if i may...

if you go far enough back - so, the period of david & solomon that chomsky briefly mentioned, or even further back to moses - what the archaeology states is that the region was a kind of backwater, to the point that real world archaeologists largely write off anything before the captivity - or a few generations before it. it's then widely understood that the area changed dramatically under the persians...

so, i thought chomsky was actually referencing the kurdish theory, and that's what the dna actually says - that the bulk of world jews today (outside of the few that stayed in israel) are genetically closer to kurds than they are to palestinians, a truth that seems to have more to do with the persian colonization, which is the event that truly changed the region. before persia, the region seems to have been ethnically and culturally phoenecian, rather than arab or jewish. what you call judaism then develops under very, very heavy iranian influence. it was under this period that the population adopted the language of aramaic. so, the language you speak of was not there, except in the temples.

there was then a period of greek hegemony, where the population absorbed grecian moral ideas, which were foundational to the construction of rabbinic judaism. the romans absorbed this, and then destroyed it. there was some jewish migration out of the region both before and after these events, and how much of it has to do with it isn't really clear. chomsky's family history is probably not entirely bunk - he's probably got some rabbinic ancestry somewhere along the way, but it would have intermarried with the local turkic and slavic groups. and, then we have yiddish. and there was spain...where neo-carthaginian patterns of migration were established, and they came full circle. everywhere they went, jews intermarried and absorbed the local gene pool.

but, most of the jews stayed put - and converted to islam. for that reason, chomsky is right: the real descendants of the historical hebrews are actually the palestinians, who adopted the identity of a greek tribe named the philistines under romanization, and then arabization. looking for jews scattered across the earth is as useful as looking for carthaginians - they're largely gone.

so, to address this guy's point about the jews being indigenous, it's not that he's wrong so much as he's confused - if you do the archaeology, what you see is how israel became arabized. that's the lesson to learn from that task - that one layer begets another. and, that the past is right in front of you.

to be clear: the karen made a horrible, bigoted transphobic statement and got the prosecutor to scream it in court. if i could get that statement, it would prove my case beyond a doubt.

but, it was removed from the transcript, and removed from the audio, somehow.

and, now the cops are telling me i can't have it - because it would be releasing evidence that could incriminate her. i need to get it via court order.

so, that's actually some progress, even if i can't get it.

so, if this thing got scrubbed, you have to wonder if it might have even gotten scrubbed by the crown, itself. 'cause, i mean...it's absurd...

it was an embarrassing moment for me, sure - but it was more embarrassing for her. or, at least, it should have been...

you could hear the air go out of the room. everybody was appalled at what they witnessed...

this wasn't some ignorant fundamentalist bigot on the street in idaho.

this was a prosecutor working for the crown, in canada.

that wasn't actually what i filed the foia for, though.

what i was actually looking for - and got - was a statement that the email address ryanmyon@gmail.com belonged to her - which contradicts the statement she made to the tribunal, that she wouldn't be representing ryan myon.

just to update on the "you're not welcome here" fiasco.

in a fit of ridiculous transphobia, the crown prosecutor (a muslim woman) made a dramatic show of pointing at me and screaming, at the top of her lungs: "your application for housing is illegitimate, and YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE!!!!".

...which made everybody in the court room kind of gasp. it was like something you'd expect to see in saudi arabia.

while her dramatic attempt to other me as an unwelcome queer failed horribly, it also seems to have been completely scrubbed. it didn't appear in the transcript (which cost me $150), and it didn't appear in the audio, which i got via court order. it was blacked out in disclosure. and, the foia request i got denied it to me under the argument that it might be used against her.

no, really, that's the argument - we can't disclose this, because it might be used against her in a case against her. i have to get it via court order...

so, i sent in a court order. and, even if the justice doesn't want to overrule the cops, it sure makes her look bad to refuse disclosure under what amounts to some kind of abstract 5th.

so, it didn't show up, but there's no comments on that video over the last three months, either.

it looks like i'm shadow banned, but it might be more like that the college has it set to approve comments, and they're a little slow about it.

i'm going to cease from getting upset for the moment.

i got my package for the karen case in on thursday, and i got a form 10 out this morning. they gave me what i was looking for, but they also gave me an opening regarding the "you're not welcome here" fiasco, which, if i could get a record of, would help me dramatically.

the way they did it sort of helps, though, because it makes it look like they're protecting her by refusing to release incriminating evidence - which is absolutely true.

i am getting fed up with the delays, though. if i don't get something soon, i'm going to have to ask the divisional court to pull it...

....as soon as they re-open.

on second thought, the only shadow ban up to now is that parenti comment. 

or maybe that's the first one.

or maybe they undid it when i said it...

i have been systematically shut down from youtube in the past, because my discourses go viral, and they're deeply subversive - and i get it.

i'm even going to try to repost on the parenti video.

they've got me shadow-banned on youtube again - they're afraid of me engaging in discourse, and the consequences of me winning arguments in public. so, i can't post because they don't want the process of me winning debates to take place. if you flip through the lengthy discussions through here, the ones where i make my opponents look like idiots - that's what they don't want to exist.

so, i'll need to do some transferring and backposting back to here.

mar 17th is up here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pQ2-8EV5YwNAeI_d5HRA480_K-bkpSRa/view?usp=sharing

so, i've got up to the end of mar 16th up...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pQ2-8EV5YwNAeI_d5HRA480_K-bkpSRa/view?usp=sharing

i just jumped past 30,000 words with this thing.

but, when they gave cuba fake independence, was it not because they didn't want to deal with the dependency? imperialism is hierarchical, but it's not hobbesian - the hegemon isn't a leviathan, it's defined by it's decadence and laziness, at the top of the class hierarchy. it's not there to colonize, it's just there to extract - and that's the difference between the romans and the greeks, isn't it? history repeats itself: if the brits were neo-grecian colonists, america is a neo-roman imperialist.

just another point, though - nowadays, they call neo-imperialism something else: neo-liberalism. because neo-liberalism is actually neo-mercantilism...

yeah, i'm confident that my teeth are getting better.

i'm just as confident that my gums are not.

i need to call the fancy dentist on monday...

so, there's another minor update, here. it's time to stop to eat.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pQ2-8EV5YwNAeI_d5HRA480_K-bkpSRa/view?usp=sharing

some of the threads in thought may not come off as important or relevant at first, but all i can say is to wait for the narrative to develop.

i'd say every single one of these things is true about me.

https://introvertdear.com/news/intp-personality-signs/

i'm an intp.

firmly.

if you're curious.

but, like i say, i can't completely wall myself off.

i need some way to connect with reality.

and, is the guitar dead?

i don't really care - i do it because i love it, not because it's profitable.

if you're looking for somebody that cares about fashions and trends, you're in the wrong place.

i took blues lessons when i was a kid from a guitarist in ottawa named robert farrell. he was a kind of an srv knockoff, although he was also a huge mark knopfler fan.

i briefly took classical lessons not long after that. it was just an introduction - i just wanted a foundation, so i could pick a classical up and play it, and so i could create on it and transfer the knowledge back.

and, of course, i grew up listening to guitarists like billy corgan, lee ranaldo and kim thayil.

so, what you're hearing there is fundamentally classical guitar music, via a blues filter - and presented as alternative rock.

fwiw, here are some videos of me playing guitar, the first in ottawa and the second in windsor, if you somehow doubt i did or do, for some stupid childish reason:

but, i'm convinced i'm allergic to something, and i need to figure it out before it does more than force me to violently shit it out.

i got more sleep tonight than i have in quite a while, and it was partly as a reaction to the pasta bowl, again - the same reaction. at least i'm pretty sure now that the reaction is real, and it wasn't a virus...

i'm experiencing some mild beeturia, as well. it's not as bad as before. so, is it the beets? it seems to be something reacting with the beets...

so, i'm going to need to rip it apart and rebuild it back up piece by piece, again.

last time, it seemed to be the sunflower seeds....and then wasn't. if i'm to jump to conclusions, i think it might be that these seeds don't last so long in the cupboard, and i should buy them in smaller amounts. so, if i reduce it down to the seeds again, the right conclusion seems to be that they're rancid.

but, why do the seeds create these problems when consumed in the pasta bowl and not in the fruit bowl?

i'll have to sit down and figure it out.

it's also a part of the reason i go to so many concerts, or did back when i could; as an artist, i needed to maintain a connection to what was happening around me, so as to not become entirely divorced from reality. it's this danger that people working in the space that i work in come up against, this constant threat we're all up against of losing touch with reality entirely....

listen.

i like to read. i think that's obvious. but, reading is time consuming, and sitting down and reading something means you don't have time to do something else. i spend the bulk of my time creating media rather than consuming it...

and, you can't multitask; you can't read and write at the same time. or, you can't do that substantively - not unless you're just writing about what you're reading. but, then you're a critic and not an artist. and, i sort of envy the critic in a sense, and become one in various spurts, but i fundamentally want to create art, not consume it.

i remember reading an interview with michael gira where he explained how difficult it was to listen to music, when he spent all his time and energy thinking about making it - and yet concluding there was a contradiction in it, because it strips out the influences around you and kind of keeps you isolated from reality. he presented a multitasking compromise/solution - he listened to music on the tour bus.

i would rather get my information from the written medium, but the multitasking around being an artist provide for minimal opportunities, and i don't want to cut into the time i need to work on my projects with reading somebody else's thoughts. my compromised multitasking solution is consequently to watch lectures when i'm eating. that keeps me absorbing information, while my activities are focused on writing - which is what i'm primarily doing now and will be until i get through these projects directly in front of me. i don't expect to create much music in this basement; the drug-addled environment simply isn't conducive to creative thought, i really need to get out to a more stable studio space.

are lectures as good as books? no. but, they're the second best thing...

that's why it's so important that i ensure i'm getting information from good sources when i am eating, and why i can't be wasting my time with specious garbage.

so, i hit my posting limit for the day and am going to take a nap before i make some pasta, but there's a few more pages added here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pQ2-8EV5YwNAeI_d5HRA480_K-bkpSRa/view?usp=sharing

as you can see, i'm really just getting started. that's an 8.5x11 sized 53 pages, at 11 pt font and minimal spacing - it's already ~150 pages, if formatted for a novel type affair. and, i'm only halfway through last march...

it's going to be a very big and very wonkish text, when i'm done.

i am a huge fan of neil's guitar playing, actually.

he might be the single realest, rawest, most gutwrenching guitarist the rock era produced - it's all feel. no pretension...

here's a few you youngins might learn sumpin from.

and, old man neil is from winnipeg, canada - if you're curious. even if he doesn't like to admit it....

and, of course - the most sarcastic anthem ever:

i had to tell you that?

freakin kids.

i meant this, actually.

so did he.

if you were curious.

but, that's implicitly condoning the red scare. but wolff is a marxist, so you shouldn't be too surprised at the use of force to assert authority.

listen, i'm all for taking down nazis,  but we have to be sure they're actually nazis first, not just idiots with offensive hats.

this is useful.

this is less than i wanted, but it's time to eat. there's a few more pages up:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pQ2-8EV5YwNAeI_d5HRA480_K-bkpSRa/view?usp=sharing

i was listening almost exclusively to cardiacs, at the time.

so, my purpose is my art - not because it's real, but because it's what i want.

i admit this is hard, but that's too bad, it's all we've got.

there is no inherent meaning or purpose in existence "out there" somewhere. search all you may, there is nothing to find; you're here for no reason, and you have no function, no fate. everything around us is stochastic, random, chaotic...

but, that doesn't mean that the concept of purpose should be discarded. after all, we invented it because we wanted it. right? so, how can we salvage this?

and, i think the answer is actually very simple: instead of looking for something "out there", instead of searching and scouring and trying to find meaning and purpose through religion or communism or whatever else, we should instead retreat inwards and define what purpose means to ourselves, uniquely. just because there isn't some grand, overarching purpose that we all fit into together doesn't mean that the illusion of an individually defined self-purpose can't be upheld. 

so, define your own purpose - if you dare. if you accept being free enough to do so. if you want to be free...

but, maybe you don't - maybe you will continue to flail against yourself, and seek meaning in some whole, instead. i guess i can only wish you good luck. but, i think you're a pitiful slave.

if i thought there was even an infinitesimal chance that a god exists, i would accept pascal's wager and try to figure out some kind of.....i dunno. some kind of deism or something, i guess. i mean, it doesn't help us understand the nature of god - it provides no information as to which religion is correct, if any of them are at all. it could be that the god that exists is even satan. so, while the argument is admittedly shrouded in christian theology, it's not necessary to default to christianity - so long as your system of thought accepts the concept of a soul (and indian and greek religion both did and do, too), you can use pascal's wager in some modified sense. and, to be consistent, pascal would no doubt argue that you can't reasonably determine which one of these systems is the right one to follow, if any of them are at all.

but, if i thought there was a non-zero probability, i'd have to give in.

i don't. 

let x be the event that god exists.

p(x) = 0.

religion is boring.

but, pascal's wager is a better argument than any theology you can find anywhere. 

it's really the best you can do - the closest i'll ever get.

i actually don't think i've talked much about the realization i came to in the mid-00s regarding the futility of existence, and the rabbit hole i went down with it. i'm not sure why...

i say that as i deny being a philosopher. i guess that, if i have a philosophy, and i suppose we all do, this is it. i won't do this every day...

so, the futility of existence is some kind of existentialism, in the sisyphean sense - all of that stuff about pushing boulders up hills. i got out of school, and that's all i could find, anywhere i looked: boulders to push up hills every day. my parents (and my sister, and my ex-girlfriend) wanted me to put the boulder on my shoulders instead, but i didn't have the interest; they told me when i was a kid that i was a natural leader, and, being the first born genetic male, my family actually looked up to me in ways i thoroughly resented, but leadership is a funny thing, right? i spent a lot of time flailing against this - i didn't want to be a leader, and i think it's partly what attracted me to anarchism, this idea of a world without leaders; if we lived in a world without leaders, nobody would look to me for leadership anymore. so, i shrugged that boulder off years ago, and nobody seemed to notice: the only boulder i saw around me was the one i had to push up the hill every day. and, maybe i could lead people out of that to freedom...

and, isn't that real leadership? gandhi & moses were true leaders; steve jobs & john galt were really not.

to me, though, the futility lies primarily in the finiteness of it. i mean, what's the point, when it just abruptly stops, someday? was i merely coming to terms with my mortality at the age of 25? dour, i know, but there's something to it - i get out of school, i'm faced with tremendous existential dread and i decide it's a farce.

i looked at occupation after occupation and i just couldn't find emancipation in anything. why bother studying math, when you'll only take a bite out of it? why bother saving lives when everybody dies, anyways? the only thing that seemed valuable was art, but that was an algorithm for an early grave, as art eventually runs out. eventually....

but, what if there was a way to escape mortality? then knowledge regains it's value. lives become worth saving. and, art can reclaim it's value as expression beyond vocation, beyond purpose.

escape mortality? what?

well, i don't think it's such a hard problem, really. consciousness is chemical - it's all in your head. literally. whatever it is is in there, and it's not necessary to fully understand it in order to emulate it. so, we can sidestep these philosophical concerns; shapeshifting shouldn't be that hard of a problem at all. we just need to...

1) download ourselves to disk

2) create a clone - perhaps a gender modified clone. if you see where i'm going with this. if i could shapeshift, i'd shapeshift into an xx body.

3) reupload ourselves to the clone

that's not hard, in principle, at all. we just need to figure out the physics....

it would help to keep a backup in a safe place so that we can regenerate in case of an accident; maybe we could do that when we sleep. if we pick up cancer or aids or something, regeneration is the easy way to beat it - we can just compost our old hosts.

people tried to argue with me about the plausibility of such a thing, but their arguments tended to be very strange. i had one person convinced that the turing thesis disproved this (i don't think the turing thesis says anything about this at all, but humans are complicated quantum computers, we're not turing machines - and that is fundamental, here. i actually think the person was interpreting the clone as a robot, which is weird.). i remain convinced that this idea is possible in theory - if we can figure out the physics of our brain (not that hard.), find enough storage to store it in (getting harder) and build a computer fast enough to download & upload it (that's a little tougher).

i realized it would require some effort. but, the futility of existence is an oppressive truth...

so, what i did was make a pascal's wager with myself - if i spend the rest of my life seeking immortality and fail, i've lost nothing. but, if i do nothing, and evade a potential solution, i've lost everything. i consequently must abandon everything else in life and strictly chase this algorithm for immortality - it's the only way to reverse the futility, the only way to salvage any meaning or purpose. otherwise, mortality is inevitable, and existence is futile.

i took a course in complexity theory at some point, and while the p=np thing was not new to me, when i sat down and worked out the bounds i became truly distraught. the amount of data that physicists require to document trivialities is immense - they have giant processing centres to document events that last fractions of a second.

so, what kind of data centre is required to store a human brain? we can imagine there might be symbolic shortcuts or compression algorithms, but the answer is absolutely tremendous. and, if p is not np, these calculations are going to be incredibly time consuming....

my pascal's wager was that it didn't matter - you need to shift into a different host, or you will die, so you'd might as well die trying; you've lost nothing by failing. but, this requires a non-zero probability that there's an answer, in the end. i eventually convinced myself otherwise, and the pascal's wager flipped over - existence became paramount. the futility must be embraced. go have fun...

so, how could i find an approximation of communism, then, in this world of capitalist decay? and, i've gotten pretty close, i think.

if you could point me to an advance that reverses my complexity calculations, i might change my analysis. but, i just can't see these advances existing before 2050, which is my exit point, my upper bound.

i will only live once.

even if millions now living will never die.

so, the last time i was getting stomach aches, i wondered if i was having an allergic reaction. 

right now, i'm noticing what look like hives on my arms.

i'm almost certain it's that garlic salt.....

i ended up living in the loeb building, like matt damon, in goodwill hunting.

when i look back at the situation, there is no defense for her behaviour.

at all.

and, if she ends up in a homeless shelter, it's just karma.

my stepmother is legitimately psychotic - the story i heard was that she watched her younger sister get fatally hit by a car, in fact totally annihilated by it, and within a foot of her face, when she was a preteen (after her mother asked her to keep an eye on her...) and the trauma left her horribly damaged...

but, if you knew her, you knew she was addicted to the medication, and it was the drugs that were the cause of her outbursts.

so, she'd randomly break things. she'd yell at you for no reason. she'd ruin your stuff, or throw it in the trash. she was consistently irrational - borderline insane. she had frequent psychotic fantasies, was prone to conspiracy theories....and, in the end, became a born-again christian. obviously, right?

she was legit bonkers.

so, i called her delusional once, and maybe that wasn't nice, but is it grounds to get thrown out of the house? i called her a lunatic and suffered the same fate. i don't remember the third offence, but it was no more substantive.

and, these accusations were substantive - she was acting like a child.

would you throw your kid that is in the third year of a difficult math program out of the house for calling you a lunatic, after you did some irrational thing or made some irrational claim to justify it?

and, it's easy enough to get conspiratorial myself, but the truth is that this was just base stupidity on her behalf.

and, all he could do in response was feed me 20s and hope it worked out....

it wasn't one semester they ruined, either.

it was three.

the idiots kept at it, convinced to completely destroy my academic career, as best they could.

and, then they pleaded with me to go back after. 

idiots.

my step-mother would be more like 68 or so. i don't know exactly how old she is...

i haven't spoken to her since the funeral, or know if she's even still alive.

but, if she's running out of money right about now, i'm not of much use to her after she ruined my transcript, am i?

derrrrrp.

i mean, my father's dead.

but, if he was alive today, he'd be entering retirement, soon - he'd be almost 64.

i've made specific choices to avoid concerning myself with finances - i'm a struggling artist, and i decided that i wanted to be that. but, you could imagine a situation where he needs support from his kids about now, and i wouldn't be of much use to him after he ruined my transcript, would i?

derrrrrrrrp.

the lesson i learned from how they acted was that they were complete idiots.

my total gpa over all the years i was there when i left in mid-2013 was roughly 11.

that's 11/12.

my marks in university are best described as "inconsistent". i actually should have held off on graduating, because i ended up with this strong b+ that put me directly on the cusp of everything.

but, if you look through my transcript, you see these dramatic differences between semesters - i'd get 5 As one semester, then 5 Ds the next, and if you didn't know the story it would just look like i was all over the place...

so, they offered me a qualifying year, but i didn't see the point. all i could do with a masters degree was get a job i didn't want, which was the situation i was in with the bachelor's degree in the first place.

the reason my marks were all over the place is that my parents were assholes - they kept throwing me out of the house for stupid reasons to try to teach me backwards lessons. it was all about adhering to authority, which is the wrong thing to teach your children, and a bizarre thing to try to push down on an adult in their early 20s. and, the stupidity of their behaviour completely destroyed my transcript.

when i went back in 2008, they couldn't render me homeless anymore because i didn't live with them. and, my marks weren't just straight As but straight 99s. i just breezed through that comp sci degree like it was nothing, until they forced me to interact with the other students - and i just fell apart on the spot. i breezed through the curriculum, but i couldn't function in the social component. 

i couldn't do anything about the situation at the time, either - i had nowhere else to go.

the reality is that the fact that i was able to cobble together a strong b+ under the circumstances i was in was actually exceedingly impressive. most people would have had little choice but to drop out...but i undid what they left me with as best as i could, and turned it around just enough.

if i had stayed for another semester, i would have pulled my gpa up that extra two percent and it wouldn't have been an issue. but, it wouldn't have made me more interested in the topic, or more convinced it was worth my time.

hey catholics.

i've got an idea for something you can give up on lent.

your faith.

so, i seem to be doing paprika wrong, but i don't want to heat it because it'll just kill the vitamins...

i don't know what i expected it to taste like, but it doesn't taste like much. the thing is that i'm getting the same thing from the mustard, and i'm concluding it might be the source.

regardless, i might be better off just buying a fresh cayenne pepper, and boosting the amount of actual red pepper.

like i say, i need to try a few things...but i think the paprika is likely to get struck out, at least.

that frustrating stomach ache is back, and only after the pasta meal, again.

i think it's the garlic salt, this time. and it may just be old. it was just a pinch, too. i'll avoid it next time...

i did the tablespoon of paprika, and added just a bit of cayenne. i dunno, yet - it's not bad, but not really what i want. let me try it a bit longer...

if i take the salt out next time and the stomach ache goes away, great. if it doesn't, i'll need to strip it down, again.

why hasn't anybody bridged a dialectic between analytic & continental philosophy, anyways?

zizek's understanding of anarchism is the kind of thing you hear from a first year student with a circle-A hat that they bought at a corporate rock concert, or hot topic or something. or, it's like rooted in the term "anarchy in production" or something. yikes.

it's every stupid mistake you'd find on a reddit message board.

the difference, in context, is just whether you let the state whither away or you actively take it out, and what that means is removing the class at the top of the hierarchy. "the state" is really just another word for "the aristocracy". like, that's marxism 101 that zizek is failing, here.

===

it's one thing to point to different measures of different truth and realize they exist, but it's another to throw your hands up in the air and decide you're stuck with relativism because of it. given two different systems of truth, we should be able to compare them and determine which is a better way to understand truth than the other - we don't have to just see them as equally useful, or interchangeable, or whatnot. in fact, we have a system of mathematics that can help us systematize and work something like that out; this was worked out primarily by godel, in the middle part of the last century. we can, consequently, evaluate how useful a system of truth determination is, and whether a system has value or does not. and, of course, the great scandal in mathematics is that our system of arithmetic has some problems, and that kant was consequently pretty much dead wrong.

=====

you know, you don't need foucault to follow this discussion, you just need to ask the question:

if a tree falls in the forest, and there's nobody around, does it make a sound?

you can bring in this naive concept of the observer effect, and a bunch of quantum woo, which is what zizek is doing; it sounds like he got that from deepak chopra, or something. or, you could point to the fact that sound is energy being released by the motion of the tree, and the gravitational force ending with the *thump*.

tuberculosis is, of course, a bacterial infection, and while the bacteria has no doubt evolved , we can trace it's genetic history back. it would probably be more correct to say the pharoah died of a bacterial infection that is ancestral to tuberculosis. or, maybe you don't think that tree makes a sound.

=====

"the time will come when we will realize that co-operation is in our self interest". 

well, there you go, slavoj.

that's kropotkin. perhaps via dawkins.

atta boy.

it's even hegelian, too. right?

=====

no, i'm going to repeat the point - comparing tuberculosis to a perception is of course a basic category error. what he's saying about rape is true enough, but it doesn't make sense to apply that kind of language to tuberculosis....except regarding what i previously said, namely the fact that bacteria changes so dramatically and so quickly that the tuberculosis of thousands of years prior would really only be an ancestor of the tuberculosis of today. and, so, he's managing to accidentally make a valid point, but he should be appealing to actual darwinian evolution via natural selection, rather than this kind of dawkinsian thing, which is sort of about memes, really - to try and salvage a sciency-ness in a topic that should be approached purely empirically, not using this goofy theory he's citing. and, i haven't read  the paper by latour. maybe i should take a look at it and post something to my blog about it...

and, just to be clear - it's just a question of approaching specific questions with the right tactics. you can talk about perception with rape; perception is the only thing that matters with rape, as two people could experience even the most violent types of sex consensually or nonconsensually. but, how tuberculosis changes over time rather clearly reduces to an evolutionary question, and you need to be using the language of science to approach it; otherwise you're just being dumb. but, i'd like to see what latour actually said - did he talk about the tuberculosis strain evolving over time?

ok, he doesn't, and that's a shame, because he'd almost have a point if he had approached the question with the right tools. but, the article seems to really be as dumb as chomsky implies....

====

i watched that twice to make sure i didn't miss something worthwhile the first time.

nope.

i was a big phil hartman fan when i was a kid....

that's really all i know about joe rogan:

you may remember me from such classic tv shows as newsradio, the one on mtv and a bunch of other bullshit nobody watched.

i really, honestly, couldn't tell you anything else about him, and i'm not interested in learning about it - not unless he gives me some reason to, and i'm not holding my breath.

i mean, i know that some people want to put philosophers at the top of the intellectual hierarchy, but i don't share that position; my epistemology places empirical science at the top of the hierarchy, and deductive or synthetic philosophy at the very bottom of it.

kant got this ass-backwards, as per usual.

outside of those topics - math, computer science, law, physics, economics, music - everything you see here is dabbling & self-taught.

and, i am more interested in dabbling in some things (history, politics, anthropology) than others (religion, philosophy).

we'll do this again.

- i do not believe i have a high school diploma. i didn't attend graduation because i didn't want to have to hang out with the kids in my graduating class; if a diploma was mailed to me, i don't have it now, and i've never seen it. i have a transcript. the reason i don't think i have a diploma is that there was a specific requirement introduced by the mike harris government to participate in a certain amount of community service (that is, unpaid labour) in order to graduate, and i boycotted it out of protest. so, this was a conscious decision on my behalf...

- i have a diploma from carleton university in my closet, somewhere. this is a b. mathematics (honours), 2006. that's a four-year degree. i was initially admitted for software engineering, and bounced around through several programs before i graduated with the math degree.

- i completed the requirements of a mcse while undergoing training directly from microsoft in 2007, but i did not pay to receive the accreditation, as it would have been more than they paid me to go through training and, again, i wasn't interested in working for free. this was, iirc, three months of paid training directly from microsoft.

- i went back to school in 2008 on my father's insistence, and against my better judgement - i was happy at the time, and it was probably the biggest mistake i've ever made in my life. i should have continued on the path i was on. alas. i was supposed to do a qualifying year for grad school in math, which he offered to pay for and i really had no actual interest in doing. but, he had to pull out at the last minute (you'll recall there was a market crash in '08...) and once i found myself faced with the need to fund this myself, and without an option to pull out due to the economic facts that asserted themselves (and have yet to undo themselves), i switched directions and decided i'd be better off with a more marketable undergraduate degree in computer science than a more or less useless masters degree in mathematics. i also decided to look into the application of a computer science degree into the field of neuroscience, with an intent to explore tactics towards accomplishing immortality, and had this idea in the back of my mind as i was going forwards. however, i found myself taking graduate math courses as electives.

- so, from 2008-2010, what i was really doing was completing an undergraduate degree in computer science and a graduate degree in mathematics,  at the same time. and, i actually got to within a half credit of the computer science degree, as i amassed not six but eight math credits at the graduate level.

- about 2010 or so, i realized that shapeshifting would require levels of computational complexity that would not be realistically developed in my lifetime, decided i was wasting my life, firmly concluded that i didn't want to work in the programming industry (i've never played computer games in my life and have no interest in them...) and shifted my focus towards law & political science, instead. if immortality was beyond my reach in this life, i decided i wanted to fight the fuckers within the futility of existence - to do something useful. i neither applied to graduate with a computer science degree, nor applied to graduate with a masters degree in mathematics, but i have completed the course load for the latter and am a half credit short for the former.

- i then had a mental breakdown that i maybe never fully recovered from and took a few years off.

- i got on odsp in 2012.

- without ever even transferring out of the comp sci program, i went back in the summer of 2012 and, over three heavy semesters, completed the requirements of a three year sociology of law program. while the requirements are complete, i never even applied for entry into the program - these courses were taken as a comp sci student (and, frankly, as alumni from the math degree).

- in the spring of 2013, i took a mushroom trip with some occupy activists near a creek and decided "fuck it, i'm wasting my life in school", and that i'd rather live on disability, instead -  i'd rather just exist. i just got up and walked away and moved to windsor to find affordable rent, instead....

so,

- i completed all of the requirements for high school except the bullshit community service nonsense, and therefore don't have the diploma. i don't think.

- i completed the four year math degree and have the diploma.

- i completed and passed training as an mcse but didn't pay for certification.

- i completed the requirements for a masters degree in math, but don't have the diploma and don't really think the diploma is actually worth anything.

- i completed the (substantive) requirements for a 4 year comp sci degree, but don't have the diploma, and don't care. i have no aspirations in the field, whatsoever.

- i completed the requirements for a three year sociology of law degree, but decided the system is too skewed to bother fighting in - that that would be a waste of time, too.

over that time, i also picked up undeclared minors in physics, economics and music, and maybe a few other things i'm forgetting.

what i want to do is exist as an artist blogger/musician with a gai in a small apartment in the urban core of a major city and experience life from that perspective. and, things weren't too bad before they closed the border...

if this continues much longer, i may need to move to toronto. i hope the rents continue to fall - that will help.

a few months ago, i was spending time with the stanford lectures, particularly the physics lectures as they were the ones i had the most interest in sorting through. i'll remind you that my academic background is in mathematics, physics, computer science....& law. 

i have never taken a philosophy course in my life and, frankly, wouldn't want to waste my time in a philosophy course. *yawn*.

but, i've pointed out many times here that i've had difficulties with surveillance on my machines, partly as a consequence of various illegal entries into this apartment. so, i put a password on the machine that required the use of an external keyboard.

what they did was break the external keyboard when i was gone, and i found myself defaulting to this chromebook to watch videos when i was eating, instead.

i initially starting watching a lot of paul jay, because i kind of missed him. but, then i found myself drifting off elsewhere...

youtube's algorithm's are notoriously terrible, and i've ranted about them in this space on multiple occasions. it's not just the fact that they're designed for maximizing ad revenue - they seem intended to maximize the spread of ignorance, as well. they seem to intentionally push religion and pseudoscience instead of valid scientific sources, and i'm not convinced that's some kind of accident. and, so i found myself watching all of this pacifica network garbage it was pushing down on me, which was fine during the election, but i've recently erupted a few times at the ignorance and stupidity of the media personalities and need to train the filters to stop pushing these garbage vloggers down on me, that present nonsense designed for uneducated morons.

seder is a little better. the rest of them are a bunch of ignorant idiots.

it's a sad truth that you need to be vigilant about this, nowadays - if you let them, youtube will turn your brain into mush with these garbage kyle kulinski and jimmy dore and the hill and katie halper and ... videos that all seem to be funded and directed by this corporate conglomeration directed by cenk uygur. this is a media oligopoly that's every bit as dangerous as the old nbc-abc-cbs triad. if we need antitrust legislation right now, that's what it should be directed towards - breaking up this vlogging network that pushes absolutely terrible information, and reduces the discourse to absolute trash.

i let my guard down for a few months there, and just found myself pissed off by it, in the end. i'm adjusting. and, i should be back to watching lectures and documentaries when i'm eating, rather than the garbage i've been polluting myself with recently.

what kind of literary genre is this?

well, it's in the tradition of the kind of commentary marx frequently did, but this is really an entirely new genrre, that's a reflection of the shift in technology - something i'm happy to embrace.

this is a new means of expression, and it has it's pros (the freeform nature, the cross-references to outside media) and cons (it's fragmented, by design).

but, this is how we write, now - and i'm more interested in making the most of it than flailing against it.

i've been distracted.

there's a minor update here that adds some posts about free speech (and trudeau's disinterest in it) to the jan, 2020 section, an important consideration in the developing narrative:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pQ2-8EV5YwNAeI_d5HRA480_K-bkpSRa/view?usp=sharing

now, what's going on at the moment is a little different; it's just empty, pointless, meaningless theatre that is explicitly designed to waste time in congress, and there should be a giant backlash on the left that this is what they're wasting time on, in the middle of a pandemic and the onset of an economic depression. worse, while it seems to be that republicans seem to agree with the censure right now, it's opening a can of worms.

is this going to become normal?

and, what should my concern be, here? should i be concerned about blowback on future democrats?

or should i embrace the potential collapse of the washington consensus and the return to partisan politics? we could only hope, right? we could only dream that such naivete may assert itself in reality...

it is true that, in canada, the prime minister is elected by the house of commons, and not by the people. so, the governing party has the ability to replace the prime minister with a member of it's own party....or a member of the opposite party, i guess, although that's a blurry part in the law for obvious reasons - it's absurd.

the impeachment hearings are not comparable to that, but are rather comparable to the situation where the opposition introduces a non-confidence motion. and, in canada, that triggers an election, it doesn't lead to a bureaucratic shift in power.

so, i'm backposting and that might be blurry, but the key is the context. and, i'll double down - i think impeachment is an undemocratic process that should be abolished.

the correct answers are:

true or false: communists support abolishing the state.

which two of the following ideologies believe in the centrality of the state within society:

a) communism & conservatism

b) collectivism & conservatism

c) liberalism & conservatism

d) liberalism & communism

which two of the following ideologies believe in the abolition of the state, in the long run:

a) communism & conservatism

b) collectivism & conservatism

c) liberalism & conservatism

d) liberalism & communism

in windsor, winter has been reduced to a week in mid-february, this year. this is the one and only week of winter that it seems we're going to get.

that's pretty mild - even if that week is very cold. 

and, it's a last gasp, too, of a dying polar wind.

what happened is that the cycle bottomed out...

so, yeah - it's the coldest it's been in about 10-11 years. right?

it will start getting warmer, now. which means watch out...

yes, we got a blast of cold air. the fact that it took this long, and is this intense, is consistent with it being the end of it for the next ten years or so.

as we enter the next solar cycle, which may be our last chance to reverse climate change, the science underlying the relation between the sun and the greenhouse effect is going to exit the bounds we currently understand. we should start seeing tipping points assert themselves, and feedback cycles kick in. 

we have to act very fast, or it's over.

and, it's probably too late.

my relationship to that community is that i have some fans in it, but i am not one of them.

and, that should be obvious.

i have found myself as a topic of discussion on fourchan by googling myself, which we all do. that community knows who i am, and seems to enjoy my writings.

but, i am not a member of that community myself, and have never posted in or frequented that space. 

we can try this as well:

which two of the following ideologies believe in the centrality of the state within society:

a) communism & conservatism

b) collectivism & conservatism

c) liberalism & conservatism

d) liberalism & communism

which two of the following ideologies believe in the abolition of the state, in the long run:

a) communism & conservatism

b) collectivism & conservatism

c) liberalism & conservatism

d) liberalism & communism

let's try this again.

true or false: communists support abolishing the state.

don't waste my fucking time with your nonsense.

suffering is passe.

pain is boring.

so, i don't really care what you've read about pain - that's a waste of time, or worse, and if i was in a room with that kind of discourse going on, i'd get up and seek something more relevant and interesting to discuss, instead.

i would have nothing in common with those people, and i wouldn't want to hang out with them.

i ask you, instead - what have you read about paine? i would rather discuss that, instead.

deathtokoalas

i'm a secularist to my bones, and i want to see a modern democracy in the geographic space, one where everybody has equal rights. but, the whole point of the jewish state was so that what you're seeing in the orthodox community wouldn't happen. it completely undercuts the idea of israel as a jewish state - which i don't support anyways (i want it to be democratic, not jewish), but...

i mean, it's almost comical.

even israel is anti-semitic, it seems.

pat m

While AIPAC secures the support of US politicians, the pro-Zionist Scofield Bible secures the grass-root support of 50+ million US Christian Zionists. The Scofield Bible by convicted conman-turned-Pastor Scofield was published in 1909 by pro-Zionist Oxford University Press, after Scofield was befriended by leading Zionists. It was the first edition of the KJV Bible to insist that Christians must support Israel. The vast majority of Christian Zionists don't know they've been conned and Israel would lose a lot of US support if they did know. Making them aware would greatly help in the fight for justice. https://www.wrmea.org/015-october/the-scofield-bible-the-book-that-made-zionists-of-americas-evangelical-christians.html

 

deathtokoalas

i have no interest in this comment, whatsoever.

pat m

Driven by insatiable greed and with 800+ military installations in 140+ countries so far, the corporate-controlled US Empire's relentless agenda is total ownership and control of the world's natural, financial and human resources. This makes it the main instigator of wars and terrorism worldwide. Toppling elected governments and replacing them with puppet regimes of the US. This makes it everyone's problem. Humanity urgently needs real democracy in the corporate-controlled US. 

https://www.rt.com/news/513554-eu-guaido-venezuela-biden/

deathtokoalas

we might have a bot here, folks. whaddya up to, pat?

pat m

In Israel bribery is a crime, fraud is a crime but slaughtering entire families with warplanes on, Gaza etc., is an accepted norm. The brutal Israeli apartheid regime breaks international laws with impunity because it's funded by the U.S. and supported by puppet states of the U.S. like the U.K. etc. Mutual backscratching between the Israeli expansionist agenda and relentless corporate-controlled US empire-building. Many Jews rightly condemn Zionism as a political movement which uses Judaism as a front. BDS!

deathtokoalas

i see. you think i'm a zionist, apparently. you're trying to drown me out. you were perhaps even sent by mr 1% banker elitist dmitri lascaris, himself.

see, this is what happens when you binarize everything - you turn your intellectual opponents into enemies.

listen - i'm very much a post-nationalist secularist, meaning i reject nation-based states all around. i neither want a jewish state, nor a palestinian one. imagine there's no countries....and no religion, too.

but, fwiw, i actually think that calling the situation an apartheid is too timid, and serves to distract from the genocide occurring.

apartheid is an economic relationship between a dominant group and an enslaved one, where the enslaved people exist apart from the dominant group for the purposes of their economic benefit. while the united states has actually attempted to coerce the israelis into an apartheid relationship on multiple occasions, most recently under john kerry's direction when he was secretary of state, israel has continually rejected these sorts of things. so, kerry wanted to build a factory in the region and put the palestinians to work in it (to produce goods for the dominant israelis), but the israelis would have none of it. rather, the israelis just want them gone, altogether.

while genocide and apartheid are both severely unjust relationships between a dominant group and an enslaved one, there is a difference of scale - apartheid is a less severe form of brutality, as it is restricted to exploitation. genocide is a much more severe situation, as the dominant group does not even seek to maintain the enslaved one to exploit.

what is happening in israel is not apartheid, it is genocide. and, bds will do nothing to end it.

bds needs an actual apartheid, or other type of slave relationship, to actually work - the exploitation must be financial. you have to cost them money. but, this isn't about money, it's about land. the israelis aren't doing this for money and aren't going to stop if they lose some....

i'm sympathetic to the arguments i've heard about it backfiring. but, it's not even the point.

this is not going to work; it's rooted in a false understanding of the nature of the exploitation, and it doesn't make any sense.

the reason that bds worked in south africa was partly because it was about the money. it's just not true, in israel, today.

this kind of puerile catholic nonsense needs to be left behind in the era of ignorance it belongs to.

nobody should read this stuff....it's worse than a waste of time - it's intellectually damaging, in the perpetuation of dangerous, medieval thinking.

it's legit backwards thinking, and i don't have time for it...

i would consider a discourse on suffering to be a medieval anachronism, and people pushing it to be stuck in the dark ages.

i'm not interested.

at all.

i don't want to talk about or explore human suffering, i want to alleviate it and emancipate people from it.

and, that is the point of being a leftist - if you don't realize that, you've lost the plot.

paine is a topic that is interesting to me.

pain is not.

sorry.

so, i forgot to mention this morning that i tried the pasta bowl with a teaspoon of cayenne and a little less garlic salt and learned that:

1) i can taste it

2) but, it's too spicy

this is somewhat of a problem. replacing the hot sauce with cayenne was done partly to reduce the sodium, and i need enough of it to get some carotenoids, which seems liike i'll be unable to handle.

that's partly why i got the paprika.

so, i'm going to try it with a tablespoon of paprika and no cayenne next time.

i've added some posts about trudeau's longstanding disdain for civil rights laws.

and, i should be able to get to looking at mid-march when i wake up.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pQ2-8EV5YwNAeI_d5HRA480_K-bkpSRa/view?usp=sharing

get rid of this idiot...

and, the liberal party needs to throw this twirp under the bus.

i mean, c'mon. this is absurd....

his father is spinning in his grave.

you can't block entry to canadian citizens because they have a virus - it's blatantly, absurdly unconstitutional. that law will be struck down within seconds of being put in front of a judge, and somebody needs to get it in front of one immediately.

i also hope that people fight these tickets being levied upon them for hotel stays, to the point that it costs the government more in legal costs than they generate in fees. and, i'm putting out a call for people to make the government pay for this through their nose - make it backfire.

stopping to eat...

this is just a quick update, up to mid-march 2020:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pQ2-8EV5YwNAeI_d5HRA480_K-bkpSRa/view?usp=sharing

so, i don't get along with princess, clearly.

off with their heads....

you're not separate but equal.

you're just equal.

suck up your existential dread and fucking deal with it.

i will always treat ciswomen the same way i treat everybody else, and if they don't like it they can get the fuck out of my face.

i'm not interested in treating you like a princess, and you can go cry somewhere else if that makes you sad.

but, i have no vested interest in you interpreting me as a feminist or not.

i want you to interpret me as a woman; if you chose not to, don't enforce your expectations on me - i don't care. i'm not interested. fuck off.

what gets under my skin is when women want to have it both ways.

i won't give it to them - they get strict, literal equality. for better or worse.

if you want me to answer this question of whether i'm a feminist or not, you have to define what it means, first - and that's challenging, because the word holds multiple entirely contradictory meanings.

i'm not at all interested in third-wave concepts of feminism, and i've never claimed i am.

what i believe is that all humans should be treated equally under the law - what i am is a radical egalitarian, and i have a concept of feminism that follows from that. that means i'm going to clash strongly against certain conservative constructions of women's rights within the framework of patriarchy, and i have no time for people that advocate these positions; they can fuck off. and, what it means is that i have no patience for people arguing for inherent gender differences, and they can fuck off too.

that puts me in a minority position and i understand that - i'm both arguing against conservatives that call themselves progressives and against militant rad fems trying to segregate themselves as some kind of nationalist movement. in that sense, the word has become it's opposite meaning. and it makes sense to define me in opposition to the opposite meaning the word has embraced.

but, i'll still use the word as i see fit to because i believe i'm using it in the proper framework, and all of these other people are lost in foucaldian, orwellian backwardsness.

the thing that's going to save the weakest is the antibody treatment that trump got, and an ability to adjust and mass manufacture that on demand.

vaccines are really not the best approach for these kinds of weak, contagious viruses.

the one drive servers are terribly inconsistent.

it's horribly frustrating to try to work in them, because the results are consistently changing.

why can't it just stay put?

there has been some editing of my writing.

i'm not going to sort through it and rip my hair out and try to figure it out.

i am simply going to demand it is undone.

this belongs to me - i do not want my art comodified or "corrected" for mass consumption.

i demand you undo all editing immediately and cease from editing anything in the future.

if everybody was like me, anarchism would actually be really easy....

alas.

i don't want to be your boss.

be your own fucking boss.

and fuck off, too.

when you ask me why i rejected "entrepreneurialism" (which is just a fancy word for the bourgeoisie), i actually don't tend to bring out the marxist or hegelian theory to deconstruct it.

rather, what i'll tell you is this: being an entrepreneur is a shitty way to exist.

- it's stressful

- it's boring

- it's time consuming...

yes - i'll align with the marxist framework if you trot it out, preferably not on skis.

but, that's not actually my pushback - i actually just think it's fucking boring.

i'm data driven.

i debunk things.

it's my function.

i'm sorry.

i've been waiting for numbers to kind of stabilize before i post an analysis update. i decided some time ago that a play-by-play isn't helpful, and i became far more interested in the diet. i'll update things as i work through this.

but, one thing is clear - while covid-19 is a strong flu, it's far closer to the 1968 flu in terms of ifr than the 1918 flu.

at the end of the day, this will end up somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of severity.

.....much like donald trump will, himself.

fwiw, this is a screenshot of the cdc's page, dated sept 10, 2020.

if you agree that the cdc's modelling is a safe source, the conclusion is clear - these numbers are roughly the same as the flu.

and, we have lots and lots of data now, too.

so, that statement appears to have been correct.

perhaps i should clarify a point that people may be unclear about, because they may not know better.

while it is the case that old people are more vulnerable to weak viruses, this specific virus is particularly deadly for the elderly because it's entirely novel. the reason it kills so many of them is that they've never seen it before, and their immune system is unable to mount a defence, because it's so old and weak.

when people in middle age today get into these older age brackets, whether they are able to mount a response or not will partially depend on how well their body was trained to deal with this virus when they were younger. it follows that protecting a 55 year old from this virus is just eliminating the body's time window to mount a defense, and leaving them vulnerable as they age.

it follows that the mortality rate should decrease as younger people get older if they get proper exposure when they're young; otherwise, we're going to see a pattern set in, where people get systematically wiped out as they age.

i could get conspiratorial, and i have a mind to, but i think ockam's razor is to blame it on our collective stupidity. we had the right answer and we attacked it; we did everything wrong, instead, blinded by our own arrogance, and this human instinct to dominate and control.

it's frustrating.

and, you wonder why i hate people.

viruses are no doubt even more deadly than religion, if they are not one and the same thing.

...and, you will die.

you know that, even if you forget it, sometimes.

historically speaking, viruses have killed a lot of humans, and you probably would have died of a virus, perhaps in the presence of cancer, regardless.

this is how people die.

it's how they've always died...

as this virus will be with us forever, people in their 30s and 40s need to catch up by contracting it as many times as they can.

it's the people in their 50s and 60s that should be most concerned about the existing policy, because their time window is closing.

they'll probably be ok if they catch it tomorrow.

...perhaps, less so in six months.

so, we need to make a choice - do we want to live under fascist lockdown indefinitely?

or are we going to need to change how the elderly live to ensure they take a greater responsibility in protecting themselves?

it's not just the one in south africa. they're finding dozens of variants...the other vaccines will fail in time, too. it's a proof of concept.

it's obvious - and you're operating on faith, in denying it.

so, what they need to do is keep track of these things and keep fighting. i'm not arguing that we need to give up; we fight against the flu every year, we don't give in to it. but, we need to accept a concept of normalcy around this.

it's going to be with us until this happens again, and some other virus displaces it. 

i don't want to be protected from the virus - that's going to get me killed, in the end.

we've done the worst things we could possibly do.

and, we've done them over and over and over.

and, we don't even understand.

shit.

this is the new flu. and, that was obvious from the start.

how's the flu doing? not so well.

vaccinations are going to need to be yearly, and vaccine research is going to need to be constant.

and, that means that everything we've done was a waste of time.

life is going to be very difficult for the elderly for the rest of their lives. but, we need to get back to reality, now. this can not be permanent. we must adapt.

we were foolish; it's time to cut our losses, and shift the burden of responsibility - you have to protect yourself, because this is never going away. ever.

as a relatively young person, i want to train my immune system via exposure. and, i resent a system that is trying to keep me weak in preventing me from doing so.

this was both predictable and obviously so.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/south-africa-suspends-astrazeneca-vaccine-drive-over-variant-1.5299360

i'm just reading through that and...

yup.

all of it.

really. no shit.

so, we're doing this as well:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pQ2-8EV5YwNAeI_d5HRA480_K-bkpSRa/view?usp=sharing

over time, i expect to have a series of these texts cut out from the main blogs that will be edited and updated.

again: i don't want a book deal. i find the idea of exchanging labour for money to be vulgar. i want a ubi....

the backlash against the term 'retard' is truly retarded.

the angrier you get at my use of the term "retard", the more likely i am to call you a retard over it.

and laugh at you for it.

you need to chill the fuck out, and i'll keep calling you all a bunch of retards until you do.

actually, i've taken to recently using the term "retard" because people find it upsetting.

five years ago, i would have suggested it was crass - but the reaction against it has become so absurd, that i've decided to regularly say it just to piss people off.

so, my position is that that kind of censorship is regressive and needs to be reacted against, basically.

i'd apologize to all the actual retards out there, but they wouldn't understand, anyways.

there's some kind of burning rubber smell down here tonight, and it's pissing me off, to say the least. it's got me feeling very shitty and fucked up.

i'm going to stop to eat.

i'd rather you call me a blogger than a journalist, frankly.

journalism is not a profession i have much respect for.

i'm an artist - a writer. sure.

i'm not a journalist. yuck.

sorry.

wait.

you don't think i think i'm a journalist, do you?

lol.

no.

i am not a journalist. at all.

this is a combination of creative writing and a public diary. i comment on the news sometimes, but i'm not a journalist in any sense at all, have never called myself one and would correct you on it if you ever called me one.

i've taken comparisons to hunter s. thompson critically, or with a grain of salt.

nor do i want to be one. yuck. no...don't think of this like that, that's vulgar to me...

people that want to push their way to the front of the line and undercut the livelihoods of others are demonstrating antisocial behaviour that benefits nobody but themselves, and the capital they're selling themselves to. that's something that should be rightfully condemned as what it is.

you've probably been badly manipulated by agents of this capital and consequently don't understand that. 

but, this is a debate about economics, not a debate about race or language or identity.

these workers are merely trying to survive. so long as laws governing the flow of labour exist, they need to be enforced in some trivial manner, but it should not be a crime to cross a border to seek work.

what is truly criminal is hiring people below the minimum wage, without benefits and without safety regulations. what is criminal is denying them the right to form unions. and, what is criminal is throwing them out of the country when they agitate for change.

what is criminal is the theft of surplus value occurring at even more obscene levels than elsewhere in the economy.

it needs to be the employer's legal responsibility to ensure they are not hiring illegal labour, and they need to be held liable for it, if they do.

in this particular case, the individual appears to have entered the country on a legal work permit and overstayed it - something that's relatively common. as such, criminal charges may not be appropriate. but, that just shifts the burden to the employer that much more.

i've been clear that i'm not an advocate of deporting people.

this is what i'd do in this case and cases like it:

1) i'd charge them with illegally entering the country, and find them guilty of doing so. that gives them a criminal record.

2) i'd send them to jail for like a week or something.

3) i'd release them.

this is within the context of very strict restrictions regarding the use of illegal labour under the table. in the long run, i'd like to see border restrictions broken down so that people can move freely between countries with minimal supervision. for right now, it is imperative that illegals register with the state to ensure that they're not undercutting domestic workers by taking substandard wages. if this person is an illegal migrant, how did they get a job? it is the company that hired them (at what wage level?) that needs to be prosecuted, not the worker that sought employment to survive.

the individual then ought to be let back into the society to make a choice as to whether they can survive in canada with a criminal record, or if they're better off returning home.

that would provide an incentive to do things properly, which is what everybody wants.

over time, when the issue of employers hiring illegals to avoid paying minimum wage is dealt with, which is the real problem here, these restrictions should be lifted and people should be allowed to move freely.

deportation is almost never justified.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/family-deportation-canada-portugal-risk-1.5902716

so, fuck political correctness.

all hail hate!

if you hate something, let everybody know.

yell it out.

scrawl it down.

bash it out.

however you want to express it - do it. 

that's healthy. suppressing or censoring yourself isn't.

hate is a valid human emotion and it has it's proper contexts. it should be nurtured and explored, not suppressed and denounced.

'cause you know what they say about people that bottle up their hate and push it down - it eventually explodes.

so, i am an advocate and purveyor of hate. join me.

certainly, i don't have any patience for stupid lovey-dovey hippies that want to hold hands and sing kumbaya. ugh. gross.

it's an error i've seen conservative fake-leftist progressives make over and over again, this misperception of misanthropy as misogyny or racism. it's essentially a category error. rather than realize that the individual hates everybody and is consumed with a more burning hate towards the state of society, something often driven by hate towards the political or social system they inhabit, they focus in on a specific aspect of their hate and misrepresent it as exclusionary.

it's just bad thinking, as performed by stupid people.

but, i won't deny being hateful, i'd just ask you to realize my hate isn't exclusionary - it's broad-based and directed at almost everybody.

and, yes - that video is badly ripped off from ministry's in case you didn't feel like showing up.

but, al's misanthropy was always a little less vulgar and a little less in your face.

and, i've given you the right word to describe me - i'm a brutal misanthrope, and proud of it, too.

so, i mean, if you think pointing out that i hate people is some kind of argument, you're arguing with the wrong person. it's true. but, what's your point?

you know me - i hate everyone.

but, yeah....

so long as we agree that women are people, i have to concede i'm going to hate the lot of them, by definition.

the basis of the hate isn't anything to do with gender, though, and i'm not any more likely to hate you based on your gender than i am to like you or love you based on it.

i'm really sort of post-gender in a lot of ways - i don't really think it's an important concept in understanding the world, anymore, but a social construction erected by capitalism to divide and conquer.

and, that's what i really hate - capitalists, of all races and genders and backgrounds.

if i had to choose, i'd have to say i hate men more than women, for sure.

but, i won't deny hating them both.

well, i hate everybody, so denying i hate women would reduce to denying that women are people.

i'd rather point out that i hate men (and everybody in between), too.

parler is a french verb that means to speak.

it's pronounced parl-eh?.

it's not pronounced parl-errrrrrrrrrr(p).

fucking ignorant americans....

this is really the wrong argument.

the right argument is to accept that the new deal was constructed during an era of segregation and reflected the realities of that era and then to argue that future new-deal-like legislation should reflect the existing era.

frankly, it would have been remarkable if the new deal wasn't racist, as every other piece of legislation at the time was.

when i criticized frank's narrative on populism, i was just trying to set the record straight - he was being revisionist. they were racists - and not much different on race, specifically, than the contemporary populists, at all. the movement was also broadly driven by small business owners, not salaried workers - another point that was badly misrepresented. the bottom line is that you still need to make the argument that the solution is to expand the policies, even as you accept they were racist (and sexist) in the era they were proposed and legislated in.

i mean, we don't argue against voting because it was restricted to landowning whites. and, we don't pretend that didn't happen. we just argue to expand the franchise.

--

but, i just want to interject on this idea that the new deal is the reason blacks switched to the democrats in the south, because that's kind of baffling to hear.

it is widely written about that the reason the civil rights movement targeted democrats in the south via the primary process was to unseat them. this wasn't about policy, in any sense - this was about building a mass movement to primary southern democrats. that's what the voter registration drives were all about!

i'm baffled.

and, i think what i'm seeing here is a couple of upper class kids that are so divorced from the country's legacy in slavery that they can't even begin to understand how to understand it, and should probably just shut up about it. in a sense, that's progress. i guess...

the reason southern blacks took over the democrats is that the republicans weren't competitive.

they had to primary them to get rid of them, because they'd never beat them in a general.

"but i cited a scholarly source! therefore i win! you lose!"

ugh.

you believe everything you read i guess, huh?

just look this up - the "solid south" was a series of one-party democratic states, kind of like california is today. voting for republicans would get you nowhere - the winner of the democratic primary won almost every office at almost every level all the way to 1964.

so, if you wanted any influence at all, you had to get into the democratic party.

and, like - that's the entire narrative of the civil rights movement: taking over the democrats from the inside, and dismantling jim crow.

these erudite scholars do not appear to have learned a thing at all about the period besides what they learned in school about it. and, we see how useful that is.

where did you think this tactic the squad is using came from, anyways?

it seems nowadays that the greater number of letters you amass besides your name is evidence of how long it took you to figure out you were wasting your time - the more letters, the dumber you are. eh?

they didn't teach you the plot.

they taught you identity.

do you think that's an accident?