Nous, thanks for the full article. While the Cassandra envy is one reading, I see it as Chomsky being constitutional incapable of admitting he is/was in error. I'm most familiar with this pattern in linguistics and Geoff Pullum notes that it is not just that Chomsky is wrong, but that he creates a system (both with his rhetoric and his theory) that is immune to being proven wrong, even when core assumptions are proven wrong.
This is a recent article about this
https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/hl.00186.pul
Pullum also had this more accessible article in the National Review about it
https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/xml_20220307_Pullum_BookReview-1.html
With the first splash he made, reviewing Skinner's Verbal Behavior, he had these traits, making me wonder if he ever changed.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2223153/
Some random thoughts. I don't know all of the gory details about the French cases mentioned here, but we have had all kinds of revelations about various groups who one would imagine would be more introspective to behave badly/act immorally. Those two phrases highlight the problem, either you assign behavior to an immature lapse in judgement or you make a claim about how it is going against all societal values. And given that Foucault was always identifying flaws in societal thinking, one can see how this can seem like society pushing back, which then engenders its own pushback, etc etc.
One thing that I think is operative in the issues in France is that academia and the elite are siloed there to a great extent, maybe much more than in other countries, and it creates structures that make misbehavior more likely. I'm thinking of the issues that have recently arisen in philosophy with McGinn, Searle and others, the issues in classics (we discussed this article about Peralta who has since moved from Princeton to ASU) as well as in other areas. I tend to think that these problems are often defined as sexism or racism, but the underlying issue is the ability to rationalize. The fact that Chomsky appears to be friends with Epstein (and his quote "I’ve met [all] sorts of people, including major war criminals. I don’t regret having met any of them.") seems like instantiations of that urge to rationalization.
The title reference was to Crown Imperial, thought I'm happy to make the connection to nous' link.
A lot of interesting points. I had to check Foucault's dates, he died in 1984, and I wonder if one problem/challenge is that we often live in an eternal present, and we can pull people into that even though they have been long gone. There is the famous letter of Machiavelli where he says:
"When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold, I strip off my muddy, sweaty, everyday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them... there I am not ashamed to speak with them and ask them the reason for their actions; and they, in their humanity, reply to me."
When we can time travel like this, it is easier to subject everyone, living and dead, to our own moral codes.
Thanks Charles, though I have my doubts about Grok's accuracy. I'm sure if Musk thought there was some money to be made, Grok would be claiming that Edwards is an assatarian...
I think this is different from some dumb-ass lawyer believing that an LLM is giving him the correct precedents and not hallucinating them. The writer knew that Shambaugh hadn't spoken to him and stuck them in anyway.
I know I sound not only like an old man who yells at the clouds, but also all those people who shouted to burn someone at the stake, but why doesn't the writer get named and shamed? I get that we don't want a mob, but it seems like a journalist has to maintain some level of truthfulness. The sad things is that Ars just withdraws the article and it misses out on all of the issues that this event raises.
Some people are claiming they’ve gotten calls from agents acting on their own.
Unsurprising, given the possibility of programs like this
https://www.wlrn.org/immigration/2025-08-06/ice-offers-then-quickly-withdraws-cash-bonuses-for-swiftly-deporting-immigrants
I wouldn't be surprised that these bonuses are happening in other places, it is just that they haven't gotten anyone to blow the whistle.
Thanks to Michael for posting the open thread and GftNC for requesting it.
Writing this immediately after writing that can lead to some unwanted inferences, but I'm wondering if anyone would like a spare set of keys to the blog in order to post a regular open thread (and no, I'm not going to get an AI agent to do that) I'll still be posting, but every bit of cognitive offloading helps at my age. Send a message to libjpn at gmail if you are interested.
morning all, fair point about the interviewee acknowledging the illegality of hiring, though instead of taking it out on those employers, he's happy for the government to take it out on the ones lowest on the payscale.
By starting a list like this, I don't mean to be dismissive (except for the Tory complaints, perhaps). Multiple things can be true, so it feels like the attempt to define this as one thing means it doesn't become anything.
That's true, but the line I hear emerging from dem politicians is that it is because ICE is undertrained that these problems are emerging. I may be missing stuff, but anyone who is talking about this on the various programs from the dem side rails on ICE and makes no mention of Border Patrol.
Re: coal, in Tooze's lecture, (roughly here in the youtube video) he points out that after Kyoto, China undertook a national industrialization project that, according to estimates, killed 1.4 million chinese citizens a year, because of increased air pollution, which is why wj refers to coal.
However, there has been a 'hard pivot' against that. Here is the youtube transcript, cleaned up a bit
we're talking here of a truly violent process of transformation which the Chinese regime can be fairly said deliberately opted into as a choice and then pivoted hard against and that pivot begins in the 2010s. It is a matter widely understood of regime survival because there's only so many times people can see their babies choking to death before uh you need to pivot. By the early mid2010s the air pollution standards imposed on Chinese coal fired power stations were actually more strenuous than those in either the United States or Europe. As unpalatable and as uncomfortable it is, we need to reckon with the fact that the cleaning up of China's first phase of dramatic hypergrowth was accompanied under the leadership of Xi Jinping by a extremely explicit commitment to environmental protection at first on a limited scale and then secondly on a global scale culminating in that Chinese appropriation of Europe's vision of green modernization in 2020.
Tooze's observation fits in with what I think are the bullshit quality of SDGs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals The SDGs are universal, time-bound, and legally non-binding policy objectives agreed upon by governments. They come close to prescriptive international norms but are generally more specific, and they can be highly ambitious. The overarching UN program "2030 Agenda" presented the SDGs in 2015 as a "supremely ambitious and transformative vision" that should be accompanied by "bold and transformative steps" with "scale and ambition"
One could argue that the Orange douche blew that one out of the water, but I thought it was western-centric from the start.
I also listened to this Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast with an energy analyst
https://youtu.be/i__iaPepixk?si=dKiCa75BrryAhVNP
I only understood half of it, but coupled with Tooze's observations, leaves me deeply uneasy.
I'd observe that the two executions in Minneapolis were apparently done by CBP agents with some experience on the job rather than the ICE agents who we've been told are minimally trained. There are a number of narratives that this could lead to and I'm not sure which one is true (and which is most likely to be seized on, which is often very different from the true one) but it does point to some interesting dynamics in all this.
And another one, a Guardian piece on Tooze
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/15/the-crisis-whisperer-how-adam-tooze-makes-sense-of-our-bewildering-age
Don't worry, nous, I remember when McKinney cited Freddie de Boer explaining that this was a guy who understood the left. (though I'm not suggesting you are doing the same with Krugman, it just always comes to mind when I think about who one cites and why)
About the Krugman link, Tooze and Klein both note, with astonishment, that the tariffs on India is higher than the tariffs on China.
A section I didn't highlight but was interested in, was Tooze's comparison with defeating Germany without Russian help to dealing with climate change without the Chinese on board, which was certainly thought provoking.
Fun chinese proverb for y'all
宁为太平犬，不做乱世人
Better to be a dog in times of peace than a human in times of chaos.
Since I have the dashboard open, I'm going to quickly move GftNC's link to a separate post as I think that it is worth considering outside what has been discussed here.
I'll leave this dogpile be except to note this I’m not arguing that at all. I’m simply pointing out that if a particular jurisdiction refuses to cooperate on ICE detainer requests and someone is released, ICE has to go get them. Simple as that. My understanding is that ICE is in the field in Minneapolis more because of the lack of cooperation in Hennepin County.
'Simple as that' does a lot of work here. As I noted, there are a number of factors that contribute to this, so sending 2,000 ICE and CBP agents rather than addressing any of those other factors makes this a disingenuous argument if made by the government, though I don't see it featuring in any of the DHS press releases. I suspect that if they said this, it would be legally actionable in that they are ignoring laws that have been made appropriately in order to get an outcome the DHS would prefer. This is law-breaking, regardless of which side does it.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
Nous, thanks for the full article. While the Cassandra envy is one reading, I see it as Chomsky being constitutional incapable of admitting he is/was in error. I'm most familiar with this pattern in linguistics and Geoff Pullum notes that it is not just that Chomsky is wrong, but that he creates a system (both with his rhetoric and his theory) that is immune to being proven wrong, even when core assumptions are proven wrong.
This is a recent article about this
https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/hl.00186.pul
Pullum also had this more accessible article in the National Review about it
https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/xml_20220307_Pullum_BookReview-1.html
With the first splash he made, reviewing Skinner's Verbal Behavior, he had these traits, making me wonder if he ever changed.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2223153/
On “Open Thread”
Charles, do you really think that Grok is a media rating service?
For the Economist, having Megan McArdle work for them is is not just one strike, it is more like striking out the entire side.
"
various media rating services
Care to share names?
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
Some random thoughts. I don't know all of the gory details about the French cases mentioned here, but we have had all kinds of revelations about various groups who one would imagine would be more introspective to behave badly/act immorally. Those two phrases highlight the problem, either you assign behavior to an immature lapse in judgement or you make a claim about how it is going against all societal values. And given that Foucault was always identifying flaws in societal thinking, one can see how this can seem like society pushing back, which then engenders its own pushback, etc etc.
One thing that I think is operative in the issues in France is that academia and the elite are siloed there to a great extent, maybe much more than in other countries, and it creates structures that make misbehavior more likely. I'm thinking of the issues that have recently arisen in philosophy with McGinn, Searle and others, the issues in classics (we discussed this article about Peralta who has since moved from Princeton to ASU) as well as in other areas. I tend to think that these problems are often defined as sexism or racism, but the underlying issue is the ability to rationalize. The fact that Chomsky appears to be friends with Epstein (and his quote "I’ve met [all] sorts of people, including major war criminals. I don’t regret having met any of them.") seems like instantiations of that urge to rationalization.
On “Open Thread”
I've heard that some companies have already sold off the legal claims for tariff refunds. I'm waiting for the scam emails related to that.
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
The title reference was to Crown Imperial, thought I'm happy to make the connection to nous' link.
A lot of interesting points. I had to check Foucault's dates, he died in 1984, and I wonder if one problem/challenge is that we often live in an eternal present, and we can pull people into that even though they have been long gone. There is the famous letter of Machiavelli where he says:
"When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold, I strip off my muddy, sweaty, everyday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them... there I am not ashamed to speak with them and ask them the reason for their actions; and they, in their humanity, reply to me."
When we can time travel like this, it is easier to subject everyone, living and dead, to our own moral codes.
"
A good time to watch Stewart Lee on Prince Andrew
https://youtu.be/MDUeO4lRhu4?si=N3cb873hkKF98w7-
On “Xi and China’s military: an off the wall theory”
A necrobump on this, this substack piece (don't worry, no Nazi newsletters!) is about Zhang Youxia
https://chinadrew.substack.com/p/the-demise-of-zhang-youxia-hits-different
On “Open Thread”
Thanks Charles, though I have my doubts about Grok's accuracy. I'm sure if Musk thought there was some money to be made, Grok would be claiming that Edwards is an assatarian...
"
and nous, I was working on something that links to your comment, so I hope the conversation about that will continue over there.
"
The ars technica thing is interesting to me because the writer had to have known that AI was creating fake quotes
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-2/
I think this is different from some dumb-ass lawyer believing that an LLM is giving him the correct precedents and not hallucinating them. The writer knew that Shambaugh hadn't spoken to him and stuck them in anyway.
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-2/
I know I sound not only like an old man who yells at the clouds, but also all those people who shouted to burn someone at the stake, but why doesn't the writer get named and shamed? I get that we don't want a mob, but it seems like a journalist has to maintain some level of truthfulness. The sad things is that Ars just withdraws the article and it misses out on all of the issues that this event raises.
"
Some people are claiming they’ve gotten calls from agents acting on their own.
Unsurprising, given the possibility of programs like this
https://www.wlrn.org/immigration/2025-08-06/ice-offers-then-quickly-withdraws-cash-bonuses-for-swiftly-deporting-immigrants
I wouldn't be surprised that these bonuses are happening in other places, it is just that they haven't gotten anyone to blow the whistle.
"
Thanks to Michael for posting the open thread and GftNC for requesting it.
Writing this immediately after writing that can lead to some unwanted inferences, but I'm wondering if anyone would like a spare set of keys to the blog in order to post a regular open thread (and no, I'm not going to get an AI agent to do that) I'll still be posting, but every bit of cognitive offloading helps at my age. Send a message to libjpn at gmail if you are interested.
On “Unsure on the definition of ‘torn’”
morning all, fair point about the interviewee acknowledging the illegality of hiring, though instead of taking it out on those employers, he's happy for the government to take it out on the ones lowest on the payscale.
On “Separated by a common language”
I feel like this whole thing is like a Rorschach test, pick the thing out that really pisses you off the most and you'll see it. You've got
By starting a list like this, I don't mean to be dismissive (except for the Tory complaints, perhaps). Multiple things can be true, so it feels like the attempt to define this as one thing means it doesn't become anything.
On “Xi and China’s military: an off the wall theory”
Yeah, there is that. But imagine if Xi is splitting the difference between those three and Marshall.
On “Moral insanity”
That's true, but the line I hear emerging from dem politicians is that it is because ICE is undertrained that these problems are emerging. I may be missing stuff, but anyone who is talking about this on the various programs from the dem side rails on ICE and makes no mention of Border Patrol.
On “Adam Tooze”
Re: coal, in Tooze's lecture, (roughly here in the youtube video) he points out that after Kyoto, China undertook a national industrialization project that, according to estimates, killed 1.4 million chinese citizens a year, because of increased air pollution, which is why wj refers to coal.
However, there has been a 'hard pivot' against that. Here is the youtube transcript, cleaned up a bit
we're talking here of a truly violent process of transformation which the Chinese regime can be fairly said deliberately opted into as a choice and then pivoted hard against and that pivot begins in the 2010s. It is a matter widely understood of regime survival because there's only so many times people can see their babies choking to death before uh you need to pivot. By the early mid2010s the air pollution standards imposed on Chinese coal fired power stations were actually more strenuous than those in either the United States or Europe. As unpalatable and as uncomfortable it is, we need to reckon with the fact that the cleaning up of China's first phase of dramatic hypergrowth was accompanied under the leadership of Xi Jinping by a extremely explicit commitment to environmental protection at first on a limited scale and then secondly on a global scale culminating in that Chinese appropriation of Europe's vision of green modernization in 2020.
"
Tooze's observation fits in with what I think are the bullshit quality of SDGs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals
The SDGs are universal, time-bound, and legally non-binding policy objectives agreed upon by governments. They come close to prescriptive international norms but are generally more specific, and they can be highly ambitious. The overarching UN program "2030 Agenda" presented the SDGs in 2015 as a "supremely ambitious and transformative vision" that should be accompanied by "bold and transformative steps" with "scale and ambition"
One could argue that the Orange douche blew that one out of the water, but I thought it was western-centric from the start.
I also listened to this Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast with an energy analyst
https://youtu.be/i__iaPepixk?si=dKiCa75BrryAhVNP
I only understood half of it, but coupled with Tooze's observations, leaves me deeply uneasy.
On “Moral insanity”
I'd observe that the two executions in Minneapolis were apparently done by CBP agents with some experience on the job rather than the ICE agents who we've been told are minimally trained. There are a number of narratives that this could lead to and I'm not sure which one is true (and which is most likely to be seized on, which is often very different from the true one) but it does point to some interesting dynamics in all this.
On “Adam Tooze”
And another one, a Guardian piece on Tooze
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/15/the-crisis-whisperer-how-adam-tooze-makes-sense-of-our-bewildering-age
"
Adam Tooze lecture. Rather dense, tossing a raft of references off
https://youtu.be/gLnxzkiB-GI?si=v2Zw4M6Ky6VcuQ1d
"
Don't worry, nous, I remember when McKinney cited Freddie de Boer explaining that this was a guy who understood the left. (though I'm not suggesting you are doing the same with Krugman, it just always comes to mind when I think about who one cites and why)
About the Krugman link, Tooze and Klein both note, with astonishment, that the tariffs on India is higher than the tariffs on China.
A section I didn't highlight but was interested in, was Tooze's comparison with defeating Germany without Russian help to dealing with climate change without the Chinese on board, which was certainly thought provoking.
Fun chinese proverb for y'all
宁为太平犬，不做乱世人
Better to be a dog in times of peace than a human in times of chaos.
On “Moral insanity”
Since I have the dashboard open, I'm going to quickly move GftNC's link to a separate post as I think that it is worth considering outside what has been discussed here.
"
I'll leave this dogpile be except to note this
I’m not arguing that at all. I’m simply pointing out that if a particular jurisdiction refuses to cooperate on ICE detainer requests and someone is released, ICE has to go get them. Simple as that. My understanding is that ICE is in the field in Minneapolis more because of the lack of cooperation in Hennepin County.
'Simple as that' does a lot of work here. As I noted, there are a number of factors that contribute to this, so sending 2,000 ICE and CBP agents rather than addressing any of those other factors makes this a disingenuous argument if made by the government, though I don't see it featuring in any of the DHS press releases. I suspect that if they said this, it would be legally actionable in that they are ignoring laws that have been made appropriately in order to get an outcome the DHS would prefer. This is law-breaking, regardless of which side does it.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.