i found this ukraine history lecture set when categorizing videos for the watchlist and decided it was worth watching immediately. i am broadly well read on the history of areas that were defined by my genealogy project in the early 00s, which certainly included kievan rus; the region was important both as a colony of viking expansion and as a link to the classical world, through byzantium. there were likely legitimate links to senatorial roman families through dominant european clan leaders like the capets, but they are lost to history; one of the few remaining links to the classical world that is actually demonstrable goes through the viking rulers of kiev, which married into both eastern and western europe. most major western european ruling families have ancestry in the vikings of kiev, and as such can trace ancestry back to rome, greece and persia through that bottleneck. you'll find very few other legitimate genealogical links to rome, although, as mentioned, they are likely there, just hidden. if the theory that the capetians were italians is correct, it follows that both the bourbons and the hapsburgs were, as well.
i intend only to explain that i already know most of what is being taught in these lectures and that i'm not going to learn many facts by watching these videos; a few, but not many. what i'm more interested in is understanding how the material is being framed to fit a western political agenda and the fact that i know it already means i'm able to deconstruct it from that perspective. tim snyder is a talking head that keeps showing up in controlled media and would therefore appear to be a cia propagandist. this lecture series is valuable in the sense that it allows a critical thinker to deconstruct the propaganda in it's deepest sense. wars are about history, after all; this is what the bureaucrats actually talk about in moscow and washington.
i'm not going to deconstruct the lecture series in writing so much as i'm going to yell at the monitor as he's speaking. it's not exactly helpful to write an essay here dismantling him as a post-truth nihilist that is destroying history, as it's not exactly his doing. according to the dominant school of contemporary "historical" thought, there is no longer such a thing as objective history; what we have instead is just a lot of stories told to advance political outcomes. a careful historian certainly needs to understand court biases, but modern historians will legitimately negate the whole field in their embrace of nihilism, which is both novel and frightening. if there is no such thing as objective history to begin with, why not just revise it to suit the political ends of the dominant class, in real time? to be clear: politicians have always done this, but historians have generally called themselves historians because they've tried to resist it. what is novel and disturbing is that professional historians in post-truthdom no longer argue that they can differentiate between history and propaganda and no longer see the value in asserting a defining line between them. all history is propaganda, and there can be no history that is not propaganda. facts are quaint, silly things that don't exist.
the reason i am posting this is that understanding the origin of the rus is really central to dismantling the nationalistic mess in the region and it contains some information about the topic that i was not previously aware of. i have previously posted the theory that the name 'rus' derives from the finnic ruotsi, which is their general word for rowers. this is one of many theories, but my understanding is that it is considered most likely by the most number of people. i did not know that the slavs had a name for seafarers that was so similar, namely rusalka.
in light of this new information, it would seem high likely that the indigenous slavs identified the sea-faring vikings with this mythological entity as they drove down the rivers in their dragon boats, whatever the etymological connection to the finnish ruotsi may or may not have been. the vikings must have seemed like magical spirits as they rowed through the rivers of the slavic homeland.
it's just a reminder that you can always learn something by listening to others speak on a topic, no matter how much you already know about it.
15:01
(edit: i am trying to write a serious document and am not interested in fighting off vandalism created by worthless, abject idiots. that is what i think of you; i think you are an idiot. your input is not valued, and your intelligence is not respected. you are a complete idiot. i would not ask you for your opinion if coerced. i do not care what you think. you are wasting your time editing a document that was written by a person that does not respect you and will not accept you edits, which will be deleted. fuck off.)
the russian origin myth is that the russian nation was created in the nationalist struggle to overthrow the tyranny of the barbaric mongol yoke by violently dismantling mongolian foreign rule through a series of revolutionary wars of liberation to overthrow mongolian imperialism and reassert slavic autonomy and which ended with the establishment of slavic self rule in moscow. russia as a political entity is defined by a process in which the slavs rose up against their mongolian and muslim oppressors, drove the islamic slave raiders and imperialists out of the slavic heartland and reasserted their autonomy to make their own laws and live their lives as they choose. this is no doubt a thoroughly correct understanding of events that unfolded in history, but it does give moscow a level of primacy over the western side of the slavic-speaking heartland that is difficult to justify in history. while it is true that the slavs are a single people with a single language and a single culture, that does not give moscow any sort of inherent justification to govern slavic culture as an administrative centre. it may very well be that kiev or warsaw, or novgorod or irkutsk, might one day be the centre of slavic government, instead.
snyder only briefly glosses over historical materialism, without ever mentioning it, and by speciously smearing it as "ahistorical". i would actually argue that while the theory of history written by marx and engels is not always helpful in understanding the history of a specific area (and, contrary to what is stated by snyder in the lectures, marxism is in fact deeply critical of what it calls "utopian socialism" and explicitly defines it's theory of scientific socialism as not being a conservative mythos of a pure past or an ideal future, in opposition to utopian socialism, which it was trying to do away with), and that while history doesn't necessarily follow rules of causal inference at all times, even if tends in that direction, historical materialism is actually the most appropriate and most applicable way to understand the specific history of the east slavic heartland, specifically.
i would narrate east slavic history as follows.
- as the direct descendants of the proto-indo-europeans that inhabited the pontic-caspian steppe thousands of years ago, the slavs are the dominant indigenous people of the region between the carpathians and the urals and are to be given historical primacy over the area for that reason.
- other groups like celts, finns, east/north germans and iranians also inhabited the pontic-caspian steppe in the early historical period, but they are not indigenous to it. only the slavs are indigenous to the pontic-caspian steppe. the dorian invasion, insofar as it happened at all (and i think it did), was a movement of indo-european speaking peoples from the pontic-caspian steppe into greece. the greek fascination with the borysthenes is likely more than colonial, it likely represents a memory of their own origins.
- the overlap between scythian and slavic has always been blurry due to a lack of written or spoken evidence, but irano-scythian at the least heavily influenced proto-slavic. there is a minority view that the scythians and slavs were functionally the same people and while that may be technically false it is likely more correct than incorrect. the slavs as they exist today are a function of the scythian occupation of the region. the scythians are generally understood as an iranic group that migrated out of the pontic-caspian steppe and into central asia and then back-migrated back into the pontic-caspian steppe many thousands of years ago. rather than being some group of mythical warriors, they are of central importance to the history of the middle east.
- gothic (that is, swedish) migration from the vistula to the mouth of the dnieper replaced a previous celtic settlement area in the centre-east part of eastern europe. this celtic settlement area existed as a buffer between the classical world and the slavic/iranic scythians in the pontic-caspian steppe; eventually, the goths replace the celts as a buffer to the pontic-caspian steppe, and the distant barbarians become turks rather than iranians. note that neither the celts nor the goths lived in states, although there were some attempts to set up states in tauris by greeks and iranians from anatolia. the infamous mithradates, a late achaemenid, died in tauris.
- the hunnic invasion event, the huns being an east asian polity from beyond the urals, pushed the goths, slavs and iranians out of the pontic-caspian steppe and deep into western europe, where they together formed a part of the nexus of barbarian migrations that dismantled the western partition of the roman empire. snyder mentions that berlin was founded by slavs, which is true; eventually, crusades are launched to drive the pagan slavs out of western europe, and it is not actually a mystery as to how they got there at all (despite what snyder says), it is well understood via archaeology and well documented in the classical sources that the slavs, goths and iranians migrated west together to escape the hunnic onslaught. why did snyder gloss over that? i'll get to it. it was the barbarian franks that defeated the huns, not the hapless romans. iranian settlement in france was substantive; any time you see any variation of the personal or place name "alain" in france, it is a memory of the iranian/alan migration westwards to flee the genocidal hunnic onslaught and indicates some level of iranian ancestry. today, the alans continue to live in a small region of the caucasus called ossetia. attempting to distinguish between celts, slavs, germans and iranians at this stage in history is dubious as they lived in interconnected tribes in overlapping areas, did not have states and didn't accept ideas like land borders or property rights. they were broadly the same people and merely spoke widely divergent dialects of the same actual language.
- the huns were truly barbarians, in every sense of the word, and were not capable of maintaining a state in eastern europe. however, the hunnic invasion event fundamentally changed the ethnic and linguistic makeup of the pontic-caspian steppe, by subsuming it into the larger kazakh steppe and positioning it as the western terminus of the asian steppe, rather than as something of it's own, behind the caspian and the urals. the indo-european tribes were pushed out of the pontic-caspian steppe and both into western europe and also into the forests to the north of the pontic-caspian steppe. it is in the forests north of the pontic-caspian steppe that slavic identity as it exists today first emerges, as a reaction to the exceedingly destructive hunnic invasion event. however, slavs do not form any sort of state out of the chaos until many centuries later. slavic cultural identity was linguistic and religious and not tied to any sort of state ruling apparatus.
- the slavs that underwent the ethnogenesis that occurred at this time in the forests north of the pontic-caspian steppe were an unadvanced people that never developed iron-working (the iranians, celts and germans were certainly all iron workers) or otherwise forgot how to work with iron. they lived a lifestyle that we would today consider that of indigenous people in the difficult climate of the forests of eastern and central europe, far from any civilization centre, and cut off from the south by the turkic groups that moved into the region after the huns. there was no trade with the south in this period. the slavs would have even undergone a period of de-evolution from about 300-800, where they went back to nature and became one with the forests, once again. this is something that happens less often in europe than in the americas, in africa or in southeast asia but it is actually a common theme in history for people to go back to the forests and reconnect with their indigenous ancestors when their society is overrun or destroyed.
- some of these turkic groups eventually convert to judaism, or otherwise accept jewish migrants escaping from the demographic changes taking place in the middle east due to arabic imperialism and the muslim colonization of the levant (the 'arabization' event in israel). however, it should be noted that the extent of semitic influence in the region is not only strictly east of the dnieper, but actually strictly east and south of the don; the khazars, whatever they really were, were a caspian sea power and not a black sea power. there were never any khazars west of the dnieper, they were always strictly east of the don, and jews and muslims do not actually enter the geographical space we currently call ukraine until well into the period of mongol imperial domination. the claim that jews have a long history in ukraine is a racist myth, partly perpetuated by nazis looking for an excuse to depopulate the region and use it as lebensraum. if what you want is to exterminate the inhabitants of a region, it is helpful to tell everybody they're all actually jews.
- when the vikings appeared from the north in boats, they likely interpreted the slavs as wretched, pitiful creatures that were fit for enslavement (the vikings themselves saw outsiders as mythical creatures and would have called finns and native americans by the ethnic slur skraeling, which implied they were literally a member of a different species or even a different type of animal altogether, although there is no record of viking slurs towards slavs, which is telling), but they would have also seen a genetic and cultural affinity with them and consequently colonized them rather than slaughtered them. perhaps the narrative of the primitive slavs interpreting the superior vikings, with their sophisticated ships, as mythological creatures emerging from the water to rule them as gods is correct, or perhaps not. somehow, a political entity emerges where vikings co-exist with a subsumed slavic population, which merges over time into a polity called the rus that speaks slavic but has viking customs and a swedish ruling class.
- while the rus were not technically a pan-slavic empire, russian cultural influence (centred in kiev) over the slavic speaking heartland was vast. then contemporary byzantine historians, of which there were many and much of which survives, describe in substantive detail how constantinople interacted with the barbarian rus, who were frequently utilized as mercenaries to fight against the far more barbarian turks. while constantinople and kiev were not always aligned, and constantinople was notorious for it's sneaky and deceptive tricks and deep levels of imperial treachery, all of which were needed for effective barbarian management, a puppet state in kiev was exceedingly useful to constantinople, who frequently utilized it as a way to govern all slavic-speaking peoples by proxy, from the vistula to the urals.
this is when the narrative sets in that i think is most helpful in understanding east slavic history.
- c. 1200, a byzantine puppet state exists in kiev that acts as a local provincial capital for constantinople to utilize to govern the entire slavic-speaking heartland, which is thereby brought into the greek civilizational sphere of influence. i mentioned that the greeks came from the pontic-caspian steppe, themselves.
- a devastating, destructive, vicious, genocidal mongolian invasion then takes place, which utterly destroys everything in it's path through a combination of conventional and biological warfare, which is similar to the earlier hunnic invasion event. however, the mongols managed to maintain dominance over the region through enforcing a series of tributary states, whereas the huns were incapable of doing so, on account of the sheer depravity of their barbarism.
- the longterm consequence of mongolian barbarism is that the slavic speaking heartland ends up divided into two factions, that which was conquered and destroyed by the mongols and placed under subservience to mongol imperial domination and that which evaded that catastrophic outcome. as the power of the eastern church wanes and constantinople itself crumbles under the corruption of primitive turkish barbarism, the slavs (and balts) outside of mongolian imperial domination are eventually conquered by the catholic church and forcibly converted to catholicism by coercion and violence, in a series of crusades launched from germany.
- the mongols do eventually convert to islam, which creates a lot of resentment amongst the slavs, who find themselves reduced to second-class citizens in their own homeland. the slavs broadly resist adopting islam, which is likely a function of how the barbaric muslims treated the indigenous slavs, which was as slaves.
- the russian origin myth is then invoked. this describes how the indigenous slavs overthrew the tyrannical mongol yoke and drove the muslim imperialists and islamic colonialists out of the slavic homeland and back to where they came from, which was eastern asia, and then asserted their own autonomy as a free people and began to build their own civilization. this only happens in the 15th and 16th centuries, and mostly after the fall of constantinople (there is a direct connection between the fall of constantinople and the rise of moscow, as russia in a very real sense takes over the empire and becomes the third rome). by the way, the turks conquered a city and renamed it, then have the insolence to get angry when you call it by it's proper name. what nonsense. the turks can fuck off if they don't like it when people call constantinople or alexandria or antioch by their proper names and instead insist on people bowing to their long toothless imperialism. they're a bunch of barbarians and they will be driven back to asia with the mongols when their time comes. arab apologists tend to criticize this narrative as "racist", and in the process whitewash and ignore the centuries of atrocities carried out by muslims in eastern europe in the name of imperialistic barbarism in order to brutally enslave the indigenous inhabitants. people criticizing this narrative as "racist" should be ignored, but that doesn't mean that the narrative is gospel truth that cannot be altered as new evidence is consolidated. this is an emotional topic, and the widespread muslim and arab atrocities in eastern europe that were carried out in the process of enslaving and colonizing the indigenous inhabitants must be roundly condemned by all historians, but an objective analysis of a difficult topic is also necessary.
- the tatars are not indigenous to tauris, they are from central asia, which is why stalin deported them back to where they came from. the only group indigenous to tauris is the east slavs.
- as the unwelcome imperialist slave-raiding muslims, mongols and arabs are unceremoniously thrown out of eastern europe in a series of revolutionary wars led by moscow, the reality that the slavs are now divided into two different factions, those that were under mongol imperial domination and those that were not, begins to set in. a deep slavic civil war between these competing factiond, who are primarily represented by the russians on one side and the poles on the other, sets in. this slavic civil war has yet to be truly resolved, to this day.
- what ukraine is is the border region between the slavs who were under mongol imperial domination and the slavs who were not under mongolian imperial domination; ukraine is where the poles and russians have fought their many civil wars in an attempt to decide which slavic faction will assume primacy over the other in an eventual pan-slavic state.
i actually think the ongoing ukraine war has a lot in common with the american civil war.
it follows that there is one slavic people, and not multiple slavic nations, but there is an ongoing and longstanding struggle between which competing slavic faction will have primacy over the others. the warped western historical narrative is predictably skewing slavic history to present a false dichotomy of russian imperialism that predictably smears russia as an imperialist actor rather than correctly explain that the russians (and slavs more generally) are the world's primary victims of brown-skinned imperialism, due to an orientalist mentality that sees imperialism as being something that is peculiar to the behaviour of white people, even when confronted with an ethnic group that we literally give the name "slave" and is clearly the whitest, blondest, most blued-eyed ethnic group on the planet. in the warped contemporary academic framework, white people can never be the victims of imperialism and can never be enslaved or driven out or colonized by brown people, so either the history has to be revised to erase the historical truth of brown-skinned imperialism occurring or the whiteness of the group must be erased, itself. simply pointing out that imperialism, colonialism and slavery have nothing to do with race at all (what imperialism, colonialism and slavery have always been about are the twin evils of capitalism and religion) and that slavic history provides the primary empirical evidence for that fact by demonstrating the existence of a white people that have been colonized and enslaved by brown-skinned imperialist armies is a discourse that can never be allowed to exist. russians are white, so they therefore must be the aggressors; or the russians cannot be white at all, because they are being oppressed. qed.
you'll note that the western media actually advances both arguments, that the russians are imperial aggressors because they're white and also that, because they are victims of imperialism and an enslaved people, they are not white.
the warped and false western narrative of russian imperialism stomping itself around obscures and distorts the actual historical process occurring in eastern europe, which is one of competition between different interests for primacy and of class conflict for political control within a broad slavic cultural continuum that extends across the slavic heartland and not one of a dominant imperial state trying to colonize and control everybody else. the poles are the quiet belligerents, here, as they sit and watch the ukrainians do their fighting for them. the serbs are getting squeezed into nato. it does not make any sense to have a dozen slavic countries at war against each other; only the muslims, the arabs, the turks and the mongols (perhaps the chinese..), as well as the germans and the americans, benefit from a disunited slavia that is fighting against itself. while there was never a time of complete slavic unity, and the various revolts in the east slavic heartland may never truly be eradicated, i am confident that the end result of the war is going to be one east slavic state, eventually. i don't mean this month or this year, i mean when the historical process resolves and the east slavs have to unite for some reason or another, be it to fight an enemy or just because they're fed up. i reject the claim that history is void of process and would push back against the ad hominens of people making that argument (that is what they have...) by labeling those arguing that history is void of process as intellectually vapid and specious nihilists. however, i cannot predict with certainty where this slavic state will be centred; it may be in moscow, or it may be in kiev or it may also be in warsaw.
there is one east slavic people, it is split into factions determined by whether it was placed under mongolian imperial domination or not and it is at war with itself; there are not a dozen different slavic entities, to be carved up and sedated by an actual imperial power, namely the anglo-american evil empire.
23:17
mar 2, 2023
i have never seen bowel movements like i'm passing after eating my salads, recently.
if you eat that today, you will shit a python out tomorrow.
i'm still trying to determine what food item is giving me gastric problems, and i've added almost everything back to the diet except the spices so i'm really down to a very small number of items that might be at the root of it, but these bowel movements are so voluminous that i don't know how they're coming out of my colon at all. these are roughly 5 mm in diameter and at least a foot long, consistently.
i did not previously have any symptoms of cancer, but there is clearly nothing blocking my intestines, right now. these python sized shits are just plowing their way through.
i did not used to shit like this. at all.
this is my salad recipe.
morning salad:
- 1 large red pepper (300+ g)
- 1 large tomato
- 80 g of kale stems, cut up like celery
- 50 g of broccoli
- 1 massive clove of garlic (or two smaller ones)
- 1 tbsp of cumin
- 1 tbsp of sunflower seeds
- 1 tbsp of nutritional yeast
- 1 tbsp of paprika
- 1 tbsp of hemp seeds
- a lot of frank's
- 20 g of cheddar cheese (find the type with added retinol)
- a swirl of caesar dressing
evening salad:
- 80 g of kale leaves, chopped into very small pieces
- 1 lime. chopped. all of it - fruit, pith, peel.
- 1 massive clove of garlic (or two smaller ones)
- 1 tbsp of cumin
- 1 tbsp of sunflower seeds
- 1 tbsp of nutritional yeast
- 1 tbsp of paprika
- 1 tbsp of hemp seeds
- a lot of frank's
- 20 g of cheddar cheese (find the type with added retinol)
- a swirl of caesar dressing
- 1 cup of fortified sugar free soy milk
- 1 tbsp of olive oil margarine
- 2 pieces of whole wheat bread (with the germ), crumbled up like croutons
8:06
i'm trying to avoid doing this, but this is a good example of the way that the revolt by northern european peoples (germans, norse, slavs) against roman christian colonialism is written out of history and replaced with a fairy tale about a pristine history of a mythological "christian europe" that never existed, instead.
his narrative is that the lithuanians were tolerant of christianity and eventually see the light and renounce their sins. who do you think wrote that narrative? in fact, what happens is that a pagan resistance movement against christian colonialism forms in the region of the baltic that was also a part of the nordic trade network and liberates kiev from christian oppression, in the power vacuum created by the mongol destruction event. vilnius formed as a synthesis of baltic and nordic in a way that is similar to how kiev formed as a synthesis of slavic and nordic.
the claim that the mongols came to europe to establish trade routes is incoherent. trade routes with who? the mongols were certainly trying to control the silk road, but the silk road was through persia. snyder seems to be applying the intention of mongols in the south to their intentions elsewhere, which is not correct. rather, the mongols seems to have seen the vikings as competitors that needed to be eliminated and really just rode in to carry out a genocide and then rode back out again. the mongols did not come from nowhere; they had centuries worth of experience in raiding china to draw upon and knew how to aimlessly plunder. the longterm effect of the mongolian destruction event was the cessation of trade between europe and china, which required europe to circumnavigate africa and eventually to try to sail to china through the atlantic in order to get around.
another example of how pagan revolts against christianity have been written out of history is the great peasant revolt in england, which we can be pretty sure from scraps of circumstantial evidence was actually a pagan uprising against the church, but which has been whitewashed out of and erased from history.
there is nowhere in europe where the masses of people ever converted to christianity with intent; everywhere in europe, christianity is introduced by the aristocracy and enforced on the people, who universally resisted it, with violence. for a thousand years, the pagan people of europe are in constant revolt against the christian artistocracy, until it comes to a teetering collapse in the age of revolution, leading into the enlightenment. the proper narrative of the history of europe describes how the the pagan people slowly undid and overthrew the romanization being enforced on them by christian colonialism via the aristocracy, which was largely a foreign occupation, and which was in function a lengthy and systematic cultural genocide that initially began with caesar. what changed in the 16th and 17th centuries is that the foreign rulers that were occupying europe gave up on trying to christianize their indigenous slaves and instead adopted the pagan practices of their serfs and the other people indigenous to the lands they found themselves owners of.
the lithuanian commonwealth was certainly an organized indigenous pagan revolt against christian colonialism and it had substantive success in fighting these horrible christians off. why is snyder whitewashing this?
if it were 50 years ago, you would expect a church history to sound the way that snyder is presenting it and, like all church histories, it would be a revisionist, fairy tale whitewashing of historical events that the church does not want people to remember. today, the actual reason that snyder is doing this is to present an invented justification for nato's recent conquest of the baltic regions, as the west otherwise has no historical justification to control a region it has never had a substantive presence in. this is not of concern to a historical nihilist; if the history doesn't support your desired outcome or uphold the intentions of the contemporary ruling elite, you just change the history so it does. easy peasy!
the correct narrative is that the catholics tried and failed to convert the pagan lithuanians, before eventually marrying into their ruling class and taking over the region politically, without ever really converting the population. the catholic moment in lithuania was in fact short-lived, as the swedes quickly regained their previous colony. there is a reason that the region has such high levels of atheism today, and it is because they were never convincingly christianized in the first place.
snyder makes sure to ask the class if they can find any other lecture series on ukraine in the country. why do you think he does that? it is because he wants to see how many lies and how much propaganda he can get away with spreading.
21:11
i also want to point out that the spelling that constantine uses for kiev - kioava - is the same as that used by contemporary finns. kiova means "birch tree" in finnish and birch trees are connected with the mythology of the rusalka. there is some convincing symmetry, there.
22:06
i have posted this previously, but this is a map of what the archaeology says that settlement around the black sea looked like immediately before the vikings arrived:
the khazars are a shifting target - they are written of vaguely in various sources, but there is no way to pin them down on a map. we don't know where their capital was and there has long been some minority view that they never existed at all. on this picture, they are south and east of the don, and that is what the archaeology says. what the archaeology says is that the kiev region was inhabited strictly by slavic farmers before the vikings arrived, and that there is no evidence at all of any settlement in kiev whatsoever before the vikings got there. the slavic tribe that lived in the region was called the severians, and they are represented by the volyntsevo culture.
you will see maps that extend "khazaria" to the dnieper or even to the dniester, but they are exercises in historical fantasy, and are currently being pushed by people with a political agenda to resume the turkic and muslim/arabic colonization of the region, which the russians successfully halted and ejected. the exact boundaries of the khazars are difficult to ascertain, but there is simply no physical evidence of them existing west of the don.
there is mention of the khazars building a city on the dnieper called zanbat by some late arab sources, but these sources are later than a single mention by the previously mentioned byzantine emperor, which is the actual source, not the arab chroniclers. constantine mentions that kiev is "also called sambatas" and nobody has since been able to understand what that means. the association of the arabic zanbat with the byzantine sambatas is recent, and built on nothing but the similarity of the words; it is almost certainly a false cognate. it may be the case that the later arab writers confused kiev with samandar, a city on the caspian, after reading the byzantine source. the vague descriptions in the arab sources (a city is eight days journey by camel towards the north star sort of thing) cannot otherwise be taken seriously, given that they have no archaeological support. however, we simply don't know what constantine meant. constantine himself may have confused kiev with a different city; these were distant and exotic places to the emperor and he may very well have confused two distant barbarian cities on two distant rivers, like kiev and samandar or samkarc (kerch). another possibility is that the arrogant khazars may have taken it upon themselves to rename a city they never lived in, and talk about it using a different name, just to be superior. it is curious to point out that there was a baltic tribe around konigsberg called the sambians. whatever the truth is, there is simply no evidence at all of khazars in a mythical pre-viking kiev, and such discussion exists strictly in the realm of pure fantasy.
it is likely true that the slavs were forced to pay tribute to the various turkic hordes in control of the steppes, but that doesn't say anything about turkic control of the forested areas, which simply doesn't make any sense. the turks avoided geographical regions like that around kiev because they couldn't get their horses into them. the slavs fled into the forest explicitly to evade the turks because they couldn't follow them in there; the forests provided the slavs a place of refuge and safety from the aggressive tyranny of turkish oppression. there's a reason the vikings could get there by boat and the turks could not get there by horse, and it is the nature of the geography, which almost always defines ancient borderlands.
it is disappointing to hear the yale professor repeat bad information from wikipedia and debunked racist conspiracy theories instead of discuss the state of the archaeology of the region in attempting to determine the settlement patterns - he is a professor teaching a course at a serious university. he has a responsibility to do better research than that, and especially to not repeat claims of such explicitly poor value that are in fact widely ridiculed in the literature. the school should be embarrassed. - but he is functioning in a propaganda role, and is repeating bad information for that reason. the reason that this bad information cannot be removed from wikipedia, despite repeated attempts, is the same reason that the yale professor is stating it in his class.
23:08
he also mentions that the vikings were blocked from the caspian by the bulgars. this is a strange statement, given that the vikings repeatedly raided baghdad from the caspian.
23:19
mar 3, 2023
this article (also previously posted, but in full) represents the current scholarly consensus on the myth of khazars on the dnieper.
This article critiques the idea that the Judaic Khazars of the late 8 th - first half of the 9 th cc. founded Kiev. That hypothesis was formulated almost a century ago, but was never taken seriously. Wide-scale archaeological investigations in Kiev have since confirmed that the concept of Khazar foundations lost validity even from the point of view of historiography.
3:35
the allegation that china tried to rig recent canadian elections may not be substantive, but this is the same tactic that the american deep state has recently used to remove trump from office (it is, of course, not likely that the russians influenced the 2016 election, but the cia claims they did, and it has used it's mouth pieces like rachel maddow to aggressively argue the point and convince dumb liberals that the lie is true) and it may very well be the signal i was hoping for that the canadian bureaucracy is going to physically remove trudeau from office very soon, if he will not vacate the position voluntarily.
justin trudeau has overseen an incredible decline in canadian living standards due to a baffling level of mismanagement and is also responsible for a total collapse in canadian foreign policy and we will need to get rid of him before we can start to rebuild and begin to recover from the damage he's inflicted on the functioning of the public service. the harper-trudeau government, together, has been a catastrophe that the country may never fully rebound from; we may be on the path to becoming a failed state. if we are to recover, we will need a government to come in that reconfirms it's commitment to a strong public service, including the administration of publicly funded social services.
i suspect that it was his personal decision to privatize health care by stealth that is the actual reason that the deep state is turning on him. his party does not support this; this is trudeau's decision, almost solely, and he is advancing the agenda of the opposition in doing so. he should avoid the struggle and simply go away and leave the country alone.
justin trudeau is no longer welcome in the liberal party or in the pmo.
19:18
mar 5, 2023
this is just baffling and while it's clearly explicit nato propaganda it's also a reflection of snyder being a loafer wearing douchebag that's afraid of being accused of being an "islamophobe" if he narrates a history of the poles driving the tatars out of europe and back into asia, which is the actual historical reality.
conflict between the poles and tatars was limited until the 17th century for the reason that the mongols left such a wide swath of destruction in their path that an area the size of france was literally left unpopulated because it was indefensible from raids from the east. the mongols rode in, destroyed and rode out but they also kept coming back for more. the vikings and slavs had to just get up and leave, which opened up this tremendous area of empty space in one of the most fertile regions of the world that stayed empty for hundreds of years. first, mongol power had to decline and then the region had to be slowly repopulated from the west in order for the poles and tatars to once again come into conflict. this is how ukraine gets it's name - it is the eastern front of slavic settlers resettling a region that was abandoned centuries earlier due to an inability to defend it from mongol pillaging. when the poles and tatars do once again come into contact, it is in the context of almost five hundred years of slavic fealty and an increasingly declining mongol power, and the result was revenge on an epic scale, which is entirely understandable. the only thing that stopped the poles from carrying out a well deserved ethnic genocide against the utterly despised tatars was that moscow got there first and did the job more efficiently by deporting and slaughtering the tatars and then resettling slavs back into their historic homeland, once the tatars and turks (they were in fact mostly turks) were rightfully done away with.
snyder goes out of his way to point out that the region of novorussiya being currently fought over was not historically rus, which is a distorted history based on a political decision to start history at an arbitrary point in time (in his case, with the rus) but is nonetheless technically correct; the recently newly annexed territories of russia are in the pontic-caspian steppe which was dominated by turks after the hunnic invasions and which the vikings could not control, because they were sea peoples. this is crude, but it's true - the vikings dominated the waterways and the turks dominated the steppes and they neither could fight each other on their respective territories nor did they try. the turks were helpless in the forest, and the vikings were useless on horseback. before the huns brought the pontic-caspian steppe into the broader asian steppe caravan and horse highway network, the pontic-caspian steppe was dominated by iranian groups in the east and celtic groups in the west, both of which were horse-mounted peoples, like the turks were. these three groups - celts, slavs and iranians - are all descendants of the ancestral indo-european speakers, who are indigenous to the pontic-caspian steppe and who have lived there for thousands of years, minus a period of illegitimate turkic control started by the hunnic invasion and ended by the russian conquest.
snyder says at one point that the greeks were in tauris by 5000 bce. that is a ridiculous statement; he clearly meant 500 bce. i am very surprised that he did not correct himself immediately after stating something that incoherent.
however, an early group of vikings named goths settled in tauris before the huns and survived there for centuries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Goths) and some of them must have been rus (by that, i mean to say that the crimean goths were probably actually a combination of goths and rus). there were some remnant swedes there the whole time.
in the midst of all of this, snyder systematically avoids any discussion of the current inhabitants of the pontic-caspian steppe, who are overwhelmingly russian speakers, and he forgets to mention that the actual justification for the invasion was not to control an area falsely claimed to be russian (and correctly claimed to be ancestrally slavic, if we start history before the hunnic invasion event rather than after it) but to protect existing russian speakers in novorussiya from linguistic assimilation policies being enforced by kiev and what was in fact an armed invasion by ukrainian thugs in 2014.
it's also worth pointing out the maps of the world created by vikings and slavs at this time were "upside down" and that this is the reason for the confusing left/right bank split. if you think about it, it makes sense for vikings to see the world looking southwards.
this lecture is a lot of bad things, but it is fundamentally an example of everything wrong with the revisionist slant on history adopted by multiculturalists in the 1960s, which has systematically destroyed history as an academic discipline and replaced it with propagandistic liberal babble. i want to know what actually happened, i don't want to be talked down to or controlled by an academic system trying to shape my perspectives for some abstract social goal. i want facts, not bullshit. nonetheless, this is dangerous on the propaganda level because you can be sure that the equivalent approach is not being taught in saudi arabia; the saudis are not teaching their young people that history is all about getting along and being friends. snyder stated this himself in the first lecture: if we forget our history as it actually occurred (in this case, this lecture should be about a distinct conflict between very different civilizations), we will be left vulnerable to future attack from forces, like islamists, that don't want to get along with us or be our friends.
1:21
no, i need you to think this through for a moment: what makes the russian invasion any less legitimate than the turkish/hunnic invasion leading to an eventual mongol state, if you want to pick up history halfway through? i mean, if you want to start history with the huns, why not start it with the russians, instead?
in fact, there are three choices of where to start history and the start of history taken here - which is currently standard in the muslim frightened west - is the only option that is not defensible.
the first option is that you start history as far back as you can, which i tend to. i will tend to take this option in most places and argue that the indigenous group is the oldest one you can find. in the pontic-caspian steppe, there is no debating that the earliest group is the proto-indo-europeans, who are the ancestors of today's west and also of much of today's middle east, as well as of north india and large amounts of western china. if you start history at this point, you see an unbroken habitation of the pontic-caspian steppe by descendants of the proto-indo-europeans from roughly 7000 years ago until about 400 years into the common era, and that is a very long time. the slavs are the most direct descendants of this ancestral population and therefore the proper indigenous group in the region.
the second option is that you start history when things came into being as they are today, which is with the empress catherine. if you take this option, you decide that the rightful inhabitants of the land are the people that live there today, which are the russians, and you discard of all of the other history as "the distant past". i don't like this choice at all and will always argue against it, but if you're going to start erasing history then you should erase all of it; the only justifiable arbitrary start point of history is the one that takes us to where we are at the moment. we can have history or not have history.
any other start point of history is arbitrary and they are all equally problematic. you could start history just as well with the greeks, the goths, the huns, the vikings, the mongols, the italians, the ottomons or the russians - any of these options presents a turnover event, and they're all equally valid, which allows you to decide the region is inherently any of these things, if you just pick the right day to start your story on.
you should at least understand this point - that deciding the tauris region is turkic (and mongolian) because you started history at a particular point in time is arbitrary and driven by nothing but politics.
9:37
mar 7, 2023
still true.
on first glance, this may seem like a reasonable claim. it certainly seems more reasonable than the idea that the russians bombed themselves, which sounds like soviet propaganda. has the media just given up on their nonsensical theory and invented a new one, after realizing nobody believes them?
14:16
(edit: i mention isis in this post, which is currently a flag for western intelligence operatives, who are whitewashing isis crimes and trying to convince westerners to support islamic fundamentalism because it is the muslims that will be the soldiers sent to fight russia. we are all supposed to see isis as victims, instead of as the single most evil political force since hitler. it is worth remembering that we created hitler to fight the russians, too.)
no. they don't actually care about convincing actual people of their lies. a part of lying to somebody with malice is the domination involved in the lyee knowing the liar is lying, and throwing it in their face, with contempt. lying is a form of domination and when the intent is to assert maximum control, an obviously transparent lie is actually a useful tactic. that is the actual truth about the intent behind the reports recently written by the cia that have conclusions that are obviously false (like that the russians influenced the election outcome in 2016 and bombed their own pipeline in 2022); they expect everybody to know they're lying, and the point is that they don't care. the more flimsy the excuse the better as the actual messaging is that they're going to do whatever they want and nobody can stop them.
china will sink it's own aircraft carriers, if we get there.
that's not what this is; this is a more disturbing piece of propaganda than that.
what the article is describing is a ukrainian terrorist group. i bet they're a nazi terrorist group that poses a threat to western civilization and needs to be bombed by the pentagon.
on the one hand, this is an escalation of the ukraine war into the type of conflict that existed in syria, which is one of total anarchy, with a failed state that only exists in name. on the other hand, it's the first step towards making a long overdue public acknowledgement that what the west always intended to do was to convert ukraine into a failed state.
america is no friend of ukraine. i've been saying that from the start.
17:16
mar 8, 2023
in a rare reversal of my generally anti-war politics, i supported the bombing of isis. i did not support bombing saddam hussein, ghadaffi, assad or any of the other states that were targeted by nato bombing campaigns. my support for wiping isis out of history has no parallel in my politics going back to world war two; the operation to annihilate isis from the face of the earth, including executing all women and children associated with it, is the singular use of american force that i've considered justified since the end of the world war two. absolutely no trace of isis having ever existed should remain on this planet. isis never existed; it should never be spoken of ever again.
i have been less critical of russia than others (i have not condemned him and will not) because i realize that they had no actual choice. if russia loses this war, it will prove their only tactic was to strike first. this war could happen now in ukraine or later by nato invading russia via ukraine. what is better from a rusian perspective? this is a fundamentally different question than trying to figure out if a hegemon should or should not have invaded an insolent client and the inability to recognize that this is different is confusing much of the western fake left, a large amount of which has no memory of the berlin wall, let alone of the cold war. this is a type of conflict that the world has not seen in decades and which the education that young people have received has left them poorly equipped to analyze. this is not an imperial occupation and trying to understand it using anti-colonial theory will just lead to an incoherent analysis; the only way to analyze the situation using that framework is by acknowledging the march of western imperialism advancing into russia, which is longstanding and substantive. i do not advise that; that is not helpful. this is a conflict between great powers and should instead be analyzed as a competition over resources, which means you have to listen to older people and look up ideas that were discarded as obsolete in the 90s, when history ended, in order to understand what is happening.
it would not be correct to state that i "support" the russian invasion of ukraine; what is correct is to point out that i recognize that a partition of ukraine is required in order to construct defensible borders between nato and russia and that the avoidance of nuclear war is contingent on the establishment of those defensible borders. i wouldn't support ukrainian nationalism, even if you could convince me that ukraine actually exists, because i don't support ethnic nationalism in any conceivable context; i am an anarchist that accepts a lot of marx but that rejects lenin as a fascist and rejects all forms of nationalism as racism and fascism. calling somebody a nationalist is usually just a polite way to call them a nazi; i am not a polite, i will just call them a nazi. the actual reality is that nato is trying to conquer russia and that the russians need to be able to defend themselves from it; otherwise, we're going to have a major war, which we should all be trying to stop. i have been seeking the least catastrophic algorithm to get to that outcome. a pre-emptive attack on ukraine in 2014 to prevent nato from being able to move military equipment and training facilities into ukraine would have been even better, but the russians were clearly not ready for it. it is not clear how much of ukraine russia will annex, but it is clear they won't annex all of it.
i would, in theory, be more likely to support a joint russian-american targeted bombing campaign against ukrainian nazis than i would be to support a russian invasion of ukraine. that sounds like a fantasy, but it is actually closer to what the russians actually wanted. how likely am i to walk into that, if the americans start talking about it?
isis is a difficult case study because the american military created a situation where a real left had no option but to support wiping isis out of history. i suspect this was deliberate, and it is angering, but they succeeded; they created conditions where any left worth calling itself one had to fall in line, as there was no alternative. it is true that isis was created entirely by american proxies and that america "bombing isis" became a cover for carrying out other activities in a region that existed in anarchy. that was less important than stopping an ethnic cleansing and preventing a bunch of thugs from setting up a society organized on a barbaric religion that sought global conquest as the justification for the state. i was not naive about this; i understood i was being manipulated to support bombing isis and i fully went along with it because the alternative (supporting isis and opposing american military intervention) was infinitely worse. the funding and organizing of isis by the saudis in the power vacuum of the desert eliminated all of the difficult logic and moral questions around removing dictators and disrupting existing societies to do it; this was a clear evil that needed to be annihilated, and there was not any collateral to protect in avoiding doing so. wiping out isis didn't require destroying cities or infrastructure, so the questions attached to other bombing campaigns to remove dictators were not pertinent. it would have been better if we had not invaded iraq at all, but we did, and the complete elimination of isis, along with any further mention of it from history, was the only remaining course of action, of which there was no good argument against.
the idea that bombing ukrainian nazis is justified in the same way that bombing isis was is not very convincing. there are some comparisons, such as that ukrainian nazism and isis are both the result of western proxy movements, but the premise that bombing ukrainian nazis is required is not as strong as the impetus to completely erase isis from history.
what the americans will be targeting when they start bombing western ukraine is evidence of their own occupation of the region, namely training facilities and military bases (which we don't admit exist). this will be a scorched earth policy, intended to eliminate anything of value from the area before the russians get there, as well as to erase any evidence they were ever there at all. the americans did the same thing in france and germany in 1944 and 1945.
we will soon be told that we are now bombing ukrainian nazis, and we will be expected to believe it. there will be a very minor layer of truth to it, too. i will probably not support it.
i'm not an american and i'm not going to accept the argument that you have to go kill some terrorists somewhere to keep america safe; most americans will accept that argument quite easily, but this canadian will not. what made the bombing of isis justified was it's ethnic cleansing campaign against the yazidis, as well as it's more general enforcement of barbaric laws from the dark ages. the argument that forced me to support bombing isis had to do with a legitimate invocation of the responsibility to protect a population that was in legitimate danger of ceasing to exist, not the idea that isis was some threat to america. fuck america.
isis were an anachronism that could not be allowed to exist.
if there is a responsibility to protect russian speakers in novorussiya from ukrainian nazis, it falls on the russians to enact and not the americans, but that argument is not as strong (the concern is nonetheless real) and i cannot move to the stage of "support". in this scenario, the americans would be merely using the threat of ukrainian nationalism as an excuse to bomb their own targets, rather than also using it as an excuse to do so, in addition to having a legitimate responsibility to protect. syria was (and still is) very tricky; those specific factors do not transfer over to ukraine.
it would be helpful if a people's movement for leftists to support would identify itself in ukraine, but the culture remains traumatized by the soviet experience and that is not going to happen any time soon, despite novorussiya being one of the historical origin points of anarchism.
0:55
of course biden wants to increase the income taxes of the rich; after using the last congress to reduce spending on healthcare and infrastructure in order to increase the pentagon budget, those defense lobbyists are still demanding even greater war spending increases. the fed is destroying money. how else is biden going to fund his war of european conquest and settle old scores against the ruskies?
you thought the fed contraction was annoying. now, they're raising taxes. what's next, conscription?
(yup.)
don't worry; the system will reduce taxes again when the war is over, thereby ensuring that it isn't doing crazy things like redistributing wealth. who wants that? they don't do that in america.
don't get confused as to what these tax increases are about. every dime collected will go directly to lockheed-martin.
why stop at 25%? you could kill even more people if you set it at 50%.
23:33
mar 9, 2023
i suppose that it is possible that the octagenarian minority senate leader tripped and fell and incurred a concussion. he is, after all, a bumbling idiot.
however, these types of stories are recurrent in washington. powerful people seem to frequently find themselves seriously hurt. it's quite curious, given that we don't know who is really running the place.
is mcconnell's black eye really because he fell down the stairs or is that actually the oldest trick in the book? i'm half expecting that the press conference was held by an obese italian man with deep bags under his eyes and a threatening expression on his face. he would say something like the following, in an overly enunciated manner:
"mr. mcconnell has fallen. he could not get up."
mcconnell recently criticized the fox news coverage of the absurdly over-politicized "january 6th" event, which was in truth an irrelevant occurrence that the local police clearly ridiculously over-reacted to. i have not seen tucker carlson's segment, but i gather that he's arguing that the situation has been overblown and that the police state reaction was not proportionate to the actual threat in front of them, which is a constant in how police treat protesters and no doubt correct. i need to stress that i have not been following this story because i consider it to be irrelevant tv drama of no substantive current or historical relevance, but the police do not stop riots, the police create riots. it has sadly been the case that tucker carlson - who i remember as an annoyingly intelligent and very conservative bowtie wearing cnn anchor when i actually watched network news in the 00s and don't really know anything about in his current incarnation as a fox news personality - is the only remaining voice of reason in a society that has gone down the rabbit hole of orwellian absurdity. it is very believable that the police started this riot, a priori; starting riots out of peaceful protests is what riot police do.
apparently, some of these idiots (and they were idiots. clearly.) have actually been charged with crimes and are going to jail. that is a black mark on the right to free expression in a country that is quickly backsliding on it's democratic rights and falling into a system of dominance and fascism, as it simultaneously mobilizes for a world war in a primarily belligerent role. americans should be embarrassed by a court system that has sent people to jail for protesting, not fearful of people exercising their right to free expression, even if they're weird and goofy looking; no, especially when they're weird and goofy looking.
18:49
ok, i went and watched it. fine.
this is notable only because it is not a sensationalist report, but a rational analysis of what was actually a rather unremarkable event.
the expected behaviour by law enforcement would be that the police saw a crowd coming and incited them to riot on arrival, because that is what police always do when confronted with peaceful protesters. the way they incite crowds to riot is by sending provocateurs to coerce protesters into destroying property, which is not "violence" but which produces a pretext for the police to break up the assembly. this tactic was invented by bismarck to break up socialist protests in the german empire and has been well documented in capitalist states ever since.
what the footage demonstrates is that the shaman was clearly an undercover police officer and a state provocateur. the real left should have instantly realized that as overwhelmingly obvious.
why does the left need tucker carlson to tell us the obvious and do our own analysis for us?
18:52
the correct deduction is that the fake left has lost the plot.
can we get back to a class analysis and remember what side we're supposed to be on?
19:10
19:55
mar 11, 2023
comparing the relationship between france and algeria to the relationship between ukraine and russia is intellectually lazy, and it is that much more egregious in the context of a discussion of france for the reason that there is actually an incredibly relevant comparison to make, in terms of the standardization of french that took place after the french revolution, which is about the same time that russia began to move west of the dnieper.
at the turn of the 18th century, france was not exactly a unitary state but a post-revolutionary realm composed of a number of regions that had been combined under personal union due to a series of marriage alliances during the thousand year ancien regime. this region - like east slavia - spoke a series of dialects of what was initially the same language, gallo-latin. these dialects were associated with different cultures and also with different religions. there was at one point a crusade launched against the south of france, which spoke a dialect of gallo-latin called occitan and was first cathar and then protestant, in opposition to the catholic church.
after the revolution in france, the language was standardized to parisian french and any other dialects were reduced to poor grammar, spelling errors, etc. this standardization was aggressively enforced on the south of france, as well as on the breton speakers in the north-west and some other minority language groups.
if he wanted to make a vague point about colonialism by comparing algeria to ukraine, i could tolerate it, while discarding it as so imprecise as to be void of utility. however, he has an extremely useful comparison in the standardization of french, and which he is not utilizing, which is neither tolerable nor forgivable.
the difference in the analogies is about whether a minority group is inside or outside of the imperial centre's legitimate sphere of cultural origins. ukraine and russia are essentially the same thing, as the north and south of france area. algeria and, say, kazakhstan, are outside of the imperial centre's respective sphere of cultural origins and for that reason are legitimate colonialism.
that said, nobody should feel bad about what the french did in algeria, either. they deserved what they got, as retaliation for centuries of raids on the french coast; they deserved all of it.
8:26
mar 13, 2023
i actually think that the government should increase taxes on people that have children, in order to ensure that they are the ones paying for all of the costs the government is required to pay to raise a child, rather than taxpayers that do not have children. i would go so far as to consider it immoral to tax those who do not have children to pay for those that do, as not having children is often a financial decision made in order to avoid the costs and annoyances associated with children. i do not pay taxes, but a big part of the reason i decided not to have children is that i don't want to pay for them; i would be livid to do my taxes to find out i'm paying into the system so some snot-bag down the street gets to eat lunch at school, while their parents get a tax cut to buy marijuana with. that would enrage me, enough that i might donate to an abortion providing population control charity in order to get a tax break to avoid paying for somebody else's kids food, instead.
there should be a child tax of a thousand dollars per year, per child. you want ten kids? that's 10,000/yr in taxes.
if you can't afford kids, get a fucking abortion, don't expect other people to be forced to pay for your mistakes.
10:18
mar 14, 2023
the premise that the republicans might run on an anti-war platform is baffling, and whether they would have any credibility seems unlikely. i'm left in very strong opposition to western involvement in ukraine, without being particularly prone to getting gaslighted by the far right. the american people may be more naive.
could anybody have predicted this party reversal, standing in 2001? in truth, you might have if you had been alive in 1971. the war party (which is currently the democrats) needs a patsy to run against, even if it's just to rouse up militarist sentiment. the upcoming election might be surreal to people my age, but the fact is that people older than us have seen this before, in reverse.
i can state that i agree that the conflict in ukraine is not just a territorial dispute but is in fact a civil war and that it has a lot of similarities with the american civil war. what is happening is that nato is intervening in this civil war, which it is also largely responsible for triggering. to keep to the analogy, nato is playing the role of the british in the american civil war. i have firmly rejected narratives of russian imperialism, but the idea of it being a competitive war is in itself also only valid upon zooming out; at it's core, this is a civil war and it's depth and scope are not yet entirely clear.
if ron desantis is the politician arguing for an immediate nato withdrawal from the war, he will be the politician i am in agreement with. i will certainly not be agreeing with politicians arguing for endless defense spending to turn the clock back to fight some kind of theatrical war against the communists. or something.
i already know i'm disenfranchised and will end up endorsing the greens or some even smaller party, as i have for the last several cycles. the reason i refused to endorse biden in the last election is that i deduced that he was a greater threat to start a world war than trump was and i am disappointed and disturbed to realize i was correct. it is up to the republicans to make the argument to exceedingly disillusioned leftists that they are the lesser evil to joe biden, and their greatest asset in doing so will be joe biden, himself.
19:39
conservatives are supposed to be isolationist. the twist is that the democrats are america's historical conservative party. americans have the language all mangled up, but a conservative should be seeking to get out of a conflict that has no benefit to the united states and which american interest in is being partially driven by something like a keynesian economic policy to maximize military spending; the other american directive is to bleed the russians, which is blatant imperialism and something conservatives are supposed to oppose.
socialists and liberals should both be aligning with self-determination on the ground, which in the east of the country means supporting russian annexation because it is clearly the overwhelming popular sentiment and in the west of the country means ending the fucking war, and easily at the cost of conceding areas that unambiguously want to leave the country, anyways.
"liberal interventionists", which would include the vast majority of both the republican and democratic parties, are operating on a kind of delusion that ukrainians are fighting a zealous and idealistic nationalist struggle against the russians, when the reality is that a large majority of them in the part of the country where the war is being fought actually want to return to russia and the rest of them just want this carnage to stop. the actual strategy being followed by the americans is not to help the ukrainians but to bleed the russians so that they are weak and vulnerable to attack elsewhere, which is not any sort of liberalism nor any sort of conservatism but imperialism and fascism in the most blatant terms possible.
i'm not a conservative, but i would agree with actual conservatives, who should be arguing for isolationism, on this specific issue of nato involvement in eastern europe. desantis is doing this right, in that context, whereas nikki haley sounds like a liberal, but is in truth only sounding like one cynically and is in fact acting strictly like a fascist.
19:59
mar 15, 2023
this is a vexatious lawsuit and the outcome should clearly state as much.
protected speech rights and the right to protest aside (which are foundational in this country, and supersede any warped articulation of the tort to enjoyment of property, which has no application in context), there is a legal principle in capitalist legal systems called limited liability that states that investors are not liable for the consequences of their investments. this is a very old principle and there is no possibility it will be overturned without legislative interference into the operation of the court. no court anywhere in the anglosphere will ever hold an investor liable for anything; investors are not subject to the rule of law, here, because they have legislated themselves above it.
if some of these whiners in ottawa that don't believe in free speech want to find some way to capitalize on the situation, they will need to find a way to hold individuals liable for individual behaviour, unless somebody in the convoy was foolish enough to incorporate, in which case they could sue the corporation.
10:25
you can never sue investors in a capitalist state; that is one of the foundational rules of capitalism, that investors are never liable for anything.
however, this corporation could be sued for damages, if it is established that the protesters were acting as employees of it (which is a stretch, but a path).
10:51
this just makes them look guilty.
the woman should speak.
11:01
Ukraine̢۪s internal security service recently shut down Telegram accounts that were helping Ukrainians avoid locations where authorities were distributing summonses.
a real left should be in solidarity with ukrainians on the ground evading military service, not with geriatric fascist war mongers across an ocean that are looking to relive their glory years by bombing the commies.
when the slavs kill each other, the only benefactor is the muslims. ukrainians will eventually figure out that they're being sacrificed to slaughter by a nihilistic west, and they may very well even make the mistake of blaming the jews for it. it is, after all, a jew that is murdering their children. at the least, it should be clear to ukrainians that the west is not helping them so much as they are exploiting them as pawns in a larger conflict, and they will have every right to rise up in resentment.
11:20
ukraine is so corrupt that it has corrupted the meaning of the word "corrupt".
11:36
is there something more than a war going on?
is the government in kiev ethnically cleansing the population by rounding them up and marching them to their slaughter?
look at the videos.
11:41
the helsinki group is a legit human rights organization in ukraine, and if they are involved in litigation that is strong evidence that something systematic is occurring.
13:31
mar 19, 2023
are we to have a show trial for vladimir putin at the hague?
i will refrain from bothering to debunk the specious case against vladimir putin. this court, which has never issued an arrest warrant for george w. bush, merely the most obvious living american president that is guilty of war crimes, has never had any remote level of credibility. the icc is a kangaroo court that creates politicized show trials that are intended as made-for-tv-news prime time dramas to advance nato geopolitical interests in the form of perpetuating american propaganda. the court is a joke and the case is a joke.
however, there are a few serious considerations to analyse regarding washington's decision to launch such an aggressive attack upon the russian state.
1) to reinforce the consistent messaging from washington that russia is not a great power or even a regional power but a small, petty nation that is to be dominated by nato and told what to do by washington. the pentagon insists on this messaging in order to elevate itself as supreme and to put the russians beneath them as a subservient client; it is a hierarchical bullying tactic that is peculiarly militaristic in it's chain of command.
2) to make it clear that washington intends to end this war with nato troops in moscow. the icc could not have issued an arrest warrant for vladimir putin if washington did not intend to actually arrest and incarcerate him. this is and must be interpreted as a clear statement of intent by washingron to go get putin and put him in a cage.
if there were any naive parties left out there that thought there was some peaceful way out of this conflict that didn't involve the west escalating it to a full scale world war, this arrest warrant should eliminate that naivete. there is no longer any ambiguity: washington is intending to take moscow before any treaty is signed and we will have a major war in order to do it.
take whatever precautions you deem necessary.
their parents told us the boomers would destroy the world. this must be their final act, and it's a race against time before we can remove biden from office and implement generational change. do not be confused; this is biden's war, and it is his generation's grand finale of depravity at the end of a lifetime of self-destruction. the commies have to lose before the boomers can die, unless we can kill the boomers first.
14:50
mar 20, 2023
the line from the pentagon recently is that china is a "competitor" and russia is an "adversary". i read those words literally and insisted it was backwards, that russia is the competitor and china is the adversary, but i did not understand the biblical implication, and how it clarifies who is determining the choice of language.
the russians are not the traditional enemy of the english; in truth, the russians and the british, as post-viking states, share a lot in common. yes, there was the crimean war and the great game, but these things came relatively recently. the traditional enemy of the british is the french, which is a conflict that goes back to before 1066 and only tentatively lapsed after the entente cordiale. the british-french conflict in truth stretches back to the british' rejection of roman imperial control over the island, which forced the romans to eventually withdraw. you could start this conflict with julius caesar, but then you're missing the context of celtic tribes sitting to the north of the latin league and the fact that the last time rome was sacked, before 406, was by celts. the underlying celtic-roman conflict that defines the english-french conflict literally stretches into pre-history. the english know who their enemy is, too; they don't need to be told it is the french. they know this, it is in their genes and their bones, their language and their laws and their religion (or lack thereof).
i have posted the thomas paine quote from the rights of man too many times, already, and will not do so again. yet, it may be consulted yet again to remember that britain only came into conflict with russia when it aligned itself against russian expansion by making a friend out of russia's enemy, the turk. russia threatened british shipping interests and needed to be contained, so britain aligned itself with russia's traditional enemy, which was islam, in the form of the then ottomon empire.
russia is not england's adversary - it is not their great satan - but it is the historical adversary of islamic imperialism and there can be little doubt that my insane friends to the south in washington actually seriously intended to denote russia as their great satan when they called it america's adversary. the ayatollah would be proud, indeed. such nonsensical language is too absurd for a sane person to understand intuitively without it being explained to them, and yet it is clear enough in hindsight, nonetheless. do americans collectively and instinctively understand that an adversary is a satanic figure, without further elucidation? such a suggestion is truly frightening.
america and russia are now locked in a mutually destructive competition over control of eastern europe, which russia has an obvious interest in and america does not, except to finally vanquish an old foe and settle old scores. the biden doctrine is, in truth, lifted wholesale from the project for a new american century and is about taking the russians down while they can, because that is what empires do. somewhere between wolfowitz and biden, the plot seems to have been lost, as empires do not merely vanquish their competitors for sport but rather seek to do so for commercial or financial gain. is europe, as an export market for natural gas, truly that valuable? perhaps, if the president owns the gas, but only if the president lives forever. the correct answer is no; this is a foolish strategy that only makes sense to hunter biden's financial interests.
there are few examples in history of such stupidity. the closest thing that exists is the iranian-roman competition over mesopotamia, which was a centuries long conflict that i'm sure nobody understood the point of within a few decades of it starting. yes, the roman emperors had to conquer lands to maintain power, but that only explains the initial conquest, which was successful but led to a withdrawal. in a pre-petroleum economy, and after the indigenous peoples had foolishly destroyed their own farmland, the region had little to no strategic or economic value to actually hold, given that the only other possible outcome was that the other of the two empires would hold it. anything transiting through the region would go through both empires, regardless. in truth, the persians and romans fought over petty nonsense like pride and, later on, religion. in the end, their destructive wars against each other destroyed both of them, which allowed their mercenary fighters (the arabs) to overcome them both, almost simultaneously. whatever the islamic origin myth states, the archaeology makes it clear that the result of the heraclean wars, particularly, was that the region was broadly depopulated by the time the arabs rode in, if they even rode in at all. there is strong evidence of locals returning to bedouinism as a reaction to the systems collapse invoked by the war, which, for the region, was essentially the biblical apocalypse.
a smart and capable adversary of america would walk into the vacuum created by america engaging in such destructive competition by taking advantage of the regions it is neglecting while it is distracted by the foolishness of competing, which is what the chinese are currently doing in the middle east. whether or not it succeeds in accomplishing the desired outcome set by beijing (how do the jews react to this?), china's attempt to get the saudis and iranians to end their own destructive competition is a direct affront to existing american military dominance over the region. existing american military power in the gulf, the central command, is both substantive and decisive; america does not control the world from the pentagon, it does so from bahrain and qatar. only a confident adversary would dare try to sweep america aside and walk right into it's own centre of power, and yet this is exactly what china is doing in brokering a normalization of relations between the iranians and arabs, while the americans are distracted by a foolish adventure in southern russia.
there are few examples in history of such stupidity. the closest thing that exists is the iranian-roman competition over mesopotamia, which was a centuries long conflict that i'm sure nobody understood the point of within a few decades of it starting. yes, the roman emperors had to conquer lands to maintain power, but that only explains the initial conquest, which was successful but led to a withdrawal. in a pre-petroleum economy, and after the indigenous peoples had foolishly destroyed their own farmland, the region had little to no strategic or economic value to actually hold, given that the only other possible outcome was that the other of the two empires would hold it. anything transiting through the region would go through both empires, regardless. in truth, the persians and romans fought over petty nonsense like pride and, later on, religion. in the end, their destructive wars against each other destroyed both of them, which allowed their mercenary fighters (the arabs) to overcome them both, almost simultaneously. whatever the islamic origin myth states, the archaeology makes it clear that the result of the heraclean wars, particularly, was that the region was broadly depopulated by the time the arabs rode in, if they even rode in at all. there is strong evidence of locals returning to bedouinism as a reaction to the systems collapse invoked by the war, which, for the region, was essentially the biblical apocalypse.
a smart and capable adversary of america would walk into the vacuum created by america engaging in such destructive competition by taking advantage of the regions it is neglecting while it is distracted by the foolishness of competing, which is what the chinese are currently doing in the middle east. whether or not it succeeds in accomplishing the desired outcome set by beijing (how do the jews react to this?), china's attempt to get the saudis and iranians to end their own destructive competition is a direct affront to existing american military dominance over the region. existing american military power in the gulf, the central command, is both substantive and decisive; america does not control the world from the pentagon, it does so from bahrain and qatar. only a confident adversary would dare try to sweep america aside and walk right into it's own centre of power, and yet this is exactly what china is doing in brokering a normalization of relations between the iranians and arabs, while the americans are distracted by a foolish adventure in southern russia.
china has it's own perspectives, remember. i've pointed out before that china is an alien culture to the west in a way that is virtually unique. there are not any indigenous american cultures of any serious threat to american hegemony and the extent of western influence in africa is probably too deep to undo. india, iran and arabia are in truth not outside of western culture but on the periphery of it, as they are all dramatically shaped by greek and jewish writing; i fail to see how india is any less "western" than sweden is, if the west is defined by greece and rome. china is different; no alexander, no aristotle, no jesus, no mohummad. china stands alone, on it's own, as the sole truly non-western society on the planet of any substantive effect. china has it's own history, it's own maps and it's own views of the west, from where it exists on the planet.
historically, it was iran that the chinese had a relationship with in directing the trade routes to europe, and that was true through the successive iranian geopolitical entities. westerners tend not to understand that the wide swaths of central asia are historically iranian societies and that the civilization that once existed there, before the mongols utterly destroyed it, was an iranian civilization. iran's cultural and political influence extended directly to the imperial outreaches of western china; the chinese-iranian trade relationship is an ancient one and it forms the nexus of centuries of ancient trade routes through asia and into europe.
the arabs were not a direct party to the trade relationship between europe and china but rather a hindrance that got in the way of commerce actually flowing. in truth, they have managed to annoy the fuck out of everybody for eons by standing between iran and europe and exacting a tax on goods transiting through the desert, without actually contributing anything to the flow of goods, themselves. it is a truly parasitic relationship, and one that the chinese have a very old memory of, as it stretches back to the sumerian period, where wandering semitic tribes would just get in the way, before they succeeded in conquering the region from the south. various schemes were enacted to try to get around the arabs, some more successful than others, but they could only ever be partially implemented. you simply had to pay the arabs to use the desert as a trade route. eventually, the arabs outright conquered the persians, which forced the chinese and europeans to find other trade routes (one of them was through crimea, where byzantines and italians had a substantive presence, and another was by sea around africa) and was a part of the reason the silk road shut down altogether. the other reason is that the mongols foolishly destroyed most of the infrastructure; the idea that they were interested in setting up trade routes, as timothy snyder claims, does not explain their persistent destruction of irrigation systems, which was clearly designed to wipe out settled populations, very well. the mongols seem to have had a deeply held disdain for cities and "civilization", which they saw as inherently oppressive to the freedom of the barbarian tribes. the actual simple and disturbing truth is that it is likely that if nobody had tried to tax or otherwise submit the mongols to the authority of the cities, then it is unlikely that any of the destruction would have happened. i strongly suspect that most of the periodic destruction horizons carried out by nomads on settled civilization (the mongol assault on the vikings is a counter-example, as the mongols saw them as competitors), going back to the bronze age collapse, and perhaps further to the indo-european expansions into europe, are punishment enacted by the nomads on the cities for trying to tax, exact tribute from or enslave them. i digress; i was pointing out that both china and europe saw the arabs as an annoyance that they tried to avoid.
the chinese have a long memory. they are seeking to trade with rome and constantinople, not with provincial backwaters like berlin or london. they know the arabs are a problem because they have thousands of years worth of history in which they have been a problem, so they wanted to build trade routes through the north, instead. the war in the region is unsettling them, so now they are looking elsewhere to salvage their plans.
it is not likely that the chinese will arrive at their desired outcome in their move to eliminate tensions between tehran and riyadh. the foundational problem is that the arabs don't respect the concept of iranian independence, and the autistic despot in charge of saudi arabia (mbs) isn't a likely candidate to give iran the respect it expects, as one of the oldest civilizations on the planet. it is the arrogance of the arabs, as personified in it's dumbass youngish ruler, that is exactly what the chinese are trying to avoid today, and what they have been trying to avoid for centuries. this particular configuration is not aligned with chinese aspirations and it could very well simply backfire, as an angry mbs refuses to make concessions to what he interprets as iranian hubris, of which the iranians are correct to loudly scoff at. if that happens, china will need to retreat to it's centuries long policy of arab avoidance. i suppose it doesn't hurt to try, even if you're sure it will fail.
whatever the outcome, it is the process of china stepping in as a mediator in the middle east that changes the balance of power; china is rapidly emerging as america's adversary in the energy triangle which it dominates and controls, while america is foolishly depleting it's resources by distracting itself in engaging in a destructive competition with that very region's historical adversary, and which has no actual historical conflict with america, at all.
empirical reality can rarely seep into the worldview of an old man reliving his lost glory years by refighting the battles of the past. age is not just a number. it is imperative that america finds a way to move on, lest they watch the chinese knock them over and eat their lunch.
1:26
back when the russians temporarily lost their mind and tentatively went "communist", they refrained from direct conflict with the west and instead relied on the premise of mutually assured destruction to prevent a major war with an aggressive and expansionist capitalist empire.
now that the russians have come to their senses and embraced the depravity and barbarism of capitalism, we can go back to the historical norm of empires destroying each other via mutually destructive competition, instead.
if history ever temporarily ended, it was from 1945-1989, not after 1989.
15:32
mar 21, 2023
amritpal singh is a dangerous lunatic that belongs in jail and the indian government is correct to hunt him down like the dog that he is.
how many other psychotic foreign terrorist cults will the clown masquerading as leader of the ndp declare his support for?
18:24
mar 22, 2023
i've been exceedingly clear that i do not want powerful people to come here and read my thoughts, which is a part of the reason i've taken them all down. this blog is intended to market my music, not to run the world from a basement on the outskirts of detroit.
i write essays from a disinterested historical view point in a way that is intended to intersect with the artistic presentation. please do not call me a journalist; i am not one. i am an activist, as all artists are, but not in the sense generally currently imagined. i am not a historian, but i am something like one. i am actually, in truth, merely doing marketing.
i am consequently not attempting to contribute to the discourse on nato strategy in ukraine or elsewhere. i feel no allegiance to nato and it should rather be clear that i am not "on nato's side" and am not "cheering" for nato to "win". something like nato was necessary immediately after the second world war, but i opposed nato expansion into eastern europe and i have been arguing for the abolition of nato for over 20 years. china does not want to overthrow the united states and create a new order but rather wants to replace america with itself and largely continue on as things are. as a working class person, i don't have a horse in that race; it matters little to me if washington or beijing run the world's banks.
my solidarity is with the people suffering the effects of the war, not with empires on one side or the other. my tactical analyses are intended to present algorithms to end the conflict and produce a structural solution of stable and defensible borders so that the least amount of people as is possible end up dead. i don't care about ukraine as a geopolitical entity, but i have a distinct cultural affinity with the russians in the donbas, as they were historically responsible for the black army of the russian revolution, which was one of history's few attempts at anarchism (under makhno). the people that live in the donbas legitimately want to return to russia, and that could not have happened without the people there self-organizing themselves.
the generals on all sides can fuck off, as far as i'm concerned.
4:13
(edit: this post needs to be dramatically rewritten from scratch to make it less politically correct and more edgy)
i need to explain what happened to my hair.
i have not changed my hair style, or at least not intentionally. i did not cut my hair because i wanted to cut it; rather, i was forced to cut it after realizing there wasn't another option, after deciding i couldn't salvage it. i have been sequentially cutting it shorter and shorter to try to salvage parts of it for the last several days, to the point where there is now almost nothing left of it. there is some possibility that i might actually shave it in the next several days.
i have not had hair this short since i was 6 or 7 years old. my parents kept my hair a little bit scruffy. i started growing it out when i was about 12, had long hair all the way through high school and went into gender transition when i was 20. it has been at least chin length pretty much constantly since about 1994.
i don't know exactly what happened, but once i decided that i couldn't fix it i then had no other choice but to destroy it. i am confident it will grow back.
this does not alter my gender identity choice, although i acknowledge it may make presentation somewhat difficult for a while. i will need to overcompensate for a while with makeup and plunging necklines. i haven't been wearing much makeup lately because i haven't gone anywhere since the start of the pandemic. i made a decision that i'm too old to go out now anyways, but there's no chance i'm going anywhere now until it grows back, which might take 2-3 years.
what happened is that it somehow got curly, which is an unacceptable outcome. i don't have or want curly hair; i have thin and straight scandinavian hair. i keep my hair straight and clean at all times; i strongly dislike any sort of styling, as i think it makes women look slutty and capitalist and bourgeois. i want flat, clean peasant hair down to my shoulders that is thoroughly brushed and otherwise not altered in any way. there is some curly hair on my paternal grandmother's side, but i did not inherit it (my father did not have curly hair, either). after a number of attempts to try to brush or moisturize these sudden uncharacteristic (and frankly disgusting) curls out, i decided i wasn't going to be able to fix it and that the only remaining solution was going to be to cut the curls out. i initially thought i could cut them out by trimming it, but i quickly realized that the fundamental nature of much of my hair had somehow changed from straight to curly and i would have to cut almost all of it out. even with the minimal amount of hair remaining, it is still clearly damaged close to the root. somehow, i have lengthy remnant dead split ends stuck in my hair and those remnant strands are wrapping around the healthy follicles as they come in, which seems to be damaging them. now that it's short enough to get at, i'm pulling out dead hair ten times the length of my remaining hair that looks like it split clean of an entire follicle, probably close to three times. it's unsettling.
i would categorize curly hair as socially unacceptable, along with other despicable traits like obesity and any sort of intentional facial hair. i can have empathy for the man that can't prevent the shadow, to some extent, but anybody that intentionally allows hair to build up on their face should be sent to a sanitarium, de-liced, shaved and transferred to a re-education camp. curly hair is disgusting. i won't accept it. if it somehow grows back curly, i'll have to keep my head shaved and resort to a wig of long, straight hair, instead. i doubt that will happen.
i tried everything and it just made it worse. trying to brush the curls out just result it in curling even worse, which is something i've never experienced before. there was no alternative remaining but to kill it with fire.
as mentioned, i don't know what happened. i have a few guesses.
i started noticing that i wasn't able to clean my hair near the end of the summer, not long after i bleached it and specifically immediately after i got stuck in the rain. the rain here is very dirty and there is some distinct possibility that the dirty rain may have interacted with the bleach to create the root of the problem. at that point, it was just unusually tangled, although i'l also point out that i hadn't actually cut my hair at that point since, i believe, 2009. if the acid rain tangled the bleached hair up, the resulting detangled hair that hadn't been trimmed in 15 years must have had cascading split ends. i was never able to bring my hair back fully after the interaction with the acid rain, although i did try repeatedly through the fall.
i did a lot of bicycling last summer and my hair was frequently damaged from air pollution, sweat and sun when i finished the workout. that no doubt contributed to the damage that seems to have been irreversible altered by the sulfuric acid bath.
a part of my hair seems to have grown back rougher than normal and it overlaps with the period i was off the testosterone suppressors. the curls started at about that transition point in my hair length. hormone changes maybe partly responsible for the texture of the hair changing, which might have partly caused the curl. it makes physical sense if you think of weights falling downward on strings due to gravity; that string will experience opposite forces and bounce up and down until it runs out of energy. my hair when i was off the suppressors would have weighed more, created a bouncy effect.
11:06
i also made the mistake of using a curly hair shampoo on hair that was frizzy. i posted a write-up of this previously, where i explained that i thought i was buying a detangler which used to actually work very well and suspect they recently changed the product. while this is unlikely to have curled my hair on it's own, it is possible that the shampoo may have given definition to damaged hair and converted split ends into permanent curls.
11:14
what i noticed sorting through my hair was that the frizzy hairs kept wrapping around the straight ones, which made all my hair look curly; i started pulling the frizzy hairs out, only to realize there were a very large number of them. i then began to realize that the straight ones were no longer straight anyways and started cutting them at the curl, but the result was that the curl just reformed higher up the cut follicle this repeated several times, until i had almost no hair left. even now, as mentioned, i'm still puling out lengthy frizz in hair that is very short.
11:16
i am confident that the curl was permanent and had to be cut out.
all i can do is learn from it and let it grow back.
11:19
i shaved it.
it's done.
21:30
mar 23, 2023
it is exceedingly frustrating that the state would vandalize a post of this sort. fuck off.
i posted something like this yesterday. i'm going to rewrite it.
===
i need to explain what happened to my hair.
when i posted yesterday, my hair was almost gone but i had not shaved it yet. last night, i shaved it; it is now sinead o'connor level shaven. i didn't understand why my hair was so damaged or why i couldn't salvage it, but the reason i couldn't clean my hair anymore finally began to reveal itself as i shaved the hair off and realized it was severely damaged by rampant split ends on the scalp and at the root. the objective fact is that there was not any alternative but to cut most or essentially all of it off, as i had been ripping it out in chunks for months and it just wasn't getting better.
i received a serious sunburn at the beginning of the summer last year, which was so severe that i couldn't leave the house for several weeks in june because my legs were so sore that i couldn't walk. i tan easily, but the sunburn i suffered at the start of last summer was so bad that it left me legitimately brown for much of the rest of the year; i was so brown from this sunburn that i began to notice that actual brown people began to incorrectly think i was brown, like they are. i recently received dna test results in 2021 which clarified that i am 1% italian, 2% jewish and 97% various types of central or northern european, including about 10% germanic-swiss from the alpine region, which may have found it's way to me through italian speakers. i am also certain that i have a mikmaq ancestor from around the year 1800, but no trace of it appeared in the test results (evidence of indigenous ancestry did appear in a clovis report that confirmed i have indigenous dna). these trace levels of italian, jewish and mikmaq are the only ancestry i have from outside of northern europe; the major result of the test was that i learned that i'm approximately 75% norse-swedish, which is far more than i realized. i'm also surprisingly r1b, with a specific ancient mutation from the alpine region, which suggests deep central european celtic ancestry on my father's side, which is the same line that married a mikmaq/metis female around the year 1800. i learned that there is some scando-russian ancestry on my father's side that i didn't know was there (and is the result of an unclear russian ancestor that is only hinted at between the lines in the quebecois church records; yes, a sneaky cavorting russian corrupting the quebecois church flock, although the phenotype on that side is visibly indigenous and my paternal ancestors more than three generations back actually were brown.), and that there is also some scando-norman ancestry that was a reasonable guess but not actually clear. the traits on my father's side that had variously been interpreted as jewish or italian are actually the result of russian-mikmaq hybridization; the brown skin tone on my father's side that nobody could understand is now unambiguously understood to be from the mikmaq ancestor, whereas the noticeably bad skin is not actually italian as was thought by some but rather obviously from the cavorting russian. my father's appearance was far more similar to sergei lavrov than to robert deniro, even if you could see the 1% italian if you strained it, or were told it was the reason he had such bad skin and happened not to know he was russian while you did know he had some distant italian ancestor. that is confirmation bias, but the dna test gives a better answer. further, and this is even more surprising, but i could not find any trace of jewish ancestry on my father's side at all, or any reason to suspect it was anywhere, so i decided that my trace jewish is probably not eastern european or on my father's side but rather more likely from a sephardic jewish ancestor on my mother's side, after finding some genealogical records pointing in that direction (and realizing that her half-sister has a substantive amount of jewish dna in her report at the same site). my mother almost certainly has a substantive jewish ancestry that is documented by jewish marriage records in philadelphia and new orleans in the 19th century and migrated to california (probably in the gold rush) before marrying out of and leaving the jewish community by migrating north to canada in the yukon gold rush. the family history remembers this vaguely as my maternal grandfather's mother being "french", but the documentation exists to show she was clearly sephardic jewish and also probably swiss-yiddish. that does not mean the russian ancestor might not have also been a little jewish, but i can't prove it (he only exists as a phantom in the birth registry) and don't have any reason to consider it, given that i found a more likely source for the trace jewish on my mother's side. again, this was in the mid 19th century, and it appears in the report as barely statistically present. the 1% italian is certainly on my father's mother's side as at least one of her parents was italian, but she was raised in a foster home with no connection to or understanding of her birth family because her parents died when she was a toddler (it was probably in a mob hit) and the actual dna connection is tying me directly to the goethe clan, which literally means "italian speakers of german ancestry", if it doesn't actually mean goth or lombard, which is more swedish, and places the markers as from the alps rather than in the actual peninsula. the trace sicilian is probably from a single great-great-grandparent. the point is that the brown tan that i had last year was starkly reflective of just how badly sunburned i was at the start of the summer, as i am not brown and i don't actually have genes that would imply that i ought to be brown (up until relatively recently, i did suspect that i might have more jewish and more indigenous, but the test clarified that that was incorrect), although i have inherited a gene that allows for burn-free tanning early in the year from the indigenous ancestor, so long as i don't get burned on purpose like i did last year. the reality is that i spent an extensive amount of time bicycling last year because i had developed some excess body fat after the surgery to remove my testicles in 2021 which i needed to do some cardio to burn off as fuel but i also intentionally went out from 10:00-14:00 on the hottest and brightest days because i was making an effort to increase my vitamin d stores by going out in the sun. i was way too white when i went out for these bicycle rides in 35 degree direct sunlight and minimal amounts of clothing and it legitimately severely roasted me in a way i wasn't expecting but in hindsight should have expected. while i will need to get on the bicycle to shed some winter fat this year once it is warm enough to, as is the case every spring, i have not gained the kind of weight this winter that i gained last winter as a consequence of going off testosterone suppressors after female-affirming surgery and will not need to spend anything close to the the time bicycling off excess weight gain that i did last summer.
(note: as i now have no ability to produce testosterone, i cannot build muscle when i am bicycling, which makes it a safe way for me to retain my slim and effeminate figure without worrying about the negative impact of gaining unwanted muscle mass. trans women find themselves in a constant quandary in that they want to stay slim but don't want to exercise because they're afraid it will make them muscular looking. a particular fear is that breast tissue will convert to muscle, which is a potential nightmare scenario. the result is that they don't eat (or they end up overweight). while i have decided to continue to take testosterone suppressors even now that my testicles have been removed because the net effect of the surgery would otherwise be an increase in testosterone (from immeasurable to around 1.5, which is still less than your mom), and that would be the opposite outcome that was intended when i decided to have the surgery, the negative potentiality of building muscle from exercising is actually not something i need to worry about because i really cannot produce substantive testosterone. i would need to be injected with testosterone to get anywhere close to normal background male levels, and you can be sure you'd have to tie me down and probably sedate me in order to do it, as i'd fight you off with everything i had, to the death, if required. it is rather the case that the reason i gained weight after the surgery to remove my testicles is that i temporarily went off the testosterone suppressors, which temporarily spiked my testosterone from 0.4 to 1.5ish, and not due to the expected weight gain from testosterone reduction, post-surgery, which is what is typically seen in cis men that get that surgery. if the reason that prostate cancer patients usually gain weight after this surgery is that their testosterone decreases (which slows down their metabolism and often results in depression), that outcome could not explain my weight gain because the net effect of no longer taking the suppressors after the testicles were taken out was that my testosterone actually accidentally temporarily increased due to my kidneys going into overdrive, instead. i should be careful; i don't actually know how much background testosterone was being created by my adrenal glands before surgery, so i don't know for sure that that is what happened. it may have been the case that my testicles had been so chemically castrated in the first place that all of my testosterone was adrenal anyways and the surgery was consequently pointless (except to remove a carcinogenic time bomb) and that all that going off the suppressors actually did was remove the existing block on my adrenal gland because my testicles weren't being used in the first place. i looked it up and learned that the tests available here cannot effectively differentiate between adrenal and testicular testosterone, so there's no way to know. all women create some testosterone in their kidneys for red blood cell production and i will need to retain the ability to create trace amounts of testosterone in my kidney for the purpose of red blood cell production or i'll effectively die of oxygen deprivation. whatever the chemistry was, the unwanted testosterone spike, as mild as it was in objective terms (it was still less testosterone than your mom. honestly.), was a subjectively disastrous unwanted outcome that i then had to take steps to aggressively reverse. i have been back to taking the suppressors since last spring and my weight has been more stable since then. nonetheless, i do generally need to lose 5-10 pounds in the spring to fit into summer clothes and this year is no different. i have actually done less walking than normal this year because the weather has been mild but dreadful. the few months where my testosterone spiked to around 1.5 may have contributed to the uncleanable hair, but that seems like a minor concern, in comparison, overall; it was, however, one of the more pressing factors in deciding to shave it off. if the testosterone had some negative effect on my hair structure that was going to linger in the middle of it and perpetuate through the next ten years of growback, it is gone now and the return to complete suppression should eliminate the overall disgustingness of the effects of testosterone, more generally. yes, i received bad medical advice from an endocrinologist and the consequences of following that bad advice has had a negative impact on me but it has at this point now been undone and reversed, as that advice has been ignored and i've returned to normal suppression. now that the damaged hair is gone, i would expect that i have no further lingering biochemical consequences of the mistakes made by following the endocrinologist's bad advice and the hair should grow back clean and soft. i am still considering legal action against the endocrinologist for malpractice in taking me off suppressors post-surgery and have not yet decided on whether i can make the argument in a court and win it or not.)
while i was painfully aware of the burn in my legs, and i vaguely recall some tingling in my scalp, i do not have a memory of the sun noticeably burning my scalp or otherwise damaging my hair in any specific way, at the time. what i learned when i was shaving the hair off of my head was that the sunburn had actually substantively damaged my hair at the root, resulting in a mess of split ends that were burnt into into my scalp and tangled up in the actual hair but so close to my scalp that i didn't know they were even there.
however, the sun was not the only factor that damaged my hair.
1) i dyed my hair red in march, 2022
2) i bleached it in mid may, 2022
3) i was severely sunburned in early june, 2022
4) i did a large amount of bicycling that summer, and generally in the evening, after the sunburn. i tried to avoid cars, but that can only be done to a certain extent.
5) i got caught in an acid rain thunderstorm in july, 2022 that left me thoroughly drenched and then had to bicycle all the way home in it from tecumseh, which is almost all of the distance traveled before turning back within the 50 km loop i was bicycling.
while the bicycling frequently left my hair tangled, i was always able to bring it back through regular cleaning, up until the acid rain encounter. i have been bicycling long distances for years and have always been able to clean my hair before, although it should be acknowledged that damaged hair also builds up. it was not until after the acid rain thunderstorm in july that my hair became tangled and knotted and curled up in a way that i could not clean out, but the hair that the acid rain encountered had also been dyed, bleached, sunburned and over-exercised over a short period of time. i initially thought it was the acid rain that was the primary cause of the damage, but i now realize that it was the sunburn after observing what was actually on my scalp by shaving the hair off.
over the rest of the summer and into the fall, the problem became progressively worse and i no doubt made it even more worse by ripping the matted up, knotted and curly hair into split ends via rough brushing. is there some other answer to matted, curly hair besides brushing it back to normality or cutting it out? as i have fine and straight scandinavian hair, i expect to be able to brush out tangles and knots when my hair becomes dirty and curly and for it to return to clean and straight hair without any substantive effort. i have simply never had to spend much time brushing my hair to smooth and straighten it out, it just straightens automatically if it happens to be curly and dirty by simply cleaning and moisturizing it. yet, by the end of the fall, i was routinely ripping hair that kept forming into matted clumps back into frizzy messes of split ends by just ripping the knots and curls out via the sheer force of brushing. while this is obviously not ideal, it is potentially acceptable, so long as the hair stays straight after it's been brushed. my experience has been that damaged or dirty and curly hair that is brushed clean either falls out relatively quickly or more or less fixes itself in appearance, despite being technically damaged. i need to again point out that damaged hair builds up, and i might have just been at the end of however many years of ripping knots and curls back into cleanliness.
unfortunately, i then made the mistakeof using a type of shampoo designed for curly hair that i used to use regularly as a detangler before it disappeared and came back on the market in an apparently different formulation, and without any marketing to indicate it. i have posted previously about this. the brand name of the shampoo is "totally twisted", which i interpreted as meaning that the purpose of the shampoo was to untwist the hair. i mean, who wants twisted hair? that's insane, right? in fact, when the product went off the market a few years ago, the reviews on the internet were all complaining that the reviewers had curly hair when they bought the shampoo and the shampoo then straightened their curly hair out, which they didn't want. the shampoo brand was even accused of being racist. it seems that everything about the product was a marketing disaster, so they just took it off the market, which deprived me of the best detangling shampoo that i'd ever used. i was excited about finding it on the shelf again in the fall, right when i needed a detangler, but i noticed something different on the packaging; it said "for defined curls" on it, which i do not believe was on the packaging before. the shampoo did not have the same fruity aroma that it did previously, either; it smelled less like blueberries and more like salty soap. the initial result was that it seemed to actually make it worse via an overuse of sulfates. this was clearly not the same product i used to use to detangle my hair and that was immediately obvious.
however, i thought i'd try it anyways because the moisturizing shampoo i was using instead had stopped working altogether. shampoo for curly hair should not usually make your hair curly, if it's healthy. however, it does make some sense to think that shampoo for curly hair may result in damaged hair becoming curly, if the damaged part of the hair is frizzy as a result of split ends or some other damage. in that case, it actually wouldn't be the shampoo making the hair curly so much as it would be the shampoo shocking tangled or messy hair into place, as now curly hair.
oops.
i would categorize curly hair as socially unacceptable, along with other despicable traits like obesity and any sort of facial hair. men with facial hair should be sent to mental institutions, deliced, shaved and forced to enroll in re-education camps where they can learn about basic hygiene before being allowed to return to society. abolishing curly hair is not quite as resolvable a problem as teaching men to shave, but it is no less disgusting. i won't tolerate it on my head, or allow it to build up dirt and pollution and bacteria and feces and insects and whatever other disgusting thing might get stuck in there, no matter how ferquently or carefully it is washed. once it became clear that the curls could not be cleaned out, there was no remaining option but to kill it with fire.
so, i thought i was buying a detangler called "totally twisted", but my hair was so damaged from the previous culmination of factors that this product, which was recently reformulated as a curly hair shampoo, actually locked the damage into place. i initially thought that idea was crazy (shampoo doesn't curl your hair. that's crazy talk.) and that the shampoo was just a "harsher" product than what i was using previously, which allowed me to pull out more damaged and dead hair, which had built up (this was partly true) but i eventually had to acknowledge the empirical fact that the shampoo (and conditioner) was actually curling my hair and that it was actually getting dirtier and dirtier, the more i used it.
once i actually convinced myself that this was somehow actually true (as stated, i think it was shocking frizzy split hairs into permanent curls and that the hair was so frizzy that the result has a sudden head of unwanted curly hair), i immediately stopped using it and instead tried to radically hydrate it through a series of deep conditioners. this had some effect for the first few hours out of the shower, but the hair always reverted to a curl by midday and it eventually became clear that the effects of the curly shampoo were unfortunately truly permanent.
i then tried to clean the curls out by realizing i could use the characteristic of curliness as a marker to identify and remove individual hairs that were beyond salvaging; it was clear that it was initially strictly the split ends that were curling up, not the healthy party of the hair. if that had worked, it would have been an easy enough pruning job, but as i removed curly split hair after curly split hair it became clearer and clearer that the amount of non-split hair on my head was a sort of illusion of tangled split ends fusing together in the presence of moisture immediately after the shower and that the difficult truth was that almost all of the hair on my head was split ends that had been damaged into a permanent curl by the curly shampoo which was inevitably going to break apart in a few hours unless i decided to just never leave the shower.
could i survive the rest of my life without leaving the shower? if i had more wealth, perhaps. i could even design a kind of breathable suit, like elvis had, where the shower never leaves me, instead. it would look something like tinfoil cap and need to fall into a drainage area around me that filters and cleans the water and recycles it, perhaps by storing it in a knapsack. the suit would need to have flip-flops connected to a locomotable collection area. alas, that's not realistic.
i started to get scared when brushing the tangles out of what looked like normal hair through began to result in it bouncing into a curl because the brush was just splitting the veneer of clean hair into it's water-infused constituent split ends; the split ends came together to reform what looked like a healthy hair strand in the presence of moisture, but it was an illusion shattered by running a brush through it. when i became cognizant of this, i realized i was at the end of my options regarding hydrating it back to life and i was going to have to try to cut the curl out of the hair by trimming it out.
as one last attempt to salvage it, i dyed it red about a week ago. the reason i did this was that i was hoping that the effects of the colouring would be that
1) it would shock the curl out of the hair. after all, i have straight hair and the curl is merely literal damage to the straight hair. if i put enough stress on it, it might potentially revert. i knew it was a stretch. and
2) the stress on the hair from the colouring process would remove the dead hair (the dead hair and the curly hair are the same thing, recall.) and leave only healthy hair in it's place.
this again seemed successful in both ways at first, and i did remove a large amount of dead hair as i conditioned it post-dye. recall that i was ripping matted hair out all fall, that i was brushing frizzy hair out when i was using the evil shampoo and that i was aggressively pulling out split hairs for much of march. yet, somehow, my hair was not yet noticeably thinner, despite pulling such large volumes of it out in a futile attempt to clean and resuscitate it. unfortunately, this was again an illusion created by the moisture in the shower; it was bunching back up into knots within an hour of getting out of the shower, and splitting back into constituent curly split ends as soon as i brushed it.
all salvage attempts had then failed; there was no remaining option but to cut the dirty curls out.
i was hoping i could save most of it by targeting and trimming the damaged curls out, but each successive curl-removing operation brought me higher and higher up in the hair until i suddenly realized that i had very little hair left to trim. even so, washing what had become short hair was pulling out metre-plus long lengths of split ends from somewhere inside the remaining hair, which was exceedingly unsettling. where was this coming from? after realizing that even the short hair was split at the ends and knotting up, i decided that the extra few months of regrowth created by shaving it right off was worth it, given that i'm not doing anything this spring, anyways. if i had left that three months worth of hair there and it had grown back knotted, i'd have to do it again; the only way to be sure that the virus was actually removed was to completely burn the host and start over again.
as i was shaving it, i started to notice that these lengthy split ends that i was pulling out of my hair were actually burned into my scalp and had to be lowly lifted off of it. the hairs left indentations in places and may have even been ingrown in others. i could not have done this without loosening it with the razor, but i ended up peeling most of the hair off like it was dead skin on a scab, and it ultimately peeled off into gobs and instantly knotted up into a matted pile. i can't have any absolute certainty, and i can't even say for sure what caused it, but i strongly suspect this at the least had to be done to get my hair back.
i'm not happy about this. i have not chosen to cut my hair and this should not be interpreted as a fashion decision or a change in hairstyle. i may have slightly overreacted, but the difference in the end of a few months of growth is negligible; the hair was irreversibly damaged and it simply had to be almost entirely removed, or i was going to spend perpetuity fighting with dirty hair.
this does not alter my gender identity choice, although i acknowledge it may make presentation somewhat difficult for a while. i will need to overcompensate while it grows back with exaggerated makeup and plunging necklines. i haven't been wearing much makeup lately because i haven't gone anywhere since the start of the pandemic. i made a decision that i'm too old to go out now anyways, but there's no chance i'm going anywhere now until it grows back, which might take 2-3 years. if you see me during this period, realize that my legal name is still jessica and my legal gender is still female; you should expect me to put a greater focus on drawing attention to the rest of my body, as i struggle through the period of regrowth.
my perspective on this is actually that i had to make a very difficult and unwanted choice, that i'm very unhappy that i had to make it and that the next few years are going to be extremely difficult. i may have to suffer with some depression as a result of it. i will no doubt deal with judgmental people and need to aggressively tell them to fuck off. it is not helpful to me to interpret the situation differently; i am very sad that i had to cut my hair out, and that sadness is likely to get more intense as i actually begin to fully understand what i actually did, but life is full of hard decisions with shitty outcomes. i hadn't cut my hair in almost 15 years and the lesson i need to learn is to take care to trim it more frequently, to prevent the split ends from running rampant and the need to do this again.
my hair will grow back and will be smoother and longer and cleaner and sexier than it ever was before.
this, too, shall pass.
22:36
mar 25, 2023
i would rather see a swedish-led defense pact than sweden in nato. while the turks may be the ones blocking sweden, i would not expect sweden to last very long in nato, anyways. this would become an election issue and an anti-nato party would remove sweden from nato. if nato finds france annoying, it won't like sweden much.
sweden is often overlooked as a regional power, partly because the culture has renounced any kind of war. defense pacts are almost always a cover for offensive military alliances and nobody wants a militaristic sweden. however, it would be helpful to rebalance power in europe back into the traditional swedish-greek-latin trichotomy of powers, as it would help to restabilize it.
the thinking last year was that sweden had to join nato because finland had decided to and that, without finland as a buffer state, sweden required article 5 protection. finland is clearly seeking article 5 protection. nato, however, was clearly more interested in parking weapons in finland to try to trick the russians into opening a northern front. finland in nato was a decoy; finland was being sacrificed.
today, sweden might more reasonably argue that article 5 would be a hindrance to swedish expansion into karelia.
8:05
"I focus my efforts against the terror and violence of my own state for really two main reasons. First of all, in my case the actions of my state happen to make up the main component of international violence in the world. But much more importantly than that, it's because American actions are the things that I can do something about. So even if the United States were causing only a tiny fraction of the repression and violence in the world-which obviously is very far from the truth--that tiny fraction would still be what I'm responsible for, and what 1 should focus my efforts against." - noam chomsky
16:05
can somebody explain to me what the supposed difference is between russian families adopting ukrainian children and canadian or british families adopting them?
there's been millions of children sent to the west - millions in poland alone - and these children will be indoctrinated by the west to hold capitalist, russophobic views. they will be taught that they are ukrainian, rather than russian, and encouraged to adopt western cultural norms instead of russian ones.
one of these actions is seen as a crime and the other is seen as charitable, but they are entirely equivalent to each other and the only difference is in the skewed politicization of it, which is really nothing more or less than a racist attack on russians. in fact, the canadian government is also politicizing it's support for ukrainian refugee children because ukrainians make up a key voting bloc in certain swing ridings.
the war zone of ukraine is currently no place for children. russia should be applauded for getting as many out as possible, not charged with committing war crimes over it.
yes, russia is being charged with war crimes for the act of taking children out of a war zone. it's preposterous.
19:34
the science does not support the idea that performance is correlated with birth sex or with hormone levels, exactly. categories like height and weight are what are actually predictive of competitive outcomes.
gender as a category is an anachronism today in almost every other aspect of our society, besides sport, where it continues to exist. the desire to "protect the female category" is deeply conservative and reactionary. our society has already almost entirely abolished the social construction of gender. sport is almost the last refuge of this now almost entirely obsolete category.
a better idea would be to align with the ongoing social revolution to eliminate gender as an obsolete socially constructed category and abolish gendered competition altogether by replacing meaningless and unpredictive gender categories with meaningful and predictive weight and height categories, instead. this would ensure that the handful of transfemale athletes that have substantive weight or height advantages over almost all ciswomen (and almost all transwomen) are placed in the proper weight and height category relative to their actual weight and height (rather than lumped into a useless category based on their gender), and would also allow some ciswomen to compete against better athletes, which is what they actually want. it would also ensure that the vast majority of transwomen are placed in predominantly female populated weight and height categories, which is where they belong.
elite female athletes do no want to be protected by male advisory boards, they want to compete against the best competitors they can find.
20:04
it may be argued that there are some genetic differences between men and women that determine competitive outcomes, but that claim is not consistent with the actual science. height, for example, is today understood to be actually be determined by nutrition when a child is growing and not by sex-linked genes (the average scandinavian female is much taller than the average indian or chinese male and would destroy them in any competition where height is a deciding factor). even if you could find some number of genes that determine competitive outcomes and unambiguously decide they were sex-linked, you'd still only be demonstrating a small subset of genes and ignoring all of the other genes that are not sex-linked.
think of it like this; do you not realize that there are genetic differences between women that contribute to competitive outcomes? why do you think woman a can swim or run faster than woman b? they perform more or less the same training. one of these women has better genes than the other for doing this specific task and that is why they win. all competitive outcomes between females are actually strongly determined by genetic differences between females that are not sex-linked at all.
the argument against race as a scientific concept is that the genetic differences within population categories are larger than the genetic differences across them; black africans are actually less similar to each other than they are to europeans or asians, if you look at the genome as a whole and discard the specific genes for skin pigmentation. the same thing is true about gender. sex-linked genes are only a very small percentage of the genome that, when compared against the entire genome, and controlled for the outcomes represented within specific outlier phenotypes (weight and height categories), are only responsible for a very small amount of the variation in the female phenotype. women demonstrate far greater variability within their own category than they do when compared with the category of men, as a whole.
that one video of that one individual winning a bicycle race that happened to be a foot taller and 200 pounds heavier than his competitors is a poor sample to use to compare against general outcomes. clearly, this individual was bigger and stronger than their competitors, and that was unfair, but it really had nothing to do with the individual's gender, exactly. the rules should ensure that situations like that do not occur, but they should do so by looking at the relevant variables (weight and height) and not the irrelevant ones (birth sex or dna or hormone levels).
21:17
india has won 35 medals at the olympics. total. cumulative. they're very good at field hockey.
the female russian team won 32 medals at the 2012 olympics.
21:44
i don't think anybody doubts that the female canadian hockey team would easily beat most male hockey teams, excluding the top 10 or so in international competition.
21:52
mar 26, 2023
canada is in the midst of a serious housing shortage due to a structural neglect on subsidized infrastructure that the liberal political class was in denial of for decades but is finally beginning to understand. canadians want to make space for people to come here, and we are certainly not running out of land, but we have not built housing at anything close to the pace required to keep up with immigration and it is beginning to catch up to us in a way that is going to result in widespread homelessness if it is not structurally addressed.
there are simply more people here, today, than there are houses for them.
the united states has an incomparably larger ability to absorb economic refugees due to it's drastically superior and larger urban infrastructure.
for that reason, closing the canadian border to migrants attempting to transit through the united states to canada is the correct decision. the most humane way to deal with these population movements is to let the country that is best suited to deal with them take the lead, which in this case is the united states.
at current immigration levels, it will be decades before canada's housing shortage is resolved, and it is not entirely clear how to go about resolving it. for economic migrants, canada is going to be prohibitively expensive to live in and almost impossible to find shelter in for a very long time into the future. this is economic reality, as a consequence of too many years of generous refugee policies driven by market neo-liberalism, rather than centralized planning. we let the market deal with it, and now we're overpopulated.
economic migrants will not be able to afford living here and will put increasingly desperate increasing cost pressures on the poor that are already here.
17:56
i actually don't know if i went threw puberty or not. at least, not really.
the shaved head actually makes me look younger. i was previously 42 going on 25; now, i don't look a day older than 13.
23:21
mar 27, 2023
the bank of canada's claim that targeted tax cuts are not inflationary is completely backwards, as has been the case with everything they've done during tiff macklem's reign of terror. monetary policy is never inflationary, but targeted tax cuts generally are.
the reason for this is that inflation is not determined by pseudo-scientific economic rules imagined by academics, and shown to be wrong at every opportunity, but is rather a large sequence of individual games of chicken between buyers and sellers that can only be measured in aggregate. the behaviour of buyers and sellers is not entirely predictable because humans are not rational in their decision making, but we can at least determine optimal strategies in order to find equilibria where neither side will (at least logically) have a reason to change their strategy. a fundamental theorem in game theory states that such equilibria always exist.
the introduction of a subsidy that is explicitly intended for groceries will have the effect of breaking the existing equilibria by coercing the seller to play a different strategy because it can now better it's outcome by doing so. if the government just sent out random checks for no reason, it would have less of an effect, but let us understand what a seller at a grocery store will do, rationally, when the existence of a grocery subsidy is explained to them.
"well", the seller should reason, "the buyer now has hundreds of dollars more to spend on groceries because the government has given them money and directed them to spend it on groceries. therefore, i can increase my prices to take advantage of the increased grocery budget and maximize my profit margin.".
now, some naive utopian market theorist might stamp their feet and cry "no! markets are efficient!" but look at the evidence in front of us. it is the error of placing faith in this market utopianism that is exactly the reason that grocery inflation is still at 10%, while the broader global effects (primarily the cost of oil) that initially led to spikes in prices have largely subsided. markets are theft; any rational seller would take advantage of the introduction of a subsidy directed at them to move the equilibria in their direction.
if the sellers succeed in moving the equilibria, the effect of the grocery subsidy is little more than a corporate handout to grocery stores, in this case on the order of $20 billion. however, if the sellers do not succeed, the equilibria will not move permanently or might not move at all. $250, which is about what i'll get, is not that much money, although it's easy enough to see how it could get clawed back in continued 5% hikes, given that it's supposed to last for six months. further, this is the second such payment, now. it is no longer a one-time payment and, frankly, there's good reason to think there'll be at least one more. buyers might reject the attempt by sellers to move the equilibria by refusing to buy, but sellers can play the long strategy in waiting them out, if they know more subsidy money is coming in the long run.
whether this specific subsidy is actually enough to create inflation, whether sellers actually raise prices to take advantage of it and whether buyers accept it or fight back are all random variables that cannot be predicted with any certainty. it is at least clear that buyers will be tempted to accept price increases knowing that they now have more money to pay for them, but we can't predict that outcome with any certainty. a large number of products are currently exiting the "gee, that's gone up a lot" category and entering the "there's no fucking way i'm paying that" category. there's some abstract breaking point that is determined less by elasticity and more by psychology and we are close to it.
however, this is certainly the type of policy that could lead to inflation and the government is making a mistake by following the bank's advice in thinking it won't, which i should remind the government is something that it is not supposed to do.
a reasonable projection is that this subsidy will have the effect of preventing imminent deflation in groceries, which is imminent because buyers are getting pissed off.
if the policy proposal by the government is that it over-collected on gst due to inflation and should give it back to the poor, i don't oppose that policy. i am in favour of wealth redistribution and an over-collection of a consumption tax is a good opportunity to do some of it. however, labeling the distribution as a grocery subsidy and marketing it as one is going to instead have the outcome of handing over the over-taxation to the corporate sector, which is not a desired or intended outcome.
the lesson of importance that should be being learned here, both by the government and by the bank, is that how subsidies are defined has a psychological effect on how they will be actually distributed. if this subsidy were to be defined as a climate subsidy, grocery stores would behave differently, even if the actual transfer of money from government to individual is exactly the same.
10:33
mar 28, 2023
there is a section in the budget about "government spending cuts" that has little useful information but clarifies that it won't mean cuts to subsides, services or jobs.
this is probably actually intended strictly as red meat for the political right. the liberals have not been a centrist party for some time; the legacy of justin trudeau will be that he permanently reoriented the liberals as a distinctly right-of-centre political party. he didn't start the process, but he firmly undid a process that was developing to move the party back to the left. at this point, there is no remaining trace of the traditional liberal party, as they continue to send weapons to ukraine and begin to aggressively privatize the people's health care system, with neither a mandate nor a debate. liberal cabinet ministers are competing with each other to be more pro-war and more pro-market than their competitors as they get ready to fight over who replaces justin trudeau. if the author of this section was chrystia freeland, as is likely, it is probably merely a political stunt intended for the next liberal leadership campaign, where she will be positioning herself as a member of the political right and trying to build a coalition of right-wing liberals and moderate conservatives in an attempt to win upper middle class voters and ridings. please understand that trudeau picked her because he agrees with her. any signs of a murmuring or disgruntled left in the liberal party are entirely absent at the moment. if this is the correct analysis, that it is intended as a way for chrystia freeland to advance her political career, which is how she sees running for prime minister, then i wouldn't concern myself with it very much,
however, there is a distinct possibility that the reason the budget says they're not cutting services is because they're actually planning on deep cuts to services and are waiting for the recession to hit as an excuse for it.
19:52
the annoying ssw is now breaking up and i would expect the temperature to quickly increase in april and to stay high.
just how warm was it here this year?
my projection of no days with a high less than -5 was frighteningly close.
we had two weekends of winter this year. that was all.
however, we didn't have many warm days, either. rather, it was consistently roughly three degrees warmer than normal. that was also the case last summer, but the difference between 25 and 28 is very felt whereas the difference between 0 and -3 seems trivial.
where i am, i would expect the temperature this summer to again be consistently about 3 degrees warmer than average due to the warm temperatures in both the pacific and atlantic oceans keeping cold air pushed into the high north. i would expect that the consequence of the warming oceans is that the middle of the continent will experience colder than average weather weather this summer, as the northern air is bottled up into the middle of the continent and forced south to texas.
20:43
mar 29, 2023
canada's historical role in the world is to provide wheat to africans affected by the war, not to send weapons to fight it in ukraine.
canadians should take note of this change in how our government is behaving, be embarrassed by it and seek to correct it.
canada's historical role as a humanitarian power that avoided stupid wars of pointless competition was something to be proud of and something that was worth fighting for. aligning with fascist ukrainian nationalists at the expense of the foreign aid budget is not something to be proud of and not something worth fighting for.
our existing policy in ukraine, and in africa by extension, is deeply uncanadian.
16:32
mar 31, 2023
sometimes songs randomly pop into your head, and you're happy to hear it, because it perks you up and lifts your spirits, a little.
4:17