if the glove fits.

i hear he has some good ideas about health care reform.

(there's an odd fit of coughing from a dark figure in a bright suit, coming from far in the background)

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/27/mitt-romney-staffers-support-joe-biden-402408

you're neither fixed, nor free.

you're stochastic.

you're not free, not exactly - not any more free than an electron in a field is. we are subject to the effects of external forces. clearly.

but, you're certainly not predetermined.

that's not even classical.

that's not even wrong.

frankly, this strikes me as obvious, and i can't fathom how anybody could think we're born with a specific amount of intelligence. that doesn't even strike me as worth testing for, that strikes me as fundamentally clear.

but, what the "we are born blank and can change" people are really up against are the christian snowflakes, the ones that think god made us all unique and variation is an expression of divine will. that is not the debate in the literature, but perhaps it ought to be, because it's what it really is.

if you take a step back from that for a minute, the idea that you're born with a specific iq, or a specific weight, or a specific height, ought to be considered ridiculous. it just doesn't make any sense, intuitively.

and, even eye colour changes, too. mine have been blue, green and brown at various points.

https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/plasticity-its-time-to-rethink-the-notion-that-intelligence-is-fixed/

there was a "chinese supermarket" i was in when i was looking for raspberry tea that...

i think there was a language barrier, and that's why i haven't posted about it. i told him repeatedly that i have asthma (which is a half-truth.), and he honestly didn't seem to understand. he just kept saying in broken english that i needed to have a mask.

so, i just stopped and asked him, blankly: "do you want my business or not?"

and, he looked at me like he was going to cry and shook his head.

so, i walked out.

the adjustment i made was that i carry my puffer now, so that people with language barriers can understand why i'm not wearing a mask, and can make a choice as to whether upholding the fud overpowers their bottom line, or not.

again, if you find yourself in this situation, what you need to do is the following:

1) be assertive, but stay calm.
2) ask for the manager.
3) explain to the manager that you're leaving the store because of the laws. that way, they understand why they're losing business.
4) take your business elsewhere.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/mask-restaurant-brandon-manitoba-1.5699001

maybe there's a nice bunker in bosnia for her to hide in for the next few months.

now, was she on drugs during the last election?

i think it's clear that she was, yes - but it's normal, most politicians are, nowadays. they give them anxiety meds, or very strong uppers to keep them alert.

what's weird is that trump doesn't seem to be; he's the exception, here.

she needs to shut the fuck up.

and somebody needs to tell it to her in no uncertain terms.

can somebody fly clinton to benghazi to get rid of her for a few months?

thanks.

so, again: let's stop pretending we can rely on china for supply chains.

we can't.

we need to adjust.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/canada-china-covid-19-vaccine-trial-plug-pulled-1.5701101

i mean, if it was a church group, i'd maybe have a more subtle response.

but, it's not.

so, my condemnation is clear:

you? never did! fuck the kenosha kid.

i can condemn this kenosha kid.

if he blew up a mosque, that's a diversity of tactics to advance secularism - i wouldn't advocate it, but i won't condemn it

but, i have no common cause with anybody that wants to shoot black protesters on the street, unless the protesters are explicitly christians.

Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old charged with shooting three people — two of them fatally — during a Kenosha protest Tuesday night, considered himself a militia member trying to protect life and property

you never did.

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2020/08/26/kyle-rittenhouse-charged-kenosha-protest-shootings-militia/5634532002/

i never did.

- the kenosha kid

it's going to be a sleepy few days, i can barely stay awake.

so be it.

the pig upstairs seems to be smoking, and it's not helping.

it can't happen here, right?

so, there's this idea that this unrest in minnesota and wisconsin is going to help biden.

derp.

if she cared about him at all, she would recognize his autonomy and provide him with agency.

he's right to call her selfish.

this is absolutely terrible.

she cannot have the right to interfere like this, and the law should be amended to ensure that she can't.

an individual's life belongs solely to them, and they must remain the sole decision maker over it.

it's things like this that are why i can't fathom getting married.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/nova-scotia-medical-assistance-in-dying-bridgewater-couple-court-1.5700203

i don't like either candidate.

but, joe's the conservative, here. not don.

it's funny that richard spencer endorses joe biden, and the coverage around it is that biden rejected it, as though biden has some kind of right to choose his voters, and as though biden's rejection at all matters.

it's this weird tendency tied into the rise of identity politics to see voting for a candidate as joining a club, rather than as an act of self-interest. in the minds of identity voters, it seems to be that there's a "biden club" and that, by supporting the candidate, you're joining the club. as such, members of the club have the right to remove you from it.

this is of course utterly ridiculous to everybody else...

if biden rejected my endorsement (which is not coming.), i'd tell him to fuck off, and that i'm voting for him anyways, whether he likes it or not.

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

richard spencer apparently thinks that joe biden aligns more with his concept of history than donald trump. why is that?

is it the kasich endorsement?

and, is spencer right? or is he foolishly voting against his self-interest?

this hurricane that's about to hit near new orleans has a very weird track, and there is actually a fairly high probability (relatively) that it could zoom across the south, end up back in the atlantic, and then slam new york.

we see these weird tracks every once in a while, where the thing zigs and zags like mohammad ali, and then pow.

you'd be daft to predict a hurricane.

but, this could be vicious.

after the last election, the media instantly jumped on the comparisons between 2019 and 1972, and i cringed.

say what else you will about the dead old man, but nobody doubts that pet was a master strategist. 

what if pierre had missed his chance all those years ago?

yeah.

he missed his chance at an easy majority, and now he's vulnerable. as fatigue sets in, the trend will be downwards.

he'd better give us a helluva budget.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7296428/trudeau-leadership-election-poll/

i'm not going to write the white paper here, and i'll leave it to the economists to fill in the details, but the rule of thumb here should be that the wealthy need to shoulder the burden, and that cuts for the vulnerable should be avoided.

but, i expect an austerity budget from freeland, at the least.

and, i'm hoping the ndp doesn't cave...

who is benefiting from this?

- online sales are up. maybe a tobin tax would help.
- the market isn't hurting.
- property is variable, up in some places, down in others. but, this would appear to be a good time to raise property taxes.

etc.

they appear to be calling for rae days. no thanks.

i don't want to see a single dime cut from spending, anywhere.

raise taxes.

https://financialpost.com/opinion/in-the-tough-times-ahead-what-is-trudeau-prepared-to-cut

i actually agree with the sailor.....

this is an international waterway, and we have no right to enforce any sort of authority over it, or stamp our feet and get mad when people disobey it.

and, we need to get used to it.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/new-zealand-yacht-cambridge-bay-nunavut-1.5698347

if death grips were half this good, they wouldn't suck.

but, they basically built their career on this old bowie/eno/reznor/ice cube/rave ogilvie collab.

i strongly agree with the historical liberal party position on this matter.

i don't care what america thinks, and don't want america running the planet.

i care what the security council thinks, and want the united nations running the planet.

my primary concern about afghanistan is the potential of getting into a war with china over it.

it would not be in canada's interests to get involved with a proxy war with china. at all.

we went to korea, and it was a mistake. but, we avoided vietnam, and we should avoid whatever's coming next, too.

nato will probably withdraw from germany before it withdraws from afghanistan.

they could be there for 200 years, if america lasts that long. and, if america collapses before then and hands over the anglo-american empire to some satellite, like canada, then they'll be there for the next 200 years, too.

now, as an aside, the nato presence in afghanistan clearly doesn't have anything to do with combating terrorism, but is rather a geostrategic positioning that has to do with controlling a very important part of the world.

well, that and the heroin.

actually, i think it's clear enough that the position that the canadian government took in afghanistan is that what america wants or does not want is irrelevant in determining the legality and desirability of intervention; what's important is how the intervention exists in the framework and context of international law.

it follows that canada would have gone to afghanistan whether it was in america's best interests, or opposed to american interests altogether, so long as it was agreed upon by the security council. what america thought, in context, did not matter, and whether it was good for america or bad for america was not a part of the calculation.

so, are we doing america a favour? what does that mean?

i think we're just implementing the security council resolution...

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/top-trump-adviser-peter-navarro-disparages-canada-s-military-efforts-in-afghanistan-1.5079375

i do hope that they are fully prosecuted for assault, and charged under the appropriate hate crimes legislation.

see, this is what nobody wants to see. and, they don't have any claim to self-defence, either, if they're going to stand on the corner and preach hate against an identifiable group, nor should they be allowed to hide behind "religious freedom".

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/anty-gay-attack-prompts-hate-related-investigation-1.5697192

the thing is this, though - how different is what they were saying on the corner in a language we all understand from what they say in a mosque or a church every day, in a language that most of us don't?

and, if you think it's ok to confront them when they do it on the sidewalk, why don't you think it's ok to confront them when they do it under their domes?

i don't want conflict, here. but i'm a very stark realist, and i know this kind of thing is going to be more likely in the future unless something is done to address the hate against homosexuality in these communities, which isn't evaporating due to integration.

i had to do a lot of running around yesterday.

i was concerned about cops sitting on the street corners with baseball bats, but almost nobody was maskless, indicating that the fear, uncertainty and doubt seems to be working. there were again two cases yesterday...

people actually seem to have been taken aback by something they saw on me that they may not have seen on anybody in quite a while, namely lipstick.

i'd bet cosmetic companies are taking it hard right now in some places, because what's the point when you're wearing a mask? but, you could see it in the eyes of random females walking by.

i remember that. i miss that, just a little. not jealous.

i managed to find another month's worth of brand name estrace, right here in windsor. is there more out there? there might be, i don't know....

this month was been awfully unproductive. i keep trying to clean up posts back to early august, and keep getting stuck, either via distraction (posts this month are twice the average) or as a consequence of migraines or oversleeping. it snuck up on me this time by accident, but quitting smoking is not fun. but, i'm inside now for a bit, and am two weeks past it, so let's hope i can get a bit of work done before i have to do groceries for september.

mackay would have won, i think.

but, he's lost this now what, five times?

this isn't america. you don't get to lose twenty times before you win.

i do hope he's done done done, now.

it's hard to see what kind of path o'toole has. mackay would have done quite well in the east, and that alone would have put the liberals in trouble. o'toole doesn't strike me as the type of conservative that is likely to do well in ontario, so he's basically just playing the same game as scheer, and the result is probably the same.

but, we still have to take him seriously. that's how they win; we stop taking them seriously.

if he does manage to get in....uch-o....

but, if he doesn't, i guess the conservatives are at a kind of crossroads. frankly, i don't see what the point of replacing scheer with o'toole actually was, but you can only run the same candidate with different hair so many times...

you have to wonder if the right answer for mackay isn't joining the liberal party.

in other news, dog bites man.

pearson >>>> douglas.

that's just how it actually is, in the real world.

sorry.

you just can't.

sorry.

woahwoahwoahwoah.

let's be truly realistic, here: the united states is currently fighting proxy wars against china in africa, and could potentially wage them again in the southeast, and in korea, as well as in south america, and even in europe.

as much as i agree with the idea that conflict is inevitable, it's another thing altogether to suggest direct conflict is inevitable, and i'm not following you down that path.

https://theanalysis.news/interviews/the-danger-of-war-with-china-is-real-and-insane-larry-wilkerson/

hi.

i spoke with dr. ________ this afternoon (aug 24) at 14:30. i mentioned at that time that i had a video of the first migraine with aura that i experienced, but didn't send the link.

dr. _____ has not requested this, but i suspect i will call him again in the future. further, as he no doubt does not often run into bloggers documenting their first serious migraine, it may also be of some professional interest to him, in general.

i've sent a fax because links are hard to speak over the phone...

this link, if typed exactly, will jump to the part of the video that is of interest to dr. _______, where i first start to experience stroke-like effects and actually get myself to the hospital. it is not unlike later occurrences, except without the shock of it being the first time and not understanding what's happening.

i was told i did not have a stroke.

the first 40 minutes, the part that you skip if you type the link exactly, are a critical analysis of the 2016 democratic party wisconsin primary (i have a math degree.).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgNetAISshM&t=2516s

if you believe that, go back to school with your kids.

this is, what, the tenth time they've made this stupid, obviously wrong claim?

https://globalnews.ca/news/7294893/coronavirus-reinfection-hong-kong-study/

to be clear.

what i'm having would appear to be a "migraine with aura", in which case the hemiplegia is a part of the aura.

that is different than a "hemiplegic migraine", which is apparently something that mostly affects kids.

i'm not convinced i see the difference, and when i pushed it he didn't give me a good response, but it was clinically relevant to him.

so, the neurologist got uber wonky on me and denied my hemiplegic migraines, claiming it was a specific condition that mostly affects children rather than being a description of a "migraine with aura" like i was using the term. so, despite experiencing extreme weakness on one side of my body in a stroke-like way, which is the literal translation from latin greek, i should be describing my migraines as "with aura" rather than as "hemiplegic". language matters, apparently.

he doesn't think it's likely that the migraines are the result of head trauma.

rather, he strongly suggested i refrain from inhaling any kind of smoke (which is hard if the neighbours upstairs are smoking), as that struck him as the most likely trigger, something i actually found myself in agreement with him around. it's pretty clear, really - when the air quality comes down, the migraines come in.

i can't stop them.

there's some possibility of a stroke, but there's nothing i can do.

i can take drugs to ease the pain, but i don't want to.

and, i just have to deal with it - and try to avoid bad air.

so, that was an overwhelmingly unproductive week that just evaporated into nothingness in front of me, and i was hoping to get some sleep this morning to start fresh, but so be it.

i'm kind of floaty, but i need to get going.

i have to make a call this afternoon regarding these headaches. while i wish my weekend was less wasted, it's sort of topical, at least. i mostly just want to know if these are something to be concerned about (i don't think they are) and talk about what this means long term, and maybe ways to get out of them when they come in. i fought that headache off for what, three days? and, then it got me in the end, and i'm still not sure it's done yet.

i was *this* close to being done, and now i'm back in lalaland again.

*grargh*

now, i'm sleepy, but won't be in five minutes.....that's what it's been like all morning....it's almost like somebody put something i don't want in my water or something...

pro-tip: if you're 45 years old and you think you're smart enough to run a country......

....that suggests you're pretty dumb.

they're all in their 30s and 40s....i think trudeau might be the oldest, at 48.

i don't think there's a single person in the inner clique over 50.

they should be out having fun, like normal people, not trying to run the country.

this is a job for older people.

"no one listens to filth pig"

touche.

so, i mean, i often suggest that this government has swung hard to the right, and it's true, but...

a lot of it is just the reality that they don't have the slightest idea what they're doing.

this is a hard country to run, that requires a lot of very careful balancing acts, and a very deep base of knowledge in the country's history.

you can't bullshit this.

you can't wing it.

you can't make it up as you go.

they're too young to govern.

that's the truth - they got over-zealous, they threw away their brains, and they're lost in a canoe in the dark without a light, floating up schitt's creek to the fall....

it's not catastrophic. not yet. but, if nothing changes, wait for it.

this entire discussion is alien to them.

but, it's in any text on canadian foreign policy.

the frustrating thing is that it's absolutely clear that these people are not carefully overturning a policy that they've researched, for sound reasons that they've argued rigorously.

they don't even know why the policy existed, or that they're overturning it in the first place.

"but we're special"

that was what they said.

yeah, we're in a special tariff category.

if they haven't woken up yet, we're doomed.

the reason that canada was the leading voice for the rule of international law through the second half of the twentieth century is because it realized it had the most to lose from the order collapsing; the threat was existential, and well understood - both from the americans to the south and the russians to the north.

canada would be the first to go, if the system ever fell apart.

so, when chretien held to this position - until the day they dragged him from his office - he was holding to a position rooted in a very deeply held view, of an international order that was of his party's design, for his country's survival.

it wasn't a triviality.

and, to suggest it "wasn't worth it" is about the most ignorant thing i could imagine somebody possibly saying.

just a reminder that history is still being written....

i can understand that it may seem incredulous to believe that this institution called the liberal party of canada actually rigorously held to the idea that any kind of military action outside of the security council is a war crime from the time the council was formed, right up until the invasion of iraq in 2003. that sounds like a fairy tale.

but, we're the ones that set the damned thing up in the first place.

to answer the question as to why the security council was so central to liberal foreign policy before ignatieff (who broke it.), you need to understand why we created the security council in the first place, which had a lot to do with our own security.

it's 1945. what country in the world is most in threat of an american invasion? hint: it's not cuba, even if we eventually formed a bond with the cubans over a shared threat.

so, that is why the security council exists in the first place! of course we held to it, and we held to it very strenuously, with the very sporadic counter-examples coming exclusively under conservative governments.

but, this is the reminder: the liberals, themselves, have yet to break from this rule in actual fact. they've said stupid things about venezuela, and supported shady groups in ukraine, but the basic policy has not yet been reversed, and can consequently still be salvaged, if the right dipshits are pushed out of power in enough time.

it was one of the things i liked most about the party, and one of the things i liked most about the country. it'll be a sad day to see it go, if it comes to it.

it doesn't have to.

it's still good.

listen...

when i had these discussions about reviving the union movement in the early 00s, there was still a sense of dissent and reversal to them. the neo-liberal project was far advanced, and we knew it, but we had yet to feel it.

and, when we had these discussion around '11, we knew it was done, but we still held to it, because we didn't know what else to do, besides drink in the park.

but, we can't still be having these discussions in 2020. it's done. let's get the memo, let's move on....

i'm going to mexico,

where there's nothing but the sun.

nothing.

(except car factories)

i can't not vote against erin o'toole. he's an unacceptable candidate for high office.

ugh.

so, this isn't like "the west v the east" or something....

islam is a western philosophy, through and through.

this is the future v the past, science v religion, enlightenment v counter-enlightenment, revolution v reaction, liberal v conservative.

if you're going to look at the board this way, and i don't think it's wrong to do so, in fact i do it all of the time, then what the rise of islam in the west is is the reactionary, conservative counter-revolution to the enlightenment.

it's the return of christianity, in a mildly different variant.

it's not something new, not an invasion, not an overrunning; it's a return to the past.

and, i want to look forwards, not backwards.

the freedom to have an identity is, again, a contradiction in terms.

it's only freedom from identity that makes a coherent use of the language.

i identify as a member of the species.

well, sometimes.

that is all.

and, i don't want an identity as an ethnic or religious type, either.

identity is slavery.

i'm an individual; i'm free.

and, of course, they're going to tell you i'm a jew, because it's what they do.

don't like somebody's opinion? must be a jew.

i think i'm ancestrally hebrew on my dad's side in some combination, but i don't actually know with any certainty. i also think i'm ancestrally cree, italian, french, irish, finnish, norwegian, malagasy and welsh. that is, i'm a mix - and any hebrew ancestry that i have is incidental, and not any important than the rest.

my father was a non-religious catholic; my mother is a non-religious anglican. i eventually went to a catholic school, but i didn't participate. my mom baptized me when i was four because the public school system started at age 5 and the catholic school system started at age 4. it was a question of getting me to school a year early; it had nothing to do with catholicism. i did not take the eucharist, did not get confirmed and don't even know what the next sacrament even is. so, i'm not technically a catholic, by their own admission criteria.

i'm a born and raised atheist.....

this is the original version of the parenti article, for the purposes of full disclosure & transparency:
http://www.swans.com/library/art9/mparen01.html

that's a different type of soundtrack for the blind, apparently.

it also follows that accusing china of colonialism in it's west is a kind of false equivalency, because islam is the root cause of colonialism, as we understand it in the west.

it doesn't really make sense to argue that they're colonizing a colonial ideology.

what the chinese are actually doing is decolonizing the uighurs by deislamifying them.

it's also a good time to post the parenti article about tibet, which debunks a lot of myths:
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html

there's no question that the chinese could have been a little less zealous in tibet. they didn't have to be quite as heavy-handed as they were.

but, i'm basically in support of the policy.

we should all be seeing this as a way to help the uighurs move past an obsolete identity that has them mired in the past, not as a way to take something away from them.

so, what i'd like to see the chinese do is implement a very careful, considered type of mass conversion program that has a specific focus on deislamifying them, but through positive incentives rather than violence and fear.

i've been pretty clear that i actually vaguely support treating religious conviction like a mental illness. i don't believe in the premise that "religious freedom" is some kind of human right - it's a contradiction in terms.

so, if i basically agree that the uighurs are batshit insane, what's the best way forward? the answer is that i'm not fundamentally opposed to what china is doing in principle, it's more in the details. how do you separate the muslim from the uighur in a way that is fundamentally just and fair?

when you see articles about china at sites like the atlantic, you need to correct for a level of bias, immediately. you expect a level of intense exaggeration in the media around "human rights abuses" in china, but you also expect that there's a kernel of truth underlying them. the truth is that nobody really knows what they're doing, and these kinds of articles should be taken with a grain of salt.

but, i don't think it's impossible to secularize these groups in a way that is ultimately beneficial to them and, in the end, has them freely choosing to move past their religion as backwards. in fact, i'd support it - and would argue it's the only approach with any chance of success.

if the chinese come in here with giant sticks, it's just not going to work, in the end.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/08/china-pathologizing-uighur-muslims-mental-illness/568525/

the most dangerous virus out there right now isn't covid-19.

actually, maybe there's something to that.

i've been pushing the idea of secularizing islam to defang it. maybe it's a better idea to corporatize it, to discredit it.

if we can get to megamosques quickly, we might get to herd immunity not long after.

we tried to escape.

but, here they are, knocking on the door, again...

it's almost like they're the abusive boyfriend that has followed us across the country, and found us hiding in a witness relocation program, and just left off back where we were, before we escaped.

the fact that they're the same as us is exactly what the problem is.

they're not different than us, they're the same as us - but they're the worst part of us, the part of us that we fought so hard to escape from and leave behind.

"western civilization" is hellenism.

christianity is just a little, small, piece of that.

i feel like a pagan standing in the third century watching the empire collapse in the face of a primitive, backwards system of thought.

i feel like we're being recolonized by a new type of christian....

and, i expect that secularism will win, so long as we can have that debate, so long as our own leaders don't sell us out. it's just a bit of a scary point in history, as it could in theory go either way...

again: i don't see islam as something foreign. it's fundamentally greek, so it's fundamentally western, unlike systems that derive from east of the indus. my concept of "the west" is greek, not christian, so it includes russia and iran and north africa and arabia, as well as some parts of black africa that ended up greek in the pre-columbus period (like ethiopia).

i'm not afraid of being invaded by a foreign culture. that's not what islam is.

what i'm afraid of is reverting to the past - just as i would be by the rise of an evangelical movement.

i just see them as a new christian denomination, a new type of evangelicalism.

and, i'm fully aware that the christians & muslims will eventually unite and gang up on secularism.

is it possible that i'm mistaking corporatism for censorship?

google sells ads. that's the point. so, if your exact phrase is close to something that can help it serve an ad, maybe it might want to expand the term a little. that's an invasion of privacy, perhaps, but it's not as scary as the image i just posted.

the terms i'm testing with make such a thing fairly unlikely, unless google is running ads for mosques, or something (would they even allow that? well, it's inevitable that we'll see a muslim jerry falwell, eventually. maybe it might help if they speed that process up.). if you can show me where the algorithm failed, i'll concede the point. but, it seems like it's too much of a stretch, in the context of the terms i'm using, and the way that the server is reacting.

google should have some kind of way to tell the engine that i want to search for a specific phrase.

quotes don't work anymore - they've decided that when i tell them i want to search for a phrase, i don't actually, really, i'm just confused.

it's curious that we can still get curious results about dechristianization, though:

https://lmgtfy.com/?q=dechristianization

i'm actually flipping this around from the conservative arguments you hear: i like the fact that i get good results when i search for dechristianization, that reflect what i actually want to see.

why i can't i get the same kind of results when i search for deislamificatoin that i get for dechristianization? why do i get censored for one and not the other?

but, no - don't react by censoring my second result. fix the problem with the first...

if it's not clear enough, i want a search engine that gives me what i'm searching for, with absolutely no censorship at all, whatsoever.

i mean, i'm searching for it. that's the first hint.

i wonder what kind of fascist agreements this government has made with google, and what we're going to learn about it when they're removed from office.

they do this kind of thing in china; are they doing it here, too?

something like this is right out of orwell:

and, it's kind of scary to see it in front of you.

if i'm looking to find some kind of information of some sort, and the search engine gives me the opposite of what i'm looking for, i'm not going to just read that instead - which is what they seem to expect, bizarrely.

rather, i'm going to turn the computer off and find some other way to get the information i'm looking for, instead.

this is useful to me, until it isn't.

if the internet loses it's value as a search tool, i'm just going to stop using it altogether, and go to the library, instead.

i may have spoken too soon regarding the openness of information on the internet, and it's utility as a means to find information.

google is clearly filtering results around certain phrases, and i do not like that it is. bing isn't any better....

i don't want my search results filtered, and i have no interest in reading the propaganda that the corporate media wants me to read, instead.

the religion is legitimately oppressive.

the question is what the most enlightened way to react to it is.

and, i won't pick a side in a struggle between nazis and muslims.

the world would be better off if they killed each other off.

likewise, as somebody that is exceedingly apprehensive about the increasing numbers of muslims in the west, i need to find that careful balance between looking the other way at offensive assertions of islamic values that are harmful in theory but not in practice, and cracking down on assertions of oppression and intolerance by people that hide behind a veil of religious freedom - even as i suggest that the line between islam as a supposedly peaceful religion and islam as a vehicle of hate is much finer than the multicultural propaganda might suggest.

it's a very subtle debate and it can't be had by ideologues.

but, remember: my argument is that christian nazis and muslim jihadists are essentially the same thing.

fuck rammstein, btw.

listen to this instead.

let's remind ourselves of this key point.

i'm not a free speech absolutist, and i've never claimed that i am. rather, i've often contrasted myself against a chomsky-type character that advocates for essentially no restrictions on speech at all by suggesting that i support restrictions in scenarios where a group has the possibility to inflict legitimate harm. the very careful, difficult and subtle point is trying to figure that out: does whatever group of thugs and demagogues actually pose anybody any threat, or are they just a bunch of dumb bikers, or something? it's very tricky, and there's no clear rules, you have to kind of figure that out as it goes.

so, if i saw a serious neo-nazi march that was actually out to hurt people, i would strongly advocate shutting it down. if i saw a couple of kids with backwards swastikas on their hats that they picked up in a buddhist shop and thought were nazi symbolism march down the street singing du hast, i'd be a little less willing to get assertive.

but, that's not the key point i want to make.

the key point i want to make is this:

free speech is not the idea that you can say what you want without consequence. free speech is the idea that you should not be restricted from saying things that you may face consequences for saying.

the former position is held by people like ann coulter, who argue in favour of free speech in self-serving ways, and do not actually understand it. the second position is that pushed by centuries of western liberal philosophy, who attempted to try to find a middle point between freedom and what they may have defined as some kind of pre-civilizational hobbesian fantasy reality.

i've been over this enough that i don't want to bother with it, but i'll point out the following, point form:

1) free speech is about a social contract between individuals and governments. it's not about private property, not about employment and not about conversations between private individuals.
2) free speech is not about "open discourse".
3) people that are offended or affected by the speech of others also have speech rights, and the right to disagree with the people that offended or affected them.

they should have done this a long time ago.

there are potential complications surrounding things like blood clots, but we need stop thinking like moral ideologues and start thinking like actuaries.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/u-s-fda-announces-emergency-authorization-for-convalescent-plasma-to-treat-covid-19-1.5075949

if you're "smart", you'll do what you're told...

the war against covid-19 is the new war on drugs.

i want to see statues of oscar wilde and alan turing stand behind the throne in the british parliament one day, as a reminder of the stupidity of queer oppression.

i wanted to make some calls today, but had to sleep off the migraine.

it's humid outside, and that is helping, but it's not clear for how long.

i'll have to be up early in the morning to make those calls tomorrow, if this is done (and it may not be).

this is what i like to see!

when the state shits all over the rule of law, they have no authority and should be ignored.

are they going to come back every night?

how many crimes are they ignoring or facilitating while they trample all over people's rights?

https://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/another-night-another-covid-19-party-ticket-at-same-victoria-home-1.24191114

it's a major contrast, though, it really is.

in 2003, the liberals were taking principled positions in standing up for international law.

in 2020, they're supporting cia puppets and arguing for intervention on behalf of industry.

it's a stark change.

powell has endorsed biden, btw.

which is a red flag....

they make it seem as though colin powell was just mistaken or something, rather than a war criminal that was lying through his teeth.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-intelligence-assessments-of-saddam-s-iraq-got-it-right-new-paper-says-1.5697028

the reports i tend to cite are from bodies like the iaea, which got it right, as you would expect.

likewise, i cite bodies like the iaea when i reject claims of iranian nuclear programs.

tabernacle, indeed.

a little bit of cheating is normal in the west.

but, the numbers he is throwing around are huge, and decidable.

you're probably not here if you don't read.

but, it's probably easier to give your friend a video than talk them into learning to read.

what is the right tactic for the democrats to defeat this kind of cheating?

well, clinton did the same thing in the 2016 primaries, and we saw sanders pull it off in specific states by sheer volume.

biden will need to get turnout up so far amongst white voters that standard republican cheating tactics fail.

and, it has to be white voters, because those are the votes that get counted, in the end.

he won't. he's fucked.

greg will fill in the details, if you want them.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/21/how-to-rig-an-election-an-interview-with-greg-palast/

how do you spot this on your own?

here's the trick: whenever you hear politicians complain the other side is rigging the election, what they're doing is called projection, a kind of pseudo-scientific idea that poli sci has yanked from psychology with great insight.

so, the reason it was obvious that trump was up to something is that he told us he was, by blaming it on the democrats out of the blue.

israel should be democratic and secular, not jewish.

the two state solution died 30 years ago.

we're waiting for a palestinian rights movement, and it's going to be bloody, but it's required.

there's no potentiality of an independent palestinian state and there hasn't been since 1967.

so, is the israel-uae thing a foil against biden's embrace of war and neoconservative imperialism?

it seems like a pr stunt, mostly. frankly, i actually support the annexation of the west bank - so long as it comes with full citizenship rights. it's better sooner than later, as it's the only potential outcome 20 years from now.

but, i'm happy enough to see trump sit on his hands for four more years in hopes that 2024 offers a better slate. he doesn't have to be gandhi, he just has to avoid fucking things up worse than they are.

...just like real dictators have facial hair.

you need to follow somebody named greg palast in this election.

google him.

look for the fedora. because he's a real journalist, and real journalists wear fedoras.

https://www.npr.org/2020/08/22/904693468/more-than-550-000-primary-absentee-ballots-rejected-in-2020-far-outpacing-2016

i can't stand him.

that's not going to change.

and, it's going to be a vicious four years, if he wins.

maybe this works for him.

i doubt it....

but, the way he's organizing his campaign is more or less designed to piss hyper-liberal voters like me right the fuck off.

so, when i hear biden channel dubya, it makes me want to puke in his face.

yes, dubya is still the worst president ever.

i don't even think trump is worse than clinton. i mean bill. and, that's not an endorsement of trump.

there has not been a "good president" since fdr - they're all horrible. but, if my primary concern is foreign policy, it's not even close - trump is somewhere near the middle since the end of wwII, and dubya is absolute dead last.

i don't care about 'decency', and have no interest in voting for it.

however, i do want to remind you that the last time america swallowed that kind of claptrap we woke up with dubya and his cronies on the button.

whatever you feel about this election, please concede that the personal conduct of the president is not a relevant input on policy formation and should be the least of your concerns in making voting decisions.

and, don't be surprised if i lace into you as a backwards reagan democrat, if you don't.

that wasn't the worst migraine ever, but it was bad, and i don't think it's over.

my fan still isn't working.

i'm going to have to tough it out until it is...

i'm going to start typing goobledygook soon, if i haven't already, so i need to stop and let the migraine, an interference pattern itself, pass.

your brain is a physical system.

of course it is subject to error, like any other system

and, that's where i step back and start wondering.

migraine imminent.

out for a bit.

i don't want to post a lecture. this is a good short analysis that gets the point across for people who need it.

the thing about your brain is that it is constantly changing, constantly reacting to things, and the question of how your brain may interfere with itself is something that i think we need new physics to totally grasp. i'm having trouble even finding the right language to try to describe what i'm thinking, and i think it's because it doesn't exist more so than that i am ignorant (although none of us are without ignorance). 

our brains are creating and destroying new neurons all of the time, and even the dna is subject to modification. there's random error involved here, there's epigenetics, there's adaptations and there's that self-interference, enough that the premise that a brain might exist as an entity that cannot be fully reduced to it's parts is less crazy than people may have thought through the nineteenth and 20th centuries.

i don't think we have the physics yet to really get a handle on this. but, there's enough factors to wonder if how your brain interacts with everything around it is really reducible to it's components or not.

what i was getting at is that, as this is so complicated to us right now, and we can't functionally reduce the brain to a chain reaction of chemical events at this time, we still have to treat it as though it is greater than the sum of the parts, at least in some ways.

if you can work this out for me, i'll concede the point.

but, if you want to tell me that you can fully predict brain patterns in advance, i'm going to suggest that that isn't really consistent with our existing concepts of physics, which suggest otherwise. and, then it kind of opens the question - is the holistic concept of the mind merely randomness and error? or is there something else that getting through the more general difficulties of modern physics might get us to?

i concede that this is hard to talk about due to a deficit of language, but i hope i got my point across.

in the west, it is true that we generally tend to be skeptical of descartes, nowadays, but there's some room for ambiguity there, too. i think a lot of the criticism is falling into the error of interpreting the allegorical a little too seriously.

i mean, sure - the mind is a part of the body, in a purely chemical sense. but, that doesn't actually mean they're the same thing, unless you want to get strictly reductionist. ironically. the mind can be a part of your body and still be something different, at the same time.

do not let me troll biden like this, in person.

it's an interesting potential wedge issue, though, dualism v monism.

i guess they were trying to do some damage control on all of that dualism in his convention speech.

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/joe-biden-kamala-harris-greet-hindu-community-on-ganesh-chaturthi-2283766

i think there's some reason to stand in solidarity with zoroaster, though, myself.

again: i have no opposition to this. do what you want. i'm not in your way. have fun.

but, it doesn't strike me as this pressing social justice concern, or this great civil rights victory, or something.

it largely strikes me as a trivial change to the law.

it's just, that, what exactly ought a marriage mean to a secular person?

we don't talk about gay baptism, for example, although...well, i guess maybe we do, but it means something else. i think a bathhouse baptism might be a lot of fun.

but, baptism as a ritual just seems silly to a non-religious person. why doesn't marriage seem equally antiquated of a notion?

and, the answer is those benefits in the real world, which should be available to people, anyways.

i've always wondered....

who are all of these gay christians that want to get married, anyways? like, it seems like a contradiction in terms, the intersection of homosexuality and christianity. you'd think the number of gay people that want a marriage would be pretty small.

so, you hear arguments about things like workplace benefits, and they're good enough arguments, from a pragmatic viewpoint. you may want to expand dental coverage to your spouse, for example. ok. but, i'd rather support universal dental care!

and, you can lay out this sequence of arguments, and for each one there's always some better argument that doesn't involve getting a religious body involved, or carrying through with a secularized religious ritual.

so, in a sense, you could say that i'd rather fight for a society where people don't need to come up with clever ways to support each other....

i would, personally, not be interested in signing a contract of that sort, regardless of the genders involved.

i guess my opposition to christianity and religion in general is more potent than my support for the normalization of queer rights.

but, there's better reasons to get pissed off at religion than that....

but, i mean, people ought to be allowed to do whatever they want. i have no prerogative to interfere.

so, you won't see me really give much of a fuck about that.

i don't actually think it's a very meaningful victory for anybody, at all - except, perhaps, a victory for the church's attempt to sanitize homosexuality as "normal".

the idea that a set of vows is somehow more or less sacred depending on the genders of the people saying them strikes me as asinine.

but, the idea that the vows are meaningful in the first place strikes me as fairly daft, too.

if we have to have marriage, then, yeah - let anybody who wants to get married, sure.

but, i'd rather the state remove itself from the process altogether.

actually, i oppose straight marriage.

if you're curious.

i don't think marriage should exist at all - i think it should be thrown in the dustbin of history.

i don't care who you shack up with, and you can exchange whatever vows you'd like, but the idea of a lifelong partnership with religious significance strikes me as obsolete.

moving on, but i'll just remind you of this one more time for now: do you know what happens when i climax/orgasm?

nothing.

because i'm incapable of ejaculating.

this process is called chemical castration and involves taking drugs that prevent the production of testosterone. when you don't produce testosterone, your testes don't work and you can neither produce sperm, nor ejaculate.

i didn't mark it on the calendar, but i haven't been able to ejaculate in well over ten years.

i've been trying to get my testes removed for years now, but cannot find a doctor willing to perform the procedure, voluntarily. i have been given funding by the ministry (finally.), and will probably need to spend a weekend in toronto doing it, despite the fact that there's probably 100 people between here and there that are qualified to do it but refuse to.

so, it's a very slow process.

if i'm lucky, i might get all of the is dotted to get me to srs by the time i'm 70, but probably not.

i'm sorry to be crude, but i have to do this every once in a while to wake people up a little, as that naturalistic fallacy is pretty pervasive, and hard to shake.

like, you could maybe pin me down, or talk me into sitting still for a few minutes, if you like your cock soft and slimy and undersized from twenty years of testosterone blockers, but you'd might as well just buy a dildo; at the least, i promise you you'll get a harder and more dynamic fuck from a carrot than you ever will from me...

when you don't have the biology to carry out your fantasies, there's no use in pretending that you do.

everybody's left unsatisfied, and frustrated and sad.

i've made women cry by riding their legs....

so, i just don't.

i'm way too sub to even be gay.

any gay guy would throw me off of him, and say "i'm not straight. stop.". i'd be riding him like a dirty slut; it would just confuse him.

there's no use in pretending - it's just a waste of time.

intentionally or not, though, what i'm doing seems to be working.

if you don't want to be tracked, this would appear to be an effective algorithm:

1) don't buy cell access. at all.
2) don't carry a phone or other device with wireless access.
3) use google voice to call out, at least
4) i use a voip box for incoming calls

again: it's just because i don't want to spend the money. i'd rather go see concerts than talk on the phone.

however, i appear to be frustrating them very thoroughly....

it's all circumstantial and deductive, and i'm not getting into it, but i'm realizing this...

it's becoming increasingly clear to me that the cops are so reliant on tracking people with cell phones at this point that they don't know what to do when they find people without one.

they seem to think i'm lying, and are just trying to get my number from me using various shady tactics. they can't understand that i don't have one, and don't seem to be trained to deal with the possibility as real.

ok, so i'm going to post this again in this space, to make the point as clear as i can.

i live in windsor, ontario. i am a male-to-female transgendered person that is functionally celibate. while i wonder if i may have been raped a few times, i have not intentionally had sex in upwards of 15 years and don't really see the point in identifying as anything beyond "asexual" at this point. i use female pronouns and refer to myself as 'jessica'.

while i did eventually buy a chinese cell phone a few years ago that i've turned on something like twice before i decided it was boring, i do not have cell service, and do not carry a cell phone. it's not turned off, it's not hidden, it's not encrypted - it doesn't exist.

i am currently typing from a chromebook, which i also use as a phone. i call out using google voice. i don't know if or how such a thing can be tracked and, frankly, it's not my problem, if it can't be. i don't have any reason to care if i'm trackable or not, although if i had a choice i'd choose not to be.

as it is, the reason i don't pay for a cell service is that it costs a lot of money. my income is $1230/month ($1170 from odsp & $60 from a tax credit run by the province), and my rent is $750. my only bill is internet, which i pay $35/month for. i budget for $200 for food, and it's variable - sometimes more, sometimes less.

1230 - 750 - 200 - 35 = 245

i don't even know what it costs to connect to the cell towers anymore, but i know it's expensive. as buying cell phone access to the tower would take up 30-50% of my remaining income, i decided a very long time ago that it was a waste of money, and that is the reason that i do not have cell service - if i spent all my money on a cell phone that i don't really need or want, i wouldn't have any money to spend on anything else. it's a bonus that i can't be tracked, but that's not the intent - i just can't afford a cell phone, or, i guess more accurately, i've decided that i'd rather spend limited resources on things i care about.

i do not have a driver's license, and have never driven a car. that is another way i avoid wasting money. it's a bonus that it is good for the climate, but i wouldn't want to waste money on a car, regardless.

so, i'm very, very cheap, and that's the reason you can't track me.

i'm not avoiding anything, i just don't have the money to utilize the tracking devices that law enforcement are so heavily reliant on.

i'm harmless, and the decision to spy on me is based on ignorance and stupidity. however, this is something to think about: given the cost of technology, if the police become reliant on it to track threatening individuals, they may find themselves in this problem more often. if you're going to create a society rooted in absurd amounts of inequality, this is the outcome - the criminals can't afford the technology you want to use to spy on them with.

trying to coerce me into giving you a number, or communicating over a phone i don't have and can't afford and don't want, isn't going to lead to anything but frustration by everybody.

i use voip for incoming calls, and i don't know or care if that's trackable, either. i would get a free google voice number, but it's not available in canada.

if you were to cancel google voice in canada, i would use a pay phone to call out, as the primary determinant is cost and that's by far the cheapest option.

poor people are hard to trace with technology because they can't afford it.

deal with it.

as much as i don't like doug ford, i like the city council in windsor even less, and would actually like to see the conservatives get pretty tough on it, in an attempt to clear it out.

i'm not a fiscal conservative - i want to see them spend the money, but they continually waste millions on these stupid projects that nobody gives a fuck about.

we've got homeless people all over the city...

and, i'd rather see them fix the damned roads.

https://windsor.ctvnews.ca/windsor-council-to-mull-550k-commitment-to-kickstart-civic-plaza-project-1.5074391

if you ask them, they say absolutely vacuous things like "i don't want to spend the money in the community, because somebody will think we're favouring their region".

well, then spend money all over the city.

i would consequently support the province more or less cutting them off, until they provide less stupid ways to spend money.

and, then they told us it was "temporary".

the story around the anti ep is maybe a more useful model, in terms of finding creative ways to protest authoritarian restrictions on freedom of association and expression.

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/78ab5d/warp-25-autechre-anti-ep

and, yes - it's becoming increasingly clear that a protest movement against these restrictions is going to be necessary, once what they're actually doing crystallizes in front of us.

once we all understand what they're doing, we will stand up and fight back.

again: i don't think this kind of thing is particularly useful, so long as the pigs are keeping it in their pants.

https://windsor.ctvnews.ca/maskless-shopping-trip-goes-ahead-with-low-turnout-1.5075346

they used to run this on tv as a propaganda nag, for all the couch potato parents that had to answer...

"no, actually, i don't."

what is this song actually about? who gets it and who doesn't?

it's really neither about being pro-partying or anti-partying, so much as it is about mocking crusty conservative portrayals of the corruption of the youth. the video really represents what some reagan conservative might have imagined a party of young people was like, but hardly actually existed in real life.

this is a problem i've run into with the songs i wrote when i was young, as well - sometimes you intend to get across an idea, and don't get it across the way you want to, leading to confusion or ambiguity. it seems to be common for people to accuse each other of misunderstanding the song; i'm going to place the blame on the band. it's legitimately not clear what they're trying to get across, as they were certainly neither advocates of absurd behaviour as portrayed in the video, nor of the kind of conservative value systems that would shut it down. the subtlety has maybe been lost in time.

so, it's absurdist humour, but it's making a serious point, too. the mockery is more reflective of perceptions people had in the 80s surrounding the difference between "good" and "bad" people; while such parties probably existed nowhere on the actual planet, it's a reasonable reflection of how you would hear older people talk about younger people, and the corruption of the youth and whatnot. you do need to fight for your rights to free expression, or you will lose them, as much fun as it is to be silly about conservative portrayals of the lifestyles of the young.

"it's 11:00 pm. do you know where your children are?"

they're probably not quite doing what you see in the video, but maybe you imagine they are. that's the joke, here.

in context, the most facile interpretation is the most relevant one - they're coming for you, and you'd better stand up, or face the consequences for you and your children, and your children's children.

if you don't stand up for your rights, you will lose them.

further, i would launch a charter challenge against the police for infringing on freedom of assembly, amongst other things.

i would rip the ticket up, and refuse to even defend myself in court.

if you don't want to go to the party, don't.

only i have the right to decide how valuable my existence is to myself.

and, it's consequently my responsibility to avoid gatherings if it means something to me - and my right to participate in them, if it doesn't.

it's not up to some government bureaucrats to tell me what my life is worth to me.

are they going to criminalize suicide, next?

enough is enough - when's the election in bc?

https://vancouversun.com/news/covid-19-b-c-announces-fines-up-to-2000-for-those-who-disobey-public-he

based on this picture, mackay is far more attractive.

right?

right....

there's a joke in canadian politics that the best looking candidate always wins, and it's usually true.

if an election were held tomorrow, that is if trudeau can't find a razor soon, he's not going to be the best looking candidate on the ballot, anymore.

the liberals were always said to campaign on the left and govern on the right, so you did expect them to break some promises.

but, the gulf between what they said they would do in 2015 and where we are in 2020 is far, far greater than that produced by any other incarnation of the party.

and, they are running out of time to close it.

i liked chretien better.

by a large margin.

when we elected this incarnation of the liberals, there was some suggestion that they were learning from their recent electoral failures and listening to the voters in the country, but they quickly broke every promise they made, and positioned themselves on a trajectory to the very hard right.

the result is that this incarnation of the liberals is actually the least liberal incarnation that we've seen in decades, and needs to be punished the most.

trudeau's been looking pretty disgusting, lately.

he's gotta get a handle on that, too, or he's going to lose women.

peter mackay is justin trudeau with better hygiene, in a blue tie.

i'm just going to be clear about this mackay v trudeau thing.

mackay is a largely non-ideological old money aristocrat that in truth isn't very smart and is just going to do what the banks tell him.

that is, he's exactly the same thing as justin trudeau.

there was a time when the liberals were better than this, but we need to learn from reality as it happens, and one of his legacies is that they aren't, anymore. they were always a bankers' party, but they were a smart bankers' party; today, they're just the same neo-liberal front group as any other late capitalist institution is.

so, the reason mackay seems so much less scary than conservatives of past years has less to do with mackay being some kind of "moderate", and more to do with how far to the right that trudeau (and his cronies, apparently led mostly by freeland) has pulled the party.

it's very hard to argue that you need to vote for the liberals to keep the conservatives out when the conservatives and liberals are essentially the same thing. i'm consequently not particularly scared of voting for a third party to punish the liberals, under the understanding that the conservatives will probably win.

the other three candidates have ideologies, and the calculus is not the same, with them. o'toole is scheer part two (or day part three) and sloan scares the hell out of me. they will have their own agendas, and will need to be stopped.

but, mackay is just a mindless front, who doesn't have an original thought in his pretty little airhead to even mention.

we'll see how the pieces fall on the board, but i'm likely to be more aggressive about supporting a third party in the imminent election, because the differences between the two major parties are going to end up too minimal to really discern as meaningful.

and, the liberals do not have much time to reverse that perception - and even seem to be moving in the opposite direction, of trying to leap-frog the conservatives to the right.

i'm cleaning some things up, and to clarify a point....

the beaker folk, from what we understand, are thought to have been a kind of hybrid culture of indo-european & neolithic types. that is, they were the neolithic peoples of western europe undergoing their first contact point with the indo-european groups, rather than a new group of people moving in altogether. as we try to understand history via continuity more than migration nowadays (and it's easy to see by flipping through this that i'm ok with a pre-history full of violent dominance and overthrow), we tend to be careful and conservative in how we morph one population into another.

so, i referred to the beaker folk as descendants of the neolithic inhabitants of europe, thought to have ultimately been from ancient turkey & the caucusus (an area that was more phenotypically "white" then than it is now) - and that is true, genetically. but, archaeologists are likely to push back a little, because they know that this population, while genetically descendent from the neolithic peoples, also adopted cultural practices (which is what archaeologists can study and see) from the new indo-european migrants and invaders.

should i have been more careful? well, in context, i was talking about genetics. i used an archaeological term to refer to a genetic clade, which was maybe a bit sloppy, but i think it's common practice, isn't it? 

perhaps the more pertinent point is to remind the archaeologists that they aren't geneticists, and that while their work may be useful in determining the flow of pottery and burial practices, it doesn't help us understand the genetic history of the region, or what the people looked like.

so, were the beaker people of spain descendants of the neolithic inhabitants of the region? yes, absolutely - even if the pottery that gives them their name came in later, from the northeast.

there's actually a new gaytheist (a portmanteau of gay and atheist) record out, and i'm not going to post too deep a review because this is a silly punk band, but i'll draw your attention to it as worth checking out. he's got that creamy corgan distortion sound up front, which is fundamentally rooted in an old muff, and is nice to hear given that it's a little bit endangered nowadays. there's nothing profound here, but you don't expect it; you expect a good kick in the ass, and they're as good at that here as elsewhere.

  

this is the social democratic party in russia, that you would vote for and support if you were an actual liberal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Just_Russia

they're usually the fourth party, in state elections.

let's try this.

navalny.

i want you to highlight that text and right-click it. i don't know what os or browser you are using, but virtually all of them nowdays should have an entry in the menu that says something like "search using google" or "search using duckduckgo" or whatever.

try it.

see what happens.

as a general rule, you want to look at multiple sources of information regarding anything you read on the internet, and be in the habit of doing thorough searches around anything you find the least bit confusing.

if something doesn't make sense to you, run a search and see what come up.

it really takes a lot of temerity, though, to publish lies on the internet under the understanding that most people are going to interact with them in the context of a search engine. you have to be exceedingly confident in the absolute incompetence of your audience...

well, except his job for the cia.

of course.

:).

it's just like this guy guaido in venezuela, who the msm likes to pretend is the president of venezuela.

juan guaido doesn't currently have a job, as far as i know.

how many opposition leaders in africa or the middle east have starved in prisons over the last fifty years, while america cashes arms sales cheques from the dictators that put them in there? hundreds? thousands?

they don't care about democracy.

he's being rescued because he belongs to us.

all your navalnies are belong to us.

i mean, is that much not obvious?

are we going to fly every dissident out of every country? that's laughable.

we're flying this guy out because he's on the payroll, he's an asset.

why are we going out of our way to save a nazi?

because he's our nazi!

you can still debunk most of this trash in thirty seconds with a knowledgeable google search.

we don't know how long that will remain true for, but i'll probably be removed from the internet before it isn't.

i'm not going to go through every article and rip them all apart, it's not worth my time.

but, the lies and disinformation from the msm around this are really pretty startling, and you should take the absurdity around it for what it is.

i hope he dies in transit....

so, the cia propaganda around navalny is ratcheting up...

this ridiculous gem comes from the washington post:

"navalny is russia's best known opposition leader"

in fact, his party currently has 0 seats in the duma.

the best known opposition leader in russia is likely gennady zyuganov, who is the leader of the communist party, which holds 42 seats in the duma, to united russia's 343. the third party is the ldpr (a very right-wing party), which holds 39 seats.

i know - you're going to tell me navalny was not allowed to run.

that's right, he wasn't - because he's a nazi. russia's rules may be a little more strict than i'd support, but there are quite a few countries in the world that bar nazis from seeking high office, that's not that odd.

why would they pass a law, if they're going to allow an exemption in the highest risk situation?

because it isn't about stopping the spread of a virus with an infinitesimal fatality rate, it's about getting in your head and telling you what to do.

https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/mayor-refines-order-masks-not-required-during-religious-services/

am i more afraid of the cops than the virus?

yes.

you'd be daft, if you weren't, given the statistics.

the health unit here is getting more patriarchal, in barking orders that it expects people to just obey.

there were two cases in the county here, yesterday. it's not remotely proportional; it's panic, just complete absurdity.

i don't have any reason to go anywhere for quite a while, so i should be able to wait for a few days. but, if the reports are that the cops are coming in and beating people up, i'll have to order the plague mask....

if i give it a few days, and if the cops are keeping it in their pants, then whatever.

maybe i should order a costume, now.

i'm sure i could find some other scenario in which i could use it.

i'll even go to jail over this, for a day or two, if i have to.

but, when they start pulling guns out?

i'm not fucking around with armed people that have iqs < 100 and literally get off by acting like thugs.

i'm not joking.

if this ends with somebody pointing a gun at me, i am going to get a plague costume and wear it as a form of protest.

i admit i'd wear a mask list this, in the right scenario.

or, i guess, if coerced at gunpoint.

that is the only exception.

this picture is perfectly ironic.

do you understand why?

hey, joe. you know she's just as likely to kill you by shaking your hand as she is by breathing on you, right?

no? you don't?

if these superstitions and empty rituals mean something to you, do them at home; don't force your beliefs on me, as i'm not buying them.

gotta catch me first, motherfuckers.

no, i'm not going to sit and listen to biden speak and deconstruct it. ew. gross.

you'd have to tie me down, clockwork orange style...

thus...

http://www.zarathushtra.com/z/gatha/dji/gathtml.htm

“If there be light, then there is darkness; if cold, heat; if height, depth; if solid, fluid; if hard, soft; if rough, smooth; if calm, tempest; if prosperity, adversity; if life, death.”
― Pythagoras

From the Ionians, the Pythagoreans adopted the idea of cosmic opposites, which they—perhaps secondarily—applied to their number speculation. The principal pair of opposites is the limit and the unlimited; the limit (or limiting), represented by the odd (3,5,7,…), is an active force effecting order, harmony, and “cosmos” in the unlimited, represented by the even. All kinds of opposites somehow “fit together” within the cosmos, as they do, microcosmically, in an individual person and in the Pythagorean society. There was also a Pythagorean “table of ten opposites,” to which Aristotle has referred—limit-unlimited, odd-even, one-many, right-left, male-female, rest-motion, straight-curved, light-darkness, good-evil, and square-oblong. The arrangement of this table reflects a dualistic conception, which was apparently not original with the school, however, or accepted by all of its members.

https://www.britannica.com/science/Pythagoreanism/Metaphysics-and-number-theory

the early christians (who descended from pythagoreans on the greek side of the lineage) assigned many statements of the type to jesus, and they're all over the bible.

i can't find any direct quotes right now, but it's also the kind of thing that you would expect zoroaster to have said, specifically about duality.

as an aside, one may wonder if pushing duality may harm him with south indian voters.

if you want to accuse him of anything, it's of having the vocabulary of a child.

in fact, these words are largely vacuous pabulum, and they could be attributed just as easily to zoroaster, or perhaps pythagoras.

it's really such trite bullshit, that i'm just as happy to assume it's random coincidence.

"up, not down. near, not far. hot, not cold. just right!" - grover expanding upon goldilocks

but, i mean...if you heard a three-year old say it....

https://nationalpost.com/news/joe-biden-accused-of-plagiarizing-from-jack-laytons-final-letter-in-nomination-speech

the way that we actually do things in canada is that we throw the damned liberals out for long enough that they get scared, and then elect them to fix what got them thrown out in the first place.

while a small number of our most important accomplishments and legislations would not exist without the ndp....

the truth is that they were, broadly, horrible, the whole time.

....and are still broadly horrible, today.

there's a bit of a history of ei in canada here (from a "progressive" source) that explains that it was basically lifted from fdr by a conservative, and then fixed and expanded by the liberal oligarch mackenzie-king, the longest serving pm in the country's history, and also the country's first labour minister.

https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/employment-insurance/a-short-history-of-ei-and-a-look-at-the-road-ahead/

there was an actual labour party in canada, and it did get absorbed by the ndp, but it was relatively small in scope and function.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Labour_MPs_(Canada)

more generally speaking, it's important not to conflate populism or progressivism with socialism.

they're really fundamentally different ideas, but that's the argument underlying the association.

the major unions in canada have actually generally tended to support the liberals for the majority of the history of the country, and actually still do today.

the flirtation of unionism in canada with the ndp was, if anything, somewhat of a shift to the right, and appears to have been rather short-lived.

This brings us to the NDP, the only mass labour-based political party in North America.

this has always been a myth, at best.

the ndp were a labour-based party for maybe five years in the 80s, or something; it's more accurate to argue that broadbent inherited a very different type of party and tried to turn it into a labour party, but then the fuckers brought in nafta and pulled the rug out from under him.

the ndp were actually rooted in a christian religious movement, not in a labour movement. they come not from factories and cities, but from farms and rural regions; it's more puritan in origin, in truth, than it is derived from sinclair or dickens. these people were not fighting for the rights of wage workers to organize into industrial unions, but for the rights of farmers to control and manipulate the market. they didn't pass minimum wage laws, or regulations to improve working conditions and these sorts of things, so much as they fought to prevent anarchy in the production of corn, to set fixed prices for grain and things of the sort that are strictly important to rural farmers.

they were a party of the middle class, not of the proletariat, and they reflected the values of the middle class, in their embrace of the centrality of religion and the bigotry that follows from religion.

the healthcare system they brought in came from their history managing grain production and was really a form of supply management that was closer to obamacare than the single payer system that the liberals preferred, and brought in by modeling the system after the nhs; it was about leveraging insurance companies by pooling resources. tommy douglas was important in bringing this in, but he didn't design it and he never had the support to do it by himself. the liberals were always the senior partner, writer and organizer of the existing healthcare system, not douglas or the ndp, and for better or worse - douglas would not have supported single-payer on his own, but the liberals thought pharmacare was a step too far in distorting the market.

douglas, a clear social conservative, was eventually pushed out as old and out of touch with the boomers, who were....the boomers, i.e. not very socially conservative. it was only at this point that the ndp starts to look more like a workers party, and it was more successful for a short period, but then they brought in nafta...

so, let's stop pretending the ndp were ever a worker's party. they weren't, really. they were really a utopian christian party run by propertied farmers that were trying to avoid getting swallowed and eaten by another depression, and who applied some of the supply management techniques they were using to health care - an innovative solution that eventually transcended their other policies, and came to define them almost in total, despite being just a minimal example of a larger approach to farming, rather than to  proletariat workmanship.

ok.

so, i avoided a major migraine, at least. the fan is still broken, but i got a lot of hair out before the last power wash, so we'll see when it dries....

i have a mild headache that i'll want to keep an eye on, but i'm going to try to get some work done tonight.

but, the tl;dr is just simply that the ndp & liberals are truly indistinguishable, and that they have been for 30 years.

that's the other thing about hearing a candidate stand up in 2020 and argue they're going to sweep into power by organizing workers.

where?

mexico?

what happened, though?

it was nafta. first the '88 election, then the '93 election, then the collapse of the manufacturing sector. then layton came in and swung the party hard to the right because he had to because there weren't any workers left.

the ndp removed the word "socialist" from their platform some time in the 00s (i don't remember when).

then, they elected thomas mulcair, who was to the right of margaret thatcher, and followed it up by jagmeet singh, who still hasn't told us why he's running, yet.

but, it was nafta that killed them, and they haven't been the same since.

so, if you're in your late 70s and still think it is the late 70s, we need to insert a giant nope, here. the ndp bear essentially no resemblance to the parties of broadbent, lewis and douglas, sometimes for the better (they've dropped their bigoted opposition to queer rights, at least on the surface, although if you ask around it's not total) and sometimes for the worst (they're essentially a milquetoast neo-liberal party like the rest of them, and have been for decades, now).

and, no, the ndp couldn't merge with a new party of the left.

'cause they just ain't.

in my lifetime, the ndp have never been anything more interesting than a superfluous adjunct of the liberals, that just causes the country problems. i've argued vehemently against merger, but it's because i want to bring back a three-party system, not because i think they're worth supporting, as they are. if a new party arises on the left, i would strongly advise the ndp to merge with the liberals, rather than try and drag the process on.

clinton, gore, obama, biden, harris - these are all conservatives, in canada.

kerry was almost a liberal, maybe; lieberman certainly wasn't.

things may have been different before 1980 or so, but, in my lifetime, the democrats have basically always lined up best with the conservatives, not the liberals. meanwhile, the liberals have generally been closer to the greens than the democrats.

the reform movement in canada may have tried to align itself with republican insanity, but it never really took off, and there was never really a time in my life where there was a viable republican-like party in canada.

here's another legacy of jack layton.

https://socialistaction.ca/2011/04/03/the-tragedy-of-ndp-support-for-nato-bombing-of-libya/