dr. kuttner is clearly a very bright, focused individual, and i have to say i like the attitude being projected the best of all of the candidates. we used to talk of the ndp as the moral conscience of the nation, but really haven't heard talk of that since the day that jack layton pulled the plug on paul martin. i am interpreting dr. kuttner as a good candidate to take on that role, from a more rigorous perspective than they ever really did. yet, that would be a role for a leader of a party with a more substantive presence than the greens currently have, and it would consequently appear as though dr. kuttner is maybe converting too much potential energy into kinetic energy. i will not be voting in this contest, but i would suggest that dr. kuttner's talents are currently better served in a support role to a leader with a more dynamic and populist style that is better able to work up a groundswell of support.

so, i had to take a nap, but i seem to have avoided the migraine, for now.

i'm very thirsty, which is consistent with my analysis.

let's hope that fan starts working again before the next wave hits.

i'm just trying to find a good way to get this across so it's written down somewhere in understandable terms for leftists to reference, because it's a big problem on the ground - the left is absolutely clueless about race, right now.

we are taught to see race. it's true; when i say it's a social construct, that's not a facetious claim - we see it everywhere, because we're taught to, forced to, brainwashed to...

but let's forget about skin colour for a moment and talk about eye colour, instead. this is easily measurable, and we have a good idea of the genetics behind it.

so, let's suppose that we decide we're going to categorize people by eye colour. i'm not even going to walk you through that; i'll let you imagine how you'd do that...

the absurdity of the process should be apparent to most, immediately. do we suppose that eye colour has some effect on who these people are? that blue-eyed people are a certain way, and green-eyed people are another way?

would we wonder if the bmi of redheads should be measured differently than the bmi of brunettes?

no - we would laugh at this.

so, why do we still take skin colour seriously? why don't we see it as as much of a triviality as eye colour or hair colour is?

the answer is because we've erected a social construct around it!

but, if we were thinking more carefully, and actually looking at the science, we would realize that the amount of our genome that codes for skin colour is not much greater than the amount that codes for eye colour or hair colour or nose shape or breast size. and, we would see the idea of categorizing people by skin colour as as absurd and full of contradictions as the idea of categorizing people by any other meaningless physical characteristic.

so, please, people - stop talking about race in biological terms.

the bbc should retract that article and apologize for publishing it.

and, no you can't use y-dna haplotypes to determine race, either.

not rigorously.

consider the curious example of the black r1b populations in africa. we don't care how that got there right now, i'm just drawing your attention to the fact that there is, in fact, a black population with overwhelming r1b y-dna, which we usually think of as the "white gene".

https://haplomaps.com/the-euro-african-or-the-story-of-the-haplogroup-r1b/

clearly, that gene ain't so white, is it?

it's also true that some indigenous groups in canada have upwards of 80% r1* ancestry. we can talk about how that happened some other time. right now, simply note that it's true, and it doesn't affect the phenotypes (or not as much as you'd imagine it does).

it's an absolutely negligible component of your genome...

it's one of my biggest peeves.

the smart post-modernist thinkers know that race is a construct, but there's still so many ignorant people out there that take these post-modernist ideas and try to erect them into race as an identity.

it's the worst pseudo-science imaginable, and it drives me fucking nuts.

listen.

people can get pissy, but they're wrong. so i don't care.

i wouldn't care, anyways; when somebody's upset because they're wrong, i'm in negative territory in terms of caring.

you'd have to actually donate me fucks to give.

the problem scientists have with race is that they can't define it.

we can't figure out who belongs to which group - who is black, who is white, who is asian, etc.

it's just incoherent, as a tool of categorization.

tautologically true statement: you have black relatives.

what does it mean, though?

you've probably heard these statements, no doubt tersely.

"race has no scientific basis", "race is not a biological concept", "there is no scientific meaning to race", etc.

what?

what it means is that your ancestors aren't as homogeneous as you probably think they are; what it means is that we migrate widely and always have, that we all fuck each other and always have and that any one of us, as individuals, has ancestry all over the world, regardless of our phenotypic expressions.

what it means is that, because genetic diversity is highest in east africa due to it being our ancestral homeland, two black women from africa are likely to have more genetic differences between each other than either are likely to have with any random white people.

what it means is that you can't build generalized genetic relationships based on observing how people look, that phylogenetic relationships are not strongly correlated with phenotypes.

what it means is that you don't just have ancestors that look differently than you, but you have ancestors that look any way imaginable.

but, mostly, what it means is that it is impossible to build rigorous, data-based categorizations of humans based on their appearance; all you get is noise and contradictions.

it's not like they didn't try to do it, but they failed.

as a scientific concept, race is just wrong.

we can talk about race in a sociology classroom.

but, we dare not speak of it in a biology course - not any more, anyways.

race is not a biological concept, it's a social construct.

there's nothing to study.

people that talk about race using biological terms are operating in the realm of pseudoscience.

the idea that bmi should be calculated differently for black people is racist.

and, if you're a black person convinced of that, you've internalized your racism.

this is completely retarded.

bmi is not a racialized concept, but poverty is. the reason these numbers are different across these ethnic groups is a reflection of systemic racism, not a question of biology.

so, i would support programs to help poor people eat better diets, regardless of their ethnicity.

but, i don't think it's worthwhile to waste time and research dollars on determining whether bmi is different for different racial types; it's a laughable suggestion, frankly.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/49f398eb-5546-4d68-8d07-4b74e35b1df8

"Based on everything we know... this has not been sufficiently tested," he added. "It's not about being first somehow - it's about having a safe vaccine."

well, tell that to the clear-minded 85 year-old diabetic that just inherited her only daughter's grandkids, as she succumbed to it herself in her 60s.

that's a little over the top....

but, you get the point. there's lots and lots of people that will very rationally choose an experimental vaccine, after a cost-benefit analysis.

this is the real world, where people have no choice but to live in risk.

i think that if people are willing to take the risk, they should be allowed to assume it; it's their body, so it's their choice.

the reality is that there's probably something like a 95% chance that the vaccine out of russia is fine. for me, a 5% chance of complications is many orders of magnitude higher than the likelihood that the virus harms me in any way. so, i'll wait.

but, if i was a little older, or diabetic, i'd jump at it.

technically, it's untested and comes with some risk, but this isn't as reckless as it's being portrayed as, and things will probably work out fine.

and, i won't even take aspirin.

i don't want the dependency. i don't want the habit.

it's not a "headache".

it's not a "bad headache".

it's a full blown, clinical, vicious migraine.

i'll run the shower for days to push it off if i have to....

but, hopefully, the fan is back working again soon.

we're talking difficulties typing, difficulties reading, confusion, blurry vision....these are the absolute worst types of migraines that you can imagine....

the last few migraines have just been vicious, too, so i don't have any apprehension in doing everything i can to stop it. i'm about 30% into it, and i think i can pull it back still.

we're talking auras, with hemiplegic weakness, on one side and then the other, like i'm having a stroke on both sides, one after the other.

i have an appointment on the 24th with a neurologist. i know that these aren't actually dangerous, i just want to know if he has ideas on how to deal with them.

the heaters make me sick.

the a/c makes me sick.

the dehumidifier makes me sick...

so, i keep the fan on 24/7, and the windows open as much as possible.

but, even that doesn't always work - i'll even get sick when the atmospheric pressure outside changes.

i'd legitimately probably be happiest living outside in a tree hut in a rainforest, i just need a tiger shield and somebody to build me a treetop studio that's hurricane proof.

for now, if i could just find somewhere to live where nobody is trying to fuck with the air in any way - where i can just enjoy the natural atmosphere, whatever that means - then that's the preferred solution.

i'm just very, very, very sensitive to anything that alters the atmosphere, almost like i'm actually from a different planet or something.

the other reason i know it's the humidity is that taking a hot shower almost always works to fix it.

and, yes - i can smell. and taste. it doesn't seem to be that.

i just had a yummy bite of strawberry. mmmm.

i just can't smell any smoke, or any of the disgusting smells i was dealing with last year. so, what i'm getting at is that it seems unlikely to be related to gasses coming up from under the floor. that issue does seem to have been fixed.

i've been through this before enough times that i know that it's the dry & stagnant air causing both the bleeds and the migraines. he doesn't seem to have his a/c on, but he may be running a dehumidifier up there, and that may be the root cause.

the fan fixes it. i just need to fix the fan.

and hope it doesn't get too bad in the mean time.

i'm not straight edge.

but, i don't like the idea of "painkillers". ever. at all. for any reason.

self-medicating, as in the case of a headache, is pretty much the only time i won't smoke pot, as a principle.

i want to use the drug in a purely recreational way, sporadically - very infrequently. i don't want to get into the habit of using anything as a sleep aid, or anything to deal with headaches or muscle pains.

i'm an advocate of suffering through it.

i mean, if i won't take aspirin, generally, because i feel uncomfortable with the premise of taking drugs for pain relief, i'm not going to smoke drugs, either.

i would rather be warm with a headache than cold without one, so there's little chance i'm going to open that window.

i'm going to run the shower, though, to get the humidity up.

maybe all night.

the cause and effect is as clear as day, too.

i haven't had a headache in months; it started to come back in within minutes as soon as the fan turned off.

am i going to take thc for migraines?

no. i won't allow myself to do that, that's an abuse of the chemical, imo.

the temperature might come up enough to open the window late tomorrow afternoon.

that's too far from now.

that's a week cold turkey for the nicotine, and i'm confident that's done with. i don't want to have to start popping aspirin down here....

so, my fan went out this afternoon and i'm predictably getting another migraine, along with nose bleeds. it doesn't smell like anything in here, though. this might be a difficult few days, coming up.

it's the same thing that happened last year - it just stopped. i'm more convinced that it's full of hair this year, though, because it's more obvious. but i don't know...

what i know is that if i don't get the fan back on soon, i'm going to potentially be writhing in pain for days, as i fight off migraines and nosebleeds.

i was dealing with something similar in the previous basement, so it doesn't seem to be unique to this space. and, i've had periodic migraines and seizure-like events going back years.

so, i don't think it's anything particularly local, i think i just need better air circulation.

a central focus in the film is the role of poor nutrition on the lifestyles of the future, and the dominant effect of fast food on our diets.

it is both the case that the flynn effect (which is what he's talking about) is usually explained primarily via increases in nutrition in our diets (as a result of oil) and that poor diets, especially diets high in fast food, lead to lower iq scores.

so, if he's projecting a future where people have been eating garbage for centuries, we would expect the flynn effect to have undone and reversed itself quite some time before the film takes place.

https://healthyeating.sfgate.com/relationship-between-fast-food-brain-12203.html

i think the film is rather brilliant, and that while projective science of the sort is tentative at best, it's at least an educated guess.

a more useful criticism, from my perspective, would be to point out that they don't talk about things like energy sources, or address the consequences of climate change. further, they treat america as though it exists on this world by itself. if america were to ever stagnate to such an absurd extreme, it would run out of energy before it ran out of food, and end up subsumed by the ocean in the process. further, some other culture would no doubt come in and wipe us out, as easy prey.

so, in that sense, this kind of future is unlikely, for the reason that we'd end up extinct before it happened.

but, in theory?

i have little criticism of the premise of the film, as it exists. it's not inevitable, surely. but, it's a reasonable projection of existing trends.

obviously, it won't be quite that bad 20 years from now.

further, the idea that intelligence has been going up recently and therefore will go up forever is a basic logical fallacy. it's the same error that led us to taking the philips curve seriously.

the reasons we saw increasing intelligence in the 20th century had mostly to do with increasing levels of nutrition, something that started to undo itself in the onset of neoliberalism around 1970 or so. so, i'm not buying the idea that we should project all of the progress we had up to 1970 indefinitely into the future, especially when the point of the film is to viciously criticize the revolutionary economic changes that set in with the embrace of corporatism and neoliberalism. we don't know what our intelligence levels will be like in 500 years, but we can certainly state with clarity that we won't have infinite growth in intelligence levels, that some kind of limit is inevitable, and that decline is just as likely as anything else.

so, again, that's a dumb criticism.

i just want to react to the genetic criticism, because this guy isn't really understanding what the film is getting at.

it's well understood at this point that the genetic contributions to intelligence are minimal to non-existent, and the exception more than the rule. intelligence does not exist entirely independently from genetics, but it is shaped dominantly by the environment.

but, that's kind of actually the point that's really being made, here - the film isn't arguing for the genetic basis of stupidity, so much as it's arguing for the environmental effects on it. it may be the case that there is no particular genetic reason why two very stupid people could not produce intelligent offspring, but because the factors in intelligence are so intertwined with environment, it does stand to reason that people that are raised by stupid people are going to end up just as stupid as their parents.

rather than cite very old and debunked studies and present them as a strawman argument around the intent of the film's creators, i'd rather direct you to studies regarding public v private schools. up until recently, private school advocates would point to higher grades as evidence of superior schooling, and it even led to support for voucher programs. but, over time, greater study led to the conclusion that the differences in grades had to do with class and upbringing rather than instruction.

that is to say that the modern science is actually pretty clear that how you raise your child is a dominant factor in how intelligent they end up.

he'd have realized that if he wasn't.....an idiot.

regarding the pseudo v anti intellectual section, i'm just going to say no and leave it at that. pseudo-intellectualism is a thing, surely. but, we live in anti-intellectualism more than pseudo-intellectualism, and i'll point to your decision to present the argument without any sort of backing as evidence of that. i realize i'm doing the same thing, but i don't have the burden of proof, here, and i don't know of any studies that analyze the question and attempt to come to a meaningful deduction.

there's a lot of criticism of the film out there and...

it's all very ironic. truly.

lol.

the actress in the film plays kamala harris on snl nowadays.....

next.

this used to be an obscure cult film.

i get the impression that it's more well known, now.

you're reaching back to make sure your ears are ok, admit it.

it's clowns up ahead of me,
jokers following behind...
here i am.

we've got 20 years, at most, between the end of boomer hedonism and the onset of idiocracy.

it's only the most critical juncture in human history.

no pressure.

if we don't fix this, they won't. and we're extinct.

don't be optimistic about the future.

maintain your characteristic pessimism.

we don't have long to fix things before the millennials step in and try and undo it.

the millennials will be worse than the boomers.

we have to be efficient. and we have to think in terms of systems that will outsurvive us.

i get the most kids are raised with these things called parents, who set rules and boundaries and otherwise shape their existence from a position of authority. this helps them transition into school, into the workforce and what not, where there is always somebody around that is ahead of them in the hierarchy, and has the role to tell them what to do. when hierarchy is normalized at home, it makes sense outside of it, too. ok.

but, when hierarchy and authority is not normalized at home, or does not exist at all, those kids will grow up and walk into classrooms and workplaces and just look at people trying to tell them what to do as though they're from another planet.

you....think...you..can...tell....me...what...to....wait...what?

(blank stare)

your average millennial may even seek guidance as they age via whatever source of authority they define - they don't just accept it, they crave it, they want it.

but, when somebody tries to tell me what to do, my general reaction is woah. who the fuck do you think you are? you can't tell me what to do. why would that even cross your mind as acceptable? i'm going to ignore you now, and if you don't stop yelling, i'm outta here.

being squeezed is an interesting way to exist, because the people older and younger than us were both raised with such structured existences (in aggregate). if the world doesn't make sense to us, maybe there's some good reasons for it.

but, our time is nearing - and we will not have much of it.

so, this is a call to gen x to make the best of what's coming, even as we watch our parents die in front of us in order to get there.

the next 20 years are ours.

let's fix this broken, piece of shit world as best we can, while we can.

so, is it partly the case that i really, really don't like being told what to do because i'm just not used to being told what to do? that authority is a weird, foreign concept that i've never experienced and don't understand?

there's probably something to do that, yeah.

but, i'd argue it's a more desirable way to organize society than one where we whip our children into shape by treating them like property or slaves.

there's some benefits of living in a society where people dislike being told what to do.

people don't want to let me be a gen xer. but, it's kind of not fair to give gen x 15 years and every other generation 20-25; gen x should really be more like 1965-1985. as it is, you usually get 65-80, so i'm stuck at the edge - thirteen days into january, 1981.

and i sort of like being the last one, ever, which is kind of intrinsically gen x, itself.

but, look at this:

that is a picture of me on the right with the hat turned up a little to see the hair. and what is that around my neck?

it's a latch-key.

qed.

i'm concerned about the planet and the country, not your trivial existence or your meaningless career.

i'll state this tersely.

i'm not running for office, and i don't want to join your party. so, i don't care if you want my endorsement or not, and your opinion of me or what i type here is not of any concern to me.

so, you can hate me to my core if you want; i don't care, i'll vote for you and analyze your policies and post here about them, anyways. you can send me an email if you'd like to have a debate about it, but expect me to post your responses here, in the long run.

politicians don't elect voters; voters elect politicians. it's my opinion of your policies that is relevant, not your opinion of my writing.

so, don't like this site? don't want my endorsement?

too fucking bad; i don't give a fuck.

i've never heard of her and have no comment.

except to remind you that twitter is not a reflection of reality; it's a circle jerk for liberal elitists.

which i will need to do over and over, i know that.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/us-primary-loomer-1.5691796

for real.

https://globalnews.ca/news/5831085/canada-summer-jobs-abortion/

"how wide is the box, again?"

"three and a sixth fuck offs"

in canada, the liberals recently brought in a law that says you need to sign a waiver declaring your support for abortion rights if you want federal funding for summer jobs programs.

and, it's considered a populist position.

i'm just trying to imagine where to put john kasich on the political spectrum, in canada.

you might pretend he's a moderate, and i might disagree, but he was a relatively mainstream republican, at one point. he's in the spectrum, down there.

i'm not even sure that the populist party in canada, what we call a far-right fringe group, would be able to deal with a john kasich. this is somebody that left the conservative party because he thought it was too liberal, and still calls himself pro-choice (although he supports the kind of restrictions that clinton does on late term abortions).

so, our far right party has roughly the same position that hillary clinton had; in our spectrum, she would be considered an anti-abortion extremist. so, where do you put kasich?

he's certainly not a libertarian.

the grassroots of the reform party had a strong anti-abortion component, but the leadership of the party just used it as an excuse to string along donors. there is little evidence that they ever had any real intent on banning anything, and they never did, despite repeated opportunities. in the end, the donors started dying off, and the issue seems to have largely receded from the conservative party's discourse.

in canada, john kasich would really have to join something like the christian heritage party, which is a crypto-fascist group, just like kasich is, himself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Heritage_Party_of_Canada

this is a party that gets a few thousand votes per riding at most and has never won a seat at any level. but, it's the only party that would come close to representing his views on abortion.

he may have been a socred, back before they disappeared in the early 80s. the socreds were legitimately anti-abortion, along with being anti-semitic and absolutely vehemently opposed to the metric system. i wonder if i could measure the length of my middle finger for them, and set it to the standard of measurement.

canada is not as liberal as europe, either, in general.

so, america, you really need to look at yourself in the mirror a little. this guy kasich, who the center-left party just brought in to appeal to supposed moderates, would be unwelcome in any party in canada. he would be so far to the right that he's out of the spectrum.

and, he claims the party left him, in some kind of twisted reagan reference.

most of the world would have considered him unelectable - in fact unnominatable - from the start.

i actually like this one better.

i warned against this in 2016, and it was part of my calculus in weakly endorsing clinton in the end; there was the jimmy dore faction that suggested that a trump victory may create a left-wing backlash, and i said to them "you're all fucking daft. if you elect trump, you'll create the biggest tent the democrats have ever seen, and end up with the most right-wing democrat since andrew jackson".

and, here we are.

and, now?

this election can't be about defeating trump, not anymore, not with the way the democrats are going; america, you need to send a message to the democrats that the direction they're moving is not acceptable, and grit your teeth and cry and vote for a third party, instead.

now is the time to abandon the democrats.

i encourage you to follow my lead.

and, so is biden.

and so is bernie.

have we fallen so far into backwardsness in america that evangelical aphorisms are now meaningful to democrats, too?

this is maybe language contemporary democrats would better understand.

kasich is a wolf in sheep's clothing.

it's also a reminder that we should be careful with words, and i'm as guilty as anybody else of this.

when we routinely throw around words like "fascist" and "nazi" in imprecise ways, we lose their meanings, and we have a hard time seeing true fascism when it actually appears in front of us.

trump is not smart enough to be a fascist. it's a scary truth, but he just isn't.

but, kasich is the real deal.

and, the dnc is on the wrong side of history in allowing him to speak, and needs to apologize for it.

“If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

that's the hard truth: allowing kasich to speak at the dnc is a major leap in the united states' slow march towards fascism.

and, unlike trump, kasich is an actual union busting, queer-hating fascist. trump just plays one on tv.

this is the article that the msm should be running, but won't, because they're invested in swinging the democrats as far right as possible.

the americans used to have a choice between the right and the far right; that's increasingly dissolving into a one-party state that embraces the far right and rejects dissent.

https://www.indy100.com/article/john-kasich-dnc-speech-video-aoc-democrat-national-convention-9675766

they should absolutely be distancing themselves from both sarsour and omar, who are going to lose more votes than they gain, in the most important swing groups. in canada, muslims actually do form a meaningful voting bloc. they simply don't in the united states.

it's not the bds movement, exactly - i follow chomsky's deconstruction, which is that pushing these kinds of tactics are more likely to get you labeled a nazi than actually work. that is, chomsky has been skeptical (albeit vaguely supportive) of these tactics, under the argument that they aren't just not going to work but are likely to lead to a backlash that makes it harder to get people substantive rights. i think that's the right analysis.

but, i mean, i don't support two states; that's a 20th century solution. the palestinians need full civil rights in a single state where everybody is treated as an equal. no solidarity with ethnic nationalism - they need to adjust and learn to be citizens of israel, and israel needs to let them be citizens, too.

the problem with sarsour & omar is the comments they've produced, which are unambiguously racist, and the associations they're bringing in, but, even more so, the liability around projecting those associations to actual swing voters, which are mostly white people in the midwest.

that said, this is too little, too late. i will be continuing to support the green ticket until i hear an explicit denunciation of john kasich, meg whitman and the lot as fascists that are unwanted in the party - because if i don't get that denunciation, i'll have to assume that they are wanted in the party, in which case it's a party i can't support.

https://forward.com/fast-forward/452889/biden-campaign-disavows-linda-sarsour-after-her-convention-appearance/

must have been all of that unemployment that pushed inflation down to negative levels.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-inflation-july-1.5691748

The Embassy of Latvia in Canada has also pushed back against criticism of members of the Latvian SS units and the annual parade. It recently labelled a Ottawa Citizen commentary describing the participation of Latvians in the SS division and the Holocaust as a “threat to democracy in the world.”

“One must study history in order to understand the truth,” the embassy added in a tweet.

that's official holocaust denial from the latvian state.

The Latvian government also has on its website a 14-page document that argues Russian “disinformation” is behind efforts to paint the gathering in an unfavourable light.

just like goebbels would have!

umm....yes, he does.

that would be a very nice surprise, especially given the fascist rhetoric from clinton around it.

i'll believe it when i see it, but i would strongly support pardoning both snowden and assange, as well.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/18/edward-snowden-deserves-trial-not-pardon/

i mean, you know what goebbels would have said about people like me, right?

exactly.

and, bizarrely, i'm being accused of being a bot again.

refraining from open russophobia is more offensive than exposing the baltic region's full embrace of nazism, apparently.

glad to see where the priorities are, here - i stand up against nazism, and i'm just a soviet propagandist. surreal.

well, we got this right, at least.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-condemns-annual-latvian-parade-that-honours-nazi-ss-unit

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/hundreds-march-with-nazi-ss-veterans-in-latvia-1.5912476

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/21/racism-sexism-nazi-economics-estonia-far-right-in-power-ekre

hey, listen.

i wasn't alive yet, but i would have supported the russians in their struggle against fascism in the past, and i'll support them in the fight against fascism, again.

but, it would help if they'd drop their own support for it, and be more proactive in removing dictators where they prop them up.

will you send nato soldiers to die for this?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/world/europe/ok-gesture-white-power-estonia.html

so, i have no interest in intervening in belarus.

but, i know that vlad doesn't like this guy, or his skunky moustache. getting rid of him is the right thing to do, and it should be done.

what history do we have in the baltics? where and when have we fought together? in what way are we allies?

these were some of the most nazi corners of europe, and they willingly aligned with the fascists against the communists. they were not on our side; they were not on the right side. and, they never even truly recanted. poland was a victim in the war, but, to this day, latvia & lithuania maintain vibrant white supremacist communities, and little shame about their collaboration with nazis. they don't deserve any protection at all.

moving further back in history, the region is actually just extremely remote. the region didn't really exist in history as anything besides a transit point for varangians moving south until the german crusaders moved in looking for lebensraum around the year 900, but the indigenous inhabitants would have been fully in the sphere of the norse-slavic states (like kiev). riga was founded in the 13th century. this area was just outside of what we call civilization. so, there's no shared history, here, until they had to fight off the mongols, which didn't end until a city called moscow decided to refuse payment, and united an indigenous revolt against them. the region only then emerges in history as a satellite of the russians, although they had to fight some wars against the swedes and others around it.

we don't need the details of baltic history, here; the point i'm making is that there's no point of shared history, no overlapping culture, nothing to tie us together with them. the region is not strategic, either; there's nothing to save, nothing to protect.

we have never fought side-to-side with these people, and to suggest they are some kind of allies is consequently an abuse of language and an abuse of history.

if anything, they're taking advantage of the west to use us as leverage in an independence struggle that is not based on any meaningful concept of difference.

we should give them back; they don't belong to us.

the way that nato should be thinking about the baltics is this: the alliance overextended itself to a region it can't and shouldn't want to protect. so, what can it get in return for handing them over without a fight?

maybe, the russians could pull back a little somewhere else, in exchange for a nato withdrawal.

and, when the russians do finally recover the baltics (and they will. it is foolish to delude yourself otherwise.), they should round up all the invading, colonialist christian germans and deport them to siberia.

and, i do not want to see a single hair on a single soldier disturbed to protect any nato countries in the russian sphere.

i would not sacrifice an infected rat for the baltics, or for poland.

this is the most ridiculous nonsense...

if the russians move in in any serious way, and i do actually think they should, it's not going to be as simple as removing a dictator (and lukashenko is legitimately a dictator) and putting in a foreign-backed puppet. the discourse is so far removed from reality, that it's not even worth debunking.

rather, if the russians get triggered, they are likely to bring in the kind of strategic and structural changes that they brought to syria.

so, that would mean:

1) closer military cooperation between minsk and moscow (if that's possible)
2) replacing lukashenko with somebody around him as a temporary leader. i don't know the situation well enough to make suggestions, but it would probably be a military leader.
3) stabilizing the region from foreign influence
4) fresh elections

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/18/lukashenko-putin-russia-belarus-tsar/

but, vlad...

you gotta get rid of this guy. c'mon.

i neither have sympathy for nor solidarity with an aggressive nato that wants to fuck around in eastern europe for no discernible reason besides playing stupid geopolitical games.

and, let this be a warning to nato - if you continue to mess around in the russian sphere of influence, don't start crying when they start destabilizing poland or the baltics; you will have brought that on yourself, and the russian reaction will be justified and correct.

i think they should have retaliated years ago, and that they didn't is a reflection of putin's delusional insistence on working with a hostile west that doesn't respect him or russia in general.

as before, the russians would be smart to shift the conflict out of belarus by starting a hot war somewhere like venezuela, instead. and, america will only have itself to blame for it.

i would support calls for lukashenko to quit. while not on the same level as the fascists in the middle east, he is an anachronism in europe that should not exist. unlike many of the countries in the region that are often labeled incorrectly, belarus is legitimately long overdue for a transition to democracy.

that said, belarus is in the russian sphere of influence, and i would oppose any sort of intervention for that explicit reason. the potential consequences of such a thing are far too destabilizing to even contemplate. the russians would be justified in intervening and escalating, and i would morally support them in doing so.

the eu may have a valid role to play in negotiation, but it should avoid the kinds of destabilizing actions that it took in ukraine.

we should, broadly, step back and let the russians deal with it - and they have every right to retaliate if we don't.

so, could we get biden-pence? trump-harris?

this is a real possibility, this cycle:

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

i had to look it up:

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

the house picks the president, and the senate picks the vice-president.

this is probably a better forecast:

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

(note that the initial post mistakenly had nevada red. oops.)

...meaning trump needs any two of the top three, or iowa + michigan, or iowa + minnesota + wisconsin, to win; biden must win michigan, and two out of the other three.

i remember back in 2016 i did this with these maps and said "trump doesn't have a path", and then he won three states that he had no business winning.

trump seems to have the advantage on paper right now, but we'll see how that works out.

in broader terms, though?

i think this is probably your election: florida, arizona and the four states in the upper midwest.

and, i'm being generous with florida and arizona...

it's those four white states in the upper midwest that will swing it.

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

it's very close in minnesota.

if i were to project right now (which is silly), it would be this:

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

so, biden wins back pennsylvania and michigan and potentially even iowa, but loses minnesota (due to the george floyd riots) and can't swing wisconsin back.

ohio is a red state and not in play. they'd have a better chance in kansas.

another question to ask, though, is if the swing to trump amongst gen xers has anything to do with these lockdowns.

if you're a senior, you want people to stay in, because you could legit die from this, and if you're younger you may actually enjoy the disruption, or otherwise be easily persuaded by government pseudoscience designed to control you.

but, middle aged people need to go to work to pay bills, and to feed their freeloading kids and their freeloading parents. they may be rightly pissed off that the democrats want to tell them to stay home.

i wondered about this a few months ago, but it seemed like it wasn't happening on the ground. maybe i had my age groups off a little; maybe the people most irked by this are more likely to vote the bums out than stomp their feet in the park.

if that is the case - if trump's support amongst gen xers is a reaction to restrictive democratic measures to contain the virus - the democrats could be in for a very, very nasty surprise, downballot.

if you take the outcome of that poll - biden 50, trump 46 - and you adjust it to account for low turnout amongst young people, who were the only group that decisively picked biden, and the potentiality of some weakening support for biden due to the harris pick in older white voters, you see how trump mounts another unexpected win.

as a gen xer, how might i explain this?

it seems counter-intuitive. i wouldn't have predicted that. but, if you just sort through this page, you'll see that i don't like either of them. in fact, i can state fairly tersely that i legitimately hate both candidates, and that my disdain for biden is much greater than it is for clinton.

it might be that simple. very young people don't like trump, but every poll for the last 100 years has the democrats winning people under 30, and (1) that always seems to change as they age and (2) they don't vote, anyways. i wouldn't draw too much from that, given that we've seen the same development over the last four years that we've seen for decades; the millenials and gen x are apparently republicanizing, just like the boomers and the generations before them did.

and, older people just seem to like biden better, maybe because they're still having problems with seeing women in leadership roles.

but, gen xers seem to have liked clinton better than either biden or trump, and biden even less than trump; in my own age category, what's developing is something like clinton > trump > biden, and i have to admit that that's becoming my own view, as well.

we just seem to dislike biden more than we dislike trump.

the error bars are quite large, so the results might be wrong, but these are still very different numbers than we saw in 2016.

A total of 1,108 adults, including an oversample of 305 adults living in 15 battleground states (Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin) were interviewed by telephone nationwide by live interviewers calling both landline and cell phones. Oversampled states have been weighted to represent their proper share of the adult population. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. Among the entire sample, 31% described themselves as Democrats, 27% described themselves as Republicans, and 42% described themselves as independents or members of another party.

http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2020/images/08/16/rel8a.-.2020.pdf

what we're seeing here is more like the dreaded squeeze that i've been hearing about my whole life; the idea that gen x is going to get flattened between the milennials and boomers, who are broadly more similar to each other than either is to gen x.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/23/how-coronavirus-could-upend-2020-battlegrounds-204708

there is one other wildcard i want to point out regarding the pandemic, and that's the death rate. in 2016, trump did much better with older voters than clinton.

this is the graphic i need right now:

(https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/08/09/an-examination-of-the-2016-electorate-based-on-validated-voters/)

55% of the population in 2016 was over 50, and it's the demographic he won; he lost the 45% of the population under 50.

you could be looking at over 200,000 dead people by election day, almost all of them over 50. it's easy to make the obvious conclusion that the virus could push trump out in a different way than is currently being contemplated.

i think you need to be careful with that for two reasons, though. first, i'd expect biden to do better with older folk, and we don't really know the breakdown of these deaths. if it splits evenly, it's a wash; if it actually hurts biden more, and it might given that the polling i've seen actually has biden ahead in the 55+ group, then it could even reverse the key swing demographic biden needs.

the second thing is that biden seems to be polling worse than clinton amongst gen xers, which is the group i'd consider myself a part of (although i'm the last gen xer, being born in 1981). in 2016, we saw a millenial/x coalition against the boomers. in 2020, the boomers actually seem to have swung to biden, but at the expense of potentially losing gen x. that could be important to trump, if gen x ends up voting at the highest proportions, even as we realize that the population numbers for gen x are much smaller, something that is not unforeseeable given the virus.

i don't have this data; this is a speculative post, i'm thinking out loud. but, in a close election, 200,000-250,000 dead seniors could be a deciding factor.

let's take a step back.

my prediction in 2016 was a trump victory, but i based it on a media analysis, rather than a polling analysis. i'll say this again...this is what i said...i'm paraphrasing....the posts will be up sooner than later....

while the data seems to point to a clear clinton victory so long as the election is fair, it is increasingly clear from the media coverage that the election has already been decided for trump.

so, when i put my mathematician's hat on, i predicted a clinton victory. but, i knew better than to wear a mathematician's hat when analyzing american elections; my media analyst hat told me that it was obvious that trump would win.

i'm not going to look this up now and i don't remember if i've already done it, but the polls in pennsylvania & wisconsin were really not as close as some people have pretended they were. i understand what error is, and i'm quick to point out a bad analysis of error when i see it. but, you have to also look at what the polls actually say and the reality is that all of the polls had clinton ahead in all of the states that she lost, by surprise. people arguing that the data was there really aren't being honest. what was there was the possibility of an error in the data, which is what the analysis is for. but, it's not correct to argue that the result was predictable because you got a 25% chance of trump winning, when you crunched the numbers; we don't run 100,000 elections, we run one, and the entire concept of a probability gets blurry and weird when you start dropping it into theoretical scenarios like that.

when all of the polls point to the same result, it's not a leap of logic to make the obvious conclusion. the reality that they might be wrong is always there, but nobody looking at the data saw this coming (although there were other people studying media that picked out clear warning signs), and anybody pretending they did is being disingenuous - what they saw coming, correctly, was the possibility that the polls were wrong, which is always there. and, that is the truth of it, if you take it at face value - that the polling was wrong, and more wrong than you can assign to statistical randomness.

so, i'll make a clear statement regarding the polling i've seen before i back off.

the race is currently actually very tight, where it matters, which is different than in 2016. four years ago, the polling that we had in the three key blue states that flipped - michigan, wisconsin, pennsylvania - universally had clinton ahead, even if by small margins, sometimes. today, those numbers are quite a bit closer than they were, then, even if the national polling doesn't look much different.

it consequently seems as though the data is suggesting that trump is going to get completely destroyed by much larger margins in states like california and new york (which he was going to lose anyways.) but is actually outpolling himself relative to four years ago in the important states.

many, many things could change in the next few months and weeks, and if the election is mostly mail then we're dealing with a situation that....we don't know if telephone sampling is useful for predicting mail voting or not. it's unprecedented.

but, all things equal, it would seem to me, right now, that my polling analysis is that trump is actually set to pull off a repeat victory via more or less the same path, even if the states are switched up a little bit.

the simple statement is this: in order for the democrats to win the election, they will need to improve their standing in specific states. right now, it's hard to see which states they hope to win in 2020 that they didn't win in 2016, given that biden's polling is essentially the same as clinton's, but slightly weaker across the board.

i don't expect to post frequent updates, but my caveat is that my media analyst hat was more useful than my polling analysis hat was, four years ago, and it's way too early to even put that hat on, right now.

so, i know i've said this before, but i'm going to clean this space up a little and really move on.

i've lost all interest in the election cycle down there - the parties are identical, it really doesn't matter who wins. so, i'm not wasting my time with it.

why do the democrats even exist, at all, anymore?

what substantive policies do they push that are different than the republicans? what's the point of voting for them?

they should just merge.

:(.

this is terrible news for the climate.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/baby-boom-ahead-as-covid-19-kept-millions-of-women-from-care-1.5070053

i think what they're really suggesting is that most of what they sell you over the counter is really just a placebo.

i'm not surprised. i find that aspirin works pretty well and the rest of it doesn't at all.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/aug/19/honey-better-treatment-for-coughs-and-colds-than-antibiotics-study-clams

i'm not surprised that i'm not the only person that reacted to the dnc with disgust and dismay.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/08/john-kasichs-dnc-speech-angered-progressives/615361/

regarding downballot issues, i'd advise you to look at the candidates very closely. there may be house & senate democrats worth supporting in your district. please do the research.

but, i am now officially opposed to the biden-harris ticket and officially in support of the green party ticket (which is howie hawkins & angela walker).

so, yeah...

i guess you never really know where the red lines in politics are until they get crossed, do you?

i can't support the democrats this cycle, and the reason is that they did not seem to have a problem giving john kasich, who is basically walking human excrement, a choice spot at their convention. that's a line i can't tolerate.

they have an opportunity to apologize. i don't expect to get one.

it would appear that that settles the issue, then - i am officially supporting the greens, this cycle.

this man passed a law removing licenses for doctors that provide information about abortion access to rape victims - not even abortion providers, but just doctors that have the basic decency to tell a woman where to go to get treatment, and he's rewarded with a prime time speaking slot at the dnc, and gets plaudits and praise about how much of a leader he is? i am disgusted. i am revolted. i am appalled.

and, what kind of message are you sending to ohio voters when you tell them "this monster john kasich is on our side, now.".

i can only imagine how frightening, confusing, maddening, saddening and angering that message must be, to ohio democrats.

how many women turned their tvs off and went into the bathroom to cry when they saw his horrible face flash across their screen?

temp post:

john kasich is an uncivilized and bigoted right-wing extremist that the democrats should not be reaching out to, as a temporary ally, however temporary. his views on abortion, queer rights, climate change and a zillion other things should be clearly and thoroughly denounced by the party, and the person responsible for giving him a platform should resign.

unfortunately, as they allowed john kasich to speak at their convention, that means that the democrats must be endorsing his policies on abortion, climate change, queer rights, etc. otherwise, they wouldn't have given a platform to his bigotry.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/moderate-john-kasich-is-actually-terrifying-226249/

temp post:

john kasich is a vicious bigot and a right-wing extremist. i suppose that, as they allowed john kasich to speak at their convention, that means that the democrats must be endorsing his policies on abortion, climate change, queer rights, etc. otherwise, they wouldn't have given a platform to his bigotry.

i'm actually going to hold off on attacking him on this, a little.

his predecessor, stephen harper, was often accused of using this tactic, in ways that were legitimately designed to shut down dissent, and prevent the institution from operating properly. that may be the actual reason that trudeau has avoided proroguing parliament; i believe this is the first time he's done this, since he was elected in 2015. that's actually an unusually sporadic usage of what is a legitimate procedure.

they just changed finance ministers, and that's a perfectly valid reason to prorogue. the guardian, being in the uk, knows that.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/18/justin-trudeau-scandal-prorogue-parliament

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/11/john-kasich-ohio-moderate-voting-record-republican-president-campaign

or, ask this old guy that you probably don't know anything about.

they voted for trump to stop cruz.

he was the lesser evil.

they just let a radical pro-lifer speak at their convention!

what is their stance on this?

the reason that trump won is that republicans rejected the kind of hard, hard right extremism being pushed by overbearing conservatives like john kasich.

this is a really key wedge issue, too. i pushed back against it (clinton is not technically pro-choice, she's pro-doctor), but one of the best reasons people could come up with to vote for clinton was to stop the republicans from stacking the courts with pro-lifers.

if you take that argument away, you really pull the rug out from under the base of the party in large parts of the country.

as it is, how am i supposed to interpret this?

what is the party's stance on abortion?

i mean...

we forget things easily, don't we?

we seem to think everybody was trying to stop trump in 2016.

in fact, the data suggests that people got stuck with trump because he was less extreme than the other options: cruz, rubio and kasich. trump, comparably speaking, was the moderate on the ballot.

we weren't even sure that trump was going to oppose abortion rights, at all. and, there's still little data suggesting that he really cares, much.

so, now it's 2020, and the democrats want to bring the right-wing extremists that republicans felt were too conservative, to the point that they settled for fucking trump instead, into their party?

it's remarkably tone-deaf.

i'm neither a democrat nor an american.

but, i could not be in a party that gives a platform to somebody like john kasich.

i would tear up my membership....

this person just spoke at the dnc.

https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/politics/2018/12/21/ohio-gov-john-kasich-signs-one-nations-most-restrictive-abortion-bans-vetoes-heartbeat-bill/2366674002/

these people don't have good politics and they should not be welcomed as allies.

i don't want to be on the same side as any of these people, at all. these are a bunch of corporate suits and nazi thugs.

if i walked into a room and john kasich was speaking, i'd get up and walk right the fuck out.

or maybe come with pro-choice signs and slogans to drown him out.

biden may be wise to try to distance himself from these people.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/18/politics/republicans-supporting-biden/index.html

when i saw spiral beach a handful of times in the mid 00s in ottawa - at the now defunct zaphod's, at the bluesfest opening for the white stripes - i interpreted them as a heavily zappa influenced goof-rock band that wasn't taking itself very seriously, but was having a lot of fun. i had no idea that they would become a kind of document 0 for a solid decade of various stuff that would develop out of it.

the core of the band were two brothers, along with a longterm partner of one of them. when the band broke up around 2010, one of the brothers went to montreal (where he became good friends and massively influential on an eventual pop star named grimes) and the other went to toronto with said partner, and then eventually to detroit, where he emerged under the moniker moon king. the bassist ended up in a pop-opera band called austra that released records under a number of monikers, after morphing in a few different directions.

so, while this record is a little bit unknown, it's existence is actually rather historically important as it formed the central focus of the very small canadian independent music scene that survived the 00s and moved into the 10s.

here's some kids having fun making a video:

and, here's some live footage, too:

they were legit talented. it's a shame. really.

canadian bands that you've never heard of flood?

ok, you talked me into it.

i saw the ssris (who self-identified as massive cardiacs fans) in 2011 in ottawa, at the now defunct zaphod's. unfortunately, they lost their drummer and had to disband, but they had a bright future as a high-end experimental pop band while they existed

they have some earlier material that's also interesting, but here's the finished record:

and, the time they got back together.

what's next, do you think?

....and the fact that a large percentage of what i listen to is in fact from this country is obscured by the reality that you've never heard of it.

but, i mean, it should be clear that i'm not very interested in mainstream music, or mainstream culture at all.

most readers would be unlikely to be familiar with much of the music i listen to at all, regardless of where it's from.

this is viewed by many art music critics as one of the or the single greatest record of all time:

this was at one point listed as the greatest ep of all time on metacritic:

why don't i listen to more canadian music?

well, i do listen to a fair amount of canadian music, but it's fairly underground. my favourite industrial band is skinny puppy (vancouver), and my favourite post-rock act is a silver mt zion (montreal); together, those are perhaps my two biggest single influences. there were also a number of very interesting alternative rock bands from southern ontario in the 90s that i've listened to a whole lot of.

i think that the canadian music scene, like most music scenes, really went to shit in the late 90s, and it never really recovered. and, i am vehemently opposed to much of what gets labeled "canadian music", because it's mostly just puerile bullshit.

but, i'm actually more broadly opposed to the concept of music as a geographic idea. i find it very unappealing to think of a band as "canadian" or "german"; music is universal, and where a musician is from does not and should not matter. nor should people be coerced into participating in the cultural scenes that exist around them, simply because they're there.

so, i'd actually argue that there have been very, very substantive music scenes in this country, in the past. there just aren't any right now, and haven't been any for essentially my entire adult life.

i'd probably move to new york, if i could. that would be the ideal place for me to live, culturally.

i'm here every night...

...until they let me back out to play.

i'm just waiting for biden to claim he really voted against iraq, but the senate got hacked.

we seem to be developing a kind of cultural cop-out in blaming things on hackers, and we should maybe stop to get a handle on it.

don't like the results of the election? it was hackers.
don't like somebody's opinion online? must be a bot.
don't want to take responsibility for something you posted? claim your account was hacked.
and, now, don't want to get busted for stealing cerb money? it wasn't me, your honour, i was hacked!

i've been clear enough that i don't support prosecuting these people.

but, hackers seem to be the answer to everything nowadays, aren't they?

of course, i don't know that they're all lying about it.

but, i sure do think they all are!

there really seems to be a lot of people that claim that it was "hackers" that signed up, and not them.

maybe i should have signed up and blamed it on hackers, too.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/victim-of-cra-breach-says-someone-applied-for-cerb-with-her-account-1.5067986

but, don't worry, bc and alberta.

ontario won't leave you behind.

here we come!

what politicians need to do when they hear things from economists is ask a simple question:

do you have any actual data?

if you're a policy maker at any level, please heed this critique from a self-described failed mathematician: the theory is useless. if it hasn't been proven wrong yet, it's a matter of time.

when they tell you there are trade-offs, correlations or relationships, be skeptical.

ask for and look exclusively at data - when they make claims, tell them you want empirical proof, not a mathematical one.

and, if they get iffy, or tell you they can't do the experiment, take it for what it actually is: a wild, speculative guess.

but, i kind of like the irony of the whole thing.

if the liberals want to be the new progressives, let's hope the same thing happens to them, in the end.

economics is at the point of development that physics was at before newton - it's a lot of badly formed ideas, it's full of contradictions, and it doesn't have a rigorous presentation.

we have more data now than we did 200 years ago, so we should be able to look at things more analytically than we could in the past. we need to essentially throw it all in the trash and start all over again, in building a rigourous system based on evidence, rather than an axiomatic system based on opinions.

who knows when that happens, but the result will be unlikely to resemble classical liberal economics very much, when it does.

for now, you need to look at economists as charlatans. they can be very confident, it is true; they don't actually really know what they're talking about, because the science is too undeveloped for them to be able to.

the philips curve is the classic argument against mainstream economics as a science. it came from the right, but the argument isn't ideological, it's about data v theory.

here's the graph:

if you look at just the little bit of it at the front, it looks like a good correlation. now, eyeing correlations from graphs is always bad, but you can at least see it by looking at it.

what economics does over and over again is cherry pick little pieces of graphs like that, build simple mathematical relationships around them and then project them into the future.

but, as we can see, that didn't work with the philips curve, did it?

what you're seeing here is a specific example that generalizes fairly well. these are the types of errors that economists make over and over again, because they don't use the scientific method.

like, you still hear mainstream economics talk about the phillips curve.

this was proven wrong with empirical data almost 50 years ago, and they just won't learn. they still talk about inflation v employment.

it's wrong - we've known that for decades.

mainstream economics is based on assuming various correlations and then projecting those correlations into the future. but, that's not how you do science; in science, you have to demonstrate the correlation with empirical evidence, and they just don't do it.

they'll tell you they can't do experiments in economics. fine. but, stop calling it a science, then.

in fact, if you look at actual reality, you'll see that the evidence generally collapses most of the correlations. for example, the idea that corporate tax rates effect employment - they simply don't, that's an assumption that the evidence has debunked over and over and over again.

so, they'll tell you it's "bad economics" to push for higher corporate taxes.

in fact, their economics is bad science - the evidence suggests the opposite of what the theory does.

here's a question.

is it possible that freeland could go down in history as a bigger loser than kim campbell? and, might the liberals follow the progressives into the dustbin of history? well, let's think this through.

in 1993, you had a progressive/conservative (same thing.) government in place. an extremely unpopular prime minister, who had earlier swept into power on the back of a populist movement, was at this point absolutely decimated in the polls. history argues it's because he shifted the manufacturing tax from a hidden tax (on corporations) to an obvious consumption tax, that is he shifted the tax burden from the corporate sector to private individuals, and he got nailed at the box for it. i'm using the word 'shift' because it mirrors the neo-liberal propaganda pushed by the corporate sector; they modeled it as a shift, but it was in truth a tax increase, because corporations will always seek to maximize accumulation at all costs, and they took it as an excuse to price gauge. so, yes - if you work it out with the models, it's a shift. but, the models do not reflect reality - which is a general problem with economics.

mainstream economics is not a science, it's mostly magical thinking with badly designed graphs. and, you can trust me on this - i'm a mathematician, i actually understand what they're doing, and what they're doing is always flatly wrong. you can throw the lot of it in the trash - which we keep doing when it fails, and then forgetting.

that is the history; we have the memories of goldfish. we trumpet orthodoxy in economics over and over, and watch it fail over and over; then the keynesians and krugmanites and mmt people come in and fix it, and within a few years we're back at orthodoxy, which fails again. we don't learn. homo economicus is a fucking idiot, incapable of any sort of cogent thought. they should rename it to homo retardicus economicus.

but, anyways.

mulroney stepped down in 1992 or 1993 (look it up) and was replaced with kim campbell, who had a few months to try and salvage a bad situation, something she was not intellectually or organizationally capable of. she was an elitist that thought she was really, really smart but just simply wasn't, so she went out and ran off a bunch of demeaning statements and got thoroughly rejected for it.

here's one:

an election is no time for serious issues.

you can see this kind of attitude in freeland, and she's not likely to be able to hold in her misguided contempt for very long.

the liberals won the 1993 election in a landslide, but it's not because there was a shift to the left in the conservative base. rather, what happened is that conservatives utterly rejected kim campbell as an airhead idiot (and, she was an airhead idiot), and moved en masse to the reform party, a new party that developed in the west to the right of the conservatives. and, they never really saw it coming.

you know the line about history repeating; i don't want to repeat myself, yet again.

but, there's a huge opening for either the greens or the ndp to walk into, if she falls flat on her face - which she will.

so, will a chrystia freeland led party manage two seats as the base caves in to the left?

stay tuned.

listen. jagmeet...

you can win seats if she does this. she will lose a general election. and, you should not wait - because the calculus with freeland flips.

a freeland-led liberal government is likely to be to the right of a mackay-led conservative government; don't be afraid of pulling the plug.

let's hope she overdoes it and destroys herself, triggering an election that she loses...

i was hoping for pretty much the exact opposite...

there's a very good chance that she's going to bring in the kind of crushing, vicious levels of austerity that the conservatives would only dream of.

ew. gross.

i wouldn't expect much of an improvement - she might actually end up being worse, as she's just about as right-wing as you can get, in this country.

https://www.cp24.com/news/parliament-prorogued-till-sept-23-says-pm-trudeau-1.5068586

if you don't want to get sick, stay inside.

don't try to enforce your authority on me, you fascist pig.

should this be the ndp's new campaign song?

fools.

there's an election soon, right?

the government in bc needs to back off and deal with reality, instead of trying to assert delusional fantasies with the threat of violence.

wave it around adrian.

just clean up your own mess, when you're done. british columbians don't want to clean up your mess, after you.

adrian's the big man now, apparently, out to enforce his iron will on any who dissent.

after all, what's his name?

adrian dicks.

as in, big dick.

cower at his superior manliness, he's out to get you.

adrian....

adrian......!

hey, guess what, adrian?

fuck off.

i'd like to see stricter penalties for this government, for failing to follow the science and giving into magical thinking, instead.

if they want to be fascists, we're going to have to fight about it.

but, i'm not interested in following magical thinking, and he can basically just fuck off.

https://www.richmond-news.com/news/stricter-penalties-on-the-way-for-covid-19-rule-breakers-dix-1.24188331

it seems like ms. ardern has been patently wrong for months, herself.

she should have let the virus spread, rather than have the masculine arrogance to think she could stop it.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7283303/new-zealand-coronavirus-trump/

something that happened in the nineteenth century is that european pseudo-intellectuals went out looking towards the "oriental" world, in search of "ancient wisdom", under the assumption that the eastern cultures were older & more wise.

thus spoke zarathustra, after all.

in fact, zoroaster was seen as a massive dilettante once they could actually translate him properly.

and, it turns out that what these people were looking for was really right in front of them the whole time - those supposedly oriental & eastern ideas seem to have actually originated in the west, after all.

so, you'll hear people wonder if jesus went to india and brought back ideas, which is just silliness. jesus never existed at all.

but, in terms of it's coherence as an idea, it seems increasingly more likely that the greeks brought their ideas to india than that they found their ideas there.

that said, you can trace this stuff to weird cults in greece that appear to have iranian origins, which is not hard to make sense of. the orphics were apparently a christian-like cult that claimed origin with the scythians, who would have lived in the steppes and spoken an iranian language. you can build a very early model of cultural diffusion across the steppes that would have moved ideas from central asia into both greece and india with indo-iranian speakers, much as the vedas record the movement of indo-aryan peoples into the subcontinent.

but, it's funny what the archaeological record will tell you if you let it, huh?

gotta do those experiments, in the end - because neither racist europeans nor nativist indians would have guessed that buddhism was fundamentally greek, despite the obvious cultural interchanges around it.

this is probably meant to be buddhist, but is kind of more in the zeno/parmenides space.

and, what we know about buddhism today is that it may have been essentially parmenidian in construction.

(that's the singer/guitarist from king crimson, the bassist from primus and the drummer from tool)

i'm still convinced that this is what nozick was actually talking about.

utilitarian spreader is not a bad term, even if you're referencing nozick more than bentham.

i'd actually like to hear bentham's take on this, though. i bet it would be refreshingly insolent...

i actually think this is bowie's best record, by a good margin.

1995. garson/eno/gabrels.

well, ok.

maybe, the stoics would accept the change, overall - even if parmenides wouldn't, and zeno would have come to his defense. parmenides was...we don't have the sources, i'm going to stop myself before i start. but, zeno was massively influential on the development of calculus (via archimedes), and the fact that parmenides was so influential on zeno means that, along with pythagoras, he's one of the origin points of western thought, even as he exists in history as a distant, distorted memory.

i wish we had better sources on parmenides...

but, when using the term 'stoic', i should refrain from referring too heavily to parmenides, who was really pre-stoic, even if it is the zeno/parmenides connection that is most interesting to myself as a failed mathematician. i mean, a seneca or a marcus aurelius doesn't really have a lot to say about the history of mathematics, which is where i'm actually coming at this from (if it wasn't obvious).

it's more the inability to affect the world around you that would define the later stoics than the idea that change is impossible, altogether. so, they'd end up just resigning themselves to it, and focusing more on how they feel about it than about how to actually do anything about it.

i suppose my tune, ignorance is bliss, is fairly stoic:

to worry about things you can't change,
is pointless and completely deranged



https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/stress

cynical spreaders.

hrmmn.

cynicism and stoicism are ideas that i sort of like, and sort of don't. i'll admit to having a tendency to romanticize poverty, and i certainly reject wealth, but i don't like the naturalistic fallacy. i also generally find myself weary of people arguing in favour of virtue, even as i try to strive for these things myself, for myself. my single biggest enemies in life are people that think they can tell me how to think correctly. 

but, i'd actually imagine that cynics would be poor at spreading viruses due to their disinterest in people. viruses need to find more sociable people to infect, if they want to get around. 

stoics would probably end up arguing that the virus is impossible, and only really exists in our minds, anyways. we'd certainly be unable to control it. stoicism is dangerous, but wise; be careful with that, as you can gain much from it, and be led much astray by it, too.

if they want to relate the spread of the virus to a school of greek philosophy, they should probably be more concerned with epicurean spreaders. it would be the epicureans that would be your social butterflies, your heavy drinkers, your pleasure-seekers and your utilitarian hedonists. 

stoics may be a threat in theory, but nobody would like them in reality, so they wouldn't actually be. and, cynics would be more likely to go sit inside and read.

https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/covid-19-one-in-five-canadians-make-no-efforts-to-curb-viral-spread

well, then.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/aug/12/jamie-lee-curtis-warns-of-trump-fans-stealing-mail/

he's got ballots too, apparently.

they're everywhere, donny. everywhere.

this was immediately obvious, as fallout.

biden is a known quantity, but harris is largely undefined, and it's going to be very hard for her to define herself in a pandemic, when everybody's communicating over the interwebs. it's a major advantage for the republicans, especially given the little bit of time that she had to define herself did not work in her favour at all.

these numbers should be scaring the biden campaign, who should be looking at the situation as a crises point. they need these states to win...

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/16/politics/cnn-poll-biden-trump-august/index.html

and, are they going to run michelle obama?

she doesn't have the ambitions that hillary had from day one. like, the punchline was that hillary was running the show back when bill was governor of arkansas. it was clear the whole time that she was going to run, herself.

michelle obama, on the other hand, always seemed to look like she wasn't sure how she got there, what she was doing there or if she wanted to be there at all, and she seemed to literally run out of the place as soon as she could get out.

whereas you had to fight hillary off, you're going to have to drag michelle in.

she's popular, it's true, which is no doubt the depth of the calculus around the situation. but, she's never run for office, has she?

they're going to try to talk her into it, expect it.

this is just bizarre and weird.

https://www.vox.com/2020/8/17/21373196/john-kasich-dnc-speech-transcript