file with the privacy commissioner about that. they also haven't produced the medical records yet (and aren't picking up the phone). so, i have filed to request an extension until i get the documents from the hospital.

b) the oiprd investigation is on hold until i can get the same documents.

c) so, i need to contact the hospital about the records, and i need to contact the privacy commissioner about the video.

d) i also need to file a foia with the cops on this one and haven't, yet.

- the discrimination case against the grocery store is waiting for the foia request. i was going to file immediately, but i need to wait because i'm only 95% sure i have the right store.

see, there's two stores in the strip mall - a freshco on one side of the street and a food basics on the other. i go to both stores, frequently - or used to. i was chased down the street after leaving the freshco, and so assumed they were the bad guys. but, i wasn't paying close enough attention to the identity of the thugs, and i've been getting weird glances when i enter the food basics ever since, making me wonder if what happened wasn't that a food basics employee saw me walking around with items i bought at the other store and chased me down the street, assuming i stole them - which is even worse. if that's true, i'm boycotting the wrong store. this will get filed, i just need to make sure i have the right store, first. so, i need the foia request to finish.

- my landlord has also accused me of running up his water bill (well, he won't refrain from smoking.) and has become non-responsive, so i may have to file against him if he doesn't react soon. it's idiocy. i guess i'll need to pay rent this weekend, so that's how long he has to react. i'm used to filing downtown, i'll have to see what the new procedure is....

i actually hope he reacts, as i don't want this right now.

so, that's the sum of what's actually been done this week, which is much less than intended:

- the karen case is at the mercy of the adjudicator - but could end at any time. like, today, tomorrow....next month. it would help tremendously to get this over with.

- i have to ask for an extension on the hospital case, because i need to wait for files. and, i need to get that information to everybody, and get my requests to everybody, too. tomorrow morning.

- i need to wait for the foia on the grocery store to make sure i don't file against the wrong store, which would be embarrassing. it would already be embarrassing, if understandable in context, if i gave the letter to the wrong store owner.

- and, i think my landlord is up to no good, and i may have to act pre-emptively against him because of it. he just drove off....

i'll remind you that i've recently purchased ground up cow bones in the form of a calcium supplement, which is being marketed as pure hydroxyapatite.

your teeth are about 97% this substance, and peer-reviewed studies have shown that brushing with it is at least as effective as brushing with fluoride. nasa has done large amounts of research into the molecule as a way to rebuild teeth and bone after extended periods in space.

it's an experiment, but it makes sense - if i can get the right process, with small enough particles, my body should pull this molecule up into my teeth, in tact.

what your body can't do is rebuild enamel from source, because the molecule is too complicated. but, absorbing it in tact is a different question, and seems to be far more likely, if technically unproven.

in the long run, i'm hoping to be able to stimulate stem cells in my mouth to regrow the lost gumline, but that may be a few years down the road.

sorry, just to clarify the thought.

so, if i had a lot of bacteria in those pockets, what i'd need to do is:

1) clean them out.

2) let them heal

in theory, they should usually reattach if you get the bacteria out.

what i'm seeing happen instead is a kind of layer of white material - i presume hydroxyapatite, or fluoroapatite - develop over the stains, which seems to be....it's less that's filling the hole in and more that it's blocking the pocket. i don't know if the material then migrates in and fills up, or if it's just a surface layer. but, the result is that the stain gets hidden.

for the stained teeth that aren't splitting, what i'm seeing is slow wear on the stain. i don't know what the chemical composition of the stain is, but i remember reading that there might be a large amount of sulfur in there. but, i mean, it looks and feels like burnt carbon. i don't want to scratch it off for obvious reasons, but it's slowly, slowly, slowly washing off - which is all i can ask for.

what a dentist would have to do is drill out the stain and fill it in, and i don't want that - i want to find a way to wash it off, which they've all told me is impossible. but, i mean, it can't be impossible - that's not how chemistry works. i may lose some enamel in the end, which is why i'm trying to rebuild it. but, slowly washing it off has to be gentler than drilling it out...

i've regained white enamel under heavy staining on one tooth so far and hope it accelerates over the next few months.

so, i'm going to buy some more hydroxyapatite and extend the experiment another two months.

how are my teeth doing after almost two months of this, now?

it's hard for me to know how much difference the fluoride is making, but i've noticed the stains fall into a pattern of very slow retreat. and, yes - i am convinced it's 100% staining and 0% cavitation, which doesn't get me out of the woods - it suggests my gums are in pretty bad shape. i put off the call to the fancy dentist until i could develop some further stability, and will need to wait a little longer, i think.

while i think the surfactants in the dish soap are eating away it at very slowly sort of thing, the most noticeable changes actually seem to be associated with the hydroxyapatite, but only when i do it right, which is proving a little more challenging than i thought. i need to use a very small amount of saliva and leave it on my teeth for something like 40 minutes. there have been a couple of times where this has noticeably helped, and a lot of times where it hasn't. i don't know if i'm actually rebuilding something there, or what.

there were a couple of teeth that were splitting open up that i've managed to reattach to themselves, at least for now. that was a part of the reason i want to call the fancy dentist to do the "root planing" thing, which cleans out developing pockets in an attempt to allow the teeth to heal themselves. this is partly why it was important for me to know what i was looking at - stains on a bad gumline (and that could be caused by smoking, by coffee, by dehydration, by malnutrition, by genetics or, more likely, by some combination of these things) or teeth falling apart due to cavities. the fact that they're reattaching suggests that giving the teeth proper surface nutrition is at least helping, whether that implies malnutrition or not.

so, it's two months and i'm going to characterize the progress as moderate and keep with it.

i'm going to want to cut the dish soap out at some point, though. 

see, what bugs me about what wolff is saying - and i'm broadly on board with his democracy at work thing, even if i think he's a producerist - is that he's setting up a choice between keynesian make-work and a post-industrial pseudo-communist ubi (which should probably look like a negative income tax). i don't like the idea of being forced to defend a ubi instead of make work - i support both approaches, as they will address different concerns that exist. but, make work is by nature temporary. a ubi is structural....

...and he skipped the last step in the discussion of the wealthy understanding the consequences of inequality - that when you take away the ability to enact change peacefully, and you drive desperation to the point of reaction, there is nothing people can do but react with force. that's when people storm bastilles and send bankers to guillotines. how close is america to that? it's not clear, but likely not far.

i said this elsewhere: if america wants to avoid collapse, it's going to have to teach it's elite how to share. and, it should do so with a government-funded education program targeted at the 1%.

"you shouldn't compare isis to the bugaloo boys, though."

you're right, i shouldn't - one is a heavily funded, highly organized paramilitary group that has killed at least hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of people, and the other is a bunch of inbred idiots that are so harmless that the cops literally laughed at then when they literally tried to storm the capitol.

it's a ridiculous comparison.

the soviets were an empire and an imperial state, themselves - so these debates were in truth between supporting two different imperialist states, and upholding the different brands of propaganda presented by them.

it's long past due that we realize that.

just to close down, at least for now, i think we need to remember that a lot of this discourse around supporting "nationalist revolutions" in the face of "imperialism", especially in the middle east, shouldn't be separated from the context of the cold war.

really, when you drop the bullshit, this was just an argument made by useful idiots supporting soviet causes. the "nationalist uprisings" were almost always soviet front groups, and rarely represented the people any more effectively than the british or american installed dictators did. 

so, the narrative, when deconstructed properly, was really a lot of bullshit in the first place - it was really never about supporting indigenous groups, but almost always about supporting soviet front groups masquerading as indigenous groups, and adopting this whole framework of propaganda designed to uphold that.

whatever you thought of that, that world doesn't exist anymore, and the left shouldn't even be entertaining these ideas as valid anymore. if we want to call ourselves a left, we need to be supporting lefts on the ground - no exceptions.

so, why don't i call for bombing white supremacist groups, then?

because there aren't any worth bombing.

i have called for bombing mormons in bountiful, bc.

the crusades were a civil war between the successors of the eastern and western roman empires, not a clash of civilizations.

the caliphs always saw themselves as emperors.

so, then should i support something like rojava?

and, i've consistently argued that i'd like to, but it's the same problem that consistently comes up. i mean, relatively speaking, there's reasons to take that position, and i will let chomsky speak here as he's a legitimate expert on this topic. but, all i see every time i look into it is a typical left-wing cult with strong authoritarian tendencies that needs to be resisted more than supported. this idea that they're some kind of anarchist paradise is just a projection of fantasy.

they look great compared to isis, but how do they compare in relation to the secular arab socialism that was in place in syria before the saudis invaded in 2011? that's less clear.

what is clear is that i can't support them moving into places and setting up, given that they have a history of participating in genocide in the region.

like most people, i want to see peace in the region and understand that it's a pre-requisite for meaningful leftist change. i think that assad is probably the best way forward and that the kurds need to be pushed back to facilitate for that; we can disagree, but we're disagreeing on tactics.

it bothers me that the narrative wants to set up a dichotomy between nazism and fundamentalist islam and play these things off against each other, as it's an attempt at divide and conquer in the most viciously regressive manner imaginable. 

my argument the whole way through has always been that isis are nazis and should be treated the same way as nazis, in the end.

i am not picking a side in that debate - a pox on both of them.

one of the problems you have in trying to define a difference between the occident and orient - and i'm taking an idea in said and running with it, here, rather than citing him directly - is the blurriness in assigning the origins of ideas to east or west, because it's not there in history. it's actually the same kind of problems that we come up with in trying to define a concept of race. it just breaks down with any meaningful analysis.

so, were the greeks occidental or oriental? how about the achaemenids? buddhism? christianity?

the renaissance?

it flips both ways - to the extent that said was right that the east, as it is understood in the west, is a racist projection by the west, it is also true that the west was largely created in the east.

how does something like the arab slave trade work it's way into that narrative? i mean, the arabs had the most vicious empire, ever, at the time, if not still. the ottomans? the mongol empire?

the point is that there isn't a clear way to divide east and west when you look at it holistically, and it's not helpful to try. so, you inevitably get stuck in racist tropes, because it's all that the division is rooted in in the first place.

there is an east, but it's the far east, not the middle east. rather, the middle east, india, russia and europe form a united cultural block with a shared linguistic, cultural and religious origin that has a strong bottleneck through alexander and his tutor, aristotle (and his teacher, plato). that's the right way to look at it, and the correct starting point on the left - we're not different, we're the same, and our popular movements should be more similar than not.

no, listen - i'm talking about something practical, not something theoretical. i'm practical & empirically driven, not theoretically driven. i can have a mild disagreement in the analysis, but it's more like we're talking at cross-purposes, and more like you're tearing down a strawman. let's address the actual point, not get lost in red herrings about post-colonialism and post-structuralism.

what if i told you that you should support the bugaloo boys in their struggle against american imperialism because they represent american culture on the ground, and it's invasive to insist on demanding i uphold concepts like universal human rights laws, as they have minimal meaning to americans?

first, i'd have to accept the premise that the bugaloo boys are representative of american culture - which i don't, just as i don't accept the premise that arabs are all a bunch of fundamentalist muslims; the fact that some of the most repressive governments in the world are fundamentalist islamic states notwithstanding, they really aren't. i mean, there's a small percentage of arabs that think like that, sure - just as there are a small number of americans that have extreme right-wing positions. but, we see how ridiculous it is to generalize americans that way pretty much immediately, and would probably call foreigners that insist on it racists. then, we apply the same ridiculous caricatures to arabs readily and gratuitously, and call it "cultural sensitivity" - while they laugh at us for our ignorance and absurdity.

second, i'd have to ignore the rights of everybody that the bugaloo boys would hurt if they took over power as unimportant in the face of the supremacy of american culture, insofar as erecting the strawman does. i'd have to decide that the right of americans to be americans means looking the other way as they lynch blacks and jews. well, what right do we have to enforce our values on them? the blacks just need to get out of the way. do you realize that's what you're telling shias and druze and everybody else, in context?

and, then, once all of this absurdity has run it's course, you'd have to rationalize the fact that you've told leftwing groups on the ground that their struggle is less important, and you're aligning with the most right-wing, reactionary forces you can find instead, because you have cultural sensitivity and respect the rights of americans to uphold their culture, which you're not judging and refuse to condemn.

said is extremely useful in breaking through this and deconstructing it for what it really is - an orwellian presentation of abject racism. and, that's all i've ever cited him for and i'll i ever would cite him for. he may be less useful in other contexts, but i'm not citing him in those contexts, so it doesn't matter, and i don't actually really care. 

i mean, i don't have these debates about post-colonialism or post-structuralism. i agitate for international working class solidarity and revolution across borders, which i argue should not exist. it is for that reason that when i look at politics in the region, i will only support leftist groups that seek to overthrow the traditional culture - just as i support groups in the west that seek to advocate secularism, and reduce the role of traditional european cultural values. the left needs consistency here, not the celebration of difference.

in the end, it's the difference between being an actual leftist and being some kind of multiculturalist liberal.