riiiiight.
they aren't far-right extremists that hate gay people or anything.
Monday, August 12, 2024
do we really need to put the bars out of business?
it's one thing to have sales in corner stores. i've appreciated that about michigan, especially regarding the hours. the liquor store in ontario closes way too early. you can get a mike's or something at the 7/11 over the bridge up to 1:00 am and pre-drink it while bicycling out to a late show or overnight rave.
it's another to have people drinking in bleach-mopped 7-11s with spotlights and perhaps in the middle of the day, like it's a supervised consumption site. i guess if you're really alcoholic, it'll have to do, but is there actually a market for drinking alcohol in the 7-11?
it would make more sense to let them sell pot and have a smoking section outside behind the store because then they're already at the 7-11. a couple of picnic tables. no need to get munchies. kids have been smoking behind the 7/11 for decades for exactly that reason in the first place.
my primary concern is whether this is going to hurt the bars, but i don't think it will. it's less opposition and more...like, who gets drunk at a 7/11, besides homeless people? in that sense, it is supervised consumption.
Sunday, August 11, 2024
the international community should be working with israel to find ways to destroy the islamist indoctrination network in gaza, which includes the united nations school facilities, and which is responsible for brainwashing children with hatred and violence in the name of allah, which is the root cause of the terrorist attack that occurred on october 7th, not condemning them for destroying "schools".
this "school" was an islamic indoctrination centre teaching children to hate and kill jews. it was attached to a mosque. legitimate secular schools are never attached to religious structures.
unfortunately, my government is run by amateur idiots that get their briefing papers from twitter and facebook. their response is embarrassing.
the islamic madrassas in gaza are not just legitimate targets, but the most legitimate target as they are at the root cause that is underlying all of this violence. the only way to put an end to the cycle of violence is to address the backwards islamicist indoctrination in these brainwashing depots and replace them with normal secular education systems.
i am not a progressive and don't like progressives, but i wish my government would take a more progressive perspective, which would be to look at the causes of the violence from a scientific perspective and try to address them at their causal point.
hippie nonsense about multiculturalism and tolerance is neither progressive nor liberal but conservative and has never ended a conflict anywhere.
Saturday, August 10, 2024
trump ultimately is in the construction business. people forget that. he benefits from low cost labour; he's the guy signing the checks that steal people's jobs.
so, this is political. is he right?
i doubt it. the number of people that are mean about immigration is lower than the number that aren't, both on the right and left.
the democrats should avoid trying to compete over who can be more brutal on immigration. rather, i think a lot of people want the underlying economic issues, which are very real, addressed, rather than mean policies to attack desperate people.
a lot of these migrants need to go home and fix their own shithole countries. america can and should help the shithole countries in the form a massive financial plunging, in ways that actually help, rather than uphold some banana dynasty or drug cartel or something.
if you address the push factors, you undo the pull factors. everybody would rather live at home.
Friday, August 9, 2024
latest political casualty of declaring solidarity with hamas is cori bush. who's next?
the arab american lobby is loud and powerful, but they represent a fringe minority. most people have at least some concept of what hamas is, and almost nobody that knows what they are would declare any support for them at all. there's a collection of very old academics that still think palestine has a marxist resistance movement, and they're confusing some very young kids that don't know better, but will in...i'd give it 2 years, tops.
those kids are going to look back at this spring in abject embarrassment.
"i camped out for hamas in first year? what? i can't believe i did that. wow. don't tell anyone. i don't want that on my resume, that's for sure."
as an aside, i think donald trump is actually blacker than kamala harris, based on the pictures i'm seeing in the media. granted, trump has a fake tan, so he's kind of more of an orange than brown, but when juxtaposed against harris in full makeup and bright light, he's pretty dark and she's pretty light.
it's damned close.
Thursday, August 8, 2024
the case filed at the board was utterly vexatious and nonsensical and should have had no chance of success at the board, but i got an extremely conservative adjudicator that imagined a situation that doesn't exist and produced a ruling that is actually going to cost the landlords thousands of dollars to enforce. it is a completely ridiculous ruling that is rooted in imagination and projection rather than facts and evidence.
i got unlucky, in getting a right-wing adjudicator.
but, i also think that a long term consequence of doug ford being premier is that the board is changing in a way that is not beneficial to most ontarians. my interactions with the board over the last few months indicate a very noticeable shift to the right by the board.
as a transgendered socialist, i'm essentially a persona non grata to the conservative movement. i have no rights. i'm an enemy to smite.
the divisional court will address these errors, but it won't correct them at the moment, since the massive step backwards taken in vavilov. that's better than nothing, but it's not good enough, really.
i'm hoping the changes in the market - in interest rates and in lower demand due to less students - give me a level of opportunity to move that hasn't existed in the last 15 months. that is likely to peak in october or november. i should be able to stall.
i could also win some hearings scheduled in the next month, but i'm realizing that the culture at the board has changed, and it might be more difficult than i'd like.
ugh.
i've got some work to do.
the upside is that the gross freaks appear to have finally left and that i'm finally in priority status for subsidized housing. the downside is that i have to get a stay within a few days and it might be somewhat of an issue to get the court to do it for me that quickly, which is particularly frustrating given that all they need to do is stamp the fucking thing.
the court i need to file in is several hundred kilometres away. at least they offer virtual services, but there's a time lag attached to it that i'm running up against. i may end up getting the stay at the very last minute.
i need to get some documents typed up essentially immediately, as i need to have them filed in the morning. i also need to format one of the computers with an operating system that can log into zoom by the morning.
i knew this was going to be tricky, but i was expecting a time frame of 6-12 weeks, not less than 3 weeks to react.
Monday, August 5, 2024
Sunday, August 4, 2024
i've mentioned that i need to move soon and have few to zero options, which is creating a bad situation in the current ridiculous market.
the listing is here:
i have a stable income at $1430/month, and it's tied to inflation. it went up about $70 on aug 1. that's about $17,000/year. i get another roughly $1000/year from carbon tax rebates and gst rebates. this is odsp (disability) for one person in ontario.
i currently live in a large bachelor's apartment in a basement duplex that somebody put a wall up in to pretend is two bedrooms. it's not. it would be useful if they knocked the wall down, frankly, as it just wastes space in the bachelor unit. the person that rented it to me advertised it as a bachelor's apartment for $750, in 2018. after a few increases, it's still only $790.
i should clearly be in subsidized housing. i'd have to be homeless, first, unfortunately. i may push it, regardless.
i could afford something around $1000-$1100, more or less max. i'd rather be in the $800-$1000 range. that is the cost of a room in ontario at the moment, and i can't live in a room, i need a private space. there are almost no one bedroom apartments in windsor available for rent at all - it's a less than 1% vacancy rate.
to be clear: it doesn't matter if you can afford it. there's no supply. you can't move anywhere.
they are building, but it will take time. they've cut out international students in windsor, which should reduce the number of college students, but you have to understand that they cram these indian kids into closets and they don't complain because that's how they live in india anyways. apparently, the owners of these houses (all indian) are just going to sell and they're cranking up the prices. it may have less effect on the market than i'd like.
however, i may be able to win some money in a number of lawsuits, and look at this:
the listing is here:
i've seen these aging and small houses in windsor (i live in one) and it's not a two bedroom house. it's nothing fancy. it's best understood as a split level bachelor's unit (so that you can have one person living upstairs and potentially another downstairs), with an attic that can be used for extra space. adding in the garage, it would be about 3x as much usable space as i have now.
it may be easier for me to find $20,000 than it is for me to find a one bedroom apartment for $1,000.
i'm disabled. i live on odsp. government assistance. it's more affordable for me to buy an old house than to pay rent. that is retarded.
how about this beachfront property on lake erie? it's a one bedroom house, for $150,000. this one is a time share and not what i want, but you get the point, regarding a property worth $150,000.
will i find a one bedroom for $834/month? no.
can i find $7500? maybe.
this is idiotic. i should not be purchasing property, i should be in city run housing.
but i'll need to do what i need to do to survive.
it's not clear to me which party here is worse, the rioters or the prime minister.
we don't yet have a clear motive for the stabbing, but the individual does appear to have been a muslim, and it is an open question if his religion played a role in his behaviour.
this is a valid question facing british society, which is overwhelmingly secular and largely atheist. is too much immigration bringing people with unwanted beliefs and values into the country?
however, rioting and breaking stuff doesn't help, and this kneejerk liberal reaction by starmer is no better and no more helpful. reducing immigration levels or making it more difficult to enter britain is a valid policy discussion and one that is long overdue in britain.
i understand that liberals will oppose deislamification.
that's fine.
that's why britain had to get rid of neville chamberlain to win the war.
go be liberal in the dung heap of history. the real world has a problem to solve and it has to be aggressive and pragmatic in order to do it.
this is not the time or situation for liberal rhetoric about "tolerance".
right.
that's exactly why we're still fighting the nazis and japanese. because occupations don't work.
this kind of defeatist attitude is ahistorical. we know how to do this because we've done it before: you lock the region down with a military occupation, you put the islamofascists on trial, you execute them for war crimes, you send the adults to re-education and then you teach the kids that their parents are wrong.
gaza is a way easier problem than japan or germany.
the thing israel needs is to embrace a marshall plan type mentality, but it's having difficulty doing that itself and it's being resisted by the west because some idiots think it's "racist". we know how to do this, but we are refusing to do it, and it indicates where the minds of many people really are.
things that would help israel include feeding, housing and educating the civilian population. blowing up a school that teaches the gazan kids anti-semitism is step one. building a new one that fixes the problem is step two, and they never seem to get to step two, but it's really not very hard to do it.
let's start with the easy stuff.
when biden tells netanyahu that he's on his own, he can't then get mad at him for ordering a missile strike into iran. there's been conflicting reports as to whether it was a missile strike or a bomb placed by the irgc (right), which appears to be intended to stop biden from yelling at netanyahu.
"well, umm, the bomb was already there. months ago. we didn't escalate. it was already like that. right."
now, what is biden's response?
again, he tells netanyahu that israel is on it's own.
well, which is it joe? is israel on it's own? then shut the fuck up and mind your own fucking business and run your own fucking country.
or is the united states going to protect it's interests and frankly stand on the side of moral decency in protecting israel? if so, stop telling netanyahu to act unilaterally, because it's pretty clear that he will, if you do.
you can't have it both ways, joe.
if you want to run for a seat in the knesset, joe, you can always move to israel for your retirement.
i want to talk briefly about china and i solely want to present a different perspective, one rooted in history. i do many things, including history and politics; i tend to approach politics from a historical filter and think this is important to do.
those of us in the west, even in north america, view china as a distant, exotic thing. it is the far east. it's far away. distinct. different. and, this is true. the first european visitors to (northern) china and japan were surprised to realize they were white and described them that way, but china has the sole distinction within surviving civilizations (because subsaharan africa may be powerful one day, but as a post-european colonial construction) in that it is not greek.
china really is different and it really is far away.
we should realize that they view us the same way and through a very long historical filter. realizing the depth of this historical filter is important in understanding how china will interact with the western part of eurasia, which will be keenly important in the upcoming decades.
in north america, when we talk about european civilization, we talk about the cities that developed from the development of global capitalism after the age of enlightenment - paris, london, berlin. we might mention older cities in the south of europe as falling apart tourist destinations, but they are not seen as being in the centre of european culture or vital parts of european civilization. in china, when they talk about europe - and this is true. look at their statements about european trade routes. - they talk about the exit points to the silk road, which include jerusalem, constantinople (which is currently temporarily renamed as istanbul while it remains under foreign turkish occupation), alexandria, carthage and rome. china has a long history with the persian empire and has had to deal with pillaging arab barbarians trying to interfere with the trade routes to europe (and tax them) since the dawn of recorded history.
when europe came to terms with the collapse of trade from china, it had to find a way to get around arab civilization to reconstruct important supply lines, which is what led to european seafaring and the "discovery" of america, and then of america as a military force, itself. china is exiting it's own dark ages, brought on by it's own religious backwardsness, which manifested itself in a severe opiate crisis that lasted centuries. it is now trying to re-establish land-based trade routes directly with europe, mimicking the process europe went through in rebuilding trade routes to china in reverse. this time, china is in control, and the arab taxation racket for transiting through the desert, which caused such a myriad of problems for both china and europe, will be placed under chinese oversight.
it seems difficult to make sense of the barbaric attempt by iran to shut down the suez canal, except it isn't at all. it's clearly in the chinese interest to re-establish land-based trade routes as it tries to rebuild a system of trade that collapsed centuries ago and that left it incredibly wealthy. that would make china great again.
in the end, both europe and china will benefit from increased trade, if the ancient trade routes through cities like samarkand, persepolis, babylon/baghdad, constantinople, jerusalem, alexandria, carthage (tunis) and rome re-establish themselves, with distant terminal points in provincial backwaters like paris and london. however, america will suffer in it's newfound irrelevance. dramatically.
the post war order was supposed to be that europe was the market for american manufacturing, whether they liked it or not. this would maintain full employment in america and keep the trade balance on america's side. nixon destroyed this by reversing the role of the american economy from exports to imports, and it's been economic decline in america ever since (but the multinational investor class, disproportionately located in europe, saw increased profits). nato evolved into a protection racket, but it was supposed to be an american military occupation of europe to enforce it's place as a dumping ground for american exports. in the end, the guns were the biggest export. increased chinese trade will lead to greater european autonomy. this will cripple american hegemony, and that is actually not in canada's self-interest at all, as much as we may moan about the fucking yankees.
the fundamental mistake of biden's presidency is that he has decided that russia is america's enemy, and china is america's competitor. such neat boxes are always foolish. as my father was fond of stating, all generalizations are false. however, as a basic analysis, this box-placing exercise is completely backwards; not only is russia not america's enemy, but russia sees itself as a western and european civilization and wants to be america's friend and ally, while china sees westerners as a distant, alien species of barbarian to be dominated and pacified and perhaps even colonized and replaced. china is not america's friend and does not want friendly competition in some victorian british sense; china is america's only true enemy in this world, and the americans are largely utterly oblivious to it.
it's like nixon left notes for biden or biden was always a republican or something.
biden is basically wasting time fighting the last war, while china has been busy starting the next one.
the most important lesson in european history is that russia always steps in and saves the day. it was russia that defeated hitler; it was russia that defeated napoleon. these are two of many examples. it was the russians that saved constantinople from collapse for centuries. the russians are the great protagonists of history that have been repeatedly pushed to the brink but always step in on the right side and always win.
in the inevitable epic, centuries long war between america and china to control the world's oceans, which historians in the distant future on other planets will compare to the even more ancient punic wars to control the eventual mare nostrum (imagine the pacific ocean as a true american or chinese lake), russia will eventually step in and decide who wins, as it always does. america will need russia's help to defeat china; it will lose if it tries to fight this war alone. if the end result of this foolish war in ukraine that biden personally incited and is personally responsible for is german rearmament, as appears to be the case, it is china that is the sole and only victor. russia will have no choice but to align with a german-chinese axis based on mutual trade interests, and then america is basically fucked.
america might have avoided this outcome by being less aggressive and more collaborative in eastern europe. it is not clear if the situation is reversible at this point, but i will remind america that russia does not hate it and likely still wants to align with it to try to contain chinese encroachment into east and central asia. it cannot do so when it is fighting a stupid war to protect it's western flank against nations it in truth actually wants to do business with but are stuck in a military occupation by a foreign power run by psychotic extremists that are using it as a terminal point for a military build-up as a consequence of a protection racket, which is both weakening it and the west and giving the chinese the upper hand. russia loses. america loses. britain loses. china and germany win.
china would certainly benefit from a port in the eastern mediterranean right about now, say right about where haifa is.
i need to begin with my previous caveat that i don't follow sports and don't like competition or competitive people, but the issue of transgender athletes is again appearing at the olympics, where a third gender called 'mike tyson' has appeared, leading to confusion and outrage. members of the other two genders are being advised to cover their ears.
my general suggestion is to pool by categories like weight, which is done in boxing. it seems wrong, i'll grant you that. but, both of the athletes with y chromosomes have been defeated by women without y chromosomes and there's little conclusion to draw but that this particular female athlete just didn't have the balls to take this...thing....on.
it looks bad, but it seems to be legitimate.
is weight the best category for female boxing, or should they choose something like bmi? i don't know. ask a boxer. i know i wouldn't want to fight the boxer from italy that went down immediately, or any other female boxer in my weight category.
the media and fake left in the west have also demonstrated an inability to understand what changed on oct 7th, and even seem to think that some entitled rich kids whining at western universities has some kind of relevance to sovereign israeli policy in the middle east. they are equally out of touch, and also need to adjust and change.
but the president is supposed to lead, not to follow.
entitled rich kids literally still in school aren't paid to figure out complex geopolitical issues, the president is.
the president is having difficulties keeping up with the conflict in israel, and the white house is consequently skewing the narrative, but somebody down there is reading this site, so i'm going to give it a go at being professor jessica to get things across more clearly. try not to fall asleep, mr. president.
biden is again upset that the "timing" of the strike to get rid of that piece of shit haniyeh puts a "cease fire" in gaza in jeopardy, indicating again that he fundamentally doesn't understand what the war is about. is it because netanyahu is being sneaky? is it actually his fault, really?
no. netanyahu is being crystal clear: while he will agree in principle to temporarily stop the operation to erase hamas from the planet to get some or all of the hostages back, which is a reasonable position, he realizes that hamas will never present a reasonable offer (hamas took the hostages as leverage and is continuing to call for the recognition of sovereignty in exchange for releasing the prisoners, which was in truth the desperate last act of a dying movement and is contemptible and has no possibility of leading to a successful truce) so there is no actual likelihood of a ceasefire and this rhetorical position is consequently real but trivial. it's sort of like telling a lion that you have locked up that you'll let it go so long as it promises not to eat you. that lion can never make that promise, or at least not honestly. ergo, the offer may be made honestly, while knowing it will never come to pass. further, you keep a lion locked up because it threatens you harm, not because you enjoy locking up lions.
further, netanyahu has been as clear as day that the war is ultimately not about releasing the hostages and that releasing the hostages will therefore not end the war, even if he acknowledges being willing to accept a ceasefire for as long as it takes to release them, if hamas will in fact release them, and for terms that are not insane. rather, the war is about destroying hamas and will end with the destruction of hamas, whether the hostages are released or not.
(the reality is that the remaining hostages are probably either all or almost all dead, and those still alive are probably on their second pregnancy and consequently property of their husbands, under sharia law, and not returnable. under islamic law, you own the women you impregnate. they're property. it's also difficult to predict how a woman ends up feeling about a man that rapes her hundreds of times. israel will never get those girls back without launching commando raids and killing the rapist/husbands, and then they'll probably have to take the kids, too.)
i suppose that if netanyahu wants to really be cynical, he could order a prisoner swap and then launch an airstrike on the bus as it enters gaza. but, hamas won't even let them get to that point of absurdity.
meanwhile, biden is still role playing bill clinton in the oslo accords, and trying to "bridge a divide" to build a "lasting peace". he hears gaza's pain. he hears israel's pain, too. in fact, i think he has tinnitus from listening to himself speak, so he hears everybody's pain. your words are his pain. literally.
the reality is that the october 7th attack fundamentally changed everything in israel. it changed the security calculation. it turned pacifists into war mongers. it has radically altered the israeli psyche, and it should have. israel woke up one day in the dark ages and is trying to turn the clocks forward, without the sardonic humour of a classic bill murray film. this is not oslo. this is not camp david. this is a different game, a different war, a different day and, in fact, a different century. this isn't about palestine anymore, it's about iran, and it's about china.
it's hard for an old man to adjust. after all, joe understands the conflict; he's been dealing with it for 50 years. in his mind, he was always going to be the one to sign the deal and bring a lasting peace. he's been planning for this moment his whole life. he's the genius that will solve this problem. right? netanyahu is mucking it all up, the sonofabitch.
that's the problem.
there's not going to be a cease fire in gaza and there shouldn't be. hamas will and should be destroyed, and gaza will need to be occupied and pacified by force.
the united states needs a commander in chief that can adjust and change with the times and correctly understand what is happening now, not what happened 30 years ago. the world has passed biden by and left his foreign policy in the 20th century and his refusal to adjust to the new reality in israel is exhibit a. netanyahu has no choice but to use kid gloves. but, the pentagon really needs to intervene, or at least give allies alternate contact info, for the next six months.
Friday, August 2, 2024
my understanding is that there's actually a single decision that is responsible for the sudden influx of temporary workers, and that is the government's purposeful and intentional decision to do away with impact assessments during the application process.
the government has the ability to restore oversight to the process by returning to a historical norm that is inevitable anyways. it is insane to let private corporations deregulate immigration policy. this is a clear government responsibility.
until they take this obvious step, they are merely bloviating and misleading all of us. they know what to do. they can do it, or blither or on about nonsense and pretend they're doing something, when the policy is actually to drive down wages on purpose.
Thursday, August 1, 2024
i consistently argue that identity and orientation are choices and not biological, but that doesn't mean it's something that people can hide or others can't figure out.
tersely, i think that sexual orientation is neither fixed nor inborn, and i insist that this is actually the scientific consensus. the calvinist gloss is political and to an extent legal (you can't execute somebody for sodomy if you can't demonstrate mens rea, so the delusional claim that the gay man had no choice actually saved lives, and this is a historical and factual truth, it has, and it may continue to, but it's just not true). they have spent half a century scouring the genome for a gay gene at this point and it's not there. i think with orientation that there are conscious and unconscious factors; in the end, there's a choice made or not (and in liberal democracies we respect individual choices that don't create harms, we don't criminalize harmless behaviour, or legislate our normative morality), but the pavlovian conditioning leading to arousal in one situation or another is largely the result of circumstance, coming out of a sexual orientation tabula rasa that we are born with. it's only the case that most of us are straight because it's what we teach our kids, and that is a general truth in all mammals. mammals are not born with instinct; mammals need to teach their children everything, from how to eat to who to fuck. it is entirely plausible that we could teach ourselves to be majority gay, if we wanted to reduce the population. there is no biological reason that couldn't happen.
gender identity is a reflection of personality aligned to gender norms, which are a social construction, so it's an entirely arbitrary decision and it's ultimately up to the individual to choose if they want to transition or not. i know extremely effeminate straight men. this is totally random and absolutely arbitrary, and also subject to change, although we tend to be kind of stubborn. the idea that there's a gene for pink lipstick is pretty stupid and fundamentally misunderstands what a gene is.
that doesn't mean it isn't obvious. from about the age of 16 to about the age of 25, when i started getting more serious about transition, almost everybody that i met figured it out.
when i told my sister around the age of 20, her response was "obviously. why did you wait so long?". this is particularly noteworthy given that she grew into an anti-trans hard-right bigot.
and i was just remembering the day when i was working the cash at an a&w and the somali girl i was working with, along with my female manager, unilaterally decided, without asking me, that i had "girl power", too, which was a spice girls thing. these girls had no way to know anything, other than to guess based on very rudimentary interactions with me and while it was certainly intended to be inclusive, they might have made the opposite choice; they also very clearly stated that the guy in the back flipping burgers did not have girl power, to which he responded with an annoyed 'cmon! that's not fair!".
but, i was working the cash in the first place because somebody in management decided i was female for me. in fact, they told me point blank they wanted me on the cash because i had a pretty face. this was pre-hormones, and before i even came out as trans. i was initially hired to work the fries stand, but that lasted all of a half of a shift before they moved me to the cash register, and i worked that job for something like two years. they moved me around all over the city, even. i was their prized pretty faced cashier. generally speaking, fast food is a pretty gendered work force, but this particular manager had a strict gender segregation policy in place, as well; when i met employees in new restaurants, they would consistently express surprise that i was on the cash, for about an hour, until they got how obvious it was.
when i was in grade school, several of the little girls tried to force me to use the women's washroom and a teacher had to intervene and discipline them for it. i want to be clear about this: i wasn't trying to enter the female facilities. they wanted me to use the female facilities. like, they wanted me to go in there and gossip and play with my hair. they thought that there was something incorrect about me using the boys room and tried to take matters into their own hands to fix it. this one little girl had me totally figured out in the fourth grade, before i had the slightest clue, for myself. i described myself as like a girl not as a girl. it took me quite a while to come around to make that choice that this kid had figured out for me when she was 10.
i even got hired to work at a makeup store called the body shop at one point, as an entirely pre-hormone cismale.
so, i mean, it's a choice, but it's one that is framed in reality, as well. it was christopher hitchens that put it succinctly when he said that you shouldn't have to insist that you're a lady; if you're actually trans, the people around you will realize it, and they will either accept you or denigrate you for it. it's not something you're required to act on, but it's not really something you can hide, either.
there is one way in that kamala harris is certainly black and it's that she's a black box for policy, a wild guess, a schrodinger's candidate (sorry to upset the cat ladies...).
and i think she wants to keep it that way.
she may be even being advised to keep it that way.
are you into surprises?
i suspect we won't like what we get.
voting for kamala harris may be a little like this:
Wednesday, July 31, 2024
i don't exactly want to criticize israel for torturing palestinian terrorists. these are not good people, and they don't treat israelis very well in the reverse context. i think the situation should be seen more as a police operation than a war, but bad things happen in wars, and israel intends to win the ones it participates in.
it's the latter point i'm more concerned about.
israel should realize that it is not helping itself by engaging in torture, that it is counterproductive, and that it won't help to deradicalize the terrorists, which is ultimately their actual goal. as the more civilized entity, it needs to take the higher ground and stop doing this.
those who are guilty of torture should be charged under israeli law and incarcerated as the law allows for. israel is a country governed by the rule of law. that needs to be asserted.
i would like to congratulate them on taking out that motherfucker haniyeh, though. apparently, they did it via a rocket strike directly into iran. i wish america would remove it's enemies with a comparable level of competency.
i had a (female) coworker about 15 years ago that you used to call me kermie, and repeatedly tried to engage me in singing 'it's not easy being green', due to my sour and sardonic exterior and utilization of dry wit that went over most people's heads, in addition to my tendency for observational humour.
his response to the harris campaign's invocation of pop stars over substance would be correct, in context. we have no idea what this woman's policy positions are and it's beginning to become clear that she has no real intention of telling us. it wouldn't help her win.
just put the lime in the coconut.
yeesh, indeed.
i don't know if kamala harris is black or not, and i don't really care. i'm white.
i'm pretty sure that, unlike barack obama, she's definitely not white.
i do, however, want to make a request to black people in the united states to vote for the candidate they most agree with, not the one they think is the blackest. if you ask the mirror on the wall who the blackest of them all is, you'll end up voting for this guy, and nobody wants that:
miami getting flooded is more than a flesh wound.
it was a long time ago now, but some dead guy said something about content of character, rather than colour of skin, and he wasn't even very liberal. you should look that up. it was good advice.
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
for clarity's sake, i want to make something unambiguous.
i only use marijuana and alcohol in social situations, as a means to eliminate anxiety. i am not an extroverted person, and i don't enjoy being around people. i need the drugs as an escape from social interaction.
further, i don't like house parties; i think they're lame and pathetic. marijuana is not something that should be done in the privacy of your house, it's a social drug that should be smoked at concerts and in large gatherings, essentially exclusively.
what that means for me is that when the pandemic happened my drug use completely dried up and i simply haven't had the opportunity to pick it back up since.
they closed the border in april of 2020 and i wasn't able to get back over again until may of 2023, but then these new landlords showed up and threatened to illegally evict me, which has forced me to stay inside since june of 2023. i was able to get out to one party in may, 2023 before i had to lock myself inside and wait for them to leave, and i'm still waiting. i have consequently had a single night of drinking since april of 2020, because i have absolutely no interest in getting drunk in my basement, or in somebody's backyard or garage in windsor, ontario. sitting around doing drugs and talking is utterly boring and pathetic to me.
i haven't been to a concert since april, 2020.
likewise, as i think smoking pot out of boredom in residential neighbourhoods is pathetic and lame (put the bong down and read a book instead), i have only had that single opportunity to get out of the house to get stoned.
i got very depressed in june of 2020 when i realized i wasn't going to be able to go out all summer and spent most of the period from june 21, 2020 to aug 1, 2020 smoking pinners and taking walks around the neighbourhood to try to cope with the fascist lockdown. even then, i had to go outside and take a walk. i can't handle smoking anything in the house, i think it's disgusting. i stopped at the end of july, 2020 and haven't touched the stuff since, except at that one party in may, 2023. at all. i came to the conclusion that government pot is a dangerous narcotic and that only homegrown or illegally grown marijuana should be smoked, as the government stuff seems designed to create dependence. normal marijuana is not addictive, but the government pot seemed to be.
even when i was a cigarette smoker, i always smoked outside. i quite smoking cigarettes in january, 2016.
i didn't decide to become straight edge in 2020 and it probably won't last, but i haven't had the freedom to live as i want to, since, and these decisions made by others and enforced on me have had that outcome: no marijuana since aug, 2020 and no alcohol since april, 2020, except for one night in may, 2023, when i was able to get out to a party.
i currently have no interest in drugs at all and i won't until i'm able to go back out to appropriate venues for drug use, which include places like bars and concert halls, not houses and back yards.
we have mandatory retirement for the supreme court in canada, and it's a relatively uncontroversial idea.
biden's proposal, like most of his ideas, strikes me as unworkable and awkward, and perhaps even designed to fail. you don't want your supreme court overturning laws every time a new president gets elected, but that seems like the obvious outcome of his initiative. that's insane, and will turn the country into a legal basket case.
what i'm really getting from this is simply that the democrats are sore losers that want to change the rules of the game because they lost it. they lost control of the court in a fully democratic process and they'll have to accept the will of the people, until they can win it back.
mandatory retirement, however, would be a good way to put a maximum age limit on the justices, to ensure they're not completely out of touch with reality, and aren't senile in office, like the president. perhaps that is the best way to look at this proposal: it is as incoherent as biden is generally these days, and evidence that he ought to remove himself from office.
the christians in the lebanese government should be standing with israel as an ally against hezbollah, which is ruining the country and trying to control it with fear, and not condemning it. this is a very disappointing response from the lebanese foreign minister.
i would call on christians in lebanon to try to replace this guy with somebody that is willing to stand up against hezbollah.
(and, lebanon has a weird government policy, where the foreign minister and most of the army leadership has to be a christian, which is in israel's potential favour)
i'm not going to like kamala harris, and i'm not going to like her because she's about three slots too far right for me to consider voting for, which has generally been the case for me with most democrats. harris, biden, clinton, obama, gore - all conservatives. i won't vote for conservatives.
i endorsed kerry, because he was actually a liberal. i did endorse hillary clinton, but i think it was a mistake.
i have otherwise not suggested voting for the democrats at any point since 1996. i usually endorse the greens, but made exceptions in 2004 for kerry and 2016 for clinton because i felt it was actually worthwhile, and i think i was wrong in 2016. in 2024, i am again endorsing jill stein.
however.
i have to acknowledge that, maybe - maybe - kamala harris might be the planet's last chance. we have now blown past 1.5 degrees and are on the brink of tipping into negative feedback cycles. time's up. she has yet to demonstrate as much, but she might still do so. i need to hear her make a very clean break from biden's pathetic and failed climate policy in order to deduce that she is, and i'll tell you what i want to hear.
i believe it was naomi klein that first pointed out that the economics of neo-liberalism were in direct conflict with the kind of of government policy required to address climate change, and that this was fundamentally a baby boomer problem. the correlation between the boomers lingering on past their welcome and best before date (to the point that a senile boomer had to literally be forced to resign at the last minute) and the fact that government has failed to address climate change as a serious issue is not a coincidence. the washington consensus put in place by bill clinton has been an absolute death sentence for the planet because it takes the tools government needs to address the problem away from it.
i read something recently that suggested that biden has succeeded in building seven charging stations. so much for positive tax incentives as a serious government policy. it's a joke. it's been clear for a long time that, in order to get some people in government that are willing to have government actually do things, a complete generational overhaul was going to be required. biden was never going to articulate the manhatten project style economic policies that are required to aggressively transition the country.
i have yet to hear kamala harris present her climate strategy. i've yet to hear her present any policy at all.
i want to hear her come out and clearly state that she is going to spend trillions of public dollars on transition, and that she is going to go into debt in order to do it and that it doesn't matter how it gets paid for one day, what matters is that it gets done. further, i want to hear her say that she is going to declare the issue a national security emergency (because it is) and use executive orders to fund it if congress is going to remain stupid. if i hear that very specific thing, i might endorse her.
there's not going to be another chance to do this.
this is it.
time's up.
Sunday, July 28, 2024
no matter how you split it up or cut it up, lebanon is different than almost any other country in the mena area (except israel) in that muslims are a clear minority group in lebanon, and shi'ites are a minority in a minority.
hezbollah has no democratic legitimacy and should not be ruling at all, let alone by force.
if you stand with democracy in lebanon, you stand against hezbollah, and it's a serious issue that needs serious addressing.
the lebanese army is essentially failing to protect the people against hezbollah. lebanon is very much a failed state.
israel could present itself as filling that vacuum left open, and seek to generate political support to do what the lebanese army won't. a lasting political union between the two canaanite groups, the israeli jews and the lebanese christians, could benefit both parties.
but, the lebanese have to make that choice.
how likely is it that you could get the christians in lebanon to build an alliance with israel to push out hezbollah?
the problem in lebanon, as i understand it, is fear. the christians in lebanon are deeply fearful of the muslims, and essentially willing to do what they're told to avoid sharia law. this is a horrific situation and not something that should be tolerated by the west, but trying to get the christians to choose to fight over submission is a historical problem that goes back centuries. unlike muslims and jews, christians legitimately don't like to fight.
however, there is a natural alliance between the maronites and the israelis and it could lead to a lasting peace if you could convince the lebanese of it's utility. as the issue is fear, the israelis should propose to protect the maronites (and the druze and sunnis) from the shi'ite muslims, in exchange for collaboration.
if israel can present the idea effectively, this is an opportunity to win their freedom that the christians in lebanon might not see again for a long time. they should choose to align on the right side of history and rise up and take control of their own destiny, with help from israel and, hopefully, a nato willing to pull it's head out of it's ass and make a correct choice for once.
the other option is going to be catastrophic for everybody in the region, and there's no other clear way to avoid it.
israel has reversed and is changing policies it brought in about 20 years ago and going back to policies it had before that, which means a more aggressive occupation zone surrounding israel in order to better protect it's borders. the first phase was a re-occupation of gaza that is unlikely to end in the near future, and should not end in the near future; the fundamental condition for the occupation to end is that the international community needs to find a way to deradicalize the population in gaza via aggressive education initiatives, which the united nations needs to be doing the day-to-day work on from a legitimately neutral perspective, and not be acting as "free palestine" proxies in regards to. morally speaking, israel cannot be expected to withdraw, otherwise. this is going to be a diplomatic fight that could take a generation to enforce.
gaza cannot be a country and the idea that it can is retarded. it should be annexed by egypt when the conditions allow for it, which could be 50 years from now. for the foreseeable future, it will need to be occupied by israel to prevent further violence.
if they don't like that, they should have thought about it before they carried out the october 7th attack. the consequences need to be deep, longlasting and real to creative a disincentive for further attacks. in the short term, they will need to get used to occupation, and they will need to find a way to change who they are as a culture and as a people if they want to end it. this has to be the end of this barbaric terrorist bullshit; there can be no further tolerance of it.
and, no, gaza is not like afghanistan. the comparison is moronic. afghanistan is a mountainous region with a gigantic surface area that, if laid out flat, would be one of the biggest countries in the world. gaza is an enclosed space that is smaller than most cities. the tunnels will slow the process down, but they have a finite number of exit points that can be mapped and controlled with enough effort. it's a challenge that is surmountable. the challenges present in afghanistan mostly don't exist at all in gaza and to the extent that they do, the comparison requires the acknowledgement of a substantive difference of scale. israel should be able to get hamas under control and pacify gaza at least as well as it has in the west bank.
a policy change is also in process in regards to the west bank that will likely lead to annexation, which has been in process for decades. opposition to this process is properly dated to c. 1995. it cannot be reversed at this point, and i frankly don't think it should be. instead, israel should offer full citizenship rights to the existing inhabitants of the west bank and tell them to take it or leave it. jordan and saudi arabia should absorb the remnant population.
the next phase is lebanon.
tersely, there is a river flowing through southern lebanon. under international law, the lebanese state is not supposed to have militias south of the river, but it has ignored this (and hezbollah has especially ignored it). this region was previously occupied by israel; the iranians moved in to the vacuum when israel withdrew, which was not what was supposed to happen. the region was supposed to remain a dmz.
if the un won't enforce the dmz and push the iranians out, the israelis are justified in pushing the iranians out themselves by force and occupying the region and that may be in the process of materializing. this is, however, a dangerous activity by israel, and it may result in an all out war between israel and hezbollah. while israel would be morally and legally justified to carry out this operation, it may be strategically foolish. this is in many ways a judgement call, as they need to do something to push the iranians out, and the united nations is of no utility to israel. nor are the iranians rational actors willing to negotiate in good faith.
it was clearly a mistake to withdraw. that doesn't mean reoccupying is the right thing to do, strategically, even if it is the right thing to do legally and morally.
worse, it is an open question, of which the legalities are less clear, if israel intends to occupy areas north of the river. i have previously argued that israel has a convincing, but convoluted, territorial claim to most if not all of lebanon. i would nonetheless advise against doing that, at least right now, if they intend to push to the river at all.
israel's better option is to seek for a political revolution in lebanon, or perhaps even organize a coup. lebanon is 40-45% christian, and the christian areas are the more urban areas. muslim arabs are invaders to lebanon and largely live in the rural areas; the christians are the indigenous canaanites, a sister people to the hebrew jews. if tel aviv can get hezbollah pushed out of power, it may find a much more friendly government in lebanon that doesn't require attacking and may seek to act jointly to eradicate the terrorist group, perhaps with nato help. they may seek to demilitarize the zone south of the river voluntarily, which is the preferred outcome.
israel has a problem here that it needs to deal with, but it is not invincible and it may be in the process of making a mistake that it should think carefully about. israel will probably defeat hezbollah in the end, but it must seek to avoid a pyrrhic outcome.
israel needs an ally in lebanon if it is to do this with seriousness and with serious likelihood of longlasting victory.
i've pointed out repeatedly that there's a lot of spooks reading this site.
why does trump talk about hannibal lector as though he's an illegal immigrant? i don't know.
i know that i have used hannibal lector as a comical example of why anarchists can't eliminate jails and posted about it for years. anarchists like to argue that crime is economic and communism will make crime obsolete, which is probably mostly true, but that doesn't give us a plan with how to deal with legit nutcases, like hannibal lector.
(i don't want to cite jeffrey dahmer in arguments. it's reductio ad hitlerum. hannibal lets me get the point across with delving into the extremes.)
here is one example:
this isn't exactly trump's stump, but it's oddly close, and i've been using it online since the 00s.
it's curious.
hey, you should fire this bum vance, don coyote.
i'm going to be moving on, but i want to draw attention to a part of the debate.
do you remember when biden started bragging about his golf game, and trump told him he was full of shit? this was a role reversal - biden sounded a lot like trump all of a sudden, and trump was right to tell him he was lying, because he was.
well, sort of.
an open question over the last ten years has been whether it's accurate to call a trump a liar or not, as lying requires a mens rea component, in addition to the actus reus. that is, you can't accidentally tell a lie; in that case, you're just wrong or misinformed. a lie is a special case of being wrong where you know you're wrong and purposefully say something that isn't true, knowing you're wrong, in order to mislead somebody.
so, was biden lying about his golf game?
i want you to consider the possibility that he wasn't, which i suspect is the actual case, and extrapolate that to the problems inherent to the biden presidency, and which are likely going to manifest themselves in the harris campaign, malignantly.
what if they told biden his golf game was better than it is?
what if they told him it was improving when it was actually deteriorating?
the reason they would do that is that they would be rewarded for it, as yes-men and yes-women (the yes-people, and i'm not talking about bill bruford), because biden had an ego, and inflating it came with self-interest. you tell the president what he wants to hear, not what is true, because you get promoted for it.
so, will biden ever learn that his golf game isn't what he believes it is?
it doesn't really matter.
but harris likely needs to address the issue and eliminate a lot of people if she wants to win and if she wants to govern effectively.
it's worth remembering that the people that advised joe biden and continue to advise kamala harris are not public servants hired to govern the country, but political staffers paid to advance a campaign and a candidate. there's been some outcry amongst partisan democrats "why didn't you tell us!?". the answer is obvious enough, and that it is that these are people with mortgages and bills and ending biden's campaign would also mean they would lose their job. that would be like signing up to get fired. it's not in their self-interest. there was a similar issue with liz truss, where they actually caught a number of people behind the scenes talking to each other, where the conversation was something like "she's fucking incompetent, but i need the squid, so fuck it."
a better question to ask is why it is that democratic candidates didn't see this coming. i want you to go back and watch the 2020 debates and tell me with a straight face that he looked capable and competent. he didn't. so, why didn't anybody primary him? the answer is that nobody thought they could win, and they were probably right. still. even after his resignation, biden would still win primaries against virtually anybody running, with the possible exception of bernie sanders.
this is a "it's not me, it's you" type situation, from the perspective of voters. biden won in the first place because the field was horrific. harris ended up as vp because there was nobody else willing to do it. for all the rhetoric about choices from an identity politics marketing perspective, the reality is that the party doesn't have many popular candidates that can win close elections in contested districts, because you could never raise enough money to run, if you actually had popular support. it's a catch-22.
so, the country ends up stuck with the bidens in the spectrum, and keeps voting for them, even after they're senile, and even after they've resigned.
i'm cringing at harris, but they are correct on some level. they need to build grassroots support. but, they're going to do that by focusing on populist economic messaging and presenting a serious candidacy, not on stupid pop culture memes that make her look desperate and half-retarded. presidents should spend the summer getting shitfaced and falling down the stairs. right. and, the actual truth is that this woman is so right-wing, the uk tories would tell her to fuck off and go call nigel farage. she's too conservative for the tories; they'd call her an extremist. you'd think these people could figure that out, but they can't and they're probably never going to.
so, the american people need to figure it out for them and organize on their own. i would advise choosing the green party as the vehicle to do it with.
Friday, July 26, 2024
so, kamala harris has begun her campaign for president by copying the cover art from a recent pop singer and declaring solidarity with hamas.
she likes hot sauce too, right? carries it in her purse?
ugh.
*gag*.
this is beginning to feel like deja vu.
at the end of this, i want the strategists in the democratic party to be forced to wear dunce caps and paraded down pennsylvania avenue.
what do i think of "drag queen story time"?
i think it's very silly and that the correct response is to realize it's very silly. most sane, rational people will consider it comical. nonetheless, is there some valid concern?
there might be. for example, i'm reminded of the time that i went over to sarah's place, and she picked out some clothes for me, and her daughter took the opportunity to jump on my lap when i was sitting down, with the expectation that i would read her a book (which she had picked out for me), and then proceeded to tell me i was stupid for wearing women's clothing. this hurt my feelings, and she never apologized for it. i nonetheless read the book, to sarah's bemusement, and when i stopped to answer a question she asked me, the child bit me, apparently as punishment for stopping. don't bite me, master. i could not possibly hit a child, so i was a sitting duck, too. so, there's a real concern that the drag queens may be the victim of abuse by spoiled kids and some attempt should be made to protect the drag queens from abuse by rotten children.
i'm not actually a drag queen, i'm a transgendered person that had just gone back on hormones and was trying to explain it to my unimpressed ex-girlfriend, and i had no intention of reading the child a story when i went over to sarah's on that day in roughly 2009ish. the kid would have been about five, a little younger. she'd be almost 20 now. one nonetheless needs to ask why the child told me i was stupid, and the answer couldn't be anything other than that her mother had told her as much, which sounds about right. the child was probably literally repeating something she heard her mother say about me. i realized that.
i think that the underlying concern that some conservative parents have about this is that the children are being exposed to a type of mental illness that is being normalized, which is an idea that has no clinical basis. simply wearing clothing is not a mental illness and is not in the dsm. to exaggerate the point, i want to draw attention to the women protesting against drag queens while wearing pants, apparently oblivious to the reality that they are cross-dressing, themselves. well, if women can wear pants, why can't men wear silly princess dresses? there is no rational response to that question, as clothing is merely a social construction, and one that has changed over time. by current standards, jesus himself would have been a drag queen, because he walked around in dresses, as was the norm at the time (and remains the norm in conservative parts of the middle east).
one of the reasons that the persians were seen as barbarians by older middle eastern cultures is that they wore trousers. to the greeks and babylonians, this was unconscionable. all greeks knew that real men wore robes.
viewed rationally, wardrobe choice is a meaningless triviality and all clinical analysis views it that way: cross-dressing itself is not only not a mental illness, but it's exceedingly difficult to even define as the goal posts are constantly shifting, as illustrated by the women in pants protesting exposing their children to drag queens, as they stand beside them, in their pants.
there is perhaps some latent concern underlying this "born in the wrong body" thing, but the idea was never intended to be interpreted as some kind of metempsychosis or something. that might be seen as a symptom of schizophrenia, sure. however, nobody has ever literally thought they were born in the wrong body. it's a figure of speech. it's to be interpreted poetically.
there are still two conditions listed in the dsm that are trans-related and one of them does have some vague relevance, but it is abstract and unlikely to manifest itself in real life. parents should nonetheless be protective of anybody that wants to put their kids on their lap, from strangers at the library to creepy santa clauses to religious freaks. a trusted priest or pastor with repeat access is more likely to abuse your child than a drag queen reading a book in public at the library. there's nothing particular about the trans issue, but i want to be real about this.
the first of these conditions is dysphoria, which is widely misunderstood. there are a lot of people, myself included, that get diagnosed with being left out of society due to their gender identity, which triggers conditions like depression or anxiety. for me, it's frankly more of an excuse for a guaranteed annual income, but i am diagnosed with anxiety stemming from discrimination due to gender identity. this is a real condition in the dsm, but it is a reflection of the society, and not of the identity itself.
the second of these conditions is the one that may be of some legitimate concern to conservative parents, and it is the diagnosis of transvestism as a fetish. clinically speaking, a drag queen is supposed to be defined as a gay man that puts on women's clothing for purposes of sexual arousal, in order to masturbate or have anal sex with other gay men. it is a kink, a fetish, a sexual quirk. on it's own it is harmless, but it has the potential to lead to obsessive behaviour. do you want your son climbing up on that dude's lap? maybe not.
but, i think that this is something that should be easily identified by discerning eyeballs. the drag queen that shows up to storytime in lingerie is not the same thing as the drag queen that shows up to storytime in a silly princess dress. the mistake that conservatives are making is conflating these things, but the use of language is unhelpful. technically speaking, these aren't clinical drag queens, as drag is a sexual activity, and what they are doing is a type of performance art. a better term would be "female impersonator" rather than "drag queen", and some change of language may be helpful to clarify that this is actually harmless and silly rather than creepy and gross.
parents and librarians should nonetheless be careful to erect those filters, as they would in any other context, and which they no doubt probably do.
i haven't seen any pictures of a drag queen story-time with dudes dressed like porn stars, but i would be uncomfortable with that. sure. it's not real. rather, having cinderalla (or perhaps the ugly duckling) told by a female impersonator in exaggerated costume can and should be silly and fun and so long as that is actually true it should be tolerated and enjoyed for what it is.
i was thinking about this while i was in the shower, and i'm waiting for some soap + humidity to soften me up (a side effect of the forced drugging by the losers upstairs has been patches of rough, dry skin, which has been extremely annoying, and has required an all-of-drugstore response) so i'm going to write it down. i am eventually going to be splitting posts like this off of this politics feed, but i've been unable to sit down and do any meaningful work and might not be until i'm able to relocate. it's taken me a long time to recover, and every time i get close, they drug me again. i don't fully understand, but they appear to be muslims trying to enforce some backwards religious code on me, which i don't care about, but i'm not able to escape. they want me to look like a bearded gay man, or something. i don't really understand and don't remotely care; i want to send them to jail for enforcing their laws on me, but i'm having a hard time generating sufficient evidence.
what i was thinking about was the open question of whether the germanic, celtic, slavic and other migrations that ended the roman empire were actually seen not as the rampaging barbarians that the church historians recorded them as but actually as liberators of christian-enforced slavery by the vast majority of the population, who rejected this weird middle-eastern religion that was enforced on them with violence by strange foreigners. i'm not going to prove this claim, so much as i'm going to generate an argument that it is a reasonable supposition by using a series of analogies within more standard, recorded history. a characteristic of this period, c. 450 to c 1000, is that there was little remembered writing outside of the churches, which were governmental and administrative bodies throughout most of europe under a system called 'papal supremacy', where the pope essentially assumed the powers of the emperor. this didn't formally end until it was dismantled by napoleon, in 1806.
first, i want to present an unrelated model that i've used to try to understand the nature of migrations into europe over a long time frame. there's this heated debate in pre-european archaeological circles over whether the indo-european migration was violent or peaceful, with the peaceniks pointing out a lack of clear evidence of violence in the record itself and the war mongers arguing that the central motifs in indo-european culture were all about war, and drawing conclusions. i've tried to resolve this debate by looking at recorded history and pointing out that there has been an essentially unbroken stream of violent horse-backed warriors moving from the steppes for as long as there has been historical records (something that was only really resolved when the russians overwhelmed the horse-backed warriors with superior technology, and eventually with tanks. horses can't fight tanks. at all. hence this giant country called russia, that formed in response to this constant stream of violence.), and almost none of that could be found in the archaeological record if it were searched for, so it's really incumbent on the peaceniks to present their positive case, which they can't. violent migrations from asia into europe were likely a near constant reality going back 6000-8000 years before present, and only ending around the year 1700.
likewise, i think we can look at the question of how northerners were seen by romans by looking at existing history, but we have the ability to look both before and after the period that middle eastern christian colonizers occupied the bulk of europe.
first, consider the byzantine response to advancing turks and arabs in the late dark ages, which was to call on the franks and germans (then seen by the byzantnes as barbarians) to liberate them. we call this the crusades, which from a byzantine roman perspective was a war of liberation (although it suffered from the unfortunate reality that the remnants of roman civilization in the middle east left several centuries previous, in a depopulation event cause by plague, war and economic collapse that peaked in the late 7th century and made it easy for arab bedouin groups to take over in syria and israel). there has also been some serious scholarly research (not some trans girl with a blog) looking into the idea that the viking invasion of christian europe was a response to charlemagne threatening to invade scandinavia, that they targeted the churches for this reason and that they met a minimal response outside of the cities because much of the rural population wasn't christianized at all, and did in truth see them as liberators. we spend a fair amount of time criticizing the inquisition, which lasted into the age of enlightenment (and may have claimed netwon, who was himself a secret alchemist, had he not been very careful about it), without stopping to realize that they were killing witches because they were pagans. this is in truth clear evidence of indigenous religious practices carrying on in europe very late into history. the great peasants revolt likely had a pagan religious slant to it (as did many of the attempts to ward off the plague in the first place). while they have sadly not survived, there are records of indigenous scottish religious practices being practiced in remote locations as last as the 17th century. eastern europe, which had crusades launched against it, did not itself convert until roughly that late, and there are in fact some baltic and finnish tribes in russia that never converted at all and are the last known legitimate vestiges of the old ways in europe. it is reasonable to suggest that perhaps the farmers and peasants in france let the vikings walk in to fight the church, which they despised, precisely because they were still worshiping derivatives of odin, themselves....at least until the vikings became corrupted by christianity, themselves, and became worse oppressors than the remnants of roman rule were.
so, we can see that the idea that the germans were seen as liberators is recorded in several places in history after roman rule, notably with the crusades (well documented in constantinople) and the viking invasions (well documented, at least from the church perspective). there are also undertones of pagan practices in major events like the great peasants revolt (the centrality of the grove, for instance) and the inquisition that draw into question how christianized europe really was, and how they might view a foreign pagan force to come to fight the church for them.
it is also possible to look at roman attitudes towards germans and celts at the dawn of constantine and the beginning of roman christianity and deduce ideas about how the people viewed their chiristian oppressors and how they may have viewed germanic warriors coming to fight against them.
there were in fact several late roman emperors that saw the goths (a swedish warrior group that migrated into the empire from the region around today's crimea, fleeing the huns) as having noble and ideal qualities, which is something the romans also projected onto the celts, even in the form of late classical art. this is very well documented. our contemporary concept of the noble savage - naked, naive, pure, just, honest but void of civilization and law- was in fact created by roman art, depicting the celtic warrior class. there are surviving statues in rome of celtic warriors that demonstrate how the romans literally placed the naked celtic warriors on a pedestal, as ideal representatives of humanity in a pure and raw state. it is easy to deduce that, in the celts, the romans saw themselves, which is true; italic tribes likely only separated from celtic tribes some time around the halstatt period (c. 1000 bce), and the celtic and italian are the most closely related dialects, which might even be why spain and france so easily converted to latin as the lingua franca. you can contrast this to how the romans saw the carthaginians, which was as creepy foreigners with weird customs. there is a very large amount of evidence from the late classical period that the romans saw the germans and celts as something closer to themselves, and that they contrasted this with their middle eastern slaves (the romans literally brought millions of semitic slaves to europe from syria, and it is these people that eventually became italian and french and spanish christians), who were foreigners that had weird customs that were not like them. there is also actually archaeological evidence of roman pagan cultural practices (like sacrifices) in italy that is contemporary to the germanic invasions, and which seems to suggest either a reversion out of fear (the christian perspective) or a brief return to free cultural activity, which is what i'm hinting at.
this is an important consideration, as the history of europe is decolonized to present indigenous perspectives, and remove introduced christian concepts. we can easily construct the earlier period - we still have the statues of celtic noble savages on display in roman museums - and we know all about the renaissance and what followed, but this historical gap of christian occupation still suffers from the fact that it was written by the occupiers, and the bulk of historians are frankly not cognizant of the depth of the biases. we know the history was written by the church. we say it. we don't understand it and we've yet to put the pieces together to build a history of europe that eliminates and expels christianity, which is overdue and necessary to complete the decolonization of europe and allow it to return to it's indigenous roots in roman, greek, celtic and germanic cultural practices.
adults have a right to choose to be gay if they want. it's harmless behaviour. no state or social institution should be oppressing anybody for consenting, free choices made by adults.
but, orphaned kids placed with gay parents didn't have the ability to make that choice and it's not fair to make it for them.
my own position is that parents don't have and should not have rights, what they have is responsibilities that are to be defined in the context of the rights of the child. this is a next step from a "best interests of the child" policy to a "the kids have fucking rights" policy. i have a consistency in perspectives that the rights issues in all scenarios belong to the children and never belong to the parents.
now, older kids (say older than 10) that can make that choice should be allowed to, if they opt to. some kids even know they're gay at that age, or end up without parents because they're gay. that is a special situation, gay people adopting gay kids, that allows for the child to consent and that actually makes sense.
it's placing newborns with gay adults that is making a choice on behalf of these kids that the placement agencies do not have the right to make and should not be making.
and, yes, being gay is a choice. the science is abundantly clear on the point. it's a complex choice, with voluntary and involuntary factors, but it's unambiguously and unquestionably a choice, and that choice should be respected, even if you think it's gross.
i don't usually call myself a liberal, but my position on the gays is right out of on liberty, which is a foundational text in canada, but doesn't tend to get much traction in the united states, where the issue is still defined by religion, which i was not raised in and don't care about. i am, nonetheless, expressing a viewpoint shared by a large plurality, or outright majority, of white northerners in the united states; it's a liberal or libertarian position, it's really not about accepting gay people into conservative society or letting them participate in conservative and religious institutions like marriage. however, because the issue only really exists politically in the south, they have warped and defined a narrative that really doesn't reflect how most people approach the issue.
most people think that the gays should be left alone so long as they aren't harming anybody, and that they're absolutely free to fuck however they choose and want, so long as it's consensual.
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