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Cake day: September 19th, 2023

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  • Yes, the Germanic tribes most certainly did eventually impose their culture and law on the Romans. Do you remember who sacked Rome in 410? It was Alaric of the Visigoths, which was a Germanic tribe. The Visigoths definitely imposed their laws, the Visigothic Code, when they could on the territories they colonized. And that was after a couple of hundred years of various Germanic tribes setting up relatively peaceful colonies in the Roman Empire. After they sacked Rome, they wanted to adopt the authority and prestige of the Roman Empire, so they became foederati, left Italy, and colonized southern Gaul. Then they colonized Spain by booting out another Germanic tribe, the Vandals, and imposing the Visigothic Code on the locals there. However, this weakened their position in Gaul, so the Franks came along and booted them out, imposing yet another culture and set of laws and creating the basis for modern France. Then the Arabs came along and defeated the Visigoths in Spain and imposed yet another culture and set of laws. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera ad infinitum for all of human history. So, remind me again who the bad guys and the good guys are?

    Edit: And with regard to North America, I wouldn’t say that Europe colonized North America in any kind of organized way at all in the beginning. European countries competed with one another for land and trade, and many colonists were independents fleeing religious persecution in Europe. My first ancestor in North America was a poor French farmer who left Europe in 1650 because the nobility owned all the land in Europe and he didnt want to be a serf. He didn’t have some evil plan to trick the Indians and eventually take the whole continent. His small group of farmers didn’t even bring many women. My ancestor married a local native girl. He and his little group largely integrated with the native people. They got the benefits of French farming techniques and crops, and he got the benefits of a new family and culture and the know-how of the locals. Of course, the Church also came along an their motivation was to convert the natives, but from their perspective that was about saving souls (misguided as that was), not conquest and genocide. A while later, after many more Frenchmen had migrated to North America, the French nobility became more interested and the king decided that he would make a more serious claim, but even then he was mostly trying to keep the British out. The French largely remained allied with the natives. Eventually, it got to the point where North America was no longer just a source of furs and an outlet for unpopular religious minorities in Europe and colonization kicked into high gear. The natives were literally at the Stone Age level of technology – no metal-smelting, no written language, not even the wheel – so they simply had no ability to maintain their sovereignty and culture once the European machine really got going, so they got steam-rolled. Thats not even considering the terrible effects of being exposed to Old World diseases that they had zero immunity to. Modern estimates are that 90% of the indigenous population of North America died of various Old World diseases long before serious permanent colonial expansion began.

    My point is, once again, that many people have been indoctrinated to a narrow, black-and-white view of colonization. It isn’t a separate thing from migration, it is one part of the continuum of migration. If you think of it on a continuum, it becomes hard to sustain the binary good vs. evil narrative that you seem to be stuck on.


  • Sure. How do you imagine colonization actually happens? It is rarely a bunch of conquistadors invading and defeating the local population and then genociding them. It is almost always a long process of migration, perhaps punctuated by conflict and perhaps not. The Greeks founded colonies all over the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, some of which exist to this day. Not every colony becomes an overwhelming nation state. When various Germanic tribes invaded Rome at various times, they came and settled on Roman territory in their own little colonies, sometimes with authorization and sometimes not. When the first Europeans came to North America, they set up tiny little agricultural colonies and mostly had a peaceful (if awkward) coexistence with the local native tribes.

    Over time, though, the power balance may change and then the colonists may start to demand more control. If the original and the invading cultures aren’t compatible, or if resources are scarce, they may end up at war with each other. What you think of as “colonization” is the most extreme form where one side is so technologically superior and aggressive that the original inhabitants simply have no chance. The weaker culture is subsumed and perhaps even destroyed by the stronger one. But it rarely starts out that way. Colonization is a spectrum from small colonies within a larger dominant culture to extreme cases where the colonizing culture completely displaces the existing inhabitants, and everything in between.

    So, is it really as simple as good guys and bad guys? If you think so, think about it some more with a more objective and less doctrinaire lens.




  • When Germanic tribes invaded the Roman Empire because they were pushed West by the Mongols, were they the bad guys? When the Romans killed Germanic peoples to prevent them crossing the border, were the Romans the good guys? When illegal immigrants cross the US border in their literal millions to escape the poverty and oppression of central America, are they the bad guys? When the Anishnawbec tribes invaded the territory of the Sioux and expelled them because they were pushed West by the Algonquin, were they the bad guys? The Inuit killed the Dene who were encroaching on their territory because of starvation, were they the bad guys or were the Dene the bad guys? When Hannibal invaded Rome and killed thousands of Italians over several years and attempted to genocide Rome, was he the bad guy, or was Rome the bad guy when they subsequently invaded Carthage and ended the war once and for all? Who were more evil, the Arabs who bought Afrcian slaves, or the African tribes who kidnapped their own people and sold them to the Arabs? History is a series of actions and reactions, not a set of good guys and bad guys.


  • I’m listening to the CBC right now and the prevailing opinion I’m hearing is that the Democrats lost because Biden waited too long to step aside. Talk about learning all the wrong lessons.

    Watch how the Liberal narrative will emphasize that. They want Trudeau to step aside, and if (when) they lose to the Cons they’ll say it’s because Trudeau wouldn’t step aside. Or if he does step aside, he didn’t step aside early enough.



  • This is a lazy and simplistic worldview. Every single square mile of land has been colonized, conquered, re-conquered, and conquered again. In other words, every culture has been both colonizer and colonized. Human migration has been occurring since time immemorial, and human migration generally means displacing whomever was there before. It is often a chain reaction, where one migration causes another, causes another, ad infinitum throigh history. In the most dramatic situations we sometimes label it genocide, but usually it’s more of a slow blending of cultures (and genes) over time.


  • I don’t feel as bad as I thought I would. I’ve been an NDP voter all my life, so like most lefties I was shocked by Trump’s win in 2016, horrified by his COVID bullshit, and appalled by his conspiracy theories and violent rhetoric in the 2024 campaign. Trump is so obviously horrible that I kept asking the same question: how could HALF of the US electorate support him? I just can’t believe that HALF of America are fascist misogynistic white supremacists.

    So, I started listening to alternative media. For example, I listened to Trump’s interview with Joe Rogan (yes, the whole three+ hours). I listened to Bari Weiss’s Honestly podcast, where she talks to disaffected progressives, and had a great debate between Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro. And many others.

    So far, this is what I’ve come up with:

    1. The Democratic Party has abandoned the traditional working class, or at least the working class feels abandoned by the Democratic Party. The Dems have become “cultural elites” that too many average people just can’t identify with at all. Trump may not be good for the working class, but at least he speaks to them and their concerns. This of course leads to a discussion about how the Dems would have a better relationship with labour if they hadn’t fucked over Bernie Sanders.
    2. The Democratic Party has become obsessed with identity politics, at the expense of real issues that matter to most people. Identity politics is pure poison that has become the leftist version of McCarthyism to a lot of people.
    3. The Dems foreign policy is seen as weak by both the left and right. They fucked around on the Ukraine war to the point where Russia is now winning. And they lifted the sanctions on Iran that allowed it to fund Islamist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis and blow up the Middle East. And the left is pissed off that they don’t speak out against Israel’s aggressive policy toward the Palestinians. So, the Dems aren’t pleasing anyone when it comes to foreign policy.
    4. The Dems had a good issue with reproductive rights, but a lot of states are moving to protect reproductive rights on theor own (including ballot measures), which may have relieved some of the pressure on Trump.
    5. People talk a lot about Trump being better for the economy. I’m not sure economists would agree, but that is a large part of the sentiment favouringTrump. Edit: 6. Immigration. How could I forget immigration. Illegal immigration really pisses off Americans, including and perhaps especially among legal immigrants. I’m not sure that immigrants love Trump’s immigration position, but most of the country see the Dems as too ideologically compromised by identity politics to be able to do anything constructive on immigration.

    You don’t have to agree with those positions and I don’t plan on defending them. This is just what I’ve picked up in trying to understand why so many people vote for Trump.

    There are some important parallels and lessons here for the next Canadian election. Trudeau and the Liberals parallel the cultural elitism of the establishment Democrats. Singh appeals more to the identity politics culture warriors than he does to the working class. This is a big departure from the NDP’s traditional roots in the labour movement. And Poilievre is Trump’s mini-me. So, what can we do in Canada to avoid a repeat of the left’s failure in the US election? Doubling down on identity politics and cultural elitism isn’t going to go well.


  • Virtue signalling: the act or practice of conspicuously displaying one’s awareness of and attentiveness to political issues, matters of social and racial justice, etc.,

    Virtue signalling is used by both left and right as a signifier of their political affiliation. You can recognize it by the fact that the signalled statement doesn’t make any sense except as a political signifier. For example, people who say that Trump won the 2020 election when he obviously did not are either virtue signalling or are complete idiots.


  • The “United Nations pontifcate”…that’s a great phrase I don’t think I’ve seen before.

    With respect to your comment, though, aren’t we all hypocrites to some degree? We all talk a better game than we actually play, and that is not unique to the West. It is a part of human nature. In fact, you could say that hypocrisy is the first step towards aspirational improvement. I also disagree that the West expects perfection from the global south. Far from it. If that were true, we wouldn’t give aid to anyone. It seems to me like you are virtue signalling without thinking through your claims.




  • According to NOAA, the ocean was originally not very salty but became saltier over time as rivers eroded the land and delivered the dissolved minerals to the ocean. At the same time, salts crystallize out of the water and are deposited on the ocean floor. This input and output are now more or less balanced so the ocean is not getting saltier. Apparently, this salt cycle involves about 4 billion tons of new dissolved salts being added to the ocean each year and about the same amount being deposited from the water to the ocean bottom.

    So, why aren’t rivers salty? Apparently, it is because rivers carry only a small amount of salt and are kept fresh by constant rainfall, whereas the ocean has been accumulating salt for the last 4 billion years.

    Lakes that don’t drain to the ocean, like the Dead Sea, can get salty over time, just like the ocean.






  • I agree. Canada doesn’t need to be embarrassed because we provide arms to an ally that is under coordinated attack by Iran and its many proxies. Yes, some criticism of their operation in Gaza and failing to resolve the Palestinian situation over the last 40 years is warranted. However, the attacks by Hezbollah and Iran show what the situation is really about, and we should proudly be helping Israel protect itself against the medieval theocracy in Tehran, and the Hezbollah death cult that has also pretty much destroyed Lebanon.

    Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea. Plus their terrorist proxies. That’s the “resistance” to the West. Whatever you think about the terrible situation with Israel and the Palestinians, there is little room of moral equivalence here.