domain:city-journal.org
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
9hr ago
Ok. Let me know when you get the political support to even begin tackling that goal. Remember, one party will actively lie and cheat the system to get welfare spending to illegals, so make sure to take that into account in your planning.
2rafa
10hr ago
You aren't chatting with your friends because no talking is allowed. Sunup to sundown every day, and you can forget about taking a vacation.
This is all stuff that can be changed.
I see shame as the most powerful tool in the social toolbox. It needs to be used sensibly, and using it too much and too trivially is going to make it harder to use it for the things it needs to be used for.
This basic idea is one of the major breaking points between the ancient Cynics and the ancient Stoics.
The Cynics were famous for their shamelessness, which they achieved through rigorous exercises designed to desensitize themselves to shame.
Zeno of Citium was a student of Crates, the third scholarch of the Cynics, and he was assigned the task of carrying a pot full of lentil soup through the pottery district of Athens. Lentils were an incredibly low class food, and carrying them out in the open was basically admitting you were gutter trash. Zeno, who had been a wealthy merchant before a shipwreck stranded him in Athens, kept trying to hide the lentils under his cloak and be as inconspicuous as possible with them. Crates realized what his student was doing, and broke the vessel Zeno was carrying the lentils in, causing lentils to dribble all over Zeno's legs, and embarrassing him enough that he fled the pottery district, with his teacher calling after him, "Why run away, my little Phoenician? Nothing terrible has befallen you."
Zeno was constitutionally incapable of cultivating the extreme shamelessness that Cynicism demanded, so he founded a less severe philosophical school that found a balance between the extremes of Cynicism, and the irrational and unvirtuous masses: Stoicism. In many ways it was still quite demanding, and had its own exercises designed to instill excellent character and healthy emotional responses in its adherents, but in a way that was a lot more attractive and achievable by a wide variety of people.
I agree with you Maiq, that shame is an important social tool, but I also wholeheartedly believe that cultivating a resistance to shame is important as well. Having a strong enough moral character to go against the crowd or the people in charge is important. It's the kind of strength that let Socrates refuse to obey an unlawful and immoral order while serving in the army during the reign of the Thirty Tyrants. It's the strength that let Helvidius Priscus speak truth to power to the Emperor Vespasian, for which he was sentenced to death - a sentence he submitted to with equanimity.
I think this is a weird aspect of how the idea of freedom of speech has developed in the West. Nowadays we view it as a right that governments are obligated to protect, a limit on state power. But for the Greeks and Romans, the virtue of parrhesia (=frankness of speech) was something that a person of excellent character did because it was the right thing to do in spite of the risk of consequences to themselves. In a way, I think the thing missing from all sides of the cancel culture debate are the Helvidius Priscus-es. Where are the sages of strong moral character on the Left or Right, who rather than whining about the injustice of their cancellation, simply nod and say, "You will do your part, and I will do mine: it is your part to kill; it is mine to die, but not in fear: yours to banish me; mine to depart without sorrow."
2rafa
10hr ago
Malaysia has a big undercurrent of anger about migrant workers not going home, it’s just rarely reported on in the West. Malaysia has 35 million people and as many as 2.5 million illegal immigrants according to some estimates, higher proportionally than the US.
Goodguy
10hr ago
I don't see any reason to think that the India-Pakistan war earlier this year came anywhere close to a nuclear war.
DiscourseMagnus
10hr ago
Realistically speaking, if Iran develops nukes relations between the two countries will probably just follow the India-Pakistan model.
The model that came horrifically close to nuclear war earlier this year, and would still seem to be on a long-term trajectory towards it?
aldomilyar
10hr ago
Singapore, Malaysia, Gulf States etc have all managed to keep temporary worker visas under control. It's just difficult under a Western system.
Goodguy
10hr ago
The US participated in a massive campaign to lull Iran into thinking an attack was not going to happen immediately
I think that the campaign can't have been that massive, given that the US telegraphed the likelihood of something like this happening by starting to withdraw non-essential personnel from its Middle East embassies a few days ago.
Israel would have almost exactly the same national security interests and likely strategic patterns of behavior even if it had no element of racial-supremacist Abrahamic cult-myths, though. Its strategic behavior is much more driven by its status as a small country that is populated by an ethnic group with a recent history of being genocided and that has a powerful superpower friend than it is by Jewish ethno-supremacist sentiments or Abrahamic cult myths.
A similar train of thought, by the way, is also why I don't think Israel or the US have anything much to worry about if Iran develops nuclear weapons. Iran might be a theocratic state with a lot of political influence from true believers in Islam, but I think that the chance that, if it developed nuclear weapons, its leaders would launch a nuclear strike that would get themselves annihilated... is close to zero. Hence the idea that Israel must prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons no matter what strikes me as pretty silly if evaluated from a cold objective perspective (of course in practice, it's not surprising that emotions run high if another country rhetorically calls for your country's destruction and is trying to build nukes). Realistically speaking, if Iran develops nukes relations between the two countries will probably just follow the India-Pakistan model.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
10hr ago
The first isn't crashing and burning though.
And the latter is also possible, just look at the U.A.E.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
10hr ago
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
10hr ago
You can focus on cutting the welfare spending instead of doing deportations, has the added benefit of not antagonizing business.
TowardsPanna
10hr ago
The universe is capricious.
kky
10hr ago
I really don’t get the proposal here. Is it that we naturalize the children of foreigners generation over generation for the service of doing work no one else wants to do, or that we maintain a permanent underclass of legally distinct residents who are restricted to such work? Those are the only two iterated versions of the model that I’m aware of, both have been tried in American history, and the second crashed and burned in a famous way while the first is currently in the process of doing so. So saying, in effect, “we already have a solution” seems a little strange here.
TowardsPanna
10hr ago
Seemed only half jokey to me because I've seen those fakers IRL, even for something as lame as being a football fan.
Apologies. I'm sleep deprived.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10hr ago
What year was this?
Rov_Scam
10hr ago
There is a farm near me that a lot of kids wanted to work at because they hired 14 year olds. Few lasted. You don't get paid by the hour, you get paid by the bushel, and it's well under a dollar per bushel. You aren't chatting with your friends because no talking is allowed. Sunup to sundown every day, and you can forget about taking a vacation. And this was a family farm with a grocery store and a pumpkin patch with hayrides, not some agribusiness with thousands of acres.
clo
10hr ago
Of course we'd give up on that idea.
For that idea to propagate successfully it needs to confer some kind of tangible benefit. In an atomized society where people can pick and choose their communities at will, why would you feel shameful or hold yourself to any standard whatsoever?
If you were shamed you used to be ostracized from your community. Nowadays, what's the point?
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
11hr ago
And when those foreigners are heavily subsidized by tapping into the American welfare systems? When they start voting to pick your pocket, and turn America into Mexico?
Tell you what, let's do 20 million deportations, and we'll save the million or two doing farmwork for last. And on the way, we'll see what effects that had on entitlement spending.
Closedshop
話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分
11hr ago
There seems to be this presumption that disagreement must stem from misunderstandings or poor messaging rather than sincere values differences.
Or even worse, it's because you're stupid or evil (or both).
you can't possibly believe that illegal immigration is bad for the country so you must actually be a secret racist trying to get rid of brown people
Shrike
11hr ago
Technically noticeable, but barely! Very interesting if true.
If I had to guess there's probably better ways to make farm work attractive, too, besides that – the article says that the average wage is $28/hour right now. For instance, normalizing shorter workdays (two shifts) or work weeks and paying more might generate a lot more interest and keep costs lower than simply quadrupling wages. But I'm spitballing (and not terribly familiar with what's normal in big ag right now anyway).
HighResolutionSleep
11hr ago
I'm not completely opposed to telling brown legal immigrants and citizens in illegal immigration hotbeds (kind enough to label themselves "sanctuary cities") that they really ought to start carrying their papers, provided that the state of exception doesn't last too long.
My bet, though, continues to be on nothing ever happening. The browning of America will continue apace, and the Trump deportation spree barely a blip in the grand scheme of things.
I live in Malaysia and there's kind of an automatic disgruntlement from the Malays on any opposing ethnic group since they're largely nonproductive. They are very hardline on not giving citizenships though due to prior experience with the Chinese and Indians. Malaysia also better adapted to giving illegal immigrants something to do and relatively low tolerance of violent crime.
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