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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   26283 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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By allowing illegal immigrants to work, to run business/employ others, and to vote in local and state elections all "legally", they have rendered their illegal population "legible" in a way that the day-workers standing outside a Home Depot in New Mexico are not

"Legible" stood out to me, is this a "Seeing Like a State" analysis? I am currently reading it and it's fresh on my mind. The relevant passage is here for other mottizens:

“The discriminating interventions that a legible society makes possible can, of course, be deadly as well. A sobering instance is wordlessly recalled by a map produced by the City Office of Statistics of Amsterdam, then under Nazi occupation, in May 1941 (figure 13). Along with lists of residents, the map was the synoptic representation that guided the rounding up of the city’s Jewish population, sixty-five thousand of whom were eventually deported.

The map is titled “The Distribution of Jews in the Municipality.” Each dot represents ten Jews, a scheme that makes the heavily Jewish districts readily apparent. The map was compiled from information obtained not only through the order for people of Jewish extraction to register themselves but also through the population registry (“exceptionally comprehensive in the Netherlands”) and the business registry. If one reflects briefly on the kind of detailed information on names, addresses, and ethnic backgrounds (determined perhaps by names in the population registry or by declaration) and the cartographic exactitude required to produce this statistical representation, the contribution of legibility to state capacity is evident. “The Nazi authorities of course, supplied the murderous purpose behind the exercise, but the legibility provided by the Dutch authorities supplied the means to its efficient implementation. That legibility, I should emphasize, merely amplifies the capacity of the state for discriminating interventions—a capacity that in principle could as easily have been deployed to feed the Jews as to deport them.”

Yes, I did intend intend for it to be read in that sense. Thus the irony.

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