Nuclear weapons, mostly. Otherwise it's just a veiled question about what makes a state good or bad. You can propose a set of laws that defines "legitimacy", but I suspect such laws would just be evaluated by whether they exclude the "bad states". So "legitimacy" itself wouldn't be doing any of the heavy lifting, but would rather just be a pre-loaded conclusion based on something else. Perhaps it's good as a rhetorical device to fool and opponent into implicitly accepting your premises, but it doesn't help explain or understand anything.
I suppose the most neutral definition of "legitimate" I can think of is when a state fails to adhere to its own explicitly stated values and goals. Is the United States illegitimate according to its own standards? Perhaps. Certainly, the modern US is increasingly adopting values and goals which are rendering itself illegitimate by its own standards. But this is merely a description of what is happening; it doesn't mean we should accept those new standards as legitimizing. Israel seems pretty legit according to itself.
nomenym
7d ago
I often joke about who the real white supremacists are. The people we call "white supremacists" believe that whites should be supreme but are actually oppressed and downtrodden. Meanwhile the most vehement progressives essentially believe that whites should be oppressed but are actually supreme and unassailable. For example, in the latter case it's literally impossible to be racist towards whites because of their actual supremacy in all things no matter what. It's very much like the German Jew reading the Nazi newspapers for all thee good news about Jews running the world. The average white supremacist could only hope that whites were actually as supreme as the progressive implies.
nomenym
16d ago
Of course, I suspect it's also true that we're now better at turning would-be suicides into unsuccessful suicide attempts for the same reason. I'd be curious to know the relative reductions.
nomenym
16d ago
Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple is a good read.
Stress is like an immune response. Sometimes the absence of legitimate pathogens can cause the immune system to start misfiring randomly. An environment with few stressors is an evolutionary mismatch. We're primed to expect real stressors to such an extent that we experience phantom stressors when they're absent, things that would normally be trivial become fixated on. Some people are just fearful, and if they don't have any genuinely scary things to be fearful of then they will find something else to be afraid of. They are full of fear by nature, and so it's actually healthier for them to be in an environment where that fear has something real to focus on. If they're in a safe environment, then their inherent fearfulness drives them to derangement.
nomenym
16d ago
Some of the decline in accidental deaths is presumably because we're now better at keeping people alive after they have life-threatening accidents.
nomenym
22d ago
If all AI ever is is a digital bulldozer, then, not unlike real bulldozers, it's still going to reshape the whole world.
nomenym
24d ago
And yet inserting black lesbian girl boss into a popular bro-shooter still happens almost every time. Many of these decisions really are ideological, and very many recent games a have failed because of it.
nomenym
1mo ago
Almost anything that isn't obviously left-coded is right wing. If you look through Wikipedia articles about entertainment products, you'll find that the "Critical Response" section often consists of little more than describing the ways that the book/show/movie/game violates left-wing taboos or is insufficiently active in pushing a left-wing message. It is the moral obligation of art to advocate for a progressive world, and this is partly because progressives ascribe great power to media to shape society for good or ill. Most of politics is, in this view, about managing perceptions, and reality will follow later.
nomenym
1mo ago
This explanation poses such incredibly irresolvable issues for how people interact that it leads to a very different society than the one we now live in, and in the "Islam is right about women" direction.
nomenym
1mo ago
I saw a clip of this trailer and also just assumed it was from a TV show and they were actors--maybe something shot in a mock documentary style. The incongruence between her eyes and smile, and the way she holds that expression with the tilting head is highly unsettling. At that moment, I think she really believes herself when she says that she's always honest.
nomenym
1mo ago
Everything is a social construct and can be reconstructed arbitrarily. The idea that a house must account for objective physical reality to stand is just a myth created by builders to limit the diversity of homes that we can live in, and they do this to maintain their own power and prestige. The Three Little Pigs was just capitalist propaganda all along.
nomenym
2mo ago
The standard is not “was she crazy.” The standard is did she know what she was doing was against the law and did she have the capacity not to do the act. There is ample evidence she knew what she was doing was not legal and that she had the capacity to not act.
I think these two standards are very slippery, especially when you're dealing with a jury of people who habitually default to an external locus of control. They take "mental health" very seriously, by which they mean that aberrant behavior is, in general, best understood as a kind of mental malfunction that is in some sense external to the true self of the person who is suffering from it. When you adopt this frame, it's very easy to satisfy those standards, especially if motivated by ulterior goals.
nomenym
2mo ago
By MA law, the women were probably in the right to find not guilty by reason of insanity, but that doesn't seem to be their motivation for finding her not guilty. The law just happens to conveniently work in their favor in this instance, but they would very much want to find her not guilty anyway. This significantly complicates the story.
nomenym
2mo ago
The very crime itself would be prima facie evidence of insanity. By reversing the burden of proof, it effectively makes acts of sufficient horror unprosecutable as crimes. The incentives this creates are disturbing, but it's also a backdoor way of displacing traditional crime and justice with deviant behavior being treated legally as a medical condition--a trend we see throughout society in many seemingly disparate domains.
I am too, in an ideal world, a Reaganite libertarian, but that almost feels like some quaint dream from a former life. It has little or nothing to do with the world as it now is. Do you think there can be a return to a politics with Reaganite libertarianism is successful? Is Reaganite libertarianism sustainable? Personally, my "black pill" was realizing that libertarianism really is only marginally more compatible with human nature than communism, albeit for different reasons. I could argue for Reaganite libertarianism, but it feels rather like trying to convince people to close the barn doors after the horse, pig, sheep, and even the donkey have already bolted, and the people I'm trying to convince are denying there was even a barn to begin with. We lost. Reaganite libertarians are like downed Japanese fighter pilots still fighting world war 2 into the 1970s. Condemning Trump for these actions feels merely philosophical, but it's all so obvious as to not be especially philosophically interesting. Of course it's stupid and wrong, and yet it's also necessary and inevitable.
One of the major problems is the enormous amounts of immigration fraud. Likely a majority of naturalized citizens and legal residents in recent years have lied on their applications and interviews and such. There is practically an industry in helping them lie, and the government has been tacitly endorsing that. This is quite aside from the other issue that governments have been granting more and more citizenship and legal statuses despite the fairly clear will of the democratic polity for decades. There is a very real way in which the whole process of naturalization, asylum, and immigration in general has been rendered illegitimate in the eyes of the public. The system has been abused, defrauded, and twisted into a mockery of what it was intended. It's like a charity that has begun enslaving its old donors when they start to object to its practices.
The fence was already torn down from the other side. The damage has already been done.
I hope the slope is slippery, or else we'll never get where we need to be. In the meantime, I will accuse anyone who objects to this of the slippery slope fallacy. Is this a risky move in danger of going to far? Yes, obviously.
You can't go handing out citizenship like candy and also claim that it should be treated like some sacred rite that cannot be undone--that is merely a strategy to undermine borders and should be regarded as enemy action (because it is).
The case of Leah Charlton from 1890 Liverpool is interesting.
nomenym
2mo ago
The law, as you describe it, is so transparently absurd that it renders itself moot. No case will actually be decided by any such law, since evidence can be arbitrarily interpreted any which way a jury intuits. It simply amounts to asking the jury whether they feel like the defendant is a bad person that they want to punish.
Make second-class citizenship great again.
More options
Context Copy link