Metaneos

It is very often important to use correct words in arguing/debating with political opponents. However, it is also very important to protect the words we do use from co-optation by our opponents who would attempt to render them meaningless. Take the word, Woke, as an example. Woke, in its terminology, when used by Black activists was used as a shorthand for knowing about Institutionalized Racism. That government service agencies were often built with anti-Blackness right into their foundation. That someone was woke meant they knew things were wrong at a foundational level for Black people and other minorities. Extreme right-wingers though have been working to co-opt this term, wanting to render it meaningless, using it to describe some "woke" army of people who'd tear apart the whole of society with "wokeness" to appease some special interest groups that are themselves anti-society. To be honest, it is laughable how far these extremists are going to use this form...

Yanis Varoufakis has described a state of affairs which should have us all worried: capitalism has been replaced but not by socialism but instead techno-feudalism (Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism (ISBN: 9781847927279)). That instead of moving forward, Western economies have instead retreated back into a neo-feudalism. That non-wealthy people have been transformed from free people to renters, and owners of corporations into rentiers: "(People) will own nothing, and be happy", as European technocrat had put it some time ago. There is much to what Varoufakis has argued: the things we buy have turned into boxes that can hold licences. Computers programs have transformed into apps which require yearly rental fees instead of being programs that we buy once and can use forever so long as the disc lasts. We can no longer buy movies, music albums, and games but instead licenses to play the movies, music, and games, which can be revoked at any time by the license issuers. We c...

Honestly, I can't quite wrap my head around the fact governments allowed spread of misinformation that gave them cover to allow spread of this virus unchecked. Covid-19's not going to go away at this rate. Any and all mitigation efforts are left to the individual, and nary a care about society as a whole. Then again, I can believe what has happened. It's happened before, historically. Cholera was allowed to spread unchecked for decades before governments ever bothered to do anything about sanitation. TB was basically controlled on the private level and ignored on the social. Any and every virus/bacteria that could spread was allowed to spread unchecked without much effort to thwart spread from government officials. Edgar Allan Poe didn't write "The Masque of the Red Death" out of a sense of hope for what the rich and powerful were doing in regards to illness in the early 19th century, after all. No, I can believe what has happened, and quite easily. I come fro...

 I've caught it as of at least a week ago. It's been awful since. My chest is getting better and worse, better and worse. Today's it's worse. It felt as though it was getting better as of yesterday but this morning I didn't feel so confident. Tested. Positive for Covid again. I feel a stubborn mucus in my chest that won't be dislodged with coughing. Then again, that could just be Covid at work in my heart and lungs. There's a weird taste in the back of my throat sometimes. The "taste" of Covid, I guess. Knowing what I know of Covid-19, I'm fairly morose. All I can really do is hope there's no long-term complications from this bout.

There's a disconnect in BC provincial politics between the problems and solutions of society. On the one hand, the province is stating it'll build 2,000 living units over ten years: " Province announces 'historic' agreement with Metro Vancouver, B.C. Housing to build 2,000 affordable homes ". However, on the other hand homelessness in BC is above 8,000: "Data collected from 25 counts conducted across B.C. in 2020 and 2021 showed 8,665 people identified as homeless, including 222 children under the age of 19 who were accompanied by a parent or guardian", B.C.'s homeless population expected to show increase when counts return in March . Just as importantly, even with an additional 2,000 public housing homes being built over ten years, there yet remains a significant amount of people earning below the recommended amount people need to earn to afford even the rent of lower-cost privately owned housing units. According to the BC Non-Profit Housing Ass...

The long tail of Covid-19 continues to coil around the throat of Western civilization, growing ever tighter, compressing the chest and stomach of society, inducing ever more and more death from heart attacks and strokes. We are witness to a spectacle observed very rarely in human history, that of the beginning of near-total collapse of civilization brought upon by novel virus. Once upon a time, smallpox spread across the continents of North and South America, bringing to the ground where the bodies were conveniently buried over in shallow graves the cultures and civilizations of North and South America. The colonizers were free to run roughshod over the ever decreasing survivors as though what had happened and what was still happening was not just inevitable but just in some form. The people of the West were anointed to spread across the landmass. It was destiny manifest. The lands were cleared with very little war and hardly any risk for the invaders. The greatest risk was encroaching...

Trudeau’s Money Heist: Emergencies Act Allows Seizure of Bank Accounts, Securities, Crypto of Those Suspected of “Links” to Convoy Members w/o Court Order   Just a reaction going off on a tangent from Yves Smith's thinking on this. She's misidentified what's important about the Liberal Party invoking of the EA. There's a sentiment that the protests are mainly American funded, and following the money will bring us to the doorstops of particular American groups of people with vested interests in ending restrictions and discrediting Covid-19 measures. The EA invoking is likely not about stopping the money (although certain individuals will probably be targeted to set examples, and the banks will play along with this as Canada retains far more control over its banks than the US does theirs). It's about discovering where the money's coming from. And getting these names will probably lead to certain discrete talks between Canadian and American officials about maybe ta...