Here's something else about the Japanese internment camps to think about in light of current ICE raids:
Within weeks of Pearl Harbour, not only was legislation signed to send Japanese-Americans off to the camps, but the majority of their possessions, including successful businesses were forfeited and destroyed/sold off.
Up to that point, there were many successful immigrant Japanese farmers and fishermen - but practically overnight their boats were hauled out and destroyed, and the farms sold off to eager neighbors for pennies on the dollar.
A few kind folks bought farms and returned them to their original Japanese owners after the war, but such instances were few and far between.
Fast forward to today: all those folks being round up and deported by ICE ; what is happening to anything they leave behind?
After the Russian revolution Lenin and Stalin wanted to collectively redistribute farmland. However, that farmland was already owned and operated by people, usually families in small communities, who didn't like the idea of their homes and livelihoods being confiscated. So, they made up the term "Kulak" to refer to any land-owning farmers who had operated successful farms in Russian and Russian controlled Ukraine, in an effort to portray them as wealth-hoarding elites.
Many either fled (my ancestors), were killed in pogroms, deported to Kazakhstan, or imprisoned in gulags. Then, their assets were seized to be redistributed to "real" Russians.
Of course, when you kick out many of the most productive farmers and replace them with novices, it's going to put a dent in production. So, when food became more scarce, the state seized it all and redistributed it only to "real" Russians. They used it as an opportunity to deliberately starve any of the remaining Kulaks and political dissidents throughout Russian controlled territory, now mainly in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
Between 3.5 and 10 million people died. Estimates vary wildly because, unlike the Nazis, the Soviets were sloppy and didn't keep very accurate records of all the people they killed.
I kinda feel like people pointing to Leninist/Stalinist Russia as "The ideal try at communism/socilism that shows it fails all the time." really don't understand how it actually went down.
Nobody around today is advocating for authoritarian communism with built in classism.
I would also argue that almost nobody today is even advocating for actual socialism (where all production is owned by the state). They've been told over and over that any welfare policies or regulation to counteract capitalism's excesses is "socialism" (it's not).
So now, when they claim that public healthcare is socialism (something nearly every other industrialized country has, even ours to a lesser degree) it makes ordinary people think, "well, I guess I'm a socialist, then."
On another note, Russia was and still is completely politically dysfunctional. That impacts and corrupts everything. Nothing works properly, everyone is taking bribes, and black markets run wild.
But, even if it weren't a completely fucked up country, implementing a centrally planned and controlled economy that actual socialism required would have been an impossible task, especially with the technological limitations of the time. It's far more practical to have a decentralized laissez-faire style economy (easily done with capitalism) where people set up businesses to produce and sell goods independently on their own initiative. That does not mean that there are no regulations or government intervention, but that prices and production are set by market forces rather than the government trying to predict future public demand.
This happened to some German-Americans in Northern California on a MUCH smaller scale. In one retelling I heard back in the 90’s from a victim (or a victim’s family member, it as a long tim ago) that hey stated the motivation was to steal the property and business of these people.
the house i live in was sold to the guy down the street when the owners were interred during wwii and his kids lived here until that couple came back. he gave the deed back to them. the Japanese couples' kids are who sold the house to my partner in '99.
i think they were the only people who ever owned this house without a mortgage the entire time it's existed (it's a 1910 build)
every witch hunt involves taking the possessions away from the people being hunted. every pogrom involves theft.
It is also inevitable. I am currently taking medicine to treat an infection. I am not a doctor. I do not know what chemicals treat infections. I am not a pharmacist, I do not know that the pills I am taking contain the medicine the doctor told me to take. I take them on a schedule, tracked by the clock on my computer, whose internal mechanisms no single human on this planet could claim to truly understand. This last one, I am the closest to understanding, being in a field adjacent to that of semiconductor physics, but also most cognizant of my distance from that understanding for the same reason.
At the end of the day, despite being a scientist, dedicating my life to the empirical study of the world, I am required to rely massively on my trust of my fellows. Even the experimental data for my research is not my own, but told to me by other scientists whose expertise and honesty I rely upon.
The answer, I think, is not purely distrust, but great care in who we trust. We must be intelligent, examine empirically what we can, and grow a network of trust starting with our own observations, understanding the motives and incentives of the people we interact with, and holding them to rigorous account, but in the end without trust I would be dying from an infection right now.
mainly because it lacks a lot of context. These words could come straight out of any science-denier.
The problem is that so many think listening to an expert is the same as listening to a politician, is the same as listening to a pod caster.
As you said - we need to take "great care in who we trust." Unfortunately that gets clouded easily, and bad actors, algorithms, the bubble-information-world we live in, etc make the clouding ever easier.
At the end of the day, despite being a scientist, dedicating my life to the empirical study of the world, I am required to rely massively on my trust of my fellows. Even the experimental data for my research is not my own, but told to me by other scientists whose expertise and honesty I rely upon.
Understand that it is only by way of the blessing of your own knowledge that you understand how little you truly know.
Highschool teaches just the basics, if that, and rarely does an adequate job explaining the depth of knowledge of any field. Once you move beyond, and you begin to specialize and learn more, you realize the required depth of study to become an expert on a singular, narrow topic - and even the experts knowledge is limited by what we as a species know.
A problem arrives with a paradox of knowledge as it related to how we as a species perceive people in the "marketplace of ideas". The intelligent expert will not answer a question they do not know the answer to. They will, appropriately, say "I don't know" when asked.
The masses see this as weakness, not honesty. And this leaves bad actors free to take the "lead" in such a debate by claiming simplistic answers to complex systemic issues.
The educated can thus be made to look stupid and weak, while the uneducated liar can confidently lie and seem smarter, stronger, better.
And with no means to check such bad faith, we wind up here.
It leaves out aspects like sadism, where people say things which they know to be untrue because they want to twist the knife while hurting somebody by also tormenting their mind, or just want something which sounds good enough to trick and delay a critical mass of those who might oppose them while they hurt somebody.
Or people playing group make believe, where they know what they're saying is untrue but they seek out groups who will roleplay with them and make it an agreed reality, then hope to reach big enough numbers to become hostile to anybody who threatens their delusion (I saw a lot of this growing up in evangelical churches, where people clearly didn't believe what they said and didn't live by it, but would use phrases and teasing statements to look for people who they could play make believe with, e.g. they heard a wailing demon in the chimney when they burnt an African idol, then if they find people who'll play along they'll go all in on it, but otherwise will sheepishly back off and know full well how stupid it is for adults to talk like that.
And then there's just general liars, people who don't care about the truth at all, and will happily lie if it means they get to do something which they want. e.g. The magician James Randi exposed an evangelical church leader who claimed to be knowing people's names from heavenly influence, his wife was reading out their names over an open radio from the cards they signed when coming in. Even though he disproved it, they went straight back to doing their complete dishonest lie a few years later, and the followers didn't care, being the second type I talked about.
There’s a hiking trail named for Gordon Hirabayashi where the old prison camp was on Mount Lemmon. It’s because of that trail that I learned about him. It’s my favorite hike on Mount Lemmon. High enough to get a drop in temperature but not so high that the air gets thin, beautiful views and amazing terrain.
Here's something else about the Japanese internment camps to think about in light of current ICE raids:
Within weeks of Pearl Harbour, not only was legislation signed to send Japanese-Americans off to the camps, but the majority of their possessions, including successful businesses were forfeited and destroyed/sold off.
Up to that point, there were many successful immigrant Japanese farmers and fishermen - but practically overnight their boats were hauled out and destroyed, and the farms sold off to eager neighbors for pennies on the dollar.
A few kind folks bought farms and returned them to their original Japanese owners after the war, but such instances were few and far between.
Fast forward to today: all those folks being round up and deported by ICE ; what is happening to anything they leave behind?
You see the video of the ice agent driving the truck on personal business after stealing it from the person he arrested?
This reminds me of the Dekulakization and the following Holodomor in Russia.
After the Russian revolution Lenin and Stalin wanted to collectively redistribute farmland. However, that farmland was already owned and operated by people, usually families in small communities, who didn't like the idea of their homes and livelihoods being confiscated. So, they made up the term "Kulak" to refer to any land-owning farmers who had operated successful farms in Russian and Russian controlled Ukraine, in an effort to portray them as wealth-hoarding elites.
Many either fled (my ancestors), were killed in pogroms, deported to Kazakhstan, or imprisoned in gulags. Then, their assets were seized to be redistributed to "real" Russians.
Of course, when you kick out many of the most productive farmers and replace them with novices, it's going to put a dent in production. So, when food became more scarce, the state seized it all and redistributed it only to "real" Russians. They used it as an opportunity to deliberately starve any of the remaining Kulaks and political dissidents throughout Russian controlled territory, now mainly in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
Between 3.5 and 10 million people died. Estimates vary wildly because, unlike the Nazis, the Soviets were sloppy and didn't keep very accurate records of all the people they killed.
I kinda feel like people pointing to Leninist/Stalinist Russia as "The ideal try at communism/socilism that shows it fails all the time." really don't understand how it actually went down.
Nobody around today is advocating for authoritarian communism with built in classism.
I would also argue that almost nobody today is even advocating for actual socialism (where all production is owned by the state). They've been told over and over that any welfare policies or regulation to counteract capitalism's excesses is "socialism" (it's not).
So now, when they claim that public healthcare is socialism (something nearly every other industrialized country has, even ours to a lesser degree) it makes ordinary people think, "well, I guess I'm a socialist, then."
On another note, Russia was and still is completely politically dysfunctional. That impacts and corrupts everything. Nothing works properly, everyone is taking bribes, and black markets run wild.
But, even if it weren't a completely fucked up country, implementing a centrally planned and controlled economy that actual socialism required would have been an impossible task, especially with the technological limitations of the time. It's far more practical to have a decentralized laissez-faire style economy (easily done with capitalism) where people set up businesses to produce and sell goods independently on their own initiative. That does not mean that there are no regulations or government intervention, but that prices and production are set by market forces rather than the government trying to predict future public demand.
This happened to some German-Americans in Northern California on a MUCH smaller scale. In one retelling I heard back in the 90’s from a victim (or a victim’s family member, it as a long tim ago) that hey stated the motivation was to steal the property and business of these people.
civil asset forfeiture is the modern version
it's definitely always a part of this kind of thing
the house i live in was sold to the guy down the street when the owners were interred during wwii and his kids lived here until that couple came back. he gave the deed back to them. the Japanese couples' kids are who sold the house to my partner in '99.
i think they were the only people who ever owned this house without a mortgage the entire time it's existed (it's a 1910 build)
every witch hunt involves taking the possessions away from the people being hunted. every pogrom involves theft.
That's a good quote, even if it isn't absolutely true.
It is also inevitable. I am currently taking medicine to treat an infection. I am not a doctor. I do not know what chemicals treat infections. I am not a pharmacist, I do not know that the pills I am taking contain the medicine the doctor told me to take. I take them on a schedule, tracked by the clock on my computer, whose internal mechanisms no single human on this planet could claim to truly understand. This last one, I am the closest to understanding, being in a field adjacent to that of semiconductor physics, but also most cognizant of my distance from that understanding for the same reason.
At the end of the day, despite being a scientist, dedicating my life to the empirical study of the world, I am required to rely massively on my trust of my fellows. Even the experimental data for my research is not my own, but told to me by other scientists whose expertise and honesty I rely upon.
The answer, I think, is not purely distrust, but great care in who we trust. We must be intelligent, examine empirically what we can, and grow a network of trust starting with our own observations, understanding the motives and incentives of the people we interact with, and holding them to rigorous account, but in the end without trust I would be dying from an infection right now.
Agreed. I'm not a fan of the phrase
mainly because it lacks a lot of context. These words could come straight out of any science-denier.
The problem is that so many think listening to an expert is the same as listening to a politician, is the same as listening to a pod caster.
As you said - we need to take "great care in who we trust." Unfortunately that gets clouded easily, and bad actors, algorithms, the bubble-information-world we live in, etc make the clouding ever easier.
Understand that it is only by way of the blessing of your own knowledge that you understand how little you truly know.
Highschool teaches just the basics, if that, and rarely does an adequate job explaining the depth of knowledge of any field. Once you move beyond, and you begin to specialize and learn more, you realize the required depth of study to become an expert on a singular, narrow topic - and even the experts knowledge is limited by what we as a species know.
A problem arrives with a paradox of knowledge as it related to how we as a species perceive people in the "marketplace of ideas". The intelligent expert will not answer a question they do not know the answer to. They will, appropriately, say "I don't know" when asked.
The masses see this as weakness, not honesty. And this leaves bad actors free to take the "lead" in such a debate by claiming simplistic answers to complex systemic issues.
The educated can thus be made to look stupid and weak, while the uneducated liar can confidently lie and seem smarter, stronger, better.
And with no means to check such bad faith, we wind up here.
It leaves out aspects like sadism, where people say things which they know to be untrue because they want to twist the knife while hurting somebody by also tormenting their mind, or just want something which sounds good enough to trick and delay a critical mass of those who might oppose them while they hurt somebody.
Or people playing group make believe, where they know what they're saying is untrue but they seek out groups who will roleplay with them and make it an agreed reality, then hope to reach big enough numbers to become hostile to anybody who threatens their delusion (I saw a lot of this growing up in evangelical churches, where people clearly didn't believe what they said and didn't live by it, but would use phrases and teasing statements to look for people who they could play make believe with, e.g. they heard a wailing demon in the chimney when they burnt an African idol, then if they find people who'll play along they'll go all in on it, but otherwise will sheepishly back off and know full well how stupid it is for adults to talk like that.
And then there's just general liars, people who don't care about the truth at all, and will happily lie if it means they get to do something which they want. e.g. The magician James Randi exposed an evangelical church leader who claimed to be knowing people's names from heavenly influence, his wife was reading out their names over an open radio from the cards they signed when coming in. Even though he disproved it, they went straight back to doing their complete dishonest lie a few years later, and the followers didn't care, being the second type I talked about.
Hey, you edited that while I was reading it. The added stuff helps certainly though.
And sometimes those 3 groups sometimes can be all allied together, like in the Trump administration.
There’s a hiking trail named for Gordon Hirabayashi where the old prison camp was on Mount Lemmon. It’s because of that trail that I learned about him. It’s my favorite hike on Mount Lemmon. High enough to get a drop in temperature but not so high that the air gets thin, beautiful views and amazing terrain.
Rachel Maddow has a new podcast out, Burn order, and episodes 2 and 3 were about the Japanese internment and deportation policies during WWII.