biden wants to turn the clocks back to 1980. the democratic party needs somebody that wants to turn them forwards to 2080.
Sunday, June 16, 2024
the statements coming from the g7 on the israel issue are like statements written in 1975, coming to us via a time machine.
i read an article accusing joe biden of being stuck in the 90s. no. he's actually stuck in the 70s.
somebody needs to explain to biden and his binkie that their concept of the middle east is so out of touch with reality on the ground that they should refrain from interfering, not try to place the peacemaker and just get out of the way, because they are so divorced from reality that all they can do is make the situation worse.
i don't like that i'm falling in line behind republican statements, but joe biden's middle eastern policy is indiscernible from jimmy carter's, and having this doddering, out of touch old man trying to interfere in events on the ground from a perspective that belongs to 50 years ago is the last thing the world needs.
he's going to do more to hinder than to help and should focus on his own fucking country.
Saturday, June 15, 2024
this guy tony blinken really is the incarnation of neville chamberlain. i've never seen a dumber liberal that's less able to learn the lessons of the past, or more willing to repeat the mistakes of the past.
they want to put the plo in charge of gaza, but this is a non-starter. to begin with, the voters in gaza rejected fatah in the last election, which was 2006. the plo has absolutely zero democratic legitimacy in the region and forcing them into power will probably even lead to a civil war.
if gaza is to return to self-rule, it clearly needs fresh elections. there is no way to avoid this, it's mandatory. otherwise, this was a waste of time.
however, i don't think gaza should return to self-rule at the moment. democracy has certain prerequisites and they simply aren't being met. the outcome is predictable.
they want a plan. i get it. i think israel has a plan, they're just apprehensive about telling us. the plan needs to be (and probably is) that the united nations takes on the role of a civilian government, while israel maintains military control, for the foreseeable future. this un-backed civilian government needs to focus on re-educating the population and minimizing the role of islamic fundamentalism.
fresh elections to transfer power to a civilian authority should be scheduled for c. 2040ish, once the re-education process has produced a new generation of leaders.
any attempt to transfer to self-rule, including via the plo, is just going to result in more violence. this is stupid and shouldn't be given the time of day as a serious option.
Thursday, June 13, 2024
there's some articles up about lia thomas not having standing to fight her competition ban because she's not a member of the usa team (which is legally convincing enough, and does point to her need to deal with the issue locally, first). i want to change the topic.
gender is really meaningless and should be seen as such. in swimming, the most important physical characteristic is height - taller swimmers perform better than shorter ones. so, the question that should be being asked shouldn't be if lia thomas' gender gives her some kind of advantage (there is literally no science supporting that idea, it's actually blatant sexist bullshit) but if her height does.
lia is in fact at the very extreme of variation in her competition pool, in terms of height. she is not substantively taller than her closest competitor, but she is at the very top of the list.
you could consequently argue that lia's height does give her the same type of advantage that the other elite competitors that are at or around 6 feet have over shorter swimmers. and, i would agree that something should be done about that.
instead of having women compete against women, and men compete against men, why not have pools based on height so that people that are 5" 4' can compete against people their own size, and people in the 6 foot or higher range can also swim against people their own size, as well?
if you find the fact that lia is intimidating at 6 feet tall, i'll point out to you that the elite male swimmers are all four or five inches taller than her. that isn't fair, either. her height is actually closer to female variation, in context.
this guy openly admits that he works for israeli intelligence, but what he's doing here - going to michigan and explaining to the dumb kids that hamas is a right-wing fundamentalist islamic militant group and not a socialist revolutionary movement - is extremely necessary, because the dumb kids actually think that hamas is like che guavara or something rather than indistinguishable from isis, as it has become recently. it's a failure in education, so a university is the right place to do it.
i've written a little about this myself. the actual reality is that hamas would immediately shoot most of these stupid protesters on contact. you'd be lucky to get sent to prison. they would just kill you. instantly.
as jello biafra once said, "you'd be the first to go".
so, yes, he's working for israeli intelligence, and he admits it, but it doesn't matter. if you're a hamas sympathizer, you should listen to this.
Wednesday, June 12, 2024
not all arabs are fundamentalist muslims, but almost all arabs are in fact crazy. yikes. you can take the islam out of the arab, but you can't take the crazy out.
it's a reminder that israel does actually have arab allies in it's fight against hamas, and that is something worth realizing. that is something the media doesn't want you to realize.
in fact, i probably have facebook posts from as far back as 2010 referring to israel's policies in palestine as "genocide", and distinctly recall having conversations with people where i present "genocide" as a more accurate description than "apartheid" over the 2011-2013 period, for the reason that israel simply does not want to enslave the palestinians and never did, it wants to exterminate them. i have not posted pre-2013 posts here yet.
the apartheid comparison was empirically terrible.
i presented genocide as something that was more accurate.
did i author this? i dunno.
Tuesday, June 11, 2024
i've been periodically googling chomsky for his response to the gaza mess because i was curious. i would actually expect his response to be a little different from that on the current fake left, as chomsky was an unabashed zionist that was critical of the state of israel's behaviour because he thought it put the zionist project under threat of destruction and not somebody that hated himself or wanted israel to disappear. chomsky always was clear that he supported a zero state solution, preferred a single state as a pragmatic approach (years ago, he would bring up yugoslavia...) and thought two states was an absurdity and a non-starter. chomsky wanted to support palestinian self-determination in the context of zionism rather than in opposition to it, which made him an anachronism. but, i think his position was preferable to anything we've heard on the left or the right since camp david. the idea of two states has been an utter failure and the insistence on segregation has simply led to entrenched divisions and perpetual conflict. he saw that coming, and he was right.
i would certainly have expected noam to be critical of israel's response as being disproportionate. but, what i've been struggling with trying to define is what "proportionate" means in the context of such a vicious attack and concluded that a proportionate response is a ferocious one intended to produce a strong disincentive. i would have liked to hear him try to articulate his concept of proportionality, and i'm sure he would have brought up something i hadn't thought about, even if i disagreed with him. i don't think he would have aligned with the hamas sympathizers.
unfortunately, we're going to all need to figure that out on our own.
the left is going to be a very different place without noam chomsky, who has played the role of virtual yoda since before my father was born, and before there was even a yoda. but, this was predictable. eventually.
and so it goes.
this is predictable, and what happens when you negotiate with terrorists - they interpret hostage taking as an effective extortion strategy and they do it again.
expect further kidnappings by iranian proxies, because our reaction to the kidnappings in gaza has demonstrated to them that it's an effective strategy.
yeah.
labour may actually lose popular support, in comparison to 2017, but the tories are getting hammered by nigel farage, and if they don't think sunak's ethnicity is a component of that, they need to wake up.
i'm a hardly a tory supporter, even if i would expect a starmer pmo to be disappointing, to say the least. however, there's been no uptick in labour support. at all.
sunak should have resigned to allow another leadership race, rather than call an election, but labour will take the easy win.
is the actual truth that rishi sunak is losing horribly because he's not an indigenous brit?
well, i have some sympathy for that position. unlike canada or the united states, the united kingdom is not a colonial state.
brits have every right to expect self-rule and to want to elect somebody that looks like them.
further, the unsc resolution adopted yesterday appears to rather blatantly contradict previous unsc resolutions that ban any negotiation with terrorism, but...this body is subject to no oversight and it's resolutions have no legal force, so of what consequence is it when it contradicts itself, other than to challenge it's relevance and validity?
a body that contradicts itself with no mechanism for oversight is of no consequence.
(2) Consular roles do not include:
(a) Participation in developing and implementing a ransom strategy. Such activity is contrary to U.S. Government policy on hostage taking and kidnapping. (See 7 FAM 1821 e and 7 FAM 1823.)
(b) Encouraging families or employers to negotiate with hostage takers. Such activity is contrary to U.S. Government policy on hostage taking and kidnapping. (See 7 FAM 1821 e and 7 FAM 1823.)
The U.S. Government will make no concessions to individuals or groups holding official or private U.S. citizens hostage. The United States will use every appropriate resource to gain the safe return of U.S. citizens who are held hostage. At the same time, it is U.S. Government policy to deny hostage takers the benefits of ransom, prisoner releases, policy changes, or other acts of concession. See 7 FAM 1821 e regarding U.S. Government policy and limitations on the role of Foreign Service posts and the Department of State should private citizens, organizations or companies elect to negotiate with hostage takers or pay ransom.
frankly, i think an impeachment hearing for anthony blinken is justified, based on the news reports i'm hearing.
the legality of blinken negotiating with hamas, or ordering that israel do so, is an open question in american law.
the supreme court would seem to think it's illegal, but obama tried to evade it via an executive order.
as far as i can tell, the biden administration has not even addressed the issue at all.
some pressure should be placed on the biden administration to explain why it has decided to negotiate with a terrorist group, all of a sudden, and without providing any explanation or justification for doing so.
i'm not sure we have another example of the united states acting so blatantly imperially as we are now seeing with blinken essentially lying about the authorship of the peace deal, and just forcing it through, whether israel likes it or not. linda thomas greenfield is apparently signing the peace deal on behalf of israel and telling them to sit down and shut up.
the terms of the proposed deal, as far as i can put them together, are entirely delusional. israel is being ordered to negotiate with a terrorist group. the position of all civilized countries should be that they will not negotiate with terrorist groups.
there is nothing that can be accomplished by negotiating with hamas. but, israel is in a very difficult position, where the president is basically a complete retard, and his foreign policy establishment is desperately trying to avoid losing an election, which is obviously actually going to backfire. biden is going to lose ten times as much support for abandoning israel as he is going to gain for siding with a terrorist group, and that is actually how the republicans should frame it - biden and blinken are in bed with the terrorists.
what a bunch of idiots....
meanwhile, hamas will continue to expect to be recognized as a state in return for the hostages, which is a tactic that should be universally condemned, and all israel can do in response is to fight.
Monday, June 10, 2024
broadly speaking, i would expect that muslim canadians would openly acknowledge that they intend to implement sharia law in canada. i mean, that's what the definition of a muslim is, somebody that abides by islamic law. the religion is the legal code. we already have sharia law operating at the family court level, in the form of consent agreements, and the common law system is designed to absorb competing legal ideas rather than resist them.
while it is true that not all arabs are muslims, it is extremely unhelpful for secular liberals to pretend that muslims don't want to enforce their laws on us. of course they do.
i'm a secular liberal, and i want to bring secular liberalism to the middle east; i want to enforce secular values in saudi arabia and iran, and i expect to deal with a secular court system in my secular country. i don't deny that. i'd be honest if an iranian asked me.
in fact, i've heard my neighbours say things like "islamic law is coming to canada soon" in response to being frustrated that the cops won't enforce islamic law on me, because they've actually tried to get the police to do it.
i believe that real secular liberals understand that islam is in fact going to be their dominant opponent over the next several decades and that islam does in fact pose the single largest threat to the country's secular institutions. i want to vote for a political party that understand the need to stay vigilant against the threat islam poses to the west, not one that is going to cave into political correctness in an attempt to buy votes from a group that, in truth, doesn't even support them in large numbers, because they're diametrically opposed to liberalism, ideologically. muslims are just about the most naturally conservative and overwhelmingly right-wing group in the country.
the realization that one of the people holding the hostages was a journalist for al-jazeera is further confirmation that al jazeera, and the qatari government in general, is not a neutral or unbiased observer but an active participant in the conflict.
the reality is that al jazeera is hamas propaganda and should be seen as a wing of the iranian government, not as a valid media source.
Sunday, June 9, 2024
pro-tip: if you don't want to suffer a thousand casualties in a commando raid by the israeli army, you shouldn't hold israeli citizens hostage for months and make unrealistic demands regarding their release.
i wish israel had done this earlier, and i hope they do it again.
israel's negotiating position should be that they will turn gaza into a crater if hamas does not release the hostages now. what hamas is entitled to receive in return for the hostages is not being destroyed.
Saturday, June 8, 2024
Friday, June 7, 2024
i had to get some groceries done and to clean the apartment up but i'm going to need to flash this board over the weekend.
i've been able to boot my backup pIII 500 into xp if i have to use it in the short run. i could also finally build my 64 bit pc. but i don't want to lose the 32-bit tower and will need to replace the board if i can't fix it.
i'm pissed off, but so be it.
i am still redesigning my network and there is a large list of things i will need to do before i can regain some semblance of normality and get back to work. my new year's resolution was made with honest intent and in good faith, but i have not been able to follow thtough.
there is going to be a series of new blogs coming relatively shortly, and this blog will be reserved strictly for political analysis. but, i've been unable to do function in any sense whatsoever while i've been fighting with my hormones, as it has required me to spend all of my waking time cleaning myself and eating. if the drugging is at least over, i can hopefully get back to doing something shortly.
for right now, i need to clean the apartment and focus on trying to save my main pc so that i know if i can or not. this is a dominant priority, and i will need to prioritize replacing it with a comparable board if i can't flash it back to health.
authorizing the use of long range missiles from ukraine is insane and merely demonstrates that putin was right.
biden has always been a foreign policy dunce and he needs to be removed from office by any means possible asap before he stumbles the planet into world war three.
trump is the harmless idiot. biden is the dangerous buffoon.
while i think that netanyahu is right and biden is wrong, israel needs to understand that the united states does not allow for dissent and that disobeying orders is certain to have catastrophic outcomes.
the united states does not want a hot war with iran because it knows it will draw the russians in. yet, netanyahu is correct in realizing that it's position is existential. further, biden's position is stupid; the israeli alliance is of extreme importance to the united states, and the saudis will never be able to replace it, as they are both unreliable and backwards.
i did not endorse biden because i worried that his foreign policy would be catastrophic, and i was right.
israel needs to stall until october.
i'm unfortunately on the brink of endorsing trump because his foreign policy is to the left of biden's.
i'm not being dramatic.
i've been the victim of at least a year's worth of brutal torture. in fact, i think this has been going on for longer than a year.
i'm realizing that i am going to need to talk to somebody to help me process this torture.
“Justin’s like a captain of a hockey team; he’s not the manager of it; he’s not the owner of it,” - justin trudeau's half brother, from his obviously very right-wing mother
this is a very canadian statement.
it's also something that canadians should be analyzing very carefully because it is both true and very problematic. our prime minister should not be like the captain of the hockey team, whose role is to increase morale and self-confidence; he or she should be the manager of it. this is a clearly stated true statement that effectively summarizes what is wrong with our democracy.
it's actually quiet here on a friday and i'm happy about it.
i'm realizing that i'm having difficulty ascertaining whether i'm remembering things or hearing them. i have an appointment booked with my gp about talking about ptsd. but, i think the drugging has stopped, thankfully.
the last month or two, i've been fighting off a psychotherapist that is trying to do some kind of conversion therapy on me. this sounds stupid on it's face, and obvious pseudo-science a priori, but there is a history of freudian (and probably lacanian...) pseudo-science being applied to queer people to try to "cure" them. that is what is apparently going on and i'm realizing it's been the purpose of the drugging the whole time.
i've been yelling at this person for months to fuck off. i think i finally got through to them this week. but they may also be hiding. i can't tell.
as mentioned previously, the idea that they're going to change my gender identity via psychotherapy is moronically idiotic on it's face, but it was predictable that trying to do so would trigger my ptsd, and that is exactly what has happened. while there is no possibility that their "therapy" will have any actual effect, i am slowly coming to the realization that i'm going to need actual real therapy to help me recover from the trauma that's been inflicted on me.
Wednesday, June 5, 2024
my main pc has now died on me c. 2007, 2014 and 2024. the first two times, i was able to force the bios into the board using the boot block (2007) and then a bus pirate (2014). the psu still works, but the fans aren't spinning at all. this is a worse problem than previously.
i don't know what happened. i woke up to a dead pc and it looked like somebody had ripped the power button out of the console. i don't know how the power button became disconnected from the console.
the machine has no wireless and is airgapped. the pentium d chip has no remote management part in the chip, which is what i've been trying to block access to because it's what they're trying to break into. i know my landlords are trying to hack my network. it seems obvious that they bricked it when i was asleep.
yeah.
either they shorted it or they tried to flash it and it bricked. i don't know yet. i can't fix it if it's shorted, but i can maybe reprogram it.
this was an expensive pc when i bought it, but it would not be expensive to replace it, although i would need to be very particular about it. the applications running on this machine cannot use multicore processors well. this blazing fast pentium D, with 2x3.8, is going to perform better using these applications than a newer quadcore is, which is counter-intuitive but why i built the thing the way i did and why i bought a quadcore for the video editing machine and not the recording machine.
the fact that you can't hack this processor is also a benefit i'd like to keep.
i blogged what happened the last time the machine wouldn't post, in march and april of 2014:
i thought i saved that site but i can't find it now. i'd like to find it again.
Monday, June 3, 2024
biden is concerned about his re-election bid.
he has consistently taken bad pr advice from questionable sources, and this is just another example.
almost nobody is going to consider a war in israel to be a ballot issue, except for right-wing christians. these dumb kids in the tents are just trying to get laid, or are so outside of the spectrum that they're unreachable.
the mainstream position in the united states is strongly in support of israel, and biden is in truth going to lose more voters in the middle than he's going to gain on the fringes.
let's be clear about this: these hamas sympathizers are the fringe of the fringe. i would label them as far right, even if they call themselves left wing. i couldn't tell the difference between these pro-hamas protesters and the kind of white supremacists you see organize in the deep south; if anything the white supremacists are less blatantly racist.
mainstream opinion in the united states is overwhelmingly pro-israel and has no sympathy for hamas at all and biden is going to get bludgeoned by trump on the point if he doesn't wake up to that fact.
it's worth pointing out that john kerry lost an election he should have easily won, and his position on the war on terrorism was a central part of that.
Friday, May 31, 2024
the way that liberals think often makes me laugh.
so, you liberals don't like netanyahu. you don't like trump. therefore, netanyahu and trump should get along. right?
no.
donny doesn't like the jews so much, guys. that shouldn't be a hard thing to guess, either.
netanyahu would rather biden win. certainly.
this is really quite the tirade. you don't see politicians much of anywhere letting loose like this. he's actually done this before, too; there's a half dozen examples of ford letting loose on immigrants like this.
the weird thing is that doug ford won immigrant voters in both of the last elections, by a good margin. in fact, it's been widely speculated that ford is premier because he does extremely well with recent immigrants, who like the machismo and the gravitas. people from other parts of the world think it's weird to vote for women, and insane to vote for gay men. that's the actual reason ford does so well with people recently arrived from africa, south america and the middle east, particularly; he looks and sounds like a linebacker. you or i think that makes him come off as a clown; they love that village idiot quality. further, nobody wants to leave those third world conflicts in the third world more than the literal refugees of those conflicts. this soft-left knee jerk might want to re-evaluate the helpfulness of calling the guy a racist, as a dozen refugees sit beside him and nod - they don't want that shit here. at all.
i want to sidestep the observation that this is more than a little bit uncouth coming from anybody in 2024 and rather ask if he may have a point about whether we're screening our migrants effectively. i've asked that question myself, in significantly less inflammatory language.
well. are we screening our refugees effectively, or are people getting into the country that should be barricaded entry when they try to get in? that's a valid question, and what he's actually trying to articulate.
the ford family is a very strange phenomenon. everybody in every corner of this country would grimace at this outburst. it will not cost him votes; he will carry immigrants by a huge margin, yet again.
Sunday, May 26, 2024
while i agree that the charges against israel lack a solid evidentiary basis, sanctions against the icc would be a bad idea and the united states and it's allies should withdraw this threat.
the united states, israel and others had an opportunity to have a seat at the icc and it chose not to take it. while that means that these countries are outside of the icc's jurisdiction, that doesn't eliminate the icc's jurisdiction over those countries that have chosen to work with it. the united states needs to respect the independence of these nations even more so than the independence of the court.
however, i think the baselessness of the icc accusation demonstrates that the icc also needs reform, as much as the charter limitations made apparent by the icj's injunction indicate that it needs reform. the united states should be involved in this reform process.
the united states should react by reversing it's previous wrongheaded policy and choosing to participate in the court, not by threatening to sanction it. american participation in the icc could present a number of attractive options for getting rid of people like saddam hussein and implementing regime change in iran or saudi arabia that are better than the military option.
the icc should be a tool to implement the hegemon's policies, not an annoyance in it's side. this request for an indoctment indicates that it was a mistake to avoid participating in the icc and that this mistake should be corrected.
Saturday, May 25, 2024
unexpectedly, i'm working on some new music this weekend. like, completely new.
i've become aware that somebody upstairs (i think my landlord) is trying to hypnotize me in order to detransition me. this is really out there, crazy stuff from my perspective, but a google search has indicated that sleep hypnosis is something that an assortment of quacks and lunatics have attempted over the years to "cure" "homosexuality". sleep hypnosis is not the only thing they're doing, but it's one of them.
they are trying to enforce a gay male identity on me. frankly, i think being transgendered is more sane than being gay and that if we are to clinicize one of these two things we ought to label homosexuality a mental illness before we label transgenderism one (after all, transgendered people generally come out of the process as straight in their preferred gender identities, and not queer), which is leading me to conclude that this person is more on the rad fem or greenwald part of the spectrum, rather than some kind of religious fundamentalist, and that is consistent with what i've been experiencing. you assume you're dealing with a christian or a muslim (a muslim is a more likely fundamentalist nowadays, in canada...) when you run into religionist bullshit, but the evidence consistently points to feminism as the religion that's driving this, rather than anything abrahamic, although there clearly have been muslims and arabs upstairs doing the actual dirty work.
i'm simply not a gay man. i've never had sex with a gay man. i've never dated a gay man. i've had kind of sort of relationships with straight men, mostly before i realized what was happening and kind of stopped myself from falling into it, but i've never had anything resembling any kind of gay encounter. i don't even have any gay friends. i am trans, but i don't call myself gay or queer and would aggressively reject being called homosexual in any sense. they're just wrong. but, they seem to think being gay is normal and acceptable and being trans is some kind of illness, when i think all evidence suggests the opposite, and that leads me to the conclusion that they would have to, themselves, be gay. my landlords were indeed presented to me as lesbians.
so, i've been recording myself sleeping to catch them, but they seem to have cameras in here (that i cannot find with an rf scanner), and stop the pseudoscience whenever i turn the recording on. it's frustrating, but if the disincentive works, it works, at least for now.
as such, i have hours worth of audio to sort through and while it's not picking their bullshit up, it is picking up sounds and other voices. as i am sorting through these sounds, i'm realizing i can get creative with this.
the rules for this project are that i'm going convert each day's worth of recordings into an industrial/ambient composition, and present the result as a series of demos to be completed when i get to 2024 in sequence, which could be quite a while. i want these to be compositions in the end, and not just soundscapes, but they will be dominantly sample collages, with the recordings as the sound sources.
this will be an entirely new project in the inri records catalog.
i want to actually get back to work, but i can't. they're constantly spying on me. they're hacking my network to try to steal my passwords and the best i can do is slow them down. they hack my camera system and break in here when i'm asleep. i can't stay online for more than a few minutes at a time. i think they want to steal all of my stuff and take over my youtube, blogger and bandcamp sites. rather than do all of things i want to do, i'm forced to fight with these losers that have no chance of actually stealing my things and that i want to just fuck off and go away. starting a new project that is a corollary of what i'm being forced to do, rather than do what i want to do (which is get back to completing the discography, in sequence), is making the best out of a horrible situation. so, let me get to it.
i don't know when this situation is going to resolve itself. these losers are actually enjoying this as they're competitive and capitalist lesbians that actually like to fight with the people around them rather than try to cooperate with them. they use references to football and also to chess. they think that evicting me and stealing my belongings is a game that they intend to win; i just want them to fuck off and go away. these are aggressive, dominant shitheads, which is a personality type i strongly dislike and go out of my way to completely avoid, but they don't get it, they just think i'm competing with them. it's exhibit a of why capitalism cannot coexist with real socialism; in a socialist society, you just simply can't tolerate losers like this, you have to send them on a one way trip to a different planet, or kill them if the technology to eject them into space doesn't exist yet.
i will have a better understanding of the situation in the first week of june, but i don't expect anything to change until the end of the summer at the earliest.
i've listened to the injunction against israel, as delivered by the president of the icj, and i want to briefly summarize it because this is the kind of thing that goes viral all wrong, and i have the background to make sense of it properly. you've probably been misled on purpose.
the order is relatively standard legal fare and, while perhaps somewhat meddling, largely reasonable. the shortform analysis is:
1. a few months ago, the court told israel not to break international law during it's operation to dismantle hamas, but stopped short of deducing that had already happened or was imminent.
2. some shit happened
3. now, the court thinks that there's grounds to order an injunction for israel to halt activity that might lead to an infraction of international law while it adjudicates the complaint made by south africa
4. israel will then write the icj an essay explaining why it isn't breaking international law and isn't going to, either. the court will then decide whether to lift or extend the injunction through the length of the trial.
this isn't a finding that israel has necessarily done anything wrong, it's an injunction for israel to pause while the question is adjudicated, and which gives israel a number of opportunities to demonstrate it hasn't broken any laws and shouldn't be sanctioned. in terms of legal consequences, it's kind of irrelevant, except to change the court's starting position from a general "israel needs to make sure it doesn't break international law" to a more specific "israel needs to stop what it's doing and explain to us why it hasn't broken international law and isn't going to". it is certainly not a guilty verdict in the genocide case.
if this were a real court with real jurisdiction and israel were a citizen under that jurisdiction, it would be obligated to follow the injunction and write the essay. if the court is fair, and israel is really innocent and reasonable, it should then have the injunction lifted, in a month. i might point out that these accusations are questionable, but that is what this process is about, israel proving it hasn't done anything wrong.
yet, jurisdiction is determined by a monopoly on violence, and that is not in force. israel's greater concern is the court of public opinion.
the court also briefly called for the release of the hostages, but if the icj has some theoretical jurisdiction over israel, it has none over hamas. i think they should have included this call in their order anyways just for show, but the icj has no business ordering hamas to do anything, nor would it listen to them. this is nonetheless extremely important and what israel should base it's response on.
if i were israel, i would ignore the letter of the injunction but follow the spirit of it. i would not halt my operations in rafah, but i would write the icj the essay explaining why i'm not in contravention of the law, as requested. while israel has in past years and operations blatantly ignored international law, they actually seem to be doing this correctly, this time. call it irony or karma or what you will, but i don't think it's fair to assume israel is making the mistakes it used to make, given that all evidence i can find tells me that they actually aren't, and that they are following the law the best they can, in good faith.
i would also release a statement that israel is willing to follow the injunction if it is bilateral, but not if it is unilateral. that is, i would release a statement clarifying that israel will stop the rafah campaign if hamas releases the hostages, so that both parties are following the injunction but, however, that israel cannot follow the injunction unilaterally, and that the order that they do so (in the absence of a recognized state in gaza) is not fair or balanced.
i am not sure exactly what israel could then do to try to alter the rules of the situation. the court has acknowledged that hamas is in contravention of international law, but has no jurisdiction to order them to stop. it is not fair to expect that the rule-abiding party follow the order, while the rule-denying party evades the order, and that is a systemic issue that needs to be addressed, perhaps by modifying the charter so that this kind of imbalance can not happen again.
israel should not ignore the injunction or claim it's anti-semitic, it should follow the spirit of the injunction (but not it's letter) and respond by trying to reform the institution to undo what is really a loophole that hamas is taking advantage of. after all, israel has a very powerful ally and this is but one example of a flawed international order that is long overdue for systemic reform.
there is something i've noticed about the diet i've been constructing over the last few years, which is that it is mostly new world originating produce. this wasn't done intentionally, but it is in theory more sustainable, as these plants evolved here, so long as it's actually done that way.
examples:
peppers: paprika, cayenne, hot sauce
sunflower seeds
strawberries
avocado
quinoa
raspberries
blackberries
blueberries
cherries
tomato
pineapple
guava
coffee
these items make up a hugely central part of the various dishes.
other items like oranges and bananas are not indigenous to the americas but are major crops in the hemisphere.
you might consequently call this the "americas diet" and note it tries to take advantage of the higher nutritional value of crops that have been domesticated most recently.
Friday, May 24, 2024
while my hair is now long enough to be presentable (while still too short), i'm not going to get out to detroit this weekend and will likely be stuck inside most of the summer.
i thought the people stalking me moved out on may 1st, but they didn't. that narrows it down, seriously, to the actual owners or some members of my family, which may include my mother, my sister and my aunt. i have a hearing on may 27th that i expect to win. there are further hearings scheduled in june, september and october about complaints i've made. i will want to wait to see if there's a turnover on june 1st, but i will need to either move or have the property sold and the locks changed before i'm comfortable going out, and even that could be a while. i've been stalked, and the stalker wants to steal my gear. there's no guarantee that moving will throw the stalker off.
i wanted 2020 to be my blowout year; i've now missed several years, and it might be too late, unfortunately. i'm getting a little old, now.
people didn't used to believe i was almost 40. i'm now almost 45, and it's a little more apparent. i don't want to be obviously too old to go out dancing or be told i'm too old to get in. i can do that filter on myself.
so, i can't go out because some pathetic people will steal my belongings if i do, and i'm really sad and angry about it but it's reality.
i don't know exactly what's going on, but i think the stalkers upstairs are reading posts to this site and i have to be as clear as i can that there is no possibility that i'm going to have children. this seems to be a primary motive; somebody, apparently a family member or family members, wants me to breed.
it's ultimately the unwanted children themselves that suffer the most from being unwanted, and i don't want to create another unwanted child in this world. i'm not remotely interested in taking care of a child. i don't want the responsibility and i would not take any pleasure or gain any joy from it. all that a shit machine means to me is a form of slavery forcing me into unwanted labour in order to pay for them.
i successfully avoided making that mistake in the early part of my life. i'm 43 years old, now. now that i'm older and smarter, i'm not about to make that mistake, now.
these people don't seem to care much about science, so they don't want to listen to the fact that i'm castrated and unable to breed. i did not save sperm because i didn't want children.
the only way i could "start a family" is to adopt, and i have infinitely less interest in being enslaved to a stranger's mistake, after having avoided creating a mistake of my own.
this is very stupid and unhelpful. i do not want children and would not be a good parent because i don't wat children. that mistake would end up neglected and ignored and unwanted like a million others, including myself.
my mind is not going to change; i made this decision when i was young and i've never considered revisiting it. i have always known i would never breed, and have never remotely wanted to.
i have better and more important things to do than waste my life raising children.
Thursday, May 23, 2024
i have updated my diet to a weekly schedule, partly because it makes it easier to adjust to the need to order groceries once per month. you can compare this to the mediterranean or whatever diets out there.
i do not use added salt and i try to make most things myself. you should pick a relatively decent caesar brand (do your homework) and you should note that the frank's is often a less harmful substitute for salt. i add cheese, ice cream, bacon and salami to actually get fat, as the diet is void of it, otherwise. i don't like the taste of milk; this is a better option than drowning it in chocolate.
monday AM - cereal:
45 gram all bran, 40 g vector, 15 g of wheat bran, 1 tbsp of flax seed, 10 g of nutritional yeast (w/ b12), 10 g of hemp seeds, 17 g of paprika, 1 tbsp of sunflower seeds, 400 ml of sugarless & fortified soy milk, 250 mg of vitamin c (1/2 of a 500 mg pill)
monday noonish - brunchy fruit bowl:
150 g of strawberries (frozen, usually), 2 bananas, 1 kiwi (with peel!), 1 mango (with peel!), 1 cara cara orange, 1 avocado, 10 g of hemp seeds, 1 tbsp of sunflower seeds, 125 mg of vitamin c
monday PM - avocado/guacamole pudding:
2 avocados, 1 tbsp cumin, 1 tbsp paprika, 10 g of nutritional yeast (w/ b12), 1 tbsp of sunflower seeds, 10 g hemp seeds, caesar salad dressing, frank's hot sauce, 30-50 g of retinal fortified cheddar cheese, 125 mg of vitamin c. you might dip whole wheat bread in this, but i just eat it with a spoon.
(vitamin c is normally taken in 125 mg doses at 00:00, 6:00, 12:00, 18:00, except mondays, where a double dose with the cereal is therapeutic)
tues AM: quinoa salad:
1 orange, 1 avocado, 1 red pepper, garlic, 1/3 cup of quinoa (cooked like rice in water & frank's red hot sauce), 1 tbsp nutritional yeast (W/ b12), 1 tbsp cumin, 1 tbsp paprika, 1 tbsp hemp seeds, 1 tbsp sunflower seeds, caesar salad dressing, frank's hot sauce, 50-75 g of retinal fortified cheddar cheese
tues PM: ice cream fruit bowl:
100 g of frozen strawberry, 1/2 container of raspberries, 1/2 container of blackberries, 1/2 container of blueberries, 2 bananas, 1 kiwi, 1 tbsp of hemp seeds, 1 tbsp of nutritional yeast (w/ b12), 200 g of chapman's cherry ice cream, with extra fresh cherries when available
wed @ noonish: tossed salad:
50 g of kale stalks, 50 g of broccoli, 110 g of carrot, 1 beet, 1 red pepper, 1 tomato, garlic, 1 tbsp of cumin, 1 tbsp of nutritional yeast (w/ b12), 1 tbsp paprika, 1 tbsp hemp seeds, 1 tbsp sunflower seeds, 1 tbsp oregano, frank's hot sauce, caesar salad dressing, 50-75 g of retinal fortified cheddar cheese, 1 tsp of cayenne pepper, black pepper
thurs early AM: bacon-avocado-tomato sandwich or melt
two open pieces of quinoa + flax whole wheat bread each built with, in order: olive oil margarine, (avocado + garlic), (1 tbsp nutritional yeast w/b12 + 1 tbsp paprika), (five slices of retinol fortifed cheddar cheese + 1 piece of low sodium bacon), caesar salad dressing, 1/2 a sliced tomato, frank's hot sauce, pepper, with a glass of 30% grapefruit and 70% orange juice
this could be a melt if you want.
friday at 00:00: fettucine
on plate: 1 tomato, 1 red pepper, thyme, basil, oregano, garlic, avocado
add mildly cooked fettucine, with, in order 1 tbsp of olive oil margarine, 150 g of fresh pineapple, (2 pieces of low sodium bacon + 100 g of fried spicy salami or some other meat like grasshoppers in the future when available), 1 tbsp of cumin, 1 tbsp of nutritional yeast (w/ b12), 1 tbsp of paprika, 1 tbsp of hemp seeds, 1 tbsp of sunflower seeds, caesar salad dressing, 130 g of grated marble cheese.
microwave or bake until cheese is melted.
then add frank's hot sauce, black pepper, cayenne pepper
with a glass of 30% grapefruit and 70% orange juice.
friday PM: caesar salad
110 g of chopped kale, garlic, avocado, two limes (with peel), 2 slices of low sodium bacon, 1 tbsp of cumin, 1 tbsp of sunflower seeds, 1 tbsp of nutritional yeast (w/ b12), 1 tbsp of hemp seeds, 1 tbsp of paprika, 1 tbsp of oregano, 1 tsp of cayenne, two pieces of whole wheat bread (including the germ) as croutons, 1 cup of fortified sugar-free soy milk, 1 tbsp of olive oil margarine, 100 g of retinol-fortified chedder cheese, frank's hot sauce, caesar salad dressing, black pepper and a glass of 30% grapefruit and 70% orange juice.
saturday PM: nachos
preferably, 1 small bag of zesty cheese doritos + 1 small bag of dill pickle doritos, or 1 big bag of zesty cheese
add homemade salsa on chips: 1/2 tomato, 1/2 red pepper, avocado, garlic, 1 tbsp oregano, 1 tbsp cumin, 1 tbsp paprika, 1 tsp cayenne, black pepper, frank's red hot sauce,
add 1 tbsp of hemp seeds, 1 tbsp sunflower seeds, 1 tbsp nutritional yeast, 2 slices of low sodium bacon
add 130 g of grated marble cheese.
microwave or bake until cheese is melted.
then add caesar salad dressing, frank's hot sauce on top
w glass of grapefruit/orange juice
sun AM & sun PM: eggs (twice on sundays)
two pieces of flax & quinoa bread open, each with (in order) margarine, same salsa as nachos above (with remaining red pepper and tomato), 1 piece of low sodium bacon, 1 tbsp of nutritional yeast (1/ b12), five slices of retinol-fortified cheddar cheese, two fried eggs (sunny side up), black pepper and
a glass of grapefruit/orange juice
this makes my shopping more predictable for a while, until i'm able to go out of the house again, once the fight with my landlord subsides.
i'm not certain if i'll hold on to the added dishes, which are the pasta, the bacon-tomato sandwich and the nachos, but i'm leaning that way.
Monday, May 20, 2024
what do i think should be done in gaza?
the idea that gaza is or should be an independent country is moronic and people stating as much cannot be listened to or otherwise taken seriously. anybody suggesting a palestinian state as an outcome of this process should be laughed out of the room; that is not a serious discussion.
gaza needs a marshall plan, and it needs to be done under heavy israeli occupation, in conjunction with a un peacekeeping force. they should depopulate the entire region, bulldoze it, rebuild it and then focus on ensuring that the new inhabitants receive a secular education that separates them from their recent history of islamism. this focus on a secular education is of the utmost importance and the primary tactic that is required to prevent further conflict in the region. a particular focus on economic development should also be fundamental.
international law is likely to be more of a hindrance than a help in stabilizing the region and some attempt to reform the international institutions to rewrite some laws to be less conservative and allow for more aggressive processes of needed change may also be required. this legal regime was written to freeze the world as it was in 1945, and that is no longer what anybody should want and something that needs to be moved on from. this is a situation where forced population replacement is helpful to the stability of the region, and the law should allow for it rather than try to stop it. this idea that all population replacement is criminal needs to be re-examined.
once the region is rebuilt, i think there should be a referendum to join egypt, with egypt's consent. if that referendum fails, some talk of statehood may again become relevant some time around 2050.
the substantive part of the prosecutor's application for a warrant against netanyahu would appear to be the (baseless) clam that he's starving the population, which is not rooted in clear evidence and which i do not expect to be granted. the israelis claim that they're being careful about shipments in and out of the country to stop weapons smuggling, and that's a convincing argument. further, the fact is that gazans aren't starving and that israel is only indirectly responsible for the absence of any sort of economy in gaza and the presence of poor eating habits, which is mostly cultural. i would like to see an objective comparison on child malnutrition performed between gaza, egypt and the united states; i would expect the result to be illuminating. the prosecutor needs to demonstrate grounds that include intent, and i don't think he can even establish that the facts on the ground justify a charge at all.
it is well documented that hamas hides behind civilians (and uses hospitals and schools as bases) and that hamas' tactics are what is primarily responsible for the high collateral. there is simply no clear intent to target civilians, as could be demonstrated in a court of law (israel can clearly demonstrate a number of things it does to avoid civilian targets, and consequently even avoid a negligence charge), and there is simply no actual mass of starving civilians, despite repeated warnings that such an outcome is imminent which never seem to materialize.
as such, i would expect the justices to reject the warrant against netanyahu and gallant as lacking in merit.
if you read through the statement by the prosecutor, it is apparent that the warrant request is some kind of identity politics designed to balance the much more grounded application against hamas leadership, including that currently living in qatar. it is much easier to demonstrate that the oct 7th attack was planned and intentionally slaughtered civilians and took them hostage; this very clearly meets the definition of an obvious war crime that can actually be prosecuted in a court of law, as we have real victims and we actually have intent. the prosecutor's statement is full of weasley words and both sidesism that make it clear that the court doesn't want to be seen as taking a side in the conflict, and is therefore charging representatives of both parties to evade a claim of pro-israeli bias.
this is unfortunate and comes off as amateur. hamas is a terrorist group that needs to be brought to justice; the israeli state is trying to do that using the methods available to it, and should not be lectured by distant academics in their comfortable ivory towers. yet, for whatever political reasons, they seem to have felt the need to do this, and it can only be criticized for what it is.
if there is a potential issue of bias to note, it is rather worth noting that the prosecutor is a muslim and as such has a conflict of interest that should cause him to defer the case to somebody of non-muslim background. history will harshly judge a muslim prosecutor framing this attack on "zionism" using the warped language that they use.
there is an extremely strong case for war crimes against hamas and i expect the warrants to be granted. this is a positive development; the qatar leadership should be rotting in the hague.
conversely, the legal case against netanyahu is exceedingly weak and i would be very surprised if the court grants the warrant request at all, let alone if there's any sort of trial.
instead of pretending that there's some kind of equivalence between hamas and the israeli state, or that both sides should be held to the same standards, i would call on the icc to acknowledge that this isn't a war but a police operation and that israel has the right to dismantle what is essentially an organized crime syndicate operating on it's border in order to stop it from committing crimes in it's territory. there is some language in the statement that indicates that there is a realization that what is happening is not a war and should not be framed as one, despite the propaganda from al jazaeera and the jingoist press releases from the knesset.
the political considerations here are likely substantive, as past israeli leaderss (most notably ariel sharon) legitimately should have been charged with war crimes, and were not. this police operation to shut down hamas is the most justified israeli action in decades, yet it is the one that gets the response from the icc, as weak as it is. netanyahu is a very prickly character that is widely disliked, but that doesn't create the legal justification to charge him with such weak evidence, when his predecessors were so obviously guilty of actual crimes that could have been actually prosecuted and were not.
the icc might even be charged with collectively punishing netanyahu for the crimes of sharon, but we're not there yet.
my opinion on marriage is that it's an archaic institution that has no place in modern society and should be abolished. to the extent that it ought to exist at all, it ought to exist as a purely religious ceremony. i actually would very forcibly argue that enforcing a separation of church and state in a secular society means removing the state from any responsibility of oversight or definition of marriage at all; the state has no place in the activity of marriage, it is strictly a religious function.
what that means is that if the religious psychotics want to define marriage as heterosexual, i actually think they have a right to do that, as marriage is their idea and their institution. a secular society rooted in atheist civil traditions would not have marriage at all, as it is not a secular idea and doesn't make any sense in a truly atheist worldview.
it would follow that if gay people want to invent their own religion and define their own institutions, they ought to be free to that, i guess. i mean, to the extent that any kind of marriage is stupid, gay people getting married isn't any more stupid. this isn't something the state should be involved in defining or overseeing, it ought to be a religious institution and process that the state has no power to interfere in.
this is a legal and civil opinion: marriage is obsolete, but gay people shouldn't be told they can't get married, if they can find a religion to marry them, and they really insist.
but, my personal opinion is that gay marriage is a dumb idea that is attempting to enforce a concept of human nature that is contrary to our biological instincts and our normal behaviour. lesbian marriage strikes me as particularly stupid. nobody should be surprised to find out that gay marriages rarely last more than a year, and the average length of a lesbian marriage is measured in months. these girls are all just lying to themselves.
when i meet married lesbians (particularly), i have a hard time taking them seriously. either they're (in fact imminently) going to cheat on each other and end their friendship in a vicious cat fight as they accuse each other of being controlling, or it's an open relationship and they're not really married. this is not real marriage by any sort of meaningful definition, and no thinking person would ever interpret it that way.
Sunday, May 19, 2024
torpedoing raisi's helicopter wouldn't be sufficient retaliation for iran's insane strike on israel, but it would be worth at least two missiles, re: a tit for tat response.
i'm actually in support of assassinating the iranian leadership, and i would have been in support of assassinating saddam hussein, despite my opposition to the 2003 invasion. this is a far better tactic.
iran has a real opposition movement to the fundamentalists. i don't know if it's a majority, exactly, but it may be enough to tip into critical mass, if it gets a little help from the outside.
biden would rather deal with benny gantz than old man netanyahu, and i don't know the half of it or what interpersonal conflicts have developed between two men that have been near the top of their respective countries for the last thirty years, but i want to point out that i bet roosevelt hated churchill's guts, and you can tell just by looking at the pictures of the two of them, 80+ years later, and he didn't pull the trigger until after the war because he knew better.
i would hope the people of israel interpret gantz' ultimatum cynically. it's not helpful, right now.
i grasp that there's innocent people being held in terrible conditions and there are people that love them that don't want to lose hope, but if you give hamas what it wants then it will do this again, and they've broadcast as much. the prime minister can't do that, as it's not in the country's interest. this is hard, but hold your resolve, israel.
israelis don't talk about martyrs, and i don't think they should start, either. these are not fallen soldiers, they're murder victims. but, their memories will outlast them, and those affected need to see the bigger picture.
it seems like nobody wants to tell them that, but they must be told it.
Tuesday, May 14, 2024
the pentagon should consider a remilitarized germany to be a greater threat than an economically recovered russia, and i'd suggest it's likely that it actually does.
if the consequences of military support for ukraine are german aggression, which is inevitable, that is not in america's self-interest, or britain's.
canada should not be paying for this.
national polling in the united states is not very helpful right now and will become less helpful over the upcoming years, as rural america disappears underneath a wave of exurban and suburban housing projects that give the democrats a decisive structural advantage.
biden should be favoured to win. substantively.
but shit happens.
Monday, May 13, 2024
let me correct a historical misunderstanding while i'm at it.
did you know that the nazis, and hitler, actually liked islam? because they did, and because there's actually a longstanding pro-islamic thread in german history going back to a seminal history textbook called the history of the decline and fall of the roman empire by edward gibbon, as published in the late 18th century. gibbon's thesis was that christianity contributed to the fall of the empire by making it "decadent" and "weak", via it's embrace of pacifism. islam, on the other hand, was a militaristic religion that made the arab armies strong and dominant. for that reason, islam is superior to christianity, and a vigorous civilization (like the germans) should choose islam over christianity.
"Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers [...] then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world." - adolf hitler
now, of course, the nazi elite actually adhered to a kind of neo-paganism that was about trying to reconstruct an indigenous german faith to replace this jewish system of christianity with, but the nazis were classist and saw the value of the jewish value system to brainwash the masses with. don't try to make sense of nazism; nazism is like quantum physics, nobody really understands it. just shut up and compute. so, the nazi vision of the world was something like there being a german elite of neo-pagans at the top and a mass of muslims at the bottom.
for that reason, the nazis did not persecute muslims. there are some anecdotes of muslims being persecuted, mostly because they were mistaken for jews, and a handful of arabs ended up at auschwitz because they were homosexuals or communists, but there simply wasn't any kind of systemic extermination of arabs or muslims at all. to the contrary, the nazis sought out alliances with nationalistic muslim resistance armies in the middle east because they were fighting the british. the muslim nationalists saw a "natural ally" in hitler, as they had a common enemy, the jews.
the italians complicated this, and hitler was actually pissed off about it. hitler actually criticized mussolini directly for making it harder to win the support of muslim nationalists.
again, that doesn't mean that every muslim was a nazi. but, think about it. the ideologies are actually quite similar, if you do a rational comparison. these muslim leaders were correct - hitler was their natural ally.
there's even a wikipedia page about this:
every once in a while i hear somebody suggest that being critical of islam is in some way some kind of nazism, and i always just gasp. this is actually one of the most ignorant positions you could possibly take.
attacking jerry seinfeld is just the most recent demonstration that these protesters are in fact nazis. seinfeld has nothing to do with this.
listen, i know there's a fine line here. i agree that criticizing israel is not anti-semitic. however, what we're seeing repeatedly, and everywhere, is at times vicious attacks on individual jews and not reasoned criticism of netanyahu's government.
i've been in these protests, and i know the truth, which is why i'm so quick to react. i'm an anarcho-communist; i'm on the furthest fringe of the left. these are, at least nominally, my tribe out there. yet, i know they hate jews, because i've seen it. even when they are presenting reasoned critiques, and it isn't anti-semitic, you can tell from their tone of voice and their body language that the jew-hating is visceral and real and the actual driving force, not some level of solidarity with palestine or hamas - because these are people that have no common ground with hamas at all.
the right is correct, here; this blatant jew-hating has become mainstream and it's an issue that needs immediate addressing. i'm critical of islam, but i don't treat individual muslims like this at all. i know that people are diverse and it's not fair to make assumptions.
Thursday, May 9, 2024
the name palestine derives from an ethnic group that occupied the gaza strip during the iron age and leading into the classical period and that is referenced in the bible as the philistines. this ethnic group is also referenced in egyptian hieroglyphs as having migrated into the region during a period called the bronze age collapse, c 1500 bce. cross-disciplinary historical investigations, including genetic studies, have identified the philistines as a greek ethnic group that moved into the gaza area as a part of a large migration southwards that the egyptians referred to as 'sea peoples' and would appear to have been a mix of indo-european groups, including halstatt period celts. these sea peoples conquered the eastern mediterranean region and dismantled most of the urban centres, replacing them with a seafaraing civilization that became what we call the classical civilization of greeks and phonecians, as told to us in the homeric epics. my own opinion after having looked into it is that they were essentially early vikings.
during the period that the philistines lived in gaza, west semitic speaking tribes inhabited the region between syria and egypt. these people are known to history variously as phoenicians (the greek name for them) or canaanites (apparently their name for themselves), and what we call israel and jewish identity broke off from the canaanites some time during the iron age, but it actually remains unclear how due to the obscuring and enduring influence of the bible, which is a useless source of actual history. there is essentially no evidence that anything in the bible before the captivity is anything more than a late founding myth, but it is relatively clear that a semitic speaking people migrated into the area with the persians and re-occupied the phoenecian coast, after it had been devastated by the barbaric assyrians. these are the people we today call the jews. outside of a linguistic continuity, it's not clear what relationship these jews actually had to the canaanites and phoenecians, the remnants of which fled assyrian barbarism by migrating to north africa. however, these jews then remained put in the levant through most of antiquity, while living in close proximity to the greek philistines, who, quite oddly, were actually there first.
what eventually happened was that the romans conquered the entire area, made the area then called judea into several different provinces and, many centuries later, eventually renamed the area from judea to philistinia in a conscious attempt to redefine the space ethnically, and in an act that we would today label clearly as genocide. before it was persia, the mortal, perpetual enemy of rome was carthage, until it was destroyed. the historical sources are not there to back me up, but i strongly suspect that the destruction of judaea was the last stage in the destruction of carthage and that most of the tropes we today label as anti-semitic (like the baby-eating thing) are actually roman propaganda against the carthaginians (although the carthaginians actually do appear to have practiced a type of child sacrifice relatively late into antiquity). this decision by rome to change the name of the province was eventually adopted by conquering arabs, who inherited the name of the province as philistinia, which in arab is falasteen and in english is palestine.
in depth genetic studies on the current inhabitants of gaza and the west bank, as well as what we call israeli arabs, indicate that they are overwhelmingly hebrew in ancestry. that's right - the palestinians are actually converted jews. however, if we could find some actually philistines in gaza today, and we no doubt could if we looked hard enough, we would learn that they are of r1* indo-european greek ancestry. these philistines could perhaps migrate back to europe; i'd propose their quality of life would dramatically increase, if they did.
while the question of eastern european jewry's origins is a valid scientific question, it has at this point been extensively studied and determined that there was a genetic bottleneck that took place and that a small number of middle eastern men moved into eastern europe with a smaller number of women and did eventually marry some of the slavic speaking women that were indigenous to the region but overall retained an almost gross level of inbreeding. as such, it has been thoroughly scientifically proven that eastern european jews do in fact have overwhelming middle eastern ancestry. the claim otherwise is intuitive and based on skin colour, but skin colour is not exactly a fixed characteristic, and people that are not of subsaharan african ancestry will vary their skin tones wildly depending on their exposure to sunlight. pigmentation is a variable trait and an adaptation. my own skin colour has varied dramatically from swedish white to sicilian brown, and my picture archive demonstrates it clearly.
while the actual truth is that both jews and palestinians are actually hebrews, they are just hebrews with different religions, it nonetheless follows that philistines are a european tribe and ethnic group, while the jews are clearly of west semitic ancestry (despite having very curious iranian cultural overtones). if anybody should go back to europe, it should be the philistines, if we insist on having a witch hunt to actually find them.
Wednesday, May 8, 2024
i'd really rather boycott metro or sobeys if i was concerned about high costs, as loblaws is actually relatively competitive. the cheapest grocery store here is walmart, as it is everywhere else, but loblaws is frequently a close second.
the boycott appears to be lowering prices, though, which is predictable.
Monday, May 6, 2024
justin trudeau still doesn't know what the rule of law is, and at this point he should be embarrassed because he simply comes off as horribly ignorant, like a pretentious child using words he doesn't understand. the irony is that his government has repeatedly skirted or even suspended the rule of law, such as with the illegal police crackdown on the bodily autonomy rights protesters that shut down ottawa a few years ago.
there has been no government in canada's history with less respect for the rule of law, or which has suspended it with such disregard.
Sunday, May 5, 2024
i think this is a fitting and appropriate way to dismantle these sites. i mean, the sites needed to be dismantled in some way. how to do it? this is the most appropriate and most correct way to do it. i would like to see this tactic applied to the other sites across the country. let's make these idiot protesters feel the same way the victims of the hamas attack did, up to a difference of scale; it's worthwhile to point out that nobody was killed and i hope nobody was actually raped.
i want to point out that it is obvious that the counter-protesters were police officers from the anecdotes in the times article, and that shouldn't surprise anybody. i like the cops' sense of humour, snark, irony and justice here, which is rare. i don't normally applaud the cops, but this is awesome. they even sent firecrackers into the camp, like palestinian terrorists routinely send into israel, in an apparent tongue-in-cheek nod to norman finkelstein.
the irony of pro-hamas supporters complaining about their party being ransacked by masked vigilantes should not be lost on anyone.
but, this is fundamentally about muslims complaining about being colonized, which is hilarious.
those "kids", who are apparently mostly actually middle aged men without university educations, should be happy that nobody raped them, killed them, or tossed their severed body parts around in the street.
the bbc is claiming that netanyahu's decision to close al jazeera will not help the peace negotiations. i actually disagree.
in principle, the israeli state should not be shutting down any media organizations. the unquestionable factual reality that al jazeera is a horribly biased, openly anti-israel source that spews factually inaccurate, skewed, brutally anti-jewish propaganda out to the west, and that their warped framing of the conflict as "israel's war" is actually having some effect on a subset of the population, is a reason to not shut al jazeera down.
however, al jazeera is state media run by the qatari sheikhs. it's a mouthpiece for the qatari government, who has played a major role in representing hamas. where does the head tyrant of qatar actually live? in a cushy villa in qatar, where he's bankrolled by iranian nazis. qatar is also an iranian beachhead on the arabian peninsula. when one of the primary news sources, as poor and propagandistic as it is, is also a lead negotiator, that creates a conflict of interest. eliminating that conflict of interest should help focus the qataris more on the plot.
that doesn't mean it's something that should be supported, exactly, but the bbc is wrong in it's analysis, at the least.
Saturday, May 4, 2024
of course the capitalist pro-drug vampires will mumble something about "removing the stigma around drug use". right. what does that mean, exactly? because it's an objective fact that drug use is disgusting, unsanitary, unhealthy and not something that normal people want to be around, for the reason that it attracts criminals and that drugs make people crazy. drug use is a vector for disease transmission. there is a stigma around drug use because it's disgusting, and that stigma should absolutely remain in place.
should we try to remove the stigma around scatology while we're at it? mmmm. yummy.
rather, what these people are saying is that they want to normalize drug use, and anybody telling you that should get punched in the face.
the stigma around drug use is a good thing and should remain in place. addicts should not be brought out of the shadows, they should be locked in closets and brushed under the rug.
Friday, May 3, 2024
bc is recriminalizing drug consumption in public spaces. the truth is that they didn't understand the idea around legalizing it in the first place, because the idea was being pushed by capitalist opportunists rather than actual health experts. the same thing, or more, is on the brink of happening in washington and oregon. these are blue states that might be handing the republicans a gift in the upcoming election cycle. i'd keep an eye out for some surprise upsets in the pacific northwest, due to public bafflement that the state won't do anything about dangerous drug users, which is what the actual policy was and not what the policy is supposed to be.
in portugal, which is supposed to be the model, the state continues to run the kind of mental health institutions that are considered to be arcane in north america and that is what the actual policy is in that country. portugal does not have a libertarian drug policy that lets the free market deal with drug use, it has a socialist model that rounds up drug addicts and puts them in mental health institutions, where they are forced to undergo intense rehab in a manner that would be considered unconstitutional in both canada and the united states. this is not some kind of secret; it's easily found in a basic google search. unfortunately, it would appear that neither the political activists nor the politicians nor the minority of health workers that have supported this approach have ever actually read up on what the portugese model actually is, but have instead relied on second or third hand word of mouth descriptions that no doubt originated in social media posts. the idea that the portugese model is a free market model is a purplemonkeydishwasher interpretation of what the portugese model actually is, and this is an actual example of a real life failure in policy brought on by poorly sourced information sharing over social media (and yet is not the kind of 'disinformation' we hear about by pro-government scare mongerers).
it's worthwhile to point out that when useful and correct information that contradicted bad policy by the state was shared over social media, it was attacked as 'disinformation' but the same state bodies were equally eager to write bad policy based on actual poorly sourced information that came to them via the same vector of social media. this proves that the problem is not the technology itself, but the people using it; we should not fear computers or social media, we should fear state institutions run by ignorant people and we should approach the problem by launching education campaigns for government workers, to ensure that the state is better at processing information it receives from questionable sources. we should fear ignorant public servants, not the tools they use to poorly gather information with.
it takes little to no foresight to predict that a free market drug policy divorced from the socialist portugese model of aggressive, enforced rehabilitation would simply lead to chaos, carnage and death. we in truth were not following the portugese model of recent years, but the chinese model of the nineteenth century, when british gun ships introduced opium to the chinese masses in order to weaken the population, and the chinese state didn't take the threat seriously. china certainly takes the threat of mass drug addiction seriously, nowadays. yet, the governments on this continent see the populace as a threat and an enemy to contain, which is fundamentally different from the cultural communitarianism that exists in china. you have to understand that the state is killing people on purpose and that it isn't some coincidence that it targeted portland, oregon, which is the most socialist city in the country.
what's happening, however, is a moral panic rather than a carefully thought out change in policy. while predictable, moral panics are not helpful and don't create good policy, either. we're moving from one failed policy to another, which is reflective of the systemic failure underlying all of the failure in the first place.
i'm typing this as i'm yelling at a smoker that lives upstairs that i thought had moved out and apparently hasn't. this person signed a non-smoking lease and then ignored it. she knows i have asthma, she knows the property is non-smoking and she's listened to me yell at her to go smoke somewhere else for months but she just keeps smoking anyways. this person doesn't care about the well-being of the people around her in the remotest bit; she's simply a worthless, self-centered piece of shit. is there some mental illness underlying her selfish and narcissistic behaviour? my guess is that it's mostly bad parenting, and a culture of hedonism. she's a reflection of the capitalist society she exists within. yet, what i'm experiencing is a clear example of why a policy that forces drug users into residential areas is exactly what nobody wants. this woman chain smokes nicotine and occasionally smokes marijuana; i've smelled some heavy substances that i think might be meth, but she doesn't seem to smoke meth every day. if you're annoyed by the crackhead at the park because you don't want your kids around her, imagine having your kids forced to breath the shit in twenty times a day from your neighbour because the government tells her she's only allowed to smoke crack inside her apartment. this is not a better outcome, this is the worst policy possible. public health experts have been trying to rid the world of second hand smoke for decades, and then the stupid government shows up and tells addicts (who are almost always renters) that they're only allowed to smoke drugs inside their rented units, thereby creating a government policy to maximize the consequences of second-hand smoke. what a disaster.
rather, what we need is something like bars for drug users. bars were the ideal compromise to deal with moral panics around alcohol use, as it kept the drunks inside while keeping them out of residential areas. i don't understand why we haven't had marijuana bars pop up, as it would get the potheads out of residential spaces, where they pollute the lungs of non-smokers. likewise, we should have bars for crackheads and junkies, places where the cops can also keep an eye on what's going on.
i support the actual portugese model of aggressive treatment, to a point. i actually think that most of these people are hopeless and that trying to help them is just a waste of public resources that could be spent on more worthy social assistance recipients, like disabled people. i would rather continue to criminalize hard drug use and force people into treatment when they're in jail (which is the only way we could implement the actual portugese model in north america, because we have bills of rights), and i think there should be hefty $1000+ fines for smoking anything (marijuana, cigarettes, fire pits, bbqs) in residential spaces. nobody should ever have to deal with any kind of drifting or second-hand smoke from their neighbours, ever, at all. yet, if we're to treat the issue like a mental health issue then we need to actually take that idea seriously and generate the resources to do so, not wave our hands and leave it up to the market to figure it out. that is the lesson from the failed free market drug policy in the pacific northwest: free market approaches just don't work.
Thursday, May 2, 2024
the comments are reprehensible and i condemn them in the strongest terms possible, but this is exactly the situation that free speech advocates seek to avoid in criminalizing clearly despicable speech. by arresting this woman and charging her with hate crimes, the state is creating a martyr, who will generate supporters. now, she can claim she is the one being persecuted, when she should be being criticized as an aggressor and a nazi. this is a gift to what is in truth the far-right, even if it labels itself as left-wing.
a better idea is to let her speak freely, and call her an idiot when she's done.
Wednesday, May 1, 2024
Sunday, April 28, 2024
we were supposed to support voting for joe biden because donald trump was going to start a world war. how did that work out for us? i didn't endorse either of these shitfaces last time and i'm not going to endorse either of them this time, either. this is in truth the least consequential election of my lifetime, as the outcome will clearly have no discernible effect on any kind of policy anywhere. it truly doesn't matter who wins.
however, i think that something sobering needs to be seriously considered: both of these men are very likely going to be dead by the year 2028. donald trump's running mate should consequently be the deciding factor in whether you should vote against him or vote for a third party. i found mike pence to be infinitely more frightening than donald trump, and trump may very well present another absolutely frightening running mate, which might make voting for kamala harris necessary, if undesirable.
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