really.

you thought pierre did all  those things, huh?

nope.

so...constitution?

nope. sorry. mostly jean, actually.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

yeah.

it's been chretien the whole fucking time, guys.

since pearson.

really.

he should get a diamond jubilee, soon.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/hp/1977-v12-n1-hp1112/030819ar.pdf

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

"no society should ever be destroyed!"

well, then you're a conservative and your opinion is invalid.

no, really.

if that's your answer, i don't care what you think.

because it's daft.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

you don't hear this debate.

nobody asks the question any more: what were these societies like, before contact?

maybe the question is closed, but it hasn't lost it's historical value. sadly, few people seem to care about the answers to these questions...

what kind of technologies did they have to make their labour easier, or not have to make their labour harder? was the society hierarchical? was the distribution of resources fair, or were there tyrants that took more? what social norms existed in the society? were gender norms enforced, and how so? did the society accept the freedom of queer people to be queer, or did it enforce arbitrary rules around sexuality? did the society accept non-conformity and the freedom to be different, or did it enforce a conformity of thought under threat of expulsion or death?

were they some abstraction of noble savages, or would a modern mind look at the society and see the same underlying problems of salem witch trials and scarlet letters and think it is more akin to a quasi-fascism?

and, if so, should this society be destroyed?

we tend to just imagine that life is always greener, don't we? we don't really analyze this question: how free were the indigenous peoples, before contact? truly? all of them? is this a culture that should be resuscitated? or should it be taken off life support? and, how free would they be today, should they reassert sovereignty?

truly?

all of them.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

* note that the question of whether the traditional indigenous cultures were tyrannical is separate from the question of whether the colonial powers were also tyrannical, which is not ambiguous.

the only reason i would think about italy is if it's the south of italy... 

this canadian would give a whole lot away to avoid snow for the rest of her life.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

norway is, in fact, in the list of ancestor countries, but i would be quick to jump on a way to finland, while placing norway in the uk/ireland/france pile of "what's the difference?".

i'll at least concede that canada to norway is largely a sideways move, whereas canada to ireland, especially, would be a step backwards. i don't think that western europe has a good future; if i'm moving back to europe, i'm going to try to pick somewhere that is going to retain a majority indigenous population, like finland or switzerland (i don't have swiss ancestors).

all i'd get out of moving to norway is the need to learn to speak norse. finnish isn't even germanic - it would be hard to learn. but, a move to finland would legitimately be a move to the very fringes of the empire. and, i may find that my opinions are not seen there as radical. 

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

woo!

go finland!

http://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2333-less-than-a-third-of-finns-believe-in-god.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

listen.

i didn't migrate here. i was born here. i have indigenous ancestors, but i reject ancestor worship, so i don't care what my ancestors did or what my ancestors thought, or think it is in any remote way binding on me - i am an individual, i am not my ancestors, nobody owns me, i am not indebted to anyone, and i have no obligation to anybody to do anything.

so, i don't feel an obligation to watch my mouth in my neighbour's house, so to speak. i was born here as much as anybody else and have the right to say what i want where i want, like everybody else does. where our individual ancestors came from and what they thought is simply irrelevant; they are dead, and nobody cares, so what i see in front of me is a competition for ideas. if my ideas are different than theirs, then we'll have to fight about it and one of us will win and the other will lose.

but, would i move to one of the places my non-indigenous ancestors came from, if some indigenous group wrote me a check and gave me a plane ticket?

i would.

well...i'd go to finland, for sure. i'd be apprehensive about italy, but, with the proper conditions, i'd go. i would not want to live in france or in the united kingdom.

if presented with a realistic option, i'd rather leave. because i'm an individual - i'm not attached to a community. i'm free, on that level of mind control.

on the level of rent, on the other hand....

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

"but, we can't separate our religion from our identity."

i agree - they can't.

but, that's not a feature. that's the bug. that's what is wrong - too much collectivism, not enough individualism.

i just don't think it's an argument. what i think it is is a diagnosis.

and, i have absolutely no interest at all in accommodating a culture that cannot separate the individual from the whole. until it can get to the point where it's members can say "i am an individual. i have a self. and i am distinct from my community. i have interests and ambitions and desires that may differ from my community and i am interested in expressing them, even if it doesn't conform with the norms in the community. i exist as an individual, to better myself, as an individual, and not merely as a corollary of the community i come from.", i just don't see anything that is worth saving. to the contrary, i might argue that such a society really ought to be destroyed, in the first place.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i agree that religiosity is primarily a function of poverty, rather than (a lack) of education, but this article is underestimating the effects of governments to maintain religion as a tool of control through demographic tinkering and immigration.

if you were to slow it down with a co-efficient such that the tipping point happens around 2050, i'd be in greater agreement.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201204/atheism-defeat-religion-2038

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

you know, i don't buy it, this idea of "spiritual awakening".

i mean, consider the term. make me laugh. i'll grant that a "spiritual awakening" is what you would expect would happen to a population, after you've dumbed it down with television to the point that it can barely operate a cash register. in that context, a "spiritual awakening" would be something like "mass insanity".

but, i actually i think we're on the cusp of a paradigmatic rejection of religion in the west, and that it could be almost entirely eliminated, at least amongst white people, by the year 2100. the next generation of white americans could very well define itself by it's godlessness.

and, i welcome that.

but, i wish the left would stop trying to appeal to the dying demographics of religious observation, and key in that, by paying too much lip service to religious values, it is slowly losing what will be the dominant atheist vote to the right.

the way things are shaping up right now, the atheists will get the tipping point to seize power once the boomers seriously die off, but, when they do, they will be republicans. and, that's a problem.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

geez.

there really are a lot of religious crazies in bc, aren't there? you need to be careful when you're in the mountains, out there.

they shouldn't be doing this, either, of course. but, it's not anywhere near as bad. i would be a lot less upset if they were just giving kids pamphlets on native religion. and, the world religions courses i took were too focused on the monotheistic religions, and not really a 'world religion' course, in the broadest sense.

i'm mostly posting because i like the idea of the atheist comics. and, i would suggest that he should be allowed to distribute the atheist comics regardless, as the bibles have already been handed out.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/gideons-versus-godless-abbotsford-public-schools-criticized-for-distributing-bibles-1.3514276

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

"sure.

i'm all about teaching my white kids indigenous knowledge. all of this eurocentric academic stuff might claim it's empirical, but it's really just racist.

i mean, it's what the indigenous people were raised on, right? for thousands of years? and, look how they turned out.

that's exactly how i want my kids to be."

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i just remember learning at some point in grade school about the scientific definition of life. i think it provided seven criteria like growth, reproduction and movement.

i don't think a chair meets many of them. and, i would have expected a teacher to correct an indigenous student on the point, because what their parents told them about chair spirits was wrong.

"no, sweetie. chairs aren't alive. these are the criteria used to determine if something is alive."

but, maybe i've only interacted with very sneaky chairs over my life time.

given that they are teaching children that chairs have spirits, i have to wonder what the science curriculum looks like in these schools.

jagmeet singh must cut is beard

no, seriously, i think this is why the indigenous religion is so much more widely scoffed at than others, which are not really any less stupid. i mean,  i'm an atheist, as you know, i don't have time for any of it, but the indigenous stuff is particularly lame because these aren't new ideas to westerners (unlike the eastern religions, which were legitimately something different) but ideas that western culture has already deduced are wrong.

it's not an issue of relativism. it's not about seeing things from a different perspective, or making way for ideas that are different. rather, it's something more akin to a kind of orwellianism: to be respectful of indigenous religious positions, you have to open yourself up to the possibility that basic empirical facts like the shape of the earth or the effects of smoke inhalation are, actually, wrong, and on the strength of evidence that not only wouldn't hold up in a lab but wouldn't even hold up in a court.

i tossed thales out there. he was an early greek philosopher that put forth the theory that inanimate objects have spirits. this is, in fact, as western an idea as anything socrates came up with. but, that was 2500 years ago. and, it's been viewed as a disproven and false theory in the west for most of the last 2500 years.

we could take about a lot of things, here. dna. migrations. the age and size of the earth.

maybe indigenous cultural leaders should be focusing less on retaining ideas that everybody else in the world knows are wrong and more focused on finding ways to modernize and synthesize what's left of the culture, to facelift it into something that is less self-parodying.

because, i'll make fun of christians. and i'll make fun of muslims. and i'll make fun of jews. but it's never as personal as it is when i make fun of people with indigenous beliefs, because they haven't developed that distance - they haven't entered modernity.

i want to help them, not make fun of them. but they make it hard...

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

you know, thales may have had some concept of a distant land beyond the oceans, from phoenician and egyptian records, and dim memories of possible contact.

he may have had an x haplotype, which has been found in strange percentages amongst indigenous people on the eastern coast.

i could imagine thales walking into an indigenous village..

"i am thales, the great sage of ionia. please bring me your greatest minds, so we can sit and contemplate existence."

*pause*

one steps forward.

"sage, huh?"

*split screen to thales, tied up, and being slowly lowered into a burning pit*

"no, no, you're ignorant for not being open-minded. maybe thales was right, and every inanimate object does have a spirit. how do you know that that chair doesn't have a spirit? and how do you know that it isn't evil? and how do you know that evil spirits don't like burning sage? you just need to expand yourself to different possibilities.

you bigot."

gee.

i guess that's a reasonable, well thought out position.  isn't it? shouldn't we all respect this deeply thought through position? i mean, isn't science supposed to be skeptical?

i guess that's it, then.

i'm just a big racist. i need to expand my horizons, to let go of my ignorance of the chair-spirits, the desk-spirits, etc and open my eyes to the broader spirit world.

sorry.

(it actually sounds to me like the teacher should have her license revoked and be sent to a psychiatric ward.)

"so, people that believe that smoke is a medicine, and that bathing items in smoke cleanses them of 'negative' energy are ignorant?"

yup.

that sounds like the textbook definition of "ignorance", if you ask me..

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

your kids will meditate in school.

the school system should not be encouraging children to inhale or otherwise bathe themselves in toxic chemicals to tap into some disneyfied concept of magic, it should be explaining why this "cultural practice" is both foolish and dangerous, and why the smoke of these grasses is not beneficial but harmful.

the school system is meant to educate kids, not to make them ignorant.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/16/canada-mother-ban-indigenous-ceremonies-public-schools

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i would support a ban of this type, in the public schools. this is not educational, and does not belong in a class room - not even if viewed through a racist filter as some kind of harmless magic trick.

even taking a softer stance of informed parental consent, there should have been a consent form sent home. and, yes, i would have prevented my kids from taking part in such a farce, although i would have also taken it as an opportunity to debunk the ceremony.

"first, sweetie, you don't want to breathe in the burning sage. it's carcinogenic. that means it causes cancer. they might tell you it's some kind of medicine, but this is simple ignorance - it is, in fact, actually poisonous. you should tell the other kids that, especially the indigenous ones, because they might not know it. so, when you see them start burning the leaves, step away from smoke. don't breath it in. and, i'll be calling your teacher in the morning to talk to her about unnecessarily exposing children to dangerous levels of smoke, before i call the principal in the afternoon.

these people suggesting that there's any magic value in breathing in smoke are just making up nonsense. i've raised you well enough to see that on your own, but i'm just telling you again. excepting the combustion taking place, there's no energy being transferred in the process. science would reject their claim outright. there's just dangerous smoke that you want to get away from, and an incredibly irresponsible teacher that is unnecessarily exposing you to environmental toxins, and a lack of decent critical analysis."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/16/canada-mother-ban-indigenous-ceremonies-public-schools

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

no. having remote farmers try remote farmers is not a decent summary of the idea of a jury of peers.

i don't know the facts in the case. it seems like somebody was trespassing, and they got shot after causing a commotion on the property they were trespassing on; extra-judicial, and perhaps not proportional, but without being clear on the facts, i'm not going to weigh in on it.

i'll restrict my comments solely to the idea of a jury of peers.

the idea of the jury of peers was meant to reduce bias in the court system, in an era where activists and dissidents specifically (rather than just general poor people) had to face two systemic, institutional class problems in what was essentially a racially homogeneous (if religiously heterogeneous) island, on the fringe of europe. the first systemic, institutional class problem allowed for wealthy aristocrats to essentially target people they saw as problems on trumped up charges, through relying on judges more than willing to play along, through common interests or bribes or even coerced threats. the second problem was of apathy in the judicial process, from the bottom up. what putting decisions in the hand of juries did was take the decision away from an authority that was institutionally unreliable, due to these class biases and interference, and put it in the hands of what ought to have been a neutral body.

so, juries were about talking decisions away from biased, corrupt judges and putting them in the hands of people that had no ulterior motives, and were better able to independently analyze the evidence. i know that your average tory will push back against this, but it is actually the truth of it. and, at the time, it was a good idea - not a perfect idea, but a good idea.

since then, a lot of things have happened. to begin with, the british judicial system has evolved to take itself more seriously. we can have a discussion about critical legal theory, but i think everybody can agree that it's at least gotten a lot better. another major shift is that the system has been transported from a racially heterogeneous island to a racially diverse colony on a large continent, opening up new issues of biases in the jury, itself.

i'm not a conservative. i don't see value in holding to tradition for the sake of it. i want to look at why a system existed, ask whether the tactics employed by it serve their ends and tweak it to better serve those ends. and, if the purpose of a jury selection was to eliminate systemic bias, the fact that the jury selection process today actually introduces bias makes it an open question as to whether it's something that should be continued, or if there are contexts where it should be suspended.

the most obvious context where it should be suspended is in a situation where the following three things are true:

1) the victim is of a historically oppressed minority group
2) the accused is in the dominant majority
3) it is impossible to construct a jury that doesn't also reflect the dominant majority.

that is a situation where bias is inevitable, and the system should step in to prevent it, by moving to a trial by judge.

so, i wasn't there. i don't have the facts. i'm not reacting to the decision. but, this article gets the point about juries completely backwards: it was meant to remove bias, not to introduce it. and, if a trial by jury cannot operate without that bias, as i think is true in this case, the judge should step in.

this man could not have possibly received a fair trial by jury, under the circumstances.

further, in order to prevent the judge from falling under the same bias, the judge's decision to not step in should be subject to outside judicial review before the trial, if requested; if lawyers on either side are so convinced of the impossibility of a fair trial by jury, they should have a body to appeal to before it starts.

http://nationalpost.com/opinion/colby-cosh-gerald-stanley-being-tried-by-his-peers-isnt-a-bug-its-a-feature

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i remember watching the swearing in ceremony in 2015 and thinking to myself "why is the prime minister groping all of the female cabinet ministers?".

a few things crossed my mind as to what i was observing. and, while some of the ministers, the older ones, were visibly tense in the encounter, others seemed to almost interpret it as an opportunity. i would be hard-pressed to suggest that the female ministers were of one mind, on the topic.

it shouldn't be hard to find the footage. it's the swearing in ceremony, where he names the cabinet ministers on by one. and, it gets cringey. really.

but, this is the ambiguity attached to a person like justin trudeau, who is both a (to anybody's knowledge) straight white male with executive power and an international sex symbol. i think there's always been concerns that the dauphin may have a clintonesque streak, where the intersection of real power and real sex appeal makes consent and coercion difficult to disentangle, and the thrill of existing in this grey area almost addictive. the idea that justin trudeau might have an active sex life with multiple partners, many of them colleagues, is not at all unbelievable.

but, i don't buy it.

trudeau's a nerd. he gets squiggley and shy when you put him beside attractive women. it's a classic nerd inferiority complex. the media image is a fabrication.

if trudeau was that other person, a person into conquest, he could be a force for serious malice, it is true, and i think everybody around him should look for signs that he might be becoming that person.

but i actually think he's strictly into monogamy, and probably kind of sexually boring. really.


i'll give warren an out on this: while i don't think the prime minister is a conqueror, i do think he'd be prone to being conquered, and that he may be the type to develop romantic feelings for staffers he spends a lot of time behind closed doors with. kind of an inversion on lewinsky. if a sex scandal is going to take this prime minister down, i would expect it to be in the form of something like that.

http://warrenkinsella.com/2018/01/column-metoo-isnt-just-coming-to-political-canada-its-here/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

israel's sudden involvement in syria is a sign of desperation from the west.

and, no, i don't think there were iranian drones flying into israel.

at least we know those russian sams are working.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i guess they'll have to leak it, then.

i'm in favour of showmanship to hold fast to a point, but this is just poor sportsmanship. it's an interference in due process. there's no hidden redeeming bombastic quality to this: we must be able to hear both sides, and a fair leader would see that, whatever his arrogance.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-memo-russia-probe-democrat-1.4529653

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i believe that ontario has chosen the cap & trade option, rather than the carbon tax option, and that the cap & trade system was developed independently of ottawa's plan, which has had no real effect on ontario.

so, it's unclear why a lawsuit would be necessary to prevent a carbon tax that is not being imposed.

the only people talking about a carbon tax were the conservatives, who had questionable motives with it from the start. but, if i get this right, the candidates are now campaigning against their own party's policy, which they are falsely attributing to the federal government.

yikes.

i'm going to play along with the cynicism a little: maybe you trick enough people to hold some obscure ridings, this way. you plant the false stories as ads, then ship them out over facebook - it would no doubt trick enough idiots, but how much growth is there in the conservative base?

and, yes - you'll see this show up somewhere in the next few months:

vote conservative to stop kathleen wynne's carbon tax!

then, if they win, and there's no carbon tax....

i don't think they win an election like this. but, that's general populace - not card carrying members, who are just going to take the narrative as an insult, if they're not naive enough, themselves, to think these candidates don't know what they're talking about.

up against this kind of fast talking, the straight talker is going to be most appealing, whoever it ends up being.

in the primaries, anyways.

this will happen in the general.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/caroline-mulroney-carbon-tax-ontario-1.4528480

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

sadly, this will probably be more effective than any protests in canada.

and, if you want to know how to get them to budge, that's it: make it an issue of canada's reputation abroad. and, this is fair game, for we are buckling to pressure from a regime of questionable integrity - in kahoots with the quasi-fascist regime in china, to destroy the planet to fuel absurdly unsustainable growth.

when it's canadians, they think they can manage it. they're wrong, but they're in a naive comfort zone that prevents them from reacting, really, at all. but, when you make it international, you set off the panic buttons.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trans-mountain-protest-california-1.4528947

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-08/investors-pull-most-money-out-of-dow-jones-etf-in-nine-months

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

as much as i've criticized her, elizabeth may needs to take some leadership over the ndp caucus, and maybe parts of the liberal caucus, in very carefully examining the new regulatory legislation. if there's a principled opposition, and constructive suggestions, it will come from elizabeth may. but, she's completely powerless without some kind of coalition with the ndp - who may be of two minds on this.

she has no technical power but she has great sway, because she has respect from her colleagues.

i don't know, really. i think the process should always be open to modification, and that regulatory overhaul should really be a recurrent process. i've seen some upsides and some downsides. so, it probably needs to be studied and amended, where necessary.

what i'm getting at is that the parliament is going to have to find a leftist front to amend this, or slow it down in the face of entrenchment.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

i want to clarify something.

the end of quantitative easing shouldn't produce a single crash, so much as it should produce a series of stutters. the market will have good days and bad days over the next few months, but the trajectory will be downwards, until all of the fake money that was pumped into the system finds  it's way out of it.

you can think of the stock market like a balloon. what quantitative easing does is it allows the balloon to fill up. what ending quantitative easing does is it lets the air out. unfortunately, however, a lot of otherwise intelligent people think that if you blow the balloon up, it will stay inflated, even after you remove quantitative easing. this is really an article of faith, and very much at the crux of the term market fundamentalist.

the balloon will never hold air. it will always deflate. so, if you want a full balloon, you must provide a constant flow of air. there is no "equilibrium".

but, i'm not going to make a personal prediction. i'm just going to point out what the expected effects of ending quantitative easing would be:

1) you would have a delayed reaction, to start, as the last bit of easing would need to take some time to work through the system.
2) as the effects of the end of easing become felt, you would slowly see what amounts to a simple divestment of money in the market. this money doesn't show up anywhere else. it just goes into accounts, and out to pay "bills", in whatever abstraction.
3) eventually, this divestment becomes recessionary, as the money slowly dries up.
4) there is no equilibrium point to reach, in the modern economy. there is simply rock bottom, when debt pyramids begin unravelling to expose there's nothing there.

so, in the end, you go back to easing - after you've stunted the economy for however long you've decided to stunt it for..

i don't know how long this takes. but, it's not a situation where you expect the balloon to burst, so much as it is a situation where you expect the balloon to slowly lose it's air. that's because the stock market devaluation, in this context, is an effect rather than a cause. the economy doesn't suffer because of the market crash; rather, the market crashes because the economy isn't generating enough investment, which is what you need the easing for.

it's access to capital. you need capital for capitalism, or it just stops working.

so, if you own stocks, what do you do?

you wait. and, you resolve to sell at the end of the next cycle, when you hear the announcement coming

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i would have probably used the term "humankind" rather than "peoplekind", but i tend to argue that woman is less a diminutive of man and more that both are equal subsets of 'human'. so, something like womyn strikes me as rooted in an etymologically confused argument.

but, if you sort through this space, you'll see i pretty exclusively use people as a sub for a gendered suffix - mail-people is one example i know i've used, although when pressed for examples i'm finding i tend to avoid it altogether: police officers, firefighters, etc.

what trudeau was doing was deflecting from the question. and, it's hard to see what the point of the town halls is, if he's deflecting questions and generating bad press; i'd expect these to end, soon.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

everybody in bc and alberta should both watch the monorail episode, because that is what rachel notley is trying to sell you both: a monorail.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6dwvc6

* this analogy is in no way meant to impugn on the reputation of the local transportation network in the rather larger city of vancouver, which i navigated once with a backpack on my way to camp on the beach in tofino. the skytrain appeared to serve a number of useful functions for the city.

http://www.netnewsledger.com/2018/02/07/kinsella-can-doug-ford-win-ontario-pc-race-damn-right-can/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, what is doug ford?

well, he's not donald trump. and, by that, i mean he's not going to come out hard against immigration, or fight against trade agreements. that's not what doug ford is.

to begin with, the fords actually come out of a fairly migrant-heavy area of toronto, and have always relied fairly heavily on the votes of brown and yellow people to gain office. there were some racist anecdotes attributed to rob ford when he was alive, but the fords, as a family, have actually gone out of their way to appeal to a sense of disenfranchisement amongst the first-generation migrant poor in the areas that they have represented in city council. further, doug has always been seen as the less stupid of the two, and he is no doubt well aware of the need to appeal to non-white voters in order to win an election in toronto, and by extension in ontario.

so, doug ford is not going to run on immigration (which is largely a federal concern) or xenophobia; to the contrary, expect him to run a fairly inclusive campaign that reaches out to minorities along conservative cultural grounds, to the exclusion primarily of the queer community. following a strategy engineered by jason kenney, and that is becoming standard amongst conservatives across the country, he is actually going to try to tap into conservative sentiment in the various religious minorities. one of the ways he's going to do that is to push looking into the sex-ed curriculum in ontario schools, which has substantial opposition from various christian and non-christian religious groups. america may actually want to look at this carefully, as doug ford is actually quite likely to succeed in building coalitions between christian, muslim and other religious groups to enforce more of a classical right-wing social agenda.

but, again following the harper model, the intent is just to string them along - there's not going to be a change in the sex ed curriculum, or provincial laws against abortion, or any of the other wild fantasies that keep money pouring into the party.

and, this campaign will be targeted, and probably actually kept a little bit quiet. one of the tricks that conservatives have used in the past is to run ads for religious minorities in the languages they speak, so the white majority doesn't catch wind of it.

what doug ford is going to run on is a classic economic libertarian policy - cutting red tape, reducing government waste, lowering business taxes, that kind of thing. it will be a classic business conservative campaign, free of open dog whistling or white supremacist race-baiting.

and, when you look for the dog whistles and do find them, buried, you'll be surprised to see what they are, to the point that you'll have to ask an ontarian to make sense of them.

i know the fords get some coverage outside of the country. doug ford isn't going to get caught smoking crack at an unrequited high school sweatheart's town house. his statements are not likely to be nearly as gauche, either. but, this is still a race worth watching.

the pc election is at the beginning of march. the provincial election is at the beginning of june.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

the transmountain pipeline is a hare-brained scheme by an industry taking it's last dying gasps of air that will neither generate jobs nor export markets, but will instead leave british columbia a disaster area for generations to come while investors slowly pull out of alberta, and the province collapses back whence it came.

it is a foolish idea that will burn every fool that gets involved with it.

and, only a fool would support it.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

guys.

if oil is trading at x dollars in country y due to z supply, what happens to x when you double or triple the supply to that country?

does x increase? decrease? stay the same?

because the policy seems to be based around the idea that x remains fixed, even after the introduction of substantial supply, with no comparable reaction in terms of demand, and this is so economically naive as to be embarrassing - but, really, par for the course in alberta. i don't want to make it seem like the pc or socred dynasties were brilliant economic managers, or anything. really, the ndp is just carrying on the tradition of making poorly researched choices.

the feds, on the other hand, should know better than this - they should be fully aware that the full entrance of canada into the asian energy market will have the effect of reducing energy prices in asia rather than the effect of increasing energy profits in canada. and, they should be as sober and clear headed about this as they can be, as they are forming their strategies to try and exist between the two superpowers.

i don't think that this is the proper catalyst for a struggle with the americans. canada will gain nothing but scorn, and trudeau will end up very badly damaged in key constituencies.

he should accept the environmental review as a stalling tactic and wait for the dust to settle a little.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

what i want to see as therapy is getting them all together in an aerobics dance class that runs through successive covers of eleanor rigby.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2018/02/07/uks-focus-on-loneliness-a-reminder-of-governments-true-purpose.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

see, you have to understand that the western mythology is that everything is the east's fault. it doesn't matter what it is, really. so, history becomes malleable to uphold the point - whatever is happening at this very instant is always the east's fault.

the country as a whole has given the western mythology a gift, in raising the dauphin to the status of prime minister, but it would have carried along the same way, regardless.

so, let's look at the actual history.

in a response to the uncertainty surrounding opec oil imports that occurred throughout the 70s, the liberal government of the time (headed by pierre trudeau) designed a plan for energy security that would provide the industrial base in eastern canada with cheap oil flowing in from western canada. this would be accomplished by a combination of state controlled industry and price and export controls, which would lead to a subsidized market for oil in eastern canada.

western canada found the situation most aggravating, as it claimed it could sell oil to the americans at a higher price. so, with the help of quebec, it managed to defeat the ruling liberals and install a conservative government that, while headed by a quebecker, had a western-first political strategy. through two successive mandates, the mulroney government did two major things to the canadian oil industry: it abolished the national energy program, which subsidized eastern canada with cheap alberta oil, and instead opened up a market in the united states....to provide the americans with subsidized oil.

and, alberta was actually quite content with this for some time.

so, the national energy program was meant to subsidize eastern canada with cheap energy from an expensive source. alberta rejected this, in favour of a plan (nafta) meant to subsidize the western united states with cheap energy from an expensive source. now, they are blaming trudeau's son for the fact that they are stuck subsidizing the americans with cheap oil from an expensive source, despite it being their own decision.

in the end, if the oil flows to china, alberta should prepare itself for the economic reality: it will be providing china with cheap energy from an expensive source. because it is the operation that is unprofitable, and no amount of pipelines will resolve that.

trudeau is actually even wrong on this point. the pipeline is backwards thinking and should be stopped. i just didn't expect to be able to see this play out politically - and this is no doubt due to the power invested in the small green party contingent in the legislature. i suspect that the bc ndp actually support the pipeline, they're just being forced to oppose it to prevent an election. but, even a short delay, politically, could help the court process sort the problems out before shovels hit the ground. so, this is an unexpectedly fortuitous balance of power in the legislature. bc voters voted wisely.

http://business.financialpost.com/opinion/jack-mintz-another-nep-fiasco-looms-as-westerners-suffer-for-trudeaus-energy-follies

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

so, i'm distributing some of my archives, here, from 2015-2016.

i have limited archives going back to 2008, but i started at 2015 because i'm running through the master document anyways, and i wanted to get my thoughts about the long election season of 2015-2017 in. this space will eventually house documents going back as far as i can find them.

this archive currently begins right after the last american election. so, i'll be filling in my comments around that election, around the primaries that preceded it and around the canadian election, starting in about august, 2015.

i've currently worked up to march, 2015 on the composer's blog (which goes back to july, 2013) and on the political ranting space (which now starts in january, 2015). i will need to put everything in sync from march, 2015 to whenever i get finished, which is going to shift to backing up files on the blogs to the master document, once i get to mid-2016 for the music blog and late 2016 for the politics blog...

while there will be some reviews on the composer's blog, there will be a third blog for music reviews, put up at some undetermined point in the distant future. so, i'm skipping over this. i'm also skipping over long youtube conversations that i've had for right now, but will eventually integrate these conversations into the rant blog. i just want a skeleton up for now, and largely to focus on the election stuff.

it's going to be a while before i get the whole thing up, but the first two months of 2015 are available to scroll through over on the side of the page.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

well, of course the kurds want you to blame it on turkey.

but, if this group is al qaeda linked, the most likely means of the americans distributing these weapons, and especially considering the geopolitical realities at the moment, is via the saudis. the russians really took out the saudi positions in syria pretty badly; my guess is that there's probably quite a bit of hardware floating around, after that - all of it american made, and purchased with oil money.

this will not be the only saudi retaliation against russia; unfortunately, the russians should expect some bombings to take place. they should also expect the saudis to continue funding forces in the region, regardless of outcome or consequence, more or less for so long as the regime exists.

with the turks aligning with both russia and iran, expect the saudi-turk conflict to become the dominant proxy war in the region, and note that the dimensions have changed: this is no longer a struggle over who gets to take control of syria under american hegemony - who gets to be the regional power - but now a struggle between whether the area is remade in american or russian interests. this proxy war has merged with the cold war between the saudis and iran and is in the process of consuming it - if there is movement from iran against the saudis, it will be co-ordinated with the turks.

and, maybe the russians.

https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/02/russia-jet-downed-syria-idlib.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

"against turkey and iran."

strange words to hear, regardless of their veracity, from a nominal ally.

listen: so, is it the case that turkey has decided in favour of the persian empire over the byzantine empire, despite the inevitability of absorption? and could the kurds exist in a broader turko-persian alliance, perhaps without an explicit identity or sovereign borders? it would be strange to see a synthesis that didn't seek out a peace settlement, although the kurds must recognize that that peace settlement would have to reflect the changed reality of an integrated empire coming up around them. they would no longer be a wedge, but instead must be converted into a bridge.

"and, maybe the russians."

in the end, yeah. eventually.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-turkey-usa/erdogan-says-u-s-has-calculations-against-turkey-iran-russia-in-syria-idUSKBN1FQ1C5

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

up until a few days ago, i would have rejected the premise of the question. alas...

the reason is just simply that the nazis didn't have time to wipe the slavs out in numbers comparable to the jews. it's less that the nazis saw the jews and poles differently (although they did see them differently, it didn't make a difference in their prescription: there was a final solution for poles, they wanted both of them exterminated.) and more that there were just way, way more slavs to exterminate over a much larger space, so it required a longer term strategy to do so.

again: the estimates are that upwards of 25% of the population was killed. it's not 90%. but it's a start.

i apologize for the grim statements, but this is the actual historical truth: they got a quarter of the way into it and ultimately lost. in the end, they got outnumbered, even - and that is actually the truth of it, in the end, the russians just simply had more soldiers, and were consequently left standing after the slaughter.

it's not due to a difference in intent. it's not due to a difference in design. it's just a question of how far they got into their plans before they were ultimately stopped, by one of their prime targets for extermination.

if the nazis could manage to wipe out a quarter of the slavic population in what amounted to about three years, it stands to reason that if the war had gone on another 6 years or so, we'd be up to around 75% of the population. and, with the absolute destruction of the jews, the nazis would have focused squarely on the slavs, so it would have picked up in pace, as well. it could very well have reached close to 90%.

do not doubt the intentions. and do not forget the dead. call it an accident of history. but, understand what happened, please.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3efw1g/why_arent_slavs_normally_counted_as_victims_of/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

no, like, really, this is kind of serious.

the only part of the holocaust that i can see that is being denied right now is the systematic slaughter of three million ethnic poles, for the crime of speaking the wrong language, and perhaps of having distant ancestors in central asia.

three million dead ethnic poles was not the same percentage of dead poles as jews, but the genocide was no less actual, it was just a little bit slower. the jews were merely the first on the list. and, the poles were most definitely second on the list.

what the narrative is doing is denying the slavic extermination policy, and replacing it with an american concept of critical race theory, which suggests that the slavs had a choice to collaborate or not. but, this is the denial of actual history.

the nazis are thought to have killed between 20-25% of the population of eastern europe, and i think this is widely understood, but it's maybe less understood that these people were not casualties, not collateral damage, but intentionally targeted.

why did hitler invade russia?

c'mon. don't look it up. do you know the answer to this question: why did hitler invade russia? you should.

the answer was to exterminate the slavs, so the region could be repopulated with germans. so, the germans didn't invade carefully with the intent of building on the existing civilization. they destroyed everything: farmlands, cities, infrastructure. when the germans got to ukraine, the first thing they did was burn the crops, so that the ukrainians would starve to death, and the germans could build their pseudo-historical gothic settlements in the crimea (which were in truth never more than pirate bases, to raid the greek settlements from). and, they did starve to death. in large numbers. the german occupation of ukraine was one of the most brutal occupations of the war, with a full on genocide of the ukrainians set in motion...

it's mind-boggling, to me, that this could be a narrative, that we could seriously bring up the question of polish collaboration with the nazis. but, like i say, this is rooted in the problem i've been pointing out for years: crt is not a universal truth, and this is what happens when you try to generalize - you turn victims into oppressors, because they are white, and you don't understand.

...which is racist, yes.

this is the exact point that people are wrong about: they think in their mind that the poles had a choice to collaborate or not. this is obvious to them because the poles are white, and therefore in some way the same as the germans. once you establish that the poles had a choice, they can then be criticized for making the wrong choice.

but, the poles had no choice. the nazis had declared them inferior from the start; the extermination of the slavs was at the very crux of what nazism was. like jews, poles had their backgrounds checked for racial impurities and were rounded up by the secret police and put in work camps, mostly due to the help of ethnic germans, who were given positions of power over the inferior poles when they signed up to be a part of the volk. they were worked to exhaustion, and then cremated in the death camps.

if you want to talk about polish death camps, you should use the term in the same way that you use jewish death camps.

can we make sure we don't forget that the poles were the second largest victim of the holocaust, and might have been the largest (in fact, were the largest if you consider all the jews that died to also be poles) if the war had carried on a little longer?

yeeesh.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

this isn't obscure history, it's the kind of thing i remember learning about in the third grade.

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

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

ok, so, what does it mean to be a polish or ukrainian nazi?

well, what does it mean to be white? and, what does it mean to be white in the context of eastern european history, rather than the context of american history? an american may want to talk about some kind of white privilege in the context of a racialized labour hierarchy, and not be able to put the discussion of asian migration into eastern europe into any context. an eastern european would have completely different concepts of what race is and frame the discussion completely differently.

to an american, a slav is obviously white. to a nazi, a slav is not white, but an inferior race to be conquered and enslaved. so, how can one be a slav and a nazi at the same time? how can one think they are superior and inferior at the same time? one cannot - this is a contradiction in terms.

the reality is that the nazis thought that the slavs - poles, russians , ukrainians and other slavic speakers - were an inferior race, because they had been corrupted by mongolian blood. the germans sought to exterminate the slavs, just like the jews, for this reason. they called them 'useless eaters' and promised to expel them from eastern europe, to open up _liebensraum_ - living space for the superior german peoples.

so, do you explain the existence of these people in poland that aided the nazis, however miniscule a part of the population that they actually were? how do you explain people that would align with a group that seeks to enslave them?

the first thing to point out is that being a slavic nationalist, or a white supremacist, is not the same thing as being a nazi, and the nazis' perception of slavs - who most americans would consider white - is a prime example of that. this is probably the point that is confusing people like sharmini, because they're ignorant of the european perspective on race, and only able to see it through more liberal american filters. so, there's no particular contradiction in the phenomenon of white nationalist poles attacking jews, while defending themselves against nazis, at the same time. you can present arguments in terms of self-preservation. they could have been focusing on the jews to distract from themselves. but, this is probably an example of the madness of war more than anything else...

the other thing to point out is that the majority of the people that the germans worked with in eastern europe were actually ethnic germans. this is another thing that an american may not understand about europe. when somebody moves to america, they become an american. but, when a european moves from one country to another, they maintain their tribal allegiances and do not adopt the nationality of the country they're living in. a german living in poland would identify as a german first and probably not as a pole, at all.

in fact, the histories of the topic are usually very careful to point this out: they speak not of polish or french collaboration, but of the german occupation. this may seem like a minor point to americans that simply don't understand the tribalism of europe. but, they need to better understand that tribalism before they start making accusations, like this.

the way that i understand the law is that it is attempting to discourage linking the crimes that occurred on polish soil to the acts of polish nationals, and i actually think this is a historically correct position. one really should _not_ talk of polish camps, but of german camps on polish soil.

to force that in law is extreme. but, the position is technically correct.

the american system of capitalism is such that only public investment will lead to economic recovery, and only public investment can lead to sustainable growth.

the stock market was in a bubble, but the tax cuts were supposed to inflate that bubble, not collapse it. it was supposed to be a one time boost to stock prices, and was timed to maximize it's effects for the 2018 cycle - then evaporate, immediately. and, so what is happening, instead?

because the administration is operating on economic ideas it found in a cereal box, it seems to have not understood that ending quantitative easing would completely negate any effects that the tax cut might have on the market. instead of having money dumped in the market by already rich people trying to figure out what to do with their windfall, money is being pulled out by institutions that are reacting to the end of the expansion.

oops?

no. it's not oops. it's DERP. because this was completely obvious.

the chain reactions for the next crisis have now already been set in motion, but don't confuse yourself as to the cause. after the last crisis, the federal reserve had actually nearly stabilized the economy.

at this point, we have too much data to in any way soften the reality: it is trump's interference in the policies developed by the bank that will be the cause of the next recession.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

the root cause of the problem is that the liberal party has a twentieth or even nineteenth century view on veterans, in that it actually sees returning veterans as a potential increase in economic growth.

this is what the liberals imagine ought to happen:

1) army people get recruited.
2) army people get trained, which may or may not mean going to a post-secondary institution.
3) army people go to war.
4) army people come back from war.
5) army people use the training they received to get jobs and be good taxpayers.

and, they honestly believe that this is a workable model, that veterans can be reintegrated, and that there isn't any difference between a veteran and a non-veteran on the job market, in the end. and, this is the actual reason they're pushing back: their economic models say that veterans are not supposed to be a net drain on resources, but should actually lead to economic growth.

they see a broken system in front of them, and they blame it on the soldiers, for not pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, rather than look at the endemic problems that exist within the system.

the previous minister was heavily criticized, before he was removed on unrelated charges. but, he was just reading the notes the party gave him. the party wants veterans to get jobs, not checks.

the only thing the liberals have ever cared about is economic growth. the reason we have all these systems in place, like universal health care, is because they're supposed to lead to growth. they often make the right decisions on social issues, but it's generally by accident - what they actually care about is growth. they just have a more academic understanding of economics than their republican cousins do - they're really more like actually smart republicans than they are like progressive democrats.

so, that is to say, that they seem to be fundamentally in denial as to the long term psychological damage that is inherent in modern warfare: they don't seem to be willing to accept that even when these veterans get sent back with all of their limbs in working condition, that that merely masks the years worth of therapy that they're going to need to go through to be reintegrated.

this is what the liberals need to actually do, here: they need to properly integrate the costs of reintegration into their war budgets. the costs of taking care of veterans from their return to their graves needs to be better integrated into war planning.

what i would say to the prime minister is this: if you didn't want to pay the costs associated with sending people into combat, you should have thought about that before you sent them into combat, in the first place. and, no, you can't blame it on other governments. as it is, these costs have already been spent, even if they weren't budgeted, and it is not acceptable for the government to blame their own poor or ideologically broken economic planning on the workers they hired to curry favour with american military and business leaders.

i'm not a veterans advocate. i would consider these people trained sociopaths, and argue they should be kept away from children. they're monsters. but, that's just the point. the government can't go around breaking people, and then sending them the bill for it, and whistling in the wind when the consequences present themselves. it's a preposterous model.

if the government is going to put people through this kind of training, and then send them to kill people, it is going to have to absorb the costs that arise as a consequence for their anti-social behaviour. and, if they don't want to incur those costs, they should stop sending people to fight wars on behalf of the empire next door - often in opposition to, and not behalf of, our own economic interests.

http://nationalpost.com/opinion/john-ivison-trudeau-in-a-fight-he-cant-win-with-veterans-and-his-frustration-shows

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

so, if you get caught driving stoned in a state where pot is legal, like colorado, do they hit you with federal law, once you're under charges related to possession at the state level?

i mean, are the feds obligated to step in at this point?

it might be a reasonable compromise, for a justice department that wants to enforce the laws, but has to deal with the electoral realities of purple state politics in colorado and potentially washington. there are purple states under republican rule, like michigan, where legalization has near majority support, and where somebody could conceivably win an election over it. appeals to the law and order base, here, could hurt the republicans in the long run in these key battlegrounds, if they come down too hard on it.

but, if somebody is dealing with legal consequences stemming from marijuana use, or is determined to have possession while being searched for some other item, like illegal guns, then it is difficult to form an argument that only some of the laws being broken deserve some kind of consequence. congress passes the laws, and that one about legalization isn't passed, yet.

the goal is ultimately not to incarcerate more people for marijuana, but to provide an incentive for responsible use. it puts in place a deal with the feds - the feds will look the other way at marijuana use for the 98% of users that harm nobody, but take initiative to get involved in the 2% of circumstances where people are using irresponsibly or to fund nefarious activities. the task for citizens, then, is simply to stay out of trouble with it, and then the feds will leave them alone.

the disincentive is perhaps heavy-handed. but, it's really not ok to drive baked....

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

while i don't mean to undermine lisa raitt's incomparable experience in actual government, perhaps caroline mulroney may want to have a sit down lunch with her, just to get a heads-up on what to expect.

somebody didn't think this through.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

they might be able to get christine elliot to step down to make way for a coronation of caroline mulroney, but they are not likely to have such luck in persuading doug ford to leave the race.

she may be the better candidate to defeat wynne, but can caroline mulroney beat doug ford in a pc leadership race?

well, i might suggest that doug ford would dominate her purely in campaign infrastructure: across the board, he would have an advantage, in terms of boots on the ground and ability to get people out to actually vote, which we learned the importance of in the recent ndp race.

caroline mulroney has never run for office before, and, with no known platform, and no history of conservative advocacy, she doesn't have a lot of time to activate conservative base voters and convince them to vote for her. she's going to have a hard time connecting past the old money tory network.

in most places on this continent that wouldn't matter so much. it's usually not that hard to handhold a kennedy or a trudeau into some position of power. but, this party has a conservative base, and has this wild card of doug ford sitting right in the position where he could take control of it, and effectively push back against the palace coup. as this is a party vote, we will not see the rush of moderates swoop in to block the fords again, which is how they lose, when they lose - the party is at the whim of it's base, which is ford nation.

if i were to put down odds in a head-to-head match-up, i'd have to make mulroney the underdog, here.

so, might mulroney want christine elliot to stay in the race, then? well, to a card-carrying pc member, one would again think that elliot would dominate mulroney on personal characteristics; when you put them side-by-side, elliot would have more of the characteristics that pc voters would want, which would not be the same thing as the media want, or perhaps the same thing that the party insiders would want. elliot would no doubt pull from both ford and mulroney, but she would appeal more to moderates, and such a three-way race could land mulroney in third place.

mulroney could, in the end, be asked to step down so that she's not in the way of elliot defeating ford. and, this ought to be way that the pcs are thinking right now: this shouldn't be about how we get mulroney in, but about how we stop doug ford. because that will be the narrative in march.

i believe it was mulroney that called for the race. and, this may merely demonstrate the point about her inexperience in politics; if she had a better understanding of the conservative base, and what drives them to elect leaders, she would have realized that she's unlikely to do well in the best of circumstances (she would need to run unopposed) and would be better off angling to be appointed leader in caucus, and thus should have agitated for a permanent leadership process after the election, once she was a caucus member.

and, if she can't win her seat? well...she might wake up in april and realize she's too far behind to catch up.

i don't know anything about caroline mulroney's politics, so i don't know if i ought to oppose her entrance to electoral politics or not. but, the conservative party needs to cultivate the potential this time around.

if she jumps in head first before she's ready, doug ford is going to ruin her career before it starts.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, i'm not commenting on the russia thing, but my predictions heading into the trump presidency were startling, frighteningly, accurate: what i deduced was happening was that the cia set the whole wikileaks things up, and then tried to deflect the blame to the russians. i predicted that the deep state would drag on the russian narrative, and use it as an excuse to consolidate it's own power by expanding it's ability to spy on people.

there was tremendous interference in the last election, but it was coming from inside the deep state, which saw clinton as a vulnerability, both due to her clear intent to involve herself in bureaucratic processes, and her allegiances being open to the highest bidder, regardless of nationality or design.

the russians maybe knew about it. maybe they even helped, a little. i wouldn't go so far as to suggest that putin would have a preference for trump, as he is hardly an ideal alternative, but he certainly had a distaste for a hillary clinton presidency, which was pretty much the worst thing that russia could imagine, given that what set the current events in motion happened under her tenure as secretary. i think jill stein was more right than she realizes: the chances of hillary clinton starting a hot war with russia were not minimal.

if i were to be actively commenting on this story, it would come off as some kind of morbid chess game, where i'm just deflecting accusations back upon the accusers. when the headlines say russia did something, the correct way to read it is that the cia did that thing, and then blamed it on russia. apply it across the board. there are few exceptions.

so, instead, i just post these periodic updates that key in on specific events.

so, trump is supposedly taking on the fbi. right. don't be surprised if the outcome of this is a power grab of some sort, as that is what this is all eventually leading up to: this is a crisis generated to consolidate power.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42922995

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

there was an announcement by the ndp a little while ago that i interpreted as a broadcast that they would be using the #metoo thing as an opportunity to put singh backers in key positions, and here it is.

erin weir is a prominent voice in caucus and a reasonable candidate for this position, but he's also a white male. i would expect the new caucus chair to, in the end, be female.

the federal ndp has a unique type of incompetence. first, they can't even do a purge without being obvious. second, the basis of this purge appears to be trivial, and the effects of a trivial pure are inevitably going to be harmful.

the predicament that the ndp is in, right now, is as much a consequence of the mulcair purges, which destroyed a lot of the party's best mps, as it is of his eventual electoral defeat. it is because of the mulcair purges that the people that ought to be shaping the party's rebuild are stuck on the outside of it; this created the vacuum that allowed singh to hijack the party, as well.

in the near future, certainly until 2019, expect the effects of these changes to be to hollow out the party by removing even more of the party's most outspoken and individually-minded mps in favour of a more visibly diverse caucus that is also conveniently chosen to be more easily led from head office.

and, this is going to backfire very badly in 2019, which is when the party will hit rock bottom, in it's transformation from a dying worker's party in a post-industrial state to one that seeks to elevate the voices of new canadians in a neo-colonial one.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/singh-allegation-ndp-1.4514117

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

what the top five or ten cities on this list - the rest are throwaway - comprise is a list of cities that have aging populations that are going to open up cheap housing markets as they die and are going to collapse if they don't get younger people to move into them.

for years, younger people have been moving out of the suburbs and back into the big cities, leaving older populations behind in these small cities. it's a potential crisis in canada that could see the backbone of several provinces crumble, and the country fragment into city states.

so, they cook up some metrics and claim that these cities are attractive to millennials. but, the only thing that the demographic they're targetting is really going to want is the price, and they'll have to offset that with commuting, and all it takes - including the time. i quit a job in the suburbs once to take one at a lower pay downtown, because i hated all of the time i was wasting getting back and forth from work. price has to compete with the intangibles of existence.

i saw this coming, though, a few years ago. and, i'll tell you what's about to happen - the boomer housing bubble is about to burst. for that is what the cost of housing right now really is, a population bulge.

you can see it clearly in the data. the number of people increased dramatically after the war, creating a scarcity in housing, which pushed prices up. then, these boomers developed a kind of addiction in going through the charade of swapping overvalued assets with each other, creating these chains of inflated sales prices, to the point that it's become endemic in these imaginary equity numbers. even without the decoupling of wages from productivity, the population pressures on housing in the boomer era have been straight upwards - and it was going to have to crash, once they faced the reality of having to sell to a generation that doesn't have a mountain of inflated debt to swap with them. there was bound to be a dramatic market correction once boomers started selling to millennials on a regular basis, even if the kids or the banks are the ones offloading the property, in the end. but, endemic wage stagnation in the face of deindustrialization has made the bottom that much deeper, as the jobs that are being passed on to the millennial generation are broadly at a fraction of the salary of the ones they're replacing. the price drops could be so shocking that it does end up being the kids or the bank that does sell - if the kids don't move in.

this scenario is usually presented as a horror story for the older generation, but they've only lost what they imagined they had. the ones that got out early no doubt did will, but it was a swindle; when the correction hits, what will be lost is numbers on a page that should have never been there in the first place. fate may be cruel, but what was lost was always only a dream.

rather, i'd prefer to see it from the perspective of the younger generation, which may get a better opportunity at affordable house ownership.

....even if it's in guelph.

https://www.point2homes.com/news/canada-real-estate/millennial-cities-ranked.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, market surveys are what you do when you want to determine public opinion.

when you want empirical data, on the other hand, you have no choice but to measure it.

as they are giving us a market survey, and not collecting data, they must be requesting an opinion on what we want marijuana to be priced at.

i don't think it should be more expensive than cigarettes. if anything, it should be less expensive to grow.

given current cigarette prices, and the idea that a cigarette is a gram of tobacco, $0.50/gram seems about reasonable - or $10 for 20 grams.

but, are they asking for an opinion? really?

if you're going to do this, use tor or something. and come in as low as you'd like.

https://globalnews.ca/news/3998543/marijuana-pricing-statistics-canada-crowdsourcing-survey/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

what would an affirmative action actually look like in canada?

if you were to match the population demographics, in canada, not the united states, you'd probably see a net flow of jobs from west and east asian women (no doubt over-represented; very highly educated) to black men and indigenous people (who are the only substantially under-represented groups that i'm aware of).

maybe we'll get a chinese protest.

it really is important to check the country of origin, when you're doing demographic studies.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i'm going to make terence's point for him, because he doesn't seem able to make it himself. there's a good possibility that he doesn't understand what he's throwing around, either; the tactic here is merely to cast doubt on the results, not to actually explain why they're being misapplied.

there's three issues, here, not one.

1) equal pay for equal work. that is, increasing the salaries of women that already have jobs so that they match those of their male counterparts, for the same work. i can't think of any way to articulate opposition to this point that isn't chauvinist, so let's assume this is something everybody agrees with, in principle. this would, indeed, produce an instant boost to gdp, by definition, although i'm not going to pull numbers out of my rear. this can and really should be legislated relatively easily, although enforcement might be a bit rough, at least at first.....i think if they pass the law, the culture will adjust, because who honestly disagrees with this? it has potential to be a systemic change in how people, women, are compensated for their labour.

2) making full use of women in the labour market. that is, finding jobs for all the women that don't currently have one. this wouldn't just create an instant boost in gdp, but would even create an instant multiplier, as a good percentage of these women will now require child care of some sort, and perhaps new cars, as well. this number should be higher than the last one. but, this pre-supposes that enough jobs exist for full employment across both genders, and that's basically pre-supposing the growth that the policy would produce. if we could create enough jobs to do this, one wouldn't need a gender policy to enforce, because the market would, indeed, adjust.

3) increasing diversity in the workplace. if we're talking about replacing people, rather than creating new jobs, as we are, then there is really no reason to think this will have any effect on gdp, save for changes in talent, and there's not any reason to think those changes in talent will be positive, if the hiring strategy is purely ethnic.

what terence wants to say here, but can't put together, is that trudeau is kind of merging these ideas together, and mixing them up in a sort of confusing way that is designed more as a pr strategy than a policy proposal. he's presenting (1) and (3) as ways to achieve (2), and then arguing that investing in women, by itself, will increase gdp. maybe trudeau is, himself, legitimately dazed by the numbers, but i doubt the party is.

so, is a policy of increasing diversity going to increase gdp? well that's not what the studies say. what the studies say is that,

1) if you increase salaries for 40% of the workforce, or whatever it is nowadays, then gdp will go up. this is tautological.
2) if enough jobs were created so that women increase their participation levels to that of men, then gdp would increase by x amount. again: i'm not weighing in on the value of x. but, a substantial increase, here, is tautological: more jobs means more demand exists which means higher gdp. that does not require further study, that's a definition. and, that definition unquestionably implies diminishing returns, as the participation numbers balance out. what requires further study is epsilon, where x +/- e is the corrected range for the gdp numbers.

what do i think?

well, the tautologies are what they are. and, as mentioned, equal pay for equal work is really not controversial, is it? but, the rest of it is muddled up.

no diversity policy will create jobs. you need to find ways to increase aggregate demand, for that.

so, the end goals will mostly not follow from the proposed policy.

but, as is often the case with these wonky policies that the liberals have brought in under this government, i don't find myself all that opposed. i don't know if they plan on inserting quotas, or what. my take on affirmative action is that it was something that was worth a try, but that it always ought to have been temporary, until the workforce balances out a little. it should have come with a kind of sunset clause that was meant to evaluate the success of the program. by any metric, affirmative action has not succeeded in it's stated intent. at this point, i don't see any point in repeating failed approaches. i'd like to try something else.

but, i have to ask the question: how necessary is this, really? and, i'm not convinced it's nearly as necessary as some would claim. i want to look at things like trendlines. are companies becoming more diverse, as the country goes through changes? are more second generation immigrants getting hired? my understanding is that second generation canadians are really the most successful segment of society at this point, and that they're doing just fine in outcompeting everybody else - although some of them may still be dragging around cultural attitudes about women that white canadians largely dropped in the last generation, or the one before it.

i mean, if you want to talk about intersectionality, ask yourself this question: would businesses that have strong influences by men reared in other cultures be more likely or maybe less likely to hire minority women?

so, not only are we getting a false solution to an actual problem, but the more important data required to get to a real solution isn't being analysed at all.

but, terence at least knows that trudeau's feminist strategy is about politics, and not about policy. so, maybe i'm the one who missed the point, after all.

http://business.financialpost.com/opinion/terence-corcoran-the-dodgy-studies-behind-trudeaus-radical-experiment-to-socially-engineer-canadian-businesses

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i have never had a cavity, btw.

if you're curious.

if you've guessed my age.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

and, to the liberal party, let me ask you directly:

is the legacy of american slavery really something you want to volunteer to absorb? what exactly are you in solidarity with? and, have you really thought through the ramifications of this?

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

imagine how angry this would make you.

suppose you're a student in, let's say ghana. your parents tell you that the only way out of this shithole is through a scholarship, so you study as hard as you can, and manage to get a scholarship to go to university to study engineering in canada.

you're perhaps not expecting utopia, but you're there after being flown across the world because you were identified as an elite student.

so, imagine what it feels like, when you get there, to be told you're supposed to identify with the (formerly) enslaved class in the country next door, despite canada having no meaningful history of slavery, due solely to the colour of your skin. your told you should be happy you're not a slave. that would be as strong a punch to the gut as you could imagine.

let's be a little more explicit, because black history month is really anything but. black history month should be explicitly called african-american history month, because it deals with themes that are inherent to being american, rather than themes that are inherent to being black.

as mentioned, in canada, a black history month would simply not be very substantial. but, in a few generations time, black canadians will have a very different history to present, won't they?

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

and, i should point out the following as well....

the vast majority of black canadians - i mean like 99% - would actually reject the idea that they have any cultural connection to american history, and thereby reject black history month along with it. that is actually kind of a big deal in canada, rather than black history month, itself. because, the best way to piss off a black canadian is to suggest their ancestors were slaves.

because it's usually not true. and, they want you to know it's not true, so you don't think it is. it's not just an ego thing; black canadians overwhelming expect that you won't treat them as the descendant of slaves. because they aren't. and they'll put you in your place if you suggest that they are.

it follows that trudeau is diving head first into instant death if he thinks that pushing black history month is a way to win votes from black voters. not only is the african american narrative not something that black canadians identify with, it's something that they vehemently reject. it's an insult to them.

trudeau is going to get his teflon suit full of eggs if he thinks he's going to talk about this kind of thing with black canadians and get anything more than a guffaw.

"excuse me. sir, are you implying that my ancestors, and the ancestors of the other people in this room, were slaves? because, if you are, i'm appalled."

and, see, a canadian pr team would know that, too. but, when you go and hire all these american strategists (that may have been born in canada, but are culturally american), they miss things like this.

and, that's the irony, right?

"african-americans, black canadians....they're all the same, right?"

no.

one group descends from chattel slavery and has roots in the united states since the fifteenth century. the other is highly educated, mostly middle-classed and has arrived in canada almost entirely since 1970, either from the caribbean or directly from africa, and largely via scholarship grants.

and, the implication that there is any commonality at all is, in fact, brutally racist, which is what trudeau will be told, when it comes to it.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i think the only state of the union address i've ever watched was the one in 2002.

i'm not an american. it doesn't mean much to me. and, i don't want to watch your president lie for an hour.

to be clear: they all lie spend the hour lying through their teeth. take a random clinton state of the union and fact check it and see if it's much better than trump's; it won't be. and, what's the point of watching that?

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

nonononononono

ok.

imagine this: imagine the president of the united states taking the stage, and announcing that the american government will recognize a national holiday around the struggle of french canadians, because it recognizes the importance of quebecois history and the contributions that quebeckers have made to american society.

that makes about as much sense to americans as celebrating black history month makes to canadians. if you are the fraction of a percent of canadians that is descended from american slaves, nobody is stopping you from celebrating your history. nobody is stopping quebecois-americans from celebrating their history in america, either. but, few people would argue that the contributions of quebec to american society are worth taking much special note of, or that the influence of french canada (while demographically substantial) is of much importance to american culture.

if the president were to do such a thing in the same week as an investigation was being launched into a conflict of interest, one might conclude that it's just some frivolous bullshit to distract the media with, and an attempt to avoid taking serious questions. and, one might applaud the journalists that see through it and ask tough questions, when the event is designed to take softballs.

now, trump will tweet out america's new adoption of international de gaulle day.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

“What the journalists did was hijack the conversation and deterred it from being on topic,”

no.

what happened was that the government held a press conference about an american political issue to try and distract from issues that actually matter in canada, and the press corps called them on it and turned the topic back to things that are actually interesting to canadians.

it's the government, here, that's guilty of creating distractions by pulling out the identity card, on an issue that canadians correctly don't recognize as relevant to them, because the facts are that it isn't. and, there's no use in feigning naivete, either. this was an intentional distraction. and, it's the media that turned the topic back to something canadians want to talk about.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

these are just numbers:

number of black people in new york city ~ 2 200 000 (30%)
number of black people in canada ~ 1 200 000  (3%)
number of black people in chicago ~ 900 0000  (30%)

number of indigenous people in canada ~ 1 400 000 (4%)

detroit is 80% black.
los angeles is 40% black.
montreal and toronto are both 9% black. [note that many african countries have french speakers, and that almost none of these people are descendants of slaves]
vancouver is about 1% black, which is more representative of most of the country.

toronto is 20% east asian [chinese, korean, japanese, philipino]
toronto is 13% south asian [indian]
toronto is 9% black.
toronto is 4% west asian [arab, persian, turk]
toronto is 3% latino

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

that's right: the plight of black canadians is not "top of mind" in canada because, unless you live in a handful of districts in toronto, they really don't exist. black canadians are less than 3% of the population, in canada,  and almost all of them have arrived since 1970. they were barely present at all in the early years of the country, as slaves or as citizens, and did not stay after the underground railroad, for whatever reasons. there are only a handful of black communities in canada, and most of them are not urban but actually quite remote. that's very different than the united states, where blacks are about 10% nationally and make up majorities in substantial parts of the country, including in major urban areas.

in the united states, blacks are without a doubt the largest minority group and of exceeding importance in the country. in canada, they're like 15th - sandwiched between japanese and jewish, or something.

the largest and most important minority groups in canada are not black africans, but lighter-skinned indigenous people and asians, both east and south. we will have chinese and indian prime ministers before we have african ones, and we may never have african ones at all.

the trudeau government's strange focus on african-canadians is an imported americanism, a consequence of the fact that so much of the liberal party went to school in the united states. and, that's a problem that the party needs to come to grips with: it needs more canadians in it's top positions. it's not running for office in california.

the media was right to change the topic, and the party should get the point.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/01/30/justin-trudeau-gets-no-questions-about-black-canadians-at-press-conference-focused-on-their-experiences_a_23348080/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

if you think that it's dark or scary to imagine we have no purpose - as though this is an obscure possibility, right - then you are experiencing something called existential dread.

i would argue that it is really existential dread that is at the root cause of the continuing spread of religion, well into an era where it should have ceased to exist many decades ago.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

"but, science says the purpose of existence is to maximize your number of descendants, so shouldn't being an atheist mean you want to have as many kids as you can?"

it's funny how religious people tend to think that science perfectly upholds religion, isn't it? i mean, how could it not, if you're absolutely certain in your faith? that's the thing about faith - all possible evidence always upholds it. if you have faith in santa claus, the absence of presents under the tree any given year just proves you were bad. and, if you have faith in god, then any possible set of events that can be thrown at you will just be perverted to offer more and more evidence for it's existence.

faith is a perversion of logic. that is why it is such a dangerous tool, and must be kept away from the state.

in the western/judaic context, this talk of descendant maximization goes all the way back to the torah. god gave abraham this purpose. but, how did this get attached to science? well, it didn't, except in the minds of religious people, that are seeking out some kind of purpose, because that was what they were taught to seek out.

so, we have this problem: when people raised with religious upbringings come into contact with science, they need to frame it in terms that they understand. religion teaches them that existence is about purpose, and that that purpose has something to do with god (although this itself is circular logic, as the purpose is created to justify god, rather than the other way around). if science is to offer some alternative to religion, it must offer some alternate purpose, right? and, from there, they come up with this vulgar dawkinsianism that deduces that our purpose, as humans, is in carrying on the dna. we exist to breed.

but, the reality is that you'd be hard-pressed to find a scientist (or an atheist) of any ability or renown that would accept that humans have any kind of purpose, as that pre-supposes that a god exists to define it, first. who or what defines purpose, if god does not exist? it's a neat trick that the religious person does, here, in defining existence in purely religious terms, before bringing it to the scientific bodies for answers, as, once you have done that, you have hard-wired religion into the question, and made it useless to science. you can walk down this path with philosophy, it's what it's all about, but not with science, which will provide you with no worthwhile answers if you present it with what are brutally leading questions.

science cannot pre-suppose that a purpose exists. science must gather evidence to determine if it suggests that a purpose exists. whether the nature of the purpose is an empirical question or not, which is what the religionists pre-suppose and assign to scientists as a strawman, is reliant on whether the purpose exists or not, first, which is also an empirical question, and not something to pre-suppose at all.

while it would be extremely difficult to do a comprehensive study that empirically disproves that we have purposes, the lack of evidence underlying any purpose is a convincing argument that we have no purposes, for most atheists and most scientists.

and, so this is what the atheist will tell you: science does not argue that our purpose is to breed, but rather that we have no inherent purpose at all, and are free to define our purposes as we see fit to do so.

i've decided that my purpose is not to raise a family but to to complete my discography, and, because i seek to be free, there is nothing in the universe that has the right to challenge my authority on the point.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.