Canada's Disgusting Culture

 

Look at it this way.  The Israelis are insane.  And they're very thin-skinned.  Even though they've been openly conducting a live-streamed genocide for over a year, they refuse to accept criticism for their nazi-level barbarism.  I'd say that anywhere between 80 to 98 percent of them are sincere when they label criticism of their racist sadism as "antisemitism."  These self-pitying, coddled idiots can't see that it's the genocide that has turned the world against them.  It's "antigenocidism" not "antisemitism."

The whole time though, the "rules-based international order" has aided and abetted them.  The USA has funded them and gone into overdrive to re-supply them with weapons.  The vermin occupying power in the UK, France, Germany, Greece, etc., attack pro-Palestine protesters and keep the trade and weapons and funding going for Israel's murder machine.  Canada assisted in punishing the Ansar Allah in Yemen for their defense of the Palestinians' humanity by assisting in the USA's "Operation Rough Rider."  Canada has also been instrumental in "training" the kapos in the "Palestinian Authority" in the West Bank to beat-down protests against the racist brutality of the Israeli occupiers.

That's what we do.  That's who we Canadians are.  Perhaps half of Canadians gleefully support the slaughter of Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, because of decades of brainwashing by a propaganda system that masquerades as "journamalism."  Most of us don't care one way or another.  It's happening to people out of their immediate zone of interest and so it might as well not be happening at all.  But the decent, sane minority are becoming increasingly disgusted and and then angry.

And so that's when our idiot leaders decided to pretend to visit an "aid site" (where starving Palestinians are shot by US and Israeli nazis for showing up to get food) and the Israeli Child-Killing Force ICKF supposedly fired "warning shots" over their heads.  And it was this shooting at privileged foreigners (rather than the mass slaughter of innocent Palestinian civilians) that empowered the cynical stooges in the West to issue strong words criticizing the Israelis and to implement token sanctions against Israeli inviduals.

And this weak sauce was apparently enough for a significant number of Canadian progressives who desperately want to believe that their culture isn't entirely irredeemable.

 Addendum to my last post: Biden would say he was "working tirelessly" to get the hostages returned.  He was lying because 1) He didn't give a fuck about the hostages because Netanyahu didn't (and doesn't) give a fuck about the hostages.  and, also 2) Because he was VERY tired and he gave in to his weariness by taking multiple naps and sleeping 10 or 11 hours a night and all the other things that a dying, senile man does.

But when he was AWAKE he did (to the degree that he was able) try to do all of the racist, imperialist, scum-bag/shit-for-brains stuff that he'd dedicated his life to.  Like destroying Social Security, exploding the prison population (especially with Blacks and Latinos), and approving wars and illegal sanctions thereby killing millions around the planet.

I guess I finally understand where Hitler's fans come from.  The same sort of filth who would feel a twinge upon hearing of Biden's cancer diagnoses.  "Except for the mass murders of entire peoples of innocent men, women and children, he was a good guy!"

Not the Brilliant Argument They Think It Is

 

I'm in a weird mood this morning so I looked at Driftglass and then Lawyers, Guns & Money.  

"Evil and Stupid" Driftglass refers to those "centrists" and "moderates" who advocate for a third political party between the extremists of the left and the right as "grifters."  As opposed to his preferred Democratic Party USA, comprised of  vermin who sell-out the lives of their countrymen to oligarchic parasites (most notably private health insurance, Wall Street and the military-industrial-coplex) and who traumatize and slaughter millions around the world, and earn a pretty penny for it.  (Clinton's net worth:  $120 million.  Obama's net worth: $70 million.)

But don't call THEM "grifters"!

But the L, G & M post is about people (like the stupid Jake Tapper) talking about Joe Biden's infirmity.

I've noticed a few Democratic Party cult sites working this meme recently; "Why are people talking about Joe Biden when the fascist threat of Donald Trump is standing right before us?????"

It's astonishing how fucking stupid these assholes are.  Let me try to explain it to them.

You see, a couple of books have come out about the last presidential election.  (One of them by Jake Tapper.)  The one that Donald Trump actually won.  They've come out NOW because now is most likely the best time for such books to come out.  Timely.  Recent history.  So, whatever one thinks of Jake Tapper, it's understandable that he would want to talk about the book he's trying to sell.

And, if you'll remember, the Democrats, seeing the FASCIST threat of Donald Trump, in their infinite wisdom decided to put Joe Biden up against him as the incumbent rival.  They did that even though they'd had been deliberately hiding Joe Biden from everyone due to his advancing senile dementia.  They'd been doing that for pretty much his entire presidency.

So, they had FOUR FUCKING YEARS to anticipate the fascist threat of Donald Trump and they decided that Biden was going to be their (and everyone else opposed to Trump) man.

Well, okay, ... Biden probably wouldn't have been their first choice.  But if the Democratic Party of the United States of America's power-brokers had really pushed for someone else, the increasingly addled octogenarian Biden would've gotten VERY UPSET.  And, for four years I guess, the power-brokers inside the Democratic Party of the United States of America felt that if there was ANYTHING worse than fascist Donald Trump, it would be the ire of a befuddled, 80-something-year old narcissist being turned on them.

Here's some further levity:

BTW one thing that isn’t appreciated nearly enough is that the Democrats handled an absolutely horrible situation last July basically flawlessly under the terrible circumstances.

So, in other words, when their disastrous decision to go with the senile incumbent inevitably blew-up in their faces, they anointed the senile incumbent's unpopular, untalented, insincere, air-head VP to carry their banner.  And when she lost against the monstrosity of Trump due primarily to her own lack of appeal, including her disgusting adherence to the Biden policy of GENOCIDE, zombie-like Democratic Party hacks like the LG&M blog say that the whole thing was handled flawlessly.

[Much of that post is quoting someone else who decries the ignorance of US-Americans about Trump's perfidy.  And the LG&M writers blames "journalists" like Tapper, and right-wing propaganda outlets like "FOX News" for that.  Conveniently forgetting their own discrediting of themselves with the "Russiagate" conspiracy theory.  And their continued discrediting of themselves by continuing with the absurd denialism and covering-up of Biden's infirmities that they started in 2019 and are still at it as of today.]

2025 Readings II

 Some formatting issues occurred in the original 2025 Readings post and I don't know html so I can't fix it.  So I'm gonna make this post the place where I try and start again.  Stuff will follow ...

I read most of This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress.

The first few essays all pretty much said the same thing: there is no Theory of Everything. After reading the first essay, the following essays fell flat-- the point had already been made.  ...  And the redundancy of essay topics truly blunted the edginess of any attempt at a novel argument.  ...  I will spare you my frustration about the jargon-filled and ego-laden, pseudo-arguments made in most of the essays – at least for now. On a positive note, a few of the essays did teach us something new, and made us think deeper, drawing us to lines of thought far-removed from our typical work and interests. Like Infinity by Max Tegmark! Who knew there is more than one type of infinity?! The essay on Entropy by Bruce Parker was similarly notable. It tackled a complex problem and was able to put in words the typical confusion many have when grappling with the concept of entropy, which measures the amount of disorder in a system. The idea also actually seems radical, and it is one of which I have never before heard.  ... Notice that you don't need to own the book to read the essays, they are all freely available on edge.org. 

The book had some good stuff.  Apparently there's nothing to the idea that the language you speak molds your brain differently from people who speak a different language.  I'm going to have to dig deeper into the ideas presented in Ross Anderson's "Some Questions Are Too Hard For Young Scientists To Tackle."  But this is the sort of book you read when you have a lot of time to sit and think and read further.  At least some of the essays, the interesting ones.

 

Um, well, ... you see ...

 

First I read this: "Dear Generation Z, Where Are You?" by Michael Albert of "Z" fame.  In this essay he asks why they aren't out protesting:

Great. But Gen Z, you are 70 million strong. 70 million. Where are you? First one, then another.

I tell myself you are preparing yourselves. You are meeting to get your arguments in order.  You will soon burst amorously onto the activist scene. Trump to savages education. Trump exiles students. Did Trump’s troops grab you? Grab a classmate? Grab someone across town? Trump commands whole universities to bend a thousand knees and some rush to do so. Are you at one of those? Are you applying to attend? Are you at work wondering who gets fired next? You must be minutes away from boiling over, mustn’t you?

How Far We've Come

 

Thom Hartman at "Common Dreams" has an editorial about the truly dangerous territory that Trump is taking the USA into:

Opinion | Do You Understand How Dangerous This Moment Is — How Far We've Drifted? | Common Dreams

He insisted that justice must be blind to nationality or legal status; that due process, as encoded in the Constitution, must apply to persons, not just citizens. If the government could arbitrarily decide who deserved rights and who didn’t, then no rights were truly secure.

It was a radical argument for the time, but the Supreme Court agreed. Adams won. And in doing so, he helped define a cornerstone of American jurisprudence: that the rule of law exists to constrain the state, not to be selectively applied at the whim of those in power.

Fast forward to 2025, and that principle is now under direct assault.

The Trump administration, enabled by allies in Congress and the judiciary, has weaponized immigration law and executive authority in ways that Adams would have recognized and condemned. They are now detaining legal permanent residents, like Mahmoud Khalil, not for crimes, but for speech. They are targeting foreign students and legal residents — often young people of color — for deportation based on political views, often under the thinnest pretexts of “national security.”

...

Because once the government claims the right to strip anyone of due process, rights cease to be rights and become privileges, granted or revoked at the whim of those in power. That is not a constitutional democracy. That is the scaffolding of fascism.

And sure enough, what began with undocumented immigrants is now creeping toward legal residents, foreign students, and even American citizens. The Trump administration recently floated the idea — with a straight face — of deporting certain American citizens to El Salvador.

Let that sink in.

So far as it goes it is an accurate summary of the openly fascist, dictatorial Trump regime.  But Hartmann fails to mention the contributions of the Democrats to this nightmare.  Biden wrote the pre-cursor to the PATRIOT Act.  Hillary Clinton normalized bush II's moving government communications to private servers.  Obama chose not to prosecute the previous bush II regime's use of torture.  (Because Democrats had approved of it at the time.)  And he expanded the state's surveillance of the populace.  And he arrogated for himself a supposed legal right to murder US citizens overseas.  

There's more, but we don't need more evidence that the USA's slide into fascism has been a bipartisan effort.

First-Past-the-Post Did It's Job

 

First, read Ian Welsh:

Five months ago I would have said, and did say, that the Conservatives would form the next government, with Poilievre (a Trump figure) as Prime Minister.