domain:amphobian.info
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7m ago
Ideological submission as the price of entry is pretty normal in world historical terms
This is a tremendously underwhelming endorsement. Being exploited by brutal overlords who demand sycophantic bootlicking is pretty normal in world historical terms. Being a subsistence farming peasant is pretty normal in world historical terms. Fifty percent child mortality is pretty normal in world historical terms. I have no idea why we would accept "normal in world historical terms" when we're presently doing far better and we know we can do better still.
American conservatism(like most imperial state ideologies) is a big tent that 95% of people can fit into comfortably
In the sense that you can always be a submissive peasant with no rights worth respecting. In the sense that it actually accommodates everyone, no.
StJohnOfPatmos
9m ago
I have to respectfully disagree with the specific examples you chose - as someone who has worked in public facing art institutions and museums interacting with throngs of tourists and casual museum-goers, Picasso is an absolute hit with the hoi polloi and by far one of the most common name drops for people who aren't aficionados or professionally involved in the art world.
Fra Angelico on the other hand blends into almost every single other "old" painting in the general publics mind, which they can as a whole barely distinguish or situate aside from famous pop culture classics like the Mona Lisa. I tentatively agree that if you were to drill them with questions about which artist has more beautiful formal output or better technical mastery, they might begrudgingly agree to Fra Angelico - but they like Picasso because they think it has a specific coolness, edge, and doesn't leave them feeling confused and uneducated as to the subject matter (the average lowbrow museum visitor couldn't even tell you what an Annunciation Scene is, it all just melts into "old Christian art"). Picasso has also been subject to a vast marketing campaign and has become a pop icon in his own right - and the masses love a celebrity, always.
Now, if we would ask the hoi polloi to choose between any kind of Old Master painting and some overly discursive conceptual art by Joseph Kosuth or actionist performance piece by Herman Nitsch, I definitely agree they would go for the former - and it IS true that modernist art has become a hermetic, jargon-and-discourse-heavy scene that often uses very nebulous and downright non-artistic criteria to evaluate contemporary art. What I'm disagreeing with specifically is that modern art is inherently bad due to elitism and that the central focus of Western art pre-modernism was its craftsmanship.
Also, calling avant-garde artists emasculated when it was quite literally their absolute time in the sun is so pitiful - it was pretty much the apex of the Artist as a public influence on society, a historically unparalleled prestige position that was gradually lost in the post-war Era.
Also, Monet and Van Gogh are some of the biggest crowd-pleasers out there and it's not even close.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
14m ago
You can’t mass deport without large scale holding camp infrastructure.
Mandatory e-verify would probably be a lot easier to enforce given that employers, unlike illegal immigrants, usually have names, addresses, assets, registrations, tax returns, etc that can be used to lean on them in legible ways. How many illegal immigrants are going to come here if they can't get a job and can't get benefits? How many will stay?
Vanning ten Guatemalans at a time at the home depot parking lot is not a serious strategy. Of course, Trump has already given carte blanche to continue hiring illegal immigrants to politically important industries, so it's just obvious that solving this is not a priority.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
17m ago
I would push back here. Do you think anything in particular would demonstrate exactly what he says is wrong? He does have a bone to pick with economics as he later published articles against fiat as we see due to inflation but so far I do agree with a lot of what he said about drugs and other things.
cjet79
20m ago
Wish I hadn't seen the libertarian critique. It was bad like most critiques of libertarianism are bad. Scott still holds the record for the only good critique I've ever read.
Every other critique makes it sound like libertarianism is a group of scolds that just want to take away the toy that everyone calls government.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
23m ago
Picasso has High favorability, rather higher than Monet.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
26m ago
There's a lot of hype and bluster but it doesn't appear different in kind than the sort of omnibus bills that have become common. Section 174 is the big win. The SALT deduction cap is a lot of sound and fury signifying little; some house-poors in California and NY/NJ will benefit, but most of those who would benefit from a higher cap will have incomes too high to take advantage of that. I think it ended up being a $40,000 cap up to $500,000 in income, phasing back to $10,000 by $600,000, but the numbers changed a lot and that may not be the final. Reducing the clean energy stuff is all good; getting Tesla (or Tesla buyers, depending on incidence) off the tit is good, cutting off the various scammers is even better.
but also singularly terrified of the massive increase to the ICE budget... It definitely looks like trump is making a military force loyal to him personally because he doesn't trust the loyalty of the existing forces.
This is just TDS, I'm afraid. ICE is not personally loyal to Trump, and getting more money in a budget will not make them so. If they are loyal to Trump as President and other existing forces are not (perhaps having been captured in the march through the institutions), then that's a bad situation and increasing their budget is probably a good thing.
hydroacetylene
30m ago
Ideological submission as the price of entry is pretty normal in world historical terms, and American conservatism(like most imperial state ideologies) is a big tent that 95% of people can fit into comfortably(the only non-negotiable are anti child gender transition, pro Trump, and anti communism).
CrispyFriedBarnacles
34m ago
I think this fits into a more general pattern that I'm becoming more aware of.
There's this idea, from some irritated younger dissident right types (and others), that America's conservative party has long existed as something like a controlled opposition. And I get where that kind of frame is coming from.
But I think there's an alternative viewpoint that goes more like this, that I'm coming to think has a lot of explanatory power. From the 1930s on, a certain version of liberalism became so overwhelmingly dominant in America that its native conservative tradition was essentially sidelined into a permanent minority status, really, and given no public oxygen at all. And the New Deal state absolutely had a massive role in that (I've brought up Hoover under FDR inventing and promulgating the slur "isolationist" and pushing it hard to delegitimize the foreign policy of most American elites up to the point, for example, and the significant censorship campaigns that government employed against conservatives, as happened under JFK as well). But liberals of a certain sort really were so dominant, under the New Deal coalition, that in a two party system, it was inevitable that a lot of the differences within liberalism would inevitably, for game theory reasons, spill over into the other party and be given an airing there. You could call that bipartisan consensus, but I don't think really captures the dynamics at play. When Eisenhower ran for president in the 50s, both parties wanted him to run for them, and what came to be called paleo conservatism (I think the public fight with Taft captured that) became marginalized and sidelined. Groups like the John Birch society came to look fringe in part because a certain broad strand of liberalism was so dominant that everything normal looked like it, and all broadcast media reinforced it.
And this, I think, is the broader social context where all sorts of 20th century laws and polices and Supreme Court rulings were developed. There were assumptions about the values and worldviews of anyone who would be wielding these laws or rulings or state power, because that broad strand of liberalism had been so dominant that it was easy to assume that surely anyone who had access to the highest levels of state power would be a liberal in that sense.
And this is the background for the rise of the Reagan coalition, which included (as thought leaders and political operatives) many more hawkish or more pro market liberals who left the Democratic party with the rise of the New Left, and with the turn towards more nakedly radical left politics, and the rise of antagonism to internationalist American foreign policy. You could call those people flooding in and bolstering the Republican party of the 70s, and 80s, 90s, and 2000s entryist or controlled opposition, but I think it's just as easy to see them as a natural consequence of a very dominant strand of liberalism reallocating itself between the two parties in a two party system, which, again, you should expect for game theory reasons. And those people (many of them really, truly elites) understood American state power, because it literally had been created by people like them, for people like them.
And thus, when Reagan came to power, he may have had some sympathies that point in some more populist conservative directions that sounds like the old, marginalized paleo conservatives, and there were important public voices like Pat Buchanan that pointed in that direction, but the coalition Reagan brought into power was still absolutely packed with those sorts of statist, more conservative liberals that existed in huge numbers in the original New Deal coalition, the ones that all state power and court rulings and so on had been written for in the first place, and the ones that were comfortable expanding the state power of Civil Rights regime and letting the CIA do whatever it is that it does. George H. W. Bush fits cleanly in this pattern.
I think part of what makes the current moment so messy and complicated is that between 2001 and 2008, those more hawkish, more internationalist, more market oriented liberals absolutely dominated the Republican party and got their way. They sidelined more traditional paleo conservative voices even more (again, bringing up Pat Buchanan is instructive here). And then Iraq happened, and the 2008 financial crisis happened, and they basically obliterated their version of conservative liberalism in the public eye (which was always much less popular with rank-and-file conservatives, who much more often were more religious and somewhat isolationist in a Jacksonian sense and more distrustful of the remote Federal state). That was the specific sequence of events that opened up the chain including the Tea Party, and the online rise of Ron Paul, (both of which were really important for making intellectual space, especially online, for younger disaffected types to start entertaining new ideas that weren't just more rehashes of conservative liberalism), and then eventually the rise of Trump. And the rise of Trump meant the rise of RINOs, who for the most part really were those older conservative liberals who suddenly found that they were losing their iron grip on those tools of state power.
The entire system of federal government power has been built with the assumption that some variety of liberal, from a certain very specific intellectual tradition, would always be given the reigns of state power. There were certain filters in place (especially through unelected credentialing bodies and universities and professional organizations) that would ensure that, regardless of party, the sorts of people who make their way to centralized power would hold certain world views and values.
And... now we're in an era where it looks like that's possibly no longer true. And that is clearly disruptive.
(And for this narrative, too, it's worth recognizing that the current 6-3 conservative Supreme Court is the first time America has had a Supreme Court that conservative since the 1920s. That, on its own, is a radical, radical shift, considering how much liberals of all stripes used their dominance of the court in the middle of the 20th century to remake America in their vision, and how central it has been to their moral story of progress)
Anyway, given that story, I think it's very likely we'll see many more examples of this, of liberals becoming shocked and horrified to discover what happens when the central state they built with the assumption of permanent broad liberal control falls into heretical hands. I'm not saying this with pleasure, exactly, because I personally would have preferred many of those tools dismantled long ago. But...
hydroacetylene
35m ago
IIRC a few states have expanded Medicaid, but anecdotally it’s also just gotten way more normal to be on Medicaid or put your kids on it even when you could technically afford employer healthcare. I think the rising expense of health insurance is the cause; people used to have too much pride to use programs they’re technically eligible for.
hydroacetylene
38m ago
While disappointed that the hearing protection act got stripped, I’m glad no tax on overtime is passed. The federal government is mostly a machine for passing out tons of cash to people that aren’t me and if that’s how it’s gonna be then fuck you, I want mine.
hydroacetylene
41m ago
Thanks, AAQC’d.
For substance to the comment, I find that hoi polloi can appreciate, say, Fra Angelico or other late medieval artists much more easily than Picasso, perhaps about as well as Monet or Van Gogh. The point at which art went off the rails seems to be earlier than you’re pointing to.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
42m ago
Does anyone have anything to say about the OBBB being passed
Nothing that wouldn't make me sound like a broken record: an unparalleled triumph of sycophancy, fiscal conservatism is a scam the barons use to con the peasants, dream of Argentinafication, etc...
I find it largely to defy discussion.
It definitely looks like trump is making a military force loyal to him personally because he doesn't trust the loyalty of the existing forces.
The Trump administration is run by people who are genuinely rabid xenophobes who view Hispanic day laborers as an existential threat, but I suspect this is in the back of their mind as well. Well, less of a military force per se and more of a political gendarmerie. You want someone you can count on to shoot protestors and whose fortune is tied to the regime.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
42m ago
I didn't like denaturalization well-after-the-fact when they were doing it to superannuated Nazis. Now that they're threatening to do it to Hamasniks (and not nearly as far after the fact!) my attitude is that the precedent is established and now the people and organizations who supported it before ought to suck it up. On a meta level, the reasons for not establishing bad precedent in the first place don't hold if you can ensure said precedents are only used against your enemies, so using such bad precedents against those who supported them is the correct moves for opponents of those supporters.
hydroacetylene
50m ago
Why is it so hard for people to take the libertarian lesson from such events?
Because CNN does not, as far as I know, object to the ‘tyranny’. They object to Trump. Liberty-as-in-freedom to live your life is not something these people particularly value and they don’t really claim to either.
It is probably true that the Trump coalition is being a bit hypocritical when they back Trumpian caudillismo, but I don’t think the anti-Trump coalition(to the extent that it can meaningfully be called a ‘coalition’ at this point) is hypocritical for backing Biden’s use of federal power to punish his enemies while bemoaning Trump’s- they really do think that the untrammeled rule of the expert scholar-bureaucrats is most important and don't value freedom at all.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
57m ago
I’m not exactly surprised by this. As much as people like to pretend to be in favor of the rule of law, as point of fact, nobody, especially those in power, are principled enough to support applying a law fairly. I’m not even sure it’s possible to do so, as the tribal instinct is simply too strong to be easily overcome by mere principles.
Power doesn’t care and cannot care. I’m convinced as I read more of history that our era isn’t really much different from any other. Sure the aesthetics have changed, the means of control have changed, but power is still held and wielded in ways that the old monarchs and emperors would have found fairly familiar. The constitution was never a particularly live letter. It’s not a letter, it’s a legitimacy producing document. It’s marketing. You want to live here because we have rights. Except that when the government really, really wants to do so it can easily get it done despite anything the constitution actually says about your rights. There’s no way that any fair reading of the constitution would allow the full faith and credit clause or the interstate commerce clause to be used to override state laws. It happens all the time. It’s happened often enough that the states have become mere appendages of the federal government. Free speech is mostly limited to approved speech that the mainstream likes. If you get much outside of those lines, then you get punished by the unofficial powers often acting in ways that the government insists they do. Your boss will get sued if he doesn’t fire you for racism or sexism. Social media for a time feared regulation if it didnT curb crime-think on its platform. That’s censorship, but because the people doing it are private individuals or companies doing so at the behest of the government, it’s fine. Free assembly is only free as long as it’s not racist or sexist.
StJohnOfPatmos
1hr ago
Why Modern Art is so awful
I'm not gonna engage with the other articles, but since I have a background and career in Art History, I feel compelled to comment on this essay.
In brief, I find it completely uninteresting and uneducated. He engages in the typical knee-jerk mystification of art that revolves around fixing some specific tipping point in History as the moment when things went from good to bad, and ascribes this turn to a form of malice or stupidity. Unsurprisingly, he can't really offer any concrete examples, quotes, dates, works, exhibitions or discursive shifts and needs to rely on completely nonsensical vibe-based generalisations that are by and large provably false.
There was a fairly obvious point in time, perhaps at the turn of the twentieth century when this changed for worse. Art became perceived as elite and snobbish.
This is pretty much the exact polar opposite of the development of the public reception of art in Western Society. On the contrary, the turn of the century saw the downfall of the Salon, with its highly academic selection process and extreme emphasis on complex, highbrow subject matter (being able to "read" a painting and divulge its mythological, historic or religious contents having been a key element of art discourse and prestige since the Renaissance), and the ineffable rise of the Gallery, which classed taste and value by means of the free market without institutional gatekeeping.
The Impressionists are of course the eminent example of an art movement rejected by the academic elites and their official Salons, only to be such a spectacular success among the general population that Napoleon III saw himself pressured to form an entirely separate Salon just for their work.
Of course, his claim doesn't hold for the avant-garde period either - the 20th century begins with the Fauvist and Cubist movements, both of which draw their names from extremely negative press reviews by the established art circles in Paris ("fauve" meaning savage, and "Cubist" meant to deride its lack of depth beyond its visual formula). Once again, the elite art snobs from illustrious collector families and high positions in art academies were the main push against the early modernist movement. If one has an absolute minimum background knowledge pertaining to the history of Art Academies, this is obviously unsurprising, since elite Academies historically always initially resist stylistic and thematic shifts in art - the same thing happened to David's early paintings, which were Neoclassical at a time when Rococo was still the academic style of choice. It's just the nature of institutions to become resistant to change once their power and status is entrenched.
The actual critique he could have made, but didn't, is that on the contrary, the democratisation of art and art criticism that happened in the 19th century with the proliferation of journalism and literacy, the inauguration of public museums, and the rise of a new class of bourgeois art collectors is what led to the crisis of modern art, which lost clear formal and narrative criteria necessary for its evaluation. Does he seriously believe art during the Renaissance was not an elite, snobbish affair? Pretty much every single painting you will see in a museum up until the 19th century was either commissioned by the Church or the Aristocracy, with more humble social classes contenting themselves with mediocre family portraits and decorative still lives which have largely been lost to time due to no one caring enough to preserve them. The very right to own and perpetuate figurative depictions was considered a noble duty not suited for the common rabble.
Modern art became an elitist affair the moment it became entrenched within the institutions and academies that produce and manage artworks, same as every successful art movement before them.
Years before, painters might painstakingly dedicate hours on end to producing a mural or simple portrait which could easily be appreciated for the skill of the craft.
Furthermore, he places an emphasis on craft being the guiding criteria of pre-modernist art, which is such a hilarious spit in the face of the artistic Western tradition since the Renaissance, which explicitly, insistently and desperately wanted to elevate itself about the status of craftsmanship and join the realm of "high arts" like poetry and literature, whose value is derived by ingenuity, singularity, and formal application of philosophical and intellectual pursuits. Dürer instantly comes to mind as the artist who constantly insisted that no, he was not a craftsman, but something more akin to a visual poet. If he had read some first semester Art History 101 literature like Vasari's Biographies, he would see that this division between craftsmanship and artistry was a foundational concern of Western tradition since the Renaissance and quite literally defined the process and output of many Old Masters.
This obviously doesn't mean that technical and formal mastery was irrelevant or unappreciated, but it was seen as a given for someone who pursued an artistic training since childhood and was considered inadequate to make a painting great without the added components of composition (which was tied to studies of mathematics and proportionality), ingenuity (where the term "genius" comes from, i.e. someone able to innovate and add), and especially subject matter - Botticelli being the eminent early example of someone who purposefully selected obscure and complex myths as subject matters because it proved he was a well-read intellectual and not a handyman.
I recommend anyone to take a look at André Félibiens lectures on painting, which took place during the founding days of the Royal Academy in Paris and explicitly seek to lay out a hierarchy of values and criteria for critiquing painting - unsurprisingly, complex mythological and religious scenes were considered the high watermark, with still lives and landscapes at the very bottom of the list.
The simple yet decisive invention of the color photograph served as a functional coup de grâce for the niche that the more laborious method of hand painting depictions of scenery had formerly filled.
Thus modern artists, many of which with feelings of effective emasculation, had been outdone by their craft.
This is only vaguely applicable to the highly figurative Academicist styles that emerged from David's Neoclassicism and were the elite style of choice in the mid-19th century, placing an emphasis on lifelike details well suited to recuperation by photography. Most Old Masters were obviously interested in expressive and psychological visual effects that go beyond just being lifelike - Mannerism's dreamlike serpentine, elongated bodies, Rembrandts' emotive spatial distortions, Goyas grotesque, writhing faces, the list goes on and on. Not to speak of the expressive caricatural tradition of Dutch miniature painting found in Bruegel or Bosch, nor the exaggerated and bombastic compositions of Baroque art, which was Europe's single most durable and lasting artistic tradition since the end of the Middle Ages.
To reduce Western painting to its technical ability to render figurative depictions on a flat surface is to essentially say that Western art peaked and concluded with the Ghent Altarpiece in the 15th century and had no meaningful developments since.
Now, I'm not really a defender of modernism in art, and I do think the past 100 years have been largely a period of decline and loss of previous artistic achievements - but I am a defender of serious analysis and criticism, and this essay is a complete joke on those fronts. How one can look at the extreme fervour and dynamism of the early avant-garde, its fanatical Utopianism and avowed quest to create forms of expression that resonated with normal people's lives under rapidly changing social, technological and political conditions and come away thinking it was due to the artists feeling "emasculated" is just the boring, vindictive anti-intellectualism of someone who has a bone to pick and lets his emotional resentment get the better of him.
I could go on picking apart more of this essay - he packed an impressive amount of bullshit into one single page - but I think I've largely made my point. Don't read this if you're looking for good criticism of modern art - watch the Shock Of The New by Robert Hughes or Ways Of Seeing by John Berger. They actually know what they're talking about.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
A quick read and that isn't even about principled opposition, it's about a guy with a local business (a microbrewery, looks like) who is trying to get petty revenge on the town fathers for their audacity in enforcing planning regulations on him. Don't they know he's a bold visionary increasing employment and helping sustainable business practices, how dare they require him to get a licence and build a parking lot! Also they fined him for after-hours drinking! And it seems like he's using the money to bankroll his own PAC because he's some kind of left-wing activist. He seems to have a record of ignoring the law and legal decisions against him, presumably on the basis that since he's a Good Guy he can never be wrong and whatever he does is always right.
So he wants to "peacefully" disrupt the town parade to get his own back. I do hope none of the local citizens in the parade accidentally run over him with a float or other terrible, unforeseeable, accident of that nature.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1hr ago
· Edited 1hr ago
How do I survive in a world where the heuristics people hold holy on both sides end up being wrong so often?
Von Neumann said "you don't understand things in math, you just get used to them". It's similar in philosophy. You never actually solve philosophical problems, but you can outgrow them.
Most of the questions here are ones you'll eventually outgrow, assuming your development is not prematurely arrested.
Regarding the "Why Modern Art is so awful" essay: Luke’s explanation of “it’s a reaction to photography” is too simplistic. Any theory of "modern art" (bit of a vague term but we'll roll with it) has to account for the fact that there are people who really do like this stuff. Genuinely. It's not (always) a scam.
Nancy McWilliams described modern art as essentially being "by schizos, for schizos":
Sass (1992) has compellingly described how schizoid conditions are emblematic of modernity. The alienation of contemporary people from a communal sensibility, reflected in the deconstructive perspectives of 20th-century art, literature, anthropology, philosophy, and criticism, has eerie similarities to schizoid and schizophrenic experience. Sass notes in particular the attitudes of alienation, hyperreflexivity (elaborate self-consciousness), detachment, and rationality gone virtually mad that characterize modern and postmodern modes of thought and art, contrasting them with "the world of the natural attitude, the world of practical activity, shared communal meanings, and real physical presences" (p. 354). His exposition also calls effectively into question numerous facile and oversimplified accounts of schizophrenia and the schizoid experience.
If modern art is primarily produced and enjoyed by people who naturally feel at home in these modes of thought and experience, whereas the majority of the human population does not recognize themselves in this experience, then that could help explain some of the disconnect.
I once posted Klee's Angelus Novus here on TheMotte as an example of a first-rate painting, and was met with disapproval and incredulity. But you'll have to take my word for it that I really do find it to be quite lovely!
naraburns
nihil supernum
1hr ago
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:
For decades, the US Department of Justice has used a tool to sniff out former Nazis who lied their way into becoming American citizens: a law that allowed the department to denaturalize, or strip, citizenship from criminals who falsified their records or hid their illicit pasts.
...
According to a memo issued by the Justice Department last month, attorneys should aim their denaturalization work to target a much broader swath of individuals – anyone who may “pose a potential danger to national security.”
The directive appears to be a push towards a larger denaturalization effort that fits with the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies. These could leave some of the millions of naturalized American citizens at risk of losing their status and being deported.
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:
From 1990-2017, the DOJ filed 305 denaturalization cases, about 11 per year.
The number has surged since President Trump's first term.
...
Since January 2017, the USCIS has selected some 2,500 cases for possible denaturalization and referred at least 110 denaturalization cases to the Justice Department for prosecution by the end of August 2018.
This sounds about in line with the CNN article's suggestion that
Trump filed 102 denaturalization cases during his first administration, contrasted with the 24 cases filed under Biden, DOJ Spokesperson Chad Gilmartin said on social media Wednesday. So far, the second Trump administration has filed 5 cases in its first five months.
The CNN article does at least include information about the history of denaturalization, which is more bipartisan than you might initially imagine...
The statute in question is part of a McCarthy-era law first established to root out Communists during the red scare.
But its most common use over the years has been against war criminals.
In 1979, the Justice Department established a unit that used the statute to deport hundreds of people who assisted the Nazis. Eli Rosenbaum, the man who led it for years, helped the department strip citizenship from or deport 100 people, and earned a reputation as the DOJ’s most prolific Nazi hunter.
Rosenbaum briefly returned in 2022 to lead an effort to identify and prosecute anyone who committed war crimes in Ukraine.
But the department has broadened those efforts beyond Nazis several times, including an Obama-era initiative called Operation Janus targeting those who stole identities to earn citizenship.
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.
Lol apologies. It's important because society works on trust, if there is none then laws can't make it functional the way a high trust society would.
If you don't learn to code properly, cheat on interviews, cheat on the job by having a fake cv or cheat your vc by forking other people without changing any code, then people will be forced to cheat as the other guy rarely cooperates.
The rise of globohomo coincides with the breakdown of trust. Extremely large societies that are becoming more heterogenous by the day cannot produce good outcomes.
We know how academia today, even in the sciences will play games with the truth to get funded, this has undoubtedly played a role in the slowdown of progress.
Software is critical today, the total acceptance of deceit will eventually cause some harm down the line. If a guy can get a job he's not good enough for, we can't trust that what he wrote will work fine the way older software did.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
1hr ago
Lol no, I was posting it and edit my comments a bunch to fix them since they're usually bad. I'm adding the missing links rn
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2hr ago
The telos of a flathead screwdriver is to apply force perpendicular to the plane of the screwdriver. This works if you are using it as a pry or to screw in screws.
aceventura
2hr ago
Adds 3 trillion to debt but simultaneously leads to millions losing health insurance.
Doesn't really matter how much money ICE gets because deportations are really hard to do in America, and anyway, immigration inflows, and thus demographic change, will not be altered even if deportations increase.
Right. Agent Smith deadnames all of them, in fact, (he calls Cypher "Mr Reagan"). You could imagine Cypher as desperate to de-transition since living the truth is unbearable.
More options
Context Copy link