domain:betonit.substack.com
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
5m ago
Accurate. There is a cultural and probably (my theory) genetic temperament that makes whites share and care. Think European killing Winters in the old days.
Beyond this its performative luxury beliefs. Rich whiteys living in gated communities that will never need to deal with the consequences of their actions.
Happy to be corrected by others.
Possibly from Yoorrook's perspective the idea is just to open with a maximal demand that they can then negotiate down from; or possibly it's to deliberately make demands that cannot possibly be satisfied so that there will remain a need for activists in this space.
I have an informed source in this general area. According to my friend, the indigenous lobby generally is full of maximalists, they've always been into maximalism and word-games to achieve maximal gains rather than good-faith bargaining. That's what they've been doing with 'sovereignty never ceded', they've been treating it like a slogan for people to say and feel good about. Universities don't actually mean that the Australian government is not sovereign and Eora tribe is in control when they say it. They just mean 'I'm progressive and left wing and a Good Person'. But it's a way of seeding the idea that the government isn't actually in control for further usage later on. If you say it and repeat it enough, it becomes true.
There are similar games being played with 'First Nations'. Nation means race or ethnic group in English but it can also mean state. They wanted to insert into the constitution, IIRC, recognition of First Nations and they said 'oh this is just for aesthetic purposes, recognition, just being a Good Person'. This got watered down in the public referendum question since the more sensible white lawyers saw through this immediately, but that's what the activists wanted. Later on, when there's a friendly High Court, the idea was to reimagine it to meaning First Nations as a political entity still around today, so then they can get a Treaty and even more gains. There's no such thing as a compromise with these people (exceptions exist obviously), only an endless struggle.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2hr ago
You know, the UK gets plenty of flak for its groveling attitude towards anyone with a slightly different shade of skin and the most threadbare justification behind seeking reparations for past injustice, but have you seen the other Commonwealth states? Australia and NZ are so cucked it beggars belief.
They all seem to cling on to a form of DEI that's about a decade out of date, at least compared to the US, and even there, it was never as strong and all-encompassing.
What even drives people to such abject and performative self-flagellation?
OliveTapenade
6hr ago
The continuing saga of Aboriginal issues in Australia!
You may recall that in 2023 Australia had a referendum on changing the constitution to attach a permanent Aboriginal advisory body to parliament. That referendum was rejected around 60-40. We discussed it here at the time, and since then I've been keeping an eye on the issue. Since then, many state governments have stated their intention to go ahead with state-level bodies, or even with 'treaty'.
'Treaty', in the context of Aboriginal activism in Australia, is a catch-all term for bilateral agreements between state and federal governments and indigenous communities. Whether or not this is a good idea tends to be heavily disputed, with the left generally lining up behind 'yes', and the right behind 'no'.
Anyway, I bring this up because just last week, in Australia's most progressive state, Victoria, the Yoorrook Report was just published.
This is the report of a body called the Yoorrook Justice Commission, a body set up in this state with public funds whose purpose is to give a report on indigenous issues in the state. They call this 'truth-telling' (and indeed 'Voice, Treaty, Truth' was the slogan of the larger movement for a while), though whether or not the publications they put out are true is, well, part of the whole issue.
Here is the summary of their report.
You can skip most of the first half - the important part is their hundred recommendations, starting from page 28 of the PDF, all beginning with the very demanding phrase 'the Victorian Government must...'
This puts the Victorian government in a somewhat difficult position. They love the symbolism of being progressive on Aboriginal issues, and indeed are currently legislating for a more permanent indigenous advisory body to parliament. However, the actual recommendations of the Yoorrook Report are very expensive, very complex, and in many cases blatantly unreasonable, at least to my eyes. Some examples would include recommendations 4 (a portion of all land, water, and natural-resource-related revenues should be allocated to indigenous peoples), 21 (land transfers), 24 (reverse burden of proof for native land title), 41 (recognise waterways as legal persons and appoint indigenous peoples as their representatives, like that river in New Zealand), 54 (decolonise school libraries by removing offensive books), 66-7 (universities must permanently fund additional Aboriginal support services and 'recompense First Peoples staff for the 'colonial load' they carry'), and 96 (establish a permanent Aboriginal representative body 'with powers at all levels of political and policy decision making'). Needless to say the recommendations taken as a whole are both expensive and politically impossible, especially since even Victoria rejected the Voice 55-45.
Possibly from Yoorrook's perspective the idea is just to open with a maximal demand that they can then negotiate down from; or possibly it's to deliberately make demands that cannot possibly be satisfied so that there will remain a need for activists in this space. From the state government's perspective it's tricky, because they will want to appear responsive and sympathetic, but not want to actually do all this. I predict that they will accept a couple of the cheaper, more fig-leaf recommendations and ignore the rest, maintaining a status quo where we engage in symbolic acts of recognition and guilt but nothing more, and the Aboriginal rights industry, so to speak, continues to perpetuate itself.
If the Victorian Liberals (the state branch of our centre-right party) were more on the ball, I might have expected them to politically profit from this and make a good bid at the next election, but unfortunately the Victorian Liberals are in shambles and have been for some time, and the recent smashing of the federal Liberal party at the last election doesn't make it look good for them either.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
My point is not that the problems are unsolvable (jury's out on that), it's that "this will be good if we can fix the problems" isn't a very meaningful statement. Everything is good if you can fix the problems with it!
Ecgtheow
1hr ago
Couldn't your conclusion that 'If Hamas manages to get an attack off it's the entire host nations problem as well' apply to Iran giving them a nuke in the first place? Couldn't Israel just state preemptively they will regard any use of nukes by hamas as use by Iran and will nuke Tehran in response? In this case would the Iranian regime be willing to chain themselves to asa suicidal ally and provide Hamas with bombs in the first place?
I don't think having a suicidal ally changes the logic of mutually assured destruction much. That relies on your enemy drawing some arbitrary distinction that doesn't serve their interests.
Corvos
1hr ago
The IRA is listed there too, but they were not enemies of America and indeed were partly funded by American groups.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
45m ago
The second person (narrative voice) in a story is very interesting. I tried it once many years ago after reading Bright Lights, Big City. Thanks for sharing, I like reading things like this. I have no answer to your question. Probably I'd be intransigent and not cooperate just because, but that could be mental bravado.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1hr ago
I expect that when people usually say that, they're implicitly stating strong belief that the problems are both solvable and being solved. Not that this necessarily means that such claims are true..
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3hr ago
If they can stop the damn thing from hallucinating caselaw and statutes, it might already be there.
Sure, but hasn't that always been the challenge? This feels like it boils down to "if they can fix the problems, it'll be great", which is true but applies to everything.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
20hr 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...
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1hr ago
If you're a Windows user, and seeking a more power-user experience, I strongly endorse Windows PowerToys. While not an official Microsoft product, it's a passion project by Microsoft devs. Current features:
- Advanced Paste
- Always on Top
- PowerToys Awake
- Color Picker
- Command Not Found
- Command Palette
- Crop And Lock
- Environment Variables
- FancyZones
- File Explorer Add-ons
- File Locksmith
- Hosts File Editor
- Image Resizer
- Keyboard Manager
- Mouse utilities
- Mouse Without Borders
- New+
- Paste as Plain Text
- Peek
- PowerRename
- PowerToys Run
- Quick Accent
- Registry Preview
- Screen Ruler
- Shortcut Guide
- Text Extractor
- Workspaces
- ZoomIt
I personally get some mileage out of the FancyZones feature, as it's a big upgrade over default window tiling manager. With a 4k screen, it's a shame not to use the real estate to its fullest potential. I can see the pixel counter being useful in Arma Reforger, where you need to measure distances on a map, cheeky mortar calculator right there.
naraburns
nihil supernum
21hr 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.
hydroacetylene
20hr 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.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
5hr ago
I predict that they will accept a couple of the cheaper, more fig-leaf recommendations and ignore the rest, maintaining a status quo
A great way to predict most western government actions these days
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
20hr 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.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
The difficulty is that a determined person could easily maintain their allegiance without overt signs especially in service to a greater cause. If I’m a person allied to hezbollah I don’t want the USA to know that, and especially if I’m joining a cell in the USA. If all I have to do is hide my allegiance to hezbollah for three years, I can probably scrub my name from official records, purge my social media, and keep my mouth shut for three years and be fine.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1hr ago
Out of boredom, I'm using Gemini to make a mortar calculator app that takes in screenshots/grid coordinates and outputs firing solutions. Should work in theory!
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
3hr ago
Given the two attempts at invasion/annexation in 10 years (one of them ongoing) it seems reasonable that the Ukrainians would not want ZZ-niks working in thier country, voting in thier elections, etc.
Remember that we are talking about naturalization here IE whether or not we let a person in, and once in, how much of an obligation is there to let them stay.
Supah_Schmendrick
9hr ago
I don't think it was done to the Nazis qua being a Nazi, it was done because they materially lied about it during naturalization.
These are not materially different things. GK Chesterton actually remarked on this:
When I went to the American consulate to regularise my passports . . . [t]he officials I interviewed were very American, especially in being very polite; for whatever may have been the mood or meaning of Martin Chuzzlewit, I have always found Americans by far the politest people in the world. They put in my hands a form to be filled up, to all appearance like other forms I had filled up in other passport offices. But in reality, it was very different from any form I had ever filled up in my life. At least it was a little like a freer form of the game called "Confessions" which my friends and I invented in our youth; an examination paper containing questions like, "if you saw a rhinoceros in the front garden, what would you do?" . . .
One of the questions on the paper was, "Are you an anarchist?" To which a detached philosopher would naturally feel inclined to answer, "What the devil has that to do with you? Are you an atheist?" along with some playful efforts to cross-examine the official about what constitutes an αρχη. Then there was the quesiton, "Are you in favor of subverting the government of the United States by force?" Agaisnt this I should write, "I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour, not the beginning." The inquisitor, in his more than morbid curiosity, had then written down, "Are you a polygamist?" The answer to this is "No such luck" or "Not such a fool," according to our experience of the other sex. But perhaps a better answer would be that given to W.T. Stead when he circulated the rhetorical question "Shall I slay my brother Boer?" - the answer that ran, "Never interfere in family matters." But among many things that amused me almost to the point of treating the form thus disrespectfully, the most amusing was the thought of the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat it respectfully. I like to think of the foreign desperado, seeking to slip into America with official papers under official protection, and sitting down to write with beautiful gravity, "I am an anarchist. I hate you all and wish to destroy you." Or, "I intend to subvert by force the government of the United States as soon as possible, sticking the long sheath-knife in my left trouser-pocket into Mr. Harding at the earliest opportunity." Or again, "Yes I am a polygamist all right and my forty-seven wives are accompanying me on the voyage disguised as secretaries." There seems to be a certain simplicity of mind about these answers; and it is reassuring to know that anarchists and polygamists are so pure and good that the police have only to ask them questions and they are certain to tell no lies.
...
Superficially this is rather a queer business. It would be easy enough to suggest that in this America has introduced a quite abnormal spirit of inquisition; an interference with liberty unknown among all the ancient despotisms and aristocracies. About that there will be something to be said later; but superficially it is true that this degree of officialism is comparatively unique. In a journey which I took only the year before I had occasion to have my papers passed by governments which many worthy people in the West would vaguely identify with corsairs and assassins; I have stood on the other side of Jordan, in the land ruled by a rude Arab chief, where the police looked so like brigands that one wondered what the brigands looked like. But they did not ask whether I had come to subvert the power of the Shereef; and they did not exhibit the faintest curiosity about my personal views on the ethical basis of civil authority. These ministers of ancient Moslem despotism did not care about whether I was an anarchist; and naturally would not have minded if I had been a polygamist. The Arab chief was probably a polygamist himself. These slaves of Asiatic autocracy were content, in the old liberal fashion, to judge me by my actions; they did not inquire into my thoughts. They held their power as limited to the limitation of practice; they did not forbid me to hold a theory. It would be easy to argue here that Western democracy persecutes where even Eastern despotism tolerates or emancipates. It would be easy to develop the fancy that, as compared to the sultans of Turkey or Egypt, the American Constitution is a thing like the Spanish Inquisition.
...
It may have seemed something less than a compliment to compare the American Constitution to the Spanish Inquisition. But oddly enough, it does involve a truth; and still more oddly perhaps, it does involve a compliment. The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed. America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the manner of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things.
Now a creed is at once the broadest and the narrowest thing in the world. In its nature it is as broad as its scheme for a brotherhood of all men. In its nature it is limited by its definition of the nature of all men. This was true of the Christian Church, which was truly said to exclude neither Jew nor Greek, but which did definitely substitute something else for Jewish religion or Greek Philosophy. It was truly said to be a net drawing in of all kinds; but a net of a certain pattern, the pattern of Peter the Fisherman. And this is true even of the most disastrous distortions or degradations of that creed; and true among other of the Spanish Inquisition. It may have been narrow touching theology, it could not confess to being narrow about nationality or ethnology. The Spanish Inquisition may have been admittedly Inquisitorial; but the Spanish Inquisition could not be merely Spanish. Such a Spaniard, even when he was narrower than his own creed, had to be broader than his own empire. He might burn a philosopher because he was heterodox; but he must accept a barbarian because he was orthodox. And we see, even in modern times, that the same Church which is blamed for making sages heretics is also blamed for making savages priests. Now, in a much vaguer and more evolutionary fashion, there is something of the same idea at the back of the great American experiment; the expierment of a democracy of diverse races which has been compared to a melting-pot. But even that metaphor implies that the pot itself is of a certain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The melting-pot must not melt. The original shape was trace on the lines of Jeffersonian democracy; and it will remain in that shape until it becomes shapeless. America invites all men to become citizens; but it implies the dogma that there is such a thing as citizenship. Only, so far as its primary ideal is concerned, its exclusiveness is religious because it is not racial. The missionary can condemn a cannibal, precisely because he cannot condemn a Sandwich Islander. And in something of the same spirit the American may exclude a polygamist, precisely because he cannot exclude a Turk.
"What I saw in America" 1912, pgs. 3-9
Corvos
1hr ago
Fair enough. So in your proposed libertarian world, you would not automatically have the right to sue for breach of contract, damages, or debt? Unless these things turned out to be foundational.
Fair enough, I thought those things were more central to libertarian ideology.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
1hr ago
There's some breakdown in communication as he wants a smaller, less powerful government where there are some things the government does. Smaller societies earlier were dependent on elders enforcing laws via the guys.
When he argues agaisnt hard drugs, it's from the perspective of that implementation in the current apparatus. It's not a bad one, he also has written agaisnt government interference, that's one of his most famous articles.
I'd rather have the government crack down on what he listed instead of hate speech.
ulyssessword
8hr ago
What is the definition of an "enemy of the United States" though?
Hamas is designated as a terrorist organization. If that isn't sufficient to meet the definition, then I'm not sure what is.
birb_cromble
18hr ago
it doesn't give the Executive that much discretion to determine the grounds for denaturalization completely freeform.
We live in a world where supreme court precedent has determined that growing your own grain and feeding it to your own stock on your own land can be regulated under the aegis of "interstate commerce". That ship has sailed.
Have you seen the UK handing the Chagos over to Mauritius these last two months and paying for the privilege? That is just as, or even more, cucked. What happened to the spirit of Wellington or Mccaulay?
For all the UK's faults there is no doubt they would run the place more efficiently than the Mauritians ever could.
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