Jim: Yet maintaining the universalist, human-rights based legal infrastructure constructed after the Second World War takes priority over addressing these issues. The fact that this infrastructure was created for an entirely different world, where there was much less international migration, and where “asylum seeker” meant a political dissident from the Eastern Bloc, does not matter. If the post-WWII occupational court infrastructure were universalist, it would be possible for Englishmen to immigrate to...
Isegoria: That’s exactly the kind of thing he’s talking about, Phileas. I don’t want to share too many lengthy excerpts from a brand new book, but I’m happy to pique everyone’s interest.
Phileas Frogg: Looking forward to reading more excerpts, I thoroughly enjoyed, “The Sports Gene,” so much so that I went and bought a copy a few years ago. I expect some similarly provocative and interesting fodder from this one. On the topic of the book, whenever I was struggling to write a drum part for the band I played for in college, I would begin systematically taking pieces of my kit away until I developed something that worked, and then slowly add pieces back in. Limiting myself...
Jim: Phileas Frogg: Then we are substantially in agreement, our only meaningful divergence being that I reflexively view utility from the perspective of the world-controllers, as opposed to from the citizen-subjects. The major difference, then, is not moral righteousness or justice or other such thing, but the habitual understanding that the perpetuation of a system, any system, is owing, ultimately, to the perspective of its managers, formal or informal, that the purpose of a system is what it does…and...
Jim: Free men do not live subject to video surveillance or electronically locked buildings.
Bob Sykes: If you want a career in education, engineering, medicine, law, business, or the sciences, an accredited degree is mandatory. The days when you could just sit in the back of the room and listen ended long ago, even for state schools. At most schools, private and public, key cards of some sort are needed to get into most buildings, and surveillance cameras are everywhere.
Isegoria: Wow, times have changed! The recent Brown University shooting footage revealed that security cameras are common now, but the idea of locking a college down is really foreign to me.
Gaikokumaniakku: Historical perspective: Although the doctrine that the sea by its nature must be free to all was eventually upheld, most commentators did recognize that, as a practical matter, a coastal state needed to exercise some jurisdiction in the waters adjacent to its shores. Two different concepts developed—that the area of jurisdiction should be limited to cannon-shot range, and that the area should be a much greater belt of uniform width adjacent to the coast—and in the late 18th century these...
Gaikokumaniakku: Middle-aged people can wonder whether they will live long enough to see the collapse of the AIPAC-USA-Epstein coalition. Meanwhile, even if the coalition is ultimately doomed, it is still effective enough to drag out the war in Iran and Lebanon.
Gaikokumaniakku: “We can’t just wish or manifest our way to crazy performance, despite what some in the self-help world may say.” Magness has a tendency to generalize too far from very limited evidence. If wishing/manifestation always worked like Aladdin’s Lamp, of course we would see everyone re-making the world into their own versions of the Arabian Nights. Conversely, if mainstream scholars were honest about paranormal topics, Steve Magness would not have a “performance coaching”...
Dan Kurt: Fellow classmate from Ivy during 1960s contacted me to say he was shocked, shocked to discover on visiting the campus EVERYTHING was locked down, security was obvious, and cameras watched over all. As to the schooling, he told me that the number of lectures given to students had decreased substantially per course since our time there.
Handle: Colleges do card now. The last five campuses I’ve been to all had many buildings with secure entry that require tapping student or staff identity cards on some RFID sensor panel to disengage the automatic lock on the doors. Even state schools that explicitly provide free “audit” access to classes for certain groups like the elderly still require more than the professor’s mere permission and one must apply for to get one of those IDs and, as I understand it, there is some...
Bruce: Ringers are a cheat code for democracy. Once one party controls the courts, you get ringers.
Phileas Frogg: Jim, Absolutely. I was just noting one way to look at it based on the posts main thrust. The, “education,” system exists to: - Continue existing - Provide jobs for people - Provide childcare for parents - Gatekeep and reward compliant behaviors - Signal who is compliant and, “acceptable,” ; for positions of power Education is a distant 7th-8th item on the list, and only incidentally due to the efforts of some individual teachers (often harangued and punished).
Jim: Phileas Frogg: “School has, as a general rule, primarily been about social signaling and only ever rarely has it been about education…” That may be true from the bottom looking up, but it isn’t true from the top looking down. From the top looking down, schools are a mechanism of homogenization and control. And it isn’t like they hide it: school buildings and prisons look similar because they’re based on the same underlying logic—compliance—if in different...
Phileas Frogg: School has, as a general rule, primarily been about social signaling and only ever rarely has it been about education, and usually only when signals are already guaranteed by some other mechanism, like class or occupation or family. Actual education focused schooling was, is, and will remain an elite minority undertaking. We only need so many Medievalists who can read/write in Old Anglo-Saxon, luckily we only have so many who are capable and find it interesting. Convenient.
Bob Sykes: Vandenengel is wrong on a number of counts, and the Pan Oceanic Navy is just another one of those practical jokes that the US military plays on itself from time to time. First, the US economy is too small to sustain our current military. Hence the epidemic of deferred maintenance in all branches, the Navy especially. Deferred maintenance is capital consumption, and it is a way of disguising the actual reduction in the size of the Navy. The Stennis has been in dry dock for over 5 years. Second,...
Wanweilin: Until there are boots on the ground or total annihilation of the adversary there truly is no victory. War making has been democratized, politicized and monetized. There are more reasons to keep conflicts going than to conclude them.
Jim: In the limit, a warship is a floating missile launch platform defended by directed energy weapons.
Gaikokumaniakku: Iran’s small boats are an important part of its real navy (not the legacy navy the USA has already sunk). Apparently six Iranian boats were sunk by helicopter salvoes. “U.S. Army AH-64 Apache and U.S. Navy MH-60 Seahawk helicopters destroyed six small Iranian boats that were threatening commercial ships in and around the Strait of Hormuz, according to the U.S. military’s top officer in the region.” Iran’s small boats may suffer high casualties. However, shortly after the U.S....