i went looking for upper limits for histidine & isoleucine and found a good write-up on histidine:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7284872/

ergothioneine is one of the items in the bottom list of iffy molecules. it's down there because i had previously read that humans can't synthesize it, which appears to be more of an open question than a stated fact. if we are able to synthesize it, we would synthesize it from histidine. so, i'll file that away mentally, for later - but i should be clear that humans have not been proven able to generate this amino acid, and the general opinion at this time appears to be that we can't. further, while we can absorb it, and appear to even transport it actively, and even know what codons are responsible for the transport, we don't actually know what our body does with it. it's an antioxidant in vitro, but we haven't demonstrated as much in vivo. garlic, wheat, eggs & beans are good sources for ovo-vegetarians. note that mushrooms are nutritionally useless because we can't do anything with chitin, but they are quite high in this compound (along with heavy metals and whatever else is in the shit they grow in, because they don't have an excretion system). there's a write up on this molecule here:

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ars.2016.6778

urocanic acid is another molecule produced by histidine in humans, which was once thought to act as a natural sunscreen to block the effects of uvb radiation on dna in the skin, but that has since been debunked. this molecule seems to react to uv light, and seems to have something to do with immune response, but it's not clear how or why. there's a write-up on this in chapter 5.2.2 (p. 98 in the text, 121 in the pdf) in this book:

https://bd.b-ok.africa/book/2054102/2e7d0c

this study suggests 57 mg/kg as a concern point:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306907749_Risk_assessment_of_L-histidine

upper limits:

1.5*57*50/980 ~ 435%

.5*57*50/980 = 145%

leucine

leucine is also primarily used to produce coenzyme a, as well as a specialized high energy fuel molecule used by specific organs in place of glucose, called acetoacetate. so, that should functionally act as another b5 boost, by another 5+ mg a day. i'm definitely getting my coA, afterall......

as an aside, when i did the b5 writeup i found the literature to produce an open question. humans were apparently replenishing coenzyme a even while fasting, indicating that b5 (or coA, generally) has some stores in the body, under the direction (in the literature.) that the whole point of b5 as a vitamin is that it's necessary to produce coA. that's why b5 is a vitamin - you need it for coA. or so i thought! i suggested maybe some was being stored in the liver, after all. i mean, it's not spontaneously generating - it's coming from somewhere. but, leucine & isoleucine have deep stores in the body, so that's a secondary explanation as to where the coA was coming from (in other words, i was sort of right in my deduction, and this is the answer). but, it opens the question as to how necessary b5 actually is, in the form of pantothenic acid, in the presence of sufficient leucine & isoleucine. i guess getting the rdi and then some for all three should ensure you're getting enough coA, which is something i wasn't sure about. is that part of the reason that the rdi for b5 got halved?

that said, b5 seems to be the better option for the production of coA due to blood sugar level regulation concerns and efficiency of conversion, so i wouldn't give up on b5 quite yet; conversely, i'm not getting a good answer as to why you need these specific amino acids, if you get enough b5. isoleucine deficiency is documented and apparently produces a hypoglycemia-like effect, but all the research i'm seeing is hypothetical - it "may" help produce hemoglobin, but they don't seem to know how. there actually seems to be a lot of overlap in the symptoms described by b5 & isoleucine deficiency, making you wonder if they aren't the same syndrome and what's actually happening is a broader coA deficiency. but, really the deficit of clear statements seems to suggest a deficit of basic underlying research. leucine seems to have more documented purposes, but the deficiency symptoms seem to be tied into a coA deficiency as well. this also appears to be vaguely understood at this time, but i admit that google may just be being less than useful to me. i can't find much....

while leucine has a longer list of known uses than isoleucine, i can't find any vitamin-like compounds that it acts as a precursor or cofactor in the production or metabolism of. there is a third amino acid, valine, that also seems to have the production of coA as a primary function, further blurring the necessity of vitamin b5, in absolute terms.

leucine also should have upper limits, as determined by this article:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22952178/

as it's 500 mg/kg, if i set a lower limit of 50 kg,

500*50/2940 = 8.50340136054---->850%

150% of 850% is 1275%, so that's the total 36 hours upper limit.

50% of 850% is 425%, so that's the per meal upper limit.

i don't see any reason to think i'm close to these upper limits.

water - 0

=============

raspberry - ?. raspberries have very low amounts of amino acids, low enough that nobody bothered measuring it, or that it couldn't be measured. i have not been able to find data, but it's minimal across the board.

guava -  171*.3 = 51.3

banana  -   8

strawberry  - 34  

avocado  -   214

kiwi  -  46

soy - 107*4 = 428

ice cream - 316*.825 = 260.7

yogurt - 577*.5 = 288.5

yeast - 775*5/20 = 193.75

vector cereal -  

all bran cereal -  928*.45 = 417.6

wheat bran -  928*.07 = 64.96

sunflower seeds - 1659*.08 = 132.72

flax -  1235*.12 = 148.2

algal oil -  1020*.1922*.0996 = 19.5259824

===============

100*(51.3 + 8 + 34 + 214 + 46 + 428 + 260.7 + 288.5 + 193.75 + 417.6 + 64.96 + 132.72 + 148.2 + 19.526)/2940 = 78.4780952381 >50

the reverse argument is that iron is important in viral replication, and the beeturia may have been a consequence of temporary viral-induced anemia. whatever phytic acid was in the seeds may have been the trigger in the presence of poor iron absorption.

i dunno.

i know it's better, now.

so, i've actually doubled the amount of sunflower seeds and the beeturia hasn't come back. nor have the stomach aches. so, was that really it?

was i actually sick?

did i get a bacterial infection that's cleared?

see, it's the beeturia that strikes me as the key symptom that i have to explain by the diet, as i can't imagine suffering malabsorption of plant pigments as a consequence of a virus. how would that work? a bacterial infection makes a little more sense, if there was something parked in my gut that was messing around with things, but i'm having trouble imagining an actual mechanism besides crowding, which....like, if that was it, i must have been overrun....

there are only two items i haven't readded, yet: anchovies & yellow mustard, which was way past date and had shit growing in it, before i realized it. was it one of those things?

see, i established a crystal clear causal relationship with those seeds.

so, i'm convinced it was a contaminated batch. but, contaminated with what?

and, it's weird to see them do it, because these are often people that are critical of capitalism, in the broader scope. they argue sex is just like any other work, but then they seem to insist that libertarian market fantasies can function in sex work, when they reject it everywhere else. how can they get this so wrong?

advocates of legal prostitution simply don't understand capitalism.

capitalism is a system where workers do not have agency, by definition. 

it's delusional to pretend that you're giving workers more agency by giving them more capitalism - that's just not how capitalism functions. in capitalism, agency is held by bosses, not workers. legal capitalist prostitution would not be a counter-example to this, and the ramifications are likely to be dour, as prices crash when supply rises. 

it's sort of the same thing with slavery.

should we legalize selling one's self into slavery?

the truth is that we already do - it's called getting a job. and, abolishing wage slavery is the whole project of the left...

it has nothing to do with morality, it has everything to do with individual autonomy.

so, then do we allow prostitution? slavery?

listen, my opposition to prostitution is not moral and it's really only subject to the existing economic realities. i'm absolutely convinced that if you tried to legalize prostitution in the existing reality of hypercapitalism what you'd end up with is mcbrothels where sex workers get paid minimum wage to work in terrible conditions, and nobody wants that.

i actually honestly, legitimately think that the black market is a safer way for sex workers who truly want to be sex workers (that is, who aren't forced into it due to economic realities) to exist. i'll accept that i might be wrong, but i want to have a statistical argument about best approaches, not a moral argument about the permissiveness of the state. this is an argument about economics, not an argument about right and wrong.

further, i realize that the vast majority of actual prostitutes (not rich girls with webcams in their parents' basement or strippers with trust funds looking for a good time, but actual prostitutes out there in the real world) are not doing it out of real choice but out of a lack of real options. so, if what you're concerned about is actual agency, any changes to the laws need to be constructed to actually ensure actual agency by giving unwilling actors a way out. 

i have no patience at all for this "sex work is work" argument, as it normalizes wage slavery and upholds the marketization of everything. it's a neoliberal argument, through and through. to the extent that it is true, we need to abolish all forms of non-consensual labour, not give up and accept slavery as a fact of life.

so, yes - you want to get rid of prostitution laws, in the long run. that's not something the state should be regulating, at the end of the day. but, that's the kind of thing you do in an advanced, communist society, not in the primitive capitalist society that we currently find ourselves in; if we were to legalize prostitution tomorrow, i am convinced that the actual economic forces at play would produce the exact opposite outcome that proponents claim it would.

....because i reject market theory, and they worship it.

in canada, and in much of europe, we actually allow for assisted suicide, which takes the issue to the next level - we acknowledge there are scenarios where one human is permitted to kill another, if the one being killed makes the request.

i couldn't imagine anybody arguing that killing somebody on request isn't immoral. rather, the argument is that an individual's autonomy is the more important consideration, and if somebody wants to make the immoral choice to end their own life then they have every right to do it, because they own their own body.

people do immoral things all of the time, but we don't generally legislate against them. it's just not a sufficient condition to ban or restrict something in a free society, where we reject the idea of the state as a moral arbiter and leave those decisions to individuals, instead.

and, we decide if something ought to have rights or not by legislating it. they don't have some kind of "natural" rights or something. from where do those rights come? there's no such thing as god, obviously - obviously. so, it's clearly not coming from some kind of supernatural decree, that's ridiculous.

we can consequently decide that, while it's immoral to kill the fetus, it doesn't deserve any legal protection under the law because it doesn't fit this set of arbitrary characteristics we've decided upon.

and, if we're honest, we have to accept that this is the actual legal regime, in truth.

the unwanted editor is popping up again; i'm going to guess they've barely read anything i've written, so i need to repeat myself.

1) there are no rules of grammar. writing is individual expression, an art form, and subject to whatever form the artist wishes to produce it in. 

2) there are no rules of punctuation, and i have no interest in following dictates set by somebody else regarding punctuation. if i put a stop or a comma somewhere, it's because i want it there as a means of expression and the grammar police can fuck off.

3) while standard spelling is useful to ensure that ideas are properly expressed and confusion does not set in, the artist retains the right to spell things wrong or make up words if they decide to. it's entirely their decision, and not subject to review.

4) i do not capitalize anything at all for the reason that i am an anti-capitalist. it's a political statement, and i have no intent to reverse it.

stated tersely, i express myself however i arbitrarily decide that i want to, i don't care what the "rules" are and you can fuck off if you don't like it.

that clump of cells in your uterus is directed by different dna than you.

that means it's not a part of your body, but an independent organism. that's what the contemporary definition of life is.

now, you can argue that it's a parasite and still be consistent, but i'd advise against it if you want to win the case. and, killing a parasite is what it is.

i just don't know why the fake left has this bizarre aversion to just stating the truth of it - it's an individual rights issue. that's what the law actually says. and, if you want to maintain the right for what it is, you're going to have to grapple with it for what it is.

people get into these bizarre arguments on the topic, because they essentially don't understand the legal rulings (roe v wade in the us, or morgantaler in canada). they'll argue it's a clump of cells, or a part of the woman's body...

the bottom line is that, legally, none of that actually matters. what matters is bodily autonomy.

scientifically speaking, we understand today that life is dna, which means that the church was actually right - life should be defined at what they call conception (and what i'd call fertilization), as that's when a new combination of dna forms. that's the science, here, and it's where any debate needs to start from.

and, i find it very difficult to argue that killing something isn't immoral, except in a situation where it's necessary to prevent imminent death, which isn't true for almost all abortions.

so, if you want to argue that abortion is immoral, i won't offer much push back on it. rather, i'm going to look you in the eye and tell you that i don't give a fuck.

the moral question just simply isn't absolute, it's just one consideration, and usually the one at the very bottom of the list, after you've sorted through everything else. and, when a woman decides to make that choice, she has a lot of things to sort through, the moral questions attached to the issue generally being of minimal, if any, importance. she needs to worry about if she can afford it, she needs to ask questions about the sperm donor (and if they choose to be more than that) and she needs to ask the question of if this is how she wants to spend the rest of her life, as the child will probably outlive her if it's born. all of these questions are of far greater importance to the individual's autonomy than the morality of the issue.

and, i really think that the left needs to stop making the pseudo-scientific arguments that it makes and instead approach the issue more realistically as one where morality is of marginal importance in the decision making process, because if they keep pushing these pseudo-scientific arguments, they're going to eventually lose them.

abortion is actually a good example of a situation where morality is less important than other considerations.

i would agree entirely that abortion is completely immoral. but, i think it should be legal anyways because personal autonomy is more important than morality.

hrmmn.

this is some creative, out-of-the-box thinking.

i think that satanism is pretty stupid and is really just a way for theists to pretend they're atheists (if you were really an atheist, you wouldn't need any of this....it's like training wheels for atheism), but this is potentially something that could be expanded upon more generally to undo an entire category of religious legislation.

in the end, you have to fight for them to stop legislating morality. in the meantime, you can make fun of their morals as you find ways around their tyranny.

https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/rrr-campaigns

marco rubio is absolutely homosexual, and it's blatantly obvious.

"but, rubio opposes gay marriage."

exactly.

freud was only right about a handful of things, but the idea that homophobes are closet fags is one of them.

he comes off as queer, and confused. that's fatal, for his presidential ambitions, in the republican party.

this is what the next cycle is going to be like.

he might win if he ran as a democrat, though.

rubio's style of politics is unpopular in the contemporary republican party.

plus, he's kind of a fag.

rubio?

no.

rubio is sort of like sanders in the sense that he might win a general if you let him run, but he'll never win the primary - because republicans won't vote for him. we learned a lot about republicans four years ago, and the big takeaway is that they don't want smaller government.

i'd give cruz a better chance because he's a little crazier...

but, none of these candidates are in the right space. i'm not being facetious when i point to palin - she represents the party, and rubio doesn't.

see, what i think - and what i've argued - is that you need a third party to pull the democrats towards the centre. it won't happen, otherwise.

as is pointed out earlier in the video, that's what happened in the 30s. and, a lot of people have argued that what went wrong in the united states was that the cio-afl merged with the democrats. that was the fail point.

policemen in parallel lines.

blind, blind, blind.

but, the real threat to democracy is some buffoons in stupid costumes breaking windows and chanting slogans.

fucking idiots.

what's important right now is getting emissions under control, and if we need to tear down every country in the world in order to do it, we should celebrate it as a step forwards towards a common human identity.

i've been over this a few times, but what is a country?

and, if you look through history, there's a common thread, all over the world - a country, as we see it in the world around us, is strictly a construction of the landholding class, which is primarily rooted in family allegiances, coming out of feudalism. historically, france was the land administered by the family that owned the land we called france, and changed based on what land that family did or did not own (due to warfare, infighting or marriage alliances) at any given time. the people that lived in france were the property of that landholding class, which is why they were forced to speak the same language as it. and, so it was in england and spain and russia and the other feudal countries, if less so in the less centralized realms, like "germany" and "italy", neither of which existed throughout most of history.

what we call a nation-state arose out of that, as a reaction to it, but remains a function of it. the slow expansion of democracy following the glorious revolution in england is great and everything, and necessary to build on if we want to get to communism in the end, but the point of it all was to act as a check on the landholding classes, because getting rid of them wasn't likely any time soon. we can't lose sight of the fact that the point is to get rid of them in the end and that this compromise can't be permanent.

so, i have no love of country, no romanticization of anything and attach no purpose to upholding the interests of the landed class. true democracy requires doing away with all of this as feudalistic and backwards.

and, if i sound like an alien to you, it's just evidence of how far away the left really is, right now.

nationalism & patriotism are childish vestiges of the 19th century that actually don't have longstanding histories in human culture (they're very recent creations.) and need to be abolished and transcended in order to move forward towards a common class identity.

...and, i want you to be unpatriotic, too, and will always seek to convince you that you ought to be.

emancipate yourself - burn your flag. it's just bourgeois mind control.

i am solely in solidarity with the proletariat of the world, across artificial national divisions.

i have more in common with and more solidarity with workers in detroit than i do with bankers or doctors in windsor.

leftists see the world in terms of class, not in terms of religion or race or nationality, and seek an international revolt of the working class against the ruling bourgeoisie and underlying aristocratic elite.

we don't care about bourgeois parliaments and, if anything, seek to see them fail and burn.

so, of course i'm unpatriotic - i couldn't be a leftist otherwise.

again: i'm a leftist.

leftists don't believe in countries.

fuck nationalism. fuck patriotism. fuck tribalism. and, fuck religion, too.

imagine there's no countries.....no, really. stop for a second and imagine it. good idea, isn't it?

isoleucine

this one seems to be mostly used to generate coenzyme a, functionally making it a supplemental source of vitamin b5 - something i thought i wasn't getting enough of. i've set my rdi for b5 at 6 mg/meal (12 mg/day). this should add another gram or two per day.

if isoleucine is a precursor for other proteins, it's not clear what they are.

water - 0

=============

raspberry - ?. raspberries have very low amounts of amino acids, low enough that nobody bothered measuring it, or that it couldn't be measured. i have not been able to find data, but it's minimal across the board.

guava -  93*.3 = 27.9 mg

banana  -   33 mg

strawberry  -  16 mg

avocado  -  126 mg

kiwi  -  35 mg

soy - 66*4 = 264 mg

ice cream - 195*.825 = 160.875 mg

yogurt - 313*.5 = 156.5 mg

yeast - 510*5/20 = 127.5 mg

vector cereal -  

all bran cereal -  486*.45 = 218.7 mg

wheat bran -  486*.07 = 34.02 mg

sunflower seeds - 1139*.08 = 91.12 mg

flax -  896*.12 = 107.52

algal oil -  1020*.1922*.0352 = 6.9007488

===============

100*(27.9 + 33 + 16 + 126 + 35 + 264 + 160.875 + 156.5 + 127.5 + 218.7 + 34.02 + 91.12 + 107.52 + 6.9007)/1400 = 100.359692857

histidine

this is an essential amino acid used to create histamine and carnosine (with β-alanine, which an ovo-lacto like me will get from rna degradation. i may attempt to measure these nucleotides last, perhaps as b4-1 through b4-5), amongst other things, such as glutamate, which is used in the kreb's cycle. carnosine is only present in the diet in red meat, and it is absorbed, but the thing is that we then split it up and put it back together before we use it. as such, despite the absorption, it's actually more efficient to get carnosine this way. for that reason, carnosine is now removed from the lower list. if you want your body to produce more carnosine, you should consume more β-alanine, which is itself only available directly from red meat or supplements (or rna degradation for those that don't eat red meat). for that reason, vegetarians tend to have lower carnosine levels, but i'm willing to let me body deal with this.

yeast:

https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2020/10/so-it-probably-makes-more-sense-to.html

algae:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7198547/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5408261/

water - 0

=============

raspberry - ?. raspberries have very low amounts of amino acids, low enough that nobody bothered measuring it, or that it couldn't be measured. i have not been able to find data, but it's minimal across the board.

guava -  22*.3 = 6.6 mg

banana  -   91 mg

strawberry  -  12 mg

avocado  -  74 mg

kiwi  -  19 mg

soy - 35*4 = 140 mg

ice cream - 88*.825 = 72.6 mg

yogurt - 142*.5 = 71 mg

yeast - 245*5/20 = 61.25 mg

vector cereal -  ?

all bran cereal -  430*.45 = 193.5

wheat bran - 430*.07 = 30.1 mg

sunflower seeds - 632*.08 = 50.56 mg

flax - 472*.12 = 56.64 mg

algal oil -  1020*.1922*.0157 = 3.0778908 mg

===============

(6.6 + 91 + 12 + 74 + 19 + 140 + 72.6 + 71 + 61.25 + 193.5 + 30.1 + 50.56 + 56.64 + 3.07789)/980 = 

0.89931417346 ----> 90% > 50

so, i'm not going to spend too much time getting into the specifics of each amino acid, other than to provide some kind of guess at an rdi. broadly speaking, these are the building blocks that your body uses dna as the instruction set to synthesize proteins with. there's a lot of woo around dna, but this is what dna actually does, and the truth is that it doesn't actually do much else. so, there are 20 of these; each of them will produce many types of proteins, built out of different combinations of the different amino acids. it's really just not useful to get into it too much, other than to make sure you're getting enough. your body will deal with it, completely autonomously. you'd only ever need to know the details if somebody at a school were testing you, and, even then, it would really just be for the fuck of it - you can't do anything with all of this information. i mean, i'm glad it's written down somewhere, and stored in some computer system for reference, but you simply don't need this burned into your neurons...

that said, there are also a number of vitamin-like proteins (we have discussed a few already, like taurine and glutathione) that end up produced by amino acid synthesis and i should attempt to discuss each of them in turn, as they are often the primary purpose of consuming these amino acids.

these rdis are adopted from the highest option at the following site

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid

i'm standardizing to 70 kg, which is more than i've ever weighed in my life. my range is more along the lines of 55-65 kg. 70/60 > 115%. so, by setting it to to 70 kg, i'm ensuring that i'm getting more than enough. as such, i don't feel the need to go over the limits too much.

so, the per meals will be 50% and the totals will be 150%, across the board.

expect a great big post with all of 'em that goes over all of the vitamin-like proteins, as well.

it was a washington post article from relatively recently. and, yes - it's clear what the intent of the headline was, a reference to the ubiquitous 90s joke....

the fact is that "bob dole says..." is likely an immortal joke. give norm macdonald credit for it. they just ripped him apart, and historians will be making fun of him forever.

they tried mccain, they tried romney....both moderately competent candidates. both abject losers.

so, maybe they do run a moderate, competent candidate in 2024, but that candidate no doubt loses, paving the way for the return of crazytown in 2028.

great headline, whatever decade's it's from:

that could be 2015, 1995, 1975, 1955, 1935, 1915, 1895..

i'm sure bob dole isn't saying much nowa...

wait. bob dole's not dead? what?

bob dole says he ain't dead and he won't be quiet and he's going to kick newt's fucking ass yet, that sonofabitch.

i made an argument back in 2015 that the reason they were doing this was to stop the export of oil to china, which made sense at the time, when the transmountain expansion was much less likely to proceed than it is, now. that is something that has since changed - when i posted this in 2015, texas was the only way out. so, if you wanted to block exports to china, you cut the expansion of the line. nowadays, more oil is being shipped through vancouver, and that's set to go way, way up; as such, if you want to control the oil (or "save it for later"), you want to prevent it from going out through vancouver by rerouting it to texas, and perhaps storing it at cushing. as the infrastructure changes, the analysis changes with it. 

i had forgotten i posted this, but there's a consistency here, not a contradiction, you just have to understand that change. 

that said, i stepped away from this analysis over time and adopted the perception i posted previously, that obama's rejection of the line was essentially a political decision intended to prevent it from being an issue in the election, under the expectation that both candidates would support it, in the end. the military analysis remained fundamental, but the decision, as it came down, was political theatre, in nature. and, i'll let you find those posts, yourself.

(ok. after the state department decided to ok the line, obama finally kibboshed only in his last year of office. i thought it was in nov, 2016 but the internet says nov, 2015. it was absolute theatre, in a reality where both parties supported it and he knew it was coming...

i expect what you'll see tomorrow will be equally performative.

but, prove me wrong, joe. i dare ya.)

years ago. it was clinton that did the review of this that kept it.

not the epa. not the the energy secretary...

the state department.

there was a reason for that.

see, you have to understand what happens if they cancel keystone:

the transmountain pipeline is still being built. and, that oil will go out of vancouver, south of victoria and out to china.

canada does not have refinery capacities. that is the actual reason we send everything to texas - for refinement. should you cancel the keystone, that oil coming out of vancouver will not just be crude but will be the heaviest, dirtiest crude you could imagine. that's right past seattle....

so, what do you do?

well, let's be clear - i'm not arguing against cancelling keystone. we've already canceled a few, and intend to cancel them all. so, if you cancel keystone, the next step is to try to get transmountain canceled, too.

but, every political actor in place right now supports the second line, and that's going to be exceedingly difficult. and, look at what you're doing - you're giving the tar sands to china.

i'm expecting something tomorrow that kind of obscures the point. this is some combination of a pr trick and a concession to the sanders camp, to get something else in the budget. great - that's democracy working, after a long absence of it.

but, america considers it's control of the global oil supply to be a key strategic necessity, and i don't imagine in the end that the pentagon - yes. the pentagon. - will allow this, as it is simply not in their interests.

listen, navalny is a fascist, i have nothing good to say about him.

but, you don't think it's a coincidence that they arrested him the same week they impeached trump, do you?

america still has a role to play in the world as a role model, and it needs to be careful how it acts.

don't waste your life reading zizek, derrida, lacan, peterson, jung, freud or foucault.

go outside and play, instead.

i actually feel bad for these people that get lost in the writings of the zizek's of the world, thinking there's some deep point to find in there, if they can just understand it...

they're wasting their time.

they're wasting their lives.

so, i mean, i get shit sometimes for not keeping up with certain things, not reading certain texts...

listen - if i thought something was relevant or worthwhile, i'd catch up on it. if i don't bother with something, it's 'cause i don't think it's worth bothering with.

neither zizek nor peterson are substantive thinkers, neither are scientists and neither are meaningful psychiatrists.

they are both charlatans pushing pseudo-science that was debunked decades and decades and decades ago.

and, they're both very successful capitalists.

actual psychology is a branch of applied biology, not a branch of analytic (ed: or continental, if you want to be hegelian rather than kantian. i meant it in the kantian sense.) philosophy. that's the psychology i have time for.

and, what do i think about zizek?

zizek doesn't deny being a capitalist. again, i'm with chomsky - i find he just spews incoherent garbage, largely. but, the thing is that i realize he does it solely for profit.

so, there was the peterson-zizek debate, for example. and, i mean, who has time to listen to a debate between two different types of psycho-analysts in the 21st century? if the debate is freud v. derrida, my answer is "neither, they're both bullshit". but, if the debate is capitalism v communism, you're not getting it, in context - zizek is just taking your money and laughing at you, as he sells you a bunch of pseudo-science that nobody actually takes remotely seriously.

and, my perception of peterson is that he's so poorly regarded that he's not even worth reading - and i haven't read a word he's ever written. i don't have time for pseudo-scientific jungian psychobabble in the 21st century.

how standard is my position on foucault?

i think i'm just solving the puzzle, really, and you should pick up the pieces and run with them.

while this accusation - that foucault was a burkean conservative in disguise - is not original on my behalf in the sense of me being the first person to make it (i've posted links to essays where others have developed the point in much further detail, in the past, i'll let you try to find them), it is a deduction i came to independently. so, i'm not the first person to put this together.

in fact, if you read foucault directly, he admits he's just inverting burke's hierarchy. but, all the psycho-babble he attaches to the inversion just fades away immediately on any kind of cursory analysis, and you're no longer left with this surface inversion. any kind of analysis of anything he argued at all just leaves the burkean hierarchy in tact.

....which is what people tend to see immediately, when they read it at first. the foucauldian theory has this whole mechanism built in where you have to dismantle people's ability to think critically and rationally before they're able to "understand" that theory, which is standard in any religious cult. but, in context, that's the religion - it's just burkeanism, through this bizarre set of irrational filters that you have to be carefully brainwashed into.

what most people on the left will say is something like "foucault was unusual" or "foucault didn't fit in" or "foucault was unusual for a leftist". the realization that one of these things is not like the others is widespread, but the truth of it is really right in front of your face, you just don't want to deal with it.

we'll eventually figure this out, and then what? like, what happens when the fake left finally comes to terms with the fact that they're actually a bunch of reactionary, burkean conservatives that have almost no intellectual connection to marx at all? i don't know...

i know marx would've hated him too, though.

your great fake leftist hero thought the iranian revolution was a great victory on the left.

the guy was a fucking idiot.

beards are also largely a sexual compensation method, fwiw.

there's a list of them that men that have difficulty performing sexually tend to fall back towards in order to reassert their masculinity.

while i don't share chomsky's moral philosophy (i'm not a nihilist, and i'm not a relativist, but i don't place morality as having great importance. i don't reject it intellectually like the nihilists or relativists do, so much as i just don't think it matters, except, of course, when it does. so, there's an objective morality, but, most of the time, it should have little meaningful input on how you analyze situations, react to them or behave. other considerations besides objective morality are just more important.), i think he was essentially correct about his denunciation of foucault, who was really a totally worthless asshole of a person.

the most telling way to understand foucault is to look up his reaction to the iranian revolution. if you don't walk away from that convinced he was a burkean conservative, i don't know what to tell you.

my perception of foucault is that he was a burkean conservative reacting against the french revolution, and that you're all a bunch of idiots for getting tricked by him into reconstructing the traditional right and relabelling it to the left. this is what i mean when i talk about the "fake left", this foucauldian conservatism that's gotten conflated with leftism, when it shouldn't.

actually, i lean towards the hypothesis that men that are insistent on utilizing political power tend to have very small penises and are essentially compensating for their lack of sexual abilities.

i think freud is more useful than foucault in understanding power.

and, i'm pretty critical of freud.

yup.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/gopublic/hospital-patient-crawls-out-mental-illness-1.5871307

deathtokoalas

biden is more like reagan than trump is. we've gone from a caricature of reagan, back to the real thing. they said this in '08, too....and obama reacted by gratuitously quoting reagan and erecting a bipartisan myth around him as some kind of unifying patriarch. i wouldn't expect much different from biden.

the lincoln project could have, should have, been called the reagan project.

if neo-liberalism is fracturing, it's fracturing on the right, not in the centre.

Fun po-LICE

You seen Biden’s stimulus plan? $15 minimum wage, child tax credits, stopping the keystone pipeline $2000 checks. It’s a pretty good start for joe.

deathtokoalas

yeah, it's time to party like it's 1999, i guess.

Daniel Robinson

the future of the GOP is DeSantis. He’s a less demagogic / smarter version of Trump

deathtokoalas

again: i don't think the evidence suggests that the party is going to want to elect somebody more intelligent than trump, given how heavily it's bleeding to the democrats in the educated part of the base - and the fact that it 's actually picking up less educated minority voters, as it's losing more educated whites. the next incarnation of the republican electorate is going to be a peculiarly uneducated party, in terms of card-carrying members. so, that argument - as presented by people like hedges - is just not upheld by the numbers. the republicans have been consistently getting dumber for decades, and, if anything, that's likely set to accelerate. and, what that means is that people like desantis are likely to hit a brick wall when they try to run for higher office. i've picked out a few female candidates, but it's just because they're the dumbest ones in the list. that said, i also think that's something you're going to see accelerate, to the frustration of democrats - there's a certain kind of female voter that is pro-gun, anti-abortion and very religious, and you're going to see them take prominent roles, too. it's going to be a scary mix, sure, but "competent" or "intelligent" aren't likely going to be ways to describe it, i don't think. but, i mean, we'll have to see what happens, you can only get so far debating projections. desantis, though? no - he's likely to go over like the next jeb bush, if he tries.

they tried dole after hw bush, who was a joke, granted, but relatively moderate, in comparison. he got destroyed. they tried mccain and romney, both of whom would have been moderately competent. even hw bush himself was more competent than the bulk of them, and he lost after four years. no luck. the candidates that win have been the dumbest of the dumb. that's the direction this has been heading for a long time, and i see no reason at all to break it.

L.W. Paradis

$2000 checks, huh? Not if Larry Summers gets his way. Biden seen walking back already . . .

Fun po-LICE

This and the rest of the ftv channels biggest effort was trying to destroy the progressive movement. It’s dissapointing because Katie halper was so likeable but like many others unsubscribed! FTV slack 😞 pretty evil people over here.

deathtokoalas

i tend to click on recommended videos when i'm eating. i didn't come here out of any specific intention, or as a fan, or looking for something. it's just some kind of distraction while consuming fuel. if youtube suggested  something else, i'd click on that. but, from what i've seen of halper, she strikes me as a pretty conventional soft leftist that's rightfully mortified and somewhat traumatized by the state of the country that she lives in.

i would identify as a social anarchist, so i'm several rungs on the spectrum to the left of the progressive movement (which i consider to be conservative and reactionary) and tend to be exceedingly critical of it, from the left. as such, i don't see a lot of difference between an aoc and a joe biden and never really did, so i'm not that upset about calling biden a progressive, because i'd consider progressives to be right-wingers, anyways. you're really fighting over a very small piece of astroturf, here.

the $2000 stimulus checks should be seen as good economics by soft leftists, by which i mean people like paul krugman, which should be who is running the democrats as a centrist party. it's not radical, and it's kind of baffling that you can't get your center-left to support it.

Fun po-LICE

Very well said and understandable I’m definately older then you and fit in to what you would probably call center left or progressive not because that’s where I want to be I’m just used to Reagan, bush, bush, and now trump so I’m hopeful for the steps I think are possible under this administration as compared to the trickle down bull crap I’ve had to see all my life. 

deathtokoalas

well, i'd expect to be disappointed, then. like i said - biden is and for a very long time has been a better representation of reaganism than trump ever was

=====

deathtokoalas

ok, the election's over now, so can we stop pretending that these immigration policies were written by trump?

most of the things that are upsetting people are interpreted judicial precedent. and, it's an open question how responsible biden actually was for them in the first place.

Fun po-LICE

the zero tolerance policy that seperate kids from there parents never to be reunited again. No let’s not ever forget

deathtokoalas

well, the left should actually be in support of the "best interests of the child" policy. that's our policy, we wrote it. an a priori rejection of court-ordered separation is essentially the definition of conservatism, as it's rooted in the primacy of the family, which is what conservatism is all about. if you're not old enough, go back and research the elian gonzalez case, and observe how the spectrum has flipped over. what i actually want to see, now, is a depoliticization of the judicial process around child placements at the border, so that the judiciary is able to go back to adjudicating on what is in the best interests of the child without fear of political repercussions. and, that's the position that any left worth calling itself as such needs to be taking.

L.W. Paradis

In court, you begin with presumptions. Either you presume that parents have a constitutionally protected right to be parents to their children, and you have to prove that reuniting families is not what's best for the children, OR you presume that reuniting parents with the children who were taken from them is not (or not necessarily) what's best for the children, and you oblige the parents to prove that that they should have their children returned to them, because that's what's best for the children. Do you see why the latter is not a good idea?

 

deathtokoalas

well, your premise is flawed, but i actually think the first approach is worse than the second. i don't even think that american citizens have the constitutional right to parent their children; i would argue very explicitly that parents do not have rights over their children, but rather have obligations to provide for them, and that the court system needs to be designed to limit the so-called rights of parents over their children. as such, you failed to provide the correct burden of proof, here, because you're not approaching the issue from the perspective of the right party. as it's the children that have rights and not the parents, what the court needs to do is determine what's in their interests. the interests and viewpoints of the parents are really irrelevant, legally. so, the burden of proof is indeed on the state to demonstrate that reunification is not in the interests of the child, but it's not stemming from this idea that parents have rights, because parents don't actually have any rights, but rather from the idea that the state is the protector of the child and obligated to act in it's interests. further, it then absolutely follows that the parents need to prove the state wrong, but as it's the state that has the burden of proof, they're only obligated to prove the state wrong, rather than to prove their own case in a positive sense. so, while i actually would argue the second option is preferable to the first, i don't actually have to do that; the error you're making in assigning the burden of proof makes your framing misleading.

children are autonomous beings, not the property of their parents. the role of the legal system here must be to uphold their autonomy, and minimize their parents' authority. and, to me, that is the big, scary idea here - the idea that parents might one day have rights over their children. they don't, and they shouldn't, and the idea that they might is scary and backwards.

L.W. Paradis

This has nothing to do with children being "property" of parents. I'll add an ABA link to a line of cases that demostrate that parents most certainly DO have a constitutionally protected right to their relationship with their children. (Sometimes outside links are shadowed, being difficult to moderate.) That doesn't mean a person can't be deprived of that right. It means they cannot be arbitrarily deprived of it. They can't lose the right through, say, bad luck, or someone else's wrongdoing that they themselves couldn't foresee, much less prevent. 

Your personal political preferences should have no bearing on the rights of families who were deprived of their children without due process. Certainly the burden is on the state to prove that they are unfit parents before they can take their children, not on the parents to prove their innocence.

The basic problem is, you have no idea what you're talking about.

deathtokoalas

i have a law degree. do you have a law degree? i don't see your attachment, but i will reiterate that the idea of parental rights is a conservative/libertarian fantasy, and not actual law in any country in the anglosphere. the legal framework from the united nations on down solely upholds the rights of the child; those are the only rights that exist in international law, in constitutional law and in case law, as well.

L.W. Paradis

Yes, of course I do. I posted a link to the ABA summary of Supreme Court cases. I don't believe you don't know that parents have constitutionally protected rights to parent their children, or that you don't know how to look it up. Then you don't have a law degree.

ABA intro:  "The U.S. Supreme Court and federal court rulings highlighted below recognize parents’ constitutional rights to the care, custody, and control of their children. See Guggenheim’s chapter for analysis of these and other cases, as well as an overview of child protection laws and how they affect parental rights."

I suppose the link was shadowed; they are often shadowed, being hard to monitor. It's a shame, but understandable. Since when doesn't a lawyer know how to find the law?

 

They really should allow links to real information. There is far too much misinformation and outright fabrication.

deathtokoalas

again - you don't seem to understand the burden of proof. you're making an (exceedingly obscure) legal argument, and that means you need to get the information to me.

i flipped through the cases presented, and none of them say anything about the rights of parents over their children, for good reason - such things only exist in the minds of conservatives, not in any sort of actual legal system. every single one of those cases is about the rights of children, and the actual law being cited in every case is about the rights of children. 

you may hear people speak colloquially about "the rights of parents", but there's no actual law underlying any of it, and it really shouldn't be done. that page shouldn't exist.

again: the idea of parental rights does not exist in reality at any layer of law. the right law to apply here is international law, not constitutional law, because you're dealing with people that are not citizens of the united states. there are no parental rights in international law, there is no bill of rights that applies to parents and there is no body of case law that develops the rights of parents. it is simply not a real legal concept in the real world - it only exists on fox news.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_Rights_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

there should be a link posted above, let me know if you can't see it.

now, why do you need an amendment like that, as proposed by far-right conservatives?

the answer is that there is no law of the sort.

the next comment will be an article from the late 90s, lamenting the fact that parental rights do not exist in law and arguing for legislation to remedy the problem. they point to "natural law" as the source for parental rights, a vague concept that i'd reject on it's face as a backdoor for ecclesiastical law. and, that's really what they've got, here - ecclesiastical law. my takeaway from the article is that they're admitting that parents have no rights under the law...

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/nov97/vol55/num03/Why-Parental-Rights-Laws-Are-Necessary.aspx

fwiw, i would strongly support any movement in america to ratify the convention on the rights of the child. that''s long, long overdue.

L.W. Paradis

No, this is wrong. There is nothing obscure about it. It is Supreme Court precedent, based on the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. FYI, it was poor and minority parents, and parents who were LGBT, or disabled, or in "racially mixed" marriages, who had the most problems with the state asserting control over their children and depriving them of their rights. Conservatives were generally fine with that, just like they shed few tears for the Latin American refugees who had their children wrested from them.

 

You're a friggin liar. And trying to pass it off as other people being the liars by floating every dirty talking point you can think of. "Fox News," my arse.

From the ABA link to actual cases, which form current precedent:  "The U.S. Supreme Court and federal court rulings highlighted below recognize parents’ constitutional rights to the care, custody, and control of their children."

From a PBS article -- You don't have to be a citizen to possess 5th and 14th Amendment rights:

"What rights do undocumented immigrants have to a court hearing, to an attorney or to free speech? What rights do their children have to education?

How those rights play out in practice is more complex.

To answer those questions, we must start with a more basic question– does the U.S. Constitution apply to undocumented immigrants?

“Yes, without question,” said Cristina Rodriguez, a professor at Yale Law School. “Most of the provisions of the Constitution apply on the basis of personhood and jurisdiction in the United States.”

Many parts of the Constitution use the term “people” or “person” rather than “citizen.” Rodriguez said those laws apply to everyone physically on U.S. soil, whether or not they are a citizen."

N. B. Links are shadowed, as already noted. Plenty of information here, for anyone actually interested in finding the material.

You don't have a "property" interest in your children, or in anyone else. 

You have a LIBERTY interest in your parental RELATIONSHIP with your children.

You've never been to any American law school.

deathtokoalas

while it is true that non-citizens can claim constitutional rights under certain scenarios where holes in the law appear, the jurisdiction of international law always take precedent in the case of a conflict. it's like state v federal law - they both apply, but one will take precedent depending on the scenario. it's not a rights discourse, it's a jurisdictional question. there's actually a very specialized form of international law that applies to migrants and that is what courts, in context, need to utilize. this is why the un declaration - which the united states has not ratified - is the actual basis of the law, in context - not this imaginary, right-wing fantasy of "parental rights".

regarding that aba post, it's just a baffling thing to see, really. arguing that roe v wade upholds parental rights, for example, is borderline comical. i initially said that every single one of those cases upholds the rights of the children and not the parents (the book is even about the rights of the child, not about parental rights), but roughly half of them don't have anything to do with a meaningful concept of parental rights at all.

it is true that the court will generally choose to avoid interfering as much as possible, but that's not about parents, that's just a basic speech issue. not one of those cases erected any sort of enforceable precedent regarding any kind of coherent concept of parental rights at all.

it doesn't exist; it's a fantasy on the far right.

i have a sociology of law degree from a canadian university, and i've been clear that the feeling is mutual - you clearly don't understand what you're posting or talking about, remotely. you're just regurgitating far right republican talking points. that should be obvious to anybody that can read.

anyways, you can't prove a negative, so i have a hard case to make in proving to you that parental rights don't exist in any concept of the law. that's why i needed you to post the links for me, to see what you're citing; i can debunk something if you post it, but i've made a sweeping statement, and it's almost impossible to demonstrate rigorously. i insist that it's true, though. the articles i posted - where pro parental rights advocates on the far right admit that the law they want doesn't exist - is about as good as i can do. if such a positive rights law existed, they wouldn't insist on their activism, or argue for an amendment. and, if meaningful case law existed, you'd be able to find it for me. you can't because it's not out there...

L.W. Paradis

I did post it. It was apparently shadowed, as links usually are. You can easily find it by using a SEARCH engine, plugging in "ABA," and an excerpt of the verbatim quote I provided.

Oh I get it now.

You are not a lawyer, and you can't even understand case blurbs. Great. STOP spreading misinformation. Enough is enough. If you don't like the right wing, WHY DO YOU IMITATE THEM, to the hilt? That is Trumpian. We're supposed to be rid of all that in a matter of hours, and it won't be soon enough.

Meyer v. Nebraska; Pierce v. Society of Sisters; Troxel v. Granville; Stanley v. Illinois; Lassiter v. Dept. Of Social Services; Santosky v. Kramer -- all six are US Supreme Court cases. 

At the federal appellate level:

"Duchesne v. Sugarman, 566 F.2d 817, 825 (2d Cir. 1977). The Second Circuit held '[T]he right of the family to remain together without the coercive interference of the awesome power of the state . . .encompasses the reciprocal rights of both parent and child.” The court explained that children have the constitutional right to avoid dislocat[ion] from the emotional attachments that derive from the intimacy of daily association with the parent.'"

None of this is "obscure" to an actual lawyer. Or even to reasonably knowledgeable lay people. Suppose your teen wants to go live with a millionaire who can send them to art school and give them violin lessons? Can they get a new, rich parent? It is in their "best interests," no? Suppose the unmarried mother of a toddler dies? Will the child be adopted out, with no notice to the father or attempt to reach him? Laughable

What does this say?

Lassiter v. Dep’t of Soc. Servs., 452 U.S. 18 (1981). The Court held parents have a due process right to a fundamentally fair procedure that may require the appointment of counsel.

Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745 (1982). The Court declared unconstitutional a New York statute that authorized termination of parental rights based on a preponderance of the evidence. Santosky is the first Supreme Court case to hold that even after parents are found unfit in a contested court proceeding, they retain constitutionally protected parental rights.

How about this?

"Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57 (2000). The Court declared unconstitutional a Washington statute that authorized judges to order parents to permit more visitation between children and their grandparents than the parents desired."

Non-citizens on American soil have constitutional rights wherever the law speaks of "persons," without specifying "citizens." (That's a right-wing talking point?)

Why did you assert you had a law degree? You have a sociology degree. That doesn't let you practice law.

deathtokoalas

ok, i signed in and out and realized my links aren't appearing. i asked you to tell me if you could see my links or not and the fact that you didn't indicates that you're really not interested in learning why you're wrong, here. but, before this continues, i need to find a way to get my sources posted and correct the discourse as it exists, so people reading this understand why you're wrong. what i did worked previously, but it got filtered this time. so, let me experiment with ways to get this out, first. i'm going to try to post a link in the next comment, sign out, etc, until it works. and, we'll get back to this when i can figure out how to post sources.

(...)

wow, the filters have really become very thick. it won't even let you post DOT instead of. ok. ummm...

the first site was the "Parental Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution" wikipedia site. can i even post this post or will it filter out the word "wikipedia"? this is why i stopped posting to youtube, the censorship is just outrageous. you can't have a discourse here anymore, it's a waste of time.

(...)

so, i was able to add a reference to the first link. the second link i tried to post was an article written in the 90s from a right-wing perspective, lamenting the fact that parental rights do not exist in law and arguing for legislation to remedy the problem. they point to "natural law" as the source for parental rights, a vague concept that i'd reject on it's face as a backdoor for ecclesiastical law. and, that's really what they've got, here - ecclesiastical law. my takeaway from the article is that they're admitting that parents have no rights under the law...

you can find that link by searching for ""why parental rights laws are necessary"" and going to the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ascd) link. i'll try to edit that in place, as well.

(...)

ok, i was able to update the second link as well. the discourse is now readable. i'll have to go back and fix other threads, too, now that i know that trick doesn't work anymore. please take the time to read those two articles. now, i will need to address your points, but i'll start by pointing out that a sociology of law degree is considered an undergraduate law degree. further, i didn't tell you i was a practicing lawyer, or that i went to law school, what i told you was that i have a law degree - and that is true. i also have undergraduate degrees in mathematics and computer science. but, i'll go back to debunking you, now.

so, i read what you posted and, again, nothing you've posted says anything about the rights of parents. what every single thing that you've posted talks about is the rights of children. now, if you're sneaky, you can spin a ruling about the rights of children around to be about the rights of parents, but it doesn't make it enforceable precedent - and there is no enforceable precedent about the rights of parents in anything you've posted at all, despite your claims that there is.

and, yes, your teen has the right to go live with a millionaire if it wants, and you have no legal say in the matter.

let's take a step back, here...

what are the rights of children? they're listed in the declaration, which is the correct body of law to cite for migrants, not american legal jurisprudence. it's not a question of whether the kids are "covered" under the constitution like it's an insurance plan (americans love their insurance, i guess) but a question of a conflict of law, and what the right law to apply in context is. and, you're just flat out wrong. but, let's put that aside because the rights of children should be universal, anyways. so, is it in the child's interests to be separated from their parents? usually not, no. insisting that the legal question is strictly related to the interests of the child - and it is - doesn't give the state a freehand to arbitrarily do what it wants. this is the point you're not understanding - when the court decides that families shouldn't be broken up arbitrarily, it's doing so with the intent to uphold the rights of the child, not the rights of the parent, even if it uses right-wing language that stems from ecclesiastical/natural law about families and whatnot. one of those rights of the child is the idea that they shouldn't be taken away from their parents, unless some other right overpowers it. 

not opposing family separation a priori doesn't mean supporting it as a general rule, it means realizing that it's a necessary useful tool to uphold the rights of the child, when required to do so - and that parents have little, if any, legal say in the matter.

so, that's what you're seeing in these cases you've posted:

1) some of them are just about free speech or free association. the idea that the state can't mandate your kids to spend time with their grandparents goes well beyond some imaginary idea of parental rights. you can't force people to hang out with each other, that's a freedom of association type concern, not a parental rights concern.

2) some of them are about the rights of the child to not be separated from their family. that is the only legal issue at hand, here.

3) some of them (like roe v wade) aren't relevant in context at all.

the aba should take that page down, it's misleading.

i'm not going to question this person's credentials, but i will point to them as an example of why credentials are less important than some people claim they are. this person is not a good lawyer and has likely lost most of the cases they've represented. and, there's lots of fully credentialed lawyers out there that couldn't win a case in clown court. as a self-represented litigant with an undergraduate degree in law, i've defeated practicing lawyers on more than one occasion. be careful with these people - they're professional liars.

and, i'd suggest googling the santosky case, which is about the state's burden of proof in child separation cases, not about parental rights. what evidence does the state need to show before it places a child in custody? that's an important legal question, certainly, if you're concerned about the wellbeing of the child. but, it says nothing at all about the rights of parents.

if you want me to continue responding, what i need you to do is point me to the source of positive, manmade law that you're deriving these imaginary parental rights from. case law doesn't erect rights, even if judges use politicized language from time to time, so case law cannot be the source of a right. and natural law is make believe nonsense. so, are you citing a united nations declaration? a specific clause in the constitution? the bible? what is the source of your claimed right, here? until you can point me to this, you haven't proven your point, you've just posted confused nonsense.

if you google "The Origin of Parental Rights - Penn State Law eLibrary" (https://elibrary.law.psu.edu/fac_works/215/) you should find an article by d. purvis at the penn state law elibrary that is quite illuminating and gets to the point about the natural law conception of parental rights being derived from concepts of property rights, and even explains how this imaginary conception of parental rights has changed along with how we understand property. can you present me with an argument that frames the situation differently, and presents some other source of parental rights as a manmade concept?

but, let's have a moment of reflection, here - what you're calling "parental rights", when separated from the property rights genealogy, are really better called "parental responsibilities", aren't they? and, so, in addition to being fundamentally rooted in the rights of the child, and/or clarifying the proper role of evidence in child custody proceedings, the thing that these cases you're citing is really upholding is the obligations of parents, isn't it?

L.W. Paradis

OKAY, FOLKS. This is the result of a modern "education." Friends don't let friends think twisted.

This one thinks a UN charter is the law in the US, and the formindable Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution (the third section of which can be used to prevent anyone fomenting insurrection from ever holding federal office again) is not. And that Wikipedia, not the Supreme Court and the federal courts is American law. 

Only a very special person can think this.

 

So -- you're going to quote some moron who is trying to rile up a mob as your "proof?" No. You need SUPREME COURT precedent. Supreme Court precedent IS constitutional law. 

People lie about the Constitution all the time. They make money doing it, too.  I've heard the Bill of Rights blamed for our "inability" to jail pedophiles. This was in the previous century, long before Orange Caligula came on the political scene.

What does this say?

Lassiter v. Dep’t of Soc. Servs., 452 U.S. 18 (1981). The Court held parents have a due process right to a fundamentally fair procedure that may require the appointment of counsel.

Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745 (1982). The Court declared unconstitutional a New York statute that authorized termination of parental rights based on a preponderance of the evidence. Santosky is the first Supreme Court case to hold that even after parents are found unfit in a contested court proceeding, they retain constitutionally protected parental rights.

deathtokoalas

well, everybody has the right to due process and the right to counsel, too. that has nothing to do with parental rights. but, i see you're trying to change the topic, because you can't answer the question. i'll wait. again - what i want is the source of your imaginary parental rights in positive legislative law, not some politicized judicial rulings.

again, though - i'd advise googling and actually reading lassiter. the case is about a woman that was on trial for murdering one of her other children via neglect, and whether or not the state provided due process in taking away the one she didn't kill. not only is due process a procedural question that everybody needs access to, but the precise case at hand is....just read it. and, it demonstrates the point - this is the best that conservative activists can do, on this point.

there's really no meaningful canon of applicable law, here. you'd do well to ratify the convention and put it in force.

i'll have to refresh to see if there are recent posts, but, as an aside, my confidence that i'm right here stems not from any specific understanding of american case law (in application, i studied mostly canadian constitutional and legislative law, with a focus on indigenous law, and some dabbling in international law), but because i took a broader approach to these kind of foundational questions. i mean, your critique is that i'm not a lawyer, but what are we debating, here? we're arguing whether an unwritten constitutional principle actually exists or not. you claim it's in the case law, and i claim it's just only in the minds of conservatives - like a lot of things are, legally. so, this is a debate that requires a deeper grounding in the historical basis of the law, which makes a degree in the sociology of law arguably a more appropriate academic background than a certification from the bar.

i studied the intersection of philosophy & law, which is what we need here. you just studied precedent, without the context required to really understand it. and, that's exactly what we're seeing in the discourse.

L.W. Paradis

Does the fact that the Equal Rights Amendment was never adopted mean women lack rights under the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 14th Amendments?

A "parental rights amendment" is a stunt. In the US, parents can even homeschool and refuse vaccination for their kids, and raise them in pretty much any religion. I suppose snake handlers might have to watch out, but Amish certainly don't, despite their horrendous record in raising happy, thriving children.

I don't have a right to due process if a private employer lays me off due to the pandemic. That's a business decision. I don't have a due process right to counsel in a civil case. I have a right to HIRE a lawyer if I can pay for one. 

The cases I cited explain the SCOPE of these rights in light of the fact that parents have a constitutionally protected LIBERTY interest in parenting their children, the latter having been articulated in cases that are a century old. And no, your teenager cannot go get adopted by a millionaire without parental consent. Idiocy.

deathtokoalas

but, if you look at the precedents for homeschooling and vaccination, they explicitly reject the argument that parents have rights over their children, and instead uphold the separation of church and state. when secularists have tried to make the same argument, they've failed. again - the court might use the language of the right in it's rulings,  but if you look at them carefully and compare them to other rulings, it's clear that these cases are not about the rights of parents, but rather about the rights of people to adhere to their religions without state intervention. and, i might dissent somewhat, but i'll at least accept the point, especially in the united states.

the era issue is actually relevant in context, because if you actually read the anthony case, the ruling is that there was never any law erected to deny women from voting - it was merely a cultural convention that came from ecclesiastical law. so, the amendments to the constitution that followed were technically unnecessary, but added to remind people that women always had the right to vote, in the first place. what followed later was a general liberalization of voting rights that was again mostly about property (and taxation). the precedent here aligns with my argument, not yours; the ecclesiastical conventions, both patriarchal in source, have little worth in the actual legal system, whether brought in to uphold the dominance of parents or the submission of women.

there was a post there where i acknowledged that americans, unlike everybody else in the developed world, don't have the absolute right to counsel in a criminal case, which is what the case you cited was. canadians certainly have the absolute right to state-appointed counsel (if they're deemed unable to afford it) in a criminal case. it seems to have been removed, likely due to the tone, but is likely in your email. this is why i don't post to youtube anymore. i apologized for that mistake. i also suggested that you would really do yourself some good, as a country, if you were to ratify and implement the declaration on the rights of the child.

now, you claim a teenager can't go get adopted without consent, but you're wrong.

1) the millionaire can petition the court for custody, and it's up to the court to make the choice.

2) the child has agency in context.

3) ultimately, a teenager will do what it wants, not what it's told.

ultimately, what do you suggest the court does if a teenager runs away and refuses to go home? do you think they should be arrested and put under house arrest? no court will do that.

L.W. Paradis

"Due process" exists for one reason only: to protect a person from being deprived of their SUBSTANTIVE rights. As it turns out, any notion that parents "need" a constitutional amendment to enshrine their (otherwise-nonexistent) rights is an ULTRA RIGHT WING talking point! The notion that the Constitution is to be treated like code law or something (or that the UN controls us) are likewise ultra right wing notions.  Oh the irony. You will now be blocked.

Not terribly sorry to see empire breaking down. Because that's what you are a symptom of. These conversations never take place in my other languages, only in English. Figures. Keep it up.

deathtokoalas

lol. i seem to have broke his brain. these responses are just incoherent...

listen, it's clear enough what the truth is - he can't cite a source of positive law for "parental rights" because there isn't one, it's just a part of this package of make believe legal ideas that conservatives like to float around to uphold religious & patriarchal institutions like the family. you'd might as well cite the 5th commandment, 'cause that's all you've really got.

the leftwing position here is that children are autonomous individuals that have inalienable rights and parents do not, they only have responsibilities to uphold the rights of their children. this may or may not extend to ratifying the convention and implementing it, something i support as long overdue. the role of the courts is strictly to uphold the rights of the child.

the rightwing position is that parents have rights that stem from ecclesiastical law (although they might cite natural law via some dodgy mechanism of case law that doesn't add up) and feudal concepts of property rights. the rights of children, insofar as they exist, are only to be interpreted relative to the rights of their parents, within the religious/patriarchal framework of the family and the religious community around it. the role of the courts is strictly to enforce the rights of the parents.

in practice, the former position exists more or less uniquely in the law, even if the language of the latter position is sometimes adopted to uphold the substance of the former. so, we may sometimes speak of the rights of parents in ways that really reduce to their responsibilities. you'd have to ask the judges why they do that - i think they shouldn't.

gah, it's raining today.

tomorrow.

your kids will be prosecuted for denying the existence of the cabal.

let me state these words of wisdom, though, from internet years past:

there is no cabal.

something else to wonder about - will historians debate whether qanon and anonymous were the same movement?

false cognate or genealogical relationship?

it's actually not clear, even right now.

"this is crazy. no sane person could believe this."

the point is just that that's the rational reaction to any religion, in it's initial stages. they're all full of completely batshit nonsense that no sane person could ever take seriously. there's not a word in any of these religious texts that's worth taking seriously, for the shortest second.

and, it's how people react to religions, until they have millions of followers, and you have to accommodate their absurdity so as to not "offend" them.

the last pagans were fully cognizant of the fact that these christians were a bunch of inbred retards, too.

unfortunately, the christians burned most of their writings. but, we know they existed.

probably the foremost intellectual of the day, porphyry, wrote a book entitled against the christians, but it was burned and lost.

so, is qanon all because the internet and social media is converting us into a bunch of inbred retards?

the irony is that this is a position firmly rooted in historical ignorance. 

so, yes - this is a peculiar expression of abject human stupidity. no doubt. but, it's just a function of the technology, really. let's take a look at what existed with previous types of technology, and convince ourselves that this is not a novel phenomenon.

the protocols of the elders of zion & the book of mormon

you might look at these morons and desperately grapple with how the fuck anybody can take this ridiculousness seriously. but, what existed to spread nonsense and disinformation before social media? the answer is the printing press, and these are two great examples of fraudulent texts that only an idiot could take seriously, and that generated millions of followers. look them up. is what is written in the book of mormon any less ridiculous than qanon, when analyzed carefully? further, the protocols was still widely cited decades after it was exposed as fraudulent, and generated very scary mass movements. maybe, it's not really the technology, then?

the bible, the koran

and, what existed before the printing press? you had various slowly developing advances on hand-reproduced texts, which would often end up producing errors that were difficult to identify or undo. when reproducing plato or aristotle, those errors could lead to widespread confusion - not unlike what you see with social media, just at a much slower rate. but, let's look at these religious texts and ask ourselves if they're any less ridiculous than qanon, or if their followers are any less crazy.

if somebody came to you and said "i just got back from 40 days in death valley, where i talked to satan for weeks. he tempted me, and he tempted me, and he tempted me, but i was strong, and emerged convinced of the need to save the world from evil. join me.", you'd quickly deduce they're on drugs. but, how is that fundamentally different than being convinced that there's some evil group of pedophiles operating out of the back of a pizza joint? do you see the commonalities, here?

now, we could flip this over - no force in history is responsible for more death and destruction than christianity, so if you see something of early christians in these people, maybe it's reason to want to crack down on them. but, that never works.

and, don't be surprised if there's a billion qanon followers in 500 years, who speak of their persecution under the american emperor as a fundamental part of their origin myth.

mirrors. how do they work?

there's a category of arrogant british liberals that includes oscar wilde and perhaps ended with the catastrophic americanization of christopher hitchens (who is, of course, completely dead). if somebody has walked into that void left open by the conversion of the young hitchens into a post-truth existence, i don't know who they are. but, that's the lineage of thought.

what that means is that i spend a lot of time listening to people i can barely stand, because at least i don't fucking despise them - at least i partially agree with them.

to be clear: i am not aware of a living philosopher or public speaker that i would agree with on more than half of their statements. if you sort through this, i'm pretty critical of almost everybody. if you can get to 30-40% agreement, you're doing unusually well.

but, if such a public speaker were to exist, they would be more along the lines of a dawkins-type character, but with a stronger embrace of stochastics and a stronger embrace of kropotkin. i think dawkins is a liberal in a hurry, but i'd hurry him up even more.

don't pretend otherwise, please.

listen, those western bastards can freeze in the dark, for all i care.

it would be great news, but you can imagine i'm pretty skeptical.

if they cancel this pipeline, they're basically handing the oil - and canada - to china. we want to keep it in the ground, sure. but it's not that easy; there has to be some agreement with the chinese. otherwise, it's not geostragetically rational.

i'd welcome it, though.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/biden-keystone-xl-1.5877038

so, what i needed to understand were the timelines the tribunal wants to put in place.

the simplified rules, here, mean there's only three:

- 21 days to file a response

then, i wait for the hearing date.

- 21 days after that, i need to provide a document list and disclose to the other parties

- 45 days before the hearing, i need to file everything in the document list

that's really all there is in these simplified rules. 

so, i've got the foia's coming, and for now should simply wait it out. that's three full weeks from friday....

i was able to get enough pills for the week from a pharmacy around the block, and have located enough for the rest of the month at a pharmacy that is walkable from here. if i get all of the running around i need to do done first, i can settle down and spend a few days on it. i think that's a better idea than rushing through it when i'm still detoxing, which i currently am.

so, for the night, i'm going to make some eggs and take a shower, and get back to the amino acids for a few hours, then try to get as much running around done tomorrow as is possible.

the increases in the cost of living in the years leading up to the pandemic were disastrous for artists in this country, and may be part of the reason why the canadian art scene caved in almost as soon as the liberals were elected in 2015. past liberal governments have actually been relatively good about funding the arts, but this is the first fully neo-liberal incarnation of the party, and all they care about is maximizing returns for investors and rentiers - including landlords.

but, if we go back to the 00s, it was actually relatively easy to live in a nice spot in downtown ottawa and only work 20 hours a week - so long as you didn't waste money on things like tv, phones, cars, etc. in fact, i even smoked at the time, and was able to make regular payments on my loan....working 20 hours a week in a call centre.

i know that the world around me was racking up debt and climbing over each other to get ahead, but you could live a low-key socialist existence back then, if you truly wanted to.

that's changed.