daezor
3d ago
The anti-ICE protesters shout "Get the fuck out of our neighborhood!" which seems to evince some sense of ingroup territoriality, just one whose boundary is drawn differently.
daezor
7d ago
And the public telling of the traumatic narrative would be a communal art form to supplant earlier and outmoded forms like the folk song or the heroic myth.
My first thought is that heroic myths often do involve stories of traumatic childhoods. And this trauma is not merely incidental, but is often a key part of what motivates the hero (to seek revenge, or whatever). So, what's new? Perhaps the absence of catharsis? Or the sense that trauma itself is what confers moral worth? (If the Romans honored Romulus, it was not because of his trauma!)
daezor
9d ago
I should register the customary skepticism of hunter-gatherer (ad venatorem-collectorem?) arguments:
- Present-day hunter-gatherers don't necessarily live lives similar to those of the distant ancestors of present-day non-hunter-gatherers, because it's only in very distinctive environments (e.g. places poorly suited for farming) that that lifestyle persisted.
- The 10,000 Year Explosion and its ilk would argue that evolution has continued apace in historical times, so even our own hunter-gatherer ancestors don't necessarily share much in common with us.
daezor
25d ago
Haredi culture already has a zero-sum, winner-takes-all status competition reminiscent of capitalism in the form of obtaining Rabbinical positions
Doesn't the increasing population lead to an increased demand for rabbis?
daezor
26d ago
A common objection might be that math or logic is not physical, but mathematics and logic can be instantiated in the physical - one can count apples, one can apply inputs to silicon logic gates. Let me clarify a bit. I am not saying that math and logic are physical. I am saying that despite the apparent ontological cost of introducing new categories, that cost is in reality dramatically reduced because as we can see by instantiating them physically they are not separate magisteria but manipulations of this one.
There are fields of mathematics about things that can't exist physically - geometric objects in dimensions greater than 3, infinitely-detailed fractals, higher infinities, etc. And before you say "we can program physical computers to write and check proofs about those objects" - this is a confusion of levels. What exists in those computers is a bunch of symbols describing the objects, not the objects themselves.
daezor
29d ago
I started to see this with the Brian Thompson shooting last year, where in the immediate aftermath, people online were commenting about how the as-yet-unidentified shooter could escape by taking such-and-such bus route to a particular Canadian airport that has direct flights to the following non-extradition countries, etc.
There was a little of this with the Charlie Kirk shooting also, with the added spectacle of the FBI claiming not once but twice that they caught the guy, only to realize it was the wrong guy, during which time it seemed like the actual shooter could have easily gotten away if he had made any effort to do so.
I do worry that if people start to actually get away with murder in this way then it'll spell the end of what little privacy and civil liberties we still have. ("What are you doing, citizen, trying to ride the bus without your papers?")
daezor
29d ago
The shooting at Brown seems to have targeted the class of a professor of Israel-US relations.
I have to squint really hard to discern any kind of motive for the Brown shooting. The aforementioned professor was not present at the time since it was just a weekend study session led by a TA and not an actual class, and anyone who was specifically targeting her would have known this. Meanwhile, the two fatalities are a Christian student and a Muslim (-sounding) student. (Source: Wikipedia).
daezor
30d ago
The first sentence contradicts the second - cultural relativism and identitarianism assert that we are inescapably bound to the particularities of who we are, and are therefore precisely a rejection of overarching metanarratives and objective truth. So it's not clear what stage in the process you think we're undergoing now.
daezor
30d ago
I think you may be using the term "post-modern" in a nonstandard/confusing way. AIUI postmodernism is specifically a rejection of the "modernist" ideology that flourished in the early part of the 20th century. We can vaguely gesture at some word associations:
- Modern: science, reason, secularism, progress, legibility, imperialism, hegemony, technocracy, evenly-spaced rectangular grids, communism, capitalism, centralization, globalization
- Postmodern: mysticism, ways-of-knowing, holistic, degrowth, localism, populism, -core/-punk, stuff like this, decolonization, marginalized voices, identity politics
So it seems what you're gesturing at is more accurately binned with the "modern -> postmodern" transition, which has been going on for a while now. Or do you claim we're entering a new stage, of "post-post-modernity"?
daezor
1mo ago
It seems the Bloody Code was only the tail end of it.
perhaps 0.02% of the English population suffered death by execution in the average year of Henry [VIII]'s reign
Compare with modern-day Oklahoma, which tops the US rankings with 3.101 executions / 100,000 / 48 years, roughly 1/300 of Henry VIII's score.
I don't know how this compares to other parts of the world around the same time, but the other aspect of this is that executions will only bring about an improvement in social trust if they're administered in a somewhat "orderly" fashion, as punishments for crimes of which the accused is more-likely-than-not to be guilty. (A comparable death rate brought about by indiscriminate mass killing will not have the same effect.) In England I'd guess the legal execution regime prevailed at least 600-700 years, starting from the time of Henry II if not earlier.
daezor
1mo ago
daezor
2mo ago
ICE is deporting lots of people.
This is not really true; deportations now are being done at a lower rate than the Obama admin's average, and pretty much the same as in 2024 under Biden. See https://factchequeado.com/teexplicamos/20250820/obama-deportations-trump-biden-numbers/
The "theatricality" with the street recording / media backlash / DHS rebuttal cycle seems to be part of a PR strategy by the Trump admin to make it look like they're being tough on illegals without actually doing anything different.
daezor
6mo ago
daezor
6mo ago
Maybe they get into college four years early. But now they're fourteen on a campus with eighteen year olds who are theoretically their peers, and unless there is someone there to act in loco parentis they may not cope well.
Maybe someone can start a college that only accepts 14-year-olds (but otherwise has the same admission standards as regular colleges).
daezor
8mo ago
It's a distinction of Sense versus Reference. The California hippie who travels the world in search of spiritual wisdom and winds up adopting (say) Tibetan Buddhism is not doing the same thing as the Tibetan layman who practices Buddhism because that's just what their people do.
Which is all well and good, since Buddhism has a core that is (purportedly) true regardless of how one arrives at it. But the irony of "trad-LARPing" comes in when the ideology has no substance or justification other than its supposed traditional status, i.e. tradition-qua-tradition, something of the form: "This society has lost its way because there are too many individualists, people who think they know better than they did in the good old days. Therefore it falls to me, the lone heroic seeker, to forsake mainstream society and devote my life to poring through the ancient tomes (the more ancient the better) in search of the one true ideology." This is the same mindset as that of the wandering hippie, a mindset which (I claim) is more persistent and fundamental to one's character than any particular ideology which one may adopt.
daezor
8mo ago
This necessarily means that any rival ideology claiming to be conservative is actually at best regressive or at worst wholly unrelated to conservatism, since the de-facto conservatives hate being called conservative.
To elaborate on this point: The accusation of LARPing is most pertinent when it's "LARPing as trad", which is a sort of performative contradiction. The original sense of "tradition" (from Latin traditio) is "that which has been handed down", and not (as in colloquial usage) "the way things were at some point in the past" - but this equivocation is significant. The value of tradition qua tradition is in the Lindy effect, but if that's what you care about, a "tradition" that must be "RETVRNed" to is really no tradition at all, but a LARP. If the tradition (as in, the organic chain of transmission) was broken, such that you have to learn about it from old books rather than from your elders, then in fact it did not stand the test of time, and so it can't claim the Lindy effect to its credit.
daezor
9mo ago
The argument is these deportations, specifically, can happen to Americans as well as non-Americans.
See this comment in response to this point.
The founding philosophy of the United States does not consider natural rights to be dependent on citizenship or physical location. They belong to all people.
Whatever one may think about universal rights in an abstract philosophical sense, the fact remains that the US government is not an all-powerful deity sitting above humanity in judgement thereof, but is a collection of finite human beings who live in a particular time and place and have only a limited capacity to impose their will on the world. When the US goes around the world trying to spread democracy and human rights by force, it has generally not been very successful. It's not inconsistent to condemn human rights abuses abroad while acknowledging that the scope of the US government and its legal system ought to be limited to its citizens only.
But, returning to earth, it seems that Bukele's policies are widely approved by the people of El Salvador. On what basis can the American government (or, still less, an American judge) deny them?
daezor
9mo ago
due process afforded to US citizens to do things like prove they're a citizen in court
This equivocation on "due process" is a motte-and-bailey because the amount of process required to establish whether or not somebody is a citizen is far simpler than, and falls far short of, the due process (trial by jury, assistance of counsel, confrontation of witnesses, right to appeal, etc.) which is constitutionally required in criminal trials. The fact that Abrego Garcia is not a citizen (and is an illegal immigrant) has never been disputed by him or by anyone else, even though he has been through several administrative hearings (which, again, do not count as "due process" in the legal sense because of the lack of jury etc.) at which he could have presented proof of citizenship if he had it.
I will start to worry about my own safety and that of other US citizens if it comes out that the "administrative error" that led to Abrego Garcia being sent to El Salvador was one that was just as likely to have caught up an American citizen. However, that doesn't appear to be the case here. The government picked up a bunch of people from a list of deportation orders from immigration judges, not realizing that in Abrego Garcia's case the order specifically excluded El Salvador. If he were a citizen, no such order would've existed and so he would not have been deported.
And they're already making mistakes mixing up citizens with illegal immigrants
Again correct me if I'm wrong (since this is not purely academic but a matter of immediate self-interest for me to know correctly one way or the other if I'm in danger of deportation) but this has the appearance of a software bug where immigrants listed this attorney's contact info as their own and so a message meant for them was instead sent to the attorney. I don't think there's any realistic chain of events by which this attorney ends up being deported because of this.
daezor
9mo ago
The crux of the Abrego Garcia controversy is a dispute about who "morally" counts as an American citizen.
The rallying cry of the pro-Abrego Garcia camp is: "If they can do it to him, they can do it to any of us." In other words, they see no meaningful difference between him and a legal US citizen, and so there is no Schelling Fence that can be drawn between the two. On other hand, the pro-Trump camp who wants Abrego Garcia to stay in El Salvador are not at all concerned that they will be next, because in their view citizens and non-citizens are two morally distinct categories.
The slippery slope argument (e.g. Laurence Tribe yesterday, and Justice Sotomayor's concurrence) is that if the government gets its way with Abrego Garcia, there will be no legal obstacle preventing them from treating citizens in the same way.
But the thing is, this is already the case. The US government's treatment of citizens abroad is already effectively unconstrained by the law. The government can negotiate for the release of a citizen imprisoned by another country, but nobody would argue that the government is legally obligated to do this, and it's absurd to imagine a court compelling them to do so, because that effectively makes diplomacy impossible. (The US government must be able to value the citizen's return at less than infinity, or else they lose all negotiating leverage.) On the other hand, the government can drone-strike a citizen abroad without due process, and while that may stir up political pushback here at home, there are effectively no legal repercussions.
This is because, according to the constitutional separation of powers, foreign affairs are a quintessentially "non-justiciable political question". In common parlance this means: If you don't like what the government is doing, the proper way to fix it is through advocacy and the democratic process, not through the court system.
To which the pro-Abrego Garcia camp will gesture around at the crowd of protesters they've assembled, waving "Free Abrego Garcia!" signs, and say "Great, come join us. Here's your sign!"
But of course the pro-Trump immigration hawks see no need to take it up, because even if these protests have no effect, this does not in any way diminish their confidence that if a citizen were to be treated in the same way, then the backlash would be swift, universal, and sufficient to compel the citizen's return - no court order needed. For them, it is simply obvious that the failure of the Abrego Garcia advocacy has no implications whatsoever for the success of the hypothetical advocacy on behalf of a fellow citizen, and this is no cause for cognitive dissonance because citizens and illegal-immigrant non-citizens are two entirely separate categories.
Prior to anything else in the political life of a nation, there must be near-universal agreement on who constitutes the body politic for whose benefit the government exists and to whom they are accountable. If there is factional dispute over this basic question, then morally speaking there is no nation, but multiple distinct nations that happen to find themselves all mixed up in the same land. But I'm sure this is no great surprise.
daezor
1yr ago
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/28/us/ballot-box-fires-oregon-washington/index.html
The boxes are about 15 miles apart. The one in Vancouver is in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, where one of the most competitive House races in the country is taking place.
This seems to point to #2 - this was coordinated across state lines and not some spur-of-the-moment thing. But I can only speculate as to what the local anarchists think they're accomplishing by doing this. Maybe it's a far-left accelerationist thing: "We want Trump to win while Kamala supporters think it's rigged, so that the system will be discredited in the eyes of liberals and they'll realize that since voting D won't change anything, radical action is needed."
daezor
1yr ago
If the joke had been about Haiti I could see it being a boost for Trump, following the pattern where he dog-whistles racism shortly before elections in order to get racists to vote for him, even though he doesn't end up implementing any of the policies they support. But Puerto Rico was a non sequitur because nobody had been making a campaign issue out of anything related to Puerto Rico. I don't see it having any effect IMO.
daezor
1yr ago
Thus, females who fought back would not be passing genes on to the next generation quite as often.
Then tie that into the need to filter partners for 'Fitness' (as defined by prehistorical norms), and a male being strong enough to overpower and take a woman without her cooperation is an imperfect but not entirely incorrect proxy for a male who can produce and protect strong offspring.
Aren't these two factors contradictory? If the woman does not fight back, then there is no fitness filtering. Meanwhile, a rapist who kills his victims won't pass on his genes either.
daezor
1yr ago
Fisher's principle - Wouldn't maintaining an uneven ratio require constant, totalitarian intervention in order to resist the natural equilibrium-restoring force?
But then again, sex-selective abortion (of females) remains a thing in China despite it being illegal. This doesn't make sense from the perspective of biological evolution. From the perspective of cultural evolution, it only makes sense if the "abort females" meme is passed on more by fathers than by mothers.
Can we imagine a similar dynamic producing a ratio with more females than males?
There's a sense in which "culture" is an inherently otherizing concept. Culture is something for those barbarians over there, not for us civilized folk. We're not having a cultural festival, we're just having a good time. What we eat is not ethnic cuisine, but just normal everyday food. We're not imposing our values, we're just doing what's right.
So, for one to talk too much of "American culture" comes across like a concession that the hegemonic project has failed. It is a project wrapped up in an ostensibly universalistic ideology (in this case, something having to do with democracy, freedom, human rights, etc.) which is what justifies America's influence all over the world. If "Americans" are just another culture or ethnicity (spoken in the same breath as "Samoans", "Maltese", "Tutsis", etc.) then the whole ideology falls apart, and we become just so many decorative artifacts in a museum display case.
It's easier to see this pattern from the outside looking in. Every great empire-building people has to believe that they have transcended "mere culture" and have achieved some special calling that sets them apart from all the other peoples in the world - the Greeks with their philosophy, the Romans with republicanism and later Christianity, the British with their rule of law, the Russians with communism... But when the empire fails, what are they left with?
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