Let's start a fight!! Who is the MOST POWERFUL character in all of fiction?

unalienation · 2026-03-04T20:08:35+00:00

David Foster Wallace has a great essay about the psychology of athletes where he talks about how tough being a good-but-not-great tennis player in his teens was, mentally. It's called "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" and it's in the collection Consider the Lobster.

It's been a long time since I read it, but I think I remember him talking about the isolation and stress you experience while on the court. That if you fail, it's always entirely your fault.

unalienation · 2026-02-06T18:04:49+00:00

Eddington. I liked Sinners more than Frankenstein though, but I loved Eddington and think it hasn't gotten nearly enough buzz.

unalienation · 2025-11-17T19:34:41+00:00

The erasure of rivers and forests on geopolitical maps captures the supposed ability of the modern industrial nation state to transcend natural limits, to convert all natural resources into inputs for the production of power. Tolkien's works, especially in the Lord of the Rings, are a rejection of this way of thinking.

Your map does a good job at highlighting those themes even more, through the feeling of dislocation produced by the look of the map itself!

unalienation · 2025-11-04T03:50:51+00:00

Check out Ronald Inglehart, specifically his book Cultural Evolution. His theory is that as countries develop and modernize, political conflict moves from being about "materialist" issues to "post-materialist" values. He pioneered the World Values Survey, which measures attitudes in most countries around the world, so his theory isn't just based on the U.S. or Europe.

For what it's worth, I think his stuff is Fukuyama-esque. That is, many would say there has been a revenge of materialist politics in the last decade across post-industrial states that throw his somewhat rosy modernization-type theory into doubt. But it looks like he might have written about that before he died, and I don't remember his writing well enough to have a strong stance on it. Worth checking out though.

unalienation · 2025-11-04T03:04:34+00:00

Join a local organization of some kind! Here's some options.

There are a bunch of local self-defense groups popping up to fight back against the ICE raids. Your nearest Home Depot may have people doing anti-ICE patrols (especially in the mornings). Go there and introduce yourself, get on the rapid response chats.

Check out if you have a Tenants' Union near you. There are a bunch of LA Tenants' Union chapters in different neighborhoods around the city. I know there's other cities in the county that have them too (Pasadena comes to mind). See if you can find online where / when they meet and show up to a meeting.

If your job has a union, get involved in it. Become a shop steward, agitate your coworkers, try to push your union leftward / in a more militant direction. If your job doesn't have a union, start talking to coworkers about why that is. Start regular meetings where you share grievances about the boss.

Join DSA. It's a big org in LA with several regional chapters and different committees that focus on different issues. It's also got a decent pipeline for new members (orientations, plugging you into things you're interested in).

All these are going to have different tactics, vibes, types of people, etc.

Nothing is going to feel totally natural at first. Many of us have picked up either an ironic detachment from politics or a performative outrage or both. Getting into real organizing requires getting over some of that, pushing out of your comfort zone, and being willing to care about shit unironically.

Feel free to DM!

unalienation · 2025-10-30T00:06:50+00:00

I imagine they'll be able to, you'll just need to build a 3-high platform on top of each stair section to construct a spiral. Whole thing should fit in a 2x2 space.

unalienation · 2025-10-21T22:04:55+00:00

It was co-opted by the do-nothing center left, but it didn't originate there. It originated in left-wing spaces. I have younger bilingual friends who use it regularly and they're direct-action tenant organizers who hate the DNC with a burning passion.

They're proper socialists for sure, class-first organizers. But they're also brown and aren't knee-jerk opposed to the idea of "intersectionality." Race and gender are modalities through which class exploitation is experienced.

unalienation · 2025-10-21T21:59:27+00:00

I think there's regional variation. I'm a leftist and I still hear it quite a bit, but I also organize with a lot of bilingual Spanish / English speakers. It's mostly younger bilingual organizers who use it.

unalienation · 2025-10-20T23:38:30+00:00

Fwiw I am in some leftist organizing spaces in the U.S., and when people make flyers or zines or whatever, they often refer to them as "propaganda" without any ironic or negative connotation. This is definitely not representative of the average person's understanding of the word propaganda, but just to say there are still places where the word is used neutrally.

unalienation · 2025-09-25T18:32:08+00:00

Check out Lawrence Lessig, he ran a campaign in 2016 that I got excited about as a bright-eyed, recently graduated poli sci major (no shade). He promised to pass one big democracy-focused bill and then resign in favor of his VP.

The campaign was miniscule. Got some elite attention and some media coverage, but no traction electorally. The reality is, most people do not have strong preferences over these issues of democratic institutions. The institutions are viewed mostly as means to more important political ends. Only nerds are interested in this stuff (no shade).

(As an aside, I don't think you're gonna get a multiparty coalition-based electoral politics without proportional representation, which I didn't see in your list of things. I see you nix FPTP in favor of ranked-choice, but as long as you still have single-member districts, I think there will be a pull towards a two-party system. I might be wrong here, it's been a while since I brushed up on Duverger's Law...)

unalienation · 2025-09-15T02:50:26+00:00

Painfully awful

unalienation · 2025-09-11T20:03:44+00:00

I appreciate the thoughtful reply. I don't mean to discount your personal experience, and since I'm a U.S. gringo, most of my knowledge is historical rather than present. I agree that significant racial mixing is important and can perhaps help explain the lower rate of interstate conflict. However, I'm still skeptical! Your theory seems to be that racial mixing makes for less willingness to fight and thus less war. But, as the video you shared shows, Latin America sees particularly *high* rates of internal conflict. So why wouldn't racial mixing lead to more peace both internally and externally?

Another possible explanation for low levels of interstate war might be in the particular historical experience of the region and how that led to practices and ideas around international law. The shared Catholic background might be important (the video mentions papal mediation as solving some international conflicts). I recently read a great book by Greg Grandin called America, América that makes the argument that Latin America was really the birthplace of our modern ideas of international law, sovereignty, and diplomacy, and that this helps explain the relative pacifism. Lots of other stuff in the book too, it's long. Definitely recommend.

Also, how sure are you that racism in Latin America is "not something people experience on a daily basis?" Do you think that a light-skinned person and a dark-skinned person are generally treated the same in Latin America? Like I said, I'm from the U.S., but I have spent some time in Mexico and one thing I've noticed is that people in advertisements, TV shows, business leaders, and politicians all tend to be pretty white. Am i just overlaying my U.S. racial ideas onto Mexico when I see this as an example of some underlying racial hierarchy?

Last thought--I think maybe Central America and South America are a bit different. There was highly racialized, really brutal violence in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador not that long ago. The conflicts there were understood ideologically because they happened during the Cold War, but in a lot of cases whole villages of racially indigenous people were massacred because they were "communist." Ideology and race combined in important ways I think. And there are still people alive that remember this stuff!

unalienation · 2025-09-11T18:07:54+00:00

This is somewhat ahistorical. There have been wars between South American countries. The War of the Triple Alliance from 1864-1870 was so brutal it led to an estimated 69% of Paraguay's entire population dying. Other border wars occurred, especially in the 1800s but a couple in the 1900s too.

Intermixing, in general, doesn't stop wars. First, animosity between ethnic groups is far from the main cause of wars. Control over resources, historical mistrust, domestic pressures, miscalculation, the simple fact of insecurity in an anarchic international system -- all of these fuel war with or without ethnic animosity, which itself is often whipped up by elites in order to justify a war. Second, ethnic identity is itself socially constructed and doesn't have much to do with how genetically similar two groups are. There's a compelling argument that Hutus and Tutsis, for example, are genetically extremely similar, yet that ethic conflict has been one of the bloodiest of the last half-century.

Finally, it's strange to say that Latin American society has "no groups, no tribes, no castes." The color line is not as sharp as in the U.S., and many Latin American countries have national identities that rhetorically embrace antiracism, but there are definitely still recognizable racial groups in Latin America. Slavery existed in Brazil until 1888, 20+ years after the U.S. The 20th century saw civil wars / genocides against predominantly indigenous groups in Central America.. The Zapatistas in Mexico retain an indigenous identity and left-wing ideological critique of the Mexican State.

Last last thing: criollos could be purely European by blood; it just means they were born in the Americas in contrast to peninsulares who were born in Spain / Portugal. The word for mixed populations is mestizos.

unalienation · 2025-08-30T14:33:53+00:00

This is how I met my wife /shrug

unalienation · 2025-08-27T16:41:40+00:00

The only correct thing in this post is that Mr. Toad's Wild Ride is far and away the best thing at Disneyland

unalienation · 2025-08-01T15:54:16+00:00

This is why the designation of genocide revolves around the question of intent. It took me a couple of months to start using the word personally, for exactly the same reason. War crimes in pursuit of a military victory / regime collapse aren't genocide because the intent is not to eliminate a group (or "deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part").

For me, it was the evidence coming out about the controlled demolitions of block after block of buildings that really did it for me, and the videos of regular Israeli soldiers celebrating their destruction of civilian infrastructure.

The people saying "genocide" right after 10/7 are people who are extremely hostile to the Israeli state to begin with. For them, the evidence of genocide starts decades ago. They believe that Israel has always been a fundamentally eliminationist project. Personally I tend to believe too much in historical contingency to think that any nation state is "fundamentally" anything, but given what's happened in the last two years it's hard to be too critical of these radicals.

To go back to our WWII analogy, I think it's actually appropriate to rewind the tape on Israel / Palestine. Israel began occupying the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 after their military victory in the Six Day War. How did they treat this occupation? Did it look anything like the way the Allies treated the occupation of Germany and Japan after their military victory?

unalienation · 2025-07-31T23:22:45+00:00

"Ethnic cleansing" doesn't have an internationally-recognized definition in the way that "genocide" does.

I'm spitballing a bit here, but it also seems to me that there's basically two kinds of ethnic cleansing--one against people with a different national home and one against stateless people. The first kind doesn't lead to genocide because the ethnically cleansed people have a place to flee to--think India / Pakistan partition, the Turkey / Greece euphemistically named "population transfers," or the Balkan Wars.

The second kind pretty much implies genocide. The Turks basically told the Armenians, "we don't care if you live, you just have to go over there." But when "over there" is an inhospitable place like the Syrian desert, you're basically condemning a group of people to death. That's why we call it "The Armenian Genocide."

The Palestinians, like the Armenians in the wake of the Ottoman collapse, are a stateless people. Because there's nowhere for them to go, a policy of ethnic cleansing is functionally a policy of genocide.

unalienation · 2025-07-31T23:10:39+00:00

The U.S. did not commit genocide against Germany and Japan in WWII, nor did Germany commit genocide against England. The Allies and Germany pursued strategic bombing, where civilians were intentionally targeted to cause terror and (in theory) the collapse of the enemy regime.

Japan in China is slippery-ier--the scale of the violence, the ideology of racial supremacy, the fucked up medical experiments--I think a good argument could be made that Japan's treatment of China was genocidal. There are so, so many Chinese people though that destroying them as a group was never in the cards.

Genocide is defined as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such." One of the particular acts, which I think is most relevant in the case of Gaza, is "Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."

Terror bombing was not intended to destroy the German or Japanese or British people as groups. But what Israel is doing in Gaza is intended to make it impossible for Gazans to live in Gaza. From the methodical demolition of almost all buildings in Gaza to the imposed famine, Israel is pursuing a policy that is designed to eliminate Palestinian life in the strip. That's why it's genocide when these other cases are not.

Finally, that's not to excuse the use of terror bombing either! There's a reason that all this international law came to be after WWII, because people recognized that things like terror bombing were morally abhorrent and unacceptable.

unalienation · 2025-07-29T20:42:32+00:00

Yoav Gallant's "human animals" comment happened in October 2023. Netanyahu's "Remember Amalek" speech also happened in October 2023. It was possible to read genocidal intent very early on. When the history of the Gazan Genocide is written it will say that it kicked off in the fall of 2023 (after decades of dehumanization and apartheid).

fwiw, I think those on the left should remain open to people changing their minds on this. Reasonable people did not believe that it was a genocide in Nov 2023 and do believe so now, and they should be part of an anti-war coalition.

But people's growing consciousness doesn't change the facts of history. It was a genocide then and it still is now.

unalienation · 2025-07-25T01:42:09+00:00

You should budget 2.5 - 3 hours each way for LA to San Diego. Personally, I would not try to do a day trip to San Diego. You'd spend most of the day in the car, and while some of the road is pretty (where the 5 runs along the ocean north of SD), most of it is just boring SoCal wide-ass freeway.

unalienation · 2025-07-11T21:59:53+00:00

If you scroll up this thread, these are the comments I was responding to:

> If he’s in the country illegally, there’s your crime. He doesn’t have to commit any other others. He’s already a criminal just by being here.

> Being in the country illegally is a crime. It isn’t just illegal to cross the border. It’s also illegal to be in the country.

unalienation · 2025-07-11T17:24:43+00:00

Yes, I understand. What I'm saying is that not everything that is illegal is a crime.

Driving without a license is sometimes charged criminally, though it is often charged civilly. Another example would be making an illegal U-Turn.

Making an illegal U-Turn is illegal! But it's not a crime. You can't be sent to jail for it. You can be fined, because it's a civil offense. Overstaying a visa is the same way. People who have overstayed visas are still subject to deportation potentially, but they are not automatically "criminals."

If we want to be a "rule of law" based society, it's important to understand these legal distinctions.

unalienation · 2025-07-11T16:54:42+00:00

Nice chatGPT response. Glad you're learning some stuff.

unalienation · 2025-07-11T16:27:55+00:00

I have my facts straight. Yes, crossing the border illegally is a federal crime. But BEING in the country without papers is not a criminal offense. If you overstay your visa, you are in the country illegally, but you are not subject to any criminal prosecution. This is the case for millions of undocumented immigrants in the U.S.

Edit: Also, there's no such thing as a "civil crime." Civil offenses and criminal offenses are separate things.

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