TM Lutas

What about Mexico’s border wall with the US?

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If you go to where Mexico meets the US at the Pacific Ocean you will see a curious thing. There appear to be two fences. One appears to be on each side of the border.

This arrangement is normal and benign. Both countries have their own security needs.

But there’s a journalistic scandal staring at you right in the face. The US media conversation covers the US fence often enough. I can’t seem to find any coverage of the Mexican border fence. Why is it there? How much coverage does it have? How much does it cost to maintain it?

The idea of Mexico paying for its own fence along our common border simply doesn’t enter into the US conversation about borders and relations with Mexico. Omitting it does make for simplified narratives, but mostly that’s in the service of laziness. We could do better, but we don’t.

Sometimes silence to a simple question is astounding

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I published a question on Quora.That’s not particularly unusual for me. What was more unusual that I got people following the question (they were interested) but nobody answered the question. That’s not an ordinary occurrence, answers are usually much higher than follows.

Here’s the question:

Does your state’s government adequately police against infanticide and how can you tell?

I would think with the legislation in NY and VA, this would be a question in the hearts and on the lips of pro-lifers everywhere. It’s not like it’s something that the police wouldn’t answer. But nobody seems to want to touch this with a ten-foot pole.

Why?

The problem of modern socialism

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This is lifted from one of many retyped responses to people who just want to engage in history-free, context-free thought experiments on whether socialism is any good. This particular one came in response to a person who was defending the USSR as a viable method of organizing society.

“The problem is, and likely will remain for the foreseeable future, that there are wannabee genocidaires who would like to be signing the death warrants for those who resist the advance of socialism. There is no reliable test to separate those evil people from those who haven’t figured out why socialism landed on the ash heap of history and genuinely want to run through what happened, what went wrong, and why so many people died in the pursuit of this idea of implementing the labor theory of value as government policy.”

If there is a reliable test, I certainly would love to know it. The ignorant are coming out of the US education system by the boatload. The malicious are far fewer than that, but so dangerous that they can’t be ignored.

How intellectually rigorous is Vox Day?

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Vox Day is an alt-right figure who is a perfect illustration of why the alt-right needs to be engaged and not just thrown into the outer darkness. He’s accomplished, influential, smart, and cruel. He claims to be interested in the truth. No matter where it leads, he wants to follow and his position is that at the end of any journey committed to the truth, you’ll end up alt-right.

He is more correct about mainstream western society than mainstream society (left or right) is comfortable admitting. There are sacred cows aplenty in both conventional camps and people do notice them and treat those conventional pieties with the cynicism they deserve. These positions leave an opening for alternative political camps with a greater fidelity to truth. Vox Day is attempting to position the alt-right as a better-enough successor to conventional conservatism in order to reorient international politics.

But when encountering something he is unfamiliar with, does he have the guts to actually chase it down and educate himself?

De-russification is largely about Russia’s peripheral states attempting to get people to switch allegiances to the local nation from Russia. It’s very close to classic American melting pot politics. It also appears to be working, something that Vox Day has made claims cannot sustainably happen when talking about the future of the USA.

So what will Vox Day do when he reads up on the subject? Will he condemn the Baltic states’ efforts and be consistent across societies? Will he reassess the chances for melting pot politics in the USA and attempt to move the alt-right to a different destination? Stay tuned. The man is unlikely to leave the subject permanently unaddressed. It’s too obvious a weak spot for his camp.

I’m assuming, without any evidence whatsoever, that Vox Day actually is not aware of what de-russification entails. It’s the charitable thing to do. But doing so without following up is not charitable. It is merely foolish.

Best thing I’ve read all week

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“What if the Internet interprets Silicon Valley as damage and routes around it?” – Glenn Reynolds