i don't want trudeau to lose the next election, so much as i want him to step down before the next election and be replaced with somebody else in the party.

the ndp are worse than a joke, they're so incompetent as to even appear unelectable from the perspective of a far left voter. the greens aren't actually a real party. and, the conservatives are no more of an option than they've ever been.

the best outcome is to replace trudeau.

no, you don't...

i'm not any of your labels.

i'm disenfranchised.

i have been the whole time.

but, it's just getting worse.

i'm going to line up on the side of people arguing that trudeau walking around in indian robes (do indians even dress like this any more?) is akin to some kind of black face.

as is the case with so much of what trudeau does, this isn't just ham-fisted. it's blatantly racist.

there is no end of history; nor does history move in one direction.

you can call it a step backwards if you want, but it's only relative to a contrived scale that only exists in your mind.

there is neither a forwards nor a backwards to step towards, or even an anthropomorphized entity which can take steps.

fuck teleological hegelianism.

http://www.weijingsheng.org/doc/en/comfacism.html

china is even the most accurate representation of corporatism in the actual meaning of the term: more accurate than mussolini, and certainly far more accurate than hitler.

yes, china is a fascist state.

that's the technically accurate description.

russia is a kind of illiberal democracy. and, america is an oligarchy, in the old european feudal sense.

but, china is a textbook fascist dictatorship.

and, i'm sorry if that upsets you, but it's the actual truth.

i am sometimes indecisive, but i do not bluff.

you could say i'm ideologically opposed to bluffing. or, i can just tell you that i simply don't have time for that kind of fucking bullshit. i want full transparency and total honesty, and i'm more likely to just treat you like an insect than i am to "make a deal" if i conclude you're not trustworthy.

and, don't call my bluff, at least not to me. if you think you're calling my bluff, what you're actually doing is increasing the chances that i pull the trigger, because i'm likely to spend less time thinking something through once my sovereignty as an individual is challenged. the act of telling me that you don't think i'll do something is pretty much guaranteeing that i will actually do it.

but, i'm not interested in erecting elaborate plans for self-interest or world domination. i project myself as honestly and as plainly as i can, and i will very quickly escalate to treating you as a non-person if i don't get the same respect in return.

liars aren't people.

the temperature outside has fallen, and the heat is working, but i don't understand what happened well enough to react.

the next time that happens, i'll have to hit the heaters in the hallways immediately in order to do some further testing.

i mean, there's three possibilities:

1) the heat was turned off, building-wide.
2) management turned the heat off in the hallways, and that in turn turned my heat off.
3) a tenant did (2), rather than management.

i had initially assumed (1). but i'm currently leaning towards (3).

what i will say is that i fully expect this to happen again in mid-march or early april, and while i'd rather not wait, i feel like i must.

i suspect that most (all) people that want to legalize heroin have never actually known a heroin addict.

there are two drugs that i have no patience for, and you shouldn't, either, and they are opiates and methamphetamines.

these are drugs that nothing good can come out of, and that the community needs to fight with every tool available.

and, affected communities will tell you that, too. i don't know what communities in canada are particularly affected by heroin. but, mr. singh better bring bodyguards, if he wants to spread his message to affected communities in the united states - and i suspect there are a few in canada that would be just as dangerous.

campaigning on legalizing crack in certain (mostly black) areas of the united states could very well get you murdered by concerned parents, who are just going to look at you like another dealer.

it's pretty much the dumbest, least populist thing i could imagine a politician doing.

if we can get marijuana passed, and i don't think it's happening, we could look at legalizing mdma next. access to safe mdma, which is harmless, would actually save lives, as it is difficult to find; almost all e on the market is some combination of cocaine and meth, which is in fact a deadly combination, and should be done by nobody.

legalizing mdma would be the most substantive policy - more substantive than marijuana, because nobody dies or otherwise gets their life ruined from bad or mislabelled pot.

another drug that could be legalized more or less immediately with minimal negative side effects is psilocybin.

there is a category in between, and it includes cocaine & lsd. you can hurt yourself on these drugs, but you probably won't. that makes them less like pot or mdma (which are less dangerous than aspirin) and more like alcohol. to be reflective of empirical evidence, the level of restrictions around alcohol, cocaine & lsd would need to be a little higher than those around marijuana, mdma or psilocybin.

fine.

but, don't even talk to me if you want to normalize heroin use.

something else i've said is this, and please quote me on it:

the aim of the british empire was to use weapons to open up markets for it's exports; the aim of the american empire is to use markets to open up exports for it's weapons.

i just want to add that america's absent strategy is actually it's strategy: america does not want anybody to win, and does not want peace in the region, but is playing everybody off against each other in order to create instability and fuel further conflict.

the status quo is america's endpoint.

so, don't be surprised if they end up harder to get out of the region than makes any sense, although i'll agree that they've burned so many bridges that they're running out of rivers to cross.

pick your cliche.

the policeman is not there to create disorder. the policeman is there to preserve disorder.

but, i also like to point out that iran is on to something in calling america the great satan. for, this is what satan does, in the mythological literature: he divides and conquers.

and, that's why people find it so hard to get their head around it. america is supposed to be the good guy, supposed to have an end point.

http://www.atimes.com/article/afrin-marks-point-collapse-american-influence-syria/

no, i need to wait - because i need to experiment.

there's four floors in the building, stairways at opposite ends and a heater on each floor at each stairway, which is how many heaters?

i bet 30% of you can't figure that out.

but, i went around and turned them all on. then, the heat comes on in here about a half hour later.

it might be a coincidence. or it might be cause and effect. but, if i can just turn the heat back on in here by flipping the switch in the hallway, that's a lot easier than taking somebody to court.

i overheard somebody talking about their heater being connected to the ones in the hallway.

it also proves wrongdoing on behalf of somebody in the building. but, it expands the number of suspects to everybody in the building. i mean, i could be undoing what another tenant did.

if that's the case, and we can figure out who it is, i could maybe get the building on my side in coming down on them.

as before, this isn't about money. i just want the heat to work...

what i need to figure out is if my heater is connected to the ones in the hallway or not; if it isn't, i'll have to push back. if it is, i guess i have a fight with another tenant on my hands - one i intend to win, but one that is very different in scope.

ok, i've got something coming in the pipes, now. that's an improvement.

i'm going to have to put out a letter of some sort tomorrow, one way or another.

Feb 21, 2017

To The Management of ===================,

On the day of February 20th, 2017, some time between 7:00 am and 2:00 pm, the heat at =============== was apparently completely shut off, building wide. As of the morning of February 21st, there is neither heat in my apartment on the fourth floor nor is there any heat in the foyer.

As you are no doubt aware, provincial legislation on this topic states that heat is an essential service that must be provided from Sept 1 to June 1. As a tenant, I consequently expect to be able to access the heat in my apartment, at will, over this period, as that is what I am legally entitled to.

I do not believe that this was an accident, but rather a cost-saving mechanism.

As such, you have 24 hours to obey the provincial law before I file the appropriate paperwork at the Landlord and Tenant Board, seeking an order that you obey the law along with a pro-ration of my february rent for services not rendered.

Should the situation arise again, I will jump immediately to litigation.

While I do not seek conflict, I cannot accept a management decision to turn the heat off when it is barely 15 degrees outside, given that this is causing me great discomfort and it is simply blatantly illegal to do so. I am concerned about the implications of this policy in the spring and fall. To avoid further conflict, please simply obey the law, moving forwards.

still no heat.

this is what i'm going to do...

i'm going to write a letter to the landlord accusing the building of turning the heat off in february - which is never legal - and explaining that i expect to be able to access the heat in the apartment, at will, between sept 1 and june 1, which is what the law says.

if the heat turns on overnight, this letter will also state that i will file the appropriate grievances to the landlord and tenant board the day of noticing the heat being turned off a second time.

however, if the heat does not turn on overnight, the letter will explain that they have 24 hours to turn it on, or the complaint will be filed on the next day.

i'm willing to put this in the official deathtokoalas platform:

the penalty for selling opiates of any kind, including prescription opiates, shall be to be roundly beaten the shit out of in the public square by a group of vetted volunteers.

yes, it's a public health issue.

no, it shouldn't be legal.

note that i'm stopping short of calling for public castration - which, in this case, is actually somewhat of a good idea.

an anarchist society would not legalize heroin, it would rather round up all of the heroin dealers and communally break their fucking faces in.

and, with that, i'm going to retire my insistence that jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

see, here's the thing: the ndp has a 0% chance of forming government so long as their leader has a beard. it was the same thing with mulcair, who lost for two reasons:

1) canadians don't want a balanced budget amendment.
2) canadians don't trust people with beards.

as somebody on the outside of the petro-state, i would like there to be a competitive option on the left.

the ndp will not be a competitive option so long as that beard is in the way.

hence, jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

but, heroin legalization is a non-starter - and without a serious option to vote for, i probably won't do so in 2019.

so, that's the end of that.

there is no fucking way i'm voting for any person or party that wants to legalize heroin for personal use.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i just want to throw this out there: the conservatives in ontario have a base, but you'll note that the very name of the party - progressive conservative - indicates that this base can at times be rather restive about the party taking centrist positions, and that there have historically been serious revolts amongst conservatives on the right, here in canada.

the biggest example is the reform movement, which revolted hard against mulroney. harper's distance from mulroney really wasn't about those envelopes: his base despised him. what do old reform voters think of his daughter? and, would they vote for her if she won?

(she won't win, unless everybody else gets banned from running)

our conservative parties tend to act more like a hillary clinton than they do like a ted cruz; they reach out to the right in a kind of superficial way by erecting left-wing strawmen and bogeymen, ultimately governing in a kind of corporatist manner, rather than from the back of a bible. they privatize things, cut services and still find ways to run deficits; they run governments into the ground. but, they don't tend to go after minorities or queer people. it's just not cultural, here.

that far right component of the base does exist, though.

so, who is in the spectrum that might take advantage of this?

that's a question, actually. i don't pay much attention to the far right in ontario.

i don't think social credit ever did well in ontario, but it is the origin of the far right in canada. i know that there is a christian heritage party that has historically done relatively well in the rural areas. the thing is that the pcs win a lot of these rural areas by 40% anyways, so it doesn't matter much if the chp gets 20%, when the conservatives get 60% (and the liberals get 15%),

again: doug ford doesn't live in this part of the spectrum. he has far more appeal to urban immigrants than he does to rural farmers. i mean, they'll probably vote for him, sure. but, if you sit them down, they'll probably complain that he's not much of a christian, and they're only doing so because the liberals are so godless.

but, tga appears as though she might. she might even be in the wrong party, really. and, it's an interesting question as to what kind of ruckus she's going to end up causing on the far end of the party's spectrum, as well as what kind of swing vote really exists there.

in a close election that comes down to a few seats, the chp could make a difference.

hey - the socreds once triggered an election at the federal level, when joe clark (in the same ideological camp as the mulroneys) refused to enter into a coalition with them, and couldn't pass a budget.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

to the contrary; what he's doing is actually kind of inspiring, and a rather welcome fresh of breath air. i don't identify with much of what he says, politically, but i'm always going to side with people taking on bullies.

and, at this point, he's clearly the real anti-establishment candidate.

if i was in his riding, i'd probably vote for him.

(the one thing i can say for certain is that i will not be voting pc in this riding)

http://nationalpost.com/opinion/kelly-mcparland-if-brown-was-a-real-leader-he-wouldnt-be-derailing-his-own-party

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

on second thought, i'm going to need a thermometer - which i don't have - before i can fill this out.

i don't what the temperature is inside.

i just know that i'm cold and the heat isn't turning on to address it.

and, i know that if i can't get the head on by the morning, i'm going to get a thermometer first thing tomorrow.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

btw.

the sneaky trick that my old landlord used to evict me (and only worked due to a biased judge) is not applicable in this building.

i'm a good tenant, that simply demands that the laws are followed. and, i'll defend myself against retaliation.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

15 degrees is cold.

25 degrees is comfortable.

35 degrees is ideal.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i mean, it's only 15 degrees today.

will i not have access to heat on an average 15 degree day?

i could see if it was 25 degrees, because then you can open the windows, but 15 degrees is simply not warm enough to turn the heat off.

what i've been doing is running the shower on full blast, full heat every twenty minutes.

i'm not going to argue with anybody about this. this place is not rock bottom cheap like the last one. i'm  paying for heat, and i will receive it on demand.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, what am i doing?

well, first - it's cold in here.

and i'm very angry about it.

the law does not say that if you have an unseasonably warm day in february, you can turn the heat off. what the law says is that you have to provide heat.

and, i'm not going to pester the landlord about it. i'm going to sue her for two things:

1) an injunction forcing them to turn the heat on.
2) pro-ration of the rent compensating me for the heat that i paid for and did not receive.

yes, i think that litigation is the way to solve problems.

no, i don't care what the neighbours think.

that said, i'm going to wait a little bit because i recognize that i made an error: i knew it was going to be warm today, so i turned the heat down.

the lesson i've learned is that i should never, ever turn the heat down.

however, if the heat does not turn on before midnight, i will mail the documents in the morning; after talking with some tenants, i've learned that the landlord is quite negligent, and i simply don't have patience for dealing with negligence of this sort.

the law is not ambiguous, and i do not feel like i have the obligation to be patient about this.

second, it took me a little longer to do some cleaning and whatnot this week, but it's done now, and i'll be focusing on finishing up 7/15 tonight - so long as the heat turns on.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i think it's less that trudeau got snubbed in india, who is a more natural ally than china, and more that everybody is well aware that all that a meeting with trudeau actually entails is watching him read prepared remarks written by somebody else.

he brought some bureaucrats with him; these are the people making decisions.

whether he's in the room or out touring the taj mahal with his family doesn't make any difference.

that's a point the canadian media actually understands, and the rest of the world should get it's head around: trudeau is more of a dignitary than an actual decision maker.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

“The Syrian government has answered our calls and sent military units today to be positioned on the borders and to participate in defending the territorial integrity of Syria,” - ypg spokesperson

see, they would have never taken this position - which is actually what the turks, syrians and russians all actually want - without the threats of turkish bombing.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

that's right.

believe it or not, the initial war plan cooked up by the saudis was based on the idea that isis would be met as liberators by the syrians, who were longing for a returning to a rightly-guided state, as they suffered under the tyranny of secularism and 'arab socialism'.

it was this absurd miscalculation that created this mess.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, to recall.

what were the actual alliances and proxies in the failed colonization of syria?

well, you initially had the saudis backing entities like isis, who were fighting against the fsa, which was backed by the turks & the qataris. that was the initial conflict: between the turks & the saudis.

you didn't know that because you didn't realize that you didn't know what was happening. the media made up some lies about kids throwing rocks, or something; there was nothing of the sort on the ground, but rather a battle between the turks and saudis for control of syria, in the post-assad space.

initially, assad was aligned with iran and hezbollah. while isis & the fsa fought each other, the americans were bombing the syrian regime, while the media projected the lie that they were fighting isis. in truth, they were aiding isis; isis were meant to be the ground troops for the invasion of syria, while america supplied the air power.

so, you had a three-sided conflict, with the following alliances:

1) saudis-isis-america & israel. this was the real alliance, and kept quiet.
2) turks-qataris-americans (but not really the americans, who interpreted this as half back-up plan and half divide and conquer). this was the fake alliance, which was in truth kept in the dark.
3) syria-iran-hezbollah

the kurds were still there, of course.

the american axis was meant to depose the syrian axis, and the turkish axis was just kind of being strung along. however, this failed horribly because the isis fighters were seen as a bunch of medieval hooligans trying to turn the clock back (to the annoyance of the saudis). the americans figured this out, that the syrians did not want a return to fundamentalism after all (see, you have to understand that the saudis thought that syrians did want a return to religious fundamentalism...) and tried to replace them with the kurds, who they figured would be more successful in actually holding syria, with the blessing of the syrian people. but, this led to a conflict between isis and the kurds that was entirely unresolved at the time that the...

.....russians stepped in, and focused on bombing isis. this was the first serious attack on isis. to an extent, the russians were supplying air power to the kurds and the syrians. this lead to the defeat of isis, and a kind of wide understanding that the saudi vision of the region was not going to manifest itself in the form of a popular revolution, after all.

that leaves the following axes:

1) america-israel-kurds + the now irrelevant remains of isis.
2) russia-syria-iran-hezbollah
3) turks-qataris

the qataris have been largely neutralized via saudi pressure, leaving the turks in the wilderness - they are aligned with the americans on paper, but they have in fact been fighting a proxy war against american interests for the better part of the last ten years, and now there are kurdish "terrorists" (if defined in terms of tactics, it's not entirely inaccurate, even if i have ideological sympathies with the rojava enclave, despite it not being somewhere i'd want to live) sitting all the way around the border, from the mediterranean to the black seas.

this has forced the turks to perform a careful dance, where they have to play along with the americans, despite holding to their positions. in a sense, the situation is being flipped: now, the turks are the ones stringing the americans along.

that leaves us with this:

1) america-israel + remnants of isis
2) russia-syria-iran-hezbollah-turkey
3) kurds

is this stable?

no.

the ultimate battle of this war will be a full out conflict between syria and saudi arabia.

and, the syrian generals will intend to win this fight, if they are allowed to wage it.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

a neighbour's dog took a run at me in the hall tonight, and it reminded me of the time that i broke my sister's leg foot.

this was in the mid-to-late 00s; 2007, maybe 2008. i would often go for brunch with my dad on sunday mornings, because i worked nights during the week.

this particular week, i was drained and didn't feel like it, so i called him and asked him not to come.

a few hours later, my sister is knocking on my door. had she not woken me up, this probably wouldn't have happened. nonetheless, i remain adamant that i made the right decision - and that she's lucky that i'm ideologically opposed to filing police reports, because i had every right to follow through with one.

so, i open up the door.

"what?"

you're coming to lunch.

"no, i'm not."

she puts her foot in the door, like a twentieth century vacuum salesman.

we have something important to talk about. come downstairs.

"i'm going to give you until i count to ten before i break your foot."

she laughed, actually.

you won't do that.

"10.....9....8....."

she's only beginning to contemplate the idea.

"...7.....6.....5..."

she's trying to talk over me, but i'm not listening.

"...4....3...2...."

she just looks me straight in the eye.

i stared right back.

"1...."

snap.

i went back to sleep.

i was told that she limped downstairs, and went right to the hospital.

all i could tell anybody was that she should have listened, but i don't recall hearing many arguments - probably because it left everybody in shock. but, i remain convinced that my position was correct. the fact that she is my sister does not give her the right to trespass in my apartment, or take away my rights of self-defense. further, i gave her plenty of warning, and she had every opportunity to withdraw - she made that choice, herself and accepted the consequences of it when she did.

fwiw, she wanted to announce that she was getting married.

that's not something i had any interest in.

if the owner of this dog is reading this, she may be advised to take my body language a little bit more seriously and thoroughly fuck off when i've broadcasted it as clearly as i have. because, i'm not going to be taking chances with my safety if i find myself left in an enclosed space with a strange animal.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

another way to articulate what i'm saying is that the legacy of slavery was so deep, and so long lasting, that it went so far as to permanently damage the genome of american blacks - requiring a type of reparations that are beyond anything we have yet to even really seriously consider.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, how do you fix that?

you bring in more black africans, and encourage black americans to breed with them.

i mean, it's not irreversible.

and, really, the white elite has a responsibility, here.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i just want to point out that there is actually a very good historical example of artificial selection in humans, and it isn't the nazis but the european colonists in the americas, who quite consciously bred african slaves for traits like strength, endurance and obedience - the last of which is correlated with low intelligence.

i think i just heard a million aneurysms. but, science is about data. and, sometimes, that data is upsetting. pointing out historical fact doesn't uphold any kind of racial theories.

did it work? well, statistics around black americans - very narrowly, very specifically - consistently pull out traits that are not replicated in black caribbeans or black africans. these differences are often explained via cultural differences, and i actually don't wish to reject that as a substantive factor.

but, it seems like these breeding experiments were not entirely unsuccessful - although this observation is better understood as an argument against racism, and not in favour of it. the same thing would happen i you took any other group and artificially selected for the same traits.

and, that's actually something that makes me angry, too. i share your indignation on this.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

"the general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know." - noam chomsky

i think this is no less true of people that call themselves academics, though, noam.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-turkey/syrian-kurdish-official-deal-for-syrian-army-to-enter-afrin-idUSKCN1G20QB

this article is making it seem as though the syrians are to be presented as protectors against turkish violence, and that might be the point; that way, the locals will welcome the syrians back in, rather than fight against them.

but, it doesn't change the point that this is deeply co-ordinated (the russians have given the turks entry into the airspace, and can't be too upset, if they haven't shot at anything), and that the goal from the start was to expel the kurdish occupation and hand the enclave back to the syrian government.

http://www.naharnet.com/stories/en/242338-pro-regime-forces-to-enter-syria-s-afrin-within-hours

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

https://www.kuna.net.kw/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=2692300&language=en

no, this isn't unprecedented at all.

everything you think you know about syria is a lie.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

http://gulfnews.com/news/mena/turkey/turkey-to-hand-over-afrin-to-syrian-army-once-kurds-defeated-1.2160467

rex tillerson is, in fact, an idiot.

it's entirely plausible that the turks are just fucking with him.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

the purpose of the turkish attack on afrin was to facilitate a syrian liberation of the region.

the narrative that the cia, i mean the media, is presenting to you is utter propaganda, but it's not clear to me if it's an american lie meant to save face or if the turks are just playing the americans for idiots, at this point.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i'd rather just ban any greeting from store clerks, sales people and cashiers altogether.

i just want you to shut up and take my money. don't greet me. don't ask me how i'm doing. don't pretend i'm your friend. just stick to the transaction, and cut out the small talk.

but, in the greater scheme of things, i understand why the anglos might be...i'd just consider this childish, and kind of look at somebody making the argument as though they're an imbecile. to legislate on this is less maddening and more depressing.

if i lived in quebec, i would probably ignore the law.

https://www.mtlblog.com/news/its-official-young-montreal-anglophones-dont-want-to-live-in-quebec

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

good.

i hope they're ordered to pay compensation, for lost profits.

and, i hope it costs her votes, too.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/b-c-launches-challenges-of-alberta-s-ban-on-wine-1.3809744

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

i just think that this leniency we have towards anti-abortion protesters is a corollary of the systemically misogynist rape culture that we live in, and it kind of gets under my skin.

we're talking about people that break restraining orders, ignore trespassing laws and harass and assault and stalk people.

that's not speech.

so, why are we so lenient about this? why don't we prosecute them to the full extent of the law, as we would anybody else that behaves that way?

i'm sick of this.

they break serious laws. throw them in jail.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

again: this is stupid and will not succeed in accomplishing at all.

did the protestor have a restraining order? was it broken? then send him to fucking jail, already.

further, you charge the people spitting on the patients with assault, and, if they don't smarten up, then you send them to jail, too.

you don't defeat self-righteousness with prohibition. you have to at least try to educate the stupid out of them, but if it doesn't work then you need to remove them from society, altogether.

that doesn't protect the victims, here, though. how do you do that? and, what is the ideal in a free society?

in a free society, the ideal is to create vigilante groups of counter-protestors that can be deployed quickly via social media. i'd put a call out to the community for this. the counter-protesters would show up and chase the protesters off.

this is preferable because it defeats speech with more speech, rather than with state violence.

https://news.vice.com/en_ca/article/a3j8nk/no-protest-zone-outside-abortion-clinics-gaining-momentum-in-canada

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, the chinese media picked this up, huh?

http://en.people.cn/n3/2018/0124/c90000-9419274.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

most chinese-canadians will take reasonable enough positions, like this.

and, i don't care if it's hard to ask them to choose sides. life is hard; sometimes you have to make hard decisions.

but, this reality should not blind you to what's happening, or make action seem less necessary.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/vince-wong/the-chinese-canadian-community-cant-fight-racism-with-islamophobia_a_23357709/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, make it a big deal.

embarrass them.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

it's an act of war.

don't take it lightly.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

it doesn't matter if it upsets the chinese-canadian community, which votes conservative, anyways.

foreign infiltration is a serious thing.

so, whose side you on?

and, if you answer wrong, expect consequences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqtQBU3DEuA

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2017/12/07/Chinese-Trade-Deal-Take-Canada-Cleaners/

so, what do you do when you wake up one day and realize you've got thousands of chinese spies in the country causing instability with the intent to overthrow the government?

well, you figure out if they're here legally or not, first. if they are, then they get freedom of expression, even if they're foreign agents - sorry. it's up to us to figure that out on our own, and ignore them, not up to to the government to track them down and punish them for what our constitution is explicitly in place in order to sanction.

but, it should also be a bit of a wake-up call.

1) there's clearly an issue of infiltration that should be addressed through running more stringent background checks. if the chinese government is going to do this kind of thing in canada, it should expect retaliation in the form of extra precautions to make sure we're not allowing spies in.
2) a good percentage of these people are probably not here legally, and the ones that can be identified should be immediately deported - once they've received their due process.

trudeau should not ignore this, as it will just perpetuate the idea that he's a door mat that the chinese can walk all over at will.

he must retaliate.

and, jagmeet singh must cut his beard, too.

as mentioned previously, i believe that this is probably a chinese psy-op.

proof: clearly...

http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/anti-immigration-groups-at-parliament-hill-protest-demand-apology-from-trudeau

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

we could go to mars tomorrow, in theory. we understand how to do this...

but, we don't have the engineering capacity.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i need to be clear on why i gave up on immortality, but i'm going to be terse.

it's not theoretical. we could probably do this in a few years, in theory. and, i have no doubt that we'll get there. but, the only thing that's important to me is whether or not we can get there in my lifetime.

and, i claim that we can't - but that the problem is not theoretical but computational.

i don't think you realize how much data your brain actually holds. it's going to be many orders of magnitude above petabytes. at our current storage abilities, we wouldn't be talking about data centres to store humans - we'd need a data center to store one human.

on top of that, the problem is going to be np. what that means is that transferring back and forth is going to be inconceivable with classical computers. so, we'll need to be able to compute non-linearly, first. and, despite some claims to the contrary, i don't think we're anywhere near this - and i'm not even convinced it's possible. the biological approaches to beating np strike me as more plausible, but they may be hard to scale, and it presents a different kind of threat for ai, when you start putting these bacteria colonies all over the place. that would no doubt wipe us out through disease.

the way i understand humans is that we have ridiculously fast processors and limitless hard drives but very small registers and almost no ram. so, there's this bottleneck in computation brought on by the insufficient amount of memory that we have to calculate in - and we end up dropping things from registers, because we just don't have the space for it. we're going to have to go through that bottleneck in extracting ourselves, too.

i looked into this quite seriously and, in the end, i made a bet with time. i might lose it. but, i'm usually right about these things.

this statement was not true when the record was released.

it might be today.

but, i don't think i made the cut.

we'll see, though.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

do negative numbers exist, or are they merely abstractions?

this one is a little more tricky, and, while it's hard to tell given my age at the time, i think i may have lost my debate partner, who, unlike myself, had finished the second grade - along with the second year of university.

it was in the years between when my parents split up and my mom remarried, and i was going to school full time, so i guess it would have been in the first or second grade. my mom got a room mate over those years, who was a philosophy student at ottawa university. i was always told the relationship was platonic, but i always thought otherwise. she officially slept on the couch.

the most important thing i remember about this woman was that i was to never, under any circumstances, touch her organic peanut butter, which was very expensive. i could have as much of the regular peanut butter as i wanted.

she let me try it once, and i didn't like it anyways. chalky. dry. sugarless.

they told her i was smart, and she wanted to test for herself, so she asked me to come over and talk about things. and, i remember that we talked about a lot of things, but the only part of what we talked about that i remember was negative numbers.

i was quick to react.

"there's no such thing as negative numbers."

she frowned. but, i continued.

"a number is the same thing as how many things there are..."

..and, she shifted in her seat a little at that...

"....so, what the number 3 means is that there are 3 things. how do you have minus three things?"

the frown lifted a little, as she became aware that i was thinking in what she understood as the correct terms.

well, she said, you have minus three things when you take away three things.

i rejected this, flatly. for, taking away three things is not the same thing as having three negative things - that is not existence, that is merely a way to describe things that don't exist.

and, then she did something that neither of us were expecting to do - she pulled out a textbook and explained to me that there was an idea called natural numbers (the whole numbers you can count), which were a subset of real numbers. i remember understanding this, or at least recognizing it as an obvious truth. then, she scrawled this backwards E on a piece of paper, which i did not understand the meaning of.

because negative natural numbers are a subset of real numbers, that means they must be real, that they must exist.

what i remember from this point was being confused. i trusted her on some level; or, at least, i knew she ought to be right. but, it didn't sit right with me. how could negative numbers exist? how could an absence of something be a real thing?

but, i had no argument.

i know today that her argument was wrong, and i maintain my own intuition on the matter, but neither really deduces the correct outcome.

so, what do you think?

do you think they exist?

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

your sermon on the mount,
from the hood of your car...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxG2UWhvXJI

swaziland.

is this:

a) a reverse transliteration of 'switzerland'.
b) south waziland
c) a very small, landlocked country in africa
d) a weapons manufacturing facility
e) a fictional land that some christians made up to trick you into giving them money.

my mother remarried when i was in grade school; he was a lebanese christian with a colonial french name, so i guess my mom was attracted to middle eastern looking men at the time (my father being quite phenotypically italian and/or jewish). they met through alcoholics anonymous...

he was not initially very christian or very strict about it, but that changed very quickly after they were married. around grade 6 or 7, my mom eventually had to kick him out for punching a hole in the wall out of anger - sober. fwiw, she ended up dating the guy that fixed the hole in the wall....but only after a lengthy binge...

anyways.

they sent me to one sunday school class, when i was around eight or nine. it was at a methodist church in the south of kanata, at fallowfield & eagleson. we went all the way across the city because he didn't want the people at the church to know he had adopted children from his wife's previous marriage; she only went to a service or two, and even i, as a young kid, could figure out the marriage was over after that. that was an insult she never accepted, and that i don't think he ever even understood.

that's as long as i lasted before getting banned - one sunday. and, why?

because i picked (e), and argued the point rather vehemently.

the correct answer is, in fact, (c).

why was i so confident, though?

because i knew the name of every country in africa, could identify each one on a map and even knew the names of all of the capitals. swaziland simply did not exist, because, if it did, i would know where it was, and what it's capital was.

the problem was that my map didn't have swaziland on it, because it's so incredibly small.

but, i would not be deterred. convinced that my fellow children were being taken advantage of for nefarious aims, i disrupted the meeting until it was cancelled, shouting slogans and lecturing the fellow students to think for themselves.

when i came back the following week, we both had atlases with us, and she was able to convince me that the place at least existed by pointing to an area that was listed on my map as a protectorate, rather than a country, although i refused to concede the point, nonetheless - i could see that swaziland existed, but that didn't mean it was a country. what was it's capital? and, it's surrounded by south africa. how can it be a country inside of another country? that was an impossibility to my young mind. so, i was able to see that swaziland is at least a real place, even as i remained skeptical about it's status as an independent state. i walked out convinced i had made my point, and the church was scamming people for aid money, like they do on tv.

they handed me a copy of the beatitudes and asked me not to come back.

i read them.

...and i liked some of them, but didn't like others.

memories are strange things, huh?

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i missed this.

but, i never seriously entertained any other option.

https://www.thenation.com/article/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

perfect!

i know comte from calculus, mostly. his theorems, or at least as they've come down to me, were always very tidy.

except we should update the names of the months, and they should be subject to renewal every century.

there should be space for einstein, darwin, heisenberg, turing and godel to start off with - and little room for religious icons or war criminals.

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

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

* godel's month should be the last one, so it is either inconsistent or incomplete

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

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

actually, 13 months is better than 14 months, here.

364 = (2^2)*7*13 = 13*28 = 13*(4*7).

that way, all 13 months have exactly four weeks.

yeah.

that's how you do this...

then, you get new years as a free day, and new years gets to be two days every four years (most of the time).

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

oh, and i don't really care about the dates of the rituals.

sorry.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

"you want to have days that exist outside of months? what are you, some kind of anarchist or something? that's lunacy.."

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

this person agrees.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-rosenthal-february-too-short-0202-biz-20160201-column.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

is february inherently unjust?

hear me out, here.

now, i should point out before i start that this doesn't affect me, personally, because my income is fixed, monthly. if anything, i do a little better in february. but, i remember doing the math on this years ago and being peeved by it.

so, consider somebody that is paid hourly and has a monthly rent to pay. that person is going to lose 2-3 days in february (7.5*15*3 = $337.50), and yet also have to pay about 6.66% extra rent for the month, due to it only being 28 days, which, at $700/month (what i'm paying...) would be $46.66.

so, that's about a $400 shortfall. and, you even lose money in the leap year.

what a rip-off...

i understand that our calendar is not arbitrary. but, do we really have to split the 365.2422 days up quite like this?

365 = 5*73.

that's a high prime number, isn't it?

364 = (2^2)*7*13 = 26*14

so, if we had 14 months of 26 days, and a special free day that is not in a month at all, we could even this out a bit better. on leap years, we could have two free days, instead.

who do i petition for this?

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

and, i'll repeat once again that i've never seen a gun before in my life.

ever.

and, i hope i never do, too.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

there is no legislative solution to the gun problem in the united states.

this is something that has to happen in the form of a social revolution.

jagnmeet singh must cut his beard.

america always says "this is not who we are".

but, what america has to do, here, is look in the mirror more carefully, realize this is who they are, stop living in denial about it and change themselves accordingly.

that has to happen at a deep cultural level, in discussions between fathers and sons, and not by passing authoritarian laws that nobody is going to listen to, anyways - perhaps for no other reason than that the law exists.

after all, prohibition did a good job getting rid of heroin and prostitution, right?

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

again: i hate guns.

but, i know that the problem in the united states is the gun culture, and not the gun industry.
 
i would consequently argue that sanders' position on guns was far more progressive than clinton's was; i'd even go so far as to argue that listening to him talk about this topic was one of the things that made it clear to me that he was a legit independent candidate, and not just another party stooge. for, clinton was - like many democrats - keen to broadcast a set of positions that she was clearly going to backtrack on (as she sold the worst kinds of weapons to the worst kinds of human rights abusers), whereas sanders was taking a more subtle, more thoughtful, more intelligent and more realistic approach to the issue that, if implemented, may have actually had some actual effect.

i don't see any reason why assault rifles of this sort should be available for purchase.

but, i don't think that banning their sales is going to reduce the violence, either.

i'd be more likely to support this kind of ban for the reason that, once it's passed, it can be crossed off the list. and, i do not mean to be dour, but once these things keep happening post-ban, perhaps more people will come around to sanders' more thoughtful analysis of the situation.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/bernie-sanders-guns_us_5a89ad60e4b004fc31934edb

jagmeet sing must cut his beard

let me out....!

i've been clear that i hate markets and want to at least escape them (art cannot be based on demand, or it is no longer art, but merely a commodity), but graeber is as close to my views as anybody else is on this topic.

i intially typed that i wanted to destroy them, but that was a little bit emotional of me, and i pulled back; if somebody designs a functionally useless, but environmentally friendly, piece of hemp plastic that people want to buy, what the fuck do i care? right?

i just want a way out...and that's something starving artists have been screaming for centuries...

http://www.businessinsider.com/most-american-workers-are-slaves-2014-4

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

a ubi is not full communism.

but, it would be the most important step our society has taken towards emancipation since the 60s. and, it would immeasurably eliminate the unquantifiable level of wasted talent attached to the unfortunate continuation of what is truly unnecessary labour in the 21st century.

it would drastically improve the province's quality of life. and, this is what i care about - not budgets and taxes.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

this is something else that i've been in strong support of for years, and would like to hear an update around before the election.

i don't see this as buying votes, even if the premier does (and she seriously might). i conceive of this as an artist's grant; this is in truth exactly the kind of society i want to build - one where people are free to explore their ambitions, without succumbing to the tyranny of the market, and getting stuck in the doldrums of wage slavery.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/basic-income-cheques-going-to-400-households-as-project-gets-off-to-slow-start-1.4329212

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

and, here comes the media to convince you to give away your freedoms in exchange for security from a threat that doesn't exist.

right on schedule.

i have yet to see anybody else figure this out. and, that itself is a sad indictment on america, itself.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/mueller-s-russia-indictments-prove-american-election-laws-are-inadequate-ncna848941

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

it's just a reminder, though:

the united states never bothered to release a shred of credible evidence tying osama bin laden, al qaeda or really anybody else to the 9/11 attacks.

but, we know what the history books will say, and no doubt already do say.

i can sit here all day and scream "but...but....", but it's not going to make any difference. and, likewise, those that study history, and understand it, will have to accept that this is simply an unsolved case that won't ever get resolved.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

it's not my fault, i was sleeping.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3qm2tTD_oQ

you know your misanthropy runs deep when even your subconscious dream state starts throwing stuff around like this:

i don't want knowledge,
i want certainty! 

fucking humans...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddn-5uKH6MU

i ignored the germans.

zee germans.

everybody ignores the germans...

i did it on purpose, this time. could they have done this? better than the russians could have, as the stasi didn't go through the same period of technological stagnation and, frankly, decline after 1980.

it's not in german interests...

but, i do think that  the germans took down the world trade center.

i repeat: i think the germans were behind the wtc attacks.

it's funny how we don't register that everything happened in berlin, isn't it?

motive: to crash the dollar, to bring in the euro as the global reserve currency.

and, i'm actually not convinced that the americans actually figured it out, potentially making it the crime of the millennium.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

to begin with, let's note that what's happened in the jump from the hacking to the social media is a classic bait and switch.

i frankly don't think it matters if the russians ran social media bots. that is protected speech under the first amendment. to me, the bigger questions are surrounding why it is that the fbi is cracking down on free speech, and using this kind of fake crisis as an opportunity to do so.

but, let us put that aside to address the hacking allegations.

my understanding of this is that it was sophisticated enough that the list of suspects is very short:

1) israel
2) the cia
3) china

aaron kind of unconvincingly drops the point he should be pushing back on. "sure, it could have been the russians..."

the quick story is that russia went through a total collapse at the same time as the technological revolution. the russians were always way behind us and needed our help to keep up (see sutton). but, the technology situation is really dire, due to that perfect storm.

putin has spoken at length about the need to end russia's reliance on american technology.

and, it's worse than you might imagine, for them, too. the intelligence consensus has long been that the russians rely on microsoft products and other american technologies that make it easy for america to get into their networks, but never developed the state capacity - which is different than random hackers - to engage in information warfare in any meaningful sense, because they lack the basic infrastructure to do it.

so, i frankly don't think that the russians actually have the capability to do this.

but, we're looking at other suspects, nonetheless.

if it was china, and any evidence existed, they would be targeted immediately, although there is little motive for the chinese to prefer trump (and i agree that the russians at least hate hillary, even as i'm less convinced that they love trump).

that leaves israel or the cia. but, i don't think you have to actually choose.

and, aaron is in fact aware of the evidence tying israel to the mess, because i've heard him talk about it. netanyahu is quite partisan in the united states, clearly preferring the republican party.

collusion becomes occam's razor, in the case of israeli involvement, due to how closely mossad works with the cia. there are examples of mossad working behind the cia's back, but that was a long time ago, and the state department's shady behaviour in making unsubstantiated claims doesn't uphold the idea that they were in the dark.

but, regardless of the extent of israeli involvement, it can't happen without ultimate direction from the cia, who leaked to assange, who then became their useful idiot.

the evidence is there, if you wish to look for it.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

actually, i apologize.

i only moved across the street, but i switched ridings.

and, this one is actually competitive.

looks like i'll have a race to pay attention to....

as mentioned: my preference would be to return the sitting government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_West_(provincial_electoral_district)

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

first idea:

turn your fucking tv off.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

oh, and i got my first "normal" electric bill.

< 120 kwh.

with the rebate?

$0.

i'm being responsible with my usage, and being rewarded for it. i might suggest others give it a try, if they think their bills are too high.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i'm sure the government would rather have me on their side, nonetheless.

but, my focus is going to be on preventing the conservatives from winning, and depending on how the numbers play out, that might mean broadcasting that only the ndp can win.

we're not there yet.

and, i frankly think horwath is a good 30 degrees to the right of wynne, and not likely to carry on with the things i like about the sitting government - i don't want it to come to that.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i've been clear that i don't see a reason to change the government in ontario, which has made some errors, but is, overall, moving in the right direction.

yes, hydro lines are a natural monopoly, and it doesn't make sense to privatize them. that's my only substantive criticism of the government: it has privatized a couple of things that it should have kept public.

and, i'll admit i kind of wish i had a medical records system. like, i wish the system worked; that would be a useful thing for people like me that have trouble keeping track of things like vaccinations.

but, broadly speaking, these are minor criticisms; i am broadly in support of the trajectory of the sitting government of ontario.

as i'm in an ndp lock, if i find myself voting, it's only going to be in the scenario where i need to try to stop a pc landslide.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

but, i mean..

...yes, a green bin program is exactly the kind of thing that's going to pull me into a voting booth.

as would be threats of cancelling one.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i guess we should expect more info in the spring.

https://www.ebr.gov.on.ca/ERS-WEB-External/displaynoticecontent.do?noticeId=MTMzOTI0&statusId=MjAzNzAz

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i am strongly, strongly in favour of this.

but, it's going to require a helluva stick.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/banning-food-waste-ontario-organic-compost-1.4244374

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, i'm coming up against a problem surrounding compost.

for years, i dropped my compost off at a muslim youth group. yes: i'd rather have dropped it somewhere else, somewhere secular. but, at least i wasn't wasting it. and i couldn't find anywhere else...

the youth group shut down, and now i have nowhere to bring the compost.

the ideal solution would be to set up a green bin program, but the city council says it's too expensive - a laugh, considering that they've built two new city halls over the last decade. there would no doubt be plenty of money for this, if they'd stop wasting it on themselves.

the truth is that there isn't any popular support for this, here.

i live in an old apartment with potential rodent and roach issues. i shouldn't even be leaving leftovers out. the idea that i can compost this myself, in this building, is a non-starter. what i do is leave it in the freezer until i find somewhere to compost it...

the ontario government has mused about setting up green bin programs, province wide. this would be something i'd vote for.

right now, my freezer is nearly full, and i'm running the risk of having to empty it a second time (i didn't find out the old drop-off was closed until a few days before i moved, and i just had to get rid of bags and bags of organic material, because my new freezer was a lot smaller than the old one).

the city council will never pass this here. the city votes ndp, but it's not very educated, and consequently tends to view any kind of environmentalism, including things as basic as bike lanes, as a waste of money. it's a city full of dumb union stooges that just don't care about the environment; this is a city that is very much susceptible to a trump or ford like demagogue, should one appear. sadly, a local politician could probably win an election in this city by promising to cancel all recycling altogether.

i'm not exaggerating: people really just don't care, here, to the point that they get angry and hostile over the costs. it's depressing, but i know better than to think you can convince these people of anything...

so, if this is not legislated provincially, it won't happen.

in the mean time? wish me luck. but, i have a month to figure this out, at most, before i need to start clearing. and, i don't think i'm going to find anybody to take it...

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

and, honestly?

frankly?

we don't send kids to trial when they say mean things. we scold them, we say "they're just kids" and we hope it works.

if it doesn't work, in the end, we might blame ourselves.

but we largely don't generate consequences out of this.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i mean, we don't want to think of ai in these fragile terms, right.

we want to convert ai into god....

...but if we're going to anthropomorphize the ai, the right way to do it is not as full fledged uber mensch, but as naked and crying new born child, that needs to be taught all the same things we do.

we can speed this up by hardcoding it. but, we still have to do it.

http://www.kulichki.com/moshkow/ZELQZNY/forbreat.txt

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

well, you have to program humans to speak politely, too, don't you?

we just don't come out of the womb as well-adjusted and polite. we need to get grounded a few times....

you can be misanthropic about it, but it should only strike you as an unnecessary task if you've never spent any time around humans before; your misanthropy is justified, but you should have gotten over this as a functional block in high school.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

the robot doesn't understand what it is saying.

it really is as easy as installing a ban list.

and, it actually shouldn't have taken microsoft more than a few minutes to make the edit, and fix the problem.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

to be clear: the example where the ai repeated back nazi slogans could have been easily prevented by installing a ban list in the ai. intent isn't the point, here. it was an oversight by the programmers.

https://slate.com/technology/2018/01/robots-deserve-a-first-amendment-right-to-free-speech.html

jgmeet singh must cut his beard.

is teaching the next generation how to survive when they're homeless the government's idea of an approach to automation?

in all honesty, this doesn't bother me, at the very low grade levels. they're kids.

just so long as they get back to math when they're done recess, however educational recess might be.

no praying, though.

https://www.therecord.com/news-story/8140445-a-school-with-trees-and-snow-instead-of-desks/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

this is surprisingly technically right.

i suspect one of these guys has an advanced technical degree..

this is a category error, but i suspect it's one we're going to see all over the place.

so, when a robot speaks, who or what is speaking? is it the robot? or is it the programmer?

if you've never programmed anything, you might be forgiven for looking at a robot speaking, and saying "this speech belongs to the robot". it's all very anthropomorphical, so it's easy for us to trick ourselves.

but, a robot is no more in control of it's speech than a cartoon character is. and, do you argue that homer or ariel or spongebob or fred fucking flintstone deserve free speech? no - because we know that cave men and talking sponges and mermaids and high school dropouts with mansions don't actually exist in real life, that their speech was written by a human entity.

we then argue that the humans deserve speech rights, through the medium of the characters they've created. and, we all agree on this point.

similarly, robots do not say anything they were not programmed to. even the ones using the ai we have are unable to actually think: they can only repeat what they've been programmed to repeat, via whatever instruction, from whatever heuristic. so, the question we need to ask is whether programmers deserve free speech rights through the medium of the characters they create inside the robot. and, the answer is that they do - because they are human beings, and this is innate.

as an easily confused human, you just need to get that reality clear to you: that this robot speaking to you is not a legal person, does not have a self, and is only capable of saying what it's been told to say. once you do that, you see it's a non-issue.

and, you also know who to go after should the robot be programmed problematically.

https://slate.com/technology/2018/01/robots-deserve-a-first-amendment-right-to-free-speech.html

jgmeet singh must cut his beard.

increasing property taxes is also just about the only thing i can think of that might actually get prices down a little.

remember: the housing bubble cannot burst in canada due to functional regulatory oversight. it has to come down slowly, via market forces.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2018/02/16/time-for-toronto-to-slip-out-of-its-tax-straitjacket.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

justin trudeau's a journey fan.

ahahahahahahahahahahaha....

https://thewalrus.ca/the-justin-trudeau-i-cant-forget/

jameet singh must cut his berard.

it's well understood that justin trudeau was passed over for michel trudeau, and about the only reason i can imagine pierre doing that is if he knew.

jgmeet singh must cut his beard..

yeah.

i think margaret would have done better than old man castro.

like, maybe, somebody her age.

whoever trudeau's father was, he was clearly a good looking man. maybe a high school crush, or something.

(the remaining brother is, i believe, thought to have been the son of a russian diplomat, at the least he is quite visibly russian, while the deceased brother may have been legit). 

https://globalnews.ca/news/4032280/justin-trudeau-is-not-fidel-castro-son/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i mean, that's why i'm opposed to religion - because it's intolerant, and i won't tolerate it.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

no, seriously.

if you can come up with an ideology that you think is less tolerant than islam is in 2018, let's hear what you think it is.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

i mean, if you're going to argue that you shouldn't tolerate the intolerant, muslims should really be your number one target.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

religion is really just another word for intolerance.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

but, keep in mind, that i would argue that all religion - not just including, but especially islam - is inherently and irreversibly intolerant.

so, my idea of stamping out intolerance is not fighting for rights for muslims, but fighting against the influence of religious bigotry.

...which isn't to say that muslims don't deserve the same rights as everybody else, so much as it is to say that i don't accept the concept of "religious freedom" as anything more than doublespeak for the intolerance that comes packaged in religion.

i would consider myself more in the spirit of where these groups originated than the people on the ground are. and, i'm avoiding them precisely because they're not representing an anarchist left at all, but a post-modern authoritarian right.

the left doesn't stand up for religious rights, it fights to get rid of religion.

and, the left doesn't use the state as a tool to implement it's policies, it fights to eliminate the state altogether.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

antifa, huh? so, what are you about?

using state power to eliminate my enemies.

(said no anarchist, ever)

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

but, on the question of tolerating intolerance?

there are two points here:

1) should we tolerate the intolerant? no.
2) should we use the state as an arbiter in the matter? no.

people advocating the use of state power to stomp out intolerance have lost the plot.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

to clarify: i'm broadly opposed to capital punishment, on the "what if we're wrong?" foundation of legal liberalism.

but, all rules require exceptions.

and, god's crimes are literally beyond parallel in scope and documentation.

could god receive a fair trial? certainly not. doesn't matter...

if we can prove a god exists, then we can find a way to stop it from existing, further; to an extent, proving that god exists is the same thing as disproving that what we're labelling god is actually immortal.

the only open question in my mind is "how do we actually physically end god's existence?".

of course, killing god will not put an end to faith. but, at least we can point to the historical record, label them flat-earthers and move on.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

why should we show mercy to a god that has shown no mercy to us?

i'm not interested in "morals".

i'm interested in logic.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

the likelihood of god existing is so low as to be negligible.

but, rare events happen.

and, if we somehow find out that a god does exist, we should try it for war crimes and, when convicted, execute it accordingly.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

to put it another way...

my views are so much more radical than manson's, and even were as a teenager, that he just struck me as another way to articulate the status quo.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

there will be almost no mention of manson in the alter-reality, because i am not and never have been a fan of his.

i was 15 when antichrist superstar was released, a fan of nin and corgan, and deeply anti-conformist, but i don't think i've ever listened to it all the way through. if i ever have, it was by accident, at a party.

first of all, the music is just not very interesting.

but, i don't think the fan base cares much about how boring the actual music actually is.

the flat truth is that i just thought marilyn manson was stupid. i didn't find him interesting or challenging on any level, and what he said was less thought provoking to me and struck me more as just flat out daft.

my opinion hasn't changed at all over the years.

i probably wouldn't have been able to articulate this at the time, but this is the difference: i was an atheist from a very, very young age. not a satanist. an atheist. so, he actually struck me as just promoting another ideology that needed to be broken down. and, if you want to tell me that satanism is not a religion, i'm going to have to take the opposite position in a debate on it.

like, i need to be clear: when i heard him speak, i heard an ideological enemy rather than somebody on my side of things. he wasn't telling people to think for themselves and rely on empiricism and science, he was just giving them an alternate means of brainwashing and trying to work them into another kind of ideology.

i was as opposed to manson's views as i was opposed to any other religionist's views.

i guess i was smart enough to see through it from the start.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

"confidence" is just a politically correct term for stupidity brought on by ignorance.

it's nearly as catastrophic a trait as faith.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i'll give you a hint, though: you need to search for england, and not britain, because this issue is so old that britain didn't even exist yet.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

do i have to write you a 50 page essay that documents chinese attitudes towards chinese-british trade agreements over the last 500 years, or can you go to the library yourself?

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i would suspect that justin trudeau gets his perceptions about chinese culture from yoga classes, new age "literature", fortune cookies and bad hollywood movies.

useful

fucking

idiot.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

china does not sign agreements.

the reason china does not sign agreements is that it does not want to be bound by them.

so, the chinese have no military alliances, no trading agreements and no allies - because they don't see themselves as a part of an interconnected world, but as an independent voice that can never be integrated.

the british appear to be unable to understand this.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

the british have been trying, and failing, to sign a trade deal with china for 500 years.

you think an oil pipeline is going to do it?

have you ever read a book before?

fucking idiots...

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

rather, what christy clark is doing is unprecedented - she's supposed to shut up and get lost. she has no business weighing in on this, and should be roundly condemned for it.

but, i'll give you the answer: the reason is that the federal government wants to sign a trade deal with china.

but the reality is that this pipeline is not going to get a deal with the chinese, who will take the oil and laugh at us for destroying our country for their benefit.

i'll say it: trudeau and notley are simply useful idiots.

https://ipolitics.ca/2018/02/11/exactly-trans-mountain-national-interest-prime-minister/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i think this battle was lost 20 years ago, when dubya was installed in a coup, but don't expect me to fall in line with the agenda to shut down democracy in america.

http://theconversation.com/government-regulation-of-social-media-would-be-a-cure-far-worse-than-the-disease-92008

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

if you were looking for a way to split the misogynist component of the ford vote, you'd have to run somebody that much more obnoxious. and, short of running his brother's corpse, i'm not sure that this is even an option.

what province does kevin o'leary live in?

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

the re-entrance of patrick brown is unlikely to alter the outcome of the race.

he was probably the party's best candidate in the general. but, he won the leadership by campaigning on the right, and then sharply turned to the centre. of course, it's hard to take the guy seriously when he runs on the right for votes in the party, then runs in the centre for votes in the general - the only conclusion to draw from that is that we don't know if he's on the far right or in the centre.

i'm going to suggest that his platform shouldn't have been taken all that seriously in the first place, and you'd no doubt see see a return of "primary brown" if he were to win.

but, the conservative base is not known for cheek-turning, and is unlikely to see a reason to take gambles when it has clearer options in front of it.

maybe he eats into mulroney's numbers just that much more, but i already think she's out of it. but, i don't even think he eats into elliot's numbers.

but, i should address the other gender argument. if a 75% female pool helps ford, shouldn't a 60% pool scale him back? well, not unless you think there are moderates voting for ford because they're misogynists. and, while i don't doubt that ford attracts some misogynists, they're not moderates, and they would not prefer brown. that is, i'm sure the identity vote is there, but it's not going to jump to brown. the key idea about tga being so key to ford's victory is that the women she's peeling away from mulroney and elliot are extremists, not moderates.

don't misunderstand me: i'm glad he's fucking with the process. and, given the circumstances, i actually kind of think that the leadership race is the right place for him to clear his name, in a kind of a "you made your bed...." kind of way.

if you're going to take him down in a back room, having him denounce you back in public is really quite retributive, isn't it?

but, he's neither going to win, nor is he going to change the outcome of the race.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

canada is an economic union that no longer makes any sense.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

confederation, as we understand it, has no future.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

alberta's interests are to maintain a high dollar and market access for a product that cannot be produced sustainably.

this harms the rest of the country, both economically and environmentally; the rest of the country's interests are to keep the dollar low to boost exports of less catastrophic commodities, from food items to marijuana to lumber to whatever else.

so long as we remain under economic union, we have no choice but to harm each other.

there are not any policies that can fix this. these are two sides of the same scale. and, we will continue to be at each others' throats until our ruling class figures that out.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

and, if your ambitions are to smile as you kill, please turn your ambitions upon yourself.

i think the claim that i lack ambition is pretty obviously false.

rather, my argument is that a market-driven, competitive society makes actual ambition virtually impossible to actualize. i mean, look around you. it's a constant. in order to be successful, you have to throw your ambitions away, first.

there's room at the top, they're telling you still
but first you must learn to smile as you kill...

all that ambition is ever going to get you in this society is a one way ticket to permanent poverty.

and that is what you see in front of you when you look at me.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

don't trust the corporate polling.

they lie.

to your face.

repeatedly.

https://climateactionnetwork.ca/2015/04/07/61-of-canadians-say-protecting-the-climate-more-important-than-pipelines-and-tarsands/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, what am i even doing?

well, i've just been sitting here ranting for a long time. i'm kind of feeling in limbo, between things.

i keep trying to do the cleaning i need to do in here, so i can sit down and get back to work, but i keep getting distracted. and, i've actually barely slept in days.

i think i'm going to get some work done for the night, and try to focus on the prep for the week tomorrow. the end point is doing laundry & tucking myself into bed to finish the rest of the rebuild, but it will have to wait yet another day before i get that in motion.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i might suggest trying a $50 bicycle with a $100 lock, next time.

i paid $30 (usd) for one to leave in detroit, + $30 (cad) for a lock, and i think it's still there.

i should check soon.

https://www.straight.com/life/1033991/bike-twitter-users-bought-replace-ivans-stolen-bikehas-been-stolen

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

in other news, i hear that congress has put out a related secondary warrant on charlotte & emily bronte, sisters, for posing as men, for the purposes of influencing public opinion.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

no.

nothing i've seen about the alleged russian involvement "tests the limits of free expression".

this is basic, garden variety free speech, long established, and a guilty verdict would set a precedent that would extend a chilling effect to to every corner of the internet.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

wow.

this is really fundamental. textbook first amendment.

if these russians are indicted, it will end free expression in the united states and reduce the bill of rights to a sad joke.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i don't know exactly how broadly applicable the first amendment is to non-citizens in the united states.

but, if past precedent is not wide enough to acquit those that are charged, a new precedent should be developed that is wide enough to acquit.

can we get the aclu involved, as well as other civil rights groups, please?

you should be shocked by this, alright.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

this is what i told you from day one, though.

russiagate is a ploy to take away your rights and extend the powers of the security state.

if it's not obvious to you at this point, you're hopeless.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i'm sorry, but what crime is being committed here?

i'd like to see the court come down hard on the justice department here, in extending constuitutional protections of free speech to these russian citizens.

and, i guess you need to watch your mouth when you speak in america nowadays, don't you?

you might get charged with the thoughtcrime of freedom of expression.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/us-politics/us-special-counsels-office-charges-13-russian-nationals-with-interfering-in-politics/article38006035/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

the senate marijuana vote is scheduled for the same day as the ontario provincial election.

are they going to vote it down outright and hope nobody reports on it?

sober second thought, huh?

it's too brazen...too contemptuous....but, this government is not learning from it's errors...

so, i don't know exactly why, yet. but that's not a coincidence.

jameet singh must cut his beard.

it's funny how these aristocrats always end up in the wrong party, though, isn't it?

the dauphin is obviously a conservative, whereas the younger mulroney appears as though she'd be more comfortable in the liberal party.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

if mulroney pulls out, it doesn't change much, the votes just go directly to elliot.

but, what if tga pulls out?

then ford's life gets a little harder, as those votes mostly go to mulroney first.

let's say first choices are this:

ford: 48%
mulroney - 27%
elliot: 25%

you would expect elliot's votes to go mostly to mulroney. but, ford isn't going to need many of them...

i guess the way to say it is this: the new candidate turns a probable ford victory into a guaranteed one, via vote splitting with female voters.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

yeah.

it's early.

but these are my predictions of the outcome of the race, after the ranked balloting works itself out (subject to change as more evidence comes in):

1. doug ford - 55%
2. christine elliot - 20%
3. tga. - 15% ----> votes go mostly to ford (because it's psychologically different to rank ford second)
4. caroline mulroney - 10%  ----> votes go mostly to elliot

the wild card entry really eliminates any chance that mulroney has of winning.

she should focus on her seat.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, what's with this wildcard late entry, this tanya granic allen?

last minute entries are usually fronts for somebody looking to split the vote. and, on first glance, it may appear that somebody wants to cut into ford's base.

i don't think so, actually.

identity politics is a terrible virus that must be destroyed, but, so long as it is here, we have to analyze it. and, there are certain demographics that are well understood, through empirical analysis, to vote almost entirely on identity. obama got something like 98% of the black vote.

women are currently also another group that prioritizes identity over ideology in making decisions. i say this with no happiness; i wish it were not true, and i hope it changes, over time. but, in the present moment, the reality is that women vote for women.

so, running a third woman on the right - that is different than the two in the middle - is probably an attempt to siphon identity votes away from the two centrist candidates. she's meant to appeal to women that prefer ford's politics, but will vote for a woman, if possible, no matter what, anyways.

will it cut into ford? probably not, because he's so polarizing. i don't expect ford's numbers to move much in either direction.

now, deductive logic doesn't mean anything in reality. but, if they're running her to eat into ford's base, it's poorly thought through (which would finger mulroney rather than elliot - and do remember that mulroney is the establishment candidate, here).

given how far to the right the tory base is, this wildcard entry could even beat one or both of the two centrist female candidates.

based solely on an identity politics analysis in the tory base, i would expect tga to beat mulroney, at least.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i could plausibly be in the list.

hope so...

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/liberals-write-off-200-million-in-student-loans-feds-will-never-collect-1.3806500

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

also: i'm not convinced trudeau is interested in running for another term.

i think he'd prefer to move to hollywood to focus on his acting career, frankly.

i mean, this is when and not if, right? trudeau will eventually end up working in film. the question is about when he gets bored with what he's doing, which is no doubt tied to what kind of opportunities exist in front of him.

the point i'm making is that we may find that electoral factors are less important of a consideration to trudeau over the second half of this mandate. he could very well be close to zero fucks territory, and if doesn't happen now, it will no doubt happen in the next cycle.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, how are they going to do this?

they're going to drag this along until the end of the year, and then pro-rogue parliament some time in late 2018 or early 2019.

the truth is that this session is already far too long. they should have reset parliament at least once already.

it would be very strange if they didn't do this some time in the next 6-12 months.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard