naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
They appear to becoming more like performance art with time, which is likely the product of a growing audience.
This is absolutely my impression also.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
Buddhist or Shinto or something - I don't know, and I assume the creators of the ad didn't know either
I would assume Jainism! They sweep the ground in front of themselves as they walk, and wear facemasks to avoid inhaling bugs. You beat me to it by about 15 minutes.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
Adelstein ("Bentham's Bulldog") is a gifted philosophy grad student (I think--he was last year identified as a second year philosophy student in a well-regarded program). It's very impressive that he has multiple publications in top journals as a student. But his particular gift seems to be finding implausible positions and developing intuition pumps for them while neatly evading all the reasons why they are, even so, implausible. This is a good way to garner notoriety in the field. It is, not coincidentally, how Peter Singer really got famous. It is arguably why Jeremy Bentham is famous.
But I have to say that it is always disappointing to me when philosophers optimize for notoriety over the love of wisdom.
I think that all utilitarianism is mistaken, of course, because I am a contractualist who rejects aggregation. But Adelstein's take on veganism strikes me as aggressively, surely willfully obtuse--my priors are that it is more likely Adelstein is engaged in a kind of extended performance art, driven by the attention and notoriety he is accumulating, than that he is doing serious philosophy about the way the world really is. These are luxury beliefs par excellence--and maybe also anxieties of the sort that make people mentally ill. I guess I might be more willing to believe Adelstein was serious if I saw him walking around everywhere with a broom and facemask--and if he does, he's still wrong, but at least he's not performatively wrong.
Happy Independence Day to those who celebrate!
First they came for the Nazis, and CNN did not speak out--because CNN reporters are not Nazis.
From CNN Politics today: Law used to kick out Nazis could be used to strip citizenship from many more Americans
This is not a meaty article--it seems like "the news" these days is mostly breathless speculation over the worst possible outcomes of things the Trump administration might be thinking about doing. As a rule, the "unprecedented" things Trump does are in fact wholly precedented--just, you know, not like that! But the substance is approximately this:
The article is light on numbers--well, it's a speculative article--so I went poking around and was surprised (not surprised) to discover that this is nothing new. An AXIOS article from President Trump's first term (but updated just two days ago, apparently) suggests:
This sounds about in line with the CNN article's suggestion that
The CNN article does at least include information about the history of denaturalization, which is more bipartisan than you might initially imagine...
That's more direct quotes than I intended to use, but the point is that I was really struck by the article's framing. Yes, the law has been used to "kick out Nazis," though it was originally intended to kick out Communists. But it has also been used to kick out e.g. scammers and child pornographers. Basically, the weight of history and legal precedent is that naturalized citizens absolutely can be denaturalized and expelled from the country for a variety of reasons, substantially at the discretion of the executive.
Several thoughts: first, even if aggressively prosecuted, I have a hard time imagining more than perhaps several thousand naturalized Americans being returned to their countries of origin in this way. This is not an approach intended to change actual demographics; rather, it is a way for the government to influence public attitudes and perceptions by identifying "enemies" and distinguishing them from "friends." Deporting Nazis, even after naturalization, sends a strong signal that we don't take kindly to Nazis around here. And who would object to that? Object too strongly, and you might start looking like a Nazi yourself...
I don't think this is a deep or surprising point, but as a consequence I was a little surprised to run into such a self-aware wolf moment on CNN this morning. "We made a law to expel Nazis, but now it might be used to expel Hamas supporters! Everyone: clutch your pearls now!" What I think of as the obvious question--"should we maybe have been criticizing the ideological slant of this law when it was being used to expel Nazis?"--never even gets asked. From the perspective of the CNN reporter, it's not the law that is bad, it's just that Trump is the one using that law, and against people CNN would prefer it not be used against.
"I can tolerate anything except the outgroup," indeed!
Anyway, add this one to the "Trump opposition continues to be mad at him for enforcing their favorite laws against them" file. I feel like, in a sane world, this would be inducement for Democrats to reconsider their historic commitment to infinite expansion of federal power. Imagine how things would look right now if Joe Biden (or his handlers, whatever) had made it his mission to dismantle as much of the federal government as possible. The easiest way to prevent a "Trump Tyranny" would have been to make law in a way that precludes tyranny, rather than to insist on empowering the executive and conspiring to ensure only the "right" tyrants ever ascend.
Why is it so hard for people to take the libertarian lesson from such events?
As I said--neither deep nor surprising. But I thought it was at least a thematically appropriate question on July 4th (even if Constitution Day might have been a better fit). The document of "enumerated powers" that is the putative core of our government practice is... "dead letter" might be an exaggeration, but maybe not. I do not usually perceive the federal government as in any meaningful way limited. Those bothered by Trump I would invite to consider the possibility that Trump is only a symptom; the disease is the statism toward which the United States has been creeping since, oh, probably July 5, 1776, but certainly since the Civil War, and more recently without even token opposition from any of its major political parties (since, I suppose, the Tea Party of 2007). DOGE makes many of the right noises, but the Big Beautiful Bill looks at best like one step forward, and one step back. (Republicans do not appear to have learned the lesson, either!)
Whether a reduction in liberty is worth the occasional schadenfreude of seeing one's ideological opponents kicked out of the country, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
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